The Clocks - Agatha Christie [48]
“And I suppose you always succeed,” I said.
Poirot was honest.
“Not always,” he admitted. “No, not always. Of course, after a time one realizes that one book of his is almost exactly like another. The alibis resemble each other every time, even though they are not exactly the same. You know, mon cher Colin, I imagine this Cyril Quain sitting in his room, smoking his pipe as he is represented to do in his photographs, sitting there with around him the A.B.C.s, the continental Bradshaws, the airline brochures, the timetables of every kind. Even the movements of liners. Say what you will, Colin, there is order and method in Mr. Cyril Quain.”
He laid Mr. Quain down and picked up another book.
“Now here is Mr. Garry Gregson, a prodigious writer of thrillers. He has written at least sixty-four, I understand. He is almost the exact opposite of Mr. Quain. In Mr. Quain’s books nothing much happens, in Garry Gregson’s far too many things happen. They happen implausibly and in mass confusion. They are all highly coloured. It is melodrama stirred up with a stick. Bloodshed—bodies—clues—thrills piled up and bulging over. All lurid, all very unlike life. He is not quite, as you would say, my cup of tea. He is, in fact, not a cup of tea at all. He is more like one of these American cocktails of the more obscure kind, whose ingredients are highly suspect.”
Poirot paused, sighed and resumed his lecture. “Then we turn to America.” He plucked a book from the left-hand pile. “Florence Elks, now. There is order and method there, colourful happenings, yes, but plenty of point in them. Gay and alive. She has wit, this lady, though perhaps, like so many American writers, a little too obsessed with drink. I am, as you know, mon ami, a connoisseur of wine. A claret or a burgundy introduced into a story, with its vintage and date properly authenticated, I always find pleasing. But the exact amount of rye and bourbon that are consumed on every other page by the detective in an American thriller do not seem to me interesting at all. Whether he drinks a pint or a half-pint which he takes from his collar drawer does not seem to me really to affect the action of the story in any way. This drink motive in American books is very much what King Charles’s head was to poor Mr. Dick when he tried to write his memoirs. Impossible to keep it out.”
“What about the tough school?” I asked.
Poirot waved aside the tough school much as he would have waved an intruding fly or mosquito.
“Violence for violence’ sake? Since when has that been interesting? I have seen plenty of violence in my early career as a police officer. Bah, you might as well read a medical text book. Tout de même, I give American crime fiction on the whole a pretty high place. I think it is more ingenious, more imaginative than English writing. It is less atmospheric and overladen with atmosphere than most French writers. Now take Louisa O’Malley for instance.”
He dived once more for a book.
“What a model of fine scholarly writing is hers, yet what excitement, what mounting apprehension she arouses in her reader. Those brownstone mansions in New York. Enfin what is a brownstone mansion—I have never known? Those exclusive apartments, and soulful snobberies, and underneath, deep unsuspected seams of crime run their uncharted course. It could happen so, and it does happen so. She is very good, this Louisa O’Malley, she is very good indeed.”
He sighed, leaned back, shook his head and drank off the remainder of his tisane.
“And then—there are always the old favourites.”
Again he dived for a book.
“The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” he murmured lovingly, and even uttered reverently the one word, “Maître!”
“Sherlock Holmes?” I asked.
“Ah, non, non, not Sherlock Holmes! It is the author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that I salute. These tales of Sherlock