The Creativity of Agatha Christie

I was listening this morning to an Agatha Christie book on tape (you have to listen to the ones recorded by Joan Hickson - she IS Miss Jane Marple) and I was struck at how Miss Marple employed lateral thinking in her deductions.

Lateral thinking - a way of solving problems by rejecting traditional methods and employing unorthodox and apparently illogical means; an unorthodox approach to problem-solving, often looking at problems from other 'sides' rather than head-on.

In the story I was listening to this morning, the victim had been a silly superstitious woman who had met with a medium who told her that when a certain flower on the wall turns blue, she will die.  She drew on her previous experience as a nurse to determine that the nurse had used litmus paper to cover the flower on the wall from pink to blue as camouflage to draw attention away from the murder.  She also tied the current problems they were having with their district nurse whose attentions were spurned by a resident, which caused her to turn on him and try to blacken his name.

Her solutions were like picking flowers in the garden.  She takes one experience that reminds her of some portion of the situation and then another that makes her think of another person who caused problems in another way and so on until she has a bouquet that wraps up the criminal with a bright ribbon.  Sometimes it was something to do with gardening, sometimes it was a person she knew from her village, sometimes it was a fact about keeping house, sometimes it was an experience from her past, sometimes it was her knowledge of human nature.  It was all grist to her mystery-solving mill.

I encourage you to listen to Miss Marple with new ears.  Let her lateral thinking challenge you to stretch your thinking all around your experiences and random facts and knit them together into a fluffy white solution to your mystery.

Today just happens to also be the 40th anniversary of Agatha Christie's death.  OED posted today, "12 January is the anniversary of the death of Agatha Christie, a doyenne of the whodunnit, or as the celebrated humorist Ogden Nash put it, a murdermongress.  In a career spanning 50 years, she wrote over 60 detective novels, as well as collections of short stories and plays.  In addition, she indulged her romantic side by writing a number of novels in the romance genre, under the pseudonyn Mary Westmacott."

RIP Agatha Christie and thanks for sharing your creativity.