Abstract
İNGİLİZCE ÖZET Nemesis, the Goddess of Righteous Anger, the concept of the `dedective`, the roots of which lie back in ancient Greece with Sophocl es's Oed i pus Rex, the `realistic novel` of the Eighteenth Century, the `Gothic Novel` and the `Melodram Tradition` of the Nineteenth Century have all contributed to the basic literary concept which forms the basis of all Agatha Christie's crime nove I s. The author's work also is a by-product of rapid industrialisation, the disintegration of rural values due to migration to big cities, and the chaos in which English Literature found itself as an aftermath of the First World War. In Agatha Christie's novels, the characters are brought together in villages or big estates where everybody knows each other intimately and in holiday resorts or vehicles of transportation where nobody knows each other, around kinship, love, friendship and business relationships. The story of the murder/s is created in a historical time sequence which shows differences as - 186 -regards motive, solution and narration of events. While these murders are shaped, they are all based on a deliberate contradiction which on one hand delays and on the other determines the solution. The order of events is disrupted while the pattern is formed. The solution is achieved by uniting signifiers with wrong signifieds, thus creating implicit signs and then uniting signifiers with correct signifieds and hence forming explicit signs. The qualities mentioned above can all be observed in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Or i ent Express (1933), Five Li i 1 1 I e Pigs (1944), and And Then There Were None (1944). Symmet r i ca I i ty is another structural quality which can be observed when the novels are folded into two in the center. Repetition of various images at definite intervals is yet another characteristic of these works. Finally, various references to English (literature, and nursery rhymes is another quality of Agatha Christie's novel s. Somet imes the behavior of the characters in her works are reminiscent of famous characters in English Literature. - 187 -
