Christie, Agatha

Entry updated 17 February 2025. Tagged: Author.

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(1890-1976) Prolific and popular UK author of detective fiction whose best-known investigatorsHercule Poirot andMiss Marple feature in many novels, stories andCinema/Television adaptations; Poirot is introduced in her debut novel,The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Christie's very considerable talent for juggling character and motivation amid small and/or isolated circles of suspects did not lend itself to stories ofNear Future global revolution, but she nevertheless attempted two. The earlyPoirot novelThe Big Four (2 January-19 March 1924The Sketch asThe Man Who Was Number Four; fixup1927) is episodic in a manner strongly reminiscent of SaxRohmer'sThe Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (fixup1913; vtThe Insidious Dr Fu-Manchu1913), and likewise features aYellow-Peril Chinese mastermind. Other members of the villainous Four are a US multimillionaire; a FrenchMad Scientist, distantly resembling Madame Curie, whoseInventions include new applications ofNuclear Energy and destructiveRays which are tested on hapless American warships; and an anonymous English executioner whose murders Poirot investigates. TheScientific Romance components in the tale are treated desultorily.

A roughly similar Big Five, lacking the Fu-Manchu figure, appears in the late and remarkably incoherentPassenger to Frankfurt (1970). Here a global "Revolution of Youth" – explicitly imitating the Hitler Youth, with a blond and Wagnerian "Young Siegfried" as puppet leader – shuts down European airports, razes Washington, District of Columbia, to the ground, and causes general alarm. The proposed solution is a speculativeDrug or gas which can be widely broadcast to induce permanent benevolence and "horror of causing pain or inflicting violence"; the novel effectively ends with a retiredScientist's decision to resume work on this "Project Benvo", while the author has seemingly forgotten the unresolved state of world chaos.

Christie wrote several short stories with supernatural elements – some collected, together with orthodox nonseries detections, inThe Hound of Death (coll1933) – and created a kind of sentimental Occult Detective [seeTheEncyclopedia of Fantasy underlinks below] forThe Mysterious Mr. Quin (coll1930). In these stories the shadowy and elusiveMysterious Stranger Harley Quin (the "harlequin" pun is deliberate and explicit, sometimes echoed in effects of lighting) does not so much detect as use his presumably occult information to steer a mundane friend, Mr Satterthwaite, towards the insight required to explain a crime; the misleadingly titledThe Complete Quin & Satterthwaite: Love Detectives (omni2004) includes two longHercule Poirot investigations featuring Satterthwaite as a minor character, but not Quin. InThe Pale Horse (1961), a criminal operation which expensively disposes of unwanted relatives is fronted by three modern "witches" whose ritual presents as aTechnofantasy fusion ofPsi Powers and a mysterious electricalMachine which supposedly directs a curse or death spell along the appropriate compass bearing; despite this impressive pantomime the killings are of course achieved by mundane means, involvingPoison.

Christie was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1971. [DRL]

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, née Miller

born Torquay, Devon: 15 September 1890

died Cholsey, Oxfordshire: 12 January 1976

works (highly selected)

The Big Four (London: Collins,1927) [fixup: stories first appeared 2 January-19 March 1924The Sketch asThe Man Who Was Number Four:Hercule Poirot: hb/]
The Pale Horse (London: Collins,1961) [hb/]
Passenger to Frankfurt (London: Collins,1970) [hb/]

collections

The Mysterious Mr. Quin (London: Collins,1930) [coll: stories first appeared March 1924-October 1929 var mags, with one new to this collection: hb/]
- The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite: Love Detectives (London: HarperCollins,2004) [omni of the above withThree-Act Tragedy (1934) and 3 shorter tales: pb/photographic]
The Hound of Death and Other Stories (London: Odhams Press,1933) [coll: hb/]
The Last Séance: Tales of the Supernatural (London: HarperCollins,2019) [coll: hb/Matt Griffin]