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As you all know she wrote books about two detectives.
如你们所知，她以两位侦探为主角写了很多书
Hercule Poirot, about whom she wrote 33 novels
围绕赫丘勒·白罗写了33本小说
and a lot of short stories
和许多短篇故事
And Miss Jane Marple, about whom she wrote 12 novels
还有围绕简·马普尔小姐写了12本小说
and again quite a lot of short stories.
同样还有大量短篇小说
They are both reassuring figures.
二者都是慰藉的人物形象
Poirot is presented, he is from the Holmes' mould.
白罗是来源于福尔摩斯的原型
His presented as intellect incarnate
他被描述为聪慧的化身
He is a dapper less daunting version
他是一个短小精悍平易近人版的
of Auguste Dupin or Sherlock Holmes.
奥古斯特·杜宾或是夏洛克·福尔摩斯
He is someone like them obsessed with orderliness and neatness.
他像他们一样着迷于秩序和整洁
Not infrequently actually he solves crimes
这很常见，事实上他断案的时候
by noticing that something is jarringly out of place.
常常是通过察觉物品摆放的不和谐
And one of the things he is always doing in the novel
小说中他总是做的一件事就是
is pushing a little piece of papers straight,
把一张纸展平
putting vases exactly where they should be placed and so on.
还有把花瓶放到最准确的位置之类的
He is obsessed with symmetry and precision
他着迷于对称和精准
and the all importance of what he calls the little grey cells.
还有一切被他称为小灰色脑细胞的重点
Miss Marple is a bit different.
马普尔小姐则有些不同
She is sharp as a needle when it comes to observing things.
她观察事物的时候锐利的像针一样
But she basically solves crimes not so much by deduction
但是她断案并不喜欢推断
as by kind of crozy cross reference.
而是进行比对
What tends to happen is that a suspect's behavior
往往是一个嫌疑犯的行为
will start to awaken suspicions in her.
唤起她的疑心
Because it was suddenly remind her of
因为那突然使她想起
a rather unsatisfactory gardener
一个令人不满的园丁
who reaped half with her delphiniums.
把她一大半的飞燕草都割掉了
Before a face or a dishonest parlormaid
面对一张脸或是不诚实的客厅女仆
who prefiltered silver tea cups called Caddy in some merry mead.
在樱桃蜂蜜酒里过滤叫作卡迪的银茶杯
The ostensibly placid picture postcard village of where she lives
她所居住的村庄表面上明信片般静谧的图画
which over the years has come to see
一年一年来她渐渐觉得
more and more like the homicide capital of the western world
越来越像西方世界的凶杀之都
It's like the arrival of midsummer in Midsummer Murders on television.
好像电视仲夏谋杀案中的仲夏到来了一样
Poirot and Miss Marple often refer gravely to evil.
白罗和马普尔小姐提及邪恶时往往非常沉重
But in fact the crimes that they solve
可事实上他们解决的凶案
are kept as unmessy as possible,
都被尽量有条理地保存
so the things are physically and emotionally undisturbing.
以便事情物质上和情感上都不惹人烦恼
What you get in Agatha Christie's novels almost always
你们在阿加莎·克里斯蒂的小说中总能得到
a very sanitize slaughterings that devoid of physical horror
非常无害的杀戮，不含生理上的恐惧
and continuing emotional distress.
和持续的情感悲痛
It's something that she was aware of
她有意识地去
the fact that her books are puzzles rather than flesh creeper.
让她的书像谜题而不是肉爬虫
I mean she wants that deliberately and teasingly underlined.
我的意思是，她想要刻意的戏谑的强调这点
This in one of her books again
这又是她的书的风格
I think it's extremely good.
我想这是非常棒的
A novel called Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
一部叫做，赫丘勒·白罗的圣诞节的小说
There is an introductory note of that novel
在该书的介绍中
where she says she has written it especially for her brother in law,
她说这本书特别献给他的小叔子
because he kept saying to her:
因为他一直总是对她说:
When are you going to write a good violent murder with lots of blood?
你什么时候会写一部精彩的血腥的暴力犯罪小说?
And what she does in this novel is
而她在这部小说中所做的
to make it seem at first as tough as exactly what she does.
是让小说显得非常符合自己的强硬风格
