What Agatha Knew and When She Knew It: Racism (Reformed) in the Christie Works
I’m a big mystery fan. Huge. I only began to suspect how big a fan I was, though, when I realized I headed to Houston’s independent mystery bookstore, Murder by the Book, first thing after every university paycheck got deposited. The self-suspicion of my fandom grew as I noticed my habit of buying a couple of mysteries set in any locale I happened to be visiting. I’ve got books set in every state I’ve visited (all but seven of the fifty), plus Canada, South America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and several countries in Europe, not to mention books in most languages I’ve studied. However, I didn’t realize just how truly big a fan I was until I started packing up to move from Houston, where I’d lived for twenty years, heading back home to Tennessee to help care for relatives. Packing thirty boxes containing over 2000 mysteries brought it home to me. And this was before I started packing books related to musicology and literary translation, which are my actual jobs.
Agatha Christie has always held pride of place among my favorite mystery writers. I’m not alone, to be sure; she is one of the most widely published authors in history with only William Shakespeare and the authors of the Bible as her nearest competition. Her works have seen treatments on the noble stage, the silver screen, and the homely television.
I read many other Brits, of course — Robert Barnard, M.C. Beaton, Dick Francis, P.D. James, Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Patricia Wentworth, and so many others, including my new favorite, Canadian writer Louise Penny. I’ve even read the famous authors whose work was interesting, but less appealing — Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle. Then there are the classic Americans: Daphne du Maurier, Dashiel Hammett, Tony Hillerman, Edgar Allen Poe, and relative newbies, like Earl Emerson, Janet Evanovich, Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, Sara Paretzky; you name it, I’ve read it.
If you know mysteries, you recognize most of initial names as the nobility of British mystery writing. Some other time, I’ll discuss why I prefer the British; for now, I’ll just leave it that American writers are generally either too unrealistic about social conditions in the U.S. (except Walter Mosley) or much too graphically real in depicting violence and depravity (except Tony Hillerman and Earl Emerson). The Brits (except Lawrence Block), generally use the violence only as a context for the puzzles they concoct.
All the Brit writers past and present have been compared to the queen of puzzles, Dame Agatha, often to her detriment. James has been touted as more psychologically sophisticated; Barnard, the master of ironic wit; Beaton, mistress of charming village life with a twist; on and on. But always, I’ve come back to the queen. I own all her books and have read each several times, some in different languages. I never tire of the twists and turns of her agile mind, but that’s not the only important thing.
Periodically, I’ve wondered at my preference for Agatha. What does a twice-married British descendant of gentlewomen have to do with a never-married American descendant of slaves? Yes, we share a sense of humor: She once said that the benefit of having an archeologist — Sir Max Mallowan — as a husband, is that the older you get, the more interested in you he becomes. In a political essay, I once compared Mitt Romney to the processional caterpillar leading conservatives into a suicide march. And yes, she enjoyed piecing together intellectual puzzles requiring great attention to detail, while I write intellectually complex research into music and dance of the renaissance and follow complex origami patterns as a hobby. Or perhaps it’s that “content of their character” thing that Martin Luther King, Jr. mentioned. There are simply things that connect us all in our humanity. Maybe that’s where Agatha and I come together.
It’s that nexus that makes me despise the most recent “remakes” of her work on television. They are beautifully done with exquisite acting, gorgeous sets, perfectly-chosen scenery, and costuming to die for, but the treatment of her stories and novels reminds me of one production of a Handel opera I saw years ago in Houston. Glorious music snipped apart and overshadowed by bizarre choices in acting and costuming. In both cases, the scriptwriter and/or director does not seem to trust the material. As a result they feel the need to cut, or alter, or overdramatize, or completely undermine the original, presumably to make the story palatable to modern audiences. For these Agatha remakes, sometimes the only part of the program I recognize is the title and character names.
I wish they’d be more like Japanese Noh drama. The national company in Tokyo performs the traditional centuries-old plays as is. Take it or leave it. Theaters are packed. It makes me wonder why these producers don’t just leave Dame Agatha alone and use something else or write their own stories, but then I remember. Agatha sells.
As a result of being one of the top three sellers ever, her name is a household word all over the world, even in households that haven’t read her books. Her books have been published in over 100 languages. But she’s not alive to defend herself and it appears that her family is simply sitting back and collecting the checks, so perhaps that’s why these philistines feel free to abuse her work.
In the one story, ITV writers pretty much leave alone, Toward Zero, the picturesque oceanside setting, the exquisite costuming, luscious scoring, and flawless acting you can always expect from British period pieces, combine with Christie’s clever storytelling to show what could have been done with all the tales. They did tamper with the love interest, but I guess they just couldn’t help themselves. But still, even in that, their lack of understanding shows. Dame Agatha suggests that two lonely people find much-deserved happiness. ITV has a decent woman fall in love with the brother of a former lover. It’s a small change, relatively speaking, but really gets to the root of the problem. Agatha Christie accepted human flaws, but the people she accepts as decent, live by a recognizable code. Affairs with brothers is not part of that code. I am nowhere near British, but I understand that; ITV is British, why don’t they? They seem to feel that lack of salaciousness is boring.
I understand that some creative license is part of the process of translating any work into the language of another medium. After all, I just finished training in literary translation. I read a number of works where the author used the original as a jumping off point for new work. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It works in the case with Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey, who took a shotgun to the poems of Austrian Expressionist George Trakl (apparently needing to “vent” them) and created his own hybrids. His works are not “translations” as I understand the word, but are beautiful nonetheless. It doesn’t work in the case with Flowers of Bad, by David Cameron, an inexcusable abuse of Charles Baudelaire’s elegant Fleurs du mal. Cameron didn’t soak them in vinegar or rip them to shreds, which should be more horrifying, objectively. But he might as well had. Sometimes intellectual abuse can be more painfully long-lasting than physical abuse.
I don’t think it’s the fact that I don’t really know Trakl’s poems, while I have an emotional investment of longstanding in the works of Baudelaire. I’m at the point of my life where I can generally distinguish between “like” and “appreciate,” so that’s not it. There’s an ineffable quality that can be recognized in its own right. Hawkey has it; Cameron doesn’t.
But Agatha Christie not only mastered the mystery, creating solutions that were unique in their ingenuity, she is typically the most egalitarian of all the Golden Age writers and many of the newbies. The other writers of her era have three punishment levels for murderers: the lower class murderers who are always hanged, middle class murderers who might be hanged, and the upper class murderers who are allowed to commit suicide. In Ngaio Marsh, you always know who won’t be the murderer because this New Zealander is so plus royaliste que le roi, that she cannot bear to have a well-to-do member of the nobility murder anyone. She’s also the most racist, but that’s a tale for another day.
Dame Agatha is by no means perfect in this regard, but she certainly keeps things much more democratic, and she showed the ability to change over time. In her works, anyone can be the murderer. People you like, people you don’t like, men, women, young, old, English, foreign, rich, poor. Anyone. Miss Marple and M. Poirot just take it in stride. I like that. They remind me of me when I had to deal with people who were surprised that racism was still an issue in the Age of Obama. (I’d like to speak with those same unbelievers now in the Age of Tr*mp.)
The hubris shown in “adapting” some of Christie’s more memorable works is mind boggling, even more mind boggling than white people (who aren’t even American) trying to explain racism to me, a black woman desegregation survivor of a certain age born and raised in the U.S. of A. But what is even stranger in these Christie “re-imaginings” as one overly generous critic put it, is the nature of the license taken. In one, A Murder is Announced, two spinsters who share a cottage are given a lesbian subplot that was mildly suggested in the original, but never overt. In Nemesis, the last Miss Marple tale that Christie wrote, and one of the author’s greatest over all, the scriptwriters decided to:
1) borrow the idea of recordings made to be played after death from And Then There were None (which has sold over 100 million copies);
2) remake the original British ne’er-do-well into a brave Nazi fighter pilot; and
3) in the case of an older intellectual spinster who is clearly obsessed with her innocent young ward and who lives with her two sisters — the youngest one single and a bit unstable; the middle one, widowed and perfectly normal — the writers subtract one sister, then convert three biological sisters into two sisters in religion. Spoiler Alert: The nun dunnit.
To be fair, some of the changes, such as giving Agatha’s homespun spinster Miss Marple more of a backstory, add depth. And I wholeheartedly approve of the expanded role given to Miss Lemon as admirably portrayed by Pauline Moran. The writers and the actor are all pitch perfect. This is the only consistent change that works throughout both series. Since one of Christie’s perceived weaknesses as a writer was fleshing out her characters, this is an area where creativity can be applied to strengthen a weak area without weakening a strong area.
The idea that Miss Marple might have had a love interest who never returned from the war is acceptable (the original Miss Marple began a relationship with a young man her family thought unsuitable — an issue she never seems to resent). But the idea that the love interest was a married man, is not. Again, the scriptwriters seem to think that the titillation of illicit sex is essential to boost a story’s viability. Somehow dumbing it down or sexing it up is the order of the day. Never mind that Agatha’s works have been and remain wildly popular as is, without the interference of Britain’s ITV.
Geraldine McEwen is my favorite Miss Marple. She has the puckish quality that Helen Hayes brought to the role, but seems more the physical type Christie describes, not to mention the fact that she looks more natural while knitting. She also exudes the curiosity that makes her role as a talented amateur detective more convincing. Julia McKenzie and Joan Hickson, two others of the most recent Marples, seem a bit too detached to let their back hair down and get in on a nice cup of tea and a good gossip. Margaret Rutherford is too much of a bulldozer to be a woman typically described as “gentle.” But despite McEwen’s perfection for the part, I can barely watch her work because of the vandalized stories.
But more than the general vandalism, the choices the scriptwriters make in defacing the puzzles, shows that they often miss the points that Agatha has already successfully (and skillfully) made. Throughout her oeuvre, Agatha related to those who were on the periphery of society, those overlooked and underrated. Perhaps this is what draws me to her plots. The protagonists of other Golden Age writers, such as Lord Peter Wimsey, Albert Campion, Adam Dalgliesh, Adela Lestrange Bradley, et al, were all from the upper crusts of society, firmly ensconced in the artistic, intellectual, and social elite. Not so with Agatha.
Jane Marple represents the single woman in a era where reproduction and domestic service were essentially women’s only roles. Outside church volunteerism, older women had no voice whatsoever. They couldn’t hold the most lucrative jobs, they couldn’t vote, they couldn’t own property, they couldn’t get divorced. They had no power. Even Raymond West, Miss Marple’s devoted nephew, a successful literary novelist, gently mocks his aunt as “provincial.” Yet, over and over again, Miss Marple proves her superior analytical skills and understanding of human nature, challenging society’s flawed system of valuation in an understated way.
Similarly, Hercule Poirot is a foreigner in the exceedingly chauvinistic society of imperial England. And he is Belgian, not even a known-quantity foreigner, like the French. Poirot frequently overplays his “foreign” physical gestures and underplays his “foreign-inflected” command of English to get the best of clever-clever bigots. Eyes twinkling, he and Miss Marple acknowledge how society dismisses them. But sometimes Dame Agatha dismisses others devalued by society.
I am never surprised when characters she depicts as bigots say bigoted things, such as the crude Mr. Blundell lording it over natives in the Middle East in the 1933 short story “Pearl of Price.” He “raised [his voice] unmusically. ‘Say, you niggers! Change my baggage out of this darned cave and into a tent!’” Yet until the 1950s, it’s discomfiting that racist sentiments among otherwise sympathetic characters were not uncommon in Christie’s works.
In The Man in the Brown Suit [1924], for example, a young white couple deeply in love, lives in isolated bliss on an African isle, blithely dismissing their native servant, Batani, as “counting no more than a dog.” In The Big Four [1927], recurring Scotland Yard Superintendent Japp refers to an Asian suspect with “Yes, I’d bet on the Chink.”
Further examples come from Parker Pyne Investigates. In this 1934 set of stories, a former mid-level government bureaucrat uses statistical models to set up his own business trying to find happiness for his clients. He advertises in the “Personals” column under the heading “Are You Happy? If not, consult Mr Parker Pyne.”
In the “Gates of Baghdad,” the drunken Captain Smethurst, the archetypal incel, gloomily complains of his lack of success with women, saying, “Disgraceful the way these girls treat you. Bought her two drinks — three drinks — lots of drinks. Then she goes off laughing with some dago. Call it a disgrace.” The irony of his appeal to white male supremacy while staggering around drunk is notable.
The most disturbing Parker Pyne series examples, though, appear as completely thoughtless disregard for bigotry. “The Case of the Discontented Soldier” presents Major Wilbraham, a white soldier who has retired from “his adventurous life in India to a dull life and a small pension in London.” Freda Clegg, a “fair-haired, blue-eyed, pretty” woman in her early twenties bemoans her dull life where nothing ever happens. Wilbraham misses the adventures he once had; Clegg misses the adventures she’s never had. Both are looking for love. Individually, each comes to Parker Pyne for help. With the help of famous mystery writer Ariadne Oliver, another recurring protagonist most often seen in the Poirot books, Pyne sets up an adventure where Wilbraham and Clegg meet:
Wilbraham . . . suddenly heard something that made him stiffen to attention. It was a kind of gurgling half-choked cry. It came again and this time it was faintly recognizable as the word “Help!” It came from inside the wall of the house he was passing. Without a moment’s hesitation, Major Wilbraham pushed open the rickety gate and sprinted noiselessly up to the weed-covered drive. There in the shrubbery was a girl struggling in the grasp of two enormous Negroes. She was putting up a brave fight, twisting and turning and kicking. One Negro held his hand over her mouth in spite of her furious efforts . . . Wilbraham was ready for him . . . his fist shot out, and the Negro reeled backwards and fell. Wilbraham turned on the other man, who was closing in behind. But the two men had had enough. The second one . . . made a dash for the gate. His companion followed suit.
Later in the story, after the lovebirds are successfully matched, Pyne is calculating costs with Mrs. Oliver, played convincingly in recent productions by Zoë Wanamaker:
“How about expenses?” Mrs Oliver drew a paper towards her. “Very moderate on the whole. The two darkies, Percy and Jerry, wanted very little.”
“Darkies” indeed. The stereotype of the black male rapist and the delicate blonde victim that Mrs. Oliver depicts, based on her understanding of the psyches for whom she writes, is either impressive or nauseating. I can’t decide which. Might be both.
Even worse is a conversation in the Poirot vehicle, Death in the Air. In one scene, two young white protagonists in the first throes of love, glory in their common interests:
They liked dogs and disliked cats, they both hated oysters and loved smoked salmon. They liked Greta Garbo and disliked Katherine Hepburn . . . They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants and Negroes. They preferred busses to tubes…
(HOLD UP! WHAT THE HELL?! You can imagine how my mind skidded to a halt as I was saying to myself, hey, I don’t like loud voices, noisy restaurants, and . . . WHOA!)
There are other instances like this brief aside in 1944’s Toward Zero: “Audrey is one hundred per cent thoroughbred. She’s white all through.” But the types of examples I’ve found, representing fewer than eight percent of her works, were already tapering off. In 1953, a Funerals are Fatal character says “So he’s the nigger in the woodpile!” but by Passenger to Frankfurt, in 1970, the same quip becomes: “‘Been the Indian in the woodpile all along?’ asked the doctor.”
I’d made note of, but moved past, these insults to blacks, browns, Asians and even Italians, but I also noted the fact that once changed, Dame Agatha changed for the rest of her career. For whatever reason, she was no longer cavalier about race. This beacons hope for others who seem equally cavalier in our own time. Or not. Though flawed, she seems to have been decent from the start. Maybe that has made all the difference.
