SOURCE: "Agatha Christie: Modern and Modernist," in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, Western Illinois University, 1990, pp. 120-34.

In the following essay, the reviewers argue that Christie's writing is more complex than critics credit her.

Agatha Christie's position in the critical discourse surrounding the detective story is an anomalous one. While Christie is the best known and most popular writer of detective fiction in this century, she has rarely been analyzed with the kind of rigor and attention that such a position would ordinarily entail. Christie's relationship to modernism, the dominant discourse of the "high" literature of her day, has been particularly slighted. Christie's position as serious artist, as not only chronologically modern but aesthetically modernist, is obscured by the view of her work that has now become canonical. This normative position on Christie is crystallized in David Grossvogel's Mystery and Its...