The process of trying to aid the recollection of repressed memories may in fact result in wholly artificial memories being created in the truth of which the person is wholly convinced. There is evidence to support the concern that such memories may be inaccurate, even false, being reconstructed by the people under conditions where they may be very suggestible. The reliability of such memories has been the subject of much debate in legal and medical circles. These repressed memories of trauma became very much more widely known during the 1980s and 1990s when suppressed memories of childhood abuse were widely discussed in the context of trials of abusers based on the testimony of victims recalled many years after the event.
She notes that children are very peculiar in what they do and don’t remember from their childhood. The plot revolves around this partial recollection from childhood and it is in describing this that Christie is so psychologically accurate. Gwenda, the young heroine of the book, is shocked by the lines from the play The Duchess of Malfi and recalls a traumatic incident from her childhood in which she saw a murdered woman with a person standing over the body speaking the self-same lines. It is in fact at His Majesty’s Theatre that a pivotal moment in the plot takes place. Indeed the book is set in the late 1930s, mentioning His Majesty’s Theatre and the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, and appears to pre-date the story of Nemesis since in that novel she has given up gardening on doctor’s orders but is evidently still an active gardener in the course of this novel. I say “last” because although it was published in 1976, shortly after her death, it was actually written in 1940*. One such example of her penetration into the workings of the mind is to be found in the “last” Miss Marple case, Sleeping Murder. Let’s face it, if she didn’t and the plots were always psychologically implausible she’d have gone out of fashion years ago. Whatever the truth behind such generalisations, there is no doubt that Christie did employ great psychological insight in more than one of her novels. Sayers amongst her contemporaries of the Golden Age. If a reader wants psychological depth then he or she should look elsewhere – perhaps to Anthony Berkeley or Dorothy L.
It is often said that Agatha Christie’s novels lack characterisation or that she employs two-dimensional stock characters to populate her village settings. Illustration by Andrew Davidson, taken from the Folio Society edition of the novel.
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