Agatha Christie’s Secret Fair Play

This essay challenges the skepticism towards the formal and thematic complexity of Agatha Christie’s detective stories by revealing the role of covert word-play in her works. In doing so, the essay also questions the consensus in detective fiction studies that the use of covert wordplay in British and American detective stories is a distinct feature of works by postmodern authors (with the exception of Edgar Allan Poe) writing in the metaphysical detective story tradition. Combining biographical criticism, close reading, and Michel Sirvent’s concept of diegetic vs. extradiagetic clues as its critical framework, the essay analyzes Christie’s novel The A. B. C. Murders (1936) and the short story “Strange Jest” (1950) to contend that Christie uses clandestine wordplay for two purposes. On the one hand, it functions as a tool for traditional fair play by serving as clues for readers in solving the plot-level mystery. The same wordplay, however, also functions as clues within an intertextual puzzle game in which readers are asked to decipher the stories as competitive rewritings of Poe’s detective tales. As a result, the essay uncovers hitherto neglected aspects of Christie’s formal craft, particularly in terms of the device of fair play, as well as the intertextual relationship between her works and those by Poe. Moreover, it shows that Golden Age detective fiction, like its postmodern successors, also employ clandestine wordplay as a part of an intricate and sophisticated metafictional narrative design.