Agatha Christie and the Metaphysics of Murder

The twentieth-century literary critic Edmund Wilson chided Agatha Christie for her “mawkishness and banality” and declared her work “literally impossible to read.” Even if this were so, that Agatha Christie’s books were mere trash of no intellectual substance whatever, the fact that they were (and are) of such worldwide appeal might be worth investigating. How is it that books whose action takes place in a social milieu so completely alien to that of the vast majority of mankind were nevert...