The Ageless Agatha Christie
Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy
Edited by J.C. Bernthal
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina
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e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2397-9
© 2016 J.C. Bernthal. All rights reserved
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Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Mystery and Legacy
Agatha Christie in Dialogue with To the Lighthouse: The Modernist Artist
Merja Makinen
England’s Pockets: Objects of Anxiety in Christie’s Post-War Novels
Rebecca Mills
Queer Girls, Bad Girls, Dead Girls: Post-War Culture and the Modern Girl
Sarah Bernstein
“With practised eyes”: Feminine Identity in The Mysterious Mr. Quin
Charlotte Beyer
“The sumptuous and the alluring”: Poirot’s Women, Dragged Up and Dressed Down
J. C. Bernthal
“The Encyclopedic Palace of the World”: Miss Lemon’s Filing System as Cabinet of Curiosities and the Repository of Human Knowledge in Agatha Christie’s Poirot
Meg Boulton
“One must actually take facts as they are”: Information Value and Information Behavior in the Miss Marple Novels
Michelle M. Kazmer
And Then There Were Many: Agatha Christie in Hungarian Translation
Brigitta Hudácskó
Mother of Invention: Agatha Christie, the Middlebrow Detective Novel and Kerry Greenwood’s Postcolonial Tribute Series
Jilly Lippmann
Autobiography in Agatha (1979): “An imaginary solution to an authentic mystery”
Sarah Street
Editorial: Fans Have the Final Word
J. C. Bernthal
About the Contributors
List of Names and Terms
Preface
This edited collection considers the crime writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) in an international, interdisciplinary context. It is the first major scholarly collection of essays on Christie in English. The ten contributors consider Christie as a writer and a media figure, each from a distinct perspective. One essay unpacks Christie’s relationship with modernism; another approaches her later texts from a queer theorized perspective. An essay considers the organization of knowledge in television adaptations; two others look at Christie in translation and explore her celebrity status in heritage cinema. Additional essays consider objects in the post-war novels, information behavior theory, feminism, gender studies and postcolonial tribute novels. The final word is given to fans, in an editorial that collates testimonies from readers, collectors and enthusiasts the world over, providing a valuable source for those wishing to study Christie’s popularity and fan communities. This ground-breaking volume provides a wide-ranging handbook for students and scholars in many disciplines who are interested in Agatha Christie’s texts or her legacy. By focusing on lesser-discussed Christie titles, it introduces new discussions, broadening horizons for study and scholarship.
Introduction: Mystery and Legacy
The detective fiction writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) is hardly obscure. She remains the best-selling author in history, the unchallenged Queen of Crime. She created the enduring detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and authored the longest-running West End play in history (“The Mousetrap,” which opened in 1952). Back in 1980, the novelist and scholar Robert Barnard noted that no one was more widely-read, not only in geographical terms—Christie’s books had already been translated into every known language—but also by people from all social backgrounds “and intelligence brackets.”1
Despite these unique credentials, Christie has received only limited critical attention. Nearly a century has passed since her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) was published. In that time, neither Christie nor her legacy has been the subject of an edited collection of essays attached to an academic publisher. Why is it that Christie, a writer more widely read—including, surely, by academics and theorists—than James Joyce, Virginia Woolf or any canonical name, has not yet been afforded this dignity?
There is a history of academic study related to Christie’s work, of course, but the overall mood of this scholarship, for a long time, was somewhat self-deprecating. Barnard’s own book typified the tone of the time with its careful preface insisting that “this appreciation … does not pretend to be literary criticism.”2 A year previously, H. R. F. Keating had edited a collection of reflections from Christie’s rivals, called Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime. They discussed her plotting, and analyzed her popularity.3 It was not, however, until the 1990s that Christie scholarship became truly and transatlantically academic.
When Alison Light considered Christie as a “conservative modernist” in 1990, she opened up a range of possibilities for studying her work, which had previously been dismissed as “part of ‘popular’ culture, nothing more than lighthearted, entertaining fiction, the genteel creation of a carefully brought up, modest Victorian lady.”4 Throughout the 1990s the criticism flowed, Britain following at the heels of the United States, where Christie had long interested students of popular culture. However, few critical approaches to Christie—or, indeed, to female-authored detective fiction—were serious. Marty S. Knepper observed a tendency towards “inaccurate … truisms” and “dubious assertions” in Christie criticism, and her own work in the 1990s did much to raise the author’s profile.5 However, it was not until the rise of middlebrow studies that a great many women writers from the early and mid-twentieth centuries, including Christie, were judged worthy of thorough consideration.
Since Nicola Humble’s The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (2001), a wealth of criticism and discussion has surrounded previously neglected texts, and the derogatory word “middlebrow” has been somewhat reclaimed. Whereas previous criticism of popular-but-intelligent writers had either explained away or simply denied their “middlebrow” status, a number of studies, including ones in the present volume, do not apologize for their interest in the genre. Woolf despised the middlebrow writer, whom she considered
neither one thing nor the other[; an individual] of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.6
However, since Humble’s ambitious challenge to Woolf’s elitism, we have been able to see both merit and critical potential in the unique “betwixt and between” status of the accessible yet ambitious work that so alarmed Woolf and her peers.
Now Christie is taught in university courses, iconic essays have been published and monographs are not uncommon. Pioneering projects have indicated that Christie is crucial to heritage film studies, post-structural theory, rhetoric and linguistics, feminist literary analysis, the social sciences, translation history and development, queer theory and more.7 Christie has been investigated within a tradition of feminine self-expression, as a commentator on the insincerity and performances of modernity and as a staple of Britain’s film a
nd television culture.8 Some of the people behind these pioneering publications have contributed to this volume, and others are engaged with here.
A new “Agatha Christie” is emerging. Christie’s own description of herself as a “lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read” is only the beginning.9 This fresh Christie we have to contend with is many things. She is a significant historical figure and a genre innovator. She is a cultural commentator and a shrewd businessperson who dominated a literary marketplace hostile to her sex. She developed into an expert stylist whose prose carries so much more than one meaning.
This volume offers the first wide-ranging and international collection of scholarly investigations into the functions, influences and subtexts of Christie’s work and its multi-media legacy. Before discussing the contributions, I wish to draw attention toward one thing they share, which is evidence of the authors’ desire to take Christie seriously: each contributor has carefully historicized his or her findings. For too long, Agatha Christie has been spoken of and written about as a vaguely interwar novelist, belonging to some airily-defined olden days that exists chiefly in the mind of the reader. In fact, her first publication, a poem about trams, appeared within months of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901, and she went on to write about space travel, electric dishwashers, teddy boys and computers. She wrote through two world wars, two waves of feminism and the dissolution of the British Empire. When she died in 1976, she was still writing.
But can we read this crowd-pleaser, this unblushing Queen of the Marketplace, on a par with her elite forebears and contemporaries? Our first contributor, Merja Makinen, points out that “Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie are two names not usually placed alongside each other,” but argues that they should be: Christie is clearly and inevitably influenced by the modernist stylings of Woolf and others. Placing Christie’s The Hollow (1946) in dialogue with Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), Makinen makes the case for a “direct and contemporary” influence, while also drawing much-needed attention to the literary fiction Christie published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. It is, however, only in “the slimmed-down popular genre format” that Christie was able to deal, uniquely and significantly, with literary themes. While Woolf posed open questions for women struggling to choose between marriage and a career, Christie’s “workaday middlebrow” ethic enabled the “comfort” of solutions “within and alongside marriage.”
Looking at objects in Christie’s post–World War II novels, Rebecca Mills sets out to “take seriously Christie’s literary and imaginative response to the war and the following era of technological advances, international tension and change.” There is a lot to be found in small everyday objects, Mills claims. Starting with a war novel, The Moving Finger (1943), and progressing through analyses of After the Funeral (1953) and The Pale Horse (1961), Mills explores the deadly sentimentality attached to relics of the past and the faceless anonymity of mass-produced post-war objects: “the real evil is capitalism … it is a dangerous world.”
The years following World War II have traditionally been neglected in Christie scholarship and, like Mills, Sarah Bernstein considers Christie as an alert social commentator who adapted her work to reflect the changing concerns of post-war Britain. Bernstein explores the theme of children—specifically delinquent girls—in some of the most individual but critically under-appreciated novels from the latter half of Christie’s career. Bernstein ties up the presentation of childhood in literature with dominant post-war rhetoric surrounding children as the innocent inheritors of the new world. An adolescent girl is “suspended in a state of non-adulthood … a form of legal strangeness.” What happens when she refuses her social duties to “reproductive futurism” (as a woman) and to family (as a child)? She causes disorder; she threatens, she kills, she dies.
As we progress through the volume, it becomes noticeable that Christie is getting more quotes—more direct analysis. Charlotte Beyer’s essay is strongly influenced by Makinen’s work here and elsewhere—but this time Christie’s texts alone and in their own right are under the microscope. Given the reputation for social conservatism that Christie has yet to shake off, some of Beyer’s revelations may be surprising. Beyer reveals that femininity can be an important quality in the male lead, by considering the gossipy, ladylike protagonist Mr. Satterthwaite. Such a “fluid position” regarding male heroism allows the author to “exceed genre boundaries and … experiment.” Beyer goes on to interrogate “femininity [and] agency” in the Quin short stories. Women in these stories are faced with an unsatisfactory choice between unhappy marriage and dishonorable excess. Finally, and ultimately, they are misunderstood.
In my own essay, I make the case for reassessing Christie as a gendered parodist. Not only is Poirot a mockery of Sherlock Holmes, his sidekick Captain Hastings can be read as both a send-up of the inevitable Dr. Watson and an unsubtle satire on heterosexuality itself. But what of Poirot’s women? His flamboyant equivalent to Holmes’s Irene Adler is read as a drag artist, while his machine-like secretary Miss Lemon is digested with a pinch of salt: “the books adopt a conservative, even misogynistic, worldview—but perhaps the ‘c’ is back-to-front.” To emphasize the queer playfulness of Christie’s prose, I contrast these women to versions of them that have appeared on-screen, in the long-running television series Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989–2013). Perhaps nostalgia prohibits irony; perhaps identity in the books is not clear-cut like it is on the screen.
Nonetheless, for many people in the twenty-first century, Agatha Christie is those immersive period whodunits on the television. Meg Boulton uncovers geographies and psycho-geographies in “the (tele)visual versions of Christie’s books,” considering Miss Lemon and her ubiquitous filing system as loci for endless, categorized and taxonomized knowledge. This “cabinet of curiosities” “contain[s] all the Poirot-verse within its cataloged confines.” It imposes order and generates new knowledge. The cabinet, in short, is an active part of and a monument to “the deductive process,” and Boulton proposes that the viewer is ultimately a part of the filing system itself—as we build up a dynamic and multifocal significance for “Agatha Christie.”
Knowledge and information is at the heart of Michelle M. Kazmer’s essay, too. Kazmer brings a completely different, and an essential, perspective to Christie, from her background in information science and communication. Kazmer considers how knowledge is evaluated and disseminated within the ever-popular Miss Marple books. “This approach,” Kazmer points out, “can also increase our understanding of how information value is co-constructed in real-life contexts” because all the time, the information in a detective story is being tailored to real-world readers. Kazmer’s investigation draws attention to the tactics Marple employs to uncover and manipulate information, by presenting herself as irresponsible or harmless and by knowing how to extract information in each specific context. As Marple herself points out in A Murder Is Announced (1950), “we old women always do snoop. It would be very off and much more noticeable if I didn’t.”10
For a quintessentially British writer, Christie has enjoyed remarkable popularity all over the world. As a translator, Brigitta Hudácskó provides another perspective on the Christie phenomenon, detailing (an aspect of) this author’s complicated translation history into Hungarian. Hudácskó’s keyword is “foreignness.” How does a country so politically removed from that in which Christie wrote confront its own position as “other” in the texts, and how does it deal with “the foreignness of crime fiction” itself for native readers? How are foreign accents and idiolects conveyed in translation, and to what effect? As Hudácskó shows, some translators have taken quite drastic liberties with the source texts to bring them into line with contemporary political climates. The three translations Hudácskó considers, invested in Christie’s “non-threatening foreignness,” reflect changing politics and public appetites; they also reflect Christie’s shifting status as an author-in-translati
on, from “lowbrow” to “highbrow” to canonical.
Christie took pride in calling herself a lowbrow, by which she probably meant “not highbrow.” The tricky terrain of the “middlebrow” is mentioned by Makinen and Hudácskó, but Jilly Lippmann runs with it by considering Christie’s middlebrow legacy. Lippmann takes seriously Christie’s role as a figurehead for a school of fiction that is both middlebrow—substantial yet accessible—and tied to its imperial context. Considering Kerry Greenwood’s Australian mysteries, Lippmann reads the flapper detective Phryne Fisher in the tradition of Christie’s protagonists Tuppence Beresford, Miss Marple and even Poirot, uncovering a subtle but unapologetic intertextual tribute in the broader context of “settler postcolonial ambivalence.” Lippmann understands Christie as an authority figure, who warrants more critical attention in the field of postcolonial studies.
Finally, reading Agatha Christie as “an author whose celebrity exceeded her writing,” Sarah Street reminds us of the mysteries of Christie’s own life and the complicated ways in which her image has been constructed by others. Street details the troubled production of Agatha (1979), a film based on Kathleen Tynan’s speculative novel, which concerned Christie’s infamous disappearance, the media event of 1926. Street does not attempt to reconstruct Christie’s “lost” eleven days, rather considering issues relating to celebrity, authenticity, memory and fiction. Perhaps all solutions to the Agatha Christie mystery fall short, because, as an artist, a celebrity and a woman, Agatha Christie is more than one mystery. As Street concludes, Christie’s story is “an enigma, continuing to fascinate with … apparently endless possibilities for re-writing.”
The contributors, by and large, do not focus on Christie’s best-known publications. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1933), Death on the Nile (1937), and And Then There Were None (1939) are mentioned, of course, and a lot of good work continues to be done on them. But for this landmark volume, the point is to discover new angles on an iconic writer of the twentieth century, who is also an influential presence in the twenty-first. In a similar vein, I have encouraged all contributors to preserve their own distinctive voices in their essays; ultimately, granting Christie long-overdue academic attention is about more than absorbing her work into a colorless canon to be studied by rote with received formulae and uninspired if technically correct vocabulary. In this spirit, I have given the final word to what Agatha Christie Limited calls “superfans”—those enthusiasts and collectors who have kept the Christie brand afloat. The closing editorial collates testimonies and reflections from a cross-section of fans, and provides a useful resource for anyone wishing to study fan communities. It is also a tribute to the unusual affection that readers—academic or otherwise—have for Christie.
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