Wartime Knitting in Agatha Christie’s N or M ?

Abstract Agatha Christie’s N or M? (1941) has received scarce critical attention despite the increasing academic discussion about the British Queens of Golden Age crime fiction. This, as Phyllis Lassner or Gill Plain argue, is a major lapse in the criticism of the genre, because the war novels by Golden Age female writers can demonstrate both the experimentation of the narrative form and the genre’s applicability to negotiate wartime concerns. N or M? focuses on the increasing paranoia about fifth columnists and the impact of WWII on everyday realities. To foreground the entanglement of the domestic and covert state operations through the counter-espionage mission of the Beresfords, Christie experiments with the fusion of spy fiction and the whodunit to subvert the traditional portrait of the spy by making Tuppence, a middle-aged housewife by now, but camouflaged as a knitting widow, the superior one. The novel also interrogates stereotypical assumptions about marginalized groups and negotiates new forms of patriotism by deconstructing propagandistic ideals of patriotic femininity. Therefore, this paper contends that Tuppence’s knitting provides insights into the competing discourses about women and their agency while also underscoring their contribution to the meaning making of the banal and the insignificant, eventually flaunted in the heroic power of the color magenta. (RZS)