R. O. Thorp talks about what inspired her latest novel Death On Ice
BY R. O. THORP, IMAGE BY TRISTAN HUTCHINSON
Murder mysteries, even at their cosiest, can hold mirrors to society: rich peoples’ foibles, the quiet viciousness of rural villages, the desperation of the respectable. It’s a kind of smuggling act. But what about queer selves and queer worlds? Where do they belong among locked rooms and clues?
The history of modern queer reading would probably include a lot of people like me: readers who saw hints of desires that mirrored themselves, and returned to them constantly without understanding why. For many of us, queer reading is often re-reading. So I was drawn to characters like Hinchcliffe and Murgatroyd, women who live together and keep ducks in the 1950 Agatha Christie mystery A Murder Is Announced. I can recite passages about them by heart. Hinch’s savage grief when (spoiler) Murgatroyd is killed remained in my mind.
Highly charged female relationships were everywhere in Golden Age murder mysteries, though the results were… variable. Dorothy L Sayers’ earlier 1927 book Unnatural Death features Mary Whittaker, who is euphemistically ‘not of the marrying sort’ and attracts an adoring younger woman. The fact that (again, spoiler) Mary ends up murdering her acolyte and trying to steal an inheritance is, alas, pretty typical. Queerness was ‘dangerous’.
As I moved through the genre, though, I felt it move with the times. Professor Caroline Derry, an expert on English law and Christie’s work, points out that by the time of Nemesis’s publication in 1971 Christie could be more explicit in her depictions of lesbianism. The fact that (spoiler again) the murder in that book is driven by sapphic unrequited love for a straight girl didn’t put me off: I read and reread. Television and film adaptations could also add more complexity to sapphic depictions. One of the greatest was Dame Maggie Smith at her most acidic in tuxedo and tails in 1978’s Death On The Nile. She was a “companion”, a mystery character trope I always found intensely queer. It’s a relationship the genre explores often, using the terrors inflicted by wealthy women on their helpmeets as a microcosm of power.
But while overt representation was emerging, actual queer joy was still thin on the ground. Out and proud sleuths like Val McDermid’s Lindsay Gordon or Mari Hannah’s Kate Daniels remain rare. Death On Ice is what it is partly because I just wanted queer people to be there: visible, unremarkable, and not automatically doomed or defined by their orientation, in a genre that has a history of doing both.
There’s a fascinating ongoing discussion about how one queers the murder mystery. Is it valuable to make LGBTQIA characters the same as everybody else: in thrall to social, material and romantic pressures, and prone to terrible decisions? Or should queer experience breed new forms that reject heteronormative settings, like manor houses or 22a Baker Street? Murder mysteries restore order after somebody violates it – but if the order isn’t one that loves queer rights and delights, should we restore it at all?
I don’t have the answers, but I hope Death On Ice is read and re-read because people see themselves in it, living queer lives in full complexity, and are comforted.
Death On Ice by R. O. Thorp is out in February and published by Faber.
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