The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Other Writing. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.

  Sova, Dawn P. Agatha Christie A to Z. New York: Checkmark, 1996.

  Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929.

  _____. To the Lighthouse (1927). London: Hogarth Press, 1960.

  England’s Pockets

  Objects of Anxiety in Christie’s Post-War Novels

  Rebecca Mills

  In Agatha Christie’s work, objects are clues to character, motive and eventually the criminal in the accepted tradition of detective fiction, but as her oeuvre develops from the Golden Age to the post-war era, everyday objects also serve a series of increasingly complex functions. Objects are reifications of social conditions and change. They are a nexus where yearning for the past meets the dangers of nostalgia; the temporality of the plot is disrupted by the everyday items that furnish interior spaces and serve as metaphors for identities positioned between the grim post-war present and the golden past, or between theatrical artifice and the solidly real. Through their contact with the violence and trauma inherent to detective fiction, but also the legacy of World War II, the objects in The Moving Finger (1943), After the Funeral (1953) and The Pale Horse (1961) come to occupy multiple blurred and layered categories, as their generic function becomes saturated with symbolic and emotional affect. In this essay, by tracing the strands of material culture in Christie’s less-studied post-war novels, I will not only demonstrate a tension between the presentation of objects as things to be preserved, as embodiments of ways of life, and the tendency to shatter these symbols of continuity and subvert ordinary objects into metaphors for danger and anxiety, but also take seriously Christie’s literary and imaginative response to the war and the following era of technological advances, international tension and change.

  This essay is informed by the cultural historian Jacques Barzun’s emphasis on the significance of the physical, material elements of detective fiction that accompany cerebral deduction and psychology. As he writes in Detection and the Literary Art, “The raw material of detection consists of the physical objects that surround action. These become literary substance when the detective imagination has chosen and arranged them so that some are clues while others produce atmosphere, verisimilitude, suspense.”1 In Christie’s post-war novels in particular, both the absence of personal items and a clutter of things can serve as indicators of both guilt and strangeness, out-of-placeness and erased or anxious individual and collective identities. Although, as Stephen Knight argues, “Christie’s wartime mysteries superintend contemporary battles from a distance and with an Austenesque pattern of radical displacement, not recognizing the war as itself, but representing its effect in terms of disruptions to the normal balance of gender and social power,”2 as in Sad Cypress (1940) and The Moving Finger (1943), the full effects of wartime and its tensions and deprivations are delayed as well as displaced. The war also leaves traces on the material culture of Christie’s wartime and post-war texts; objects and the emotional and social textures of the spaces where they are positioned reveal both “disruptions” to social stability, but also to emotional mental equilibrium at collective and individual levels.

  In its concern with social and cultural continuity and change after the war as well as literary style and genre, this essay also builds to some extent on Alison Light’s discussion of Christie’s “conservative modernism” during the interwar period. Light hints at the importance of objects in Christie’s fiction; of Peril at End House (1933), she writes:

  End House is hardly a symbol of patrician bourgeois authority but of modern domestication; it offers a new image of bourgeois pleasures, one which depends upon the consumption of a commercialized culture: the gramophone, the wireless, journalism. What interests Christie is this mixing of old and new and the possibilities it creates for different kinds of desires, new species of deception.3

  This mixing of old and new is evident throughout Christie’s Golden Age work; in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), for instance, the crucial clues are a “Tunisian dagger” which would be at home in any Holmes story, and a Dictaphone, with its modern uncanny power of broadcasting a dead man’s voice. Light seems to suggest that Christie’s use of technology and items anchors her work in Christie’s present, serving to locate the interwar books in their contemporary milieu. Objects in Christie’s post–World War II novels, however, I would suggest, serve to dislocate the books from their period, undermining their modernity; the insistence is on legacies of the past—and the concomitant dangers of eradicating the past altogether. While objects, particularly weapons, retain what Light calls the juxtaposition of the “macabre and the familiar,”4 the balance often tilts towards the former. But this tension between the everyday and the defamiliarized is part of the process of the detective story; as Barzun writes, “What do we gain from the details of detection? An understanding, first, of the silent life of things, and next, of the spectacle of mind at work.”5

  England Has Pockets

  I begin my investigation of the “silent life of things” with the Miss Marple novel The Moving Finger (1943). This novel serves as an apposite starting point because it straddles the divide between Christie’s explicitly wartime novels such as N or M? and her early 1940s novels in which the war is blanked out such as Evil Under the Sun. As well as offering examples of the alienating affect assigned to things, and illustrating the connection between metaphorical objects and collective or individual identity, The Moving Finger demonstrates the temporal dislocation revealed and concealed by objects. Set in the village of Lymstock, the narrative revolves around a series of poison-pen letters, which lead to seeming suicide, a murder and mounting paranoia among the villagers. Narrator Jerry and his sister Joanna end up in the village in search of rural peace and quiet after Jerry’s accident; as the aesthete Mr. Pye, an inhabitant of the village and due to his queerness, a suspected author of the letters, comments,

  A wonderful country, England. It has pockets. Lymstock is one of them. Interesting from a collector’s point of view—I always feel I have voluntarily put myself under a glass shade when I am here. The peaceful backwater where nothing happens.6

  To belong to the village is not only to be enclosed in a pocket, but also to be an object, a static figurine isolated from the rest of England and the passage of history. Indeed, Mr. Pye refers to the elderly Miss Emily as “a charming creature…. Like a piece of Dresden,” going on to emphasize her age and unsuitability for the modern world by reiterating the glass metaphor:

  Absolutely a period piece. She’s not, you know, of her own generation, she’s of the generation before that. The mother must have been a woman of very strong character. She kept the family time ticking at about 1870, I should say. The whole family preserved under a glass case.7

  Glass suggests vulnerability as well as protection, however—as Gill Plain observes, “In her depiction of Lymstock under siege, Christie is more than usually explicit in her suggestion that the idyllic ‘English’ community is a fragile construct.”8

  Pye’s seemingly casual remarks reveal the other aspect of the village; the presence of the past. The preserving glass case is not only a symbol of Miss Emily’s mother’s monstrous feminine power, but also enforces stagnation in the village. This is evident, again via Pye’s acid commentary, through reference to objects—Miss Emily “likes to keep things as they were—but not for le bon motif—not because of the resultant harmony—but because it is the way her mother had them.”9 This stasis extends to the village as a whole: “And then, somewhere in seventeen hundred and something, the tide of progress swept Lymstock into a backwater…. It turned into a little provincial market town, unimportant and forgotten.”10 Servants have a regular day out and postmen have a regular hour for deliveries; the routines are choreographed and fixed, which enables the murders and delivery of the letters. Nevertheless, the backwater has an inhabitant tormented
by what Mrs. Dane Calthrop, the vicar’s wife, describes as “a dark stream of poison … black inward unhappiness—like a septic arm physically, all black and swollen.”11 Poison as a motif recurs not merely through the “poison-pen” letters that allow the anxieties of the community—related to faithful partners, hidden perversions, or past sins—to rise to the surface. As Jerry remarks, “What kind of place is this for a man to come to lie in the sun and heal his wounds? It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.”12 Eventually the poison shifts from a metaphorical and spiritual concept to materiality; it comes to light that the first fatal victim of the letters was murdered by her husband with cyanide used by the gardener to kill wasps. This is an instance of what Light describes as Christie’s typical “domestication of weaponry,”13 but there are further implications; poison is concealed, killing the body from within. The murderer and poison-pen letter-writer Mr. Symington poisons his wife because he wishes to marry his children’s governess but maintain his façade of respectability as a county solicitor; he is imprisoned within the glass case of social convention, with fatal results.

  Symington intended the letters as a smoke-screen. He took on the persona of a deranged woman and disseminated them in order to divert suspicion, as well as providing a motive for his wife’s seeming suicide. As objects, the letters continue the theme of the intrusion of the past into the present, as the police expert describes: “The text of the letters is composed of words made up from individual letters cut out of an old printed book. It’s an old book, printed, I should say, about the year 1830. This has obviously been done to avoid the risk of recognition through handwriting, which is, as most people know nowadays, a fairly easy matter.”14 The cut-out letters that make up the text mean that the police and amateur detectives are searching for a book with missing pages, an absence rather than something hidden, that echoes the absent moral code of the writer/murderer, and suggests blank spaces within the communal narrative of the village that is being re-written by the poison pen letters. It is indeed the “silent life of things” that is tracked as the police search for the hollow book and analyze the typescript. The book turns out to be a “ponderous volume of somebody’s sermons,”15 found in Miss Emily’s bookshelf in the house rented by Jerry and Joanna. The book has been preserved because everything in Lymstock has been preserved. Not only does its location cast suspicion on Miss Emily, it also transforms the book of religious writing into an empty shell; the texts have been cut and rearranged for evil purpose.

  It is a chance message on a piece of paper and a dream evoking the language and atmosphere of wartime that provides the final check to Symington’s scheme. War has been conspicuously absent from the novel; there is no rationing, blackout, or war news, London has a plentiful supply of fashionable dress stores and restaurants and although Jerry is an injured pilot, military flying is not mentioned. As Plain comments, “Far more important [than mourning the murdered] is the novel’s insistence upon communal health and gender normativity. The Moving Finger is firmly designed to assert stability in the face of change and to keep wartime trauma under control.”16 We see this particularly in the happy endings for Jerry and Joanna, who find true love and move to the village, rather than in any acknowledgement that Symington’s two young sons will be orphaned when he is hanged. Nevertheless, there are hints of war in the escalating paranoia of the villagers and the growing sense that secrets are dangerous and the symmetry of the ending is only made possible through Miss Marple’s analysis of Jerry’s dreamwork: “No smoke without fire. No fire without smoke. Smoke…. Smoke? Smoke screen … no, that was the war—a war phrase. War. Scrap of paper…. Only a scrap of paper. Belgium—Germany.”17 The insistence on fire here connotes the destruction of the war, while the “scrap of paper” suggests a worthless peace treaty. From Jerry’s recital of this dream, Miss Marple translates international warfare into personal conflict and deduces that Mrs. Symington’s alleged suicide note was a handful appropriate words torn from a longer, innocuous message (another re-ordered text) and that the poison pen letters were a smoke screen, a diversion to conceal real intent. Jerry’s dream shatters the dreamworld beneath the glass casing, the world of Dresden dolls and poisonous festering wounds; fire can be purifying as well as destructive. It is left ambiguous, however, whether Lymstock is thereby restored to modernity, or whether by moving to the village, Jerry and Joanna themselves abandon their careers as pilot and bright young thing and sink into the past.

  “The tea-shop that would never be”

  After the Funeral (1953) picks up on the themes of “period pieces” and change versus stasis. England’s pockets are no longer backwaters forgotten by time and progress, but are emptied, sites of change and disintegration and brutal murder. Cora Lansquenet is found dead in her bed in a country cottage, hacked to death with a hatchet; the general response is that the only possible culprit capable of such senseless violence is one of the “half-witted local oafs” or “these adolescent criminals—there’s a lot of them about.”18 In Christie’s post-war era, the countryside no longer even has a peaceful façade; on a more imaginative level, Cora’s niece Susan muses, sleepless in Cora’s cottage, “How sinister the country was somehow. So different from the big noisy indifferent town.”19 There is safety in numbers in After the Funeral—though, of course, as is Christie’s wont, the danger comes from within the closed community; as with Mr. Symington in The Moving Finger, the person closest to the victim here committed the crime.

  Miss Gilchrist, the respectable and solidly bourgeois companion to Cora, has been playing the part of the flustered middle-aged maiden lady; in actual fact she is resentful of Cora and the restricted and subservient life of the lady-companion, and obsessed with re-establishing her tea-shop from before the war. As Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns write of Christie’s interwar novels,

  Christie’s use of the mask in her fiction has its roots in the nature of mystery novels, which depend on their highlighting a doubleness, a dichotomy between appearance and reality, a dichotomy which the detective in his investigations enacts rhetorically but only provisionally solves.20

  In After the Funeral, this “dichotomy between appearance and reality” is negotiated through the relationships between the characters and the objects they desire and which surround them. Miss Gilchrist goes to Cora’s brother’s funeral dressed in Cora’s clothes: “rather cushion-like in shape, and dressed in wispy artistic black with festoons of jet beads, back in the home of her girlhood, moving about and touching things and exclaiming with pleasure when she recalled some childish memory.”21 Later it becomes apparent that the alleged Cora’s “cushion-like” shape was literally due to padding, and Miss Gilchrist has also appropriated Cora’s “false front” of hair as well as her childhood memories and nostalgic connections to the furnishings of the house. The other implication here is that the house, or at least its above-stairs quarters, has remained unchanged for decades; this stagnation enables Miss Gilchrist to perform her role, to fake belonging to the house and the family.

  After the Funeral is cluttered with things and families. While the funeral of Cora’s brother Richard Abernethy and the reading of his will may seem to be the starting point of the novel, we actually start with the story of Enderby Hall, a “vast Victorian house built in the Gothic style” and furnished with “rich faded brocade and velvet” and family portraits.22 The blinds in the windows are falling apart but have lasted a long time; the alternative, according to the butler is “Gimcrack…. The material wasn’t good, or the craftsmanship either.”23 The end of an era is mourned via the kitchen of Enderby Hall: “[Cook] Marjorie turned up the gas under her large saucepan of creamy chicken soup. The large kitchen range of the days of Victorian grandeur stood cold and unused, like an altar to the past.”24 This is an altar not much respected by the younger generation of Richard’s relations; the house is too old, too big and too inconvenient, and it might as well be turned into an inst
itution.

  Despite the sense of heritage and tradition, the house is gradually emptied of the family lineage; not only is “head of the family” Richard now dead, but his sons had been killed in the war and by polio. Enderby Hall and its faded drapery and period pieces are being divided and discarded. The arrangement of “a bouquet of wax flowers under a glass shade on a malachite table” is particularly important25; as in The Moving Finger, the connotations of the glass shade are artificiality, and the doubled preservation and stagnation. The glass shade here is fragile, however—even the family name is lost after Richard’s death. The younger generation may have escaped stagnation but are all flawed; George is dishonest and embezzles from his business, Rosamund lacks a moral compass and is married to an egotistic, potentially murderous actor, Susan has business acumen but a blind spot for her highly neurotic, potentially murderous husband. We are meant to assume that the faded grandeur of Enderby Hall, the replacement of mansions with public institutions or cheaply built suburbs, and the shoddy craftsmanship of post-war building and factories, are metaphors for the younger generation’s corruption and lack of integrity, especially since Rosamund has theatrical connections and Susan wants to repurpose “period pieces” from their place within a family’s interior geography into a decorative gimmick in her commercial operation. Indeed, R. A. York comments that in After the Funeral,

  Christie’s anxiety is obviously that the modern world is one in which morality and social stability have been undermined by egoism and hedonism. The concern with social stability is based on the assumption that an ordered society is comprehensible and therefore helps people to manage life because it defines possible types of conduct and the reactions to them that are to be expected.26