Agatha Christie!

When I was 11, I picked up AND THEN THERE WERE NONE to read on my ride to school and arrived there at the same time that Philip Lombard, with a vulpine smile, says, "It's called 'Swan Song'." I carried it with me all day and read it under my desk. I finished it that night.

(No actor in any film version ever really did the vulpine smile except Aleksandr Kaidanovskii.)

The amazing thing about Agatha Christie (obviously there are problematic things, but I'm not talking about those right now) was her analytic mind. In a time when men said that women baffled them by being too emotional, *she* baffled men by being remorselessly logical.

Julian Symons, who was a member of the Detection Club at the same time she was, once arrived late to one of their meetings (the meetings were black tie) with grease all over his hands, having had a puncture on the way. He recalled in his book Bloody Murder how he sneaked in...

...and looked up to see Christie staring at him. At first he flushed, thinking she was eying him censoriously, but then he realized she wasn't judging him at all. She was just noting the inconsistency- formal dress and filthy hands- and wondering, what could I do with this...

When her daughter Rosalind wanted to be presented at Court, Christie was informed that, as a divorced woman, she could not accompany her daughter. After Christie's death Rosalind found notes for a never-written mystery about- yes- debutantes, in which divorce is a plot point.

The degree to which Christie could step back from her personal feelings for analysis- and the degree to which she relished using people's assumptions about her against them- is most obvious in her use, over and over again, of the M-W-W triangle motif in her novels and stories.

Christie's first marriage had broken up when her husband left her for a younger woman, a fact of which most of the newspaper readers of the British Isles were cognizant for reasons I won't go into now. This was the divorce that rendered her "unfit" to be presented to the Queen.

(I don't know when this changed, but it must have eventually, because Christie eventually became a Dame.)