The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

The boundary between fact and fiction, truth and lies, is a major theme of the novel woven through character motivations, plot, and the nature of the text itself. Elements of metafiction—or telling stories about stories—are prevalent in The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. As a novel about a novelist, and a mystery about a mystery writer, the elements of metafiction appear in Benedict’s central conceit. The structure of her novel, however, reinforces the multiple layers of metafiction to emphasize the storytelling aspect of her text—the fiction in historical fiction.

The novel is bookended with Agatha’s reminders of the constructed quality of the story her readers (and Benedict’s readers) are about to encounter. In the first “Manuscript” chapter, she thinks, “I could not have written a more perfect man” (11), positing Archie, even before she (or readers) encounters him, into the hero archetype. Conversely, at the end of the novel, when the final details of Agatha’s plan are unfolding, she thinks of how to move forward as if she were writing a novel: “What is the right course at this precise moment in the narrative?” (161). By this point in the text, readers have encountered a further layer of metafiction. The Part 1 sections, entitled “The Manuscript,” appear as a collected document (titled The Manuscript) in Archie’s timeline, and the nesting-doll structure of Benedict’s novel deepens: The Manuscript is a novel, made up of “The Manuscript,” which is part of a novel (The Mystery of Mrs. Christie), whose narrator is a novelist (the in-text Agatha), based on a real novelist (the real-world Christie). The layers of metafiction build upon one another, obfuscating truth and fact.

Benedict pushes this theme further by introducing a series of unreliable narrators. Archie and Agatha are both unreliable narrators, the latter by her own omission, the former shown through his contradicting convictions in his third-person limited perspective. While Archie is seemingly unaware of his own unreliability, Agatha, the writer of the two, is more aware of this quality in both herself and her husband. When speaking of Archie’s desire to keep his mistress’s name out of the divorce proceedings, Agatha comments, “You wanted to become your own unreliable narrator, rewriting your past and your present history to suit the story you told yourself and Nancy” (168). Archie wishes to write himself as the hero that Agatha once believed him to be. In Part 2, Agatha confesses to the unreliability that led her to, for so many years, do whatever she could in order to attempt to make Archie happy, and outlines her newfound theory of this project’s failure:

The man I believed him to be, the man who could have fostered my strengths and talent into being, never existed. I wrote him into being on the first night we met, on the dance floor at Chudleigh Hall, just as I had the characters of my detective novels. But I could never get him right because I was an unreliable narrator of my own life, with only the vaguest sense of myself (175).

Agatha’s self-awareness in this regard, her admission of her past failure to see the truth, implies that this “new” version of Agatha sees things correctly.

Benedict once again turns the concept of certainty on its head when Agatha confesses to lying. She insists that Archie claim, publicly, that she had amnesia, and admits that certain parts of The Manuscript were exaggerated or fictionalized in ways that overlap with Mrs. Christie’s metafictional elements. In one of the latter “The Manuscript” sections, Agatha fears that Archie will push her off a mountain, thinking, “After all, [murder] didn’t happen only in my books. It could very well happen in real life” (145). In a twist of irony, she later identifies this as one of the exaggerated portions, suggesting that it didn’t, in fact, actually happen and only did occur in her book. The final conclusion on narrators as Benedict lays them out is perhaps articulated most clearly when Agatha ruminates on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of her novels famous for its unreliable narrator: “As I reread it a final time, it occurred to me that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, crafting stories about ourselves that omit unsavory truths and highlight our invented identities” (116). In this way, Benedict utilizes the very concept of unreliable narrators, positing it as a universal quality to humanize her characters and imbue them with interiority and whole personhood within a social and historical context that would paint them as archetypes.