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Understanding Agatha Christie: Notes

Understanding Agatha Christie
Notes

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Notes

table of contents
  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. List of Illustrations
  7. Series Editor’s Preface
  8. The Mystery of Agatha Christie’s Titles
  9. One: Understanding Agatha Christie
  10. Two: Agatha Christie’s Life and Puzzling Persona
  11. Three: The Scofflaw of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction
  12. Four: The Hardboiled Queen of the Cozies
  13. Five: The Poet of Genre Fiction
  14. Six: The Tragicomic Themes of Christie’s Murders
    1. The Comedy of Christie’s Murders
    2. Christie’s Tragedies
  15. Seven: The Queer Insularity of Christie’s England
  16. Eight: Christie’s Murders at the Movies . . . and Why She Disliked Them
    1. Barry Sandler’s Camp Adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d
  17. Conclusion
  18. Notes
  19. Bibliography
  20. Index

Page 121 →Notes

one: Understanding Agatha Christie

  1. 1. Christie, Autobiography, 344.
  2. 2. Chandler, quoted in Sophia Hannah, “No One Should Condescend to Agatha Christie.”
  3. 3. James, Talking about Detective Fiction, 97–98.
  4. 4. Nabokov, quoted in Israel Shenker, “The Past Master of Mysteries.”
  5. 5. Sandbrook, “Clever-clogs Critics.”
  6. 6. Symons, Bloody Murder, 137.
  7. 7. Moon, “Agatha Christie,” 72.
  8. 8. Grossvogel, “Agatha Christie,” 265.
  9. 9. Kenney, “Detecting a Novel Use,” 127.
  10. 10. “New Mystery Stories,” BR25.
  11. 11. “Books: Murder Market,” 67.
  12. 12. Irvin, “New Mystery Stories,” 122.
  13. 13. Neimark, “Human Nature Is the Culprit,” BR49.
  14. 14. Trewin, “Mixed Weather,” 482.
  15. 15. Barnard, A Talent to Deceive, 123–24.
  16. 16. Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs, 211.
  17. 17. Gill, Agatha Christie, 7.
  18. 18. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 119.
  19. 19. The enduring and combustible issue of who determines which books belong to the literary canon—and whether such a canon exists—cannot be more than acknowledged here, but in suggesting that Wells, Verne, Shelley, Stoker, Poe, and Green have achieved the status of canonical authors, I refer to their inclusion in the Penguin Classics series. Indeed, it seems probable that several of Christie’s novels will join this list when the copyrights of her books expire.
  20. 20. Updike, “Agatha Christie and Beatrix Potter,” 52.

two: Agatha Christie’s Life and Puzzling Persona

  1. 1. In this chapter, I cite the following sources parenthetically: Agatha Christie’s Autobiography and Come Tell Me How You Live, Max Mallowan’s Mallowan’s Memoirs, Willa Page 122 →Petschek’s “Agatha Christie,” and Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie. To avoid confusion and redundancy, Agatha Christie and members of her family are referred to by their first names.
  2. 2. “Keeping Posted,” 108.
  3. 3. Grant, “A Tribute to Agatha Christie,” 106.
  4. 4. “15,000 Hunt Vainly for Mrs. Christie,” 1.
  5. 5. “Mrs. Christie Has Lost Memory,” 4.
  6. 6. “Mrs. Christie Has Lost Memory,” 4.
  7. 7. And Then There Were None was originally titled Ten Little N------, and it was also published as Ten Little Indians. Throughout this volume, I use the title And Then There Were None and phrase sentences to avoid using the original title while retaining an accurate account of Christie’s career.
  8. 8. Plain, “‘Tale Engineering,’” 180.
  9. 9. Green, Curtain Up, 1.
  10. 10. Agatha Christie, Introduction to Peter Saunder’s The Mousetrap Man, 7.
  11. 11. Tyler, “Curtains for Poirot,” 24.
  12. 12. Kingston, “The Ultimate Whodunit,” 45.
  13. 13. Spenser, The Faerie Queene, book 1, canto 40, lines 9–10.
  14. 14. Mochrie, “They Make Crime Pay,” 28.
  15. 15. Dyer, Stars, 22.
  16. 16. Redmond, Celebrity, 3.
  17. 17. Mathew Prichard, quoted in Green, Curtain Up, v; italics in the original.
  18. 18. Mathew Prichard, quoted in Culhane, “The Woman with a Knack for Murder,” 95.
  19. 19. Norman, Agatha Christie, 158.
  20. 20. Yiannitsaros, “‘Tea and scandal at four-thirty,’” 78.
  21. 21. “Mistress of Mystery,” 69.
  22. 22. Agatha Christie, quoted in “The Talk of the Town,” 24.
  23. 23. Rowse, Memories, 90 and 103.
  24. 24. “Mme. Whodunit,” 13.
  25. 25. Bernthal, “‘If not yourself, who would you be?’”
  26. 26. Birns and Birns, “Detective Fiction and the Prose of Everyday Life,” 219.
  27. 27. Curran, Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, 101; see also Curran’s Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making.

three: The Scofflaw of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

  1. 1. Poe, Collected Tales, 141; italics in the original.
  2. 2. Gaboriau, The Widow Lerouge, 270.
  3. 3. Christie, “Agatha Christie on Mystery Fiction,” 27–28.
  4. 4. In “The Boscombe Valley Mystery” and “The Adventure of the Crooked Man,” Holmes says instead, “You know my method” and “You know my methods, Watson” (Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 2, 214 and 416).
  5. 5. As Holmes explains to Watson, “I had grasped the significance of the silence of the dog, for one true inference invariably suggests others…. Obviously the midnight Page 123 →visitor was someone whom the dog knew well” (Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes, vol. 2, 349).
  6. 6. Christie, “Agatha Christie on Mystery Fiction,” 28.
  7. 7. Barnard, A Talent to Deceive, 206.
  8. 8. Green, The Leavenworth Case, 10 and 305–6.
  9. 9. Carr, The Hollow Man, 103.
  10. 10. Petschek, “Agatha Christie,” 130.
  11. 11. Petschek, “Agatha Christie,” 129.
  12. 12. Chesterton, “A Defence of Detective Stories,” 3–4.
  13. 13. Strachey, “The Golden Age of English Detection,” 12–13.
  14. 14. Stern, “The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley,” 233.
  15. 15. Wilson, Classics and Commercials, 234 and 263.
  16. 16. Freeman, “The Art of the Detective Story,” 9.
  17. 17. In a vast number of detective novels of this era, Chinese and other Asian characters, including Anglo-Asian and American-Asian characters. were routinely depicted as murderously nefarious. Knox’s rule alludes to the ubiquity of this trope and condemns it for its obviousness. Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan, a Honolulu detective, also rebuts the simplistic characterization of Asian characters as suspicious, although other regressive tropes remain in his portrayal of his protagonist. Knox’s rule and Biggers’s Charlie Chan implicitly condemn the widely known figure of Dr. Fu Manchu, the villainous mastermind of many of Sax Rohmer’s novels.
  18. 18. Knox, “A Detective Story Decalogue,” 194–96.
  19. 19. Van Dine, “S. S. Van Dine Sets Down,” 129–31.
  20. 20. Constitution and Rules of the Detection Club, reproduced in Edwards, The Golden Age of Murder, appendix 1.
  21. 21. “The Detection Club Oath,” 198.
  22. 22. Queen, The Siamese Twin Mystery, 134.
  23. 23. Carr, The Hollow Man, 151–52.
  24. 24. Makinen, “Contradicting the Golden Age,” 85.
  25. 25. Van Dine, “S. S. Van Dine Sets Down,” 131.
  26. 26. Faktorovich, The Formulas of Popular Fiction, 13.
  27. 27. Knight, Secrets of Crime Fiction Classics, 13–32.

four: The Hardboiled Queen of the Cozies

  1. 1. Leitch, “Wanted: A New Theory of the Cozy,” 78. For an example of Christie’s title as “Queen of the Cozies,” see Mundow, “Agatha Christie Review” C5.
  2. 2. Grant, “A Tribute to Agatha Christie,” 106.
  3. 3. Penzler, quoted in Fryxell, “All about Agatha,” 44.
  4. 4. Stasio, “Murder Least Foul,” BR42.
  5. 5. “The Escape of Agatha Christie,” 38.
  6. 6. O’Brien, Hardboiled America, 16.
  7. 7. Leitch, “Wanted: A New Theory of the Cozy,” 78.
  8. 8. Heissenbuttel, “Rules of the Game of the Crime Novel,” 80.
  9. 9. Page 124 →Delamater and Prigozy, The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television, preface (n.p.).
  10. 10. Rowland, “Cooking the Books,” 158; italics in the original.
  11. 11. G. M. Malliet, quoted in Cogdill, “Birth of a Cozy Writer,” 24.
  12. 12. Madden, “Anne Riordan,” 3.
  13. 13. Poirot Loses a Client, also published as Dumb Witness, includes a less apparent example of this trope: although these titles do not allude to the nursery rhyme “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary,” the novel’s plot matches that of “How Does Your Garden Grow?” one of the short stories of The Regatta Mystery.
  14. 14. Christie also alludes to the Charles Bravo poisoning in Ordeal by Innocence, 69, and Elephants Can Remember, 55.
  15. 15. Powers, True Crime Parallels, 132.
  16. 16. Powers, True Crime Parallels, 1; italics in original. On Christie and true crime, see also Holgate, Stranger Than Fiction.
  17. 17. Acocella, “Queen of Crime,” 82.
  18. 18. Yang, “Psychoanalysis and Detective Fiction,” 596–97.
  19. 19. Cain, Preface to The Butterfly, ix; italics in original.

five: The Poet of Genre Fiction

  1. 1. Agatha Christie, quoted in Rowse, Memories, 88.
  2. 2. “The Mallowans,” 52.
  3. 3. Sayers, quoted in Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder,” 231.
  4. 4. Holquist, “Murder She Says,” 27.
  5. 5. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 13.
  6. 6. Gelder, Popular Fiction, 35–39.
  7. 7. Ewers, “Genre in Transit,” 97.
  8. 8. Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 11 and 53.
  9. 9. Lecercle, “Three Accounts of Literary Style,” 159.
  10. 10. Holquist, “Murder She Says,” 28.
  11. 11. Chandler, The Raymond Chandler Papers, 28.
  12. 12. Symons, Bloody Murder, 137–38.
  13. 13. Bunson, The Complete Christie, 208 and 299; Curry is the “discreet officer.”
  14. 14. Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, 165.
  15. 15. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 62.
  16. 16. Green, “Why Human Beings Are Interested in Crime,” 39; italics in the original, xx.
  17. 17. Christie, “Agatha Christie on Mystery Fiction,” 28.”
  18. 18. Kenney, “Detecting a Novel Use,” 127.
  19. 19. Bayard, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? 67, italics in the original, xx. Bayard elaborates further on these points, positing the challenge of resolving the author’s movements between opening and foreclosing meanings: “Now, these two movements are essentially contradictory…. The second movement, which proposes a unique textual truth, certainly attempts to cancel the multiple meanings organized up to this point by substituting a single meaning presented as necessary after the fact. But so many hypotheses are Page 125 →generated by the combination of different possible decoys that the movement of foreclosure runs a serious risk of leaving a certain number intact” (67–68). In other words, the conclusions of some mystery novels may be more inconclusive than their authors might intend.
  20. 20. Freeman, “The Art of the Detective Story,” 17.
  21. 21. Singer, “The Whodunit as Riddle,” 166 and 158.
  22. 22. For Freytag’s structural analysis of narrative, see his Technique of the Drama, 131–32.
  23. 23. While praising Dickens and Dumas, she simultaneously conceded, “I have never been able to appreciate Thackeray as I should” (Autobiography, 137).
  24. 24. Makinen, “Agatha Christie in Dialogue.”
  25. 25. Birns and Birns, “Agatha Christie: Modern and Modernist,” 123.
  26. 26. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” lines 232–33, from Four Quartets.
  27. 27. Prescott, “Books of the Times,” 19.
  28. 28. “Indian Scene and Other Recent Works,” BR7.
  29. 29. Mary Westmacott, pseudonym of Agatha Christie, The Burden (1956; Dell, 1967).
  30. 30. Gill, Agatha Christie, 156.

six: The Tragicomic Themes of Christie’s Murders

  1. 1. Agatha Christie, quoted in Rowse, Memories, 93.
  2. 2. DeMarr, “The Comic Village,” 76.
  3. 3. This formulation has deep roots in the heteronormative expectation of reproduction in marriage, a narrative conclusion not (or no longer) denied to queer couples but one that requires enactment through a range of imaginative ways.
  4. 4. Thompson, Agatha Christie, 68.
  5. 5. Knepper, “Reading Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple Series,” 68.
  6. 6. Hirst, Comedy of Manners, 1.
  7. 7. Hirst, Comedy of Manners, 2.
  8. 8. McDonald, “Three Poirots on a Train,” 130.
  9. 9. Eagleton, Tragedy, 169.
  10. 10. Langer, “The Great Dramatic Forms,” 324.
  11. 11. Beran, “Love in the Absence of Judgment,” 530–31.
  12. 12. Hopkins, Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction, 10.

seven: The Queer Insularity of Christie’s England

  1. 1. Agatha Christie, quoted in Time, “Dame Agatha,” 75.
  2. 2. Thompson, Agatha Christie, 353.
  3. 3. Moon, “Agatha Christie,” 72.
  4. 4. Bernthal, Queering Agatha Christie, 264.
  5. 5. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “insular,” 4 (a); https://www.oed.com.
  6. 6. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “pukka”; compounds, “pukka sahib.”
  7. 7. Allmendinger, “The Erasure of Race,” 60.
  8. 8. Page 126 →Freeman, The Red Thumb Mark, ix-x.
  9. 9. Marsh, A Man Lay Dead, 37.
  10. 10. James, The Lighthouse, 3.
  11. 11. Moon, “Agatha Christie,” 70.
  12. 12. On the potential queerness of dandyism, see Janes, Oscar Wilde Prefigured.
  13. 13. Lucchesi, “‘The Dandy in Me,’” 163.
  14. 14. Munn, Murder by the Book? 8.
  15. 15. Mezei, “Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech,” 104.
  16. 16. In contrast to Miss Brent’s death following her cruelty to a pregnant teen, another of Christie’s victims, Miss Crabtree, is murdered by the son of her maid Martha, who years ago found herself “in trouble”: “I got into trouble, sir, when I was a girl, and Miss Crabtree stood by me—took me back into her service, she did, when it was all over” (“Sing a Song of Sixpence,” Witness for the Prosecution, 133).

eight: Christie’s Murders at the Movies … and Why She Disliked Them

  1. 1. Cartmell and Whelehan, Screen Adaptation, 12.
  2. 2. Otto Penzler, quoted in Fryxell, “All about Agatha,” 45.
  3. 3. Hesse, “Assumed Identity,” 196. With these words, Hesse specifically refers to theatrical adaptations, yet her point applies equally to cinematic adaptations.
  4. 4. This brief overview of film and television adaptations of Christie’s publications is indebted to Mark Aldridge’s Agatha Christie on Screen; see also his Agatha Christie’s Poirot.
  5. 5. Lord Snowdon, “‘What do you expect of 83?’” 29.
  6. 6. Agatha Christie, quoted in Thompson, Agatha Christie, 432.
  7. 7. Haining, Agatha Christie: Murder in Four Acts, 140.
  8. 8. Aldridge, Agatha Christie on Screen, 287–310.
  9. 9. Macdonell, “Alibi: By M. Morton,” 533.
  10. 10. Lord Snowdon, “‘What do you expect of 83?’” 29.
  11. 11. See McCarver, The Case of Compartment, 7, and “Finding the Queen of Mystery.”
  12. 12. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 279.
  13. 13. Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 284.
  14. 14. Meyer, “Introduction: Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp,” 11.
  15. 15. Core, Camp: The Lie That Tells the Truth, 9.
  16. 16. Barry Sandler, phone interview with the author, 27 January 2017.
  17. 17. Jenkinson, “The Agatha Christie Films,” 177.
  18. 18. Gibbs, “The Theatre: Fair Enough,” 32.
  19. 19. York, Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion, 41.
  20. 20. Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity, 82.
  21. 21. Dyer, “It’s Being So Camp as Keeps Us Going,” 13.
  22. 22. On the “aging diva phenomenon,” see Flynn, “The Deaths of Camp,” who cites “Elizabeth Taylor on the cover of Hollywood Babylon II” to illustrate this stock figure of camp (444).
  23. 23. Barry Sandler, phone interview with the author, 27 January 2017.
  24. 24. Page 127 →“Tea-Cozy Mischief,” 20.
  25. 25. “Review of The Mirror Crack’d,” 48.
  26. 26. “Stay Home with a Good Game of Clue,” 58.
  27. 27. Reed, “Movies: The Mirror Crack’d,” 27.
  28. 28. Thompson, “Off the Wall: The Mirror Crack’d,” 59.
  29. 29. “Stay Home with a Good Game of Clue,” 58.
  30. 30. Reed, “Movies: The Mirror Crack’d,” 27.
  31. 31. “Tea-Cozy Mischief,” 20.
  32. 32. Smith, “Communicating to the Audience.” New York Social Diary.
  33. 33. York, Agatha Christie: Power and Illusion, 69.

Conclusion: Literary Criticism and the Mystery of Christie’s Murderous Pleasures

  1. 1. Agatha Christie, quoted in “The Talk of the Town,” 24.
  2. 2. Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs, 206.
  3. 3. Hannah, “No One Should Condescend to Agatha Christie.”
  4. 4. Orwell, Shooting an Elephant, 186
Page 128 →

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