The Ageless Agatha Christie

by Bernthal, J. C. ;

  Also of interest, and perhaps somewhat less expected than the (visual) relationship between Poirot and the encyclopedic system, are the multiple instances in which the as-yet-unrevealed perpetrator of the crime locates themselves in proximity to the cabinet. They unwittingly place themselves in relation to it, divided from it by the glass window into the outer office; yet always, obviously, in close relation to it, often, indeed caught between it and the figure of Poirot himself, thus forming a spatial, deductive binary around the perpetrator. This placement of Poirot and cabinet foreshadows the eventual outcome of the investigation, as despite the machinations of the criminal-antagonists, and their conviction that they will outwit and out-think Poirot, evading detection, their (self-)placement between the detective and his encyclopedic other (the reflection of his intellect, preserved in the space of the cabinet) intimates their ultimate downfall; and their inevitable cataloging and containment within the very cabinet that forms a seemingly neutral background to their crimes; merging with the other crimes and criminals it contains. This placement is seen over and over again; with Marcus Waverly in the 1989 adaptation of “The Adventure of Johnny Waverley,” Nigel Chapman in the 1995 adaptation of Hickory Dickory Dock, Mr. Graves in the 1993 adaptation of “The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman” and Miss Jane Plenderleith in the 1989 adaptation of “Murder in the Mews” all locating themselves in relation to the cabinet when visiting Poirot at his apartment, to name but a few.

  Throughout the adaptations, the filing cabinet is frequently juxtaposed visually with the inferior systems of others, perhaps most notably that of Scotland Yard’s new (and highly prized) forensic division. This comparison consistently highlights the superiority of Miss Lemon’s system, resulting in some really delightful moments in the television series (if size mattered, for instance, the police force would be in trouble!). The Yard’s filing system, as portrayed, is composed of one in-tray and one filing cabinet, as opposed to the expansive stretches of space devoted to Miss Lemon’s cataloguing of Poirot’s cases, housed in their glorious cabinet. Indeed, the juxtaposition of the superiority of Miss Lemon’s system as set against the modern scientific advancements of the police force provides one of my very favorite tableau in the series, where, in the 1989 adaptation of “Four and Twenty Blackbirds,” the mystery is solved onstage in a theatre by Poirot with the entire forensic body of Scotland Yard “staged” to “act” as a convincing scientific backdrop of the “modern method” to his denouement of Lorrimer as the murderer; the modern method, frozen in the act of falling short of the encyclopedic system.

  As demonstrated by this theatrical foray, far from being a static, monolithic immovable machine—which one might expect, given the scale and scope of its cabinet—Miss Lemon’s system in fact acts as a sort of web or nexus within the visual field of the Poirot-verse—engaging with the world and with similar systems of information. In Lord Edgware Dies and in Hickory Dickory Dock the cabinet and its contents are instrumental in solving the crime, in the televised versions of these stories. Once, through one of its subsections on specialist London jewelers which helps to reveal the true narrative behind the gold box in Carlotta Adams’ death; and, perhaps more remarkably, in Hickory Dickory Dock, through a symbiotic relationship with another cabinet of curiosity-esque space—the London Transport Lost Property office (and through the presence of its portable counterpart as constructed on-screen in the Hickory Road hostel by Poirot and Miss Lemon to assist in the dénouement of the crime).

  When the cabinet is seen outside the confines of Poirot’s apartment (either as a curtailed chalk-board presence or as part of a network communicating with the similar encyclopedic space of the London Lost Property office) it is always shown accompanied by, or as performing through the agency of its creator Miss Lemon—as the relationship between the two is almost entirely symbiotic. As mentioned above, when at work in Poirot’s apartment, she is often shown either surrounded by component parts of the system or portrayed in the act of generating further information to be incorporated into its drawers and compartments. There is an interesting piece of visual staging that occurs throughout the episodes of the first eight seasons that affirms her relationship to the cabinet. When giving a wide shot of the cabinet as background from Poirot’s living room into the outer-office where Miss Lemon works we are repeatedly presented with an image of Miss Lemon, seen through glass, sitting at her typewriter, in the act of generating future data for confinement in the cabinet, which forms a backdrop to whichever scene is playing out. In the little changing space of the apartment, in front of the window which links the space of living room and the office beyond, which frames the scene of Miss Lemon and the cabinet is a glass table, upon which resides a bowl of ceramic fruit. Taken together, this repeated scene is a rather extraordinary one, the presence of the perpetual fruit effectively transforming the image of the cabinet and Miss Lemon at work into a Still Life22; framed and frozen by the window. This act of transformation, with its strong visual references to the artistic tradition of Still Life painting, with its endemic (and problematic) belief that the subject of the work “exists” as discussed by Bryson,23 and its ideas of memory and morality, the real and the realized all seem to be particularly apposite frameworks to contemplate the role of Miss Lemon and her superlative system. She is both real and unreal, a fictional character given a yet more fictional presence as she is written into narratives she was never meant to occupy. Her encyclopedic system is an entity with both symbolic and actual resonances across the series, weaving in and out of narratives, engaging and engaged with by character and viewer alike; yet, in its perpetual presence and continual evolution it is a presence that serves to monumentalize and enable the deductive process, but also to memorialize it.

  Memory, here, is significant, because as Christie tells us in the opening line to Lord Edgware Dies, “the memory of the public is short.”24 As such, in closing, I wish to address the curiously spatial nature of the cabinet in relationship to its audience, as opposed to the characters that surround it. For the viewer, the cabinet and its system are at once pivotal and liminal—providing points of encounter and tension throughout the viewing of these episodes; but also capable of providing spaces of forgetting. Placed, as noted, in an anti-chamber to Poirot’s living room, accessed in the apartment through two threshold points the cabinet is both centralized and marginalized, an object acting as both foreground and background. Indeed, in its on-screen presentation, it is most-often seen through a glass window—an aspect which almost transforms the cabinet into a curiosity in its own right. In closing, I would like to draw attention to one of the most frustrating aspects of Miss Lemon’s Cabinet—in that, due to a network change and a stylistic shift in the construction of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, it vanishes from the viewer’s gaze. Having spent around 32 episodes becoming ever more convinced of the cabinet’s centrality to Poirot’s identity and deductive method, and its role in memorializing and monumentalizing his intellectual achievements, it vanishes from the screen alongside its creator, surviving only as a memory for its viewers.

  However, such is the power of the cabinet and the system that it sustains, that it lives on past this imposed invisibility. Having been ever-present, indeed, omnipresent, the cabinet takes up residence in those watching (and re-watching) the adaptations. In recognizing and considering Christie’s cases, in discussing them, in making cross-connections across the narratives, as it does, and in observing their minutiae, we, as viewing audience, become part of the Encyclopedic Palace of Knowledge created by Miss Lemon; as, despite its on-screen absence, it continues to function, in the collective mind of the viewer, as both memorial and memory palace. Thus, even in absentia, the cabinet and the encyclopedic system it contains remain a vital part of encountering the televised universe of Poirot; as real as Christie’s characters themselves; a remembered curiosity that functions as symbolic signifier for our own collecting of Christie as readers and viewers of her work.

  Notes

  1
. See R. Barthes, “Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text” in Image-Music-Text (Waukegan: Fontana Press, 1993), pp. 142–148 and 155–164, respectively; see also M. Foucault, Language Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, D. F. Bouchard (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1980), pp. 113–38 and Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

  2. Clive Exton as interviewed by Janette Clucas in the documentary Super Sleuths (Season 1, Episode 1).

  3. For further reading see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

  4. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. vii.

  5. Peter Haining, Agatha Christie’s Poirot (London: Boxtree and LWT), p. 14.

  6. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p. 3.

  7. Agatha Christie, Hickory Dickory Dock (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981), p. 9.

  8. Ibid., p. 28.

  9. Ibid., p. 30.

  10. Agatha Christie, “How Does Your Garden Grow?” in The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories (New York: Avon, 1939), p. 65.

  11. Ibid., p. 51.

  12. Curran’s comment on the nature of Miss Lemon’s obsession with filing was given in an interview for ITV’s series The People’s Detective, which aired in 2010. Many thanks to Eirik Dragsund for help locating this quotation, who writes the blog Investigating Poirot, where it first came to my attention in the entry The Big Three: Hastings, Miss Lemon and Japp (December 20, 2012), accessed May 3, 2015, www.investigatingpoirot.blogspot.co.uk.

  13. For a comprehensive introductory text to these collections see Patrick Mauriès’ Cabinets of Curiosities (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002).

  14. Christie, “How Does Your Garden Grow?” p. 51.

  15. Mauriès, Cabinets of Curiosities, pp. 23–25.

  16. Ibid., p. 12.

  17. Renny Rye (dir.), “The Adventure of Johnny Waverly,” Agatha Christie’s Poirot, 1.3, dramatized by Clive Exton (London Weekend Television, 1989).

  18. V. Rousseau, “Encyclopedic Palace” [sic.] exhibition label for Self-Taught Genius: Treasures from the American Folk Art Museum, curated by S. C. Hollander and V. Rousseau (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2014).

  19. Ibid.

  20. See Massimiliano Gioni et al. (eds.), Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace), The 55th Exhibition catalog of the Venice Biennale (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013).

  21. For an introduction to this see Edward Hollis, The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors (London: Portobello Books, 2013), especially pp. 14–21.

  22. For further information see Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion, 1990). See also Erika Langmuir, A Closer Look: Still Life (London: National Gallery, 2010).

  23. Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, pp. 7–15, particularly p. 7.

  24. Agatha Christie, Lord Edgware Dies (London: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 9.

  Bibliography

  Agatha Christie’s Poirot. Television series, Granada and ITV Studios, 1989–2013.

  Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

  Barthes, Roland. “Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text.” Image-Music-Text (1979). Waukegan: Fontana, 1993.

  Bryson, Norman. Looking at the Overlooked Four Essays on Still Life Painting. London: Reaktion, 1990.

  Burke, Sean. The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

  Christie, Agatha. Hickory Dickory Dock (1957). Glasgow: Fontana, 1981.

  _____. “How Does Your Garden Grow?” (1935). The Regatta Mystery and Other Stories. New York: Avon Publications, 1939.

  _____. Lord Edgware Dies (1934). London: HarperCollins, 2007.

  _____. The Man in the Brown Suit (1924). London: Pan, 1973.

  Foucault, Michel. Language Counter-Memory Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. D. F. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.

  Gioni, Massimiliano, et al. Il Palazzo Enciclopedico (The Encyclopedic Palace). The 55th Exhibition catalog of the Venice Biennal, Venice, Marsilio Editori, 2013.

  Haining, Peter. Agatha Christie’s Poirot. London: Boxtree and LWT, 1995.

  Hollis, Edward. The Memory Palace A Book of Lost Interiors. London: Portobello Books, 2013.

  Langmuir, Erika. A Closer Look Still Life. London: National Gallery, 2010.

  Mauriès, Patrick. Cabinets of Curiosities. London: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

  “One must actually take facts as they are”

  Information Value and Information Behavior in the Miss Marple Novels

  Michelle M. Kazmer

  “There are many ways we prefer to look at things. But one must actually take facts as they are, must one not?”

  —Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage1

  One perspective not often brought to the study of detective fiction is that from the field of information science. Among other topics, information science is concerned with information behavior, or how people behave with respect to information: needing, seeking, accidentally encountering, avoiding, evaluating, storing and so forth. Examining the solving of a mystery as an information behavior has potential for insights into the genre and into our twenty-first century readings of detective fiction. Current audiences are accustomed to modern information technology and the information behaviors afforded by it: amateur sleuths hack computer systems or professional detectives analyze trace evidence for DNA. Highly technologized contemporary information environments leave us to ask: in what ways do the manipulation of information value, and the sophistication of the information behaviors, in novels written by Agatha Christie in the early to mid-twentieth century, continue to enthrall readers in the twenty-first?

  Within the information science discipline, many scholars have conducted research that focuses on information behavior and information value in real-life contexts; another important research stream focuses on the use and recommendation of fiction for entertainment. It is much less common to see information behavior theories applied to helping us understand the construction of fictional narratives and actions.2 Theorizing the solving of a mystery as an information behavior has potential for insights into the detective fiction genre overall. This approach can also increase our understanding of how information value is co-constructed in real-life contexts by focusing on how mystery authors’ narratives succeed in convincing, holding the attention of, and occasionally fooling, real-world readers.

  The analysis presented here is an extension of my work in studying shared knowledge practices and how those are shaped by the contexts in which they occur.3 For this analysis, I chose the theoretical approach afforded by information worlds theory. The theory of information worlds was created by Gary Burnett and Paul Jaeger, and published in 2008.4 In creating information worlds theory, Burnett and Jaeger drew on two existing conceptual frameworks. The first was Elfreda Chatman’s “Small Worlds,” where information behaviors occur within local, largely homogeneous social settings.5 The second was Jurgen Habermas’s “Lifeworld,” the sum total of all information resources and norms culture-wide.6 Burnett and Jaeger sought to resolve this big/small dichotomy to examine information within individual worlds as well as interactions across multiple worlds. Information worlds theory includes four concepts: social norms, social types, information value, and information behavior. Social norms are the shared understanding of rightness and wrongness in observable social behaviors; social types are the shared perceptions of individuals’ roles in the context of the information world. The social norms, social types and social worlds as viewed through economic/political/sociological lenses have already been heavily studied for early detective fiction.

  The concepts of information value and information behavior are open for analysis, specifically as they help us learn about how amateur detectives—and particularly women—function in the worl
ds constructed by and for them in the literature. Information value is defined as the shared understanding of what is worth attention and what information is meaningful within an information world. Information behavior is the full range of normative behaviors related to information. Information behavior includes such concepts as information needs, seeking, use, avoidance, rationing and management. People in various situations need information, and they may or may not be aware of those needs. Faced with an information need people may seek information actively, such as by searching a website, or passively encountering information during daily activities, for example, reading billboard advertisements while driving. People use information to inform decisions, to build knowledge or to influence the actions of others. They may avoid undesirable information, and withhold or ration information they give to others. Acquired or created information is managed: organized, stored/archived, preserved or discarded. Within this chapter, the two concepts of information behavior and information value are used to examine the twelve Miss Marple novels.7 The analysis demonstrates that Miss Marple lives within sophisticated information worlds that are shaped not only by contextually-determined social norms and social values, but by information-oriented behavior and co-creation of information value. Applying these concepts to the Marple novels indicates several aspects of Miss Marple’s praxis that are susceptible to information worlds analysis.8 This essay focuses on three: access, tactics and value.