'A Snapshot Rather Than a Film'

Theodore Dalrymple sees more in the novels of Agatha Christie than I ever could. Of course, I have not read even a sentence of Christie’s prose. I’ve seen several film adaptations of her books but the only one I remember in any detail and with any pleasure is René Clair’s And Then There Were None (1945), mostly because of Barry Fitzgerald. In “Agatha Christie & the Metaphysics of Murder,” Dalrymple conducts an interesting experiment: “My method would be to take every passage of possible social, psychological, or philosophical interest and deal with it in succession, and decide whether, taken at the end, they amounted to a Weltanschauung, a worldview. This method would not show any development in the author’s ideas, of course: it would be a snapshot rather than a film.” This is not the way I have ever read a novel. Dalrymple, a retired physician, is conducting a literary post-mortem. Not that I have a systematic strategy. I read intuitively, trusting the author’s gifts for plot,…