Lowena Buñi Consorio, 42, has a journalism degree from the University of Sto. Tomas and is a mother of three daughters. She works for the Philippine Navy as a research analyst. She likes to quote H.G. Wells to describe the joy she gets from reading: "I had just taken to reading. I had discovered the art of leaving my body to sit impassive in a crumpled-up attitude in a chair or sofa, while I wandered over the hills and far away in novel company and new scenes… My world began to expand very rapidly."
Yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live. – Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun, 1941.
In a crowded literary genre dominated by contemporary writers like Mary Higgins Clark and old-school storytellers like Erle Stanley Gardner and the legendary maverick Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dame Agatha Christie still remains largely nonpareil in psychoanalyzing and dissecting the forces of nature that drive men over the edge and into the dark side, to commit acts of evil. These are the acts of evil that are wantonly destructive, inhumane, selfish and wicked.
In all of Christie’s 80 mystery novels and short stories, the answer to the question of why men do evil basically lies in the very intrinsic nature of man’s God-given freedom of choice. In Crooked House, which features one of fiction’s youngest purveyors of evil, the murderess is a narcissistic 12-year-old girl, an evil genius who is simply born bad. Her evilness is both natural and a freak of nature. In Three-Act Tragedy and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, evil runs in the blood, a part of the gene pool. In The A.B.C. Murders and Death on the Nile, evil is the ultimate path chosen as a means to an end, presumably after all possible legitimate options have been exhausted.
In the world of Agatha Christie, committing evil becomes easy, almost second nature, once man crosses the moral threshold dividing what is right and wrong and commits the crucial, no-turning-back first act of evil. In Death on the Nile, two underdog lovers are transformed into scheming, cold-blooded conspirators and murderers the moment they set into motion their murderous plot. In The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, Third Girl, After the Funeral and Cat Among the Pigeons, simple, ordinary individuals became killers the moment they resort to concealing a sordid past or simply out of self-preservation.
In Christie’s world, five of the seven deadly sins – greed, envy, lust, pride and wrath – represent a perennial, foreboding and ominous danger. These deadly sins motivate or compel men and women to evil. Among these sins, greed for money and power is usually the major culprit, the most compelling human frailty that initially tempts until it becomes too intoxicating, too powerful to resist.
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (generally regarded as her masterpiece), The Mystery of the Blue Train, Evil Under the Sun, The Body in the Library, Cat Among the Pigeons, and 4.50 From Paddington (a.k.a. What Mrs. McGillycuddy Saw), the villains are lured and overpowered by the seductive power of greed. In Death on the Nile, Thirteen at Dinner and Lord Edgwere Dies, greed is intertwined with lust, eventually leading to almost-perfect crimes of passion.
In The A.B.C. Murders and Peril at End House, greed and envy form a lethal combination that drives the villains to commit their atrocities. Greed also forms a deadly alliance with pride in Three-Act Tragedy, Hallowe’en Party and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead to conceal violent pasts and other long-hidden skeletons in the closet. Wrath unleashes its fury in Murder on the Orient Express, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (a.k.a. A Holiday for Murder) and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, which also proves that revenge is sometimes a dish best served cold. In Ten Little Niggers (a.k.a. And Then There Were None), the killer perceives himself as an executioner who systematically dispenses his own twisted brand of vigilante justice reminiscent of the killing spree of Kevin Spacey’s character in Seven.
In the realm of Christie, evil lurks in every corner. It unexpectedly dwells in sleepy, quiet towns and communities, finds sanctuary in exotic and glamorous places, or seeks refuge in mansions, apartments, offices, restaurants and other ordinary places where crime inevitably happens.
But crime does not pay, not even in Dame Agatha’s world of evil geniuses and perfectly conceived and executed murders and schemes. The villains and murderers always get their comeuppance; their evil deeds are exposed and condemned; and good always triumphs over evil.
Philosopher James McCosh could well have been referring to Dame Agatha’s mind-boggling mystery-thrillers when he said: "The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think."
Indeed, there are more than enough nutrients for the brain, challenging puzzles, and twists and turns in her novels and short stories. There are more than enough mental and intellectual calisthenics in reading the cases and exploits of her sleuths: the methodical Hercule Poirot (Dame Agatha’s answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes), whose main weapon is his gray matter; the nosy spinster Miss Jane Marple; and her own version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the husband and wife team of Tommy and Tuppence. But her thrillers are also crowd-pleasing, highly entertaining, hard-to-put-down page-turners.
She is the Steven Spielberg of the whodunit genre, a virtuoso who rarely lets her readers down.
I discovered Dame Agatha quite by accident. I was wandering around the University Belt along CM Recto when I accidentally bumped into a high school friend whom I last saw on graduation day. She lent me her By the Pricking of My Thumbs, which I barely touched for days until one lazy day when I decided to read it purely out of curiosity. By the time I finished reading the novel, Dame Agatha had me eating out of the palm of her hand. For someone whose first foray into the world of books was courtesy of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, I suppose my addiction and passion for Agatha Christie’s mysteries is inevitable. Even now that I have greatly expanded my reading into and beyond the domains of Tom Clancy, Dan Brown, John Grisham and the other best-selling authors, I remain a devout Agatha Christie fanatic. Even now that I have rediscovered the classics of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and James Joyce as well as formed a special affinity with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Christie’s whodunits remain my one constant guilty-reading pleasure.
Although I have read all her novels, rereading her thrillers is a joy I continue to savor over and over again. While it was the escapades of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew that first stirred my curiosity for reading, it was Christie who nurtured what was initially merely a habit into a real passion that continues to grow and evolve.
Writer/playwright W. Somerset Maugham once said that "to acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all of the miseries of life." While Dame Agatha’s world of cold-blooded murderers, evil geniuses, conspiracies and schemes is hardly a place of refuge, oddly enough, I find solace between the blood-soaked pages of her mysteries. From her writing about the evil that men do, I think I was able to build for myself a sort of refuge from the dangers of intolerance and bigotry.
Her thrillers taught me that there is still a place where men can live in relative harmony despite their irreconcilable differences, a place where they can meet halfway and disagree civilly without having to kill each other, even in a world where evil is a constant, brooding presence.