Agatha christie, p.36
Agatha Christie, page 36
See also: The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“A Fairy in the Flat” (story; alternative titles: “Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives”; “The Affair of the Pink Pearl”; “Publicity”). See Partners in Crime (story collection)
“Faked!” See “The Case of the Distressed Lady”
A Family Murder Party. See Petits Meurtres en Famille
Fane, Walter, and Family
In Sleeping Murder, Walter Fane is a colorless solicitor who, long ago, was in love with Helen Kennedy/Halliday. He is married to Eleanor and has two adult sons, Gerald (banker) and Robert (soldier).
Fanshawe, Maria (“Ada”)
Maria Fanshawe is Tommy Beresford’s Aunt Ada, an elderly and extremely forceful care home resident who takes grim delight in outliving her friends. The name evokes Aunt Ada Doom from Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm.
Farley, Benedict
Eccentric millionaire Benedict Farley is the victim in “The Dream.” He seems to exist as the sum of his idiosyncrasies: his distinctive appearance, ancient dressing gown, and aversion to cats. These make him easy to impersonate but are also his mimic’s undoing, and the quirks are applied inconsistently.
Farr, Stephen
In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Stephen Farr is the name used by Stephen Grant. The real Farr—son of Simeon Lee’s business partner, Ebenezer Farr—has been dead for two years and Grant, Lee’s illegitimate son, is using his identity to infiltrate the family home.
Farraday, Stephen
Stephen Farraday is a careerist politician in Sparkling Cyanide, who was having an affair with Rosemary Barton. He married his wife, Lady Sandra, purely for money but is shocked, late in the day, to discover that he has fallen in love with her. His narrative arc is one of reformation.
The Fatal Alibi. See Alibi (play)
Faulkener, Jimmy
The two Jimmy Faulkeners in the Christieverse do not appear to be the same man, although both are young, upper middle-class dimwits who are exploited by villains. Captain Jimmy Faulkener in “The Crackler” is an oblivious mule for counterfeit banknotes. Jimmy Faulkener in “The Third Floor Flat” is an unwitting accomplice in setting up the murderer’s alibi.
Feminism
Christie’s relationship with feminism has been much studied. Although Christie would not have described herself as a feminist and famously claimed on her passport that her occupation was “housewife,” her work has been analyzed for its feminist potential at least since the 1980s.
In 1983, Marty S. Knepper argued that Christie should be considered “a feminist” rather than an “anti-feminist,” because her texts show that she “obviously respects women and has feminist sympathies”: most notably, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the married detectives, are equally matched and truly egalitarian—highly unusual in crime fiction (“Feminist” 383, 399). In 1999, Roberta S. Klein suggested, in the very title of her dissertation, that Christie should be subject to “a feminist reassessment.” In her authorized biography, published in 2007, Laura Thompson suggests that Christie was an “unconscious” feminist, not identifying as one but drawing on several of the ideas and principles that feminists were also communicating in her lifetime (26). Merja Makinen agrees that Christie’s fiction, although not actively seeking to contribute to feminist analysis, was written with awareness of social change and “in accord with [contemporary] feminist agendas,” savvy to “the performativity of femininity, as masquerade” (Investigating 22, 57).
Popular culture has been behind the academy, potentially due to the arch-conservatism of traditional screen adaptations. Christie was “discovered” as a feminist writer in the mainstream media around 2015, thanks in large part to a rebranding initiative from Agatha Christie Ltd. that promoted images of Christie surfing in the 1920s and reminded the public that her second husband was 16 years her junior. The populist blog Eclectic Literature published an article, “Miss Marple vs. the Mansplainers: Agatha Christie’s Feminist Detective Hero,” arguing that Christie’s use of Miss Marple over Poirot in her later novels speaks to “exhaust[ion] with male know-it-alls” (Bolin n.p.). Meanwhile, both the Daily Telegraph and BBC America proclaimed Christie a “feminist icon” (Cohen; Margolis)—the former because she was a single mother who worked and the latter because of strong female characters: Tuppence Beresford, Ariadne Oliver, and Bundle Brent.
Although none of the latter analyses stands up to academic scrutiny, scholarship is increasingly finding fresh applicability in Christie’s work. Christie’s fiction undoubtedly emphasizes women’s experiences and presents women as powerful, resourceful, often intelligent, and often flawed people—in other words, as human beings, often underestimated and undermined by their patriarchal contexts.
See also: Appointment with Death (novel); An Autobiography; Partners in Crime (story collection)
Ferguson, Mr.
Mr. Ferguson is an angry socialist in Death on the Nile, whose sense of entitlement and immense hypocrisy likely stem from his secret aristocratic roots. In reality, he is Lord Dawlish, heir to a fortune; however, this does not impress the object of his affection. The clues to his identity lie in his apparel: he wears the same old school tie as Poirot’s friend Captain Hastings (that is, Eton), and despite cheap outer clothing, he dons expensive underwear.
Ffoliot-ffoulkes, Helen. See Van Schuyler, Marie
Fictional Portrayals of Agatha Christie
Christie has appeared as a character in works of fiction across multiple media, most often dealing with her 1926 disappearance. Her extreme shyness and aversion to the limelight has had a paradoxical effect: it has made her highly attractive to audiences who want to find out her mysteries and to creators who can construct a character from a relatively blank canvas. To this end, she has been portrayed variously as intellectual, oblivious, mischievous, prudish, soppy, inquisitive, a committed feminist, an angry imperialist, demure, nymphomaniacal, and even possessed. Generally, she is presented with whatever qualities are most common for female leads at a given moment.
Novels. The first novel about Christie was Kathleen Tynan’s Agatha: The Agatha Christie Mystery, published in 1978 and filmed the next year with Vanessa Redgrave as Christie and Dustin Hoffmann as a journalist, Wally Stanton, with whom she falls in love. Describing itself as “an imaginary solution to an authentic mystery” (Tynan 5), Tynan’s novel looks at Christie’s much-publicized 1926 disappearance, which had not been discussed in any detail in her autobiography that had been published the year before. Tynan imagines friendships that Christie might have forged at the hotel in which she stayed after her disappearance and has her confronting her husband’s mistress in a dramatic manner.
In 1990, to mark Christie’s centenary, Gaylord Larsen published Dorothy and Agatha: A Mystery Novel. It has Christie working with Dorothy L. Sayers to solve a murder. A supremely American effort, its cover shows the two women drinking tea and looking disapproving, and there is little to distinguish the book beyond misapprehensions about British customs. A better-known American, Max Allan Collins, made Christie the detective in The London Blitz Murders (2004), which followed his The Titanic Murders (starring crime writer Jacques Futrelle, who went down with that ship). The Christie entry is generally considered Collins’s weakest entry in a gimmicky series. Christie has also been a girl-detective, alongside a young Alfred Hitchcock, in a series of children’s books by Ana Campoy. The Spanish book series, Agatha & Alfred, has been optioned for television. In addition, Christie has appeared as a character in two French graphic novels, Agatha (Anne Martinetti, Guillaume Lebeau, and Alexandre Franc, 2016) and Le Detection Club (Jean Harambat, 2019).
There have been many attempts to weave detective stories out of Christie’s disappearance—sometimes she appears as a detective going undercover and sometimes as the subject of the investigation. Examples include Alison Joseph’s Murder Will Out (2015, spawning a series, Agatha Christie Investigates); Roy Dimond’s Silence and Circumstance (2015); Andrew Wilson’s A Talent for Murder (2016, spawning a very popular series); and Marie Benedict’s The Mystery of Mrs. Christie (2020). Lindsay Ashford’s The Woman on the Orient Express (2016) is the most consciously literary take on the disappearance. It is set in 1928, during Christie’s first trip aboard the Orient Express, and imagines her mental state as she reflects on the events of two years prior, as she prevents another woman’s suicide.
Stage. On stage, there have been at least four musicals featuring Christie as a character. Vanishing Point, a 2014 musical by Rob Hartmann and Liv Cummins, is about three women who famously disappeared: Christie, pilot Amelia Earhart, and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. The three women appear on stage, trying to solve one another’s disappearances, and the main aim is comedy. The 2014 Korean musical Agatha is more serious. The story of an inspiring writer, who is a neighbor of Christie’s and is embroiled in a plagiarism scandal, publicity was boosted in 2015 when a pop star, Kim Ryeo-Wook, took on the male lead.
There are less ambitious productions featuring Christie as well. Mary McMahon’s Mystery on the Orient Express (2000) is a semi-musical aimed at amateur companies and offers anti-intellectual rollicks, with Christie as a kind of compere. The Mystery at Magpie Manor by Mary Green and Julia Stanley is a musical for American primary schools, set in the 1920s. Christie appears among several fictional characters in a show that pitches itself as “Downton-meets-Poirot” (“Mystery at Magpie Manor”).
Murder, Margaret and Me (2017) by Philip Meeks (originally titled Murder, Marple, and Me, 2012) was originally a one-woman show starring Janet Prince and directed by Stella Duffy, although in recent manifestations, there is a cast of three. It imagines a meeting between Christie and Margaret Rutherford, who was to play Miss Marple on screen. Although both women admired one another, both were troubled by the films for different reasons, and Meeks explores their mental conflicts.
Steven Carl McCasland’s Little Wars (2020) advertises its premise as “the most fantastical what-if dinner party imaginable.” Set on the eve of World War II in France, it features six famous writers: Christie, Gertrude Stein, Muriel Gardiner, Alice B. Toklas, Dorothy Parker, and Lillian Hellman. With humor and tension, it comments on hate crimes such as anti-Semitism and homophobia, using the unique and divergent voices of these key women writers.
Film and Television. Christie makes cameo appearances in more film and television productions than it is possible to detail, so only cases where she is a major figure are highlighted here. Although movies about the disappearance are frequently proposed, and treatments are easy to find online, only Agatha (1979), the beleaguered adaptation of Tynan’s novel by Warner Bros., has been made. This production was troubled for several reasons, including the famous difficulty of leading man Dustin Hoffman, who reportedly demanded rewrites to give his character more screen time and moral authority. There were also issues with Agatha Christie Ltd., which tried to stop the making of the film (see Street).
Christie has appeared in dramatized segments of countless television documentaries, but she has also been a central character in screen dramas. She was played by Peggy Ashcroft in Murder by the Book (1987), which also featured Ian Holm as Hercule Poirot, visiting his creator in her twilight years.
In 2004, as ITV began to promote its new series Agatha Christie’s Marple and its revamped Poirot, the BBC sought to cash in with a docudrama, Agatha Christie: A Life in Pictures. There are two Christies in this—an old one (Anna Massey) and a young one (Olivia Williams)—and almost all dialogue is taken directly from An Autobiography. The result is bizarrely static despite attempts to mine the deliberately serene autobiography for high drama and a focus on her first marriage. The move may have been inspired by Murder by the Book, which takes a great deal of its dialogue from essays and archived letters—however, the older drama adapts the material rather than transposing it into dialogue.
Christie makes appearances in all kinds of historical dramas such as the Spanish hit Gran Hotel (2011–13) and is central to a 2020 episode of CBC’s The Frankie Drake Mysteries (2017- ), where she, played by Honeysuckle Weeks, helps the detective locate a missing friend. More famously, the BBC’s Doctor Who (1962– ) features Christie in a 2008 episode. “The Unicorn and the Wasp” stars Fenella Woolgar as Christie and posits a unique explanation for her disappearance: it blames a giant alien wasp that has possessed a local vicar. One gimmick given to this episode was the inclusion, in dialogue, of around two dozen of Christie’s book titles: some (e.g., “We are facing a secret adversary”) more successfully than others (e.g., “Murder at the vicar’s rage”).
In 2017, Andrew Wilson’s A Talent for Murder and subsequent series of novels was optioned for a big-budget television series. British broadcaster Channel 5 promptly commissioned its own series of Christie-as-detective dramas, to air each Christmas. At the time of writing (January 2021), there have been three: Agatha and the Truth of Murder (set during the 1926 disappearance), Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar (set during her 1929 trip to Iraq), and Agatha and the Midnight Murders (set during the Blitz). Following the model of Netflix’s The Crown, each year’s installment has a different actor playing Christie. However, some recurring characters are consistently cast.
No Christie-as-sleuth productions are licensed or endorsed by Agatha Christie Ltd. Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson, has refused multiple “serious and potentially well-financed offers to do an Agatha Christie Investigates type series,” considering the idea an act of “trespass on her life” (qtd. in Aldridge, Screen 335–36). Inevitably, treatments for various films and miniseries exist. One that has significant traction is a series unauthorized by the estate, Young Agatha, by Rebecca Pollock and Kas Graham. Set in Devon in the 1900s, it has a teenaged Agatha Miller solving mysteries unconnected to her future novels.
Radio. Christie appears as a character in several BBC radio productions. The Mysterious Affair at Harrogate (Radio 2,11 January 1992) is an episode of The Pasadenas’ Almanac about the disappearance (a comedy musical). The Case of the Vanishing author (Radio 4, 17 June 2002), a drama by Stephen Sheridan, imagines Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, and even Sherlock Holmes joining forces to find Christie during her disappearance. Psychiatry (Radio 4,18 October 2007) is an episode of the sitcom Old Harry’s Game in which a dead woman in hell consults Christie to help solve her own murder—Christie (and Conan Doyle) simply complain that writers are not paid enough and do not help.
Between the Ears: The Impossible Book (Radio 3, 11 June 2016) by Peter Blegvad is an artistic drama about a writer who hears other writers’ voices, including Christie’s, while traveling on a train—he occupies conflicting realities. Simon Brett’s Eric the Skull (Radio 4, 22 May 2020) is a comedy drama about the foundation of the Detection Club in the late 1920s. This time, Fenella Woolgar plays Dorothy L. Sayers to Janie Dee’s Agatha Christie.
The sheer range of texts and media in which Christie has appeared as a character demonstrate that the Christie phenomenon is entirely pervasive and that there is no consensus as to her character or the tone in which she is to be presented and enjoyed.
See also: Agatha Christie Ltd.; An Autobiography; Come, Tell Me How You Live; Disappearance of Agatha Christie
Fiddlers Five (alternative titles: Fiddle de Dee; Fiddlers All; Sixpence Off; This Mortal Coil)
The original version of Fiddlers Three (1972), Christie’s final play. Fiddlers Five, originally titled This Mortal Coil, was also given alternative titles Fiddle de Dee, Sixpence Off, and Fiddlers All. The play opened in Bristol in 1971 and toured briefly. Critics were polite but not kind about this farce, which centers on a man who needs his father to live to a certain date if he is to claim a grand inheritance. Christie acknowledged the poor reviews but was highly committed to its staging—potentially for the West End—much against the wishes of her daughter.
Rosalind Hicks wrote to her mother in no uncertain terms about the damage the play could do to her reputation: not just because it is poorly written (which it undeniably is) but also because of a scene that celebrates the cunning of high earners cheating the Inland Revenue. Christie responded furiously, and it was left to her producer friend Peter Saunders to soothe damaged egos. The play was rewritten and retried as Fiddlers Three in 1972.
See also: Fiddlers Three; Hicks, Rosalind
Fiddlers Three
Christie’s final play, Fiddlers Three, is a revised version of Fiddlers Five, which had gone on tour to mediocre reviews in 1971. In a new production, directed by Allan Davis, who had supervised several changes to the plot, structure, and characters, the play starred Doris Hare in a role for which Irene Handl had been approached. It opened at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, on 1 August 1972 and although Christie hoped for a West End run, this did not happen. The play, a farce about hiding a body to avoid death duties, has rarely been staged since.
Characters: Blunt, Sally; Bogusian, Felix; Fletcher, Sam; Jones, Gina; Moss, Mr.; Nolan, Dr.; Panhacker, Henry; Panhacker, Jonathan; Trustcott, Mr.
See also: Fiddlers Five
Finch, Sally
Sally Finch is an American student on a Fulbright scholarship in Hickory Dickory Dock. A practical and efficient woman, she is also one of the more humane students in the hostel on Hickory Road and is more friendly than others to Mr. Akibombo, although in an infantilizing way. She and Len Bateson end up engaged to be married.
“Find the Cook.” See “The Adventure of the Clapham Cook”
“Finessing the King.” See Partners in Crime (story collection)
Finn, Jane
Christie started writing The Secret Adversary after overhearing a conversation about someone called Jane Fish. The name struck her as highly amusing, so she placed the scene into a novel, altering “Fish” to “Finn.” Tommy Beresford overhears the name, which he remembers because it intrigues him, and this leads him and Tuppence Cowley into a hunt for the woman discussed.
