Detecting the blitz: Memory and trauma in Christie’s postwar writings

Pages: 137-154

ISBN: 9780367208523

DOI: 10.4324/9780367855185-10

Abstract:

References to the Blitz and its personally and nationally disruptive effects occur with decreasing frequency between 1948 and the posthumous publication of Christie’s autobiography in 1977, but are frequently related to psychological and mental wounds such as nervous breakdown in Taken at the Flood (1948) and amnesia in Destination Unknown (1954) and After the Funeral (1953). This linkage of individual damage and disruption to war continues a pattern evident in Christie’s interwar detective fiction and the heavily autobiographical Mary Westmacott novel Unfinished Portrait (1934). This chapter draws on theory of trauma and narrative to map this diffusion, focusing particularly on the resurfacing of references to the Blitz after the Second World War, and arguing that they offer a means of articulating both individual and national identity crisis, as well as a working through of trauma.

Source: Scopus