Agatha Christie is, according to her website, ‘the world’s bestselling novelist’. That is a difficult claim to prove, and the official site makes no attempt to do so, but when you think that she wrote 66 novels and 14 short story collections, all of them still in print in multiple formats in dozens of languages, you can begin to see how she got to a total of one billion copies sold in English and another billion-odd in translation. Oh, and the longest-running play in the history of the world. Sceptics would be well advised to admit defeat on the issue of whether or not she sold more books than any other novelist ever has, and instead pivot to a more interesting question: why? I’m not claiming that this is an original inquiry, but I started to take an interest in it during a period when I was writing mainly about economically inflected subjects, and found that almost the only non-worky thing I could bear to read was Agatha Christie. She is the only writer by whom I’ve read more than fifty books. So – why?
“A bad night is not always a bad thing,” wrote the late science fiction author Brian Aldiss. A long-time insomniac, he appears to have been searching for the silver lining of a condition that, in chronic form, can suck the lifeblood from you.
One does not have to try hard to build the case against insomnia – the way its vampire clutch leaves just a hollow shell of you to ghost walk through your days; the way it trips you up and compromises your cognitive integrity. But Aldiss was after compensation. The “great attraction of insomnia”, he observed, is that “the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instinct and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind.”
New Yorkers tend to discover Brighton Beach by accident. They set off for Coney Island, but through train mishaps or sheer excitement at the first sight of the sea, they get off at the wrong stop and are confronted with its grumpy next-door neighbor instead. If they do make it to Coney Island, they might stroll down the shore, until the sea turns to vodka and the newspapers turn Cyrillic. Regardless of how they get there, they seem to peregrinate in a fog, for which they can hardly be blamed: In Brighton Beach, questions are deeply frowned upon, then ignored.
But no one’s coming to Brighton Beach for clarity. A dose of local exoticism is the best they can hope for. And after wandering up and down the boardwalk, marveling at the decked-out seniors — the ladies in fur coats with radioactively purple hair and men in track suits playing backgammon as if their lives depended on it, which they quite possibly did in the Siberian prisons — after devouring the warm piroshki (flying saucers of fried dough), tanning alongside the master tanners who’ve got it down to a science, and braving the dour ladies in paper hats who dole out the delicacies the land has on offer, the visitors will sigh contentedly, as after a battle won, and say that they’re going back to Brooklyn.
A slip of the tongue, perhaps, but it means something. And what it means is that Brighton Beach is a universe onto itself, with its own time, its own language, its own customs, for which it makes no apologies.
In many of the major cities of the world, it has begun to dawn even on public officials that walking is a highly efficient means of transit, as well as one of the great underrated pleasures in life. A few major cities have even tentatively begun to take back their streets for pedestrians.
Among the stranger moments in the saga that is Brexit was Michael Gove’s suggestion that Theresa May, “our first Catholic prime minister”, is insufficiently attuned to the mood of Protestant Britain to see the project through. This would be the same Michael Gove who hailed Geoffrey Hill as “our greatest living poet”, despite that writer’s saturation in Anglo-Catholicism, the counter-reformation and proneness to celebrate visionary European saints and mystics. In her splendid Francis: A Life in Songs, Ann Wroe has produced a book that Hill, for one, might have relished, however awkwardly it sits with Britain’s current difficulties with Catholic Europe.