The Heroine with 1001 Faces

by Maria Tatar

  2.All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

  3.Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

  4.No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.

  5.No Chinaman must figure in the story. [Charlie Chan had made his first appearance in 1925 in Earl Derr Biggers’s House without a Key.]

  6.No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.

  7.The detective himself must not commit the crime.

  8.The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.

  9.The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

  10.Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.45

  The Golden Age of Murder, as some call it, was bookended by two world wars, providing comfort in the form of cozy mysteries (or “cozies” as they were called, in contrast to darker, “hard-boiled” detective fiction more graphic in its depiction of violence). Offering sensation bundled with distraction, these volumes also served to reduce one anxiety by amplifying another.46

  Today we may be charmed by figures like Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Harriet Vane, or Jessica Fletcher in the series Murder, She Wrote, but the priests of high culture had a different view about these lady detectives and the mystery writers who created them. America’s eminent twentieth-century literary critic Edmund Wilson, never a fan of popular culture, famously (and mirthlessly) wrote in the New Yorker about his indifference to the detective novel in a series of articles, one of which mocked an Agatha Christie title: “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” The entire genre, he declared, is nothing more than “a habit-forming drug,” and its readers are victims of a “form of narcotic.” The coup de grâce comes in his own resolve to avoid all detective fiction, but Agatha Christie’s volumes in particular: “So I have read also the new Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End, and I confess that I have been had by Mrs. Christie. I did not guess who the murderer was, I was incited to keep on and find out, and when I did finally find out, I was surprised. Yet I did not care for Agatha Christie and I hope never to read another of her books.”47

  But Wilson has remained in the minority. Jane Marple’s colossal appeal can be documented not just in sales figures but also in the powerful literary and cinematic afterlife of the spinster detective. She makes appearances on stage, screen, and television and also stands as godmother to woman detectives ranging from Amanda Cross’s Kate Fansler to P. D. James’s Cordelia Gray.

  But before Miss Marple there was Miss Climpson, Alexandra Katherine Climpson to be precise, a middle-aged “spinster” in the employ of Lord Peter Wimsey, Dorothy L. Sayers’s renowned British aristocrat and amateur detective. In the 1927 murder mystery Unnatural Death, she is introduced in a chapter entitled “A Use for Spinsters.” The epigraph to that chapter cites an “authority” named Gilbert Frankau on how women are disproportionately represented in the populations of England and Wales, where “there are two million more females than males.”48 Lord Peter congratulates himself on employing one of the many “spinsters” in England and wonders out loud if one day there will be a statue erected to him, “the Man who Made Thousands of Superfluous Women Happy.”

  Although Miss Climpson herself is no gossip, she is an expert inquiry agent, blending in with local gossips as they knit and carry out needlework. “People want questions asked,” Lord Peter declares to his friend Detective-Inspector Charles Parker. “Whom do they send? A man with large flat feet and a note-book—the sort of man whose private life is conducted in a series of inarticulate grunts.” Lord Peter is no fool, and his strategy is to send “a lady with a long, woolly jumper on knitting-needles and jingly things round her neck.” She can ask all sorts of questions, and “nobody is surprised. Nobody is alarmed.” Miss Climpson does the legwork for Lord Peter, and her contributions to crime-solving are not at all negligible. Hers is also not a risk-free profession, as becomes evident before the case closes. In Strong Poison, written three years after An Unnatural Death, she uncovers the key piece of evidence to solving a murder case that landed the mystery writer Harriet Vane (later to become Lord Peter’s wife) in jail.

  Agatha Christie transformed the status of the spinster sleuth, turning her supporting role into that of lead actor. Now she has become a feisty, self-sufficient, free-spirited figure who can solve cases without a team of subordinates. Artfully contrived artlessness best characterizes Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, the gossipy old lady who knits and gardens, minding her own business while also getting in everyone else’s business. “She was inquisitive,” she tells herself at one moment, conforming to the stereotype of the busybody in ways that provide her with “camouflage” as a detective. “You could much more easily send an elderly lady with a habit of snooping and being inquisitive, of talking too much, of wanting to find out about things, and it would seem perfectly natural,” she reflects.49

  Miss Marple’s skills run along the lines of what we today call the interpersonal, and she herself gives us a powerful refutation of the idea that gossiping and “talking scandal” are worthless. And she mounts a defense of “superfluous women,” rebutting her nephew’s condescending description of such women as having “a lot of time on their hands.” As it turns out, “people” are their chief interest: “And so you see they get to be what one might call experts.”50 That idle talk and gossip can serve as conduits of vital information becomes evident from Miss Marple’s investigative methods. “Everything’s talked about,” a detective observes in The Mirror Crack’d. “It always comes to one’s ears sooner or later.”51 Snooping and eavesdropping—all the activities associated with dowagers and matrons—enable Miss Marple to put together the pieces of a puzzle that solves a mystery. A newsie as well as a gossip, Miss Marple is found at the beginning of Nemesis reading the paper, scanning the front page, then turning to births, marriages, and deaths. In some ways, of course, all these activities could also be seen as the province of writers, those who take command of a universe and are able to probe its hidden spaces, divine the motives of its actors, and restore order in a world that has undergone some kind of upheaval. The interpretive energy of Miss Marple is, of course, also mirrored in the hermeneutic drive of readers, who struggle to make sense of the rupture in the social order that a murder produces.

  The dithering old maid becomes a daunting embodiment of Nemesis, a clear-sighted, sober, impartial agent of justice in a world driven by passions that can turn toxic and murderous. At one point Miss Marple wears a hat with a bird’s wing, an unmistakable allusion to the winged Greek goddess who often also carried a whip or a dagger and came to be known as the daughter of justice and the sister of the Moirai, or Fates. What is the last novel in which Miss Marple is featured but Nemesis, a work in which knitting, one of the spinster’s signature sidelines (along with gossiping and gardening), takes on mythical significance. Inspector Neele in A Pocket Full of Rye makes the following observation about the amateur sleuth: “He was thinking to himself that Miss Marple was very unlike the popular idea of the avenging fury. And yet, he thought that was perhaps exactly what she was.”52 Knitting joins spinning, weaving, and creating tapestries and textiles as an activity that goes hand in hand with dispensing justice.

  Albrecht Dürer, Nemesis (The Great Fortune), 1501–2. Metropolitan Museum of Art

  Nemesis and knitting are repeatedly linked in the Miss Marple mysteries in ways that cannot but bring to mind Madame Defarge’s knitting on “with the steadfastness of Fate” as she becomes an instrument for securing retributive justice in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. “I could be ruthless if there was due cause,” Miss Marple explains to her housekeeper. In reply
to a question about what constitutes due cause, she declares, “In the cause of justice.”53 And what is the moniker she gives herself but “Nemesis,” with one client “amused” that she describes herself with that particular word. Mr. Rafiel, the man who hires Miss Marple for her “natural genius” in the area of “investigation,” buttresses the connection between knitting and serving justice when he tries valiantly to uncouple the two activities: “I envisage you sitting in a chair . . . and you will spend your time mainly in knitting. . . . If you prefer to continue knitting, that is your decision. If you prefer to serve the cause of justice, I hope that you may at least find it interesting.”54

  All of Miss Marple’s pastimes—knitting, gardening, gossiping, and eavesdropping—mingle comfortably with ratiocination, and the lady detective, unlike her male counterparts, does not sit and smoke or take late-night strolls to fire up her neurons. The domestic field of “trivial” pursuits is not at all separate from higher-order thought. “You know my method,” Holmes tells Watson, inadvertently connecting his methods with those of Miss Marple: “It is founded upon the observance of trifles.”55 Like the spinster, who traffics in the trivial, the detective too reveals how the devil of detection is in the details, the little things that often go unnoticed but become symbolically central. Just as the extraneous detail grows in significance, taking on explanatory power, so the marginalized spinster, barely visible, is endowed with mythical weight.

  In a sense Agatha Christie can be seen as the Queen of Crime who advanced opportunities for elderly women (in a culture that mocked them for being feeble, foolish, and irrelevant). Miss Marple, as two critics point out, “subverts the ‘spinster’ category by which society seeks to diminish and trivialize her.”56 Yet in a touch of irony, it is the formidable Miss Marple who also safeguards and secures a social order that views the spinster as a figure of contempt or tolerates her as an amusing, pitiful fixture in the social landscape. Saint Mary Mead, the idyllic village in which murder occurs with astonishing regularity, never really changes: “The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different . . . the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been.” Even the conversations, we learn, “were the same.”57 As in the Nancy Drew series, the restoration of reputations, inheritances, and the social order is what is at stake, even for the oddballs, misfits, and eccentrics at the margins.

  The conservative streak in Miss Marple will come as no surprise to those who have read Agatha Christie’s autobiography. “I was a married woman,” she wrote, “and that was my occupation. As a sideline, I wrote books.” Those are modest words from one of the world’s most prolific authors, a woman who wrote nearly one hundred novels and as many short stories in addition to two autobiographical works. Never mind that her sales are calculated in the billions. Domestic chores did not disrupt Christie’s writing routines; rather, they were in a symbiotic relationship with creating a first draft: “The best time to plan a book is while you are doing the dishes.”58 That the boredom of household practices might foster a vivid imagination in thrall to mystery and murder may also have a certain logic to it.

  In the course of the twentieth century, the female detective morphs from the 1930s teen sleuth, spinster detective, and undercover agent into a dutiful wife in the 1940s (who helps unravel mysteries to save the man she loves), and finally into an expert investigator from the 1980s onward, with TV cops Cagney and Lacey, fiction writer Jessica Fletcher, and hard-boiled agents like Clarice Starling and V. I. Warshawski.59 The female investigator is finally freed of the obligation to hew to a small set of stereotypes and, no longer constrained by the marriage imperative, she can become ageless, as it were, as well as polymorphously inquisitive. Suddenly her private life shrinks in unexpected ways. It becomes as inconsequential as the inner life of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, who famously walks the “mean streets” and is not only “the hero” but also “everything.”60

  Privileged and Disadvantaged: Kate Fansler and Blanche White

  Carolyn Heilbrun, a professor of English at Columbia University who wrote detective novels under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, explained to her readers that writing detective fiction was for her a form of self-actualization and also of self-creation, enabling her to produce a new identity rather than replicating what once was and always will be. “I was recreating myself,” she wrote about her experiment in writing detective novels. “Women come to writing . . . simultaneously with self-creation.”61 Her Kate Fansler is also a literature professor, and she moonlights as a sleuth, solving mysteries using the same skill set she employs to read texts critically for her day job. Reading is, after all, in many ways a process of detection, with authors (reliable and unreliable) leading us across narrative terrain.62 No coincidence, it could be added, that the compulsive knitting of Kate Fansler’s literary antecedents has now been replaced by entanglements with texts. In addition, the challenges facing Professor Fansler are often literary in nature, as the title The James Joyce Murder (1967) suggests, with its chapters named after stories found in Joyce’s Dubliners. And solving the mystery of a female professor found dead in the men’s room of the English department at Harvard University in Death in a Tenured Position (1981) creates plenty of opportunities for literary banter about authors ranging from George Herbert and Charlotte Brontë to George Eliot and Henry James.

  The Kate Fansler series is in many ways prophetic, constructed by a feminist professor who wrote eloquently and at length about gender discrimination in her home department and who also envisioned a future that would be different for both her women students in the English department at Columbia University as well as for her literary progeny. Here is Heilbrun’s description of her detective heroine, borrowed in some ways from Joseph Campbell’s playbook, but with gender roles reversed:

  Without children, unmarried, unconstrained by the opinion of others, rich and beautiful, the newly created Kate Fansler now appears to me a figure out of never-never land. That she seems less a fantasy figure these days—when she is mainly criticized for drinking and smoking too much, and for having married—says more about the changing mores, and my talents as prophet, than about my intentions at the time. I wanted to give her everything and see what she could do with it. Of course, she set out on a quest (the male plot), she became a knight (the male role), she rescued a (male) princess.63

  With the rise of the female detective novel also came attention to crisis situations that had not been part of the traditional fabric of the detective narrative that largely depicted men. Unemployment, poverty, and domestic violence, subjects almost always avoided by the male detective writer, become the province of figures like Cordelia Gray in P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), as they were for Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Cordelia is a “lonely, courageous and unprivileged private eye,” and she inherits an “unsuccessful and seedy detective agency” after the suicide of its proprietor.64 Caring more about friendship than about finding a fellow, these woman detectives see romance as a threat to their hard-won independence and are often more passionate about pursuing a lead than about keeping a date. The search for justice takes a new turn, with a focus on “making things right” and restoring reputations.

  In a similar vein, Barbara Neely’s Blanche White series, in which Blanche takes on “emancipatory projects” that have not traditionally been in the purview of the detectives in crime fiction, marks a second sea change in woman detectives.65 As a Black woman, Blanche does what Miss Marple does so well and hides in plain sight, the perfect location for gathering clues and information. A domestic worker, she remains, through her race and her social status, doubly invisible to her employers and those around them. To ensure that no one in her orbit suspects anything, she also plays dumb: “Putting on a dumb act was something many black people considered unacceptable, but she sometimes found it a useful place to hide. She also got a lot of secret pleasure from fooling people who assumed they were sma
rter than she was by virtue of the way she looked and made her living.”66

  “Night Girl.” “Ink Spot.” “Tar Baby.” Those are the nicknames Blanche’s cousins use to tease her about her skin color (she is just a shade darker than they are). What was once humiliating turns into a source of power for Blanche, who becomes Night Girl, “slipping out of the house late at night to roam around her neighborhood unseen.” Suddenly she becomes “special,” “wondrous,” and “powerful,” capable of gathering knowledge in ways that endow her with what others think of as second sight. Wearing a cloak of invisibility empowers Blanche, as do her patient listening skills. She knows storytellers can’t be rushed: “Their rhythm, the silences between their words, and their intonation were as important to the telling of the tale as the words they spoke.”

  If Blanche is as curious and caring as her white counterparts in detective fiction, she faces challenges unfamiliar to figures like Kate Fansler or even Cordelia Gray. For her, race is a fundamental fact of life, and it puts her at odds with representatives of the law (Blanche on the Lam begins with a jailbreak) and adds social responsibilities unknown to the solitary, loner types that make up the ranks of sleuths and private eyes (Blanche is partial caretaker for her dead sister’s two children). And it adds a sense of obligation to the community to which she belongs. In the end, she refuses to accept the “hush money,” or “aggravation pay,” that might enable her to live comfortably, preferring instead that justice be served and that she hold sacred the memory of Nate, a victim of the crazed murderer Blanche faces down.

  Wonder Woman

  Female sleuths seem to be a breed apart. By nature reclusive, they often live alone, and though they investigate the murders of the rich and famous, they themselves are nearly always of low social status. Into this landscape leaps a figure who became an instant celebrity, glamorous, enigmatic, and endowed with attributes that made her, what else but a superhero. She too is a crime solver (and she also has a shy, retiring side, a disguise that links her to the spinster sleuth and to Alcott’s happy spinsters), but she uses far more than her wits to outmaneuver those on the wrong side of the law.