It seems unnecessary to introduce Dame Agatha Christie–the most popular author of all time, outsold by only William Shakespeare and the Bible. Her work as a nurse in the First and Second World Wars, her life as an archaeologist in the Middle East, and the countless adaptations of her stories for stage and screen, are mentioned on every dust cover. What is less commonly discussed (and of more interest to her Christian readers) is her Protestant faith, and the influence of that faith on her writing. Christie was a lifelong member of the Church of England, and kept a copy of Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ by her bedside throughout her life. She was not a theologian like her contemporaries and fellow mystery authors Dorothy Sayers or G.K. Chesterton, and she spoke little publicly about her Christian faith; nevertheless, the comments she did make on religious matters reveal a thoughtful and serious contemplation of Christ and the Gospel–a contemplation which emerges subtly, but clearly, in her literature.
Christie’s faith is particularly evident in an early work entitled The Mysterious Mr. Quin, in which she wrestles with questions of suffering, sacrifice, love, and death–questions she had wrestled with herself. In her autobiography, Christie recalls a speech by one of her school teachers, which stayed with her throughout her life.
‘All of you,’ she said, ‘every one of you – will pass through a time when you will face despair. If you never face despair, you will never have faced, or become, a Christian, or known a Christian life. To be a Christian you must face and accept the life that Christ faced and lived; you must enjoy things as he enjoyed things; be as happy as he was at the marriage at Cana, know the peace and happiness that it means to be in harmony with God and with God’s will. But you must also know, as he did, what it means to be alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, to feel that all your friends have forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you, and that God Himself has forsaken you. Hold on then to the belief that that is not the end. If you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian life.’[1]
The Mysterious Mr. Quin is, in many ways, an exposition of this moment, contemplating what it means to live a life in conformity with Christ. The book is an anthology of twelve short stories, most of which were published individually in the mid and late 1920s, and later compiled into one volume in 1930. Each story follows two characters: Mr. Satterthwaite, a late-middle-aged bachelor with a penchant for the theater, and many friends throughout England with large estates to visit; and Mr. Harley Quin, a mysterious gentleman who always seems to appear immediately before some great drama. Over the course of each story, Mr. Satterthwaite, with a quick eye and an unusually refined social sense, is placed among a cast of individuals with secrets to hide, passions to control, and histories to resolve. Satterthwaite observes the working of these unseen forces like the opening acts of a play until, as if on cue, Mr. Quin steps into the picture. He gently spurs Mr. Satterthwaite to take an active role in the proceedings, inevitably leading to the sudden discovery of hidden truth, resolution of buried conflict, and aversion of impending disaster. Often he saves someone from a fast-approaching demise; always he brings together young lovers who otherwise would have been torn apart.
In the adventures of Quin and Satterthwaite, Christie uses the vehicle of romance to address the desire for God latent in the human heart. In her stories, this desire is reflected in the relationship between a man and a woman–a lover, and a beloved. This romantic longing is personified in the figure of Harlequin, a traditional pantomime character who acts as the archetype of the perfect lover. Because the thing longed for–eternity and peace with God–is so great, there is a commensurate danger in pursuing it. Sin and selfishness lead men and women to do terrible things attempting to grasp it, damning themselves and dooming those around them to misery. But such danger only highlights the surpassing worth of the thing pursued. And as love is the end of that pursuit, so love–a Christlike, humble love–is also the means of achieving it. Such love, Christie asserts, has two requirements. Firstly: God is the Great Producer, and history is his drama. He has a role for each of us, and we can choose to take his cues and submit to our parts, or not. A cruciform love requires that we embrace the role we have been given. And secondly, because the story to which we are submitting is ultimately Christ’s story, conformity with it requires our conformity with Christ in his suffering and death. Death is present wherever love is present, and therefore achieving the ultimate good of love–union with God–requires us to die to ourselves.
These themes appear with greatest clarity in the final story of The Mysterious Mr. Quin, titled “Harlequin’s Lane.” Mr. Satterthwaite is staying with his friends Anna and John Denman at their country home. Anna is a former Russian ballerina, whom John rescued from the Bolsheviks during the First World War. Satterthwaite describes his friends as “Philistines, and dull Philistines at that,” and yet finds himself strangely drawn to them. There is something more to their relationship than meets the eye. In one scene, the older man sits down with Anna as she reflects on her former life:
“A great dancer–she can have lovers, yes–but a husband, that is different.”
…
“I see,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “I see. So you gave it up?”
She nodded.
“You must have loved him very much,” said Mr. Satterthwaite gently.
“To make such a sacrifice?” She laughed.
“Not quite that. To make it so lightheartedly.”
“Ah, yes–perhaps–you are right…Always one looks for one thing–the lover, the perfect, the eternal lover…No lover ever satisfies one, for all lovers are mortal.”[2]
Here Christie presents her principal theme: the longing of every heart for God. It is a desire for peace, for a home, for the belonging that comes from knowing and being known. Anna recognizes that her love for her husband reflects a longing for a love more permanent, invulnerable, and eternal. It is not a stretch to hear echoes of Augustine’s observation that the heart is restless until it finds its rest in God. The same theme reappears through different images in other stories. One young woman sees a vision of the country of her dreams, “shining and beautiful” on the other side of a forest, and it produces in her an expectation for happiness that is almost superhuman, and even frightening. A man and woman, both given what they consider to be good lives, still desire the joy of a family. That desire draws them toward one another mysteriously, without their knowledge. Finally, Mr. Quin himself sums up all of these depictions in the simple image of a cottage on a hill: “the house of one’s dreams.” Christie’s characters recognize, even implicitly, the final good to which their earthly goods point.
As noted, in Mr. Quin, Christie chooses to represent this longing as a romantic longing. Each plot centers around a couple whose intimacy–and often whose lives–are somehow in peril. Sometimes the couple is married, and some secret threatens to pull them apart. In other cases the couple’s chance at matrimony is impeded by a wrongful accusation or a misunderstanding. It is through the pursuit of these relationships that the characters pursue the “house of their dreams.” In putting marriage center-stage when contemplating the desire for God, Christie shows the Protestant influence on her thinking. In her stories, marriage, and not a vowed celibacy, is the normative institution through which the ultimate good of union with God is seen and pursued. This counter-emphasis against monasticism echoes the reformed character of Thomas Cranmer’s Form of Solemnization of Matrimony in the English Prayer Book with which Christie would have been familiar. His choice to add “to love and to cherish” to the marriage vows of the old Sarum rite reflect the Protestant insistence that marriage is a “holy estate.”[3] This emphasis does not imply that marriage is exclusively necessary, but that the intimacy and self-giving required for a healthy marriage tends toward the sanctification of the heart.[4]
In addition to the image of the “house,” Christie personifies this longing for peace and home in the character Harlequin, the eponymous protagonist of traditional Harlequinade plays which were performed all over England into the early twentieth century. Each production portrayed Harlequin wooing his beloved Columbine away from her evil caretaker Pantaloon.[5] Mr. Quin is identified with the pantomime character (his name is perhaps a giveaway), and over the course of their acquaintance Mr. Satterthwaite learns to expect his appearance wherever masked figures or motley patterns are on display. In Harlequin’s Lane, Anna describes Harlequin as the man she had always imagined she was dancing with when on stage:
“Supposing, then, that to carry on one’s…trade, one’s profession, one were to make use of a fantasy–one were to pretend to oneself something that did not exist–that one were to imagine a certain person…It is a pretence, you understand, a make believe–nothing more.
…
Always one looks for one thing–the lover, the perfect, the eternal lover…It is the music of Harlequin one hears.”[6]
Having revealed the universal desire for home and permanence–for God–Anna identifies Harlequin as that lover for whom all other lovers long. When Mr. Quin appears, she recognizes him as that fantasy she had kept all her life, not believing that it could ever be real. Christie sets up Harlequin as a kind of icon, representing and personifying the object of the desires of every lover, and by extension every person. The dance of Harlequin, in every production pursuing and saving Columbine from her wicked master, is presented as a meta-narrative. It is the story that is reflected in every couple, in every dance between lover and beloved. Christie reinforces this image in the closing scene of the book by placing her protagonists Quin and Satterthwaite at the head of a country lane. The sign at the entrance, like the title of the story, reads “Harlequin’s Lane,” but the locals call it the “Lovers’ Lane.” There is, observes Mr. Satterthwaite, one like it in every village; but this one belongs to Mr. Quin particularly. At the end of it, much to Mr. Satterthwaite’s indignation, is an old quarry filled with garbage, and the ruins of a cottage standing on the edge.
“What is this place?”
“I told you earlier today. It is My lane.”
“A Lovers’ Lane,” murmured Mr. Satterthwaite. “And people pass along it.”
“Most people, sooner or later.”
“And at the end of it–what do they find?”
Mr. Quin smiled. His voice was very gentle. He pointed at the ruined cottage above them.
“The house of their dreams–or a rubbish heap–who shall say?”[7]
The Lovers’ Lane is Harlequin’s Lane, and every pair of lovers must pass down it eventually. Thus, every lovers’ journey is Harlequin’s journey, and every lovers’ story is Harlequin’s story. This typological use of the Harlequinade is established at the very beginning of the anthology. At their first meeting, Mr. Quin recommends the Harlequinade to Mr. Satterthwaite. “It is dying out nowadays,” he says, “but it repays attention, I assure you. Its symbolism is a little difficult to follow–but the immortals are always immortal, you know.”[8]
But as the house at the end of the Lovers’ Lane stands perched above a rubbish dump, so the pursuit of home is not without danger. Indeed, the beauty of the “house of one’s dreams” drives some to try to grasp it at others’ expense. After discovering that her husband has been unfaithful to her, Anna reflects on the fact that human weakness means the heart’s longing for that “eternal lover” can never be fulfilled. “It is the music of Harlequin one hears. No lover ever satisfies one, for all lovers are mortal. And Harlequin is only a myth, an invisible presence…”[9]
And in The Mysterious Mr. Quin, this danger does not stop at broken hearts. Time and again the selfish actions of one person trying to capture the music of Harlequin cause or risk their own, or another’s death. Sometimes this death is literal–this is Agatha Christie, after all–and sometimes it is figurative, but it is always there.
Finally, by setting up Harlequin as the icon of love, and the archetypal lover in whom all other lovers participate, Christie makes him to be a kind of Christ figure. This connection is not explicit in her writing, but the step to reach it is not a large one. The typology of a man as the perfect and immortal lover, the object and fulfillment of every desire, and the reality of which all mortal lovers are imperfect images, clearly parallels Christ. In the light of the speech of Christie’s school teacher to “be as happy as he was at the marriage at Cana,” the Harlequin pattern cast on the Lovers’ Lane takes on a decidedly Gospel hue.[10] With this context, it is easy to see the themes of that impromptu sermon–the pursuit of Christ in joy and in sorrow–echoed in Anna’s recognition of Harlequin as the object of her fantasies, and her lament that “no lover ever satisfies one, for all lovers are mortal.” Thus, Christie makes the mysterious drama of Harlequin and Columbine the narrative retelling of St. Paul’s mystery of marriage as an image of Christ and his Church. In every marriage, the story of Christ’s love is retold again and again, reflected in the individual lives and relationships of Christian men and women.
Thus far, Christie has presented a problem. Every heart longs for eternity with God, as every lover longs for the music of Harlequin. The desire for the “perfect, the eternal lover” is the desire for Christ, who is love itself. But the pursuit of that love is fraught with danger. Human frailty and sinfulness mean that attempting to achieve our desires often leads us to disaster, and drags others along with us. How, then, can the object of the heart’s longing be achieved? Christie’s answer is: love. As love is the goal of our striving, so love–humble, self-sacrificing, Christlike love–is also the means of achieving it. She presents two necessary aspects of this kind of love: first, one’s willingness to submit to the role that God has given one in this life; and second, one’s willingness to die. Ultimately, those two aspects are one and the same.
A recurring theme throughout The Mysterious Mr. Quin is that of the drama. Mr. Satterthwaite is introduced as a man who looks on life as one watches a play, but does not himself participate. “All his life, so to speak, he had sat in the front row of the stalls watching various dramas of human nature unfold before him. His role had always been that of the on-looker.”[11]
Through his acquaintance with Mr. Quin, he is drawn progressively into life as a player, and a key player at that. Initially he is hesitant, but over the course of his adventures becomes bolder and bolder in his role. Finally, he comes to understand what it means to be a conscious participant in what he now recognizes as the Divine Story being told by God:
You say your life is your own, but can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play–it may be totally unimportant, a mere walking-on part, but upon it may hang the issues of the play if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.[12]
Christie presents human history as a drama, a living play being put on by God, the Great Producer. Each person is given a role, one they can choose to embrace or to reject. Such a role may not be large–to human eyes it may be trivial–but its significance is known to God. Here, again, Christie shows her Protestant influence in an affirmation of the doctrine of vocation. The importance of one’s work, one’s place in life, does not depend on its proximity to the Church, but on the hidden plans of the Author. It is for each person to play his part, whatever that may be.
Further, Christie’s presentation of this drama is twofold. In God’s grand production, the story is the story of history, and each person is given his small part in it. But also, as seen in the image of the Harlequinade, each individual story is a reflection of one story being played out through eternity. In “Harlequin’s Lane,” Anna, still mourning her husband’s betrayal, dances the role of Columbine in the Harlequinade production, playing opposite Mr. Quin. It is worth taking time to summarize the production as Christie describes it.
The night is one of sublime beauty. Anna’s Columbine and Mr. Quin’s Harlequin dance “as they had danced through time immemorial.” Then the mortal Pierrot appears, played by Anna’s husband John, and sees Columbine dancing in the woods. He is entranced. Yet she dances away with her immortal lover, and leaves him alone. Next, the lovely Pierrette is introduced but Pierrot is unmoved. His mind is fixed on Columbine. Pierrot falls asleep, and in the night when the rest of the village have gone, the two eternal dancers, Harlequin and Columbine, return. He awakes and confesses his love to Columbine who, after a moment’s hesitation, chooses to stay with him, and Harlequin dances away. The two are married, and live together for many years. Then, one dark night, Columbine is restless. Her doting husband sits sleeping in a chair. Suddenly, Harlequin reappears in a doorway, the music of their dance filling the night. She leaps up, and rejoins her beloved, and dances away into the night with him, leaving Pierrot alone once again. In an instant, the play leaps forward decades. Pierrot has taken Pierrette as his wife at last, and now they are grown old together. It is another dark night, and the couple are asleep in their home. Suddenly, the music of Harlequin rises, and the two Immortals return, dancing, into the scene.
The door swings open and Columbine dances in. She leans over the sleeping Pierrot, kisses him on the lips…Crash! A peal of thunder. She is outside again. In the centre of the stage is the lighted window and through it are seen the two figures of Harlequin and Columbine dancing slowly away, growing fainter and fainter…A log falls. Pierrette jumps up angrily, rushes across to the window and pulls the blind. So it ends, on a sudden discord…[13]
The play, symbolically, tells the story of Anna’s life with her husband, first dancing with her imagined Harlequin, and then falling in love with John’s Pierrot. He is unable to live up to the image of the perfect lover, and so loses her, and the play ends in tragedy. But the story belongs, not just to Anna, but to every pair of lovers. Harlequin and Columbine are “immortals,” never dying, but recurring again and again, just as Christ’s love for his Church is reflected over and over again in every Christian marriage. As every lover participates in the drama of Harlequin, so every Christian participates in the drama of Christ, with every life taking on a cruciform shape. The drama of life that Mr. Satterthwaite discovers is therefore twofold, made up of our own individual parts given as God’s wisdom dictates, and simultaneously caught up into the one story of Christ’s redemptive work on Calvary.
From this insight into the parity between the Christian’s individual story with the story of the cross, comes a final insight: participation in the story of Christ means participation in His death. Christie has identified Harlequin with the perfect lover for which all lovers long. But Anna goes a step further.
“No lover ever satisfies one, for all lovers are mortal. And Harlequin is only a myth, an invisible presence…unless–”
“Yes,” said Mr. Satterthwaite. “Yes?”
“Unless–his name is–Death!”[14]
In identifying Harlequin, the eternal Lover, with Death, Christie asserts that in every love, death is necessarily present. The Lovers’ Lane along which all lovers must eventually walk is Harlequin’s Lane, and Harlequin is Death. Therefore all lovers must walk with death, and eventually come either to “the house of their dreams–or a rubbish heap.” Death is not optional, but the kind of death is up to the lovers. If one dies to oneself, sacrificing one’s own interests, desires, pride, for the sake of the beloved, and submitting to the part given by the Divine Producer, the reward is “the house of one’s dreams.” That is, if one is able to conform oneself to Christ, and live a life which reflects his sacrificial death, one will be able to reach that peace with God which is the end of all longing and all desire. This is the lesson of Mr. Quin, the perfect Lover who is also Death. It is the lesson given by a school teacher to a young Agatha that, “if you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian life.”
Satterthwaite, through his friendship with Mr. Quin, has been drawn deeper into the drama of which he was once only an observer. But there is still something of the “looker-on” about him; something that desires safety and comfort. Mr. Satterthwaite has never passed down the Lover’s Lane, because he has never sought out love, never taken the time to find a wife and build a family, never stepped into the despair, sorrow, and joy that such love entails. He has been content to remain a perpetual bachelor, spending his time observing others. But the question goes deeper–or perhaps goes higher–than marriage. He has never taken the chance to sacrifice–to die. From Christie’s Protestant perspective, sanctification comes, normally, from married life, but it is not exclusive to it. So the question remains: can Mr. Satterthwaite be saved? Like the play they had just witnessed, Satterthwaite’s conversation with his friend ends with an unanswered question, “on a sudden discord.” It is up to him to answer whether he has sufficiently died to himself and submitted to the Divine Producer. And in this moment Christie uses her character as a mirror, which she turns on the reader, and invites us to ask whether we have submitted ourselves to the drama, and learned to die with Christ. In the end each of us, like Mr. Satterthwaite, will stand before the Judgment Seat and answer the question, “do you regret?”
But Christie ends her story with a question for her protagonist. Mr. Satterthwaite has learned how to participate in the drama. But has he learned to die?
“‘A Lovers’ Lane,’ murmured Mr. Satterthwaite. ‘And people pass along it.’
‘Most people, sooner or later.’
…
Mr. Satterthwaite looked up at him suddenly. A wild rebellion surged over him. He felt cheated, defrauded.
‘But I–” His voice shook. ‘I have never passed down your lane….’
‘And do you regret?’
Mr. Satterthwaite quailed. Mr. Quin seemed to have loomed to enormous proportions…Mr. Satterthwaite had a vista of something at once menacing and terrifying…Joy, Sorrow, Despair.
And his comfortable little soul shrank back appalled.
‘Do you regret?’ Mr. Quin repeated his question. There was something terrible about him.
‘No,’ Mr. Satterthwaite stammered. ‘N-no.’
And then suddenly he rallied.
‘But I see things,’ he cried. ‘I may have been only a looker-on at Life–but I see things that other people do not. You said so yourself, Mr. Quin….’
But Mr. Quin had vanished.”[15]
Satterthwaite, through his friendship with Mr. Quin, has been drawn deeper into the drama of which he was once only an observer. But there is still something of the “looker-on” about him; something that desires safety and comfort. Mr. Satterthwaite has never passed down the Lover’s Lane, because he has never sought out love, never taken the time to find a wife and build a family, never stepped into the despair, sorrow, and joy that such love entails. He has been content to remain a perpetual bachelor, spending his time observing others. But the question goes deeper–or perhaps goes higher–than marriage. He has never taken the chance to sacrifice–to die. From Christie’s Protestant perspective, sanctification comes, normally, from married life, but it is not exclusive to it. So the question remains: can Mr. Satterthwaite be saved? Like the play they had just witnessed, Satterthwaite’s conversation with his friend ends with an unanswered question, “on a sudden discord.” It is up to him to answer whether he has sufficiently died to himself and submitted to the Divine Producer. And in this moment Christie uses her character as a mirror, which she turns on the reader, and invites us to ask whether we have submitted ourselves to the drama, and learned to die with Christ. In the end each of us, like Mr. Satterthwaite, will stand before the Judgment Seat and answer the question, “do you regret?”
John Walnut is a graduate of the University of Virginia, who works as a computer engineer in Washington D.C. He lives in Arlington, VA, where he attends an ACNA parish.
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), 150; emphasis original ↑
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin: A Harley Quin Collection (New York, NY; HarperCollins) 301-303 ↑
Alan Jacobs, The Book of Common Prayer: A Biography (Princeton, NJ; Princeton University Press) 39-41 ↑
For additional reflection on the Protestant association between marriage and holiness, see Joshua Patch, “Gentle Discipline: Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Christian Elites” in Ad Fontes, Spring 2022, 17-23 ↑
The Harlequinade originated in late medieval Italy as a comedy pantomime, with a basic romance plot and slapstick comedy. Each character underwent development across the centuries, deepening and evolving until they reached their final instantiation in the production with which a young Agatha Christie would have been familiar. The primary characters were Columbine, a beautiful young woman kept under the oppressive hand of her overbearing caretaker Pantaloon; Harlequin, Columbine’s romantic counterpart, who with his charm and cleverness seeks to deliver her from Pantaloon’s grasp; Pierrot, Pantaloon’s servant who is deeply infatuated with Columbine; and the Clown, whose chaotic antics complicate the lives of the characters and hinder Pantaloon’s attempts to keep Columbine under his control. Harlequinades all followed a similar pattern, and were often tacked onto the end of other, more serious productions, with the actors changing in an elaborate “transformation scene” into the characters of the well-known “Harlequin” tale. The Clown would stride forth onto the stage and announce “Here we are again!” and so introduce the new story. By the 1930s, the Harlequinade had been fading in popularity for many decades, and was mainly an antiquated curiosity. In including the pantomime in her story, Christie is marking the end of an era. ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 291, 302 ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 306; emphasis original ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 21 ↑
Christie, An Autobiography, 302 ↑
It is not a leap to think that this very speech was consciously in Christie’s mind at the time of her writing Harlequin’s Lane. In her autobiography, Christie concludes the anecdote about her teacher by saying, “It is odd that those few words, more than any sermon I have ever heard, remained with me, and years later they were to come back to me and give me hope at a time when despair had me in its grip.” (Christie, An Autobiography, 150) In the year before Harlequin’s Lane was first published, Christie had gone through the death of her mother, the strain of clearing out her childhood home alone, and her husband’s announcement that he had fallen in love with another woman and wanted a divorce, all of which culminated in her infamous disappearance. “So,” she writes, “after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak.” (Christie, An Autobiography, 353) It is difficult to imagine that this time was not what she was referring to when she spoke of despair having her in its grip. ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 1-2 ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 144 ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 300 ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 303 ↑
Christie, The Mysterious Mr. Quin, 306; emphasis original ↑