Introduction
Welcome fellow journalist. We are planning to do a feature on famous crime writers.
The editorial team picked Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie.
You will have to go in the Guardians' archives to find out all about them and their books.
Enough said. Sharpen your eyes, pencils and mind; pick up your notebook and off you go !
Task
We are finalising the Sunday edition tomorrow at 10:00.
By then you will have written an article of ca. 100 words about either Doyle or Christie.
Don't forget, our readers want to know : who they are? where they get their ideas from? which is their favourite and/or most famous character. Also try to find out what makes a perfect crime story?
Finally you will justify why you chose to do a column on either Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie.
Process
Later in the Archives you get to the D aisle and find a row of twenty boxes labeled "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle"
In the first one you can see :
* A book named "Who was Arthur Conan Doyle?"
* A smaller box labelled : Odd characters
* A folio about SH&Dr.W on which is stuck an audio recording
* Another folio in which there seem to be lists of characters potential traits and associated tempers (only look up in the 1rst paragraph)
That should be enough to write a couple of lines on this chap. Now let's go and find some information about Agatha Christie.
On the shelves dedicated to her you also find an enormous amount of boxes.
- The first one entails hundreds of pictures of the author
- In a second box are several books dedicated to her biography
(Gather 4 clues about her)
one of the books interestingly talks about how she came to writing crime novels .
Page 65 you read " For people of Christie’s time and class, writing was not an uncommon pastime. For instance, her sister, Madge, had a play produced in the West End long before she did." Again, this was not a remarkable choice. The period between the First and Second World Wars has been called the golden age of the detective story. Practically everyone who wanted to write had a go at it. Such books were adored by ordinary readers—according to Colin Watson, a historian of the genre, housewives brought them home in the shopping basket—but they were just as popular with educated people. W. H. Auden said that when he picked up a detective story he couldn’t put it down until he had finished it. In T. S. Eliot’s “The Family Reunion,” the mystery is solved by a character named Agatha. Because the form was so popular, almost any detective novel stood a good chance of getting a contract. That fact was no doubt in Christie’s mind as she went to her desk—Archie’s salary was small. At the start, she was a clumsy writer. But she was able to offer her readers what they wanted, a whodunnit, also called a “puzzle mystery”—a story that is a contest between the author and the reader as to whether the reader can guess who the culprit is before the end of the book."
(Psst, I'm your editor : remember to quote (pick up) one sentence explaining why she went for crime novels)
In another book dedicated to The Art of Crime , Page 15 you read about Christies' favourite ways to dispose of a body?
(You can either follow the link and discover a new document, or read the following paragraph)
"Though Christie’s novels sometimes have colorful settings—a Nile steamer, an archaeological dig in Mesopotamia—most of them are set in England. The corpse may be discovered in its time-honored location, the library, or it may be stuffed into the cupboard under the stairs, with the tennis racquets. As for the weapon, golden-age mystery writers exercised great ingenuity over this. In the words of Christie’s colleague Dorothy Sayers, victims were brought down by “licking poisoned stamps; shaving-brushes inoculated with dread disease . . . poisoned mattresses; knives dropped through the ceiling; stabbing with a sharp icicle; electrocution by telephone.” Christie was less fanciful. Now and then, the victim is shot or stabbed, and poor Agnes, the one stored with the tennis racquets, has a skewer driven through her brain, but Christie favored a clean conking on the head or—her overwhelming preference—poison. That choice was surely a product of her war work in the dispensary, with its many shelves of potentially lethal drugs. But poison probably appealed to her also because it did not involve assault. Christie disliked violence. When, in her novels, someone starts to look dangerous, her detective does not pull a gun. He doesn’t have a gun. Bystanders may wrestle the malefactor to the ground. In one case, where there are no bystanders, the detective squirts soapy water into the murderer’s face. It works!"
Then you bump on a tape witch is labelled : A Christie : her most famous characters
Next to it is a folio advertising the A to Z of Agatha Christie's success.
With these documents in hand you should be able to explain what makes a perfect crime novel and insert at least 3 words related to investigations and 3 ways of expressing a hypothesis in your article (only look into the first paragraph).