“How much I have loved that part of the world”: Agatha Christie and her mysteries in the Middle East

Date

2025

Authors

Singh, Alicia

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Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

University Of Victoria

Abstract

During her lifetime, famous British author Agatha Christie, most known for her mystery novels, had set several of her mystery novels in the Middle East. This project is an examination of Christie’s perception of the Middle East through these books. For the purpose of this project, I studied four of these stories, Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1937), Appointment with Death (1938), and They Came to Baghdad (1951). I found that although Christie incorporates subtle criticisms of certain Orientalist views, she ignores others, and fails to criticize British colonialism in the Middle East as a whole within her novels.

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Keywords

Agatha Christie, Orientalism, colonialism, Middle East, novels

Citation