The Golden Age of Murder

On Friday 10 December, Dorothy L. Sayers (whose father had jumped to ‘a scandalous explanation’ of the puzzle) wrote about the case for the Daily News. She assessed the possible scenarios: loss of memory, foul play, suicide, and voluntary disappearance, but her article was apparently written without personal knowledge of Christie’s character. Her speculations highlighted the questions about the case, but yielded no answers.

Was Agatha conducting a form of ‘mental reprisal’ against someone who had hurt her? Edgar Wallace advanced this theory in the Daily Mail, guessing that she was taking revenge on Archie for his adultery. A year or so later, Wallace wrote a story inspired by the case, ‘The Sunningdale Murder’. The Daily Mail also featured Max Pemberton, author of several bestselling Victorian thrillers, fearing the worst. He thought Agatha was dead.

Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a former Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey, although he had resigned after developing a passionate belief in spiritualism. He had investigated real-life crimes, such as the Edalji and Oscar Slater cases, with much success. The Surrey police supplied him with one of Agatha’s gloves, which he took to a medium and psychometrist named Horace Leaf. Leaf’s considered opinion was that ‘trouble’ was connected to the glove. If this insight was of limited value, Leaf did say that Agatha was still alive. Conan Doyle informed Archie of this breakthrough, and announced that the case was ‘an excellent example of the uses of psychometry as an aid to the detective’.

The police appealed for public help in searching the Surrey Downs, and ‘the Great Sunday Hunt’ took place on 12 December. About two thousand civilians took part, wrapped up warm against the cold. It was like a massive outdoor pre-Christmas party. Ice creams and hot drinks were sold from vans to refresh the spectators. Sayers could not resist joining in the excitement, and persuaded John Gilroy, her artist friend from Benson’s, to drive her to the Silent Pool. The outcome for her was even more of an anticlimax than her foray to France to investigate the Nurse Daniels mystery. During a brief look around, Sayers failed to spot any tell-tale clues that the police had missed, and was left to pronounce, with all the authority she could muster, ‘No, she isn’t here.’ Yet if she failed to contribute to the detective effort, at least her day out amounted to useful research. Aspects of her visit featured in Unnatural Death, in which two women go missing from a car left abandoned on the south coast.

As darkness fell, the hunt was called off. A flare was lit to help searchers who had lost their bearings find their way home. Weary and deflated, Kenward told journalists that he did not believe Agatha Christie’s disappearance was a gimmick designed to sell her books.

What he did not know was that the answer lay more than two hundred miles north. A banjo player and a fellow bandsman performing at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, the North Yorkshire spa town, were keeping a close eye on a woman guest. They concluded she was the missing novelist, and their detective work proved superior to anyone else’s. Within forty-eight hours, the whole world learned that Agatha Christie had been discovered, safe and well.

After travelling by train to Harrogate, Christie had taken a first-floor room at five guineas a week and bought herself some new clothes, including a glamorous pink georgette evening dress. She followed the reports about her disappearance in the Press, and played bridge – and billiards – in the public rooms. At night she danced in the Winter Garden Ballroom to the music of the Happy Hydro Boys. Otherwise she relaxed by having massages, solving crossword puzzles and borrowing books from the W.H. Smith’s lending library. Her favourite reading comprised thrillers rejoicing in titles such as The Double Thumb and The Phantom Train. She had assumed the identity of a Mrs Teresa Neele, recently returned to Britain from Cape Town. Her chosen surname was that of her husband’s mistress.

Today Agatha Christie remains, almost half a century after her death, a household name. More than that, she has become a global brand. Big business. Two billion (or is it four billion? – estimates vary, and at such a stratospheric level, it scarcely seems to matter) copies of her books have been sold, and she has been translated more often than any other author. About two hundred film and television versions of her work have been screened, and the stories have been adapted into video games, graphic novels and Japanese anime. She was the most performed female British playwright of the twentieth century, and The Mousetrap is the longest-running stage play of all time, with more than 25,000 performances in London alone. The sixtieth anniversary of its first performance was celebrated by sixty specially licensed performances worldwide. Her home overlooking the River Dart is in the care of the National Trust and a popular tourist destination, while her native Torquay boasts an Agatha Christie Mile, along which visitors can retrace her steps.

A statue featuring a bust of Christie stands in Covent Garden, the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul has an Agatha Christie room, and her face smiles from a billboard welcoming tourists to Gran Canaria. On the 120th anniversary of her birth, cooks around the world baked a Delicious Death cake from a recipe by Jane Asher. The book with the thickest spine in the world has been created from the complete Miss Marple stories. In Harrogate, a plaque in the Old Swan Hotel (formerly the Hydropathic Hydro) commemorates her disappearance, the reason for which continues to provoke debate. Agatha Christie is, in short, an icon whose name is synonymous with detective fiction and mystery.

The enduring nature and astonishing scale of her fame would have amazed, and possibly appalled her. Not only was she genuinely modest, she was fanatical about preserving her privacy. She had always been shy, but the media frenzy that surrounded her disappearance left her with a lifelong detestation of the Press.

At first sight, Christie seems as genteel as her books are supposed to be. With Christie, however, nothing was quite as it seemed. In person, she combined a straightforward outlook on life with hidden depths, just as her simple and accessible writing style contrasted with her devious plots. Her father was American, and from childhood she spent long periods abroad, gaining a breadth of understanding and experience of the world that helps to explain why her work has enjoyed unceasing popularity when so much more sophisticated fiction has vanished from sight.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890, the third child of Frederick and Clara Miller. Frederick had inherited enough money from the family business not to need to work, and not long after Agatha’s elder sister Margaret (known as Madge) was born, the family settled in Torquay. Frederick was good-natured but lazy, and his failure to keep a close eye on the family fortune proved financially calamitous. To economize, he let the Torquay house, and took his family to France for over six months. Agatha enjoyed such an idyllic summer in Pau that she never went back there, unwilling to diminish the magical memories of that first foreign adventure. Her novels are stereotypically associated with settings in country houses and seemingly Home Counties villages for which detective novelist Colin Watson coined the generic term ‘Mayhem Parva’. In fact, a high proportion of her stories are set overseas. This reflects her love of travel, but above all her core belief that, in its fundamentals, human nature is much the same everywhere.

Madge was regarded as ‘the clever one’ in the family, and attended boarding school, but one of Clara’s unorthodox ideas was to school Agatha at home. Frederick Miller’s health deteriorated along with the family finances, and he died in 1901. Money was short, but Madge had married James Watt, who came from a wealthy Mancunian family, and Agatha often stayed with them at Abney Hall in Cheshire. She loved Abney, and fictitious versions of it appeared in After the Funeral and ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. After a brief and unsatisfactory spell at a Torquay school, attending two days a week, she completed her education at three pensions in France.

She lived in her imagination, and loved writing stories and poems. Her instinct was to watch and listen to others rather than take centre stage herself. A keen eavesdropper, she gathered plot ideas from stray phrases in overheard conversations between strangers. She was as curious about other people as she was reluctant to reveal her own thoughts. Her innate modesty meant she felt under no compulsion to talk too much, and so she never gave herself away.

She wrote a novel set in Cairo, where she and her mother had taken a three-month holiday, but a literary agent, Hughes Massie, turned Snow upon the Desert down. Undaunted, she continued to write, as well as taking singing lessons, while receiving plenty of overtures from young men attracted by her serene manner and quiet good looks. Tall, slim and pale-haired, she rejected several marriage proposals before becoming engaged to Reggie Lucy, a major in the Gunners. Yet she broke with Reggie after meeting a dashing young airman.

Lieutenant Archie Christie was the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service, and Christie later said she fell for him because she found him unpredictable and fascinating. When war broke out, she realized he was likely to be killed. Three days before Christmas, he suddenly obtained leave from duty and they decided to marry. The wedding took place on Christmas Eve 1914, and Archie returned to France on Boxing Day. Life at this time was heady, exhilarating, and impulsive. It was also frighteningly insecure. Agatha’s brother Monty, a feckless charmer, was badly wounded while serving with the King’s African Rifles, and although he survived, he suffered psychological damage. To Clara’s distress, he liked to take up his revolver and shoot at people passing the family home in Torquay – a hobby Christie gave to a character, decades later, in her play The Unexpected Guest.

Archie was decorated for bravery and promoted to the rank of colonel before being invalided out of the Royal Flying Corps. At one point the couple did not see each other for almost two years. Agatha became a V.A.D. (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurse, later transferring to the dispensary. A rather sinister pharmacist who told her he enjoyed the power afforded by dealing with poisons stuck in her mind, and nearly fifty years later, provided her with a key character in The Pale Horse. She blew up a Cona coffee maker whilst attempting the Marsh test to detect the presence of arsenic, but acquired an extensive knowledge of poisons, which she soon put to use – in fiction.

Madge shared Agatha’s enthusiasm for detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and his French rivals Arsène Lupin and Joseph Rouletabille, and challenged her to write a whodunit. Having encountered a few Belgian war refugees, Christie decided that her detective would be Belgian too. She created someone who was vain but brilliant: Hercule Poirot. His foreign nationality was a clever stroke, and so was his conceit: British people were often suspicious of foreigners, and distrustful of cleverness. Christie poked fun at her fellow countrymen’s insularity, while making it plausible that suspects who concocted ingenious murder schemes made the catastrophic mistake of underestimating this seemingly ridiculous figure, with his broken English, extravagant moustache and insistence on using ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain. Christie’s prime literary influence was Conan Doyle, and she equipped Poirot with an amiable if rather obtuse Watson in Captain Arthur Hastings.

Christie finished The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1918, and the following year she gave birth to Rosalind. After a series of rejections from publishers, John Lane offered a less-than-generous contract which gave him an option over her next five books. She made the revisions he asked for, and her ingenious country house mystery finally appeared in the US in 1920 and in Britain the following year. Next came The Secret Adversary, a light and breezy thriller which introduced a young couple who went on to marry and to feature in four subsequent books, the last published more than half a century after the first. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford represent wish fulfilment on Christie’s part. She imagined herself as the lovely, sharp-witted Tuppence, while the courageous and eternally reliable Tommy was an idealized portrait of the man she thought she had married.

In January 1922, Christie and Archie took the extraordinary step of leaving their young daughter for almost a year so that they could take part in a ‘Mission to the Dominions’. This was an international publicity exercise meant to pave the way for the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. The grand tour was the brainchild of Major Belcher, a friend of Archie’s with a genius for self-promotion, the highlight of whose war service was a spell as Controller of the Supplies of Potatoes. Belcher offered Archie, who had worked in the City since the war, the job of financial adviser to the mission, and Agatha’s travel expenses were covered, with a month’s holiday in Honolulu thrown in. Archie’s employers were unwilling to keep his job open for him, but he was bored with civilian life, and Agatha loved to travel. She said in her autobiography: ‘We had never been people who played safe.’

Although Madge and her mother agreed to look after Rosalind, Madge felt Agatha should have stayed in England, but Clara Miller was supportive, arguing that a wife’s priority was to be with her husband. Agatha fell in love with South Africa, and the experience provided material not only for her next book, but also for creating the make-believe life of Mrs Teresa Neele. On board ship, she often played bridge, and sometimes quoits, once defeating the captain. In Waikiki, the couple were among the first British people to master the art of stand-up surfing. An added pleasure for Agatha was the chance to show off her figure in an emerald green wool bathing dress.

The tour was long and often gruelling, but although Belcher proved a cantankerous and selfish companion, who sent Agatha out to buy socks or on other errands, and then forget to reimburse her, she had no regrets. On their return, however, Rosalind treated them as strangers. Perhaps her mother’s long absence during her childhood accounted for some of the complexities in the relationship between mother and daughter that persisted for the rest of Christie’s life.

Christie’s naïveté is illustrated by the fact that she did not realize that the money she earned from writing was subject to income tax, and this was the start of a long and unhappy relationship with the Revenue. She needed a literary agent, and although Hughes Massie had died, she was taken on by his youthful successor whose trustworthiness made him someone she relied on for the rest of her life. This was Edmund Cork, who later escorted Ngaio Marsh to Bentley’s installation as President of the Detection Club.

Poirot had returned in The Murder on the Links, whose plot was influenced by a recent murder in France, and she tried to supplement her finances by entering newspaper competitions. The Daily Sketch serialized The Mystery of Norman’s Court, by John Chancellor, a crime writer who enjoyed a brief vogue but is now forgotten. The first prize for the solution to Chancellor’s puzzle was an eye-watering £1,300, illustrating the lengths newspapers were willing to go to in order to attract readers. Christie did not win, but was one of twelve people who shared in the runners-up prize of £800.

At this time, she did not have the loathing of publicity stunts that developed later. She even took part in a mock trial to promote a mystery play, In the Next Room, a dramatization of a locked room mystery by Burton E. Stevenson. Christie was one of four writers on a jury presided over by G. K. Chesterton. The accused was found not guilty, and Chesterton announced that in any case he would have ‘refused to convict a Frenchman for the humane and understandable act of murdering an American millionaire’.

Poirot’s popularity prompted her to feature him in a string of sub-Sherlockian short stories, but The Man in the Brown Suit broke fresh ground. It is almost unique among early Golden Age novels in being narrated (mostly) by a woman. Anne Bedingfeld, the heroine, was an idealized self-portrait of an independently minded young woman with a taste for adventure. After arriving in South Africa, Anne goes surfing at Muizenberg, as Christie had done, and finds the sport equally exhilarating. By the end of the book, she has also found love, and is happily married, with a child.

At Belcher’s request, a character based upon him played a prominent part. Much of the story is presented through extracts from two diaries, and the surprise solution paved the way for an even more daring and skilful means of confounding the reader’s expectations in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Christie took care to ensure that this breakthrough novel did not appear until after she had completed her contractual obligation to John Lane with a collection of the Poirot tales and a third light-hearted thriller, The Secret of Chimneys.

The events of 1926 changed everything. The year began pleasantly, with a holiday in Corsica, and winning the prize (under husband Archie’s name) for solving Berkeley’s serial, The Wintringham Mystery. In June, the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd catapulted her into the front rank of crime novelists. The book remains a landmark title of classic detective fiction. The story is told not by Captain Hastings but by Dr Sheppard, who lives with his busybody sister Caroline in the sleepy village of King’s Abbot, and their new neighbour is Poirot, who has retired to grow vegetable marrows.

The arrival of a fictional detective in a tranquil location invariably presages an outbreak of homicide, and when the little Belgian starts to investigate, Dr Sheppard acts as a surrogate Hastings. Christie enjoyed writing about the doctor’s sister, Caroline Sheppard, someone who is intensely inquisitive, ‘knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home’. More fully developed than most of Christie’s puppets, Caroline was the prototype for Jane Marple. The village setting and dazzling plot combine to make this the definitive Christie novel.

Christie’s masterstroke was to give an ingenious extra twist to Berkeley’s central idea in The Layton Court Mystery. Her spin on the ‘least likely person’ theme resembled the trick in a book written more than forty years earlier. The Shooting Party was a remarkable early novel by that least likely of crime writers, Anton Chekhov. The Swedish writer Major Samuel August Duse (it is not true that Swedish crime fiction began with Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson) had previously used a comparable device in Dr Smirno’s Diary and The Dagmar Case. However, since Chekhov’s book was not translated into English until 1926, and Duse’s books not at all, it is unlikely that Christie was aware of them.

A minority moaned that Christie had failed to ‘play fair’. One reader wrote a letter of complaint to The Times, and the News Chronicle harrumphed that the book was a ‘tasteless and unfortunate letdown by a writer we had grown to admire.’ This was an absurdly harsh judgment, even though Christie’s telling of the story was economical with the truth. T. S. Eliot reckoned it was a ‘brilliant Maskelyne trick’, while Sayers insisted, ‘It’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody.’

Before the year was out, Christie’s comfortable existence was ripped apart. Clara died, and as Christie struggled to cope with grief and the task of sorting out her mother’s affairs in Torquay, she felt increasingly run down and lonely. She was acutely conscious that she was no longer the svelte young woman who made admirers swoon. Her delicate beauty was fading, and since Rosalind’s birth, she had put on weight. Archie stayed in London, and when he rejoined her, he broke the news that he had fallen in love with Belcher’s former secretary, Nancy Neele. At that moment, Agatha’s ‘happy, successful, confident life’ ended.

She tried to persuade Archie to stay, but he became increasingly unkind, perhaps a sign of a guilty conscience. He walked out on his family on the morning of 3 December to be with Nancy. That same evening, Agatha drove away from home, leaving Rosalind asleep in the house.

After Agatha was tracked down to Harrogate, Archie maintained in public that she had been suffering from amnesia, a claim supported by two doctors. In a forerunner of a tabloid witch-hunt, hostile journalists accused her of simply seeking publicity. She also found herself caught up in a row between two formidable bruisers from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

When the Home Office announced that the cost to Scotland Yard of the search for Christie was twelve pounds, 10 shillings, the MP and former miner William Lunn ranted about the expense of a ‘cruel hoax’. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, promptly revised the cost to nil, on the basis that it was absorbed by the general police budget. The real argument was not about Christie, but the bitter aftermath of the failed General Strike. Lunn was angry about expenditure on the moneyed classes when the poor were suffering. Joynson-Hicks was a right-wing hawk, unwilling to give his opponents an inch, and quite prepared to juggle the figures to suit his purpose.

Lunn’s condemnation was as brutal as the Press coverage. Christie was a victim, though she was too strong to wallow in victimhood, and too proud to seek help before she cracked. Her experiences left a mark on her future writing, in which the idea of the ‘ordeal by innocence’ undergone by ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by murder crops up as often as the ‘wronged man’ in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The trauma left her barely able to work. Drained of energy and enthusiasm for writing, she recuperated at Abney Hall and then took a holiday in the Canary Islands; her visit features in their tourist literature to this day. But the process of recovery was slow and tortuous. She had lost her trust in people, and had developed a loathing for crowds and for the Press. She admitted in her autobiography that she could hardly bear to go on living. Yet she, like Sayers, had a young child to whom she felt not only devotion but a sense of duty. Suicide was not an option.

With her marriage in ruins, and her confidence shattered, she struggled to earn money to look after herself and Rosalind. Inspiration had deserted her. As a stop-gap measure, she was helped by Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, to cobble some previously published short stories together to form The Big Four. The resulting thriller was lively but ludicrous, featuring not only an evil Chinese mastermind and an exotic femme fatale, but also, in a nod to Mycroft Holmes, Poirot’s smarter brother, Achille.

When Christie did force herself to produce a fresh novel, it was simply an expanded version of an earlier short story. By her standards, it was dismally dull. Even Christie admitted she hated The Mystery of the Blue Train. The book is dedicated to Carlo Fisher, one of the few people whom Christie felt she could trust. In April 1928, she was granted a divorce, and Archie promptly married Nancy Neele. Hoping to rid herself of her former husband’s name, she tried to persuade her publishers to allow her to adopt a male pseudonym, but they refused. The Agatha Christie brand was already too valuable to be sacrificed.

She tried her hand at various types of story in an attempt to recapture her joy in writing, but struggled to recapture her zest and originality. The Seven Dials Mystery, another thriller, resurrected characters from The Secret of Chimneys, while Tommy and Tuppence Beresford returned in Partners in Crime, a collection of short stories which had mostly appeared five years earlier.