Agatha Christie was amazingly insightful when it came to human nature; unfortunately, people who don't read her consistently fail to recognize this and see only cliches. What Christie did was paint brief, extremely astute portraits of types recognizable to many readers. Classical and classic literature has been doing this for thousands of years. It is only ridiculous modern literary culture that insists that characterizations be 3 billion words long and contain a psychological breakdown of everything from the character's potty years to the character's angst-ridden three marriages.
By the way, the above is why YA literature still produces, on average, better novels than adult literature: less space.
One type of character Christie did extremely well was the heart-broken female protagonist. She understood unrequited love like nobody's business, and she understood that love (for women) doesn't have to be physically sexual to be all-consuming.
For example, the main character of Sad Cypress is terribly in love with a man who, I think, was consciously or unconsciously based on Christie's first husband, Archie: a fastidious, aloof person who fell out of love the moment it inconvenienced him.
Granted, Christie slept with Archie, but her devastation when he left was psychological to the nth degree. It wasn't that he was sleeping with someone else (he actually wasn't; he was engaged, but he was very British and proper about the whole thing) and it wasn't (necessarily) his physical abandonment that overwhelmed her. It was the loss of an emotional connection; Christie was enthralled by Archie, not because he was her type but because he was her first love and that was the kind of connection she'd made with him. It was almost imaginary, not in the "fake" sense but in the sense that it was almost entirely in her head. Archie wasn't that romantic a guy. When he left, Christie lost her sense of reality. I think that's why she disappeared. I don't think she had amnesia. I think she just couldn't handle the pain anymore.
The main character of Sad Cypress is this type of woman. But the movie writers didn't know how to show this, so they used the old "oh, I was sleeping with him, but he left me" ploy. To me, this completely misses the essence of the character. She's not upset because her lover leaves her; she's crushed, devastated, psychically thrown into deep depression because the man she invested so much imaginary importance in turned out to not be worth it. There is a sexual element, but it starts in the woman's emotional investment. It's way more Basic Instinct than it is some dumb Melrose Place-type drama.
Christie's books are, in fact, much darker and psychologically astute than people credit them with. I think Christie gets labeled "cozy" by people who don't read her. (See the haunting Ordeal by Innocence with Donald Sutherland for a dark Christie book rendered almost perfectly on film; also, see Endless Night.)
Some critic--I think it was Edmund Wilson--criticized Christie's books for always restoring the status quo of her middle-class characters. He argued that her perfect, middle-class village settings create a feeling of security for Christie's readers because, after the murder, things always return to how-they-were-before. Making readers feel secure is, according to Wilson, bad.
I remember the first time I read this criticism, I thought, "Has he read any of her books?"
Personally, I don't see what's wrong with writing books that restore the middle-class status quo, but then, I don't think the purpose of literature is REVOLUTION! and RESISTANCE! If I did think there was a purpose to literature (and I am willing to say there isn't), I would say it was to reflect back to us the human condition, and the human condition includes cozy perfection and the desire for security plus the middle-class. (Frankly, I think REVOLUTION and RESISTANCE are utterly tiresome purposes for art; I tried to read Walden by Thoreau and got so tired of him, I almost threw the library book in the trash. I read Kerouac who actually I quite enjoyed, but then I tried to read about Kerouac and got so tired of his friends, I gave up. They may be fascinating to themselves but I personally find navel-gazing mind-numbing. By the way, this is the same reason the book Julia & Julia is extremely tiresome. If you want to read about Julia Child, read Julia Child.)
Setting aside the purpose of literature and whether or not it is okay to write "cozies," the fact is that change--due to time, biology, and circumstances (you know, World War II)--is woven through all of Christie's books. Although individuals achieve security in her books, life rarely continues as-it-was-before. Even Poirot and Miss Marple get old and suffer the strangeness of a world that has changed fundamentally (but not personally) from the one they remember.
What Miss Marple, for one, does point out continually is that human nature in a village is NOT fundamentally different from human nature anywhere else. And I think this is what made and makes Christie great: she has the ability to accept change while still seeing clearly basic human needs, feelings, and desires.
As Poirot says in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, "You talk of the continued peace of the nation. Oh, yes, that is right, but Poirot is not concerned with nations. Poirot is always concerned with private individuals who have the right not to have taken from them their lives."
Which is why Christie will last when so much "relevant" literary garbage goes into . . . the garbage.
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