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The Importance of Being Poirot (Paperback)
Loot Price: R511
Discovery Miles 5 110
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The Importance of Being Poirot (Paperback)
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Loot Price R511
Discovery Miles 5 110
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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Written by the renowned British historian who has been described as
both utterly thorough and humanely delicate, Jeremy Black offers a
guided tour through the mind of Agatha Christie and life during the
Great World Wars. His incomparable treatment of literary craft
developing alongside global military engagement nearly overshadows
the natural draw of the crime drama that is the subject of his
book. Indeed, the "prurience and sensationalism" of crime is not as
exciting as Black's aptitude for drawing the reality from the
fiction (and periphery sources), giving Christie a much louder
voice than she might ever have dreamed. If Christie is also
moralist and mirror to her times, Black here plays his part as the
detective and reveals layers of previously unmined truths in her
stories. Hercule Poirot as a character is masterfully imagined, but
Black shows us how he is inseparable from Christie's turbulent and
changing world. He also illuminates significant social commentary
in Christie's fiction, and in so doing Black often uses his
authority to vindicate Christie's work from hastily, at times
stupidly, applied labels and interpretations. He is especially
magnificent in his chapters, "Xenophobia" and "The Sixties." Black
nevertheless gives due recognition to Christie's critics when they
have something relevant and reasonable to say, and hence the reader
finds yet another service in Black's comprehensive review of the
reviewers over the expanse of Christie's writing career. For all
this, Black proves himself to be a worthy history-teller because he
can aptly 'detect' the meaning of stories that seeks to answer the
past and guide the present. His erudition runs much deeper than his
ability to navigate the stores of resources available on the
subject, and the reader gets a glimpse of this early on when in the
introduction he proffers his own defense for writing about the
importance of a Hercule Poirot. Black writes, "the notion of crime
had a moral component from the outset, and notably so in terms of
the struggle between Good and Evil, and in the detection of the
latter. Indeed, it is this detection that is the basis of the most
powerful strand of detection story, because Evil disguises its
purposes. It has to do so in a world and humanity made
fundamentally benign and moral by God." The Golden Age of detective
novels represents much more than a triumph of a literary genre. It
is in its own right a story of how the challenge to address the
problem of evil was accepted. Its convergence with the plot-rich
narrative of the twentieth century in the modern age renders
Black's account a thrilling masterpiece, seducing historians to
read fiction and crime junkies to read more history.
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