About the lecture

In this lecture, we explore the 'golden age' of detective fiction and the work of Agatha Christie, focusing on: (i) the surge in popularity of detective novels in the interwar years, (ii) the shift in form to the novel, (iii) the rise in prominence of women writers, (iv) detective fiction as a coping mechanism for the senseless loss experienced during World War I, (v) the character of Poirot, and (vi) how The Murder of Roger Ackroyd challenges the reader and the genre of detective fiction as a whole.

About the lecturer

Dr Christopher Pittard joined the University of Portsmouth in 2009, having held previous teaching positions at Newcastle University and the University of Exeter. His main research focus is on the popular culture of the nineteenth century, especially the emergence of popular genres in the Victorian fin de siecle and detective fiction in particular. His monograph, Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction, considers how such fictions (and the periodicals in which they appeared) engaged with ideas of material and social purity, ranging from Sherlock Holmes cleaning the face of criminality in “The Man with the Twisted Lip” to the moral policing carried out by the Social Purity movements and late Victorian antivivisection campaigns. His publications in this area include discussions of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Morrison, Fergus Hume, and of the Strand Magazine more widely.