Title:

The Columnist in the Mousetrap

Word Count: 702

Summary: I am a voracious reader of the most convoluted and lexiphanic texts - However, there is 1 specific author I pick to most.

Key phrases and phrases:

Post Physique: I am a voracious reader of the most convoluted and lexiphanic texts - nonetheless, there is one author I favor to most. She delivers me the greatest pleasure and leaves me tranquil and craving for far far more when I am by means of devouring one of her a great number of tomes. A philosopher of the mundane, a scholar of death, an exquisite chronicler of decay and decadence - she is Dame Agatha Christie. I expend as significantly time asking your self what so mesmerizes me in her pulp fiction as I do attempting to decipher her deliciously contorted stratagems.

1st, there is the claustrophobia. Modernity revolves close to the quickly depletion of our private spaces - from pastures and manors to cubicles and studio apartments. Christie - like Edgar Ellen Poe just just before her - imbues even the most confined rooms with endless possibilities for vice and malice, specifically where quite a few prospective scenarios can and do unfold kaleidoscopically. A Universe of plots and countervailing subplots which permeate even the most cramped of her locations. It is practically absolutely nothing brief of consummate magic.

Then there is the realization of the ubiquity of our pathologies. In Christie's masterpieces, even the champions of great are paragons of psychological illness. Hercules Poirot, the quintessential narcissist, self-grooming, haughty, and delusional. Miss Marple, a schizoid busybody, who savors neither human organization, nor her inevitable encounters with an intruding globe. Indeed, it is deformity that gifts these two with their eerily penetrating insights into the infirmities of other men and women.

Then, there is the death of innocence. Dame Agatha's detective novels are quaint, set in a Ruritanian Britain that is no considerably much more and most likely had by no indicates existed. Technologies make their debut: the automobile, the telephone, the radio, electric light. The particularly nature of evil is transformed from the puerile directness of the highway robber and the passion killer - to the scheming, cunning, and disguised automatism of her villains. Crime in her books is calculated, the outcome of plotting and conspiring, a confluence of unbridled and corrupted appetites and a malignant mutation of individualism. Her opus is a portrait of our age as it emerged, all bloodied and repellent, from the womb the dying Victorian era.

Christie's weapons of alternative are uncomplicated - the surreptitious poison, a stealthy dagger, the cocked revolver, a hideous drowning. Some acquaintance with the sciences of Chemistry and Physics is indispensable, of course. Archeology comes third. But Christie's main problems are human nature and morality. The riddles that she so fiendishly posits can't be solved with out taking each and every into account.

As Miss Marple keeps insisting all by way of her countless adventures, men and women are the precise very same all over the location, regardless of their social standing, wealth, or upbringing. The foibles, motives, and most likely actions of protagonists - criminals as nicely as victims - are inferred via Marple from character investigation of her village men and women back home. Human nature is immutable and universal is Christie's message.

Not so morality. Formal justice is a slippery notion, regularly opposed to the organic sort. Life is in shades of gray. Murders occasionally are justified, specially when they serve to rectify past wrongs or steer clear of a greater evil. Some victims had it coming. Crime is part of a cycle of karmic retribution. The detective's role is to restore order to a chaotic circumstance, to interpret reality for us (in an inevitable final chapter), and to administer right and impartial justice, not shackled through social or legalistic norms.

Hence, completely absolutely nothing is as it appears.

It is perhaps Christie's greatest allure. Beneath the polished, petite-bourgeois, rule-driven, surface, lurks 1 a lot more globe, replete with demons and with angels, volcanic passions and stochastic drives, the mirrors and the mirrored, specifically where no ratio guidelines and no laws get. Catapulted into this nightmarish, surrealistic landscape, like the survivors of a shipwreck, we wander, bedazzled, readers and detectives, heroes and villains, damsels and their lovers, doomed to await the denouement. When that moment comes, redeemed via trigger, we emerge, reassured, into our reinstated, ordered, Just before Christ(ie) existence.

Her novels are the substance of our dreams, woven from the material of our fears, an open invitation to plunge into our psyches and courageously confront the abyss. As a result Christie's irresistibility - her utter acquaintance with our deepest quiddity. Who can forgo such narcissistic pleasure? Not your columnist, for sure!