I think it's a big mistake for fictional detectives to have private lives. It very much distracts from the business in hand.
The problem with too many detective writers is they want to transform the genre and raise it to the heights of literachur. P.D. James is a prime offender- following in the footsteps of Dorothy L. Sayers. My experience is that the more literary a detective novel becomes the more insufferable it is.
Christie is never literary in the way James and Sayers aspire to be, but she's a finer artist than either of them. She accepts the limitations of the genre and plays with them like the virtuoso she is.
Poirot first appears- as a middle-aged man- in 1916 and is still chipper in 1973, by which stage he must be about 100. His death- in a novel written out of sequence and published in 1975- seems to have occured around 1946.
Re: Detective fiction
The problem with too many detective writers is they want to transform the genre and raise it to the heights of literachur. P.D. James is a prime offender- following in the footsteps of Dorothy L. Sayers. My experience is that the more literary a detective novel becomes the more insufferable it is.
Christie is never literary in the way James and Sayers aspire to be, but she's a finer artist than either of them. She accepts the limitations of the genre and plays with them like the virtuoso she is.
Poirot first appears- as a middle-aged man- in 1916 and is still chipper in 1973, by which stage he must be about 100. His death- in a novel written out of sequence and published in 1975- seems to have occured around 1946.