The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie vs. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins.
Agatha Christie’s “Blue Train” was first published in 1928. It is still available in print and on e-devices. Paula Hawkins’s “Girl on the Train” was first published in 2015 and has been made into a movie.
Question: Why is Agatha Christie still the Queen of Crime? Answer: She knows how to tell a story without making us wince in disgust at the main characters. None of the characters, including the detectives, in Girl on a Train are remotely likeable. They are misfits from alcoholism, mental illness and narcissism.
The characters in “Blue Train” are not wonderful people either – but they are not chronic alcoholics. They do not spend their time on psychiatrists’ couches. They are not hippity-hopping in and out of each other’s beds. They are people drawn from Victorian life. They are like us, except they live in big houses and have servants, even though they sometimes can’t afford them.
The plot in Blue Train is “whodunit.” The plot in Girl on a Train is: Who is the lethal mental case?
Comparison of these two books illustrates something bizarre in modern literature. Literary fiction today is about our “interior.” Fiction yesterday was about the exterior. Even books that were named after the central character – like Oliver Twist or David Copperfield – were about the culture, the bad people, the good people, the twists of fate. Today’s fiction is about the characters’ potty training, psychological abuse, marital abuse, substance abuse. The not-very-specific plots are how the characters negotiate their way through their traumas, hopefully not winding up in a mental institution.
In Girl on a Train, the murder witness battles alcoholism and emotes her way to a baffling deus-ex-machina conclusion. Christie’s Hercule Perot pieces together bits of information to finger the murderer. Literary subjectivism vs. objectivism.
Emotive books make good book sales — for other kinds of books like old-fashioned crime and espionage. When readers want a good story, they turn to Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie and . . .
The Windsor Knot by S.J. Bennet. This charming, soft mystery tells readers a little bit about spies, a little bit about crime, a little bit about crime-detection bureaucracy and a lot about the late Queen Elizabeth. In this book, the queen at age 90 is a unique sleuth. She has an instinct for detection that rests on her uncanny ability to analyze scenes and people and on her subtle ways of following up on clues through her trusted private secretary, a nervous sleuth wearing tight skirts and spike heels.
In “The Windsor Knot,” a social gathering at Windsor is disrupted after hours by the murder of the visiting pianist. He has been strung up naked in a closet with a pair of women’s panties close by. The director general of MI5 thinks it’s the work of a Russian spy. The queen doesn’t buy it, but she maintains her calm demeanor as she listens to his theory, puts up with the investigation, and then sets her secretary off on super-secret “errands.”
Readers will turn the pages to figure out what the queen seems to suspect. Along the way a charming picture of Queen Elizabeth emerges. No one has quite captured her spirit as this novel does.
And maybe it’s true.
Bill Bryson. If you are one of the people who hasn’t discovered Bill Bryson’s books in the past 40 years, you must fix this. His books are memoirs/travelogues/history/science/gripes/humor. Especially humor. You can learn a LOT from these books – if you can stop holding your sides from laughing.
Here is the list of Bryson books from the book-review site AddAll (which you should also check out):
History books:
- Icons of England (2008)
- At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010)
- One Summer: America, 1927 (2013)
Language books:
- Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984)
- The Mother Tongue (1990)
- Made in America (1994)
- Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors (2008)
Non-fiction books:
- The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir (2006)
- Shakespeare: The World as Stage (2007)
Science books:
- A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003)
- A Really Short History of Nearly Everything (2004)
- Seeing Further (2010)
- The Body (2019)
Travel books:
- The Palace Under the Alps (1985)
- The Lost Continent (1989)
- Neither Here nor There (1992)
- Notes from a Small Island (1995)
- A Walk in the Woods (1997)
- I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1998)
- In a Sunburned Country / Down Under (2000)
- Bill Bryson’s African Diary (2002)
- The Road to Little Dribbling (2015)
Bryson is a journalist, so he’s not going to wear you out with long paragraphs, show-off sentence structure, wordiness. He wants to communicate, which is a huge relief to readers. He kinda “talks” in his books.
You will find yourself trying to NOTICE everyday things while reading Bryson. You will also feel exhausted, because he walks miles and miles and miles: from village to village, from museums to art galleries, from points along the Appalachian Trail, which is 2200 miles long, give or take. The man probably wouldn’t recognize a varicose vein.
I started with “A Walk in the Woods,” which is the day-by-day account of walking the Appalachian Trail with his old, ne’er-do-well travel companion, Stephen Katz. Katz and Bryson together should be on the Comedy Network. My sides were aching from laughter. For example: At one point on the trail, they are overtaken by a woman hiker who talks non-stop about nothing. One of her “things” is the daily reading of her horoscope. She asks Katz what sign he is. He immediately replies: cunnilingus. “I haven’t heard of that one,” she says. She then asks Bryson for his sign. He immediately replies: necrophilia. She looks confused. “Are you putting me on?” she finally asks.
“Woods” was made into a movie of the same name, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. I was amused by that movie, but the book is better! The book is full of facts and orchestrated by stand-up humor. I know more about the Eastern Seaboard and Appalachia than I ever knew before, and I now walk around with a smile on my face whenever I think about hiking.
Bryson was born and raised in Iowa, a fact he milks for all its comedic value. He married a woman from England and became a citizen there. In “Notes from a Small Island” and “The Road to Little Dribbling,” Bryson meanders from the bottom-most village in England to the top-most village in Scotland. He walks a LOT – in rain and fog. Along the way, the reader finds out interesting things about towns and villages in Great Britain. Twenty years later in “Little Dribbling,” he tries to cover the sites he missed. I am laughing as he misses connections, endures weird seat mates, tries to make sense of England’s rules, codes and imperfections.
Along the way, he sneaks up on you with humor. In “Little Dribbling,” for example, Bryson remembers a story from his previous visit to King Arthur’s castle. He was picked up by two women on the road. “We took off with a throaty vrooom – one of the few times in my life that I have experienced actual g-forces. . . the woman drove (the car) as if she were Stirling Moss and this was the Nürburgring. She appeared to be short and almost perfectly round. Her companion, a woman of similar years, was tall and lean. I remember thinking that they could go to a costume party as the number 10.” LOL. LOL.
You can read his books with a map – of the countries, the universe, the human body – but it’s not necessary. If you’re about to visit Europe, “It’s Neither Here nor There” would be fun and helpful. If you’re reading in bed, it’s still hugely fun and informative.
Bryson knows everything about everything (after a little journalistic research perhaps). In “Dribbling,” for example, he’s walking the Dorset coast (now called the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site), and mentions that the Dorset cliffs have claimed a few lives and a lot of property over the years. One casualty was Richard Anning in 1810. Nobody remembers Anning, but his daughter Mary became a famous archaeologist. As a child she was already searching and selling fossils she found along the seashore. “She is commonly credited with being the person referred to in the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore.”
Mary Anning spent years excavating some of the most important British fossils, but Bryson quips: “she seemed a curiously unlucky person to be close to. In addition to her father tumbling over a cliff, one of her sisters died in a house fire and three other siblings were killed by a lightning strike. Mary, sitting right beside them, was miraculously spared.”
Readers can enjoy some laughs over America via Bryson’s sojourn through 38 states. “The Lost Continent” was published in 1989, so some of the information is outmoded (although it seemed right-on to me). The snide humor that sees the truth and absurdity in the mundane is timeless, however. For example:
“I drove to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That’s an interesting fact – a topographical tit-bit, so to speak – that Miss Mucous, my junior-high-school geography teacher, failed to share with us in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopeless drunk who couldn’t button his own fly without falling over, I would have shown a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.”
Footnote about walking: Bryson and his wife emigrated to New Hampshire after 20 years in England. They chose a little town where they were within walking distance of stores, library, gym, etc. Bryson describes in “Notes from a Big Country” that, amazingly, NO ONE else walks. When Bryson invited their next-door neighbors to dinner, they came BY CAR – from the house next door! Another woman, who lives within a 6-minute walk from her gym, DRIVES to the gym and then complains about the parking. Bryson suggested she take off 6 minutes from the treadmill and walk to the gym. She replied that it wouldn’t work with the treadmill’s digital program.
It turns out that Bryson is a global treasure. How did I not know this? I think we need better book clubs and more erudite book sites. I have joined a number of book clubs and have never been asked to read a Bryson book. Here’s a suggestion to book-club presiders: Don’t pick books that are new necessarily. Pick books that are GOOD. Bryson should be on that list.
Bits and Books. It’s official: We ARE supermen and superwomen. Philipp Detmer explains why in his analysis of our insides in “Immune.” We are made up of trillions of bits of microscopic “stuff” that protect us from death every second of our lives. Sometimes, for various, unlucky reasons, they fail us. Usually, however, our wounds heal up, our early cancers are destroyed, our colds and flus cause a week of misery but then vanish and never reappear. This is our immune system, heroic and better than krypton (which is not only Superman’s birth planet but also a real type of gas).
If you do get sick, you know what it’s like to face the medical establishment. Adam Kay knows what it’s like, too. He was interning to be a doctor in the United Kingdom and quit after the death of a newborn baby and the near-death of its mother. In “This is Going to Hurt,” he describes the lives of young UK interns, most of them becoming doctors because they had to put something down on their paperwork when they were 16 years old. But he remains the champion of doctors everywhere. In his final chapter, he rejects the popular notion that doctors are “in it” for the money. Not true, he says. They really are heroes. They want to save lives.
__ Jane Anderson
