Introduction

Agatha Christie's work has traditionally been regarded as emblematic of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which covers the twenty or so years between the two world wars. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920, and her most famous works—The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), Death on the Nile (1937)—are products of this period as well. This timeframe is aptly referred to as the Golden Age because the most widely read and influential novels of Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, John Dickson Carr, S. S. Van Dine, and Marjorie Allingham were written at the time as well. Yet to limit Christie's achievement to the years between the two world wars is a failure to acknowledge the fact that Christie, as well as several other Golden Age authors, continued to produce major work after 1940. In Christie's case, she continued to write until the mid-1970s, and the later books comment on the changing mores and values of the times, most interestingly those associated with the young generation of the mid and late nineteen sixties. As a result, analyzing these late novels demonstrates that the label “Golden Age” and the years 1920–1940 as its time period are both “uncertain spaces” that need to be qualified by attention to the entire span of Christie's career.

What I will discuss here primarily are some of the novels she published between 1965 and 1970, books in which she depicted the youth culture of those turbulent years: the rebelliousness, the rejection of authority, the widespread bohemianism that involved drugs and the relaxation of sexual standards. This is a world far removed from the country estates or middle-class tourist life she commonly treated in the past, and her vision of the world is darker, with the books taking on their own noirish sensibility. Five books from this period—At Bertram's Hotel (1965), Third Girl (1966), Endless Night (1967), Hallowe’en Party (1969), and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970)—include references to the new youth culture that was exploding in the Western world.

In many ways Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are the most underrated comedy team in Hollywood history, probably because both performers achieved such tremendous success independently of their collaboration. But in terms of box-office success, cultural impact, and genuine innovation in screen comedy, Hope and Crosby rival, if not surpass, the great teams that come just before them and immediately follow them: the Marx Brothers in the thirties and Martin and Lewis in the fifties. The latter also achieved great success independently, but only after the team had irreparably split. Certainly it is time for a major “Road” picture revival, the kind the Marx Brothers enjoyed in the sixties. The recentDVDreleases will help renew public interest, but my main point is that much of the success of the team stems from the fact that unlike Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, and others who maintained roots in European comic traditions and personae, Hope and Crosby created characters whose roots were distinctively American. In fact, much of the humor of the series stems from the clash between the boys’ unshakeable Americanness and the traditions of the exotic cultures they encountered. Of course, by contemporary standards some of these conflicts can occasionally seem tasteless in their cartoonish stereotyping of other peoples. And their Americanness is certainly rooted primarily in the experience of nineteenth and early twentieth century white males. But the fact remains that the more genuinely American the boys’ tastes and habits are, the funnier their reactions are to their surroundings.

Hope and Crosby made seven “Road” pictures between 1940 and 1962: Singapore, Zanzibar, Morocco, Utopia, Rio, Bali, and Hong Kong. An eighth film, Road to the Fountain of Youth, was being planned when Crosby died suddenly in 1977. Of course, they also performed numerous times together during those years on radio and television, embellishing the characters they had created on the screen. To the delight of the audience, Crosby often did cameo roles in other Hope films of the forties and fifties, always appearing in a way that emphasized their “rivalry.” Though each actor made his greatest non-“Road” films during this twenty-year period, as far as comedies are concerned, they both reached their peak in the series.

In the summer of 2002 the American media, predictably, gave extensive coverage to the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. Journalists and pundits analyzed the remarkable influence that Presley's music and image still wields over popular culture; concurrently, the “Elvis Number Ones” CD headed straight to the top of the Billboard chart. Yet little notice was taken in October of the same anniversary of the death of the most successful and influential American entertainer of the first half of the twentieth century—Bing Crosby. Though they both died in the same year, by 1977 Crosby's music had come to seem hopelessly anachronistic to the younger generations of record buyers, and to them his image had faded into that of a kindly old man who did occasional Christmas specials with other aging crooners of a bygone era. Elvis's early, sad self-destruction and death created for him an instantaneous, immortal place, alongside the other tragic American icons Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, while his music continued to be the archetypal basis of all rock ‘n’ roll, from rockabilly to punk. Elvis impersonators have become a staple of the American entertainment scene—who has heard lately of a Crosby impersonator?

Yet the truth is, all American popular singers, including Elvis, are Crosby impersonators of one kind or another. Bing emerged as a solo act in the very early 1930s just as the microphone became available to show business, and he quickly learned to use it as an instrument that allowed him to create a new, intimate kind of singing that was both masculine and sensitive to the emotions implicit in the melodies and lyrics. Instead of “belting” like Al Jolson or Eddie Cantor, Crosby—well—he “crooned” the song, of course. Meanwhile, his up-tempo records jumped and jived as much as the best jazz recordings of the time. There had been no one like him before and his achievement inspired countless young singers to follow his musical path—including his most famous “son,” Frank Sinatra. And through Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, and many others, the Crosby style eventually became an ingredient in the musical mix that was rock ‘n’ roll.

Frank Sinatra's recording and film careers reveal interesting parallels and divergences. In the forties, his music and his movies served to create a unified persona: the fresh-faced young innocent of Anchors Aweigh (1945) seemed to be a perfect physical embodiment of the Voice that his audience heard on records and the radio. However, during the fifties and sixties, Sinatra created new film images that occasionally contradicted the lush romanticism of the Capitol and Reprise recordings. The psychopathic killer in Suddenly (1954), for example, could not be easily reconciled with the singer of In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning (1955). This was the kind of role—the tough, violent yet strangely appealing social outcast— that his friend Humphrey Bogart had originated in The Petrified Forest (1936) and developed in a variety of gangster movies and films noirs in the thirties and forties.

Interestingly, the “swinging” Pal Joey character—perhaps Sinatra's signature role in the fifties—is rooted in the forties, in John O’Hara's popular sequence of stories. It is not difficult to imagine Joey against the backdrop of a classic film noir. An unmistakable romanticism marks these movies: under the tough, hard-boiled surface, actors like Bogart and Cagney conveyed a hidden but potent sensitivity and a wounded but still active idealism. This is the quality that Sinatra seems to understand: toughness is often the necessary shell to protect tenderness. The beauty of the fifties and sixties recordings in no way cancels out the cynicism of Sinatra's “tough” films or the “swinging” ones with the Rat Pack. (Sinatra also played roles in which his ethnicity and his comic talents accompany his streetwise toughness.) Like Bogart's, Sinatra's appeal lies in his implicit assumption that toughness does not exclude feeling, that a sense of irony does not preclude a sense of honor.

It is a truism when discussing Sinatra's film career that he had one ten-year period of major work, from From Here To Eternity in 1953 to The Manchurian Candidate in 1962.