Crime, Narrative and Meaning in Agatha Christie’s Interwar Fiction
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By Ewelina Agnieszka Gradwicka,
London Metropolitan University.
This dissertation examines how Agatha Christie’s interwar detective fiction illuminates the narrative foundations of criminological explanation. While Christie’s novels are often approached as entertainment, this study argues that they offer a sophisticated engagement with questions central to criminology: how crime is explained, how motive is constructed, and how moral judgement is shaped. The research problem addressed is the tendency within criminology to treat explanation as the discovery of objective facts, overlooking the role of narrative, interpretation and cultural meaning. The study adopts a qualitative, interpretive approach, combining close textual analysis with thematic reading informed by cultural criminology and narrative criminology. Selected insights from zemiology are also used to examine forms of harm that extend beyond formal legal definitions of crime. Rather than applying a formalised coding methodology, the analysis examines how Christie constructs meaning through motive, narrative structure and moral framing. Three novels form the core case studies: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and The ABC Murders. These texts are analysed in dialogue with criminological theories including narrative criminology, neutralisation theory and rational choice theory, which are used reflexively as interpretive lenses rather than explanatory tests.
The findings demonstrate that Christie consistently presents crime as a narrative phenomenon rather than a purely legal or behavioural event. Motive emerges as unstable and contingent, shaped by emotion, social context and storytelling. Explanations of crime are shown to depend on perspective, moral consensus and performative display rather than on fixed categories or objective certainty. Across the case studies, Christie reveals the limits of individualistic and rational explanations, highlighting the cultural and emotional dimensions of judgement and responsibility. A zemiological reading further shows that legally defined offences do not exhaust the physical, autonomy and relational harms represented across the novels.
The dissertation concludes that Christie’s fiction offers valuable insight for criminology by exposing the interpretive processes that underpin explanation. It recommends greater engagement with narrative and cultural analysis within criminological theory, recognising fiction as a productive site for understanding how societies make sense of crime.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21500098