A Shimmering Pattern of Events: Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Mr Quin and the Modernist Short Story
This article examines a “blind spot” in Agatha Christie’s detective canon: the fourteen stories featuring supernatural detective Harley Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, his partner in crime. After she published a first, formulaic collection of detective stories, Christie chose to try her hand at a hybrid...
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| Publicat a: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicat: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2024
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| Accés en línia: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Sumari: | This article examines a “blind spot” in Agatha Christie’s detective canon: the fourteen stories featuring supernatural detective Harley Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, his partner in crime. After she published a first, formulaic collection of detective stories, Christie chose to try her hand at a hybrid form, “detection touching upon the fairy tale” (Max Mallowan), that displays strong similarities to the Modernist short story as an experimental form. Like their more highbrow counterparts, the Quin stories challenge the traditional boundaries of genre and, in so doing, provide a constant reflection on their own status as artefacts. They rely upon a pervasive sense of uncertainty that turns the process of truth-finding into a more fragmentary epiphany. They foreground an aesthetic positioning that blurs or threatens the ethical premise of detective fiction. Finally, by means of the Harlequin figure, they promote a non-normative approach to identity—both ethnic and gendered—embodied by the two partners, that fuels the eerie charm of the stories while shifting the enigma onto the “other side” of detection—the detectives themselves. |
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