Haunted houses have a long history, dating back to the earliest European gothic fiction, such as The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. The gothic home, like most gothic architecture, is designed to evoke a sense of dark wonder or apprehension. When this conceit intertwines with the generic conventions of detective fiction, provocative patterns emerge, reflecting the values and anxieties of an author’s contemporary audience. The specter of the haunted house has come to mean many things in symbolic terms, but its potential for harm has never grown any less. This MLA special session proposes to build on the scholarship of popular gothic crime fiction by examining uncanny domestic spaces in women’s detective stories of the early 20^th century (through the interwar period). Through the examination of works by popular transatlantic writers such as Anna Katharine Green and Agatha Christie, in conjunction with lesser-known authors like Margery Allingham and Gladys Mitchell, panelists will heighten our understanding of how women authors of detective fiction developed the theme of danger in domestic spaces.

Keli Masten begins with an analysis of Anna Katharine Green’s writing. Prosperity and inequality grew together during the American Gilded Age, and Anna Katharine Green, one of the most popular writers at the time, was an underappreciated critic of these social changes. Green observed class difference firsthand from her Buffalo, New York home. In The Filigree Ball (1908), Green uses a murder mystery to expose the crass greed that props up a once-proud estate. In this novel, the ancestral family manor is itself a weapon, armed with a device designed to eliminate human obstacles to the family’s socioeconomic success. In this way, Green incorporates the gothic tradition of haunted places to critique the evils of generational wealth preserved through corrupt, and often violent, means. Using the historical lineage of the Moore House as its central focus, Green suggests that avarice is the deadliest sin.

The session then pivots to the topic of the abject and haunted house in crime fiction into the interwar period. During the 1920s, a new type of crime fiction emerged that is usually called “Golden Age Crime/Detective Fiction.” During the interwar period, some of the best-known crime writers debuted their detectives and book series, e.g. Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Kerstin-Anja Münderlein looks at three debut novels – by Agatha Christie (The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 1920), Margery Allingham (The Crime at Black Dudley, 1929), and Gladys Mitchell (Speedy Death, 1929) – all set predominantly in English manor houses. Like their predecessor Green, these three authors employ the manor houses in their gothic effect, but they also move beyond the confines of gothicity in depicting these houses. This paper will thus examine how the manor house in Golden Age crime is both a gothic place and not a gothic place by showing that although the mansion of the typical country house mystery fulfils most of the criteria of a gothic house, it has a decidedly different “feel” to it.

Gill Plain’s final paper of this session brings the concern with gothic tropes and the “Golden Age” of crime (to the brink of the Second World War). Plain explores Agatha Christie’s relentless psychodrama, And Then There Were None (1939). The house on Soldier Island, to which a group of ill-assorted guests are invited, is the antithesis of both the gothic mansion and the conventional English country house. Described as “the essence of modernity” (89), this is a house in which – we are explicitly told – nothing is hidden. And yet, in its setting, its plot, its conceits, and its debt to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this is also one of the most “gothic” fictions Christie ever produced. This paper will explore the simultaneous refusal and embrace of the gothic in Christie’s mass murder narrative, examining the means through which And Then There Were None enacts a literature of terror within the space of modernity.