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THE DETECTIVE GENRE OF THE ENGLISH LITERETURE. AGATHA CHRISTIE
Atabayeva Zarnigor Bahrankizi, Samarkand state Architectural and Civil Engineering institute, Samarkand city
E-mail: sweety.zarinka@mail.ru
Annotation. This article is devoted to the "The Development of Detective genre in the English literature. Agatha Christie". The purpose was to highlight the • detective genre of world literature, to specify the most well-known writers and their famous novels of detective genre. In this article we clarified the life and works of Agatha Christie who was known as "The Queen of Crime". Her works such as "Ten Little Niggers or And then There were None", "Murder in the Orient Express", "Hercule Poirot" and "Miss Marple" and others were favorite and best-selling books of the past and our time.
Key words: detective fiction, genre, short story, novel, fiction, non-fiction, "Queens of Crime".
English literature, more restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit and language that foregrounds literariness, as opposed to ordinary language. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction, and it is poetry or prose; it can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel , short story or drama. Telling about the detective works, first of all we should ascertain: " what is the detective fiction in which itself?" Detective fiction is one of the subgenres of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which a detective- either professional or amateur- investigates a crime, often murder. [1]
Some scholars have suggested that certain ancient and religious texts carry similarities to what would later be called detective fiction. In the Old Testament story of Susanna and Elders, the account told by two witnesses breaks down when Daniels interrogates them. The author Julian Symons has commented on writers who see this is a detective story, arguing that " those who search for fragments of detection in the
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Bible and Herodotus are looking only for puzzles" and that these puzzles are not detective stories. In the play Oedipus Rex by Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles, the title character discovers the truth about his origins after cross-examining various witnesses. Although " Oedipus's enquiry is based on supernatural, pre-rational methods that are evident in , most narratives of crime until the development of Enlightenment thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries", this story, including a mystery surrounding a murder, a closed circle of suspects, and the gradual uncovering of a hidden past."[2]
As scholars mention, every genre has its flourishing period. The period of 1920s and 1930s is generally considered as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. During this period , a number of very famous writers emerged, mostly British but with a notable subset of American and New Zealand writers. Female writers constituted a major portion of notable Golden Age writers, including Agatha Christie, the most well-known of the Golden Age, among the most famous authors of any genre, of all time. Four female writers of the Golden Age are considered the four original " Queens of crime": Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngao Marsh and Margerry Allingham. Apart from Ngao Marsh (a New Zealander) they were British. During the Golden Age • Various conventions of the detective genre were standardized, and the writer Ronald Knox codified some of them in 1929, in his "Decalogue" of rules for detective fiction, among them to avoid supernatural elements, all of which were meant to guarantee that, in Knock's words, a detective story " must have as its main interest the unraveling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity which is gratified at the end ." In Golden Age detective stories, an outsider - sometimes a salaried investigator or a police officer, but often a gifted amateur - investigates a murder committed in closed environment by one of a limited number of suspects. The most famous scholars Carole Kismaric and Marvi Heiferman said that. "The golden age detective fiction began with high class amateur detectives sniffing out murderers lurking in rose gardens, down country lanes, and in picturesque villages. Many conventions of the detective-fiction genre evolved in this era, as numerous writers -from populist entertainers to respected poets - tried their hands at mystery stories." Many of the most popular books of the Golden Age were written by Agatha Christie, who produced long series of books featuring her detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, amongst others, and usually including a complex puzzle for the reader to try to unravel. Christie's novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on The Nile, And then There were None or Ten Little Niggers. Also popular were the stories featuring Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey and Van Dine's Philo Vance. [3]
Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is the most commercially successful woman writer of all time
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and probably the most widely read author of the twentieth century. A master of the murder mystery her dozens of novels, stories, and plays have been translated into more than one hundred languages and have sold a phenomenal two billion copies- a record topped only by the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare. Her drama the Mousetrap opened on the London stage in 1952 and has yet to close; it is the stories. Poirot regularly referred to the "little grey cells" of his brain; he relied on primarily on reason in solving crimes, shunning the more physical and laborious tactics of A. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and other investigators. Christie grew distinctly sour on the pompous Poirot over the years an occupational hazard for authors in the detective genre - yet she continued to crank out Poirot mysteries to meet the demands of her readers. She did, however , eliminate him from the stage versions of several of her stories, believing that Poirot was a more effective character in print. In the novel The Murder at the Vicarage Christie introduced her other well-known detective: Miss Jane Marple, a genteel, elderly spinster who resides in a rural English village . Miss Marple is many ways the antithesis of Poirot. Miss Marple works largely by intuition to solve crimes, often finding clues in village gossip. One of her most effective traits is her shrewd skepticism, which prevents from taking anyone she meets at face value. [4] •
World War II brought about a major change in Christie's life. Her husband served as an intelligence liaison officer in North Africa While Christie remained in London, working again as a volunteer dispenser. In her off hours, she was busy writing.
Christie's work for the theater has proved as enduringly popular as her fiction and as full of cleverly constructed plots and surprise endings. Most of her plays are adaptations of her own stories or novels. One such work, originally titled Ten Little Niggers and subsequently retitled Ten Little Indians, uses as a children's nursery rhyme to build suspense. Ten strangers assemble for holiday on a small island, where, one by one, they are murdered. The combination of terror and olderly predictability creates a memorable theatrical mechanism. The success of her early plays pales before the phenomenon of the Mousetrap, which is now in its sixth decade of uninterrupted performances on the London stage. Despite the success of the work, Christie received no royalties for it. She gave the rights to her nine-year-old grandson, it is estimated, has since earned well over fifteen million pounds sterling from his grandmother's gift. The year after the Mousetrapopened, Christie scored another smash with Witness for the Prosecution. [5]
Christie powers gradually declined in the decades after World War II, but she retained her towering popularity and reputation as the "Queen of Crime". In 1971, she was made a Dame of British Empire. Her last formal appearance was in 1974, at the opening of the film version of Murder in the Orient Express. As her health failed, her publishers persuaded her to release the final Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries.
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Curtain: Poirot's last Case takes the detective back to Styles Court, the location of Christie's first mystery. The death of Poirot caused a sensation, making the papers even in the People's Republic of China, and spurring the New York Times to publish, for the first time, an obituary for a fictional character. Christie herself died the following year.
Literature:
1. Anne Marie Hacht. Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature. 2009.
2. Duncan, Paul: Film Noir. Films of trust and Betrayal. Harpenden, 2000. P. 351
3. John Peck, Martin Coyle. A Brief history of English Literature. Palgrave, 2013. P. 76
4. Fiona Kelleghan. 100 Masters of Mystery and Detective fiction. Salem Press, 2001.
5. James F. English. A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. 2005.
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