Ageless Agatha Christie

J.C. Bernthal is a visiting fellow at the University of Suffolk, UK. He has authored or edited several volumes on Agatha Christie and in 2020, won the Popular Culture Association’s George N. Dove Award for advancing crime fiction scholarship.

“this is a brilliant essay collection on one of the world’s most popular detective fiction writers...a thought provoking collection which provides a new look on Christie and her work. This is definitely a must read for Christie fans”—CADS; “definitely recommend...the arguments posed are thought provoking and engage with Christie in a new way...something of interest for every Christie fan”—Cross Examining Crime.

• Table of ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: Mystery and LegacyAgatha Christie in Dialogue with To the Lighthouse: The Modernist Artist (Merja Makinen)England’s Pockets: Objects of Anxiety in Christie’s ­Post-War Novels (Rebecca Mills)Queer Girls, Bad Girls, Dead Girls: ­Post-War Culture and the Modern Girl (Sarah Bernstein)“With practised eyes”: Feminine Identity in The Mysterious Mr. Quin(Charlotte Beyer)“The sumptuous and the alluring”: Poirot’s Women, Dragged Up and Dressed Down (J. C. Bernthal)“The Encyclopedic Palace of the World”: Miss Lemon’s Filing System as Cabinet of Curiosities and the Repository of Human Knowledge in Agatha Christie’s Poirot (Meg Boulton)“One must actually take facts as they are”: Information Value and Information Behavior in the Miss Marple Novels (Michelle M. Kazmer)And Then There Were Many: Agatha Christie in Hungarian Translation(Brigitta Hudácskó)Mother of Invention: Agatha Christie, the Middlebrow Detective Novel and Kerry Greenwood’s Postcolonial Tribute Series (Jilly Lippmann)Autobiography in Agatha (1979): “An imaginary solution to an authentic mystery” (Sarah Street)Editorial: Fans Have the Final Word (J. C. Bernthal)About the ContributorsIndex