Death and the Detective Novel after the First World War Annika Houwen Submitted in total fulfilme

91 Pages·2014·0.46 MB·English

The Soldier and the Sleuth: Death and the Detective Novel after the First
World War

Annika Houwen

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
Master of Arts (by Research)

March, 2014

The School of Culture and Communication

The University of Melbourne

Produced on archival quality paper

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Abstract

The First World War was a confrontation with death as well as with the
enemy, and this confrontation continued in the British detective novels that were so
popular in the interwar period. Both the war and the detective novel revealed the
importance of death and its associated rituals to the correct functioning of society.
As society and its needs changed, so did the appropriate responses to death, and we
see these changes occurring in the postwar novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy
L. Sayers, two of the most popular authors of the period. The effects of individual
death on the community are explored in detail in the detective novel, as each
mourner must perform the correct emotional display in order to prove their
innocence. The rituals surrounding death are also revealed in the novels’ depiction
of the inheritance of property, which is a common motive for murder, underlining
its importance in the social structure. The First World War had transformed the
role of the transmission of property, and it also deeply affected the position of the
scientific community, which came under suspicion for its role in the war’s brutality.
In the years after the First World War, the memory and legacy of the conflict
shifted in response to upheaval in the present, in particular to the threat of a new
war. The detective novels’ depiction of violent death recalls and rewrites the
experience of war, and through social responses to violence, the dead body is made
safe again.

Declaration

This is to certify that:
i. The thesis comprises only my original work towards the masters;
ii. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material
used;
iii. The thesis is less than 40 000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps,
bibliographies and appendices.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 4
Chapter One: The Unknown Warrior: Mourning in the Absence of 15
the Corpse
Chapter Two: Reading the Will: Social Stability through 30
Inheritance
Chapter Three: Science after Slaughter: Murderous Doctors in the 47
Detective Novel
Chapter Four: A Haunted Nation: The Return to War 65
Conclusion 82
Bibliography 85

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Introduction

It was in the decades after the First World War that two separate yet
complementary pastimes reached new heights of popularity: the detective novel and
the crossword puzzle. Both were seen as exercises in logic, a means of distraction
from the chaos of everyday life. This attitude has persisted in critical opinions of
detective fiction of the ‘golden age,’ which typically emphasise its popularity and
conventionality. Agatha Christie, perhaps the most famous writer of detective
fiction from this period, began her career as a bet with her sister, marking her work
as less a literary endeavour than an intellectual hobby. Christie relates in her
autobiography that her sister told her that writing a whodunit would be too
difficult, and ‘[f]rom that moment on I was fired by the determination that I would
write a detective story’ (211). There is a central distinction between the crossword
puzzle and the detective novel, however, as the detective novel’s very structure is
predicated on the presence of violent death.
This central presence is simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed by both
authors and critics of the genre. Dorothy L. Sayers, another popular author of
detective fiction, saw it as characteristic of honourable public school values, writing
in her introduction to The Omnibus of Crime (1928) that ‘[t]he British legal code,
with its tradition of “sportsmanship” and “fair play for the criminal” is particularly
favourable to the production of detective fiction’ (75). In saying this, she implicitly
refocuses the detective novel on the punishment of crime and the restoration of
order after the murder, rather than on the murder itself. Reading detective fiction
offered a short-lived assurance that the chaos of modern life could be neatly solved,
the sources of disruption removed and the social fabric rewoven. Critics, too, see
the disruption of death as easily smothered by the process of rational detection;
Ivana Shiloh argues that the ‘chaos and senselessness associated with crime are
vanquished by the exercise of the investigator’s transcendent reason’ (12). In these
views of the genre, the crime is relatively unimportant in comparison with the
reactions to and investigation of that crime.
As depictions of communities reacting to sudden death within their midst,
detective novels are concerned with the place of death and mourning within the
social structure. The focus of detective novels is not on the great metaphysical
questions of existence, but on how society can survive and remain coherent when it

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is challenged by premature mortality. Christine Jackson argues that ‘[t]he
detective novel perpetrates a great lie – that death is knowable’ (4), because once
we experience it we are beyond the reach of communication or awareness. This is
not entirely true, however, as for the survivors death is experienced socially, and as
such must be restrained within social parameters. The detective novel is most
concerned with the communal expectations and institutions that surround death,
notably with the survivors, so death in these novels is necessary, yet subdued.
The physical realities of death are less important to the surviving social group
than how those realities are incorporated within ritual and myth. Rituals and
traditions—such as the funeral or mourning dress—control the experience of death
and integrate it into the routines of daily life. Anthropologist Arnold van Gennep
finds that death rituals adhere to the same tripartite structure that he identifies in
all major rites of passage. Eric J. Leed describes these three phases further:

Rites of separation, which remove an individual or group of
individuals from his or their accustomed place; liminal rites, which
symbolically fix the character of the ‘passenger’ as one who is
between states, places, or conditions; and finally rites of incorporation
(postliminal rites), which welcome the individual back into the group.
(14)

Leed goes on to apply this structure to the experience of trench warfare in the First
World War: one’s own lines facing the enemy’s lines, and the liminal phase of no
man’s land lying in between. Leed collected responses from a range of soldiers to
claim that this ‘uncanny’ experience of no man’s land was, for many, the most
memorable and the most resonant facet of their experience on the battlefield. It is
the process of transition wherein danger lies, where certainties are troubled and
divisions become unclear.
This structure of uncertainty and of disruption between two clear divisions is
also something that we find in the ‘golden age’ detective novel. The novel begins
with the first phase of van Gennep’s rite: the victims are separated from their social
position by their untimely death and their surroundings are thrown into disarray. It
ends with the rite of incorporation as the victim is interred, the murderer
apprehended, and the community purged and reborn. Elizabeth Bronfen argues of

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the detective novel’s characteristic ending that ‘[o]nly the psychic solution
(successful disinvestment of the dead beloved) and the hermeneutic solution
(successful deciphering of the enigma) arrests an uncanny body into a recuperated
stable division between living and dead’ (295). That is, until the crime is solved, the
boundary between life and death, destabilised by violence, cannot be fixed in place.
It is with the liminal phase between the apparent security of the opening and the
renewed stability of the conclusion that the novel is concerned, as this is the period
in which the community is under threat, and where each character must be
scrutinised for signs of betrayal.
It is in the post-war period that social reactions and rituals relating to death
become extremely significant and closely observed in new forms, principally as a
result of the war, and it is this performance of the social within the liminal through
the medium of detective fiction that is the subject of my thesis.
I will focus on the novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, two of
the most successful detective authors writing in the years after the First World
War. The novels chosen span the interwar period, from Sayers’s and Christie’s first
works, written at a time when the losses of war were still fresh, to those of the
political upheavals of the late 1930s, as I trace the ways in which the war shifted in
meaning and memory over this turbulent era. This was a liminal period in British
history, as the experience of total war had alienated Britain from its traditional
worldview before new social codes had been allowed to develop. In the midst of
such a transition, the detective novel’s depiction of liminality was necessary, as it
‘held its highest place of influence [in] a period when the notions of authority and
stability in society were beginning to be questioned and to be radically changed’
(Paul, 151). Significant social changes occurred in the years after the war: women
gained suffrage, workers sought greater rights through industrial action, the middle
class grew in size and power, and Britain’s empire slowly weakened. As the
upheavals multiplied, detective fiction was an immensely popular source of comfort.
Agatha Christie, in particular, became the ‘queen of crime’: ‘[m]ore than half
a billion copies of her works have appeared in more than a hundred languages since
the publication of her first book’ (Rzepka, 156). However, such popularity, and the
enduring nature of detective fiction’s appeal (new editions and television
productions of golden age novels continue to appear), led to criticism and literary
disdain. As new forms of popular fiction and crime fiction were created, they often

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established their own position by diminishing the role of past writers. Carl
Malmgren explains that ‘each new generation of writers justifies itself by insisting
upon the artificiality of the previous generation and upon the verisimilitude and
“truth value” of its own forms and experiments’ (4). The new genres of crime
fiction were based upon exposure of the ‘truth’ of crime, and characterised the
golden age as formulaic and out of touch. Raymond Chandler, for example, the
most famous exponent of the new ‘hard-boiled’ crime fiction, described Christie’s
work as:

Featuring M. Hercule Poirot, that ingenious Belgian who talks in a
literal translation of school-boy French, wherein, by duly messing
around with his ‘little gray cells,’ M. Poirot decides that nobody on a
certain through sleeper could have done the murder alone, therefore
everybody did it together, breaking the process down into a series of
simple operations, like assembling an egg-beater. […] Only a halfwit
could guess it. (230)

Sayers is less often mentioned in such a disparaging manner, but her position as a
female writer in the tradition of the English ‘whodunnit’ has contributed to a
relative dearth of literary analysis of her works. Chandler’s reference to an egg-
beater is typical: in this view, Christie’s and Sayers’s fictions are feminised and
domesticated, situated in a privileged realm that is sheltered from the wider world.
However, this domestic idyll is shattered by the intrusion of violence, and thus the
private becomes public, and political. Central to the understanding of these novels
is their status as rituals in themselves, rewritings of the experience of millions of
people in wartime who were forced to accept the reality of death.
The ‘golden age’ of the detective novel was a period of mourning for loved
ones lost at war, but the war, like the fictional victim’s corpse, is both foundational
to the detective novel yet pushed to the periphery. As Stephen Knight explains,
there is critical debate over how significant a role is played by the war in the
detective novel: ‘[p]ost-war angst is often seen as being dissipated by the [clue-
puzzle] sub-genre. Some analysts think that the fiction works by ignoring the
conflicts of the time […] others feel the sub-genre displaces these pressures into
manageable form’ (2004, 109). However, it can be argued that the very structure of

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the detective novel evokes the experience of conflict, and mirrors the development
of trench warfare. The novel begins with apparent normality, but this safety is an
illusion, and a battle must be fought before the community can be restored to order.
This is an idealised battle against chaos, where the removal of a single criminal
individual is apparently enough to restore control, a conclusion that would have
been extremely compelling to men and women who had experienced years of
stalemates and inconclusive battles.
The wartime experience also recurs in the novels’ need to continually repeat a
generic plot structure. The rewriting of an experience of liminality suggests that the
conclusions of both the novel and the war itself were unable to subdue the effects
on the psyche of the war and its violence. The greater part of the novel occurs in
the no man’s land of the investigation, where nobody can be trusted. It is this
experience that resonates with the survivors of war, who are themselves part of a
society struggling to regain trust in traditional values. It is the correct performance
of the death rites that banishes the revenant of the dead body into its safe resting
place, and I shall argue that it is in this focus on the social performance of death
that the First World War re-emerges in the detective novel.
Such mourning rites included public displays of grief, which were common in
the years after 1914 as the construction of war memorials began in all major towns
and cities. Jay Winter describes the social aspects of such memorials: ‘[a]fter
August 1914, commemoration was an act of citizenship. To remember was to affirm
community, to assert its moral character, and to exclude from it those values,
groups, or individuals that placed it under threat’ (90). Post-war detective novels,
like cenotaphs and war graves, transform the gruesome, wasteful death of the
battlefield into ‘good’ death: mourned, investigated, and finally laid to rest.
The war was not as easily subdued as the fictional murderer, and continued
to resonate for decades after the armistice. In novels published into the 1930s the
experiences of random slaughter and treason continue to recur and to trouble
readers, particularly in the espionage novels of Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and
John Buchan that were so popular in this period. The conventionality of Christie’s
and Sayers’s novels operated as relief to readers trying desperately to return to a
sense of normality, seeking reassurance that they were responding appropriately to
social death, and it was this role that led substantially to the genre’s popularity in
the years following the First World War. By observing others reacting to violent

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death, the power of correct social etiquette in restoring normality was emphasised,
and such a promise of future stability proved irresistible in a period of drastic
change.
Processes by which detective fiction rewrites the war experience operate in a
number of significant areas, to be developed further in this study. If a death is
necessary for the detective novel, then the processes of grief and mourning
inevitably follow. Christine Quigley contends that ‘[w]hen we die, we relinquish
our individuality. Void of personality, the corpse joins the masses’ (9). Mourning is
an attempt by the kin of the deceased to reverse this process, to maintain specificity
in the face of eternity, a task that seemed even more daunting, and even more
important, after the mass death that characterised the First World War. The first
chapter of my thesis will be concerned with the process of mourning as depicted in
the detective novel, and in particular the ways in which the individuality of the
corpse is balanced against the demands of the community.
Approved social displays of mourning permeate detective fiction: characters
show grief, but subdue their emotional displays to appropriate levels, while other
characters express their condolences. Thus, like the memorials that proliferated
after the First World War, detective novels are aimed at the bereaved, and at
rehearsing the correct responses to sudden death. The murder occurs early in the
novel, and for the rest of the work, the reader is encouraged, along with the
detective, to scrutinise each character’s protestations of grief and innocence. Just as
in post-war Britain, violent death has entered the community and left its mark,
forming a society of the bereaved.
Agatha Christie’s 1923 The Murder on the Links contrasts a range of responses
to the death of a central character, lauding genuine emotion and self-control, while
exposing those who put their self-interest before the good of the community.
However, this is a novel in which almost every character hides his or her true self,
and such responses to death are necessarily performative and rehearsed. Death
here becomes part of a wider social display, its physical reality subsumed beneath
the creation of a particular emotional response. There are similarities here with the
statues erected to remember soldiers killed in battle, where the brutality of wartime
death is denied in favour of heroic propaganda. Like these statues, this detective
novel renders such deaths part of a wider narrative: the accidental death of a
vagrant is investigated, along with the murder of a wealthy businessman. Before

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Hercule Poirot is able to untangle the true motives behind the crimes, all of the
victims appear as the possible focus of the murderer, and all are part of a
community of the fallen, like the war dead. The detective novel here is the
champion of meaningful death, the investigations of the detective acting in the same
way as mourning, to keep the dead from losing their individuality.
However, even as mourning aims to protect the deceased’s status as an
individual, its wider importance for social coherence is revealed. Funeral traditions
are founded in long-held beliefs about the powers and dangers of the dead, beliefs
founded on the physical realities of putrefaction as well as the necessity of replacing
the individual in the social fabric. As José Gil argues, ‘[a]fter death, the presence of
the deceased among the living would become intolerable without a set of strategies
in place to respond practically to these problems’ (42), and the practices of
mourning are thus not merely emotional but also pragmatic.
Another major element in the relation between the war and detective fiction
is the laws and practices of inheritance. In a society based upon individual
property, the fate of one’s worldly goods after death must be subject to rigorous
protocol in order to prevent social conflict. The allure of inheritance and the
temptation to hasten its arrival are common motives for murder in the golden age
detective novel. The reading of the will (as well as the surrounding legal issues) and
the responses to its provisions, play a central role in the plot, often one more
prominent than the funeral. In fact, the will and the possessions that it represents
are depicted as constituting the very identity of the deceased. My second chapter
will examine how the laws surrounding death and inheritance function in the
golden age detective novel, and how, through legislation, the state intrudes into the
individual experience of death.
In the war, death had been both sanctioned and controlled by the state, and
in the detective novel we see how, through inheritance, this control extends into
peacetime. Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), depicts the
dangers of inheritance: money is left by the father to the stepmother, who then
exerts an ‘unnatural’ degree of power over her stepsons, and remarries an
unsuitable younger man. When the stepmother is murdered and her husband found
guilty, the acceptable progression of wealth, land and power is restored, as English
masculinity in its appropriate form is triumphant. This rehearsing of a ‘good’ death,
one that strengthens the social order rather than challenging it, would have been

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