The Clocks - Christie Agatha - Страница 26

I guessed that for some time now he had had no one much to talk to and was enjoying the sound of his own voice.

‘From real life I turned to fiction. You see me here with various examples of criminal fiction at my right hand and my left. I have been working backwards. Here-’ he picked up the volume that he had laid on the arm of his chair when I entered, ‘-here, my dear Colin, isThe Leavenworth Case.’ He handed the book to me.

‘That’s going back quite a long time,’ I said. ‘I believe my father mentioned that he read it as a boy. I believe I once read it myself. It must seem rather old-fashioned now.’

‘It is admirable,’ said Poirot. ‘One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama. Those rich and lavish descriptions of the golden beauty of Eleanor, the moonlight beauty of Mary!’

‘I must read it again,’ I said. ‘I’d forgotten the parts about the beautiful girls.’ 

‘And there is the maid-servant, Hannah, so true to type, and the murderer, an excellent psychological study.’

I perceived that I had let myself in for a lecture. I composed myself to listen.

‘Then we will take theAdventures of Arsene Lupin,’ Poirot went on. ‘How fantastic, how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache. There is humour, too.’

He laid down theAdventures of Arsene Lupin and picked up another book. ‘And there isThe Mystery of the Yellow Room. That-ah, that is really aclassic! I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach! There were criticisms of it, I remember, which said that it was unfair. But it is not unfair, my dear Colin. No, no. Very nearly so, perhaps, but not quite. There is the hair’s breadth of difference. No. All through there is truth, concealed with a careful and cunning use of words. Everything should be clear at that supreme moment when the men meet at the angle of three corridors.’ He laid it down reverently. ‘Definitely a masterpiece, and, I gather, almost forgotten nowadays.’

Poirot skipped twenty years or so, to approach the works of somewhat later authors.

‘I have read also,’ he said, ‘some of the early works of Mrs Ariadne Oliver. She is by way of being a friend of mine, and of yours, I think. I do not wholly approve of her works, mind you. The happenings in them are highly improbable. The long arm of coincidence is far too freely employed. And, being young at the time, she was foolish enough to make her detective a Finn, and it is clear that she knows nothing about Finns or Finland except possibly the works of Sibelius. Still, she has an original habit of mind, she makes an occasional shrewd deduction, and of later years she has learnt a good deal about things which she did not know before. Police procedure for instance. She is also now a little more reliable on the subject of firearms. What was even more needed, she has possibly acquired a solicitor or a barrister friend who has put her right on certain points of the law.’

He laid aside Mrs Ariadne Oliver and picked up another book.

‘Now here is Mr Cyril Quain. Ah, he is a master, Mr Quain, of the alibi.’

‘He’s a deadly dull writer if I remember rightly,’ I said.

‘It is true,’ said Poirot, ‘that nothing particularly thrilling happens in his books. There is a corpse, of course. Occasionally more than one. But the whole point is always the alibi, the railway time-table, the bus routes, the plans of the cross-country roads. I confess I enjoy this intricate, this elaborate use of the alibi. I enjoy trying to catch Mr Cyril Quain out.’ 

‘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 time-tables 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 meme, 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 over-laden 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. Itcould happen so, and itdoes 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, ‘Maitre!’

‘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 Holmes are in reality far-fetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived. But the art of the writing-ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr Watson. Ah, that was indeed a triumph.’

He sighed and shook his head and murmured, obviously by a natural association of ideas:

‘Ce cherHastings. My friend Hastings of whom you have often heard me speak. It is a long time since I have had news of him. What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.’