Agatha Christie's Gun Man Nightmare

Dear listeners,

Things have been a little hectic on my end the past few weeks, so I've missed a couple of newsletters. I'm sorry about that and hope to be resuming normal weekly service soon.

As such, there are two new episodes that I need to alert you to. The first concerns this book:

Jim Noy joined me for a Green Penguin Book Club discussion about The Sanfield Scandal by Richard Keverne — a golden-age era thriller from 1929 that, in one sense, was doing Enid Blyton before Enid Blyton was. It prompted some interesting discussion of how we appraise genre with hindsight versus in the moment. Keverne was also a brand new author to both of us, which as we're long-time fanatics about reading this stuff doesn't happen very often, so that was a lovely bonus of doing the episode.

And then today, I have a different kind of episode for you: I take a psychological deep dive into a single instance from Agatha Christie's autobiography and look at how it influenced her crime fiction. As a child, she experienced recurring nightmares of a "Gun Man", who appeared in a military uniform and with a musket. The terrifying thing about this figure wasn't his weapon, though, but the way he seemed to exist, unnoticed, in the happiest, most cheerful situations. In her dream, Christie would be enjoying a picnic until suddenly noticing that the person she had thought was her mother or her friend was actually this sinister Gun Man in disguise. He was always hiding in plain sight, casting an evil shadow over what had seemed to be a good day.

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You can listen to this episode right now on all major audio platforms (just click the icon of your preferred app here to jump right in) as well as on the podcast's website, where there is also a full transcript to read if you prefer that. New episodes are also available on YouTube. If you're in the UK, you can listen ad free on BBC Sounds.

I'm sure you can see how this dream connects to golden age detective fiction, a style of crime writing that thrives on the closed circle of suspects and sudden revelations that characters are not all that they seem. Christie also expanded significantly on the Gun Man idea in the fiction she wrote under the Mary Westmacott pseudonym, so it was good to bring some of that into the episode as well. I recently re-read all of the Westmacott novels and feel like I have come to a greater appreciation for them than I had in the past. Absent in the Spring, in particular, is a book that I think holds up against the top rank of Christie's crime fiction.

I hope you enjoy these episodes, and I look forward to being back with more for you soon!

Until next time,

Caroline