Sleuthing from the Margins: 
Agatha Christie’s Marple and Poirot 
as the Detecting Other
Bojana Vujin, Sonja Veselinović
University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English, Dr Zorana Đinđića 2, Novi 
Sad, Serbia
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6769-5199, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6877-5222
bojana.vujin@ff.uns.ac.rs, sonja.veselinovic@ff.uns.ac.rs
Despite their central position in the canon of detective fiction, Agatha Christie’s 
most famous characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, occupy an ex-centric 
position in their respective fictional worlds. Both sleuths can be interpreted as 
marginalized Others and as such challenge the normative assumptions of the 
society in which they live. Miss Marple’s marginalization is primarily reflected 
in her gender, her amateur detective work, and her marital status, while Poirot’s 
Otherness is implied by his foreignness, his effeminacy and his neurodivergence. 
Both characters can also be interpreted as asexual and analyzed as straight-
passing queers. This article explores how Christie uses her detectives’ status as 
Other to gently challenge the era’s dominant ideas about authority, sexuality, 
gender and morality. The analysis focuses primarily on the works The Murder 
at the Vicarage, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, “The Double Clue” and Hallowe’en 
Party and their film and television adaptations to examine both the textual and 
subtextual instances of marginalization, and the various attempts to keep the 
Other within the confines of normative identity.
Keywords: English literature / detective novel / Christie, Agatha / Miss Marple  / Hercule 
Poirot / marginalization / the Other
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Introduction
Recent criticism (Rowland; Plain; Makinen; Bernthal) shows that 
Agatha Christie’s innovations with regard to the detective genre can 
be observed from narrative, social, cultural, and feminist perspectives, 
to name but a few most important ones. Still, one of the most original 
aspects of her work are her two main detective characters, the elderly 
spinster Miss Marple and the funny little foreigner Hercule Poirot, 
who are based not only on the social context of the period (the genteel 
interbellum era which saw the publication of Christie’s most celebrated 
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works), but also on a plethora of literary and non-literary intertextual 
relations. The two detectives are clearly positioned as marginalized in 
the society which nevertheless needs them to re-establish the disrupt-
ed order. Without explicitly questioning social and political norms of 
the turbulent period in which she was creating, Christie still points 
at the necessity of a search for alternative authority figures. The nar-
rative thus constantly re-examines the two sleuths, facing them with 
official, accepted authorities and occasionally treating them as objects 
of scorn and ridicule. Christie playfully uses both conspicuous (Poirot) 
and unremarkable (Marple) Otherness as a corrective counterpart to 
the dominant, masculine discourses. Although her novels reflect the 
period’s prevailing views on key social and moral issues through the 
characters who represent the pillars of society, Christie’s narrative still 
dialogically engages with the Other, by depicting characters who may 
seem to be socially subversive, but who actually provide a different, 
even transgressive, perspective. These dominant, normative views are 
challenged in Christie’s narrative by the fact, as emphasized by J. C. 
Bernthal, that “such figures as doctors, solicitors and politicians are sta-
tistically more prone to homicide in their work than are cross-dressers, 
homosexuals, adulterers and people from foreign countries or religious 
backgrounds that are not protestant” (Bernthal 78). Conservatism that 
is usually ascribed to Christie thus mostly stems from selective reading, 
that is, from taking the narrators’ and characters’ views to be those of 
the author, and from disregarding dissonant voices. This is to be ex-
pected within the framework of genre literature: the detective novel’s 
formulaic structure of crime and investigation places the reader in a 
comfortable position where they are rarely expected to detect social 
and cultural ideologies, let alone the narrative’s ironic distancing from 
those ideologies. Nevertheless, as exemplified in The Murder of Roger 
Ackroyd (1926), Christie shows the importance of who is speaking, so it 
can be deduced that this does not refer only to the facts of the crime, 
but also to the articulation of social rules, limitations, and freedoms.
Poirot and Marple also represent Otherness in terms of the con-
ventional heterosexual family unit, since they are an independent, 
unaligned element of the community, a fact that is even more interest-
ing given that large families feature heavily in Christie’s work. In Alison 
Light’s words, “[t]he disavowal of a romantic masculinity and its heroic 
performance in the public work of action” in Christie’s novels is an 
obvious matter of disdain even for some contemporary adaptors (Light 
75), so it is not surprising that Raymond Chandler bemoaned the femi-
nization of the detective genre in England, which was made to appeal 
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to “the flustered old ladiesof both sexes (or no sex) and almost all 
ages” (qtd. in Light 75). The “no sex” part is particularly telling, clearly 
showing that certain readers saw a threat in what can otherwise be clas-
sified as a rather discreet intervention on Christie’s part regarding the 
genre’s legitimacy and social relations in the fictional world. A male 
detective more concerned with his appearance than with the charms of 
the fairer sex is a direct threat to the image of hegemonic masculinity 
of the British Empire, and if foreignness is added to the mixture, that 
image is doubly threatened. Representation of women not as objects 
of desire, but as agents, especially agents who resist sexualization and 
are yet quite aware of the particulars of the sexual dynamics around 
them, can be interpreted as a creative use of the term “surplus woman,” 
quite prevalent in the 1920s. Taking into account what Marion Shaw 
and Sabine Vanacker, Gill Plain, and Susan Rowland wrote on the 
subject, Merja Makinen states that “Miss Marple should be viewed 
within a context of cultural concern about the lone woman” (Makinen 
45). This type of female Otherness is particularly threatening to the 
patriarchy, because female privacy and sexuality remain unknown and 
uncontrolled. In patriarchal societies, women’s financial and profes-
sional independence, or their refusal to engage in conventional marital 
and familial relationships, are severely limited or completely neutral-
ized through sexual control and policing. Christie sometimes depicts 
the detective genre’s staple of femme fatale as a seemingly powerful, but 
essentially victimized woman (“Triangle at Rhodes,” 1937; Evil Under 
the Sun, 1941). Poirot, too, challenges the social mores of the time 
by being flamboyantly Other: he is an effeminate, neurodivergent for-
eigner who does not fit in with the social image of the heroic, masculine 
detective in service of the Empire, and, by being “clearly the reverse of 
the masculine and English Holmes” (Knight 90), he also questions the 
literary norms of the period. Both Poirot and Marple thus represent 
marginalized identities, and yet they are the unmistakable moral supe-
riors to superficially wholesome, but essentially repugnant perpetra-
tors of the novels’ many crimes. Therefore, the two characters are both 
eccentric and ex-centric. In this article, we will show how Christie uses 
her two detectives to challenge the dominant authorities and systems 
of thought, even if those challenges usually remain confined to the level 
of subtext. We will also touch upon some film and television adapta-
tions in order to explore the ways those subtextual challenges rise to the 
surface or leave the text altogether, thus undermining the idea of mar-
ginalization in an attempt to force the characters into normative roles.
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Spinsterhood as transgressive femininity: Miss Marple
By placing her female sleuth into a sexually undefined zone, Agatha 
Christie stresses her independence and her non-participation in the web 
of human relations she observes. As Miss Marple has no personal inter-
est in these relations, she is uniquely relevant for the disrupted order 
of the world, even as she herself stays out of its domain. Miss Marple 
is thus an author figure, much earlier than Ariadne Oliver. It is then 
not surprising that Juliette Wells makes a connection between Miss 
Marple and Jane Austen through cultural imagination of “Aunt Jane” 
(Wells 199–219). On the one hand, biopics tend to pad up Austen’s 
biography with unfulfilled romances and depict her writing career as a 
consolation prize, unable to accept an unmarried woman as a cultural 
icon. On the other hand, as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar show, the 
portrayal of both entrepreneurial and passive women is an ambivalent 
representation of Austen’s attitude toward her own authorship (Gilbert 
and Gubar 146–183). It could be said that Christie, too, projects her 
own authorial authority and manipulative view of story, narration, and 
characters onto the character of Miss Marple, hiding behind more or 
less stereotypical depictions of writers like Ariadne Oliver or Raymond 
West. Miss Marple’s behavior is steeped in performativity, conforming 
to the accepted social expectations regarding gender, age, and class, but 
the novels’ narrators point to the irony and distancing inherent in this 
performance. This is already noticed by Leonard Clement, the vicar 
who serves as the narrator of the first novel featuring Miss Marple, 
The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), while A Caribbean Mystery (1964) 
demonstrates that even basic communication can be seen as acting. 
The latter’s opening lines show Miss Marple in “a routine with which 
she was well acquainted”: an elderly man, Major Palgrave in this case, 
tells her of his past adventures. Humorously and ironically, the narrator 
explains: “Miss Marple had bestowed on all of them the same gentle 
charity. She had sat attentively, inclining her head from time to time in 
gentle agreement, thinking her own thoughts and enjoying what there 
was to enjoy: in this case the deep blue of a Caribbean Sea” (Christie, 
Caribbean Mystery 1).
Although her mannerisms echo the cultural idea of an elderly 
English spinster, Miss Marple often slips out of her role and reveals 
that she is in possession of knowledge and control. Therefore, per-
formativity is present even in her approach to crime, her directing of 
scenes and manipulation of other characters through the selection and 
presentation of the information she uncovers. Also, since the reveal 
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of the truth and the unmasking of the perpetrator often come with 
no concrete evidence, half of Miss Marple stories use traps and stag-
ing to arrive at the solution (e.g., 4.50 from Paddington, 1957). In 
The Murder at the Vicarage even the murder itself is practically stage-
directed for the old lady who notices everything, as a scene observed 
from “the danger point of Miss Marple’s garden” (22). This element 
is also evident in Sir Henry Clithering’s excited words in A Murder 
Is Announced (1950): “Once more a murder is announcedfor the 
benefit and enjoyment of Miss Marple” (61). In both The Thirteen 
Problems (1932), which introduced the character of Miss Marple 
(the collection featured short stories published in fiction magazines 
between 1927 and 1930), and The Murder at the Vicarage, Christie 
demonstrates her male characters’ condescending attitude towards 
Miss Marple and consequent role reversal, because the one who knows 
moreMarpleis shown as the dominant figure, despite that conde-
scension. Thus, when the vicar objects to gossip, Marple replies: “You 
are so unworldly. I’m afraid that observing human nature for as long 
as I have done, one gets not to expect very much from it” (Christie, 
Murder at the Vicarage 18). When Colonel Melchett needs to talk to 
Miss Marple and asks about her reliability, the vicar says: “She has 
a powerful imagination and systematically thinks the worst of every 
one” (59). The Colonel, however, makes the same mistake as the other 
male characters, starting with Raymond West: he bases his opinion of 
Miss Marple on everything that is performative about herher house, 
her salon, her appearance. According to Makinen, the repeated details 
about her appearance (pink cheeks, fluffy knitting, meandering talk) 
“point to an awareness of elderly femininity as a form or masquerade, 
a performance that lives up to expectations in order to gain its own 
advantages” (Makinen 58). Therefore, even the concepts of privacy 
and domesticity can be questioned, especially considering Makinen’s 
conclusion that “Miss Marple’s masquerade points beyond her own 
individual identity to femininity as a whole” (58).
This stereotypical gender performance is almost didactically empha-
sized by Christie through Melchett’s mocking words: “The typical 
elderly spinster, in fact … I ought to know the breed by now” (Christie, 
Murder at the Vicarage 59). Upon seeing Marple’s small drawing room, 
he exclaims: “A lady’s room, eh, Clement?” (60). This statement shows 
that he is confident in his knowledge about both public and private 
domains and depicts him as a keeper of order who thinks he sees through 
both people and their environments. However, Christie shows a modern 
world where such convictions indicate outdated preconceptions about 
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gender and class, which only serve to cloud one’s judgement. In her 
detective novels, the characters’ feeling of disorientation remains even 
after the crime is solved and the order is restored, reflecting numerous 
social and political changes of the interbellum period. Indeed, the inves-
tigation itself often echoes the acknowledgment of the changed social 
structures, behaviors, or moral norms, or, as Light states:
The instabilities which these popular murders set in motion bear a direct rela-
tionship to the existential crises which torment the writers of high culture: 
the obsession with unstable identities, the ultimate unknowability of others, 
the sense of guilt which accompanies civilisation, and the concomitant effects 
which such destabilisation has upon the certainties of realist narrativeall 
find their modified parallel in Christie. (Light 88)
Male authority figures can thus be seen as symbolic of the disrupted, 
ineffective old order, while marginalized voices, represented though 
social unremarkables like Miss Marple, actually seem to be the more 
reasonable ones and it is them who are crucial to the solution. Unlike 
his wife, the vicar misjudges the young girls Lettice Protheroe and Miss 
Cram, because he cannot safely pigeonhole them into any “breed.” 
Melchett is so condescending in his treatment of Miss Marple that 
even the vicar notices that he is “putting on his bluff military manner 
which he had an idea was attractive to elderly ladies” (Christie, Murder 
at the Vicarage 60). Christie obviously takes great pleasure in having 
Miss Marple invalidate these preconceptions. She first demonstrates 
her powers of deduction, which the vicar reports to the reader: “Miss 
Marple shook her head slowly and pityingly. The pity was, I think, for 
two full-grown men being so foolish as to believe such a story. At least 
that is what we felt like” (64). Then, in her unassuming, polite manner, 
she concludes the conversation by saying: “But I’m afraid there’s a lot 
of wickedness in the world. A nice honourable upright soldier like you 
doesn’t know about these things, Colonel Melchett” (65). Throughout 
the novel, the author faces her sleuth with male authority figures whom 
she easily triumphs over, and key to that triumph are Miss Marple’s 
knowledge of human nature and gossip as a “denigrated form of inter-
female communication” (Makinen 62). Gossip is, more broadly, also 
seen as a form of folk wisdom passed down from generation to genera-
tion, available for creative use by Miss Marple, the author figure. All 
of these features are more emphasized in The Murder at the Vicarage 
not only because this is where the character of Miss Marple is estab-
lished, but also because the novel’s narrator is a man in position of 
social power, rather than a neutral omniscient narrator.
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Later novels somewhat mitigate the image of the “nasty old cat” 
(Christie, Murder at the Vicarage 18), while the first British television 
adaptation of The Murder at the Vicarage (the fifth episode in Agatha 
Christie’s Miss Marple, BBC, 1984–1992) “puts her more in line with 
later characterizations, a simple observer who quietly works everything 
out without fuss, but understandably makes her more prominent” 
(Aldridge 230). Since “Vicarage” was not the first episode of the series, 
Marple’s character had already been shown as more refined in earlier 
stories (“The Body in the Library,” “The Moving Finger,” “A Murder 
Is Announced,” “A Pocketful of Rye”), not gossipy and nosy, and less 
conspicuously clashing with authority figures. Joan Hickson was in 
her eighties when she played Marple, and so the character’s liveliness, 
vivacity, and unconventional views were curtailed in favor of a more 
classical portrayal. Agatha Christie herself points out that Miss Marple 
was “born at the age of sixty-five to seventy” (Bunson 288). Writing 
about a 1970 German adaptation of the novel, Mark Aldridge points 
out that Inge Langen’s Marple (quite a young version, as Langen was 
only in her mid-forties) corresponds better to the Marple from the 
novel, as an “outright busybody,” not wholly likeable but somewhat 
irritant, and “not the kindly, softer version seen in most later adapta-
tions” (Aldridge 290). The BBC adaptation of Marple novels, generally 
considered canonical, has obviously largely contributed to a conserva-
tive view of Agatha Christie.
Unfortunately, neither does the ITV series Agatha Christie’s Marple 
(2004–2013) have “The Murder at the Vicarage” as its first episode, 
but places it after “The Body in the Library” instead. The latter caused 
quite a stir among fans, since a pair of lesbian killers were introduced 
into the plot. The ITV series’ looser adaptation harkens back to the 
campy, parodic context of earlier Christie films, which also featured a 
slew of movie stars. The need to introduce a romance element into the 
life of the elderly spinster manifested itself early on, with the MGM 
adaptations (1961–1964) starring Margaret Rutherford. Writing about 
the adaptation of After the Funeral (the book version featured Poirot, 
but the movie uses Marple instead, and changes the title to Murder 
at the Gallop), Aldridge writes that, “[a]s with Murder She Said, the 
film ends with the hint of wedding bells for Miss Marple” (Aldridge 
100). ITV’s “The Murder at the Vicarage” (2004) goes one step fur-
ther: it does not promise any future romantic involvements, but inter-
venes in Miss Marple’s past. In her popular book The Life and Times of 
Miss Jane Marple (1985), Anne Hart points at two places in the novels 
where Marple hints at two suitors from her past (At Bertram’s Hotel, 
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A Caribbean Mystery), one of whom was disliked by her mother, and 
the other was “rather gay, almost Bohemian in his views” (Christie, 
Caribbean Mystery 170), but she found him very dull. Hart is decid-
edly unhappy with the fact that Christie never revealed anything from 
Miss Marple’s life between early girlhood and middle age, and desires 
to “imagine something vaguely heroic” in that gap (Hart 32). A biog-
rapher would generally fill in those gaps, but the task is less straight-
forward when the biography in question concerns a fictional character, 
whose entire existence and all the corresponding material is already tex-
tual in nature, so that kind of freedom is not tolerated outside of realms 
of fan fiction. Hart’s biography can be seen as a narrative extension of 
Miss Marple’s detective adventures, offering a frame story for the pro-
cedural since, as one Goodreads review says, “it makes a nice compan-
ion to the Miss Marple series.” Television and seriality created a type 
of parasocial relationship with the character that was not encouraged 
by the original novels. Hence the ITV series’ need to create Marple’s 
intimate world and to assign her normative sexuality.
The beginning of ITV’s “The Murder at the Vicarage” takes us back 
to 1915 and shows us young Captain Ainsworth being photographed 
in his uniform, with the photographer asking him to “look brave” and 
a young woman offering to see him to the station, because he is off 
to war. At the end of the episode, we find out that the young woman 
in question was Jane Marple, who had an affair with a married man 
whom she told to come back from the war, not for her, but for his wife. 
The captain dies in the war, and at the very end we see his photograph 
on the vanity. This flashback parallels the emphatically romanticized 
story between Mrs. Protheroe and Mr. Redding, so as to suggest that 
Miss Marple does have some experience which allows her to under-
stand the world. This is, however, contrary to the principles of deduc-
tion she reveals in the original novel, which are based on observation, 
comparison, and classification of people. Makinen shows that Marple 
creates liminal space within the investigation which connects intuition 
and logocentrism: “Miss Marple, as main detective, is in control of the 
complete process, both the initial ‘feminine’ disquiet and the ‘mascu-
line’ explanation of the facts” (Makinen 60). Finally, if we return to 
our view of Miss Marple as an author figure, here too we have a parallel 
with the idea that a writer does not necessarily have to have a rich life, 
but the ability to combine and compare impressions and experience. 
On the other hand, it seems that the reason why Marple never married 
needs to be explained, albeit within the bounds of heteronormativity. 
Ironically or not, the series which includes two characters coming out 
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of the closetMurgatroyd and Hinchcliffe are shown kissing in the 
fourth episode, “A Murder Is Announced” (2005), while in the cor-
responding novel the two women were “merely” living togetherfelt 
the need to explicitly address Miss Marple’s sexuality and uncover the 
secrets from her “threatening” privacy. In the adaptation of Murder Is 
Easy (1939), which did not originally feature Miss Marple at all, an 
existing queer character, Mr. Ellsworthy, is not included. Moreover, 
he is missing even from the newest 2023 adaptation. In this way, his-
torical representation of homosexuality is corrected: it is made explicit 
when it is only hinted at (like with Murgatroyd and Hinchcliffe), and 
an illusion is created that the society at large might have been approv-
ing of a queer relationship. This allows for a historical setting with-
out any uncomfortable examinations of the actual historical context. 
A similar tendency can be seen not only in ITV’s Agatha Christie’s 
Poirot (1989–2013), but also in BBC’s Father Brown (2013–), where 
the amateur sleuth is a Catholic priest in 1950s England (transposed 
from G. K. Chesterton’s original stories, written between 1910s and 
1930s) who has a remarkably modern and tolerant stance on queer-
ness. While it is understandable that the heroic main characters of all 
of these detective stories cannot be seen as bigoted by modern stan-
dards, particularly because their genre is ultimately “cozy mystery” 
which does not usually explore the darker parts of human nature, this 
often results in obvious historical inaccuracy and an arbitrary set of 
rules where only the buffoons and villains tend to be aggressively sex-
ist, racist, classist, or homophobic, and queer characters or characters 
of color tend to be represented in a more positive light in the adapta-
tions than in the original stories, so as to avoid negative stereotyping. 
Therefore, when its representation in the original stories is negative, 
queerness is erased in another example of interference into the histori-
cal treatment of Otherness. Mr. Ellsworthy, thus, as a minor character 
whom Christie uses to show the community’s paranoia, particularly 
at the dawn of World War II, does not appear in the adaptations. 
Nevertheless, however much her novel may reflect the prejudices of 
its time, Christie also points out how easily those who are different 
become scapegoats because they are seen as perverted, corrupt, and 
insane. Queer men like Mr. Ellsworthy and Mr. Pye (The Moving 
Finger, 1942), who are “relatively minor characters who act chiefly 
as red herrings and to allow the male protagonists’ assertion of their 
own manly masculinity by comparison” (Bernthal 102) turn out to be 
innocent of the crimes in the novels, but what cunning sleuth could 
have relieved them of doubt in real life?
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Such references to the social reality of the time, which Christie 
makes using the discourse of the period she belongs to, should not be 
erased in contemporary adaptations simply out of the desire to be polit-
ically correct. This does not only counterfeit social history, but exposes 
one’s superficial reading of Christie. In the first Marple novel, the pro-
tagonist emphasizes that most people are “a little queer,” and more-
over, that “normal people do such astonishing things sometimes, and 
abnormal people are sometimes so very sane and ordinary” (Christie, 
Murder at the Vicarage 193). Normality and ordinariness are examined 
in connection with guilt in a complex manner. Christie often shows 
that, unlike the actual perpetrators who are guilty of crimes, those who 
are considered to be outsiders have no “blame” other than either their 
unconventionality or some small infractions, and they can therefore be 
reintegrated into the community, or “restored to a state of innocence” 
(Auden 158).
Otherness on display: Hercule Poirot
When it comes to her other, arguably more famous, fictional creation, 
Hercule Poirot, Christie makes him much more conspicuously Other 
than Miss Marple. Unlike Marple, who hides her superior intellect and 
deduction skills behind the image of unimposing femininity, Poirot is 
loudly and obviously different: he is not only a foreigner, but a refu-
gee; not only a dandy, but a man so ridiculously vain and impractical 
that he chooses fashion over common sense (e.g., patent leather shoes 
instead of more comfortable footwear even when traipsing around the 
countryside); not only a genius at solving crime, but an insufferable 
braggart about it as well. He is immensely irritating, not only to many 
characters in his stories, but also to his author, who gradually became 
so disillusioned with her creation that she side-lined him in his own 
narratives. Everything about Poirot, from his foreignness, his atypical 
masculinity, and his heavily implied neurodivergence, screams “Other.” 
Yet he too, like Miss Marple, plays a role and exaggerates a lot of these 
traits on purpose, using a performative version of self in order to either 
confuse, annoy or trick the culprits into confession, because he also, 
more often than not, lacks actual evidence and has to rely on the guilty 
party confessing when confronted with the detective’s interpretation 
of the crime. Like Miss Marple, Poirot is also always right, and his 
performance at the denouement, when he gathers all the suspects to 
reveal the truth, has an air of theatricality about it. Unlike Marple, 
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though, he is a man, even if his masculinity is coded as Other; and 
a professional, rather than an amateur sleuth, so he is awarded more 
respect by his many police associates. Furthermore, as the most famous 
private detective in the fictional world he inhabits, Poirot is a wealthy 
member of high society, which accords him certain privileges that a 
less fortunate immigrant might not have enjoyed in the class-conscious 
British society. Thus, as much as he is Othered for being a foreigner 
who does not embody the Empire’s ideal of hegemonic masculinity, 
he also benefits from the advantages given to him by his sex, race, and 
class. Despite this, Poirot is still noticeably different from other rich, 
white, male characters in the novels. Interestingly enough, he revels in 
that difference, probably because, in his endless vanity, he perceives it 
as superior. Moreover, as previously mentioned, it is often these ultra-
privileged members of the society’s upper echelons that commit the 
most heinous crimes, which leaves an outsider like Poirot to serve as 
the world’s moral center.
Conceived as a simultaneously straightforward and parodic version 
of a genius eccentric detective in the style of Arthur Conan Doyle’s 
Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot first appeared in Christie’s debut 
novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (written 1916, published in the US 
in 1920 and in the UK in 1921). Here, in an evident attempt to emu-
late the Holmes stories, the narrator is the detective’s associate, Captain 
Hastings, who met Poirot some years earlier and knows him as an odd 
and dandyish, albeit brilliant investigator. Unlike Watson, whose pal-
pable admiration for Holmes casts Conan Doyle’s stories in a homo-
erotic light, Hastings does not immediately take to Poirot. Rightfully 
deducing that her detective did not need an engaged narrator, Christie 
would later abandon this formula and send her Watson-like character, 
Hastings, to Argentina, leaving Poirot’s adventures to impersonal nar-
ration. In Styles, the two characters reunite while Hastings is on leave 
from the front (the action takes place during World War I), recuperat-
ing from an injury, and Poirot is in England because he was forced to 
leave his native Belgium as a war refugee. In contrast to Holmes, who 
is an addict and an eccentric, but still very much a proper Victorian 
Englishman, Poirot is a foreigner, and a foreigner during wartime at 
that, a direct threat to the colonial cultural constructions of nation-
hood and masculinity. Moreover, to his eternal consternation, he is 
often confused for a Frenchman, even though he is a Belgian, which, 
to Charles Brownson, makes him “twice an outsider” (qtd. in Bernthal 
88), as he is Francophone, but not French. As Bernthal puts it, com-
paring Poirot with Doyle’s Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin, two 
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famous fictional detectives who solve crimes in their native lands, he 
is “explicitly a foreigner” who invokes colonial British prejudice of 
foreign men’s inferiority and effeminacy (Bernthal 36). However, he 
recognizes the potential benefits of being underestimated and thus he 
usually plays up this role, using other characters’ xenophobia to his 
advantage, as he explains in Three Act Tragedy (1934):
It is true that I can speak the exact, the idiomatic English. But, my friend, to 
speak the broken English is an enormous asset. It leads people to despise you. 
They saya foreignerhe can’t even speak English properly. It is not my 
policy to terrify peopleinstead I invite their gentle ridicule. Also I boast! 
An Englishman he says often, ‘A fellow who thinks as much of himself as that 
cannot be worth much.’ That is the English point of view. It is not at all true. 
And so, you see, I put people off their guard. (Christie, Three Act Tragedy 191)
Poirot’s foreignness is thus steeped in performativity, just like Marple’s 
spinsterhood. Both use other people’s prejudice toward their Otherness 
in order to fly under the radar and to gain an (often invisible) upper 
hand. This testifies to our earlier assertion that Christie gently chal-
lenges the conservatism of her era through the transgressive nature of 
her two sleuths.
Since diagnosis of fictional characters is never advisable and rarely 
useful, we will not get into medical detail about Poirot’s numerous 
eccentricities. Still, it bears pointing out that the character is heavily 
coded as neurodivergent, with traits that would later become associ-
ated with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive 
Disorder, and which would often characterize subsequent fictional 
detectives (e.g., in TV shows Monk, 2002–2009, or Professor T, which 
started in Belgium in 2015 and expanded into a whole franchise). In 
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Poirot’s implied neurodivergence is an 
asset that solves the crime: since he craves order and symmetry, is for-
ever straightening things, and is particular about details, Poirot is the 
only one who notices that the figurines on the mantelpiece have been 
disturbed, which leads him to the solution. The ITV adaptation of 
the novel provides more detail on these quirks, adding, for instance, a 
scene where Poirot suggests to the baffled village shopkeeper that she 
should arrange spices by their country of origin. Like in its sister series, 
Agatha Christie’s Marple, the first episode of Agatha Christie’s Poirot is 
not actually the first story featuring the titular detective; indeed, “The 
Mysterious Affair at Styles” comes after nineteen other episodes, as 
the first story of season three. This way, the audience is already used 
to Poirot’s many eccentricities, so their effect is affection rather than 
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irritation in the viewer. This insistence on order is one of the keys to 
Poirot’s success: he is detail-oriented and observant, and familiar with 
numerous obscure facts, due to what, if the neurodivergent angle is to 
be observed, might even be deemed hyperfixations. Thus, it is Poirot’s 
mental Otherness that helps him challenge the authority of the domi-
nant ways of thinking and allows him to succeed where they fail.
As was already stated, Poirot’s gender expression is atypical and 
closely tied with his foreignness (insomuch that he cannot fully partici-
pate in homosocial bonding with true Englishmen, whose masculinity 
is uncontested), or, in Bernthal’s words, he is “an alien whose stripe 
of masculinity is out of place in the world he inhabits” (Bernthal 36). 
This is signaled by his very name: he is named after the Greek demigod 
Hercules, the epitome of masculine strength, and yet, he is nothing like 
him. Further, his surname, Poirot, could loosely be translated as “little 
pear,” which inspires neither dread nor awe. The character’s full name 
is thus incongruous, and the effect is similar to that achieved by T. S. 
Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: by using a decidedly 
unromantic name, Eliot suggests that the love song the reader is about 
to encounter is a wholly ironic piece. Indeed, Hercule Poirot, unlike his 
mythological counterpart, is regularly described as a “little man.” He is 
barely 5’4, and is known not for his strength, but for his intellect and 
his fastidiousness, reflected in his impeccably styled mustache, his neat 
morning suits, and his shiny patent leather shoes. Even though he takes 
great pride in his appearance (so much so that he dyes his hair black 
when it starts graying), he is never described as an attractive man (and 
indeed, does not think of himself as such, barring his admiration for 
his impressive mustache): much is made of his egg-shaped head and his 
small stature. Interestingly enough, though most adaptations portray 
him as overweight (even David Suchet’s portrayal, usually regarded as 
the definitive one, includes a fat suit), he is not described as such in the 
books; on the contrary, he is often compared to a cat, with his agility 
and his green eyes, which grow more and more “cat-like” the more 
excited he becomes. This version of manliness is clearly not an ideal 
of masculine strength and beauty: unlike Sherlock Holmes, who is an 
accomplished boxer, Poirot is a “quaint dandified little man” (Christie, 
Mysterious Affair 35). Moreover, even though he is overly reliant on 
his “little gray cells” and “order and method” in earlier appearances, he 
becomes more of an observer and a “psychological” detective as time 
goes by. Thus, his masculinity is doubly feminized: at first, his mental 
faculties are placed before his physical prowess, so that the less “manly” 
brains are used instead of brawn, and later, that less manly, but still 
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masculine-coded intellectual ability gives way before feminine-coded 
powers of observation and analysis of people. Again, when compared 
with Holmes, who typically relies on cold, hard logic, Poirot solves his 
cases mostly by carefully observing the assorted suspects’ interactions 
and emotional reactions, which aligns him more with Miss Marple’s 
feminine style of sleuthing than with Holmes’s masculine-coded logic. 
Even his impressive knowledge can be understood as “stereotypically 
female” (Knight 91), as exemplified by his understanding of poisons, 
explicitly mentioned as a feminine method of murder in Styles, or his 
observance of nail polish colors in Death on the Nile (1937). As Stephen 
Knight points out, “[b]efore Miss Marple is invented Poirot already 
represents a heightened version of female domestic knowledge as a 
weapon against fictional disorder” (Knight 91).
As mentioned above, “Styles” is not the episode which introduces 
the ITV adaptation of Poirot. That honor falls to “The Adventure of 
the Clapham Cook,” where the character’s first scene has the cam-
era zoom in on his feet and then slowly pan up, lingering on his legs, 
and finally reaching his face. Such scopophilia is typically reserved for 
female characters, as a textbook example of Laura Mulvey’s notion of 
the male gaze. Yet, Poirot is not eroticized herewhat is on display 
is not his sexualized body, but his fastidiousness: his shiny shoes, his 
neatly pressed trousers, his well-manicured hands that are clearing off 
some invisible lint. He is not just dapper, but a proper dandy, and, as 
Judith Halberstam explains, the dandy is symptomatic of queer threat, 
since he is “too feminine,” “a Gothic monster,” who “represents too 
much and too little, excess and paucity; … the parasitical aristocrat 
and the upwardly mobile bourgeois. He obviously also represents the 
homosexual male” (Halberstam 62–63). Nevertheless, Poirot’s queer-
ness is only ever implied, and easily explained away by his foreignness 
(e.g., his enthusiastic kisses to greet Hastings). Moreover, he, like Miss 
Marple, could more properly be read as asexual-coded, the type of queer 
that is still societally safe on the surface, linked as it is to the notion 
of passing. Indeed, both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot can thus be 
interpreted as straight-passing queers. Asexuality may be described as 
invisible queerness, and is often excluded from more radical, hierarchi-
cal queer spaces for not being visibly queer enough or not understood 
as queer at all (see Serano). The homoerotic gaze in “Clapham Cook” 
is thus teased but ultimately thwarted, and the prospect of homoeroti-
cism is, as Patrick Schuckmann says, both “evoked and disavowed” by 
the genre’s constraints (Schuckmann 675). The reader (or in this case, 
viewer) is invited to be a voyeur, but it is Poirot’s Otherness (i.e., his 
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overemphasized neatness, which could be linked to all three main fea-
tures of his Otherness: his foreignness, his effeminacy, and his neuro-
divergence) that is on display, rather than his sexually objectified body.
Nevertheless, Poirot, like Marple, suffers from being “straightened” 
in adaptations. One of the most egregious examples is the ITV version 
of his relationship with Vera Rossakoff, which turns his fascination 
into a full-blown infatuation, and even a doomed romance. Of the 
character’s three book appearances (“The Double Clue,” 1923; The Big 
Four, 1927; The Labours of Hercules, 1947), two were televised, and each 
time, Rossakoff’s dubious aristocratic title is taken at face value, and her 
relationship with Poirot, loud and cordial in the original, gets a wist-
ful note in the adaptation. Bernthal rightly points out that Rossakoff’s 
book version is so flamboyant and exaggerated that it easily invokes 
Judith Butler’s notion of performative gender as artifice (Bernthal 
129–134). In “The Double Clue,” Hastings describes her as “a whirl-
wind in human form [which] invaded our privacy, bringing with her a 
swirl of sables … and a hat rampant with slaughtered osprey” (Christie, 
Poirot’s Early Cases 65). She is “a disturbing personality” (65), with a 
taste worthy of a drag queen, as evidenced by her “marvellous negli-
gée of barbaric design” (67). Poirot’s fascination stems from her clever 
and dangerous nature (she is an accomplished thief), and not from any 
overt sexual attraction. In spite of this, the ITV adaptation of “The 
Double Clue” plays up the relationship between Poirot and Rossakoff, 
who is refined and subdued here, and when the couple separate at the 
end of the episode, the viewer is invited to consider Rossakoff as “the 
one who got away.” Interestingly enough, even though Poirot is thus 
placed within a heteronormative context, he is still not entirely sexual: 
while saying goodbye, Rossakoff kisses him, but instead of a passionate 
lip lock, he is only given a peck on the forehead. Thus, even with all 
the attempts to straighten him, Poirot still manages only to appear as a 
straight-passing asexual.
The latest in the long line of cinematic Poirots is Kenneth Branagh, 
who also assumes the mantle of director in his adaptations (Murder on 
the Orient Express, 2017; Death on the Nile, 2022; A Haunting in Venice, 
2023). Branagh’s Poirot is noticeably less Other: he is still eccentric, 
but the quirks are toned down and even played for sympathy; more-
over, he is also more conventionally attractive than any other portrayal. 
Branagh interferes in Poirot’s past quite heavily, giving him an unorigi-
nal back story (he is no longer a former Belgian police detective turned 
refugee, but a World War I trench veteran who only ever wanted to be 
a farmer and ended up a detective by chance) and inventing a tragic 
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116
loss of love in the character of Katherine, Poirot’s fiancée who died in a 
train crash. Even Poirot’s mustache is given a tragic past: it is no longer 
simply a sign of his dandyism and vanity; now it is there to conceal 
shrapnel scars. In short, Branagh’s version of Poirot is not an outsider 
by nature, but by circumstance, which changes the entire conception of 
the character. In Branagh’s Death on the Nile, Poirot is conventionally 
heterosexual, and, if the flashback with Katherine was not enough to 
prove it, he is even given another love interest in Salome Otterbourne, 
who is no longer a drunken has-been writer constantly talking about 
sex, but a tough jazz singer who overcame racial prejudice (this version 
of the character is African-American) in order to become successful. At 
the end of the movie, Poirot, his mustache now shaved, enters the club 
where Otterbourne (the character is spared in this adaptation) prac-
tices her performance; the implication is that Poirot and Otterbourne 
are either already in a relationship, or about to enter one, leading the 
viewer to conclude that Branagh’s Poirot is Poirot in name only. In 
A Haunting in Venice, a loose adaptation of Hallowe’en Party (1969), 
all subtextual signs of Poirot’s queerness have been eradicated, and, 
despite the gothic atmosphere of the movie, the traditional relationship 
between the Gothic and the queer is left unexplored. In Hallowe’en 
Party, Poirot is entranced by Michael Garfield and his great beauty 
from the moment he sees him, and he keeps returning to it:
There was no doubt that Michael Garfield was a very beautiful young man. He 
found it difficult to know whether he himself liked Michael Garfield or not. It 
is always difficult to know if you like anyone beautiful. You like beauty to look 
at, at the same time you dislike beauty almost on principle. Women could be 
beautiful, but Hercule Poirot was not at all sure that he liked beauty in men. 
(Christie, Hallowe’en Party 308)
The last sentence in particular could be linked with suppression of ho-
mosexual desire in Poirot, which could then shed light on his seeming 
asexuality as a defense mechanism against internalized homophobia. 
Poirot’s relationship with Garfield in the book is one of fascination, 
and a scene in which Garfield admires Poirot’s mustache (incidentally, 
the only part of himself that Poirot considers beautiful, as he explicitly 
states in the book) could be read as flirtation. As Garfield turns out 
to be the killer and commits suicide at the end, there is no need for 
Poirot to explore these confusing feelings, and he remains safely de-
sexualized. The ITV adaptation of the novel greatly reduces Poirot’s 
interactions with Garfield and does not have him explicitly admire his 
beauty, while A Haunting in Venice removes the character altogether 
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117
and entirely changes the killer. Interestingly enough, the ITV version 
pulls a lesbian relationship between two minor characters out of the 
novel’s subtext, where it is only hinted at, and even easily dismissed as a 
joke, as one of the many implausible theories by two teenage boys. The 
subtext between Poirot and Garfield, on the other hand, is completely 
ignored. In this way, Poirot is once again, like in “The Double Clue,” 
pushed back into the realms of sexual normativity, while the series re-
mains superficially inclusive by queering two unimportant characters.
Conclusion
As we have seen, both Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot function as 
moral centers of their respective fictional universes, although their so-
cial position in those universes is more closely connected with the mar-
gins. Unlike Miss Marple, who is more explicitly marginalized as an 
elderly spinster who solves crimes by interfering in the investigations 
undertaken by real police officers, Poirot seemingly occupies a more 
central position, given that he is a famous and rich detective sought 
out by the police. Nevertheless, it is actually Poirot who is more obvi-
ously Othered, since his seemingly central position belies his actual ex-
centricity, as he is an effeminate, neurodivergent foreigner who is not 
really a part of the homosocial group, but an outsider only occasionally 
allowed in. Miss Marple’s true transgressivity, on the other hand, man-
ages to remain hidden. As a woman, she is already marginalized, and 
she uses this underprivileged position to her advantage.
Christie utilizes her two sleuths to challenge normative ideas of gen-
der, authority, sexuality, and morality; however, taking into account the 
social and literary context in which she creates, these challenges mostly 
remain on the level of subtext. For reasons of focus and space, we con-
fined our research to a few representative texts and their adaptations, 
but hopefully, they served as an illustration enough of the complicated 
relationship between the center and the margin, the dominant and 
the Other. The books cleverly show Marple and Poirot’s balancing act 
between the socially acceptable surface and their inner Otherness, all the 
while keeping it clear that they are the only ones who can serve as arbiters 
of morality and truth. When it comes to adaptations, the two sleuths’ 
Otherness seems to be perceived as threatening and is therefore neutral-
ized, most often through their forceful heterosexualization. As disheart-
ening as this may seem, it only serves to prove our point: Miss Marple 
and Hercule Poirot do their best work while sleuthing from the margins.
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118
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Bojana Vujin, Sonja Veselinović:     Agatha Christie’s Marple and Poirot as the Detecting Other
119
Zasledovanje z obrobja: Marple in Poirot Agathe 
Christie kot zasledujoči Drugi
Ključne besede: angleška književnost / detektivski roman / Christie, Agatha / Miss 
Marple / Hercule Poirot / marginalizacija / drugi
Kljub svojemu osrednjemu mestu v kanonu detektivske literature zasedata 
najslavnejša junaka Agathe Christie, gospodična Marple in Hercule Poirot, 
v svojih fikcijskih svetovih »izsredni« položaj. Oba detektivska lika je mogoče 
razmeti kot marginalizirana Druga, ki predstavljata izziv za normativne pred-
postavke družbe, v kateri živita. Pri gospodični Marple gre zlasti za marginali-
zacijo na podlagi spola, njenega amaterskega detektivskega dela in zakonskega 
stanu, medtem ko Poirota kot Drugega implicirajo njegova tujost, ženstvenost 
in nevrološka atipičnost. Oba lika je mogoče pojasniti tudi v okvirih asek-
sualnosti in ju analizirati kot na videz heteronormativni kvir osebi. Članek 
razkriva, kako Christie uporablja status detektiva kot Drugega, da bi previdno 
izzvala prevladujoče ideje o avtoriteti, spolnosti, spolu in morali svojega časa. 
Z namenom raziskati besedilne in podbesedilne primere marginalizacije ter 
različne poskuse, da bi Drugi ostal v mejah normativne identitete, se ana-
liza osredotoča predvsem na dela Umor v župnišču, Skrivnostna smrt v Stylesu, 
»Dvojna sled« in Zabava za noč čarovnic, pa tudi na njihove filmske in televi-
zijske priredbe.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.111.09-312.4Christie A.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v47.i3.06