A few months ago my sister gave me an old collection of six novels by Agatha Christie. There is something so lovely about reading Agatha's mystery stories. It's as if you simply do not care one whit about the present day struggles and troubles with society and politics and world events. You are tossed backwards in time, to the 1930-1970's and you are happily taken up with the customs and moral concerns of those eras. Miss Marple spans about 30 years, so one must be ready for a few modern changes in culture as one reads about her amazing murder-solving abilities.
One readily acknowledges that one's time could be better spent improving one's mind with modern day non-fiction about socioeconomic disparities and the political breakdown of our country but one does not care, at least for about three or four hours. Agatha Christie is a tonic for all of the above.
Currently I am reading a Miss Marple novel. (Yes, I am one of the "ones" mentioned above.) The where, when, how of the novel are not important because they all have a common theme: polite conversation, a mysterious murder, more investigative conversation and Voila! We know who the murder is and how it was done and why, all thanks to the elderly and sometimes doddering Miss Marple.
However, in today's light, these books give us such a rich look into society of that time, especially because Agatha Christie began writing her mysteries in the 1930's but her last book was published 40 years later. That's a huge span of time, of course, running from the Great Depression through WW2, into the Cold War and almost to Watergate! While Christie doesn't mention a lot about current events in her Miss Marple stories, she does flavor her tales with quick references to daily events. She will mention how novel telephones are in the early novels and then moves on to the same thoughts about television. But since most of her murder solving work takes place in small villages in Britain, it's easy to ignore the fact that time has marched on. While reading her stories, it's easy to pretend everything is stuck in 1933.
Agatha Christie was certainly not a "politically correct" writer. She has no problem using pejorative and dismissive words and phrases, not to mention racially loaded terms. I won't repeat them all here, but words like "chink" and "darkie" and other pejorative terms for different nationalities are widely used by characters in her mysteries. They aren't necessarily used in a malicious manner, just as a term of identification in some way. But reading them today, it is sometimes a bit of a shock that those phrases exist so easily on the page.
If you haven't read one of the classic Agatha mysteries in a while, please do. "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" or "The A.B.C. Murders" are good places to start for a Hercule Poirot mystery. "The Body in the Library" or "The Caribbean Mystery" are good Miss Marple books. Reading one is like taking a little vacation from reality and that is often just the tonic for what wears us down in everyday life. Check them out.
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