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

On 16 December 1949, nineteen years after the novel’s first publication, Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, dramatized by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, was produced in London at the Playhouse or, as it was tautologically called at the time, the Playhouse Theatre. (The Playhouse still stands, at the Thames Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue.)

A reasonably faithful and straightforward adaptation of the novel, Murder at the Vicarage simplifies the original plot somewhat, and alters the ending, though not the murderer’s identity, in the interests of dramatic effect. The play is set, not in the 1930 of the novel, but in ‘the present time’, i.e. 1949, with references to American airmen being stationed in the village during the war.

With Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple, Reginald Tate (who also directed the play) as Lawrence Redding, Jack Lambert as the Vicar, and Genine Graham as his wife, Griselda, Murder at the Vicarage had a reasonably successful run of four months, and later became popular with repertory companies and amateurs. A production at the Savoy Theatre in the West End of London in 1975, with Barbara Mullen returning to her role of Miss Marple, and Derek Bond as the Vicar, ran for two years.

A television adaptation in two episodes was produced by BBC TV, the first part being shown on Christmas Day 1986, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.

The Mysterious Mr Quin SHORT STORIES (1930)

1930 was professionally a busy year for Agatha Christie. In addition to The Murder at the Vicarage, she had two books published and her first play produced. One of the books was a volume in which were collected a number of stories featuring Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, stories which she had written at the rate of one every three or four months for publication in magazines. Mrs Christie refused to produce a series of Mr Quin stories for any one magazine. She considered them to be something special and apart from her usual crime stories, and preferred to write about Mr Quin only when she really felt like doing so.

Twelve of the stories were collected in The Mysterious Mr Quin (published in March 1930). The game is given away almost immediately when one notes that the volume is dedicated ‘To Harlequin the invisible’ and that, in the opening story, an unexpected visitor who ‘appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow’ announces, ‘By the way, my name is Quin – Harley Quin’.1 Whenever Mr Quin makes a first appearance in these stories, some trick of the light makes him seem momentarily to be dressed in the motley costume of Harlequin and to wear the commedia dell’ arte character’s mask. Then the illusion vanishes, as Mr Quin is seen to be merely a tall, thin, dark man – and young, according to a fugitive Mr Quin story not collected in this volume – conventionally dressed.

A by-product of Agatha Christie’s youthful interest in the characters of the commedia dell’ arte and of the sequence of Harlequin and Columbine poems, ‘A Masque from Italy’, in The Road of Dreams (1924), Mr Quin is the friend of lovers, and appears when some crime which threatens the happiness of lovers is committed. Usually, however, he does not himself directly intervene to solve a problem, but works through his intermediary, Mr Satterthwaite, ‘a little bent, dried-up man with a peering face oddly elf-like, and an intense and inordinate interest in other people’s lives’.

Despite the elf-like face, there is nothing supernatural about Mr Satterthwaite, a gentleman of means, in his sixties, and someone whom life has passed by, who has always been merely an onlooker. After his first meeting with Mr Quin in ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’, he discovers within himself an ability to penetrate to the heart of mysteries and to solve problems, but only when Mr Quin is there to act as catalyst, to reveal to him what it is that, unconsciously, he already knows.

Mr Quin and his emissary Mr Satterthwaite were, according to Mrs Christie, two of her favourite characters, so it is hardly surprising that their stories should be among her very best. Sometimes Mr Satterthwaite encounters Harley Quin at the Arlecchino, a Soho restaurant. At other times, they meet, as if by accident, at a country pub, the Bells and Motley. Once, very appropriately, Mr Satterthwaite (who, oddly for such a connoisseur of the arts, thinks the opera Cavalleria Rusticana ends with ‘Santuzza’s death agony’) encounters Mr Quin at Covent Garden in the interval between Cav and Pag. (The clowns in Pagliacci perform a Harlequinade, and one of them, Beppe, impersonates Harlequin.)

On one occasion, Mr Quin persuades Mr Satterthwaite to travel all the way to Banff, in the Canadian Rockies, to find a clue which brings a criminal to justice and reunites two young lovers. Not surprisingly, Mr Quin turns up at Monte Carlo at Carnival time to intervene in a story involving a soi-disant Countess who consorts with men (‘of Hebraic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses, wearing rather flamboyant jewellery’!)

One of the most curious stories in the volume is ‘The Man from the Sea’, which takes place on a Mediterranean island. Mr Satterthwaite muses on the role of Isolde which a young protégée of his is about to sing in Germany, and encounters a young man contemplating suicide. It is a story in which, you sense from the quality of the prose as much as from anything else, Mrs Christie’s beliefs concerning the meaning of life, not very original, perhaps, but her own and deeply held, are involved. And there are four paragraphs, not essential to the plot, in which the last moments of a dog’s life are described: paragraphs whose observation, imagination and compassion are the equal of many a novelist generally thought vastly superior in literary ability to Agatha Christie.

In his memoirs, Sir Max Mallowan describes his wife’s Mr Quin stories as ‘detection written in a fanciful vein, touching on the fairy story, a natural product of Agatha’s peculiar imagination.’ He mentions that there is a Mr Quin story, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, not in The Mysterious Mr Quin, but published separately in Winter’s Crimes 3 (1971), an anthology of stories by several writers. Sir Max was apparently not aware of a fourteenth story featuring Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, ‘The Love Detectives’, which finally appeared in Great Britain in Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories in 1991, although it could already be found in Three Blind Mice and other stories first published in America in 1950 and sometimes reprinted as, confusingly, The Mousetrap.

In ‘The Love Detectives’, Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite assist Colonel Melrose (whom we remember as Chief Constable in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery) in the investigation of a murder. It is a story which fits easily into the canon, and clearly dates from the period in the twenties when most of the Quin stories were written.

The fugitive Harley Quin story mentioned by Max Mallowan, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, is a pendant to the series, written much later, after the Second World War, containing an oblique reference to the Mau Mau troubles in Kenya in the early 1950s. Mr Satterthwaite, ‘now of an advanced age’, has a final adventure involving Mr Quin whom he encounters, as always apparently by chance, at the Harlequin Café in a village whose name, Kingsbourne Ducis, suggests that it is in Dorset. It is many years since he last met Mr Quin: ‘A large number of years. Was it the day he had seen Mr Quin walking away from him down a country lane’ in the final story in The Mysterious Mr Quin? It was, indeed, and they were not to meet again after this single late adventure, for Mr Quin, who has now acquired a small black dog called Hermes, contrives to turn himself into a burning scarecrow at the end of the story. The supernatural has come too close for comfort.

Perhaps the most charming story in The Mysterious Mr Quin is the final one, ‘Harlequin’s Lane’, despite the fact that the author sees fit to describe one of its characters as ‘a fat Jewess with a penchant for young men of the artistic persuasion’. Mrs Christie’s fat Aryans, whatever their sexual proclivities, tend to attract their creator’s venom neither so fiercely nor so frequently. In general, however, the Mr Quin stories are both unusual and pleasantly rewarding to read. Incidentally, Mr Satterthwaite appears, without Mr Quin, in Three-Act Tragedy (1935), a Poirot novel, and ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, one of the four long Poirot stories which make up Murder in the Mews (1937: in the USA the volume itself was called Dead Man’s Mirror, probably because ‘Mews’ is a much less familiar word in America than in England).

After its initial magazine publication, but before it had been collected into The Mysterious Mr Quin, one of the stories, ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’, was filmed in Great Britain in 1928. In addition to having its title changed to The Passing of Mr Quinn (Did the film makers fear their audiences would read a sexual connotation into ‘coming’? And why the additional ‘n’ in ‘Quinn’?), the story underwent such violent changes in the course of its adaptation for the screen that you wonder why the producers of the film bothered to acquire it in the first place. Perhaps their interest was simply in acquiring the name of Agatha Christie. Made by Strand Films, and both produced and directed by Julius Hagen, The Passing of Mr Quinn was the first British film to be made from a work by Agatha Christie. (The German film industry had got in a few months earlier, with its adaptation of The Secret Adversary. The leading roles were played by Stewart Rome, Trilby Clark and Ursula Jeans, and the script was written by Leslie Hiscott who, three years later, was to direct two Christie films, Alibi and Black Coffee.

In 1929, in a cheaply produced series, ‘The Novel Library’,2 The London Book Company published The Passing of Mr Quinn, described as ‘The book of the film adapted from a short story by Agatha Christie, novelized by G. Roy McRae’. It was prefaced by a note: ‘Readers are requested to note that Mr Quinny of this book is the same person as the Mr Quinn of the film.’ But neither Mr Quinn nor Mr Quinny is Agatha Christie’s Mr Quin, for this Quinn-Quinny reveals himself at the end to be the murderer. The victim is a Professor Appleby, who also bears little resemblance to anyone in ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’. Here is a sample of the narrative style of G. Roy McRae’s ‘novelization’:

Such was Professor Appleby, a monstrous figure of ebony and white in his dinner suit, as he wrestled under the soft-shaded lamp with the Haje snake.

There sounded all at once a slight hiss. The Haje’s long body wriggled and coiled sinuously, so that its black and white diamond markings seemed to blur. A glass vessel fell to the carpet, knocked over by the snake in its struggles, and Professor Appleby’s monocle dropped on its black cord as he smiled grimly.

In Agatha Christie’s original story, Appleton (not Appleby) has been dead for ten years, and there is no suggestion that he was given to playing with poisonous snakes when he was alive.

Black Coffee POIROT PLAY (1930)

Perhaps because of her dissatisfaction with Alibi, the play which Michael Morton had made in 1928 out of her Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie decided to try her hand at putting Hercule Poirot on the stage in a play of her own. The result was Black Coffee. ‘It was a conventional spy thriller,’ she said of it later, ‘and although full of clichés it was not, I think, at all bad.’ She showed it to her agent, who advised her not to bother submitting it to any theatrical management, as it was not good enough to be staged. However, a friend of Mrs Christie who was connected with theatrical management thought otherwise, and Black Coffee was tried out, in 1930, at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London. (The Embassy is now used as a drama school.) In April the following year, it opened in the West End where it ran for a few months at the St Martin’s Theatre (where a later Christie play, The Mousetrap, was to run forever).

In 1930, Poirot had been played by Francis L. Sullivan, with John Boxer as Captain Hastings, Joyce Bland as Lucia Amory, and Donald Wolfit as Dr Carelli.3 In the West End production, Francis L. Sullivan was still Poirot, but Hastings was now played by Roland Culver, and Dr Carelli by Dino Galvani. The London Daily Telegraph thought the play a ‘sound piece of detective-story writing’, and preferred Sullivan’s rendering of the part of Poirot ‘to the one which Mr Charles Laughton gave us in Alibi. Mr Laughton’s Poirot was a diabolically clever oddity. Mr Sullivan’s is a lovable human being.’4 Agatha Christie did not see the production. ‘I believe it came on for a short run in London,’ she wrote in 1972, ‘but I didn’t see it because I was abroad in Mesopotamia.’5

The play, which is in three acts, is set in the library of Sir Claud Amory’s house at Abbot’s Cleve, about twenty-five miles from London. Sir Claud is a scientist engaged in atomic research and had just discovered the formula for Amorite, whose force ‘is such that where we have hitherto killed by thousands, we can now kill by hundreds of thousands.’ Unfortunately, the formula is stolen by one of Sir Claud’s household, and the scientist foolishly offers the thief a chance to replace the formula with no questions asked. The lights in the library are switched off to enable this to happen, but when the lights come on again, the formula is still missing, Sir Claud is dead, and Hercule Poirot has arrived. By the end of the evening, with a certain amount of assistance from Hastings and Inspector Japp, Poirot has unmasked the murderer and retrieved the formula. However, the way is not thus paved for Hiroshima fifteen years later, and the horror of nuclear war, for something else happens just before the end of the play.

Sir Claud’s butler is called Tredwell, but whether he is related to the Tredwell who was the butler at Chimneys in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery is not known. He cannot be the same man, for Lord Caterham would surely not have let his treasure of a butler go. Sir Claud’s family are an impressively dubious collection of characters, and the suspects also include the scientist’s secretary, Edward Raynor, and a sinister Italian, Dr Carelli.

Black Coffee, which was successfully revived some years after its first production, has remained a favourite with repertory companies and amateurs throughout the world, as have so many plays either by or adapted from Agatha Christie. Though Black Coffee lacks the complexity and fiendish cunning of Agatha Christie’s later plays, it would probably repay major revival not only as a period piece but, if impressively enough cast, as a highly entertaining murder mystery. The casting of Poirot would, however, have to be very carefully undertaken.6 Agatha Christie used to complain that, although a number of very fine actors had played Poirot, none was physically very like the character she had created. Charles Laughton, she pointed out, had too much avoirdupois, and so had Francis L. Sullivan who was ‘broad, thick, and about 6 feet 2 inches tall’. Austin Trevor, in three Poirot movies, did not even attempt physically to represent the character. A publicist for the film company actually announced that ‘the detective is described by the authoress as an elderly man with an egg-shaped head and bristling moustache’, whereas ‘Austin Trevor is a good-looking young man and clean-shaven into the bargain!’

In 1931, Black Coffee was filmed at the Twickenham Studios, with Austin Trevor (who had already played Poirot in the film, Alibi) replacing Francis L. Sullivan, Richard Cooper as Hastings, Dino Galvani as Dr Carelli, Melville Cooper as Inspector Japp, Adrienne Allen as Lucia Amory, Philip Strange as Richard Amory, and C. V. France as Sir Claud. The film was directed by Leslie Hiscott, but was generally considered to be inferior to the same director’s Alibi.

Adapted by Charles Osborne as a novel, Black Coffee was first published in England and the USA in 1998. It was simultaneously translated and published in several other languages. (The Finnish edition was actually the first of all to appear, in 1997.)

Giant’s Bread MARY WESTMACOTT (1930)

It is no longer a secret that, between 1930 and 1956, Agatha Christie published six non-crime novels under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. (It was, however, a well-kept secret until 1949.) As these novels are often referred to as ‘romantic’ or ‘women’s fiction’, it is important to state that they are not examples of what is generally thought of as the genre of the romantic novel (they are, for instance, much closer to Daphne du Maurier than to Barbara Cartland), and that they are ‘women’s fiction’ only in the sense that they can share that description with the works of Jane Austen or Iris Murdoch. The six Mary Westmacott titles belong to no genre: they are simply novels.

In her autobiography Agatha Christie described how she came to write these books:

It had been exciting, to begin with, to be writing books – partly because, as I did not feel I was a real author, it was each time astonishing that I should be able to write books that were actually published. Now I wrote books as a matter of course. It was my business to do so. People would not only publish them – they would urge me to get on with writing them. But the eternal longing to do something that is not my proper job, was sure to unsettle me; in fact it would be a dull life if it didn’t.

What I wanted to do now was to write something other than a detective story. So, with a rather guilty feeling, I enjoyed myself writing a straight novel called Giant’s Bread. It was mainly about music, and betrayed here and there that I knew little about the subject from the technical point of view. It was well reviewed and sold reasonably for what was thought to be a ‘first novel’. I used the name of Mary Westmacott, and nobody knew that it was written by me. I managed to keep that fact a secret for fifteen years.7

Published in March, 1930 and dedicated ‘to the memory of my best and truest friend, my mother’, Giant’s Bread is a long novel of 438 pages (approximately 140,000 words), which is about twice as long as a Christie murder mystery.8 It is also a rather remarkable novel, which is ostensibly about music, as its author claimed it was, but which is really about obsession, friendship, genius, childhood and identity. In other words, it is a novel about real people, in which the author is freed of the requirement to steer her characters along certain paths so that they can be manipulated into making the right moves to establish the necessary pattern that a crime novel must have. She could allow her characters to develop freely, could write about those aspects of them that moved and excited her, and could, in the process, explore and come closer to understanding her own nature and desires.

Without the self-imposed restraints of the mystery novel, Mrs Christie might easily have found herself floundering and confused, but she did not. She found, instead, that she was not only a brilliant creator of puzzles but also a real novelist, with an ability to create fully rounded characters and with the confidence not to worry about the exigencies of plot. Giant’s Bread is, in a sense, autobiographical, as is all good fiction. And, for that matter, all bad fiction. Human beings are condemned to tell the truth about themselves, though some find oddly devious ways of doing so. Later Mary Westmacott novels will wear their autobiographical aspects on their sleeves, but those truths about Agatha Christie which exist in Giant’s Bread are very deeply embedded within the novel, and are not so much factual as psychological or spiritual. The novel examines a number of characters, but concentrates upon its hero, or anti-hero. Vernon Deyre, whom we meet first as a sensitive child in a sheltered, upperclass environment in Edwardian England, and whose development we follow into adult life.

Vernon becomes a composer, and what is most remarkable about Giant’s Bread is the understanding with which Mrs Christie, despite her disclaiming ‘technical knowledge’, describes the total possession of Vernon’s personality by music. She has created a totally believable composer, believable not simply because Vernon flings the right names about – Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, even ‘Feinberg’9 – but because his own music, experimental and avant garde, is convincingly described and because his total absorption in music is so clinically and unromantically conveyed. Vernon Deyre could be Bliss or Goossens or an anglicized Scriabin. In fact, although Vernon is not based on any real person, Mrs Christie was helped by Roger Sacheverell Coke, a seventeen-year-old pianist and composer whose parents were friends of her sister. (Roger Coke studied composition under Alan Bush, and went on to compose an opera on Shelley’s The Cenci, several symphonies and concertos and a great deal of chamber music. Coke’s music, most of which has not been published, is thought to be pre-Debussian in idiom, and so not at all like the music of Agatha Christie’s Vernon Deyre.)

Giant’s Bread contains fascinating portraits of an opera soprano who loses her voice by insisting on singing Strauss’s Elektra, a role too strenuous for her, and of an impresario, Sebastian Levinne, a friend of Vernon’s since their childhood, and ‘the sole owner of the National Opera House’. Although, in the prologue to the novel in which a new opera is having its première at the National Opera House, Sebastian is referred to by a member of the audience as ‘a dirty foreign Jew’, Mrs Christie has produced in Levinne and his parents an unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding portrait of a Jewish family coping with genteel English upperclass resentment and prejudice.

It is the apparent ease with which Agatha Christie was able, in Giant’s Bread, to examine various aspects of human behaviour that is impressive, rather than the actual quality of her writing, though her prose is never less than adequate to convey mood and meaning. She was always too fond of the verb ‘to twinkle’: Poirot’s and Miss Marple’s eyes are forever twinkling as they make their little jokes, and in Giant’s Bread there is a pianist whose hands ‘twinkled up and down the keyboard’ with marvellous speed and dexterity. But for the most part Mrs Christie’s first ‘straight’ novel reads very smoothly, and indeed grippingly. If the author’s attitude to some of her characters is romantic, it is never sentimental, and not even romantic in the diminishing sense in which the word is used to denote a blinkered view of reality. Twice in the course of the novel she quotes that greatest of realists, Dostoevsky, and is fully justified in doing so. She even gets away, towards the end, with a scene in which Vernon, shipwrecked, can drag to the safety of a raft, only one of two drowning women, and has to make a choice between his wife and his ex-lover.

Agatha Christie must have known the real worth of her Mary Westmacott novels, and must surely have been disappointed that they did not arouse more interest in the literary world. But when she was interviewed many years later, after it was known that she had written several non-mystery novels, she merely remarked with an ambiguously arrogant modesty: ‘I found with straight novels that they didn’t need much thinking out beforehand. Detective stories are much more trouble – even if you have no high ideals in writing them.’

The Sittaford Mystery Alternative title: Murder at Hazelmoor (1931)

Mr and Mrs Mallowan had bought a house in London, at 22 Cresswell Place, Earls Court, which Agatha completely redecorated, and which contained a music room on the top floor where she could both write and play the piano. They also kept up Ashfield, the house in Torquay, where Agatha loved to go during the summer holidays when Rosalind was home from school. After their honeymoon, Agatha spent the winter of 1930–31 in London while Max was at Ur, and it was not until March that she joined him at Ur for a few days and then travelled home with him.