Thoughts on Agatha Christie’s Mrs. Oliver

A Self-Aware Self-Insert?

‘Cards on the Table’ is a Hercule Poirot mystery that includes a female murder mystery writer named Mrs. Oliver.

She is an interesting case. She is a bumbling soul who keeps announcing that she knows who the murderer is and being wrong. She is described as a feminist who is always writing articles about how the Superintendent of Police should be a woman because their intuition is infallible. However, her intuition is regularly wrong. She isn’t mean and she does contribute a bit to solving the crime, but she is no Jessica Fletcher or Castle.

What is interesting about her is how purposely like Agatha Christie, the actual writer of the novel, she is. Her sleuth is a foreigner (a Finn, where Poirot is Belgian,) she’s married, and she admits to relying heavily on untraceable poisons.

She’s also interesting for what she says about the nature of mystery writing, mystery writers, and the difference between writing a book and solving a crime.

1930’s Pop-feminism and Character

All right, that subtitle is awfully portentous. I just mean that Mrs. Oliver hits the high notes of the Difference Feminist and is made fun of for it. Her harping on women’s intuition and changing her memories to polish her self-image tracks with the stereotype. Silly girl, doesn’t do thinky, should stick with what she knows.

On the other hand, she’s not completely wrong about everything, and the other women in the book are — well, people with histories and motives. Or at least, a variety of types. We got the cool, collected school marm who is supposed to be a murderer but is sympathetically portrayed, and then there is the skittish little schemer who plays on everyone’s heartstrings. In the realm of 1930’s views on women, Christie is probably much in line with her contemporaries, but it doesn’t hurt her characterization.

So, let’s acquit her of wanting to dunk on feminism. It feels more like she is pointing out a certain type and having fun with it.

Writing Mysteries =/= Solving Murders

The detective on the case starts telling Mrs. Oliver that she got some procedural points wrong, and she cuts him right off, declaring that her readers don’t care.

There is then a paragraph of her saying her readers ‘like untraceable poisons, damsels in distress, and big heroics.’ The details don’t matter, and she can re-furbish old plots for new stories all she wants.

I mean…she’s kind of right and kind of wrong.

Clearly, in this book, people care about the details. That’s why the detective wanted to correct her. She complains that folks in Finland keep writing her to tell her stuff she got wrong.

On the other hand, she’s wildly popular and I know from my own experience that small details only matter if you happen to know them. There’s a lot I don’t know, and so flies under the radar.

And, if I’m being honest, there are many times people complain about something not being realistic, and then either reveal that they have very wrong-headed views on the subject at hand or are nit-picking because they don’t like other things about the book. There is a point where we forgive nonsense in a book because we have bought into the fantasy and are comfortable going along for the ride.

The little speech she gives the detective ends with her saying, ‘oh, I’m boring you by talking shop, let’s move on,’ and this is bookended by her telling a witness later in the story that she is used to ‘cheating’ when it comes to murders, since she gets to change the rules of the game in her own books.

This feels like a direct jab at the Sir Arthur Conan Doyles and Patricia Cornwells of the world who think they have ‘done their research’ and can now solve crimes.

Self-insert or Parody of a Type?

Is this a loving moment of self-deprecation? A book in which Christie reminds herself not to mistake the real world for one of her books? Or is she calling out the dozens, if not hundreds, of other woman mystery writers of the era?

‘Cards on the Table’ was written in the 1930’s, which is in the Golden Age of detective fiction. GK Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers were both writing at the time, and Doyle was still alive. Many people, including a lot of women, were following in Christie’s footsteps.

I need to read up on Sayers and the other women writers of the era, but I have a feeling at least some of them would be of the opinionated type parodied by Mrs. Oliver.

Either way, the tenor of the character is kind. She means well, and her ‘intuition’ never seriously hurts anyone. She’s silly sometimes, with her empty pronouncements, and you can get a whiff of the ‘women who think they can enter a man’s world just don’t know what is involved’ moral that was popular in books until the…I’d say the 1960’s or so.

But she is obviously right about her area of expertise: people love an untraceable poison and a damsel in distress. Whether Christie meant to poke gentle fun at herself or her fellow lady mystery writers, Mrs. Oliver comes out happily unchanged and unbowed. It is a kindly ribbing, nothing more.