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Murder, Mass Culture, and the Feminine: A View from the 4.50 from
Paddington
Angela Devas
To cite this Article Devas, Angela(2002) 'Murder, Mass Culture, and the Feminine: A View from the 4.50 from Paddington',
Feminist Media Studies, 2: 2, 251 265
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14680770220150890
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Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2002
Murder, Mass Culture, and the Feminine:
A View from the 4.50 from Paddington
Angela Devas
The seductive appeal of the feminine has long provided a metaphor for the
addictive and dangerous appeal of mass culture, but women within the location
of mass culture have not so readily accepted this place. The feminisation of
certain popular texts provides an opportunity to analyse the way they provide
an understanding of the marginalisation of women and how that marginalisa-
tion may be resisted while still locating women within acceptably feminine
parameters. This paper examines how a popular text4.50 from Paddington, by
the British crime ction writer Agatha Christieallows the inscription of an
alternative version of female subjectivity, which places it within the praxis of
knowledge, power, and reasoning, while continuing to operate within a tra-
ditional discourse of femininity.
Distinctions of taste and culture, while more varied and ssiparous than in
pre-postmodernist times, have not disappeared; hierarchies of television, litera-
ture, and lm still retain a particular status, even if much of this is a sub-cultural
or youth-associated prestige (see Sarah Thornton 1995). What is of interest here
is not the particular texts or practices that constitute the masculine or the
feminine, but that such gendered binary oppositions continue to hold sway.
1
In
such an opposition, the place accorded to the feminine remains constant,
forever made to bear the composite marks of passivity, mystication, and
vulgarity (Patrice Petro 1986: 16).
Andreas Huyssen (1986) claims that the trajectory of modernism itself was
based on a distanciation of the masculinist avant-garde from the pulpy feminine
of mass culture, the latter an indispensable other to the former, providing
the necessary correlative to modernisms claims of authority, progressive-
ness, and superiority. However, with the advent of postmodernism and
feminist interventions, mass culture has lost its pejorative status as the femi-
nine. As Huyssen suggests, If anything, a kind of reverse statement would
make more sense: certain forms of mass culture, with their obsession with
gendered violence, are more of a threat to women than to men
(1986: 62). Huyssen does not elaborate, beyond a brief reference to the mas-
culinist valorisation of violence, on the differences within mass culture
that allow a recategorisation of some of its texts and practices, while leaving
others rmly located within the feminine.
2
Furthermore, the existence of
this oppositionality is not removed by a repositioning of the cultural objects;
the maintenance of difference and distinction is dependent on the migratory
possibilities of cultural practices (see Pierre Bourdieu [1979] 1984). The eternal
feminine seems eternally capable of inhabiting different cultural spaces
and making them her own. Tania Modleski (1991) demonstrates in her critique
ISSN 1468-0777 print/ISSN 1471-5902 online/02/020251-15 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1468077022015089 0
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252 Devas
of Jean Baudrillards (1983) revisionist version of mass culture that merely
inverting the notion of the passive, inert mass from the corrupting to the
resistant does not do the feminist cause any favour. The delight that Bau-
drillard manifests in the implosion of meaning in the social means that femi-
ninity is again yoked to entropy, passivity, and formlessness, with any feminist
politics of difference also disappearing into this mass. As Petro (1986) argues,
the contrast between television and lm is one arena where such an opposition
is clearly mapped out. Film studies, as the analysis of discrete, separate texts,
with its emphasis on cool, intellectual spectatorship, is considered more aca-
demically coherent and more orderly than its counterpart, television studies,
with its emphasis on the domestic, its messy and frequently indiscrete texts,
and its image of consumer passivity.
The relationship of women to mass culture is clearly not only a question of
metaphor, but also of social practice. Women and men are consumers of mass
culture and also its producers. As studies of soap operas (see Ien Ang 1985;
Christine Gledhill 1997) have shown, texts are polysemic and resist easy cate-
gorisations of resistant, progressive, or reactionary. Texts that appeal to women
cannot just appeal to a mass and undifferentiated category of women, but must
cater to selective markets that in turn will be situated within culturally hier-
archised boundaries. The organising principle behind the authoring of a text
can indicate its cultural respectability or otherwise.
3
Agatha Christie is so well known that television productions of her work fall
into the remit of her authorship. The Agatha Christie name and a photograph
of Joan Hickson as Miss Marple dominate the cover for the video of 4.50 from
Paddington. The television productions, subsequently made available by mail
order video, are situated in the feminised territory of the middlebrow, the
nostalgic, and the cosy, suitable for family viewing. The rst television
programme of the series 4.50 from Paddington was broadcast in the UK
on Christmas Day, 1989, on BBC1. Like Christies novels, the television
series remains enduringly popular. In this paper I will be discussing
three Christie texts: the novel 4.50 from Paddington, rst published in 1957;
the television transmission 4.50 from Paddington, starring Joan Hickson; and
the lm Murder, She Said (1961), directed by George Pollock, starring
Margaret Rutherford. I shall refer to the novel as the book, the television
transmission as the video, and Murder, She Said as the lm. The book and
the lm follow a very similar plot; the video tidies up some of the more
glaring loose ends that a rereading of the plot uncovers. In line with all the
series starring Joan Hickson, the detective is Inspector Slack, who is uncoopera-
tive and resentful of Miss Marples help. In the book, Inspector Craddock is
less dismissive. Most of Christies books are still in print, and the video is
available as part of a series of 14, all relatively faithful adaptations of the
novels, and all featuring Miss Marple. The lm, Murder, She Said, departs quite
substantially from the book. Two of the characters, Mrs McGillycuddy and
Lucy Eyelesbarrow, are elided into Miss Marple herself, who does her own
sleuthing at Rutherford Hall. In the lm, Miss Marple is provided with a male
helper, a timid librarian and potential romantic attachment. Other additions
and omissions are also made, generally to raise the comic potential of Margaret
Rutherfords character, although it does stay within the genre of detective story
lm.
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Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 253
Detective ction as mass culture
In a hierarchical structure of cultural production, detective ction sits uneasily
on the cusp between the accepted and the debased; it is a literary genre, but it
is not marketed as ction per se. It may be sold through downmarket outlets such
as supermarkets and chain stores, but it also occupies a substantial section in
bookshops. It is not associated exclusively with a particular class or gender, in
a way that, for example, romantic ction may be bracketed.
4
It is interesting to
note that in her foray into the reading habits of romantic ction readers, Janice
Radway ([1984] 1987) does not locate herself as one of those readers. Indeed, she
distances herself from the practice of such a reading public by her empiricist
methodology, situating herself as the academic investigating the Other.
5
In
contrast, many who write on detective ction are happy to place themselves,
implicitly or otherwise, as active readers of the genre (see Wystan H. Auden
[1948] 1988; Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker 1991; Sally Munt 1994).
Cultural critics have argued that the golden age of detective ction lasted
approximately from 1920 to 1939 (Munt 1994; Colin Watson [1971] 1979). During
this period, critical reection on the genre began to appear (see Robin Winks
[1948] 1988; Raymond Chandler [1934] 1988). The era of the detective story set
among the English middle classes was later challenged and superseded by the
American hard-boiled detective tradition.
6
However, sales of the Miss Marple
videos and Agatha Christies books suggest that classical, golden-age ction still
retains a huge popularity, culturally located as feminised and middlebrow. This
contrasts with the cultural or sub-cultural status given to contemporary feminist
hard-boiled detective ction (Munt 1994).
7
Many of the early critics of golden-age ction share a wry acknowledgement
of the stimulating and entertaining properties of the genre, Auden going so far
as to compare it to an addiction:
For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like
tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: rstly, the intensity of the
cravingif I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective
story, for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have nished it. (Auden
[1948] 1988: 15)
Edmund Wilson compares the detective story novice to a potential drug
addict: So the opium smoker tells the novice not to mind if the rst pipe makes
him sick (1988: 39). Opium smokers are often represented as orientalised,
reclining and degenerate, the antithesis of the active, muscular Englishman. An
addiction to reading detective stories becomes a rejection of masculinity and its
values, positioning the reader as feminised and passive.
There is often an anxiety among these writers to identify the highbrow authors
of the genre or to situate the readers as professionals. Auden again:
The most curious fact about the detective story is that it makes its greatest
appeal precisely to those classes of people who are most immune to other forms
of daydream literature. The typical detective story addict is a doctor or clergy-
man or scientist or artist, i.e., a fairly successful professional man with intellec-
tual interests and well-read in his own eld, who could never stomach the
Saturday Evening Post or True Confessions or movie magazines or comics. (Auden
[1948] 1988: 23)
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254 Devas
What is interesting here is the insistent disavowal of any liking for what could
be considered feminine genres or their feminine readers. In this account, detec-
tive ction may come out of mass culture, but it must also be distinguished from
it, cordoned off from its deleterious reach:
Book reviewers settled into an attitude of good-natured, if slightly supercilious,
tolerance. They, too, had fallen in with the notion of detective stories being in a
class quite separate from legitimate literature and therefore not subject to the
ordinary rules of criticism. (Watson [1971] 1979: 98)
If this paradigm is reversed, it is possible to see the acceptance given to
detective ction, a literature separated from the mainstream, but yet still
literature, still worthy of being reviewed in the kind of broadsheet newspapers
which cater to a literary sensibility. Watson also goes on to use the metaphor of
addiction, but following Auden, he uses a vice that a professional man might be
understood to fall fordrink. Erik Routley likens the detective story to necess-
ary (self) abuse when he suggests, You can defend the detective story only if
you admit sabbaticals for the serious-minded. And you are bound to admit that
detective ction can do harm to people who abuse it and treat all life as a
sabbatical (1988: 177). The detective story becomes an almost pornographic
release, over-indulgence in which could sap a mans energies. It can be used, like
a drug or sex, but only within carefully drawn boundaries and by the serious-
minded, those of a particular position or social standing.
Joseph Krutch claims that he once assumed the detective story was read only
by weary statesmen on the one hand and by the barely literate on the other
(1988: 41). In saying this, he is exaggerating the dichotic popularity of the genre
in order to place it more rmly in the realm of the respectable, and by
implication, the masculine. Krutch deals with its propensity to formulaicism by
linking detective ction to the equally convention-bound structures of great
literature, invoking William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen,
among others. Similarly, in the beginning of an article, Jacques Barzun invokes
this troubling phenomenon: because detective stories, short or long, are conven-
tionally called cheap entertainment, and yet are read by talented people, absurd
theories have been evolved about their signicance and secret function (1988:
144). Barzun identies a literary readership anxious to see a justication for their
habit; he is as equally ready to supply one, to help remove the taint of cheap
entertainment that aligns this practice of reading with the sordid and the
feminine. Instead it must be elevated, if possible to quasi-classical status. Barzun
argues, the detective story is a sequence of ve parts, for which it is a pity that
Greek names cannot at this late date be invented ([1948] 1988: 147; italics mine).
Crime ction could be presented as an intellectual puzzle (Ronald Knox 1988),
a morality tale (Winks [1948] 1988), or, indeed, it could be written by academics
themselves.
8
However, even devotees of the genre evince some unease in their
discussion; the title of Watsons book, Snobbery with Violence ([1971] 1979), sums
up the ironic distancing that he feels impelled to adopt.
The golden-age school of detective ction has its detractors, not only by virtue
of its alleged trivialisation of literature, but also because of the feminisation of
the genre. The creation of a new reading and viewing public, between the two
world wars, provided increased opportunities for women to consume ction,
whether as lms or novels, a situation that was the basis of public anxiety about
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Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 255
the role of such entertainment (Alison Light 1991). Crime ction, while reso-
lutely middlebrow in its appeal, nevertheless had a cultural respectability
lacking in other genres. Many of the most well-known and successful golden-age
detective writers were womenAgatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell,
Dorothy Sayers, and Margery Allinghama fact that was often played down by
some of the more traditional writers on crime ction (see Ernest Mandel 1984;
Watson [1971] 1979). Wilson insists, I feel it is probably irrelevant to mention
that I enjoyed The Burning Court by John Dickson Carr, more than the novels of
any of these ladies (1988: 37; italics mine). It may be irrelevant, but not unneces-
sary, for it helps to hierarchise the genre and disparage its female practitioners
while allowing a grudging acknowledgement of a particular male author.
The eagerness of writers such as Auden to redeem the detective novel stems
partly from its excoriation by respected literary theorists, such as Queenie Leavis
and her Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), but it also appears because the
increasing feminisation of the genre contributed to public anxieties about crime.
Golden-age writers were responsible for creating the world of Mayhem Parva
(Watson [1971] 1979), a ctionalised version of middle-class Englishness charac-
terised by a crime, usually a murder, that takes place within the settled milieu
of the English bourgeoisie. People know their place and for the most part are
settled securely and condently within it. This setting may be disturbed by the
arrival of an upstart foreigner or the nouveau riche, who were often
depicted as murderers among lesser novelists than Christie. The prime motives
for murder are usually love and money, with fear of blackmail often as a
follow-up. Inheritance or lack of it functions as a key factor in the transference
of wealth (Shaw and Vanacker 1991). Women could be expected to inherit
money and thus become murderers, victims, or suspects.
Despite this unease about the feminisation of the genre in the golden age,
Light claims:
Crime ction was one place within the more popular literatures that
middlebrow and highbrow could meet, and where both men and women of
the middle classes could be united in despising romantic literature Regardless
of how many women wrote detective ction between the wars, it was still
considered to be a masculine form, mainly read by men. (1991: 162)
In classic detective ction, the society in which these crimes are committed is
stable, prosperous, and represented as far removed from real criminality;
murder is the ultimate crime. The criminal presents a persona where she or he
continues as a sentient bourgeois being, obeying all the codes of their class, until
their nal unmasking. Light argues, it is not physical disguise so much as
psychological disguise which is potentially pathological It is within the
charmed circle of insiders that the criminal must be sought (1991: 94). The
process of arrest, trial, and sentencing takes place after the closure of the
narrative. The detective may have some scope to offer alternative forms of
justice, for she or he is usually placed within the same society and broadly
speaking shares its system of values. The criminals also come from this same
stratum of society and operate as one of us; servants are rarely implicated in
these sorts of murders. The murder destabilises the genteel morals of the gentry
and pseudo-gentry, but it is a murder committed for all the right social reasons
(John Clarke 1996). Challenging this assumption, Mandel (1984) analyses golden-
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256 Devas
age detective stories using the Marxist notion of alienation amongst the bour-
geoisie. He credits the detective story with a powerful and controlling inuence
in the maintenance of ruling-class ideology, an ideology from which he and a
select coterie of fellow users/readers are exempt. Mandel claims that, the
common ideology of the original and classical detective story plays a power-
ful integrative role among all but extremely critical and sophisticated readers (1984:
47; italics mine). To sum up, then, detective ction has typically been attacked
from the political right for its assumed formulaic worthlessness and from the left
for its allegedly pernicious role in upholding the class structure.
One of the most trenchant attacks on golden-age detective ction comes from
Raymond Chandler:
Down these mean streets a man must go who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The
detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is
everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual
man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct,
by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. (cited in
Mandel 1984: 35)
Chandler ([1934] 1988) argues against the cosy complacency of the Home
Counties and the genteel murder. The detective must be active, walking the
streets, a person of the city, not of the suburbs or the commuter train. He must
be heterosexual, a complete man, and classless. In other words, he must not
be the dilettante or the dandy or the foreigner of many of the interwar novels.
9
Moreover, he must be a man; it was inconceivable for Chandler to envisage
women walking those mean streets other than for nefarious sexual activities. Not
only did the golden age provide feminised men, but also female detectives, for
example, Harriet Vane (Sayers), Mrs Adela Lestrange (Mitchell), and Miss
Marple herself, usurping the role of the hero and taking on that masculinised
identity for themselves.
Many of the writers on the golden age are keen to posit the world of
Mayhem Parva as an essentially conservative one. It is a world composed
exclusively of the upper or upper-middle classes, where servants know their
place, and situated in an idealised version of a rural and unchanging England
(see Clarke 1996; Mandel 1984; Watson [1971] 1979). Any genre can be difcult
to generalise about. It may often be necessary to delineate the outlines, rather
than to call attention to the many particulars of difference that may be uncov-
ered by an examination of specic texts. Nevertheless, as I hope I have demon-
strated, some of the dismissal of this literature may be seen in part as a reaction
to what some perceived as its feminisation.
Light (1991) re-examines the supposed conservatism of Christies books and
provides an altogether different reading. Light concentrates her analysis on
Christies novels between the wars, when Hercule Poirot was her serial detec-
tive. I would argue that much of what Light says about Christie remains
pertinent to her later, post-Second World War writing. Light discounts the usual
criticism of the snobbishness of Christies novels and instead locates her as a
more egalitarian writer. Christie does not dwell affectingly on the mannerisms
and way of life of a cast of upper-class characters who are drawn exclusively
from an aristocratic milieu, a world for which her readers would forever be
denied access. Instead, she tends to positively represent solidly middle-class
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Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 257
communities. At no time does she suggest that she is antagonistic to the
emerging middle class that is living in new suburban developments. Light
argues that Christie is a more modernist writer than she is given credit for.
Unlike many of her contemporaries, Christie does not see the upper classes, their
houses, and their lifestyle through the lens of nostalgia or loss. She eschews the
idea of a society based on aristocratic privilege, where that social class values
and beliefs are unhesitatingly accepted as the ideal. In At Bertrams Hotel, for
instance, it is the imposing Edwardian hotel itself, steeped in pre-war aristocratic
grandeur and tradition, that comes under suspicion. It is too uncannily perfect.
Much of the potential wealth of the Crackenthorpe family in 4.50 from
Paddington comes from the land that surrounds the house, land that could be
sold to developers.
10
In none of the texts does this gure as a future tragedy, a
despoliation of the countryside and a desecration of rural England; it is merely
a fact of life. The ugly Crackenthorpe mansion, Rutherford Hall, is caught
between the railway lineof paramount importance to the plotand the
encroaching suburbia of the nearest town. The mansion is surrounded by a high
wall. The isolation of the property and the eccentric will which does not allow
Mr Crackenthorpe to dispose of the capital or the house do allow him to indulge
in an outdated patriarchal lifestyle in which he bullies his daughter, Emma. At
the end of the book, although her father is not dead, Emma is set free. In the
video and book, she goes on a cruise, and it is hinted that her father will die
soon, leaving her nancially independent. Houses in Christie novels are not
necessarily great country mansions, but may be pleasant villas, modern houses,
or in the case of 4.50 from Paddington, a crumbling, Victorian, mock-baronial,
miniature Windsor Castle. The video presents a more tidied-up and attractive
version than the book, but it is still not a beautiful country house and the family
is middle class.
In classic detective ction, the criminal has to act out her or his part until the
end. Christie is an expert in unmasking the readers complacency at attempting
to spot the likely candidate, for it will frequently be an outsider from the
accepted circle of suspects, most notoriously, of course, in The Murder of Roger
Ackroyd. All the characters must present a bourgeois facade, a potential for
deception. In 4.50 from Paddington, Harolds bank is failing and he has an
unsatisfactory marriage, Cedric is a dubious artist, Alfreds business is on the
shady side of the law and he is running short of money, and Brian Eastley, an
ex-RAF pilot, is unable to settle down.
11
Very often, as in 4.50 from Paddington,
it is the apparently sanest and most normal gure who emerges as the murderer.
Christie exposes the fragile facade of the middle classes and the terror that they
feel about not being able to keep up appearances.
The woman detective
Although ctional female detectives have existed since 1866 (Munt 1994: 5),
they have often occupied an ambivalent position in their role. Many of the
traditional qualities that may be associated with the detective are often perceived
as masculine. A detective novel concerns elements that can be seen as related to
the masculine sphere, such as rationality and authority, with the detective
responsible for the restoration of justice and the imposition of moral order. The
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258 Devas
persona of the detective embodies the ability to enact these qualities, and
therefore the obvious candidate for this kind of role is a man. A male detective
has the necessary gendered qualities to ensure that these processes can be
carried out (a self-fullling rationale!). Where the detective is a woman, there is
therefore a disturbance in the natural state of affairs and the boundaries of the
genre itself are called into question.
Following up on this point, it is worth considering how the classic golden-age
detective novel operates on two levels at the same time:
The rationality of the detective repeats the thinking of the criminal; the crimi-
nals plot to commit the crime and evade discovery are shadowed by the
detectives tracing of the plot and its exposure in the nal act. There are thus two
complementary and dialectical aspects of the plot developing simultaneously, in
which the readers attention moves forward to the resolution of the crime and
backwards towards its origins. In this way, total control is established over the
crime at the heart of the action. (Shaw and Vanacker 1991: 16)
The detective must be capable of ratiocination, for it is their responsibility to
uncover what has taken place and to point towards a nal resolution. The
detective is thus crucial to the development of both narrative drives; they must
reconstruct the original crime and construct the narrative revelation of the
criminal. The detective occupies an almost god-like position in the narrative, for
they hold the overall narrative power. They may share a few insights with the
police or the readers but it is only they who can tell the full story. At points in
all three Christie texts, Miss Marple makes it clear that she knows who did it,
and she is merely waiting for proof:
Close-up of Miss Marple, followed by reaction shot of Inspector Craddock:
Miss Marple: I think I know who our murderer isthe difculty is trying to get
him to show his face. (4.50 from Paddington 1989)
This is a powerful position for a female character to occupy; she is a possessor
of knowledge that is denied to the other characters and to the reader/viewer.
This is an unsuitable job for a woman, in terms of constructions of femininity
and narrative importance. Even if denied much of a physically active role, as
Miss Marple is in the book and the video, the detective maintains the narratives
action, a role normally associated with a masculine hero. When a female
detective takes on this role, the kinds of action she can initiate will inevitably be
different; she will appear to lack some of the necessary attributes of a real
(male) detective. Christies creation, Miss Marple, operates by turning these
supposed shortcomings into advantages.
Shaw and Vanacker (1991) argue that Christie overcomes this narrative
obstacle by utilising the qualities of femininity, old age, and spinsterhood that
are so frequently denigrated in society and turning them into the very attributes
that make Miss Marple such an excellent investigator. As with any stereotype,
there may be permutations and alternatives. In her discussion of soap operas,
Modleski (1997) argues for the narrative power of the wise woman. However,
what she is referring to is a more traditional role of woman as mother, a
paradigm from which the spinster is excluded. Aspects of the wise old crone are
nevertheless recongured to suit the sensibilities of the middle-class drawing
room. Miss Marples knowledge of the minutiae of village life and its channels
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of communication, often in the form of gossip, provides her with a particular
type of understanding about human nature. However, she does not use gossip
for its own sake, as do the women in Murder at the Vicarage, who pass on
salacious titbits and misread the evidence. Marple uses gossip to collect infor-
mation and to expose indiscretions pertinent to her investigation. She also uses
her persona of the little old lady to deect suspicion and encourage personal
condences. In addition, her class position provides her with a shrewd under-
standing of the genteel as well as the vulgar. In the following speech from the
video, she demonstrates her powers of observation and deduction, interlaced
with the necessary female hesitancy:
Miss Marple: Ive been thinking about her clothes and so on.
Duckham: Yes?
Miss Marple: It occurred to meand this is merely a suggestion you under-
standthat her clothes imply someone who has times when she has money and
times when she hasnt. When she has, she buys good things and when she
hasnt, she buys throwaway thingsnow that might mean someone whos in
and out of work a lot but isnt feckless, and the most notorious profession for
that is, of course, the theatre. (4.50 from Paddington 1989)
The detective must be detached but a participating member of their social
surroundings. Miss Marple is centrally located in the village, both socially and
geographically; in the video, for example, she lives right next to the village shop
and post ofce. The detective must also have a certain sensibility to understand
the nuances of middle-class mores but remain unsentimental in their dispen-
sation of justice. They cannot be over-burdened by domestic ties. Marple is
single, elderly, and middle class, but she does not look back nostalgically at the
past; she keeps up to date with developments in her village and elsewhere. Her
conservatism is rooted in her view of human nature as unchanging and her
uninching notion of justice, duty, and morality. In all these respects, Miss
Marple operates by embracing those things usually associated with spinsterhood
and middle-classness, using them to her advantage. She has more leisure time
than many women and sufcient income to socialise. In addition, being an old
lady affords her entrance to different homes in the village further aeld, such
as Rutherford Hall, some of which she might not have been granted access to if
she were younger.
Comparison of the three texts
All three texts start with a middle-aged woman who has been Christmas
shopping in London and is getting on a train at Paddington to go home. On the
train, she reads a crime story, falls asleep briey, and then wakes up. A train
going in the same direction passes hers; the blind in one of the carriages shoots
up and the woman witnesses a murder, a man strangling a woman. She tells the
ticket collector, who humours her, assuming she has been asleep and has dreamt
it all. At her destination, she goes to the police and a search of the tracks and the
other train is organised; no body is found. The woman who witnessed the
murder is assumed to be dotty, deluded, or dreamingall supposedly normal
attributes of the feminine condition, especially the middle-aged oneand
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260 Devas
denitely wasting police time. The woman knows that she witnessed a murder
but cannot get the authorities to believe her.
There are variations of this opening scenario in the three texts. In the book and
the video, it is Miss Marples friend, Mrs McGillycuddy, on the train; in the lm,
it is Miss Marple herself. The lm and the video both have close-ups of the crime
novel: Death has Windows by Michael Southcott (in the lm), Unsolved by Bruce
Graeme (in the video).
12
The cover shows a womans dead body, depicting a
somewhat more lurid version of the detective story than those written by
Christie herself, but nevertheless, as I have already argued above, a suitably
respectable form of reading for a middle-aged female passenger.
13
The guard
assumes that the woman had been reading about a murder, fell asleep, and
dreamt about it. In all three cases, the woman is adamant that what she saw was
real; there is no ambivalence about this in the texts. Later, she is justied by the
successful discovery of a real body, lodged inside a sarcophagus in an outbuild-
ing at Rutherford Hall. With Miss Marples involvement, of course, there is
never any doubt that this would happen, and the discovery of the body merely
allows for the arrival of the police at what is now accepted (rather late in the
day) as a murder enquiry.
What interests me here is the way that in the narrative the travelling woman
is positioned by the authorities and by the texts, and the contrast this provides
with the positioning of women in society. As Munt (1994) notes, From the
golden age onwards female authors have been making the social situation of
women a primary theme in crime ction, exposing the harmful effects of
masculinity and femininity (1994: 204). This is not an attempt to claim Christie,
Miss Marple, or 4.50 from Paddington for feminism; rather I consider it to be
important to examine what the texts may offer as a particular kind of account of
feminine experience and subjectivity. In all three texts, the reader is invited to
identify with the woman on the train. She is middle-aged, she is tired, she has
been shopping; she is not an obvious candidate for any kind of adventure as the
camera follows her along the platform and into the train. The lm and the book
are both laced with humour. In the lm, an elderly gentleman who is about to
bite into his sandwich becomes unexpectedly aware of her gaze and puts down
his sandwich in embarrassment. A little girl in another carriage makes a face at
Miss Marple and Miss Marple retaliates. The book offers a wry sketch of the
ustered Mrs McGillycuddy and her lack of municence as she tips the porter
who bested her to the train. The humour is affectionate, inviting the reader to
share in her predicament rather than to mock. In each case, the woman has the
anonymity of elderly middle-class respectability through which we, the reader/
audience, are invited to share the experience of her initial shock, horror, and
disbelief as she witnesses the killing. The emphasis remains on the woman, and
in none of the cases is the reader or viewer invited to dwell on the voyeurism
of the death. The anxiety of the woman is centred on the need to tell, to alert the
authorities, and to see action taken. Her distress arises not only from the event,
but also because of the disbelief of the police and the railway authorities.
In the video and the book, it is Mrs McGillycuddys arrival at Miss Marples
house that allows for the restoration of the womans credibility. Miss Marple
knows. In the classic, golden-age detective story, knowledge is crucial; the
detectives version is the denitive one. The detective, as in this case, is
frequently in a position to respond when other forces of law and order refuse to
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Feminist Media Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 261
act. Miss Marple does not doubt what her friend tells her. Her friend is not like
a lot of elderly women travelling around, fully convinced that they had
unmasked communist plots, were in danger of being murdered, saw ying
saucers and secret space ships, and reported murders that had never taken
place (Christie [1957] 1960: 9). Here, women, hysteria, and mass culture are
linked together; the text does not challenge this inscription of femininity. There
is no attempt to interrogate the politics of women and madness; instead, there
is a resolute individuation of a particular woman and her experiences. The video
cuts from Mrs McGillycuddy stumbling off to look for the guard on the
shrieking train to a close-up of Miss Marples knitting on her lap. The camera
pans out slowly to reveal her sitting in front of the re, a picture of domesticity
and order. Of course, Miss Marple is a serial detective, so the audience will have
every expectation that she will believe Mrs McGillycuddy and set in motion the
necessary investigation. Miss Marple says to Inspector Slack, She saw what she
saw (4.50 from Paddington 1989). As she argues with Inspector Slack over his
refusal to continue the investigation any further, there is a medium close-up of
Miss Marple, her mouth set in a grim line.
Miss Marples desire to uncover the murder seems stymied at this stage. In the
book and the video, she is too frail to undertake the necessary search for the
body. Mrs McGillycuddy is despatched from the narrative (Scotland in the
video, Ceylon in the book) to reappear at the denouement. In her place, Miss
Marple calls in Lucy Eyelesbarrow, an independent, well-educated, and intelli-
gent woman who believes Miss Marples account, subsequently taking up a post
at Rutherford Hall. Eyelesbarrow uses her golf practice as a ruse to search the
grounds and nds the body in a sarcophagus.
The three women between them witness, believe, investigate, and uncover a
crime, a crime that was dismissed by the police as never having taken place. As
such, the women challenge an accepted notion of feminine knowledge and
action. It is not a challenge that is commensurate with any kind of feminist
discourse, but nevertheless it is a speaking out that repudiates their assigned
place in a patriarchal culture where women are silenced, disbelieved, and
discouraged from action. The women themselves are located within the parame-
ters of acceptable femininity. Elspeth McGillycuddy is solid, unglamorous, and
unimaginative, but it is these very qualities that make her such an excellent
witness. At one time, Lucy Eyelesbarrow had the chance to be a brilliant
academic; however, in addition to scholarly brilliance, [she] had a core of good
sound common sense. She could not fail to observe that a life of academic
distinction was singularly ill rewarded (Christie 1960: 25). Instead, Eyelesbar-
row became a career domestic, turning what is generally regarded as drudgery
into an amusing and protable way of life. She is represented as forward
thinking enough to abandon any snobbery over the idea of servitude and to take
on the role of servant-at-large, utilising traditional feminine skills of cooking,
cleaning, and people maintenance to secure a lucrative living. Miss Marple is the
traditional spinster on the exteriordithery, sweet, and gossipybut she uses
this as a cover for her shrewdness and investigative prowess. Although each
woman does not defy conventional notions of appropriate middle-class feminine
behaviour, they are nonetheless able to operate successfully by using their
classed and gendered positions to provide them with a cover.
The texts themselves are feminised; women are the chief initiators of the
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action and most of the narrative takes place in the home, Rutherford Hall, which
is presented as a dysfunctional family home with an outdated patriarch at its
head.
14
Emma, the daughter, is seen as nice but somewhat ineffectual. The
brothers are pompous (Harold in all versions), seedy (Alfred in the book), sad
(Alfred in the video), a has-been ghter pilot (Brian Eastley in all versions),
amboyant but shallow (Cedric in all versions). The sarcophagus acts as a
metaphor for the house: old, ugly, and lled with the dead. Lucy nds the
corpse, Miss Marple nds the murderer, and Mrs McGillycuddy provides the
eyewitness account. Lucys arrival acts as a catalyst upon the household; in the
book and the video, she is propositioned in one way or another by all the men,
but at the end settles for Brian Eastley, for she will be able to take him in hand.
Marriage is only tangentially connected to romance. It is instead seen as the next
utilitarian job for Lucy. In the video, Brian is required to ght and capture the
murderer, who is threatening everybody with a gun, before Lucy can be seen to
acquiesce in his proposal. However, even this is undercut by Miss Marples
observations to Cedric as she watches them in long shot strolling on the lawn:
Miss Marple: Shes not in love with him yet, of courseI rather think shes more
attracted to youbut shell marry him and make of him what she wants and
then shell fall in love with him (4.50 from Paddington 1989)
In the lm, the passenger on the train is Miss Marple herself. She must deal
with the disbelief of the railway guard and Inspector Craddock. By the time
Inspector Craddock comes to see her, it is two days after the incident. Miss
Marple asks him to sit him down in the armchair while she remains standing.
His rst attempt, however, is thwarted because he sits on a ball of wool and the
knitting needles. He is initially disempowered by the paraphernalia of feminine
domesticity. At rst Miss Marple is jovial, until Inspector Craddock reveals that
he does not believe her story; he believes what she witnessed was a
honeymooning couple. There is a shot of Miss Marple from the waist up, her
hands behind her back, looking down at Inspector Craddock, saying, I may be
what is termed a spinster, but I do know the difference between horseplay and
murder (Murder, She Said 1961). Spinsters and respectable women are not
presumed to know about sex. Mrs McGillycuddy is equally supposed to be
ignorant about the difference between sex and murder. The texts, with their
insistence on the reality of the womans vision, refute the metonymic reduction
of woman to her sexuality, whether as woman to sex or spinster to sexlessness.
The woman is given credence for what she sees.
What is valued in the texts is common sense; in the video, it is elevated to
quasi-sexual proportions. Cedric the artist falls in love with Lucy:
Cedric: I never realised before that common sense is as powerful an instinct as
love, hatred, or patriotism.
Miss Marple: How very commonsensical of you to realise that. (4.50 from
Paddington 1989)
Lucy Eyelesbarrows common sense lies in her ability and efciency at the
domestic artsshe is an excellent cook, among other skillsand her ability to
capitalise on these talents. She eschews Cedric as a future mate because of his
licentiousness, preferring the more malleable Brian and his motherless son. Her
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common sense revels in making order. In a scene from the video, Lucy is in the
kitchen washing up, and Cedric approaches her:
Cedric: What a frightening woman you are Miss Eyelesbarrow; out of chaos you
make order and light, a goddess in sensible shoes and skin like a Manet or a
Tissot (4.50 from Paddington 1989)
Aspects of femininity, such as coping, caring, and clearing up, are here
prioritised; a traditional discourse of femininity still holds sway, but it insists on
a construction of woman that allows a space for more than the conventionally
sexualised and domestic attributes of the Other. The restorative, home-making
skills of women are not trivialised and demeaned but celebrated almost as an art
form, thus both elevating her role while at the same time more rmly securing
her within it.
The reading of the three texts of 4.50 from Paddington that I offer here does not
seek to reclaim these texts as necessarily feminist, but it allows a particular
ctional form, one that sits comfortably in the mainstream, to be read from a
gendered perspective. Christies oeuvres continue to be located within the
middlebrow and the feminine and lack the iconicity of more overtly feminist
contemporary detective heroines. However, as Munt (1994) argues, Perhaps it
is more efcacious to examine those specic cliches imbuing crime ction which,
possibly within an overall conformity, can be appropriated by feminists for
political ends. (1994: 197).
What I have sought to argue in this paper is that any radical potential that can
be read from these texts emerges from an appropriation of traditional femininity,
a femininity that, in its search for justice, repositions itself as active and able to
speak. The various texts of 4.50 from Paddington provide a site for a rebuttal of
the silenced or hysteric woman and allow her a place of belief, action, and
investigation, albeit within the prescribed limits of the genre.
Notes
1. Indeed, Patrice Petro (1986) demonstrates that it was cinema that was coded as
dangerous, seductive, and feminine in the early part of the twentieth century.
2. In fact, Huyssen (1986) collapses his point about texts into one about male control of
the production of mass culture.
3. Soap operas are a case in point, as they are unauthored; there is no single gure
that can be clearly delineated as being responsible for the text.
4. Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose is an exception, as are other books that use the
format in a self-consciously literary way.
5. This is a stance that was critiqued by Ang (1996) and by Radway ([1984] 1987) herself
in her introduction to the British edition.
6. For example, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald.
7. The woman detective has become much more of a staple in present-day detective
ction. See, for example, a discussion of Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky in Patricia E.
Johnson (1994).
8. For example, G. D. H. and Margaret Cole, Dorothy Sayers, Ronald Knox; see Watson
([1971] 1979) for a discussion of respectable academics writing whodunits.
9. For instance, the upper-class and snobbish Lord Peter Wimsey (Dorothy Sayers), the
ineffectual-looking Albert Campion (Margery Allingham), or a small, vain egghead
like Hercule Poirot (Christie).
10. The familys name is Ackenthorpe in the lm Murder, She Said (1961).
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11. Alfred in the video is presented as a much more sympathetic character.
12. Both covers hint at the future direction of the plot; Death has Windows refers to what
Miss Marple has witnessed and will see through and uncover; Unsolved has Mrs
McGillycuddys gloves and glasses in close-up on the cover, as she will not be able
to solve the puzzle, but her friend Miss Marple will.
13. Christie frequently introduced a self-referential angle into her books. See Light (1991)
and Shaw and Vanacker (1991).
14. See Light (1991: 102) for a discussion of Christies dislike of the patriarchal family.
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Revised Edition. London: Eyre Methuen.
Wilson, Edmund. 1988. Who Cares who Killed Roger Ackroyd, in Robin Winks (ed.)
Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 3540. Revised Edition. Woodstock:
Foul Play Press.
Winks, Robin (ed.). [1948] 1988. Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Revised
Edition. Woodstock: Foul Play Press.
Angela Devas is working on secondment for two years to the Art, Design and
Communication Learning and Teaching Subject Centre, based at the University of
Brighton. Her research interests include gender, nationalism, and cultural studies; her
work on gender, religion, and class is due to be published in the forthcoming book
Relocating Britishness. Devas is currently researching media pedagogy in higher
education. E-mail: a.devas@bton.ac.uk
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