Sonia and I have begun to read this book together. She mentioned a few weeks ago that she liked to read mysteries, and the “little free library” in her neighborhood had a copy of this book, so she picked it up. When we were at the library together a couple of weeks ago, I checked out a paperback copy, and we have begun to work through it together.
I have been an Agatha Christie fan for 65 years, give or take. I started reading her books when I was around 10, I think, and I have probably read all of them over the years – many of them more than once. After reading some of her books, I discovered other authors from what has been called the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction:” Dorothy L. Sayers, Patricia Wentworth, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Margery Allingham, P. D. James, Josephine Tey, and the like.
So we dug in to this book. And although I’m pretty sure I’ve read all of the “Agatha Christeries” that exist, but I don’t recall this one. It was one of her last books (it was published in 1970 and she died in 1976), and one of the first things we had to do was place it in time. 1970 is not so long ago from my perspective, but it was before Sonia was born, and it is inarguable that things were very different then. So we have to talk about this in some detail to understand how people traveled and communicated in those days.
We are reading this in segments, a few chapters at a time. We read chapters 1-3 and then got together last week to talk about the book. There is a lot of vocabulary to discuss – Agatha Christie is an upper-class English woman, and her vocabulary and word usage are very different from what we hear around us in Williamsburg today. She uses a lot of idioms that were barely understandable in the England of 50 years ago – and even less accessible in America today. Here are a few of the most difficult words or phrases that appear within the first few pages of the book:
“In dress he rather liked to affect the bizarre.” He liked to dress funny.
Sartorial whims. choices of clothing
There was something about him of the eighteenth-century buck.” His funny clothing choices were old-fashioned
A man was relegated to the shelf. He was assigned a meaningless job as he got older.
Darkhorse. An unanticipated success
He had thrown a few spanners in the works. We would say he threw a monkey wrench into the process
To have a bee in one’s bonnet. To be obsessed with an idea.
And these are just a few of the problems we found on the first five pages.
If you’ve ever read any Agatha Christie, you know she spends a lot of time developing characters. So we spent a lot of time talking about the main character in the book – a man called Sir Stafford Nye. He fits a specific British stereotype: from a good family with “old money,” highly educated (always at Oxford or Cambridge), widely traveled, droll and witty, somewhat removed from everything around him, a hereditary (rather than life) peer, casually acquainted with important people, enjoys a arcane hobby. He’s very comfortable in his own skin because he’s never had reason not to be. However, he’s vaguely bored with life as he gets older and realizes that his most adventurous days are probably behind him.
Within the first chapter of the book, we find Stafford Nye embarking on an unexpected adventure, seeming without regard for the danger he’s putting himself in. Most of us avoid dangerous circumstances, but not Stafford. When a young woman sits down beside him in the airport passenger lounge, he is vaguely curious about her but not overly so. When she suggests to him that he give her his cloak, his passport, and his tickets so she can get to London more quickly, he doesn’t get up and move away like normal people would. Instead, he asks why she thinks she can pass for him. She says that she has vaguely the same shaped face that he does, that she’s traveling in slacks, that he’s been wrapped up in a cloak with a hood while he’s been in the passenger lounge, and that if she cuts her hair she’ll look enough like him that she will be allowed to board the plane and disembark in London.
Let’s just acknowledge that airport security has changed since 1970.
Rather than telling her to buzz off, Stafford asks what he’s supposed to do without a passport and tickets. She tells him to go to the restroom and then to sit at the opposite end of the sets of chairs when he returns to the lounge. There will be a glass on the table in front of his seat. Drink what’s in the glass, she says. It will make you go to sleep, and when you wake up you can claim that you were robbed while you were dozing. She goes on to tell him to report his dilemma to the authorities, and they’ll make it all right. He asks her how she knows that he won’t be in any trouble, and she responds that he is clearly a man of some substance and importance, and people like that don’t get into trouble.
So, Stafford being Stafford, he seems to think this will be jolly good fun. He does as he’s directed – he goes to the restroom, comes back and sits where directed, drinks from the glass in front of him, and nods off; when he wakes up he reacts as if he has been robbed.
Things move on, and I’m not going to recount more of the story right now. Suffice it to say that it all works out for Stafford – he is treated sympathetically by airport security and is allowed to go back to London with little delay.
The rest of our discussion was about why in the world someone would do this – which had us circling back around to analyzing Stafford’s personality and underlying character. Our discussion took us in the direction of talking about risk-taking and the personality traits that differentiated a risk-taker from someone who was risk-avoidant. We had a great time talking about all of this.
When Sonia first suggested reading a book together, I wasn’t sure if it was the best way for us to spend our time together. I had been told she needed to work primarily on listening and speaking, not on reading. After our first session with this book, however, I realized that reading a book with someone else involves a great deal of talking and listening. Using some of the new vocabulary words that the book presented to us, we explored how to talk about the things that Stafford did in the book – traveling, eating, going to work the next day, trying to figure out who this strange woman was. It was a lot of fun and (I think) very useful to Sonia.
We’re reading more before we meet again this week – through chapter 5. I’m looking forward to continuing to talk about this unusual man, Stafford Nye, and his 1970s-era adventures of espionage, intrigue, diplomacy, and – probably – murder (although no one has died yet).
Great article. You do such interesting things. I would imagine Sonia is learning a lot from you. I, on the other hand, am looking for Agatha Christie books again! Thanks for the reading tip.
Me, too! Agatha Christie! Age 10. Followed by P.D. James and Dorothy Sayers. Loved them. Still do.