Agatha Christie

Tonight, I remembered just how awesome Agatha Christie is.

I’ve read some Agatha Christie in my day—not a lot, but enough to have a profound respect for her as a mystery writer—but somehow I always forget just how cool she is. Agatha Christie is her own Miss Marple: that quiet, proper, understated old maid who nonetheless sees right through veils of intrigue and deceit... and yet at the end of the day goes home to her tidy cottage and almost fades from everyone else’s memory.

The play “An Unexpected Guest” premiered tonight at the Van Wert Civic Theatre, an amateur theatre in my hometown (50 miles west on U.S. 30; if you hit Indiana, you’ve gone too far).
Although the acting quality wasn’t what I’ve grown accustomed to at Freed, VWCT is pretty darn good in the community theatre world. So it was time for me to sit back and let a little suspension of disbelief work its magic.

The setup of the play is this: A stranded motorist knocks on the French windows of a house and enters, looking for a telephone. Instead, he finds a man dead in his wheelchair—and the man’s wife, holding a gun, standing on the other side of the room. The woman says that she did it. The motorist, taking pity on her, proceeds to work with the wife to make the scene look as if a stranger broke into the house, shot the man, and left again.

As the story unfolds, it turns out that the wife wasn’t the killer… but who was? Nearly all of the occupants of the house—the man’s mother, the family secretary, the manservant, the retarded brother, and the wife’s secret lover—are under suspicion at some point in the play.

Somewhere in the middle of the show, I started to lose faith in Agatha. All the signs pointed to a particular character; it seemed as if it was that character; everyone else believed it was the character, he was essentially convicted… I thought to myself, this is like CSI/NCIS/Cold Case/Criminal Minds/insert crime drama here. I know whodunit. I’ve seen it all before.

And then it happened. The Agatha Christie ending. Almost every single character in the play was under suspicion except for one. And, like Agatha Christie herself, the character seemed to squeaky clean, too perfect, to unimportant to be the killer. But Agatha has a flair for the deliciously unexpected, and oh boy, she delivered.

The play itself was enhanced by a spectacular performance by the actor who portrayed the retarded brother; it was I am Sam set in an Agatha Christie mystery—and it was too perfect. The experience was enhanced by an audience full of old people who liked to make rude comments, sneeze, burp, and speak too loudly (likely because of hearing aids and whatnot). Oh boy, I’ve missed Van Wert…

Regardless, I encourage everyone to experience Agatha Christie at least once. Read a book, watch a play, check out Murder, She Wrote, listen to a book-on-tape (I have one, if you want to borrow). Whether you like genre fiction or not, reading a master is reading a master, no matter what the classification. And hoo boy, Agatha Christie is nothing if not a master of her craft.

Link to the official Agatha Christie site.