Beyond the Scene of the Crime

Beyond the Scene of the Crime: Investigating Place in Golden Age Detective Fiction Brittain Bright Goldsmiths, University of London English and Comparative Literature PhD Submission I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work and that it has not been submitted anywhere for any award. Where external sources of information have been used, they have been acknowledged. Brittain Bright 2 Acknowledgements Writing is a solitary endeavor, but it is impossible to do it alone. I am deeply grateful to Dr. Caroline Blinder for her belief in the value of my work and for teaching me to ask (and answer) complex questions; however, I appreciate at least as much her willingness to read, and maintain enthusiasm about, a daunting pile of detective novels! I would also like to thank Jessie, for her practical and insightful comments, and David, for his support and encouragement throughout the seemingly endless writing process. Finally, and most of all, I thank my parents for their constant patience with my educational meanderings, and for their belief in me. 3 Abstract Place is both physical and conceptual; in fiction, place offers an initial basic orientation, but also fulfills many more complex roles. This thesis considers place in the Golden Age detective novels of Agatha Christie, Gladys Mitchell, and Dorothy L. Sayers to establish place as a point of critical engagement, and uses place to re-consider influential works in the genre. The exploration of place uncovers textual clues that are not necessarily detective clues, complicating these novels and dismantling deceptive assumptions about the homogeneity of the Golden Age. The evidential place, or “the scene of the crime”, provides a physical setting for the crime itself and the clues that it generates, but it is rarely the most important or revelatory place in a detective story. Christie developed a place-typology that defined much of her work: the house, the village, London, and the holiday convey distinct meanings from early in her career. These places evolve over decades of social commentary, but each maintains a core of structural meaning. Character and place often develop in tandem, and Mitchell is particularly interested in the distortions of the relationship between the two. She rejects the rationality of the genre, and uses place and focalization to embed psychological questioning in her novels. Sayers considers place a central “artistic unity” of the novel. She presents place as a socially constructed unit, and through notions of “belonging” or being “out of place”, she interrogates structures of milieu. Place becomes a central focal point in her later novels, through which she questions contemporary values and identities. In all of these authors’ work, the detective is a figure representative of modernity, developed through his or her relationship to place. Place also takes the investigation outside of purely plot-based channels, and into sociological and psychological areas of questioning. 4 Beyond the Scene of the Crime: Investigating Place in Golden Age Detective Fiction Brittain Bright Introduction 6 1. The Scene of the Crime: Place as Evidence 37 2. “You’d be surprised if you knew how very few distinct 51 types there are”: Agatha Christie’s Typologies of the House, the Village, the City, and the Holiday 3. Subject(s) to Place: Interdependent Place and Character 117 in Agatha Christie and Gladys Mitchell 4. “When things become a little abnormal”: The 139 Externalization of Character Psychology in Gladys Mitchell’s The Rising of the Moon 5. Meanings of Milieu: Performance, Conversation, and 185 Place in Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and Murder Must Advertise 6. The “Artistic Unity” of Place: Dorothy L. Sayers’ 217 Gaudy Night Conclusion 285 Appendix: Agatha Christie’s Works, by Type of Place 293 Bibliography 295 5 Introduction: The Place of Place in Fiction To make an artistic unity it is, I feel, essential that the plot should derive from the setting, and that both should form part of the theme. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Gaudy Night” The most elemental orientation of a reader to a narrative text is through its evocation of places. Setting is immediately positive and reassuring until action and character are gradually unfolded. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature While it may seem evident, in fiction as well as in fact, that all stories must happen somewhere, the participation of that somewhere in the story is frequently overlooked. “Setting”, far from being a reassuring, stationary backdrop for a dynamic plot, is often deeply integral to its mechanics and meanings. This thesis asserts the essential role of place as a literary element and examines its operation in an ostensibly plot-driven genre. Many of the claims herein are applicable to place in fiction as a whole, but I have chosen to focus on detective fiction, specifically that of the British “Golden Age”, or inter-war period.1 The reasons for this choice are twofold. First, a new emphasis facilitates a new perspective on a genre often dismissed as simplistic and reductive: attention to an under-utilized mode of analysis reveals a level of complexity in this fiction that has been overlooked in the past. Conversely, this exploration of place extends far beyond its obvious evidential role in the detective novel, demonstrating that the most readily apparent uses of place are often not the most revealing. Wesley A. Kort asserts that “[t]he language of place and space is always a part of narrative discourse and can be a principal locus of a narrative’s power and significance.”2 However, despite the prominence of place in many works of fiction, the 1 For the purposes of this work, the dates of the “Golden Age” are 1920-1945. See below for further explanation of this definition. 2 Wesley A. Kort, Place and Space in Modern Fiction (Gainesville: Florida University Press; London: Eurospan, 2004), p. 11. 6 fact remains that, as J. Hillis Miller observes, it “has hardly given rise to a distinct mode of the criticism of fiction, as has the criticism of character, or of interpersonal relations, or of narrators and narrative sequence.”3 The “elemental orientation” of place informs the reader: What is supposed to happen in this place? What does this place represent? What types of narrative does it characterize? Narrative typologies, whether established through history, genre, or individual œuvre, create an “elemental orientation” from which to approach a narrative, or a place. For T.S. Eliot, “Sherlock Holmes reminds us of the pleasant externals of nineteenth-century London”, and “he may continue to do so even for those who cannot remember the nineteenth century.”4 This evocation of memory suggests the instinctive, and pervasive, nature of the assumptions readers make about place. I have chosen to consider three writers in this thesis who, though united by time period and genre, could hardly be more diverse. The ways that they establish and use place are as different as their writing styles: Agatha Christie presents brilliantly deceptive inversions of the readers’ expectations and prejudices, Gladys Mitchell experiments with the genre’s Gothic heritage and popular psychoanalysis, and Dorothy L. Sayers endeavors to fuse the detective plot with a complex and personal novel of manners. One might say that Christie’s places are structural, Mitchell’s psychological, and Sayers’ holistic. The emphasis on different aspects and actions of place in the work of each author is various, but far from arbitrary; my intent is to emphasize the unique contributions of each author to the genre, as well as the particular nature of their response to place. In Christie’s work, many subtleties of expression may pass unnoticed in a casual, plot-oriented reading; revisiting a text to consider its relationship to recurring place-types reveals small, apparently inconsequential, details. This re- orientation offers a new perspective on the composition and intention of novels usually presumed to be “known” and formulaic. The author’s careful craftsmanship becomes apparent, as well as her concentrated and consistent attention to national 3 J. Hillis Miller, Topographies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 9. 4 T.S. Eliot, “The Complete Sherlock Holmes Short Stories: A Review”, in The Baker Street Reader ed. by Philip A. Shreffler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 17-20 (first publ. in Criterion, April 1929), p. 17. 7 preoccupations such as work, status, modernity, and domesticity. The impact of place is much more immediately evident in Mitchell, to the extent that its particulars sometimes overshadow the story (Julian Symons dismisses her entire œuvre because of his impatience with “travelogue details”5). In her best novels, however, place looms, spectre-like, a seemingly conscious agent pursuing its own agenda, and infiltrates unexpected corners of plot and narrative. Place in Sayers’ novels, like her detective, becomes more detailed and painstakingly characterized over the course of her career. Her character’s reactions to places in which they find themselves, from pride to amusement to disgust, illuminate both character and place; the author’s observations on the large variety of places in her novels, which equally range from satirical to tender, provide some of the most illuminating, and engaging, detail in her work. The detective format has been dismissed as a formulaic and unproductive reading experience; Umberto Eco, an avowed enthusiast, declares that, Paradoxically, the same detective story that one is tempted to ascribe to the products that satisfy the taste for the unforeseen or the sensational is, in fact, read for exactly the opposite reason, as an invitation to that which is taken for granted, familiar, expected.6 The genre received scant critical attention until the 1980s, notwithstanding the pioneering analytical work of practitioners including G.K. Chesterton, Willard Huntington Wright (S.S.

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