One of the things I've been doing this week is rereading Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Mr. Quin. It is said that Harley Quin―a pun-based name Christie came up with about six decades before the creation of the Joker's girlfriend―and Mr. Satterthwaite were her favorite of her own characters, in part because she only wrote about them when she wanted to. Which means that you have to take quality over quantity. There are no Quin and Satterthwaite novels, only this collection and a few other stories.
Satterthwaite, a rather Walter Mitty-ish old man even if he does hobnob with the upper crust, is the viewpoint character and effectively the protagonist. The enigmatic and ghostly Quin doesn't solve crimes himself, but rather listens and makes suggestions. In effect he is a suggestion. He'll appear somewhere in a the course of a story, provide a sounding board for Satterthwaite, and then disappear without warning.
I'm reading a copy borrowed from the library. It's barebones, perhaps disappointingly so. The book doesn't even have a table of contents. They used good paper, though.
2 comments:
I've been a fan of Agatha Christie's books since I was a teenager - they formed a decent percentage of the paperbacks at the bus station in Toronto where I used to get a book for the ride back to Oak Ridges back when I had a part-time job in the city. All that aside, I liked her stories and read many of them then, but I don't recall ever coming across Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite. Recently, I enjoyed the Miss Marple books all over again and they were fun.
Mr. Satterthwaite was sixty-two - a little bent, dried-up man with a peering face oddly elflike, and an intense and inordinate interest in other people's lives. All his life, so to speak, he had sat in the front rowof the stalls watching various dramas of human nature unfold before him.
Now it looks as if I have another treat waiting in the form of her stories about The Mysterious Mr. Quin. This afternoon I found there are several copies available in pdf format but, since I don't enjoy reading novels or collections of short stories on screen, I'll try to get a paper copy. I'm glad to know your library one was at least printed on good paper.
I have to wonder how Christie's level of success affected her. Any writer will want to be read, of course, and any author who says they don't is lying. And it's certainly a bonus to be able to support yourself by writing, buying a house, raising a family etc. But to go so far beyond that and have your work, your fictional detectives, be popular to that level? It must have seemed somewhat unreal to her.
So anyway, that's how it got to be that so many of the paperbacks at the bus station were her books. Which is a perfectly fine and straightforward way to be introduced to them. No doubt the most popular were the Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stories. With Quin and Satterthwaite taking up one book of short stories and part of another, they wouldn't be a big part of the market. A good discovery, though. But I love Marple as well.
The library does have electronic editions, of course. I generally leave them be, because I spend enough time staring at screens as it is. With paper books it's the luck of the draw as to which edition you get, and what kind of condition the book is in.
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