Agatha Christie is the RD Burman of the book world — every iteration in every medium is a success. Christie’s mystery novels and short stories have been made into movies, video games, graphic novels and television series. Hercule Poirot, her Belgian sleuth, famous for his marvellous moustaches, little grey cells and passion for order and the dear Miss Marple with a fondness for knitting fluffy pink things and drawing village parallels to every kind of inequity in the picture postcard pretty village of St Mary Mead are Christie’s best known creations.
That Christie, whose birth anniversary falls on September 15, is ever popular is borne out with Kenneth Branagh’s big screen adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express coming out this November. The Shakespearean actor plays Poirot in an ensemble cast including Johnny Depp, Penélope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Michelle Pfeiffer and Daisy Ridley.
HarperCollins India, as part of its 25th anniversary celebrations has released 25 Christie titles in hardback, reproduced from the first editions. From the covers to the blurbs, it is all lovingly reproduced.
Talking about the choice of books, Ananth Padmanabhan, CEO HarperCollins India says, “Generations have grown up reading Christie. These 25 are the most popular titles in India by sales and fan feedback. Last year in September-October HarperCollins India ran an online voting campaign called “India’s Favourite Agatha Christie” which also helped in choosing the most preferred titles for India.”
Speaking of the queen of crime’s enduring popularity Mayi Gowda from the popular Blossom Bookstore on Church Street says, “We sell 150 Agatha Christie novels a month. Poirot books are popular; among her novels not featuring him, And Then There Were None sells a lot.”
The limited edition books are faithful to the originals warts and all – when Poirot talks of Bauerstein in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, he describes him as “a very clever man, a Jew of course.” While the title of And Then There Were None has been changed, Philip Lombard remembers Isaac Morris’ “thick Semitic lips.”
David Brawn, Publisher Estates (HarperCollins UK) says, “The myth that Agatha Christie was racist or anti-Semitic sadly persists, although there is no evidence from her personal life to support this view if you consider the context and era in which she lived. Christie was writing at a time when attitudes were different from today’s, so it is perhaps unfair to project a 21st century sensibility on to books written in the first half of the 20th century, when Colonialism was still fresh in everyone’s thinking, if not their memories. In fact, many of Christie’s contemporary writers were much less restrained than she was in their use of pejorative language and attitudes and are shocking by today’s standards compared to Christie’s stories. In fact, Christie often projects racist attitudes on to her characters for dramatic effect, as a way of making them appear more unsavoury and at odds with their rivals in the stories, which suggests that she was actually quite enlightened in some areas of her thinking. This would be supported by the fact that she spent time in the 1930s and 40s in Syria and Iraq on archaeological digs, giving her greater exposure to and understanding of foreign nationals than many of her peers.” The 25 books chosen include well-known books including Curtain, the final Poirot book, The Mystery of the Blue Train which was written in the midst of Christie’s own Gone Girl experience and features the first appearance of St Mary Mead, the unsettling Endless Night, Appointment with Death and Murder in Mesopotamia set in the Middle East and A Murder is Announced featuring Miss Marple.
Talking of Christie’s continuing success, Brawn says, “She wrote such great stories. She was a great plotter, but she tells her stories with apparent simplicity, which makes them much easier to read than those of many of her contemporaries. In fact she will put significant clues directly in front of the reader, with Poirot often taunting Hastings (or another character) about thinking about what you’ve already learned, but in a way that you still don’t understand their significance until the end. She really was a genius, and that kind of storytelling is timeless.”