Body of Evidence

The Feminine Corpse and the

Middlebrow Corpus in Agatha

Christie’s Evil Under the Sun

JC Bernthal, University of Exeter

Christie’s bodies have long been regarded as empty signifiers. Intensely underwritten, they appear at the beginning of the novel as a tabula rasa upon which the script of detection will be written and any degree of corporeal complexity they might possess seems secondary to their function as instigators of narrative causality (Gill Plain, ‘The Corporeal Anxieties of Agatha Christie’, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, p. 31)

Christie murder victims

In novels published 1940-1945Female: 14 Male: 06

In all original sole-authored crime novels (1920-1977)Female: 47 Male: 73

‘Bodies Everywhere’

Sunbathing as fashion, Vogue (1930)

Rita Hayworth, riding the erotic fashion in

1939

‘She was tall and slender. She wore a simple backless white bathing dress and every inch of her exposed body was tanned a beautiful even shade of bronze. She was as perfect as a statue. Her hair was rich, flaming auburn, curling richly and intimately into her neck. Her face had that slight hardness which is seen when thirty years have come and gone, but the whole effect was one of youth – of superb and triumphant vitality.’ (Agatha Christie, Evil Under the Sun, pp. 16-17

‘[Poirot’s] moustache quivered appreciatively, Major Barry[’s] eyes bulged […] with excitement [and] the Reverend Stephen Lane drew in his breath [as] his figure stiffened.’ (pp. 18-19)

‘The adolescent puts away her dolls. But all her life the woman is to find the magic of her mirror a tremendous help in her effort to project herself and then attain self-identification.’(Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, p. 643)

Works Citedde Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).Christie, Agatha. Evil Under the Sun

(Glasgow: Fontana, 1988).Curran, John. Agatha Christie’s Secret

Notebooks: Fifty Years of Mysteries in the Making (London: HarperCollins, 2009).

Evans, Caroline. Fashion at the Edge (Yale UP: 2007).

Horsley, Lee. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (Oxford UP, 2005).

Mass Observation Archive. Fiction and the Reading Public (report, 1944).

Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality, and the Body (Edinburgh UP, 2001).

New (April 2014) edition