ABSTRACT
Agatha Christie is often described in terms antithetical to the concerns of this book. Rather than the transgressive world of the fantastic, hers is the rational world of detective fiction, where social order is restored through the solving of the crime; rather than radical or feminist, she is socially and politically conservative; rather than the formal experimentation of the modernists, her work is known for its establishment of highly formulaic genre conventions. Although more recent criticism has contested all of these claims, they nonetheless constitute the dominant account of Christie’s work. Yet fantastic elements recur throughout her writing. During the 1920s, as Christie emerged as the most celebrated writer of “Golden Age” detective fiction, she also published fiction featuring supernatural subjects including ghosts, mediums, and uncanny premonitions.
