"Liking is more important than loving. It lasts." — Murder Is Easy
"And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth." — They Came to Baghdad, the villain speaking
"Most people – and I don't exclude policemen – are far too trusting for this wicked world. They believe what is told them. I never do." — Miss Marple
"She always expected the worst of everyone and everything" — An Autobiography, on her step-grandmother
Agatha Christie's (1890-1976) books are often misguidedly described as "cozy", but their main component is a low-temperature intelligence that assumes everyone in the room may be lying, regards strong feeling as the most reliable precursor to murder, and holds that the pleasant village contains every wickedness available to man. The frilly teacup can easily contain poison. Christie was ILI, with an accent on SLI that shows in her hands rather than her mind.
Out of her two famous detectives, Miss Marple is more telling. She is a character — she has a settled and coherent view of human nature that the books take seriously as a philosophical position. Poirot, despite constantly being given far better Te-like specific-construction-of-events detective plots, and better deduction, is a collection of quirks: the moustaches, the symmetry, the little grey cells, the vanity. David Suchet's achievement was to construct a portrayal out of an inventory, which was genuinely a feat of acting. Maybe the reason for better Poirot plots (nearly every formal craft innovation is his) is simply that a detective who is an inventory of quirks doesn't compete with the plot construction and other characters for the reader's attention.
According to Christie herself, Marple was not a direct portrait of her step-grandmother, being far fussier and more spinsterish than that lady ever was. But one thing they shared, and Christie names it precisely: though a calm person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right. Marple's own version, in The Mirror Crack'd, is that most people, policemen not excepted, are far too trusting for this wicked world; they believe what they are told, and she does not. It's quite a skeptical, and not particualrly optimistic, view of human nature. And as Christie aged, Marple quietly became her self-insert: the elderly woman who is underestimated, who says little, who has stopped expecting people to be better than they are, and who is never wrong.
Her detective novels have many features of the "comedy of manners," linking her to the tradition of Jane Austen. Still, while the common description of her characters as Cluedo game chips is badly misguided, at least when it comes to the best third of her work, their Fi characterization still serves the Te plot outline, rather than vice versa. The insight you get when the murderer is revealed — the revelation, that, in her best books, is both unexpected and inevitable — is Ne material, but used relatively sparingly, also in service of Te plot construction. Ne was definitely not her weakest function, but she generated new possibilities with restraint.
Christie didn't sympathize with high Fe passions. Love Makes You Evil is a common trope in her writings, and while it is indeed a common motif for a domestic murder in real life, she often liked to stress the topic. One of her best romances, the one between Luke and Bridget in Murder Is Easy, explicitly ends with the leads noting that liking the person you're going to marry is even more important than loving them! Her best political thriller (a genre where Christie wasn't the best, in general), They Came to Baghdad, has a sinister political organization which wants to build "a new heaven and a new world" — the conspiracy wants the fat old Western men and the Communists to destroy each other in a total war, after which comes the new Heaven and the new Earth, administered by a small chosen band of higher beings — scientists, agricultural experts, the young Siegfrieds of the New World. As Robert Barnard perceptively noted, she distrusted transformative enthusiasm as such, wherever it came from, and she assigned it to comic figures or villains. Also characteristically for ILI, she disliked children — when they do appear on-page, their characterization is usually derisively negative (they tend to be nasty snotty lying brats), although there are exceptions (the nine-year-old detective story fan in Body in the Library and the boarding school girls in Cat Among the Pigeons). Still, the children Christie could write with warmth are the detective novels fans and ones behaving as junior investigators!
In December 1926 her husband asked for a divorce, and her response to the highest-intensity emotional situation of her life was the biggest mystery of her life: she drove away, abandoned the car, and turned up in a Harrogate hotel under the surname of her husband's mistress, apparently not recognising him when he came. She never explained it. She left it out of the autobiography entirely — a book of several hundred pages by the most famous writer of concealment in the world. The rest of the biography is consistent and mostly consists of absences. Trained to concert standard in Paris, she never performed, because she disliked to be looked at. She gave interviewers almost nothing. Lucy Worsley's portrait has her a frequently absent and rather aloof mother, and Laura Thompson also has her as "not a devoted maternal person."
The accent is in her hands. She bought houses compulsively from the dollhouse stage onward and noted with some satisfaction in the 1930s that she had accumulated eight; she was interested enough in practical aesthetics to paint her own bedroom fireplace at Greenway. On Max Mallowan's digs she cleaned the Nimrud ivories — patient close handwork on small objects, the sort of introverted-ST task most people would find unendurable and she evidently did not. Come, Tell Me How You Live is a memoir almost entirely about logistics: the management of an expedition, told with real relish for the practical detail. Also, while gender does play a role here, she pointedly disliked extreme gore, unlike less Si-ish ILI's (see Ambrose Bierce). In fact, the Si elements in her work often leads to the above "cozy" description, although her coziness is very much exaggerated by the common perception (it's hard for me to understand how And Then There Were None is "cozy"). It seems that by "cozy", people just mean "no swear words, graphic sex, and Scenes From The Lowest Level of Urban Lumpen-Proletariat." But her squeamishness is purely sensory, not moral or informational. She was a qualified dispenser who could tell you precisely what thallium does to a nervous system, and did, accurately enough to be credited with a real diagnosis or two.
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