This week, I’m introducing you to The Stiletto Gang, a multi-author blog where I post the first Monday of every month. Here’s the beginning of my Oct. 1st blog on Agatha Christie’s alter-ego, Ariadne Oliver:
I spent the better part of my teen and early-mid twenties reading everything Agatha Christie wrote (including the six books written under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Recently, after the rather 2017 dismal remake of Murder on the Orient Express—sorry, Kevin Branagh, you are not a convincing Poirot (though perhaps no one can achieve David Suchet’s spot-on interpretation of the Belgian detective)—I reread the book and was pleasantly surprised to find that it held up very well.
That got me thinking about Christie’s alter-ego, Ariadne Oliver. A middle-aged woman and successful detective novelist, she’s an apple-chomping woman described as “handsome in a rather untidy fashion, with fine eyes, substantial shoulders, and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continuously experimenting,” having written The Affair of the Second Goldfish and The Cat It Was Who Died.
While Christie always insisted that her characters were entirely fictional, she admitted that Mrs. Oliver had “a strong dash of herself.” The character appeared in Cards on the Table, Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Dead Man’s Folly, The Pale Horse, Third Girl, Hallowe’en Party and Elephants Can Remember.
So why would Murder on the Orient Express make me think of Ariadne Oliver? Well, consider these quotes of Ariadne’s as she laments creating her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson. READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON THE STILETTO GANG.