Agatha Christie born, 1890.

[niyad]

[First Speaker]

1. Just what is there about her that's become a "classic"...?

...I love her books. Everybody loves her books--she's sold, I dunno, billions and billions of them. All thruout her life, people kept saying that Dorothy Sayers, or Margery Allingham, or P.D. James, or someone, was a "better" writer than Agatha was. And yet here she still is, her books on sale in every book store, while those "better" writers are halfway to oblivion. She, and Doyle, and Hammett, and Chandler, are the names that will last from the Century of the Detective Story. (Ironically, Chandler hated her. The laugh's on you, pal...) Like P. G. Wodehouse, she's a permanent part of our cultural landscape; and like him, she was regarded as an entertainer without any literary *elan*. Sooner or later, criticism is going to have to come to terms with the reasons for this. So many best-sellers of her era have been totally forgotten; but she endures.