The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  As we have seen, a central preoccupation in the Mr. Quin stories is loss and its symbolic manifestations, such as the diminution or obliteration of identity and the self. This point is made by Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick in their discussion of the Mr. Quin stories. They have it that “death is the other focus of the stories, death in the form of murder or suicide.”70 These themes are of course central to crime fiction, but they also provide a link to “highbrow” modernist literary fiction and poetry in the 1920s and 1930s. Novels such as May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) explore such ideas in various ways as part of a formal and thematic preoccupation with experimentation.71 The erasure or loss of self takes a number of different forms in the Mr. Quin stories, but always has catastrophic consequences for the female characters. Isolated from other women and without the fortification of female friendships or alliances in a society which is often hostile and unsympathetic to their needs and desires, these female characters are portrayed as attempting in differing ways to resist patriarchal restrictions on women during the interwar period. Christie’s portrayal of female characters in her Mr. Quin stories anticipate Gildersleeve’s point about Christie’s post–World War II work that “women, in this context, are at risk: whether they transgress the limits and traditional roles of the domestic sphere and become victims because they refuse or are refused the cloistering care of the Victorian family structure, or because they succumb to a postwar insistence on returning to an ordinary life that inevitably places women on the marriage market and at risk of making a hasty or unwise decision.”72 The crime short stories discussed here all focus on the severe and potentially deadly consequences for women of making the “wrong” choices, cautioning women against forming alliances with men which may lead to their victimization, and alluding to alternative means of defining themselves in the world.

  This focus has enabled my chapter to place this overlooked short story collection within Christie’s contemporary literary and cultural context. Considering Makinen’s discussion of Christie’s “violent women,” it is interesting to note that in the stories examined here, it is the male characters that have the capacity for violence against others, echoing conventional crime fiction’s gendered patterns of agency. In contrast, none of the female characters discussed here occupy the position of murderer or criminal in their respective narratives. The female characters examined here direct their violence inwards, resulting in either escapism (as is the case for Mabelle in “The Bird with the Broken Wing”), compromise (Gillian’s decision to marry Charlie in “The Face of Helen”; similarly, Madge and Roger in “The Bird with the Broken Wing”), or depression and suicidal impulses (Naomi in “The World’s End”). These women are all young, from certain social class backgrounds, and without children, all of which impacts on their portrayal and the options available to them in the texts. Christie’s short stories thus provide a unique insight into her representation of femininity, as well as of wider questions related to narrative, plot, and perspective. The Mr. Quin stories treat themes and topics that were pertinent to women’s experience in the interwar years. Both “The Face of Helen” and “The Bird with the Broken Wing” hint at the possibilities and choices women faced in heterosexual relations at this time, and contain warnings to women against the ways in which patriarchal authority may seek to hurt them, should they transgress the boundaries of accepted and conventional conduct for upper-class women. In “The World’s End,” the crime plot revolving around unfair imprisonment serves to draw attention to the way in which characters are criminalized by society through their financial status. The story also examines how female artists experimenting with new formal and thematic strategies in their work are compartmentalized and trivialized. These issues were pertinent to Christie and other woman writers at the time, preoccupied with reimagining femininity and its representation by exploring narrative conventions without conforming to the requirement to depict marriage as a happy ending. Christie’s crime fiction short stories in The Mysterious Mr. Quin promote explorations of gendered identities and agency and invite reflection on twenty-first century readings of the Christie canon. They help us to acknowledge and assess the questioning and experimental potential of Christie’s fiction.

  Notes

  1. Agatha Christie, “The Face of Helen” in The Mysterious Mr. Quin (London: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 230.

  2. See Makinen’s essay in the present volume, for example.

  3. Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 89.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick assert that “Harley Quin and Mr. Satterthwaite continue to spark interest perhaps because they are so different from [Christie’s] other detectives” (p. 121).

  6. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, p. 95.

  7. My discussion focuses on representations of femininity, rather than the relationship between Mr. Satterthwaite and Mr. Quin, or Mr. Quin’s presence/absence within the stories.

  8. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, p. 97.

  9. Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick discuss the Mr. Quin stories from a different angle, focusing on the figure of Mr. Quin and the theme of love. They state that “love relationships and the reuniting of estranged but true lovers dominate this collection.” See Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press), p. 124.

  10. Melissa Schaub, Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 38.

  11. This question is also examined by Virginia Woolf in her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

  12. Agatha Christie, “The World’s End,” The Mysterious Mr. Quin (London: HarperCollins, 2003), pp. 335–336. Here, the Duchess is rudely dismissive of Naomi’s paintings, due to their experimental style and bold use of color and technique.

  13. Elsewhere I have discussed the capacity of the crime short story to encourage and elicit textual experimentation and to challenge generic conventions and boundaries; see Beyer “Bags.”

  14. Cited in Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, p. 90.

  15. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, p. 91.

  16. Mary Evans, The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World (London: Continuum, 2003), Ch.3.

  17. Christie, “The Face of Helen,” p. 234.

  18. Sarah E. H. Moore, Crime and the Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 245. See also Merja Makinen’s incisive comments about Poirot as “ungovernable”: Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 39.

  19. Christie, “The Face of Helen,” p. 229.

  20. Ibid., p. 230.

  21. Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story, p. 107.

  22. Agatha Christie, Foreword to The Mysterious Mr. Quin.

  23. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace (ed.), Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), p. 76.

  24. Christie, “The Face of Helen,” p. 233.

  25. Ibid., p. 234. Christopher Marlowe used the phrase “the face that launched a thousand ships” to describe Helen of Troy in his play. See Laurie Maguire, Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), p. 159.

  26. Christie, “The Face of Helen,” p. 233.

  27. Ibid., p. 234.

  28. Ibid., pp. 242, 240.

  29. Ibid., p. 234.

  30. Ibid., p. 243.

  31. Ibid., p. 235.

  32. Cathy Cole, Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004), p. 154.

  33. Christie, “The Face of Helen,” p. 243.

  34. Ibid., pp. 234–235.

  35. Evans, The Imagination of Evil, ch. 3.

  36. Agatha Christie, “The Bird with the Broken Wing” in The Mysterious Mr. Quin (London:
HarperCollins, 2003), p. 297. Katherine Mansfield’s short story “Miss Brill” and its outsider protagonist provides an interesting parallel to the depiction of Mr. Satterthwaite, illustrating that Christie’s work shared many thematic and textual commonalities with more “literary” fiction.

  37. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 80.

  38. Christie, “The Bird with the Broken Wing,” p. 300.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., p. 323.

  41. Ibid., pp. 301–302.

  42. Ibid., p. 305.

  43. Makinen, Agatha Christie, p. 111.

  44. Christie, “The Bird with the Broken Wing,” pp. 303–304.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Ibid., p. 304.

  47. Jessica Gildersleeve, “‘We’re All Strangers’: Postwar Anxiety in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2, p. 116.

  48. Christie, “The Bird with the Broken Wing,” pp. 306–307.

  49. Makinen, Agatha Christie, p. 81.

  50. Ellen Moers, Literary Women (London: The Women’s Press), pp. 245, 247.

  51. Christie, “The World’s End,” p. 349.

  52. Light, Forever England, p. 91.

  53. Makinen (p. 6) also discusses the significance of cars in Christie’s portrayals of female autonomy.

  54. Christie, “The World’s End,” p. 332.

  55. This is a topic also treated by Virginia Woolf in her artist’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927).

  56. Rosina Nunn is another interesting female artist figure in the story.

  57. Makinen, Agatha Christie, p. 66.

  58. Christie, “The World’s End,” p. 333.

  59. Ibid., p. 334.

  60. Ibid., pp. 335, 334.

  61. Ibid., p. 336.

  62. As mentioned, Merja Makinen has done this topic justice in her contribution to the present volume.

  63. Christie, “The World’s End,” pp. 337–338.

  64. Schaub, Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction, p. 41.

  65. Makinen, Agatha Christie, p. 64.

  66. Ibid., p. 65.

  67. Patricia Juliana Smith, “Gender in Women’s Modernism” in Maren Tova Linett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 91.

  68. Evans, The Imagination of Evil, ch. 3.

  69. See also Moore’s fascinating discussion of Hercule Poirot as outsider character.

  70. Maida and Spornick, Murder She Wrote, p. 125.

  71. Makinen (p. 9) also mentions Sinclair as a contemporary of Christie’s.

  72. Gildersleeve, “We’re All Strangers,” p. 118.

  Bibliography

  Beyer, Charlotte. “‘Bags Stuffed with the Offal of Their Own History’: Crime Fiction and the Short Story in Crimespotting: An Edinburgh Crime Collection.” Short Fiction in Theory and Practice 3.1, pp. 37–52.

  Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography (1977). London: Harper, 2011.

  _____. “The Bird with the Broken Wing” (1930). The Mysterious Mr. Quin. London: HarperCollins, 2003, pp. 297–328.

  _____. “The Face of Helen” (1930). The Mysterious Mr. Quin. London: HarperCollins, 2003, pp. 229–257.

  _____. “The World’s End” (1930). The Mysterious Mr. Quin. London: HarperCollins, 2003, pp. 329–359.

  Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004.

  Cook, Michael. Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story: The Haunted Text. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

  Evans, Mary. The Imagination of Evil: Detective Fiction and the Modern World. London: Continuum, 2009. E-book.

  Gildersleeve, Jessica. “‘We’re All Strangers’: Postwar Anxiety in Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2, pp. 115–123.

  Goodman, Lizbeth. Literature and Gender (1996). London: Routledge, 2013.

  Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth (ed.). Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory (1996). Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.

  Liggins, Emma, Andrew Maunder and Ruth Robbins. The British Short Story. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

  Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (1991). Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.

  Linett, Maren Tova (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

  Maguire, Laurie. Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

  Maida, Patricia D., and Nicholas B. Spornick. Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982.

  Makinen, Merja. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

  Moore, Sarah E. H. Crime and the Media. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

  Schaub, Melissa. Middlebrow Feminism in Classic British Detective Fiction: The Female Gentleman. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

  Sinclair, May. Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922). Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org.

  Smith, Patricia Juliana. “Gender in Women’s Modernism” in Maren Tova Linett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 78–94.

  Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.

  _____. To the Lighthouse. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.

  “The sumptuous and the alluring”

  Poirot’s Women, Dragged Up and Dressed Down

  J. C. Bernthal

  “To Hercule Poirot, she still represented the sumptuous and the alluring.”

  —Agatha Christie, “The Capture of Cerberus”1

  This essay joins a growing body of work that approaches Agatha Christie from a queer perspective. More precisely, it identifies what I have described elsewhere as “queer potential” in Christie’s detective fiction.2 That is to say, in this essay I consider spaces in Christie’s writing where human identity itself appears undefinable; where there is no such thing as “truth” about a person, or a “normal” individual. From there, it is possible to read Christie, a writer well-known and much decried as a conservative novelist, queerly.

  Assessing Christie’s queerness, I am not merely looking for gay or lesbian characters in her several novels, short stories and play scripts. I am looking for queerness at the very heart of her conventional plots and characters. After considering the extent to which Christie’s most popular detective, Hercule Poirot, can be considered a conventional hero, I will turn to his very heterosexual friend Captain Hastings, before considering the women in Poirot’s life. Hastings’ love life, and his friendship with Poirot, can be theorized with reference to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who has claimed that male-male friendships are always predicated on something erotic, and that men who fight over a woman are in fact enjoying something intense and emotional between themselves.3

  Just as Sherlock Holmes respected one woman, a criminal who outsmarted him, Poirot also admires a single woman: he praises the Countess Vera Rossakoff, a flamboyant and unrepentant jewel thief, as “a woman in a thousand—no, a million!” and the question of their marriage is raised more than once.4 Rossakoff is not a demure, conventional love interest; she is downright exuberant, taking great pride in her femininity. Reading this character as so overly feminine that she is a mockery of femininity itself means reading her role as Poirot’s romantic interest—the proof of his heroic straightness—as part of a wider generic parody.

  There are two other women in Poirot’s life: his friend, the crime writer Ariadne Oliver and his machine-like secretary, Miss Lemon. Some work has been done on Oliver,5 but Miss Lemon is relatively unchartered territory.6 I would like to consider Lemon less as a character than as a comic device—as a woman, absurdly under-characterized, she is merely a part of Hercule Poirot’s orderly modern(ist) world. Ho
wever, on some occasions, the machine-like coldness slips and she fails to compute. Most ostensibly, she shocks her employer by making three errors in a single letter and then attributing her weakness to family problems. In such moments, Felicity Lemon illustrates the inadequacy of any homogenous description of even the dullest individual. How broad, after all, is the great detective’s worldview if he has failed to consider the woman closest to him—his secretary—as a real person with sensitivities and relatives?

  Finally, this essay considers how Rossakoff and Lemon have appeared in the popular television series Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989–2013). My first and most unorthodox claim is that on-screen Poirot is transformed into a subtly but conventional heterosexual hero; his eccentric chivalry is reformulated for the screen as less a foreign flourish than a response to falling in love with various women. Rossakoff appears on-screen as less autonomous and more sensitive than in the books—she depends on Poirot’s manly protection. By her final appearance, in “The Labors of Hercules” (2013), the countess’s unmediated pursuit of pleasure has led to bad parenting. In other words, Rossakoff has become a woman who, without Poirot’s guiding authority, has descended into unacceptable femininity. Lemon, on the other hand, is mercifully spared the pain of becoming a love interest; as in the books, her attentions belong entirely to filing. However, the character on screen is, as it were, “rounded” and made more sympathetic to a 1990s and early twenty-first century audience than the literary Lemon. She is portrayed as naïve and maternal—in other words, as the only acceptable kind of non-sexualized woman in a man’s world. In “rounding” the characters, dramatists invest deeply in binarized narratives of feminine worth, which appear satirized in the literature. Maternal or grotesque, virgin or whore, the characters on-screen are earnest products of a heteronormative misogynistic context. Perhaps Christie’s literary texts are richer in queer potential than the television adaptations, despite the latter’s democratic intentions.