Sleuthing Miss Marple: Gender, Genre, and Agency in Agatha Christie's Crime Fiction

Sleuthing Miss Marple explores the methods, motives, and alibis that underpin Agatha Christie's crime fiction, using a rigorous evidence base and original literary analyses to uncover Christie's engagements with gender roles and genre rules. It also shows how Christie's ingenious methods made it possible for an elderly spinster to solve murder.

Format: Hardback
Length: 232 pages
Publication date: 01 July 2022
Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Sleuthing Miss Marple is a captivating exploration that mirrors the structure and playful analytic style of a detective novel. It begins at the 'scene of the crime' and delves into the historical context, shedding light on the methods, motives, and alibis that underpin Agatha Christie's crime fiction. This enquiry adopts a rigorous textual approach, constructing a comprehensive evidence base drawn from the Marple short stories and novels. It offers a valuable interpretation of crime fiction scholarship, providing a foundation for original literary analyses that unveil Christie's engagements with gender roles and genre rules, as well as the sleights of hand that they conceal. Through meticulous investigation, Christies modus operandi is uncovered, as are the narrative strategies and literary devices that she deployed to ambush unwary readers. Crucially, this study demonstrates how Christie's ingenious methods enabled an elderly spinster to successfully solve murder, making Sleuthing Miss Marple an invaluable resource for students and researchers of crime fiction, twentieth-century literature, and creative writing.

Dimension: 239 x 163 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781800854642