Agatha Christie’s Mid-Century ‘Manosphere’ Reveals a Different Kind of Dysfunctional Male

A New Book Explores Agatha Christie's Chemicals of Death ...

Agatha Christie, circa 1950. By Robin Olson At first I was put off by the scary illustrations in Kathryn Harkup’s new book, V Is for Venom: Agatha Christie’s Chemicals of Death. My fears weren’t roused by pictures of grotesque corpses or ominous crime scenes, but by diagrams of molecules and chemical reactions horribly reminiscent of my dreaded high-school chemistry textbook.Indeed, images of atoms balanced in Calder-esque designs are the only i…

Agatha Christie’s mid-century ‘manosphere’ reveals a different kind of dysfunctional male

This piece contains spoilers for Towards Zero. Agatha Christie, a middle-class English crime writer who preferred to be known as a housewife, is the world’s bestselling novelist. Since her death in 1976, her work has been translated into over 100 languages and adapted for cinema, TV and even video games. Her writing is characterised by its cheerful readability and ruthless dissection of hypocrisy, greed and respectability. Christie is fascinated…

Alex Kazemi’s Y2K period novel reminds us the manosphere is nothing…

New Millennium Boyz — Replete with MTV and endless band t-shirt references, the book follows three teenage boys living in 1999 USA as they descend into a pit of darkness. We spoke to its author about masculinity, the accelerated aging of teenagers, and the rebirth of subcultures in the algorithm age. Masculinity is hot right now. And not hot in the desirable sense, but in the public outcry – let‘s write one million thinkpieces about the impacts …