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So, what are you reading?
I'm finally done with Christie's And Then There Were None. Didn't have much preamble, it just goes straight into it. Seems like a book written to an audience already very familiar with her work. It was enjoyable enough, and the characters worked. I've more or less given up on the desire to figure out who the killer is beforehand in these kinds of books, and I find that it is pleasant to read them like that. I'm afraid that the only other thing which I can say is that my favourite character died.
Going to give another stab at Sayers' Whose Body?
Mysteries are better once you understand they are not homicide investigations, but manners comedies. The solution is unimportant, and is often shoe-horned in to wrap up the real story, which is uncovering all the dastardly details of rich people's lives. The murder is forever in august company, never a drug addict shivved by feral teenagers. The parade of red herrings are inevitably the dirty laundry of the social elite. While pretending to denounce this poor behavior, the focus of the story reinforces to middle-class mass consumers that their social betters are really worse, but also that this is the aspirational life. Working class people are maudlin cartoons no closer to reality than step-n-fetchit blackface is to real black people.
The murder mystery is a middle-class fantasy that rich people are corrupt in the ways that middle class people look down on in the poor. In reality of course, getting rich, famous or powerful means you don't need to murder people to get what you want, and the crime rates bear this out. The corruption of a class is generally invisible to those below, who generate conspiracy theories to explain the obvious dissonance. One of those conspiracy theories is the murder mystery.
Agreed: they are escapist fantasies, often about lives of rich people and often moralistic in a way to appease genteel middle class tastes. Even more true for later adaptations, such as ITV Poirot and BBC Miss Marple, because they double as nostalgic period shows.
Disagreed: it says anything about what middle class think of rich people in a psychologically or culturally relevant manner. A generic Christie murder mystery includes a cast that includes a few rich people but rest of the cast (suspects) are servants, rich-adjacent or simply middle-class people who hang around for plausible or implausible reasons. I am confident that identity of culprit is statistically random, and thus usually not the rich upper class heir. Christie wrote puzzle pieces which are supposed to surprise the reader with a technically possible but usually unexpected solution.
Rich upper class people are there because by virtue of being rich, one can conjure many superficially plausible reasons for many people to want them dead. None of the reasons interrupt the puzzle with inconvenient social realities unless the author wants so. Their other function is to introduce other interesting plot devices, like an exotic locale, or an exotic murder weapon, or an exotic motive, or both. Sometimes other decidedly non-rich people serve some or all the same functions, such as archeologists or middle-rank military officers who have served in exotic places.
Consider some highlights of Christie's oeuvre. "Why was the victim murdered in the shadow of pyramids? ...he was an archeologist." "Nobody has written a good murder mystery about an airplane yet. Why was the murder victim found dead in an airplane? ...obviously, for starters, he was a rich enough to travel in business class." "Why would a murder victim be killed in an enclosed place, filled only with his family and friends who all had reason to kill him and no distracting possibility that someone else did it?" "...obviously, he was weird and rich, and was killed in his yacht." "Why would my detective receive a summons to solve a murder before it has happened, and I am bored of the setup where it is the murderer who invites the detective to watch his crimes happen? Naturally, the task is given by a weird, quirky millionaire in his last will and testament ... who previously was upstanding guy who solved murders together with my detective and found something weird just before he died!" "How can my quirky detective afford all the quirks and luxurious lifestyle I have written for him? "...he is a crime-solving consultant for the government and rich people." "Why is my detective in an exotic locale in order to board this famous train? ... as I said, he works for the government, on secret military stuff." "Why was the murder weapon an unusual arcane object? ... the victim was a rich antique collector." "Why was he murdered in a closed room together with a group of highly esteemed citizens, yet nobody saw anything? ... he was a rich antique collector and they were all playing bridge. Actually, one of the clues for the detective is to work out everyone's bridge game strategy. My readers love that game."
It all makes much more sense as "rich guy was there to make the plot happen" (not too different from "a wizard did it") than for "let's look at the depravities of the rich people". She also tried her luck in writing some books where "secret spy stuff made the plot happen", but those don't play so well. Considering "depravity", Christie's mysteries are chaste enough to child-friendly. The gruesome murders are abstract enough to be almost cozy. There is surprisingly little depravity, and the little of it's mild. Jealously, vengeance, greed, blackmail about something not too shocking are the common motives for murder. Sex is nearly always presented in very abstracted way: an affair, a romance.
"Social critique" homicide fiction post-date the classic murder mystery fiction. It was pioneered by Raymond Chandler (who was all about showcasing the general depravity of the rich people, and vibes are considered more important than consistent puzzle-like mystery.) Scandinavian noir does the same thing, but with more explicitly left-ward values valence.
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