3. Gemstones and Paste

Stories about emeralds, diamonds, rubies, and other gemstones also do different cultural work from stories about pearls. For Agatha Christie in particular, it is coloured stones which matter rather than the pearls in which Patricia Wentworth is so invested. Partly this may be because the price of gemstones was perceived to have risen after the Second World War while the value of pearls had fallen; mainly however it is because Christie has a more complex and ambivalent view of femininity than Wentworth’s and coloured stones convey complexity and nuance better than the supposed purity and simplicity of pearls. Although the Bible may say that the price of a good woman is above rubies, in Christie the price of a bad woman often is a ruby, and the same suspicion could apply to diamonds. If stories about pearls are typically about marriage, stories about gemstones are more often about sex, and while pearls must be dived for, the mining of gemstones was even more hazardous and exploitative and the mechanics of trading and selling them even more transactional. The theft of gemstones is still almost always a crime against women, but stories about stolen emeralds, rubies, sapphires and diamonds show us a darker world and more dubious characters than stories about stolen pearl necklaces, and leave us wondering not only about the value of the stones themselves but also about what their owners are worth. Mention of stolen jewels is also a way of paying homage to arguably the foundational text of all detective fiction, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, and we are thus implicitly invited to understand these texts as considered interventions in the history of a genre.