I was a punk rock kid. I love metal, but I think punk rock is still my favorite music. It’s simple; it’s against the grain; it’s intended to get a reaction; but most of all, it strikes a responsive chord of rebellion in us all. Agatha Christie was punk rock too. It may seem like she’s about as normal as you can get these days, but in her day, she was punk rock!
She attacked high-society excess with her characters. She took the idea of the British hero, and she stood it on its head. She took the stale old carbon-copy mystery stories, and she gave them a new life. She reinvented a popular genre, so much so, that when we think mystery, we think Agatha Christie. Her style never seems to die. Her characters never seem to get stale or old. She’s lived on for almost a century, and she’ll probably go on and on and on. All of this is very much like punk rock: the rebellion, the reinvention of popular heroes, the rejiggering of cultural values, all of this is punk rock.
Punk rock isn’t just a style of music; it’s a state of mind. When someone shakes the foundations of authority, when someone threatens the status quo, when someone is revolutionary in their approach and reworks the cultural fabric of their times, they are called “punk rock” by people in the know. It’s a new standard. And Agatha Christie was punk rock.
In her day, the big mystery and adventure fiction had a big “boys own” spin to it. Mostly the baddies were evil foreigners, and the good guys were extreme right-wing nationalist vigilante types like Bulldog Drummond. This really came to my attention when Christopher Lee was interviewed about the Dennis Wheatley novels Hammer Films did movie adaptations of in the 1960s and 1970s. Christopher Lee said that the problem with the Wheatley stories was that they followed the old British fictional stereotypes of having the villains be “dirty foreigners”, while the good guys were ultra-nationalist Brits, so they had to fix that so as not to kill the potential foreign markets. Then, recently, I saw a Poirot mystery where the baddies he caught called him: “You, you, foreigner!” And that brought it all back to me.
So Agatha Christie would have grown up and began her fiction writing career around all of this ultra-nationalistic, right-wing, anti-foreigner sentiment during the run-ups to WWI and WWII, and she probably saw what it did to resident aliens as well as to tourists who were always regarded with suspicion, while an ultra-nationalistic anti-foreigner attitude pervaded throughout the land. Now, this is conjecture on my part, but it is my belief that she saw this trend in fiction and in the British national outlook (which is historical fact), and she decided to see if she could do something about it.
So what to do? Well, how about a foreign hero? He couldn’t be French or German: too obvious, and potentially objectionable. But how about a Belgian? She could get all the anti-French stuff in without the guy actually being French! So she could essentially “have her cake and eat it too” with such a move. This is also a good way to indirectly criticize her own countrymen’s views, attitudes and behaviors without having to come out and call a spade a spade, so to speak. It could all be through the experiences of someone else, and in ways everybody would recognize. And in so doing, perhaps they would recognize the way it made others feel, while also introducing a foreign hero to try to change stereotypes and general distrust. That’s what I think she was after; partially, anyway. And in any case, her choice of a hero in Poirot went against the grain in every possible way (particularly in how he was a prissy wimp). She blazed a new path to break accepted but outmoded cultural norms, and that, in itself, is extremely punk rock.
But she didn’t finish there. After making Poirot a star, she noticed that there weren’t enough stage and movie roles for older women, so she created Miss Marple to remedy that. And how many actresses have her to thank for their continued stardom? Many, many. And in so doing, she also blazed a new path to correct a perceived (and real) injustice. And that, my friends, is totally punk rock.
Oh yes, and there’s another thing she did that was extremely punk rock: When she found her husband was cheating on her, she up and disappeared for awhile, leaving everyone thinking he had bumped her off (!). She must have enjoyed herself on that one. After 11 days of much suspicion, finger-pointing, and whispered scandalous gossip, Agatha was found alive and well at a hotel in Yorkshire, probably reveling in her perfect revenge plot. Now that’s totally punk rock!
Plus, she and her first husband are the first Brits to ever surf standing up! Check Wikipedia: It’s true! Plus, you can add whatever other facts you like about her to that same webpage, and then they’ll be true too! (Like, say, the following:) She was probably also the first Brit to ever skateboard down a cement staircase handrail, and the first the snowboard down a cliff face, but there’s no concrete historical evidence to support it. But I’ll bet she did it anyway! And she was also the first woman to do a reverse double-cork in a half-pipe, or so I hear…
Yes, Agatha Christie stuff may seem old hat to many of us, but put in into historical context, and it is undeniable punk rock. And like the best of punk rock, like the Ramones the Sex Pistols, and The Clash, it will be around and loved forever.
