Page 68 →SixThe Tragicomic Themes of Christie’s Murders

In the virtual self-satire of “The Mystery of the Spanish Shawl,” it is evident that Christie assumed an ultimately comic view on the challenges of writing detective fiction. This short story opens by detailing the travails of Mr. Eastwood, a struggling neophyte novelist, and it is difficult not to see Christie herself in this somewhat exaggerated scene, as surely she found herself occasionally perplexed concerning how to develop one of her initial ideas into a fully formed novel: “‘the mystery of the second cucumber,’ so it ran. A pleasing title. Anthony Page 70 →Eastwood felt that anyone reading that title would be at once intrigued and arrested by it. ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber,’ they would say. ‘What can that be about? A cucumber? The second cucumber? I must certainly read that story.’ And they would be thrilled and charmed by the consummate ease with which this master of detective fiction had woven an exciting plot round this simple vegetable” (“The Mystery of the Spanish Shawl,” Witness for the Prosecution, 139). Here Christie finds humor in the writer’s common frustration of what precisely she is going to write, which suggests her attention to the latent humor of vexing circumstances. Anthony Eastwood’s second cucumber thus metonymically represents the likely disjunction between murder and humor but also their surprising union in Christie’s hands, and it is precisely owing to the ugliness of murder that Christie’s humor shines through in their glaring yet productive contrast.

“Of course, say what you like, a murder is an awkward thing—it upsets the servants and puts the general routine out,” proclaims Lady Angkatell in The Hollow (90), to which the reader is seemingly solicited to nod in sympathy, Ah, yes, the ordeals that plague the wealthy in Christie’s England, from the distressed domestic to the occasional murder! Lady Angkatell’s words also apparently indicate that murders occur with relative frequency among the rarefied realms of Britain’s elite, as if this aggrieved, if not quite distressed, hostess has experienced such turmoils repeatedly. At the very least, Lady Angkatell considers the worrisome implications of pursuing one’s social life during the aftermath of a murder, as she explains the etiquette of consuming dessert amidst such untimely circumstances: “There would be something very gross, just after the death of a friend, in eating one’s favourite pudding. But caramel custard is so easy … and then one leaves a little on one’s plate” (Hollow, 100). To eat one’s favorite pudding after a murder would shockingly abrogate the manners of polite society, but no one could object to a caramel custard, particularly if the diners leave behind a lonesome morsel to indicate their mourning, which is not to imply that they are actually experiencing sorrow. The Hollow stands as one of Christie’s most entertaining and ingenious novels for several reasons—notably the solution to the murder which is simultaneously extraordinarily clever but rather simple—but also in its religious themes, as the murder of Dr. John Christow becomes an allegory of the killer’s loss of faith. As evident from Lady Angkatell’s observations on the social proprieties of murder, the novel also triumphs in its steady attention to comic themes, and thus exemplifies a prevailing thread throughout much of Christie’s fiction: her frequent interweaving of the humor of a comedy of manners into a murder mystery, resulting in novels as amusing as they are perplexing. To some degree Christie’s interest in the comedy of manners tradition should not be surprising: her first effort at novel writing, Snow upon the Desert, is a comedy of manners, which testifies to her early interest in satirizing Page 71 →the foibles of English society.⁴ Indeed, Marty Knepper identifies Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple’s debut novel, as “a marvelous comedy of manners.”⁵

The comedy of manners establishes a sense of decorum, only for the characters then to flaunt these rules of decorum. David Hirst explains this theatrical genre: “The subject of the comedy of manners is the way people behave, the manners they employ in a social context; the chief concerns of the characters are sex and money (and the interrelated topics of marriage, adultery and divorce); the style is distinguished by the refinement of raw emotional expression in the subtlety of wit and intrigue.”⁶ Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing is often celebrated as the first comedy of manners in English theatre, and famed playwrights of this tradition include William Congreve (The Way of the World), Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The Rivals), and Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest). Murder mysteries and comedies of manners potentially overlap in their joint interest in their characters’ mercenary and amorous motivations, as well as the ways that these motivations disrupt the surrounding community. Hirst further states that “the keynote of these plays is decorum. This has given rise to another criticism: that of a shallowness and lack of sincerity in the characters and their authors.”⁷ As discussed in the previous chapter, the alleged shallowness of Christie’s characters mostly arises from the fact that their emotional development must occur before the novel’s inciting event of murder, and thus before much of its narrative action, but any such shallowness can also reflect their participation in the human comedy of life in a cloistered society. Certainly, Miss Marple knows the strictures of etiquette and decorum and refuses to break them, such as when she reacts to surprising circumstances by not reacting: “True to the precepts handed down to her by her mother and grandmother—to wit: that a true lady can neither be shocked nor surprised—Miss Marple merely raised her eyebrows” (What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! 8).

As much as The Hollow could be classified as a murder mystery influenced by the comedy of manners tradition, Christie’s theatrical version of The Hollow could be inversely classified as a comedy of manners influenced by the traditions of detective fiction. Consider Lady Angkatell’s response to her husband’s subtle suggestion that she might be the culprit: “Darling, darling, you don’t imagine for a moment that I shot John? (She laughs, rises, crosses to the fireplace and picks up the box of chocolates from the mantelpiece.) I did have that silly idea about an accident. But then I remembered that he was our guest…. One doesn’t ask someone to be a guest and then get behind a bush and have a pop at them” (TMAOP, 243). These lines join together a variety of comic tropes: Lady Angkatell’s languid repetition of “darling,” her airy laughter, her appetite for chocolates during what should be a serious discussion, her light confession that she had indeed considered dispatching the victim, and finally her capitulation to the demands of etiquette that one should not murder one’s guests. She soon Page 72 →adds, “What a pity John Cristow’s dead. Really quite unnecessary after all. But what an exciting weekend” (TMAOP, 248). In one of her final lines, she sighs winsomely, “It was a wonderful inquest” (TMAOP, 260). Many comedies contrast their outré and excessive characters with so-called “straight men,” and it is evident that Christie envisioned this play’s detective, Inspector Colqhuhoun, as filling this role: “a thoughtful quiet man with charm and a sense of humour. His personality is sympathetic. He must not be played as a comedy part” (TMAOP, 210). Notably, Christie replaced Hercule Poirot with Inspector Colqhuhoun for her stage adaptation of The Hollow, thus to deflate the audience’s expectation that Poirot fill a comic role in this instance, as he frequently does in her novels owing to his sardonic view of English culture.

Christie’s comic stylings can be productively aligned to Oscar Wilde’s, as several of her characters reflect types common to the comedy of manners tradition as exemplified by his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest. The artist Cedric Crackenthorpe channels Wilde’s Algernon Moncrieff when he claims, “Of course I despise money when I haven’t got any…. It’s the only dignified thing to do” (What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! 190), and readers hear an echo of Wilde’s imperiously aloof Lady Bracknell in Christie’s treatment of Miss Hartnell, one of Miss Marple’s neighbors: “She visited the poor indefatigably, however hard they tried to avoid her ministrations” (Body in the Library, 36). Comedies of manners often treat romantic and even adulterous affairs in a mock scandalous manner, evident when Clarissa, a married woman, asks, “Are you making immoral advances to me, Jeremy?” He candidly replies, “Definitely,” and she acquiesces immediately to her ostensible debauchment: “How lovely. Go on” (Spider’s Web, 13). Within comic scenarios, domestics such as Mrs. Kidder often aspire to break the bonds of decorum by gossiping about their employers, as illustrated in her conversation with the imperturbable Lucy Eyelesbarrow: “‘Dreadful, the things people go about saying. I don’t listen, mind you, more than I can help. But you’d hardly believe it.’ She waited hopefully” (What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! 194). One should be able to trust the authority and competency of the police, but when Chief Inspector Davy, shaking “his head gently and reassuringly,” comforts Miss Marple that the mysterious events at Bertram’s Hotel will not continue—”There won’t be any murders” (At Bertram’s Hotel, 143)—he is proved incompetent and incorrect in the very next sentences when another murder occurs: “A sharp report, louder than the former one, came from outside. It was followed by a scream and another report” (144). Comedies often rely on mistaken identities, such as when snobbish Mrs. Schuyler is horrified that “the outrageous Mr. Ferguson” is courting her cousin Cornelia—“Cornelia … have you encouraged this young man?”—only to quickly change her opinion when Poirot informs her that Ferguson’s true identity is the “young Lord Dawlish. Rolling in money, of course” (Death on the Nile, 217–18). Comedy, in many Page 73 →ways, consists of the art of inverting and reversing expectations, which these brief scenes aptly illustrate.

Despite the discovery of a murder victim, the opening scenes of The Body in the Library further illuminate Christie’s treatment of murder as a comedy of manners. As Neil McDonald observes, Christie relies on “more than a touch of comedy in the ways she deployed her outrageous plots,”⁸ which is readily evident as Mrs. Bantry wakes from her dreams of winning first prize at a flower show, which also featured the vicar’s wife in her bathing suit, to the hysterical cries of Mary, her maid: “Oh, ma’am, oh, ma’am, there’s a body in the library” (2). Mrs. Bantry and her husband bicker amicably over the unlikeliness of this reported corpse and then confirm its presence. The social disruption caused by murder escalates improprieties of etiquette, as Miss Marple is surprised to receive a phone call before the accustomed hour of nine in the morning. Mrs. Bantry oddly and volubly compliments Miss Marple. “You’re so good at bodies,” she effuses, and soon adds, “you’re very good at murders” (7). Mrs. Bantry then explains her plan to amuse herself despite this misfortune: “What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one’s house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean” (8). The scene concludes as Mrs. Bantry notes a point of disagreement with her husband: “He seems to think I shouldn’t enjoy myself about it at all” (8). Mrs. Bantry perceives murder as an amusing interruption of life’s quotidian fare, whereas Mr. Bantry rejects any pleasures afforded by crime and instead insists that they present a façade of concern—in effect, revealing their joint comic duplicity, if for separate purposes.

Without the feelings of the victims to consider, the suspects and survivors find themselves in an array of socially awkward situations, particularly with the bleak yet ironic realization that “anyone’s safety depends principally on the fact that nobody wishes to kill them” (Easy to Kill, 173). Indeed, even murder victims are at times treated as breaching social etiquette due to the indignity of their untimely demises. In Cat among the Pigeons, the newspapers, in reporting the death of a school teacher, “had an almost apologetic note in [their reports], as though it were thoroughly tactless of any games mistress to get herself shot in such circumstances” (85). In comedies of manners, characters often deliver their lines in a deadpan style—what they say is funny, but they do not acknowledge its humor—and this paradigm enlivens Christie’s characterization of Poirot. She emphasizes his determined pursuit of justice for murder victims, yet she embellishes his personality through his droll replies to others. When Colonel Race reacts exasperatedly to the theatrical, alcoholic, and erratic Mrs. Otterbourne—“What a poisonous woman! Whew! Why didn’t somebody murder her?”— Poirot calms his friend: ‘“It may yet happen,’ Poirot consoled him” (Death on the Nile, 159). When two teen boys spin out increasingly farfetched scenarios to explain a murder, the narrator records their eager anticipation of Poirot’s Page 74 →approval—”They both looked with satisfied faces to Poirot”—but his response records the disjunction between their viewpoints: “Well … you’ve certainly given me something to think about” (Hallowe’en Party, 143). In another such exchange, Mrs. Clapperton wonders aloud, “But really, M. Poirot, what would one be if one wasn’t alive?” to which Poirot succinctly replies, “Dead.” Christie then details his interlocutor’s reaction: “Mrs. Clapperton frowned. The reply was not to her liking. The man, she decided, was trying to be funny” (“Problem at Sea,” Regatta, 171).

Miss Marple generates similar reactions, such as when she explains the intricacies of a murder and another character shudders, “That old lady gives me the creeps” (Nemesis, 223). Miss Marple’s insistence on propriety also gives rise to humorous euphemisms, evident when readers learn of her distaste for the word nymphomania: “Indeed it was not a word that Miss Marple would have used—her own phrase would have been ‘always too fond of men’” (At Bertram’s Hotel, 15). The wit of many comedies of manners hinges on an epigrammatic style, evident in Wilde’s razor-sharp quips; Christie’s wit is often epigrammatic, as in her deinition of a “real Conservative” as one who “preferred acute boredom to the meretriciously amusing” (The Rose and the Yew Tree, 37). When one of Christie’s characters opines sardonically, “If you can’t have a gentleman, I suppose a hero is the next best thing,” the narrator assesses these words as “practically an epigram” (38).

Many of Christie’s characters also display comic foibles in their characterizations, as she applies deftly comic and individualizing touches that leaven their supporting roles in the unfolding plots. Poirot’s secretary Miss Lemon could be excised from the novels altogether with little loss to their storylines, yet her monomaniacal obsession with her filing system elevates a forgettable figure into a memorable one: “Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion. She dreamed of such a system at night” (“How Does Your Garden Grow?” Regatta, 47). Hickory Dickory Death opens with Poirot incredulous at Miss Lemon’s three typing errors, with the social fabric of his household upset by this intrusion of disorder. As the narrator explains: “It was well known that the whole of Miss Lemon’s heart and mind was given, when she was not on duty, to the perfection of a new filing system which was to be patented and bear her name” (2). All told, Miss Lemon emerges as a strikingly unique comic character: one who would never see herself as such, owing to her strict professionalism, but one who appears as such to readers precisely because of the excesses of this professionalism.

Truly, Christie often takes an unabashedly optimistic view of murder in her novels, in which untimely deaths are not to be unduly lamented but appreciated as part of life’s rhythms. Jerry Burton, the first-person narrator of The Moving Finger, takes comfort in his valedictory evaluation of life’s ephemerality, despite Page 75 →the murderous circumstances prompting these thoughts: “Just for a fleeting moment I thought of Mrs. Symmington and Agnes Woddell in their graves in the churchyard and wondered if they would agree, and then I remembered that Agnes’ boyfriend hadn’t been very fond of her and that Mrs. Symmington hadn’t been very nice to Megan, and what the hell? We’ve all got to die sometime! And I agreed with Miss Emily that everything was for the best in the best of possible worlds” (180). A rosier view of murder could hardly be envisioned: the inevitability of death awaits us one and all, and so death cannot help but be appreciated as an unavoidable experience in life, as part of “the best of possible worlds” that facilitates human existence (even if we have no choice in the matter). The disparate fortunes of life and death are often noted in passing fashion, in lines that could be read either mournfully or mordantly, with the latter interpretation illuminating Christie’s insights into the latent humor of death. Such a dual interpretation is also evident in the successful efforts of Mrs. Spenlow, formerly a between-maid but now a shopkeeper, to raise her financial prospects: “The shop had prospered. Not so [her husband], who before long had sickened and died” (“Tape-Measure Murder,” Three Blind Mice, 93). Tears over Mr. Spenlow’s untimely passing, it appears, would merely be wasted.

Finally, it should be stressed that the line between comedy and tragedy can be surprisingly thin, as evident in the following exchange from Remembered Death, which commences in a comedy-of-manners style. Lord Kidderminster believes that one’s duty to the common good requires him to report any homicidal infractions committed by his family members and is shocked by Lady Kidderminster’s suggestion that he should withhold any such information: “If my daughter’s a murderess, do you suggest that I should use my official position to rescue her from the consequences of her act?” Lady Kidderminster tersely replies, “Of course.” Lord Kidderminster reiterates his viewpoint—“My dear Vicky! You don’t understand! One can’t do things like that. It would be a breach of—of honour.” She again dismisses his ethical stance: “Rubbish.” Such a comic pairing of earnestness and insouciance injects a note of humor in the scene, but then Christie sharply changes its tone: “They looked at each other—so far divided that neither could see the other’s point of view. So might Agamemnon and Clytemnestra have stared at each other with the word Iphigenia on their lips” (Remembered Death, 144). With this reference to one of the more dysfunctional of families from Greek legends, as Agamemnon sacrifices their daughter Iphigenia for propitious winds to sail to Troy, for which Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus murder him on his return, the reader may well wonder if similar fates might befall these characters, particularly as Christie occasionally uses well-known tragedies to signal and foreshadow her plots. This succinct scene between the Kidderminsters captures the ephemerality of a particularly charged and potentially momentous conversation—from the humor of discordant social Page 76 →and familial views to the latent chance that their differences might result in one or the other’s murder. In another such moment, Hercule Poirot observes of a murder victim, “Yes, she is dead…. Someone has turned the comedy into a tragedy” (“The Theft of the Royal Ruby,” Double Sin, 75), and then tragedy again metamorphoses into comedy when it turns out that the victim, Bridget, is not really dead after all. Christie again comments on the tenuous line between comedy and tragedy in a moment from The Rose and the Yew, when a character discusses Shakespeare’s Othello and, in commenting on Iago, identifies him as the tragic counterweight of the playwright’s great comic figure, Falstaff: “Falstaff stuff, only this time it’s not comedy but tragedy” (The Rose and the Yew Tree, 140). For Christie, tragedy is not the flipside of the comedy but its potential continuity.

At their core, tragedies focus on the human body in suffering and agony, as their protagonists fall to their personal failings and end in misery and death. According to Aristotelian dramatic theory, the conclusion of a tragedy is intended to incite a cathartic reaction from the audience, and the conclusions of mystery novels can function similarly, as readers experience the revelation of the killer and the presumed restoration of civic order. In his rich account of the tragic tradition and in a formulation relevant to Christie’s novels, Terry Eagleton writes: “Tragedy, then strikes a balance between meaning and mystery.”⁹ Tragedies ask haunting questions concerning the purpose of life and the finality of death that remain unanswerable, only ponderable, whereas murder mysteries touch upon these unanswerable questions while resolving the one at the heart of the novel, of who killed the victim and for what reason. “Murder is a drama. The desire for drama is very strong in the human race” (Murder in Retrospect, 79), opines Hercule Poirot, and murder mysteries align closely with tragedies in their joint focus on the painful condition of the human body and the loss of life. In this light, many murder mysteries can be seen as tragedies with solutions.

A pall of tragedy hangs over many of Christie’s novels, a theme keenly evident in the opening pages of Ordeal by Innocence. Arthur Calgary, returning from an Antarctic expedition that precluded him from testifying and proving the innocence of a wrongly convicted man, begins his quest for atonement by confronting the implacability of fate: “To his already overstimulated imagination, it seemed as though Tragedy herself stood there barring his way. It was a young face; indeed, it was in the poignancy of its youth that tragedy had its very essence. The Tragic Mask, he thought, should always be a mask of youth…. Helpless, foreordained, with a doom approaching … from the future” (Ordeal by Innocence, 5). Fate bears inexorably down upon tragic protagonists, who cannot escape their destinies but must proceed apace to the disastrous climax. Page 77 →As Susanne Langer notes: “The mythical tradition of Greece treated the fate of its ‘heroes’ … as a mysterious power inherent in the world rather than in the man and his ancestry; it was conceived as a private incubus bestowed on him at birth by a vengeful deity.”¹⁰ Arthur Calgary sees himself as similarly afflicted, as he muses: “The tragedy that ended his life has darkened my own” (Ordeal by Innocence, 19). Such are the destinies awaiting so many of Christie’s characters, notably the murder victims but also sundry others ensnared in the killer’s (and the author’s) plots.

As many critics have observed, several of Shakespeare’s great tragedies—notably Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello—can be read as murder mysteries themselves, but if not precisely as “whodunnits” than as “whydunnits,” in which the playwright explores the affective motivations that result in carnage and carcasses on stage. Shakespeare’s influence on Christie is evident in a range of her novels, but as Christie likely tired of critics unfavorably comparing her to literary authors, Hercule Poirot, in an additional example of his forays in literary criticism, pinpoints Shakespeare’s faults as a mystery writer:

Iago is the perfect murderer. The deaths of Desdemona, of Cassio—even of Othello himself—are all Iago’s crimes, planned by him, carried out by him. And he remains outside the circle, untouched by suspicion—or could have done so. For your great Shakespeare, my friend, had to deal with the dilemma that his own art had brought about. To unmask Iago, he had to resort to the clumsiest of devices—the handkerchief—a piece of work not at all in keeping with Iago’s general technique and a blunder of which one feels certain he would not have been guilty. (Curtain, 167)

Despite this pointed slight at Shakespeare’s plotting skills, Christie found inspiration in a range of his tragedies, thus to deepen her themes and the emotional impact of her murders. In a very real sense, both tragedies and murders result from mismanaged and untamed emotions, evident when Poirot discerns a Shakespearean undercast to the mysteries he is called to solve: “it is very Shakespearean—there are here all the emotions—the human emotions—in which Shakespeare would have revelled—the jealousies, the hates—the swift passionate actions” (There Is a Tide, 193).

Among the motivations of her murderers, a misguided or overzealous love ranks among the most common, which allows Christie to probe the complexity of human relationships in an inherently fallen world while playing murderous variations on a Romeo and Juliet theme. Death on the Nile illustrates these precepts in Jacqueline de Bellefort’s realization that her love for Simon Doyle transformed her into a murderer, as the narrator reports: “She herself had not coveted Linnet Ridgeway’s money, but she had loved Simon Doyle, had loved him beyond reason and beyond rectitude and beyond pity” (256). Upon learning Page 78 →the motivations behind the murders, another character states mournfully, “Love can be a very frightening thing,” as Poirot then identifies the tragic cast to love: “That is why most great love stories are tragedies” (261–62). Ondřej Beran assesses the morality of Jacqueline’s love for Simon and concludes that “she acts out of loyalty: to act otherwise would be difficult or impossible to reconcile with her love for Simon”; in other words, to do so “would be incompatible with who she is,” and thus Christie ponders the very meaning of the self in relation to one’s beloved.¹¹ In line with Beran’s interpretation, readers are asked to contemplate the ways in which love shifts identities in potentially unwelcome ways. Murder in Retrospect envisions Elsa Greer as a Juliet figure driven to murder following the anguishing loss of her Romeo, an ending that the narrator foreshadows in an appraisal of her: “No Juliet here—unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor—living on, deprived of Romeo. Was it not an essential part of Juliet’s make-up that she should die young?” (80). Christie imbues this narrative with a deeper tragic cast in Elsa’s eventual realization that the ultimate victim of her murder was herself: “I didn’t understand that I was killing myself—not him…. I died” (185).

From Poirot’s perspective, the tragedy always potential in love extends across one’s life, entrapping both the young and the old: “A tragedy of love may not always belong to Romeo and Juliet. It is not necessarily only the young who suffer the pains of love and are ready to die for love” (Elephants Can Remember, 186). More so, some characters, such as Victoria Jones in They Came to Baghdad, view Romeo and Juliet as a template through which to structure their lives, evident when she muses over her meeting and departure from handsome Edward: “She and Edward, she felt, were somewhat in the position of that unhappy couple, although perhaps Romeo and Juliet had expressed their feelings in rather more high class language” (17). Victoria persists in inhabiting the narrative position of Juliet virtually to the novel’s conclusion, seeing herself “once more in the role of a modern Juliet, waiting for Romeo” (186). They Came to Baghdad admits a rosier ending than many of Christie’s novels, as Victoria escapes an untimely demise by refusing the tragic conclusion meted out to Juliet and piercing through the veil of romanticism: “And as she looked at that beautiful evil face, all her silly adolescent calf love faded away, and she knew that what she felt for Edward had never been love. It had been the same feeling that she had experienced some years earlier for Humphrey Bogart, and later for the Duke of Edinburgh” (189). Soon after, she realizes, “I just had a thoroughly school-girl crush on him—fancying myself Juliet and all sorts of silly things” (216). Victoria Jones avoids the tragic fates of Jacqueline de Bellefort and Elsa Greer by refusing to metamorphose into a murderer, yet the novel similarly ponders the actions, even the possible atrocities, committed in the name of love.

Page 79 →Shakespeare’s Othello likewise inspired a range of Christie’s more tragically themed murders, evident in Poirot’s analysis of Desdemona’s demise: “The character of the victim has always something to do with his or her murder. The frank and unsuspicious mind of Desdemona was the direct cause of her death. A more suspicious woman would have seen Iago’s machinations and circumvented them much earlier” (Holiday for Murder, 94). More than simply “victim blaming,” Poirot’s meditations on Desdemona detail the intimate connection between so many murderers and their victims, not for the purpose of glorifying an ultimately misbegotten affection but to highlight the impossibility of knowing the motives of even the people most beloved in our lives. Expanding this theme in Endless Night, Christie’s first-person narrator Michael Rogers dismisses the possibility of fairy-tale endings, foreseeing the tragic events forthcoming: “‘And so they got married and lived happily ever afterward.’ You can’t, after all, make a big drama out of living happily ever afterward” (53). Here Christie acknowledges a simple narrative truth—fairy tales end at the moment of “they lived happily ever after” because most narratives are based on conflict, not contentment—but this point holds exponentially true for murder mysteries. Furthermore, she builds the tragic cast inherent in narratives based on conflict when, ironically, Michael’s wife Ellie foreshadows her own death by likening herself to Desdemona: “So I suppose I’d have had to be like Desdemona and deceived my father and run away with you” (131). Shakespeare’s vision of love in Othello, in the possibility that one might be killed by one’s beloved, is terrifyingly dark, and it heightens the emotional resonance of the many instances in which spouses murder their mates in Christie’s fiction.

Besides the killers and their victims, the tragic force of Christie’s murders ensnares a range of other characters in their aftermath. In a particularly striking instance of these dynamics, Mrs. Folliatt is forced to confront the horror of her son’s wickedness: “I have always known…. Even as a child he frightened me…. Ruthless … without pity … and without conscience…. but he was my son and I loved him” (Dead Man’s Folly, 180–81). A mother witnesses her son’s depravities yet can do little to stop them and then must confront her own complicity in his evil. In an inversion of these tragic dynamics, the Boynton family, following the murder of their imperiously cruel stepmother, is rejuvenated by her death, in a conclusion that unsettlingly ponders the possible benefits of murder, that asks readers whether an untimely death should always be regretted. Halloween Party features a modern-day Agamemnon in the character of Michael Garfield, who plans to murder his daughter in pursuit of his art: “Iphigenia. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter so that he should get a wind to take his ships to Troy. Michael would have sacrificed his daughter so that he should have a new Garden of Eden” (215). With these and other families more murderous than nurturing, Page 80 →Christie questions the foundations of human life and community, uncovering primal passions that demand the sacrifice of another.

As Christie employs tragic traditions to elevate the themes of her novels, she also cagily weaves them into her narratives as clues to the killer’s motivations and as red herrings designed to deceive knowing readers into undue suspicion against innocent characters. As Lisa Hopkins argues of authors’ use of allusions in detective fiction, “Shakespearean allusion also has consequences for the reader and for the status of the text itself: it interpellates the reader and establishes the literary status of the text.”¹² Readers perceiving allusions to Shakespeare and other authors must disentangle these threads, piecing together the author’s purpose in the reference and how it affects an understanding of the characters’ motivations. For example, in Remembered Death, George Barton sees himself in Othello upon learning of his wife Rosemary’s infidelity—“He understood in that moment just what Othello had felt” (66–67)—although when another character reminds him of her duplicity, he claims he was prepared for this betrayal (66–67). Another character admits his infatuation over Rosemary in Shakespearean terms—“Even Romeo … had his Rosaline before he was bowled over for good and all by Juliet” (102). Yet neither of these allusions provides insight into the objectives behind Rosemary’s murder, which was committed for pecuniary motives unrelated to these Shakespearean echoes.

By interweaving comic and tragic elements in her mysteries, Christie unsettles readers’ expectations before they open the pages of one of her novels. Will she find inspiration from her comic muse, as in The Murder at the Vicarage, The Body in the Library, and The Hollow; or from her tragic muse, as in Ordeal by Innocence, Endless Night, Sleeping Murder; or from both simultaneously, as in Death on the Nile and Cat among the Pigeons? Readers will only know once they open a novel’s pages, for in addition to the identity of the killer, Christie’s subgenres must be identified as well, with additional reading pleasures available from her polyvocal forms. Surely there is nothing tragic about that.