Self-Care With Crime

French Onion Soup and Other Crime-Solving Strategies

On a bad day, I reach for comfort with intention. French onion soup—vegetarian stock for me, vegan for my daughter. A hot water bath. Then bed, a book, and permission to stop performing. Tonight’s companion is The Chimneys by Agatha Christie, a novel that never fails to lower my shoulders by several notches before the first chapter is done.

As it happens, today pulls off a neat thematic trick. It is International French Onion Soup Day, which feels delightfully indulgent, and also the anniversary of Agatha Christie’s passing. Nourishment and mystery share the calendar. I approve.

The Chimneys does not deploy Christie’s heavy hitters. No Poirot polishing his certainty, no Miss Marple knitting her way to truth. Instead, amateurs tumble into intrigue, with Inspector Battle—solid, unflashy, reliably competent—keeping the chaos from spilling entirely off the page. Christie reminds us that “very few of us are what we seem,” and this book enjoys proving her right without ever raising its voice.

What fascinates me is how reliably such stories comfort us. After a long, grinding day, people do not reach for existential philosophy. They reach for crime, spies, and the promise of a body that will be explained. Why?

The answer, I suspect, lies in structure. A thriller offers a controlled environment for danger. There are rules. There are villains. Suspense rises and falls on schedule. The nervous system relaxes because it knows what kind of ride it is on. Christie herself trusted this instinct, noting, “Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.”

These stories externalize threat. Instead of wrestling with our own shapeless anxieties, we chase someone else’s. Anger finds a harmless outlet. Moral ambiguity does not linger; it gets tied up neatly by the final chapter. Best of all, the reader is spared decision-making. We simply follow the clues and let the narrative do the work.

Psychologically, this is not escapism so much as regulation. When life overwhelms, function temporarily hands over to story. The solar plexus—so often clenched with responsibility—borrows a sense of control. As Poirot would say, “Order and method—these are the essentials.” Thrillers provide both.

This is why crime fiction becomes protective behaviour rather than indulgence. It delays collapse, not by denial, but by offering resolution. The world may be messy, but within these pages, chaos submits to logic. Justice, if not perfect, is at least punctual.

A good comfort read pauses the system, restores just enough equilibrium, and sends us back into life slightly steadier. Some readers feel guilty about this pause, as though rest must be justified. Christie would likely scoff. “One cannot know too much of a good thing,” after all. Sometimes, the wisest move is soup, a bath, and a mystery that promises—quite reliably—that everything will be sorted out by morning.