Agatha Christie’s Sibling Rivalry With Her Sister

Agatha Christie is often called the Queen of Crime Fiction. A very apt title indeed considering she is one of the most successful authors of all time. Though she is not regarded as highly as say James Joyce or Jane Austen among literary critics, in terms of the sheer number of books sold, Agatha Christie stands head and shoulders above all of them. 

The readers loved her. They loved her amateur sleuths – Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple – just as they loved Sherlock Holmes and Auguste Dupin. It was the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Crime fiction was the most preferred genre by all readers and this remains true even today.

Agatha Christie and her husband Max Mallowan at their Winterbrook House in 1950. (National Portrait Gallery, London, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Her success stems from her ability to hook the readers into her web of crime and mystery. Everyone loves a good whodunnit. Most of us love to see the mystery unravelling at the end and enjoy the sweet satisfaction of justice being served. 

Her Elder Sister was considered the brightest in the family.

Growing up, it was not the young Agatha who was expected to become the successful writer in the family. Her sister Margaret Frary Miller excelled in her studies and was already showing signs of being a budding author during her childhood. The young Agatha could never surpass her sister and this would eventually start a healthy sibling rivalry between the two sisters.

It might surprise us today but Agatha Christie struggled initially as a writer. Her manuscripts kept getting rejected by the publishers. She had not yet taken the plunge into Crime Fiction and her initial novels mostly had spiritualism as the common theme. Spiritualism was very popular among the intellectuals at that time. In fact, one of the most popular proponents of spiritualism was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself.

It was a bet initiated by Margaret – fondly called Madge – that prompted Agatha Christie to start working on her first crime fiction in full earnest. Madge challenged Agatha to come up with a murder mystery so clever that the reader would fail to guess the murderer. She won the bet – yep, that was the first draft of ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ – and the rest, as they say, is history.

Reading Ebooks Might Not be a Good Thing After All

This question inevitably dawns upon people like me who lead a nomadic life moving from one rented apartment to the next: what to do with all these books lying around the house? And they must weigh a tonne. How am I supposed to shift them to the new location while looking for my next rented accommodation?

The solution that I always arrive at is to haul them to my family home and dump them there before I move on to a new city for a new job. And pretty soon, books start to pile up in my new apartment as well. One suggestion I always receive from well-wishers is to switch to an ebook reader.

Three Women Reading in a Summer Landscape by Johan Krouthén. (Johan Krouthén, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Why ebook reading is not good for you

But I never wanted to switch to ebook reading. Sure, I use the ebook reader app on my smartphone to clandestinely read books at work. And I often noticed that the reading experience on an electronic device is much inferior. I am not talking about the romantic and sentimental reasons like the smell of the book, the touch and feel of the page, etc. But I am sure these factors might be playing a role in it as well.

I am talking about the ability to recall what you read the previous week or the previous month. A physical book plays an important role in deep reading. You are somehow encouraged to slow down the entire process of reading and digest the words with a cup of tea or coffee, ponder over them and carefully store them in a nice little nook inside your brain. This rarely happens on a tablet or an ebook reader.

Maybe, this is because these devices are primarily designed for browsing rather than reading. Their main purpose is to get you to keep on tapping and scrolling. Every time you tap or scroll on the screen you get a dopamine hit which encourages you to keep going. This is part of the design to get the customers to use the product more. But for a reader, this might lead to browsing rather than reading.

First of all, you are looking at the content through the window of the screen. You are aware of the fact that you are not actually touching the page when you are reading. You are simply looking at it through a window. Whereas the experience of reading a physical book is much more experiential.

For instance, when looking for a particular passage in a book, I will recall that I should look for it within the first two paragraphs of the left side pages in the second chapter. That is where I remember reading that passage. This is one of the benefits of deep reading.

Of course, deep reading is not your goal when you are trying to get to the ending of a story. We have all done it. Quick-reading through the boring parts of the book to find out what happens at the end of the story. But when you are reading great works of literature or nonfiction in general, it is important to pay attention to the details. So, stick to physical books as much as possible and resort to ebook reading sparingly.

Reclaim the Lost Art of Writing

The art of writing is fast disappearing from our world. We are fond of texting which is not the same as writing. Writing is an excellent daily discipline that will help formulate your thoughts and arrange them in logical order. This used to be taught in schools where the pupils were made to submit long essays on given topics every week.

Writing is a very simple activity if you are already thinking and talking in full sentences. You merely have to put them onto the paper. But, these days, most of us are thinking in phrases or sentence fragments and then burping them out. This often involves a lot of filler words and phrases. Try talking for a while without uttering ‘you know’ or ‘like’ and you will get what I am referring to here.

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin. (Tammy Lo from New York, NY, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Lost Art of Writing

More than a century ago, the written word was the main means of communication for the educated. If you look at the Victorian Age, you will see people engaging in regular correspondence through elegantly composed long letters. The quality of the prose of the children in that era even surpasses that of university students of our day.

Of course, the primary mode of communication is no longer the written word. Visual media dominates the communication landscape of our times. However, the information you receive through the visual media tends to be very ephemeral. Whereas the knowledge you gleaned from reading a book tends to last longer.

This is not surprising really. Reading is an active process and it is the reader who decides when to flip the page or move on to the next paragraph. Whereas the visual message would proceed to run out its course whether the audience is listening or not. In fact, the participation of the audience is not required at all.

The linear process of reading also focuses your attention on what you are reading. You are not distracted by anything else on the page. In fact, you will notice even the very small mistakes in punctuation when you are reading. Nothing escapes you.

Pen Down Your Thoughts

If you are scribbling down your thoughts in a journal or a blog regularly, you will soon notice that you are getting into the habit of logically organizing your thoughts as soon as you sit down to write something. First comes the introduction, then comes your main argument and sub-arguments and finally the conclusion.

It is often said that veteran journalists can churn out a copy within a few hours or less. The bulk of their time is then wasted in re-drafting the same copy again and again until the editor is satisfied. You are sharpening your intellect simply by penning down your thoughts every day. So start a journal today and just get on with your scribbling.