2008-01-22 Bleak and beautiful

Agatha Christie is an English prodigy. She is able to transform some banal and particularly obnoxious situation into some kind of normal banality. And Miss Marple is the old spinster she uses most of the time to do this. Urban bleakness will go to Hercule Poirot, the continental and Belgian private eye, the very challenger of Sherlock Holmes. The bleakness of a village where everyone is locked up in set roles they have to play day after day and forever. Let some new character appear and everything is prone to tilt over without even showing what is really happening. Since one cannot get out of his or her role, he or she is going to correct the problem to his or her advantage and without anyone knowing about it. So let's have a smoke screen to cover up in advance what is really happening. Then let's do some surgical operation to get rid of what has to be gotten rid of. And then let's do it and pray for salvation (not to be found out for the criminal, and for that criminal to be sent to the gallows for the reader). Of course Agatha Christie shows how the truth can only be discovered by someone from outside because anyone from inside, including the police, will be blind to small details and will be trapped into blindness by the smoke screen. But the truth can only come from someone who knows exactly what it is to live in a small village. The two people from London cannot discover the truth though they are the only ones to see the real facts. It takes Miss Marple to put the real facts in perspective and then to do the slightly illegal act that will get the wolf out of the wood, using an innocent girl as bait. Miss Marple has a sorry side to her personality: and she is not even sorry about it: "we are not put into this world, Mr Burton, to avoid danger when an innocent fellow-creature's life is at stake". And she forgets that the bait is put in danger by her because the double murderer is quite satisfied by now even if a third person could be sent to the gallows for his crime. And strangely enough she forgets the two young sons of the murderer in the final settlement of the novel. And Agatha Christie adds one charming touch on top of that: she manages to get two marriages arranged in that small village, probably to make us forget that two people were killed there too. And that's the discreet charm of Agatha Christie that is inimitable and will remain so forever I guess.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines