Agatha Christie: an unlikely obituary - Latin America: Private Eyes & Time Travelers

Literary Review, Fall, 1994 by Jorge Ibarguengoitia, Fernanda Soicher

IN THE LAST FEW WEEKS THREE DIFFERENT PEOPLE HAVE ASKED why didn't I write an obituary for Agatha Christie or an article about her under the pretext of her death. I told all three the same thing: that to me, this woman's books seem unreadable, because the ones I read or tried to read, have caused one of two experiences for me: I have found out who the murderer was on page 40, because of my own intuition for which she isn't to blame (for instance, I think that if a gentleman's only personal characteristic is that he winds all the clocks in the house everyday, he must be the criminal); or, on the contrary, I finish the novel not knowing which way is up, and I can't understand the explanation Poirot gives at the end, so I'm totally confused. But this mundane and contemptuous attitude is, on second thought, false. I think what actually happens to me with Agatha Christie, and with any detective story in which I have to solve a mystery, is that I'm a total failure. Because when I reexamine my past, the opposite of what happens to Hercule Poirot happens to me: I see in the shadow of the past a forest of unanswered cases.

Not that I have found cadavers when entering the dining room, nor shoes at the bank of a river, nor received letters signed with little drops of blood. The cases I have tried to solve are of another nature. If I may, they are small mysteries, but no less stabbing. Overall, although not for that reason, they are often, but not always, easier to resolve. One of the most irresolvable: Who took the nutcracker? In my house there were two identical nutcrackers that were in my family's possession for at least 70 years. They were old, but not so much so (my mother would classify them as little old men), not well designed (their form resembles instruments of torture from the Middle Ages), nor were they of precious metal (they are heavy with a varnished silver coating). This is the corpus delicti. The suspects are the 10 of us who ate at the house a Sunday in August 1967. Between the fruits there were figs and nuts, and since that day, in my house there is only one nutcracker. I have gone over that scene many times in my mind, and I always get wrapped up in its complexity. Of the 10 of us who were sitting there, no one has a criminal record, nor ill-begotten money, nor do we know of anyone who has an illness that involves losing sight by a metallic sparkle. All, I'm sure, have nutcrackers at their respective homes. And I'm also sure that a nutcracker identical to the one I now hold would not have seemed endowed with such irresistible beauty to anyone. And yet, there is but one nutcracker, not two. Another disquieting possibility is that the nutcracker was thrown into the trash, with the nutshells and the fig peels. Who would dare to undo this possibility?

Another irresolvable mystery that haunts me is represented by a fork with a different design than the rest that are to be found in my house. It appeared in the silverware drawer in 1950. If I'm not mistaken, this fork was property of the Herrasti family. But in this case I'm the one to blame for this crime. This is clear. What remains a mystery are the circumstances that led me to commit the sinful act.

There is yet another mystery that I think is resolved. I'm going to explain it because I believe its solution represents a triumph, not of logic, but of parabolic deduction. I'll start at the end. A few months ago, we had a fairly numerous group of people over for dinner. When the guests left, my wife discovered a very long, platinum blonde hair tangled in the bristles of her brush. Later on she noticed that the bottle where we mix the mustard had disappeared. In one instant we solved the mystery: at the party there was only one woman with platinum blonde hair: we imagined her using the brush, and then putting the mustard bottle in her handbag. But this deduction led me to an even more important conclusion: that woman had been present at another occasion, many years before, the night that half a chicken pie disappeared.

I have solved these three crimes but always get confused by Agatha Christie's plots. Am I a good boy scout but a bad detective?