The Thought Police Come for Miss Marple

I happen to belong to that small group of Agatha Christie devotees who believe that the great English mystery writer not only told a good yarn but conveyed genuine and enduring wisdom about human nature and the struggle between good and evil in the human soul. The conservative political philosopher Harvey C. Mansfield, in recommending some Agatha Christie books as Christmas purchases way back in the 1970s (along with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Leo Strauss no less!), wrote that she was deeper than the so-called depth psychologists such as Freud and Jung, because she knew human beings better. That was what allowed her to fool the reader time and time again. The truth of that recommendation seems self-evident to me.