Guy Cuthbertson

He said that in fiction of the 1930s, people were regularly jumping into bed with each other, especially in books set in the countryside.

Incidentally, Arlen is often identified as the inspiration for the character Michaelis in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Michaelis has an affair with Milady before the Gamekeeper does.

The countryside has a very amorous effect on the characters in modern novels, he says, but no such action occurs in Murder Mysteries.

According to Arlen, there is not even an arch hint of zizzy pom-pom.

Not even for what he calls the girl with all the earmarks of a pretty hot number.

Married couples make us wonder whether they have done anything constructive.

In Agatha Christie's fiction, he says, they grimly sleep alone.

That unusual word of Arlen's, zizzy pom-pom, which he had introduced in the Tatler a month before, is not used by Christie as far as I know, although John Dixon Carr would later use it in his fiction.

But was Arlen fair to Agatha Christie?

We look at the Marple books and we see that there is sexual content, rather a lot of it, but it is veiled and politely dealt with.

rather intriguing to see how Christie deals with this.

It's not chaste, there's plenty of filth, but we could hardly notice it.

Sex as a word does occasionally occur, early on in the story The Herb of Death in 1930, or later in A Murder Is Announced in 1950.

where sex was a fad?

After the war we went in for sex, now it's all frustration?

Or in 1962's The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side, we are told that Marina Gregg was a film star before the modern obsession with curviness and vital statistics, even though in the film version she is played by Elizabeth Taylor.

We are told that she could not have been described as sex incarnate, or the bust, or the torso.

She is the tall, thin, bony beauty like a garbo.

She gave her films personality rather than mere sex.