In the first decade of the 20th century also another trend started being popular both in England and in the USA, the detective story. The main representative of this genre was an English born woman, Agatha Christie – (Mary Clarissa Miller, 1890-1976) – daughter of an American father and a British mother. Educated at home, then in Paris, in 1914 she married Col. Archibald Christie and had a daughter. In 1920 Christie started her prolific writing career. When in 1926 she discovered that her husband was in love (innamorato) with another woman, she suffered a nervous breakdown (esurimento) and disappeared from her home. Her car was found abandoned and after ten days the police found her in a hotel registered under the name of the woman with whom (con la quale) her husband was having his affair (una storia). She said she did not remember, the case was not pursue (indagato) further (ulteriormente), and two years later she got the divorce. In 1930 she married Sir Max Mallowan, a famous archaeologist whom she accompanied during his expeditions. Named a Dame of the British Empire in 1971, Christie died on January 12, 1976. She wrote about 93 books and 17 plays, translated into 103 languages. Agatha Christie was surely influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes when she created the detective Hercule Poirot, introduced in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Poirot is convinced of the power of the human rational faculty (“the little grey cells”). He has a companion, Captain Hastings, a retired (pensionato) military man, super ingenuous, who tells his adventures and sometimes by police Inspector Japp. In 1930, in Murder at the Vicarage, she first presented Jane Marple, a single old woman, who, behind the Victorian tea and crochet (uncinetto) facade has a mind coldly (freddamente) aware of the frailty (fragilità) of all human beings and the depravity of some.
2012-10-28