Abstract

Detective fiction centres upon the explication of a mystery by a genius and often disabled detective, who works from a liminal space, utilising it to his benefit. The two most celebrated mystery writers, Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Agatha Christie’s iconic detective creations – Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple respectively, best illustrate the liminality of a detective and their individual disabilities lending to their genius status. Sherlock Holmes possesses unparallelled observational and deductive skills, mixed with eccentricity and emotional detachment. Holmes possibly exhibits the Savant syndrome and other neurological disability spectrums like bipolarity and antisocial tendencies. Christie’s Miss Marple is an old rheumatic grandmother, relying on her inductive understanding of human behaviour and psyche, and covert observational powers to uncover mysteries through experience. Being an old woman, she holds a unique ‘liminal’ position in society – constantly overlooked as harmless, underestimated as senile, which she uses to her advantage. Disability here is not explicitly of the body, but from socio-cultural rules and expectations of the times. The detectives are deviant of conventional ‘normality’ by being an asexual, sociopathic savant in the case of Holmes (queerness being associated with disability), and Marple by being a powerless aged spinster who manages to trump professional detectives with her feminine insight. In this research paper thus, disability studies and feminist theories shall be used to investigate how the detectives are disabled geniuses and the gendered, socio-historical difference in Holmes and Marple’s conditions and approach to detective work.