Guy Cuthbertson

The critic Eric Routley spoke about detective stories as puritan.

They are not associated with sex.

One newspaper recently observed that none of Christie's detective novels included any sex or swearing.

We see certainly that the books do not contain descriptions of sexual intercourse.

They could not be called explicit.

The bedroom door remains closed, we could say.

They are family-friendly mysteries.

They don't offend with sex any more than they wallow in blood and gore.

Nor do the books use the kind of rude or vulgar language of sex that got Lawrence in hot water.

The titles of Marple books might attract the eye of an ignorant reader in search of erotica,

The Moving Finger, The Body in the Library, They Do It with Mirrors, What Mrs McGilly-Cuddy Saw, Double Sin, but they are far from being erotic novels.

Lady Chatterley's love around the Marple stories seem to be different kinds of literature, as much as Lady Chatterley and Miss Marple are different types of person.

You might even feel that you need to take sides.

Are you a Chatterleyite or a Marple-ite?

In fact, the character stands for the kind of book that they inhabit.

Lady C, daring, controversial, liberated, and highly sexually active.

And Miss M, prim and proper, discreet, gentle, old-maidish, but very sharp.

In 1939, in an article called The Chastity of Murderers in The Tatler, the writer Michael Arlen complained about the unrealistic chastity of the characters in Agatha Christie's books.

He felt that they don't have sex lives.

He said, "...the unassailable chastity of all these people is getting a bit too thick altogether."