The Agatha Project

Two years ago I quit a job I loved–teaching students and reading great books. It was January 2022. The pandemic (did we ever think “pandemic” would become a regular part of our vernacular?) was having its last surge in the U.S., and we had pulled our kids out of school for four weeks during Omicron.

Like so many people with chronic illness, I struggled to assess risk when daily life was calling for “rise and grind,” my body was calling for more care and doctors’ visits, and my brain, endlessly in need of stimulation, was so enjoying the mental gymnastics of intellectual work. I have no doubt frustrated friends by mourning for two years since over leaving the workforce–how many would love the ability to do that? But work gave me a sense of purpose, drive, a propulsion forward through life.

Major life changes can feel significant and long, or inconsequential and short in hindsight–like labor when you are lamaze breathing and want to claw your eyes out, versus when it is all over and you think….maybe I could handle that again for child #2. I am currently watching Alex Honnold’s climb of a rock wall in Greenland, and ice shelves are similar, with one small layer connoting a major, traumatic climate event the shelf survived, dwarfed underneath 500 feet of ice that came after. Like many post-Covid, I am in the yawning “after”. What now?

I need an occupation, and one of my favorite things to do is read Agatha Christie. I have taught her detective fiction and short stories to high schoolers and college students. Although I hesitate to say “taught,” because “encountered and analyzed together” is more accurate. Christie still speaks to readers from divergent backgrounds, deftly entertaining us with a Poirotian malapropism and, in the next beat, confounding us with an ethical dilemma worthy of a philosophy seminar. This ability to seamlessly entertain and intellectually stimulate makes serious (and mostly male) authors and academics discount her work; academia is also allergic to anything on a paperback best seller list. But contrary to what our parents told us, sometimes what’s popular is popular because it is good.

Christie herself, prolific in her work and occupied in her daily life, used the gift of time in what many might see as a frivolous endeavor. She had some of her best ideas eating apples in the bathtub, like her semi-autobiographical character Ariadne Oliver. She traveled widely, was well read, and enjoyed tea on the lawn prepared by household help. But beneath this excessive privilege lay an analytic, whirling dervish of a mind that gave us the most widely-translated and well-read body of work known to humanity. It is none the less rigorous and deep for all that, making her the Queen of Crime and, arguably, the Queen of literature.

The women Christie centered her stories around, most of whom are upper middle-class women without standard jobs, serve as my inspiration in beginning this project, although I would place myself squarely as lower middle-class, and thus unable to flit off to Cairo for a holiday like so many of these characters. But I am rich in time, an increasingly rare commodity, and one I do not spend lightly. Everyone needs an occupation, traditional or not, and the Agatha Project is mine.

Like a good ex-teacher, I made a syllabus-of-sorts for myself. The Agatha Project will take two years to complete, by my conservative calculations and ambitious reading calendar. Thank you for coming along on the journey.