Exhilarating masquerade

A wig, an exotic accent, a fake passport; not much was needed for the Charlatan’s exhilarating masquerade. Oh, the freedom she felt once transformed! Shameless and above the law, she took what she wanted: your money, your job, your husband. But tonight, for the first time, she had almost taken someone’s life. Looking in the mirror afterwards, she was startled to see the mask staring back at her. Had she gone too far this time? Lost herself completely? With trembling fingers, she tried to take it off…

“Very few of us are what we seem,” Agatha Christie once wrote. And indeed, Agatha’s books are peopled by characters pretending to be someone else: colorful charlatans and fabulous frauds. From Frances Cary in ‘Third Girl’ who uses a wig to switch back and forth between her 2 roles to archaeologist Eric Leidner wo fakes his own death in ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’, then returns 15 years later. But wait, is that really Eric? You get the picture. It isn’t just criminals who play with identities, however. To obtain information, even Agatha’s saintlike detective Poirot occasionally pretends to have (and poses as) an identical twin brother named Achille. Let’s not be hypocrites, Agatha seems to say, all of us wear masks, on a daily basis. After all, didn’t she herself disappear for 11 days in 1926, refusing to talk about it for the rest of her life, claiming she had no recollection of the entire incident? (Yeah, right). As Agatha put it so beautifully in ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’: “A woman who doesn’t lie is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.”

“The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.” (from ‘Sad Cypress’)