ok so now in my trek through a.christie decade by decade i have reached one i like unreservedly (=no.1 in the 1930s omnibus, The Sittaford Mystery, 1931, where she really finds a rhythm), so i am going to try and sum the 1920s AC for you
i. AC invented the teenager (tuppence in The Secret Adversary; anne bedingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit; bundle in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery, in this last alongside a whole bunch of generally idiotic young men)
ii. servants are largely emo, except when they are jeeves knock-offs
iii. haha the empire wtf*
iv. the appeal — besides i-iii — is that AC (and her heroines, and YOOF IN GENERAL) are BOTHERD. oh it’s a murder, oh it’s politics, oh it’s me getting married — everything is just a lark, it’s fun to play detective, nothing matters; AC is observant, clever, funny, and almost MILITANTLY flippant — people-as-types have amiable fun poked at them; she has a real ear for the rubbish people say to one another, but this isn’t SATIRE, that would imply an idealism somewhere in her and i don’t think there is, except a deep belief that whatever commitment-to-real-serious-life drives people to kill, or rob, or become politicians, IS ALL FOOLISHNESS, so you might as well just BE foolish, or clever but direct it towards frivolous puzzlesolving time-killing (bcz at least no harm can come of that?)
v. this sets her apart from her predecessors — even chesterton, who is all-fun-all-the-time, turns it to serious moral ends (he is telling us how complex people are; and father brown is a detective of the material facts of the SOUL); conan doyle is passionate about logic, rigour and evidence, and the rich variety of london; dorothy l.sayers cares about the intelligence of women as an issue, and that people are decent to one another — all three keenly sketch the shifting mores of the day; which agatha does too, except she turns it all into tintin-ish cartoons (the seven dials is as nuts as cigars of the pharoah), and it all feels second-hand in her hands (not necessarily in a bad way)
vi. maybe this is a post(great)war thing — like the anomie and jazz-age dazzle in sayers’s murder must advertise, where the Young Things party like it was already after the end of the world — anyway i’m definitely interested to see how it keeps up (i associate agatha with UNCOOL and ELDERLY detectives, after all)
*viii. to exaand on this: where real-world elements do intrude — like rhodesia or the balkans or wealth and aristocracy, AC is clearly perfectly capable of seeing right through the rubbishness of the set-up; and sort of does, the way she comments on it; but just doesn’t (even slightly) make the common next step, which is to want to do something about this…
UPDATE: i meant to include this, which is my absolute LOL-fave of a line, from seven dials: “When you ran up and said there might be danger, I was more determined than ever,” went on Loraine. “I went to Harrods and bought a pistol.”