A detective in a world of illusions: Stereotypes and the narrative voice in „Murder is Easy” by Agatha Christi

Abstrakt

Already the sensational novel writers of the second half of the nineteenth century renounced the stereotypical image of peaceful and idyllic provincial life, dominating in English culture at the time. This stereotype is recalled in a number of Agatha Christie’s novels, where the seemingly quiet countryside occurs to be a scene of the crime. The object of analysis in the paper is Murder is Easy (1938), one of Christie’s novels where the action of is set in the country. The narration here is carried almost exclusively from the protagonist’s point of view, who imposes various stereotypes — literary and cultural — on the observed reality (among others that of the peaceful countryside, but also its more sinister counterpart — that of country witches). The stereotypes and the clash with reality re-sult in a more complex vision of the world than that which is proposed in classical detective fiction where the crime is merely an intellectual problem.