Among the many mysteries in the world of British crime writer Agatha Christie is how she came to be the biggest-selling fiction author of all time.
Thirty years after her death on January 12 1976, British linguistics experts reckon they have solved part of the puzzle as to how she came to sell an estimated two billion books worldwide.
In a recent study, they identified her simple, mesmeric style as the chief suspect in the case.
Roland Kapferer, who led the project undertaken by experts from London, Birmingham and Warwick universities, said her gripping style made her books “unputdownable”.
“It is extraordinary just how timeless and popular Agatha Christie’s books remain,” he said.
Christie, the author of Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, was a success from the start when her novels first appeared in the 1920s. Sales records soon tumbled.
She wrote 80 novels and short story collections and 19 plays. Her work has been translated into more than 70 languages, and is outsold only by the Bible and William Shakespeare, according to Chorion, which owns her property rights.
In her prime, Christie was rarely out of the bestseller lists, with her British publishers promoting the availability each year of a “Christie for Christmas”, where regular characters Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot turned up in locations the author had visited.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, “whodunit” expert Christie is the best-selling fiction author of all time.
The popularity of her novels seemingly transcends language and cultural barriers.
She is one of the best-selling authors in Japan and is the most popular author in France, outselling second-placed French literary hero Emile Zola by nearly two to one.
In Britain, where Chorion is campaigning for Christie’s works to be studied in schools, some reckon there is no mystery about her style at all.
The late British novelist Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange, accused her of flimsy characterisation and cliche.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature accuses her of having “undistinguished style” and “slight characterisation”.
Kapferer’s study, however, unravels the style which sustained her success. It found that as Christie’s novels reach the plot denouement, sentence structures become less complex, increading the reader’s excitement level, stimulating the brain’s natural opiates.
She used everyday English, avoiding clever wordplay, to force readers to concentrate on the plot and the clues.
Christie would make use of connected words which convey a common, unconscious message, such as “I’d rather die than go swimming”, “grave mistake” and “good grief” in the same passage to conjure up the spectre of death.
The study found she frequently used a dash to create a faster-paced narrative and long, mesmerising sentences such as a hypnotherapist would use.
“These initial findings indicate that there is a mathematical formula that accounts for her phenomenal success,” Kapferer said.
“I am convinced that our research has come one step closer to defining what it means for a book to be unputdownable.
“Our next step is to seek to replicate these experiments with other leading authors to discover whether their writings cause similar neurological activity among readers.”
However, Christie’s secret as to how she done it may never be completely revealed, he warned.
“Whether Christie herself was aware that her words contained such powerful neural triggers is another matter for debate and may well remain an enduring mystery in itself.” – AFP