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James Zemboy is the
author of The Detective Novels Of Agatha Christie: A Reader’s Guide
(published by the prestigious McFarland), perhaps the largest study
of her work yet published. A retired teacher of French and Spanish,
he lives in Detroit, Michigan. After
L. J. Hurst’s review appeared on the Shots website he agreed to
describe his working methods in more detail for us.
LJH:- A first brief question: why did you write your Guide?
JAMES ZEMBOY:- I wrote the book because no
other writer seemed to have attempted to account for Christie's
world-wide popularity. It had been a source of puzzlement to me ever
since I was seventeen years old (I'm now 66) WHY I had always
enjoyed reading Christie so much, while never enjoying any other
crime writer. At age seventeen I read three Christie novels in rapid
succession – the first crime novels I had ever read. I thought to
myself, "Golly, I must be a mystery buff," and so I read a few other
detective novels by other authors. I found that I had no interest in
any of them at all. This went on for a couple of years and finally,
in 1962, I wrote a letter to Christie, telling her that I had read
most of her books and loved them, and that I had sampled a few other
crime writers without enjoyment. I asked her to name a few of her
own favourites. She wrote back to me with a short list of her
favourite mystery writers and I read at least one or two books by
each of those people, with the same result: no reading pleasure.
Eventually I realized that I was strictly an
"Agatha Christie fan" and no fan at all of crime fiction in general,
and it occurred to me that that must be the case with a lot of
people, since Christie is so much more widely read than any other
writer, and all around the world. And I realized, too, that
"serious" fans of crime fiction generally don't think much of
Christie, for very good reasons: unlikely events, ridiculous
coincidences, Poirot and Marple often arriving at "the truth"
through nothing but lucky guesses. Clearly it is not Christie's
skill as a crime writer that has made her popular, and I always
wondered about the real reason for her world-wide appeal. I
eventually concluded that it was her amusing, recognizable
characters that were most responsible for her popularity, and I
decided that if I ever wrote a book about her works, I would focus
on that aspect.
And so I wrote the book in order to explain Christie’s incredible
world-wide popularity, and to show the uniqueness of each of her
novels and the uniqueness of most of her characters.
LJH:- What did you think of the other critical works about Agatha
Christie that you read? I had a quick look at my copy of Charles
Osborne’s Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie before I wrote my
review of your Guide.
JAMES ZEMBOY:- I did not like the book by
Osborne at all. I think it's filled with facts that are interesting
in themselves but unrelated to the appeal of Christie. He goes on
and on about something that was happening in Christie's life when
she was writing a particular book, for example, but he doesn't
bother to comment very much on the book itself, or the characters,
or anything that the characters suggest about Christie's thinking or
what makes the book fun to read. He picks on her repeatedly for her
alleged anti-Semitism, for example, and he calls Poirot's French
"frightful" (which is nonsense), but he fails to note her hilarious
portrayals of the exceedingly boring ex-Anglo-Indian colonel, the
maddening slowness and deliberation of lawyers, the self-importance
and general incompetence of politicians, the know-it-all smugness of
hospital nurses, etc.
I knew that there was a lot more interesting material that could be
written about every one of Christie's novels than Osborne and all
the others had ever done, and that I could do it with enthusiasm and
pleasure, and that I could show that every Christie novel was
unique.
There has only been one book about Christie that I have ever really
liked, and it was Nancy Blue Wynne's A Christie Chronology; a very
short paperback that came out just after Christie died. Wynne's book
is a celebration of the fun of reading Agatha Christie, and I
decided that my book would also be a celebration of the fun of
reading Christie, but in far greater detail, and so that's what it
is.
LJH:- Were you consciously making notes, keeping records, etc, at
the age of 17 when you started to read Agatha Christie? Or did the
origins of the book only become manifest much later in life?
JAMES ZEMBOY:- At age 17 I was just a kid
having fun reading Agatha Christie’s detective novels and being
surprised that I liked her books so much, so of course I never kept
records of anything, and of course I had no idea that thirty or
forty years into the future I would still be reading her books and
enjoying them. I didn’t even bother to keep the letter that she
wrote to me. The thought of writing a book about Christie never
occurred to me until I retired in the summer of 2005. The very first
thing I did when I retired was to read three extra-long classic
novels that I had been “putting off” for retirement. Those were The
Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and An American Tragedy. On the
day that I finished the last of these, I looked at my book shelves
and asked myself “Which will I read next?” My eyes happened to fall
on a couple of books about Christie, including the one by Osborne I
mentioned earlier. At that moment I decided that I would write my
own book about Christie, and I set about it that very day.
LJH:- How did you decide on the ultimate format of your work, the
headings under which you analyse each volume, etc? It seems markedly
different to any other book on Christie I know. How long would you
say it had taken you?
JAMES ZEMBOY:- I began writing the book on a
beautiful day in September of 2005 and it was substantially finished
in March of 2007. It meant rereading all 66 of Christie’s detective
novels, of course, and keeping notes. I read them chronologically,
writing my notes in a spiral notebook, and then composing the
chapter on that novel on the computer. At first I wrote the chapters
in three parts: Story, Characters, and Discussion. After reading the
first ten or twelve of Christie’s novels and writing the chapters on
those, I decided to separate the Discussion into two sections: one
called “Setting” in which I would present only facts and none of my
own opinions and perceptions, and another called “Comments” in which
I would feel free to express opinions and ramble on about any
subject that I thought might be interesting to readers. I felt that,
in this way, a reader who was not interested in my opinions could
simply ignore my Comments sections and read only the factual Setting
sections. The Setting sections, of course, explain not only the
physical settings but the historical backgrounds. Finally I decided
that a lot of American readers might appreciate having Hercule
Poirot’s French remarks translated idiomatically within their
contexts and placed in an easy-to-use section within the chapter on
the novel in which they occur.
LJH:- Did you use a computer database or some other tool to help
you, once you decided on a book?
JAMES ZEMBOY:- Once I had established the
format of the book, I approached each new novel in the following
way: If it was a novel that contained any French (usually just the
Poirot novels) I took the book to the computer and glanced through
it page by page to find the French expressions, which are always
printed in italics, and therefore easy to spot. I typed the Chapter
number and then the French expressions with their translations. Of
course I translated them “within context”, which is the only correct
way to translate from one language to another; a simple word like
Voilà! can have many different meanings, depending on the context in
which it occurs. Then I went into my library where there is a
comfortable chair and ottoman and a convenient table for my tea or
coffee cup, and read the novel, keeping notes in a spiral notebook,
carefully noting page numbers so that I could retrieve character
descriptions, quotations, remarks about geographic and historical
settings, etc. easily. When I had finished that, I went back to the
computer and quickly composed the Story outline. For the Characters
section, I left most of the characters in their “order of
appearance” in the novel, but I did group members of families
together, so that husbands and wives and their children would all be
together on the same page. My notes on the settings, both
geographical and historical, made the Setting section a quick job.
Finally I wrote the Comments section in free form.
Of course, once the book was finished I read through it carefully
and found a good deal of repetition and redundancy in the Comments
sections. I found that I had inadvertently repeated numerous
“discussions”, and so I did an enormous amount of cutting and
editing. When I did the editing, of course, it then became possible
to add comments such as “For further discussion of the special
importance of flower gardening in English life, see the Comments
sections for The Patriotic Murders and Poirot Loses a Client,” and
“For a full inventory of motherless adult female characters in
Christie’s novels who seem to survive very nicely, and quite
happily, without them, see the Comments section for Poirot Loses a
Client.”
LJH:- You go into detail about some of Christie’s themes and
idiosyncratic subjects. I had never realised the frequency with
which idle gardeners appear in her books before you pointed them
out. But more seriously you also describe, for instance, her unusual
but recurring mother–daughter relationships. Did you notice themes
and subjects such as these when you read the books originally or did
they slowly occur to you as you reread the canon?
JAMES ZEMBOY:-That’s an excellent question,
and the answer is no, I did not notice any of those themes and
subjects when reading the books originally. It was not until I was
well into the writing of my book that I became aware of them. I
think I was working on Christie’s 1937 Poirot Loses a Client
(British title: Dumb Witness) when it first struck me that “mothers
of adult children” are singularly absent in Christie’s writing. It
was when I read Miss Caroline Peabody’s remarks to Hercule Poirot
about Emily Arundell’s family that I noticed that she commented
extensively about Emily’s father but said absolutely nothing about
her mother. I noticed, too, that Bella Tanios was rather
sarcastically described as “dumpy, dowdy, and devoted to her
children”. That made me sit back and think about Christie and
“mothers” and “fathers” and “children”, and because I had just
finished writing about Christie’s twenty-one earlier novels, all of
it was fresh in my memory and I was struck by the near absence of
mothers in nearly all of those books. I went back to my character
descriptions of the earlier novels and noticed that all of the
assertive young women in those books were “motherless” but many of
them had fathers with whom they enjoyed pleasant, mutually
affectionate relationships. Those included Lady Eileen Brent, Lady
Frances Derwent, Tuppence Beresford, Ruth Kettering, Anne
Beddingfeld, Sheila Reilly, Linnet Doyle and others. And so I kept
an inventory of “adult female characters who enjoy warm
relationships with their fathers but whose mothers are conveniently
dead and never mentioned”, and I was amused to find that that list
grew and grew as I proceeded.
Other character types recurring in Christie’s books emerged in my
consciousness in the same way. “The obnoxious self-made man”, “the
boring ex-Anglo-Indian colonel”, “the village gossip”, “the
adenoidal – and therefore stupid – female”, “the lazy old gardener”,
“the unpleasant child”, “the smug, know-it-all nurse”, all recurred
from time to time and formed an amusing pattern within Christie’s
character offerings.
LJH:- And you were going to say …
JAMES ZEMBOY:- In your review [for Shots
Magazine] you noted that I sometimes repeat myself on certain
subjects and wondered if it's because I expect my book to be "dipped
into" and not read straight through. That's absolutely the case. The
book is a reference book – a handbook, which I expected to be used
by readers specifically looking into one novel in particular. And so
I allowed myself to reintroduce the subject of “unpleasant
children”, for example, two or three times whenever that subject
presented itself in the discussion of a particular novel.
LJH:- I believe you originally planned a different title for the
book.
JAMES ZEMBOY:- Yes. I wrote the book
specifically for American readers of Agatha Christie’s detective
novels, and I went to great lengths to clarify anything that might
be unfamiliar to the average American reader. My original title was
The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie: An American Appreciation,
and that's the title it has in the United States Copyright Office.
It was the publisher who insisted on changing the title to A
Reader's Guide, saying that having the word "American" in the title
was "not a good marketing strategy".
I did everything I could to make the publisher see that the book
would be of little interest to Britons. Explanations of the British
Protectorates of Iraq, Palestine and Jordan, for example,
explanations of what "terraced houses" are, reminders that the
"first floor" of a house in England is really the "second floor" in
American terms, explanations of terms like "Pukka Sahib", etc. would
all be insulting to the intelligence of British readers, not to
mention translations of all of the French, etc.
To no avail. The publisher gave the book its present title and
proceeded to distribute it world-wide and I have no control over
that.
LJH:- Turning to Agatha Christie and her readers, how far did you
feel you had to explain “England” or “Britain” to an American
readership?
JAMES ZEMBOY:- A good deal. I tried to give to
my readers a general sense of what is referred to in Christie's
books when "a grim northern industrial town" is vaguely referred to,
or when a "preposterously huge Neo-Gothic mansion built by a
Victorian ironmonger" is "probably located in the Midlands" because
of that region's association with industry. I suspect that most
Americans’ knowledge of general world history is limited to some
vague, distant memories of history classes, and I felt that some
reminders of the events of the two world wars and the “Cold War”,
etc. would enhance American readers’ understanding of the settings.
Details such as the British custom of referring to the bedroom level
of a two-storey house as the “first floor” can also be confusing to
an American reader, as in The Mysterious Affair at Styles in which a
drawing showing the “first floor” of the Styles Court occurs in an
early chapter.
LJH:- Yes. And I think you caught well Christie’s attitude to
contemporary design and architecture – her dislike of the false
“Stockbroker Tudor” styles and her understated approval of modern,
probably Art Deco, building. On the other hand you think that her
attitudes to class were regressive.
JAMES ZEMBOY:- Yes, I do. In her Autobiography
Christie makes it amply clear that she saw the demise of the servant
class as a definite loss to civilization and that, when there were
plenty of selfless, devoted servants, everyone – including “the
servant class” – was much happier. Our friend Miss Marple, who
"trained" orphan girls from St. Faith's orphanage for happy and
satisfying employment polishing other people's brass door knockers,
is a clear expression of Christie's personal views on that subject.
Christie’s aristocratic and middle-class characters always treat
their servants with great respect and all of the servants seem to be
“devoted” to their masters and very content with their lives. Most
of them, however, are not very bright; they are often
“adenoidal-and-therefore-stupid”; they usually exhibit a ghoulish
enjoyment of the gory details of the murders, etc. In at least four
novels it is suggested that servant girls – as opposed to
higher-class English females – respond more candidly to police
officers who are handsome than to ones who are not, it being a
“lower class” trait to respond affirmatively to sex. On the subject
of sex and female servants in Christie novels, in several cases
there is a derisive reference to an unmarried housemaid’s becoming
pregnant, and in all cases the man involved in the pregnancy was
also a servant, or at least “one of the local tradespeople”. Never
in a Christie novel does the “gentleman” of the house impregnate a
maid. That just doesn’t happen in the Christie world, because in the
Christie world, servants are never exploited, sexually or otherwise.
That’s a part of Christie’s fantasy world in which servants were
“actively happy and appreciated”, and of course treated with great
respect at all times.
On the other hand, it is also clear that Christie felt no particular
reverence towards the old aristocracy. Her aristocratic characters
are usually amiable people and quite often the younger ones, such as
Lady Frances Derwent in The Boomerang Clue (British title: Why
Didn’t They Ask Evans) are ultra modern in their thinking and feel
that there is nothing special about “class” at all. Christie pokes
fun, in fact, at all characters who are “devoted to” the aristocracy
and even the Royal Family, such as the reactionary housekeeper Mrs
Bishop in Sad Cypress and the lawyer Mr Spragge in The Boomerang
Clue. And so, to Christie, there was really nothing special about
being born into the aristocratic class, but it was not a nice thing
to be born into the servant class.
LJH:- Do you know how well the book has been selling? Is it selling
only to fans, or have, for instance, academics teaching college
courses on detective stories also been reading it? Are you receiving
any feedback?
JAMES ZEMBOY:-Sales of the book have been very
slow, and common sense tells me that it is because of its very high
price. American and Canadian municipal and university libraries have
been acquiring it and the book received a very favourable review
from Booklist, which is an organ of the American Library
Association. A published review in Booklist is important, since
Booklist only publishes its favourable reviews, and so librarians in
America rely on it for purchasing decisions. The Booklist review,
incidentally, is shown in the Amazon.com listing for the book. But
seventy-five dollars is a lot of money to pay for a book when one
can have the Osborne book in hardcover for $22.95, Wagstaff’s Agatha
Christie: A Reader’s Companion in hardcover for $19.77, Fitzgibbon’s
The Agatha Christie Companion in paperback for $19.95, etc. One
would have to be an absolute Christie fanatic to pay $75 for a book
about her novels, I think. I suppose the price has to be $75 because
of the book’s ridiculous length. I did my best to make it as concise
as possible, but 66 novels are a lot of novels. If I had been
writing about an author who had only written a dozen or so novels,
it might have been different.
As to the university libraries, I am able to check the circulation
status of the book at several university libraries, through
Worldcat.org, and at a number of American universities the book has
been signed out for long periods (several months at a time and even
for entire semesters) and that usually can only occur when
professors sign the books out. This suggests to me that at least a
few university professors are taking a strong interest in the book.
Perhaps the book will be used as a text in a course on Agatha
Christie. Wouldn’t that be pitiful? When I was in college only real
literature was studied.
LJH:- This book only covers the novels. Do you think you will extend
your study to the short stories? Some critics see collections such
as The Labours of Hercules, published in 1947, as seminal.
JAMES ZEMBOY:- No, I will not be writing
anything more about Christie. The fact is, I have never been a fan
of short stories in general, and I have never cared very much for
Christie’s short stories, either. I think it’s because the
compactness of short stories necessarily results in very sketchy
character development, and it has always been Christie’s character
portrayals that have interested me the most. I did force myself to
read a collection of her short stories when I began writing my book,
hoping that I would take an interest in them, but I did not. And so
in my Preface I stated that I would “...leave to other writers the
pleasure of commenting on Christie’s ‘other’ works.”
LJH:- Perhaps they will talk to Shots Magazine in their turn. James
Zemboy, thank you.
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