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As you all know she wrote books about two detectives.
如你們所知，她以兩位偵探為主角寫了很多書
Hercule Poirot, about whom she wrote 33 novels
圍繞赫丘勒·白羅寫了33本小說
and a lot of short stories
和許多短篇故事
And Miss Jane Marple, about whom she wrote 12 novels
還有圍繞簡·馬普爾小姐寫了12本小說
and again quite a lot of short stories.
同樣還有大量短篇小說
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.
白羅是來源于福爾摩斯的原型
His presented as intellect incarnate
他被描述為聰慧的化身
He is a dapper less daunting version
他是一個短小精悍平易近人版的
of Auguste Dupin or Sherlock Holmes.
奧古斯特·杜賓或是夏洛克·福爾摩斯
He is someone like them obsessed with orderliness and neatness.
他像他們一樣著迷于秩序和整潔
Not infrequently actually he solves crimes
這很常見，事實上他斷案的時候
by noticing that something is jarringly out of place.
常常是通過察覺物品擺放的不和諧
And one of the things he is always doing in the novel
小說中他總是做的一件事就是
is pushing a little piece of papers straight,
把一張紙展平
putting vases exactly where they should be placed and so on.
還有把花瓶放到最準確的位置之類的
He is obsessed with symmetry and precision
他著迷于對稱和精準
and the all importance of what he calls the little grey cells.
還有一切被他稱為小灰色腦細胞的重點
Miss Marple is a bit different.
馬普爾小姐則有些不同
She is sharp as a needle when it comes to observing things.
她觀察事物的時候銳利的像針一樣
But she basically solves crimes not so much by deduction
但是她斷案并不喜歡推斷
as by kind of crozy cross reference.
而是進行比對
What tends to happen is that a suspect's behavior
往往是一個嫌疑犯的行為
will start to awaken suspicions in her.
喚起她的疑心
Because it was suddenly remind her of
因為那突然使她想起
a rather unsatisfactory gardener
一個令人不滿的園丁
who reaped half with her delphiniums.
把她一大半的飛燕草都割掉了
Before a face or a dishonest parlormaid
面對一張臉或是不誠實的客廳女仆
who prefiltered silver tea cups called Caddy in some merry mead.
在櫻桃蜂蜜酒里過濾叫作卡迪的銀茶杯
The ostensibly placid picture postcard village of where she lives
她所居住的村莊表面上明信片般靜謐的圖畫
which over the years has come to see
一年一年來她漸漸覺得
more and more like the homicide capital of the western world
越來越像西方世界的兇殺之都
It's like the arrival of midsummer in Midsummer Murders on television.
好像電視仲夏謀殺案中的仲夏到來了一樣
Poirot and Miss Marple often refer gravely to evil.
白羅和馬普爾小姐提及邪惡時往往非常沉重
But in fact the crimes that they solve
可事實上他們解決的兇案
are kept as unmessy as possible,
都被盡量有條理地保存
so the things are physically and emotionally undisturbing.
以便事情物質上和情感上都不惹人煩惱
What you get in Agatha Christie's novels almost always
你們在阿加莎·克里斯蒂的小說中總能得到
a very sanitize slaughterings that devoid of physical horror
非常無害的殺戮，不含生理上的恐懼
and continuing emotional distress.
和持續的情感悲痛
It's something that she was aware of
她有意識地去
the fact that her books are puzzles rather than flesh creeper.
讓她的書像謎題而不是肉爬蟲
I mean she wants that deliberately and teasingly underlined.
我的意思是，她想要刻意的戲謔的強調這點
This in one of her books again
這又是她的書的風格
I think it's extremely good.
我想這是非常棒的
A novel called Hercule Poirot's Christmas.
一部叫做，赫丘勒·白羅的圣誕節的小說
There is an introductory note of that novel
在該書的介紹中
where she says she has written it especially for her brother in law,
她說這本書特別獻給他的小叔子
because he kept saying to her:
因為他一直總是對她說:
When are you going to write a good violent murder with lots of blood?
你什么時候會寫一部精彩的血腥的暴力犯罪小說?
And what she does in this novel is
而她在這部小說中所做的
to make it seem at first as tough as exactly what she does.
是讓小說顯得非常符合自己的強硬風格
