Orientalism in Agatha Christie’s Detective Novel They Came to Baghdad

Abstract

Following the assumption that the origin of the detective novel was inspired from the Arabian Nights, this paper explores the Orientalist landmarks in the novel They came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie which displays the orient as an exotic and inferior location. It relies on the groundbreaking critical book Orientalism by Edward Said (1979) that has pointed another dimension of seeing the east. It adopts a critical analysis of the novel’s Orientalist elements based on historical evidence. The extended essay is composed of two chapters, a general background and an analytical study. The first chapter introduces the basic components of the research work which are: the detective novel, Orientalism, and the Arabian Nights. The second one pinpoints the analysis of the novel They came to Baghdad which contains the features of Orientalism in the detective type more than they seemed to be. They Came to Baghdad is a detective novel by the ‘Britain’s Queen of Mystery’ Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, written in 1951. It is an espionage and a thriller detective type of story expertly plotted in the city of Baghdad after the Second World War. The novel is analyzed under the Orientalism appraisal that indicates how Agatha Christie presents the western characters vis-a-vis the Orientals). The novel pictures the negative Orientalists’ stereotypes about the Middle East specifically and about the Orient in general and discusses several perceptions against the oriental civilization and atmosphere. It emphasizes the dichotomy of the self and the other and notifies the schism between the west and the east. The study concludes that They Came to Baghdad is an Orientalist novel by Agatha Christie with a biased way of examining and presenting the Orient.