More on Amateur Aristocratic Detectives: Harley Quin

Although a great many Golden Age detectives created amateur aristocratic detectives, Agatha Christie didn't much. Her primary detectives--Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple--are thoroughly middle-class gentry. Her lesser known detectives tend to be the police or, like Colin Lamb, people connected to the police. 

The one somewhat aristocratic character that Christie created was Harley Quin. He appears in the short story collection bearing his name, The Mysterious Mr. Quin. He is a dark, saturnine young man who shows up when problems/mysteries arise involving lovers. He often solves them by prompting an elderly man Mr. Satterthwaite to take certain actions. 

Harley Quin is not entirely aristocratic, but he bears markers in common with Wimsey and Vance--namely, his secrecy and vaguely humorous air. However, he has a far darker side than the other characters. Christie was drawing on Harlequin from the Harlequinade, and Harley Quin has the unorthodox and faintly chaotic nature of Eros. Not the cutesy Cupid but the god who might just challenge all expectations. 

Christie's novels show a continual willingness to allow for passion and terror in the face of domestic love. She would, of course, come down on the side of Miss Marple regarding civility and decent behavior. But she allows that people are often helpless before their emotions. Characters who plan and carry out deaths are far more venial in her books than characters who wish and hope in secret, full of painful desires. On more than one occasion, Poirot consoles a character by pointing out that "wishing" for a death, however desperately, is not the same as carrying one out. 

Christie also, continually, comes down on the side of young women leaving home to "chance" their lives with rogues and other such lovers rather than remaining safely at home. One gets the impression that she wouldn't be all that big on trigger warnings. Stepping outside the door matters more than throwing up blockades to experience.

Harley Quin protects lovers but not always in the way we or Mr. Satterthwaite expect. The stories are, oddly enough, more Hans Christian Andersen's mermaid walking about on legs that give her continual pain than anything from Hallmark. 

Love is dangerous. Harley Quin will help but he will not pause or excise the emotion.