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 in 2020 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. Critically, the installation provides an ironic counterpoint to the exhibition by responding to Christie-related scholarship and identity politics in a post-Brexit UK context.

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