I am writing sitting on a train, which is an entirely appropriate setting for the focus of this week’s blog, Agatha Christie, whose most notorious murders frequently occur in train carriages. Ian Fleming famously described his James Bond novels as ‘written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains’, if that’s the case, then I do feel that Agatha Christie novels were written for cool headed women in railway trains.
(An early paperback edition published by Fontana Books)
I made my first foray into Agatha Christie after watching Lucy Worsley’s excellent documentary about Christie’s life. In the programme, she traces the interrelation between Christie’s novels and her life experiences, including her descent into a ‘fugue state’ where Christie crashes her car and forgets her identity. Examining the differences between the Poirot novels (written earlier in Christie’s life) and the Miss Marple novels (which were her later works), Worsley comments that there is an evolution in how each crime is solved. Where Poirot uses logic and reason, Marple relies on a form of psychoanalysis grounded in feminine intuition that reflects Christie’s later psychology.
(A rare Crime Club paperback edition)
This difference between Poirot and Marple is something both detectives are keen to point out themselves:
“Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory - let the theory go.” - Poirot in ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’
“If only I could assist you in my very feminine way” – Miss Marple in ‘A Pocketful of Rye’
However, here we need to be careful, for as Poirot himself says “Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas” and sometimes there can be a disjunct between the two.
Poirot for example, ultimately uncovers the perpetrator in ‘The A B C Murders’ by spotting the ‘characteristics’ of the murderer in his list of suspects (a.k.a. via psychological profiling). In contrast, Miss Marple, in ‘A Pocketful of Rye’, despite claiming to solve the murder based on her psychoanalytic prowess, is really involved in a logical piecing together of clues from a combination of newspaper cuttings and nursery rhymes.
(A sought after Penguin first edition)
Christie herself has often been examined in relation to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories, particularly with regard to the dream sequences in her novels (such as ‘The A B C Murders’). However, by the time that Christie was in the swing of her career as a novelist, Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ was 40 years old. Christie herself, living and writing in London during the Blitz, would have been exposed to the far more advanced psycho-analytic theories which were abuzz in London at the time. That is, of course, the famous battle between Melanie Klein and Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, which culminated in the ‘Controversial Discussions’, a series of meetings of the British Psychoanalytical Society which took place in London between October 1942 and February 1944 (the BBC’s podcast Freud v Klein: The Battle For Our Children's Minds is a fascinating insight into this debate).
(A very rare 'black top' first paperback printing by Pan Books)
These sessions saw the clash between old style Freudian analysis based on the id, ego and super-ego (theories which Poirot is quick to adopt in ‘The A B C Murders’, where he refers to the Oedipus complex, dreams, the sex-drive and the unconscious mind) and Klein’s more modern ‘object relations theory’ which was deeply routed in her clinical experience and more reminiscent of Miss Marple (when presenting her own discoveries to the police inspector leading the investigation in ‘A Pocketful of Rye’, she proclaims, ‘it isn’t a theory, I know’).
By believing what these characters claim for themselves, we have fallen for what I think is Agatha Christie’s most successful sleight of hand. We have, like many of Christie’s characters before us, overlooked Miss Marple, failing to see both her shrewdness and her modernity underneath her fluttering maiden-aunt exterior.
(An early 1940's Crime Club hard back edition)