30 APRIL 1977, Page 25

Crime pays

Penelope Houston

Atha Christie: First Lady of Crime ...clited by H. R. F. Keating

Nit:Olson (Weidenfeld and

£5.00) A dinner of that rather formidable body the Detection Club. Julian Symons, crime nho.velist and reviewer, arrives late, slips into is Place, and becomes aware that from across the table a speculative look is being directed at his hands which, he realises, are distinctly grimy. The mildly gazing lady Is Agatha Christie. Mr Symons suspects, lilerhaps a shade uncomfortably, that a raginent of observation is being stored taWaY for possible future use. A man arrives fate for dinner; his hands are dirty; what 1°1lows in the plot? /1104en. if Agatha Christie had nothing tiler! in mind than disappointment about ni„ ,'QuP or hope for the pudding, it's a 0--eiY suggestive moment. It turns out to be t Of not too many in a book which offers tell crack the mystery of Dame Agatha (if, that the one-woman fiction factory had ' -Itch Mystery to spare) but ends up as an assortment of dutiful, surface-skimming ssaYs grouped around clumps of photothe :aPits, including a rather alarming one of ,, old lady confronting her own waxwork. n.d. there's a solemnly posed picture of Pt°1tee 'reconstructing the scene of the mys_crrY' around the car which the novelist abandoned near Guildford in 1926, setting a vanishing lady search which ended nine dayslater with her discovery at a HarLogate hotel. Whether as amnesiac or

re likely u ecorous destination.

piqued wife, she chose a te As editor, Mr Keating fields a promising „aro. If Julian Symons, Edmund Crispin, 'Ichael Gilbert, Emma Lathen and half

a-dozen others leave Dame Agatha more or less where they found her, benign and ingenious as a corkscrew, perhaps it's too late for the obituaries and too soon for the evaluations. We're told undemandingly about her sales, her plots, her American sales, her plays, -and her movie sales. Miss Marple clicks her needles through a chirpy piece by Christianna Brand; Mr Keating deduces that when Poirot arrived at his last case he must have been a wellpreserved 130.

At her best, Agatha Christie's writing is instantly forgettable; at her worst, she may have forgotten it instantly herself. Her last books after, like Henry James, she took to dictating are Plump with repetition. But a better writer would have been a lesser Christie. If the conjurer's patter is there to camouflage the trick, it's rather essential that he shouldn't say anything too interesting; and in her heyday Agatha Christie commanded perhaps the steadiest hand in detective fiction. No one cares who killed Roger Ackroyd; it's the reader who is checkmated with style. 'There is nobody and nothing that I do not suspect,' Poirot says somewhere: a basic Christie truism, worth more attention.

The other expert in legerdemain, the greatest three-card trickster lost to respectability, is Alfred Hitchcock. And there has often seemed to be a good deal in common between these two vigorous veterans Dame Agatha still ingenious at eighty, Hitchcock directing the sly Family Plot at seventy-five. Both have had to a quite unusual degree an awareness of their public, of how it might be reacting at any given moment, and how to lead it up any garden path in sight; both sustained their fascination with technical Challenge. Hitchcock springs other surprises for his purposes, the Christie type of story depends altogether too heavily on denouement. But there is the same feeling for the allure of deception in broad daylight.

And perhaps there is also a shared and basic toughness, born possibly of unusually rational minds,

Possibly of distant, confident Edwardian upbringings. There is a scene in a Hitchcock film of the 'thirties in which a small boy unwittingly transports a time bomb aboard a London bus. The child begins to play with a puppy, disarming the audience until Hitchcock blows bus, boy and pup to smithereens. The sentimental tough guy novelists might have faltered at the puppy. But one feels that Agatha Christie would have seen the point. Cohn Watson suggests that in the genteel fiction Of home counties detection 'the rule against the slaughter of children was absolute.' But I seem to remember a late Christie novel in which there is murder done at a children's party; and done by a child. In her work, Agatha Christie escaped the imagination of horror. The Great Detectives exercised their infallibility in a tidy world, where the trains ran on time even if all the passengers in the Calais coach had murder in mind. The artificiality of the con

vention encouraged overbearing mannerism, from Poirot to Nero Wolfe; omniscience still had regularly to be asserted. Now that life has simply become too disorderly for the Great Detective to function, it will be interesting to see how long the breed survives on the paperback shelves, in competition with their harassed and fallible successors. Agatha Christie is said to have become bored with Poirot; but the shrewd old entertainer also took care, with her posthumously published novel, to leave him the last word..