Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction

Agatha Christie and New Directions in Reading Detective Fiction
Author: Alistair Rolls
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 183
Release: 2022-06-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 100060439X

This book brings a new lens to the work of Agatha Christie through a series of close readings which challenge the official solutions by Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. This book's approach interweaves two core ideas: first, it explores the importance of French critic Pierre Bayard’s self-styled ‘detective criticism’; second, it takes detective criticism in a new direction by refocusing on the beginnings of Agatha Christie’s novels. In this way, the book counters the end-orientation that has traditionally dominated the reading experience of, and critical response to, detective fiction by exploring the potential of the beginning to host other interpretations and stories. Offering a new way of reading detective fiction, this book is a mixture of narratology and detective criticism, and deploys it in the form of radical new readings of a number of Christie’s most famous works. This illuminating text will interest students and scholars of crime and detective fiction, literary studies and comparative literature.

The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie

The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie
Author: Dick Riley
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 390
Release: 2001-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780826413758

Over 400,000 copies sold! If you are a mystery buff, an Agatha Christie fan, an occasional Christie reader or an acquaintance of any of the above, this book is for you and all your fortunate friends The Bedside, Bathtub & Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie, on the 25th anniversary of Agatha Christie's death, continues as a grand salute to the queen of mysteries. It is filled with wonderful and surprising things about her books, her characters, the movies and plays based on them, and Dame Agatha herself. Original contributions by some sixty writers celebrate the Christie touch. Take your pick among thse intriguing features and speculations: -Surviving an English country weekend - if you had the advice of Hercule Poirot - A guide to the Christie poisions, as well as the cruder methods of genteel mayhem - The "other" Agatha Christie who wrote romantic novels - A murder victim's (!) first-person account of a Christie Mystery Weekend - The Hercule Poirot Double-Crostic and other puzzles That's a taste. There's much more - and witty plot summaries of all Christie's novels, plays, and many of her short stories. (But no endings, of course!) This treasury is more than entertainment - it is also a personal reference work for Christie fans. And there are scores of movie posters, film stills, illustrations and a Christie mystery map, too.

Cruising the Library

Cruising the Library
Author: Melissa Adler
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-04-03
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0823276376

Cruising the Library offers a highly innovative analysis of the history of sexuality and categories of sexual perversion through a critical examination of the Library of Congress and its cataloging practices. Taking the publication of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemologies of the Closet as emblematic of the Library’s inability to account for sexual difference, Melissa Adler embarks upon a detailed critique of how cataloging systems have delimited and proscribed expressions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in a manner that mirrors psychiatric and sociological attempts to pathologize non-normative sexual practices and civil subjects. Taking up a parallel analysis, Adler utilizes Roderick A. Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black as another example of how the Library of Congress fails to account for, and thereby “buries,” difference. She examines the physical space of the Library as one that encourages forms of governmentality as theorized by Michel Foucault while also allowing for its utopian possibilities. Finally, she offers a brief but highly illuminating history of the Delta Collection. Likely established before the turn of the twentieth century and active until its gradual dissolution in the 1960s, the Delta Collection was a secret archive within the Library of Congress that housed materials confiscated by the United States Post Office and other federal agencies. These were materials deemed too obscene for public dissemination or general access. Adler reveals how the Delta Collection was used to regulate difference and squelch dissent in the McCarthy era while also linking it to evolving understandings of so-called perversion in the scientific study of sexual difference. Sophisticated, engrossing, and highly readable, Cruising the Library provides us with a critical understanding of library science, an alternative view of discourses around the history of sexuality, and an analysis of the relationship between governmentality and the cataloging of research and information—as well as categories of difference—in American culture.

The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie

The Detective Novels of Agatha Christie
Author: James Zemboy
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 449
Release: 2010-08-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786451688

The most popular mystery writer of all time concocted a rich recipe of intrigue, character, and setting. All of Agatha Christie's 66 detective novels are covered here in great detail. Each chapter begins with general comments on a novel's geographical and historical setting, identifying current events, fashions, fads and popular interests that relate to the story. A concise plot summary and comprehensive character listing follow, and each novel is discussed within Christie's overall body of work, with an emphasis on the development of themes, narrative technique, and characters over the course of her prolific career. An appendix translates Poirot's French and defines the British idiomatic words and phrases that give Christie's novels so much of their flavor.

Murder You Wrote

Murder You Wrote
Author: L.J.M. Owen
Publisher: Clan Destine Press
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2023-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1922904538

One story. Twenty writers. Your choice. Murder You Wrote: An Interactive Mystery is a choose-your-own-investigation murder mystery set in remote Tasmania, a world of stunning beauty, dark history and deadly creatures. You are a retired police detective invited to speak at a crime fiction writers festival. You are looking forward to a weekend with some of Australia's bestselling authors. You're staying in a convict-built country manor house along with five other guests of the festival. The other guests don't exactly get along. You awake to discover the homestead is cut off. Overnight, storms flooded the only road out, the internet is down... and a world-famous writer is missing. You discover his body in the library. Certain that one of the four remaining guests was responsible for his death, you decide to investigate. Which suspect will you interrogate first? Which clues will you follow? Can you solve the case? Contributors: Alison Alexander, Sarah Barrie, Karen Brooks, Jack Cainery, R.B. Cole, Alan Carter, Natalie Conyer, Craig Cormick, E.K. Cutting, Livia Day, Jo Dixon, Jacq Ellem, Jason Franks, Narrelle M. Harris, Carys King, Angela Meyer, Allison Mitchell, David Owen, L.J.M. Owen, Matthew D. Ruffin, E.V. Scott, Marion Stoneman, Maggie Veness, Sarah White, and Z.E. Davidson Appealing to mystery lovers everywhere, purchasing this criminally good book supports the mentoring of new writers and literacy for adults.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie
Author: Gillian Gill
Publisher: Portico
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1911042742

In this sensitive and revealing biography of Agatha Christie, Gillian Gill probes the mysterious private life and motivations of one of the bestselling authors of all time and discovers a brilliant and eccentric woman whose passionate search for success was balanced by an obsession with privacy. The break-up of Agatha's first marriage to Archibald Christie and her subsequent ten-day disappearance had made headline news. Feeling hunted and wounded by the press, Christie determined never again to let them into her private life. Instead she developed a public persona - seemingly tongue-tied and dull - which ensured the journalists and the public would let her be. This successful strategy helped to account for a happy second marriage and family life as well as an astonishing literary productivity. Skillfully weaving the details of Christie's life with the plots and characters of her mystery novels, Gillian Gill uncovers the flesh-and-blood woman behind the popular and celebrated Marple-like image, and establishes Agatha Christie as a unique and determined person whose fictional creations sparked the imagination of millions around the world.

Bodies in Formation

Bodies in Formation
Author: Rachel Prentice
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2013
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0822351579

In Bodies in Formation, anthropologist Rachel Prentice enters surgical suites increasingly packed with new medical technologies to explore how surgeons are made in the early twenty-first century.

Queering Agatha Christie

Queering Agatha Christie
Author: J.C Bernthal
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2016-09-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3319335332

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie’s emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?