ABSTRACT
During the 1920s, as Agatha Christie emerged as the most celebrated writer of "Golden Age" detective fiction, she published fiction featuring supernatural subjects including ghosts, mediums, and uncanny premonitions. This chapter focuses on one of these stories: "Wireless", first published in 1926, in which Mary Harter hears the voice of her long-dead husband Patrick over her new radio set. "Wireless" exemplifies how radio culture was gendered in the 1920s. Comparing "Wireless" to her other supernatural fiction from the 1920s, the chapter argues further that Christie critiques positivism on the grounds that it lacks a more intuitive grasp of truth—an ability she primarily associates with women and with men who possess traditionally "feminine" qualities. "Wireless" illuminates radio's connections to the supernatural, in the process revealing a gender divide stemming from conflicting epistemologies. Christie's work destabilizes the boundary between detective fiction and supernatural fiction by suggesting that more intuitive forms of knowledge are necessary to a full understanding of truth.
