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protecting them from thugs hired by an unscrupulous developer. At the end of the novel, Amanda asks Campion to take her into partnership and hints that ‘in about six years’ time she may be ready to marry. In The Fashion in Shrouds, published in 1937, Amanda reappears as an aircraft engineer. To distract attention from an awkward investigative moment, she announces her engagement to Campion. The super-sleuth is shocked, but warms to the idea. After a party to celebrate the breaking-off of their fake engagement, the jilted Campion argues with Amanda and throws her in the river. Somehow she manages to see this as a demonstration of his affection and at end of the novel they become properly engaged.
    These romantic liaisons in detective fiction prove to be ideal marriages, the sort the writers would have wanted for themselves. They are pairings of equality, where a super-sleuth’s match is an equally capable wife, who makes no career compromises. Amanda Campion’s work takes precedence over housekeeping, and Peter Wimsey is emphatic that Harriet’s writing is not to be interrupted by domestic trivia. Within the conventional institution of marriage, the Queens of Crime tackled a tricky modern problem that did not necessarily reflect the views of the status quo. Women’s equality in the workplace and at home was not a social assumption like the hierarchies of class, culture and religion. For many itwas controversial. The Queens were not flagrant feminists or subversives, yet it was revolutionary in a genre that was assumed to reflect society’s established mores, to portray a marriage of equality as the norm.
    In Overture to Death, published in 1939, but inspired by Ngaio’s experiences in 1938, Alleyn writes a letter to Troy, committing himself to a modern marriage. In it he admits that his profession makes him ‘a chancey sort of lover…A fly-by-night who speaks to you at nine o’clock on Saturday evening, and soon after midnight is down in Dorset looking at lethal pianos.’ He makes a pledge:
My dear and my darling Troy, you shall disappear, too, when you choose, into the austerity of your work, and never, never, never shall I look sideways, or disagreeably, or in the manner of the martyred spouse. Not as easy a promise as you think, but I make it.
    While Wimsey, Campion, and Alleyn were either engaged or honeymooning, Hercule Poirot was safely single and holidaying aboard a paddle steamer on the Nile.
    In 1937, Agatha Christie was in the Middle East with her husband Max Mallowan, who was leading an archaeological expedition to Tell Brak in Syria. Christie photographed and recorded finds at the site, and during her spare time began Death on the Nile, a novel set in Egypt where they took a break. She uses love mixed with greed as the motive for her crime. Simon Doyle and his rich heiress wife, Linnet, are on a luckless honeymoon, tracked down and stalked relentlessly by the thwarted Jacqueline de Bellefort, Simon’s former fiancée and Linnet’s former best friend. Linnet is eventually found shot through the head, with the letter ‘J’ drawn in blood on the wall to incriminate Jacqueline. Christie uses this romantic triangle to generate one of her cleverest plots. The novel was one of her favourites, and certainly, she thought, one of her best ‘foreign travel’ books.
    Death on the Nile was well received by critics, some of whom were rapturous. ‘ She has excelled herself ,’ wrote the critic for the Evening News, ‘…must call for unqualified praise.’ Even The Times reviewer admired the complexity: ‘Must be read twice, once for enjoyment and once to see how the wheels go round.’ Agatha Christie was at a peak.
    Hercule Poirot remains untouched, however. He never faces the complications of sharing his life with anyone and never changes to accommodate it. Christieputs romance at the heart of her plot, but not in the heart of her sleuth. To her, the novel of social manners was another genre. The most