Abstract
This chapter compares the murderers and evil characters in Curtain by Agatha Christie and in Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell. A double perspective, verbal and factual, will be applied in order to show the fragile boundary between mental and physical acts considered as “Evil,” including the ambiguities and the “antithesis” of the detectives. The chapter outlines an unexpected paradox of the concept of ‘Evil’ associated with its performers allowing the readers to reflect on how performance creates the villain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Published in 1975 but written during World War II (Jessica Gildersleeve, “Nowadays: Trauma and Modernity in Agatha Christie’s Late Poirot Novels,” Clues 34, no. 1, Spring 2016, 103).
- 2.
“A person’s public self-image” as defined in Yule (2011, 129).
- 3.
The expression refers to the title of a series of lectures given by J. L. Austin, “How to do things with words”.
Bibliography
Austin, John Langshaw. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bernthal, James Carl David. 2016. Queering Agatha Christie. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Christie, Agatha. 2002. Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case [1975]. New York: Harper.
Culler, Jonathan. 2000. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction [1997]. New York: Oxford University Press Inc.
Eco, Umberto. 2014. The Name of the Rose [1980]. New York: Mariner Books.
Fatout, Paul, ed. 1997. Mark Twain Speaks for Himself. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.
Forster, Edward Morgan. 1927. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt.
Gildersleeve, Jessica. 2016. “Nowadays: Trauma and Modernity in Agatha Christie’s Late Poirot Novels.” Clues 34, no. 1 (Spring): 96–104.
Gomel, Elana. 1995. “Mystery, Apocalypse and Utopia: The Case of the Ontological Detective Story.” Science Fiction Studies 22, no. 3 (November): 343–356.
Knepper, Marty S. 2005. “The Curtain Falls: Agatha Christie’s Last Novels.” Clues 23, no. 4 (Summer): 69–84.
Messent, Peter. 2013. Crime Fiction Handbook. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.
Mitchell, Gladys. 2014. Speedy Death [1929]. London: Vintage Random House.
Moretti, Franco. 2005. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms [1983]. London: Verso.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peppis, Paul. 2017. “Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell’s Speedy Death and Popular Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3 (Spring): 120–134. https://doi.org/10.2979/jmodelite.40.3.08.
Yule, George. 2011. Pragmatics [1996]. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Crescentini, F. (2021). Wicked Speech and Evil Acts: Performativity as Discourse and Murder as Responsibility in Curtain—Poirot’s Last Case (1975) and Speedy Death (1929). In: Zouidi, N. (eds) Performativity of Villainy and Evil in Anglophone Literature and Media. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_22
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76055-7_22
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-76054-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-76055-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)