"We're All Strangers": Postwar Anxiety in Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap

Abstract

Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap (1952), disturbs the middlebrow, middle-class conventions of Golden Age detective fiction. By introducing an explicit suspicion of personas and roles, Christie's play points to a postwar anxiety that wartime freedom undermined the capacity for surveillance, putting citizens—especially women—at risk.