Aunt Agatha to the rescue

A mystery-loving child will eventually start eyeing complex novels meant for adults, which can be completely age inappropriate. This is where Christie’s mysteries come in.

This September 15, Agatha Christie would’ve turned 131 years old. Wait. Why is Agatha Christie in a column about children’s literature? Because I think Christie’s books are the perfect gateway into one of the most popular genres in adult literature — murder mysteries.

Any mystery-loving child who has outgrown simple plots involving robberies, spying and sabotage, will eventually start eyeing complex mysteries meant for adults. But the mystery genre can run to extremes, with blood and gore, unsavoury details, and can be completely inappropriate for children.

This is where Christie’s mysteries come in. They do involve deaths, of course, and that’s a given. But they are not violent. They are not messy. The manner of death and the death itself is not dwelt upon too much. What is important is the mystery. The stories are both gentle and do justice to children’s intelligence.

What is the perfect age for children to start reading Agatha Christie? Depends. The language is simple (and modern) enough for 10-year-olds to read. But are they ready for it? After all, at the end of it, a murder is a violent crime, even if it is not depicted violently. So, I would say, it depends on the emotional readiness of the child.

I read my first Christie, ‘The Thirteen Problems’, a collection of short stories, when I was about 11 or 12. It floored me. I ended up reading every Christie I could lay my hands on in the next few months. But then, I’m from the era in which we went from children’s books directly to adult books. I didn’t have much choice if I wanted something more complex than the children’s books I had been reading.

My daughter, on the other hand, refused to read any murder mystery until she was nearly 14.

Then, she read Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’, which by the way, I highly recommend as the first Christie. It blew her mind. She turned the last page, and then she went right back to the first page and read it all over again, saying, “HOW did I miss all these clues!!”

Even for adults, Christie’s plots are clever, but for children, who haven’t read anything in that genre, they seem astonishingly brilliant.

Also, since she travelled a lot with her archaeologist husband, many of Christie’s books have history, travel and culture thrown in. My interest in both ancient history and historical fiction began when I read her book ‘Death Comes as the End’, set 4,000 years ago in Egypt. I’m now reading it out to my daughter.

The other books of Christie’s I’d recommend children start with, are The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Death on the Nile, and Murder on the Orient Express.

For maximum fun, read the books yourself first (if you haven’t already), give them to a child who’s ready for them, and then watch their expressions change as they discover the twists and turns and enter an exciting new world.

The author has written 12 books for children and can be reached at www.shruthi-rao.com

GobbledyBook is a fortnightly column that gives a peek into the wondrous world of children’s books. Hop on! Or as Alice did, plunge into the rabbit hole.