‘Agatha had Alzheimer’s writing last Poirot’
English murder mystery writer Agatha Christie developed Alzheimer’s disease when she penned her last Poirot novel, Elephants Can Remember, at the age of 81, a leading professor has claimed.
For long, the puzzle of Christie’s poorly received the last Poirot novel has baffled scholars and fans alike — why was the plot so weak and why did it have so many errors? Now, Professor Ian Lancashire has said that the “Queen of Crime” was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s when she wrote the book. “I didn’t want to say what was said in the end, but, yes, the data supported a view she had developed Alzheimer’s,” the Sunday Express quoted Professor Lancashire as saying.
In fact, he came to his conclusion after studying 16 of Christie’s most famous novels, such as Murder On The Orient Express, Ten Little Indians and Murder.
The Canada-based English Professor fed data from the books into a computer at the University of Toronto. Then a specially devised programme analysed the vocabulary, focusing on things like number of words used and frequency of the use. Astonishingly, it showed that Christie was using 20 per cent fewer words by the time she wrote her 73rd book. Instead, the book was littered with lazy words like “thing” and “anything”.
It was “astounding”, said Lancashire, that the author had lost a fifth of her vocabulary. The crippling memory loss that comes with Alzheimer’s was the only possible explanation.
“Although she was never assessed for dementia, her last novels reveal an inability to create a crime solvable by clue-detection, according to the rules of the genre she helped create,” said Lancashire. Christie, the most published author in history, wrote romances, but it is her 80 detective novels that still sell across the world 34 years after her death in 1976. —PTI
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