阿加莎·克里斯蒂：解密悬疑女王

看完最感慨的地方是，伟大传奇的作家也不一定要像刻板印象里一样，有一些神经敏感酗酒的文人毛病，最后潦倒死去——她也一样可以有美满的婚姻、家庭、名利双收、最后平静地离开，甚至第一个婚姻的失败、使其饱受非议的失踪案这样的曲折都只增添了侦探小说家人生的戏剧性元素；而她的女性身份、护士药剂师身份、考古爱好者身份、独身女性旅行者、畅销书身份，在各个领域都可以算作开拓者，没有比这更圆满刺激又有价值的一生了。

印象深刻的新知识点，是她的失踪失忆案并没有一直以来传得那么扑朔迷离，她本人和相关人士早就多次澄清过是因为心理病症导致的失忆，结果没有人相信，只指责这是个拙劣的骗局，只因为没有满足这些看客想要的戏剧性效果。神游症是a flight into health，可怜当时她并没有得到真正的庇护所，好在最终最终的结果是好的。

特别喜欢片中提到失忆的Agatha在疗养酒店中看到自己本人失踪案的新闻报道，推理出这个人肯定做了傻事已经无力回天（这个情节可太侦探小说了哈哈），这未尝不是在说，旧的Agatha已经脱离了自己并且死去，以后是钮祜禄·阿加莎了。想起神秘博士那集改编，消失的阿加莎只是又经历了一场奇艺的冒险，以后她的人生只会更精彩，而那些背叛者的名字早就消失在历史长河中了。

很流畅的纪录片，就是主观表达有时候有点多，有些探索研究有点武断，比如阿加莎的医师具体是谁，不过瑕不掩瑜。

【Cat Among the Pigeons】

She knew she was actually an extraordinary, modern woman whose career was steaming forward but she also sensed society wasn't ready for a woman like her yet, So Agatha would hide her brilliance in plain sight.

She'd used the upheaval of the First world War to her advantage and at this moment she buys the house under her own name during the marriage. We get a glimpse of an Agatha we don't often see, a woman in control of her destiny, a woman unapologetically herself.

【Destination Unknown】

It's fascinating to see Agatha fighting to keep Poirot under her control(away from love story). Made wiser by recent troubles(bereavement, cheated, divorce, lawsuit, press pressure, public censure, insomnia, amnesia, psychotherapy…), emboldened by her independent travel, she was beginning to find the confidence to stand up for herself and her writing.

Miss Marple first appeared as a character in a short story of 1927, The Tuesday Night Club, before emerging as a detective in her own right in 1930's, The Murder at the Vicarage. Now you might think that Miss Marple is a sort of cuddly, tea-drinking old lady. She's actually an independent and quite subversive woman. And she works through feminine intuition. This is how she defines it, ‘’Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that cos a child has little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.’’ She's really talking about life experience. As she says here, ‘’My hobby is and always has been, Human Nature.’’ Now I think it was Agatha's own life experience, this sense that she'd been through trouble and come out stronger, that she was entering into her power, that allowed her to create the rule-breaking Miss Marple. Agatha found a way of combining her new confidence and independence, with the psychological insights from her illness to create the perfect detective. She's one of the great unsung heroes of literature, and one the great women of literature not just crime but everything because she is utterly herself. She's uncompromising but she's gentle and clever. How many other women are the hero of their story at the age of 65, but without it being because they’re somebody's mother. Miss Marple embodied the new Agatha of the late 1920s, determined not to be at anyone's mercy, completely in control of her craft.

Agatha had gone from desperate fugitive to this confident, powerful, independent woman. In a really horrible way I think that the traumatic 1920s had made her stronger. They'd certainly made her into a household name. And I also think, the trouble she'd had made her work better. It made it richer, and darker, and more psychologically interesting. She was ready for a fresh chapter.

【Unfinished Portrait】

Now some people would say that this kind of offensive title is, typical of her class and time, but that's not a get-out-of jail-free card.

Agatha Christie is a woman coming out of that colonial background, she's well read, well educated and she's coming out of a fairly elite class and she's not writing to change the narrative, she's writing so that she's ready for that white audience, that white European, white American audience, and, she is, picking up where they are and not advancing that discussion.——Which is why as a historian I think we have to look at this stuff and appreciate that it was there and to understand how potent it was.——Exactly, we need to understand it in context, knowing that Agatha Christie was not alone in terms of what she was doing. Writers in the United States and elsewhere, here in England, you know everyone was writing in this vein and using this kind of language.（There should be no room for racism.）

She's a good writer, there are some things that aren't acceptable that she wrote. Because if I rule her out I would be ruling out a lot of other writers during that period, there are things you can learn from reading those writers. It is complicated. We can't just, put people into these boxes of good and bad.

Agatha's creation, Miss Marple, the shrewd and observant old lady detective, appears in 12 novels, most of them from the post war years. Now I think the very best Poirot novels are from the twenties and the thirties when Agatha was young. In nineteen-fifty she turned sixty, and from then on she and Miss Marple would get older at the same pace, they'd go through life together, almost as if Christie and Marple were the very same person. Agatha inhabited Miss Marple inside and out. She was so immersed in Marple's stories, that she grabbed anyone she could to help perfect their brilliant plots, including getting her neighbours to act them out.

‘’Goodbye cher amie. They were good days.’’

‘’Sometimes, but not so very often, two people find real love together as we do. We know that what we have cannot perish. For me, you will remain beautiful and precious with the passing of years.’’