The science in Agatha Christie

Carla Valentine helps us admire Agatha Christie all the more.

Valentine is a pathologist — she even runs a dating site for people in her profession called Dead Meet — and the author of The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie (2021). She is also a longtime Christie fan.

She enjoys the mysteries themselves, just like the rest of us do, adding, "But when I first began reading her books as a child, it was the many clues she provided about dead bodies — the blood, wounds, and confusing  decomposition artifacts — that I found the most ingenious, and this cemented the love of forensic pathology that would go on to shape my whole life."

Christie learned much about blood and wounds when she worked as a nurse during both world wars. Mostly, however, she was just a good student who read medical journals, questioned experts and worked hard to stay on top of the latest developments in crime solving.

Valentine points out how her stories reflect her growing knowledge about such things as fingerprints and trace evidence and how these are used to solve crimes. In her early books, Christie didn't seem to know the difference between a revolver and an automatic handgun, yet she learned, just as she learned about poisons, autopsies, handwriting analysis, blood spatter and all the rest.

Speaking of blood spatter, Valentine points out the difference between blood spatter and blood splatter and also between blood that spouts and blood that spurts. Christie also knew these differences, and this is clear from her books.

There is actually more blood in Agatha Christie novels than we remember. We tend to associate her with poisonings, something she became an expert on. Yet shootings and stabbings also occur frequently. Valentine provides a Murder Methods Table in the appendix that shows at a glance how victims die in each of her books. In And Then There Were None, for example, there is a shooting, a poisoning, a blow to the head, a drowning, an ax murder, a hanging and a person who is crushed to death.

Christie closely followed true crime news and sometimes modeled her plots on these actual events. Other times her characters make reference to these crimes.

Valentine tells us a lot about the use of forensics in solving crimes, both the history and the science, yet she never strays far from Agatha Christie. Thus her book never fails to stay interesting.

Books to chew on

Sir Francis Bacon

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

Sir Francis Bacon

Sir Francis Bacon's food metaphor applied to the reading of books seems apt to me.

We taste new books in the same way we taste a new dish or a more familiar dish prepared in a new way. That first bite is small, taken cautiously. Is it any good? Will we like it? Will it satisfy? With some books, as with some foods, we never get past that first taste. Some readers rarely get beyond the first chapter or two. A taste is enough.

Just as there are comfort foods, so there are comfort books. We  seek out books by authors we know and who have pleased us in the past. These we devour. Unfamiliar authors make finicky readers uneasy, just as unfamiliar foods make finicky eaters uneasy.

The trouble with most of the books we devour is that they give us little to chew on. I love a good thriller as much as anyone else, but after the last chapter there is not much to think about. The thrill, quite literally, is gone. One fast-food burger is pretty much like the last one.

The books we can chew and digest thoroughly are the ones we read more slowly and can talk about, think about, perhaps even write about and then reread later with just as much pleasure, if not more, than the first time.

A superior person's insults

If you were challenged, say as a party game, to create a string of insults, each starting with a different letter of the alphabet, could you do it? I might begin like this: "You are an asinine, bigoted, corrupt, dim-witted ...," but I would soon run out of gas.

Yet in the 1979 book The Superior Person's Book of Words, Peter Bowler provides just such a string. And not only that, but each word in his string is probably a word you have never used in your life and could only guess at its meaning. Here it is:

"Sir, you are an apogenous, bovaristic, coprolalia, dasypygal, excerebrose, facinorous, gnathonic, hircine, ithyphallic, jumentous, kyphotic, labrose, mephitic, napiform, oligophrenial, papuliferous, quisquilian, rebarbative, saponaceous, thersitical, unguinous, ventripotent, wlatsome, xylocephalous, yirning zoophyte."

Even the speller on my computer  hasn't heard of most of those words. But what do they mean? Here's Bowler's translation:

"Sir, you are an impotent, conceited, obscene, hairy-buttocked, brainless, wicked, toadying, goatish, indecent, stable-smelling, hunchbacked, thick-lipped, stinking, turnip-shaped, feeble-minded, pimply, trashy, repellent. smarmy, foul-mouthed, greasy, gluttonous, loathsome, wooden-headed, whining, extremely low form of animal life."

That's telling him..

A thousand lives

George R.R. Martin

Some author, perhaps it was Anne Tyler, once said she wrote novels to live more than one life, or something to that effect. Readers do the same thing, of course. George R.R. Martin put it this way: "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies."

Read a mystery and you can be a detective in pursuit of a killer. Or you might even experience what it's like to be a killer on the run, without the inconvenience of actually having to murder someone.

Read a romance and you can feel all the excitement, passion and misery a lover experiences while you sit alone in a room. It's not quite the same thing, of course, but it's better than just sitting alone in a room.

Read one of the classics and for a few hours you can be Pip or Scout or Huck or Holden or Hester and know what it's like to live their lives in the comfort of your favorite chair.

I don't believe in reincarnation, but I do believe in living a thousand lives in one lifetime.

The single book

 "Beware the person of a single book," Thomas Aquinas said.

As a 13th century priest and theologian, you might have expected Aquinas to make an exception for the person of a single book when that single book was the Holy Bible. Apparently he didn't.

Admittedly I am taking seven words out of context, so I don't know exactly what Aquinas was getting at. My paraphrase all these centuries later would be something like, "Don't trust a single source for all knowledge, all wisdom, all pleasure." This might apply to news sources as well as books.

Even if one holds one particular book as supreme — the Bible, say, or the works of Shakespeare — other books can complement that book, or in some cases contradict it. Reading more books can confuse, but in the end should make more clear to the reader what is actually important, what is most meaningful, what is true.

The Covid misinformation period we recently went through, which is now unraveling, illustrates the danger of relying on just one source of information. Physicians who disagreed with the official party line on Covid treatment were often shunned and even persecuted. They have since been proven right in many cases, while the official party line, spread by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC and others, was often wrong. Thus those warning of misinformation turned out to be the ones spreading misinformation. Allowing conflicting views might have saved lives.

Beware the person of a single book.

The summer childhood ends

Somewhere in what now felt like the distant past there had been a beautiful May morning when she had turned ten years old, and for the first time happiness and sadness, beauty and cruelty had begun to join together inside her, entwining themselves inextricably like the tendrils of a vine up the trunk of a tree.

Carrie Brown, The Rope Walk

Coming-of-age novels mostly follow the same outline — childhood wonder crashes into harsh reality — and Carrie Brown's The Rope Walk (2007) is no exception. Just the same, the novel is both original and exceptional. That it is not more widely read is a shame.

Alice, who lives with her widowed father, Archie, and much older brothers, celebrates her 10th birthday as the novel opens. And so begins the most wonderful summer of her life, and yet also the cruelest.

On that day, Theo, a mixed-race boy of about her age, comes to live with her temporarily. His mother is experiencing extreme depression and his grandmother has been hospitalized. Archie agrees to let the boy stay with them for a few weeks. He is like the best birthday gift ever.

Theo turns out to be a creative, game-for-anything child who brings a tool box with him, but very few clothes. The summer days become one adventure after another. "He was the kind of boy she didn't think she would get tired of," Brown writes.

Nearby lives Kenneth, a famous artist in declining health. Alice is asked to read to him each day, and Kenneth chooses The Journals of Lewis and Clark, a book that feeds Theo's thirst for adventure as he listens along with the old man.

As a secret gift for Kenneth, the children decide to build a rope walk through the nearby forest so that the old man will be able to experience nature on his own and find his way back home again. Their naive kindness leads to tragedy.

I don't know if The Journals of Lewis and Clark is a great book for reading out loud, but I'm sure The Rope Walk would be. Many passages in the story are utterly beautiful, and I discovered myself reading them aloud.

Like Lamb in Love, another Carrie Brown novel, The Rope Walk is a gem that deserves a comeback in bookstores.

Banks at the beginning

After becoming immersed in Peter Robinson's more recent Inspector Banks mysteries, I found it revealing to read one of the first, A Dedicated Man, published in 1988.

Banks, newly transferred from London to a rural part of England, is still a relatively young man whom young women find attractive. His wife, Sandra, hasn't left him yet, and his two children still live at home. He has yet to assemble the team of detectives featured in Robinson's later books.

Also unlike most of the later mysteries in the series, there is just one case to occupy his time, at least until a teenage girl disappears. The disappearance may or may not be related to the murder of a scholarly man whom everybody seemed to like and nobody seemed to have any reason to kill. Yet someone did murder Harry Steadman.

Because there seems to be no motive to be found in the present, Banks explores the past, old relationships and especially old love affairs. Where does the secret lie?

Had I read A Dedicated Man back in 1988 I think I might have liked it better than I do now, for now I have Robinson's later work to compared it with, and the author has improved with time. The ending fits the model of the traditional murder mystery, but seems a bit forced and is not as convincing as the conclusions of most of his later novels that are modeled more on actual police work.