The social function of the detective fiction of the Golden Age

Résumé

The aim of this paper is to identify the precise nature of the ideology, (or the social function, to look at the matter in another light), underlying the crime stories of the Golden Age, taking Agatha Christie as the prototypical figure of that School, a position held by much of the criticism on crime fiction. Crime fiction is characterised by two major trends: a majority trend which has dominated the genre since its inception and which has a conservative social function, and a minority trend which is deemed a relatively recent development and whose goal is to use the genre as a tool for social criticism. Agatha Christie typifies the former, conservative stance. In addition to identifying the components of Christie’s ideological stance, the paper will attempt to identify the linguistic means by which Christie gets her ideological message across and covertly positions the reader so that he unconsciously identifies with the ideology on which her novels are founded. The objective is justified by the fact that television in some countries is ‘dominated’ nowadays by detective films and other types of serials whose ideological base is that to be found in prototypical Christie. Thus television may be considered as an instantiation of what Althusser terms Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), namely a social institution exerting social control by inculcating and perpetuating ideological practices.