Page 49 →FiveThe Poet of Genre Fiction

How do we define the distinction between literary fiction and genre fiction? Critics know it when they see it, though they are hard-pressed to define it, for it is virtually impossible to circumscribe the aesthetic bliss of the former and the purported limitations of the latter. Furthermore, while it stands as one of the overarching goals of this chapter to render this binary ridiculous by exposing its useless prejudices, it is virtually impossible to extricate analysis of Christie’s fictions from this divide, for the history of her books is also the history of their interpretation through this lens, particularly because she applied it to herself and her fictions. Christie did not shy from appraising her reputation as an author of genre fiction with sardonic good humor, referring to herself as “the mistress of low-brow detection.”¹ In a more extended meditation on her career in the literary arts she similarly downplayed her achievements: “I drifted into writing. I tried music first—piano and singing. Then I wrote a story, and had it accepted by a magazine. That encouraged me. I think I’ve written seventy-five books. I’m a regular sausage factory. You can write anywhere, thank goodness! It must be awful to be a sculptor.”² Why should one think of an author who compares herself to a sausage factory—grinding down the meat and marrow of a story through an imaginary mill until the product is extruded ready for consumption—as an artist, when she herself appears so amenable to devaluing her accomplishments? Christie’s fellow Queen of Crime, Dorothy Sayers, similarly downplayed the aesthetic possibilities of their preferred genre: “It [the detective story] does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of literary achievement”³ With Christie, Sayers, and other writers of detective fiction diminishing their personal accomplishments and their chosen métier, any neutral, let alone positive, appraisal of the genre and its authors’ achievements must overcome this defensive crouch built into the discussion. Even if one conceded the arguments of Christie’s naysayers and agreed that her fiction lacks aesthetic merit, her literary style and narrative techniques surely affected her Page 50 →reception and thus illuminate why she remains one of the mostly widely read English-language authors in history.

Within longstanding, virtually sacrosanct, assessments of literary value, poetry occupies the opposite, and esteemed, end of the literary spectrum from detective fiction. Only the most outrageous and least credible of iconoclasts would claim that all poetry fails in its aesthetic objectives, thereby denying any worth to the works of such greats as Alexander Pope and Phillis Wheatley, Langston Hughes and Adrienne Rich; in contrast, several critics, including those quoted previously in this volume, blast all of detective fiction as inherently worthless. Given these conditions, it is instructive to recalibrate Christie’s achievements by contextualizing her narrative structure and prose style through her poetic efforts, even though most readers view Christie primarily as a novelist and perhaps secondarily as a playwright.

Both of these perspectives overlook her interest in poetry, the field in which she first notched impressive accolades. Considering an early poetic effort, she dismissed her aesthetic achievements—“Could anything be more suggestive of a complete lack of literary talent?”—but she soon surpassed these juvenile attempts and published several poems over a decade prior to The Mysterious Affair at Styles: “By the age of seventeen or eighteen, however, I was doing better…. I sent one or two poems to The Poetry Review. I was very pleased when I got a guinea prize. After that, I won several prizes and also had poems printed there” (Autobiography, 179). Over the course of her career she published two collections of poems—The Road of Dreams in 1924 and Poems in 1973—as well as Star over Bethlehem and Other Stories, a collection of short stories and poems, in 1965. The eponymous protagonist of her play Akhnaton devotes his life to the arts and poetry, and many of his lines are written in verse, in contrast to the other characters who speak only in prose. With reviews parallel to the critical drubbing meted out to her detective fiction, several critics have lambasted her poetic efforts; Michael Holquist tersely denounced them as “vile.”⁴ At the same time, Christie’s attention to poetry throughout her life contradicts any reductive assumption that she typed, rather than crafted, her sentences. Again creating a dialectic tension between an assumed binary, this time between the high arts of poetry and literature and the purportedly low art of genre fiction, Christie negotiated the limitations of the murder mystery, particularly in regard to its inherent restrictions on settings, characters, and plots, while imbuing her stories with a rich aesthetic depth and style.

To begin to address these issues in Christie’s fiction, it is helpful to ponder what precisely is accomplished by presuming—or enforcing—a binary division between genre fiction and literary fiction. Critics have long viewed the two modes hierarchically, as John Cawelti explains: “Because such formulaic types as mystery and adventure stories are used as a means of temporary escape Page 51 →from the frustrations of life, stories in these modes are commonly defined as subliterature (as opposed to literature), entertainment (as opposed to serious literature), popular art (as opposed to fine art), lowbrow culture (as opposed to highbrow), or in terms of some other pejorative opposition.”⁵ The most provoking of these distinctions aligns genre fiction with entertainment, which thus implies that “serious literature” might very well not entertain its readers, an assumption that belittles the achievements of many great authors. In a similar vein, Ken Gelder distinguishes between popular and literary fiction by stressing the former’s status “as ‘entertainment,’ its self-identification as a form of industrial production or ‘manufacture,’ and its commercial and merchandizing potential,” in contrast to which literary fiction is valorized as “more complicated, resisting ideological reduction, disfavoring its commercial identity, able to criticize rather than capitulate to capitalism, enmeshed in nothing less than life itself.”⁶ Such capitalistic critiques in the debate between genre fiction and literary fiction are almost risible: surely most authors of literary fiction would be quite pleased if more readers purchased their books and thus padded their royalties. Some readers will prefer Stratford-upon-Avon and its productions of Shakespeare’s plays over Universal Orlando’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter and its re-creations of J. K. Rowling’s fantasy fictions, but in a very real sense, both are theme park versions of the narratives—literary for the former, genre fiction for the latter—upon which they are based.

Assessing Christie’s place in these debates, Chris Ewers summarizes the double bind facing authors of genre fiction and the myopic vision of the critics attempting to uphold it: “Academic critics, in a dubious critical move, have classified Christie as a ‘lowbrow’ author, the type of writer who is devoured and then forgotten; conversely, they compensate writers of greater weight for their lack of sales by emphasizing how influential they are. By a reverse logic, the more you are read, the less impact you have.”⁷ Adding another wrinkle to this critical imbroglio, the imaginary line dividing genre fiction from literary fiction is further blurred by the concept of middlebrow literature. Nicola Humble defines this mediating genre as “one that straddles the divide between the trashy romance or thriller on the one hand, and the philosophically or formally challenging novel on the other: offering narrative excitement without guilt, and intellectual stimulation without undue effort.” Considering the detective novel as a subset of middlebrow literature, she adds, “the detective story forms an exception to the usual run of middlebrow novels; its ratiocinative elements offer … the illusion of an active, intellectually engaged reading, rather than a passive abandonment.”⁸ But why, one might wonder, does the middlebrow detective novel, or any novel, project “the illusion of an active, intellectually engaged reading”? Might this genre of fiction not actually provoke active, intellectually engaged reading? As the discussion of Raymond Chandler in the previous chapter Page 52 →mentions, some authors once dismissed as genre authors have metamorphosed into literary fiction authors, or are at least more widely respected than their first reviewers would have predicted. Passing the test of time, as writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe and Bram Stoker have achieved, is perhaps the surest way for a writer’s reputation to gain respect denied them during their lifetimes.

Christie’s writing is often faulted for her style, a chorus that she joined when comparing herself to her contemporaries in the field of literary fiction: “If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, or Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to copy them” (Autobiography, 394). Bowen, Spark, and Greene evince their unique styles as writers, yet their individual accomplishments do not preclude Christie’s ability to articulate a style unique to her and to detective fiction. As Jean-Jacques Lecercle argues, style is “an ambiguous, if not a paradoxical, concept. It designates singularity in language … but it also designates the language or the artistic practice of a group.”⁹ Christie’s idiosyncratic style is key to her appeal as a mystery writer, and it is also directly relevant to many attacks against the quality of her prose. Her writing—succinct, precise, and direct—represents her realization that the genre benefits from a quick pace: “Economy of wording, I think, is particularly necessary in detective stories” (Autobiography, 329). In an intriguing passage relevant to her own fiction, Christie recalls her mother’s words about Sir Walter Scott’s lengthy novels: “All these descriptions … Of course they are very good, and literary, but one can have too many of them” (Autobiography, 136–37). Christie eschewed such longwinded descriptive passages, and in Unfinished Portrait, her semi-autobiographical novel, the author Celia discloses that she “found local colour extremely elusive” (223). Celia’s publisher admonishes her: “You’ll never write well about anything you really know about, because you’ve got an honest mind. You can be imaginatively dishonest but not practically dishonest. You can’t write lies about something you know, but you’ll be able to tell the most splendid lies about something you don’t know” (235). Christie’s “honest mind” accepted her strengths and weaknesses as a writer, and she leaned into her strengths rather than wringing her hands over her weaknesses. One can readily imagine Christie’s novels running many pages longer if she described in detail the furnishings of Styles, or waxed rhapsodic over the currents of the Nile, or lavished eagle-eyed attention on any number of her other settings or characters, but it is more difficult to imagine how such changes would improve her novels.

Brevity is acknowledged as the soul of wit, not as the animating impulse behind great fiction, but brevity is key to Christie’s style. More so, she would have likely written even briefer novels had her publishers not encouraged her to write longer ones, as she noted: “I think myself that the right length for a detective story is fifty-thousand words. I know this is considered by publishers as Page 53 →too short” (Autobiography, 329). Further concerning the ideal length of mystery fiction, she added, “The short-story technique, I think, is not really suited to the detective story at all” (Autobiography, 329). Such a statement may to some degree surprise her readers, for not only did Christie write numerous short stories and short-story collections, but she also developed some of her masterworks from plots originally written in short-story format: Death on the Nile evolved from “Death on the Nile,” a short story in Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective; Evil under the Sun evolved from “Triangle at Rhodes,” a short story in Dead Man’s Mirror. Still, the short-story format precluded Christie from drawing together a full cast of characters and left her less room to arrange her clues and red herrings.

Christie’s novels benefit from her succinct style, and it is also apparent that she considered the aural quality of her words and sought to imbue them with a fresh, ear-catching flair. In plucky moments of metadiscourse, her characters comment favorably on her writing, such as when a character approves of the title of the book in which he appears: “Good title that, by the way. Lord Edge-ware Dies. Look well on a bookstall” (Thirteen at Dinner, 96). Likewise, in The Secret Adversary, Tommy Beresford speaks to Tuppence and comments on the quality of his (and thus Christie’s) words: “Remember that if Mr. Brown is all he is reported to be, it’s a wonder that he has not ere now done us to death. That’s a good sentence, quite a literary flavour about it” (42). Despite the tut-tuttings of certain critics, many of Christie’s novels do indeed evince “quite a literary flavour” about them, highlighting her keen attention to language. She has an ear for the alliterative and an eye for the outré, evident in the mention of the “Californian Cucumber King’s wife” (Parker Pyne, 15). Her metaphors often hit the mark, as in such phrases as “the kind of speculative interest she might have accorded to an odd sort of beetle” (Death on the Nile, 216) and her terse characterization of “the bluff breeziness of the ex-Naval man” (Dead Man’s Mirror, 87). Occasional inversions of word order create memorable turns of phrase, as in the following: “Merciless, these modern young women, and terrifyingly alive” (Murder in Three Acts, 23). Even many of Christie’s disparaging critics acknowledge her ear for dialogue, evident in such passages as “If a girl couldn’t fend for herself a bit, I don’t know where we’d all be” (Death in the Air, 115) and the following concise assessment: “That was stupid, but you are a stupid man” (Holiday for Murder, 195).

In fully evaluating Christie’s style, it must nonetheless be conceded that she succumbed to the allure of clichés—the bane of the literary writer—frequently. To look at a few examples, a car is described as “running like a dream” (Seven Dials Mystery, 35), and a character finds that “words failed her” (Seven Dials Mystery, 204). Another character is “jumpy as the proverbial cat” (Peril at End House, 15), with the unnecessary word proverbial underscoring Christie’s use of aphorisms. In one instance Poirot declaims in the manner of an aphoristic Page 54 →thesaurus: “There are many of your English idioms that describe him. The rough diamond! The self-made man! The social climber!” (Evil Under the Sun 125–26). A nonnative speaker of English, Poirot frequently employs clichés: ‘“For somewhere,’ said Poirot to himself, indulging in an absolute riot of mixed metaphors, ‘there is in the hay a needle, and among the sleeping dogs there is one on whom I shall put my foot, and by shooting the arrows into the air, one will come down and hit a glass house!’” (McGinty, 42). As Poirot’s words evince, even clichés can produce a pleasing literary affect when used self-consciously, as further evident when the narrator wryly comments on Poirot’s reliance on clichés—“One thing leads to another, as Hercule Poirot is fond of saying without much originality” (Labors of Hercules, 151)—which indicates Christie’s interest in developing Poirot’s character through his clichéd speech. In another instance, a character muses, “The world was at his feet. A phrase, but a good phrase” (Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? 35), which indicates that Christie realized she was employing a cliché but chose it regardless as an apt expression of her character’s perspective. Also, through their very overuse, clichés and aphorisms allow insight into the foibles of human nature, which stands as one of the enduring themes running across Christie’s fiction, as evident when her ancient Egyptian character Esa voices such bromides as “Handsome is as handsome does” and “There’s no fool like an old fool” (Death Comes, 17). When a character suggests, “First … we synchronize our watches,” the narrator reports, “This familiar literary phrase had a heartening effect” (At Bertram’s Hotel, 47). Surely Christie’s fiction would have achieved a stronger literary flavor if she edited out overused idioms, yet it is worth considering as well that she employed them to achieve such “heartening effects.” When a character muses over the phrase (and thus the title) Easy to Kill—“No wonder those words stuck in your mind…. They’ll stick in mine—all my life!” (171)—readers hear Christie’s attention to evocative phrases, even ones that had lost their luster of freshness.

Christie employs her direct, crisp style to immediately engage the reader in her fictions, thus merging her diction with the narrative tactic of hooking the reader’s interest. One of Captain Hasting’s narrative musings illustrates Christie’s attention to hooks:

I believe that a well-known anecdote exists to the effect that a young writer, determined to make the commencement of his story forcible and original enough to catch and rivet the attention of the most blasé of editors, penned the following sentence:

“Hell!” said the Duchess. (Murder on the Links, 7)

There Is a Tide … similarly snags readers’ attention with a brief statement likely recognized as a universal truth by anyone who has ever participated in a social organization—“In every club there is a club bore” (1)—and The Moving Finger Page 55 →immediately plunges readers into the mystery at hand: “I have often recalled the morning when the first of the anonymous letters came” (1). It would be difficult to resist reading the paragraphs that follow this simple but engrossing opening sentence.

Moving forward from the minefield that questions of style and aesthetics so often detonate, it is apparent that literary fiction and genre fiction differ markedly in a key way: Literary fiction is remarkably unbound by expectations of plot, style, and narrative conventions, whereas genre fiction must to some degree adhere to the conventions of the given genre. That is to say, the only requirement for literary fiction is that the characters, settings, plots, and themes be deemed sufficiently engaging or otherwise absorbing to win the reader’s attention and praise, whereas successful genre fiction must similarly meet these minimal requirements while adhering to the restrictions of its particular field. Too often genre fiction is assessed according to the parameters of literary fiction; only very rarely is literary fiction assessed according to the parameters of genre fiction. As Michael Holquist argues, detective fiction must be reappraised according to its unique particularities: “The detective story’s sketchy characters, its narrow settings, its rejection of mimesis in the service of structure all reveal themselves now as a quite proper—and sophisticated—lust to know its own discourse”; he adds further that the genre “consists of an austere, minimalist purity of narrative in which the story is the discovery of its own plot.”¹⁰ Precisely because murder mysteries revolve around the narrow circumstances of an enigmatic death, an investigation, and a resolution to this mystery, their characters, settings, and plots must be tailored to these requirements, despite the likelihood that these characters, settings, and plots, virtually by definition, will appear markedly dissimilar from those of literary fiction. As with those critics who snubbed Christie’s style without adequately considering the terse aesthetics of the mystery novel, others have criticized her characters, settings, and plots without sufficient attention paid to the generic constrains placed on them.

In a key line of critique against genre fiction, its characters are denounced as hollow figures with little interiority, such that they can be condensed solely to their narrative functions. Raymond Chandler dismissed much detective fiction (and thus tacitly praised his more hardboiled style) by criticizing its characters: “to get the surprise murderer you fake character, which hits me hardest of all, because I have a sense of character.”¹¹ To see Christie’s characters as “fakes,” however, misunderstands the foundational premise of the murder mystery, in which all characters must be approached as if they might be cloaking their motives for murder. Mystery novels require three roles—the victim, the killer, and the detective—with additional suspects and miscellaneous individuals rounding out the cast of characters. Critics such as Julian Symons contend that many mystery novelists strip their characters of personalities to accentuate their pivotal Page 56 →functions in the unfolding plots: “In constructing the detective story as a perfect mechanism, however, the Golden Age writers sacrificed almost everything else. Their work pandered to the taste of readers who wanted every character de-gutted so that there should be nothing even faintly disturbing about the fate of victims or murderers.”¹² Symons oddly claims that readers of murder mysteries are squeamish about the murders depicted within the genre, and thus authors protect their readers from any emotional attachment to their characters. Any such barrier between readers and characters, however, more accurately represents the author’s need to obscure their multiple characters’ multifarious and often unstated objectives, rather than any predetermination that readers should not be discomforted by the murder of a fictional being.

Further to this point, and within the rudimentary distinction between flat and round characters, Christie’s characters would ostensibly merit critique because they are uniformly flat. Along these lines, the vast majority of the detectives and inspectors who attempt to solve the crimes alongside Miss Marple appear interchangeable and virtually indistinguishable, and only the most devoted of Christie’s readers could meaningfully distinguish between Superintendent Nash in The Moving Finger and Inspector Curry in Murder with Mirrors, or others of their ilk. Their narrative purpose is the same: to be outshined by Miss Marple’s brilliance. In The Complete Christie: An Agatha Christie Encyclopedia, Matthew Bunson describes one of these men as “a discreet officer who does not seek headlines” and the other as “approach[ing] the problem with calm and confident efficiency,” but does it matter which is which?¹³ The name of Detective Inspector Bland of Dead Man’s Folly rightly suggests that he is a rather forgettable, and thus aptly named, character. Even many of Christie’s recurring characters evince little maturation over the course of their appearances. Colonel Race appears in four novels—The Man in the Brown Suit, Cards on the Table, Death on the Nile, and Remembered Death—but he is sketched vaguely and with little individuality: “Race was an out-of-door man, essentially the empire builder type—most of his life had been spent abroad” (Remembered Death, 89). Similarly, Dr. John Stillingfleet first surfaces in “The Dream” of The Regatta Mystery, is mentioned briefly in Sad Cypress, and more than twenty-five years later emerges for his third (and final) outing in Third Girl. After assisting Poirot with his investigations, Stillingfleet’s storyline concludes with his engagement to Norma Restarick, the woman who enigmatically claimed to Poirot that she might have committed a murder at the novel’s onset. Other than his impending nuptials, Stillingfleet’s multiple appearances do not converge in a triumphant narrative arc, or culminate in a deep emotional insight, or any typical marker of a fully rounded character.

Relevant to these insights, while Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple exhibit strikingly different personalities, they share precisely the same narrative Page 57 →function—to solve the mystery that perplexes all other characters—and thus, because of this symmetry of purpose, it is quite possible to imagine, for example, Miss Marple solving The Murder on the Orient Express while vacationing abroad (as later occurs in A Caribbean Mystery) or Hercule Poirot solving The Body in the Library (or any other mystery set in an English village or manor house). Moreover, neither Hercule Poirot nor Miss Marple shifts notably before readers’ eyes. They advance in years from old to even older, evident in the transitions for the former from Cat among the Pigeons to Halloween Party (in which one character says of Poirot, “I don’t think that one can rely on the faculties of a man of that age”; 196) and for the latter from A Caribbean Mystery to Nemesis, but they do not reach deeper insights into the human condition than they previously realized. Poirot enters the world as a retired detective, continues the work of a detective in retirement, and does not radically shift his worldview in any way. No emotional development is evident in the miniscule changes in his character, such as when he replaces his “large turnip-faced watch of earlier days” with a “neat wrist-watch” (“The Dream,” Regatta, 126). His repeated mantra, “I do not approve of murder” (e.g., Sad Cypress, 89), while laudable, does not exhibit higher level moral or philosophical thinking, with the singular exception of the storyline of Curtain, in which he must become a killer to stop a killer. Miss Marple solves crimes owing to her detailed understanding of various personality types—“It’s just that living in a village as I do, one gets to know so much about human nature” (“Strange Jest,” Three Blind Mice, 74), she states—which has left her with a rather jaundiced view of humanity as a whole: “Miss Marple seldom gave anyone the benefit of the doubt; she invariably thought the worst, and nine times out of ten, so she insisted, she was right in so doing” (At Bertram’s Hotel, 85). Beyond the fact that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple exhibit little emotional development, they live inherently implausible lives, as Miss Marple realizes: “No, it has just happened that I have found myself in the vicinity of murder rather more often than would seem normal … I do not like to write it down, but it does appear that murders seem to happen in my vicinity” (Nemesis, 54). Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, from this perspective, represent flat characters incapable of development or growth, whose repeated encounters with murder leave them just short of farcical, in terms of their believability as fully developed characters reflective of the human condition.

One might well ask in reply, why must characters experience emotional growth to be viewed as fully engaging, sympathetic, and recognizably human characters? Evaluating varieties of characters over centuries of literature, Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg conclude, “The concept of the developing character who changes inwardly is quite a late arrival in narrative,”¹⁴ and one can list numerous characters of literary classics who do not notably shift in their perceptions of the world: Odysseus, Beowulf, the knights of the Arthurian legend. More Page 58 →so, in a discussion of Hamlet in The Rose and the Yew Tree, Christie recognized that dynamic characters reflected a shift in narrative conventions: “Hamlet, with his musings, his ‘to be or not to be,’ was an entirely alien figure to his age. So much so that then and for long afterwards critics wrote condemning Hamlet as a play because of the fatal weakness of plot…. It is quite unbelievable to them that there could be a play about character” (93). Thus, Christie acknowledges this key shift in the historical construction of fictional characters, which suggests as well her understanding of the necessity of creating characters not out of deference to the aesthetic preferences of her age but to the narrative needs of her fiction. Expanding on related points, E. M. Forster, in his classic study Aspects of the Novel, encourages readers to appraise characters not according to universal parameters but to the idiosyncratic standards of a particular piece of fiction: “a novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not those of daily life, and … a character in a novel is real when it lives in accordance with such laws.”¹⁵ The characters of detective fiction must “live in accordance with such laws,” those upon which the genre depends and those by which Christie’s characters abide.

These converging viewpoints demonstrate that a virtually insurmountable challenge for writers of mystery fiction is to create characters who fulfill their narrative function—as suspects in a murder mystery—and who embody the complexity of fully developed human beings. Whereas realist literary fiction is often lauded for the lifelike portrayals of its characters, the basic premise of a murder mystery demands a roster of characters who would conceivably kill their enemies—mercifully, a grossly unrealistic prerequisite for real life, in which most of us can travel home for a holiday dinner without any real fear of murder disrupting the festivities, even if we occasionally squabble with our parents and siblings or hold on to unexpressed hopes for a generous inheritance. Christie recognized the inherent implausibility of creating lifelike characters for her novels, ventriloquizing her views through her alter-ego Ariadne Oliver: “Say what you like, it’s not natural for five or six people to be on the spot when B is murdered and all to have a motive for killing B—unless, that is, B is absolutely madly unpleasant and in that case nobody will mind whether he’s been killed or not, and doesn’t care in the least who’s done it” (Pale Horse, 11). That is to say, the mystery novel simultaneously requires verisimilitude, in that the events could plausibly occur in real life, while also requiring a cast of inherently implausible characters, any one of whom might be a killer.

Stock characters play a vital role in murder mysteries, and Christie did not shy away from employing them in her fiction, as evident in the cast of characters of So Many Steps to Death, in which she identifies three successive characters as either “typical” or a “type”:

MRS. calvin baker—A typical American woman tourist—talkative, energetic, curious. Maybe she’s even too typical.

Page 59 →janet hetherington—Another type: the dour English traveller plagued by currency restrictions. Her knitting suffers, but she keeps a sharp eye about her.

henri laurier—Surely he’s typical, too: A Frenchman bent on being gallant and charming and making small talk about the weather.

At the same time that mystery writers often employ stock characters, readers know they can never trust any character’s description at face value. The sketch of Mrs. Calvin Baker warns, “Maybe she’s even too typical”—and thus perhaps the character’s surface presentation does not align with her deeper interiority. Yet if a character’s surface presentation does not align with a deeper interiority, the framework of the stock character has been fractured. Part of the mystery of a mystery novel, therefore, is determining which characters are stock characters and which assume the mien of a stock character to camouflage their true identity as the villain—another role that might be dismissed as a stock figure but that requires sufficient motivation for the mystery to remain credible.

Furthermore, Christie realized that any emotional development that her characters might be expected to experience occurred in the narrative time prior to the commencement of her novels. In the prologue of Towards Zero, solicitor Mr. Treves—soon to be dispatched by the murderer—regales his audience with his views on criminology: “I like a good detective story … But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes—with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day” (xi; cf. Christie’s play Towards Zero, in which Mr. Treves expresses similar sentiments; The Mousetrap and Other Plays [TMAOP], 491). As Mr. Treves perceives, the inciting experiences that mold a human being into a murderer are almost uniformly undepicted in detective fiction, and thus static characters stand as virtually a prerequisite of the genre—but only if the reader is so incapacious and unimaginative as not to envision the potential evolution of an ordinary person into a murderer. As Anna Katharine Green explained of her characters and their misdeeds: “Crime must touch our imagination by showing people, like ourselves, but incredibly transformed by some overwhelming motive.”¹⁶ Given these principles, it could be posited that detective fiction, rather than curtailing readers’ imaginations through the use of stock characters, activates their imaginations as they disentangle characters’ back stories which, to some degree, require their furtive disclosure, even to the point of dissembling.

As Christie fashions a range of intriguing characters within the parameters of detective fiction, so too do her settings evince the particular challenges of the genre and her wily negotiation of them. For all fiction, whether genre or Page 60 →literary, settings serve the essential purpose of grounding the characters in a recognizable time and place. Even when characters resist the customs and mores of their locations, settings establish the necessary backdrop for their actions. Readers may encounter a locale unfamiliar or unknown within their personal experiences, yet the author must then communicate its essential features so that they understand its landscape, its culture, and its inhabitants. Indeed, the very concept of regional literature is predicated on the principle that it is virtually impossible to imagine some narratives transported to unfamiliar soils. One almost suffers from whiplash imagining Toni Morrison’s novels set in eighteenth-century England or Flannery O’Connor’s short stories set in the twenty-first-century American West.

Christie’s novels, however, rely on regionalism for their quintessential Englishness while the settings themselves are virtually interchangeable, even when Christie leaves England altogether. Whether a particular victim is dispatched on the Blue Train or on the Orient Express, whether at the youth hostel of Hickory Dickory Death or at Bertram’s Hotel, or in any one of Christie’s nearly identical English manor houses or estates, the setting is essential yet oddly superfluous, rarely rising above the level of a simple backdrop. On many occasions, Christie viewed her settings in a utilitarian manner and minimalized their specificity. For instance, when she abandoned her primarily English settings for Murder in Mesopotamia, her narrator, Amy Leatheran, advises readers that they will see very little of the regional landscape: “I think I’d better make it clear right away that there isn’t going to be any local color in this story. I don’t know anything about archaeology and I don’t know that I very much want to” (34)—a point Christie echoes in her autobiography Come Tell Me How You Live: “there will be no beautiful descriptions of scenery, no treating of economic problems, no racial reflections, no history” (xiv). With Death Comes as the End, Christie relocated her standard mystery plot both geographically and chronologically, yet as she explained in her “Author’s Note,” the setting is curiously insignificant to the mystery at hand: “The action of this book takes place on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes in Egypt about 2000 B.C. Both places and time are incidental to the story. Any other place at any other time would have served as well” (“Author’s Note”). Death Comes as the End could have been set in Alexandria in 300 b.c.e. or in Baghdad in 800 C.E., or for the most part, even in England in the 1940s, with mostly surface edits. The characters’ relationships would remain the same, the motivation for the many murders would remain the same, even if the widow Renisenb might be renamed Mary and the Nile replaced by the Thames in deference to the transposed setting.

Christie acknowledged that critics faulted her for frequently setting her novels in country estates, and her reply to this point suggests her slight impatience with critiques from those who did not recognize the peculiar demands of Page 61 →murder mysteries and again expected her to write her novels with the freedoms granted to authors of literary fiction. As she explained, “The one thing that infuriates me is when people complain that I always set my books in country houses. You have to be concerned with a house: with where people are. You can make it a hotel, or a train, or a pub—but it’s got to be where people are brought together. And I think it must be a background that people will recognise, because explanations are so boring. If you set a detective story in, say, a laboratory, I don’t think people would enjoy it so much.”¹⁷ One might well reply that a laboratory could serve admirably as the setting of a murder mystery. For example, this hypothetical laboratory could be helmed by an imperious researcher and populated with a gaggle of graduate students and interns murderously intent on taking credit for a breakthrough discovery that promises ample financial rewards and international renown. Christie’s counterpoint would likely be that, even within such a setting, a pseudo-scientific and detailed description of this laboratory would simply divert attention from the novel’s investment in the characters’ emotional responses, to the extent that one of them metamorphoses into a murderer. Finally, it must be acknowledged that, whereas her settings play a rather negligible and background role in most of Christie’s novels, They Came to Baghdad effectively employs its setting in Baghdad. This novel thus demonstrates by counterexample that Christie envisioned appropriate settings for her fiction by recognizing the varying degrees to which a setting influences a given genre.

In an amusing moment touching on the challenges of plotting murder mysteries, Inspector Japp comments on mystery novelist Daniel Michael Clancy, one of the suspects in Death in the Air: “I don’t think it’s healthy for a man to be always brooding over crime and detective stories. Reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas in his head.” Poirot dryly replies, “It is certainly necessary for a writer to have ideas in his head” (63). In her detailed plotting Christie exceeded the achievements of so many other writers precisely because, in a transposition of their respective qualities, literary fiction requires emotionally resonant characters in a finely drawn setting, yet the plots of these novels might be rather minimalistic. For example, in their attention to the emotional development of their protagonists, many bildungsromans are extolled as literary masterpieces, including Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913), Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), and Diran Adebayo’s Some Kind of Black (1997). The plots of these novels, however, are typically episodic, allowing insights into the characters but without the necessity that the various plot points click together like a piece of clockwork on the final page.

Even though Christie was criticized for using “narrative simply as a way of structuring the detective puzzle,” such a critique is virtually meaningless, Page 62 →for how can one write a detective story without using narrative as a way of structuring the detective story?¹⁸ Instead, it is more helpful to recognize that mystery novels require specific narrative structures, as Pierre Bayard theorizes: “The detective thriller does not function as a seamless whole but works in two successive movements. The first of these, which lasts for most of the book, is a movement of opening meaning and tends to multiply leads and solutions…. The second movement, which intervenes at the end of the book, is a movement of foreclosing meaning. It brutally eliminates different possibilities and privileges a single one, charged with clarifying all proposed mysteries in retrospect while giving the reader the feeling that it was there in front of him all the time, protected by his blindness.”¹⁹ R. Austin Freeman, author of the Dr. Thorndyke mysteries, likewise focuses on the necessity of the conclusion for cogently completing a mystery novel, such that no other ending could appear to fall into place so convincingly: “To the critical reader the quality in a detective story which takes precedence of all others is conclusiveness. It is the quality which … yields that intellectual satisfaction that the reader seeks; and it is the quality which is the most difficult to attain, and which costs more than any other in care and labour to the author.”²⁰ Eliot Singer observes of the murder mystery’s foundational structure that “there [must] be an apparent crime (usually a murder), that someone seek to solve that crime, and that the reader not learn of the solution until the final epiphany”; he assesses Christie’s accomplishments not primarily from a literary perspective but from a riddling one, determining that her success arose in her ability to devise “a satisfactory solution to a mystery,” one that “must be acceptable as rationally superior to those alternatives that the reader has conceived.”²¹ As these viewpoints collectively evince, the narrative structure of mystery novels is simultaneously protean yet rigid, adaptable but conventional.

Cognizant of these challenging conditions, authors of mystery fiction face rather constrained possibilities for their endings, and it is again useful to contrast these strictures with the freedoms of literary fiction, in which a variety of endings can be imagined. Jane Eyre ends happily with Jane’s marriage to Rochester, but it could end equally effectively if Jane left Rochester to pursue further her journey of self-discovery. Imagining Christie’s novels with different killers, however, would require their plots to be reformulated in fundamental ways. (The exception to this general principle is evident in the theatrical adaptation of Appointment with Death, for which Christie exonerated the novel’s killer and implicated a different character as the killer, with a different motive.) Moreover, the stringent limitations on the narrative structures of murder mysteries open an innovative manner for reading them, one by and large untransmittable to literary fiction: in reverse order. As one character explains to another in Christie’s The Burden, some texts afford a variant path of reading that eschews the Page 63 →expected pattern of moving from beginning to end: “I take a look at the start, get some idea of what it’s all about, then I go on to the end and see where the fellow has got to, and what he’s been trying to prove. And then, then I go back and see how he’s got there and what’s made him land up where he did. Much more interesting” (55). Rather than consuming mystery novels in a linear fashion—in the terms of Gustav Freytag and his classic analysis of narrative structure, from the introduction (or exposition), to the rising action (or complication), to the climax, to the falling action (or return), and finally to the catastrophe (or dénouement)—some readers of mystery novels (including this author’s maternal grandmother) commence with the introduction / exposition, turn to the catastrophe / dénouement, and then read the book for the pleasure of seeing the clues that they would likely have missed without first knowing the novel’s conclusion.²²

Regarding the plots of detective fiction, the simple requirement that a murder mystery include a murder severely constrains the author’s creativity. The lion’s share of most mystery novels details the investigation of the crime, and here too the author is challenged to maintain the reader’s interest throughout passages depicting the detective interviewing the various suspects. Again, the basic structure of such a plot requires little extraneous information beyond dialogue and brief descriptions of settings that might provide clues, and so the author must, in effect, camouflage the simplicity of the structure by changing settings, introducing subplots, slipping in red herrings, and other such tactics. In a telling passage, Hastings indicates that interviews qua conversations dominate his recollection of events: “My narrative of the days spent at Styles must necessarily be somewhat rambling. In my recollection of it, it presents itself to me as a series of conversations—of suggestive words and phrases that etched themselves into my consciousness” (Curtain, 43). With Hastings’s words Christie tacitly acknowledges the challenges of camouflaging conversations as narrative action, yet the conversations between the detective and the suspects occupy the narrative space between the crime and its resolution. Christie’s unique ability as a writer is evident in her ability to keep the story progressing despite these limitations; as Ariadne Oliver states: “What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up” (Cards on the Table, 51).

Along with the attacks on her style, characters, settings, and plots, another reason why Christie’s murder mysteries have received such a critical drubbing emerges in the fact that her career largely coincides with the rise of modernist literature, which innovated new storytelling techniques, including stream-of-conscious narration, fragmented perspectives, and alienated protagonists. Resisting these tides, Christie preferred a more straightforward narrative style as represented by such writers she revered as Charles Dickens and Alexandre Dumas. She cited Bleak House as her favorite of Dickens’s novels and detailed Page 64 →the period when “the works of Alexandre Dumas in French … entranced me” (Autobiography 137).²³ Christie’s novels, with their linear plots told by third-person, and occasional first-person, narrators, appear uninterested in developing new narrative styles, yet Christie herself read widely in modernist literature. As Merja Makinen notes, The Hollow echoes key themes of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, primarily in their attention to women artists pursuing their visions,²⁴ and Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns align Christie’s “theatrical procedures … with their emphasis on character” to “those of such modernist dramatists as Yeats, with his interest in ‘masks,’ or Brecht, who sees character as above all a way of highlighting social convention, radically foregrounding the characteristics of a given scene.”²⁵ In recalling her reading history, Christie acknowledged her debts to the premier modernist poet T. S. Eliot, evident in the title of the Mary Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree, an allusion to his Four Quartets: “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree / Are of equal duration.”²⁶

In contrast to these modernist touches, at numerous points throughout her novels Christie obliquely indicates her lack of appreciation for innovative literary and artistic forms. Indeed, the character Raymond West, Miss Marple’s nephew, offers little narrative purpose other than for Christie to satirize modern literary fiction, such as when she records his reaction to being mistaken for an author of popular fiction. “‘I don’t write detective stories,’ said Raymond West, horrified at the mere idea” (“Greenshaw’s Folly,” Double Sin, 133), with his shock establishing the contrast between his literary ideals and the dross of genre fiction. Christie’s narrators pointedly distinguish between literary success and financial success, as measured in the sales of West’s books. “Although Raymond West was a ‘big name’ in literature, he could hardly be described as a best-seller. Though softening a bit with the advent of middle-age, his books dealt bleakly with the sordid side of life” (“Greenshaw’s Folly,” Double Sin, 120), the narrator declares, with a similar point made in Sleeping Murder: “Raymond West was a well-known (rather than popular) novelist” (11). Notwithstanding her nephew’s opinions, Miss Marple frequently expresses her impatience with modernist fiction. In her typical self-effacing manner, she first disqualifies her opinion—“I know that in comparison with you young people I’m not clever at all”—but then delivers a withering denouncement of modernist fiction and art: “Raymond writes those very modern books all about rather unpleasant young men and women—and Joan paints those very remarkable pictures of square people with curious bulges on them” (“Miss Marple Tells a Story,” Regatta, 111). In Sleeping Murder, Raymond West lauds the play They Walked Without Feet as “absolutely the most significant piece of drama for the last twenty years,” but Gwenda’s reaction indicates her preference for entertainment over edification, as the narrator reports that she “flinched slightly at the prospect of They Walked Without Feet, Page 65 →but supposed she might enjoy it—only the point about ‘significant’ plays was that you usually didn’t” (16). Initially similar to Raymond West in his literary ambitions, Edmund Swettenham, the struggling novelist of A Murder Is Announced, describes his efforts in literary modernism: “I began writing a novel. Rather good it was. Pages about an unshaved man getting out of bed and what he smelt like, and the gray streets, and a horrible old woman with dropsy and a vicious young tart who dribbled down her chin—and they all talked interminably about the state of the world and wondered what they were alive for” (225). He renounces these efforts to write a farce, in the recognition that many readers desire entertainment over edification, in an apt echoing of Christie’s career.

As much as Christie is most remembered for her detective fiction, her literary fiction—the six novels published under the nom de plume Mary Westmacott —allows for a deeper assessment of her talents, ambitions, and relationship to modernist literature. What is perhaps most striking about the Westmacott novels is their vastly differing narrative interests: the künstlerroman of musician Vernon Deyre in Giant’s Bread; the thinly veiled autobiography of Unfinished Portrait; the searing psychological profile of a woman who realizes—and then chooses to forget—her personal failings in Absent in the Spring; the intersection of political and erotic intrigues in The Rose and the Yew Tree; the intergenera-tional struggles and rivalries of a mother and daughter in A Daughter’s a Daughter; and the charged sibling dynamics of The Burden. Christie’s Westmacott novels garnered high praise from several contemporary reviewers, evident in Orville Prescott’s New York Times review of Absent in the Spring, which he calls a “mordantly clever story that is in some danger of being overlooked,” observing that “Miss Westmacott strips her heroine of every shred of character and then finishes her brilliant satire with a stunning and absolutely inevitable climax.”²⁷ The New York Times reviewer of Unfinished Portrait affirms that the novel “is worth reading for its sympathetic—and sometimes very amusing—account of [the protagonist’s] childhood.”²⁸ In her forays away from detective fiction into the realm of literary fiction, Christie demonstrated the artificiality of this divide, proving herself adept in both métiers.

If we accept the hypothesis that in many instances the division between genre fiction and literary fiction dissolves when assessing the great variety of fiction as a whole, it is nonetheless clear that this distinction remains of critical importance for marketing and selling books. That is to say, as a work of genre fiction may evince notable literary accomplishments, and as a work of literary fiction may engage deeply with the tropes of genre fiction, publishers market their books to maximize sales, which frequently involves pigeonholing them into recognizable genres. Obviously, Christie mostly wrote mystery novels; it is neither slander nor praise to state this fact and to observe these books were marketed as such. In complementary contrast, Christie’s publishers sought to Page 66 →frame the Mary Westmacott novels, which lean more toward literary fiction than to genre fiction, as romances. Christie includes romance elements in many of her mystery novels, such as the courtship and marriage of Anne Beddingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit and of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford in The Secret Adversary, but she appeared impatient with the genre as a whole, evident in a satirical moment in The Clocks when the narrator comments on Naked Love, the newest manuscript of author Armand Levine: “Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested—as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine’s readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography. In spite of lurid jackets and provocative titles, his sales went down every year” (2). As this brief incident indicates, Christie realized that longstanding generic tropes can deaden a romance novel if deployed overextensively. Situating the Westmacott novels as romances, Christie’s publishers dubbed The Burden “a novel of romance and mystery,” and on the back cover added, “Under the name of Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie has also written Absent in the Spring and A Daughter’s a Daughter. Her stories of romantic intrigue are among the finest in the genre.”²⁹ The back cover of A Daughter’s a Daughter praises it as a “suspenseful novel of love and passion,” and The Rose and the Yew Tree is similarly lauded as a “probing and suspenseful novel that reveals the conflicting passions of two men—and the woman they both wanted.” While these brief descriptions are true on a surface level, they camouflage Christie’s forays in literary fiction under the rubric of romance, thus obscuring the extent of their deeper plots and the liberties she takes with this form.

Similar in style to her mystery fiction, Christie’s Westmacott novels push their plots forward energetically with crisp dialogue and brevity of expression, as Christie refrains from excessive descriptions. As the narrator of Unfinished Portrait declares: “I’m not going into details—this isn’t a chronicle of such things. There’s no need to describe the quaint little Spanish town, or the meal we had together at her hotel, or the way I had my luggage secretly conveyed from my hotel to the one she was staying at” (21). From Christie’s own perspective, Absent in the Spring represented the apex of her efforts: “Shortly after [Death Comes as the End], I wrote the one book [Absent in the Spring] that has satisfied me completely. It was a new Mary Westmacott, the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken. Through her own actions, her own feelings and thoughts, this would be revealed to the reader” (Autobiography, 484). The novel ends with the protagonist’s husband thinking of her, “You are alone and you always will be. But, please God, you’ll never know it” (Absent in the Spring, 192). It is a brief and powerful ending, one that conveys the protagonist’s limitations as a human being and her husband’s devoted attention to protecting her from this Page 67 →knowledge. As Gillian Gill theorizes, through the Westmacott pseudonym, Christie divulged more of her personal experiences and viewpoints to her readers than in the works published under her name: “Through the elaborate self-masking device of Mary Westmacott, Agatha Christie felt free to speak to the reader more directly and openly than anywhere else. The woman who had hated to ‘part with information’ and who had changed herself into the Mistress of Mystery felt an imperative need for at least one outlet for the expression of her own personality, experience, ideas, and emotions.”³⁰ Freed from the parameters of mystery fiction, the six Westmacott novels offer a wider view of Christie’s talents, with many showcasing her skill with modernist techniques.

To identify Agatha Christie as a “Poet of Genre Fiction” is to recognize the paradox of her accomplishments, as she negotiated the requirements of genre fiction against a sea of reviewers who too often assessed her writing as if she were attempting to be the next Virginia Woolf. While cranking away as a “sausage factory,” she penned novels that evince her ear for language, her recognition of the constraints of character, her judicious if minimal use of settings, and her attention to plots above virtually all other considerations. In this light, Christie’s early forays into poetry were not a side path on the road to genre fiction, but an early and instructive period in her growth as an artist.