Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

308 Pages·2016·2.72 MB·English

by  J.C Bernthal (auth.)

Queering
Agatha Christie
J.C. Bernthal
Revisiting the
Golden Age of
Detective Fiction
General Editor: Clive Bloom
Crime Files
Series Editor
Clive   Bloom
Professor Emeritus
Middlesex University
London
United Kingdom
Since its invention in the nineteenth century, detective fi ction has never
been more popular. In novels, short stories, fi lms, radio, television and
now in computer games, private detectives and psychopaths, poisoners
and overworked 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 fi ction. Every aspect of crime writing,
detective fi ction, gangster movie, true-crime exposé, police procedural
and post-colonial investigation is explored through clear and informative
texts offering comprehensive coverage and theoretical sophistication.
More information about this series at
http://www.springer.com/series/14927
J.C.   Bernthal
Queering Agatha
Christie
Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
J.C.   B ernthal
Independent Scholar, Norwich,
United Kingdom
Crime Files
ISBN 978-3-319-33532-2 ISBN 978-3-319-33533-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33533-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951265
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A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Elements of Chap. 2 were originally published under the title “‘Every
Healthy Englishman Longed to Kick Him’: Masculinity and Nationalism
in Agatha Christie’s C ards on the Table ” in C lues: A Journal of Detection ,
Vol. 32, No. 2, 2014 by McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.
This project would not have been possible without funding from the
Arts and Humanities Research Council, to whom many thanks. I would
like to thank Vike Martina Plock, Jana Funke, Lisa Downing, Nicola
Humble and Sian Harris for their priceless insights and guidance at vari-
ous stages. Christine Faunch and Hannah Lowry were wonderfully help-
ful with archive preparation. Thanks to Brittain Bright, Sarah Burton
and Chia-Ying Wu, who generously allowed access to their unpublished
research. This project has benefi ted from the expertise of great fi gures in
the Agatha Christie community: thanks to Tom Adams, Jared Cade, John
Curran, Sophie Hannah, P.D. James, and Mathew and Lucy Prichard. The
frustrations of writing have been greatly tempered by the love and support
of family: thank you to Gerald Pinner, Jenny, Carl, Deanna, Sam and Viola
Bernthal. I am deeply grateful to the editors at Palgrave Macmillan who
have worked on or supported this monograph: Clive Bloom, Benjamin
Doyle and April James. Final thanks to Alan Hooker, who has been the
greatest support of all.
v

C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
2 Constructing Agatha Christie 2 5
3 English Masculinity and Its Others 75
4 Femininity and Masquerade 1 21
5 Queer Children, Crooked Houses 1 61
6 Queering Christie on Television 2 13
7 Conclusion 263
Bibliography 271
Index 299
vii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
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 sub-
sequently. Early commentators were apt to agree with the crime fi ction
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 fi ction, combined with her stereotyped
characters and picturesque middle-class settings, created a literary land-
scape 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 “fi ctional 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 fi ction, to the extent that her name
appears in the O xford English Dictionary defi nition 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”
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1
J.C. Bernthal, Queering Agatha Christie,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33533-9_1
2 J.C. BERNTHAL
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 vic-
tim 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 fi gure of the doctor as described by
the historian and philosopher Michel Foucault: an authority fi gure who
reads the human body, identifi es and categorizes “diseases” (or, in the
detective’s case, clues) and fi nally 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 offi cial identity categories, human behaviour
would be defi ned very differently. Figures such as Judith Butler and Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick have critiqued apparently “natural” ways of categoriz-
ing 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 fi ction 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 fi ction 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 fi rst full queer reading of a “Golden Age” detec-
tive novelist, this book expands queer notions of archive and canonic-
ity. Despite the diversifi cation of queer theory in the twenty-fi rst century,