The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie

2 The Vintage Years

The Big Four POIROT (1927)

Mrs Christie spent the first weeks of 1927 recovering from her December adventure, at Abney Hall in Cheadle, near Manchester, the home of her sister and her brother-in-law, Madge and Jimmy Watts, while Archie Christie continued to live at Styles, which he and Agatha had agreed to sell. Archie wanted a divorce as quickly as possible, but Agatha thought it fairer to their child Rosalind to wait for a year, so that Archie could be quite certain that he knew what he wanted. It is from this time in her life that Agatha Christie’s revulsion against the press and her dislike of journalists can be dated. She had felt, she said later, like a fox: hunted, her earths dug up, and followed by yelping hounds. She had always hated notoriety of any kind, and now could hardly bear even the kind of publicity consequent upon her successful career as a writer.

With her marriage in ruins, Mrs Christie was forced to give serious thought to that career. She had little money other than that which she earned from her writing; it was important, therefore, that she should continue to produce books at regular and frequent intervals. She had been unable to write since the death of her mother; her brother-in-law Campbell Christie, Archie’s brother, now made the suggestion that the last twelve of the Hercule Poirot stories which had been published in the weekly magazine, The Sketch, and which had not yet been collected into a book, could with very little rewriting be strung together in such a way that they would make a kind of picaresque crime novel. Campbell Christie helped his sister-in-law with the rewriting, for she was still in no condition to manage it on her own, and the result was The Big Four.

In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder on the Links and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd we were presented with dazzlingly plotted domestic crime novels, their mysteries solved by Hercule Poirot. In the mystery-thriller novels The Secret Adversary, The Man in the Brown Suit and The Secret of Chimneys we were introduced to a world of international crime in which Poirot did not appear. Now, in The (hastily patched-together) Big Four, the consultant detective who prefers to stay at home finds himself in the wrong kind of novel, forced to chase after the Big Four, an international crime organization ‘hitherto undreamed of. The four would-be rulers of the world heading the organization are Li Chang Yen, an immensely powerful ‘Chinaman’ (to use Mrs Christie’s term which nowadays would be thought offensive), a wealthy American, a mysterious French woman and, the chief executive of the cartel, an Englishman referred to as ‘the destroyer’.

Hastings, who has spent the previous year and a half managing a ranch in the Argentine (‘where my wife and I had both enjoyed the free and easy life of the South American continent’) arrives in London on a business trip, and of course immediately makes his way to 14 Farraway Street, where he had shared rooms with Poirot, only to find his old friend about to set out to visit him in South America, as well as to undertake a commission there on behalf of Abe Ryland, an American who is ‘richer even than Rockefeller’. It takes the death of a stranger who bursts into Poirot’s rooms in a state of collapse to change the detective’s plans and to set him and Hastings on the trail of the Big Four, one of whom had been responsible for offering Poirot the South American commission merely to get him out of the way.

One by one, Poirot picks off the criminals in a series of only loosely connected episodes. In the first, he does not actually catch the real criminal but is at least instrumental in saving an innocent man from the gallows, which, as Poirot remarks to Hastings, is enough for one day. It is in this chapter, ‘The Importance of a Leg of Mutton’, that Mrs Christie makes unacknowledged use of a brilliant piece of deduction which she, if not Poirot, ought to have credited to Sherlock Holmes.

Throughout The Big Four, Poirot is thrust into adventures which require him to resort to a number of uncharacteristic and, indeed, highly unconvincing actions. In his encounter with the female French villain, he threatens her with a blow-pipe disguised as a cigarette and containing a dart tipped with curare. ‘Do not move, I pray of you, madame. You will regret it if you do,’ he exclaims in his best Sherlock Holmes manner. The wealthy American is the second of the Four to be tangled with, and here Poirot is helped by Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard and by Hastings, whom Poirot unkindly uses as an unwitting decoy. The Chinese member of the foursome is never encountered in person.

Some of the episodes in the novel are only tenuously linked with the main plot, and indeed one of them, ‘A Chess Problem’ (Chapter 11), has appeared separately in short story anthologies. The Big Four is packed with incident, including the threatened abduction and torture by ‘that Chinese devil’ of Hastings’ wife in the Argentine, the unexpected appearance of Poirot’s brother Achille (whose name causes Hastings to ponder on the late Madame Poirot’s classical taste in the selection of Christian names), and, horror of horrors, the apparent death of Hercule Poirot, and his funeral, a solemn and moving ceremony at which Hastings is, not unnaturally, overcome by emotion. Again, has not Mrs Christie placed herself too heavily in the debt of Conan Doyle with these brothers and deaths, even though Achille returns to the land of myths at the end of the story, and Hercule miraculously returns to life? When Hastings says he had no idea that Poirot had a brother, Poirot is somewhat cynically made to exclaim, ‘You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated than they are, were it not for constitutional indolence?’

At the end of The Big Four, at least three of the four are dead. But a slight doubt remains about number four, the Englishman who is a master of disguise and who has played a number of roles throughout the novel. His body has been found, but the head was blown to pieces and it is just possible that the real Number Four has escaped again. Poirot cannot be absolutely certain, but he thinks that he has routed the Big Four, and that he can now retire, having solved the greatest case of his life, after which anything else will seem tame. Perhaps he will grow vegetable marrows, he says. And Hastings will return to his charming wife in the Argentine. So we should assume that the events in The Big Four have occurred before those in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which began with Poirot already in retirement and attempting to grow his marrows.

Though it is entertaining to read, and moves swiftly, The Big Four can hardly be counted among Agatha Christie’s more successful works. Poirot in The Big Four is, like Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, shabbily treated by his creator. Two of the novel’s characters, the Countess Rossakoff and Joseph Aarons, are to be met in other Poirot adventures. Aarons, the theatrical agent and friend of Poirot (it is reassuring to know that Poirot has at least one Jewish friend) has already helped the detective in The Murder on the Links and will do so again in The Mystery of the Blue Train, while the Countess Rossakoff, a flamboyant and exotic Russian beauty who gains Poirot’s respect and even affection, remains an acquaintance for many years, appearing in two short stories, ‘The Double Clue’ in which Poirot first meets her (1925, but not collected in a volume until 1961) and ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ in The Labours of Hercules (1947).

‘Those who come to expect subtlety as well as sensation in Mrs Christie’s writing will be disappointed,’ said the Daily Mail of The Big Four, and this seems to have been the general opinion. Nevertheless, this hastily assembled ‘novel’ managed to sell more than 8,500 copies of its first edition. There can be little doubt that the publicity surrounding its author’s disappearance a couple of months earlier was largely responsible for the increased sales.

The Mystery of the Blue Train POIROT (1928)

In February, 1928, Agatha Christie took her daughter Rosalind for a holiday to the Canary Islands, and while they were there she managed to finish another novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train. She did not enjoy writing it, and persevered only because of the contractual obligation to her publisher and the need to continue to earn money. She had worked out what she referred to as a conventional plot, based on one of her short stories, ‘The Plymouth Express’; but, although she had planned the general direction of the story, both the scene and the characters resolutely refused to come alive for her. She plodded on, recalling later that this was the moment when she ceased to be an amateur and became a professional writer.

If one differentiates between amateur and professional (writer, actor, musician) on the basis that the professional can do it even when he does not feel like it, while the amateur cannot even when he does, then undoubtedly Mrs Christie was now justified in admitting herself to the professional ranks, for although she did not much like what she was writing and did not think she was writing particularly well (in fact, she later referred to The Mystery of the Blue Train as easily the worst book she ever wrote), she nevertheless finished it and sent it off to Collins. It immediately sold a healthy 7,000 copies, which pleased her, although she could not feel proud of her achievement.

Mrs Christie was granted a divorce from her husband in April, 1928, on the grounds of his adultery not with Nancy Neele but with an unknown woman in a London hotel room. This particular act of adultery was purely formal, if it took place at all: in those days, when both parties to a marriage wanted a quick divorce the only course open to them was for one of them to stage-manage an act of infidelity and to arrange for circumstantial evidence to be provided by ‘witnesses’. (As soon as the divorce became absolute, Christie married Nancy Neele. They remained married until Nancy died of cancer in 1958. Archibald Christie died in 1962.)

After the divorce, Agatha Christie wished to discontinue using her former husband’s name, and suggested to her publishers that she should write her novels under a male pseudonym. However, she was persuaded that her public had become used to her as Agatha Christie and that it would be unwise for her to change her name. So she remained Agatha Christie to her readers, for the rest of her life.

Though it is far from being one of her more brilliant efforts, and is distinctly inferior to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mystery of the Blue Train does not deserve the scorn which its author liked to pour upon it. It is, at least, an improvement upon its immediate predecessor, The Big Tour, although, like The Big Four, it uneasily combines domestic murder with international crime. In solving the former, Poirot manages also to put a stop to the latter. One marvels at Agatha Christie’s objectivity as a writer. There is little trace in The Mystery of the Blue Train either of the emotional turmoil which its author had recently undergone or of the reluctance with which she claims to have written it.

The daughter of an American millionaire is found strangled in her compartment on the famous Paris-Nice train bleu when it pulls into Nice, and a fabulous ruby, the ‘Heart of Fire’, which her father had recently given her, is discovered to have been stolen. The plot is an expansion of a short story, ‘The Plymouth Express’ in which the theft and murder take place on a less glamorous train, the 12.14 from Paddington, and are very swiftly solved by Poirot. ‘The Plymouth Express’ did not appear in a volume of Agatha Christie stories until 1951 when it was included with eight other stories in The Under Dog, published in the United States. This volume was not published in Great Britain, and it was not until 1974 that British readers found ‘The Plymouth Express’ collected in a volume entitled Poirot’s Early Cases (called Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases in the United States).

In its expansion into a full-length novel, Mrs Christie’s story acquired subplots and a great many more characters. Anyone reading the novel who remembered the story would be able to identify one of the criminals but would still be left with a mystery to solve. Though the novel reveals traces of having been hastily written, its characters are entertaining and not unbelievable, and an atmosphere of the French Riviera in the twenties is still conveyed by its pages today, perhaps even more clearly than when the novel was first published. And scattered among the clumsy syntax and the phrases of bad French are a number of tart Christiean aperçus. Hastings is absent from the story, presumably on his ranch in the Argentine, and Poirot is a retired gentleman of leisure, travelling with an English valet, George, whom he must have acquired recently. It is only because he happens to be travelling to the south of France on the Blue Train on which the murder is committed that Poirot is drawn into the case.

The Mystery of the Blue Train is the first Poirot novel to be written in the third person. With no Captain Hastings or Dr Sheppard to make ironic little jests at his expense, and thus keep his overweening vanity in check, Poirot tends occasionally to act like a caricature of himself. But he is more like the Poirot Mrs Christie’s readers had come to regard with affection than the cardboard figure of The Big Four, though at one point he indulges in an uncharacteristically Wildean epigram, taking to his bed because the expected has happened and ‘when the expected happens it always causes me emotion’.

Parts of The Mystery of the Blue Train are set in the English village of St Mary Mead, which we will later come to know as the home of Miss Marple, a Christie detective we have yet to encounter. A minor character in the present novel is Miss Viner, an elderly inhabitant of the village who, with her curiosity and her sharp powers of observation, is quite as definitely an adumbration of Miss Marple as Caroline Sheppard was in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

There are one or two inconsistencies in the plot. Why, for instance, does Poirot say of Derek Kettering that he ‘was in a tight corner, a very tight corner, threatened with ruin,’ when Kettering has, in fact, been offered £100,000 in return for allowing his wife to divorce him? Agatha Christie told an interviewer in 1966 that The Mystery of the Blue Train ‘was easily the worst book I ever wrote … I hate it’. And her final verdict, in her autobiography, was that it was commonplace, full of clichés, and that its plot was uninteresting. ‘Many people, I am sorry to say, like it,’ she added. And so they should. Third-rate Christie is, perhaps, to be sneezed at, but not second-rate Christie.

The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

The difficulties which Agatha Christie had experienced in writing during the period of nervous exhaustion which led to her disappearance, and even later, while she was recovering, seemed to evaporate as soon as she and Archie Christie were divorced. She continued to write stories for publication in magazines, especially when she needed ready cash for repairs to Ashfield, her childhood home, or for some other unexpected expense. A story brought in about £60, and took a week to write. At the same time, she found that ideas for novels were coming quite easily to her. Having especially enjoyed writing The Secret of Chimneys five years earlier, she decided to employ some of the characters and the setting of Chimneys in a new light-hearted thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery, for she continued to find that thrillers required less ‘plotting and planning’ than murder mysteries.