THE AGATHA CHRISTIE COLLECTION

1 The Mysterious Affair at Styles

2 The Secret Adversary

3 Murder on the Links

4 The Man in the Brown Suit

5 Poirot Investigates

6 The Secret of Chimneys

7 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

8 The Big Four

9 The Mystery of the Blue Train

10 The Seven Dials Mystery

11 Partners in Crime

12 The Mysterious Mr Quin

* Black Coffee

13 The Murder at the Vicarage

14 The Sittaford Mystery

15 Peril at End House

16 The Thirteen Problems

17 Lord Edgware Dies

18 The Hound of Death

19 Murder on the Orient Express

20 The Listerdale Mystery

21 Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?

22 Parker Pyne Investigates

23 Three Act Tragedy

24 Death in the Clouds

25 The ABC Murders

26 Murder in Mesopotamia

27 Cards on the Table

28 Dumb Witness

29 Death on the Nile

30 Murder in the Mews

31 Appointment with Death

32 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

33 Murder is Easy

34 And Then There Were None

35 Sad Cypress

36 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

37 Evil Under the Sun

38 N or M?

39 The Body in the Library

40 Five Little Pigs

41 The Moving Finger

42 Towards Zero

43 Death Comes as the End

44 Sparkling Cyanide

45 The Hollow

46 The Labours of Hercules

47 Taken at the Flood

48 Crooked House

49 A Murder is Announced

50 They Came to Baghdad

51 Mrs McGinty’s Dead

52 They Do It With Mirrors

53 After the Funeral

54 A Pocket Full of Rye

55 Destination Unknown

* Spider’s Web

56 Hickory Dickory Dock

57 Dead Man’s Folly

58 4.50 From Paddington

* The Unexpected Guest

59 Ordeal By Innocence

60 Cat Among the Pigeons

61 The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

62 The Pale Horse

63 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side

64 The Clocks

65 A Caribbean Mystery

66 At Bertram’s Hotel

67 Third Girl

68 Endless Night

69 By the Pricking of My Thumbs

70 Hallowe’en Party

71 Passenger to Frankfurt

72 Nemesis

73 Elephants Can Remember

74 Postern of Fate

75 Poirot’s Early Cases

76 Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

77 Sleeping Murder

78 Miss Marple’s Final Cases

79 Problem at Pollensa Bay

80 While the Light Lasts

* ADAPTED BY CHARLES OSBORNE

THE LIFE AND CRIMES

OF

AGATHA CHRISTIE

CHARLES OSBORNE

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by

William Collins Sons & Company Limited 1982

Revised and updated edition 1999

Copyright © Charles Osborne 1982, 1999

Charles Osborne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9780006531722

Ebook Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780007455508

Version: 2014-07-15

For Joe Hansen, crime novelist in the Christie mould, in Los Angeles; and Ken Thomson, his sometime accomplice in publishing, in London.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

1 Appearance and Disappearance

2 The Vintage Years

3 War and Peace

4 ‘The Mousetrap’ and After

5 Towards the Last Cases

Plate Section

Keep Reading

Bibliography

Index

Notes

Illustration Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

PREFACE

‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ was the title of an article by the American critic and novelist Edmund Wilson,¹ who had no taste for crime fiction. It was a silly question, for millions cared.

W. H. Auden began an essay, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’,² with the words ‘For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol’, and went on to confess that ‘if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin one, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it.’

The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie is a book for the likes of W. H. Auden, rather than for the likes of Edmund Wilson. It examines not only the crime novels but also everything else that Agatha Christie published, including the non-fiction, the stories for children, the poetry, the plays (both those written by her and those adapted from her novels by other hands), the films based on her works, and the six novels she produced under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott.

My qualifications for writing this book are slender: (i) I began reading Agatha Christie surreptitiously during a Latin lesson at school in 1943, and I have stopped, temporarily, only because I have read everything she wrote and, blessed with a highly selective memory, have actually read several of the murder mysteries more than once over the years; (ii) I played Dr Carelli in Agatha Christie’s Black Coffee during a summer season of repertory in Tunbridge Wells in 1955 (‘Nearer the Latin temperament was Charles Osborne as the slick Dr Carelli,’ said the local newspaper critic, after savaging the leading lady); (iii) I once met Dame Agatha at a party given by her publishers to celebrate the publication of Passenger to Frankfurt in 1970. Suddenly and uncharacteristically nervous at finding myself momentarily alone with the eighty-year-old author whom I had admired for so many years, I found myself offering her an engagement to take part in an Arts Council Writers’ Tour, and address audiences in the provinces. ‘Oh, I’m afraid I couldn’t do that,’ Dame Agatha replied immediately. ‘I wouldn’t be any good at it, and in any case, you see, the reason I began to write more than sixty years ago was in order to avoid having to talk to people.’

Let me assure potential readers of this book that they may proceed in perfect safety. Nowhere in these pages do I reveal the identity of any of Agatha Christie’s murderers.

Unless otherwise indicated, dates given after the titles of books are those of first publication. In the majority of cases only a few weeks separate American and British publication dates. Where a title was not published in both countries, this is made clear.

My thanks for help of various kinds are due to the following individuals and institutions: Jonathan Barker, Jacques Barzun, Agatha Christie Ltd, Allan Davis, Sebastian Faulks, Joseph Hansen, Jennifer Insull, Mathew Prichard, Sir Peter Saunders, Brian Stone, Julian Symons, Kenneth Thomson, John Wells, Philip Ziegler; Arts Council Poetry Library, Brighton Area Library, British Library, British Theatre Institute Library, William Collins Sons & Co., Crime Writers’ Association, Daily Telegraph, Library of Congress, London Library. I am especially grateful to my editor, Elizabeth Blair.

C.O.

1 Appearance and Disappearance

The Mysterious Affair at Styles POIROT (1920)

It was while she was married to Archie Christie that Agatha Christie, neé Miller, wrote and published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. That marriage lasted for less than fourteen years, ending in divorce at about the time of publication of her ninth book, The Mystery of the Blue Train, but her career as a writer of crime fiction continued for a further half-century and a further eighty-five titles (excluding the plays). Having become known to a vast reading public as Agatha Christie, the author continued to use that name for professional purposes throughout the rest of her life, although privately she became Mrs Max Mallowan soon after her divorce from Christie.

Agatha Miller was born in the elegant, sedate seaside resort of Torquay, Devonshire, on the south coast of England, on 15 September 1890, at Ashfield, the home of her parents, Frederick and Clarissa Miller. Frederick Alvah Miller was a well-to-do young American who lived as much in England, where he had relatives, as in America, on an income derived from the family business. After he married Clarissa Margaret Beochmer (his stepmother’s niece) he and his wife planned to live in America. However, they first spent some time in Torquay, at the height of the winter season, and Mr Miller, who loved the sea, became enchanted with the town, its attractive bay and the dramatic south Devon coast. The Millers’ first child, Marjorie (Madge) was born in Torquay, shortly after which the family left for America, where they expected to make their permanent home. It was while they were staying with Frederick Miller’s grandparents in New England that their second child, Louis (Monty), was born.

The Millers returned to England for a visit, but Mr Miller was almost immediately recalled to New York by business concerns, and therefore suggested to his wife that she should take the children and rent a furnished house in Torquay until his return. What Clara Miller did, instead, was to buy a house in Torquay from a Quaker family called Brown. Extremely placid by temperament, Mr Miller, though surprised, did not remonstrate. The house could, after all, be sold again in a year’s time. The Millers and their two children moved into the house, Ashfield, and Mr Miller found life in Torquay so agreeable that in due course he decided that they may as well settle there. Ashfield, a large and comfortable villa with green lawns, a garden of about two acres, and great beech trees, made a splendid home for Mrs Miller and the children even though it was not in the most fashionable part of Torquay but in Barton Road, in the older, upper-middleclass district of Tor Mohun.

When a third child was born to the Millers, a good eight years after the second, she was christened Agatha May Clarissa. The second and third were family names, but ‘Agatha’ appears to have been suggested by a friend of Mrs Miller on the way to the christening. A chubby redhead, Agatha turned out to be a quiet, imaginative child who played a great deal on her own or with her elderly nannie, ‘Nursy’, since her brother and sister were away at school for much of the time and were, in any case, so much older than she. Agatha did not go to school but taught herself to read, and learned something of elementary mathematics from her father. Her formal education did not begin until, at the age of sixteen, she was sent to a finishing school in Paris. Her father had died when she was eleven, and the family income had dwindled. Mrs Miller considered selling Ashfield but was prevailed upon by her two elder children merely to reduce the number of servants and make certain other economies.

The Millers were still able to live comfortably. With Madge married and living in New York, and Monty serving with the army in India, Mrs Miller decided shortly after Agatha’s return from finishing school in Paris that she would let Ashfield furnished for three months and take her teenage daughter off to Egypt. Her own health had not been good, but three months with Agatha in and around Cairo, sight-seeing, going to dances and parties and on excursions to the sites of antiquity, seemed to improve her condition and certainly helped Agatha to overcome her childhood and adolescent gaucherie. The attractive young lady even received several proposals of marriage from officers serving in the British Army in Egypt, but took none of them seriously. She was still very young, and she was also now her mother’s only comfort and companion. When they returned to Torquay, Agatha continued to live at home with her mother, though she also led an active social life with friends of her own age.

Agatha had already begun to write. During her childhood, when she was lying in bed recovering from influenza, her mother had suggested that, instead of telling stories which she enjoyed doing, she should write one of them down. Soon Agatha had produced a number of stories, and began to write poems as well. It was as a poet that she made her first appearance in print, at the age of eleven, with a poem about the new electric trams which she had seen when visiting her grandmother at Ealing, a suburb of London. The poem, which was printed in the local Ealing newspaper, began: ‘When first the electric trams did run/In all their scarlet glory,/’Twas well, but ere the day was done,/ It was another story.’

Her poems improved, and by the time she was in her late teens Agatha had won a few prizes with them, usually of a guinea or so offered by the Poetry Society, and had had several poems published in The Poetry Review. She had also written a number of stories which, as she said later, usually revealed the influence of whomever she had been reading the previous week, as often as not D. H. Lawrence. Under various pseudonyms, among them Mack Miller and Nathanael Miller (her grandfather’s name), she would send her stories off to magazines and they would invariably come back to her accompanied by a printed rejection slip. She even attempted a novel, which she called Snow Upon the Desert, and at the suggestion of her mother sent it off to Eden Phillpotts, the author of popular novels of Devon rural life in the tradition of Thomas Hardy. (In the twenties and thirties, Phillpotts was to write murder mysteries, both under his own name and as Harrington Hext.)

Phillpotts, who was a neighbour of the Millers and a friend of the family, gave generously of his time and advice. Though he was critical of Snow Upon the Desert, and advised its author to cut out the moralizing of which he considered she was much too fond, he thought Agatha had a ‘great feeling for dialogue’, and introduced her to his literary agent, Hughes Massie. Agatha went to London and was interviewed by Mr Massie, a large, swarthy man who, she said, terrified her. Massie read her novel, and advised her to put it aside and begin another. Instead, she returned to writing her poems and stories.

Agatha was now in her early twenties and fending off young men who wished to marry her. After what she referred to as two near escapes, she became engaged in 1912 to Reggie Lucy, a Major in the Gunners, but while Lucy was serving with his regiment in Hongkong, she fell in love with a handsome young Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, whom she had met at a house party in Chudleigh, not far from Torquay. He was Lieutenant Archibald Christie, the son of a Judge in the Indian Civil Service. They danced together several times at their first meeting, and a few days later Christie arrived on his motorcycle at Ashfield and was allowed by Mrs Miller to stay to supper. Within days, he and Agatha had become engaged, and Agatha eventually plucked up the courage to write to Reggie Lucy in Hongkong ending their engagement.

It was eighteen months later that Agatha Miller married Archie Christie, now a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps. The wedding took place on Christmas Eve, 1914. During the period of their engagement, the Miller family income had been further depleted by the liquidation of a firm in New York, and Britain had declared war on Germany. Captain Christie went off to war two days after the wedding, while his bride went to work at the Torbay Hospital in Torquay, nursing the first casualties who were being brought back from the Front. After two years of nursing, and a number of reunions with Archie when he came home on leave, Agatha transferred to the hospital’s dispensary, where she acquired the accurate knowledge of poisons which was later to prove so useful to her.

Years earlier, Agatha and her sister Madge had one day been discussing a murder mystery they were reading, and Agatha had mentioned, idly, that she would like to try her hand at a detective story. Madge was of the opinion that Agatha would find this too difficult a task, an opinion which Agatha remembered in 1916, while working in the hospital dispensary at Torquay. She decided to devote her occasional slack periods at the dispensary to the composition of a detective novel, in the hope of proving her sister wrong.

Her first problem, as Agatha Christie revealed many years later in her autobiography, was to decide what kind of detective story she would write. Since she was surrounded by poisons, it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method she selected. She settled on one particular fact or donné which seemed to her to have possibilities, toyed with the idea for a time, and finally decided upon it. Next she turned to the dramatis personae. Who should be poisoned? Who would be the poisoner? When? Where? How? Why? It would, she decided, have to be ‘very much of an intime murder’, because of the method chosen. It would have to be all in the family, so to speak.

And, of course, there would have to be a detective to unravel the mystery and unmask the evil-doer. An avid reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha pondered upon the personality and methods of Holmes and his relationship with Dr Watson, his friend and the chronicler of his cases. Her detective, she decided, would have to be as different in personality from Sherlock Holmes as possible. However, the device of the friend and helper, the Dr Watson-figure whose obtuseness sets off the brilliant deductive powers of the great detective, was too useful to discard. Her detective would, therefore, have such a figure in attendance, and he could be the narrator of the story. The budding crime writer now had an idea for the actual crime, and a detective and his aide. But who were the other characters to be? Who was to be murdered? Husbands frequently murdered their wives, of course, but perhaps it would be better to opt for a more unusual kind of murder and for a very unusual motive. But then the whole point of a really good murder mystery was that the criminal should be someone obvious, whose obviousness was not apparent until pointed out in the last chapter by the brilliant detective. At this point in her reasoning, Agatha Christie confessed later, she became confused and went away to make up a couple of extra bottles of hypo-chlorous lotion, so that she would have more free time the following day to give further consideration to her crime project.

Over the next few days, her plot began to develop in some detail, though in a somewhat unorthodox manner. Having first decided what she wanted her murderer to look like, Agatha next began to search around among her acquaintances for someone who fitted the description, in order to study his physical characteristics. She soon realized, however, that it was pointless to attempt to base a fictional character upon a real person’s characteristics. Later, with experience, she would find ways of doing this to some extent, but for the present she was in need of a starting-off point. She found it when, sitting in a tram, she saw exactly what she wanted: ‘a man with a black beard, sitting next to an elderly lady who was chattering like a magpie.’ As she did not know these people, her imagination was unfettered; she could invent characters for them, and place them in situations of her own invention.

She continued to give consideration to the question of the detective. It was important that he should not be simply an imitation Sherlock Holmes. What other models were there? Arsène Lupin? The young journalist Rouletabille in The Mystery of the Yellow Room?¹ Perhaps the detective could be a scientist. Or a schoolboy? A schoolboy would be too difficult, and Agatha was not acquainted with any scientists. Then she remembered the colony of Belgian war refugees who were living in the parish of Tor, in Torquay. Might not one of them be a Belgian police officer? A retired Belgian police officer, not too young:

I allowed him slowly to grow into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy, I thought to myself, as I cleared away a good many untidy odds and ends in my own bedroom. A tidy little man. I could see him as a tidy little man, always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes, he would have little grey cells. He would have rather a grand name – one of those names that Sherlock Holmes and his family had. Who was it his brother had been? Mycroft Holmes.²

Since he was to be a little man, it seemed an amusing idea to name the retired detective Hercules, the hero of Greek myth. Where did ‘Poirot’ come from? Did Agatha Christie think of her little detective as also being pear (poire)-shaped? Later, she was unable to remember. But she liked the sound of ‘Hercule Poirot’, and enthusiastically set to work on the other characters and on the plot, inventing situations, revelations and false clues during her leisure time at the dispensary and at home. Eventually, she began to write her novel, using a battered old typewriter that had belonged to her sister. Her method was to produce a first draft of each chapter in longhand and then revise the chapter as she typed it.

About halfway through, Agatha began to find herself in difficulties with her complicated plot, at which point her mother suggested that, if she was ever going to bring her novel to a successful conclusion, she should take the typescript away with her on her holiday from the hospital, and work at it with nothing else to distract her. And so, in the summer of 1916, Mrs Archibald Christie took herself off to beautiful, grey, remote Dartmoor, quite near Torquay in distance, but a world away in atmosphere with its rugged moorland, giant granite tors on craggy hills, ancient stone circles, and prehistoric remains.

Much of the 365 square miles of Dartmoor is bleak country, with treacherous bogs. But a few hundred yards from the summit of Hay Tor, the Moorland Hotel is situated, partially hidden by trees, with views over the moor and across south Devon to the sea, and it was there that Agatha Christie lived for two weeks while she finished writing the murder mystery which she had decided to call The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The hotel is still there, though it has been closed since fire destroyed some of its rooms in March 1970. Years later, Agatha Christie described her two weeks’ stay at the Moorland Hotel in 1916:

It was a large, dreary hotel with plenty of rooms. There were few people staying there. I don’t think I spoke to any of them – it would have taken my mind away from what I was doing. I used to write laboriously all morning till my hand ached. Then I would have lunch, reading a book. Afterwards I would go out for a good walk on the moor, perhaps for a couple of hours. I think I learned to love the moor in those days. I loved the tors and the heather and all the wild part of it away from the roads. Everybody who went there – and of course there were not many in wartime – would be clustering around Hay Tor itself, but I left Hay Tor severely alone and struck out on my own across country. As I walked, I muttered to myself, enacting the chapter that I was next going to write; speaking as John to Mary, and as Mary to John; as Evelyn to her employer, and so on. I became quite excited by this. I would come home, have dinner, fall into bed and sleep for about twelve hours. Then I would get up and write passionately again all morning.

When Archie Christie came home on leave, he read his wife’s novel and enjoyed it. A friend of his in the Air Force was a director of a publishing house, and Archie suggested that he should provide her with a letter from his friend which she could enclose with the typescript and send off to Methuen’s. This plan was duly followed but, although Methuen’s sat on the typescript for about six months, perhaps to prove to Archie’s friend that they were giving it their most earnest consideration, they eventually concluded that it was not quite suitable for them, and returned it to its author.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was submitted to another publisher, again without success, after which Agatha decided to try The Bodley Head, having noticed that they had recently published one or two detective novels. She packed the manuscript off to them, heard nothing, and forgot all about it.

Towards the end of the war, Archie Christie, now a Colonel, was posted to the Air Ministry in London, so Agatha was able to leave Torquay and live at last with her husband. They took a small flat in St John’s Wood, at 5 Northwick Terrace, which was really no more than two rooms on the second floor of a house (now demolished), and Agatha started a course of book-keeping and shorthand to occupy her days. The war came to an end, and a few months later, in 1919, Mrs Christie gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind, at Ashfield, the family home in Torquay.

The Christies now needed a larger London flat, and in due course found what they were looking for on the fourth floor of Addison Mansions (Flat 96), a huge double apartment block behind Olympia in Earls Court. Archie was demobilized, and went to work for a firm in the City. It was towards the end of 1919, nearly two years after she had sent the typescript of The Mysterious Affair at Styles to The Bodley Head, that Agatha Christie received a letter from John Lane, the Managing Director of the publishing house, asking her to call and see him. When they met, John Lane explained that several people had read her novel and thought it showed promise. However, the dénouement, which she had written as a court-room scene, did not ring true. If Mrs Christie would rewrite that chapter, in a different setting, and make some other minor changes, The Bodley Head would be willing to publish her book.

After explaining what a risk he was taking by offering to publish a new and unknown writer, and how little money he was likely to make with her novel, John Lane produced a contract from the drawer of his desk, and an excited young author who had given up hope of ever having anything published, other than the occasional story or poem, immediately signed it. She was to receive a small royalty, but only after the first 2,000 copies had been sold. All subsidiary rights, such as serialization and film rights, would be shared fifty-fifty between author and publisher, and there was a clause binding the author to offer The Bodley Head her next five novels, at an only slightly increased royalty rate. A jubilant Agatha rushed home to inform her husband of her good fortune, and that evening they celebrated at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse.

When The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, it sold nearly 2,000 copies. The £25 which Agatha Christie earned from her first book came, not from royalties, for there were none due to her under the terms of a distinctly unfair contract, but from a half share of the serial rights which had been sold for £50 to The Weekly Times. Taking the view that £25 was not a very satisfactory return for all the time and energy she had expended upon the writing of her novel, Agatha did not envisage ever attempting to write another. At least, this is what she was to claim, years later, in her autobiography. She had been dared by her sister to write a detective story, she had done so, and she had got it published. There, as far as she was concerned, the matter ended. She would probably write stories from time to time, but she had no intention of turning herself into a professional writer. To her, writing was fun.

In this, as in one or two other matters, Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography is less than completely reliable. Writing it over a number of years between 1950 and 1965, she did not always remember with accuracy events which had taken place thirty or forty years earlier. In fact, in a letter to Basil Willett of The Bodley Head, written in the autumn of 1920, she inquired about the publication date of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, adding that she was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to appear, as she had already nearly finished a second novel, The Secret Adversary. She also wanted to know what the cover of The Mysterious Affair at Styles would look like. After she had seen the cover design, she agreed that it would do as it was ‘quite artistic and mysterious’. She also asked that a dedication, ‘To my mother’, should appear at the beginning of the book.

Most of the qualities which were to make Agatha Christie the most popular crime writer there has ever been were already on display in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and it is astonishing that several publishers turned the novel down before it was accepted by The Bodley Head. Characterization is no more detailed than Agatha Christie needed it to be for her purpose, the setting is an English country house in or near a small village, there is a proliferation of clues which are there for the reader to discover, if he is not dazzled by the author’s sleight of hand, and the method used by the murderer is poisoning.

The young Agatha Christie had learned a great deal about poisons through her work at the hospital dispensary in Torquay, and she was to put her knowledge to good use in several of her murder mysteries. Among the many favourable reviews her excellent first novel received, Agatha was especially proud of that in the Pharmaceutical Journal, which praised ‘this detective story for dealing with poisons in a knowledgeable way, and not with the nonsense about untraceable substances that so often happens. Miss Agatha Christie knows her job.’

The ‘Styles’ of the title is Styles Court, a country house in Essex, a mile outside the village of Styles St Mary. In later novels, Mrs Christie tended not to specify the county, and even in this first novel she avoids using real names of towns. Characters may take the train up to London from the country, but if they have to visit a nearby country town it will not be identified as Chelmsford or Colchester, but will be given a fictitious name. The fictitious village of Styles St Mary is, for instance, seven miles away from the fictitious town of Tadminster, where one of the characters works in the dispensary of the Red Cross Hospital.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, though not published until 1920, had been written during the First World War, and was set in the summer of 1916. Its narrator, Captain Hastings, is a young officer who has been invalided home from the Front and who, after spending some months ‘in a rather depressing Convalescent Home’, is still on sick leave when he runs into someone he had known as a boy: the forty-five-year-old John Cavendish who is ‘a good fifteen years’ Hastings’ senior. Hastings, then, is about thirty. Reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles now, the reader interests himself more in Captain Hastings’ personal details than Agatha Christie’s readers would have done in 1920, for they were not to know that Mrs Christie would go on to write scores of crime novels over the years and that Hastings would figure in eight of them (and in numerous short stories) as the associate of her detective, Hercule Poirot.

John Cavendish invites the convalescent Hastings to spend his leave in Essex at Styles Court. Cavendish’s stepmother, whom Hastings remembered as a handsome, middle-aged woman, is now an autocratic grande dame of seventy or more. After several years of widowhood, she has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, who is about twenty years younger than she, and ‘an absolute bounder’ in the opinion of John Cavendish because he has ‘a great black beard, and wears patent leather boots in all weathers’. Clearly, Alfred Inglethorp is a fortune-hunter, for Mrs Inglethorp has a sizeable fortune to dispose of. When she is found murdered, he is the chief and favourite suspect.

The other inhabitants of Styles Court include John Cavendish’s wife Mary, his younger brother Lawrence, a girl called Cynthia, who is a protégé of Mrs Inglethorp and who works in the dispensary of the nearby hospital, and Evelyn Howard, a forty-year-old woman who has been the old lady’s companion, factotum and general assistant. There is also a tall, bearded and somewhat mysterious foreigner, a Dr Bauerstein, who is staying in the village, recuperating after a nervous breakdown. He is said to be one of the greatest living experts on poisons.

When Mrs Inglethorp’s death, at first thought to be due to a heart attack, is found to have been caused by strychnine poisoning, suspicion falls not only upon her husband but, in turn, on most of her nearest and dearest. The local police are called in, but Hastings has encountered in the village an old friend of his, Hercule Poirot, a famous detective now retired, and it is Hastings who persuades his friend John Cavendish to allow Poirot as well to investigate the crime.

Before the First World War, young Hastings had worked for Lloyd’s of London. (Not until The ABC Murders in 1935 shall we learn Hastings’ first name to be Arthur, for Agatha Christie’s men habitually address each other in what used to be the approved English upper-middleclass fashion, by their surnames.) It was while he was working for Lloyd’s that Hastings had first met Poirot, in Belgium. Poirot had already retired from the Belgian Police Force, after a long career as its most illustrious detective, and had set himself up in private practice as an investigator. Hastings is surprised and delighted to meet him again unexpectedly in the village of Styles St Mary where Poirot, together with a number of other Belgian refugees, is living. Poirot accepts with alacrity the commission to find Mrs Inglethorp’s murderer, for, as he explains to Hastings, ‘she had kindly extended hospitality to seven of my countrypeople who, alas, are refugees from their native land.’ ‘We Belgians,’ he adds, ‘will always remember her with gratitude.’ Poirot, on his first appearance, is described in some detail:

He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.³

Later, we shall discover that Poirot is not only fanatically neat but is also obsessed with symmetry. He is forever rearranging the objects he encounters, putting them into straight rows. He probably wished that eggs were square: he certainly, on one occasion, deplored the fact that hens lay eggs of different sizes (‘What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table?’) It is odd, therefore, that he should habitually carry his head tilted a little to one side. He cannot have been aware that he did so.

Poirot will acquire other personality traits in later books, or at least we shall learn more about him, but already apparent in Styles are his genuine affection for Hastings, of whose perspicacity he has a justifiably low opinion, his endearing vanity, his odd misuse of the English language and still odder occasional misuse of his native tongue, French (for, despite her Paris finishing school, Mrs Christie’s French was to remain obstinately unidiomatic). Incidentally, when he sees his old friend for the first time in several years, Hastings notices that Poirot now limps badly. But the limp is never referred to again: we must assume that it was a temporary disability from which Poirot soon recovered. Indeed, when he inspects Mrs Inglethorp’s room at Styles Court, Poirot, we are told, ‘darted from one object to the other with the agility of a grasshopper.’

Just as ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, (which is not a direct quotation from any story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) is the phrase you most associate with Sherlock Holmes, so a habit of constantly referring to ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain is something closely associated with Hercule Poirot. But, though he is continually having ‘little ideas’, and recommending order and method to Hastings, Poirot mentions the ‘little grey cells’ for the first time only towards the end of Styles. He makes a point, however, of informing Hastings (and the reader of the book) well before the dénouement that ‘I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.’ Hastings, however, never wins a battle of wits with Hercule Poirot, and it is a reasonable assumption that even the most assiduous reader of Agatha Christie will do so only rarely.

Agatha Christie was conscious of the necessity to make Poirot very different from the most famous fictional detective of his day, Sherlock Holmes. After all, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures were still appearing. The Valley of Fear was published in 1915, His Last Bow in 1917, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. But it is only physically that Poirot differs greatly from Holmes. The two detectives share a number of qualities, among which vanity is by no means the least noticeable. Still, if Poirot owes something to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, does he not also owe something to another crime novelist? Mrs Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, and writer of a number of historical and mystery novels and stories, was the creator of a detective who, like Poirot, was foreign, retired (in his case, from the Paris Sûreté), and incredibly vain. His name was Hercules Popeau. Agatha Christie must certainly have been aware of him when she began to write her first Hercule Poirot novel, and indeed throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties when stories by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, featuring Popeau, appeared in the same anthologies as stories of Hercule Poirot’s exploits. In the mid-thirties, Mrs Belloc Lowndes published a Popeau story, ‘A Labour of Hercules’, which did not deter Mrs Christie in the mid-forties from calling a collection of Poirot stories The Labours of Hercules.

Devoted Christieans, who delight in assembling the ‘facts’ about Poirot in the same manner that Conan Doyle’s more fanatical admirers tend to research the great Sherlock Holmes, have somehow convinced themselves that Poirot retired from the Belgian Police Force in 1904, and that this fact is revealed in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is not. We are told that Poirot ‘had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian Police.’ When, late in the story, Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard puts in an appearance (he is the Christiean equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s sparring partner, Inspector Lestrade), he greets Poirot and then, turning to a colleague says: ‘You’ve heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then do you remember “Baron” Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr Poirot here.’

Poirot, then, was active in his post in 1904, and the ‘Baron’ Altera affair may well have occurred after 1904. It is possible that Poirot’s retirement did not take place until 1914, in which case he could have been as young as sixty-seven at the time of the Styles murder in 1916. (In Murder on the Links, published three years after Styles, we learn that Poirot was still active in Ostend in 1909.) Agatha Christie later declared that, if she had realized how long she was going to be saddled with Poirot, she would have made him a much younger man on his first appearance. It is fortunate that fictional chronology can be flexible, for otherwise Poirot would have been at least one hundred and twenty years of age when he came to solve his final case in 1974, after having featured in thirty-three novels and fifty-two short stories. That he was still in his sixties, and not older, when Mrs Christie first introduces us to him in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is suggested by a remark of Hastings, when he fails to understand Poirot’s train of thought: ‘The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old.’ If Poirot had appeared to be in his seventies, the idea that he might be growing old would probably not have crossed even Hastings’ mind.

One of Agatha Christie’s great achievements as a crime writer was to make murder cosy enough to be palatable to refined middleclass tastes. She abhorred violence,⁴ and those who see in it the only reality will seek that kind of reality in vain in the Christiean oeuvre. Her appeal is incredibly wide – ça va sans dire, as Poirot might say – and it is an appeal not to the blood lust but to a civilized delight in the puzzle shared by her readers of all social and intellectual classes. One can discuss Agatha Christie novels with cleaning ladies and classical scholars, with dustmen and dons.

This cosiness is, of course, in itself unreal. The Mysterious Affair at Styles has the inhuman remoteness of the puzzle, but it also, curiously, has something of the texture of a social document as well, especially now, more than half a century after it was written, when its social world has all but disappeared. To Agatha Christie, it would seem to have been already disappearing in 1916. The atmosphere in Styles Court and in the nearby village of Styles St Mary is of a country at war. The war may be only a lightly sketched background, but it is there. The servants necessary to staff a large country house are there, too, but only just. Of Dorcus, the faithful old family retainer, Hastings says, ‘I thought what a fine specimen she was of the old-fashioned servant that is so fast dying out.’

The values implicitly subscribed to, and the opinions expressed by many of her characters, can reasonably be assumed to be shared by the young author of Styles. Evidence in a good many of the early Christie novels seems to point to an unthinking, casual anti-semitism of the kind then prevalent in the English upperclasses. In Styles, Dr Bauerstein, a Polish Jew, is suspected of spying. ‘A very clever man – a Jew of course,’ says Poirot, at which Hastings exclaims, ‘The blackguard!’ Not too worrying, though there is a suggestion that the doctor’s Jewish cleverness is as reprehensible as his espionage activities. In any case, the balance is redressed somewhat with this exchange between a jealous husband and his wife who is infatuated with Bauerstein:

‘I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.’

‘A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the’ – she looked at him – ‘stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.’

The tactics, though not the actual method of murder, used by the killer of Mrs Inglethorp were adopted successfully by a real-life murderer about ten years after the publication of Agatha Christie’s first novel. It is quite possible that he derived his inspiration from a reading of the book. Other odd facts to be noted about The Mysterious Affair at Styles are that the author emphasizes the puzzle-solving aspect of the reading experience by including two plans, one of the first floor of Styles Court and one of Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom, and a number of illustrations of clues, letters, fragments of handwriting and cryptic messages; that Hastings gives evidence of his propensity for redheads, which will continue to be displayed in later stories, by unsuccessfully proposing marriage to one; and that Agatha Christie signals to the reader in the final paragraph of the novel that she is prepared to produce one or more sequels to Styles. ‘Console yourself, my friend,’ Poirot says to Hastings who has failed to capture his redhead. ‘We may hunt together again, who knows? And then –’

Though her gift for tight and ingenious plotting and her flair for creating believable characters mainly through convincing dialogue were to develop greatly in the next ten or fifteen years, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles Mrs Christie made an extraordinarily successful début as a crime writer. Her novel is a distinct improvement on the average level of the genre as it was then practised, and looking back on it more than half a century later you can see that, in fact, it ushered in a new era for the detective story, an era which Agatha Christie would come to dominate with her engaging and fiendishly ingenious puzzles, an era which lasted for more than three decades and which is referred to now as the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Between 1989 and 1997, nine of Agatha Christie’s novels and thirty-four short stories, all featuring Hercule Poirot as the investigator, were adapted for television with David Suchet as Poirot. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was first transmitted on London Weekend TV on 16 September 1990.

The Secret Adversary TOMMY & TUPPENCE (1922)

With Archibald and Agatha Christie living in a flat in London, and Agatha’s mother still attempting to keep up Ashfield, the Torquay house, on an inadequate income to which Agatha could not afford to contribute, the question of selling Ashfield was raised by Archie. When Agatha received the suggestion with horror, Archie then proposed that she should try to raise funds towards the upkeep of Ashfield by writing another murder mystery. After all, although she had earned only £25 from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it had been well received and had sold a respectable number of copies. The Bodley Head had presumably not lost money on it, and would no doubt be willing a pay a little more for a second novel.

Agatha, apparently, had already begun a second novel, but was not sure whether The Bodley Head would like it. It was not another detective story, but a thriller, so there was no place in it for Hercule Poirot. The idea for the book had first come to her one day in an A.B.C. teashop, one of a chain of London cafés, when she had overheard two people at a nearby table talking about a girl called Jane Fish. That, she thought, would make quite a good beginning: someone overhearing an unusual name in a café, and then remembering it when it came up again in a different context. Jane Fish, however, was perhaps just a little too comical, so Agatha altered it to Jane Finn, and set to work to invent a plot. Young people in their twenties were being demobilized from the armed forces after the First World War and finding it difficult to settle down to civilian life. Many were unable to find jobs, or were having to act as door-to-door salesmen. Mrs Christie, who found herself frequently answering the doorbell to ex-servicemen, and buying stockings, household gadgets or even poems from them, decided to have such a pair as the young hero and heroine of her thriller.

When she had finished writing her book some months later, Agatha took it to John Lane of The Bodley Head, who had published The Mysterious Affair at Styles and who had an option on this and her next four books. Lane was disappointed at finding it was not another murder mystery, thought it would sell less well than Styles, and even considered rejecting it. In due course, however, The Bodley Head published the novel, which its author decided to call The Secret Adversary, having first considered The Joyful Venture and The Young Adventurers (‘The Young Adventurers Ltd’ in fact became the title of Chapter 1). The publishers disposed of serial rights to The Weekly Times, as they had done with Styles, and sold a reasonable number of copies. This time Mrs Christie ‘got £50 doled out’ to her by John Lane. It was, she considered, encouraging, though not encouraging enough for her to think that she had as yet adopted anything so grand as a profession. She would have been astonished if anyone had told her she would, from now until the end of her life, publish at least one book a year, sometimes one novel and one collection of short stories, sometimes two novels, and in one year (1934) a total of two crime novels, two volumes of short stories and (under a pseudonym) one romantic novel.

With The Secret Adversary in 1922, Agatha Christie introduced her readers to two characters whom she would use again in four later novels: Partners in Crime (1929), N or M? (1941), By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) and Postern of Fate (1974). It is as well, therefore, that Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to their friends as Tommy and Tuppence, are only in their twenties in 1922, for this enabled their creator to allow them to age naturally. In their final adventure in 1974 they are presented as an elderly married couple with three grandchildren. When we first meet them, however, in The Secret Adversary, they are young, and just emerging from wartime activities, he as a Lieutenant in the army, who had been in action in France, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and she as a maid-of-all-work in an officers’ hospital in London. Tuppence is, perhaps, the author as Agatha Christie liked to fantasize herself, and Tommy is the kind of young man who appealed to the fantasy Agatha.

The relationship of the young couple is lightly romantic, though they refrain from confessing their feelings for each other until the last page of The Secret Adversary, and their style of speech is positively Wodehousian. ‘Tommy, old thing!’ and ‘Tuppence, old bean!’ they exclaim when they meet unexpectedly for the first time since the war, at the exit to the Dover Street tube station. (This is not a fictitious venue: there used to be a Dover Street station on the Piccadilly line.)

Set in 1920, in the autumn and winter of which year it was written, The Secret Adversary is dedicated ‘To ALL THOSE WHO LEAD MONOTONOUS LIVES in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure’. If, in her first novel, Mrs Christie had set forth one of her two favourite subjects, the murder committed in (or at least involving the members of) an upperclass or upper-middleclass household, in her second she introduces her other favourite, the master criminal seeking to dominate the world. These two themes, domestic crime and global crime, continue to appear throughout her career, though the domestic crime novels not only greatly outnumber the thrillers involving international criminals or crime syndicates, but also are generally considered to be vastly superior to them.

The Secret Adversary begins with a prologue which takes place at 2 p.m. on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Ireland. The Lusitania has just been torpedoed by a German submarine, and is sinking fast. Women and children are lining up for the lifeboats, and a man approaches one of the women, an eighteen-year-old girl, to ask if she will take possession of some ‘vitally important papers’ which may make all the difference to the Allies in the war. The Lusitania settles with a more decided list to starboard as the girl goes forward to take her place in the lifeboat, and then suddenly we are in Mayfair, five years later, with Tommy and Tuppence blocking the exit to the Dover Street underground station, turning themselves into the Young Adventurers.

The Prologue is brief, graphic, and flings the reader in medias res. the sudden juxtaposition of a grey, grim Atlantic with the bright sunshine of post-war London and the cheerful optimism of the young adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, is startlingly effective. In the interests of accuracy, however, it should be noted that Mrs Christie thought the Lusitania was sunk by two torpedoes. In fact, the German U-boat fired only one torpedo: those among the survivors who may have thought otherwise were misled by secondary explosions from the Lusitania’s boilers.

The story proper concerns the efforts of Tommy and Tuppence to trace the girl, Jane Finn, who survived the Lusitania disaster only to disappear immediately afterwards with those secret papers which, if they were made public now, months after the end of the war, would cause great embarrassment to the British Government. Mr Carter, a mysterious individual who is very high up in the British Secret Service, recruits the Young Adventurers to save the country. We are left in no doubt of Agatha Christie’s political leanings when Mr Carter points out to the Adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, how vital it is that the documents should be retrieved and suppressed, for they could discredit a number of Conservative statesmen (–was there really a time when a government of any political persuasion contained a number of statesmen?–) and that would never do. ‘As a party cry for Labour it would be irresistible, and a Labour Government at this juncture,’ Mr Carter adds, ‘would, in my opinion, be a grave disability for British trade.’

During the course of their search, Tommy and Tuppence encounter a number of entertaining characters, some of them engaging but others distinctly unsavoury. They include Julius P. Hersheimmer, Jane Finn’s American millionaire cousin; Albert, the cockney liftboy in a Mayfair apartment block; and Sir James Peel Edgerton, a distinguished barrister, ‘the most celebrated KC in England’, a man likely to become a future Prime Minister. What links The Secret Adversary, and later Christie thrillers, with the murder mysteries on which the author’s reputation most securely rests is the fact that these and a number of other characters whom Tommy and Tuppence find themselves either collaborating with or pitted against are not only the clearcut ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of the usual thriller, but are potential suspects as well. For, although Agatha Christie clearly differentiates the thriller from the murder mystery, she retains an element of the puzzle in her thrillers. The question ‘Who?’ is asked in the thrillers; it is simply that the question ‘How?’ becomes equally important.

In The Secret Adversary, the puzzle is the identity of the adversary. The Bolshevists, we are informed, are behind the labour unrest in the country, but there is a certain man who is ‘behind the Bolshevists’ (the italics are Mrs Christie’s). ‘Who is he?’ Mr Carter asks rhetorically:

‘We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of “Mr Brown”. But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere.

Tommy manages to eavesdrop upon a meeting of Mr Brown’s organization, at which various representatives report on their activities. A Sinn Feiner guarantees to produce, within a month, ‘such a reign of terror in Ireland as shall shake the British Empire to its foundations’. Others have infiltrated the trade unions: the report from the miners is thought to be most satisfactory, but ‘We must hold back the railways. There may be trouble with the ASE.’ It is important that the principal Labour leaders should have no inkling that they are being used by the Bolshevists. ‘They are honest men,’ says the representative from Moscow, ‘and that is their value to us.’

All good clean reactionary fun, and not without a certain absurd relevance to political life today! Those who take their politics solemnly, if anyone other than politicians is still able to do so, will probably reflect that The Secret Adversary gives an interestingly distorted picture of the social and industrial unrest which followed the First World War and which, during the years which saw the consolidation of the Russian revolution, was to lead to the General Strike in Great Britain, an event which is curiously anticipated in more than one of Agatha Christie’s early novels. But Mrs Christie is politically no further to the right in her thrillers than Ian Fleming in his distinctly less amusing James Bond novels of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.

The villain is unmasked at the end of The Secret Adversary and the threatened General Strike is averted or, as we now know, postponed. Inspector Japp has made, not an appearance, but a certain effect offstage, and the reader with a knowledge of nineteenth-century French opera will probably spot a certain clue which will leave those who suffer from amusia (the inability to comprehend or produce musical sounds) mystified.

The Secret Adversary was the first Agatha Christie novel to be made into a film. This did not happen until 1928, by which time Mrs Christie was being published in a number of foreign languages. The film, produced by Julius Hagen for a German company, was called Die Abenteuer Gmbh (Adventures Ltd), was directed by Fred Sauer, and starred Carlo Aldini, Eve Gray and a Russian character actor, Michael or Mikhail Rasumny, who was to appear in a number of Hollywood movies in the nineteen-forties and fifties.

A television adaptation of The Secret Adversary was first shown on London Weekend TV on 9 October 1983.

The Murder on the Links POIROT (1923)

Archie Christie had a friend, Major Belcher, who was a larger-than-life character with the ability to bluff people into giving him positions of responsibility. Belcher came to dine one evening with the Christies at Earls Court, and explained that he was shortly to leave on a grand tour of the British Empire in order to organize ‘this Empire Exhibition we’re having in eighteen months’ time’. ‘The Dominions,’ Belcher explained to Archie and Agatha, ‘have got to be alerted, to stand on their toes and to cooperate in the whole thing,’ and it was Belcher’s mission to ensure that they did so. He invited Archie to come with him as financial adviser, with all expenses paid and a fee of £1,000. Agatha would be permitted to accompany the party, since most of the transport was being provided free of charge by the ships and railways of the various Commonwealth countries to be visited.

Archie Christie had already grown tired of his job in the City, and when Belcher announced the proposed itinerary, from South Africa to Australia and New Zealand, then on to Canada after a brief holiday in Honolulu, the Christies agreed to go. Agatha longed to travel and see as much of the world as possible, but had expected that, as the wife of a business man, two weeks abroad each summer would be all she was ever likely to get. There was a certain risk to be taken, for Colonel Christie’s employer was not willing to guarantee to keep his job open for him on his return, but the Christies did not consider themselves to be people who played safe. Like Agatha’s Tommy and Tuppence, they yearned for adventure and were perfectly willing to take risks. Off they went, around the world with Major Belcher, leaving their daughter with Agatha’s sister.

The British Empire Exhibition Mission set off in grand style on the Kildonan Castle, bound for Cape Town. But Agatha Christie’s enjoyment was soon cut short: the weather in the Bay of Biscay was atrocious, the ship was tossed about violently, and for four days Agatha suffered the most appalling seasickness. The ship’s doctor became seriously concerned about her, and a woman in a nearby cabin who had caught a glimpse of her was heard, on the fourth day, to ask the stewardess: ‘Is the lady in the cabin opposite dead yet?’ However, her condition improved when the ship docked at Madeira, and although she subsequently became ill again whenever the weather was rough at sea, it was never quite as bad as those first days. In due course, the ship reached Cape Town, and Agatha was delighted to be back on terra firma for a time. By now, she had come to know Major Belcher quite well, and to realize that travelling around the world with him was not going to be the entirely happy experience she and Archie had anticipated. The Major was very demanding, complained continually about the service, and bullied his secretary, Mr Bates, a serious, somewhat humourless young man and an excellent secretary, though nature had given him ‘the appearance of a villain in a melodrama, with black hair, flashing eyes and an altogether sinister aspect’. ‘Looks the complete thug, doesn’t he?’ Belcher said to the Christies. ‘You’d say he was going to cut your throat any moment. Actually he is the most respectable fellow you have ever known.’ Neither Belcher nor his secretary realized that they were being scrutinized, analysed and filed away for future reference by a crime novelist always ready to make use of a colourful character or two.

From Cape Town Agatha travelled on to the diamond mines at Kimberley; to Salisbury and the Victoria Falls; to Livingstone where she saw crocodiles swimming about, and hippopotami; to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. She and Archie managed to do a great deal of surfing at Muizenberg, in Cape Province, before facing the, in her case, dreaded sea voyage to Australia.

In Australia she was fascinated by the parrots,⁵ blue and red and green, ‘flying through the air in great clustering swarms’, and by the gigantic tree ferns in the bush outside Melbourne. The food and the sanitary arrangements left much to be desired, but staying on a sheep station in New South Wales was an unusual and enjoyable experience. In the major cities, Belcher made successful public speeches, or rather repeated the same speech which his travelling companions soon knew by heart. After visiting Tasmania, where Agatha fell in love with ‘incredibly beautiful Hobart’ and decided to go back and live there one day, the party proceeded to New Zealand.

Belcher had, by now, revealed himself in his true colours. The Christies found him for much of the time to be rude, overbearing, inconsiderate and oddly mean in small matters. He was continually sending Agatha out to buy him white cotton socks and neglecting to pay her for them. He behaved, Agatha remembered later, like a spoilt child, but had such immense charm when he was on his best behaviour that he was instantly forgiven. Tasmania forgotten, Agatha now thought New Zealand the most beautiful country she had ever seen, and vowed to go back one day. (However, by the time that air travel had made it possible to get there quickly, an elderly Agatha Christie had decided that her travelling days were over.)

After a lazy voyage, stopping at Fiji and other islands, Agatha and Archie arrived in Honolulu for two weeks’ holiday, while Belcher stayed with friends in New Zealand, after which they all embarked upon the last and most gruelling part of their journey, a tour of Canada. It was from the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff National Park, high up in the Rockies, that Mrs Christie wrote on 26 September 1922, to Basil Willett of The Bodley Head thanking him for a cheque for forty-seven pounds, eighteen shillings and ten pence. (But, in December, back in Torquay, she wrote again asking for accounts to be sent to her, and some weeks later had occasion to point out to Mr Willett that, since he had wrongly calculated the selling price of the American edition of The Secret Adversary, the exchange rate being $4.45 to the pound, The Bodley Head owed her two pounds, two shillings and three pence.)

Before setting out on her tour of the Commonwealth, Agatha had virtually completed a third novel, The Murder on the Links, the idea for which she derived from newspaper reports of a murder in France. Masked men had broken into a house, killed the owner and left his wife bound and gagged. There were discrepancies in the wife’s story, and a suggestion that she may have killed her husband. This led Agatha to invent her own plot, beginning several years later and in a different part of France.

Hercule Poirot having been a decided success on his first appearance, he and Captain Hastings were employed again in The Murder on the Links. The Bodley Head professed themselves pleased with the novel, but its author quarrelled with them over the jacket they provided for it. She thought its colours ugly and the actual drawing poor. In her autobiography she claims that the jacket was also misleading in that it appeared to represent a man in pyjamas on a golf-links, dying of an epileptic fit, whereas the character had been fully dressed and stabbed in the back. But, in fact, the murdered man, according to Mrs Christie’s text, wore only underclothes beneath an overcoat. Whoever was in the right about the jacket, a certain amount of bad feeling was engendered between author and publisher, and Agatha secured her publisher’s agreement that, in future, she should see and approve jacket designs for her books. (She had already had another difference of opinion with her publisher, during the production of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, over the spelling of the hot drink, cocoa, which Miss Howse, an eccentric employee of the firm and described by Mrs Christie as a dragon, insisted should be spelled ‘coco’. Agatha produced dictionaries and even tins of cocoa, but failed to make any impression on Miss Howse.)

With The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie returned to the murder mystery or puzzle type of novel, and to her team of Poirot and Hastings. Years later, she wrote of it:

I think Murder on the Links⁶ was a moderately good example of its kind – though rather melodramatic. This time I provided a love affair for Hastings. If I had to have a love interest in the book, I thought I might as well marry off Hastings. Truth to tell, I think I was getting a little tired of him. I might be stuck with Poirot, but no need to be stuck with Hastings too.⁷

The Murder on the Links is a more than ‘moderately good’ example of its kind. Until the diabolically ingenious solution, which perhaps fails to convince because of its very complexity, the action moves swiftly, the small seaside resort on the northern coast of France rings true and is not simply an English village in disguise, and the characters, lightly sketched though they are, all come vividly to life. The skill with which Agatha Christie manipulates her plot involving two crimes committed twenty years apart is quite brilliant. Occasionally, however, she displays an odd carelessness in matters of detail. For instance, the corpse of the murdered man is described when it is viewed by Poirot and Hastings. The face is clean-shaven, the nose thin, the eyes set rather close together, and the skin bronzed. We are told that the dead man’s ‘lips were drawn back from his teeth and an expression of absolute amazement and terror was stamped on the livid features’. The features, it is clear, are at least intact and undamaged. But Poirot finds a short piece of lead piping which, according to him, was used to ‘disfigure the victim’s face so that it would be unrecognizable’. Poirot’s theory of the crime, fortunately, does not hinge upon this point!

Since we are in France, Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard is not available to act as a foil for Poirot. This function is undertaken by Giraud, a young detective from the Sûreté who is already famous and inclined to pour scorn on Poirot’s old-fashioned methods. Agatha Christie has confessed that, in writing The Murder on the Links, she was influenced less by the Sherlock Holmes stories than by Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. She must also have been reading A. E. W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose, for certain events at the Villa Geneviève in The Murder on the Links call the 1910 mystery classic to mind.

Since their earlier adventure in Essex, Poirot and Hastings have taken furnished rooms together in London. If you did not learn from The Big Four (1927) that their address was 14 Farraway Street, you would have sworn that it was 221B Baker Street, for the ambience is distinctly Holmesian, as is their landlady, who is difficult to distinguish from Sherlock Holmes’s Mrs Hudson. Captain Hastings works as private secretary to a Member of Parliament while Poirot pursues a retirement career as private detective, and Hastings finds time to write up Poirot’s cases, just as Watson used to chronicle those of Holmes. At the end of The Murder on the Links, it seems likely that Hastings will propose marriage to the auburn-haired beauty he has met, and there is even a hint that he, or they, may emigrate to ‘a ranch across the seas’. Mrs Christie, it would seem, was already laying her plans for the removal of Hastings from Poirot’s life.

A television adaptation of The Murder on the Links, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 11 February 1996.

The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)

Back in London after their world tour, the Christies for a time found it difficult to settle down. Agatha longed for a cottage in the country, near enough to town for Archie to commute to the city, but far enough away for little Rosalind to be able to breathe air fresher than that of Earls Court. Archie took some months to find a job that suited him. Eventually, however, he was offered an excellent position with Austral Trust Ltd, a city firm run by an Australian friend, Clive Baillieu. Archie was to remain with Austral Trust Ltd for the rest of his life. Now, while they searched for their place in the country, Agatha proceeded to work on her next novel.

The egregious Belcher had suggested to her, before they went on their trip, that his house, the Mill House at Dorney, would make an excellent setting for a murder. ‘The Mystery of the Mill House,’ he had said to her one evening when the Christies were dining there. ‘Jolly good title, don’t you think?’ Agatha admitted that it had possibilities, and on their voyage to Cape Town Major Belcher continued to refer to it. ‘But mind you,’ he added, ‘if you write it you must put me in it.’ Agatha doubted if she could manage to create a character based entirely on someone she knew, but Belcher continued to pester her throughout their world tour. When he asked her, for the umpteenth time, ‘Have you begun that book yet? Am I in it?’ she replied, ‘Yes. You’re the victim.’

But Belcher did not see himself as one of life’s victims. ‘You’ve got to make me the murderer, Agatha. Do you understand?’ And Mrs Christie replied carefully, ‘I understand that you want to be the murderer.’ She had not, in fact, begun writing the book, but she did sketch out its plot while she was in South Africa, and Belcher played a leading role. ‘Give him a title,’ Archie suggested. ‘He’d like that.’ So Belcher became Sir Eustace Pedler. Agatha Christie explained later that Sir Eustace Pedler was not really meant to be Belcher,

but he used several of Belcher’s phrases, and told some of Belcher’s stories. He too was a master of the art of bluff, and behind the bluff could easily be sensed an unscrupulous and interesting character. Soon I had forgotten Belcher and had Sir Eustace Pedler himself wielding the pen. It is, I think, the only time I have tried to put a real person whom I knew well into a book, and I don’t think it succeeded. Belcher didn’t come to life, but someone called Sir Eustace Pedler did. I suddenly found that the book was becoming rather fun to write. I only hoped The Bodley Head would approve of it.⁸

The book was written in London and, retitled The Man in the Brown Suit since its author thought the title proposed by Belcher too similar to her earlier ones, was delivered to The Bodley Head who ‘hemmed and hawed a bit’ because it was not a proper detective story but one of those thrillers which Mrs Christie seemed to find easier to write. However, they accepted it.

Agatha Christie, author of four books, was no longer the novice who had grasped eagerly the chance to have her first novel published. As she herself put it, though she had been ignorant and foolish when she first submitted a book for publication, she had since learned a few things. She had discovered the Society of Authors and read its periodical, from which she learned that you had to be extremely careful in making contracts with publishers, ‘and especially with certain publishers’. When The Bodley Head, who still had an option on her next two books after The Man in the Brown Suit, suggested shortly before its publication that they scrap the old contract and make a new one for a further five books, Mrs Christie politely declined. She considered that they had not treated a young and inexperienced author fairly, but had taken advantage of her ignorance of publishers’ contracts and her understandable eagerness to have her first book published.

It was at this point that Agatha Christie decided she needed a literary agent and went back to the firm of Hughes Massie. Massie, who had advised her years earlier, had since died, and she was received by a young man with a slight stammer, whose name was Edmund Cork. Finding him impressive, and considerably less alarming than Hughes Massie himself had been, Mrs Christie placed her literary career, such as it was, in Cork’s hands, and left his office feeling that an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for more than fifty years until her death. Edmund Cork subsequently died, but the firm still represents the Agatha Christie Literary Estate.

The Evening News offered what seemed to Agatha Christie the unbelievable sum of £500 for the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit, which she hastily accepted, deciding not to object that the newspaper intended to call the serial version ‘Anna the Adventuress’, as silly a title as she had ever heard. That she should receive such a huge amount of money, was, she thought, an extraordinary stroke of luck and, when Archie suggested she buy a car with it, Agatha invested in a grey, bottle-nosed Morris Cowley which, she revealed many years later, was the first of the two most exciting things in her life. (The second was her invitation to dine with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace many years later.)

The Man in the Brown Suit, another of the thrillers which Agatha Christie found easier and ‘more fun’ to write than her detective stories, is one of her best in that genre. The heroine, Anne Beddingfield, is a romantic young woman whose archaeologist father dies, leaving her little more than the opportunity to be free and to seek adventure. Adventure, for Anne, begins when she witnesses the apparently accidental death of a man who falls onto the electrified rails at Hyde Park Corner tube station. Finding reason to suspect that the man’s death was not accidental, Anne persuades the great newspaper magnate Lord Nasby, ‘millionaire owner of the Daily Budget’ and several other papers, to commission her to investigate the matter. (For Nasby, we are probably meant to read Northcliffe.) A second death occurs at the Mill House, Marlow, whose owner is Sir Eustace Pedler, MP, and the trail leads Anne to sail to Cape Town on the Kilmorden Castle. On board, she meets Sir Eustace, a character whom Agatha Christie, as we know, based largely on Major Belcher, and his secretary, Guy Pagett, who, like the real-life secretary of Belcher, ‘has the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner’. Anne, like Agatha herself, proves to be a very poor sailor, and it is not until they reach Madeira that she begins to feel she might possibly recover from her seasickness.

With the exception of a Prologue set in Paris, the entire action of the novel takes place either en route to, or in South Africa and Rhodesia, and is presented through the diaries of Anne and Sir Eustace. The villain is a master criminal who organizes crime ‘as another man might organize a boot factory’. Jewel robberies, forgery, espionage, assassination, he has dabbled in them all. He is known to his underlings simply as ‘the Colonel’, and it falls to Anne finally to unmask him, with the aid of two or three friends.

Who Anne’s friends are, and who her enemies, is something which Mrs Christie keeps her readers guessing about. Like all Christie thrillers, The Man in the Brown Suit incorporates the puzzle element into its plot as well. Thus it retains a hold on the loyalties of those who prefer the murder mystery to the thriller, for it conceals until the last pages the identity of ‘the Colonel’ (who is, after all, a murderer), while at the same time including all the ingredients of the ‘international crime’ story: action, violence, suspense. Whether or not the charming old rogue Sir Eustace Pedler is at all like Major Belcher, he is one of Agatha Christie’s most convincing and memorable characters, and the author’s underestimated ability to convey a strong sense of place is very much in evidence in her discreet but effective description of the exotic African landscape through which Pedler, Anne and the others move.

It might be thought that to present the narrative through the diaries of two characters detracts somewhat from the suspense, or at least from the list of suspects. But with Agatha Christie you cannot always be certain that anyone is above suspicion. Diaries can also be published posthumously. (This is not necessarily a clue.) In The Man in the Brown Suit Mrs Christie makes use of a device which, to a certain extent, anticipates her tactics in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), though less spectacularly.

It need not impair enjoyment of the novel to know that one of the characters, a strong silent man called Colonel Race, will appear in three later Agatha Christie novels, ageing over forty years in the process. In fact, enjoyment of The Man in the Brown Suit will be impaired only if you take too seriously the African revolution which seems to be trying to foment itself offstage. Mrs Christie, never an acute political observer, rather charmingly recalls in her autobiography that ‘there was some kind of a revolutionary crisis on while we were there, and I noted down a few useful facts.’ Those facts must have got lost somewhere.

The Man in the Brown Suit was produced by Warner Brothers as a TV movie in 1987, starring Tony Randall.

Poirot Investigates POIROT SHORT STORIES (1924)

One of Hercule Poirot’s earliest fans was Bruce Ingram, editor of the London illustrated weekly, The Sketch. Ingram got in touch with Agatha Christie to suggest that she should write a series of Hercule Poirot stories for his magazine, and a thrilled and delighted Agatha agreed. She was not entirely pleased with the drawing of Hercule Poirot which The Sketch commissioned to accompany the first of the stories: it was not unlike her idea of Poirot but it made him look a little too smart and dandified. Agatha Christie wrote eight stories, and at first it was thought that eight would be sufficient. However, it was eventually decided to extend the series to twelve, and the author had to produce another four rather too hastily. When the series of stories began, in the 7 March 1923 issue of The Sketch, it was accompanied by a page of photographs of ‘The Maker of “The Grey Cells of M. Poirot” ’, showing her at home with her daughter, in her drawing-room, on the telephone, at her writing table, at work with her typewriter and so on. The author of ‘the thrilling set of detective yarns’ made it clear to The Bodley Head that she thought they should publish them quickly as a volume of stories, while the publicity from their appearance in The Sketch and from the serialization of The Man in the Brown Suit in the London Evening News was still current. The Bodley Head agreed, and the stories were collected in a volume which, at first, it was intended should be called The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot, but which, in due course, appeared as Poirot Investigates. The volume was also published in the United States (by Dodd, Mead & Co, who remain Agatha Christie’s American hardback publishers), but there is a discrepancy between the British and American editions. The British volume consisted of eleven stories while the American edition contained fourteen. (The three extra stories, ‘The Lost Mine’, ‘The Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Veiled Lady’ eventually appeared in Great Britain, along with several other stories, fifty years later in Poirot’s Early Cases. ‘The Veiled Lady’ was also published, together with two other stories, in Poirot Lends a Hand [1946: see p. 212].)

Some, though not many, of Agatha Christie’s short stories are as satisfying as the best of her novels. In general, however, her talent is not suited to the short story, or at least not to the very short mystery story of which she wrote so many. Her plots are, perforce, skeletal, and her characterization at its most perfunctory. The puzzle element is, therefore, given even greater emphasis than in the novels in which it contributes largely to the reader’s pleasure. Many of the stories, including most of the Hercule Poirot adventures collected in Poirot Investigates, are little more than puzzles or tricks given ‘a local habitation and a name’.

Prior to the emergence of Agatha Christie upon the crime writers’ scene, many of the genre’s greatest successes were with short stories. It is generally agreed, for instance, that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are superior to the Holmes novels, and most of the other mystery writers who flourished at the same time as Conan Doyle, among them G. K. Chesterton (with his Catholic priest-detective Father Brown), Baroness Orczy, Richard Austin Freeman (whose detective was the physician Dr John Thorndyke), the American Melville Davisson Post (whose mysteries are solved by Uncle Abner, a shrewd Virginian), H. C. Bailey with his Mr Fortune stories, and Ernest Bramah, all produced their most successful work in the form of the short story. However, though she wrote more than a hundred and fifty short stories, Agatha Christie’s greatest triumphs were to be achieved with her full-length novels, rather than with short stories or novellas.

That so many of Agatha Christie’s stories are little more than puzzles or tricks might not matter so much were the puzzles more varied and the tricks less repetitive. For instance, the first time that Poirot points the accusing finger accurately at the person who engaged him, the reader is surprised and delighted; but M. Poirot and Mrs Christie connive several times at this particular trick, which is also not unknown in the novels.

The stories in Poirot Investigates are, on their own level, quite entertaining, but it would be as unwise to read more than one or two at a sitting as it would be to consume a two-pound box of chocolates in one go. Occasionally, Mrs Christie’s touch falters, as when, in ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’ she is snide about Inspector Japp’s French accent and has him refer to the ‘boat train to the Continong’. Why would he not pronounce ‘continent’ as an English word? But usually her social placing is exact. In ‘The Case of the Missing Will’, Poirot’s client, a handsome young woman, explains that her father, who came of farming stock, ‘married slightly above him; my mother was the daughter of a poor artist.’

‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, in which Poirot investigates a strange series of deaths of people who were involved in the discovery and opening of the tomb of King Men-her-Ra, an event which we are told followed hard upon the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Lord Carnarvon, is interesting as evidence that Agatha Christie was conversant with the science of archaeology some years before she met Max Mallowan. (She had already introduced an archaeologist into her collection of characters in The Man in the Brown Suit.)

One of the best stories in Poirot Investigates is ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’. It is also one in which we learn something more of the author’s political opinions, or opinions which it seems reasonably safe to attribute to the author even though she issues them through the mouths of her characters and not by way of authorial comment. It is unlikely that, in 1923, any irony was intended in the opening sentence of the story (even a story narrated by the not very shrewd Hastings), which begins, ‘Now that war and the problems of war are things of the past…’ But pacifism takes a knocking at more than one point in the story, and the statement made by someone meant to be a leading British politician that ‘the Pacifist propaganda, started and maintained by the German agents in our midst, has been very active’ seems to be accepted by Poirot and Hastings without modification. The politician is ‘Lord Estair, Leader of the House of Commons’. Is it, in fact, possible for a nobleman to lead the House of Commons? Apparently, if his is a courtesy title.

It is in ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’ that Poirot most clearly describes his method. He has declined to leap into a military car at Boulogne and set off in pursuit of the kidnappers:

He shot a quick glance at us. ‘It is not so that the good detective should act, eh? I perceive your thought. He must be full of energy. He must rush to and fro. He should prostrate himself on the dusty road and seek the marks of tyres through a little glass. He must gather up the cigarette-end, the fallen match? That is your idea, is it not?’

His eyes challenged us. ‘But I – Hercule Poirot – tell you that it is not so! The true clues are within – here!’ He tapped his forehead. ‘See you, I need not have left London. It would have been sufficient for me to sit quietly in my rooms there. All that matters is the little grey cells within. Secretly and silently they do their part, until suddenly I call for a map, and I lay my finger on a spot – so – and I say: the Prime Minister is there! and it is so!’

Nevertheless, when it suits him Poirot is not at all averse to snooping about, gathering up the cigarette-end and the fallen match. He has sufficient confidence and vanity to contradict himself whenever he feels like it. In these early stories, he is at his most Holmesian, and the parallels with the minutiae of the Conan Doyle stories are most noticeable. Hastings, similarly, has become more Watsonian than ever, and in some of the stories Mrs Christie treats his relationship with Poirot mechanically. In addition to the stories already mentioned, the volume contains ‘The Adventures of “The Western Star” ’, ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’, ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’, ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’, ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’ and ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’.

All fourteen stories were adapted for television in the series which featured David Suchet as Poirot, and were first transmitted on London Weekend TV on various dates between 1990 and 1993.

The Road of Dreams POEMS (1924)

Ever since she was a child, Agatha Christie had written poetry. One of her earliest efforts, written at the age of eleven, begins: ‘I knew a little cowslip and a pretty flower too,/Who wished she was a bluebell and had a robe of blue.’ In her teens, she had occasional poems published in magazines, and by the time she was in her mid-thirties there were enough of them to be gathered into a slim volume which, in 1924, the London publishing house of Geoffrey Bles published, under the title of The Road of Dreams. This was also the title of one of the poems in the volume (‘The Road of Dreams leads up the Hill/So straight and white/And bordered wide/With almond trees on either side/In rosy flush of Spring’s delight! …’)

Agatha Christie’s talent for poetry was genuine, but modest and of no startling originality: the finest poetry is made not out of feelings but out of words, and Agatha Christie was not sufficiently in love with words to become a poet of real distinction. She did, however, enjoy relieving her feelings in verse and, in doing so, occasionally produced a pleasant little lyric poem.

The Road of Dreams is divided into four sections. The first, ‘A Masque from Italy’, is a sequence of nine poems or ‘songs’ to be performed by the commedia dell’ arte characters, Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierrette, Punchinello and Pulcinella. Written when Agatha was in her late teens, the Harlequin poems have a certain wistfulness which is appealing. They are of interest, too, in that they anticipate the Harlequin element which was later to creep into some of her short stories, those involving that mysterious character Mr Harley Quin.

The second section of the volume, ‘Ballads’, consists of six poems, among them ‘Elizabeth of England’ (‘I am Mistress of England – the Seas I hold!/I have gambled, and won, alone …’), which is presumably one of the author’s teenage efforts, and ‘Ballad of the Maytime’, a fey little ballad about bluebells which Mrs Christie wrote in 1924 in Sunningdale.

One or two of the eight poems in ‘Dreams and Fantasies’, the third section of the volume, are romantically death-obsessed – Keats’ ‘La belle dame sans merci’ is not too far away – and one of them, ‘Down in the Wood’, which forty years later Mrs Christie still liked sufficiently to reprint in her autobiography, is rather good, with a last line that lingers in the memory: ‘And Fear – naked Fear passes out of the wood!’ The volume’s final section, ‘Other Poems’, consists of thirteen poems written at various times, about the passing of love, the horror of war and the romance of the unknown. Again, there is a certain amount of evidence that the poet is ‘half in love with easeful death’:

Give me my hour within my Lover’s arms!

Vanished the doubts, the fears, the sweet alarms!

I lose myself within his quickening Breath.…

And when he tires and leaves me – there is Death …

Mystery is never completely absent from any aspect of Agatha Christie’s world, and there are one or two minor mysteries connected with this innocuous volume. The crime writer Michael Gilbert in an article on Agatha Christie⁹ mentions the volume’s title poem, ‘The Road of Dreams’, and quotes two stanzas from it. But the stanzas he quotes are part of a completely different poem in the volume, a poem called ‘In a Dispensary’ which Agatha Miller wrote in her mid-twenties when she was working in the hospital dispensary in Torquay.

Mystery number two is provided by the author of a book described as ‘an intimate biography of the first lady of crime’¹⁰ who says that Agatha Christie exposed her love for Max Mallowan ‘for all the world to see in a poem entitled “To M.E.L.M. in Absence” in The Road of Dreams (1924)’. But there is no such poem in The Road of Dreams, and Agatha Christie did not meet Max Mallowan until several years after 1924: to be precise, in 1930.

A stanza from ‘In a Dispensary’ which is not quoted in Michael Gilbert’s article clearly reveals the future crime writer’s interest in the poisons on the dispensary shelves among which she worked:

From the Borgia’s time to the present day, their power has been proved and tried!

Monkshead blue, called Aconite, and the deadly Cyanide!

Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain – courage and vigour new!

Here is menace and murder and sudden death! – in these phials of green and blue!

The final poem in the volume is ‘Pierrot Grown Old’, which reads as though it ought to have been part of the commedia dell’ arte sequence, ‘A Masque from Italy’, with which The Road of Dreams begins. (When the contents of The Road of Dreams were reprinted in Poems nearly fifty years later, ‘Pierrot Grown Old’ was, in fact, taken into the ‘Masque’ sequence.)

The Secret of Chimneys (1925)

Archie and Agatha did not find the cottage in the country for which they were searching. Instead, they took a flat in a large Victorian country house, which had been divided into four flats. The house, Scotswood, was at Sunningdale in Berkshire, only twenty-four miles from London and close to the Sunningdale Golf Club of which Archie had become a member. Golf was such a passion with Colonel Christie that before long Mrs Christie began to fear she was turning into ‘that well-known figure, a golf widow’. She consoled herself by writing The Secret of Chimneys, which she later described as ‘light-hearted and rather in the style of The Secret Adversary’.

Before leaving London for the country, Agatha had taken lessons in sculpture. She was a great admirer of the art, much more than of painting, and was disappointed when she became aware that she possessed no real talent for it. ‘By way of vanity’, she composed a few songs instead. Her musical education in Paris had been thorough and there had been a moment in her life when she even considered taking up the career of a professional pianist. She also had a pleasant singing voice, so it was appropriate that she should turn, however briefly, to the composition of songs, and equally appropriate that she should set some of her own verses to music. In later years, she continued to profess herself quite pleased with one group of songs in particular, settings of her Pierrot and Harlequin verses. She realized, however, that writing seemed to be the trade to which she was best suited.

After a few months at Scotswood, the Christies decided that they needed a house of their own, and they began to look at properties in the vicinity of Sunningdale. Their choice fell upon a large house with a pleasant garden, and, in 1925, after less than two years in their flat in the country, they moved into their own country house which, at Archie’s suggestion, they named Styles after the house in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Agatha’s literary agent, Edmund Cork, had been busy extricating his client from her involvement with The Bodley Head. Cork approached the firm of Collins, who had begun to add detective novels to their list, and offered them the first Agatha Christie title which did not have contractually to be offered to The Bodley Head. A three-book contract was signed with Collins as early as 27 January 1924, though there were at that time two volumes still to be published by The Bodley Head. The Secret of Chimneys was the last Agatha Christie novel to appear under The Bodley Head’s imprint. Collins became her English publishers for the rest of the author’s life.

The Secret of Chimneys is one of the best of Agatha Christie’s early thrillers. It is, in its way, as typical of its time, the twenties, as Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat or P. G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, both of which were published several months before Chimneys. It also owes something to the Ruritanian world of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, for its plot is concerned with political events in the fictitious small Balkan state of Herzoslovakia, the character of whose people appears to be of an almost Montenegran fierceness. After a beginning in Bulawayo, however, the events of the novel take place not in the Balkans but in London or at Chimneys, one of the stately homes of England and the seat of the ninth Marquis of Caterham. Chimneys, we are told, is as much a national possession as a grand country house, and history has been made at its informed weekend parties. It was perhaps not unlike Cliveden.

Diplomatic intrigue involving the possible reinstatement of the Herzoslovakian royal family and international crime concerning the attempts of a jewel thief known throughout Europe as ‘King Victor’ are ingeniously combined in The Secret of Chimneys, and at the end two characters are unmasked and revealed in their true colours, though only one of them is criminal.

It is when she is freed of some of the restrictions of the domestic murder mystery, as in this type of novel, that Mrs Christie seems able to relax into more leisurely, and, therefore, more detailed and believable characterization. Believable, that is, in the context of your willingly suspended disbelief; for, although the reader greatly enjoys making the acquaintance of, for instance, Baron Lolopretjzyl who represents in London the Loyalist Party of Herzoslovakia, it has to be admitted that the Baron’s construction of English sentences is a trifle more exotic than it need be. ‘Of many secrets he the knowledge had. Should he reveal but the quarter of them, Europe into war plunged may be,’ he says of a fellow countryman.

The Baron resides in a suite at Harridge’s Hotel. Mrs Christie’s London hotels are only lightly disguised. Mr Anthony Cade, who may or may not be the hero of the story, stays at the Blitz, which seems an inappropriate, indeed irreverent, name for an hotel clearly based on the Ritz. The Blitz, however, is oddly situated. Although, at one point, it appears to be where it ought to be, in Piccadilly, when Anthony Cade first arrives he strolls outside for a brief walk on the Embankment, for all the world as though he were staying at the Savoy.

Though it is not he but one of the upperclass amateurs who solves the secret of Chimneys, Superintendent Battle who is in charge of the case is no plodding and unimaginative policeman inserted into the plot to be the butt of the amateur genius’s humour. Battle is not at all like Inspector Japp (who is mentally continually trailing along some steps behind Hercule Poirot’s thought processes): he is an intelligent and successful officer whose speciality appears to be crimes in which politics or international diplomacy are involved. Outwardly a stolid and impassive figure, Battle reaches his conclusions by a dogged application of common sense. After The Secret of Chimneys, he was to appear in four more Christie novels in some of which he would deal with purely domestic crimes.

Occasionally, Agatha Christie carried over from one book to another characters other than her detectives and policemen. Not only Superintendent Battle but also four other characters from The Secret of Chimneys appear again four years later in The Seven Dials Mystery, as does the house, Chimneys. The house itself, and the kind of life lived in it, play a lively part in both novels. Chroniclers of a fast disappearing scene will be interested to note that the lavish English breakfast was still very much in evidence in the twenties. On the sideboard in the dining-room were half a score of heavy silver dishes, ‘ingeniously kept hot by patent arrangements’. Lord Caterham lifts each lid in turn. ‘Omelette,’ he mutters, ‘eggs and bacon, kidneys, devilled bird, haddock, cold ham, cold pheasant.’ Deciding he cares for none of these things, he tells his butler to ‘ask the cook to poach me an egg.’

The mandatory racial slurs occur in The Secret of Chimneys, though apparently they have been edited out of more recent American editions. ‘Dagos will be dagos’, ‘Like all dagos, he couldn’t swim’, and other remarks are cheerfully exchanged, and of course all references to Jews are uncomplimentary. People are beginning to be interested in Herzoslovakia, Anthony Cade tells his friend Jimmy, and, when asked what kind of people, he replies, ‘Hebraic people. Yellow-faced financiers in city offices.’ When we meet one of these financiers, Herman Isaacstein, we are invited to smile at Lord Caterham’s references to him as ‘Mr Ikey Isaacstein’, ‘Noseystein’, and ‘Fat Ikey’. But the true-blue British unemployed are treated with equal contempt. When Anthony Cade disguises himself as an out-of-work ex-serviceman, the upperclass Virginia Revel takes one look at him and decides that he is ‘a more pleasing specimen than usual of London’s unemployed’.

Her attitude to democracy is so unsympathetic, at least as expressed by a character of whom Mrs Christie evidently approves, that it reveals an unexpectedly authoritarian aspect of the author’s nature:

Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on people with a strong hand – ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers – they may some day, but they don’t now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures yet awhile – but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with.

It is true that people on the Moscow underground are less surly in their behaviour than those in London and New York, but you would hesitate to use the citizenry of Moscow as a kind of democratic barometer. Even Agatha Christie, one imagines, if she had been offered the choice would have preferred to be bad-tempered in a democracy than polite in a police state.

The danger of pontificating solemnly on the subject of Agatha Christie’s politics must, however, be guarded against. The author tells us in The Secret of Chimneys that there was nothing that bored Lord Caterham more than politics, unless it was politicians, and one suspects that she shared his Lordship’s feelings. No one need be deterred from enjoying The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie’s politics, nor even by occasional infelicities in her prose style, though prose is more serious a matter than politics. Is there not something endearing about an author who can write the phrase, ‘eyeing a taxi that was crawling past with longing eyes’?

In general, Mrs Christie’s grasp of style is firm: The Secret of Chimneys is enjoyable because its style is light and humorous. It is not, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an adventure-romance, but a comedy-adventure, which is perhaps a new category.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd POIROT (1926)

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so. But a variant of the idea, whether you regard it as an outrageous fraud or remarkably original or both, had earlier been suggested by Mrs Christie’s brother-in-law, James Watts, and the author was already mulling it over. It appealed greatly to her, but before starting to write the novel she had to work out just how to make use of the startling suggestion (which will not be revealed in these pages), in such a way that it could not be regarded as cheating the reader. Of course, as Mrs Christie was to admit in her autobiography, a number of people do consider themselves cheated when they come to the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong, for ‘such little lapses of time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an ambiguous sentence’.

It was with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by far the most ingenious crime novel she had written, that Agatha Christie’s reputation took a great leap forward, and so did her sales. The author’s solution to the mystery is still debated in books and articles on crime fiction more than half a century after the novel’s first publication, and although its immediate success meant no more than that an edition of approximately five thousand copies sold out, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd must by now have sold well over a million copies.

Critics and readers were divided on the propriety of Mrs Christie’s brilliant trick. Though the Daily Sketch thought it ‘the best thriller ever’, the News Chronicle considered The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a ‘tasteless and unfortunate let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’. One reader wrote a letter to The Times in which he announced that, having been a great admirer of Agatha Christie, he was so shocked by the dénouement of Roger Ackroyd that he proposed ‘in the future not to buy any more of her books’. Even some of her fellow crime novelists thought she had not played fair, though Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a number of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey as investigator, defended Mrs Christie by pointing out that ‘it’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody’.

Agatha Christie herself remained unrepentant. In an interview with Francis Wyndham in 1966, she explained: ‘I have a certain amount of rules. No false words must be uttered by me. To write “Mrs Armstrong walked home wondering who had committed the murder” would be unfair if she had done it herself. But it’s not unfair to leave things out. In Roger Ackroyd … there’s lack of explanation there, but no false statement. Whoever my villain is, it has to be someone I feel could do the murder.’¹¹

Lord Mountbatten’s claim to be responsible for having given Agatha Christie the idea for Roger Ackroyd should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. It is true that, at Christmas in 1969, he received from the author a copy of the book, inscribed: ‘To Lord Mountbatten in grateful remembrance of a letter he wrote to me forty-five years ago which contained the suggestion which I subsequently used in a book called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Here once more is my thanks.’ However, this was in response to a letter from Mountbatten reminding her that he had written to her forty-five years earlier.

Whether Agatha Christie thought Roger Ackroyd her best book is uncertain, but she usually mentioned it as among her three or four favourites.

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, dedicated not to Lord Mountbatten but ‘to PUNKIE,¹² who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on every one in turn!’, Agatha Christie returned to the classical domestic crime novel for the first time since Murder on the Links three years earlier, and at the same time reintroduced Hercule Poirot who, apart from the short stories in Poirot Investigates, had also been missing for three years.

The story, narrated not by Poirot’s usual associate, Hastings, but by the local doctor whose name is Sheppard, begins with the death of someone other than Roger Ackroyd. Mrs Ferrars, a wealthy widow, has been found dead in her bed, and Dr Sheppard has been sent for. He suspects suicide, but sees no point in saying so publicly. The following evening Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy widower whom village gossip had prophesied would marry Mrs Ferrars, is murdered in the study of his house.

We are soon introduced to Dr Sheppard’s sister Caroline, who keeps house for him, and to the Sheppards’ neighbour, a recent arrival in the village of King’s Abbot. He is a foreign gentleman with ‘an egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes’. He has retired from whatever his profession may have been, grows vegetable marrows, and is thought to be called Porrott.

Porrott, of course, is simply the King’s Abbot pronunciation of Poirot, and soon the retired detective has introduced himself to Dr Sheppard, has admitted how bored he is with his vegetable marrows, and how much he misses his friend (‘who for many years never left my side’) who is now living in the Argentine. When Poirot is asked to investigate the murder of Roger Ackroyd, he allows Dr Sheppard to take the place of his old friend Hastings as assistant and part-confidant; and also as Boswell to Poirot’s Johnson, for it is Sheppard who writes up the case and is the chronicler of Poirot’s eventual success.

It is not a success which comes easily to Poirot, for the suspects are many and varied. Most of them were staying in Ackroyd’s house when he was murdered. Major Blunt, a big-game hunter, is an old friend, and appears to have a romantic interest in Ackroyd’s niece, Flora. Flora and her mother, who is Ackroyd’s widowed sister-in-law, are poor relations living on a rich man’s charity. Geoffrey Raymond, the dead man’s secretary, Ursula Bourne, a somewhat unusual parlourmaid, and Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s adopted son who is burdened with gambling debts, all come under suspicion.

Poirot is assisted not only by Dr Sheppard but by the doctor’s sister Caroline, a middle-aged spinster who seems to know everything that goes on in the village. Many years later, in discussing the character of Miss Marple, an unconventional solver of puzzles whom she was to introduce in Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie said she thought it possible that Miss Marple ‘arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.’

It is not simply because of its startling dénouement that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has remained one of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels. The story is believable, the characters convincing, and Mrs Christie’s ear for dialogue is accurate. That she can occasionally be clumsy ought not to obscure the fact that, on form, she writes speech which sounds natural, whether it issues from the mouth of a peeress or a parlourmaid. Even more impressive is her ability to enter into the thought processes of her male characters. Dr Sheppard, the narrator of Roger Ackroyd, is a fully rounded and perfectly convincing character, and his loving, exasperated relationship with his sister Caroline, an amusing and acutely observed character, is beautifully conveyed. Another important ingredient in the success of the novel is the background of English village life which Mrs Christie provides. It is never obtrusive but it is there, and it is important.

From The Murder of Roger Ackroyd onwards, Agatha Christie’s readers knew what to expect, or rather knew that they would never know what to expect. And it is this quality of unexpectedness which makes Mrs Christie unique among crime writers. Dorothy L. Sayers writes more elegantly but also, at times, more ploddingly. Her stories do not move quickly. Ngaio Marsh is in the Christie tradition but can get bogged down in endless interviews with suspects. Patricia Wentworth is pastiche Christie and her villains can usually be guessed. After the trick Christie played on her public in Roger Ackroyd (though some of those who remembered The Man in the Brown Suit ought perhaps not to have been taken in), clearly there were no holds barred. It is this realization that no one, absolutely no one, is exempt from suspicion in an Agatha Christie novel that makes reading the finest ones such a delight. Here she will kill off all the characters, there she will make virtually everyone the murderer, somewhere else the crime will be committed by – no, surely not by him? But how could she possibly justify that? Well, she does.

Her puzzles endure to delight and surprise readers towards the end of the twentieth century just as much as they did in the twenties because they are not mechanical but concerned with human character. The locked-room mysteries beloved of John Dickson Carr are of no great interest to Agatha Christie, nor are the fiendish devices, the evaporating ice darts or any of the other paraphernalia used by some of the earlier crime writers. Her tricks are sometimes verbal, sometimes visual. If you listen carefully and watch her all the time, you may catch Mrs Christie, but it is highly unlikely that you will. The solution which she has somehow persuaded you quite early in the narrative is not the correct one very frequently is – but not invariably.

Mrs Christie is at her best throughout The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The occasional Christie carelessness is there, as when she tells us that Ackroyd is nearly fifty years of age, and a paragraph or two later it becomes clear that he could not have been older than forty-three. And Poirot’s years in England have caused his command of French to deteriorate. He says ‘Je ne pense pas’ when he clearly means ‘Je crois que non’, and in any case is perfectly capable of saying ‘I think not’ in English. But these are minor quibbles. In Dr Sheppard and his sister Mrs Christie has created a pair of highly engaging characters, and her description of Caroline Sheppard, tempted to gossip, but wavering for a second or two ‘much as a roulette ball might coyly hover between two numbers’, is especially felicitous.

You can usually expect a little music in her books and, at least in the early Christies, a little anti-semitism. Both are to be found in Roger Ackroyd. Oddly, it is the unmusical Major Blunt who provides the two references to opera when he talks of ‘the johnny who sold his soul to the devil’, adding that ‘there’s an opera about it’, and later reveals his knowledge that Mélisande is someone in an opera. Agatha Christie probably saw both Faust and Pelléas et Mélisande during her period at finishing school in Paris, but you would not have expected Major Blunt to know Debussy’s opera though he might just have been aware of the more popular Faust of Gounod. Blunt, incidentally, is a name Mrs Christie seems to have been fond of using. Three more Blunts, one of them an Admiral, will turn up in later works.

The mandatory anti-semitic reference occurs when one of the characters receives demands from debt collectors (Scotch [sic] gentlemen named McPherson and MacDonald), and Dr Sheppard comments: ‘They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.’

Two years after its publication, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was adapted for the stage by Michael Morton. Mrs Christie much disliked Morton’s first suggestion which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot, and have lots of girls in love with him. With the support of Gerald Du Maurier who produced the play, she persuaded the adaptor not to change the character and personality of Poirot, but agreed to allow Caroline Sheppard to be turned into a young and attractive girl, in order to supply Poirot with romantic interest. Mrs Christie’s agreement was reluctant. She resented the removal of the spinster Caroline, for she liked the role played by this character in the life of the village, and she liked the idea of that village life being reflected through Dr Sheppard and his sister. In the play, Poirot confesses to Dr Sheppard that he loves Caryl, as she is now called and, although at the end the great detective announces his intention to leave ‘for my own country’, the final moments suggest that he may, one day, come back for Caryl:

POIROT (taking both her hands and kissing them): Un

de ces jours …

CARYL: What do you mean?

POIROT: Perhaps one day …

(Caryl goes out slowly. Poirot turns back to table, takes rose out of specimen glass which is on table, kisses it, and puts it in his button-hole, looking off towards the garden where Caryl has gone out.) The curtain falls.

The play, which was called Alibi, opened on 15 May 1928, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End of London, with the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot, J. H. Roberts as Dr Sheppard, Basil Loder as Major Blunt, Henry Daniell (who went to Hollywood the following year to play suave villains in countless American films) as Parker, the butler, Lady Tree as Mrs Ackroyd, Jane Welsh as her daughter Flora, Cyril Nash as Ralph Paton, Henry Forbes Robertson as Geoffrey Raymond, Iris Noel as Ursula Bourne, and Gillian Lind as Caryl Sheppard. The Sketch said that Laughton ‘admirably impersonated’ Poirot, and Mrs Christie thought he was a good actor but ‘entirely unlike Hercule Poirot’. The play was a commercial success, running for 250 performances in London before being taken up elsewhere and eventually by amateur dramatic societies with whom it is still highly popular.

In 1931, the play became a film, still with the title of Alibi. Produced by Julius Hagen, who had already made an Agatha Christie movie in 1928 and directed by Leslie Hiscott, Alibi was filmed at the Twickenham studios near London, with Austin Trevor, who was even less like Hercule Poirot than Laughton had been, and who made no attempt at a characterization, but played the role ‘straight’. Others in the cast were Franklin Dyall, Elizabeth Allan, Clare Greet and Milton Rosmer. (Max Mallowan in his autobiography, Mallowan’s Memoirs, wrongly identifies the actor who played Poirot in this film as Francis Sullivan, who played Poirot twice on the stage, but who was not in either the film or the stage version of Alibi.)

Retitled The Fatal Alibi, the play was staged in New York on 28 February 1932, with Charles Laughton directing and also playing Poirot. It closed after twenty-four performances.

The first of Agatha Christie’s books to be produced in Great Britain by Collins and in America by Dodd, Mead & Co who had bought John Lane and Co, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in the spring of 1926. Seven months later, on Friday, 3 December, Mrs Christie disappeared in mysterious circumstances worthy of one of her crime novels.

The year 1926 had been far from a happy one for Agatha Christie. It began well enough with a brief holiday in Corsica with her sister, during which she worked on The Mystery of the Blue Train, but shortly after the sisters arrived home they learned that their mother was ill and some months later Agatha found herself also having to cope with the realization that her marriage to Archie Christie had badly deteriorated. For some time Colonel Christie had seemed to be more interested in golf than in his wife, and now Agatha discovered that she had a more serious rival for her husband’s affections, a young woman called Nancy Neele who lived at Godalming in Surrey and who was also an acquaintance of hers. Archie confessed that he was in love with Miss Neele and wanted to marry her. He asked Agatha to divorce him.

On the morning of Friday, 3 December 1926, after a quarrel with his wife, Colonel Christie packed his bags and left home to spend the weekend with Miss Neele in Godalming. That evening, leaving her daughter Rosalind asleep in the house, Mrs Christie drove off in her car. She left two letters, one addressed to Archie, and one requesting her secretary to cancel her appointments as she was going to Yorkshire. According to the daughter of the then Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey, she posted a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable, in which she said she feared for her life, and appealed for his help. Her car was found next morning by George Best, a fifteen-year-old gypsy lad. It had been abandoned on the embankment at the side of the road at a popular ‘beauty spot’ called Newlands Corner, near a lake known as the Silent Pool. The bodywork of the car was covered in frost, and the lights were still on. Inside the car the police found a fur coat, and a small case which had burst open and which contained three dresses, two pairs of shoes and an expired driving licence in the name of Mrs Agatha Christie.

For the next few days the newspapers were full of stories about the well-known mystery writer’s disappearance, with huge banner headlines announcing new so-called developments, interviews with and comments by several people, and speculation by many more. Suicide was not ruled out, nor was murder.

On 7 December, the Daily News offered ‘£100 reward to the first person furnishing us with information leading to the whereabouts, if alive, of Mrs Christie’. The Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey said, in the best tradition of the detective novel: ‘I have handled many important cases during my career, but this is the most baffling mystery ever set me for solution.’ Also in the best tradition of crime fiction, suspicion centred for a time upon the husband of the missing woman.

By the following weekend, hundreds of policemen and thousands of members of the general public had joined in the search for Agatha Christie. The Silent Pool was dredged with special machinery, light aircraft scoured the countryside from above, and packs of airedales and bloodhounds went over the ground more closely. Police from four counties, Surrey, Essex, Berkshire and Kent, were brought in. As in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, a number of clues were found, only to be discarded as red herrings: a local chemist said that Mrs Christie had often discussed with him methods of committing suicide; a woman claimed that she had seen someone, whom she identified from photographs as Mrs Christie, wandering about, dazed; and two other people remembered that a woman answering to her description, her clothes covered in frost, had asked them the way to Petersfield, a town in Hampshire. The police guarded Colonel Christie’s house, monitored his phone calls, and followed him to his office. Christie told a city colleague, ‘They think I’ve murdered my wife.’ The weekend after her disappearance, in answer to an appeal from the police fifteen thousand volunteers searched the Downs. On the Saturday afternoon, three thousand of their cars were parked on Merrow Downs, and they set off in groups of thirty with a police officer in charge of each group. The Daily Mail played its part by publishing an article by the famous thriller writer, Edgar Wallace, in which he expounded his theory of Mrs Christie’s disappearance. He did not suspect foul play, but considered it

a typical case of ‘mental reprisal’ on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly her first intention seems to have been to ‘spite’ an unknown person who would be distressed by her disappearance.

That she did not contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by abandonment of her car.

Loss of memory, that is to say mental confusion, might easily have followed but a person so afflicted could not possibly escape notice … If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car was found, she must be alive and in full possession of her faculties, probably in London. It is impossible to lose your memory and find your way to a determined destination.

Edgar Wallace’s theory was perfectly tenable, and indeed in its essentials was correct. It was certainly quite proper for him to have suggested it, but perhaps unwise of the chief suspect, Colonel Christie, to put forward the same idea to the Daily News: ‘My wife said to me, some time ago, that she could disappear at will and would defy anyone to find her. This shows that the possibility of engineering her disappearance was running through her mind.’

During the week in which Agatha Christie remained missing, the banjo player in the band at the Hydropathic Hotel at Harrogate, in those days an elegant spa resort in Yorkshire, informed the Harrogate police of his suspicion that the Mrs Neele who had been staying at the hotel since the previous Saturday was, in fact, Mrs Christie. The police stationed a detective in the hotel for two days to keep an eye on Mrs Neele, and the manager of the hotel (which is now called the Old Swan Hotel) made a statement to the police about Mrs Neele:

She arrived by taxi on Saturday morning with only a small suitcase and asked for a bedroom on en pension terms and was given a good room on the first floor with hot and cold water.

I did not see her myself but I believe that the price quoted to her was seven guineas a week. She accepted this without hesitation. Indeed, from the first day she has been here she seems to have as much money as she wants. From the first her life in the Hydro has been exactly similar to that of our other guests. She takes her meals in the dining-room and only once or twice has had breakfast in bed. She is a very agreeable guest.

When the story that a Mrs Neele at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate might well be Agatha Christie was leaked to the press, several newspapers sent reporters to Harrogate, and the Daily Mail sent a special train with a team of reporters and photographers. It was, however, a Daily News reporter, the twenty-year-old Ritchie Calder (the late Baron Ritchie-Calder) who walked up to Mrs Neele in the lounge of the hotel and addressed her as Mrs Christie. ‘Mrs Neele’ admitted to him that she was Mrs Christie, but, when asked how she had got to Harrogate, said she did not know as she was suffering from amnesia. She then left Calder abruptly, went up to her room and stayed there for the remainder of the afternoon.

On Tuesday, 14 December, the London Evening Standard published the news that Agatha Christie had been found. The Daily News sent Mrs Christie a telegram, which they also published: ‘In view widespread criticism your disappearance strongly urge desirability authentic explanation from yourself to thousands of public who joined in costly search and cannot understand your loss of memory theory.’

No ‘authentic explanation’ was ever vouchsafed by Agatha Christie. She had registered at the Hydro Hotel as Mrs Teresa Neele, and had let it be known to fellow guests¹³ that she was a visitor from Cape Town. On the evening of the day she arrived, Saturday, 4 December, there was a dance at the hotel, and when the band played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, Mrs Neele got up and danced the Charleston. She spent her week at Harrogate shopping (‘she was constantly buying new clothes,’ Miss Corbett, the hotel pianist, told the police), taking tea in a local tea shop, and going on long walks. In the evening she played billiards at the Hydro, and on more than one occasion was prevailed upon to sing in her small but sweet soprano, accompanying herself at the piano. Once in the middle of a sentimental song, she faltered and seemed close to tears, but this was attributed to the fact that ‘Mrs Neele’ was recovering from the loss of a child in South Africa. During the week she posted an announcement to The Times, which appeared in the newspaper’s personal column on Saturday, 11 December: ‘Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele, late of South Africa, please communicate – Write Box R 702, The Times, EC4’.

When he accosted her at the hotel, the young journalist Ritchie Calder thought that ‘amnesia’, which Mrs Christie flung glibly at him, ‘was much too clinical a word for someone supposedly surprised into conversation, and if, as her doctor later suggested, she had an “identity crisis”, well, by golly, there was no “Teresa Neele” lurking in the self-possessed woman I met.’

Archie Christie arrived in Harrogate at 6.45 p.m. on Tuesday, 14 December, and identified his wife as she walked through the lounge of the hotel wearing an orchid pink dinner gown. She appeared unembarrassed as he walked up to her, merely turning to a group of fellow guests and saying, ‘Fancy, my brother has just arrived’. One of the guests who watched the reunion said later that the Christies then sat down in front of the fire in the lounge, but several chairs apart from each other as though they had been quarrelling. They stayed overnight, not in Mrs Neele’s room but in a suite. Colonel Christie made an announcement to the press:

There is no question about the identity. It is my wife. She has suffered from the most complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is. She does not know me and she does not know where she is. I am hoping that the rest and quiet will restore her. I am hoping to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and specialists.

Two doctors, a neurologist and a general practitioner, issued a statement to the effect that Mrs Christie was ‘suffering from an unquestionable loss of memory and that for her future welfare she should be spared all anxiety and excitement.’ In other words, ask no questions.

The press accused Mrs Christie of having planned her disappearance merely to obtain publicity. That was a nonsensical accusation, for she was not only a shy woman who avoided publicity as much as possible, she was also in no need of it. But she was certainly not the victim of amnesia. The week before her disappearance, Agatha Christie had lost a diamond ring at Harrods. She wrote to the Knightsbridge department store from Harrogate, describing the ring and asking that, if it were found, it be sent to Mrs Teresa Neele at the Hydro Hotel. Harrods did, in fact, return Mrs Christie’s ring to Mrs Neele.

In 1980, in a magazine called The Bookseller, a very elderly journalist claimed to remember that, in 1926, on the morning after Mrs Christie disappeared, her publisher Sir Godfrey Collins had told him not to talk to anyone about it, as Mrs Christie was in Harrogate, resting.

The strongest likelihood is that a very unhappy Mrs Archibald Christie had come close to nervous collapse, and that it was in a condition of considerable mental turmoil that she, nonetheless deliberately, staged her disappearance in such a way as to cause the maximum distress to the man whom she loved and who had caused her such anguish. She probably hoped that he would think she had killed herself and would suffer remorse. She may even have hoped that he would be suspected of having murdered her. Perhaps she thought her disappearance would bring Archie to a realization of how much he needed her. Normal, warm-hearted and affectionate a creature though she was, Mrs Christie was not necessarily more so than many another who had been driven by extreme mental anguish to commit actions which seem wildly out of character. Far from disappearing in order to court publicity, she was so distraught at the collapse of her marriage that she was driven to a course of extremely neurotic behaviour despite her fear of publicity. And, her most successful novel having been published seven months earlier and sold extremely well, she had no need of publicity.

In her autobiography, written in old age, Agatha Christie made no direct reference to these exciting events of 1926, contenting herself merely with the observation that after illness came sorrow, despair and heartbreak, and that there was no need to dwell on it. Further clues to the mystery of her behaviour in December 1926 are inextricably embedded in the crypto-autobiographical novel, Unfinished Portrait, which she wrote a few years later.

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.

The Seven Dials of the title can be taken to mean either the district of Seven Dials in the West End of London, or the dials of seven alarm clocks (Mrs Christie favours the older spelling, ‘alarum’) which are discovered ranged along the mantelpiece in the room at Chimneys in which a young man is found dead in his bed. The action takes place partly at Chimneys, the country seat of Lord Caterham, and partly in various other places, among them the sinister Seven Dials Club, in Seven Dials, which ‘used to be a shimmy sort of district round about Tottenham Court Road way’. Seven Dials is actually a block or two southeast of the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and not noticeably less slummy now than in 1929. (Two of its theatres which stand side by side, the Ambassadors and St Martin’s, acquired Christiean connections when, in 1952, Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap, opened at the Ambassadors, and in 1974 transferred next door to the St Martin’s where, at the time of writing, it is still running.)

As usual with Agatha Christie’s thrillers, the mystery element is not neglected. Not only does the reader have to discover who killed two of the house guests at Chimneys, he also has to worry about the secret society at Seven Dials and the identity of its leader, referred to by his cronies as ‘Number Seven’. Among the characters from The Secret of Chimneys who reappear in The Seven Dials Mystery are some of the representatives of law and order, including Colonel Melrose, the Chief Constable, and the stolid, reliable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard. Lord Caterham’s daughter, Lady Eileen Brent, familiarly known as ‘Bundle’, who had played an important role in The Secret of Chimneys, is the amateur sleuth who attempts to solve the Seven Dials Mystery with the aid of a couple of amiably silly young men, one of whom, Bill Eversleigh (also in Chimneys), works at the Foreign Office.

The Seven Dials secret society is in many ways similar to the secret organization headed by the mysterious Mr Brown in The Secret Adversary, but its aims turn out to be not at all similar to those of Mr Brown’s group. The reader is not likely to discover the identity of Number Seven before it is revealed to Bundle Brent, and whether one discovers the identity of the murderer (not the same person) will depend on how one interprets an ambiguous utterance quite early in the piece. The solution to the mystery of the Seven Dials secret society is, in fact, more than usually ludicrous, but such is the air of Wodehousian inconsequentiality and charm with which Agatha Christie has imbued the characters and the atmosphere of her story that it hardly matters. The Seven Dials Mystery has not quite the freshness and insouciance of The Secret of Chimneys but it is in very much the same mould, and is one of the more engaging of the early thrillers.

As an author, Mrs Christie was not given to making comments in propria persona, but you gain a certain amount of information about her attitudes by noting what is said by characters of whom she approves. Superintendent Battle reveals a tough edge to his cosy, bourgeois normality when he speaks contemptuously of those who play safe on their journey through life. ‘In my opinion,’ he tells Bundle, ‘half the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They’re no good.’ Even Bundle is shocked by the brutality of Superintendent Battle’s sentiments, which will issue a few years later from the lips of kindly Major Despard in Cards on the Table, in almost the same words: ‘I don’t set as much value on human life as most people do … The moment you begin being careful of yourself – adopting as your motto “Safety First” – you might as well be dead, in my opinion.’ (‘I have never refrained from doing anything on the grounds of security,’ Mrs Christie was to reveal in her autobiography.)

‘Hearts just as pure and fair/May beat in Belgrave Square/As in the lowly air/Of Seven Dials’, wrote W. S. Gilbert in Iolanthe. Oddly, Mrs Christie said very much the same thing in The Seven Dials Mystery, and was rewarded with initial sales of over 8,000 copies. This was thought by all concerned to be highly satisfactory: it was to be a good twenty years before the first printing of a Christie novel reached 50,000 copies.

More than fifty years later, by which time The Seven Dials Mystery had become a quaint old period piece without losing its power to entertain and to mystify, a British commercial television company produced a film of Agatha Christie’s thriller, in a faithful adaptation by Pat Sandys which was first transmitted in Great Britain on 8 March 1981, and on 16 April in the United States. Sir John Gielgud made a convincing Lord Caterham, with Cheryl Campbell very much in period as Bundle, Harry Andrews as an excellent Superintendent Battle, Christopher Scoular as Bill Eversleigh, and James Warwick, Leslie Sands and Lucy Gutteridge in other important roles. The director was Tony Wharmby. ‘The millions around the world,’ wrote the television critic of The Times the following day, ‘on whom television co-productions are regularly foisted will in this case get their vicariously spent money’s worth…. Mere entertainment? Yes, and why not? There is at present no dearth of Plays for Today purporting to school us in the so-called realities of life.’ On its first showing on London Weekend TV the film, which ran for two-and-a-half hours with commercial breaks, topped the ratings with fifteen million viewers.

Partners in Crime TOMMY & TUPPENCE SHORT STORIES (1929)

In Partners in Crime, a collection of short stories, and the second Agatha Christie title to appear in 1929, the author reintroduced Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the two engaging young sleuths from her second book, The Secret Adversary. Tommy and Tuppence have now been married for six years, and life has become a little too dull and predictable for them, at least for Tuppence. Tommy works for the Secret Service, but apparently in an administrative capacity, so there are no thrills to be had from that direction. When Tommy’s boss, Mr Carter, the chief of British Intelligence who was responsible in The Secret Adversary for starting them off on their adventures, offers Tommy and Tuppence a new assignment, they eagerly accept his offer. They are to take over for six months the running of the International Detective Agency, which had been a front for Bolshevik spying activities. In addition to keeping an eye open for letters with Russian postmarks, they may also take on any genuine cases which happen to come their way.

Having read, as he claims, ‘every detective novel that’s been published in the last ten years’, Tommy decides to adopt the character and methods of a different detective of fiction for each case, thus giving Mrs Christie the opportunity to produce a number of satires on the detectives of her rival crime writers. The Beresfords have acquired Albert, the young Cockney assistant porter from The Secret Adversary, who has become their all-purpose domestic servant, and who now takes on the job of office-boy for the International Detective Agency. At least, one supposes it is the same lad, for he has the same name and personality as the earlier Albert. But he is described now as being a tall lad of fifteen, which means that he can have been no more than nine when he was a lift-boy in Mayfair. This, if not impossible, is unlikely; but then, Agatha Christie’s chronology was ever inexact. Albert apparently stays in the employ of the Beresfords: we shall meet him in middle-age in N or M? and By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and as an elderly servant in Postern of Fate.

The Bolsheviks make an occasional appearance in Partners in Crime, and are routed in the final episode, but most of the stories in the book are self-contained adventures, with Tommy and Tuppence assuming the methods of a different detective of fiction for each case. In ‘The Affair of the Pink Pearl’, Tommy decides to solve the mystery in the manner of Dr John Thorndyke, the physician-detective hero of the stories of Richard Austin Freeman. In ‘The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger’ Tommy and Tuppence are the Okewood brothers, Desmond and Francis, who were popular crime solvers of the period. They are American detectives McCarty and Riordan for their next case, and Tommy is Sherlock Holmes in the one after that. For ‘Blindman’s Buff’ Tommy decides, appropriately, to be Thornley Colton, ‘the Blind Problemist’. Chesterton’s Father Brown, an Edgar Wallace investigator, ‘The Old Man in the Corner’, A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud, Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French, Roger Sheringham and Dr Reginald Fortune are all impersonated, until the final episode, ‘The Man Who Was Number 16’, when Tommy has the gall to pretend to be Hercule Poirot and Mrs Christie has a joke at the expense of The Big Four. ‘You recall, do you not,’ Tommy-Poirot says to Tuppence-Hastings, ‘the man who was No. 4. Him whom I crushed like an egg shell in the Dolomites … But he was not really dead … This is the man, but even more so, if I may put it. He is the 4 squared – in other words he is now the No. 16.’

When Agatha Christie wrote Partners in Crime, all those detectives would have been familiar names to readers of crime stories, but when she came to write her memoirs many years later, she could not even remember who some of them were, for many had faded into oblivion. If they had not been created by Mrs Christie, one feels certain that Tommy and Tuppence would also have failed to survive, for their adventures in Partners in Crime are really rather unmemorable. Most of the separate stories are too slight and far too brief for any suspense to be generated, and the reader has to make do with the light comedy of the Tommy-Tuppence relationship, for their ‘little grey cells’ are by no means the equal of Poirot’s. As parodies, the stories are superb; but, since the majority of the writers parodied are hardly known at all today, much of Mrs Christie’s skill has to be taken on trust.

The volume entitled The Sunningdale Mystery, published by Collins in 1929 as a 6d paperback, is in fact merely Chapters 11 to 22 of Partners in Crime.

Several of the stories in Partners in Crime were seen as part of a weekly Tommy and Tuppence series on London Weekend TV in 1993.

As no attempt has previously been made by writers on Agatha Christie to identify all of the crime writers parodied in Partners in Crime, the following table which lists them all may be of interest:

Chapter | Detective(s) impersonated | Author (and some titles)
3 | Dr John Thorndyke | Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943): The Cat’s Eye; Dr Thorndyke Intervenes
5 | the brothers Desmond and Major Okewood (there is a passing reference to Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond stories) | Valentine Williams (1883–1946), writing as Douglas Valentine. The Oakwood brothers appear in The Secret Hand, also entitled Okewood of the Secret Service
7 | (Timothy) McCarty and Riordan | Isabel Ostrander (1885–1924). McCarty and Riordan appear in McCarty Incog.
9 | Sherlock Holmes | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; His Last Bow; The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes
10 | Thornley Colton | Clinton H. Stagg. Thornley Colton is the hero of Thornley Colton, Blind Detective
11 | Father Brown | G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936): The Innocence of Father Brown; The Secret of Father Brown; The Scandal of Father Brown
13 | The Busies | Edgar Wallace (1875–1932): The Clue of the Twisted Candle; The Ringer
15 | The Old Man in the Corner | Baroness Orczy (1865–1947): The Case of Miss Elliott; The Old Man in the Corner, Unravelled Knots
17 | Inspector Hanaud | A. E. W. Mason (1865–1948): At the Villa Rose; The House of the Arrow
19 | Inspector French | Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957): Inspector French’s Greatest Case; Tragedy in the Hollow
20 | Roger Sheringham | Anthony Berkeley: The Wychford Poisoning Case; Top Story Murder, Murder in the Basement
22 | Reggie Fortune | H. C. Bailey (1878–1961): Mr Fortune’s Practice; Mr Fortune Objects
23 Hercule Poirot | Agatha Christie (1890–1976): The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder at the Vicarage MISS MARPLE (1930)

In the autumn of 1929, Agatha Christie decided to take a holiday alone. Rosalind was at school, and would not be at home until the Christmas holidays, so Agatha planned a visit to the West Indies and made all the necessary arrangements through Thomas Cook’s. Two days before she was to leave, a married couple at a dinner party spoke to her of the Middle East, where they had been stationed, and of the fascination of Baghdad. When they mentioned that you could travel most of the way there on the Orient Express, Agatha became extremely interested, for she had always wanted to travel on the famous international train which went from Calais to Istanbul. And when she realized that, from Baghdad, she would be able to visit the excavations at Ur, the biblical Ur of the Chaldees, the matter was decided. The following morning she rushed to Cook’s, cancelled her West Indian arrangements and made reservations on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and further on to Damascus and Baghdad.

The journey on the Orient Express, through France, Switzerland, Italy and the Balkans, was all that she had hoped it would be. After an overnight stay in old Stamboul, Mrs Christie crossed the Bosphorus into Asia and continued her train journey through Asiatic Turkey, entering Syria at Aleppo, and continuing south to Damascus. She spent three days in Damascus at the Orient Palace Hotel, a magnificent edifice with large marble halls but extremely poor electric light, and then set off into the desert by bus (the Nairn Line fleet of buses was operated by two Australian brothers, Gerry and Norman Nairn). After a forty-eight-hour journey which she found both fascinating and rather sinister because of the complete absence of landmarks of any kind in the desert, she finally reached her destination, the ancient city of Baghdad, capital of modern Iraq and of old Mesopotamia.

One of the first things Agatha did was arrange to visit the excavations at Ur, about halfway between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, where Leonard Woolley was in charge of the joint British Museum and Museum of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition. As Woolley’s wife Katharine, a formidable lady, was a Christie fan and had just finished reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd with great enjoyment, the author was accorded special treatment and was not only allowed to remain with the digging team but was invited to join them again the following season. Having fallen in love with the beauty of Ur, and the excitement of excavating the past, Mrs Christie enthusiastically agreed to return. Meanwhile, she enjoyed the rest of her stay in Baghdad until, in November, it was time to go back to England. In March of the following year, 1930, travelling from Rome to Beirut by sea, she made her way back to Baghdad and to Ur.

This time, Agatha Christie met Woolley’s assistant, Max Mallowan, who had been absent with appendicitis on her first visit. Of mixed Austrian and French parentage, his father being an Austrian who had emigrated to England, Mallowan was a twenty-six-year-old archaeologist who had been Woolley’s assistant at Ur since coming down from Oxford five years previously. At the conclusion of Agatha’s visit, the imperious Katherine Woolley ordered young Mallowan to take their distinguished guest on a round trip to Baghdad and to show her something of the desert before escorting her home on the Orient Express. They enjoyed each other’s company and, by the time they arrived back in England, Mallowan had decided to ask Mrs Christie to marry him.

When he proposed to her, she was taken completely by surprise. They had become close friends, but that was all, and she was fourteen years older than he, she told him. Yes, he knew that, and he had always wanted to marry an older woman. She agreed to think about it, and although she had grave doubts as to the wisdom of marrying again, let alone marrying a man so much younger than herself, she did like him and they had so much in common. She consulted her daughter, Rosalind, who gave her unqualified approval. At the end of the summer, Agatha Christie said yes, and on 11 September 1930, after she returned from a holiday in the Hebrides, they were married in the small chapel of St Columba’s Church in Edinburgh.

The Orient Express took the newly married couple on the first stage of their honeymoon to Venice, whence they made their way to Dubrovnik and Split and then down the Dalmatian coast and along the coast of Greece to Patras in a small Serbian cargo boat. After a tour of Greece with a few idyllic days at Delphi, they parted in Athens, Max to rejoin the dig at Ur, and Agatha to return to London, suffering from an especially violent form of Middle Eastern stomach upset or possibly, as diagnosed by the Greek doctor she consulted, ptomaine poisoning.

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie writes that Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but that she cannot remember where, when or how she wrote it, or even what suggested to her that she should introduce a new detective, Miss Marple. (As with The Murder on the Links, the title originally began with the definite article, which it lost in some later editions.) Mrs Christie claimed that it was certainly not her intention at the time to continue to use Miss Marple and allow her to become a rival of Hercule Poirot. It merely happened that way. Poirot was to remain her most frequently employed detective, appearing altogether in thirty-three novels, as well as ten volumes of stories, while Miss Marple was allowed to solve no more than twelve full-length mysteries. In the post-Second World War years, Poirot and Miss Marple novels tended roughly to alternate, but Miss Marple titles were thin on the ground in the earlier years. After her initial appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and in a volume of stories in 1932, Miss Marple is not heard of again until the end of the thirties.

The vicarage in The Murder at the Vicarage is in the small village of St Mary Mead, a village in which Miss Marple had always lived and from which she was rarely to stray for the rest of her life. She did not go out into the world in search of murder; it came to her. We are not meant to wonder at the fact that so much violence should be concentrated in so small and, in all other respects, so apparently innocuous a village, and indeed to wonder would be churlish. In her introduction to murder, in The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple acquits herself well. Although she is not trained to detect crime, she is inquisitive, has a good memory, a rather sour opinion of human nature (though she would deny this) and a habit of solving problems by analogy. She does not possess little grey cells of the quality of Hercule Poirot’s, and when congratulated upon her success is likely to attribute it to the fact that she has lived in an English village all her life and thus has seen human nature in the raw.

The surface cosiness of village life, disturbed by violent crime and then found to be somewhat murky under the surface, is something which Agatha Christie is extremely adept at conveying. In The Murder at the Vicarage, one of the vicar’s more irritating parishioners, Colonel Protheroe, is found dead in the vicar’s study. There is no shortage of suspects, including the vicar himself who narrates the story, his flighty young wife, Griselda, and his teenage nephew, Dennis. The relationship between the vicar and his wife is amusingly presented. More likely suspects are the Colonel’s widow, his daughter, a slightly dubious anthropologist, and a mysterious Mrs Lestrange. Dr Haydock, Miss Marple’s physician and next-door neighbour, must be above suspicion as he is to appear in a number of later Miss Marple stories, and the same applies, surely, to Miss Marple’s nephew, Raymond West, a novelist and poet who writes the kind of novels and poems, all pessimism and squalor, which Miss Marple rather detests, though of course she is proud of her nephew’s reputation.

Like Poirot, Miss Marple is elderly when we first meet her in 1930, and over the next forty years she will age some more, but not as much as forty years. Agatha Christie based Miss Marple on the kind of old lady she had met often in west country villages when she was a girl, and described her also as being rather like the fussy old spinsters who were her grandmother’s ‘Ealing cronies’. With Agatha Christie’s grandmother, Miss Marple shared a propensity to expect the worst of everyone and, usually, to be proved right. She was to exhibit this propensity in twelve novels and twenty short stories.

The Murder at the Vicarage provides an auspicious début for Miss Marple, and a mystery which few of her readers will solve before the amateur sleuth of St Mary Mead even though Mrs Christie’s tactics are not dissimilar to those she adopted in her first novel. In later years, Agatha Christie professed to be less pleased with The Murder at the Vicarage than when she had written it, having come to the conclusion that there were far too many characters and too many sub-plots. But she still thought the main plot sound, and added, ‘The village is as real to me as it could be – and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days [the early 1960s].’

The domestics in St Mary Mead are a dim lot, and rather unsympathetically described by Mrs Christie. This may be because she wishes her readers not to consider them as ‘real people’ and therefore potential suspects, but you cannot help observing that Mary, the vicar’s all-purpose servant, is presented as a truculent dim-wit and an appalling cook, that the artist, Lawrence Redding, describes his cleaning woman as ‘practically a half-wit, as far as I can make out’, and that Gladys, kitchen-maid at the Old Hall, is ‘more like a shivering rabbit than anything human’. It should also be noted that Mrs Christie, like the Almighty, helps those who help themselves. The vicar is, for the most part, the essence of Christian charity, but he is prone to make cynical remarks about the ‘thorough-going humanitarian’ and to sneer at Dr Haydock’s sympathy for what the vicar calls ‘a lame dog of any kind’. Sentiments more Christiean than Christian. The police in Agatha Christie novels are not always the comic incompetent butts of the private detective, but Inspector Slack (who also appears in two short stories and in the 1942 novel, The Body in the Library) is a satirically characterized stupid police officer disliked by all, rude and overbearing, and foolhardy enough to allow his contempt for Miss Marple’s suggestions to show.

There is no formula by which you can forecast guilt in the works of Agatha Christie. Nevertheless, for some years after the collapse of the novelist’s marriage to Archie Christie, her readers would do well to cast a wary eye upon any handsome young men in the novels, while keeping in mind the fact that resemblances to Colonel Christie do not automatically stamp a character as the murderer!

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.

The journey back to England was an adventurous one. Having decided to go by way of Persia (Iran), the Mallowans flew from Baghdad to Shiraz, via Teheran, in a small, single-engined plane which ‘seemed to be flying into mountain peaks the entire time’. In Shiraz, they visited a beautiful house with a number of medallion paintings on the walls, one of which was of Holborn Viaduct in London! Apparently a Shah of Victorian times, after visiting London, had sent an artist there with instructions to paint various medallions of scenes the Shah wanted to remember, and these included Holborn Viaduct. Agatha Christie used the house as the setting for a short story called ‘The House at Shiraz’, which she included in a volume, Parker Pyne Investigates (1934).

From Shiraz the Mallowans travelled by car to Isfahan, which Agatha maintained to the end of her life was the most beautiful city in the world. Its colours of rose, blue and gold, its noble Islamic buildings with their courtyards, tiles and fountains, the birds and the flowers, all entranced her. They next made a sudden decision to continue their journey home by way of Russia. Hiring a car, they made their way down to the Caspian sea where, at Rasht, they caught a Russian boat across to Baku, capital of the Soviet province of Azerbaydzhan. In Baku, an Intourist agent asked if they would like to see a performance of Faust at the local opera house. They declined, and instead ‘were forced to go and look at various building sites and half-built blocks of flats’. Their hotel was one of faded splendour, but everything in Baku ‘seemed like a Scottish Sunday’. By train, they made their way to Batum on the Black Sea, having been forbidden to break their journey at Tiflis, a town Max Mallowan very much wanted to see. A French ship took them down the Black Sea to Istanbul, where they joined Agatha’s beloved Orient Express.

Max Mallowan had arranged not to go back to Leonard Woolley and his dig at Ur, the following season, but instead to accept an invitation from Dr Campbell Thompson to join him in excavating at Ninevah. So, in late September 1931, Max travelled to Ninevah, and it was arranged that Agatha should join him there at the end of October. Her plan was to spend a few weeks writing and relaxing on the island of Rhodes, and then sail to the port of Alexandretta and hire a car to take her to Aleppo. At Aleppo she would take the train to the Turkish-Iraqi frontier, and then drive on to Mosul where she would be met by Max. But a rough Mediterranean Sea prevented the steamer from putting in at Alexandretta, so Agatha was carried on to Beirut, made her adventurous way by train up to Aleppo, and eventually arrived at Mosul three days late.

The big mound of Ninevah was a mile and a half outside Mosul, and the Mallowans shared a small house with Dr Campbell Thompson and his wife, quite close to the mound which was being excavated. The country was fascinating, with the distant Kurdish mountains to be seen in one direction, and the river Tigris with the minarets of the city of Mosul in the other. At the bazaar in Mosul, Agatha bought herself a table. This cost her £10, according to her memoirs, or £3, according to Max Mallowan’s memoirs. Both agree that, on it, she wrote a Poirot detective novel, Lord Edgware Dies. When a skeleton was dug up in a grave mound at Ninevah, it was promptly christened Lord Edgware.

The Sittaford Mystery, published in Great Britain in 1931, and in America as Murder at Hazelmoor,¹⁰ was written during a few weeks in 1929, and is one of those Agatha Christie crime novels in which the murderer is unmasked not by Poirot or Miss Marple or one of the author’s other ‘regulars’, but by the heroine of the novel, who is usually a courageous and determined young woman with something of the spirit of Tuppence Beresford in her.

Anne Beddingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) is the earliest of these adventurous ladies, and Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) is potentially one of them, although she does not develop her potentiality since she has Poirot on hand. In The Sittaford Mystery Emily Trefusis is engaged to be married to a young man who has been arrested for the murder of his uncle, Captain Trevelyan. Convinced of his innocence, she sets out to discover the identity of the murderer, and eventually succeeds with the help of the police Inspector in charge of the case. The police, in Christie novels, are not always Inspector Japp-like incompetents brought into the story merely to set off the brilliance of the private detective.

For the first time, Mrs Christie makes use of Dartmoor, virtually her native heath and the place where she wrote her very first crime novel. Normally, her settings are in less bleak and inhospitable parts of the English countryside, but in The Sittaford Mystery she takes advantage of the snow-bound moorland village, using it not simply for atmosphere but making it contribute to the plot as well. You cannot fail to be reminded of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, not only by the setting but also by the fact that, in both novels, a prisoner escapes from Princetown, the prison in the centre of Dartmoor.

Agatha Christie was interested in the supernatural, and indeed was to write some of her finest short stories on supernatural subjects. The Sittaford Mystery begins with a seance in which the assembled sitters are informed by the rapping of the table that Captain Trevelyan, six miles away in Exhampton, is dead. And it is discovered that Trevelyan has indeed been murdered, probably at the precise moment that the message was received in the seance six miles away. But The Sittaford Mystery is not necessarily a supernatural one. There are, in fact, two mysteries, and Mrs Christie juggles them superbly so that, until she is ready to tell us, we are never sure whether they are connected or even what one of them is. Who murdered Captain Trevelyan? And why have Mrs Willett and her daughter come to live in Sittaford? These would appear to be the mysteries, and presumably they are related.

The Sittaford Mystery is strongly plotted, and the solutions to its puzzles are not likely to be arrived at by deduction on the reader’s part. It is also one of Mrs Christie’s most entertaining crime novels, and her use of the Dartmoor background is masterly. But you cannot help thinking that, given the characters of those involved, the actual motive for the murder when it is revealed seems rather inadequate. Real life produces murders committed for motives which seem even more inadequate, but that is not the point. Usually the reader is convinced by Mrs Christie’s explanations, but on this occasion he may well consider it unlikely that this particular person would have committed that particular crime for the reason given. This reader would have liked a stronger motivation and also to have had loose ends tied up. What, for instance, is the significance of the information given in Chapter 37, that the maiden name of Martin Derring’s mother was Martha Elizabeth Rycroft? What is her connection with Mr Rycroft the ornithologist? Why does Rycroft refer to the Derrings as ‘my niece … and her husband’? There is an irrelevant and unnecessary confusion here.

Mrs Christie, the most objective of authors, who usually keeps herself in the background, intrudes at one or two points in the story: once, inadvertently, when she has Emily think to herself that a tall, blue-eyed invalid looks ‘as Tristan ought to look in the third act of Tristan und Isolde and as no Wagnerian tenor has ever looked yet’, for Emily is not the kind of girl to have been at all interested in the operas of Wagner, and the comment is clearly not hers but her author’s; on the other occasion, Mrs Christie describes a character’s voice by telling us that it ‘had that faintly complaining note in it which is about the most annoying sound a human voice can contain’. The qualifying clause is the opinion not of anyone in the novel but, again, of the author. It is possible to pick up pieces of information about Agatha Christie’s personal likes and dislikes in this way, but not often.

In one or two details, there is a similarity between The Sittaford Mystery and the long story, ‘Three Blind Mice’, of about sixteen years later, a story which was subsequently used as the basis of the play, The Mousetrap.

Several months before The Sittaford Mystery was published, the crime novelist Anthony Berkeley had written, in the preface to one of his Roger Sheringham mysteries, The Second Shot.

I am personally convinced that the days of the old crime-puzzle, pure and simple, relying entirely upon the plot and without any added attractions of character, style, or even humour, are in the hands of the auditor; and that the detective story is in the process of developing into the novel with a detective or crime interest, holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.

Berkeley would seem here to be looking ahead to Simenon, whose first Maigret stories were soon to appear, or to writers of the type of Patricia Highsmith. But, until the end of her life, Agatha Christie was able to retain and increase a huge readership with precisely the kind of novel which Berkeley thought was on the way out. She did so, of course, by the cunning and subtle injection of those qualities of character, style and humour into a form which, in the hands of some of her rivals, seemed to offer little more than the donnish delights of puzzle-solving.

The Floating Admiral COLLABORATIVE NOVEL (1931)

An oddity, published in 1931,¹¹ was the crime novel, The Floating Admiral, written by ‘Certain members of the Detection Club’.

The Detection Club of London, founded in London in 1928 by Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, is a private club to which a number of leading crime writers belong. Its first President was G. K. Chesterton.

For many years, the club dinners were held in a private room at L’Escargot Bienvenu in Greek Street, Soho. Later, they moved to the more luxurious Café Royal. Agatha Christie was a member of the Detection Club, and from 1958 until her death its Co-President. She was one of fourteen members who combined to write The Floating Admiral, a murder mystery to which each of its authors contributed one chapter. The conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written were described in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Introduction:

… the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection. Except in the case of Mr Chesterton’s picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely ‘to make it more difficult’. He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and, to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.

Set in the classical murder mystery country of southern England, the events in The Floating Admiral take place in and near Whynmouth, a fictitious south coast holiday resort. The corpse of Admiral Penistone is found floating down the river Whyn, in the vicar’s boat, and the detective whose task it is to discover the killer is not Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey or Father Brown or anyone associated with an individual contributor, but Inspector Rudge of the Whynmouth police, ‘a tall, thin man with a sallow, clean-shaven face’.

The authors of The Floating Admiral, in the order of their contributions, are G. K. Chesterton, Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, G.D.H. and M. Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald A. Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. The book is a remarkably successful group effort, and the fact that the story twists and turns even more than it would have done had it been the work of a single writer merely adds to its effectiveness as a mystery. The New York Times Book Review

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