From Maps to Stories: Dangerous Spaces in Agatha Christie’s Homes

Debora Sarnelli

doi:10.3390/h8010023

Abstract

In the common imagination, home denotes the physical space where human beings find protection, intimacy, and bliss. Home is a place of affection and warmth. This article proposes to analyze the perception of the place called home within Christie’s narratives and how her fictional households are deprived of their protective value and become as blood soaked as the hard-boiled dirty back alleys. The article focuses on how every room occupies a different role in Christie’s fictional houses. There are safe rooms—the busiest rooms of the household where murder never happens—and dangerous rooms. The dangerous room—the murder scene—is described through the use of a map offered by the first-person narrator. The map provides the reader with important spatial information: this is the very place where the murder was perpetrated.

Highlights

During World War I Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle were writing detective fiction simultaneously
While a young and inexperienced Agatha Christie was giving life to a new detective hero, in 1917 Conan Doyle published a collection of short-stories, His Last Bow—already appeared on
The originality of The Mysterious Affair at Styles—a new detective hero strolling around a domestic space—was not appreciated

Summary

Introduction

During World War I Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle were writing detective fiction simultaneously. Agatha Christie grew to despise Poirot intensely She secretly killed him off in Curtain—a novel she wrote during the years of the Second World War—with the attempt to publish it posthumously. The Mysterious Affair at Styles—Poirot’s debut novel—and The Murder at the Vicarage—the first novel to feature the character of Miss Marple—reveal Agatha Christie’s fascination towards rural villages and enclosed spaces that recall the structure of an English country house. Christie’s fondness of country houses has affected her narratives to a point that every geographical location, whether in London, in the countryside or abroad, is shaped as an ideal country house, with its structure and closeness The pattern she follows is always the same: a bounded place where a small assembly of people with no direct contact with the outside world is involved in a crime. I shall focus on other four novels—The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Secret of Chimneys, The Body in the Library, and The Murder at the Vicarage—to demonstrate how the library/studio represents the most dangerous space within Christie’s fictional households

The House as an Unhomely Place

Dangerous

Conclusions