Page 36 →FourThe Hardboiled Queen of the Cozies

It has long been said that England and the United States of America are two countries divided by a common tongue, and this aphorism can be extended to the historic division between their conceptions of detective fiction, in the enduring generic binary between the “cozy” and “hardboiled” styles. While Agatha Christie and many of her compatriots of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction were English writers who came to be associated with the cozy tradition, across the Atlantic Ocean several American writers, notably Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, developed the hardboiled style of mystery novel. Along with her title as one of the Queens of Crime of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Christie is also frequently lauded as the Queen of the Cozies. “Cozies are detective stories in the tradition of Agatha Christie,” writes Tom Leitch, thus positioning her as the inspiring wellspring for the authors of this subgenre.¹ Yet much as Christie’s achievements are not fully contextualized, and even undervalued, by zealously linking her to the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, so too does her status as Queen of the Cozies minimize the full extent of her authorial vision. Capable of penning novels ranging in tone and tenor from the intellectually perplexing to the hair-raising, Christie eludes the constraints of the cozy / hardboiled binary while also exposing its gendered biases, again paradoxically proving the limitations of being dubbed a “Queen,” no matter the compliment intended.

As the word cozy implies, this subgenre of mystery fiction is envisioned as comforting readers; it elicits images of them snuggling up in front of the fireplace, or curling up in bed, as they hold an engrossing book in their hands for a peaceful evening at home. Cheekily alluding to this image of cozy reading, Ellsworth Grant refers to Agatha Christie as “the best of all companions in bed,”² and Otto Penzler, owner of the Mysterious Book Shop in Manhattan, similarly opines: “Agatha Christie [is not] threatening to anybody. Picking up an Agatha Christie book is like putting on cuddly old slippers.”³ Cozy readers, Page 37 →it is presumed, desire a distraction from the vexations and troubles of their real lives and the world at large, and they thus relish the escapism offered through this genre of fiction, for cozies depict a narrative space where, although violence erupts in the form of a murder, readers can rest assured that the detective will restore order by the novel’s end. As with Ronald A. Knox’s and S. S. Van Dine’s attempts to codify certain requirements and prohibitions of the mystery novel, critics such as Marilyn Stasio have documented the expected tropes of cozies:

No gore. Violence is kept to a minimum and described discreetly.

Amateur status is preferred in a sleuth, who is often a woman with an interesting occupation.

The crime takes place close to home, or within a confined community in which the victim, suspects, and sleuth are all known to one another.

The settings are never sleazy; the atmosphere is designed to give pleasure and comfort.

The characters are driven by personal motivations and have no affiliation with institutions like the Mafia or the C.I.A.

The hero does not get beaten up during the investigation, although romantic entanglements are permissible.⁴

Taken together, Stasio’s precepts envision a genre that soothes, rather than agitates, its readers through a simple formula: a functional, although not altogether harmonious, social order is introduced; it is disrupted through crime, usually the murder of an unpleasant person over whom the other characters need not excessively mourn. Following the detective’s investigation, the criminal is identified, and the social order is restored to its prior sense of comfortable stasis. Cozies are frequently aligned with women authors, readers, and characters, as indicated by Stasio’s observation that this genre often foregrounds female detectives for its protagonists.

For the most part, Christie’s mysteries adhere to Stasio’s precepts. Her murderers typically commit their nefarious deeds with poisons or single gunshots, not with bloody stabbings, eviscerations, or disembowellings. Trained in the vagaries of human nature but not in the telltale clues of forensic analysis, Miss Marple belongs among the ranks of amateur investigators, and, as a retired detective, Hercule Poirot retains an air of professionalism yet without the status either of the Belgian police force or of Scotland Yard to bolster his authority. One might assume that, owing to its title, Christie’s eponymous protagonist of Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective is, in fact, a professional detective; instead, this book features a retired governmental statistician, who, with his professional duties behind him, has decided “to use the experience I have gained in a novel fashion” (Parker Pyne, 2). Christie often sets her murders in closed environments such as estate houses or rural villages, with occasional forays onto trains (The Mystery Page 38 →of the Blue Train), planes (Death in the Air), and boats (Death on the Nile), although only very rarely does she descend into London’s underworld or other potentially “sleazy” locales. Whereas several characters in Christie’s adventure novels are affiliated with criminal or governmental institutions, such is not the case with her mystery fiction, except, as mentioned previously, the criminal organization behind the misdeeds in At Bertram’s Hotel. And finally, and mercifully, it is true that neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot are “roughed up by toughs” during the course of their investigations, although on one occasion Ariadne Oliver is attacked while pursuing a lead: “She hurried … down a narrow passageway, heard a footstep behind her, half turned, when she was struck from behind and the world went up in sparks” (Third Girl, 89). In contrast to Van Dyne, who proscribed romances in his essay “S. S. Van Dine Sets Down Twenty Rules for Detective Stories,” Stasio permits them, although neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot pursue love affairs while solving the mysteries they encounter—although it should be noted that Poirot expresses deep admiration for the mysterious Countess Vera Rossakoff. Acknowledging in an obituary the genial pleasures afforded by her fiction, the editors of Christianity Today thanked Christie for “provid[ing] millions of readers with hours of restful reading pleasure,” with their words tacitly identifying her supreme place in the authors’ pantheon of cozy detective fiction, and with little irony (as there need not be) in the editors of a Christian publication lauding the author of fictions that repeatedly break a rather significant admonition of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not kill.⁵

Opposed to the cozy stands the hardboiled mystery, which typically features a corrupt society overrun by organized crime; an ineffective, understaffed, and sometimes complicit police force; politicians seduced by graft; and an antihero protagonist with a wearied sense of ethics who fights for justice, if only reluctantly. As Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 marks the dawn of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, credit for the birth of the hardboiled mystery is typically dated to 1922 with the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s first Black Mask story. Geoffrey O’Brien attests that, in comparison to the cozy’s English roots, the hardboiled style is linked to the United States: “the characteristically cool and cynical tone of the tough-guy novels was a distinctly American invention.”⁶ Christie is forever linked to her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, and so too are the progenitors of the hardboiled school eternally connected to their wearied protagonists: Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon, 1930), Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep, 1939), and Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (I, the Jury, 1947), as well as such later authors and detectives as Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski (Indemnity Only, 1982) and Walter Mosley’s Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (Devil in a Blue Dress, 1990). Invented in the United States, the hardboiled school of fiction soon grew in Page 39 →international influence, with many readers entranced by its hard-knuckle approach to crime and criminals, as well as its subsequent influence on the nascent cinematic genre of film noir.

As the formula of the cozy mystery features the disruption and restoration of a functional social order, the formula of the hardboiled mystery novel could be similarly but distinctly posited as a world in which a dysfunctional social order is introduced; it is disrupted further through a particularly puzzling or otherwise egregious crime; following the detective’s investigation, the criminal is identified; and the dysfunctional social order is restored to its prior status quo. As Tom Leitch notes of the contrasting dynamics of these genres: “The cozy concentrates on evoking a particular, apparently stable milieu that is disrupted by death; the hardboiled story presents a world in which death is normal, is indeed the defining condition of normalcy.”⁷ The antihero protagonists of hardboiled novels diverge notably from the precedents set by the likes of C. Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes, and Helmet Heissenbüttel summarizes the distinctions between the two primary characterizations of detectives: “There is a classic pair of opposites among detectives: the one who, roughly or even brutally, thrashes his opponents (and naturally is himself also thrashed on occasion) until he has found out who done it; and the other who, by a mixture of investigation of facts and combinatory puzzle solving, brings what was at first confused and opaque into plausible connection and makes it transparent.”⁸ Sounding a similar note, Jerome Delamater and Ruth Prigozy assert that “the classic British detective story is based primarily on ratiocination. Its American counterpart, however, has from the outset been described as ‘hardboiled.’”⁹ In sum, cozy detectives interview, reflect, and deduce to solve mysteries; hardboiled detectives stand ready to brawl.

Christie denounced the hardboiled literary school on several occasions, declaring herself surprised and disappointed by its popularity: “No one could have dreamed then that there would come a time when crime books would be read for their love of violence, the taking of sadistic pleasure in brutality for its own sake” (Autobiography, 424). Allusions to hardboiled fiction, often disparaging in tone, appear regularly in her novels, and notably in Poirot’s reactions to current novels and films. After Poirot spends the evening at home rather than attending the cinema, the narrator reports his reasoning: “Scenes of violence and crude brutality were the fashion and as a former police officer, Poirot was bored by brutality…. He found it fatiguing, and unintelligent” (McGinty, 3). When a character asks Poirot about “the tough school” of detective fiction, he replies coolly: “Violence for violence’s sake? Since when has that been interesting?” (Clocks, 111). Indeed, occasional characters appear to have ingested so much hardboiled fiction that they view the United States as hopelessly depraved, as in the words of a maid interviewed by Poirot: “I’ve read about Chicago and Page 40 →them gunmen and all that. It must be a wicked country; and what the police can be about, I can’t think. Not like our policeman” (Thirteen at Dinner, 68). It is equally plausible that this maid refers to Chicago’s real-life criminal underbelly, as notoriously led by Al Capone, but in either instance, this city represents the violent antithesis of the cozy tradition’s small villages and manor houses. As with so many thematic issues across Christie’s extensive corpus, one can find countervailing opinions, and her overriding distaste for the hardboiled school is complicated by the fact that she depicts Miss Marple as a reader of such fiction. When Miss Marple uses the term fall guy, she explains that she herself reads these novels—“I got it from one of Mr. Dashiell Hammett’s stories”—as Christie then ventriloquizes a compliment to her fellow author of mystery fiction: “I understand from my nephew Raymond that he is considered at the top of the tree in what is called the tough style of literature” (A Murder Is Announced, 74).

While any binary division too strongly linking the cozy style with English writers and the hardboiled style with American writers would inevitably collapse owing to the many cross-pollinations of authors and styles on both sides of the Atlantic, it is well worth pondering why cozy should describe any murder mystery. As Susan Rowland notes, the term cozy “indicat[es] a paradoxically comforting quality to stories about catching murderers. Cozies feel ‘cozy’ because they end in a restoration of a relatively tranquil social group whose values are strengthened by one of their own solving the murder.”¹⁰ True, but one of their own is typically the murder victim (or victims) as well, and one of their own is typically the murderer, too. These conditions hardly seem conducive to the gemütlich tenor for which the so-called cozy genre ostensibly strives. Furthermore, the distinction between cozy and hardboiled mysteries carries with it an overarching (and oversimplified) gender politics, one that aligns the former with femininity and the latter with masculinity, with these words themselves hinting strongly at their gendered undertones. G. M. Malliet, herself a writer in the cozy tradition, acknowledges this word’s potentially alienating effect: “I think cozy is a kind of twee word that makes some men flee in horror.”¹¹ But most importantly in considering Christie’s literary reputation, authors of the cozy school are rarely acknowledged for their literary artistry and innovation, whereas several authors of the hardboiled school are increasingly viewed as trailblazing talents, as evident in David Madden’s assessment of Raymond Chandler’s burgeoning literary reputation: “Since his death in 1959, Raymond Chandler has been elevated to detective fiction’s pantheon of writers and many scholars have even ventured to argue that Chandler’s is an important voice in twentieth-century fiction, without qualifying this achievement by noting that he worked in popular fiction.”¹² As in so many other instances, women’s work—or work simply associated with women—is devalued in comparison to similar work undertaken by men. And so we may well ask, what does the binary Page 41 →between cozy and hardboiled fiction accomplish, other than to devalue artworks associated with women authors such as Agatha Christie?

Even as much of Christie’s fiction falls within the parameters of the cozy tradition as outlined by critics, in several notable moments she adopts a dark, menacing, and distinctly discomforting tone, which additionally undercuts any taxonomic value of the cozy / hardboiled binary. For instance, as much as Christie refrained from depicting violence for the sake of violence, one should not lose sight of the fact that, whether a novel depicts a murder by arsenic poisoning or by a gunshot to the head, the victim remains equally dead. Christie dulled the visceral impact of murder in many novels, yet she accentuates it in others, such as in the rising body counts of And Then There Were None and Death Comes as the End. Indeed, if one tallies the murders of And Then There Were None committed both by the killer and by the killer’s victims in the novel’s backstory, the body count reaches into the dozens. In the dedication of A Holiday for Murder, Christie responded to the genial criticism of her brother-in-law James Watts and promised a truly gruesome murder: “You complained that my murders were getting too refined—anaemic, in fact! You yearned for a ‘good violent murder with lots of blood.’ A murder where there was no doubt about its being a murder!” (Holiday for Murder dedication page). Christie delivered in her promise, evident in Poirot’s reaction to the crime scene: “Yes, that is it—violence…. And blood—an insistence on blood. Blood on the chairs, on the tables, on the carpet…. Such a frail old man, so thin, so shriveled, so dried up—and yet—in his death—so much blood” (Holiday for Murder, 74). Other elements of Christie’s novels that challenge the concept of coziness include the séance and death ritual scenes of Pale Horse (150–54), the psychological torment suffered by the Boynton family in Appointment with Death, and the child murders in both By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Hallowe’en Party, among many other chilling and unsettling scenes. Her short story “The Last Séance” features a medium “birthing” a deceased child back to life and the mother stealing it away, leaving the medium dead in a shrunken husk of her former body; this tale, which includes a pseudo-scientific explanation of paranormal phenomena, illustrates Christie’s interest in tropes and traditions of the horror genre (Double Sin, 168). One should not overinterpret a chance use of the word cozy as necessarily referring to the cozy / hardboiled binary, but it is nonetheless instructive to consider the scene when, after Detective Inspector Hardcastle learns that characters are drinking tea to calm themselves after discovering a murder, the narrator reports, “Dick’s comment was that it all sounded very cozy” (Clocks, 11). It is difficult to interpret this statement without irony. In complementary contrast, one of the characters of Christie’s play Verdict describes the murderer as “much too hard-boiled” (553), which further blurs any binary between these two styles within her corpus.

Page 42 →Also aligning Christie with the cozy tradition, several of her titles, and thus her plots, are inspired by children’s nursery rhymes, notably And Then There Were None; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (aka The Patriotic Murders); Five Little Pigs (aka Murder in Retrospect); Crooked House; Three Blind Mice (aka The Mousetrap); Mrs. McGinty’s Dead; A Pocket Full of Rye; and Hickory Dickory Dock (aka Hickory Dickory Death).¹³ Any simplistic assumption that children’s literature exclusively features narratively comforting themes is itself highly debatable, and so too should any assumption that Christie’s novels based on children’s verse are inherently cozy in their plotlines. Illustrating these points, Christie’s novels were frequently retitled for publication in the United States, and it is evident that her American publishers sought to stress the murders of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe and Five Little Pigs by renaming them The Patriotic Murders and Murder in Retrospect; in effect, the publishers were attempting to market these books as less cozy and, if not precisely as hardboiled, certainly as more violent than children’s verse would suggest. At the same time, by aligning her murderous plots with light rhymes that readers likely remember from childhood, she alienates her audience from any previous expectation of the rhymes’ meanings, metamorphosing the familiar and innocuous into the unfamiliar and deadly. Of these titles, And Then There Were None and A Pocket Full of Rye most effectively link the fates of the nursery rhyme characters to those of Christie’s characters, creating eerie parallels that suggest not merely the murderousness of the respective killers but their depraved obsession with staging fanciful jingles within the real-life settings they inhabit. In Murder in Three Acts, playwright Muriel Wills discusses her new production, titled Little Dog Laughed, and describes it as “a kind of modern version of the nursery rhyme—a lot of froth and nonsense—hey-diddle-diddle and the dish-and-the-spoon scandal,” to which Sir Charles agrees, “The world nowadays is rather like a mad nursery rhyme” (Three Acts, 145). Inverting children’s rhymes into murderous plots, Christie creates a determinedly alienating effect from many readers’ beloved memories of childhood verse.

Efforts to pigeonhole Christie’s novels as cozy and escapist fare are also undercut by her frequent references to well-known murderers of the past, thus interweaving elements of nonfiction into her fictional (and purportedly escapist) worlds. She alludes to a range of notorious cases, often to enhance the suspense of her novels by likening her unfolding plots to actual events. With its depiction of a potential serial killer stalking the citizens of England, The ABC Murders surely stands as one of her less cozy mysteries, and as one character nervously states, “It’s like Jack the Ripper all over again” (ABC Murders, 130, 194; cf. Cat among the Pigeons, 179). Notably, the identity of Jack the Ripper remains an unanswered question, imbuing this scene with a similar sense of disquiet. Christie repeatedly refers to the case of Hawley Harvey Crippen (Murder in Page 43 →Retrospect, 45; Labors of Hercules, 37; “Tape-Measure Murder,” Three Blind Mice, 99; Sleeping Murder, 59), an American living in England who, in 1910, murdered his wife Cora but then explained her absence by claiming that she had returned to the United States. In The Patriotic Murders Inspector Japp, conversing with Poirot, alludes to the gruesome case of Isabella Ruxton in 1935, who was murdered by her husband, a physician afterwards dubbed the “Savage Surgeon.” Japp proposes that a missing woman might have met a similar fate: “I suppose you’re hinting that … we’ll find her in a quarry, cut up in little pieces like Mrs. Ruxton?” (Patriotic Murders, 81). A character in Cat among the Pigeons refers to Thomas Neill Cream, the serial killer known as the Lambeth Poisoner, suggesting that, as Cream “went about killing an unfortunate type of woman” in the 1880s and 1890s, the murderer in this novel “just goes about killing schoolmistresses” (Cat among the Pigeons, 179). (The “unfortunate type of woman” alluded to among Cream’s victims were mostly prostitutes and women seeking abortions.) Perhaps what is most unsettling about the so-called Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934, alluded to in The Body in the Library (93) and The Labors of Hercules (142), is that the murders of an unidentified woman and of Violette Kay were unrelated; this macabre coincidence led Brighton to be dubbed “The Queen of Slaughtering Places.”

Complementing these murderous men and their female victims, Christie alludes to a wide range of murderous women, thereby balancing the gender politics of her true-crime allusions. In the 1850s Madeleine Smith was suspected of murdering her boyfriend Pierre Emile L’Angelier, but insufficient evidence precluded her conviction for the crime; in Sleeping Murder, Smith is cited as an example of “a type who commits a crime, manages to get away with it, and is darned careful never to stick a neck out again”—which parallels the actions of the novel’s culprit (Sleeping Murder, 32; cf. Pale Horse, 172). Christie repeatedly cites the most infamous of unconvicted but likely murderers, Lizzie Borden, particularly as an example of the impossibility of predicting people’s behavior: “Such apparently unlikely people do the most fantastic things. Take the case of Lizzie Borden. There’s not really a reasonable explanation of that” (Moving Finger, 114; cf. Ordeal by Innocence, 37 and 48; Elephants Can Remember, 55; Sleeping Murder, 32 and 88). In 1860, sixteen-year-old Constance Kent slashed the throat of her four-year-old half-brother. She is alluded to in Crooked House: “Constance Kent, everybody said, was very fond of the baby brother she killed…. I think people more often kill those they love, than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you” (103). In its attention to a family with relatively young children in the characters of Eustace and Josephine Leonides, Crooked House thematizes the possibility of violence meted out to and enacted by children. In the early 1920s, Edith Thompson plotted the murder of her husband Percy with her boyfriend Frederick Page 44 →Bywaters; both Thompson and Bywaters were hanged for the crime. Thompson is described as a woman who “had lived in a world of violent unreality,” an eerie but apt assessment of her and her crime that imbues the search for the murderer of Funerals Are Fatal with a similar frisson of dark fantasy (Funerals Are Fatal, 56; cf. McGinty, 91).

Also in Funerals Are Fatal, the lawyer Mr. Entwhistle muses over a rogues’ gallery of true-crime killers: “Murderers as far as he could judge seemed to be of all sorts and kinds. Some had had over-weening vanity, some had had a lust for power, some, like Seddon, had been mean and avaricious, others like Smith … had had an incredible fascination for women; some, like Armstrong, had been pleasant fellows to meet…. Nurse Waddington had put her elderly patients out of the way with businesslike cheerfulness” (56). Frederick Seddon murdered his boarder Eliza Mary Barrow in 1911, and George Joseph Smith, a bigamist, was convicted for the Brides in the Baths Murders of 1912 to 1914. Herbert Rowse Armstrong murdered his wife by arsenic poisoning in 1921 and also attempted to murder Oswald Martin, a professional rival; to this day Armstrong remains the only solicitor to be executed for murder in England. In 1935 Dorothea Waddingham—not Waddington—killed a patient in her care to gain an inheritance. This laundry list of murderers creates a chilling effect, with readers confronted with the likelihood of untimely and violent death interrupting the tranquility of life in a range of everyday encounters, including those with their beloved family members.

As much as Christie alludes to famous murderers of the past to generate a sense of unease among her readers, with her novels approaching a greater sense of verisimilitude despite their obvious fictionality, she is also sufficiently versatile to reframe these true-crime accounts in a less threatening manner—in effect, to metamorphose the horrors of true crime into fodder for humor. Magda Leonides, one of Christie’s flamboyant actress characters, hopes to stage Edith Thompson’s story as a comedy: “I know they say I must always play comedy because of my nose—but you know there’s quite a lot of comedy to be got out of Edith Thompson” (Crooked House, 36–37). In another lightly comic moment, Poirot cites several famous historical murders as a point of pride, confident that he could solve mysteries that perplexed the police and the public for decades: “There is no doubt whatever in my own mind who murdered Charles Bravo … Then there was that unfortunate adolescent, Constance Kent. The true motive that lay behind her strangling of the small brother whom she undoubtedly loved has always been a puzzle. But not to me…. As for Lizzie Borden, one wishes only that one could put a few necessary questions to various people concerned” (Clocks, 108).¹⁴ This passage indicates Poirot’s superior knowledge, in that he can solve the unsolvable crimes of the past, and thus it contributes to Christie’s humorous motif of Poirot’s egotism. Yet Poirot’s musings are simultaneously Page 45 →somewhat disquieting because he withholds his theories from readers. The crimes thus remain unsolved and unsettling for them, and thus provide another strong example of how Christie’s fiction dismantles the frameworks of cozy and hardboiled fiction.

Further tapping the power of true-crime incidents to bolster her fictions, Christie modeled several of her plots on real-life events, as Anne Powers documents through detailed readings of historical cases and Christie’s fiction. Powers links the violent life of Dr. William Palmer, also known as the Rugeley Poisoner and the Prince of Poisoners, to the events depicted in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The notorious Madame Marguerite Steinheil was reported to be having sex with French president Félix Faure when he died unexpectedly in 1899; subsequently, she was tried but not convicted for the murders of her mother and husband in 1908. Steinheil claimed that intruders gagged and bound her, a plot point employed in Murder on the Links. Pondering the far-reaching consequences of the kidnaping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby for his family, friends, and associates, Christie envisioned the revenge fantasy of Murder on the Orient Express, devising one of her most clever solutions as a satisfying resolution to this notorious case. Powers argues that the Hawley Harvey Crippen case parallels the plot of Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, in that “the eternal-triangle story of fictitious Alfred Craig, Mrs. Craig, and Eva Kane equates to that of true-life Dr. Crippen, Cora Crippen and Ethel Le Neve, and is chiefly elucidated through Hercule Poirot’s brief retrospective rumination on the fictional event.”¹⁵ George Joseph Smith’s lethal mix of bigamy and murder matches key aspects of the killer’s motivation in A Caribbean Mystery. As Powers argues of these and other parallels, while Christie’s fictions reflect “her own unique and imaginative set of puzzles and solutions,” these works “are also distinguished by an underlying authenticity lent by consideration of famous real-life crimes.”¹⁶

Christie’s interweaving of true-crime events into her novels testifies to her interest in building the credibility of her murders and thus in imbuing them with a disquieting edge, as does her interest in the nascent field of psychology. Somewhat paradoxically, Christie’s novels gain emotional depth through their surface engagement with issues of psychology. Certainly, she is not attempting to plumb the depths of her individual characters’ consciousnesses, as her contemporaries Henry James and Virginia Woolf did for their protagonists. Owing to the peculiar mandates of mystery fiction, such an objective is hardly possible because Christie would have needed to generate psychological portraits for all of her credible suspects, not merely for her protagonists, which would overwhelm her novels with character portraits to the extent that their mysteries would be lost. Further to this point, as Joan Acocella declares, complex psychological portraits would, almost by necessity, resolve the novels’ mysteries: “If [Christie] had given her characters any psychological deinition, we could have solved the mystery. Page 46 →But as long as they are kept suspended, opaque—as they must be, in order for the book to be a puzzle—any one of them could be the culprit.”¹⁷

Notwithstanding these limitations to the utility of psychology for detective fiction, this science and Christie’s preferred genre matured during roughly the same period, as Amy Yang observes: “Both psychoanalysis and modern detective fiction evolved into their modern form around the turn of the twentieth century.” One can readily see their overlaps and mutual interests: the psychoanalyst employs the tactics of the detective, interviewing and discussing with patients the roots of their neuroses or related troubles, whereas the detective employs the insights of the psychoanalyst, trying to frame a mental picture of the type of person who would commit the crime under investigation. Yang further posits: “With the introduction of the unconscious mind into mainstream discussion, psychoanalysis offered a concept more intriguing than just the obvious, surface motive.”¹⁸ Sigmund Freud rose to fame during Christie’s childhood and teen years with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904). He published many of his most trailblazing works in the 1920s, as she was breaking into the upper ranks of detective fiction: Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). In occasional passages, Christie offers a quick primer on psychology, which suggests the necessity of educating some readers on this emerging field. For example, in “The Red Signal,” a short story published in The Witness for the Prosecution, a character explains the subconscious: “Your conscious self did not notice or remember, but with your subconscious self it was otherwise. The subconscious never forgets. We believe, too, that it can reason and deduce quite independently of the higher or conscious will” (27). The discovery, or the invention, of the subconscious afforded the opportunity for people to reconsider their understanding of their motivations and desires, and thus the possibility of discovering their own sense of alienation from themselves.

When employed effectively, psychology can dissolve any borders between the cozy and hardboiled styles, both of which are often more concerned with surface motivations for murder—greed, desire, revenge, corruption—than the possibility that the killer suffers from a psychological imbalance. Psychology, in effect, multiplies the potential number of suspects, for a given character need not be pursuing an outwardly apparent objective in dispatching the victim. Certainly, Christie tosses in many potential complexes for her characters, including the possibility of a “protection complex” (Easy to Kill, 73), an “inferiority complex” (Easy to Kill, 167), a “persecution complex” (Cat among the Pigeons, 98), and “incipient persecution mania” (Sleeping Murder, 137), as well as the supposition that a suspect has “a punishment complex—has had it, I suspect, since infancy” (Funerals Are Fatal, 200). “Sex mania” might motivate a killer (Sleeping Page 47 →Murder, 159), as might the possibility that a killer is afflicted with a form of “religious insanity [that] made her feel that she had a divine command to rid the world of certain people” (Pricking, 133). One of Christie’s more compelling armchair psychologists, Mr. Satterthwaite, even mentions “our Anglo-Saxon complexes” (Three Acts, 44), thus pathologizing the English as an inherently unbalanced people. In an absorbing example of the intersection of true crime and psychology, Mr. Satterthwaite assesses the roots of Crippen’s criminality: “An inferiority complex is a very peculiar thing. Crippen, for instance, undoubtedly suffered from it. It’s at the back of a lot of crimes” (Three Acts, 105). Such armchair diagnoses appear frequently in Christie’s fiction, and one character is lightly satirized as “an excellent example of the danger of half-baked psychological theories in the head of an amateur” (Towards Zero Cast of Characters).

While one could easily dismiss such characters for their surface understanding of human psychology, Poirot perceives it as an essential component of his investigative technique. “I study the psychology of crime” (Thirteen at Dinner, 131), he declares, and notably as well, Christie employs his interest in psychology to distinguish him from detectives of the Sherlock Holmes model: “It is the psychology I seek, not the fingerprint or the cigarette ash” (Orient Express, 52). As the greatest detectives must master psychology, so too do Christie’s more accomplished criminals understand the motivations of the human mind, as remarked upon by Mr. Parker Pyne: “If a criminal were a psychologist, what a criminal he could be” (Parker Pyne, 154). His words point to the necessity of understanding the complexities of human thought to better evade the strictures of human society. Christie’s use of psychology, like her references to historical murderers, frequently creates an alienating and unnerving effect, in the simple fact that no one can fully understand the mental processes of another, even those to whom they are most intimately linked. As a character muses in Murder in Three Acts: “Some books that I’ve read these last few years have brought a lot of comfort to me. Books on psychology. It seems to show that in many ways people can’t help themselves. A kind of kink” (106). In a fictional world where everyone might suffer from, or indulge in, a “kind of kink,” or is otherwise characterized by a mental abnormality, any line dividing the psychologically stable and the psychotic is dizzyingly blurred.

To designate Agatha Christie as Queen of the Cozies is to unnecessarily delimit the scope of her accomplishments and to perpetuate stereotypes concerning the gendered preferences of women authors and their readers, and thus to do so latently calls into question the common critical practice of labeling authors as participants in certain writerly schools. Christie’s contemporary James M. Cain, known for such riveting novels as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Mildred Pierce (1941), rejected the hardboiled label for himself and his fiction in the preface to The Butterfly (1947): “I belong to no school, hardboiled or Page 48 →otherwise, and I believe these so-called schools exist mainly in the imagination of critics, and have little correspondence in reality anywhere else…. If he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at anybody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal; it is sealed off in such fashion that outside ‘influences’ are almost impossible.”¹⁹ In a reversal of traditional gendered imagery, Cain compares himself to a woman giving birth, but one who must do so on her own, and the power of literature often arises in its ability to resist regimes of gender and genre. The cozy / hard-boiled binary latently encodes traditional gender roles into the creation and consumption of detective fiction, whereas much of the pleasure of the murder mystery arises in the novelty that a given author infuses into this narrative paradigm. Indeed, Christie began writing her novels before the terms cozy and hardboiled were applied to mystery fiction, which thus raises the paradoxical question of how one could be the queen of a genre she never envisioned.