Ghostly Characters: a short comparison of some of Agatha Christie's people, with comment on Sophie Hannah's Poirot

 

  When i bought my latest Christie book at the bookstore, the bookseller was eager

 

to tell this Agatha Christie fan about Sophie Hannah's books.

  He'd urged them on me before.  And i am a fan - sort of.  Hannah writes really good mysteries, but somehow i've always  felt her Poirot was a ghost character, a stick figure filling in for the real guy.

  i still want to read her Poirot stories though.  And that leads me to my comment about Death in the Clouds.

  i'd read this one before, decades ago, so it read like a new book.  And i love the story with its double twist ending.

  But this time, i found a character who reminded me of Hannah's Poirot.  No, not Poirot himself, but the heroine.

  Jane Grey feels like a "shadow character."  She is the the sweet ingenue, the heroine for whom the young men fall, but she doesn't seem very defined.  She's a hairdresser who would love to have adventures.

  And she's enjoyable in the context of the story, though forgettable after it's over.

  In contrast, consider:. 

• Anne Beddingfeld (The Man in the Brown Suit) is her father's household manager who wants to have adventure.  She is feisty and saucy. Determined to solve the mystery, she follows the clues to Africa, taking a surfbreak between kidnappings.

• Victoria Jones (They Came to Baghdad) is a (bad) secretary who wants to have adventure.  Maybe someone nicknamed "Little India Rubber Face" has a character that came with the name, Her only goal is to reunite with the young man she met once at the park. Determined  to join her young man, she embarks on her adventure, not knowing how she'll get there.
  

• Katherine Grey (The Blue Train) is is the most conventional of these young women. A companion who wants to have adventure, she is thoughtful and self-contained, but the thoughts she has are many and carefully-considered.

  Somehow these characters are more than young women who successfully burst out of their humdrum existence.  

  i don't know how to define this further.  A feeling thing, from forty years reading and rereading the author.  Perhaps i'm imagining the differences.

  Or perhaps the bookseller, fan though he is, hasn't yet sufficiently immersed himself in the characters pick up the subtle nuance.