Category: Themes

• June 21, 2025

  Flowers for the Judge

  Margery Allingham, 1936 It’s no secret that I’m a big Campion fan. Originally designed to be a parody of the upper-class amateur detective, particularly Sayer’s Peter Wimsey, as time goes on and the series develops, Campion develops himself and becomes his own distinct(ish) self. This is helped by the two authors’ different writing styles, with…
• May 5, 2025

  Part for a Poisoner

  ECR Lorac, published 1948. Published in America as Place for a Poisoner. I’ll start by saying I find E.C.R Lorac’s (born Edith Caroline Rivett) writing consistently enjoyable and I’ll forever be grateful for British Library Crime Classics to introducing her to me. I find she’s a bit more subtle than Christie, with less of the…
• September 10, 2023

  Reading suicide in Agatha Christie – part one

  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…