Abstract
Hoffman explores depictions of women who do not conform to the heteronormative order, including spinsters, lesbians and ‘fallen’ women, as detectives, villains and victims. Single women detectives, including Dorothy L. Sayers’ Miss Climpson, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver and Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley, are liminal figures allowed to work both inside and outside the domestic circle—both near enough to detect effectively and detached enough to identify corruption within. The chapter also examines Christie’s Murder is Easy (1939), Ngaio Marsh’s Overture to Death (1939) and Sayers’ Strong Poison (1929) with relation to depictions of single women victims and villains. Such characters’ existence points to unease about their potential for agency and the questions this raises about concepts of ‘transgressive’ and ‘normal’ sexuality.
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Notes
- 1.
Susan Rowland, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 160–1.
- 2.
Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 63.
- 3.
Stephen Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1980), p. 77.
- 4.
Kathy Mezei similarly argues that ‘the spinster is … uniquely situated as an instrument of surveillance precisely because of her marginal and indeterminate position’. Kathy Mezei, ‘Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech: The Case of Miss Marple, Miss Mole, and Miss Jekyll’, Journal of Modern Literature 30.2 (2007), p. 104.
- 5.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 24.
- 6.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 24.
- 7.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 31.
- 8.
Walter Gallichan writes in his 1929 book The Poison of Prudery that ‘prudery arises as reinforcement of resistance against the forbidden thoughts, and the resistance may be so heightened that it becomes a pathological symptom’. Walter Gallichan, The Poison of Prudery (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1929), p. 13, quoted in Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), p. 191.
- 9.
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2003), p. 54.
- 10.
Sayers, Strong Poison, pp. 54–5.
- 11.
Indeed, Catherine Kenney suggests that Miss Climpson and the women of her typing agency are actually more convincing than Wimsey as detectives, despite the fact that they are his employees: ‘Lord Peter himself must wrestle with his amateur status as a crime-solver, but as his employee, Miss Climpson is unassailably professional, a privileged place indeed for a woman of her generation … By working for Wimsey, she and the other “superfluous women” employed by the Cattery gain access to the hierarchical power structure of society, an access usually barred to their gender.’ Catherine Kenney, ‘Detecting a Novel Use for Spinsters in Sayers’s Fiction’, in Laura L. Doan (ed.), Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 127.
- 12.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 32.
- 13.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 190.
- 14.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 29.
- 15.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 192.
- 16.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 203.
- 17.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 237.
- 18.
Sayers, Strong Poison, pp. 1–5.
- 19.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 280.
- 20.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 186.
- 21.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 191.
- 22.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 86.
- 23.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, p. 86.
- 24.
Sayers, Unnatural Death, pp. 187, 190.
- 25.
Shaw and Vanacker, Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 36.
- 26.
Shaw and Vanacker argue of the spinster detective: ‘What better figure to choose to defend the innocent than the admonitory figure of childhood, of fairy-stories and the morality tale: the maiden aunt, the spinster schoolteacher, the wise woman of the village? Relieved of sexuality and undistracted by close emotional bonds, such a figure cannot but see things clearly and act impartially as an agent of moral law.’ Reflecting on Miss Marple, p. 4.
- 27.
Patricia Wentworth, Lonesome Road (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007), p. 275.
- 28.
Patricia Wentworth, The Case is Closed (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2005), p. 146.
- 29.
Wentworth, The Case is Closed, pp. 148–9.
- 30.
Wentworth, Lonesome Road, p. 10.
- 31.
Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism Between the Wars (London; New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 94.
- 32.
Patricia Wentworth, Grey Mask (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985), p. 243.
- 33.
Wentworth, Grey Mask, p. 245.
- 34.
The idea of danger emerging from within the supposed safety of an enclosed community is a common theme in crime fiction; Kathy Mezei points out that ‘The secretive elements that motivate so many detective novels are not merely the usual threat to the status quo and moral order from the outside (urbanization, modernization, the foreigner or stranger), but the uncannier, more disturbing threat from the inside.’ Mezei, ‘Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech’, p. 110.
- 35.
Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, p. 116.
- 36.
Wentworth, Lonesome Road, pp. 5, 32.
- 37.
Agatha Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1986), p. 191.
- 38.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 190.
- 39.
Agatha Christie, ‘Death by Drowning’, The Thirteen Problems (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1988), p. 205.
- 40.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 14.
- 41.
Mezei, ‘Spinsters, Surveillance, and Speech’, pp. 109–10.
- 42.
Agatha Christie, ‘A Christmas Tragedy’, The Thirteen Problems (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1988), pp. 148–9.
- 43.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, pp. 11, 24, 20.
- 44.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 220.
- 45.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 220.
- 46.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 220.
- 47.
Christie, The Murder at the Vicarage, p. 219.
- 48.
Gladys Mitchell, Speedy Death (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), p. 11.
- 49.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 13.
- 50.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 13.
- 51.
Mitchell, Speedy Death, p. 21.
- 52.
In Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction, Samantha Walton argues that Mrs Bradley’s assumption of legal authority functions as a commentary on the treatment of mentally ill people in the British legal system, as Mrs Bradley ‘pronounces a moral judgement upon the laws that she herself breaks’. Samantha Walton, Guilty But Insane: Mind and Law in Golden Age Detective Fiction (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 125.
- 53.
Ngaio Marsh, Overture to Death (Glasgow: Fontana Press, 1962), p. 36.
- 54.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 16.
- 55.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 81.
- 56.
Marsh, Overture to Death, pp. 11–12.
- 57.
Laura L. Doan, ‘Introduction’, in Laura L. Doan (ed.), Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), p. 6.
- 58.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 11.
- 59.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 144.
- 60.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 153.
- 61.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 253.
- 62.
Marsh, Overture to Death, p. 251.
- 63.
Agatha Christie, Murder is Easy (London: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 14.
- 64.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 16.
- 65.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 170.
- 66.
Christie, Murder is Easy, pp. 29–30.
- 67.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 40.
- 68.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 40.
- 69.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 113.
- 70.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 115.
- 71.
Christie, Murder is Easy, pp. 26, 28.
- 72.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 35.
- 73.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 52.
- 74.
Christie, Murder is Easy, pp. 65, 66–7.
- 75.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 18.
- 76.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 151.
- 77.
Christie, Murder is Easy, pp. 180–1.
- 78.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 198.
- 79.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 206.
- 80.
Christie, Murder is Easy, p. 204.
- 81.
Sayers, Strong Poison, pp. 41–2.
- 82.
Maureen T. Reddy, Sisters in Crime: Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Continuum, 1988), p. 22.
- 83.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 5.
- 84.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 7.
- 85.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 51.
- 86.
Sayers, Strong Poison, p. 280.
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Hoffman, M. (2016). ‘Everybody Needs an Outlet’: Nonconforming Women. In: Gender and Representation in British ‘Golden Age’ Crime Fiction. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53666-2_3
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