Page 81 →SevenThe Queer Insularity of Christie’s England

In a strikingly candid assessment of her cloistered perspective on the world, Agatha Christie admitted: “I could never manage miners talking in pubs because I don’t know what miners talk about in pubs.”¹ The old adage that authors should write what they know holds true and false throughout the field of fiction, for any flights of fancy in which authors indulge while imagining new situations, new characters, and new plots must be counterbalanced by creating a general verisimilitude to their stories. Christie need not have personally experienced a murder occurring within her circle of acquaintances because her imagination compensated for this lack; in contrast, the settings depicted in her novels represent an English world of relative wealth and comfort that resembles the one in which she grew up and lived. Such a narrow perspective would apparently endorse a conservative vision of England, and, as Laura Thompson states in her biography of the author, “Agatha herself was a Conservative voter.”² Aligned with this political conservatism, Christie upholds a traditional, conventional vision of England and its citizenry, evident in the simple fact that, spanning the decades during which she wrote her mysteries, the stately manor homes and close-knit rural villages remain overwhelmingly populated by white, straight, and financially comfortable characters.

Against this mostly uniform and mostly unquestioned cultural background, Christie simultaneously observes England’s internal inconsistencies and prejudices, exposing the nation to a thorough critique. From these converging viewpoints, England is both historically conservative yet gradually liberalizing, both regressively retrograde in its views of races and ethnicities outside of white Anglo-Saxonism yet held up to scrutiny for its hidebound mores. Michael Moon proposes that Christie engages provocatively with cultural norms, demonstrating that, rather than monolithic phenomena, they are “playful, unpredictable, highly mobile, curious, omnivorous, generous in according value and attention —in several of the broader senses of the term, queer.”³ J. C. Bernthal sounds a Page 82 →similar note: “A premise that Christie self-consciously presented her characters as stereotypes has evolved into a realization that, in these texts, normality is presented as insecure, paranoid, frail, and theatrical. Normativity requires a set of pinpointed queers to define itself against.”⁴ Queer, in these instances and throughout this chapter, refers not exclusively to erotic desires and identities that undermine England’s prevailing presumptions of heteronormativity but to a wider range of such subversions, including when characters subvert hitherto unquestioned ideals of Englishness. Such queer instances of her fiction destabilize the staid, conservative, and insular Englishness otherwise on display. On the whole, Christie’s fiction reflects a queer sense of the nation’s insularity, one in which norms are upheld and travestied, unquestioned yet surprisingly malleable.

But what is conservatism for a writer, and how does one recognize it in her novels? To take one example relevant to Christie’s fictions, politically conservative viewpoints have long endorsed the death penalty, a perspective promulgated by Miss Marple when she states: “I am really very, very glad … that they haven’t abolished capital punishment yet because I do feel that if there is anyone who ought to hang … ” as she then identifies the culprit of What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! (228). Many strains of conservatism endorse traditional gender roles and condemn feminism, and There Is a Tide … offers a rather horrifically anti-feminist lesson when a woman reunites with her fiancé after he attempted to kill her: “When you caught hold of me by the throat and said if I wasn’t for you, no one should have me—well—I knew then that I was your woman!” (213). Lamenting the social revolution of the 1960s and the freedoms it brought, the narrator of Endless Night realizes that he knows little of love, thereby echoing conservative diatribes on shifting sexual mores: “I didn’t know at that time anything about love. All I knew about was sex. That was all anybody of my generation seemed to know about. We talked about it too much, I think, and heard too much about it and took it too seriously. We didn’t know—any of my friends or myself—what it was really going to be when it happened. Love, I mean” (20). In a related example of these dynamics, does one perceive Christie’s views of religion in her short story “Promotion in the Highest,” which includes a jibe at Catholicism when St. Peter says: “I’m not so sure about that Church I founded…. It’s not turned out at all as we meant” (Star over Bethlehem 57)? Anti-Catholic prejudice also appears in Crooked House when a character theorizes on the murderer’s identity: “if it wasn’t the Communists, mark my word, it was the Catholics. The Scarlet Woman of Babylon, that’s what they are” (116). Similarly, characters occasionally express anti-Semitic perspectives, as illustrated when Mahmoud, the “stout dragoman” in Appointment with Death, cries, “My life all one misery! Ah! what with miseries and iniquities Jews do to us—” (140); another character later assesses, “That man’s just crazy on the subject of Page 83 →the Jews. I don’t think he’s quite sane on the point” (161). Such viewpoints are expressed by Christie’s characters, not by Christie herself, and so any attempt to discern her personal views from her fiction must disentangle them from her characters’ words, personalities, and motivations; must assess her efforts to build her themes, particularly comic and ironic ones; and must grapple with the likelihood that her conservative views shifted, even if only partially, during the fifty-six years separating her first and last novels.

In a complementary tactic that challenges readers attempting to glean her viewpoints from her fiction, Christie often avoids taking sides in political debates. In several instances two characters represent opposing sides of a controversial topic, but she employs this technique to enhance their characterizations without committing herself to either perspective. The Hollow, published in 1946, features the comically imperious Lady Angkatell wryly baiting her interlocutor about taxation and social programs, with her words hinting at her conservative views: “I must have a talk with you, David, and learn all the new ideas. As far as I can see, one must hate everybody but at the same time give them free medical attention and a lot of extra education, poor things!” (111). Her words concerning “free medical attention” allude to contemporary debates concerning the National Health Service, which was established through general taxation in 1948 and has long been described as Great Britain’s gift to its citizenry following the hardships of World War II. Both Lady Angkatell and David Angkatell are exaggerated characters—her gentility is excessive, as is his revolutionary fervor—and so readers are not encouraged to align themselves with either viewpoint.

In a particularly dazzling display of political neutrality, Christie describes a character who joins the Labour Party for motives of personal advancement rather than of ethical conviction: “Though by predilection a Liberal, Stephen realized that for the moment, at least, the Liberal Party was dead. He joined the ranks of the Labour Party…. But the Labour Party did not satisfy Stephen. He found it less open to new ideas, more hidebound by tradition than its great and powerful rival. The Conservatives, on the other hand, were on the lookout for a promising young talent” (Remembered Death, 44). Political parties are not selected for their platforms and social policies, in this instance, but simply for their instrumentality. As these examples collectively demonstrate, hints of Christie’s conservatism appear in her fiction mostly through tortuous routes.

Whereas Christie mutes her conservative leanings in her fictions, she consistently satirizes the English as starchy, stuffy, and insular—in effect, employing the stereotype of the conservative English to mock the nation and its citizenry for their very Englishness. In one such instance she depicts her English characters as interpersonally frosty—“True to their nationality, the two English people were not chatty” (Orient Express, 7)—and a French doctor diagnoses the country’s citizens as sexually repressed: “The English have a complex about sex. Page 84 →They think it is ‘not quite nice’” (Appointment with Death, 54). Poirot frequently derides the English for their insularity, and it is etymologically insightful to consider the English roots of this term that derives from the Latin insularis, via the French insulaire. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term as “Pertaining to islanders; esp. having the characteristic traits of the inhabitants of an island (e.g. of Great Britain); cut off from intercourse with other nations, isolated; self-contained; narrow or prejudiced in feelings, ideas, or manners.”⁵ The English, within Christie’s ironic portrayals, represent an unquestioned cultural norm yet cannot accurately see themselves owing to their insular limitations. As Poirot observes, “I am sure they think that English doctors are the only doctors in the world. Insularity accounts for a lot” (Poirot Loses a Client, 129), as he also mocks the English as inveterately immature: “The Anglo Saxon, he takes nothing seriously but playing games! He does not grow up” (Death on the Nile, 70). Mr. Satterthwaite, one of Christie’s recurring characters, denounces the insularity of his fellow citizens: “Poor old Melrose was so very British in his outlook. Agreeably conscious himself of a cosmopolitan point of view, Mr. Satterthwaite was able to deplore the insular attitude toward life” (“The Love Detective,” Three Blind Mice, 195–96).

Particularly egregious enactments of insularity expose English racism and xenophobia, which several characters denounce. Poirot refers to Hastings’s “insular prejudice against the Argentines, the Portuguese and the Greeks” (Poirot Loses a Client, 138); readers are left to discern the uncomfortable irony that Hastings takes his prejudices to Argentina when he relocates there. “Foreigners are so much more precocious than English girls,” states one character, to which her indomitable interlocutor sharply replies, “Don’t be so insular…. We’ve had plenty of English girls trying to make unsuitable assignations” (Cat among the Pigeons, 78). English insularity is further evident in Christie’s depictions of juries eager to scapegoat foreigners, including when Poirot is implicated as the killer but the coroner refuses this flagrant, prejudiced injustice: “What’s all this? … Nonsense. I can’t accept this verdict” (Death in the Air, 40). Detective Inspector Bland is disappointed but unsurprised by the unexamined prejudices of the local populace: “Bland reflected that the local verdict seemed to be the comfortable and probably agelong one of attributing every tragic occurrence to unspecified foreigners” (Dead Man’s Folly, 72). In one of his most pointed barbs, Poirot murmurs to himself, “In verity, there are some Englishmen who are altogether so unpleasing and ridiculous that they should have been put out of their misery at birth” (Patriotic Murders, 7).

Further relevant to these points, it should be stressed that, in her characterizations of England and English cultural norms, Christie does not view Great Britain as populated by an integrated citizenry, not truly as a United Kingdom; instead, she mostly overlooks any broad concept of the British—one that would, Page 85 →by definition, be inclusive of the Welsh, Scottish, and northern Irish—to focus almost exclusively on the English, as evident in the casual libels directed at the nation’s non-English citizenry. Unless otherwise informed, readers know simply to assume that her characters are English born-and-bred, and any characters identified as Welsh, Scottish, or Irish are frequently depicted in disparaging, if ostensibly comic, terms. Ariadne Oliver cries, “I never trust the Welsh! I had a Welsh nurse and she took me to Harrogate one day and went home, having forgotten all about me” (Cards on the Table, 78), and Spider’s Web depicts its protagonists smirking at the Welsh accent of a constable (57). When a lawyer is examining a witness, he undercuts her honesty by employing tired Irish stereotypes: “You’re Irish, I think? … And the Irish have rather a vivid imagination, haven’t they?” (Sad Cypress, 173). Tuppence thinks: “Oh, damn, damn, damn the Irish! … Why have they got that terrible power of twisting things until you don’t know where you are?” (N or M? 122). A character in The Patriotic Murders derides Scotland as populated wholly with irritable citizens—“The Scotch are always touchy” (141)—although another character concedes, “The Scotch are very independent and one respects them for it” (130). Their characterization as a “patient, dogged people, the Scots” explains why one is suspected of murder in The Unexpected Guest (41), and Sleeping Murder features a brief but stereotypeladen assessment of a character: “He’s a hardheaded, shrewd unemotional Scotsman” (58). The Welsh, Irish, and Scottish may be recognized as citizens of Great Britain, and thus as British, but within Christie’s fictions, they do not trouble any presumption that English people and English traditions define the United Kingdom’s cultural norms.

For the most part Christie portrays her wealthy, white English characters as insularly ensconced in a nation that respects their cultural authority, and when change is noted, it is almost invariably lamented. Many affluent characters express their discontent with the shifting social landscape, preferring the past when more rigid economic castes reigned; they look longingly back to “the days before money swept aside all class distinctions” (Crooked House, 15) and fondly recall the deference formerly afforded them, bewailing that “no loyalty [is found] any more in the lower classes” (Funerals Are Fatal, 62). On several occasions Miss Marple laments modernity’s encroachments on the old-world charms of St. Mary Mead, such as when she muses inwardly over “the new housing developments. The additions to the Village Hall, the altered appearance of the High Street with its up-to-date shop fronts” and then states reluctantly, “One has to accept change, I suppose” (At Bertram’s Hotel, 9). In a similar moment, she notes the village’s location as “about twenty-five miles from London” and adds: “It used to be a very pretty old-world village, but of course like everything else, it is becoming what they call developed nowadays” (Nemesis, 77). Characters similarly condemn evidence of shifting cultural mores, such as when Page 86 →Christie alludes to such trailblazing mid-century fashion designers as Jacques Fath and Christian Dior (Dead Man’s Folly, 98), but Miss Marple’s friend Ruth Van Rydock, slightly shocked, inquires: “My dear, have you seen what Christian Dior is trying to make us wear in the way of skirts?” (Murder with Mirrors, 6). Modern musicians are similarly dismissed when an investigator evinces little knowledge or interest in twentieth-century composers: “Hindemith? Who’s he? Never heard of him. Shostakovich? What names these people have”; he then expresses his preference for Handel (Murder with Mirrors, 133).

As Christie confessed that she could not write about miners talking in pubs because she did not know what miners talk about in pubs, she likewise admitted, through her alter ego of Ariadne Oliver, that she knew little of “beatniks and sputniks and squares and the beat generation” and then justified her decision largely to overlook them in her fiction: “I don’t write about them because I’m so afraid of getting the terms wrong. It’s safer, I think, to stick to what you know” (Pale Horse, 11–12). Indeed, Oliver’s list is an amusing assortment in itself, as she lumps together beatniks first with space technology and then with “squares” who, by definition, they were not. As the decades passed, Christie increasingly alluded to scientific innovations and the onset of the space age but often simply to depict children’s amusements. Boys read “the latest space fiction” (What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! 47), and young Ernie Curtin replicates “a rocket ship going through outer space on its way to Venus” in his play time (Clocks, 35). A mother reports that her son said, “Mum I’ve seen a sputnik, it’s come down” (Ordeal by Innocence, 168), but it was actually a bubble car. Within Christie’s conventional and insular England, change is grudgingly or passingly acknowledged, rarely welcomed, and most evident in children’s play. As a further example of Christie’s suspicions of change and innovation, supermarkets are not appreciated for their convenience and vast array of products, as lamented by Aunt Matilda in Passenger to Frankfurt: “Our own grocer … turned suddenly into a supermarket, six times the size, all rebuilt, baskets and wire trays to carry round and try to fill up with things you don’t want and mothers always losing their babies, and crying and having hysterics” (24).

Even if England’s insular voices would prefer to preserve the status quo, the twentieth century registered a wide array of changes for the nation and its people, particularly concerning their geopolitical preeminence. England’s imperialist ambitions, even if never altogether abandoned, withered over the years of Christie’s career as many former colonies asserted their independence, including South Africa in 1931, India and Pakistan in 1947, Nigeria in 1960, Zambia in 1964, and Singapore in 1965, among many others. In a likely alignment with her political conservatism, Christie mostly endorses England’s imperialist past and present, acknowledging this legacy through affirmations and passing descriptions of characters who lived abroad and then returned home. One character Page 87 →proudly proclaims the honorable ambitions behind English imperialism: “it is, after all, a great thing to be an Englishman. Honesty. That’s what we stand for. The Navy has carried that ideal all over the world” (Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? 30). Many characters who lived in (former) British colonies but then returned to England are referred to as pukka sahibs, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a person (usually a man) of good family, ability, or credentials; one who is socially acceptable” and notes its etymological roots in Panjabi and Hindi.⁶ As a cultural import from the British Raj, the term suggests a comfort with the imperialist mission, evident when Lady Frances Derwent comments on a murder victim: “The dead man was—well, it sounds a most awful thing to say and just like some deadly old retired Anglo-Indian—but the dead man was a pukka sahib” (Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? 47). In Passenger to Frankfurt the indomitable Aunt Matilda assesses the end of British imperialism and compliments the nation for suspending such global aspirations: “We were good at running an empire. We weren’t good at keeping an empire running, but then you see we didn’t need an empire anymore. And we recognized that. Too difficult to keep up” (59). Sounding this nostalgic note, Aunt Matilda now sees England’s colonial legacy as an unnecessary encumbrance on the nation but not one that in any way need be regretted.

In a striking irony, the English, as a legacy of their imperialism, might be expected to embrace the diverse citizenry of a multicultural world, but in a telling passage Amy Leatheran, the sympathetic narrator of Murder in Mesopotamia, says of Poirot: “I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn’t expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean” (72). Such an assessment of Poirot in England would reflect the nation’s insularity, but this novel occurs, as the title indicates, in the Middle East, not in England, and so Amy Leatheran displays the casual arrogance of the English person who cannot see herself ever inhabiting the role of the “foreigner,” even when traveling in a distant land. In a similarly ironic moment Poirot comments on the citizens of diverse nationalities residing in the United States: “only in America. In America there might be a household composed of just such varied nationalities—an Italian chauffeur, an English governess, a Swedish nurse, a German lady’s maid, and so on” (Orient Express, 203)—despite what one might presume would be the greater propensity of these nationalities to congregate in England, given its proximity.

In a manner similar to her treatment of imperialistic themes, Christie’s presentation of a predominantly white England showcases a casually pernicious racism. Two characters enjoying their date share their mutual antipathies—“They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants and Negroes” (Death in the Air, 115)—and one of the suspects in Cards on the Table declares, “I never forget a face—even a black face, and that’s a lot more than most people can say” (99). Mr. Parker Pyne masterminds a scenario in which his client encounters a distressing Page 88 →scene—“There in the shrubbery was a girl struggling in the grasp of two enormous Negroes” (Parker Pyne, 21)—but even if this scene is staged, it nonetheless relies on troubling racist visions of Black men preying on white women. Again, as with so many other elements of Christie’s fiction, it is important to consider the ways in which her characterizations influence readers’ interpretations of their potential motives for murder. For example, in And Then There Were None, the adventurer Lombard denies the fundamental humanity of nonwhite peoples—“And natives don’t mind dying, you know. They don’t feel about it as Europeans do” (44)—whereas Emily Brent speaks in the words of a humanitarian: “Black or white, they are our brothers” (70). Both Lombard and Brent are murdered for their past actions, rendering the latter’s recognition of racial fellowship a sign of her rigid thinking rather than of her enlightenment.

In a telling sign of her comfort with racist epithets, Christie frequently used the n-word, most notably in the original title of And Then There Were None as Ten Little N------. Despite its later retitling, as Blake Allmendinger notes, “Christie referred to the novel by its original title in her autobiography, published posthumously in 1977 … [and editions] of the novel featuring the original title continued to be published in the United Kingdom until 1980.”⁷ Christie frequently employed the phrase “a n----- in the woodpile” (Poirot Loses a Client, 139; cf. And Then There Were None, 25, 76; Murder with Mirrors, 101; Funerals Are Fatal, 192), but toward the end of her career, she replaced it with “Indian in the woodpile” (Passenger to Frankfurt, 202) in a benighted attempt to employ less offensive language.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, one of England’s ostensibly defining norms—whiteness—could no longer assert the overwhelming force of its cultural hegemony. Of Christie’s novels, Hickory Dickory Death, set in a boarding house for university students, most cleary envisions a newly multicultural England, but only partially, for many of these students are foreseen as returning to their homelands. The novel commences as Miss Lemon observes England’s changing racial demographics—“‘Half the nurses in our hospitals seem to be black nowadays,’ said Miss Lemon, doubtfully”—with the adverb “doubtfully” indicating her discomfort, perhaps even distaste, yet she then adds, “and I understand much pleasanter and more attentive than the English ones” (4). Miss Lemon’s distinction between the nurses as Black or as English tacitly indicates her presumption that whiteness defines Englishness.

This novel contains several seesawing passages in which one character expresses a racist viewpoint that another then rebuts. When Mrs. Nicoletis, the hostel’s owner, proposes that all of the nonwhite tenants should be evicted—“And if it is these coloured students, these Indians, these Negresses—then they can all go, you understand?”—Mrs. Hubbard, the hostel’s manager, indignantly replies: “Not while I’m in charge” (20). One character identifies another as a Page 89 →racist while exculpating the other boarders from this charge—“I think he might have a bit of racial feeling. About the only one of us who has” (82)—but then a different character disproves this point: “All these coloured people are very jealous of each other and very hysterical” (91). Elizabeth Johnson, from Jamaica, is referred to as “Black Bess,” with the narrator adding, “The nickname was an affectionate one and had been accepted as such by the girl herself” (22), and the nonwhite characters discuss the implications and limitations of the phrase “free, white, and twenty-one” (56). Hickory Dickory Death also features Mr. Akibombo from West Africa, who is played for humor when in an interview with Inspector Sharpe he “gave a most realistic and gigantic belch” to demonstrate his digestive ailments (175). In a concluding image of racial harmony, Mr. Akibombo is invited to be the best man at the future wedding of two white characters (197), yet it is one in which, by definition, he must stand to the side of them. Christie adumbrates interracial and interethnic marriages in some of her later novels, including the pairing of Tina Argyle and Michael Argyle at the conclusion of Ordeal by Innocence and of Alice Calder and Ali Yusuf in Cat among the Pigeons.

While the blanket assumption of English whiteness holds true for the vast majority of Christie’s novels, any presumption of a norm of moral whiteness is travestied by the fact that these books uniformly feature white murderers. In a strikingly mordant instance of these dynamics, Colonel Race opines why a particular suspect would not likely be the killer: “I’d lay long odds against its being Despard. He’s a white man, Battle.” Superintendent Battle replies, “Incapable of murder, you mean?” to which Colonel Race agrees, “Incapable of what I’d call murder—yes” (Cards on the Table, 122). Colonel Race’s name ironically underscores his interest in racial profiling and his obdurate defense of whiteness as a virtue, yet surely virtually every reader, no matter how baffled they might be by Christie’s puzzle, would nonetheless correctly presume that the killer would be white, given the overwhelming whiteness of her casts of characters. Colonel Race is proved correct in his defense of John Despard but incorrect in his defense of white men, one of whom is the murderer in Cards on the Table. A similar instance of ethnic profiling occurs in A Holiday for Murder. Pilar Estravados, a character who is half-Spanish and half-English, trots out tired stereotypes of both nationalities: “In Spain they take out their knives and they curse and shout. In England they do nothing, just get very red in the face and shut up their mouths tight” (105). Building on such stereotypes, another character implicates Pilar by suggesting that the murder—a throat-slashing—was “so very un-English”; Poirot understands the insinuation: “Ah … the Spanish touch, you think” (126). Despite this character’s attempt to pin the crime on Pilar by appealing to English bigotries, it turns out that the murder, and the murderer as well, were not “so very un-English” after all.

Page 90 →Against these backdrops of imperialism and the assumed cultural normativity of English whiteness, Christie condemns English insularity through a particularly ingenious narrative strategy for creating such appealing fiction: her most famous detectives, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, act as queer foils who highlight the inability of normative English culture to perceive its hidebound traditions and prejudices. Because Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple stand outside the insular ranks of the English, owing to the advanced age and nationality of the former and the advanced age and gender of the latter, they are more memorable and appealing protagonists than those of many of her predecessors, her contemporaries, and her successors in the field of detective fiction, as evidenced by such authors and detectives as R. Austin Freeman’s Dr. Thorndyke, Ngaio Marsh’s Roderick Alleyn, and P. D. James’s Adam Dalgleish. For instance, Freeman said of Dr. Thorndyke: “As he was a man of acute intellect and sound judgment, I kept Thorndyke free of eccentricities, perfectly sane and normal.”⁸ Without any distinguishing personality quirks, Thorndyke simply represents a white male English character among a sea of other such characters. Ngaio Marsh introduced Alleyn through the eyes of another character: “Alleyn did not resemble a plain-clothes policeman she felt sure, nor was he in the romantic manner—white faced and gimlet-eyed. He looked like one of her Uncle Hubert’s friends, the sort that they knew would ‘do’ for house-parties.”⁹ In other words, Alleyn belongs comfortably, if somewhat jauntily, to the social class and society that he is called upon to investigate. P. D. James’s Dalgleish similarly fits into the investigative department to which he is assigned: “Dalgliesh, as a permanent ADC [Assistant District Commissioner] to the Commissioner, had a number of functions which, as they grew in number and importance, had become so ill-defined that most of his colleagues had given up trying to define them.”¹⁰ Thorndyke, Alleyn, and Dalgleish sport some individualizing touches—Thorndyke’s background in medicine, Alleyn’s spry humor, Dalgleish’s forays in poetry—yet, as white, straight, financially comfortable men, they enjoy the prerogatives of their privilege and the deference afforded them by others.

Christie succumbed to similarly nondescript characters several times, but her white, straight, financially comfortable detectives (e.g., Parker Pyne, Superintendent Battle) are simply less memorable than Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Indeed, the name of “Detective Inspector Bland” in Dead Man’s Folly indicates that he is unremarkable and destined to be outshined by Poirot, and thus that he need display little more than the blandest of personalities. Even when Christie features Superintendent Battle as the primary detective in Towards Zero, he alludes to Poirot’s obsession with symmetry, which then helps him to determine the correct murder weapon. In sum, even many of the finest mystery writers of the twentieth century did little to individualize their detectives as distinct from Page 91 →their wider culture, in contrast to the noteworthy features of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple that sharpen Christie’s critiques of English insularity.

Further relevant to the queer touches of Christie’s novels, Michael Moon points out that “Christie’s two main series detectives—Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple—are themselves hardly exemplars of twentieth-century models of heterosexuality for their respective genders.”¹¹ On the surface, Poirot appears a confirmed bachelor of heteroerotic orientation. “Me, I always notice when a girl is pretty” (Dead Man’s Mirror, 108), he chirps, and narrators record his passionate admiration for Countess Vera Rossakoff: “He, Hercule Poirot, remembered women…. One woman, in particular—what a sumptuous creature—A Bird of Paradise—a Venus…. What woman was there among these pretty chits nowadays, who could hold a candle to Countess Vera Rossakoff?” (Patriotic Murders, 162). Another narrator sympathetically hints that Poirot’s affections were seldom returned: “It is the misfortune of small, precise men to hanker after large and flamboyant women” (“The Capture of Cerberus,” Labors of Hercules, 197). Retired from the Belgian police force in his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and growing older as the novels progress, Poirot appears to have left amatory matters behind, as the narrator reports of his thoughts: “Admittedly there must be love, young people must meet and pair off, but he, Poirot, was mercifully past all that” (Hickory Dickory Death, 46). Poirot admits that he is “not of an ardent temperament. It has saved me from many embarrassments” (“The Mystery of the Bagdad Chest,” Regatta, 26).

Collectively these lines suggest a man of heterosexual orientation aging into celibacy, yet Christie complicates her characterization of Poirot by repeatedly describing him with queer stereotypes. He is mistaken for a “woman’s dressmaker” (Orient Express, 40), Hastings calls him a “man milliner” (ABC Murders, 113), and he looks “like a hairdresser in a comic play” (Mesopotamia, 72). Further along these lines, Hastings calls him an “inveterate dandy” (“The Mystery of the Bagdad Chest,” Regatta, 29), and readers see him “dressed in a dandified fashion in white flannels” (“Triangle at Rhodes,” Dead Man’s Mirror, 205). In late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Britain and the United States, dandyism upset any presumed borders between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Not all dandies of these eras were queers, and not all queers were dandies, but sufficient interplay of the categories raises the issue of how these many dandies contribute to Christie’s characterization of Poirot.¹² Oscar Wilde stands as the definitive exemplar of a queer dandy; Joe Lucchesi observes: “After Oscar Wilde’s 1895 sodomy conviction, the image of the elegantly attired gentleman became indelibly associated with decadent male homosexuality.”¹³ Christie’s alter ego Ariadne Oliver avows her protagonist’s asexual tendencies—“Sven Hjerson never cared for women”—to which a playwright adapting her Page 92 →novel responds, “But you can’t have him a pansy, darling!” (McGinty, 101). One could certainly object that a man who “never cared for women” need not necessarily be a gay man, but the presumptive force of normative heterosexuality is such that, when a man does not adhere to its expectations, he is then interpreted as queer. More so, as much as Christie disliked Hastings and dispatched him to Argentina, Poirot’s friendship with him marks them as a homosocially inclined couple. Hastings finds love in Murder on the Links but his wife subsequently lingers in the background. “My wife remained to manage the ranch” (ABC Murders, 1), he informs readers who might wonder of her absence, and his daughter Judith comments on her father and his longtime friend, “What a funny couple you are” (Curtain, 22). Further to these points, Sally Munn observes that Poirot “embodies … the ‘feminine.’ He is a parody of the male myth; his name implies his satirical status; he is a shortened Hercules, and a poirot—a clown.”¹⁴

Poirot’s idiosyncratic gender and sexuality mark him apart from normative English culture, and he takes advantage of his otherness during his investigations, which thus affords Christie another opportunity to hold England up for critique over its insularity. In a telling passage, the narrator describes “the Hercule Poirot manner,” in which the detective has “masked [himself] behind a foreign shield of flattering words and much-increased foreign mannerisms, so that they themselves should feel agreeably contemptuous of him” (Hallowe’en Party, 138). Poirot’s performed foreignness protects him from other’s misperceptions and prejudices; he, in essence, disguises himself as a foreigner (evident in the “much-increased foreign mannerisms”), with the explicit purpose of engendering disdain for himself and thereby disarming these English natives of any defenses they might presumably erect. Compounding this aspect of his character, Poirot deploys his accent to deceive his interlocutors: “It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. They say, ‘A foreigner; he can’t even speak English properly.’ It is not my policy to terrify people; instead, I invite their gentle ridicule” (Three Acts, 198). The “gentle ridicule” that Poirot solicits traps the English in their very English insularity, with this tactic frequently ensnaring the culprits.

Christie pays even less attention to Miss Marple’s erotic biography than she does to Poirot’s, but like the Belgian detective, this character’s Otherness within English culture allows her to dupe many of her interlocutors and always to identify the killer. Most apparently, her advanced years mark her as estranged from the prevailing norms of society, leading her younger relatives and companions to dismiss her intellect: “they decided that dear Aunt Jane was perhaps getting a little bit disconnected in her old age” (“Greenshaw’s Folly,” Double Sin, 123). Like Poirot, Miss Marple is similarly characterized as somewhat queer, even if not necessarily homosexual or bisexual in her orientation. If Christie envisioned a Page 93 →backstory explaining Miss Marple’s spinsterhood, she never divulged it, and so this aspect of her background must remain an unknowable void. Thus, to read Miss Marple as a lesbian character would be to overinterpret from the available textual evidence, but, correspondingly, perceiving her as a heterosexual character likewise overinterprets from a pervasive omission of information.

All that can be confidently stated is that Miss Marple enjoys sufficient understanding both of straight and of queer desires to solve the mysteries that she chances upon. As Kathy Mezei observes of literary spinsters, “the spinster is nevertheless uniquely situated as an instrument of surveillance precisely because of her marginal and indeterminate position,”¹⁵ and Miss Marple’s knowledge of nonheteronormative sexuality tacitly indicates a range of queer goings-on in St. Mary Mead and beyond. She more often uncovers murderous motivations that are heteroerotic in their orientation, as in her debut novel The Murder at the Vicarage, but in explicating the subterranean desires at play in Nemesis, she discreetly, but nonetheless clearly, delineates the homoerotic attractions that led to murder. She explains that Clotilde Bradbury-Scott killed Verity Hunt because Verity wanted “to live with the man of her choice, to have children by him. She wanted marriage and the happiness of normality” (Nemesis 205). She then expands on these points, detailing that, as Verity matured, she planned to leave behind her relationship with Clotilde: “It was all mapped out so plainly then—the overwhelming love that Clotilde had had for this girl. The girl’s hero-worship of her, dependency on her, and then as she grew a little older, her normal instincts came into play” (Nemesis, 218).

Miss Marple’s focus on “normality” marks lesbianism as the abnormal—and hence we can see Christie’s insularity in play—yet Miss Marple’s knowledge about lesbianism marks her as more worldly than many readers might originally anticipate. Another Miss Marple mystery, A Murder Is Announced, includes passages suggestive of lesbian relationships, primarily in the pairings of Letitia Blacklock and Dora Bunner and of Miss Hincliffe and Miss Murgatroyd. Letitia Blacklock is described by another character in masculine terms: “Letitia, you know, has really got a man’s mind. She hasn’t any feminine feelings or weaknesses. I don’t believe she was ever in love with any man. She used a little makeup in deference to prevailing custom, but not to make herself look prettier…. She never knew any of the fun of being a woman” (130). In her letters Letitia describes herself as wholly uninterested in romance, potentially suggesting her asexuality, “I said I didn’t think I was likely to fall in love with anybody” (164). Readers see Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd as devoted companions, and after Miss Murgatroyd’s death, Miss Hinchcliffe’s mourning registers deeply: “The ravaged face of the tall vigorous woman told its own tale, and would have made any expression of sympathy an impertinence” (194). With Nemesis and A Murder Is Announced showcasing Christie’s deepest excavations of lesbian Page 94 →desire, it is a tangential but compelling piece of evidence that Miss Marple is called upon to resolve their mysteries.

Christie’s queer insularity is also evident in her gender politics, as she represents the intriguing case of a woman who achieved an international reputation and fantastic wealth through her work while concomitantly displaying a curious double-mindedness about the question of whether women should, or even should want to, work. The labor of writing appears to have so wholly ingrained itself into Christie’s character that she could hardly have stopped had she desired to do so, as evident in the words of the sculptor Henrietta Savernake, who, in The Hollow, muses on the creation of her artworks: “Sculpture isn’t a thing you set out to do and succeed in. It’s a thing that gets at you, that nags at you—and haunts you—so that, sooner or later, you’ve got to make terms with it. And then, for a bit, you get some peace—until the whole thing starts over again” (51). For a woman who began writing after a wager with her sister, who hesitated to call herself an author for almost a decade into her illustrious career, these words illuminate the ways in which words and plots nagged her annually. Notwithstanding her personal work ethic, she wondered why women would seek professional vocations: “The position of women, over the years, has definitely changed for the worse. We women have behaved like mugs. We have clamoured to be allowed to work as men work” (Autobiography, 121). More so, in appraising the financial acumen of her father and brother, she noted their failures and her success: “My grandfather made a big fortune. My father, mainly owning to trust in his fellow men, let it dwindle away, and my brother ran through what was left of it like a flash of lightning. I seem to have started up the ladder again, perhaps taking after my grandfather!” (Autobiography, 26).

Given this disjunction between Christie’s rigorous work ethic and her stated beliefs, it is hardly surprising that her views of gender, as mediated through her fiction, represent a Gordian knot of contradictions and paradoxes, resulting in the virtual impossibility of clearly delineating her views of the feminist advances of the twentieth century. Women’s collective intellects and abilities are occasionally denigrated by other women, such as when a female character of approximately sixty years says, “I’m afraid women are never quite such deep thinkers as men” (Easy to Kill, 128). Miss Marple sees clear, essentialist distinctions between the sexes: “Accuracy is more a male quality than a female quality” (Nemesis, 124). When a woman confidently tells Hercule Poirot, “Woman, M. Poirot, is going to be the great force in Government in ten years’ time,” his reaction, as recorded by the narrator, suggests his acceptance, or perhaps his resignation, to this prediction: “Poirot said that he was sure of it” (“The Incredible Theft,” Dead Man’s Mirror, 123). In several contrasting instances, Christie sympathetically portrays women’s aspirations for fulfilling career opportunities, acknowledging their rather limited options throughout much of the twentieth century, as Page 95 →evidenced by Mary Durrant: “This girl, Mary Durrant, had come to be with her aunt and learn the business and was very excited about it—much preferring it to the other alternative—becoming a nursery governess or companion” (“Double Sin,” Double Sin, 7). Another woman points out the inherent sexism behind advancing a boy’s education over a girl’s: “It is incredible to you that women should want a career. It was incredible to my parents. I was anxious to study for a doctor. They would not hear of paying the fees. But they paid them readily for Owen. Yet I should have made a better doctor than my brother” (Moving Finger, 45). In a particularly chilling moment, Honoria Waynflete confesses that sexism played a significant role in the frustrations that led her to murder: “Yes, I always had brains, even as a girl. But they wouldn’t let me do anything. I had to stay at home, doing nothing” (Easy to Kill, 182). During the boredom she was compelled to endure grew the seeds of her homicidal inclinations.

Further complicating Christie’s gender politics, her novels quietly endorse women’s rights to reproductive autonomy through abortion but question the reality of rape. “Girls in trouble” appear with relative frequency in Christie’s canon, perhaps most famously with the case of Emily Brent’s maid in And Then There Were None. This young woman died by suicide after Brent dismissed her for her pregnancy, but Brent’s callous cruelty justifies the killer’s selection of her as one of his victims.¹⁶ As Miss Marple knows about lesbianism, she also knows about premarital sex and its potential repercussions. “And sure enough poor Florrie was in trouble” (A Murder Is Announced, 122), she states, and in another of her cases, she says to her maid Edna about Edna’s cousin Gladdie: “Dear me … Not—not in trouble?” (“The Case of the Perfect Maid,” Three Blind Mice, 105). By and large, these unmarried pregnant women are treated with sympathy and concern, including when Miss Bulstrode does not fire a teacher employed at her school for her “trouble” and summarizes the challenging situation that this young woman faced: “There was a man, you fell in love with him, you had a child. I suppose you couldn’t marry” (Cat among the Pigeons, 213–14). Sometimes “girls in trouble” would benefit from an abortion, a possibility that Christie treats sensitively when a character recalls the unjust fate of a local doctor: “We still call him Dr. Stokes although he’s been struck off. A very nice man he is, embittered a bit, of course, by being struck off. It was only his kind heart really, helping a lot of girls who were no better than they should be” (At Bertram’s Hotel, 115).

In another example of these dynamics, Christie’s short story “The Water Bus” features the hypocritically religious character Mrs. Hargreaves who feels little sympathy for the plight of her maid’s daughter, as reported by the mother: “Just goes off to this awful place—and how she heard about it, I don’t know—and this wicked woman did things to her, and it went septic—or whatever they call it—and they took her off to Hospital and she’s lying there now, dying … Won’t say who the man was—not even now” (“The Water Bus,” Star over Bethlehem, 24). Page 96 →In a similar passage Christie writes that Mrs. Jarrow “had tried two doctors with the idea of having an abortion, but did not succeed in finding one who would perform what was then an illegal operation” (Elephants Can Remember, 147). Notably, these latter references to abortion occur toward the end of Christie’s career—At Bertram’s Hotel was published in 1965, Star over Bethlehem in 1965, and Elephants Can Remember in 1972—reflecting her assessment of contemporary debates on the topic. The Abortion Act of 1967 legalized abortion in England, Wales, and Scotland.

In contrast to these sympathetic views on pregnant, unmarried women and the liberal views expressed on abortion, Christie mostly overlooks rape as a potential story line or plot device. Murders occur in nearly all of her fiction, but sexual violence rarely darkens her pages. In contrast to this prevailing absence, Christie speaks repeatedly but dismissively of rape in Nemesis. One character states: “Girls, you must remember, are far more ready to be raped nowadays than they used to be. Their mothers insist, very often, that they should call it rape” (Nemesis, 110). Some pages later, another character offers an extended version of such views: “Well, we all know what rape is nowadays. Mum tells the girl she’s got to accuse the young man of rape even if the young man hasn’t had much chance, with the girl at him all the time to come to the house while Mum’s away at work or Dad’s gone on holiday. Doesn’t stop badgering him until she’s forced him to sleep with her. Then, as I say, Mum tells the girl to call it rape” (133). Both of these characters are men, yet their perspectives are not meaningfully questioned or challenged.

Christie pays only passing attention to homosexuality and queer identities in her novels, yet their deeper thematic relevance arises in the unknowability of suspects’ motivations for their actions, in the undercurrents of unexpressed yet vibrant desires. Foremost, it is at times difficult to discern precisely what Christie means by the word queer, as illustrated in the following passage from Murder with Mirrors. This novel is set in an institution for delinquent boys, and the character Gina Hudd expresses her distaste for them: “I don’t fancy the queers so much. Of course, Lewis and Dr Maverick think they’re all queers—I mean they think it’s repressed desires and disordered home life and their mothers getting off with soldiers and all that” (18). It seems unlikely that Gina believes that all of the inmates are gay and is instead suggesting that they all suffer from some sort of mental disorder, a possibility that gains further credence when she later suggests: “But one of the queers—you know, what they call mentally maladjusted—might do it for fun, don’t you think?” (120). Queer does not necessarily denote, or even connote, gay in Christie’s fictions, but because homosexuality was classified as a mental illness for much of the twentieth century, Gina Hudd’s mishmashed assessments of the delinquent boys showcases the overlap between the two.

Page 97 →At other times in Christie’s fiction, it is possible to read queer subtexts that were perhaps unintended or were simply left undeveloped. For example, in Passenger to Frankfurt Sir Stafford Nye reads the personal ads in a newspaper and comes across the following: “Young man who objects to hard work and who would like an easy life would be glad to undertake a job that would suit him” (38). Such an advertisement would seem to be offering the services of a sex worker—a rent boy, in the popular parlance—but this possibility is not explored as the novel unwinds. As with many of Christie’s allusions to queer characters and queer desires, it is mentioned in passing as the story then marches on.

Any comparison between queer people of the twentieth century and Christie’s murderers is not a flattering one, yet it reflects the coded nature of much queer life during this period: quite simply, many queers and virtually all murderers had a secret they desperately wanted to keep. In searching for traces of queer characters in Christie’s fictions beyond the examples of A Murder Is Announced and Nemesis, several men, similar to Hercule Poirot, could be described as queerly straight. Christie does not label them as gay or depict them engaging in demonstrably homoerotic behaviors, but she unpacks any presumption that heteronormativity might capture the vast array of male gender performances. For example, Mr. Christopher Wren in Three Blind Mice appears to be a gay connoisseur, which is hinted at when he scrutinizes furniture for its aesthetic appeal, when a male character expresses blatant, likely homophobic, hostility toward him, and when a female character calls him “a very peculiar young man” (14). Wren comments on Detective Trotter’s physical appeal: “He’s very handsome, don’t you think so? I always think policemen are terribly attractive” (33). Mr. Satterthwaite, who appears in The Mysterious Mr. Quin, Murder in Three Acts, and some short stories, embodies several gendered paradoxes: “For a manly man, Mr. Satterthwaite knew far too much about women. There was a womanish strain in his character which lent him insight into the feminine mind. Woman all his life had confided in him, but they had never taken him seriously” (Three Acts, 11). A woman tells Mr. Sattherthwaite that he is “half a woman” (Mr. Quin, 200). A “manly man” with “a womanish strain” whom women never perceive as a likely romantic partner, Mr. Satterthwaite seems queer without being defined as such. In another intriguing moment, Egg says candidly, “I like men to have affairs … It shows they’re not queer or anything,” following which the narrator records his reaction: “Mr. Satterthwaite’s Victorianism suffered a further pang” (Three Acts, 26). Does the arrow hit too close to any closeted desires that Mr. Satterthwaite might have buried?

Christie’s characters inhabit an unquestionably cisgendered world, aside from a few characters who cross-dress, often for notorious purposes. The Man in the Brown Suit features Miss Pettigrew, of whom another character snipes: “There is nothing attractive about Miss Pettigrew—she is a repellent female Page 98 →with large feet, more like a man than a woman” (Brown Suit, 183; cf. 269). In actuality, “Miss Pettigrew” is the assumed identity of Arthur Minks, a man who impersonates a range of identities, including the Reverend Edward Chichester and Count Sergius Paulovitch. In Partners in Crime the criminal mastermind No. 16 disguises himself as Mrs. Van Snyder (213). Christie also depicts women cross-dressing as men, such as entertainer and male impersonator Kitty Kidd, who plays a small role in the duplicities of The Mystery of the Blue Train (202). In explicating the solution to a mystery, Poirot explains that “The tall, deep-voiced Mrs. Rice is a very successful male impersonator” (“The Stymphalean Birds,” Labors of Hercules, 111). Christie mostly employs cross-dressing not to explore the interiority of a character’s gendered identity but simply as a ruse in a criminal act, but at the same time, readers might wonder how these characters discovered their talents for such convincing cross-dressing. David Hunter, a suspect in There Is a Tide … who impersonates a woman to avoid suspicion, says of himself: “I think a good deal of myself as a female impersonator” (207). Surely readers must therefore imagine David Hunter practicing this talent and seeking to enhance the illusion that his performances create, and thus wonder as well of his personal motivations for pursuing this goal.

Christie’s queer insularity reflects the personal circumstances of her life and times, the historical trajectory of the twentieth century, and her compelling critique of Englishness, even if Englishness is mostly valorized as her characters’ default normative identity. For many readers, Christie’s queer insularity may not overwrite the troubling aspects of her fiction, while other readers will contextualize these elements as part of her milieu and its insufficiently examined prejudices. For instance, the word “retarded” has fallen out of favor for describing people with intellectual disabilities, but Christie’s use of it simply reflects its unquestioned acceptance during much of her lifetime, when “mental retardation” was used as a medical term. Her play The Unexpected Guest includes a character with an intellectual disability, and it now begins with the publisher’s disclaimer, titled “Notes on Sensitive Terminology,” which states that “Language used by the author in her stage directions and by her characters to describe mental and physical conditions and disabilities is of the period in which the play was first performed” and which encourages “directors and actors to interpret” these passages in respect to their personal vision (vi). The disclaimer included with Spider’s Web expands on such points: “Language used by the author in her stage directions and by her characters to describe religion, gender, sexuality, race and class is of the period in which the play was first performed” (vi). Clearly individual readers must determine for themselves whether the historical conditions of a novel’s production offer sufficient contextualization for any insensitive treatment of benighted prejudices, as they must simultaneously assess the ways in which Christie reflected and resisted the cultural mores of her lifetime.

Page 99 →As this chapter demonstrates, Christie privileges assumed English norms (of wealth, whiteness, and heterosexuality) while creating sufficient space to critique them as reflective of English insularity and ignorance. In an apt concluding example of these dynamics, one character says disparagingly to Miss Marple of an American, “He’s young, crude, and he comes from a country where a man is esteemed by the success he makes of life,” to which Miss Marple replies with tart innocence: “Whilst here we are so very fond of failures” (Murder with Mirrors, 96). Precisely because of its assumptions of wealth, whiteness, and hetero-sexuality, England abounds in such failures, even as Christie’s queer insularity ironically highlights them for readers both inside and outside of English norms.