Agatha Christie and Dorothy L.Sayers

I was reading the Oxford Companion to English Literature yesterday, looking up the entries for various Golden Age detective fiction writers (as I’m planning a mystery series set in the 1920’s). What intrigued me was the contrast in the entries for Agatha Christie and Dorothy L.Sayers, who of course were two of the period’s most celebrated crime writers, especially the summing-up.
Agatha Christie: ‘Her prodigious international success seems due to her matchless ingenuity in conceiving plots, sustaining suspense, and misdirecting the reader, to her ear for dialogue and brisk, unsentimental commonsense and humour. Her style is undistinguished and her characterisation slight, but sufficient for the exigencies of the form.’
Dorothy L.Sayers: ‘Her detective fiction is among the classics of the genre, being outstanding for its well-researched backgrounds, distinguished style, observant characterisation, and for its amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey.’

It is, I think, an extraordinarily clear indication of just how far literary snobbery can blind people to the actual qualities of a writer’s work. As I’ve been re-reading both Christie and Sayers extensively recently(as well as others)–a rereading that’s ctually probably the fourth or fifth time since I first came across their work at the age of about 14–I have become more and more aware of several things. First of all, that both writers do indeed have a ‘distinguished’ style and a very distinctive voice. There is nothing formulaic about either, unless formula is using your own voice and presence within your work in a particular genre. Sayers, an Oxford-educated classics scholar and clergyman’s daughter, who went to work as a copywriter before turning her hand to detective fiction, and Christie, whose well-off American father died when she was a child, who never went to university but worked in a hospital dispensary and married early before turning to detective fiction(in competition with her sister Madge, who’d had several stories published in Vanity Fair), express very much their life experiences and ideas within their work: and I’m sorry, but I can’t agree that an Oxford education somehow makes you that much more distinguished!
Both writers use archetypes to construct characters who in Christie’s case are sketched in a few pungent phrases, and who in Sayers’ case are exhaustively described. Both writers combine social observation, humour, romance and the macabre, though in my opinion Christie does it much more effectively. In both cases the stories are interesting in themselves and make you want to turn the pages–though Sayers can sometimes blether on at a tangent–an interesting tangent, but still! She uses more words than Christie, but since when is that the ‘mark of distinction’?
The real difference in the writers’ work, in my opinion, is that Agatha Christie can be read by just about anybody–the clear limpidity of her style, especially of her best work, the warmth and intelligence of her personality(which comes through quite clearly), the sense you have that you are being told a story, and to gather around, and the sharpness of her character portraits and settings, all make for easy reading. There’s something timelessly sparkling about her work–rather, like, say the feeling of a Hitchcock film, or a Tintin comic strip adventure–which nevertheless has some very hard things to say about human evil–and suffering.
Compared to this, Dorothy L. Sayers’ work, though charming and readable, is both less accessible and much more dated. Though intelligent, her work is sometimes too conscious of its own intelligence; and though she hit on the perfect fantasy figure with Lord Peter Wimsey–who has a rather Scarlet Pimpernel-like mask of upperclass buffoonery whilst being of course as sharp as a tack–he is much more firmly situated in his own time than are either Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, who, like Tintin, somehow transcend their times. Just how difficult it is to reproduce that Christie style is evident to me from reading the ‘novelisation’ of Christie’s play Black Coffee by Australian Christie expert, actor and writer Charles Osborne(who’s also written a wonderful guide for Christie fans, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie) . The author had the dialogue of the play; the story of the play; and all the puzzle element and so on; yet the novel is utterly flat, without any of the pleasure of a Christie, and with a singularly unreal feel. The authors of the Oxford Companion should take note–Christie’s style is so distinctive that even with all those elements they mention, someone else simply cannot do it!
If I had to make a choice between Christie and Sayers, I’d say that Agatha Christie was the better writer, not only because her work is still so extraordinarily popular, but because in fact her work is more satisfying–at least for me. It leaves more room for my own imagination; it allows me to create my own visions in a way that is less evident with Sayers, who circumscribes things by telling you far too much about all that ‘well-researched background’. I track down and buy every Christie I can find, but am content to get Sayers out of the library. And I guess that’s the litmus test for any reader.