A Study On Agatha Christie's Justice Theory

Detective stories are usually neglected by serious literary researches. However, Agatha Christie has won global renown by writing detective stories. Why? The author believes that it is because Agatha Christie is seriously researching on humanity and justice issues while writing detective stories. In order to prove this and to tentatively establish her justice theory thereafter, three of her most representative works, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None, are selected for the study. The thesis will give full revelation and assessment of Agatha Christie's ambiguous attitude toward her detectives and criminals, to her partial objection to the conventional understandings of justice, to her understanding of punishment, and centrally to her cognition of the combative pair of judicial authority and public sense of justice.The research method is divided into three stages. In the stage of work selection, attention is paid not only to the excellence of a single story, but also to a patch of outstanding stories which must be created within a short span of time. This is to ensure the persuasiveness of the existence of Agatha Christie's justice theory and the reason why the three stories are selected. In the stage of collecting Agatha Christie's judicial preferences, literary evidences are not only collected from each of the three stories, but also organized into a momentum across them where her judicial preferences are found developing rather than stable. Finally in the stage of establishing Agatha Christie's justice theory, the existing practices of contemporary detective story writers are also factored into the final establishment. Four aspects of the established theory are closely assessed.The thesis has formed following opinions. Firstly, Agatha Christie is not only writing detective stories, but also thinking and doing experiments on justice issues during the process. Secondly, Agatha Christie's justice theory is fruitful, for she has realized that an ideal main body of social justice is absent, and neither judicial authority nor public sense of justice is yet qualified for that vacancy. Thirdly, Agatha Christie's justice theory is imperfect, for instead of systematically proposing her ideal justice model, she is too submerged by pessimism about the weaknesses of her theory. Finally, Agatha Christie's relentless allusions to her understanding of justice suggests that detective story has a cross-disciplinary potential which, if studied together with justice and law, will probably prove more rewarding.