Guilty Pleasure

I’ll always have a place in my heart
for Agatha Christie because
her books made an unhappy childhood
that little bit brighter.

It’s true she never wrote
a Pulitzer Prize contender,
that her stories are full
of plywood aunts, red-faced colonels,
and such. But she was shrewder than
she often was credited for,
and besides, she not once overstepped
the boundaries of her simple craft.

Pleasures like this might be guilty,
but also innocent, a paradox
that not even Poirot could have resolved.