Queering Agatha Christie

Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

J.C Bernthal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319335339
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie's emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2016

J.C BernthalQueering Agatha ChristieCrime Files10.1007/978-3-319-33533-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

J. C. Bernthal¹

(1)

Independent Scholar, Norwich, UK

End Abstract

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, she was the best-selling novelist in history. Her appeal was widely discussed at the time, and has been subsequently. Early commentators were apt to agree with the crime fiction historian Julian Symons, who put Christie’s “permanence” down to “the comfort of the familiar”. ¹ According to Symons, the formulaic nature of Christie’s puzzle-based detective fiction, combined with her stereotyped characters and picturesque middle-class settings, created a literary landscape that was unlikely to shock or surprise—a reassuringly conservative world view. By the same token, Symons acknowledged a limited audience: “Few feminists or radicals are likely to read her.” ²

Nonetheless, familiarity does not breed certainty, and “feminists and radicals” have long noted something playful or even subversive in Christie’s conservatism. ³ For one thing, any “fictional world—however [familiar]—where almost all the players are [murder] suspects”, and most characters are hiding something, “hardly suggests a society at peace with itself”. ⁴ Christie, touted by her publishers as “the Queen of Crime”, has become synonymous with her branch of crime fiction, to the extent that her name appears in the Oxford English Dictionary definition of “whodunit”. In that genre, it is a truism that few characters present themselves as they “really” are. By the end of the narrative, the detective will have assigned identity labels—guilty/innocent and so on—to a motley collection of individuals. Although these characters and their surroundings are recognizable to even casual readers, as are the plots they inhabit, when such limited “types” are repeated in different arrangements over sixty-six novels and hundreds of other texts, the effect can be disorienting. The murderer might be an elderly colonel “type” in one book, but that “type” may describe the victim in the next; the combination of identities varies. Far from being safe in its familiarity, an Agatha Christie novel notions towards fear of disorder and uncertainty in recognition.

Here, the detective resembles the figure of the doctor as described by the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault: an authority figure who reads the human body, identifies and categorizes “diseases” (or, in the detective’s case, clues) and finally declares what will become accepted as “natural truth” about the individual. ⁵ Several theorists have built on Foucault’s insights and set to “queering” modern culture, pointing out that without the authority of official identity categories, human behaviour would be defined very differently. Figures such as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have critiqued apparently “natural” ways of categorizing human beings. For example, Butler has revealed gender and biological sex to be “performative”, part of a social script that owes more to people enacting it than to any natural authenticity, and Sedgwick has explored ways of registering human sexuality beyond, or more appropriately than, the gay/straight binary. ⁶ This project starts with a rarely acknowledged similarity between puzzle-based detective fiction and the writings of queer theorists: both present human identities as constructed within their given contexts.

Queer theorists’ insights can afford new readings of Christie’s novels and short stories as texts with queer potential. That is, the texts can be read as spaces in which presumptions about human identity are exposed, undermined and renegotiated. Drawing parallels between queer theory and questions of identity in Christie’s detective fiction means rethinking the relevance of a body of work, once dismissed as escapist and “ephemeral”. ⁷

This study has a twofold relevance. On the one hand, it provides a new reading of Christie, acknowledging an historically unique context of change, development and adaption. Social customs, codes and orders came under unprecedented scrutiny in the context of two world wars and advances in technology and communication, while the necessity of change was underscored by an increasing awareness that nothing was stable; that little if anything about individuals and their worlds could be “known”. On the other hand, as the first full queer reading of a “Golden Age” detective novelist, this book expands queer notions of archive and canonicity. Despite the diversification of queer theory in the twenty-first century, engaging perspectives beyond those of white gay Western men, and despite the increasing popularity of queer methodologies in literary analysis, very few scholars to date have considered mainstream literary texts without already obvious queer coding from a queer theoretical perspective. ⁸ Such exclusionary readings endorse a key presumption against which many theorists rally: that “queerness” already exists, delineated if not defined as the “other” of some unproblematized model of straightness or normalcy.

Christie described herself, foremost, as a wife and mother, and insisted that her passport should list her profession as “housewife”. ⁹ A staple of British television and tourism initiatives, the best-selling English-language author in history and a Dame Commander of the British Empire, she can be identified positively with “Establishment” institutions. White, English and politically conservative, Christie is hardly an obvious candidate for a queer reading. Accordingly, her main detective, Hercule Poirot, has long been read as a figure whose “aim (and purpose) [is] to restore order after it has been disrupted by crime”. ¹⁰

Nonetheless, as Sally R. Munt observes, “[h]e is a parody of the male myth; […] a shortened Hercules […] and socially ‘other’”. ¹¹ Moreover, Christie’s prose, which relies on ready stereotypes but also on presenting them in unexpected ways (if only to fool the reader as to the puzzle’s solution) must have something to say about normality; a construction queer studies seek to destabilize. As Christie’s other popular detective, the spinster Jane Marple, states in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), “most people are” “a little queer”, “when you know them well”: queerness may be hard to spot and harder to define, but is more pervasive than its opposite. ¹² This study uncovers an extraordinary amount of playful destabilization in the texts, much arising from Christie’s deliberately jarring presentation of ready stereotypes. In this sense, her writing is not merely superficial; it draws attention towards the artificial nature of taxonomized identity itself.

Treatments of Christie to Date

Before going further, we must define the “Golden Age” of British detective fiction. Christie is usually said to typify the Golden Age, partly because of her memorable sales figures, but also because of her strict adherence to the puzzle format, which has become the trademark of the period. ¹³ Commentators do not agree upon a time-frame for the Golden Age; Heather Worthington puts it between 1918 and 1930, John Curran between 1918 and 1945, and Susan Rowland between 1920 and 1937. ¹⁴ More universally accepted is that Golden Age detective fiction is both puzzle-based and highly artificial, usually featuring murder and an amateur, rather than a professional, detective. The detective discovers who committed the crime and how; the solution is often outlandish but the reader should have access to sufficient clues to solve it. ¹⁵

In the 1920s, when Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and J.J. Connington dominated the market with their puzzle-based mysteries, the Detection Club—a body of crime writers—was established. There followed, both within and beyond the Club, numerous sets of “rules” for writing detective fiction. The most famous British example is Ronald Knox’s “Ten Commandments” (1928). Knox stipulated that a detective novel

must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end. ¹⁶

Rules included “fair play” clauses (“Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”) and snobbery concerning populist clichés (“No Chinaman must figure in the story […] Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear”). ¹⁷

As the tone indicates, these “rules” were chiefly gentle satires between professionals acknowledging the tropes and clichés of each other...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Constructing Agatha Christie
• 3. English Masculinity and Its Others
• 4. Femininity and Masquerade
• 5. Queer Children, Crooked Houses
• 6. Queering Christie on Television
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter