At Bertram’s Hotel

I really enjoyed this John Lanchester essay on Agatha Christie, which came out a little before Christmas. I thought it was even better after watching John Malkovich play Poirot in the new BBC version of The ABC Murders. The essay explains in advance why the adaptation failed. Poirot is not so much a character as a bundle of mannerisms. To provide him with an interior life, much less a Secret Wound that drives his quest for justice, is to miss the point completely.

I’ve been listening to Agatha Christie adaptations a lot over the last several months. If you have a ten year old and a twelve year old, they turn out to be an admirable introduction to beginning-to-be grown up fiction, as well as an excellent way of keeping them quiet in the car. Christie is a much better prose stylist than people give her credit for being and is often deft and funny. It certainly helps that several of the Miss Marple audiobooks are narrated by Richard E. Grant.

But what’s original about Lanchester’s essay is his argument that Christie is best thought of as an exponent of formalist modernism.

Her career amounts to a systematic exploration of formal devices and narrative structures, all through a genre with strictly defined rules and a specified character list: a murder must happen, it must be solved by a detective, there must be a murderer, a victim, a set of characters who might be the murderer but turn out not to be, a number of possible motives, most of which turn out to be misleading; the setting must be circumscribed, the list of suspects finite, the motive and crucial evidence something disclosed to the reader but preferably not shown to be significant. And it must come in at around 50,000 words – that’s not a genre rule, it’s just how long Christie thought a murder story should be. From within this narrow framework, Christie produced a range of formal experiments so extensive that it’s quite difficult to think of an idea she didn’t try, short of setting a Poirot novel in a school for wizards.

and:

The least believable detective of all is in numerical terms the most successful. Readers understand and resonate to the profoundly artificial, conventional nature of Christie’s fictions; Poirot is understood and accepted, indeed actively enjoyed, as a formal device, an almost Brechtian reminder of the artifice in which we are being invited to participate. He’s the most popular detective because he is the least plausible.

As Lanchester notes, what Christie is good at is not character, but social setting.

She isn’t thought of as a realist writer, and with good reason, but the 20th century is one of the main characters in her books: she turned ten in its first year, and was well placed to notice the many changes in manners, mores and styles of life that happened throughout the five and a half decades of her career. You can trace it in the buildings, from the ‘fine old house’ of Styles Court in 1920, with two wings and a gallery and a separate set of servants’ quarters, to the ‘modern bungalow of the better type’ in 1934, to the millionaire-built ‘luxurious modern house’ of 1939 and the cottage of 1942, which ‘consisted of all modern amenities enclosed in a hideous shell of half timbering and sham tudor’, sited on a ‘new building estate’; by 1961 we’re in a world of rented flats and espresso machines and ‘refrigerators, pressure cookers, whining vacuum cleaners’, where ‘the girls looked, as girls always looked to me nowadays, dirty.’ Social and economic change of this type isn’t one of Christie’s subjects, not directly, but it is something she never fails to register, and like Miss Marple, she misses very little.

Lanchester only mentions Christie’s “strange self-pastiching late novel At Bertram’s Hotel” in passing. Given his thesis, it deserves further discussion. Not because it’s a good detective novel. Indeed, it’s actively bad. It has a large scale criminal conspiracy, the kind of thing that Christie was never much cop at (her proper murders are small time affairs, carried out for money, vengeance or petty personal motives). The book is full of loose ends. But it feels all the more weirdly modernistic for it. Why does the gang of thieves impersonate respectable members of society, complete with similar cars with fake license plates, while carrying out their crimes? By the standards of the crime novel, or indeed ordinary common sense, it is ridiculous. But if it had appeared in a book or film by Alain Robbe-Grillet, it would seem appropriate amidst all the other incongruities.

The difference though is that Christie was not looking to explore the possibilities of the form. Instead, she was trying to make a point, albeit somewhat clumsily. The book centers on Bertram’ Hotel, which appears to be a post-war survival from the old pre-war regime. It makes all of the delicious food that one can’t get elsewhere: proper seed-cake, delicious buttered muffins (the word ‘muffin’ appears 23 times in the text). The “real chambermaid [looks] unreal, wearing a striped lavender print dress and actually a cap, a freshly laundered cap. A smiling, rosy, positively countrified face. Where did they find these people?”

It turn out that none of this is real at all (the real-unreal chambermaid turns out to be a paid actress and a gang member). Bertram’s Hotel isn’t economically viable any more as a hotel. It’s a front; a means for a highly organized criminal conspiracy to organize and launder its crimes. The old world of charm, comfort and convenience that Bertram’s seemed to preserve is an artifice, hiding something very different.

On one possible reading, this is a meta-commentary on the entire old fashioned society described in so many of Christie’s books. The country houses, the libraries in which bodies were so awkwardly discovered, the resorts and Nile cruises; all those too depended on one or another form of looting. I don’t know whether Christie completely intends this – she was probably politically quite conservative. Still, she seems at least to be playing with the idea. After all, a world in which it is easy to mistake criminals for “a High Court judge, an archdeacon, an admiral, a major general,” is plausibly a world in which the high court judge, the archdeacon, the admiral and the major general themselves had criminal qualities. At Bertram’s Hotel is not, under any reasonable definition, a good book or a good detective story. But precisely because it isn’t good, it’s easier to see the artifice, and think about what it might be supposed to do.