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No Way! HE'S the Grim Reaper?
The Grim Reaper takes on many guises, and one of them is so clever that it's never identified even though it appears in many television series, films, and novels. In fact, this Grim Reaper is a famous character of the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie. Though most known for her whodunnits, Christie delved into horror, Gothic, and supernatural themes. For example, there's a haunted house in The Lamp, a mummy's curse in The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb, an animated figurine in The Dressmaker's Doll, witchcraft in The Pale Horse, a cursed plot of land in Endless Night, spirit mediumship in both The Last Séance and The Sittaford Mystery, nuns with destructive powers in The Hound of Death, and spirit possession in The Fourth Man. But Christie's Grim Reaper requires no classic horror situations to drop its victims.
This Reaper is none other than Hercule Poirot, the greatest villain of Agatha Christie's world (and hence ours, what with the way fiction interpenetrates). Poirot is inseparable from death, just as the goddess of the hunt, Diana, is one with the stag. A murder need not have already occurred — Poirot is there, his very presence guaranteeing murder. His investigations have nothing to do with serving justice. Let's take an example at random: Death on the Nile. One single, purposeful murder unnecessarily multiplies into five deaths, wholly due to Poirot's egomaniacal investigation. It's inconceivable that five deaths with Poirot's bloody "case closed" stamp are preferable to an unsolved mystery with a single victim. When Poirot finally gathers his (surviving) suspects to endure an interminable self-congratulation, he never addresses the elephant in the room — the fact that the world would be an infinitely safer place if he were to leave well enough alone.
We should note how Poirot is obsessed with motives, as if anyone with a motive possesses, by definition, a criminal mind and the capacity for murder. His presumption that everyone on earth is capable of cold-blooded killing says far more about Poirot's own rotten soul than it does about the rest of humanity. But once we recognize Poirot as the Grim Reaper, his assumption that everyone is an agent of death makes better sense. And now one can read more so-called Whodunnits as horror novels.
—Hailed by the art world as the most unusual scholar working today, Craig Conley a.k.a. Prof. Oddfellow fled academia to author Weiser Books' Magic Words: A Dictionary, HarperCollins' One-Letter Words: A Dictionary, and The Young Wizard's Hexopedia. Esoteric publications include Books of the Dead, Magic Archetypes, The Care and Feeding of a Spirit Board, Seance Parlor Feng Shui, How to Hoodoo Hack a Yearbook, Heirs to the Queen of Hearts, Astrogalomancy, The One-Minute Mystic, and Divination by Punctuation. He produces, directs, and writes both Grave Mood Rings and Prof. Oddfellow's Penetralia. His work has been profiled in the New York Post, the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, Publishers Weekly, The Associated Press, and dozens of others. His website is MysteryArts.com
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