Joan Acocella “Queen of Crime: How Agatha Christie created the modern murder mystery” The New Yorker August 16 & 23, 2010, pp.82-88
アガサ･クリスティ*1についての概説。少しメモ。
エドガー・アラン・ポーによって開始された探偵小説では、クリスティが書き始める頃には既に”the detective's eccentricity”と”the absolutely central role of ratiocination”という二大ルールが確立されていた。しかし、以下のような〈定型〉を「創造した」のはクリスティである；
クリスティの生。特に1926年の〈失踪事件〉（pp.84-85）。興味深かったのは母親のClaraという人。彼女はユニタリアンだったが、神智学やゾロアスター教にも詳しかった（p.84）。また、アガサが孤独な子ども時代を過ごしたこと。きょうだいは歳が離れすぎており、彼女は学校に行かず独学で読み書きを覚えたので学校の友達もいなかった（ibid.）。
They are assembled—maybe eight or nine people—in a small place: a snowbound train, a girls' school, an English country house. Then—oh no! A body drops. And why, and how? Among those gathered, or soon summoned, is a detective, who says that no one should leave, please. He then begins questioning the people concerned, one by one. In the end, he collects all the interested parties and delivers the “revelation”: he names the murderer and the motive and the method. Almost never does the culprit protest. Occasionally, he goes off and commits suicide, but as a rule he confesses (“God rot his soul in Hell! I'm glad I did it!”) and exits quietly, under police escort. (p.82)
クリスティの小説における殺人手段は鈍器による撲殺或いは毒殺が多い。何故彼女は毒殺を好んだのか。Joan Acocellaは彼女が第一次大戦中に病院の薬局で働いており、薬、特に劇薬についての知識があったことを挙げているが、最大の理由は「彼女は暴力が嫌いだった」からだという。クリスティの小説には殆ど銃が出てこない。探偵も銃を持たない（p.85）。
探偵小説の〈階級性〉について；
クリスティの小説におけるレイシズムや反ユダヤ主義の話があって（ibid.）、探偵小説の文学的意義について；
For today's readers, one pleasure of Christie's books is her portrait of the times: the period between the two world wars and, above all, the changes that took place after the second war. Her people are upper middle class or, sometimes, upper class. They gaze with astonished disgust at housing developments and supermarkets. They complain bitterly about how heavily they are taxed and how they can no longer afford to maintain the grand houses they saw as their birthright. Eventually, they sell these huge piles to the nouveaux riches. (Christies's own home in Devon, a lovely Georgian house on the River Dart, was turned over to the National Trust in 2000.) (…)
Social inequality seems to have meant nothing to Christie, or to most other golden-age detective novelists. Julian Symons, in his “Bloody Morder,” an erudite and witty history of the detective story, sums it up: “The social order in these stories was as fixed...as that of Incas.” On the other hand, if we consider Christie within the context of her time and social class, she was a proto-feminist. Miss Marple is far from the only plucky female investigator in her novels. And though Poirot is allowed to make condescending remarks about women (“Women are never kind”), such comments, like his pointy shoes, are part of her satire of his silly, Frenchy ways. Furthermore, his aspersions are as specks compared with Christie's portrayal of the difficulty of being a woman. “I always had brains, even as a girl,” one of her old ladies says. “But they wouldn't let me do anything.”(She is the one who pushed Tommy Pierce out of the window.) Another woman, accused of being a gold-digger, answers, “The world is very cruel to women. They must do what they can do for themselves—while they are young. When they are old and ugly no one will help them.” (p.88)
2009年にはアガサ･クリスティ関連の本が２冊出ている（p.82）；
Auden thought that the fundamental appeal was religious. At least in Protestant countitries, he wrote, the solution of crime vicariously relieves our guilt, restores us to innocence. Others have said that the solace is political. The interwar years were marked by terrible political upheaval. The detective story may have reassured people that disruptive forces lay not in the social order but just in one bad person, who could be removed. According to John Cawelti, in “Adventure, Mystery, and Romance,” a probing history of the detective story, the genre is still doing that duty. Another proposal is that the loss and the recovery are literary—-that readers of the twenties onward, assaulted by modernism, were grateful to find in detective literature sentences with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Borges said that after you read a detective novel other fictions seem to you shapeless. At bottom, all these arguments are the same: the appeal of the detective story is the restoration of order. (ibid.)
Richard Hack Duchess of Death: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie Phoenix
John Curran Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mystery in the Making HarperCollins
探偵小説については、http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20060408/1144471534 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080630/1214763317 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080816/1218860400 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20090616/1245178653 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091028/1256753819 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20080221/1203567187とかも。
