Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros79Special section: Short crime fictionA Shimmering Pattern of Events: A...

Special section: Short crime fiction

A Shimmering Pattern of Events: Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Mr Quin and the Modernist Short Story

Camille Fort
p. 43-58

Résumés

Cet article examine un « angle mort » dans la fiction policière d’Agatha Christie : les quatorze nouvelles centrées sur Harley Quin, detective surnaturel, et son acolyte humain, Mr Satterthwaite. Ayant publié une première série de nouvelles policières tout à fait conventionelles, Christie choisit une nouvelle voie : une forme hybride « où l’enquête confine au conte de fées » (Max Mallowan), et qui présente de fortes similitudes avec la nouvelle moderniste comme terrain d’expérimentation. Comme leurs pendants de la haute littérature, ces récits ébranlent les limites traditionnelles du genre et, ce faisant, trament une reflexion sur leur propre statut d’artefacts. Ils reposent sur un principe d’incertitude qui transmute la quête herméneutique en une épiphanie fragmentaire. Ils font la part belle à un positionnement esthétique qui brouille ou sape la prémisse éthique du genre policier. Enfin, convoquant la figure de l’Arlequin, ils promeuvent une approche non-normative de l’identité, ethnique et genrée, incarnée par ce duo de détectives. C’est là ce qui nourrit le charme étrange des nouvelles tout en projetant l’énigme « de l’autre côté » du récit – c’est-à-dire sur les détectives eux-mêmes.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

“A brief, brilliantly-lit treatment”

1When asked in 1956 to define the short story, Elizabeth Bowen suggested that its brevity served a twofold purpose: intensity of focus, and the deepening of a mystery inherent to human motives:

There is a touch of the Sphynx in many human beings, and this sphynx-like quality is one which the S. S. [short story] exploits… In fact, the short-storyist often makes an instinctive choice of the type of character most likely to profit by brief, brilliantly-lit treatment. (134)

  • 1 Three-Act Tragedy, first published in 1934, and the title story in the volume Dead Man’s Mirror, f (...)

2Agatha Christie’s Harley Quin certainly fits the bill. The slippery eponymous figure is first seen standing under a stained window that covers him briefly, brilliantly, with all the colours of the rainbow, before he moves back into a normality soon revealed to be a mask. He is a clue hidden in plain textual view, a modern avatar of the stock-character Harlequin; and, while omniscient, he is shadowy too—always shown in external focalization, his oracular sayings oblique, his true being the ultimate enigma. As a Golden Age detective, he is less known to the general public than Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, or the Beresford spouses, or even his partner in crime, elderly Mr Satterthwaite, who appears sans Quin in two later works by Christie.1 In fact, all fourteen of the Quin stories—spanning fifty years, from “The Arrival of Mr Quin” (1924) to the belated “Harlequin Tea Set” (1971)—are still stuck in a critical limbo. They are barely touched upon by Christie scholars now, nor were they in 1930 when the first twelve were gathered in a volume, The Mysterious Mr Quin.

3I propose that the critical unease generated by the Quin stories lies at least in part in their being an experiment in Modernist writing. Although detections by name, they strive away from the clear-cut, well-coded (at the time) agenda of the genre and renegociate its core theme, mystery, from an elusive and ultimately disquieting “sphynx-like” approach. Alone within the Christie canon, they display traits—listed here below—then found in the more highbrow stories of Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, or Katherine Mansfield, that undermine the normative expectations of Christie’s readership.

  1. The Quin stories promote generic hybridity. As detections bordering on the marvellous, or the fantastic, they seek to “transcend accepted literary distinctions, challenging fictional boundaries . . . by way of form” (Drewery 6). As a result, they foster a pervasive sense of uncertainty.

  2. They place love at the heart of the investigation, echoing Virginia Woolf’s 1927 injunction that the short story shape itself as “certain emotions placed in the right relations to each other” (Reynier 10). In the Quin stories, such placing of emotions trumps the ordering of clues; it opacifies the detecting process even as it becomes a driving principle of representation.

  3. At the same time, the Quin stories show a modernist obsession with the figure of the artist and the notion of artistic purity, that blurs the ethical scope traditionally associated to the whodunit.

  4. Finally, they promote a non-normative approach to identity, notably gendered identity, more radical than in any other work by Christie.

Departing from the Norm

4The Quin series was Christie’s second attempt at writing detective stories. Her previous collection, published in 1924 under the title Poirot Investigates, had met with approval precisely because it made good on its title’s promise. They were true-to-genre whodunits, each following the Aristotelian principle of beginning, middle, and end—that is, mystery, investigation, and closure. This was noticed and praised by the critic of The Observer:

The short story is a sterner test of the “detective” writer than the full-grown novel. With ample space almost any practised writer can pile complication upon complication, just as any man could make a puzzling maze out of a ten-acre field. But to pack mystery, surprise and a solution into three or four thousand words is to achieve a feat. There is no doubt about Miss Christie’s success in the eleven tales (why not a round dozen?) published in this volume. (The Observer, 30 Mar. 1924)

5The cardinal virtue of the detective short story was deemed akin to that of the Persian miniature: to pack a world into a minuscule format, then pack a punch in delivering the requisite solution in a minimal count of words.

6In theory, this generic concentrate ought to be found in the Quin and Satterthwaite stories. Each of them starts by situating Mr Satterthwaite, the amateur sleuth, in an ad hoc context: a wordly environment, be it London’s Mayfair, the French Riviera, or the upper-class country house (still a novel setting in the 1920s). “Little” Mr Satterthwaite is quickly re-introduced as an elderly bachelor of means. A snobbish, fussy sixty-year-old man, he is also kind-hearted and enjoys a vicarious sentimental life: he observes the romances of others as a spectator, and, like Shakespeare’s Puck, an actor too if he sees cause. As a “love detective,” his motive for investigating is not so much an addiction to truth-finding as a compulsion to ensure a pair of lovers’ happiness. He does so by clearing a suspect in the first five stories, until Christie brings a twist to the pattern in “The Man from the Sea,” in which Mr Satterthwaite’s mission is to prevent the crime—self-slaughter—by reuniting together two suicidal one-time lovers.

  • 2 As stipulated in S. S. Van Dine’s essay, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” first publis (...)

7So far, so normal. The first deviation from the genre, however, comes from the fact that the second, titular detective is neither human nor a bona fide investigator, since it is quickly established that Mr Quin knows the truth from the start. In each story, he appears out of thin air and plays Socrates to Satterthwaite’s Plato by asking a key question or dropping a verbal clue, only to vanish once the case is solved. His supernatural status is confirmed in “The Man from the Sea,” when he reveals that he acts on behalf of the dead; as in “The Bird with a Broken Wing,” in which he sends word to Mr Satterthwaite by means of a ouija board. In the ninth story, “The Dead Harlequin,” his face appears on a painting bought by Mr Satterthwaite, who later finds him seated among his guests in his dining-room, although Mr Quin never rang at the door. A non-detecting sleuth, a non-human figure in a genre that imposed crime solving “by strictly naturalistic means,”2 Mr Quin embodies Christie’s challenge to the fictional boundaries of her field.

Line Crossing: Christie’s Experiment with Hybridity

8The stories’ generic hybridity—“detection in a fanciful vein, touching upon the fairy story” as described by Christie’s second husband (Osborne 80)—earned them a lukewarm response at the time. As mentioned supra, they remain mostly ignored, occasionally treated as a hit-and-miss attempt on Christie’s part to blend her favourite genres, before she went on to write either detective or uncanny fantastic tales. Yet in her autobiography Christie defends the Quin and Satterthwaite stories as a stylistic success and the duo as her favourite characters (419-20).

9Within the stories, generic hybridity is cleverly validated with a framing reference to another mixed tradition, the Harlequinade. It is mentioned in the first story, where Quin’s parting words to Satterthwaite are “I must recommand the Harlequinade to your attention” (Q & S 18), and in the last one, where one character states that “You certainly couldn’t have a Harlequinade without Harlequin” (219). The British Harlequinade, itself a short display, was a one-act farce staged as a prologue or epilogue to a longer pantomime. A popular entertainment in the Victorian and Edwardian era, still performed in the 1930s though on a cultural decline, it relied upon a quintet of characters. Two of them—the Clown and the Policeman—were identified as English stock-characters by the audience, whereas Columbine, her lover Harlequin and old Pantaloon pointed to the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. The plot, derived from Old Comedy, had the Clown help the Harlequin—a more dashing, romantic, and independent figure than the original Arlecchino—marry Columbine against her father’s veto. The bumbling Policeman mostly appeared to chase them round the stage, sealing the Harlequinade as a mix of romance and slapstick, a defence of love, and a nonsensical performance. While it only very indirectly influenced the Quin stories, Christie used the reference to champion mixity in form and content, genre, and characterization. She does more than pepper the detection with an additional fairy touch: fantasy changes the gist, scope, and purport of detective fiction from the inside.

10How do the stories themselves operate? In seven of them, the mystery takes the form of a murder, past or present, to be investigated. The investigation, however, does not follow the flexible pattern of interrogation (often spread out across several chapters) typical of the whodunit; neither does it launch Mr Satterthwaite on a geographical or scientific quest for clues in the manner of a Sherlock Holmes. Instead, the inquest is condensed into a more operatic form: a conversational trio, quartet, or quintet between the detective and a few chosen interlocutors. The intensity of focus is not on Satterthwaite’s thinking process, his capacity to infer a logical conclusion from a given fact. What is foregrounded is his telling process, his capacity to perform as a speaker, a mouthpiece for the omniscient but silent Quin: a self-aware actor in a play which he neither directs nor controls. Such a role is made apparent in the title story, “The Coming of Mr Quin,” in which Mr Satterthwaite (already) prevents a woman’s suicide by proving to her second husband that she did not kill her previous spouse:

Portal sprung forward. His voice was hoarse, his eyes bloodshot.
“Why did she break the decanter?” he cried. “Why did she break the decanter? Tell me that!”
For the first time that evening, Mr Quin addressed himself to Mr Satterthwaite.
“You have a wide experience in life, Mr Satterthwaite. Perhaps you can tell us that.”
Mr Satterthwaite’s voice trembled a little. His cue had come at last. He was to speak some of the most important lines in the play. He was an actor now—not a looker on. (Q & S 17)

11The theatrical motif, a follow-up to the wink at the Harlequinade, is not in itself a novelty. The novelty lies in the elliptical aspect of the narrative that follows, as Mr Satterthwaite provides a trembling answer, but not how he came to it. His brief performance consists only in recreating a woman’s emotional impulse: she broke the decanter, he says, not out of guilt, but out of compassion for the murderer, whom she once loved. The speaker does not say, and his audience does not question, what made him cast the woman as an innocent rather than a scheming accomplice. Doing away with the main tenet of detective fiction, the sleuth’s articulate reasoning, is a bold move on Christie’s part. On the one hand, she does play the game of question and answer, enigma and enlightenment. But she does so by means of a textual gap, a form of non sequitur.

Vision Above Reason: The Strange Case of Christie’s Aesthetic Ethos

  • 3 “I will tell you one thing—I believe in the value of impressions. In any time of crisis there is al (...)

12This strategy is used blatantly in the following stories. Culprits are found, but the discursive enlightenment that in standard detective fiction would be stretched over an entire chapter is sacrificed to a visual, indeed visionary approach. The “shimmering pattern of events” (Q & S 143) pieced together by Mr Satterthwaite appears to him only as epiphanic flashes framed in darkness, an impressionistic process validated on his behalf by Mr Quin.3 Consequently, the truth is blurred or left incomplete, a partial glimpse into the culprit’s emotional psyche rather than a lengthy exposition of opportunity and motive.

13Thus, in “The Bird with a Broken Wing,” Mr Satterthwaite is shown to deduce who killed and how, but not why. He asks the murderer, who answers him with a “funny giggling little laugh” (188). The reader is left on this redundant yet discordant note, echoing the sound made by the victim’s guitar in a previous scene, when a string “snapped” and provided Mr Satterthwaite with a clue. Silence and insanity offer a symbolic parallel, although both preclude any further revelation. In the seventh story, “The Voice in the Dark,” a motif is found, but only because Mr Satterthwaite recalls that a chambermaid whom he had kissed forty years before had brown eyes. In a flash, he sees the truth… that cannot but strike the reader as highly implausible. The chambermaid is actually the victim’s elder sister, who became amnesiac when she suffered a blow to the head forty years ago in a famous shipwreck. The victim then saw her chance, declared her sister dead, and passed her off as her maid in order to inherit the family property. Decades later, as the elder sister’s memories returned, she avenged herself. That nobody in the sisters’ entourage should have noticed the swap beggars belief, yet Christie makes no attempt to fill the blank. Or rather, she fills it with a single image, another vision “rising up” in Mr Satterthwaite of the two sisters: “the faded old woman with grey hair, and the radiant golden-haired creature sitting in the sunshine at Cannes” (131). The uncanny vision carries no extra wisdom; nor does it exculpate one killer and condemn the other. It merely conveys an emotional impact, Mr Satterthwaite’s acknowledgement of “the wonder and pity of life” (131).

14The final story offers the most blatant subversion of the detective pattern since the investigation precedes the discovery of a corpse. Mr Satterthwaite, as he attends an amateur dance festival, deduces that the main dancer, a middle-aged woman named Anna Denham, is a former legendary Russian ballerina. Having escaped the Bolshevists with her future husband, then a dashing young adventurer, she agreed to renounce dancing and settle with him in the English countryside. As the years passed, he neglected her for a duller but younger woman; meanwhile, a former suitor of hers, a Russian artist named Sergei, has come to claim her again. By the end of the story, Anna, torn over her husband’s betrayal, chooses to leave with Sergei. When Mr Satterthwaite tries to prevent her, he sees her dancing with Mr Quin instead. The denouement, which left many readers (including my fifteen-year-old self) and critics baffled, is the following:

They [Sergei and Satterthwaite] came round the last corner—came to the deep pit and to something lying in it that had not been there before, the body of a woman lying in a wonderful pose, arms flung wide and head thrown back. A dead face and body that were triumphant and beautiful in the moonlight.
Words came back to Mr Satterthwaite dimly—Mr Quin’s words: ‘wonderful things on a rubbish heap.’ . . . He understood them now. (228-29)

15And so the story ends, with Anna’s death left unexplained. Rather, the reader is left with three explanations, each potentially backed by the narrative. Carried away by her perfect dance, her swan song, Anna stumbled and accidentally fell to her death. Or, as implied by her triumphant pose, she leapt to her death. Or Mr Quin took her life—as foreshadowed by his answer to Mr Satterthwaite’s reminder that Quin never acts directly: “Sometimes I do” (212). However, when asked by Mr Satterthwaite to confirm he was Anna’s last dancing partner, Quin only answers “I was—if you like,” refering to the fact that his face, when glimpsed by Satterthwaite, was that of a younger John Denham. Quin personifies both Eros and Thanatos, a duality which paints Anna’s death in colours equally ambivalent: fulfillment, yet escapism.

16The uncertainty that fringes the volume’s ending undermines the coherence of its narrative fabric. Not only is Anna’s death made undecipherable, but the aesthetic discourse that sublimates it runs directly counter to the ethical drive underlying the stories. If Anna’s death is accidental, then Quin’s presence becomes meaningless and the story loses its mystical sense of purpose. If it is self-slaughter, Satterthwaite’s acceptance of it jeopardizes his role as the “love detective” who previously rescued four characters—three women and a man—from suicidal ideation, each time delivering an impassionate speech on the necessity to live one’s life out. And if we ascribe the death to Quin, his mentorship of Satterthwaite, the ethical foundation of the stories, becomes much more opaque. A “disturbing story,” as summarised by Earl F. Bargaignier in The Gentle Art of Murder (94), it leaves the reader as bewildered as Mr Satterthwaite.

  • 4 It would be revisited in The Hollow, a later novel by Christie, in which sculptress Henrietta Saver (...)

17Yet it could be that in bewildering us, the story only fulfills its Modernist purpose, since bewilderment, according to Woolf, is what a Modernist short story should accomplish: “the moment when the mind loses its bearing and is ready to accept new landmarks, a new way of thinking” (Reynier 16)—here, the acceptance of death as a means to transcend the tension between art and life, vocational energy, and domestic duty. The tension is reconducted in the stories, whenever a lover’s artistic drive is at odds with his or her romantic devotion. Both in “The Face of Helen” and “The Bird with the Broken Wing,” an exceptional music amateur becomes infatuated with an average individual; in both cases they are rejected. One ends up a murderer, the other a victim. With “Harlequin’s Lane,” the tension comes to a breaking point.4

18And yet Mr Quin is meant to appear as the hopeful, if elusive, interface between love and art. We may think that his sub rosa function was to help Christie overcome the binary choices laid before her by her 1928 divorce. At the time, she attributed her husband’s desertion to her own careerism, making no mystery in her autobiography that her literary work had come between them and contributed to Archibald Christie’s desertion of his wife. The dark, hopeless mood that haunts some of the stories reflects back on this binary mindset, which constructs earthly love as an ingrained need doomed by chronological time, and vocational art as a timeless ideal, or enchantment that incurs a loss either of self or the beloved. At the same time, Mr Quin comes to embody a refusal to choose between art and love—a faith in both, a belief that they may yet coexist. Like Harlequin’s motley coat, Mr Quin divides himself between patronizing the arts and protecting the lovers. And where love fails, art still prevails. In “The Bird with the Broken Wing,” Mr Satterthwaite receives word from Mr Quin to join a country house party. There he meets the enchanting Mabel Annesley, who writes and sings her poems to the ukelele. She is married to a nondescript man, carrying on an affair with another (who, unknown to her, is planning to leave her) and gets killed by a third. Mr Satterthwaite deduces the murderer, but rues the fact that despite his friend’s warning he could not save Mabel. Mr Quin first reminds him that in deducing the culprit he has saved the other two suspects, then asks if death is “the greatest evil that can happen to anyone”:

“No,” he [Satterthwaite] admitted. “No—perhaps death is not the greatest evil…”
He remembered the blue chiffon of her dress that had seemed to him like the plumage of a bird… A bird with a broken wing…
When he looked up Mr Quin was no longer there. But he had left something behind. On the seat was a roughly fashioned bird carved out of some dim blue stone. It had the vague quality of enchantment. So said Mr Satterthwaite, and Mr Satterthwaite was a connoisseur. (Q & S 189)

  • 5 Likewise, in Three-Act Tragedy, his sympathy will go to the Jewish, foreign-looking young man whom (...)

19Today’s readers may find fault with this notion of turning the dead woman into a consolatory artefact, or with the implied meaning that, like Anna Denham, Mabel is better off dead than disenchanted. Or they may decide that the bird is Christie’s embracing of the “rough,” imperfect, open-ended form in defiance of her critics. The Quin stories certainly gave her an opportunity to move past, or beyond, the classic ending of the British whodunit. As W. H. Auden famously remarked, the genre itself could be read as a modern take on the Aristotelian model of tragedy, where a culprit must be expelled so the social community tainted by his crimes may achieve purgation. Likewise, the detective thriller, in Auden’s view, relies on “the ethical and eristic conflict between good and evil, between Us and Them.” Yet a striking feature of the Quin stories is their lack of focus on the culprits. Most of those are mediocre nonentities who either left the stage even before Mr Satterthwaite investigates or disappear half way through the narration. Hence, there is little to no sense of a community in search for purgation: the short story does not allow for the necessary build-up to one. Instead, it bolsters a sense of individuality. As he investigates, Mr Satterthwaite’s attention is divided between the specific lovers whom he succours and the radically rootless Quin who belongs to no determined milieu. While Satterthwaite himself is quite entrenched in his identity as a gentleman, his notion of class proves to be oddly porous: in the fourth story, “The Dead Harlequin” he advises an anxious young painter in love with an aristocrat to “disabuse [his] mind of some very old notions, one of which is that birth has a significance at all in our modern society” (169).5 What matters to him is not to bolster Us versus Them, or restaure lost innocence to the moneyed upper class, but to savour each chance encounter as a source of pleasure to which guilt and goodness may equally contribute.

20The best twist on the “eristic conflict between good and evil, Us and Them” occurs in the penultimate story, “The World’s End.” Mr Satterthwaite is told a tale of woe by an actress whose opal was recently stolen by a handsome young man, a poor but talented playwright. The man was arrested and de facto separated from his fiancée Naomi, an equally talented painter. Mr Satterthwaite’s mission, as conveyed to him by Mr Quin’s presence, is to unveil the real culprit and consequently serve both art and love. He is, however, unable to perform his task, since there is no culprit—or rather, the culprit is an artefact: the wooden box in which the actress used to keep her jewel. As another character demonstrates, the box turns out to be a puzzle box still holding the jewel, the actress having accidentally switched its secret compartments. Evil as a motivator for the crime needn’t be purged, since it never existed in terms of agency or intentionality; instead, the story lingers on evil as an aesthetic motif. When Naomi shows Mr Satterthwaite her portfolio, he is struck by one of her paintings:

It was a queer vorticist study of prickly pear—just recognizable as such. Grey-green with splodges of violent colour where the fruit glittered like jewels. A swirling mass of evil, fleshy—festering. Mr Satterthwaite shuddered and turned his head aside.
He found Naomi looking at him and nodding her head in comprehension.
“I know,” she said. “But it is beastly.” (194)

21The text remains elliptical, withholding any information as to what, exactly, is beastly. The reader may infer that Naomi, another character with suicide on her mind, has depicted her own despair as a corrupting influence. Yet the violent-coloured fruit are associated to jewel-like brilliance, and the allusion to vorticism makes it less easy to view the artwork in a moralistic light. Vorticism, a London-based modernist art movement, seeked to endow Cubist fragmentation with vital, not lethal, energy, and while Naomi’s fruit is “festering,” it is also “swirling” with a life of its own. Briefly, Christie appears to suspend her own moralistic stance, showing how art transcends the binary categories of good and evil, beauty and ugliness. At the end of the tale, a relieved Naomi draws another vorticist sketch, a portrait of Mr Quin: “a kaleidoscopic whirl of snowflakes with a figure in the centre” (207). She draws him as a harlequin, recycling both the swirling pattern and the discordant colours of the first picture into another expression of sheer energy—devoid of any ethical message. Her art (and Christie’s) merely conveys the idea that Mr Quin transcends the traditional dichotomy between order and disorder—that while he may be a pure spirit, there is nothing traditionally Christian about him. Mr Quin is at once a guardian angel and a spirit of chaos, offering both ultimate dissolution (death) and graspable knowledge, and only showing up to upset the mortals’ best-laid plans.

The Harlequin, a Modernist Figure of In-Betweenness

22Who or what, indeed, is Harley Quin, beyond a Harlequin pun? It quickly appears that he is no longer the zanni or comic servant of the classic Commedia dell’Arte, still to be found in Marivaux’s Jeu de l’Amour et du Hasard. Christie’s Quin is a loner, indentured to nobody and nothing but his own opaque design. For one thing, he displays none of the zanni’s earthly appetites. Though Mr Quin usually liaises with Mr Satterthwaite at the latter’s favourite restaurants, or at the table of a country inn, contrary to his friend (a gourmet “accustomed to the best cooking of continental chefs” [41]), he is never shown eating. Yet neither is he quite the romantic Harlequin promoted by the Victorian and Edwardian pantomime. Mr Quin has no official Columbine within the stories and never refers to a romantic partner; the only character with whom he appears to entertain a strong bond is Mr Satterthwaite, although the partnership is unequal, conducted strictly on Mr Quin’s terms. If anything, Quin’s increasing mentions of death, or the dead, connect him to the medieval version of Harlequin: Hellequin, a ghost demon known to haunt the wicked. Interestingly, this ghostly Arlequin is also the guise taken on by another detective of the Golden Age, Lord Peter Wimsey, when pursuing a minor antagonist in the 1933 novel Murder Must Advertise.

23Neither dead nor alive, both shadowy and multicoloured, a demonic angel with a “long, sad face” (533) Quin is indeed multifaceted. To a Modernist reader, he may recall the slender Harlequins painted by Pablo Picasso in the early twentieth century. Like Quin, and like Picasso himself, they refuse to endow one self, appearing as isolated figures even when depicted with a female companion (as in Arlequin et sa compagne, 1901). Picasso’s 1923 portrait of his friend Joaquin Salvado as Harlequin, in which he deliberately leaves part of the costume uncolourized, parallels Mr Quin’s capacity both to coalesce into visibility and slip out of perception.

  • 6 Like Quin, “[Shaitana] knows things, but what he knows, or how much he knows, can only be felt, bec (...)

24It also suggests a refusal to let the viewer commit him to a definite status. Mr Quin embodies an in-between-ness that keeps challenging Mr Satterthwaite’s stiffer sense of identity. A man used to classifying people around him, Satterthwaite fails time and again to categorize his friend, something he finds both scary and irresistibly attractive. In that respect, The Mysterious Mr Quin is an oddity in the early Christie canon: it dissolves boundaries firmly established in previous and following books. If, for instance, we compare her depiction of Mr Quin to that of Mr Shaitana, the dubious victim in Cards on the Table (published two years before the Quin anthology), common points arise. Both Quin and Shaitana are “dark” men—dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dark-faced. While in Quin’s case the effect is partly due to his fondness for standing in the shade, the repeated trope of darkness acts not only as a callback to Harlequin’s black mask, but also as a hint that Mr Quin, despite being Harley, might also be a “swarthy” man of Italian descent. Both men dress colourfully in the beholder’s eye—Mr Shaitana in Oriental garb, Mr Quin whenever he stands under a stained-glass window. Both favour half-lit interiors, where they can sit silhouetted by a chimney’s fireglow. Both are omniscient figures whose knowledge endows them with a powerful hold over their fellow beings,6 though Shaitana uses his for mental torture and Quin for benevolent purposes. And both sport a patronym that falls short of Englishness. Shaitana’s is a blatant, at the time culturally acceptable attempt to connect his “Oriental” effeminacy with his Satanic designs, later revealed by Hercule Poirot. Quin’s testifies to a more indirect, hence more interesting, refusal on Christie’s part to anglicize him wholly.

  • 7 The stories were initially divided into two volumes, both published in 1969 by Les Éditions du Masq (...)

25She could in fact have called him Quinn, an Anglo-Saxon spelling still prevalent in multiple works of fiction. Yet in crossing out the second n, she favoured a more slippery signifier: a patronym that teases a French or Spanish reading since it can be found in both countries, notably France, where it emerged as an abbreviation of Jacquin. It is significant that Christie’s French translators—there were four of them for the Quin stories7—chose to erase that semiotic ambivalence and re-anglicize “M. Quinn.” This, to my mind, was a mistake. It weakens the point made by Christie in “The Love Detectives,” the only story to provide an outsider’s point of view on Mr Quin: that his presence forces even the most insular Briton to think outside the box. The local Chief Constable, upon stealing a glance at Mr Quin, does not brand him a Dago, the contemptuous term once used for a person of Italian descent; indeed, used by “every healthy Englishman” against Mr Shaitana (Christie, Cards 10). He merely thinks, “The fellow look[s] all right. Quite a young chap. Rather dark, but not all foreign-looking” (Q & S 508). Mr Quin, to borrow Lacan’s famous definition of woman, embodies pas-tout—a being that will not commit to exist in one place and as one entity, localized in age, ethnicity, and gender.

Queering Mr Quin: Detectives in Love?

  • 8 The homosexual connotation of the word is made clear in Three-Act Tragedy, when the heroine tells M (...)
  • 9 He is indeed shown as a lithe swaying figure in dual garb: his stocky chest in a white shirt and bl (...)
  • 10 Notably in Gherardi’s 1682 series of engravings, that inspired Alain-René Lesage’s best-known farc (...)

26Christie’s gendering of both Quin and Satterthwaite also blurs the strong conservative line between manly masculinity and disreputable effeminacy. It was a surprise to find out that they barely rate a mention in J. C. Bernthal’s 2014 essay, Queering Agatha Christie. Mr Quin, it is true, is sketched out as a homme fatal—a tall dark man carrying “something terrible about him” (Q & S 230). But he is also said to be slender with a “lithe swaying figure” (227), and the descriptor queer is applied to him as lavishly as to Christie’s other effeminate characters, notably to his “queer little smile” (37).8 Interestingly, the cover illustration for the original 1930 edition chose to reflect on Quin’s hybrid nature in a way that highlights his androgynous presentation.9 Yet this queering of Quin does not carry any negative connotations, unlike that of Shaitana or Mr Ellsworthy, the self-declared pervert in Murder is Easy, who also exudes “queer magic” along with his “queer, sly, triumphant smile” (Christie, Murder 80). It merely provides an alternative mode of being, and appearing, to British manhood. Christie may not have known that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, part of the Arlequin lore showcased him as a hermaphrodite, half-dressed as a woman or able to breastfeed his child.10 She may have known that the early British pantomimes featured “an androgynous Harlequin played by a woman—Hester Santlow, Barton Booth’s wife, was a particular favourite at Drury Lane” (Leach 123). Christie leans into her own variation on the theme, one that lets Mr Quin slip back and forth into male- and female-coded portrayal: a transgressor of boundaries, who “passes by” and bypasses every fixed marker of identity.

27Likewise, Mr Satterthwaite is said to possess a dual constitution: a “masculine side” tempered by “a large share of femininity” (Q & S 2-3). Both sides fuel his aura as a protagonist. Despite his age and frailty, he can, when rescuing a damsel, race up stairs “like a young athlete” (146). Yet he walks with “nimble steps” (30), clucks like a hen (526), and his main asset is a sensitive empathy which he extends even to some of the culprits. After one tepid early Victorian romance, he is content to admire women from a distance, but shows a more focussed attention to Mr Quin’s “attractive . . . lean, strong, well-muscled” back in the 1971 story “The Harlequin Tea” (530). While “old-maidish” (192), he lacks a Miss Marple’s relentless focus on the banality of evil; nor is he, like her, an advocate of the death penalty. Mr Satterthwaite’s main trait is care, a female-coded attribute in Christie’s time, and it is as a caring man that he is summoned by Mr Quin.

28As a result, their encounters take on an emotional tone that is decidedly un-British. The emotion is filtered through Christie’s prose, made sparse by necessity, so that it too becomes undecidable. By the time she published the last Quin story in 1971, her readers may have struggled to pinpoint the subtext in the sentence “Why should that one word [harlequin] stir his heart?” (528) or the nature of Mr Satterthwaite’s “impulsive gesture” as he knocks his tea cup off the table and tells Mr Quin “Come with me. Come with me… Come with me. You must. I insist” (537). (Mr Quin, true to self, refuses.)

29Forty years earlier, the last story in the Mysterious Mr Quin series offered another shadowed clue as to the nature of their bond. At the beginning of “Harlequin’s Lane,” the two men take a walk in the eponymous lane, a charming green path nicknamed “Lovers’ Lane” by the villagers and revealed to be Mr Quin’s property. At one point, Mr Satterthwaite mentions a quotation with no direct link with the story: a sentence taken from Oscar Wilde’s 1888 tale, “The Happy Prince.” The quote is “Bring me the two most beautiful things in the city, said God,” and Mr Satterthwaite adds, “You know how it goes, eh?” (211). In Wilde’s tale, the beautiful things are the souls of an unlikely couple—a male swallow and the statue of a dead prince whom he befriended. The two paired off to bring relief and happiness to the late prince’s subjects. In so doing, the swallow forewent his yearly journey to warm Egypt and endured the frost of winter, finally embracing death after receiving permission to kiss the statue’s lips. The tale ends with God blessing the soulmates and reuniting them in the afterlife. Its critical assessment can be summarized in Kevin Kopelson’s reminder that while the bond between the male-coded protagonists can be read as Platonic friendship, it leaves ample room to be parsed as a sexless celebration of love that is “chaste, ideal, sublime, and sentimental” (24). If the quotation operates as a hypertextual hint—and the fifth story does compare Mr Satterthwaite, whose habit it is to winter in the South, to a swallow—then a parallel conclusion must be reached. Posthumous Quin and mortal Satterthwaite belong to different species, different planes of being, yet the latter obeys the former’s command and sacrifices his ease and comfort for the greater loving good. Moreover, Satterthwaite’s inner torment—that, like Henry James’s John Marcher, he wasted his life by precluding the joys of love and marriage—is repeatedly soothed by Quin’s allegation that Satterthwaite’s investigations are a labour of love. Quin goes further: in “Harlequin’s Lane,” he makes Satterthwaite the recipient of a lover’s gaze—his own, and not his own. This occurs when Satterthwaite watches Anna Denham, the ex-Russian ballerina, dancing to, or with, her death:

Mr Quin turned his head and looked back, and Mr Satterthwaite had a shock, for it was not the face of Mr Quin as he had ever seen it before. It was the face of a stranger—no, not quite a stranger. Ah! he had it now, it was the face of John Denman as it might have looked before life went too well with him. Eager, adventurous, the face at once of a boy and a lover… (Q & S 227)

30When joined by Anna’s past suitor, who laments that he “would have loved her always,” Mr Satterthwaite, shaken by his vision, protests the statement:

“How do you know?”
The Russian stared at him—at the fretful peevishness of the tone.
“How do you know?” went on Mr Satterthwaite. “It is what all lovers think—what all lovers say… There is only one lover—”
He turned and almost ran into Mr Quin. (229)

  • 11 Interestingly, when Mr Satterthwaite reappears in Three-Act Tragedy, his attempt to mention his pas (...)

31It is up to Christie’s readers to parse this epiphanic moment. Did Mr Quin reward Mr Satterthwaite by letting him share, briefly and vicariously, Anna’s past experience of being loved? Or did he borrow John Denham’s face to mask, yet express, his own devotion to Mr Satterthwaite? Is Mr Satterthwaite’s dangling cri du cœur, “There is only one lover” a metaphysical or an emotional revelation? True to its Modernist strain, the text does not say11—or rather, the entire Quin corpus implies that all is fair in love and reading.

Haut de page

Bibliographie

Auden, W. H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May 1948. Web. 8 Jan. 2023.

Baridon, Michel, and Norbert Jaunard, eds. Arlequin et ses masques. Dijon: Publications de l’université de Bourgogne, 1991. Print.

Bargaignier, Earl F. The Gentle Art of Murder: The Detective Fiction of Agatha Christie. Bowling Green: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1980. Print.

Bernthal, J. C. Queering Agatha Christie: Revisiting the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

Bowen, Elizabeth. “Truth and Fiction.” Afterthoughts: Pieces About Writing. London: Longmans/Green, 1962. Print.

Christie, Agatha. Cards on the Table. 1936. London: Fontana/Collins, 1978. Print.

---. Murder is Easy. 1939. London: Fontana/Collins, 1980. Print.

---. The Complete Quin and Satterthwaite, Love Detectives. London: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

---. An Autobiography. 1978. London: Berkley Publishing Group, 1991. Print.

Drewery Claire. Modernist Short Fiction by Women: The Liminal in Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Print.

Kopelson, Kevin. Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Print.

Leach, Robert. An Illustrated History of British Theatre and Performance. London: Routledge, 2018. Print.

Light, Allison. “Agatha Christie and Conservative Modernity.” Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars. New York: Routledge, 2013. 61-112. Print.

Osborne, Charles. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001. Print.

Reynier Christine. Virginia Woolf’s Ethics of the Short Story. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.

Serres, Michel. Le Tiers-Instruit. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Print.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Three-Act Tragedy, first published in 1934, and the title story in the volume Dead Man’s Mirror, first published in 1937. Both works feature in The Complete Quin & Satterthwaite, Love Detectives, a collection published in 2004 by HarperCollins. All quotations from the stories will be taken from this volume, henceforth abbreviated as Q & S.

2 As stipulated in S. S. Van Dine’s essay, “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” first published in The American Magazine in September 1928.

3 “I will tell you one thing—I believe in the value of impressions. In any time of crisis there is always . . . one image that remains when all else has faded” (Q & S 36). Likewise, in her essay “Modern Fiction,” Woolf famously describes the mind as besieged by “a myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel” (Drewery 92). What defines consciousness for Woolf foregrounds the detecting process in Christie’s novels, perhaps more than for any of her peers.

4 It would be revisited in The Hollow, a later novel by Christie, in which sculptress Henrietta Savernake is aghast to find that, while weeping for her dead lover, she is already modeling her grief into a new artwork.

5 Likewise, in Three-Act Tragedy, his sympathy will go to the Jewish, foreign-looking young man whom he sees as a more appropriate match for the heroine than the designated hero, the very British Sir Charles Cartwright.

6 Like Quin, “[Shaitana] knows things, but what he knows, or how much he knows, can only be felt, because he cannot himself be understood” (Bernthal 96).

7 The stories were initially divided into two volumes, both published in 1969 by Les Éditions du Masque: Le Mystérieux Mr Quinn and Mr Quinn en voyage. They were fused into a single volume in 1991. The French translators for the Quin stories—Laurence Kiefé, Gérard de Chergé, Jean-Marc Mendel, and Daniel Lemoinehave been unanimous in keeping the anglicized spelling.

8 The homosexual connotation of the word is made clear in Three-Act Tragedy, when the heroine tells Mr Satterthwaite “I like men to have affairs. It shows they’re not queer or anything” (Q & S 257). Given Satterthwaite’s canonical lack of affairs, the subtext is left to the reader’s appreciation.

9 He is indeed shown as a lithe swaying figure in dual garb: his stocky chest in a white shirt and black tie, his long slender legs in motley tights and black ballerina shoes.

10 Notably in Gherardi’s 1682 series of engravings, that inspired Alain-René Lesage’s best-known farce Colombine-Arlequin et Arlequin-Colombine (1715). In his 1981 essay Le Tiers-Instruit, French philosopher Michel Serres views Harlequin as the perfect hybrid, male and female, a body infinitely mixed and composite.

11 Interestingly, when Mr Satterthwaite reappears in Three-Act Tragedy, his attempt to mention his past history with Mr Quin is cut short, as if doomed to remain unspoken, a private utterance:“‘Once, when my car broke down and I was staying at a lonely inn—’ He got no further” (Q & S 290).

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence papier

Camille Fort, « A Shimmering Pattern of Events: Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Mr Quin and the Modernist Short Story »Journal of the Short Story in English, 79 | 2022, 43-58.

Référence électronique

Camille Fort, « A Shimmering Pattern of Events: Agatha Christie’s Mysterious Mr Quin and the Modernist Short Story »Journal of the Short Story in English [En ligne], 79 | Autumn 2022, mis en ligne le 02 avril 2024, consulté le 16 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/3897

Haut de page

Auteur

Camille Fort

Université de Picardie Jules Verne. Camille Fort is a Senior Lecturer at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France. Her research is divided between translation studies and modern and contemporary British literature. Among other works, she has supervised a special issue of Études anglaises (October-December 2011, L’Héritage du policier) on contemporary detective fiction and contributed to a radio show, “Agatha Christie : la mécanique de l’énigme,” on France Culture in August 2013. She is currently wrapping up an essay on detective fiction and language philosophy entitled Le Mot de l’énigme.

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search