Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies

1Introduction

The novels this thesis will be dealing with are Crooked House (1949) and Evil Under the Sun (1941). In each of these books the children are in a different situation: Crooked House is a story of the murder of a wealthy patriarch and it takes place in a family mansion. In Evil Under the Sun the murder victim is a retired actress who is on holiday with her husband and his sixteen-year-old daughter. Therefore, Crooked House deals with upper-class children and Evil Under the Sun with an upper middle-class teenager. Additionally, each of these books features a different detective: Evil Under the Sun is a Hercule Poirot story and the investigation in Crooked House is led by an amateur detective Charles Hayward, whose father is an Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard. Each of these detectives has a different approach to solving the crime and the thesis will also deal with their approach towards the children in the story.

Children in detective fiction are not a very common theme. In various Sherlock Holmes novels, the detective uses his “Baker Street Irregulars” – a gang of street children who help him with gathering information about people, whom Holmes calls his “unofficial force” (Doyle). However, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle does not give the reader any background of the children, he does not seem to care about them, and he just uses them to help his Great Detective do his work. In the so-called “the Golden Age detective fiction”, however, mystery stories started to focus on domesticity rather than on an almost perfect, thinking machine detective, which provided more space for children as regular characters in the stories.

In her autobiography, Christie speaks about a game she used to play with her sister Madge when she was a little girl – the “Elder Sister” game. The elder sister was “mad and lived in a cave at Corbin’s Head, but sometimes she came to the house” (An Autobiography 54). When Madge played the elder sister part it made Agatha frightened and terrified, but she always wanted her sister to play the game with her – “she wanted to be pleasurably terrified” (Guardian 20 April 1989 qtd. in Light 88). The pleasure of being frightened as a child may offer an explanation why she was interested in mystery stories in the first place, and why she used so many nursery rhymes as titles or parts of her novels; Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) or Crooked House – to “remind us of both the terrors and the magic of the nursery”. (Light 88).

The first chapter of the thesis introduces detective fiction in general. The first part of the first chapter examines a brief history of the genre, the second part deals with the Golden Age of detective fiction and the last part comments on Agatha Christie’s life and her approach to writing detective stories. The second chapter examines Christie’s depiction of children in Crooked House, with a brief introduction of the plot and then the actual analysis in the later parts of the chapter. The third chapter is organised in a similar way; the book examined is Evil Under the Sun. The last chapter of the thesis concludes the findings established in the previous parts of the thesis.

2The Detective Story

2.1A Brief History

Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered to be the first detective story in the English-speaking world. With its publication in 1841 began the history of the detective story as it is known today. It features the first “Great Detective”, the brilliant but eccentric C. Auguste Dupin, dim-witted policemen, and the story is narrated in first person by a close personal friend of the detective: a trend which is later seen in the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. Poe thought of his stories as tales of “ratiocination”, where the primary concern of the story is to find the truth by carefully observing the facts and then making a conclusion at the end of the story.

As P. D James points out, the very first detective novel in the English language was Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, an epistolary novel written in 1868 concerning a theft of a precious diamond in an English country house (James 4). In the novel, there are several ideas which helped establish the genre of the detective story, such as the setting in an isolated place, numerous red herrings, the least likely suspect being the culprit and a final twist in the plot.

In 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, a detective whose ability of “deduction”, as Doyle calls his method of solving the crime, is well known around the world. The name of Doyle’s famous detective became a synonym for a person of great intellectual ability, and the character of Dr. Watson, Holmes’s sidekick, inspired writers such as Agatha Christie or Rex Stout to have their great detectives accompanied by sidekicks, who became narrators of the stories. However, the best known detective stories were created in what is called the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.