True Left

Our enemies on Agatha Christie, whom I agree academically showed through her novels with great accuracy how colonial-era "whites" saw themselves compared to "non-whites" (of course, unlike our enemies, I have never been a fan of Christie novels):

https://counter-currents.com/2021/04/murder-maps/

Why have her books endured so well? An obvious answer is the fondness we all seem to share for celebrity, murder, and mystery (an author rarely goes wrong when he decides to open his first chapter with a gruesome crime perpetrated against a young blonde). Another involves escapism. For all the aristocratic bad behavior depicted in her fiction, Christie’s stories have evoked a charmed era when Europeans dressed well, drank scotch and gin during afternoon luncheons, took long holidays in the Mediterranean — and above all took for granted white (and particularly British) dominion. Rule Britannia! It is indeed hard for whites (myself included) not to be seduced a little by the romance of St. George’s Empire, once breathtaking in its ambitious scope.
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She wrote during both the twilight of the aristocracy and the British Empire, a sprawling hegemon that, at its apogee, flew its crossed colors over one-fifth of the globe’s landed territory. Yes, she wrote detective novels, but they were also romances dedicated to nonchalant European supremacy, to a confidence in Western values and institutions. Unconscious and unselfconscious mastery.
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When she was a child in the 1890s, Britain was the undoubted center of the world: first in naval might, finance, and overseas possession. Following the American Revolution (1775-1783), the British Empire had appeared on the verge of decline. Instead of wallowing or retreating back into their small island fortress in order to “reassess,” or to “think things over,” Britishers devoted more energy to the Orient, particularly to that most lucrative and prized diamond adorning their imperial diadem — Hindoostan (India). But in general, the British were more concerned with maintaining their empire rather than expanding it during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This changed over the course of Queen Victoria’s long reign and culminated in “the Scramble for Africa” and various (mis)adventures in East Asia (The Opium Wars and “The Open Door” policy among them), all of which caused the Empire to suddenly swell to new and fantastic proportions. But by the interwar era (ca. 1920-1940), the British had once more returned to maintaining an empire that had bloated beyond prudence.
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Of the wilds of Mesopotamia, she remarked, “The utter peace is wonderful. A great wave of happiness surges over me, and I realize how much I love this country, and how complete and satisfying this life is . . .” It was a place where Christie could mock “Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Turks and Yezidi devil-worshippers who worked on the excavations as freely as she could of Oxford scholars, of her husband and herself.” [5] Simultaneously, and next to all this antiquity, were the modern innovations that condensed twentieth-century time and distance — and allowed for mass European tourism. Motor cars, trains, steamers, and aeroplanes all played indispensable roles in Christie’s Oriental murder mysteries. “Detection” and archaeology went hand-in-hand, after all, for each sifted through clues, and both investigated the dead.
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NB: “Colonial” in this essay refers to whites of European ancestry born or having lived outside the West. In the greater Anglo-Saxon world, “colonial” was almost always a white person (joined by expressions such as “Anglo-Indian,” “white African,” “Boer,” etc.); when referring to nonwhites in the Empire, the British used terms like “Aborigine,” “colored,” “Hindoo,” “black,” “Sambo,” “tribesman,” “Mohammedan,” or “native.” Almost never were the locals or native porters seriously suspected of having committed the arch-crimes in Christie’s fiction. The schemes were too well-planned and ingeniously crafted for audiences to believe their simpler minds were capable of them. And what an anticlimax it would have made for Monsieur Poirot to have fingered a lowly colored footman for the murder of Lady Linette Ridgeway-Doyle! With a few exceptions, nonwhites filtered in and out of Christie’s stories to “set the mood,” as it were, to carry the luggage, and to part pretty English ladies from their coin in exchange for palm readings and colorful baubles from the bazaar. These were books whose Edwardian sensibilities appealed to interwar readers who found themselves pining for a past already lost to them.
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In the novel The Sittaford Mystery, the character (and victim) Captain Trevelyan was a retired naval officer who apparently hated women due to a romantic “jilting” he had once suffered as a young man overseas. He’d come back to England and rented the large Sittaford House to the Willetts, a mother and daughter pair fresh from South Africa themselves (“overfriendly, you know, like colonials are”). [13] During a seance parlor game, the Willetts and several of their houseguests received a troubling message from the spirit board: “TREVELYAN DEAD.” Amidst a witching-hour blizzard, an expedition was then mounted to assess the welfare of the Captain — only for the sleuths to find his body slumped, lifeless, and surrounded by his most treasured possessions: “two pairs of skis, a pair of sculls [oars] mounted, ten or twelve hippopotamus tusks, rods and lines and various fishing tackle including a book of flies, a bag of golf clubs, a tennis racket, an elephant’s foot stuffed and mounted and a tiger skin.” [14] The stuff of a former colonial adventurer.
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Major Despard, one of the prime suspects in Cards on the Table, might have resembled Trevelyan during the latter’s younger years. He was a tall, dashing aristocrat who’d made a living writing books about his explorations of the dark corners of the world — places like South America, East Africa, Sri Lanka, etc. He, too, scorned what in his view was an “effeminate” existence in favor of sport and safari. Oh, he admitted to liking England “for very short periods. To come back from the wilds to lighted rooms and women in lovely clothes, to dancing and good food and laughter — yes, [he] enjoy[ed] that — for a time. And then the insincerity of it all sicken[ed] [him], and [he] want[ed] to be off again.” [16] While Sittaford depicted white colonials as having suffered enervation by way of the tropical climate, Despard held the opposite opinion: those of his countrymen who stayed at home were the degenerates, those who preferred the company of women — afraid of manly risk and loath to test their mettle against the elements.
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Luxmore’s wife attempted to tackle the major, forcing the weapon up and the shot to tear through the Doctor’s back, killing him instantly (“foolish woman!”). Aware that such a story would have invited scurrilous speculation, Despard and Mrs. Luxmore agreed to keep the incident quiet and to tell all who asked that her husband had died of his illness. In a supremely white and self-assured way, Despard explained that though “the [native] bearers” who accompanied the trio “knew the truth . . . they were all devoted to [him] and [he] knew that what [he] said they’d swear to if need be.[17] [They] buried poor old Luxmore and got back to civilization.” [17] Despite precautions, the shooting in the wilderness would return to torment Despard “back in civilized” England.
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Christie’s 1939 novel Ten Little Indians (known, too, as Ten Little **** or And Then There Were None), also delved into the psychology of colonialism, particularly in the character of Philip Lombard, a “soldier of fortune.” Having received a job offer through a Jewish middleman and with the promise of a one-hundred guinea bounty, Lombard accepted the mysterious request with practiced insouciance
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When accused via gramophone of killing “twenty-one men, members of an East African tribe” in February of 1932, Lombard was the sole man undisturbed at having his crimes aired before the company. In fact, he seemed proud. The “Story’s quite true!” he said, grinning. “I left ‘em! Matter of self-preservation. We were lost in the bush. I and a couple of other fellows took what food there was and cleared out.” General Macarthur, another servant of the Empire, and one more committed to duty and of preserving the veneer of imperial beneficence, asked sternly: “You abandoned your men — left them to starve?” Lombard shrugged: “’Not quite the act of a pukka sahib, I’m afraid. But self-preservation’s a man’s first duty. And natives don’t mind dying, you know. They don’t feel about it as Europeans do.’ Vera [the young governess] lifted her face from her hands. She said, staring at him: ‘You left them — to die?’” Lombard answered in the affirmative once more as “his amused eyes looked into her horrified” face. [20]
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By the 1930s, middle and upper-class Europeans could easily book a passage to the Orient, or to North Africa. The technological revolution in transportation afforded them steam liners, zeppelins, planes, railways, and automobiles with which to journey far; and each of these new modes of travel had become icons of modernity, of luxury and speed. But they could also be modes of violence and murder. Cars, trains, and airplanes could be terrifyingly efficient death machines that could entrap and then kill many men at a time. [22] How could flesh and blood, bone and marrow confront 6,000 tons of steel and fire blasting along at forty or fifty kilometers per hour? World War I gave perhaps the most eloquent answer to this question. Agatha Christie’s fiction, too exploited the dual face of modern technology to great effect: how rich and beautiful Europeans enjoyed their outremer trips aboard the most fashionable rail and river liners — but also how these sleek new vessels were the perfect setting for murder. And in a foreign land with confusing languages, laws, and smells, with an unceasing heat that beat down and deranged the senses, any number of evils under a stronger, heathen sun were likely.
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Hastings found that “the charm of Egypt laid hold of [him],” while Poirot complained incessantly of the sand, heat, and horseflies. Undaunted, Hastings pointed to the magnificent ruins: “Look at the Sphinx . . . Even I can feel the mystery and the charm it exhales.” But Poirot “looked at it discontentedly. ‘It has not the air happy,’ he declared. ‘How could it, half-buried in sand in that untidy fashion. Ah, this cursed sand! . . . It is true that they [the Sphinx], at least, are of a shape solid and geometrical, but their surface is of an unevenness most unpleasing. And the palm-trees, I like them not. Not even do they plant them in rows!’” [25] Here then were the dual expressions of the imperial and insular white worldviews: one reveled in the exotic vastness of empire, while the other was only content in his native European habitat, or in those colonial environs comfortably Europeanized to suit his taste.

Once at the tomb, Poirot questioned the surviving Dr. Ames, “What [did] the native workmen think” of all the trouble? Did Ames believe in the curse? I suppose, said Dr. Ames, “that, where white folk lose their heads, natives aren’t going to be far behind. I’ll admit that they’re getting what you might call scared.” On cue, Lord Willard’s native servant Hassan appeared, begging Poirot to take his master’s son away from “the evil spirits.” [26] In the end, of course, the killer was a flesh-and-blood man. Pairing the Gothic with the realist-Modernist was a common Christie device. Her characters experienced what at first seemed like supernatural events: seances, ghost sightings, and ancient curses — but by the end revealing them all as having a logical explanation. The murderer deliberately manipulated the Ouija Board; a wicked chemist devised a concoction that would release ghastly green vapors; doctors killed their patients under the guise of an old hex. As the detective observed, “Once get it firmly established that a series of deaths are supernatural . . . [and] you might almost stab a man in broad daylight, and it would still be put down to [a] curse, so strongly is the instinct of the supernatural implanted in the human race.” [27] Which is perhaps another way of saying that whites who spend too much time among primitives become more primitive themselves.
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Since “the boat was not full, most of the passengers had accommodation on the deck. The entire forward part of this deck was occupied by an observation saloon, all glass-enclosed, where the passengers could sit and watch the river unfold before them,” could watch the brown natives from a safe distance ashore. [29]
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A Mrs. Allerton too lamented the lack of peace whites enjoyed in Egypt and the impossibility of “‘[getting] rid of some of these awful children.’ A group of small black figures” had earlier “surrounded her, all grinning and posturing and holding out imploring hands as they lisped . . . hopefully . . . ‘they closed in on [Mrs. Allerton] little by little’” until she yelled “Imshi” brandishing her sunshade at them. They “scattered for a minute or two. And then they came back and stared and stared, and their eyes were simply disgusting, and so were their noses . . . I don’t believe I really like children – not unless they’re more or less washed and have the rudiments of manners.” [31] In other words, Mrs. Allerton only found white children tolerable. Even though murder quickly turned the cruise ship into a coffin, it was at least devoid of nonwhite pests (save for the mostly invisible serving staff). Readers got the distinct impression that Poirot, Rosalie, Mrs. Allerton, et al. preferred the white nightmare aboard the SS Death Trap to spending another minute with the colored irritants on land.
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That an insular group of affluent Europeans such as this one assumed that their misbehavior would remain an internal matter, that clear lines separating us from them existed, that colonized peoples would not notice, nor infringe upon their white bubble — that was perhaps the most striking feature of Christie’s “colonial novels.”
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The major enjoyed gallivanting in the colonial wilds and appreciated the deference natives there paid to a man like himself: an intrepid and commanding British explorer of means. But when a “louse” like Shaitana, who preyed on the weaknesses of white women, settled in the major’s own native land and began to meddle in the business of Europeans — even setting them against one another — that was disgusting. Despard knew instinctively that Shaitana had crossed a line that white men needed to vigilantly guard with their lives. The Syrian fiend could rot in the same hell with which he affected so much familiarity! He belonged nowhere near the Berkshire Downs.