Ms Fletcher and Ms Christie

Once the festivities were out of the way, I spent much of my Christmas break in the company of the most famous female crime writers; Agatha Christie and Jessica Fletcher.

There was a "Murder She Wrote" marathon consisting of four feature length episodes of the crime-solving mystery writer. The quartet had plots involving the FBI and stolen security secrets, slavery and Jessica's great aunt (Angela Lansbury in a bonnet), a convention of writers and a treasure hunt in Ireland. None were set in the murder capital Cabot Cove, but still it turned out that two of Jessica's friends were killers.

Aside from bits and pieces of Miss Marple, I watched a few episodes of Poirot with my mother. My mother has seen most episodes of Poirot already but due to lack of anything else on the television (and lack of anything else to do), she didn't mind watching them again. I had not seen these episodes before, but impressed my mother by quickly guessing the murderer, before the Belgian detective did. In the episode "Poirot at Christmas", I guessed the killer so quickly that my mother took to telling me I was wrong to throw me off the scent. I didn't quite identify how the crime was committed, but considering it involved a balloon that squealed like a pig that was hardly surprising.

Suffering from my customary inability to sleep in a strange bed, I also saw a bit of the 1978 film "Agatha" about the writer's disappearance. It starred a young Dustin Hoffman, as a journalist, not as Ms Christie!

Along with Christmas Cake and sprouts, I've had my fill of Christie and Fletcher for a while.

Nepotism and Unbelievability

I didn’t have too much to drink on my birthday. I really didn’t. I didn’t have a headache or anything like that. I went out to buy the Sunday paper with minimum fuss. But after that I was besieged by extreme tiredness, so the only thing to do was lie on the sofa in front of the television, where I dozed on and off all day.

In between dozes, I watched the following:

Murder 101: College Can be Murder
Described by the Hallmark announcer as ‘the new Diagnosis Murder”, which was a fairly accurate description in that it was a crime show, starring Dick Van Dyke and it wasn’t very good. He played much the same character as in Diagnosis Murder, except this one was a lecturer in Criminology rather than a doctor so it was set in a university rather than a hospital, but he was still the same irritating character. It also, like Diagnosis Murder, involved his son Barry, who, as far as I could tell, lived with him, was a Private Investigator but not playing his son this time. A few other lesser Van Dykes also cropped up in lesser roles.

Agatha Christies Poirot – Murder in Mesopotania
Despite telling the OH I didn’t like Poirot much, I ended up watching this. I wondered whether it might have any interesting undercurrent about politics in the Middle East and Colonialism, but it didn’t unless that happened while I snoozed. The plot involved the murder of an archaeologist’s wife, who we were supposed to believe was captivatingly beautiful. I found her insipid. The resolution involved asking us to believe that someone could marry the same man twice without realising it. What I refer to as the “Martin Wellbourne Scenario” after a similar plot in The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin. Frankly, I don't believe it is possible. Mrs Perrin knew all along that Martin Wellbourne was Reggie, just as Jodie Foster in Somersby knew it wasn't really her husband. So I couldn't believe this was any different. Nonsense.

After this was finished watching the rest of the Homicide DVD which was majestic and deserves its own post. More later

Reading the Detectives

I was looking for other blogs on a similar theme to this one, and pretty much all I could find were blogs on crime fiction. There are tons of them out there.

I'm not actually a big reader of crime fiction. I'm not sure why - perhaps I just need a break from it after watching it on television so much. Or it might be that my degree in English Literature makes me a bit of reading snob. But that's not to say I haven't read any crime fiction. I have.

Some of the first adult books I read were crime fiction - Agatha Christie novels, read on holidays in Spain and the Algarve, that had been left behind in the clubhouses by previous holidaymakers. Normally read after I'd exhausted my own supply of books (usually the Sweet Valley High series!).

Later, around the age of 16, I was reading the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books, which led onto the Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently novels. Not really ordinary detective fiction - Dirk ran a holistic detective agency. I remember a particularly great description of a character as 'looking like lots of David Bowies joined together'.

Then at University, I read a few bits and pieces in the genre - some Sherlock Holmes stories definitely - but I never managed to take the course entitled 'Signs and Clues: Detective Fiction'. I did however do a course in Post War American Fiction, taught by the unfortunately named Sally Munt, a leading light in Lesbian fiction. The course syllabus was changed from the advertised books, to include a few lesbian detective novels. I can't remember the name of the author - all I do remember is that no crimes were ever solved as that was a masculine narrative tradition which she was rejecting. We also read American Psycho, The Crying of Lot 49 and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, which I suppose were all crime/mystery fiction but not as dear old Agatha would have recognised.

1996 and the 'Trainspotting' effect can be fully seen in publishing. I'm 21 and lap up books about clubbing, which includes a couple by Manchester writer Nicholas Blincoe, who seemed to be found in the Crime section because his books featured gangsters. The then-boyfriend bought me a Janet Evanovich book - Two for the Dough I think - he bought it because it had a bright cover and I then did read another couple of hers before losing interest. I also read 'White Merc with Fins' which was set where I was living - it was good but his next book 'Rancid Aluminium' was rubbish and tainted the memory of his previous work.

Then I read Christopher Brookmyre's 'Quite Ugly One Morning' and loved his mix of mystery and politics. I read everything he wrote after that and quite fell in love with his investigative reporter, Jack Parlabane. But then the relationship soured - 'The Sacred Art of Stealing' was too much of a rip-off of 'Out of Sight' and the next one I never really grasped. I haven't read his most recent effort.

Because of the comparisons made between Brookmyre and Carl Hiaasen, I decided to see what the fuss was about there. I read a couple of his books, borrowed from the local library. I enjoyed them but the mistake I made was that I couldn't later remember ones I'd read already because I no longer had the books to check and reading the covers, they all sounded kind of the same. So I've not read anymore Carl.

Then came Alexander McCall Smith' 'No 1 Ladies Detective Agency'. An easy read on holiday (as with Agatha Christie) but after reading about five, I found them rather repetitive - I don't just mean in plot structure, I'm pretty sure whole chunks of description about the main characters were lifted wholesale from one book and plonked down in the next.

I'd seen Ian Rankin on the Late Show and News Night Review alot and liked him but hadn't read any of his books. I took the plunge about two years ago, buying one in a train station shop for my journey home. I enjoyed it - like Hiaasen and Brookmyre, he was politicised. I started to work my way through the series when I had a long train journey ahead of me, finding the books easy to get into, but not too low-brow. I decided I preferred the later books. On my last trip to visit my mother, I bought 'The Falls' and 'Resurrection Men'. The former I read greedily on the outward journey and finished half way through the return, then I started the next one. Three months later, I have just managed to finish it - I don't know why but I lost interest in it. I'm out of love with Rebus and can't see me picking up a crime novel for a while.

Unless of course, someone wants to recommend something from the millions being written.