It’s been a long time coming!
I’m referring to this website, certainly, but I’m also thinking about Agatha Christie’s books. She wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916 and it was published in 1920. That’s over one hundred years ago. A few changes have occurred in the world since then.
Have you seen those videos in which a couple of today’s teenagers are presented with a rotary phone? Those of us old enough to have used a rotary phone are amused watching the teens figure out how it works. I wonder what they would do with a candlestick phone from the 1920s, a task that, one hundred years ago, was common knowledge.
Lots of little “common knowledge” details are sprinkled into Agatha Christie’s novels. For the most part, they don’t affect the mystery or the character development, so they can be skipped over safely. I know I used to skip over them. Until one reference bothered me enough to look it up. And then I looked up another. And down the rabbit hole I went!
The research has been fascinating and I’m really excited to share it with other Christie fans. I think it makes Agatha Christie’s stories richer to read them with the “common knowledge” of the 1920s. And it’s also great fun when watching Christie television shows and movies. Details that you never noticed before will make you point at the screen and say “Ooh, I know what that is!”
This website and data base represent several years’ worth of re-reading Christie’s books to pull out odd terms and then researching them. Did I get them all? Most likely not. Did I correctly define each word? Again, there’s bound to be mistakes. But that’s the beauty of the data base and the community. I am hoping that between us, we’ll find and identify all the references that perplex the twenty-first-century reader and continue adding to this guide for Agatha Christie readers one hundred years from now.
Photo by Sofia Alejandra