Resolution52 – Brian Utley & Jenny Dalton

I’m not a writer. And I’ve never blogged. Publicly anyway.  But I was an English Lit major, (not an English Everything is Spelled/Grammatically Correct major, I might point out) once upon a time, and I do enjoy a good over-analysis when I’m all worn out from honing that skill set on my current romantic relationship.  So here I am, reading some books and giving you the what for.

So I was perusing my tiny, somewhat pitiful they-do-an-okay-job-with-what-they-can-get, local library a couple months ago, when my eyes fell on a familiar author that I had never gotten around to reading, Agatha Christie. Turns out she is literally the best selling author OF ALL TIME.  She is the third most widely published after William Shakespeare and THE BIBLE. That’s insanity! Anyway, despite not knowing this impressive resume at the time, I proceeded to checkout Christie’s, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  Wow, was I surprised at the ending.  And I don’t get surprised by endings.  You wanna know why? Because I watch a ton of CSI and Law and Order and I have read almost every Stephen King novel.  That’s the kind of training that has made me nearly un-surpriseable (it’s a word). And I’ll tell you what else- Agatha wrote a real page turner.  I couldn’t put the book down.

So I told Brian, I said, “Brian, you gotta read this,” and he said, “Jenny, I’m in the middle of something,” and I said, “I don’t care,” and he said, “Ok. Sigh (he actually said the word ‘sigh’ which was weird).”  So then he read it and loved it too, and we also read Murder on the Orient Express, which was also fantastic.  We decided Christie was a real pioneer in the detective novel genre and began to wonder how this came to be.  She must have had influences as all writers and artists do, after all, there’s always someone who changes things just enough that the wheel starts spinning in a totally different direction, like Elvis and rock ‘n’ roll, or Nirvana and the era of grunge and alternative music. Coincidently, Brian had recently begun reading Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and it was toward this famous detective that we began to look for Christie’s inspiration.

So we started with the basics.  We read the short stories, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.  Then we moved on (grudgingly) to A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I’m not saying they were bad. Because they weren’t, obviously. I’m just saying, me reading Christie before Doyle was basically akin to my kids growing up watching Toy Story and Tangled and then expecting them to be impressed with the plot and graphics of Snow White.  I mean of course, still today his stuff is impressive, but I imagine, as new things often are, it was pretty amazing in 1887.  Sir Conan Doyle was a major founding father of the great mystery detective novel, (who of course was, I’m sure, influenced by Poe), and laid the groundwork for one of my most favorite genres- the mystery novel.  But I’ll tell it straight.  What I didn’t like about Holmes was, as a reader, you only got the basic story and all the detective work was already done, without the reader, and summed up concisely at the end.  There was no way I could even try to solve the clues because I wasn’t given the same information that Holmes had.  And that was frustrating, because just as I have perfected all my major karate skills from watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’ve also honed my detective skills from picking up the subtle clues left to me by my favorite mystery novels and television shows.  I’ll be watching Bones or Psych for instance, and some might say I’ll “annoyingly” tell you my predictions through constant commentary on character dialogue, body language, and plot details until I have solved the crime. It’s fun and enjoyable (for some more than others) and all part of the experience! The long and short is this; Christie allows you to participate, while Doyle, not so much.

My conclusion? Agatha does it better – but, without Doyle, she probably wouldn’t have done it at all.

Book Thoughts, Jenny Dalton, Mystery Novels Agatha Christie, Blogging, Jenny Dalton, Sherlock Holmes