A Murder Is Announced

“I’ve never really cared for dachshunds myself—I don’t mean because they’re German, because we’ve got over all that—I just don’t care for them, that’s all.”

Christie subtly establishes A Murder Is Announced as a postwar novel when Mrs. Swettenham comments on a newspaper advert for dachshund puppies, asserting that her dislike of the dog breed has nothing to do with lingering hostility toward Germany following World War II. Her declaration, “we’ve got over all that,” is unintentionally ironic. In the course of the novel, Christie demonstrates that English society is far from recovered from the conflict, and xenophobia abounds.

“Oh dear me, nowadays unless one has an old Nannie in the family, who will go into the kitchen and do everything, one is simply sunk.”

Here, Mrs. Swettenham laments another effect of World War II: the difficulty in hiring reliable domestic staff. Affluent households like the Swettenhams, accustomed to relying on servants, had to make do with what help they could get or even do the housework themselves. These minor domestic details illustrate how the war and its aftermath eroded England’s rigid class divisions.

“She wore country tweeds—and with them, rather incongruously, a choker necklace of large false pearls.”

The first physical description of Miss Blacklock provides a significant clue to her role as an imposter. The ostentatious pearl choker she customarily wears is at odds with her understated costume of “country tweeds.” The pearls cover Charlotte’s surgical scar, concealing her true identity and thus symbolizing concealment and deception; the symbolism is magnified in how the pearls are presumably “false.