Recently I received a call from a radio program. Could I say something about Agatha Christie in four minutes that night? It was her birthday.
Since I wrote a piece about Agatha years ago, I’ve been getting requests like this more often. I then have to answer two questions that I still don’t have an answer to after all these years.
The first question is what is so good about Agatha Christie’s work. If we knew that, we’d all be writing Agatha Christies. Ten people in a remote place, someone is murdered and everyone turns out to have a motive for that murder. This pattern is followed to this day, but no one does it as well as Agatha Christie and no one knows why.
The second question is: “What does Agatha Christie have to say to us today?” This question is always asked when it comes to writers who have been dead for more than half a century. What else does Multatuli have to say to us? Tolstoy? Theo Thijssen?
You can then say: Multatuli talked about the king and we still have a king, Tolstoi talked about war and peace and we still have war and peace, Theo Thijssen talked about education and we still have education.
Interviewers don’t rest until they have an answer that shows that it used to be the same as it is today.
But the nice thing about reading old books is that things used to be very different back in the day. In Agatha Christie’s books, lower-class people are sometimes half beasts, barely able to love their children. It is precisely the casualness with which she describes this that is so staggering. Multatuli shouted that we should not enslave the Javanese, but he did not think that we had no business in Java at all. Theo Thijssen writes about a schoolteacher who, with an arithmetic book, visits a boy who is dying of tuberculosis in a stuffy workers’ cottage. That world has disappeared and we can no longer describe it as if we ourselves lived in that time.
Later ‘Poirot books’, written by Sophie Hannah on behalf of the Christie heirs, are clearly products of this time. We have lost the innocence with which we could colonize and discriminate.
A few weeks ago I read Elspeet’s Jew, a children’s book from 1885. A posh family takes a driving tour and gets out of the carriage for a walk across the heath. They meet a man who tends to seven charcoal ovens at once. Day and night he maintains the gently smoldering fires.
“But when are you going home to sleep?” asks the son of the genteel people. (Note that ‘you’ to a workman).
“Why, sir, there is my house!” the man shouts cheerfully, pointing to a potato sack stretched over some sticks.
What has Elspeet’s Jew tell us today? The importance of a good working conditions law?
Nicole Mizee is a writer and replaces Frits Abrahams during his vacation.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 19, 2023.