Agatha Christie

Yeah, I mean, what else can you tell us about this guy? He's a fascinating character.

Well, as we've discussed on the Untitled History podcast, he's also actually best friends with Agatha Christie, which causes him enormous problems in World War II when she releases a book that has a Major Bletchley as a character.

But Dilly Knox is a fantastic thing.

And this is actually...

We looked at the history of cats on ships.

We've looked at civilian side of histories.

We've got a whole episode on Agatha Christie and her World War I and World War II experiences, which are critical to understanding how she writes.

So lots of interesting episodes there.

parallels there immediately.

Because when I wrote Murder Isn't Easy about Agatha's forensics, Agatha Christie's forensics, I was talking about crime scene kits.

And there was no such thing as a crime scene examiner's kit until sort of Bernard Spilsbury created one in the 1930s.

And at that point, what police officers were doing were they were using their own tissues like their handkerchiefs to pick up, you know, chunks of flesh.

um, I just loved, cause I, again, I love Mr.

Like Agatha Christie.

Yeah.

I love that kind of, I love those kinds of books.

oh okay strike striker okay i'm gonna start with that

um and for me also the narrator makes a difference you know so how this is yeah i'm reading the book so that's you know

i'm with you i really like that book um it's about the agatha christie i forget who wrote it but it's about when agatha christie went missing for 11 days and no one actually really knows what happened but that book is like up there i've gotten the i've gotten i keep getting the the time thing so i'm i'm speeding up my talking but i love that book and i'm gonna read striker or strike Striker.

You can tell I'm not a, it's so funny.

So, Matt Bracken, give me your take on that, and I'm going to sit back and listen.

Yeah, you know, I think it's Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express, and there might have been another novel with a similar theme where there's a murder on the train, and the upshot is everybody had a motive to kill the guy.

So if you're looking for, like, who is the one wizard behind the curtain that's, like, pulling all the levers, It may be, you know, there are a lot of wizards pulling levers.

And we're just in a time when, like, the big vault door has all these, the way the tumblers work, you know, you've got the circle with little notch that they all have to line up so that the bar can fall and the safe door can open up.

I've been going on my

Agatha Christie era, like the last year.

I reckon it's been just the last year and a bit.

I have been slowly reading through all of Agatha Christie's books.

Can I show you the one I'm currently reading?

Yeah.

So I love old copies of books.

So this one's from an op shop.

And you get to watch their faces react to it.

You know, I think Agatha Christie is having great fun parodying this kind of thing.

But this is...

The same idea that we have a show off in Dupin and our narrator, because he is less quick-witted and because he asked the right questions, gives Dupin the chance to show off in this way.

And that's part of the formula here, too.

It's quite amusing, but also frustrating in a way.

I love that Agatha Christie does give us a few chances where she allows Captain Hastings.

You've promoted him, Drew.

So you just absorbed whatever was on TV and whatever was at your local video store.

So to me, there really was no difference between an episode of The Simpsons or something Agatha Christie movie from the 1970s or the latest, you know, Reality Bites or Clueless or Hitchcock, you know, so I just watched it all and loved it all.

And I loved the escapism that it gave you.

And at the time, when I was young, I also wanted to be an actor.

But, I mean, it wasn't, like, violent.

It was just, like, one of those Agatha Christie things where a knife goes into the person's back and they fall.

But that was the most gruesome I've seen in Hallmark.

Like, normally they don't even show that stuff.

narrator did it? Well,

and then you get to about halfway through all Agatha Christie's and you're like, wait a minute, this was a short story for another group of people.

Yeah.

What I'm really pleased in all these movies is there's no Marple and no Poirot.