…and that ticked me off!

While I am not exactly a True Crime aficionado, my habit is to fall asleep at night while listening to the Datelinepodcast. I find it interesting, but not interesting enough to keep me from getting sleepy. I set a timer to shut it off after 15 minutes, and it may take me a week to listen to a whole episode.

Not long ago, Dateline started a “Talking Dateline” feature in which the reporters interview each other about the stories they’ve done and ask questions sent in by viewers and listeners.

I was drifting off to sleep one night listening to Talking Dateline discussion about the Deadly Swap report when Andrea Canning asked Dennis Murphy if he was more of a fan of Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, or Scooby-Doo. Naturally, I jerked awake at the mention of Christie and eagerly listened for the reply:

Agatha Christie, you know, I don't disparage what she did. It was a great series of books. I think you're done with it by the time you're twelve years old. Who doesn't like Sherlock Holmes?  But for me, I think then you gotta morph, you gotta graduate to, like, Raymond Chandler. You know, get into the real grown-up stuff, and I think there's some terrific crime – I would call it –  literature.

Mr. Murphy, I believe I know a few people who would vehemently disagree with you!

I am guessing that what Murphy calls “real grown-up stuff” is the violence and cynicism found in hardboiled novels. I won’t argue whether Raymond Chandler is considered “crime literature” or not because it is a different beast. Not Christie’s style at all. I prefer my mysteries “cozy” since I see plenty of violence and cynicism in real life, and I want to avoid it when I curl up with a book.

Christie’s stories do have adult themes, I would argue, nuances that no twelve-year-old would recognize. Think of Letty Blacklock’s reaction to Bunny’s death in A Murder Is Announced or the relationships between Caroline Crale, Amyas Crayle, and Elsa Greer in Five Little Pigs. Or even simply Miss Marple as a character. Miss Marple was more of a caricature to me in my younger days, but she becomes more real every year as we get closer in age.

Lots of true crime podcasts discuss what might have happened because the cases aren’t yet solved, and some even try to solve cases during the podcast. I don’t listen to those. Rather than being frustrated by the unknown, I prefer fairy tale-type stories in which questions get answered, bad guys get punished, and good guys get happy-ish endings. Again, with all of the uncertainty and unfairness in the real world, I have no desire to wallow in that when I’m reading.

Mr. Murphy doesn’t “disparage” Christie’s work, but his opinion of her books and her readers is a bit condescending. I don’t plan on sending a flaming email to him about this. However, I will get a bit snarky:  One has to wonder if, in a hundred years, Dennis Murphy’s Dateline reports will have the kind of audience Agatha Christie enjoys a hundred years after her work was published.

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