Cecily Devereux

And and it's those years between and then just after the two world wars in the 20th century that that that her work is so, you know, is so popular.

And so when when there is this.

chaos, then yeah, I think that having some even illusion of order or being able to solve it yourself a little bit.

So Agatha Christie kind of famously wrote her stories as puzzles.

And not everyone would agree that you can always solve it yourself.

that the clues are there, you know, and you can figure it out.

But that's the idea.

That's the principle that you get presented with the clues and you as the reader can solve it yourself.

And so it's not just that you're seeing something brought back to a kind of order that you can recognize that there's some kind of stability restored by the end, but that you get to play a part in that as a reader because you can try to solve that puzzle.

I think so.

i would say yes um i i my answer sounds more uh less closed and more ambiguous than that question might warrant but i think that speaks to the fact that so much in life never gets resolved and so it's very satisfying to read it in print and imagine it as you as you go through a story

I think that's absolutely the case.

Murder mysteries tend, or detective fiction tends, I think, to have a detective working to solve a crime that is itself a part of something bigger.

So there's always something that's at stake.

There's a status quo that is either being

you know, fought for.

You're trying to preserve it.

So in the case of a lot of Agatha Christie's novels, and especially her Miss Marple novels, there's this kind of conservative idea of Englishness that, you know, Miss Marple is working to preserve.

And the crime's

come from a particular context that the detective is working in that case to kind of try to maintain.