Abstract
Both Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs and Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison reject the expected detective-story ending (the arrest of the culprit) by depicting the social and legal aftermath of a crime. In doing so, they highlight the power of often-overlooked bystanders to determine guilt, innocence, and true justice. In both novels, some of the bystanders support the female poisoner on the grounds that the crime delivered well-deserved comeuppance for behavior that typically goes unpunished by mainstream society. Their support transforms the poisoner from a simple criminal into a Robin Hood-like champion who strikes back at an inequitable system on behalf of an oppressed community. Other bystanders vilify the poisoner, even after she is found not guilty in court. The chapter argues that both novels highlight the gap between ideal justice and the law due to sexual double standards and social inequality. It also argues that these novels reveal the limit of the detective figure and of the detective plot to reestablish social normality because social normality is defined by bystanders who often define justice outside of the law and not by authorities working within the law.
Spoilers for Five Little Pigs and Strong Poison
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Notes
- 1.
Seal (1996) agrees with Hobsbawm that the outlaw must have community support but criticizes Hobsbawm as ignoring specific social conditions of various historical bandit figures (3).
- 2.
Notably, Hobsbawm (2000) sees only two roles for women, love interests and honorary boys, although he concedes that there are rare women who turn to outlawry to exact revenge for sexual abuse (149). Graham-Bertolini (2011) asserts that “female avengers in literature rarely conform to Hobsbawm’s definition: they are seldom depicted as ‘outlaws’ or even as women who thwart the law on a regular basis” (19).
- 3.
Seal (1996) describes female outlaws as not true outlaws but merely “out of gender” (194).
- 4.
Martin (2008) suggests that women poisoners could win over bystanders and escape punishment if their crime was viewed as appropriate comeuppance for domestic abuse. For representations of early modern crime and gender, see Martin (2008), Walker (2003), and Wilson (2013). For discussions of nineteenth-century female poisoners as either exonerated or demonized due to their perceived adherence to gender norms, see Blake Price (2019), Knelman (1998), Hartman (1977), and Downing (2009).
- 5.
Symons (1985) calls both right-wing. Priestman (2003) calls Christie “very conservative” and describes her female detective as “slow and sidelong in coming” (23). He also notes Sayers’s loyalty to the male detective and male-led social formations (25). Makinen (2006) objects that “Christie’s fiction resists easy stereotyping and produce instead a range of renegotiated gendered formations” (65).
- 6.
W.H. Auden (1948) describes this basic formula as false innocence, revelation of guilt, location of guilt, catharsis, and true innocence.
- 7.
- 8.
Christie’s bystanders have been described as fulfilling functional purposes: “to provide information on the victim or the murderer, provide red herrings, provide social commentary, provide humor, and to provide a sense of familiarity by recurring” (Bargainnier 1980, 131). At the same time, they may “have something to say about twentieth century British life’ (Bargainnier 1980, 133). Symons (1985) argues that the police, detective, thriller, and spy novels overlap as part of sensation fiction (15) but he focuses on the generic differences, not continuities (162).
- 9.
Alternately, one could argue that Christie is merely “enlivening her stereotypes…to create false impressions of them” (Bargainnier 1980, 39).
- 10.
The Golden Age of Detection lies between the two world wars. See Stephen Knight (2004) on the clue-puzzle form. See Symons (1985) on the limits of Golden Age writing. Victoria Stewart (2017) follows Knight in recognizing Sayers as complicating the clue-puzzle form using elements of the true-crime genre (8). See also Horsley (2005) and Munt (1994) on problematizing the Golden Age.
- 11.
Christie and Sayers were members of the Detection Club, a group of detective fiction authors (Harkup 2015, 15). They collaborated on several works, and each, of course, published independently following rough “rules” about permissible plots and devices. Fair play meant that readers must be given all necessary clues to solve the case as the detective uncovers them. Sayers was president from 1949 to 1958. Christie was president from 1958 to 1976. See Symons (1985) on the influence of the club on Golden Age authors.
- 12.
- 13.
Wald (1990) suggests that the novel alludes to problems too large for Wimsey to solve (98) while complicating his ability to reason (102). Campbell (1983) argues that the Wimsey-Vane novels “reveal a pattern of gradually redefined and partially resolved problems” (498). Horsley (2005) mentions Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Peril at End House alongside Strong Poison as novels in which the narrative is complicated beyond the detective’s ability to solve (42). Horsley (2005) also suggests the detective can be viewed as a kind of culprit in sending someone to hang (43). LaGrand and Mattson (2007) suggest that writers such as Sayers “use the genre as a literary framework for examining mores and morality, culture, and cognition” (634).
- 14.
Stewart (2017) notes the overlap between true-crime accounts, such as the Notable Trial, Victorian State Trials, and Famous Trials series, and Sayer’s fiction.
- 15.
Doyle reviewed the evidence and wrote an account of the trial of Oscar Slater, whom he believed wrongly convicted. The Notable Trials series also described errors in this case. Slater was released in part due to these publications (“Case of Oscar Slater”).
- 16.
Andrew Mangham (2007) concurs that Madeleine was tried more for promiscuity than for this murder, but argues that Madeleine’s own defense represented her as a foolish dupe (23). Elaine Showalter (1976) notes the surprise and dismay of (male) court reporters at the number of respectable women who lined up each day for a seat in the courtroom during Smith’s trial, claiming that “Respectable women’s appetite for real and imaginary crime had long been noted as an inexplicable but charming paradox” (3).
- 17.
Hoffman (2016) describes this woman and Miss Climpson as feminist champions: “These two women do not bow to the pressure of the ‘male authority’ represented by the judge and the other jurors to deliver a guilty verdict, and they achieve the retrial that saves Harriet’s life” (65).
- 18.
Wald (1990) notes the power imbalance in Harriet and Peter’s relationship in this novel and its gradual development over the series (103). As Campbell (1983) argues, Sayers cannot have Harriet marry Peter in this novel and retain her self-respect, although a power imbalance remains even in later novels due to his social standing and detective work (499).
- 19.
The novel’s American title is Murder in Retrospect. In his reading, Barnard (1980) notes that the retrospective plot emphasizes psychology not clues. He locates the novel’s emotional power in the difference between how we see characters in the past and present (83).
- 20.
As Harkup (2015) claims, Christie always plays fair with her poisons by representing their actions accurately according to the pharmaceutical science of the day (15).
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Pamboukian, S.A. (2022). Cheering Bystanders in Christie and Sayers. In: Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16000-4_4
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