Human Nature

Abstract

Miss Marple tells her vicar that her hobby is Human Nature (Vicarage, xxvi). Poirot tells Dr Sheppard that his profession is Human Nature — from which the doctor deduces that he is a hairdresser (Ackroyd, iii). Being foreign and therefore more abstractly intellectual, he more often claims to be an expert on psychology. It would be reckless to attribute to the author any sophisticated knowledge of academic psychology or any systematic study of psychoanalysis. But there is certainly in Christie’s novels a persistent wish to account for what people are like and the way they behave. As with many aspects of her work, this can easily be explained in structural terms. Plausibility is a requirement of the classic detective story; if readers can’t see the likelihood of certain characters behaving in certain ways and having certain motives, the solution of the crimes is unmotivated and the puzzle element of the stories is invalid. But this is not the whole explanation. Clearly, Christie did wish to create the impression that the author of her novels possesses a certain wisdom, a wide and dispassionate view of behaviour. This serves to maintain a sense that the endings of the novels represent a possible establishment of a morally significant state of affairs; it is also a kind of rhetoric, assuring the reader that reading the novel is not just a self-indulgence, but that it also offers a kind of learning experience.