‘A drop of water from a stagnant pool’:
Agatha Christie’s Parapractic Murders
by Dewi Llyr Evans, Cardiff University

In his book, Freud and His Followers (1974), Paul Roazen describes ‘Freud’s love of detective stories.’1 Agatha Christie, Roazen reveals, was a particular favourite.2 Through a consideration of Christie’s detective narratives, this essay examines the ways in which Agatha Christie was, in her turn, informed by Freud’s theories. After outlining a critical history that, until very recently, denied any but the most superficial relationship between Agatha Christie’s works and psychoanalysis, I will argue that her novels and short fiction are heavily informed by the theory of the unconscious as explained in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910). Rather than unproblematically reproducing these theories, Christie dramatises their wider implications for the communities depicted in her novels. The murder, in Christie’s detective narratives, has its equivalent in the Freudian parapraxis. Freud’s revelation of a conscious self whose actions are frequently at the mercy of apparently repressed impulses has, in the murder plot, its social equivalent. The impact of both psychoanalysis and interpretative narrative frameworks on the ascription of meaning allows for a far more subversive interpretation of Christie’s works than has yet been proposed.

 

I: Conservatism and ‘folk wisdom’

As Anna-Marie Taylor notes, ‘Agatha Christie’s popularity seems obvious to everybody except literary critics’3 and it is only in the last twenty-five years that this situation has gradually begun to be rectified. While the major contributions to the growing body of criticism on the author all touch on the question of psychoanalysis, the tendency has been to dismiss the issue as at best irrelevant to the perceived formulae of Christie’s plots and, at worst, manifested through a singularly unsophisticated engagement. Robert Barnard, for instance, argues that Hercule Poirot’s oft-cited reference to the central position of ‘psychology’ in his deductive methods represents nothing more than a ‘sort of folk wisdom about human behaviour’4. Stephen Knight is in agreement, defining Poirot’s use of ‘psychology’ as ‘no more than comprehending people in a general, untesting way … Poirot never shows any fuller grasp of psychological process’5.

This is hardly surprising since, as Alison Light explains, ‘The assumption, so common now as to be almost unassailable is that Christie’s fiction is that of a “natural” Tory’6 and, as such, is deeply concerned with upholding and recreating ‘the values of the English property owning bourgeoisie’7. Psychoanalytic theory, or any other school of thought that questions the possibility that ‘values’ are contingent and not ‘natural’ at all, becomes difficult to reconcile with Christie’s perceived obsession with preserving the bourgeois status quo. Alison Light herself provides a cogent and convincing rebuttal of this image of Agatha Christie as inescapably and overtly class-bound.8 She also concedes that, ‘On the face of it, Christie is modernist enough to recognise the force of unconscious desires’9. Ultimately, however, Light traverses the same path as Knight and Barnard before her, arguing that ‘psychology’ simply ‘becomes a series of learnable axioms, whose effect is not to open up the Pandora’s box of subjectivity but to limit and contain disorder, making the world knowable, manageable and liveable in.’10

These positions do not only underestimate the radical potentialities of Christie’s works, but are also, in their denial of a psychoanalytic presence in her books, demonstrably unjustified. Merja Makinen, in a recent study, provides an illuminating list of examples to suggest that, on the contrary, the author possessed a ‘grasp of both the workings of the psychologist and the unconscious.’11 Makinen feels compelled, however, to qualify this by explaining that Barnard’s ‘folk wisdom’ remark does remain valid ‘for the early novels’12. In fact, these early works are not completely without reference to psychoanalytic theory. ‘The Tragedy at Marston Manor’, a short story included in Poirot Investigates (1924), contains a striking example. In this tale, Mr Maltravers is found dead near his home, a rook rifle at his side. The cause of death is apparently natural, the result of an internal haemorrhage, but the insurance company calls upon Hercule Poirot to investigate the possibility of foul play. At the conclusion of Poirot’s interview with Captain Black, an acquaintance of the dead man and his wife, the following exchange occurs:

   Poirot was silent for a moment, then he said gently: ‘with your permission, I should like to try a little experiment. You have told us all that your conscious self knows, I want now to question your subconscious self.’
   ‘Psycho-analysis, what?’ said Black, with visible alarm.13

This ‘experiment’ is one of free association: ‘I give you a word, you answer with another, and so on. Any word, the first word you think of.’14 After this exercise, Poirot explains the results to his associate, Captain Hastings:

“Story” recalls to him one of the “Lion” stories he told at dinner. I proceeded to “Rook Rifle” and he answered with the totally unexpected word “Farm”. When I say “Shot”, he answers at once “Suicide”. The association seems clear. A man he knows committed suicide with a rook rifle on a farm somewhere.15

 

Working on the assumption that Black’s mind is still lingering on the subject of stories he told at dinner with Maltravers and his wife the night before he died, Poirot feels sure that Black has revealed to them, unconsciously, a ‘particular suicide story he told at the dinner-table’16. Sure enough, Black is questioned again and Poirot’s suspicions are proved correct. This example contains obvious parallels with the parapraxes investigated by Freud in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901). In that book, seemingly innocuous speech acts, actions or lapses of memory are given possible meanings, through a process of association linking the conscious manifestation (the act itself) to a repressed unconscious: ‘There is thus a constant stream of “self-referentiality” going through my mind. I am not usually aware of it, but it betrays itself when I forget’17.

Further parallels with Freud’s methods become apparent later in the story. Poirot finally concludes that Maltravers did not die of natural causes, nor did he commit suicide. The culprit, decides the detective, is actually Mrs Maltravers, the mode of death having been suggested by Black’s suicide story. In the absence of any evidence, however, the Belgian plays a trick on the guilty widow, hiring an actor to impersonate Maltravers’s ghost and smearing red paint on Mrs Maltravers’s hands. Apparently confronted by the restless spirit of her husband, who points accusingly at her ‘bloody’ palms, she confesses: ‘Yes, it’s blood. I killed him. I did it.’18 Like the psychoanalyst encouraging a patient to recall a repressed memory and so effect a cure for a neurosis,19 Poirot’s ghostly ruse brings about an enforced re-enactment of the repressed circumstances similarly effecting a ‘cure’ for the narrative prognosis of the murder mystery.

 

II: ‘The underlying principles are sound enough’

This example gives lie to the complete absence of any ‘fuller grasp of psychological process’ than mere ‘folk wisdom’. Yet, useful though this instance of direct imitation is, the full extent of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is more subtly represented in Christie’s narratives than this isolated example would suggest. It manifests itself through an enactment, not of the specific psychiatric applications of Freud, but of the consequences of his theories for the possible generation of meaningful interpretation – indeed, for the very idea of meaning itself. Critics, when searching for Freud’s influence on these works, have failed to make this connection. Alison Light, for instance, is aware that Christie’s texts can be examined with a view to revealing characters affected by unconscious desires, taking Appointment with Death (1938) as an example. Ultimately, however, ‘the criminal is never sick and always sane in the stories’, with the result that apparent attention to psychoanalytic practice ‘offers little resistance to a more conservative view of human nature’20. Thus the texts offer ‘a Freudian view with none of Freud’s radical potential’21. Susan Rowland makes similar concessions to the Freud-informed presentation of characters in these works, taking The Hollow (1946) as her text, but is forced to concede that Christie’s brand of crime fiction rejects ‘the legitimacy of psychoanalysis functioning as a cultural authority claiming to explain all crime and deviance.’22

Rowland’s assertion is certainly accurate to an extent. After all, despite Poirot’s devotion to uncovering the mysteries of the ‘subconscious’ self in ‘The Tragedy at Marston Manor’, the incident is unusual. Indeed, such specific applications are often approached with perturbation within the novels, as when, in Hickory Dickory Dock (1955), the psychology student Colin McNabb offers a conclusive explanation for a series of kleptomaniac thefts as manifestations of repressed desire: a cookery book is a symbol of home life, for instance, and a stethoscope represents the female culprit’s desire for a professional career. McNabb even exhibits Freud’s awareness of the potential for embarrassment in such analyses23 when called upon to explain the theft of a pair of his own trousers. Though Poirot rejects this complex and conveniently all-encompassing psychological explanation, he does not dismiss it out of hand: ‘no, it is not all nonsense. The underlying principles are sound enough’.24 For an idea of what these ‘underlying principles’ might be, one might turn to Freud’s Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (1910). Freud uses the lecture theatre as a metaphor for the unconscious, in order to explain his theories. He asks the audience to imagine a disturbance in the lecture hall, caused by a laughing audience member, forcing him to announce that he cannot continue his talk, whereupon some other members of the audience ‘who are strong men, stand up and, after a short struggle, put the interrupter outside the door. So now he is “repressed” and I can continue with my lecture […] If you will now translate the two localities concerned into psychical terms as the “conscious” and the “unconscious”, you will have before you a fairly good picture of the process of repression.’25 This is, as Freud himself admits, only a ‘rough analogy’26, but it is one which informs Agatha Christie’s works at the deepest of levels.

This is evident in the twenty-first chapter of The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), when Miss Marple offers a rough analogy equivalent to Freud’s. Her nephew, Raymond West, likens the village of St Mary Mead to ‘a stagnant pool’, but Miss Marple admonishes him: ‘That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond… Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under a microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool’27. Anne-Marie Taylor is right to argue that ‘Christie makes fun of the “psychological” writer in her creation of Raymond West’28, but it would be misguided to imply that mockery of the ‘psychological’ writer also entails, by default, a mockery of psychoanalytic practices. West’s jocular attempts to explain that, for him, the obvious culprit is the Vicar, operating from a repressed and mounting hatred of the dead man, falls down when the Vicar admits that, yes, he had been ‘wishing him out of the world not so long ago’29:

   ‘I’m afraid I was,’ I said. ‘It was a stupid remark to make, but really I’d had a very trying morning with him.’
   ‘That’s disappointing,’ said Raymond West. ‘Because, of course, if your subconscious were really planning to do him in, it would never have allowed you to make that remark.’30

 

As with Poirot and McNabb in Hickory Dickory Dock, the difference between Marple and West is not that the latter entertains principles founded on an understanding of psychoanalysis, while the former does not. It is simply that, in each case, the two young men see ‘nothing but complexes and the victim’s unhappy home life’31 and are blind to the wider implications of the specific theories they obsessively apply. Miss Marple and Poirot, on the other hand, are concerned with nothing but these wider implications, these ‘underlying principles’.

Freud’s theory of the unconscious and its implications for the conscious self is, if rarely explicit, absolutely implicit in Christie’s works. It is true that critics who, like Colin McNabb, look only for the rehearsal of ‘nothing but complexes’ will come away disappointed. Robert Barnard sees St Mary Mead as ‘a hotbed of burglary, impersonation, adultery and untimely murder’32, leading him to wonder: ‘What is it precisely that people find so cosy about such stories?’33 Ironically, Barnard, who so vehemently denies any intrusion of ‘psychology’ into Christie’s novels, draws our attention here to the very way in which the consequences of Freud’s theories are felt in these works. ‘Cosiness’ is, similarly, a luxury denied to the individual in the wake of the discovery of the unconscious, for the individual psyche can no longer be complacently certain of its own self-awareness. What is thought repressed often returns, uncontrolled, when unbidden. As Freud notes in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: ‘I can no longer regard the fact that I forgot the name of Signorelli by chance. I have to recognize the influence of a motive in the procedure.’34 This disturbance of the conscious by the return of that which it represses has a social equivalent in Barnard’s list of the transgressions at work in the similarly complacent St Mary Mead, a village which, like Christie’s other murder-stricken communities, suffers from a return of a socially repressed. Far from being completely absent or unsophisticatedly presented, psychoanalysis informs Christie’s work in a way that allows for a far more radical view of these texts than has hitherto been posited. Like the conscious mind, Christie’s communities are sites of contested meaning, places where transgressive criminal acts signify the return of hitherto repressed impulses – a body in Colonel Bantry’s library, or the Vicar’s study, or a golf links; a murder on the prestigious Orient Express or a fashionable Nile cruise liner; a hidden secret at Styles, Chimneys, or the Seven Dials region. All are the result of a series of motives that had remained hidden. As in ‘The Tragedy at Marston Manor’, the detective, in the manner of Freud, works backwards from these apparently chance occurrences until an explanation is reached through the recollection of similarly repressed transgressions (‘burglary, impersonation, adultery and untimely murder’), ultimately leading to the rendering of these events as meaningful and effecting a ‘cure’.

 

III: Radical Tragedy at Marston Manor

These incidents all point to the existence of hitherto unsuspected activity beneath the superficial surface of these ‘stagnant pools’. Yet, just as the detective works to exorcise these transgressive elements by bringing them to light, he also reveals that the possibility of transgression exists and cannot be exorcised. In the earlier quotation, Freud’s parapraxis, when investigated, reveals not only the existence of repressed motives in his own psyche, but also the very fact that his psyche is capable of repression at all. Similarly, while dramatising the process of detection and ultimate containment of socially transgressive impulses, the novels emphasise the fact that such processes are not infallible, that society, like the psyche, requires an arbiter, an interpreter – that it is not innate. Susan Rowland notes that ‘Like detective fiction, psychoanalysis is a narrative art. Both function as a literature of crisis in looking for clues to previous unsolved traumas and in seeking secure boundaries to fix knowledge and desire in a social context.’35 Rowland’s statement is astute, but she fails to address the fact that any narrative art is inherently subversive. Not only does transference of events into narrative confer power on the narrator, it also reveals, by its very status as ‘authored’, the fact that the power to arbitrate meaning is a contested one. Christie’s novels dramatise this process by containing two such arbiters – the murderer and the detective – in contestation with each other.

In The ABC Murders (1936), for instance, Poirot investigates a series of killings in which the victims are selected alphabetically, an ABC railway guide left next to each corpse. Before each incident, the killer sends Poirot a letter informing the detective of the location of the next murder. The third letter arrives late however, due to its being incorrectly addressed. As Hastings explains,

Poirot was at the time living in Whitehaven Mansions. The address ran: M. Hercule Poirot, Whitehorse Mansions, across the corner was scrawled: ‘Not known at Whitehorse Mansions, EC1, nor at Whitehorse Court – try Whitehaven Mansions.’ 36

 

Inspector Crome suggests a psychoanalytic explanation: ‘I’d almost bet the chap drinks White Horse whiskey.’ He elaborates: ‘We’ve all of us done much the same thing one time or another, unconsciously copied something that’s just under the eye. He started off White and went on horse instead of haven…’37 Initially endorsing this theory, Poirot later rejects this Freudian explanation for a more prosaic one – the incorrect address is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the letter goes astray. The figure of the serial killer operating from psychotic motives is a fiction created by the murderer as an alibi for the third killing. Disguising his brother’s death as the work of a maniac, the murder hopes to divert attention from the more usual questions associated with criminal investigation, which would surely have revealed him as the obvious culprit: ‘Opportunity. Where everyone was at the time of death? Motive. Who benefited by the deceased’s death?’38

While initially seeming to be a rejection of psychoanalytic interpretation, however, The ABC Murders actually presents the reader with a series of crimes that illustrate the contingencies of ascribed meanings. Much the same idea can be observed in Hickory Dickory Dock where the work of a kleptomaniac is used as a disguise for a more premeditated transgression. In Christie’s texts, the Freudian framework of a parapraxis whose meaning depends on repressed elements exposes the position of power conferred on the interpreter. In so doing, the most basic assumptions of psychoanalysis become the basis from which to critique the more complacent and narrow applications to which they are sometimes put. The murderer-narrator of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) declares that he had ‘intended it to be published as the history of one of Poirot’s failures’39 and relates his eventual detection to a failed psychoanalytic understanding on his part: ‘I never dreamed that Parker would have noticed that chair. Logically, he ought to have been so agog over the body as to be blind to everything else. But I hadn’t reckoned with the trained servant complex.’40 Dr Sheppard’s status as both narrator and murderer demonstrates the fact that the meaning of an apparently inexplicable event is not necessarily recoverable but depends on an accurate construction or reconstruction of events. Sheppard is empowered by the fact that meaning is not fully recoverable. The interpretation of the murders is thus literally contested, in that it is a contest, between Dr Sheppard and Poirot, which Dr Sheppard loses. Fittingly, Sheppard concedes Poirot’s narrative victory by poisoning himself with veronal, the substance used to murder Mrs Ferrars at the beginning of the novel. Sheppard deems it a ‘kind of poetic justice’,41 his way of conceding himself to be the victim of his own attempted reascription of meaning to the narrative of events. Similarly, the ending of ‘The Tragedy at Marston Manor’, with Poirot’s use of actors to impersonate the victim’s spirit, emphasises his use of narrative enforcement for his own ends. However accurate Poirot’s theory is and however morally justified his actions, this is an interpretative (and therefore entirely contingent) victory over the murderess. It lays bare the power struggle that is the narrative battle at the heart of the detective narrative.

 

Conclusion

Agatha Christie’s texts do not unproblematically equate ‘psychology’ with ‘folk wisdom’. It is true that her works almost invariably reassert ‘the values of the English property owning bourgeoisie’, but only on the most superficial levels. In Christie’s narrated world, the process of psychoanalytic interpretation is linked with narrative interpretation to reveal meaning as unfixed, arbitrary and a powerful tool. Ultimately, Alison Light is misguided in her assertion that Christie’s narratives offer readers ‘a Freudian view with none of Freud’s radical potential’. Freud’s radical potential is everywhere in her works, lying as it does in the radical potential of narrative itself. Meaning is contested in a society which, like the psyche, is revealed to be constantly at the mercy of ‘a vast reservoir of strange things’42. In his Introduction to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Paul Keegan writes: ‘Freud breaks intellectual rank by noticing what exists beneath the threshold of attention, and he breaks social rank by noticing the cracks in the smooth glass of ritual.’43 He could have been describing Poirot, Miss Marple or, indeed, Agatha Christie herself.

 

Bibliography.

Primary Works:

Christie, Agatha, The ABC Murders (London: HarperCollins, 1993)

Christie, Agatha, Appointment with Death (London: HarperCollins, 1993)

Christie, Agatha, Hickory Dickory Dock (London: HarperCollins, 1993)

Christie, Agatha, The Murder at the Vicarage (London: HarperCollins, 2005)

Christie, Agatha, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (London: HarperCollins, 1993)

Christie, Agatha, ‘The Tragedy at Marston Manor’ in Poirot Investigates (London: Collins, 1989)

Freud, Sigmund, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis in Two Short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis, translated and edited by James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962)

Freud, Sigmund, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002)

Secondary Works:

Barnard, Robert, A Talent For Deception: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie (Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co Ltd, 1990)

Knight, Stephen, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1980)

Light, Alison, Forever England: Femininity, literature and conservatism between the wars (London: Routledge, 1991)

Makinen, Merja, Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)

Osborne, Charels, The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (London: HarperCollins, 1999)

Rowland, Susan, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001)

Anna-Marie Taylor, ‘Home is Where the Hearth Is: The Englishness of Agatha Christie’s Marple Novels’, in Ian A. Bell and Graham Daldry, eds, Watching the Detectives: Essays on Crime Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1990), pp.134-148