The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  18. Dömötör, Az eltitkolt gonosztettet a szél is kifúvja?, p. 79.

  19. Bálint Varga, “Nyomozás az első magyar krimi után” in K. Benyovszky and P. H. Nagy (eds.), Lepipálva: Tanulmányok a krimiről (Dunajská Streda: Lilium Aurum, 2009), p. 65.

  20. Even at the time of writing (2015) one can rarely find a hardback crime novel on the Hungarian market, whether translated or original. It is interesting, however, that Sophie Hannah’s The Monogram Murders immediately received the “Christie treatment,” as it came out in hardback at Európa Kiadó, while Hannah’s previous novels have been published by another house, in paperback format.

  21. Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, p. 167.

  22. Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (London: Phoenix, 2004), pp. 84–104. The introduction of these approaches can by no means considered novel, as choosing either the “foreignizing” or the domesticating path is an approach consciously or unconsciously, but always applied by translators and is discussed in theoretical texts on translation. As for the specific case of English-Hungarian translation, the issue is introduced and debated in volumes by Kinga Klaudy and Judy Szöllősy.

  23. Agatha Christie, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, in Murder on the Orient Express—Cards on the Table—Five Little Pigs—Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (London: Diamond Books, 1991), p. 338.

  24. Ibid., pp. 338, 339, 364.

  25. Ibid., p. 413.

  26. Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?, p. 45.

  27. Christie, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, pp. 398–399.

  28. Ibid., p. 379.

  29. Ibid., p. 381.

  30. Ibid., p. 335. Emphasis original.

  31. Dömötör, Az eltitkolt gonosztettet a szél is kifúvja?, p. 99.

  32. Christie, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, p. 489.

  33. Agatha Christie, Valaki csenget…, trans. Lola Kosáryné Réz (Budapest: Pengős regények, 1939), p. 206. Translation mine.

  34. Dömötör, Az eltitkolt gonosztettet a szél is kifúvja?, p. 98.

  35. Something similar occurs in the translation of Murder Is Easy (1939), which first appeared in Hungarian in 1940 (trans. Éva Moharné Dobó). The Hungarian title was A gyűlölet őrültje [“Crazed by Hatred”], merging legal and medical discourse and emphasizing the “ill” nature of the murderer. Later editions, however, bear the title Gyilkolni könnyű, a direct translation of the original.

  Bibliography

  Bart, István. Világirodalom és könyvkiadás a Kádár-korszakban. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2002.

  Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. New York: Faber and Faber, 2011.

  Christie, Agatha. Hercule Poirot karácsonya (1939). Trans. Judit Gálvölgyi. Budapest: Európa Kiadó, 2012.

  _____, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1939). Murder on the Orient Express—Cards on the Table—Five Little Pigs—Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. London: Diamond Books, 1991, pp. 333–492.

  _____. Poirot karácsonya (1939). Trans. Katalin Csanády (1975). Budapest: Európa Kiadó, 2011.

  _____. Valaki csenget… (1939). Trans. Lola Kosáryné Réz. Budapest: Pengős regények, 1939.

  Dömötör, Edit. “Az eltitkolt gonosztettet a szél is kifúvja?”: A magyar bűnügyi irodalom ismeretelméleti megközelítése. Budapest: E. Dömötör, 2011.

  Eco, Umberto. Mouse or Rat: Translation as Negotiation (2003). London: Phoenix, 2004.

  Varga, Bálint. “Nyomozás az első magyar krimi után” in K. Benyovszky and P. H. Nagy (eds.), Lepipálva: Tanulmányok a krimiről. Dunaská Streda: Lilium Aurum, 2009, pp. 49–82.

  Zsámba, Renáta. “Szocialista krimi kapitalista díszletekkel: Linda és a nyolcvanas évek.” Korunk, March 2014, pp. 18–25.

  Mother of Invention

  Agatha Christie, the Middlebrow Detective Novel and Kerry Greenwood’s Postcolonial Tribute Series

  Jilly Lippmann

  Agatha Christie casts a long shadow over the genre of mystery and detective fiction, but she has yet to be seriously considered in terms of her influence on and engagement with other aspects of literary culture. This chapter introduces three overlapping frames of interpretation for Christie’s fiction (postcolonial, feminist and middlebrow) by showcasing how they converge in the work of contemporary Australian crime writer, Kerry Greenwood, whom Christie has influenced. In particular, this chapter will show how Kerry Greenwood’s popular Phryne Fisher mystery series (1989 to present) produces a creative tribute to the Grand Dame of Crime, and as such, invites fresh consideration of Christie’s work.

  A best-selling and award-winning author who writes across many genres (and whose fiction, like Christie’s, has been adapted for television), Greenwood has won a lifetime achievement award from the Sisters in Crime society and the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Writing. Greenwood’s series is based on the investigations of a twenty-eight-year-old flapper-like detective: Phryne Fisher. Beginning in 1928 and including credible vignettes of interwar Melbourne city life, Greenwood’s work not only engages with history through fiction, but also showcases her fascination with history and crime. Her choice of historical period coincides with the year writer Anthony Berkeley proposed a regular meeting with Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and Agatha Christie, who then went on to establish the famous “Detection Club,” which developed rules to establish what should be deemed “fair play” in detective fiction.1 This coincidence can be read as a coded tribute to the golden age of detection. However, despite having won global audiences and wide acclaim only a small number of critics have engaged with Greenwood’s fiction. In the face of this lack of critical engagement despite (or perhaps because of) the popularity of her novels, issues of reception can be productively bought to bear on her work. This essay argues that Greenwood’s work is not merely superficial popular fiction, but that it also offers an ambivalent criticism of late colonial society. Part fantasy postcolonial revisionism and part colonial critique, Greenwood’s series can be understood as displaying both a playful frivolity as well as an educative register. As such, ambivalence is not only thematic but also formal, extending to her engagement with the middlebrow. Consequently, new readings of Agatha Christie will emerge here as much as (and through) new readings of Kerry Greenwood’s series.

  “Writing Back” to the Golden Age?

  Though postcolonial readings of Christie’s fiction are rare, the critic Sue Ryan-Fazilleau has pointed out that Greenwood’s fiction provides a postcolonial interpretation and response to Christie’s oeuvre. Ryan-Fazilleau proposes that the first novel, Cocaine Blues (1989), for example, “invites the reader to compare Greenwood’s and Agatha Christie’s crime fiction,”2 and that the novel might be understood as a satire on Christie’s technique, which takes up the stock tropes of English detective fiction to subvert them, in a kind of postcolonial “writing back.”3 For instance, Ryan-Fazilieau points out that the clever and highly sexualized Phryne solves the crime in the first pages of Cocaine Blues, rather than taking the whole novel to laboriously unlock the puzzle clue by clue. After solving the crime with her characteristically feminine éclat, Phryne then promptly departs from England (the place predominantly represented in Christie’s fiction) for more adventurous escapades abroad at the periphery of the British Empire. In her capers through Melbourne, Phryne becomes a tool with which Greenwood reprises the unsavory aspects of Australia’s colonial past to depict colonial Melbourne as a freer and more equitable space. These and other aspects of her work, Ryan-Fazilleau maintains, suggest Greenwood’s “intention to undertake a postcolonial ‘rewriting’ of the Queen of Crime.”4

  Ryan-Fazilleau’s interpretation of Greenwood’s postcolonial re-writing of Christie’s work is a salient one, but one that I argue does not take into consideration the full complexity of the Australian postcolonial relationship with England in general, and that therefore misses, in particular, Greenwood’s more subtle relationship with the work of the Queen of Crime. One of Ryan-Fazilleau’s contentions, for
example, is that Greenwood revises and reverses the terms of Christie’s “elitist ideology” to present a more egalitarian Australian system, appealing to contemporary readers.5 She contrasts the two detective protagonists of Greenwood and Christie—Phryne and Poirot—to highlight her point. Revealing that while Poirot makes “disdainful remarks about [his offsider’s] lack of intelligence and frequently humiliates him,” Ryan-Fazilleau shows that in contrast, Phryne “treats her offsider [her maid and companion, Dot] with far more respect.”6 While this observation is accurate, Ryan-Fazilleau’s analysis of these characters cuts across the premise of postcolonial texts, which, as Elleke Boehmer suggests, resist hierarchical structures from a marginalized position.7 Ryan-Fazilleau’s analysis of Phryne as Dot’s superior is a top-down approach, and her critical discussion centers on a person in authority (Phryne) treating her subordinate (Dot) well. This formula is problematic in that it can redeploy the hierarchical relations of superior and subordinate typically critiqued within postcolonial theory.

  I suggest that it is more productive to observe how Greenwood elevates the marginalized and disenfranchised (including Phryne herself) from positions of weakness to positions where they have agency and autonomy. Phryne’s upward social movement from a street urchin in the slums of pre–World War I Melbourne to a titled, wealthy lady, for example, is mirrored in Dot’s elevation from a low socio-economic status to social and financial security. Indeed, Phryne rejects and challenges suggestions that Dot is lower than her in social status, despite her own newly-attained aristocratic position. In Death by Water (2005), for example, Dot assumes she will be dining with the maids in the second-class dining room, yet Phryne insists, “No…. You’re dining with me. Second Class indeed. I did not bring you here to be patronised, Dot.”8 Furthermore, the way Greenwood writes back to Christie lacks the antagonism that some postcolonial texts possess, such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), in which Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester is presented as an imperious British villain who causes the insanity and subsequent death of Bertha Mason, his subaltern wife. Instead, I argue, that the Phryne Fisher mystery novels can be labeled a postcolonial tribute series, a term which I have employed to signal the way they pay homage to the grand dame of detective fiction, as well as undercut or critique aspects of the framework of classical British detection in which Christie wrote. Drawing on settler postcolonial theory, I show that this form of tribute is marked by ambivalence, rather than the outright rejection or “writing back” which Ryan-Fazilleau’s interpretation presupposes.

  One form of tribute Greenwood pays to Christie is the way she models her heroine upon Christie’s characters, for many similarities can be drawn between Phryne and three of Christie’s main detectives. Christie’s sleuth, Tuppence Beresford (née Cowley) from The Secret Adversary (1922), can be seen as a model for Phryne as an “adventuress.” Phryne, like Tuppence, is a 1920s flapper-type, with bobbed hair and a stylish wardrobe; she also loves the good life and smokes, and both characters exhibit a desire to break away from their father’s Victorian patriarchal control. While the Detection Club’s rules of fair play rule out feminine intuition, both Tuppence and Phryne subvert this interdiction and rely on their sixth sense to solve crimes. In The Secret Adversary, Tuppence uses her female intuition to detect that the antagonist is somewhere at hand. She then cries out to the infamous Sir James Peel Edgerton and to Julius P. Hersheimer, “I can’t help it. I know Mr. Brown’s somewhere in the flat! I can feel him”9 and, as the reader finds out later, she was right. Likewise, in Greenwood’s novel Raisins and Almonds (2007), Phryne tells her wharfie friend Bert that she feels there is something underhanded going on in the Eastern Markets, and as the novel progresses, she is also proved right. Bert asks her if she knows this by “female intuition” and Phryne retorts, “absolutely.”10 Further, both adventuresses make reference to Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series by employing irregulars. Tuppence employs a young assistant, Albert, after she notices a “threepenny detective novel protruding from Albert’s pockets.”11 Phryne likewise employs an irregular with a similar sounding name to Tuppence’s coadjutor—Herbert—and notices that he, too, reads detective stories. However, unlike Tuppence’s reliance and subsequent marriage to Tommy, her fellow sleuth, Phryne prefers—and operates from—an independent status, much like Miss Jane Marple.

  Christie’s Miss Marple could be considered another strong female character to whom Greenwood pays tribute via a number of inter-textual references. Miss Marple’s methods of detection stem from her perceptive understanding of human nature, combined with her ability to listen carefully and ask loaded questions from an apparently naïve point of view. Similarly, Phryne is considered “very perceptive about people”; she asks questions constantly and deciphers people’s motives with consistent accuracy.12 Crucially, the two sleuths operate under the radar in some sense, as both are women and often dismissed as innocuous. Miss Marple is an unassuming old lady; Phryne is a young and glamorous flapper who “looked perfectly harmless” because, presumably, her interests are in men, society and fashion. However, in both cases the detectives’ eyes reveal their intelligence and astuteness, and Phryne’s guise of harmlessness is only an apparent one: “unless you caught her eye, in which case you felt that you were stripped down to component molecules, weighed in the balance, and found wanting.”13 Greenwood pays particular tribute to Miss Marple in Urn Burial (2003). Here, Phryne and an older lady sleuth called Miss Mary Mead (itself a reference to St. Mary Mead, the village where Miss Marple lives), together solve some mysteries at a mansion in country Victoria and light-heartedly discuss their experiences as female detectives. The collegiality between the two characters parallels the relationship between Greenwood and her precursors, as she fondly draws on Christie’s characters. However, while Miss Marple is portrayed as celibate, Phryne is sexually active and regularly beds handsome and intelligent men. One reviewer has labeled Phryne as “Miss Marple’s naughty niece.”14 This might be seen as a tactic by which Greenwood updates Christie’s iconic female sleuth.

  There is an even more significant relationship between Christie’s iconic male detective and Phryne. Hercule Poirot and Phryne share a penchant for the finer things in life, and are similar in the breadth of their social acquaintance and engagement with the police. Poirot has a preference for exotic food, is markedly cosmopolitan, and has an unusual degree of access to the middle and upper classes. Phryne, too, is a food connoisseur, travels the world, and speaks numerous languages—including Poirot’s French. Because of her prefix, the Honorable Phryne Fisher moves in high society, but her egalitarian nature also positions her favorably and in sympathy with the middle to lower classes. Both detectives also develop good relations with the police. While Poirot has a long-standing friendship with Chief Inspector Japp, Phryne has a mutually beneficial partnership with Detective Inspector Robinson. It must be noted, however, that Phryne’s methods of detection differ from Poirot’s: while Poirot famously relies on his “little grey cells,” Phryne (as noted earlier) relies more on instinct and her subconscious. In The Green Mill Murder (1993), Phryne witnesses a murder, yet who the murderer is and how the victim has met his end initially escape her notice. Phryne often muses throughout the novel that “her subconscious [is] trying to tell her something,”15 and rather than isolating herself like Poirot to think and use rational methods of deduction, Phryne eschews reflection and just goes to bed. Because she disengages her conscious mind, and allows her dreams and subconscious to reveal answers, Phryne awakes with the solution to the mystery. Greenwood also affectionately parodies Poirot, as Phryne admits that she wishes

  the real world [would conform] to Hercule Poirot’s rules…. She would love to gather all the suspects together and state, on the authority of the little grey cells, exactly how each one could have been the murdered but wasn’t, until she reached the last person, who was, and who always confessed instantly.16

  The textual examples already cited show that Greenwood’s work can be seen a
s a tribute to, rather than an undermining of, Christie and her British detective fiction. Further titles in Greenwood’s series cement this relationship of tribute: Murder on the Ballarat Train, Dead Man’s Chest, Death on Victoria Dock and Murder in Montparnasse play on Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, Dead Man’s Folly, Death on the Nile and Murder in Mesopotamia. Greenwood also makes explicit reference to one of Christie’s novels in her short story collection, A Question of Death (2007), in which one of the stories is titled “The Body in the Library.” However, a postcolonial response to Christie’s work can indeed be traced in Greenwood, although it is one that is subtle rather than aggressive, and focused more on detective fiction in general rather than on Christie herself.

  Greenwood responds in an ambivalent manner to dominant interwar detective fiction’s conventions in that she subverts many of the Detection Club’s rules of fair play, as indicated above. The club members insisted, for example, that authors should not rely on “mumbo jumbo” in solving mysteries, and that they should only use ghosts and Chinese characters in moderation.17 By contrast, in Death Before Wicket (1999), “mumbo jumbo” is a thematic thread throughout the novel as two characters practice black magic and manipulate the behavior of other characters. Even Phryne participates in some of their rituals in order to solve the mystery. In many of the Miss Fisher Mystery novels, supernatural themes underpin the plot. In Ruddy Gore (1995), for example, a ghost haunts the set of a theatre and appears to make frequent spectral appearances, even leaving a mysterious smell. Moreover, Phryne’s recurring love interest is a handsome Chinese man, Lin Chung. In these ways, Greenwood’s series demonstrates resistance to British canonical detective fiction prescriptions. Consequently, I maintain that ambivalence is key to understanding the relationship between Greenwood and her precursors, in Australia and England, and to understanding the literary register in which she works.