The Real and the Unreal

Abstract

It is easy to think that the Christie world is cut off from the real world of the readers. She lends herself to this view all too readily: in her first novel, Hastings comments more than once on the remoteness of the war from which he has returned and its apparent irrelevance to the crime with which he finds himself involved. The implication seems plain that the crime with which the novel is concerned is something very different from the war which was the overwhelming factor in British life in 1916 (Styles, i, ix). By the same token, one can be astonished at how little World War II appears in the novels which appeared while it was in progress. The obvious exception is the spy thriller N or M, which might reasonably be regarded as a frivolous fantasy rather than a genuine response to history. Gerry appears in the village of The Moving Finger because he is recuperating from injuries he has suffered as an aeroplane pilot. What could have caused a pilot to crash in 1943? We are not told, though there is perhaps a hint in the comment of an old lady on the courage of young men, and later in Gerry’s dream of war and Chamberlain’s “scrap of paper”. The stress in the book is on the difference between the urban Gerry and his fashionable sister and the apparently staid inhabitants of Lymstock. His presumable heroism is behind him, and outside the story.