Below is the introduction from my MA dissertation, titled Justice, despair or plot; reading suicide in the novels of Agatha Christie, submitted in 2022 as part of Medical Humanities at Birkbeck.

When one looks at collected thematic works of Agatha Christie, for example the upcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, similar themes emerge: the impact of the wars,  colonialism and race, gender and feminism, the golden age and the self-defining genre of detective fiction, are all examples of themes that have been explored around Christie’s life and writing. An area less explored, however, is that of mental health in her novels. How it is captured, what role does it play, and what does it tell the modern reader about contemporary understanding about social attitudes are all important factors that deserve attention.

This dissertation will focus on just one element that sits partly in the theme of mental health, and that is suicide. Suicide is mentioned by name in a wide range of Agatha Christie’s writing. In Sparkling Cyanide, her 1945 novel, the word is mentioned no less than 66 times throughout the book. It is used as a threat, designed to show weak moral character from a “ne’er-do well son” and as a disguise for murder, put down to suicide due to “depression after influenza”1. But in other of Christie’s novels, suicide happens without being named, or identified as such. In particular, as an ending for the murderer(s) of the novel, always identified and almost always caught. Across Christie’s novels, characters who die by suicide vary greatly, across genders and classes. There are similarities between them too though, similar psychological stances and series of events can be seen in those who tried to end their own life out of despair, and at the very least, a likeability can been seen across those that Poirot allows the choice of ending their own lives rather than facing a death sentence at the hands of the law.

Olive Anderson writes about the change in understanding suicide and suicidal people in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. She maps how “In Victorian England, as today, some people sought to prevent suicide by social action and the creation of a deterrent environment, while others concentrated on helping individuals who were known to be at risk.” 2 She goes on to note the gender disparity in people who died by suicide at that time, and the probably causes, using a social model to explore “if the main explanation of suicide is found in the disintegration of social ties and the increase of egoism and anomie under the impact of the division of labour” then the impact of this would be felt differently between men and women. 3 A particularly interesting argument that Anderson makes is that suicide became more significant as the general death rate fell and “old age alone had become the great killer” of most people, tempering this by saying that “Probably what mattered more than the increased rarity of premature death in general, was the far greater rarity of violent and accidental death in particular. Between the 1880s and 1914 life was growing safer very fast.”4 Another factor that was likely to have played into the publics understanding of and attitude to suicide is an increased understanding and appreciation of psychology.

Emile Durkheim wrote his hugely influential work On Suicide in 1897, and it was first translated into English shortly after. In the Introduction to the latest edition, Richard Sennet notes that “at the time Durkheim write, European attitudes to suicides were shaped by three forces. The oldest was virtuous suicide, first practiced by Socrates…” Sennet notes the irony captured in titling this type of suicide as ‘virtuous’ as “from its earliest days, Christianity had rejected the virtue in virtuous suicide” and classed suicide among “infanticide, abortion and contraception” as the same crime: “that of judging when life should end”. 5 Another view of suicide was that of a “thermometer of human subjectivity”, with dying by suicide a romantic act that captured the extreme sensitivity of the deceased. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that suicide was first thought of in a social context, an answer to the curiosity around “ordinary people, neither sinners nor sensitive souls” who were ending their own lives.6 Some of these differing views can be seen in Christie’s fiction, as she explores differing stances of the virtuousness of suicide in her earlier novels, before moving to explore personal and social factors that might play a role in a person’s decision to end their own life.

In the Murder at the Vicarage Clement, the narrator, finds Hawes, the suspected murderer, in the middle of overdosing. The narrator is a parson, and he discovers the attempted suicide with the Chief Constable of the County. Their differing views are apparent and offer insight into the wider debate seen in the earlier of Christie’s writing. Clement says “It’s his way out poor chap. Perhaps the best way. It’s not for us to judge him.”7 Clements is representing a softer approach to justice, showing that self-implemented justice is valid, and that, here at least, there is no moral implications to go with the action. It is Melchett, the Chief Constable, who acts – “He had caught a murderer and he wanted his murderer hanged.”8 Here already, we are seeing a small snapshot of the conflict between different schools of thought around suicide. It turns out that Hawes is, after all, innocent, which adds an interesting dimension to the portrayal of suicide as a tool for justice and the responsibility society has around suicide – unlike the courts which would need proof of guilt before assigning someone to die, the social assumption of guilt is enough that Hawes decides to end his own life. Death, it seems, is preferrable to being suspected of a crime and unable to prove that, in fact, you are innocent.

This dissertation will focus on eleven Agatha Christie novels, all written between 1922 and 1955. This is not an inclusive list of her works that cover the theme of suicide – her later writings have not been included, nor has her short story collections – The Mysterious Mr Quinn, for example, uses suicide in multiple ways in the short stories narrated by Mr Satterthwaite, and could be a study on its own. The ones selected for analysis in this dissertation capture a range of approaches utilized by Christie; Peril at End House and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for example, are ‘classic Christie’ and show off the skills of Christie and Poirot at their strongest. In contrast, the second section of this dissertation will compare The Secret Adversary and Death on the Nile – two vastly different novels written fifteen years apart, with vastly different ‘detectives’ leading the narrative. The third section is focused on And Then There Were None, potentially Christie’s best book and one that, written at the eve of the second world war, acts as a transition between styles, genres and approaches for Christie. The second half of the dissertation will compare two sets of novels, all written closely together – The Hollow and Towards Zero cover suicide as a personal choice, with minimal relationship to the central murder; on the
reverse side, The Moving Finger and Sparkling Cyanide have their characters use suicide as a tool, using the social repercussions of a suicide to get away with murder. These four novels were all written
within three years of each other and so can be seen to capture a distinct period for Christie – the fact that they all feature suicide so prominently, is significant. However, to explain away the themes
captured in these novels as due to the times they were written, the early 1940s, is reductionist and I will bring in the concurrently published novels Destination Unknown and Hickory Dickory Dock, published in the mid-1950s, to show that the themes discussed in her earlier novels are long lasting.

1: Sparking Cyanide. P22, P11

2 Anderson, Olive. P5

3 Anderson, Olive. P41

4 Anderson, Olive. P68

5 Sennet, Richard. Pxii

6 Sennet, Richard. Pxiii

7 Vicarage, P272

8 Vicarage, P272