51. Ibid. The story, written in 1960, is an expanded version of another story, first published in 1932.
52. Elizabeth Abel, quoted in Nancy R. Harrison, Jean Rhys and the Novel as Women’s Text (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), p. 118.
53. Agatha Christie, The Man in the Brown Suit (London: Pan, 1973), p. 13.
54. Peter Haining, Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Boxtree: LWT, 1995), p. 19.
55. David Suchet quoted in Ibid., p. 19.
56. David Suchet and Geoffrey Wansell, Poirot and Me (London: Headline, 2013), p. 113.
57. Ibid.
58. Quoted in Haining, Agatha Christie Poirot, 19.
59. Quoted in Suchet and Wansell, Poirot and Me, pp. 113–114.
60. Ibid., p. 114.
61. Ibid., p. 62.
62. Quoted in Phil Penfold, “A Passion for Poirot,” Yours (April 2004), p. 6.
63. Sigmund Freud, “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” (1912), Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11 (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 177–190.
64. Pauline Moran, “Poirot and Me,” Guardian (November 10, 2013), accessed January 1, 2015, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/nov/10/pauline-moran-poirot-tv.
Bibliography
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Bargainnier, Earl F. The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie. Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press.
Bernthal, J. C. “‘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.
_____. Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Defective Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.
Brownson, Charles. The Figure of the Detective: A Literary History and Analysis. Jefferson: McFarland, 2014
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Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction Since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
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Makinen, Merja. Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Meyer, Jessica. Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Moran, Pauline. “Poirot and Me.” Guardian (November 10, 2013).
Penfold, Phil. “A Passion for Poirot.” Yours (April 2004), pp. 5–7.
Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
Rupp, Leila J., and Verta Taylor. Drag Queens at the 801 Cabaret. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
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_____. Epistemology of the Closet (1990), updated ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.
Suchet, David, and Geoffrey Wansell. Poirot and Me. London: Headline, 2013.
“The Encyclopedic Palace of the World”
Miss Lemon’s Filing System as Cabinet of Curiosities and the Repository of Human Knowledge in Agatha Christie’s Poirot
Meg Boulton
The discussion in this essay is one of collected knowledge, visual signifiers and cultural memory surrounding the totemic loci of Miss Lemon and her filing system, as well as the cabinet that houses it as it is glimpsed through Christie’s work, and through subsequent adaptations of her novels for television. The discussion focuses on the role of Miss Lemon’s filing cabinet (and on that of its creator), suggesting that it/they are a pivotal element in the visual presentation of accumulated knowledge and the deductive process as displayed to the viewer in the television series of Agatha Christie’s Poirot. This series of adaptations (broadcast between 8 January 1989 and 13 November 2013, first aired by LWT and later produced by ITV Studios), are so much part of the public engagement with Agatha Christie’s work that for many they are Christie, although it must be said that the adaptations en masse are frequently divisive among fans and scholars of Christie’s work. Despite such differences of opinion surrounding the treatment of individual episodes across the adaptations, the (tele)visual versions of Christie’s books have become immersed in the popular consciousness surrounding the author, dictating the way her plots, characters and settings play out in our imaginations, and affecting intertexts with the narrative space of the novels that perform a role somewhere between palimpsest and interstice; inserting familiar characters into scenarios and narratives not originally penned by Christie, while reproducing aspects of her famous stories.
The on-screen adaptations present a lush, vivid world that surrounds Poirot, his companions and his adversaries, providing those viewing the episodes with an immersive and hyper-saturated encounter with Poirot: with his world; with the places he goes; the people he sees; the criminals he encounters; the cases he solves. We, in a privileged viewing position, see his geographies and his psycho-geographies; witness his professional and private lives as they unfold; case by case, year by year.
While the early adaptations created under the aegis of Clive Exton (the primary scriptwriter and the series story consultant) and Brian Eastman (who produced the first eight seasons from the pilot until 2001, when the series underwent a marked shift in tone), are, for the most part, largely faithful to the novels (as distinct from the later, highly filmic adaptations created by Michele Buck and Damien Timmer), there are departures from Christie’s text within the televised versions that may not sit ent
irely happily for those primarily concerned with ideas of verisimilitude, the privileging of the original and authorial intention.1 Changes include dramatists writing the characters of Captain Hastings and Miss Lemon (played by Hugh Fraser and Pauline Moran) into several cases in which they do not feature as written by Christie. This was an act of insertion intended to give Poirot the stability of an on-screen “family,” as Exton explained during an interview for the Poirot episode of the Super Sleuths documentary directed by Janette Clucas in 2006:
I do think, for a television series, you need a basic family unit, whether it’s a family or not; people who interact with each other. Also, it’s very useful, for a not very clever writer like me, to have somebody for Poirot to confide in.2
As well as writing in Hastings, Miss Lemon and Philip Jackson’s Chief Inspector Japp to the first eight seasons of the adaptations, Exton and Eastman deepened their characters, adding elements of human interest, hobbies and backstories unseen in Christies novels, reminding those who both read and watch her that the televised world of Poirot is a creative act of adaptation from the original. Yet, along with the acknowledgment that the television adaptations are just that, adaptations, it must also be recognized that the adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Poirot present extraordinarily fertile ground for analysis of the way in which Christie’s ideas lend themselves to a graphic (re)casting and (tele)visual identity, (if allowed to exist as separate and distinct entities to the novels and thus worthy of consideration in their own right); being intriguing (re)presentations of Christie’s works that exist within an extraordinarily rich and detailed visual environment. It is, in part, the depth and detail of this environment that enables the type of discussion produced here—as the created, imagined spaces that are presented and produced by the creators of the televised versions of Christie, particularly those of Poirot’s apartment in the early adaptations, not only provide a continuous backdrop for the staging of the deductive narrative but also provide a plethora of nuanced shifts and subtleties that substantiate and support the narrative of the drama as it plays out on-screen.
Indeed, it is the space of Poirot’s apartment that forms the epicenter of this discussion, since, as has long been recognized, the house (like domestic space more generally) is a potent space of memory; an active component of identity and self.3 As noted by Gaston Bachelard, in his seminal work on the phenomenology of the interior, The Poetics of Space “inhabited space transcends geometric space,”4 and certainly, the space created in the adaptations of Christie is inhabited—opulently envisioned; full of period detail, saturated with objects and cultural ephemera. These spaces are entirely inhabited, and it is, in part, the richness of the detail of the interiors in the adaptations that facilitates the relationship between the viewer and the characters on-screen; surrounding them with lived spaces and personal objects; giving them a place, making them a world. This type of object-orientated resonance is demonstrated again and again in the visual choices made by the creators of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, typified in the domestic spaces and objects with which they choose to surround their protagonists; which, to some extent come to visually codify them, emulating and echoing their patterns of behavior for a long-term audience, viewing across seasons. In part the sustained visual analysis of the object-spaces that flood the world of the detective, as applied here, is aided by Eastman’s decision to fix the stories in 1936, effectively halting time and stemming the chronology created by Christie herself, whose later mysteries play out against the ultra-modernity of the 1960s.5 The stopped time of the mid–1930s seen on-screen provides a glamorous chronological constant, allowing a stable visual vocabulary to emerge across the series and thus ensuring tiny developments in costume or object gain significance in their own right, speaking volumes about the nuances of character and plot.
The Woman Behind the System
The focus of this paper is largely on Miss Lemon, Poirot’s formidable and elusive secretary—who also appears in a secretarial role in Christie’s Parker Pyne series—as well as the filing system she creates, which takes up a large amount of the visual “space” throughout the adaptations; ostensibly corralled within an outer-office, but continually glimpsed through the liminal threshold spaces of corridors, doorways and the glass partition window that divides Miss Lemon’s office from the main living space in the apartment (which also functions as Poirot’s office) as the episodes unfold. In his discussion of domestic space Bachelard states that “the house furnishes us dispersed images and a body of images at the same time,”6 which could equally be said of the filing system that functions as record and regulator for Poirot’s world. It is a once a fragmented image, spread across the series in facets, glimpsed in half-shots, presented as background and shown as the fundamental aspect of the administrative machine that keeps the fictive world in order, a continuous presence that is both aspect and extension of its creator and of the detective whose intellect it reflects, records and monumentalizes. Miss Lemon herself is a figure who appears relatively infrequently in the literary texts, but despite her elusiveness is understood to be otherwise indispensable to Poirot. She is woven into the fabric of the television adaptations, where she is given a far weightier presence, involved in detection, actively enabling Poirot’s patterns of metal deduction both in and out of the office.
In the mystery novel Hickory Dickory Dock (1958), Christie centralizes Miss Lemon, making her the agent through which the mystery unfolding around her sister is introduced to Poirot. Here she is described as a “hideous and efficient woman…. For all practical purposes, that is to say, she was not a woman at all. She was a machine the perfect secretary.” We are told that “Miss Lemon’s Heel of Achilles had always been her imagination. She had none. On questions of fact she was invincible. On questions of surmise she was lost.”7 We are informed that she “was sublimely incurious by nature,”8 and that she was “the most efficient woman that ever lived.”9 These descriptions of her match those given in “How Does Your Garden Grow?” where we are told that “she enjoyed typing, paying bills, filing papers and entering up engagements. To be asked to imagine herself in hypothetical situations bored her very much but she accepted it as a disagreeable part of a duty.”10
This, then, is the woman behind the system; the formidable and machine-like mind that created the overarching cabinet that becomes the visual epitome of triumphant deduction across the series. Identifying, catching and “collecting” criminals could be said to be a leitmotif in Christie’s oeuvre for her fictive detectives and readers alike, and this is perhaps most coherently demonstrated to her audience through the visual device of Miss Lemon’s system, which is presented in tantalizing fragments to the reader/viewer of the novels and their subsequent adaptations; being, like Lemon herself, vastly more present in the television adaptations than in the books, where it is introduced in absentia, existing more as an abstract concept in Miss Lemon’s mind than as anything with an object-oriented reality. As readers, we are told, for example, that “her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system besides which all other systems would sink into oblivion. She dreamed of such a system at night.”11 It is through such narrative fragments that we become aware of the filing system, encountered, as it is, through Miss Lemon’s abstracted and gleeful imaginings of her patented system as a possibility, as potential. Nonetheless, its intangible presence is there to be read in her all-consuming passion for filing and systematizing the paper-portfolio of Poirot’s deductive admin; a passion once described by the meticulous Christie scholar and archivist John Curran as “seriously sad!”12 Certainly it is serious, as despite its slightly nebulous and abstract presence in the novels, on-screen the filing system is a ubiquitous presence, filling a room with its ranks of ordered cabinets and containing a vast miscellany of detail about past cases. The burnished wood, brass handles and neatly labeled identification cards on the drawers of the cabinet are a visual reminder of cases past and cases to come; containing all the minutiae and scope of the Po
irot-verse within its cataloged confines.
This encyclopedic structure arguably finds its origin in the exotic collections and Linnaean taxonomies that fill and govern the rare and wonderful specimens of enlightenment era curiosity cabinets and wunderkammer of early modern Europe.13 Felicity Lemon’s filing system, “besides which all other filing systems will sink into oblivion,”14 and the on-going on-screen evolution of her all-encompassing card catalog and the cabinet which houses it, is not only central to the ordering of Poirot’s methodical world and indeed to Poirot himself, acting as both an identifying and signifying feature of the detective/stories, but may be thought of as the inheritor of these early collections. The (self-)contained encyclopedic system (which remains an abstract in the novels but is extant and immediate in Poirot’s on-screen world, present though its collective identities as being the material realization of Poirot’s consciousness, the product of Miss Lemon’s material record and as it exists in the viewer’s imagination) asks questions of who is privy to what; of how knowledge is controlled and ordered; of how the taxonomization of societal behaviors may abet the deductive process and how the ordering of chaos into a cataloged and controlled cabinet may provide a greater control in the face of murder and mayhem. But, as will be argued here, it also holds the key to how the modern viewer engages with the presentation of Christie’s cases and narratives as a visual construct somewhere between the imaginary world on screen and the suspended real world of the viewer.
The catalog and its containing cabinet, presented on-screen variously as object, concept and iconic image relates to the wider phenomenology of the interior presented by Christie in her books and is further developed by those translating her narratives into a visual medium in terms of the psychological spaces and clandestine human histories it simultaneously conceals and reveals. As noted, one of the functions of Miss Lemon’s system is to provide a comprehensive archive of the detective’s past, while simultaneously offering insight into future human behaviors—several times throughout the series, for example, we see Poirot and his companions use the system to inform current investigations. As a repository of knowledge, the cabinet is an inanimate presence throughout the adaptations that effectively bears witness to the detectives’ interior world, to his current endeavors and to his past victories; illustrating his prowess as a detective and holding him to a continuum of deductive genius embodied by this tangible monument to his previous cases. Thus the catalog is a thing that both imposes and composes order; continually offering possible connections between disparate ideas and absent facts through the data held within its compartments, continually generating new knowledge for author and audience alike. As such, this discussion of a contained and functioning encyclopedic entity that preserves the past while it continues to evolve, generating a surfeit of information through the actions of its curator and amanuensis as well as those of its autocratic subject, that continually intersects with the present must be set into a wider discussion of space and containment on-screen in the Christie adaptations. This, in turn, creates further points for consideration, such as how the visual arrangement of space, the manifestation of knowledge and the visualization of deductive processes and of criminal agency alike engage with our perceptions of (and preoccupations with) Christie, as well as with her narratives and protagonists, the rational and the irrational as they appear in this fictive world.
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 15