Agatha Christie Power and Illusion R.A. York Crime Files Series General Editor: Clive Bloom Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fiction has never been more popular. In novels, short stories, films, radio, television and now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, prim poisoners and over- worked cops, tommy gun gangsters and cocaine criminals are the very stuff of modern imagination, and their creators one mainstay of popular consciousness. Crime Files is a ground-breaking series offering scholars, students and discerning readers a comprehensive set of guides to the world of crime and detective fiction. Every aspect of crime writing, detective fiction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication. Published titles include: Maurizio Ascari A COUNTER-HISTORY OF CRIME FICTION Supernatural, Gothic, Sensational Hans Bertens and Theo D’haen CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN CRIME FICTION Anita Biressi CRIME, FEAR AND THE LAW IN TRUE CRIME STORIES Ed Christian (editor) THE POST-COLONIAL DETECTIVE Paul Cobley THE AMERICAN THRILLER Generic Innovation and Social Change in the 1970s Christiana Gregoriou DEVIANCE IN CONTEMPORARY CRIME FICTION Lee Horsley THE NOIR THRILLER Merja Makinen AGATHA CHRISTIE Investigating Femininity Fran Mason AMERICAN GANGSTER CINEMA From Little Caesar to Pulp Fiction Linden Peach MASQUERADE, CRIME AND FICTION Criminal Deceptions Susan Rowland FROM AGATHA CHRISTIE TO RUTH RENDELL British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction Adrian Schober POSSESSED CHILD NARRATIVES IN LITERATURE AND FILM Contrary States Heather Worthington THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY POPULAR FICTION R.A. York AGATHA CHRISTIE Power and Illusion Crimes Files Series Standing Order ISBN 978-0-333-71471-3 (Hardback) 978-0-333-93064-9 (Paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England Agatha Christie Power and Illusion R.A. York © R.A. York 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-52501-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-35741-3 ISBN 978-0-230-59078-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230590786 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 For Rosemary This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements viii 1 Introduction 1 2 The Spectacle of Death 9 3 The Wrong Angle 22 4 Actors and Imposters 35 5 Human Nature 48 6 The Self and the Other 60 7 Change and Decay 74 8 The War of Good and Evil 87 9 Clues 100 10 The Myth of Crime 114 11 The Real and the Unreal 128 12 The Culture 141 13 Curtain: A Conclusion 155 Bibliography 166 Index 171 vii Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Humanities Research Institute of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ulster for financial assistance in publication of this book, Rosemary York for help in picture research, and Stan Short for technical assistance. viii 1 Introduction No one needs to study Agatha Christie, one might think. Christie is not a difficult writer. People do not have to be taught to enjoy her, to trace subtle and elusive patterns of imagery, erudite references or complex ideological stances. She is a popular writer, and she is popular because her writing is readily intelligible to the overwhelming majority of people, at least in the developed world. Anyone who sets out to write a book about her risks seeming either to say the obvious or to perversely invent aspects of the novels overlooked by immense numbers of previous readers. This, of course, is an argument against systematic study of any kind of popular culture. The case for such study is actually taken for granted by many people now; in the case of detective fiction it is effectively stated by Porter (1981, 1–2). But it is worth keeping in mind those initial reservations, because they come very close to the reasons why it is, after all, important to study Christie: the very fact that she is easy to read and to enjoy suggests that her writing takes for granted a mass of assumptions about story telling and about the relationships and acts that appear in stories – in fiction and in real life, assumptions which her readers, to some extent and in some way, share. Christie has had enormous popular and commercial success. According to her publishers’ website, her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in 44 foreign languages. She is moreover widely regarded as typifying a literary genre which at one time was the staple leisure activity – the staple imaginative stimulus – of a great many people, and which retains a great deal of popularity, whether in its original literary form or in its transpositions to radio, television and film. It is characteristic that she earns 213 entries in the Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing (Herbert, 1994), well ahead of 1 2 Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion Conan Doyle, with 151, Dorothy Sayers, 149 and Raymond Chandler, 137. (One may, however, get the impression that most of the 213 refer to the Roger Ackroyd trick.) “An Agatha Christie” is a detective story par excellence. Her work strikes a chord in very many readers; it appeals to inexplicit and perhaps uncritical assumptions about important things: crime and justice, reason and passion, the social and the private, the established and the outsider. These are no doubt the things regarded as “familiar universal themes” by a biographer (Morgan, 1985, 250); more precisely they are fundamental aspects of life in the developed world and most specifically in the middle-class England of the early twentieth century. Christie’s work, and more generally the genre of the detective story, has in fact attracted a considerable amount of critical comment. Light (1991, 64) was able to comment that “no self-respecting British critic” had yet written about her at length, and some of the published work is very slight criticism, such as Ramsey (1967), or gossipy and sometimes negligent biography such as Robyns (1978). There has, however, been a considerable improvement recently; a major addition to the critical liter- ature, for instance, is Makinen (2006) which also contains a substantial survey of recent criticism, especially of a feminist orientation. Critical discussion has had, above all, to reconcile two aspects of mystery fiction, as well as to do justice to each. On the one hand, the mystery story is a mystery. It is a puzzle, which calls for solution, and it is often assumed that the enterprise of reading a detective story consists essentially of solving the puzzle. The puzzle theme is a favorite one of critics: a few instances are Cawelti (1976, 84), Knight (1980, 107), Morgan (1985, 257–9), Caillois (1983, 9) and Heissenbüttel (1983, 82). Just as people enjoy crossword puzzles or jigsaws (and the jigsaw is a favorite simile of Christie for the detective process) in order to get the satisfaction of getting a pattern out of chaos, or of getting a sense of completion out of a state of frustration, so – it is thought – they get satisfaction out of locating the guilty party out of a number of competing characters and identifying what happened at the crucial moment, which has been disguised up to the end. Puzzles are not novels: they do not depend on the things that make up normal novels – presentation of interesting and more or less sympathetic characters, relation of characters in a society, the sense of place or institution, the invitation to be concerned about the fate of individuals. The beauty of the image in a jigsaw is a secondary issue for the solver: the real experts do them with the blank side up. Some detective stories similarly are essentially concerned with train timetables and locked doors, and the people who catch trains and Introduction 3 open doors might sometimes just as well be automata.