Having left the countess in Hell, Poirot sends her a lavish bouquet of flowers. His secretary, Miss Lemon, is tantalized. Usually a grim and efficient typist, whose sole aim in life is to invent a filing system, she sets down her work. “Her filing system was forgotten,” we learn. “All her feminine instincts were aroused.” She wonders whether, “at his age,” Poirot could really be interested in marriage.47 These “feminine instincts” would shock the detective. There are few women in Poirot’s life, and his secretary’s sex is something he apparently fails to register.
Lemon is one of Christie’s cross-over characters, in that she features in Poirot adventures and in lesser-known stories about the statistician J. Parker Pyne. The secretary—certainly the woman secretary—is not a Holmesian trope, and Poirot’s efficient servants reflect his status as a modern man in a fast-moving urban world. After all, as Poirot reflects at the beginning of Hickory Dickory Dock,
With George, his perfect manservant, and Miss Lemon, his perfect secretary, order and method ruled supreme in his life. Now that crumpets were baked square as well as round, he had nothing about which to complain.48
It comes as a shock, then, when Poirot’s “precision instrument” of a secretary—“so completely machine made”—makes three mistakes in a simple typing job because she is worried about her sister. “Poirot,” the reader learns, “had never conceived of Miss Lemon’s having a sister. Or, for that matter, having a father, mother, or even grandparents.”49
Miss Lemon is, fundamentally, a modern product. In one story, Poirot considers her as “composed entirely of angles,” thereby “satisf[ying his] demand for symmetry.” Indeed, as he observes again, “she was a human machine—an instrument of precision”; “he had never considered [her] as a woman.”50 Poirot likes Lemon, whose forename, Felicity, is only revealed fleetingly in Hickory Dickory Dock, because of her lack of imagination. When he does consider his secretary “as a woman” in “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest” (1960), he laments her lack of “voluptuous curves,” comparing her unfavorably to “a certain Russian countess. But,” he concludes, “that was long ago now.”51 The old demands of the crime fiction genre have disappeared and the ideal woman of the 1930s is not only unlikely but also unhuman.
This all ties in with contemporary debates about human identity becoming “mechanized” in the modern world. In Elizabeth Bowen’s novel To the North (1932), cars tear through cities while their drivers sit still, mechanically operating switches and pedals; critics have long noticed a tension in Jean Rhys’s modernist prose between women’s sense of “responsive, covert inner self and [the] mechanical external one” required to succeed in society.52 Miss Lemon, this precise and perfect angled machine, keeps proving her inhumanity with exceptions to the rule; speculating on romance, mistyping, having a sister. How perfect is this paragon of modern womanhood? Even the supreme Lemon fails to hold true to form, and therefore the fashionable construction is flawed. The tension between the “responsive” interior and the “mechanical” exterior is loquacious in its apparent absence from the text.
Miss Lemon is a character whose role in each narrative is to remind readers that she is a non-character; a real-not-real woman. Part of her failure to warrant attention as a woman lies in her ugliness. The words “hideous” and “ugly” always surround her. As an author, Christie distrusts women who are very ugly as much as she distrusts the very beautiful. Her heroines are young and “plain”—there is a mobility in their plainness; they can make themselves up according to whichever witness they are trying to manipulate. “It is really a hard life,” says Anne Beddingfeld, the protagonist of an early novel. “Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.”53 Women stand out in Poirot’s symmetrically modern, ironically generic world only if they are extravagantly feminine or outstandingly unfeminine; “sumptuous and … alluring” or “ugly and efficient.” The books adopt a conservative, even misogynistic, worldview—but perhaps the “c” is back-to-front.
On Television
There have been several attempts to translate Agatha Christie’s fictional world to the screen. Both Lemon and Rossakoff have appeared as minor characters in short-lived projects such as The Agatha Christie Hour (London Weekend Television, 1982) and Murder on the Orient Express (Daniel H. Blatt, 2001). However, both have become major supporting characters in the highly successful television series Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Having explored Christie’s presentation of Poirot and the women in his life from a queer perspective, I will now consider how these characters and their relationships have translated to the screen. For many, “Agatha Christie” in the twenty-first century is the sum of her media success: the merest glance at Christie’s official website or Facebook page reveals that television adaptations have been elevated to the status of canon.
In the early 1990s, Poirot became an unlikely “sex symbol” among middle-aged television viewers.54 Perhaps in response to this interest, despite his prissy accent and dainty mannerisms, this Poirot becomes surprisingly virile and conventional over the course of the series. He even considers marriage in several episodes, always to “nice English girls.”55 In “Cards on the Table” (2005), he is able to identify a homosexual murderer because the latter never “tried [his] luck” with a beautiful woman, whom Poirot considers “irresistible”: the straight Poirot sees something suspicious, and ultimately unethical, in a man who does not share his sexual appetite.
Poirot’s heterosexuality is made explicit from the third season when he has a romance with Vera Rossakoff in “The Double Clue.” In his memoirs, David Suchet, the star of Poirot, describes Rossakoff as “the one woman with whom Poirot falls in love.”56 Suchet compares Rossakoff to Conan Doyle’s Irene Adler, but concludes that, unlike Adler, Rossakoff “does not outwit [Poirot]. Instead, he allows her to get away with her crimes.”57 Playing into the cultural myth that Christie molded her characters around plots, and that therefore finer points of character are less important than the finer points of the puzzle, Suchet here considers Rossakoff as submissively feminine. In Suchet’s reading, Rossakoff depends on Poirot’s love and authority to “get away with her crimes,” and—like Poirot—Suchet does not question anything else about the character: he does not entertain the notion that Rossakoff’s whole identity, or at least her aristocratic femininity, is a performance. The character, as portrayed by Kika Markham in the relevant episode of Poirot, has no memorable characteristics. In the short story, Rossakoff is feminine, aristocratic and foreign to the point of comic implausibility, but there is no suggestion of artifice in the television character, and no other character discusses Rossakoff’s dubious title or “strong personality.”
In the adaptation, Rossakoff seems to be less a clearly-defined character in her own right than a factor in the development of Poirot’s character: she exists insofar as she provides Poirot with heterosexual romance and heterosexual heartbreak. The most flamboyant stereotypes Christie draws upon to sketch the character do not translate to the screen, but other stereotypes, about the passivity and understated beauty of attractive femininity, do. Markham described her character as one charged, like a conventional wife, with “want[ing] to change” Poirot.58 Her motivations are not really explored, though, and Suchet quotes Poirot from the screenplay: “You are the most remarkable, the most unique woman I have ever met [but m]arriage is not for me.”59
Suchet compares the final scene to Brief Encounter (1945): “The end of the film has him effectively saying goodbye to any chance of love, and … condemned to remain wrapped forever in his own loneliness.”60 For Suchet, Rossakoff is significant only to draw out Poirot’s “deep regret at never having truly experienced love.”61 There is nothing playful and less still irreverent in the relationship—it accords with a reassurance Suchet frequently made in promotional interviews about Poirot: that he is, “Lord knows, emphatically not a ‘luvvie.’”62 Decisions in adaptation and Suchet’s performance establish Poirot as a heterose
xual figure, rewriting the satire that underscores his relationship with the Countess in Christie’s prose.
A very different Rossakoff appears in the final season of Poirot, played by Orla Brady. Now a kleptomaniac instead of a jewel thief, and an alcoholic, this new Rossakoff is certainly at the center of comedy. However, the joke is on her: she is a bad mother, who has not settled down with a good husband but bundled her daughter all over the world, creating an unstable life that has driven the latter to serious crime. This Rossakoff still lives for pleasure and is deeply invested in her appearance—when Poirot comments, “You look well,” she responds, “I want to look like a goddess; one of the better ones”—but she is trying to please herself and not male admirers, a set of priorities that causes Poirot and others to wince. Indeed, she is not too bothered to have missed out on passion with Poirot (“A love like ours could have burned down this city,” she remarks, disinterested. “Such a waste,” before passing through a doorway into a bright light). Of course, for most twenty-first century viewers, a woman who lives for pleasure and strives to look good because she wants to rather than to satisfy the male gaze is a very good thing indeed. As an individual, there can be no doubt that the twenty-first century Rossakoff is a more inspiring figure than those of the books and the early series. However, as a character in a fictional world, this character is judged whereas Rossakoff’s generic function as a woman, and not the woman herself, is mocked in the literary texts. Agatha Christie’s Poirot features two Rossakoffs, each a staple of that Freudian binary: Madonna/whore.63
Finally, there is Miss Lemon, a character of such little substance that she could not exist on the screen without artistic liberties being taken. Moreover, an extreme product of the interwar period, Miss Lemon is uninteresting to contemporary viewers. Portrayed by Pauline Moran in the television series, Felicity Lemon is more than a secretary to Poirot: she acts as a friend and surrogate mother, chiding him over his diet, exchanging gifts, playing word games over ice-cream, taking part in a séance and even hypnotizing Captain Hastings. The character is undeniably more rounded; she is very definitely now a real person, and a likable one at that. There is something genuinely subversive in the creation of a strong recurring woman character who is not defined by any relationship and who never has a romantic subplot of any kind. However, she is consigned to the role of matron; although clearly younger than all the male leads, Miss Lemon appears as a multi-purpose mother figure who rarely leaves her small office and is not allowed any more significance in the actual events than Christie’s literary character. Pauline Moran, playing Miss Lemon in the series, gets significantly less screen time per episode than minor recurring characters such as Inspector Japp (Philip Jackson). When she is an angled and mechanical furnishing in Poirot’s satirically modern apartment, Lemon’s limited narrative significance makes sense; when she is a rounded and likeable character, it does not.
Like Suchet, Moran has discussed the need to stay “faithful” to “the books” and “the Canon” when appearing in Poirot.64 Although she never quite claims to have grounded her character—whose interest in astrology reflects her own—in the literary texts, Moran like other cast members has promoted the television series as a visual version of the books; an authentic slice of “Agatha Christie.” In publicity, the television series has been continuously positioned as “authentic” with reference to an implied author. This conjured Agatha Christie is conservative, strait-laced and robustly heterosexual. Her world is one in which men look at women, the good women adapt to the male gaze and the bad women stare back.
Where does this lead us, by way of conclusion? Agatha Christie has a reputation for simple, nostalgic conservatism—but to what extent is this fueled by the conservative nostalgia of television adaptations and fan communities? When it comes to gender, there is something lukewarm in the books’ clear-cut perspectives. We cannot dismiss Christie as a purveyor of cozy ephemera, demanding no more thought than a cryptic crossword. Other essays in this volume have questioned the good and evil binary in Christie; I suggest that masculinity and femininity are also far from secure as opposite constructions, and the codification of human desire is presented as arbitrary. Reading Christie queerly means reading her as an ironic master of the mystery genre and an engaged social commentator.
Notes
1. Agatha Christie, “The Capture of Cerberus” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (London: Harper, 2008), pp. 844–864 (p. 846).
2. See J.C. Bernthal, Queering Agatha Christie (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
4. Agatha Christie, The Big Four (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 211; “The Capture of Cerberus,” p. 864.
5. See especially Merja Makinen, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 48–52.
6. An exception, of course, is Meg Boulton’s contribution to the present volume.
7. Quoted in Bernthal, Queering Agatha Christie.
8. See, for instance, Marty S. Knepper, “Agatha Christie: Feminist,” The Armchair Detective 16 (1983), pp. 398–406; Dennis Altman, The End of the Homosexual? (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2013), pp. 129–132.
9. Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 51, 21, 38.
10. Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (London: Harper, 2011), p. 282.
11. Ibid.
12. Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 5.
13. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 87–161 (p. 96).
14. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Sign of Four,” pp. 95–96.
15. When Holmes fears that a gunshot has injured Watson: “Then my friend’s wiry arms were round me…. It was worth a wound—it was worth many wounds—to know the depth of loyalty and love which lay behind that cold mask.” Holmes goes on to “rip [Watson’s] trousers up with a pocket knife” to investigate, and swear that if Watson had been damaged he would have killed the attackers. Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Three Garridebs” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 1044–1055 (p. 1053).
16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 162.
17. Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 11, 23. I have written about Poirot’s masculinity and nationalism more extensively in “‘Every Healthy Englishman Longed to Kick Him’: Masculinity and Nationalism in Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table,” Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2 (2014), pp. 103–114.
18. Charles Brownson, The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), p. 60.
19. Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet” in The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes (London: Penguin, 2009), pp. 13–87 (p. 21).
20. Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, p. 217; Sad Cypress (London: Collins, 1940).
21. Christie, The Big Four, pp. 207, 161.
22. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 90.
23. Agatha Christie, “The Cornish Mystery” in Poirot’s Early Cases (London: Harper, 2002), pp. 57–80 (p. 73).
24. Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links (London: Bodley Head, 1923), p. 16.
25. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, p. 185.
26. Christie, The Big Four, p. 252.
27. Ibid., p. 211.
28. For a rich discussion of Adler’s gender ambiguity, and her significance in a macho genre, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 191–196.
29. Christie, “The Capture of Cerberus,” p. 848. Emp
hasis in original.
30. Arthur Conan Doyle, Memories and Adventures: An Autobiography (London: Wordsworth, 2007), p. 108; Agatha Christie, “The Double Clue” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (London: Harper, 2008), pp. 282–290 (p. 286).
31. Earl F. Bargainnier, The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press), pp. 53–54. Emphasis in original.
32. Agatha Christie, “Mystery Writers in England” in Ask a Policeman (London: HarperCollins, 2012), pp. xiii-xx (p. xi).
33. Christie, “The Double Clue,” p. 285.
34. Ibid., p. 286.
35. Ibid., p. 287.
36. Leila J. Rupp and Verta Taylor, Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 136.
37. Roger Baker, Drag: A History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts (New York: Cassell, 1994), p. 157.
38. Quoted in Moya Lloyd, Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics (London: Sage, 2005), p. 136.
39. Quoted in Ibid., p. 108. Emphasis original.
40. Christie, “The Double Clue,” p. 285.
41. Ibid., p. 286.
42. For Christie’s fondness of pantomime dames and female impersonators, see Autobiography, p. 140.
43. J. D. Doyle, “More Bert Savoy” in Queer Music Heritage (June 2004), accessed May 1, 2014, www.queermusicheritage.us.
44. Christie, The Big Four, pp. 188–189.
45. Agatha Christie, “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest” in Hercule Poirot: The Complete Short Stories (London: Harper, 2008), pp. 421–455 (p. 421).
46. Christie, “The Capture of Cerberus,” p. 850.
47. Ibid., p. 864.
48. Agatha Christie, Hickory Dickory Dock (Glasgow: Fontana, 1988), p. 5.
49. Ibid., pp. 5–6.
50. Christie, “The Mystery of the Spanish Chest,” p. 421.
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