Ariadne Oliver and Harriet Vane on the Work of Writing

I’ve come around to appreciating Agatha Christie’s fictional crime novelist, Ariadne Oliver.

She’s written broadly, as a caricature of Christie herself–a substantial woman in midlife, trailing apple cores. Like Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, a writer of detective novels, Ariadne is a well-regarded author of mysteries who can’t resist dabbling in a few herself. Also like Harriet, she occasionally muses on the differences between fictional and real-life crimes. So in both characters, we have authorial alter egos who ponder the reading tastes of the general public, and the challenges of introducing the appropriate level of variation into their ingenious crime plots.

Ariadne makes her first appearance in Christie’s Cards on the Table (1937). We learn she is, at that point, a slight acquaintance of celebrated private investigator Hercule Poirot. She turns up as one of the invited guests at a dinner party, at the home of the Mephistophelian Mr. Shaitana. Wealthy and urbane, he’s known as the consummate host, but this is a very special occasion. While encountering Poirot at an exhibit of snuffboxes two weeks earlier, Mr. Shaitana had boasted that among his other impressive collections, he enjoyed a curated selection of murderers in his social circle.

The dinner party aims to introduce Poirot to Shaitana’s finds. Included in the gathering are a Scotland Yard detective, a secret service member and, rather unexpectedly, the mystery writer Ariadne Oliver . . . along with four people that Shaitana either knows or suspects to be implicated in fatal crimes. In Poirot’s evocative phrase, Shaitana is meeting with tigers in their cages, instead of studying them from outside the bars. It’s a failed experiment; he does not survive his own party.

Ariadne is portrayed initially as effusive, enthused, but slightly foolish. She offers to match wits with the professional investigators, and she is zealous in her pursuit of the suspects. But simplistic, too, in her insistence that women’s instincts about people offer a more effective means of ferreting out murderers than male logic.

Along the way, however, she demonstrates shrewd insight into psychology and has a lot to say about the craft of crime fiction. For instance, she is delighted when Poirot notices that two of her novels use the same device, albeit in very different contexts. She declares that all of her fiction, in fact, involves variations on a theme. And she doesn’t romanticize the labour of constructing fresh stories that are still reassuringly familiar to her fans:

“One actually has to think, you know. And thinking is always a bore. And you have to plan things. And then one gets stuck every now and then, and you feel you’ll never get out of the mess–but you do! Writing’s not particularly enjoyable. It’s hard work like everything else.”

Ariadne is spurred on in her efforts largely by the prospect of financial rewards for serial rights, not to mention her bankbook, “when [she] sees how much overdrawn [she is].” Christie has the fictional writer fret about the array of complaints that arrive from readers when she has mistaken a detail, such as whether a particular plant grows in a specific season. Fortunately, she’s endlessly creative in imagining means and motives for murder. “I can always think of things,” she concludes. “What is so tiring is writing them down.”

Harriet Vane has a somewhat different take. Like Sayers herself, she turned to crime fiction to earn a living, and she’s generally unapologetic about how her popular fiction contrasts with “intellectual” or arty novels. Her old dons praise her mysteries, and if anyone’s disappointed with the path taken by a former and brilliant student, it’s not because of her successful efforts in fiction.

When she returns to Oxford in Gaudy Night (1935), Harriet is drawn into solving the mystery of an increasingly dangerous poison-pen writer. She decides to pursue a new writing project as well, a critical-biographical study of Sheridan Le Fanu. Her research begins as a cover story for spending an extended stretch at the fictional Shrewsbury College, modelled on Sayers’s own Somerville, but nonetheless she’s drawn in to the pleasure of a meditative academic life.

Women graduates were not eligible to receive degrees when Sayers completed her studies in 1915. Five years later, when that changed, Sayers was among the first of the former women’s college students to put her name forward for degree status. Her relationship to crime fiction was ambivalent compared to Christie’s. At times in her career she preferred more serious intellectual labour, writing plays with religious themes for the BBC, or translating Dante.

After Gaudy Night, she completed only one additional Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane mystery. Busman’s Honeymoon was drafted as a short story, and then was produced as a successful play before being extended into the final novel. Posthumously, Jill Paton Walsh worked from Sayers’s notes and manuscript draft to create a new volume in the series, Thrones, Dominations.

Christie, meanwhile, composed both plays and novels but remained faithful to the crime fiction genre. She continued writing in it until the early 1970s (not long before her death), and Ariadne Oliver featured in seven books, typically in Poirot’s company. During this first foray for the writer-sleuth, we see Christie reflecting with some ruefulness about her choice of a Belgian detective protagonist:

“I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible he’s said or done.” (Cards on the Table)