The Spectacle of Death

Abstract

Death is strange in Agatha Christie. The deaths in detective stories are not the deaths of everyday life, the results of accidents, illness, and old age - and if they seem to be, there is something more to find out about them, something that makes them remarkable. They are not even the murders we are all too familiar with from our newspapers (and from a different sort of crime novel), deaths of simple violence or perverse pleasure, the results of uncontrolled anger, brutal desire, revenge or intimidation. They are spectacular, exceptional and fantastic: they engage our imagination not only as extreme acts, but as conspicuously extreme acts, as products of ingenuity and imagination, as challenges to our sense of the rational, the explicable and the normal. And so they bring home to us the limits of what we may take to be rational or normal and they demonstrate that the limits can be exceeded. The detective novel is a domesticated Gothic, Knight has acutely said (2000, 7); it may ultimately refer to common sense and common experience, but like the true Gothic, it has the strangeness and menace of the unknown. Knight elsewhere points out that it is only since the late nineteenth century that murder has become the characteristic crime of the detective genre, “the threat which the fiction would dissipate” (2004, 81). As often in Knight, this pregnant comment is not fully developed; it certainly seems that he is right to stress that in the period 1890–1920, the novelists ceased to be concerned chiefly with threats to property or to national security and began to present threats to life.