In Agatha Christie's detective novels, Jewish characters are often portrayed as greedy and suspicious outsiders. Even after the Holocaust, Christie continued to write about Jews in prejudiced ways, albeit in a more indirect form. According to University of Copenhagen historian Sofie Lene Bak, this demonstrates how popular culture can contribute to the persistence of antisemitic ideas.
Agatha Christie is one of the world's most widely read authors. Her books have sold more than two billion copies and continue to be read, republished and adapted for screen audiences around the globe.
But Christie's popular detective novels contain more than intricate murder mysteries. In a new research article, historian Sofie Lene Bak from the University of Copenhagen shows that Jewish characters in Christie's fiction are frequently depicted through antisemitic stereotypes.
At the same time, Jewish characters often serve a particular function in the plot, with readers' own potential prejudices being used to divert suspicion away from the actual perpetrator.
Surprisingly explicit
Bak first noticed the prevalence of Jewish stereotypes and prejudices when she began rereading Christie's novels as part of a research project on antisemitism after 1945.
One of the first books she revisited was Peril at End House (1932). There, readers encounter the following line: 'Rolling in money, of course. Did you see that car of his? He's a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one.'
"I was surprised by how explicit the Jewish stereotypes were, both in this novel and in a number of Christie's other works, but I think many readers simply overlook them because they are presented so naturally as part of the narrative," says Sofie Lene Bak.
According to Bak, the problem is not that fictional characters express racist views. Popular fiction from the period in which Christie wrote is full of villainous foreigners. Such characters also appear in Christie's work, but in those cases readers' suspicions are typically challenged and called into question.
"Characters are allowed to be prejudiced because that gives readers insight into who they are. What is distinctive about the antisemitic prejudices in Christie's novels is that they are not problematised. Instead, they are presented as a natural part of the world in which the stories take place."
The suspicious outsider
In several of Christie's novels, Jewish characters function not only as people within the story but also as a literary device.
"Christie often uses Jewish characters as red herrings. Readers are meant to suspect them, only to discover in the end that someone else committed the crime. But that mechanism works only if readers already associate these characters with certain negative assumptions."
According to Bak, Jewish characters are frequently portrayed as people who do not quite belong among the other characters in the novels.
"They are depicted as different or foreign. This creates a distance between them and the other characters, and this distance is essential to the role they play in the story."
Prejudices did not disappear after the Holocaust
Other scholars have argued that Christie changed her portrayal of Jewish characters after the Second World War and the Holocaust. Bak agrees that Jewish characters became far less common in her later work, but they did not disappear entirely.
"It is true that she abandoned the most overt depictions. Instead, the stereotypes became more indirect and coded."
One example is A Murder Is Announced (1950). The novel never explicitly states that Mitzi, the German cook and Holocaust survivor, is Jewish. Yet according to Bak, the references are so clear that the character can hardly be understood in any other way.
"No one in the novel likes Mitzi, and it is suggested that she suffers from paranoia and may even exaggerate the suffering she experienced in her homeland. As a result, the other characters portray her as unreliable, ungrateful and fundamentally ridiculous. It is a brutal caricature. I believe Christie intended her as a comic character, but that does not make the portrayal any less problematic."
How do prejudices survive?
The study forms part of Bak's research project, Code and Conspiracy: Antisemitism in Denmark After 1945, which explores how antisemitic ideas have managed to survive in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Christie's popular detective novels, Bak argues, illustrate a broader cultural phenomenon.
"Antisemitism did not disappear after the war. Many of these ideas became socially unacceptable, but they survived elsewhere in culture and reappeared in new forms. Agatha Christie's novels show how that process can unfold."
The fact that Christie's books are still read by millions of people today makes the issue particularly relevant, Bak adds. In recent English-language editions, some of the most offensive passages have been removed, and screen adaptations have often omitted Jewish characters altogether or substantially altered them.
But Bak does not believe censorship is the best solution.
"I am not in favour of rewriting literary works. Instead, I hope that making readers aware of these stereotypes can help us understand how they work and why they have endured for so long."
Bak's article,"Whodunit? Antisemitism as a Literary Device in the Detective Works of Agatha Christie," has been published in the journal Scandinavian Jewish Studies.
