I have already shared two posts on visual vocabulary learned from Agatha Christie… but that doesn’t begin to cover the horticultural entires. Seriously, why has no one ever written Agatha Christie, Botanist?!

Some plants (chiefly flowers in her works) are so common that even a non-gardener like me knows them: roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, yew trees. But I encountered quite a lot of unknown terms in my latest read-through of Miss Marple in particular (the spinster detective is a passionate gardener). Though, as I’ve looked them up, I realized that I know a number of them by sight, just hitherto not by name.

Enjoy this Christieish bouquet…

My March 2023 issue of Theology & a Recipe deals with “Miss Marple’s Low Anthropology”… which was, of course, a transparent excuse for going back and re-reading all the Miss Marple stories and novels. And, as I’ve documented before, Agatha’s trickily plain prose once again expanded my visual vocabulary. Hence, these fruits of my re-reading for your enjoyment…

Passenger to Frankfurt is not exactly Christie’s most beloved novel. It’s a thriller, rather than a straight-up detective mystery, for one thing. In my recent quest to read all her novels, I discovered that she peppered a fair few thrillers in with the mysteries. She was never as good in this genre, but I can appreciate her need to change things up to keep her writing and imagination fresh.

That’s not the only problem with PTF, though. It came out in 1970, toward the end of her life and career, and it’s beyond question that her powers were waning at that point. (However, in all fairness, I think her silliest thriller of all was The Big Four, which was published in 1927, right as she was hitting her stride.) Christie fans know full well that she was of a conservative turn of mind, very irritable about high taxes, and generally unhappy at the drift of things, socially and culturally. That really shows through in PTF. But this too should be qualified: a novel like Third Girl reckons with what has become of “young people these days” and takes them at face value. It’s not all invective.

You can read a very thorough description of what passes for PTF’s plot on Wikipedia. The opening sequence in which the protagonist trades places with someone who is convinced that she will be killed if she takes her flight is one of the best in Christie’s work—it’s a shame the rest of the book didn’t follow through on the initial premise.

But here’s where it gets interesting. For one thing, the titular city is Frankfurt. An obvious choice for an international flight hub, but I can’t help but wonder if more lies behind it: namely, the so-called Frankfurt school, which unleashed Critical Theory in all its corrosive glory on the world. That would be utterly speculative on my part—except that in this book Christie actually mentions by name Herbert Marcuse (the leading proponent of the Frankfurt school)! Who knew that she was keeping up with, at that time, arcane philosophical movements? …

Last time I was into reading Agatha Christie novels, i.e. the mid-1990s, it was not so easy to get on the internet and search engines were not great (awww, AltaVista). So if I read a word or phrase I didn’t get, I just jumped on ahead and kept going. They were really only touches of color, not essential to comprehension.

Agatha gets a bad rap as a writer (and unjustly), and one of the many ways to disprove the accusation is to have a closer look at the little details she amasses to flesh out her worlds. As I’ve said before, she is mostly a charcoal sketch artist, not a colorful mosaicist. But that means she can capture with just a few strokes enough to evoke a whole world. So this time around, I took her up on her visual clues as much as her mystery clues, and went to the trouble of looking up online what I didn’t already know.

While I did learn some actual vocabulary words from Agatha—like ”prognathous,” “catlap,” and “cacography”—and took note of some of her favorite descriptive terms of phrase that seem to be unique to her—”boiled gooseberry eyes,” “blue eyes put in with the smutty finger,” and “hatchet-faced”—what I liked best were very solid nouns with very distinctive looks to them. Hence, here are my favorite additions to my visual vocabulary from the whole range of her oeuvre…