Abstract
The ‘golden age’ of clue-puzzle detective fiction is usually considered to end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Yet Agatha Christie, the most high-profile and successful exponent of the form, continued to produce bestselling novels until her death in 1976. This essay examines three novels from the immediate postwar period to consider how she adapted her writing to negotiate a changing world and evolving fashions in genre fiction. Engaging with grief, demobilisation, gender, citizenship and the new fears of the atomic age, Christie proves unexpectedly attentive to the anxieties of a new modernity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 179-199 |
| Number of pages | 21 |
| Journal | Literature and History |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| Early online date | 19 Oct 2020 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Nov 2020 |
Keywords
- Agatha Christie
- Crime fiction
- Second World War
- Postwar
- Cold War
- Gender
Access to Document
- Plain_2020_LH_AgathaChristie_CC
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
