A word cloud for Celia, heroine of Unfinished Portrait: queer, mummy, darling, cruel, lovely, simply, poppet, horrid, husband, languished, posies, croquet, co-respondent, sigh, adenoid, terribly, golden syrup, jewellery, cutlet, cook, awfully.

After Woozy Worswee’s hymning of the “six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott” as her publisher’s blurb used to uninvitingly describe them, I thought I’d give Agatha Christie’s roman à clef a go. Just as I don’t buy the “because she’s a writer of bestselling crime fiction she must be a hack” analysis that proliferated among (mainly male) literary critics in the later part of the 20th century, I’m not subscribing to the “hitherto unsuspected literary masterpieces” thesis Woozy was energetically promoting in her recent Christie media Blitzkrieg. Unfinished Portrait is moderately readable, workmanlike and apparently interesting to Christie nuts who think it offers some insight into her character. Given she’s an author who specialises in legerdemain, I’d be wary of that if I were you.

Christie’s misfortune is in trying to do what others have done so much better. The craft of genre fiction - at which she is masterful - benefits from techniques such as minimal description, characterisation so far as it pushes forward the plot, repetition, and distraction of the reader. Deployed in a literary work, these only serve to highlight the author’s deficiencies of style and substance. Jean Rhys does woman on the verge of a breakdown with more depth and clarity, and Evelyn Waugh describes the coldness and absurdity of upper middle class mariages blancs more convincingly. And if you want someone being driven to destruction by a sociopathic monster, Daphne Du Maurier offers them in entertaining spades.

What we get is tepid middle class emotions expressed in the most etiolated terms. People may talk like this in real life, as one critic wrote of Christie, but that doesn’t mean one wants to read about it. The cover art is quite nice though.