What’s more satisfying than solving a puzzle? In our unprecedented times, I live for the reassurance of a predefined and uncontroversial solution. I’m clearly not alone. The detective story is a cultural mainstay: Carmen Sandiego, Scooby Doo, and all my favourite shitty copaganda procedurals (all the CSIs and Law & Orders, The Closer, Rizzoli & Isles, Major Crimes, Monk, The Mentalist… I could go on).
Back in April, my pal Joy assembled a team of friends to take part in an “outdoor murder mystery event/ city-wide crime-solving experience”. Armed with our smartphones, we ambled across the Civic District all afternoon, picking up clues, speaking to virtual witnesses, and piecing together the events of the murder.
I cannot adequately communicate to you just how much this was a dream come true for me…
Not satisfied with an entire afternoon of mystery solving, Joy and I headed to the library where I picked up a detective novel among other things.
Somehow, despite being somebody who loves both books and mysteries, I haven’t read a detective novel since bingeing Nancy Drew novels as a child. To get reacquainted with the genre, I read 3 very different Agatha Christie titles for this issue:
Published in 1931, The Floating Admiral was written by the members of The Detection Club. The Club’s members were the best writers of crime fiction at the time like Dorothy L. Sayers, GK Chesterton and, of course, Agatha Christie. The Club was set up as an “association of writers of detective novels” and functioned as a salon/workshop/support group. They occasionally produced collaborative novels like The Floating Admiral. Each chapter was contributed by a different author and the goal was to collectively produce a coherent mystery. In the introduction to the book, Sayers lays out the rules:
Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view—that is, he must not introduce new complications merely 'to make it more difficult' ... [E]ach writer was bound to deal faithfully with all the difficulties left for his consideration by his predecessors.
As far as mysteries go, The Floating Admiral is clunky and a little hard to follow. As the title suggests, the story starts with the discovery of a retired admiral’s body in a boat floating along the river. As the story progresses, the reader encounters a staggering number of suspects, clues, and motives. Because each writers has their own solution to the murder, the story’s different threads occasionally get tangled up in each other. Chapter 8, written by Ronald Knox, is titled “Thirty-Nine Articles of Doubt” and is literally a list of 39 problems that need to be solved by the novel’s conclusion.
All that being said, I still really enjoyed The Floating Admiral. The first appendix at the back of the book contains all the solutions to the mystery that each writer had to submit in a sealed envelope along with their completed chapter. It’s not the most elegant mystery but it is fascinating to see its exposed seams. The final chapter, written by Anthony Berkeley, does an admirable job of tying up the loose ends and still provides the reader with a satisfactory ending.
Perhaps the detective novel lends itself to the collaborative form precisely because of the genre’s defined rules. The members of the Detection Club were writing towards a common goal and that helped structure the project. The Floating Admiral was written during the Golden Age of detective novels, a period loosely defined as the years between WWI and WWII. These novels tend to be “cosier” straightforward whodunits, not hardboiled noir novels with tragic flawed characters. Ronald Knox suggested these 10 Commandments for mystery games:
The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
No Chinaman must figure in the story.1
No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The detective himself must not commit the crime.
The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
The "sidekick" of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
I love how some of these rules are very clearly writing against conventions that Knox must have been disappointed by in his compatriots’ work. “Hitherto undiscovered poisons” is a fantastic phrase. The rest of them are very sensible guidelines for what makes a detective novel fun for the reader: readers want to be let in on the puzzle and enjoy being dazzled by an unexpected by entirely fair conclusion.
This is classic Christie and was the best out of all the mysteries I read. She just gets what people love a good murder mystery – exploring the tension between humanity’s emotionality and rationality. Watching a prodigiously gifted detective systematically uncovers the truth behind a crime of passion is so delicious. The crime here is very very good. I can’t even tell you about it because it only takes place midway through the novel; Christie spends the first half of it introducing the reader to the victim and all the potential suspects, laying clues, and setting the scene. You know a murder is coming, why else would you pick up a Christie book, but you don’t know how or why.
I stayed up all night reading this.
Death on the Nile is very good but it is also very racist.
They came out from the shade of the gardens on to a dusty stretch of road bordered by the river. Five watchful bead-sellers, two vendors of postcards, three sellers of plaster scarabs, a couple of donkey boys and some detached by hopeful infantile riff-raff closed in upon them. “You want beads, sir? Very good, sir. Very cheap…”
…
Hercule Poirot made vague gestures to rid himself of this human cluster of flies.
Poirot gallantly attempted to disperse the mob for her, but without avail. They scattered and then reappeared, closing in once more.
“If there were only any peace in Egypt, I should like it better,” said Mrs Allerton. “But you can never be alone anywhere. Someone is always pestering you for money, or offering you donkeys, or beads, or expeditions to native villages, or duck shooting.”
As you have guessed from the title, Death on the Nile takes place in Egypt. A bunch of Europeans and some token Americans end up on the same Nile holiday and one of them gets murdered. How absurd for these Europeans to holiday in Egypt and be bothered by the presence of Egyptians! The racism present in Christie’s books is an open secret though not much has been made of it in popular discourse. I am not suggesting cancelling a dead woman but I can’t really write about her work without addressing its overt racism. I found this fascinating academic paper about the narrative of British decline and how Christie’s oeuvre reflected popular sentiments about the colonies and non-white subjects in the British Empire. I have institutional access to journal articles so just shoot me an email if you’d like the PDF.
In the introduction, Christie says that this book is “one of the best of my ‘foreign travel’ ones, and if detective stories are ‘escape literature’ (and why shouldn’t they be!) the reader can escape to sunny skies and blue water as well as to crime in the confines of an armchair.” This sends a pretty strong message about who Christie envisioned as her audience. I’m currently reading Craft In The Real World by Matthew Salesses and it’s a great companion to these thoughts. Salesses makes the case that craft in fiction is a set of standardised expectations that are “not innocent or neutral”.
Craft, like the self, is made by culture and reflects culture, and can develop to resist and reshape culture if it is sufficiently examined and enough work is done to unmake expectations and replace them with new ones.
That excerpt doesn’t do Salesses’ work justice but it boils down to this: all writing is infused with ideology, the way to wield craft morally is to recognise and engage with those problems. Christie was a lifelong Conservative and many of her plots play on contemporary (at the time) conservative fears. From the academic paper I linked to:
She wrote of the threats supposedly posed to Britain by a future Labour Government (1922’s The Secret Adversary), of Irish neutrality as a complicating factor during the Second World War (1941’s N or M?), and of a moral decay embodied by the revolutionary spirit of 1968 (1970’s Passenger to Frankfurt). Christie was extremely timely; By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) – published seven months after Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of blood’ speech – has her long-running hero and heroine Tommy and Tuppence rolling their eyes at the idea of racial integration.
Does this mean we stop enjoying Christie? I have longer thoughts about this that we can talk about in a later issue but – given the global balance of power, the publishing industry’s historic ties to wealth, and the forces of history that have kept minorities out of positions of power, I’m not sure that its in the reader’s interest to conduct purity tests for every author. I don’t mean to dismiss her racism, it is there as a prominent feature of her work. But so is her mastery of the mystery genre. So if you are going to read her, just go in with both eyes open.
The Monogram Murders was written by Sophie Hannah and is a brand new Hercule Poirot mystery approved by the Christie estate. It was published in 2014 and dubbed “the literary event of the year” but I honestly had not heard of it until now. I’m not a Christie superfan so I went to Goodreads (where they live) and wow, so many one-star reviews.
From my quick scan, it seems like fans are upset because Hannah’s Poirot is too different from Christie’s and because the plot lacks the elegance of the classics. I don’t really have an opinion on this because I haven’t read enough classic Christie. I did think that Hannah’s Poirot was a little too snooty and aloof compared to the kooky kindly old man in Death on the Nile. And I totally agree that The Monogram Murders lacks the finesse that Christie is so known for. I’m not sure it’s unicorn puke levels bad though.
The Monogram Murders is a perfectly competent detective novel. It just has too much to live up to. Hannah introduced a new character – a Scotland Yard detective named Catchpool – to create distance between the story and living up to the impossible task of perfectly channelling Agatha Christie. The mystery itself is very intricate and romantic, I just wish it had been pared back and simplified a little. Perhaps the legacy of Christie was too much to live up to?
So, my reader, are you a fan of detective novels too? Should I try reading a more contemporary (not racist) writer? Who would you recommend?
I hear Death on the Nile is slated to be a 2022 movie release. It stars both Gal Gadot (Zionist), Letitia Wright (anti-vaxxer) and Armie Hammer (rapist and rumoured cannibal fetishist) so I will be giving it a miss. Will they squeeze past the Orientalist themes of the source material? I’m sure I’ll hear about it on Twitter.
I can’t wait for lockdown 2.0 to be over
Restaurants. When.
This sounds racist but was actually a reaction against the trend of racist characterisation that plagued a lot of British writing at the time. He still could have worded it much better; I suspect he took more umbrage with the triteness of racism than its immorality. Knox explained, "I see no reason in the nature of things why a Chinaman should spoil a detective story. But as a matter of fact, if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstore, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad.” The Floating Admiral does violate this commandment, part of its story set in Hong Kong. Knox bemoans this fact in his section of the Appendix – “I once laid it down that no Chinaman should appear in a detective story. I feel inclined to extend the rule so as to apply to residents in China. It appears that [character names redacted because of spoilers] are all intimate with China, which seems overdoing it.”