The Labours of Hercules - Agatha Christie

Crime writing has always struck me as little more than writing by numbers. The essential frame is laid out and the author has to do little more than stitch a couple of his or her own colours in to make up their own pattern within the confines of the crime tapestry.

As such, it seems to lack any of the scope that makes fiction the magnificent roaming beast that it is, prying into the depths of consciousness, seeking meaning and beauty in real life’s manifold incomprehensibilities.

I once picked up Louise Welsh’s ‘The Cutting Room’ on the back of a wealth of critical acclaim along the lines of ‘this is crime fiction for lovers of literature’, but found it little more than hackneyed and tiresome.

And the same can be said of Christie’s ‘Labours of Hercules’. This time, I picked it up having found it for 50 cents in a small shop in Lisbon. I had run out of English books and Christie drew me in with its classic Penguin cover.

This particular Christie book consists of 12 short stories in which her hero, Hercule Poirot, decides to undertake 12 more cases before he retires. However, each of the 12 must resemble one of the labours of his mythological namesake, Hercules.

A fairly literary idea for a crime novel, and thus I was drawn in a little further.

After rollocking through the first 70 pages, fighting off horrific visions of my future self as a Christie obsessive, I soon hit the albatross of tediousness that formulaic crime fiction inevitably carries around its neck.

Plod plod plod for 25 pages until each little story is wrapped up successfully by Poirot, usually with a twist or two in the tail.

I can’t fault Christie’s construction. It’s tight, decently written, and moves along pacily enough. But there’s just no flesh to go on the bones.

We have a story, but there is very little depth of character, very little descriptive prose, very little of anything other than an author walking us through the pleasant fictional equation of crimes and their solutions.

Like a picture puzzle we slid the pieces into place and are supposed to feel content with the restoration of order that is the outcome.

Like a picture puzzle, we toss it away afterwards and give it little further thought.

Plays: 1 – David Mamet

Reading drama is a thoroughly different experience to reading prose or poetry.

From the more ‘real time’ feel of it, to the fact that it’s essentially an artform taken away from its first home. The novel belongs on the page, is meant to be read silently. Poetry belongs to the page but also the tongue, and we can read it aloud, we can experience it in its proper place. Yet drama belongs on a stage, belongs in front of an audience of more than one, and thus reading it on your own, in the silence of your own head can often be a disappointing, flat experience.

A lot of Mamet’s work has starred the brilliantly nervy William H. Macy, and the image of him acting these roles seemed to only widen the divide between written drama and acted drama.

The same goes for the idea of Al Pacino in ‘American Buffalo’, Mamet’s play about the relationship between a couple of small-time crooks. A lot of the lines seem written around the idea of Pacino in the main role, just as a lot of the characteristics of the persecuted parts played by Macy in ‘The Water Engine’, American Buffalo’ and particularly in ‘Squirrels’ seem scripted around the idea of him in the role.

So while the ideas of the staged version help, are almost an essential aid to bringing written drama to life – I often paused in my reading, imagining the actors on stage pausing, trying to picture each of their expressions – it struck me how much this contrasts to the way film versions of books can ruin a book.

Inevitably turning a novel into a two-hour dramatic piece is going to involve tossing certain elements of the novel into the abyss, but rarely do films ever seem to do any justice to books, and I can only think of one instance – Morvern Callar – where I found a book inferior to its film version.

Yet what I find more interesting is the way that, if a film version of a book has been seen before the book has been read, the faces of the film characters and the structure and impression of the film seem to ruin the book, to pin it down, to constrict it and submit it to degrading simplification. I hate the way films literally and mentally take the book out of your hands.

Yet with drama I always find myself struggling to envisage the drama, to turn it into this thing that is out of my hands, permutated by the actors and directors.

Maybe it’s because the lack of descriptive narrative in written drama means that we’re led elsewhere to look for concrete setting. Yet why is it the image of the actors on the theatre stage that is always the one that comes to my mind, rather than the characters in their fictional dramatic setting?

It seems that drama is much more tied into its own medium than the novel is. That it knows it can never fully break the illusion of fiction and is therefore written with a tacit acknowledgement of this fact, that in ways it is playing up to its inauthenticity.

Why hide the fact that this is a stage direction? Why pretend that this is a character? Why not ham up this line for comic effect?

And all the while prose is much happier to nestle in the comfort of its illusion, worming itself into the downy clouds of reverie, painting pictures that it fully believes in and content in thinking that it’s really managed to pull the wool over your eyes.