I have attempted to show that Kerry Greenwood’s fiction offers much to consider, not least in its tentative tribute to, and ambivalent critique of, canonical British detective fiction. In such a way, Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series can be read in terms of its settler postcolonial relationship to its British precursor, namely Agatha Christie. This characteristic ambivalence is also a theme in Greenwood’s work, as well as a structuring principle. I have argued that Greenwood’s engagement with both history and social themes can be read in terms of another position of ambivalence: the middlebrow. Partly a confected fantasy, yet partly also a serious social critique that reaches a wide readership, the Fisher series connects with and highlights women’s experience in Australia. As the Fisher series connects two “middling” aspects of Greenwood’s writing—the settler postcolonial and the middlebrow—these draw out fresh ways of reading the work of her precursor: Christie. Greenwood arguably plays with the canonical conventions of the golden age of British detective fiction, but reading her fiction from an affirmative middlebrow position also draws attention to the ways in which Christie’s strong heroines subvert some dominant aspects of the British literary tradition. Greenwood comments on Australia’s late colonial modernity, and draws the reader’s attention away from male pioneer and bush narratives that have dominated Australian literature, towards a period of modernity where women were carving out new roles in a distinctly urban environment. Christie’s fiction possesses similar qualities of social critique and comment. These middlebrow feminist and settler postcolonial frames of interpretation force clever forms of analysis, not merely on solving fictional crimes. They suggest that further work might be productively undertaken on Christie’s own engagement with imperial and colonial themes.
Notes
1. Mitzi M. Brunsdale, Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: From Sleuths to Superheroes (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2010), p. 615; Hallie Ephron, “‘The Deadly Dozen’ Mistakes in Mystery Writing,” The Writer 121 (2008), pp. 26–29 (p. 26).
2. Sue Ryan-Fazilleau, “Kerry Greenwood’s ‘Rewriting’ of Agatha Christie,” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 7 (2007), pp. 59–70 (p. 59).
3. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin’s The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge 1989).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 60.
6. Ibid., p. 61.
7. Elleke Boehmer, “Postcolonialism” in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 340–61 (p. 342).
8. Kerry Greenwood, Death by Water (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2005), p. 15.
9. Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie 1920s Omnibus: The Secret Adversary (London: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 101. Emphasis added.
10. Kerry Greenwood, Raisins and Almonds (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2002), p. 130.
11. Christie, The Secret Adversary, p. 59.
12. Kerry Greenwood, Dead Man’s Chest (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2002), p. 55.
13. Kerry Greenwood, Murder and Mendelssohn (Crow’s Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013), p. 16.
14. Greenwood, Raisins and Almonds, back cover.
15. Kerry Greenwood, The Green Mill Murder (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 1993), p. 83.
16. Greenwood, Murder and Mendelssohn, p. 166.
17. Brunsdale, Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection, p. 615.
18. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 5.
19. Alan Lawson, “Difficult Relations: Narrative Instability Is Settler Cultures” in Matria-Alzira Seixo, John Noyes, Garça Abreu, and Isabel Moutinho (eds.), Proceedings of The Paths of Multiculturalism: Travel Writings and Postcolonialism (Lisboa: Edicoes Cosmos, 2000), pp. 49–60 (p. 50).
20. Victoria Kuttainen, Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), p. 7.
21. Lawson, “Difficult Relations,” p. 53.
22. Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s-1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 11.
23. Woolf, “Middlebrow,” p. 156.
24. Christie, The Secret Adversary, pp. 80, 40.
25. Ibid., p. 8.
26. Agatha Christie, Partners in Crime (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 14.
27. Ibid., pp. 9–11.
28. Ibid., p. 16.
29. Angela Woollacott, “White Colonialism and Sexual Modernity: Australian Women in the Early Twentieth Century Metropolis” in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge 1999), pp. 49–62.
30. Kerry Greenwood, Murder on the Ballarat Train (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 1991), p. 419.
31. Kerry Greenwood, Away with the Fairies (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2001), p. 38.
32. Woollacott, “White Colonialism and Sexual Modernity,” p. 58.
33. Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (London: Chatto & Windus, 1939), pp. 39, 37.
34. Ibid., p. 236.
35. Erica Brown and Mary Grover (eds.), Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 1.
36. Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2d ed. (New York: Norton, 2010), pp. 1107–1126 (p. 1122).
37. Faye Hammill, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), p. 6.
38. Kerry Greenwood, A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury (Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2007), p. xi.
39. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 108.
40. Katherine Bode, Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field (London: Anthem Press, 2012), p. 161.
41. Ibid., p. 6.
42. Ibid., p. 161.
43. Brown and Grover, Middlebrow Literary Cultures, p. 10.
44. Bode, Reading by Numbers, p. 205.
45. Ibid., p. 161.
Bibliography
Boehmer, Elleke. “Postcolonialism” in Patricia Waugh (ed.), Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 340–61.
Bode, Katherine. Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field. London: Anthem Press, 2012.
Brown, Erica, and Mary Grover (eds.). Middlebrow Literary Cultures: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Brunsdale, Mitzi M. Icons of Mystery and Crime Detection: From Sleuths to Superheroes. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2010.
Carter, David. “The Mystery of the Missing Middlebrow or the C(o)urse of Good Taste” in Judith Ryan and Chris Wallace-Crabbe (eds.), Imagining Australia: Literature and Culture in the New World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004, pp. 173–201.
Christie, Agatha. Partners in Crime (1929), London: HarperCollins, 2001.
_____. The Secret Adversary (1922). Agatha Christie 1920s Omnibus. London: HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 1–218.
_____. The Seven Dials Mystery (1929). Agatha Christie 1920s Omnibus. London: HarperCollins, 2006, pp. 645–841.
Ephron, Hallie. “‘The Deadly Dozen’ Mistakes in Mystery Writing.” The Writer 121 (2008), pp. 26–29.
Greenwood, Kerry. Away with the Fairies, Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2001.
_____. Cocaine Blues. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 1989.
_____. Dead Man’s Chest. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2010.
_____. Death Before Wicket. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2003.
_____. Death by Water. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2005.
_____. The Green Mill Murder. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 1993.
_____. Murder and Mendelssohn. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013.
_____. Murder on the Ballarat Train. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 1991.
_____. Raisins and Almonds. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2002.
_____. Ruddy Gore. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 1995.
_____. Urn Burial. Scottsdale: Poisoned Pen Press, 2003.
Griffiths, Tom. “A Haunted Country” in Jennifer McDonnell and Michael Deves (eds.), Land and Identity. Sydney: Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1998.
Hammill, Faye. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore W. Adorno. “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in Vincent B. Leitch (ed.), The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2d ed. New York: Norton, 2010, pp. 1107–1126.
Humble, Nicola. The Feminine Middlebrow Novel 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Kuttainen, Victoria. Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010.
Lawson, Alan. “Difficult Relations: Narrative Instability is Settler Cultures” in Matria-Alzira Seixo et al. (eds.), Proceedings of The Paths of Multiculturalism: Travel Writings and Postcolonialism. Lisboa: Edicoes Cosmos, 2000, pp. 49–60.
Leavis, Q. D. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto & Windus, 1939.
Light, Alison. Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars. London: Routledge, 1991.
Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Ryan-Fazilleau, Sue. “Kerry Greenwood’s ‘Rewriting’ of Agatha Christie.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 7 (2007), pp. 59–70.
Woolf, Virginia. “Middlebrow.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1932). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942, pp. 152–60.
Woollacott, Angela. “White Colonialism and Sexual Modernity: Australian Women in the Early Twentieth Century Metropolis” in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities. London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 49–62.
Autobiography in Agatha (1979)
“An imaginary solution to an authentic mystery”
Sarah Street
On December 4, 1926, Agatha Christie, aged 36, disappeared inexplicably. Her car was found on the Surrey Downs with few clues as to her whereabouts. The case became a cause célèbre as detectives and the public searched for the author. After eleven days she turned up in a hotel in Harrogate where she had registered under a false name. While speculation ensued that she had been suffering from memory loss, or mental instability following her mother’s death, the full story behind the episode was never revealed, not least in her autobiography published posthumously in 1977.1 Kathleen Tynan published a novel in 1978 about the incident which formed the basis for her screenplay for Agatha (directed by Michael Apted, 1979), a film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman.2 Released at a time when interest in Christie was particularly intense—her death, the autobiography, a spate of film adaptations of her novels—the film represents a desire to know, to “write” those missing sections of the autobiography in a way that Tynan and others involved in the film’s production felt to be true to her character. This essay discusses how a controversial biographical incident became translated into a film that was similarly controversial, but not just because of its subject matter. Through the twists and turns of a tortuous film production, I examine broader issues relating to celebrity, authenticity, memory and fiction related to those eleven “lost” days of Agatha Christie’s life.
The title of this essay is a quotation from Kathleen Tynan. “An imaginary solution to an authentic mystery” is an epigraph at the beginning of her book Agatha; the phrase also opens the film. It is appropriate because the book and film explore the tension between notions of authenticity and imagination arising from an incident in Christie’s life (authenticity) about which she thereafter kept silent (giving rise to imagination). This situation has led to many interpretations of what might have happened—Christie’s fame as a mystery writer compounds curiosity about her real life and public desire for the author of thrillers to have a suitably mysterious life. Yet as a popular figure she commanded great respect, which influenced responses to Tynan’s book and the film.
In her autobiography Christie writes that she hates recalling a part of her life that was unhappy. Her mother had died and her husband Archie was of little support during her period of grieving. He stayed in London and started a relationship with Nancy Neele, the former secretary of one of his business associates, while Agatha cleared away her beloved mother’s possessions. She felt lonely and recalls becoming tearful and absent-minded, forgetting her name on one occasion when signing a check. When Archie returned, she felt him to be a stranger; he told her he was in love with someone else and wanted a divorce: “He would hardly speak to me or answer when he was spoken to … he was fighting for his happiness.”3 Ill, depressed and unable to write fiction since her mother’s death, Christie was haunted by self-reproach during this dark period: “If I’d been cleverer, if I had known more about my husband—had troubled to know more about him instead of being content to idealize him and consider him more or less perfect—then perhaps I might have avoided all of this.”4 Despite these elements of self-reflection and introspection, the autobiography makes no reference to the eleven days when she was missing, implying that it was a chapter Christie preferred to be kept private: forgetfulness should be forgotten.
At the time, the disappearance attracted great speculation. The first sign of anything wrong was when Christie’s car was found abandoned down a slope at Newlands Corner near Guildford.5 In the car were her fur coat, a suitcase and an expired driver’s license; Christie was nowhere to be found. The newspapers had a field day reporting the case while the Silent Pool, a natural spring near the scene of the car accident, was searched in case the novelist had drowned. Theories abounded—some suspected her husband of foul play—and even the crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers visited the scene of the disappearance in search of clues. Some sources claim that Christie had written letters before she disappeared, one to Archie which he burned, one instructing her secretary to cancel reservations for a trip to Yorkshire and, confusingly, a letter to her brother-in-law Campbell saying she was going to Yorkshire for a recuperating break. Inclined towards spiritualism, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle took one of Agatha’s gloves to a medium. Christie was eventually found in the Hydropathic Hotel, Harrogate where she had registered as “Mrs. Teresa Neele of Cape Town,” Neele being the surname of Archie’s lover. Several people there had suspected her real identity, including journalist Peter Ritchie-Calder who was probably the basis of the character Wally Stanton in Tynan’s novel. Without any clear information forthcoming from Agatha Christie about what had happened, her disappearance was put down to a loss of memory. Yet her silence on the matter did not result in drawing a line under the incident. Public curiosity was insatiable regarding this moment of non-conformity, which appeared both shocking and fascinating at the same time.
Many years later, these known facts—sparse but intriguing—interested novelist Kathleen Tynan, who turned to them for her screenplay and book, her “imaginative” response to an “authentic mystery.” The memory loss was referred to in Tynan’s book by the doctor who examines Agatha in Harrogate as la belle indifférence, apparently a medical description of amnesia. In the novel Agatha translates this as “a fine indifference … or perhaps ‘‘blithe’’ would be a better translation?”6 This implies a sagacious knowingness about the disappearance, a desire to be someone else for a brief time in order to cope with personal trauma. This sympathetic premise is key to Tynan’s vision for Agatha, one that became embroiled in the machinations of filmmaking practice as the production proceeded. Apart from exploiting intense public interest in Christie, the film involved
conflict between other celebrities and professionals who in their different ways struggled to make sense of this puzzling event in Christie’s life.
Adapting Agatha for the Screen
Agatha was a tortuous film production that went ahead in spite of many difficulties. Registered as a British film but financed mostly by American capital, many British and American personnel were involved in the complex development and production process. British director Michael Apted was particularly distinguished for his work in television and all of the location shooting took place in the UK including at Harrogate, Bath, York and at Bray Studios. The production team consisted of Gavrik Losey, David Puttnam and Jarvis Astaire, British producers who contributed particular expertise at key stages, but Losey had the greatest creative input. The American production companies that financed the film were Sweetwall Productions, Warner Bros. and First Artists. Sweetwall Productions was owned by actor Dustin Hoffman, the main co-star in Agatha, who also had an interest in the film via First Artists. First Artists was a somewhat unusual operation since as a subsidiary of Warner Bros. it had been founded in 1969 by very high-profile actors: Barbra Streisand, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, who were subsequently joined by Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The company’s aim was to give these actors greater artistic control over productions than was usual, and Hoffman’s two films for the company were Agatha and Straight Time (1978). This meant that Hoffman’s expectations for having considerable executive control over Agatha were high and his First Artists contract stipulated that he could only star or co-star in a film rather than be a supporting actor. However, correspondence on the film held at the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum in the University of Exeter shows that Hoffman’s personal ambitions for a high degree of creative control were frustrated by a number of factors that make the film fascinating for reasons that extend beyond the controversial nature of its subject matter.7 During production many people became concerned for different reasons—financial, creative and personal.
The Ageless Agatha Christie Page 24