The stories of Agatha Christie, the greatest crime novelist over last decade, have been played again and again at Shanghai’s theatre, which indicates how popular she still is in people’s minds.
That prompts me to wonder how a woman could start to write about crimes, where her inspirations came from, and most importantly, why she could be so productive-at a time when there’s even no computer or internet.
A great documentary that host by the leading character and most well-known detective of her books P, visited Agatha’s hometown, and places she had travelled in her lifetime, trying to lift up the mysteries of the Lady.
Agatha had a wonderful, carefree childhood, as she wrote in her biography. She expressed her deepest gratitude to her mother, who discourage her to get “normal” education until she was eight years old. But Agatha showed her enormous curiosity about the world and read a lot by herself.
It is hard to tell what enforced a little girl to get interested in crimes. The documentary did not illustrate clearly, but from her biography, Agatha said she had nightmare about guns, so maybe from that time, “evilness and dark-sides” were incepted into her sub-conscience.
Not until Agatha graduated from college in Paris, she began to write her first book.
In Agatha’s stories, her inspirations about setting, the ways of poisoning, etc mainly came from the special time she experienced-the First and Second World War, when she temporarily worked as a nurse at pharmacy. She learnt a lot about chemistry(drugs and poisoning) and used them into her stories.
Agatha was not only a novelist, but an adventurer. After her mom died and her first husband had an affair with another woman, the poor lady was in deep sorrow and chose to leave home alone. Her “disappearance” soon made newspaper headline and hundreds of police officers set out to search for her. She was finally found at a hotel but that was just the beginning of her adventurous life.
Agatha was fascinated by the East when she first arrived at Turkey, she took the famous Orient Express-which turned out to be the setting of her story The Murder on Orient Express. In Turkey, she also met her second husband- an archaeologist, who brought her travel around. The journey in the east opened her eyes and her books, set at many Eastern countries, became fairly distinctive.
For me personally, I was amazed by her talent and writing techniques that she could perfectly mix her personal experiences with crimes-no matter what kind of experience.
Agatha lived a long life-she died in 85, with xx novels and xx short stories published. Until now, a lot of her stories were made into movies and her dramas are still played in theaters.
One of the most important “secret of her success”, as the documentary concludes at last, was her “simplicity”-her story structures, plots, and characters…etc. Even for the most complicated stories, it is easy for readers with all the ages to understand, and that of course, stunned out all the other crimes stories at the same time.
