Risk Society and Nation State: Agatha Christie's Espionage Novels

Abstract

Although known as a popular detective novelist, Agatha Christie also wrote several espionage novels mainly featured with entangled plots of spy agents working under the cover of secret intelligence organizations in a trans-national world. Novels like "They Came to Baghdad" (1952), "Destination Unknown" (1955), and "Passenger to Frankfort" (1970), resemble one another and share a basic premise concerning not only espionage story plots but also what Ulrich Beck calls a risk society. In Christie's these novels, a new social reality affected by multi-national capitalism and technologies of medical science, gene biochemistry and even nuclear weapon gradually turns the global world into an uneasy and unstable situation. More importantly, the reactionary protest and demonstration of rebellious youth or social masses, terrorist's sabotage in urban cities, and capitalist's multinational investment of new energy presented in her works also cause the "risks" that endanger the stability of a nation state. These various risks and circulation of transnational capital in a global culture adumbrated in Christie's novels in the twenty century seemingly foreshadow repetitive social unrest (including Neo-Nazi movement and nuclear crisis) in our present era. Why does Christie punctuate this critical awareness of the risk society and transnational world in her espionage novels? How can these "risks" within a social reality and the power of capital money threaten the consolidation of a dominant order or a governmental regime of the nation state? These issues will be covered and examined in this paper.