Rival Queens: Allusion to Sayers in Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh

This chapter explores allusions to Sayers in the works of Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. It describes why Margery Allingham’s engagement with Sayers falls into the category of “influence” rather than “allusion”, and that when Sayers left the detective genre her fellow “Queens of Crime” began to allude to her novels. This chapter includes a series of readings of these allusions, exploring the ways Christie used Sayers to position herself as a more middlebrow novelist, whilst Marsh used her to explore an imagined rural England and negotiate her own status as a colonial novelist writing about “Home”.