Between Christie and Poe

When we talk about books, we can say that there are a huge variety of them. We can find about every topic in the world, kitchen, science, children’s, cars, fairy tales, etc. Each of them is written with an intention for the reader and beginning this, each author decides how to form its production with images, acknowledges, the body of the main story or topic, etc. That is the way these two famous authors worked their entire lives: Agatha Christie and Edgar Allan Poe. These two authors, known because of many productions that made them famous a parted from each other, made their careers based in fictitious stories that liked readers from every age around the world.

On one hand Agatha Christie, an English writer wrote around 79 novels and hundreds of short stories transformed into movies and plays on theatres. She wrote books like “Black Coffee”, “Love from a stranger”, “Cards on the table”, etc. On the other hand Edgar Allan Poe, an American writer, poet and romantic journalist, was known because of his short stories and his horror tales. He wrote stories like “The oval portrait”, “A dream within a dream”, “The masque of the red death”, etc. In all these productions we can see the differences between these two ways of writing that they have.

Let’s analyze two of the most famous books to compare how they usually describe and tell their stories. Firstly we will take “The million dollars bonds robbery” by Agatha Christie, which tells a short story about a theft of money that belongs to “The London and Scottish bank”. Secondly, we will choose “The gold bug” written by Edgar Allan Poe that tells another short story about a man who find a strange kind of insect on the shore which it will take him to a tremendous treasure. From the first time we listen the titles of each story, we can imagine that the topic of each story are very different between them. We can infer that they are destined to different people according to the age, and this first sight it’s not so far from the general vision.

The story written by Agatha Christie is about relations among people, but not any people, people from a bank so that relations are full of speech, treatments, lies, treachery, etc. while Poe’s story is about adventures, creatures, magic, etc., something more interesting for children. Besides, in the first one, the author is very descriptive. Christie gives the whole description with little details to make the reader imagine her same vision; meanwhile the second one gives the chance to imagine in any other way. Why this happens? Her intention giving the details is because the mystery plays with these details, focused in the environment because of its importance for the development of the story, unlike “the gold bug” in which Poe focus his writings in the facts of the story, the situation is the important thing no matter the details.

The vocabulary that Agatha uses in her book, is more complex than Allan’s one. She includes words in French and concepts like “Mal de mer” that the meaning requires some knowledge of culture to understand it well, otherwise you can’t it’s difficult to understand because it’s not possible to look for that in dictionaries. With these features, we can infer that these books haven’t been posted to the same rank of age as I said before. That’s something that we can check with the fact that the author of one of these books, of the gold bug to be more specific, uses pictures with the texts. That is a characteristic way to create books for children. Hence with all of these, we can see Christie wrote her book for people older than the readers of Poe’s one.

Therefore, with all of this stuff, we can see how authors of books choose different ways to form their books depending of the rank of age. You can’t create a book for children with no pictures, because pictures are what they see at first! They love draws and it is a way to help them, imagine the monsters and heroes whose the writer, is talking about. Even there are some little kids that when they are starting with readings, they only look the draws understanding the main fact of the story or unless the characters in some situations. Nevertheless, there are books to adults that have small lyrics in each paper, with the intention to have more information compressed to make the reader a fast reading.

Hence we can see that each author catches the attention of the public in many ways. With or without images or the weight of books, the important thing is the content, and that’s what people love, getting involved with the characters and the world the author presents us.

In my opinion, I think these two kinds of books are good options for entertainment with fast readings. In my case, I used to read with my mom many types of books since I was a child and the things was that, with an adult, all kinds of readings can be very good. Of course, the books of Edgar Allan Poe are more recommended to children because of all what I said but the books of Agatha Christie, with some help, can make kids be interested in different and advanced type of reading. With these activities, we can increase children’s reading, and this can be very useful for their future.

The two famous writers gave the world a different way to tell stories and the mystery and magic of all their productions can make people believe that there is a fantastic world in which everything can happens: your head. The imagination is very important in the development of people, and this is a way to believe that nothing is so urgent, so serious, only for adults. With the imagination, we can play, and let the kid that we have inside our hearts, being alive.