Why do Americans gulp down Agatha Christie in such quantity? Our most eminent literary critics have asked the question with genuine and growing bewilderment. Their pardonable zeal to espy a new [Leo] Tolstoy or [Fyodor] Dostoyevsky blinds them to the essence of Gutenberg's invention. They fail to recognize that, ever since the availability of the printing press, mankind has been evincing a dogged determination to read. And Americans, as usual, have taken a simple human desire and run away with it….

Now genius is just as rare in literature as it is every place else. The world has long accepted the fact that the lack of a [Christopher] Wren or a [Charles] Bulfinch has never prevented people from erecting buildings. Instead they have settled for the nearest reliable craftsman…. (p. 85)

In the same sense, Agatha Christie has become a vernacular art form in her own right. And there...