- Title
- Putting people in jail, putting people in books: author characters in Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett
- Creator
- Gulddal, Jesper
- Relation
- The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms p. 545-555
- Relation
- XXI. Congress of the ICLA - Proceedings, Volume 4
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/9783110642032-041
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2021
- Description
- The use of authors as fictional characters is a shared feature of two novels by authors who are often seen as diametrical opposites: Agatha Christie’s Death in the Clouds (1935) and Dashiell Hammett’s The Dain Curse (1928–1929). This article argues that the fictional authors have significant implications for our understanding of the two novels, not only because they serve as mediums for reflection on the detection genre and its conventions, but also, more importantly, because they initiate a complex interplay between conflicting forms of authority – a game of truth and fiction that threatens the authority of the detective protagonist and thereby calls into question the authoritative self-interpretation of the mystery plot as presented in the form of the detective’s solution. The article presents a comparative analysis of two writers who are rarely studied together and may seem to have little in common, embodying as they do two distinctive styles of detective fiction. As the analysis shows, the close proximity of detectives and authors in both novels makes for an important and overlooked connection between them, bringing to light a set of shared epistemological ironies.
- Subject
- Agatha Christie; authors as characters; Dashiell Hammett; detective fiction; metafiction
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1434805
- Identifier
- uon:39512
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783110641486
- Language
- eng
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