ABSTRACT
In Agatha Christie’s detective fiction, the cosy cultural work of gardening is often linked to murder. It is no surprise, then, that garden and human pests meet the same fate at the hands of a pesticide in “The Blue Geranium” (1931). While “wasp season” proves mutually fatal for a wide ontological spectrum in that tale, only the death of the purportedly “useless” human pest, Mrs. Pritchard, is deemed a murder. But, by the tale’s end, Jane Marple muses over killing on a larger scale. Wasps, seasonally exterminated in the thousands by potassium cyanide, are on her mind. Marple’s discovery of the murder weapon in the garden shed, in fact, reveals that ranking and taking life is a casual human practice, even amongst those who might be considered most “humane”: caregivers, gardeners, or otherwise “very good sort[s].” Her qualms over the mass killing of wasps encourage the reader to reconsider the ontological boundaries we place around crime. By the end of the tale, the reader joins Marple in realising ecological violence as violence or even more imaginatively, as murder.
