Abstract

Variations on a Theme of Agatha Christie is an audio-visual installation specially commissioned to accompany the ‘Investigating Detectives’ exhibition at The National Centre for the Written word. The installation invites visitors to hear sounds/music that draw their inspiration from detective fiction.

Depictions of sound and music in crime novels create atmosphere, suspense and a sense of place. Sometimes they even provide plot-critical clues for literary detectives—as when a piano is used to hide a murder weapon or a ukulele string is used to kill someone. In deploying a varied palette of sounds, the work takes a musical composition by Agatha Christie herself as one of its points of departure. Some of the music is performed on a priceless violin (by Steve Morris), which was itself the subject of a sleuthing exercise, having hit the headlines when it was stolen from a London train.

With a prominent role given to this (recovered) violin, the musical score includes a dramatic passage for virtual orchestra which embeds some of the conventional sounds of contemporary and hardboiled detective fiction—a Rebus cityscape, a Poirot railway carriage, the striking of a Marlowe matchstick.

With its varied palette of vocal, acoustic and digital instruments and sound effects, 'Variations' provides a rich and subtly ambient complement to the National Centre's Investigating Detectives exhibition, which opened in October 2021. the installation provides an ironic counterpoint to the exhibition by responding to Christie-related scholarship and identity politics in the post-Brexit UK context.

An online version of 'Variations' is on permanent display on the national Centre for the written Word's website.