Dame Agatha

Any time I’ve taken an odd visit with friends to a rustic two room cabin on a lake with its musty smells from damp rugs and smoke that doesn’t quite exit the flue and heat that exudes from the kitchen oven and noises that flutter down from the tilted attic, and scratching noises on the floor of the front porch, and the shadows of bats over the lake against the setting sun, there always have seemed to be strewn on coffee tables and in book racks ratty paperbacks of some novel of Agatha Christie. The covers painted and glossy and creased and cracked, the pages always yellowed as if with nicotine, and someone’s name almost always written in script, in blotted ink, on the title page. “Christine Langer” in a woman’s hand, with a date, above the block letters “Murder at the Vicarage,” by Agatha Christie (in italics). Uncomfortable, edgy in a room with beams and faded window shades and an old TV, with rabbit-ear antenna,  somewhere up in a north country, the dirty old soft old book was a link to a sophisticated, well-to-do, safe world, where terrors were only imagined, and solvable by clever old Poirot, the chapters short and funny with good chapter titles, and lights going on and off and gasps and disappearances and surprising guests were all fantasies, comforts of pseudo-fear and happy endings, that helped me fall asleep and awaken to the smell of a hearty hot breakfast and crisp country air.