Agatha Christie Writes Alone

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Agatha Christie had a very productive WW2. This is the start of Queens of Crime at War, a six part series looking at what the best writers from the golden age of detective fiction did once that period came to an end with the start of the Second World War. Thanks to my guests: — J.C. Bernthal is an Agatha Christie scholar and the author of Queering Agatha Christie. His website is jcbernthal.com and he is on Twitter as @jcbernthal — Martin Edwards is a crime writer and the author of, among many other books, The Golden Age of Murder. Find out more about all his work at martinedwardsbooks.com or via his Twitter as @medwardsbooks There are no spoilers in this episode. Books referenced: — The Golden Age of Murder by Martin Edwards — Agatha Christie Goes To War edited by Rebecca Mills and J.C. Bernthal — And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie — Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie — Murder Must Appetise by Harry Keating — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie — The ABC Murders by Agatha Christie — Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie — One, Two Buckle, My Shoe by Agatha Christie — An Autobiography by Agatha Christie — Sad Cypress by Agatha Christie — Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie — N or M? by Agatha Christie — The Body in the Library by Agatha Christie — The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie — Partners in Crime by Agatha Christie — Bletchley Park: The Codebreakers of Station X by Michael Smith — The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie — Curtain by Agatha Christie — Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie — The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie — Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie — A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie — The Hollow by Agatha Christie — Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/agathachristiewritesalonetranscript. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. The original music for this series, "The Case Of The Black Stormcloud", was created by Martin Zaltz Austwick. Find out more about his work at martinzaltzaustwick.wordpress.com. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). Blackwell’s is a UK bookselling chain that ships internationally at no extra charge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the start of Queens of Crime at War, a series looking at what the best writers
0:28.2	from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction did once that period came to an end with the
0:33.0	start of the Second World War in 1939. There are six episodes each devoted to a
0:39.8	different novelist who had made an impact during the heyday of the classic who
0:43.7	done it. These stories combine the personal and the professional because the
0:49.6	war touched every part of these women's lives as it did for everyone else. Each
0:54.9	week for the next six weeks, I'll be telling you the story of what the
0:59.0	Queens of Crime did when war arrived and utterly changed the way they and their
1:04.1	readers thought about crime writing.
1:14.8	As Britain was heading towards war at the end of the 1930s, something other than
1:20.7	just the post-World War I piece was coming to a close.
1:39.6	This is Martin Edwards, the author of among many other excellent books, The Golden Age of Murder,
1:46.1	which is a brilliant nonfiction work about the popular crime fiction of the
1:50.1	interwar period. I asked him to help me gauge the mood among the leading figures in
1:55.1	what we now call the Golden Age of Detective Fiction as the political situation in
1:59.6	Europe was worsening through the 1930s. I think the crime writers probably
2:05.3	reflected the general attitudes of the day that the majority I would guess don't
2:12.9	know for sure were fervently hoping that war wouldn't return. But we do see signs in
2:19.3	some of the books reading between the lines that there was fear. There are of
2:23.3	course references to the dictators Hitler, Mussolini, start to get name-checked in
2:29.8	novels and you get this idea of the altruistic crime in the 1930s, this idea that
2:35.5	in certain circumstances very exceptionally a murder can be justified if it's
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