Notes on Agatha Christie

• She really has a knack for detailed and vivid description, genuinely human dialogue, both conceiling and revealing clues and red herrings in a way that builds to the climax. It is really hard to put her books down.
• She is usually pretty psychologically astute, but occasionally her (masterful) manipulation of events shows through in an undermotivated action or decision on the part of one of the characters.
• No one in my family actually likes Poirot or Marple as characters, although we certainly enjoy the books they appear in. We all agree that we enjoy better the ones they don't appear in.
• She seems to have an obsession with Americans. They appear frequently in her stories. When they do she overdoes the slang, causing me to cringe. It isn't quite right--seems studied and overwrought--not natural.
• She seems to have a typically British Guy Fawkes Day type abhorrance of things Catholic. I am always disappointed when I find perfectly intelligent Brits who are so unreflective about this prejudice. It's "civilization vs. those benighted, superstitious, jesuitical, untrustworthy not-quite-full Englishmen."--the very attitude that Waugh addresses by portraying the real Catholicism in Brideshead.