8. Agatha Christie in Southern Africa

In 1922, Agatha Christie accompanied her first husband on a year-long commercial tour of the Dominions, to promote the upcoming British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The first port of call was South Africa, where the Christies’ stay unexpectedly coincided with a labor crisis that threatened to unhinge the Union government and the imperial mining industry, and that later formed the backdrop for Agatha’s fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit. The only one of Christie’s books to be set in sub-Saharan Africa, it introduced various imperial themes that Christie would later utilize in her better-known mysteries set in the Middle East, and narrative devices that she would perfect in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But though the book was a product of a very particular context, it was the masking of that context that would resonate most for Christie and her readers—specifically, by creating new imperial outlets to offset domestic anxieties, and employing racialized tropes to stabilize gender uncertainty. This chapter examines the relationship between Christie’s imperial imaginary and lived experience, situated against the post-World War I backdrop of an expanding market in detective fiction and a contracting demand for female professionalism.