Page 22 →ThreeThe Scofflaw of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Whether in retrospect the act should be considered a mere coincidence or an illuminating portent, Agatha Christie published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920—the year that heralds the beginning of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which reigned for the following two decades. For afficionados of the mystery novel, this era represents the genre’s apex, its flowering from the seeds of decades past into a highly engrossing and increasingly sophisticated genre. As with most declarations of any so-called Golden Age, such a designation sutures over the conflicts waged before, during, and after these supposedly halcyon years, and in this instance, over the fraught nature of mystery novels as an aesthetic narrative form in themselves, particularly in relation to authors’ debates concerning its proper contours. When viewed within the context of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and of the decades preceding it, Christie’s contributions to the genre come into sharper focus, as her novels both complement the general tenor of the era while resisting, even subverting, many of its established tropes and emerging dictates. Moreover, if one examines the history of the genre through Hercule Poirot’s amateur pursuits as a literary critic, Christie’s innovations in the field of detective fiction come into sharper focus. As all noted authors must do, Christie inherited a preexisting literary tradition that she then sculpted to her own needs and desires; she also refused to conform her novels to the increasingly rigid rules of the genre, thus fashioning herself into a literary scofflaw of prevailing and emergent conventions.

As the early history of detective fiction is often told, Edgar Allen Poe is credited as the progenitor of the genre with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a short story published in the April 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine, in which the investigator C. Auguste Dupin solves the mysterious murders of two women. In Page 23 →a metadiscursive meditation on this new direction for fiction, Poe envisions his protagonist and his readers as people of an analytical mindset, those who are “fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics” and who exhibit in their pursuit of a mystery’s solution “a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension præternatural.”¹ Dupin appeared in two subsequent stories, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842) and “The Purloined Letter” (1844). Subsequent entries in this emergent field include Emile Gaboriau’s novel L’Affaire Lerouge (1866), often titled The Widow Lerouge in its English translation, identified as the first detective novel (or roman policier). Gaboriau’s protagonist, Père Tabaret, while investigating the widow’s murder, summarizes the logical precepts behind his investigation: “Given a crime, with all the circumstances and details, I construct, piece by piece, a plan of accusation, which I do not warrant until it is entire and perfect. If a man is found to whom this plan applies exactly in every particular, the author of the crime is found; otherwise, we have laid hands upon an innocent person.”² Dupin and Père Tabaret, in their joint role as foundational detectives of investigative fiction, endorse logic and methodical analysis as their key methods for solving mysteries, in a trope that remains highly influential to the characters and plots of the genre.

Detective fiction soon immigrated to England with Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868), and a decade later in the United States, Anna Katharine Green’s The Leavenworth Case (1878) introduced Ebenezer Gryce, a detective following the Dupin and Père Tabaret model of investigation. The form skyrocketed in popularity with Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1877), which marked the debut of the iconic Sherlock Holmes, whose adventures continued in a series of successful publications, including The Sign of Four (1890), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). R. Austin Freeman’s The Red Thumb Mark (1907) features the first scientifically based investigation, undertaken by Dr. Thorndyke, whereas G. K. Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911) explores the psychological causes and effects of crime. Maurice Leblanc initiated his famed series featuring Arsène Lupin—simultaneously a gentleman, a thief, and a detective—in 1905. Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) popularized the genre of the locked-room mystery, which he soon followed with his mysterious The Phantom of the Opera (1910), even if it is not precisely a mystery.

Every mystery writer must confront the legacy of Poe’s Auguste Dupin and Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and many authors therefore fashion idiosyncratic detectives, creating unique and memorable figures who distinguish their fictions from others. As Christie stated of her inspiration for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple: “I was worried about finding a detective for my first book, and we’d had Belgian refugees at the beginning of the War, so I thought that quite a good idea. But I didn’t really know any. Miss Marple, of course, is very like one’s Page 24 →aunts or grandmothers.”³ On numerous occasions, Christie readily acknowledged her debts to Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, such as when Ariadne Oliver comments of Poirot: “He’s a detective. You know. The Sherlock Holmes kind—deerstalkers and violins and all that” (McGinty, 80). Christie replaced “deerstalkers and violins and all that” with crème de cassis, an exorbitant moustache, and a variety of other foibles, yet the chief appeal of both characters—their ability to pierce through a confusing array of clues, red herrings, and conflicting testimony—unites them. Poirot further resembles Holmes in their methodical approach to investigations, evident when Poirot slightly misquotes his forebear: “I have my methods, Watson.” (“Problem at Sea,” Regatta, 182).⁴ His deductive capabilities impress a range of characters, including one who asks admiringly, “Are you really a kind of Sherlock Holmes and do wonderful deductions?” (“Yellow Iris,” Regatta, 93), and Poirot himself alludes to Sherlock Holmes, in a rather telling passage: “It reminds you of Sherlock Holmes, does it not? The curious incident of the dog in the night … Ah, well, I am not above stealing the tricks of others” (Cards on the Table, 69). Poirot refers here to Doyle’s “The Adventure of Silver Blaze,” in which Holmes solves the mystery because a guard dog does not bark,⁵ but Poirot’s suggestion that he is “not above the stealing the tricks of others” would imply that Christie allowed herself to be inspired by the works of her forebears in detective fiction.

Despite the strong connections between Holmes and Poirot, additional evidence suggests that Christie grew impatient with the comparison, and in these instances readers can discern her efforts to liberate herself from her predecessors. For instance, when Amy Leatheran, the narrator of Murder in Mesopotamia, meets Poirot, she is surprised that he does not accord with her image of a detective as inspired by Doyle: “I don’t know what I’d imagined—something rather like Sherlock Holmes—long and lean with a keen, clever face” (Mesopotamia, 72). One of Christie’s characters muses, “Personally, I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories greatly overrated. The fallacies—the really amazing fallacies—that there are in those stories” (Death in the Air, 132), and the murderer of Crooked House dismisses Holmes as an avatar of a bygone era: “Anyway, I’m not very keen on Sherlock Holmes. It’s awfully old fashioned” (110). In a similar instance Poirot snubs Doyle’s plots while admiring his prose: “These tales of Sherlock Holmes are in reality far-fetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived. But the art of the writing—ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr. Watson” (Clocks, 112). Ironically, Poirot’s disparagements of Doyle echo many critics’ assessments of Christie’s writings as offering outré and unconvincing plots enlivened by vibrant prose and dialogue. Most obviously, Christie emulated the pairing of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson with Hercule Poirot and Hastings, even compelling Hastings to acknowledge his inferior narrative position by Page 25 →referring to himself as “the humble Watson” (Poirot Loses a Client, 28). Yet as many writers discover, what they first perceived as inspiring can metamorphose into a constricting force on their own imaginations, and Christie, finding the Watson figure unnecessary for her plots, thus dispatched Hastings: “I got very tired of Captain Hastings, Poirot’s Watson. Quite early on I banished him to the Argentine.”⁶ This lesson appears to have been fully absorbed by 1930 when Christie introduced Miss Marple in her first novel, The Murder at the Vicarage: Miss Marple never requires a Dr. Watson figure as her sidekick.

As the example of Sherlock Holmes suggests, Christie immersed herself in the many authors of this literary legacy, also evident in the fact that Poirot enjoys in his retirement from the police force his new hobby of literary criticism. Poirot’s most extensive forays in literary analysis occur in two of Christie’s later novels, The Clocks (1963) and Third Girl (1966). Ironically, these two novels are often considered among the weaker of Christie’s efforts: the reason behind the many clocks of The Clocks rings hollow, and Robert Barnard lambastes Third Girl as “one of Christie’s more embarrassing attempts to haul herself abreast of the swinging ‘sixties.’⁷ As is the case with so many of Christie’s novels, even if in some or another way a given entry in her canon fails to fully satisfy, in another way it springs to life, and such is the case with Poirot’s literary musings. In Third Girl Christie indicates that Poirot has long read detective fiction enthusiastically but critically, finding much to praise and much to condemn and that he has collected his thoughts in “his Magnum Opus, an analysis of great writers of detective fiction.” She writes that Poirot “lauded to the skies two American authors who were practically unknown, and had in various other ways given honour where honour was due and sternly withheld it where he considered it was not…. He had enjoyed this literary achievement and enjoyed the vast amount of reading he had had to do, had enjoyed snorting with disgust as he flung a book across the floor … and had enjoyed appreciatively nodding his head on the rare occasions when such approval was justified” (Third Girl, 1). In his new pastime, Christie’s detective finds fault with the genre’s originators: “He had dared to speak scathingly of Edgar Allen Poe, he had complained of the lack of method or order in the romantic outpourings of Wilkie Collins” (Third Girl, 1). Continuing his appraisals, Poirot evaluates Maurice Leblanc’s Adventures of Arsène Lupin in terms similar to his analysis of Doyle, in finding the plots farfetched yet the prose immersive: “How fantastic; how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache” (Clocks, 109).

In many instances, readers can glean insights into Christie’s reactions to her critics by examining Poirot’s literary criticism, and thus better perceive her accomplishments in the Golden Age of Detective Fiction as a whole. Poirot praises Green’s The Leavenworth Case as “admirable,” and, similar to Poe’s Auguste Page 26 →Dupin and Gaboriau’s Père Tabaret, Green’s Ebenezer Gryce modeled for Christie the type of logical mindset that defines the protagonist of the genre. “It is not for me to suspect but to detect,” Gryce declares succinctly, and he later expostulates on his investigative methods: “Now it is a principle which every detective recognizes the truth of, that if of a hundred leading circumstances connected with a crime, ninety-nine of these are acts pointing to the suspected party with unerring certainty but the hundredth equally important act is one which that person could not have performed, the whole fabric of suspicion is destroyed.”⁸ Beyond these similarities between Gryce’s and Poirot’s modi operandi, Poirot further praises Green’s novel, adding that “one savors its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama” (Clocks, 109). These words also hint at Christie’s impatience with criticisms of her works for their melodramatic qualities. For Christie, melodrama, which favors stock characters expressing over-pitched emotions, does not represent the failure of an incompetent neophyte but the intended effect of a seasoned author, one who purposefully pursues this technique for the audience response it generates. Sounding a similar note, Christie’s contemporary John Dickson Carr allowed his protagonist, Dr. Fell, to defend the use of melodrama: “The point is, [authors] are afraid of the thing called Melodrama. So, if they can’t eliminate the melodrama, they try to hide it by writing in such an oblique, upside-down way that nobody under heaven can understand what they are talking about.”⁹ In their defense of melodrama, Christie and Carr tacitly strike back against critics who denounce their works for such exaggerated emotionality, pointing out its utility and power for works of detective fiction. Also relevant to this point, the line between realism and melodrama can be surprisingly thin, as expressed in the assessment of one of Christie’s characters to the odd events unfolding around her: “Melodramatic, but one does read of such things happening” (Unexpected Guest, 78).

In another instance of Christie rebutting her critics through Poirot’s literary analyses, the detective singles out Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room for unqualified praise. “That is really a classic! I approve of it from start to finish” (Clocks, 109), he effuses, as he then argues against the novels’ critics: “There were criticisms of it, I remember, which said that it was unfair … No. All through there is truth, concealed with a careful and cunning use of words” (109). Here too readers can discern Christie responding to her critics, for she vigorously defended her novels against any accusations of “cheating the reader” with similar terms and rejected the accusation that she employed false clues, declaring instead: “I just say things that can be taken two ways … I don’t cheat.”¹⁰ Murder in Retrospect illustrates Christie’s doubled use of language, as the solution to the mystery hinges on the victim’s words, “It’s all settled—I’ll send her packing, I tell you!” (182). These words are slightly rephrased in the novel’s theatrical adaptation as Go Back for Murder—“All right, I’ll send her packing” Page 27 →(656)—but in both instances, the simple pronoun her likely leads many readers and audience members astray.

Emerging from this literary backdrop that ranged from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction witnessed the evolution of the crime novel into an extraordinarily popular genre of increasing sophistication. Along with Christie, illustrious British names associated with this period include G. K. Chesterton, Ronald A. Knox, Michael Innes, and Edmund Crispin. Perhaps it is mere coincidence that the Golden Age of Detective Fiction overlapped with the enfranchisement of women in 1918 and 1928, following the passage of the Representation of the People Acts in the United Kingdom, for women authors had long achieved great success for their literary efforts. It is nonetheless striking that many of the most esteemed authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction are women. Margery Allingham, Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Christie were dubbed the era’s Queens of Crime, and such secondary figures as Patricia Wentworth, Gladys Mitchell, and Josephine Tey were widely celebrated as well. Beyond the borders of the British empire, American authors contributed notably to the genre’s heyday, including John Dickson Carr, recognized as the master of the locked-room mystery; Earl Derr Biggers, author of the Charlie Chan mysteries; Erle Stanley Gardner, author of the Perry Mason mysteries; and Ellery Queen, the name of the fictional detective posing as the author of this eponymous series, which was penned by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee. Belgian author Georges Simenon found acclaim for his Jules Maigret mysteries.

Broadly speaking, the Golden Age of Detective Fiction prized the creativity and puzzle of the “whodunit,” in which a crime, usually a murder, occurs; the detective, a person of superior intelligence, insight, and cleverness, investigates. The investigation typically features a series of interviews with witnesses; as these interviews unfold, the detective observes a slight contradiction in testimony, evidence, or other such details. As Poirot says, “It is very valuable, conversation. Sooner or later, if one has something to hide, one says too much”; in complementary contrast, he further explains: “There are the innocent people who know things, but are unaware of the importance of what they know” (Cat among the Pigeons, 175). Frequently the perpetrator is revealed with the remaining witnesses and suspects present, granting these surprising finales an audience amazed by the detective’s ingenuity, with their response modelling the author’s intended effect on the reader.

Within these general parameters, individual authors developed unique strategies for deceiving readers, and Christie’s clever solutions evince her steady attention to the necessity of a well-designed puzzle as the heart of the story. The fuzzy demarcation between a puzzle and a mystery novel contributes heavily to the denigration of the genre, and such contemporaneous works as Lassiter Page 28 →Wren and Randle McKay’s The Baffle Book (1928) stripped detective fiction of its novelistic trappings and turned it into a parlor game, offering condensed accounts of mysteries with the reader charged with determining the solution and the answers printed upside-down in its final pages. Reflective of this publishing phenomenon, Christie’s “The Plymouth Express” includes an editorial interruption similar in intent, stressing the story’s puzzling elements: “It is suggested that the reader pause in his perusal of the story at this point, make his own solution of the mystery—and then see how close he comes to that of the author.—The Editors” (Under Dog, 79; cf. “The Affair at the Victory Ball,” Under Dog, 96). In constructing her puzzles, and thus her novels, Christie reverse-engineered her plot—“You know, you start with the wish to deceive and then work backward”¹¹—and thus wove a basic element of deception, predicated on her careful attention to words and the slippage between their meanings, into the resolution. As she proceeded backward from the story’s resolution to its formulation, she often employed the key strategy of misdirection. Both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot identify misdirection as an essential tactic of magicians, as they further explain its relevance to the mysteries at hand. Miss Marple declares: “Because if you’re looking at one thing, you can’t be looking at another. And one so often looks at the wrong thing, though whether because one happens to do so or because you’re meant to, it’s very hard to say. Misdirection, the conjurers call it” (Murder with Mirrors, 78). Hercule Poirot similarly affirms: “It was merely the trick of the conjuror. Misdirection. You focus the eyes on the kidnaping here and it does not occur to anyone that the kidnaping really occurred three weeks earlier in Switzerland” (Cat among the Pigeons, 199). Along with her title as the Queen of Crime of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Christie could be similarly dubbed Her Majesty of Misdirection.

But much as the people living during the Western Middle Ages could never have guessed that their era would later be dubiously posited as a “middle” between the classical era of Greece and Rome and the subsequent flowering—or perhaps grandiosity—of the Renaissance, the writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction lived in the moment of their literary production, not in the aftermath of its designation as the genre’s apex. Opinions from this era diverged widely over the quality of the writing produced. Almost two decades before the Golden Age, G. K. Chesterton published “A Defence of Detective Stories” in 1902, in which he discerned a general prudery leveled against the genre: “The trouble in this matter is that many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil.”¹² In his 1939 essay “The Golden Age of English Detection,” John Strachey effusively celebrated the literary achievements of the form: “Here are books which the authors evidently enjoyed writing and the readers unaffectedly enjoy reading. I have myself little doubt that some of these detective novels are far better jobs, Page 29 →on any account, than are nine tenths of the more pretentious and ambitious high-brow novels.”¹³ Only two years after Strachey praised the literary achievements of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Philip Van Doren Stern lamented the degradation and decadence of the genre in his 1941 essay “The Case of the Corpse in the Blind Alley,” arguing that it “needs overhauling, a return to first principle, a realization that murder has to do with human emotion and deserves serious treatment.”¹⁴ This essay is often credited as the death knell of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, even though many of the authors associated with this period continued writing for decades, notably Christie herself. The interrogative titles of Edmund Wilson’s 1944 essay “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” and his 1945 essay, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” adequately convey his derogatory views both of Christie—“I hope never to read another of her books”—and of the genre of detective fiction altogether. In a biting analogy, he compares its afficionados to alcoholics: “Detective-story readers feel guilty, they are habitually on the defensive, and all their talk about ‘well-written’ mysteries is simply an excuse for their vice, like the reasons that the alcoholic can always produce for a drink.”¹⁵

As much as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction is considered by many to represent the apex of the genre, one can hardly be surprised that several authors of the period did not recognize it as such. Indeed, it is a truth universally acknowledged that some writers write well while others write poorly, and the skyrocketing success of detective fiction in the 1920s also facilitated the publication of several works of dubious merit and frustrating plotting. In his 1924 essay “The Art of the Detective Story,” R. Austin Freeman argued for the genre’s aesthetic potential and optimistically assessed the groundswell among authors for more exacting standards for their art: “In late years there has arisen a new school of writers who, taking the detective story seriously, have set a more exacting standard, and whose work, admirable alike in construction and execution, probably accounts for the recent growth in popularity of this class of fiction.”¹⁶ Notably, Freeman mentions authors who “set a more exacting standard,” presumably by and for themselves as individual authors, yet other writers attempted to prescribe such rules for all authors of detective fiction. In his 1928 essay “A Detective Story Decalogue,” Ronald A. Knox, author of the Miles Bredon series, outlined a set of rules for the popular genre, in a cri di coeur against substandard entries in its growing canon:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. Page 30 →No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.¹⁷
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.¹⁸

Frustrated with the subpar plotting evident in supernatural events, houses with an improbable number of secret passages, and homicidal twins, Knox redirected writers of detective fiction to the art of plotting, of arranging their narratives with carefully constructed clues that lead to the culprit’s identity. At their core, Knox’s rules enumerate the panoply of ways that the deus ex machina was reimagined for detective fiction, and he urged authors to avoid such dodges. Writing in the same year, S. S. Van Dine, the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright and author of the Philo Vance mysteries, published an essay titled “S. S. Van Dine Sets Down Twenty Rules for Detective Stories.” Van Dine doubled Knox’s decalogue, making many similar points while contributing as well his personal bugbears. He rejected the intersection of mystery and romance (“There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”) and insisted that the culprit be found among the higher social classes (“A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution”). Additionally, he rejected the demands of literary fiction for a streamlined reading experience: “A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.”¹⁹

Complementing Knox’s and Van Dine’s efforts, the Constitution and Rules of the Detection Club similarly attempted to legislate the genre’s fundamental precepts. This club, formed in 1930, gathered together the foremost English mystery writers of the day, electing G. K. Chesterton as its first president. Article 1 of its constitution stipulates as a condition of membership for potential authors “That he or she has written at least two detective-novels of admitted merit or (in exceptional cases) one such novel; it being understood that the term ‘detective novel’ does not include adventure-stories or ‘thrillers’ or stories in which the Page 31 →detection is not a main interest, and that it is a demerit in a detective-novel if the author does not ‘play fair by the reader.’”²⁰ The “fair play rule” is often considered the foundational axiom of detective fiction, yet within the annals of detective fiction, fair play is often found in the eyes of the beholder. Initiates into the Detection Club swore an oath both tongue-in-cheek and serious, as they were required to reply “I do” to the following questions: “Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?”; “Will you honour the King’s English?”; and “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo-Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or the Act of God?”²¹ Beyond these legalistic statements of the guiding precepts of detective fiction, many writers included in their novels their own sense of its proper contours of plot and exposition, such as when Ellery Queen, in The Siamese Twin Mystery, dismisses detective stories featuring “secret societies and such tripe” because such explanations may appear in substandard fiction but “not in real life.”²²

While Knox, Van Dine, and many of the Detection Club’s members surely aspired to encourage authors to write better stories by avoiding the genre’s clichés, great fiction can be guided but never constrained by rules, and authors of the period chafed against such strictures. In The Hollow Man, John Dickson Carr includes a chapter titled “The Locked-Room Lecture,” in which his detective, Dr. Fell, expostulates in a metacommentary on the detective novel. “We’re in a detective story, and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not,” he begins, as he then refuses to encapsulate the tropes of the locked-room mystery into a quasi-legalistic code: “I am not going to start an argument by attempting to lay down rules.” He later adds: “But when you twist this matter of taste into a rule for judging the merit or even the probability of the story, you are merely saying, ‘This series of events couldn’t happen, because I shouldn’t enjoy it if it did.’”²³ In effect, Carr argues for the preeminence of the author and the reader for determining the success or failure of a given work, not the imposition of a code that can only constrain an author’s ingenuity. Whether or not Christie read Knox’s and Van Dine’s rules, she, like Carr, certainly did not adhere to them. As Merja Makinen observes: “Christie’s novels broke almost all of the gentlemanly Detection Club ‘rules,’ deliberately teasing the genre out of all recognition while ostensibly secure within its confines. In this sense, her novels encapsulate generic mobility … according to which crime fiction displays a ‘transgressive impulse’ thereby proclaiming and challenging its own limitations.”²⁴

Foremost, Knox’s first rule, declaring that “the criminal … must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow,” takes dead aim at Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, with his broadside published two years Page 32 →after her groundbreaking work. She repeated this “transgression” later in her career with Endless Night. Although the title character of the short-story collection The Mysterious Mr. Quin serves in the role of the detective / protagonist rather than as the culprit, Christie introduces “supernatural or preternatural agencies” throughout the works in which he appears, in direct opposition to Knox’s second rule. It would appear that she adheres to Knox’s tenth rule when she mocks the twin solution—“The identical twin solution? … So very convenient in fiction. But in real life, it doesn’t happen you know” (Pale Horse, 92–93)—but she comes rather dangerously close to breaking it in such novels as A Holiday for Murder (although with half-brothers, not twins) and A Murder Is Announced (with sisters Letitia and Charlotte Blacklock). Ellery Queen may have dismissed “secret societies and such tripe,” but Christie’s At Bertram’s Hotel features a criminal organization, with no detriment to this intriguing tale of murder and mayhem.

The following question arises: In considering the inherent implausibility of binding guidelines for fiction, who determines when a so-called rule is broken? Knox argues that “No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used,” but hitherto undiscovered by whom? The general reader is unlikely to know of the curious effects of thallium poisoning, a murderous device that Christie uses to great effect in The Pale Horse. Regarding Van Dine’s rules, Christie eschews romance for her protagonists—with Hercule Poirot a confirmed bachelor and Miss Marple a spinster—yet many of her novels include a secondary plot of lovers overcoming obstacles to unite. For example, Murder on the Links features Hastings’s romance, ending in eventual marriage, to “Cinderella.” The Murder of Roger Ackroyd depicts the growing attraction of Flora Ackroyd and Major Blunt, and in Elephants Can Remember Celia Ravenscroft and Desmond Burton-Cox cannot marry until the shadow of Celia’s parents’ deaths has been cleared, with numerous other examples of such plotlines throughout her corpus. In her adaptations of her novels into plays, Christie rewrote certain plotlines, including those of Towards Zero and Go Back for Murder, so that they would end with romantic pairings; indeed, in the revised ending of the theatrical version of And Then There Were None, she revivifies two of the novel’s dead characters and pairs them romantically. Christie typically limits her range of suspects to family members and friends rather than expanding it to include servants and employees, yet they play key roles in such works as Ordeal by Innocence and Poirot Loses a Client. Knox condemned mysteries solved by intuition rather than by evidence, but in some instances, Christie glides over the evidence necessary to convict the malefactors, such as in The Murder at the Vicarage when Colonel Melchett chastises Miss Marple, “Your solution is a very plausible one … but you will allow me to point out that there is not a shadow of proof” (222), and so they plot a trap to catch the killer. In the same novel, Miss Marple states, “I know Page 33 →that in books it is always the most unlikely person. But I never find that rule applies in real life” (215), and these words suggest her author’s cagey reframing of one of the most common “rules” of detective fiction. Finally, Knox demands that “The detective must not himself commit the crime,” yet Christie long planned for her career to conclude with this ultimate transgression, as she transforms Poirot into a murderer in Curtain. Indeed, after writing Curtain in the early 1940s, Christie alerted readers to her plans for Poirot in subsequent works. In Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, a playwright proposes to Ariadne Oliver: “You know, Ariadne, that might be rather a marvelous idea. A real Sven Hjerson—and you murder him. You might make a Swan Song book of it—to be published after your death.” Amusingly, Oliver replies, “What about the money? Any money to be made out of murders I want now” (126)—in a telling reference to Christie’s troubles with the US and British tax authorities.

As Knox’s and Van Dine’s lists express their exasperation with overdone tropes of detective fiction, so do Christie’s novels allow insights into her own assessments of the genre’s and its authors’ failings. Death in the Air features among its suspects Norman Clancy, “a writer of detective stories,” for whom Inspector Japp expresses his disdain: “Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with” (8, 29). “Ignorant scribblers of rubbish”: this telling formulation exposes Christie’s exasperation with her less-talented peers. Poirot often refuses to investigate a crime scene, remarking that he will solve the mystery through logical deduction rather than through a superfluity of physical evidence; he does not require “the cigarette ash—nor the footprint—nor a lady’s glove—nor even a lingering perfume. Nothing that the detective of fiction so conveniently finds” (Thirteen at Dinner, 58), and here he echoes Van Dine’s impatience with “determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime.”²⁵ In plotting her novels, Christie limits herself to misdirecting readers through a single coincidence, but not multiple ones, evident when Hastings says to Poirot, “You said yourself once that one coincidence is nearly always found in a murder-case” (Poirot Loses a Client, 198), when Poirot concedes, “I am always prepared to admit one coincidence” (Holiday for Murder, 148), and when Miss Marple distinguishes for readers between real clues and a coincidence. “Oh, dear, no…. That wasn’t a coincidence” (Murder at the Vicarage, 220), she explains of one vexing event, and then identifies the single truly random event: “That is what I call the coincidence” (222). Locked-room mysteries, known as the particular strength of Christie’s contemporary John Dickson Carr, were also becoming somewhat clichéd, and although Christie availed herself of the tropes of this particular subgenre, such as in Murder in Mesopotamia and Dead Man’s Mirror, she recognized that some of her readers might find it wearisome, evident in the words of Colonel Johnson in A Holiday for Murder: “Do you mean to tell Page 34 →me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency?” (Holiday for Murder, 69). As apparent virtually throughout the history of the arts and humanities as a whole, tropes once vibrant and exciting deaden into staleness through overuse, and writers must negotiate this tension to avoid devolving into the kind of hackneyed writing that Knox and Van Dine hoped to discourage.

This problem of overused tropes is exacerbated for genre fiction in the simple requirements that a romance novel must feature a romance, a science-fiction novel must feature futuristic technology, a detective novel must feature a mystery, and so on. These plot requirements are then complicated by the genre’s standard parameters and further complicated in the amorphous realm between rules for authors and the expectations of readers. Anna Faktorovich explains this complex interrelationship: “The trouble with modern formulaic writing is not that it has too few rules, but rather that the rules are numerous and dictate the dimensions of elements that are much more complex than the boundaries they are allowed.”²⁶ In other words, genre writing requires its authors to respect its boundaries, yet any such boundaries should not constrain authors from transgressing them in accord with their unique visions. Complicating matters further, the gender politics of these prohibitions should not be overlooked. As women like Christie increasingly entered the field of detective fiction, men like Knox and Van Dine increasingly attempted to delineate its contours. An enduring theme of myth and literature illustrates the consequences arising when women refuse to accept men’s proscriptions on their behavior, and more specifically, on their quest for knowledge, in such stories as Pandora and Bluebeard’s wife. Christie’s resistance to rulebound fiction functions in similar terms, as she liberated herself from unnecessary constraints imposed by others.

And so as much as Christie enduringly reigns as the most popular author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, this period paradoxically fails to capture her comfortably within its parameters, and perhaps most notably in the simple fact that many of her greatest works were written after the 1930s. Furthermore, whereas most histories of detective fiction begin with Poe, traces of the form date back millennia, including the story of Susanna in Jewish scriptures, and Stephen Knight discerns the genre’s foundational texts as William Godwin’s Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) and Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly (1799).²⁷ The Golden Age of Detective Fiction conveniently marks the beginning of Christie’s career, which continued for an additional thirty-six years after this era’s conclusion, and thus many of her masterworks highlight the arbitrariness of this construction. How Golden can a Golden Age be if it arbitrarily excludes Christie’s Murder in Retrospect and The Page 35 →Moving Finger for the crime of being written two years after the period’s end? By breaking men’s “rules” for detective fiction while adhering to her own sense of the genre’s demands, Christie penned works that challenged any arbitrary efforts to curtail the possibilities of the genre, proving instead the deeper freedoms of genre fiction than many of its most esteemed practitioners imagined.