Five questions: FSU information professor and resident Agatha Christie expert follows author’s travels to Hawaii

Michelle Kazmer is the dean of Florida State University’s College of Communication and Information. She is also a professor in the School of Information and a leading expert on Golden Age crime fiction author Agatha Christie.

Kazmer is a leading expert on how Christie uses information theories in her stories, but she also explores other aspects of Christie and crime fiction’s lasting impact on society.

Kazmer recently spoke with Sir David Suchet in his new BritBox original series “Travels with Agatha Christie & Sir David Suchet,” specifically on the episode about Christie’s holiday in Hawaii.

Kazmer has contributed the chapter “Christie’s Clues as Information” to “The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie,” been interviewed by the BBC on the topic twice and co-hosted two episodes of the All About Agatha Christie Podcast. She is also the first American to give the keynote speech at the Agatha Christie and Golden Age of Crime international conference.

What drew you to study Agatha Christie’s works and life?

Like many readers, I’ve been an Agatha Christie “fan” since my tween years. A little over a decade ago I had the opportunity to turn my research attention to her works. Crime fiction in general is an extremely important object of study; it’s economically powerful, first of all, but crime fiction is also important to humanity. For millennia, human beings have processed what it means to be human, and how we handle those among us who violate our shared obligations, through consuming crime fiction. It literally shapes how we think and our societal infrastructures of justice.  

How does your background in information science differentiate your unique expertise on Christie and Golden Age crime fiction?

There are lots of brilliant folks who study crime fiction from many different perspectives: literary, legal, media, linguistic, forensic and so forth. There wasn’t anyone I could find who was approaching fictional detection as an “information behavior.” Information behaviors are something we study and theorize a lot in information science so I was curious: can we learn more about what makes crime fiction successful by analyzing it according to theories from the field of information science? The answer is yes.

How did Christie’s holiday in Hawaii and travels in general in the 1920s, before she became the famous writer known today, inform and influence her writing?

Young Agatha Christie was, as we see from her diaries and autobiographical material, a quite vigorous woman. She was social and quite physically active! She loved travel and took the opportunity to travel part of the world in 1922 on a trip associated with the British Empire Exhibition in London. There’s a book about it called “The Grand Tour” edited by her grandson, Mathew Prichard. The new series available on BritBox, “Travels with Agatha Christie and Sir David Suchet,” features Sir David Suchet going to all the same destinations.

Travel features heavily in almost all of Agatha Christie’s writing. Whether it’s domestic travel in trains or automobiles, or international travel on trains, airplanes, ships, boats, buses or on camels — she included it in her work throughout her more than 50 years of publishing. Travel is in many ways a crime writer’s dream: it lets you pull together different types of people, often into an isolated setting, and have them acting in ways they mightn’t do in their everyday lives. And because she traveled so much herself, her travel is very realistic, both in the good aspects and in the inconveniences!

What makes Christie’s work enduring and lasting in popular media as well as academia?

Crime fiction remains popular globally and Agatha Christie particularly so. She’s the best-selling novelist of all time and her work has been translated into more then 100 languages from their original English, and adapted into every possible medium from radio play to manga, from stage play to video game. But WHY Agatha Christie, in particular? First of all, her writing is readable, not because what she has written is easy or simple, but because she had an extraordinary talent and skill for clarity of plot and prose. So, you can read it quickly in an airport and enjoy the heck out of it, or you can read it deeply for academic analysis — and still enjoy it as well as learning a lot. Her work bears re-reading; it’s sufficiently interesting that even if you know “whodunnit,” you are happy to come back for more. And finally: she was a brilliant innovator. For anything we think of as a common trope in crime fiction, Agatha either did it first — that is, she invented it; or she did it best — so someone else invented the trick, but she perfected it; or BOTH — she innovated a trick and did so perfectly.

Where would you recommend new readers start if interested in reading Christie’s works?

As you can imagine, recommending a “first” Agatha Christie to new readers is highly debated among the Agathologists! I will offer some groupings:

• Starter pack: “The Murder at the Vicarage” (Miss Marple); “Death on the Nile” (Hercule Poirot); “Evil Under the Sun” (Hercule Poirot); “Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?” (Standalone).
• The crown jewels: “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” “Murder on the Orient Express” and “And Then There Were None.”
• Other wonderful things to read early on: “The Secret Adversary,” “Five Little Pigs,” “A Murder is Announced,” “Ordeal by Innocence,” “Hercule Poirot’s Christmas,” “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” “A Pocket Full of Rye” and “Crooked House.”

There are 66 novels, 14 short story collections, plays and practically infinite adaptations, so it is possible to be occupied for quite some time.

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