After the Funeral

After the Funeral: An Introduction by Sophie Hannah

In a poll conducted by the Crime Writers’ Association in November 2013 to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary, Agatha Christie was voted ‘Best Ever Author’. Any other result would, frankly, have been rather a joke. Christie’s novels have sold more than two billion copies in 109 languages (and probably more). Her play The Mousetrap has been delighting audiences in the West End for over 60 years. It would be fair to say, I think, that no other crime novelist comes close to matching her achievement. For me, as a psychological thriller writer, Agatha Christie is and will always be the gold standard—a lifelong inspiration whose every inventive tale demonstrates exactly how it should be done. It was Christie who made me fall in love with mystery stories at the age of twelve and, rereading her work now at the age of 42, I still believe that she cranks up the excitement and the intellectual puzzlement like no other.

In the ‘Best Ever Novel’ category of the Crime Writers’ Association poll, Christie won again, with a story that many of her fans believe to be her best: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Indeed, it is a deserving winner for the boldness of its solution. Interestingly, the most popular Christie novels tend to be the ones with the high-concept seemingly-impossible- yet-possible solutions, the ones that take your breath away: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express. It’s easy to see why this might be. Christie, when conceiving these stories, gave her readers exactly what they wanted: the best story possible, the one most likely to elicit gasps of shock and astonishment when the genius solution is revealed at the end.

Sensibly, Christie didn’t give a damn about the tedious consideration of ‘Come on, how likely is this to happen, really?’ So long as it could happen in theory—as long as no law of science made it impossible—then she quite rightly deemed it to be plausible, and therefore acceptable fodder for fiction. She would, I suspect, have little sympathy for those contemporary readers who determinedly misunderstand the word ‘plausible’ and use it as if it were synonymous with ‘commonplace’, ‘everyday’ or ‘has happened to several people I know personally’.

I say ‘contemporary readers’ because I think our expectations of novels have changed. While Christie was alive and writing, my impression is that most readers of crime fiction shared her philosophy of ‘above all else, tell the most exciting story that you can’. Now, however, a far greater value is placed upon what many insist on calling ‘plausibility’ but what is in fact a worrying lack of imagination seeking to curtail the imaginations of others. Many, for example, might feel uncomfortable with a super-clever detective like Hercule Poirot, who always gets the right answer and proves himself over and over again to be a man of unparalleled genius. Some—having met no unparalleled geniuses themselves and therefore finding them impossible to believe in—might say, ‘No, this is not realistic—can’t you have the detective being a bit more ordinary in his capabilities, and maybe solving the case by… oh, I don’t know, maybe putting some fingerprints into the database and finding a match?’

Let’s imagine for a second that infallibly brilliant detectives like Poirot and Miss Marple could never exist in real life. Wouldn’t it then be all the more important to invent them? To use fiction as a way of enlarging life—making it bigger, better, more interesting, and—crucially—more satisfactory? Of course there has to be a Hercule Poirot! Isn’t it precisely the job of fiction to offer us what real life cannot, while at the same time enlightening us with regard to real life? If so, then this is exactly what Agatha Christie does. Her novels are packed with wisdom and experience and psychological insight. She understood that sometimes the best way to illuminate an important truth about reality was to frame it in a startlingly unusual way, using an outlandish, unforgettable story that would grab everyone’s attention.

Christie didn’t only tell great stories, however. Her true genius was to convey the story, once she’d come up with it, with palpable relish and irrepressible glee. When you read an Agatha Christie novel, you get a strong sense, all the way through, of how thrilled she is by the clues she’s strewn across your path for you to misinterpret or ignore. You can feel her presence behind the text, laughing and thinking, ‘Tee hee! You’re never going to get there before me—I’ve been too clever for you again!’

Christie’s tangible love of storytelling is not her only unique feature as a crime writer. She also manages to combine light and dark, without either of them ever detracting from the other, in a way that no other writer can. Her stories are in no way cosy or twee, though some of their village settings might be; she understands the depravity, ruthlessness and dangerous weakness of human beings. She knows all about warped minds, long grudges, agonising need; in each of her novels, a familiarity with the darkest parts of the human psyche underpins the narrative. Yet at the same time, on the surface of her stories there is fun, lightness, warmth, a puzzle to make readers say, ‘Ooh, this is a good challenge!’ The dark side of Christie’s work never undermines the feel-good effect in any way— reading an Agatha Christie novel is, above all else, great fun.

In September 2013, I was commissioned by Agatha Christie’s estate, family and publishers to write a new Hercule Poirot novel as a way of celebrating the character’s longevity on the printed page. As part of the publicity for the announcement, I was asked to name my favourite novel featuring Poirot. This was a tricky question to answer. I knew for certain that my favourite Miss Marple novel was Sleeping Murder—that was easy!—but with Poirot I wasn’t sure. I have a very soft spot for Murder on the Orient Express because I believe it has the best mystery-and-solution package of all detective fiction. However, when I thought about the Poirot stories as fullbodied novels and not simply as plot structures, I ended up deciding that After the Funeral was my favourite.

After the Funeral has a brilliant plot, meticulously planted clues, a memorably dysfunctional family at its centre, and a truly ingenious solution, but it also has something else that I prize highly: the non-transferable motive. Poirot is forever telling Hastings that motive is the most important feature of a crime, and I agree with him. A non-transferable motive is something that no other murderer in no other crime novel has ever had or would ever have—a motive that is unique to this character in this particular fictional situation. With a non-transferable motive, the reader should ideally think, ‘Well, although I would never commit murder for this reason, I can absolutely understand why this character did—it makes perfect sense because of their unique personality/predicament combination.’ On this score, After the Funeral works in the most superb way. It also does something else very clever on the motive front—it offers us a two-layer motive of the following sort: ‘X committed the murder(s) for reason Y. Ah, but why did X have reason Y as a motivation? Because of reason Z.’

I am being deliberately cryptic because I don’t want to give away any of the wonderful surprises this book contains. All I really want to say is read it! Read it now!