AGATHA CHRISTIE® POIROT

THE GREATEST DETECTIVE IN THE WORLD

Mark Aldridge

Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Mark Aldridge 2020

The AC Monogram Logo and the Poirot Icon are trade marks and AGATHA CHRISTIE, POIROT, MARPLE and the Agatha Christie Signature are registered trademarks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and elsewhere. All rights reserved.

www.agathachristie.com

Jacket design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Jacket illustration © Bill Bragg

Mark Aldridge asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008296612

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008296629

Version: 2020-10-06

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

A Note from the Author

Foreword by Mark Gatiss

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE: THE 1920s

The Mysterious Affair at Styles

The Murder on the Links

Poirot Investigates

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Big Four

The Mystery of the Blue Train

Alibi

CHAPTER TWO: THE 1930s

Black Coffee

Austin Trevor as Hercule Poirot

Peril at End House

Lord Edgware Dies

Murder on the Orient Express

Three Act Tragedy

Death in the Clouds

The ABC Murders

Murder in Mesopotamia

Cards on the Table

Murder in the Mews

Poirot’s First Appearances on Television and Radio

Dumb Witness

Death on the Nile

Appointment with Death

Hercule Poirot’s Christmas

CHAPTER THREE: THE 1940s

Sad Cypress

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe

Evil Under the Sun

Five Little Pigs

Poirot Returns to the Radio

The Hollow

The Labours of Hercules

Taken at the Flood

CHAPTER FOUR: THE 1950s

Mrs McGinty’s Dead

After the Funeral

Hickory Dickory Dock

Poirot Returns to the Airwaves

Dead Man’s Folly

Cat Among the Pigeons

CHAPTER FIVE: THE 1960s

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

Hercule Poirot

The Clocks

The Alphabet Murders

Third Girl

Hallowe’en Party

CHAPTER SIX: THE 1970s

Elephants Can Remember

Poirot on Radio and Television

Poirot’s Early Cases

Murder on the Orient Express

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case

Death on the Nile

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE 1980s and 1990s

Evil Under the Sun

Thirteen at Dinner

Dead Man’s Folly and Murder in Three Acts

Murder by the Book

Appointment with Death

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 1–6

The Centenary Celebrations

CHAPTER EIGHT: 2000 and BEYOND

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 7–8

Murder on the Orient Express

Agatha Christie’s Poirot, Series 9–13

Reinventing Poirot

The Monogram Murders

Murder on the Orient Express

The ABC Murders

Death on the Nile

Epilogue

Key Names

Endnotes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Although arranged chronologically, this book is designed so that you may read it however you choose – whether from cover to cover, or by dipping into sections that you particularly want to find out more about (or, indeed, skip sections that you are less interested in). There are no major spoilers in the main text, although a handful are in the endnotes (and clearly signposted as such).

FOREWORD

What is required, of course, is order.

Order is paramount. Order is a good and beautiful thing. Order is what the little Belgian prizes above all things. But order is a hard thing to come by when assembling memories. What, you may ask yourself (standing in the metaphorical witness box of one of those tiresome trials which he himself never seemed to attend), was your first encounter with M. Hercule Poirot? A thrilling childhood viewing of And Then There Were None and the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films had taught me that Christie was very much up my street, but it was on foreign holidays (where Christie still seems to belong) that I first properly engaged with the little man with the egg-shaped head. The Mallorcan apartment we’d rented, you see, had the lot – a whole shelf of Christies with those incredibly scary Tom Adams covers and the strange, mustardy coloured pages of the foreign edition. The ABC Murders. Death on the Nile. Five Little Pigs. Hallowe’en Party. I can still remember one sultry Spanish evening, breathlessly explaining the plot of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to my slightly bemused parents as we trudged home from the local tapas bar. Indiscriminately, I devoured them (the books, not my parents). There was no order, you see! No way of appreciating the incredible run of copper-bottomed classics that Christie produced in what was a genuine golden age of crime writing. Which is why it’s so pleasing to see each novel given a (spoiler-free) synopsis in Mark Aldridge’s delightful, detailed and compulsively readable history of the great detective. And also to see the pleasingly gushing reviews from the papers of the time (The Observer’s crossword-compiler ‘Torquemada’ is a particular delight). It’s thus possible to see Agatha Christie grow from a popular but easily dismissed sausage-machine into a national treasure.

But just who is Hercule Poirot? Albert Finney’s spluttering, sinister pug-in-a-hairnet Poirot? Peter Ustinov’s clubbable, delightful, portly Poirot? David Suchet’s avuncular, twinkling Poirot, his little grey cells owning many a childhood? John Moffatt on the radio? Austin Trevor? Charles Laughton? Kenneth Branagh? There have, you see, been an awful lot of Poirots, although, as Mark Aldridge demonstrates, few actually met with Dame Agatha’s approval. Leading us by an infectiously learned hand, Mark travels all the way from Styles to Styles, from the detective’s faltering beginnings right through to his creator’s demise – and beyond. To the rich afterlife which has propelled Poirot into the front rank of fictional detectives and into one of the most beloved characters in popular culture. Mark’s text is peppered with fascinating fragments from Christie’s correspondence and that of her family. Her own sometimes crotchety response to publishers, editors and (most entertainingly) fans, as well as unpublished portions of her autobiography. There are wonderful blind alleys and curious near-misses all along the way. Did you know that Orson Welles played Poirot and Dr Sheppard? That there was a 1962 TV pilot in which Martin Gabel’s Poirot watches TV in the back of his car? That Ronnie Barker played Poirot (straight) at the Oxford Playhouse? It’s a feast for both the dyed-in-the-moustaches fan and the newcomer alike, a testament to a still-thriving industry born of sheer talent, hard work and what we would now call brand management. Mark brings order to a sometimes chaotic narrative, along the way nailing the unique, Sunday-night charm of the Suchet series and the reasons why the Ustinov Evil under the Sun is still the best time anyone can have in the cinema.

And though he mysteriously describes Spice World – The Movie as a ‘classic comedy caper’, he rightly dismisses the version of Appointment with Death which I myself was in. Some crimes even Papa Poirot cannot forgive.

MARK GATISS

London. 2020

INTRODUCTION

Mes amis, we have cause for celebration. The great Hercule Poirot, the incomparable private detective, has now been entertaining us for a full century. Ever since The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written by Agatha Christie during the First World War and first published in 1920, the reading public has keenly followed the Belgian detective’s adventures as he investigated mysteries throughout the highs and lows of the following decades.[1] We have seen Poirot solve mysteries on trains, ships, and even a plane, with the results usually delivered to a warm critical and popular reception. He has solved cruel murders, uncovered international conspiracies, and found missing jewels for relieved owners. While doing this, he has sometimes been ably assisted by friends including Captain Hastings, Inspector Japp, his valet George, secretary Miss Lemon, and crime writer Ariadne Oliver – but it is always Poirot’s own little grey cells that are needed to solve the crimes.

Some have tried to tell Poirot’s life story by weaving together the scraps of information found in dozens of stories written across more than half a century, but any attempt to create a conclusive biography of the detective is a futile task. Many ‘facts’ are irreconcilable, and there are gaps and contradictions alongside extraordinary anti-ageing abilities. Even Christie often had to double check details of Poirot’s life with her agent, and so it’s no surprise that there are inconsistencies. Thankfully, this doesn’t matter, because to make Poirot real would be to make him mundane and minimise his brilliance as a creation. This creative force, and the woman behind it, is what this book celebrates and explores.

Following the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie’s stories only grew in popularity before reaching a productive peak in the 1930s, a decade that saw a dozen novels starring Poirot, before the pace slowed a little, with the detective finally being retired by his creator in 1975’s Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case. Christie had actually prepared Poirot’s swan song during the dark days of the Second World War, although she continued to place him in new stories for the next three decades, with this final manuscript designed to be published after her death. In the event, Christie would outlive her creation by a few months, as she died in January 1976. In total, she had created mysteries for Poirot to solve in thirty-three novels, dozens of short stories, and a handful of plays that would variously debut on the stage, radio and television.[2]

However, the story of Poirot does not end there. While Agatha Christie fiercely protected her creation throughout her life, by the 1970s there were signs that Poirot had the potential to become a mainstay of multiple media, with the big budget 1974 film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express kickstarting a franchise of sorts. Later decades also saw a long running television series and one-off screen dramas, as well as faithful radio productions. But Poirot’s reach has even moved beyond these traditional outlets for adaptations, as he has also appeared in almost every conceivable artistic form, from graphic novels to computer games and animations. Meanwhile, some of his lesser-known adventures have been uncovered and published to new audiences, and 2014 saw the first official original Poirot novel to be written by someone other than Christie, as Sophie Hannah took readers back to the golden age of detective fiction for what was to become the first in a series of new Poirot mysteries.[3] In short, Poirot has never really gone away, and is as popular as ever.

Any biography of Agatha Christie will show her to be a determined person. Born Agatha Miller in 1890, her early life is difficult to fathom for many of us in the twenty-first century, especially with its (by modern standards) baffling interplay between wealth and poverty – she was part of a family with the trappings of the upper-middle classes, including servants and a beloved home, while they also appeared to teeter on the edge of destitution. Even the day-to-day events of Christie’s life as a child feel like they are from such a distant age that it seems incredible that anyone experiencing them would still be working and publishing new material as late as the 1970s. Christie would later claim that she had ‘a very lazy youth’. She recalled that her father, Frederick Miller, was ‘a gentleman of substance who never did a hand’s turn in his life – and a most agreeable man. I never went to school. I had nothing much to do but wander around the garden with a hoop, which was in turn a horse or ship, making up stories. It was a very happy and satisfying life; you did a certain amount of work but on the whole it was play all the time. Leisure is a great stimulant of the ideas. Boredom is a better one.’[4]

The creative stimulation provided by this boredom meant that Christie was no stranger to story writing as a child, especially when it was encouraged by her mother while young Agatha was suffering from the flu. ‘I suppose I was trying things, like one does,’ she later recalled. ‘I first tried to write poetry. Then a gloomy play – about incest, I think … some of the writing wasn’t too bad but the whole thing was pretty poor.’[5] These stories included one called ‘The House of Beauty’, which she later claimed was ‘the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise’.[6]

In around 1908 Christie completed her first novel, called Snow Upon the Desert (‘I can’t think why,’ she claimed dismissively).[7] Although never published, the typescript still survives and offers an insight into the juvenilia of Christie, as she penned a lengthy story (at nearly 400 pages) concerning a group of people who are involved with the ‘coming out’ into society of young women in Cairo, just as Christie had done in 1907. While certainly overlength (this was likely the book she later referred to as ‘a long, involved, morbid novel’), with a winding story of relationships between vaguely connected characters, there are several smaller moments or turns of phrase that indicate Christie’s growing talent, such as one character being described as ‘as indiscreet as a babbling brook’, while young dreamer Melancy Hamilton wishes for more when confronted with the mundanity of day to day life, as she complains about dull discussions of breakfast choices – ‘eggs were so painfully prosaic’, she thinks, before despairing ‘That people could talk of eggs when there were blue skies and waters, and picturesque locals to watch’. Like a young Christie, Melancy fantasises about interesting lives and adventures, and we are told that ‘to a discerning observer she expressed infinite possibilities’.

In Snow Upon the Desert, Melancy Hamilton has come to Cairo in the hope that it will help the deafness affecting her – initially she is only hard of hearing in a crowd, but with indecent haste she is completely deaf by the end of the first third of the book. It’s probably telling that by the time Christie had finished writing this story she felt encumbered by this heroine of her own making, as she realised that her deafness made dialogue very difficult, and perhaps this character’s enforced insularity also explains the book’s propensity for rather overwritten meditations on characters’ thought processes. In the end the author found a straightforward solution to her woes, as she granted Melancy a miraculous recovery of her hearing upon the character’s return to England. We might see some parallels with Hercule Poirot himself here – another character whose traits she would come to dislike and felt restricted by. Could there even be a predecessor of this later difficult creation in Snow Upon the Desert’s brief description of ‘a little foreign looking man’ who lunches with some of the characters at one point? Certainly, we see forerunners of some other characters, most significantly in the two young lovers Tommy and Crocus, who decide to elope and then go on to solve a minor mystery in the final act. Their sparring relationship and gung-ho attitudes seem to mark them out as early versions of Tommy and Tuppence, the excitable investigators who meet in Christie’s second published novel, The Secret Adversary, and then marry.[8]

The typescript of Snow Upon the Desert was read by the novelist Eden Philpotts and the literary agency Hughes Massie, and both offered helpful advice, but it was not deemed good enough to publish. Nevertheless, Christie persevered with her writing when time allowed. Eventually, it was a bet with her sister, Madge, that paved the way for Poirot’s debut. This bet, made in 1916, concerned the difficulty – or otherwise – of writing a mystery novel. ‘At the time my sister and I used to argue a lot whether it was easy to write detective stories,’ Christie later recalled. By this point, in the midst of the First World War, her life had inevitably moved on, and she was now working in a hospital dispensary to help the war effort having married Archibald Christie on Christmas Eve 1914, when she was twenty-four. The possibilities of writing her own piece of detective fiction clearly fired her imagination. ‘It was never a definite bet,’ Agatha Christie clarified in her autobiography. ‘We never set out the terms – but the words had been said.’ This is where Christie’s determination would come to be so valuable. ‘I thought perhaps now is the time for writing a detective story: I had a good idea going round about medicine. Then I had a holiday from hospital. Mother said “Why don’t you go and stay on Dartmoor if you are going to write that book?” I think I spent three weeks in a hotel by myself, going for walks. I don’t think I spoke to anyone and I managed to finish The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I got it typed; I can’t say I had high hopes. I started sending it to publishers. And it started coming back.’[9]

High hopes or not, the result of this bet would eventually transform Christie’s life, and the world of detective fiction.

CHAPTER ONE:
THE
1920s

The period between the completion of Agatha Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and its publication in book form was a frustratingly lengthy one for Christie. However, her tenacity in getting the book both completed and published would bode well for the challenges that she’d face during the 1920s, as she proved her skills as a writer of mysteries and thrillers time and again, which included a slew of Poirot short stories and five novels featuring the detective before the decade was out. For her first effort she’d written a murder mystery steeped in influences from her own reading of the genre, most particularly Sherlock Holmes, but presented the plot in such a way that it felt fresh and unpredictable while setting a template that she’d continue to offer twists on for more than half a century.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles
(Novel, 1921)

Set in 1916, The Mysterious Affair at Styles concerns the inhabitants of the eponymous English country house, in which the wealthy matriarch Mrs Emily Inglethorp is murdered. Several family members, including her younger husband Alfred, are obvious suspects, but the accumulated evidence eventually presents a surprisingly complex picture. In the days when typescripts would be sent to prospective publishers in order of desirability (or likelihood of interest), the initial rejections meant slow progress as the companies held on to the story for months at a time. For a while she gave up hope, as she explained in an unpublished portion of her autobiography:

I had really forgotten about it. In fact I had by that time written off The Mysterious Affair at Styles as being just as much as failure as the first novel I had tried to write [the unpublished Snow Upon the Desert]. It was no good, I evidently had not got the knack. Still I might try something else some day for fun if I had the time.[1]

Although she generally didn’t lack perseverance, Christie had become busy with family life following the birth of her daughter Rosalind on 5 August 1919. Eventually, it was publishing house The Bodley Head that showed an interest, although by Christie’s later recollection more than two years may have passed since she had sent it to them.[2] The Bodley Head’s first reader’s report had seen Styles as a potentially worthwhile commercial venture, despite feeling that it had ‘manifest shortcomings’. The report claimed that the book was an ‘artificial affair’, while the positives of characterisation and atmosphere were undone by a court-based denouement that was considered to be less dramatic and thrilling than it should be. The second reader’s report echoed these concerns about the ending, which was felt to be improbable, but decided that publishing the novel was ‘quite worth doing’. Christie was asked to change the final chapter for publication, which she did, and in doing so set the template for the lengthy reveal in the company of key characters and suspects by the detective in domestic surroundings that would become famous components of her novels, although this type of scenario actually occurred less often than many may assume.[3] One area that pleased the writers of both reports was the ‘exuberant personality’ of the ‘jolly little man’ who operated as the story’s Sherlock Holmes and was identified as the novel’s most original feature. The identity of this ‘welcome variation’ on the detective character was, of course, none other than Hercule Poirot.

It’s no surprise that The Bodley Head noted similarities between the Poirot of Styles and the now familiar Sherlock Holmes. For one thing, the emphasis on seemingly innocuous details that have a greater significance – such as ash in the fire grate, or the arrangement of apparently ornamental items – echoes the approach to solving mysteries advocated by the original consulting detective. But perhaps more significantly, the relationship between the detective and his less accomplished assistant (and narrator) has particularly close parallels – if Poirot is this story’s Holmes, then Hastings is most definitely its Watson. It’s through the eyes of Arthur Hastings, our establishment figure as an invalided captain who is recuperating near to Styles, that we first meet one of the Belgian refugees who are finding refuge away from the war being waged across the channel:[4]

Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. 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. Yet this quaint dandyfied little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.

This description of the odd-looking little Belgian would be solidified and repeated over the next five decades and more, and while events changed around him – characters, locales, even wars – he stayed fixed (mostly, at least – the mysterious limp is soon healed). Christie later felt exasperated when asked to clarify the physical details of Poirot, but recalled that she twice saw people who fitted the description. In a draft discussion of Poirot and his cases penned for a newspaper serialisation in 1938 she pondered:

Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head? Have I ever seen an egg-shaped head? When people say to me ‘Which way up is this egg?’ do I really know? I don’t because I never do see pictorial images clearly – but nevertheless I know that he has an egg-shaped head – covered with black, singularly black, hair – and I know his eyes occasionally shine with a strange light – and twice in my life I have actually seen him – once on a boat going to the Canary Islands – and once having lunch at the Savoy – and I have said to myself ‘Now if you had only the nerve you could have snapshotted the man on the boat and then when people have said ‘Yes, but what is he like?’ I could have produced the snapshot and said ‘This is what he is like’ and in the Savoy perhaps I could have gone to the man and explained the matter. But life is full of lost opportunities.[5]

In her autobiography, Christie remembered Poirot’s creation in terms of necessity – she needed a detective for her story, but also needed one unlike those that had gone before. Having dismissed the likes of a schoolboy investigator or a scientist, she found inspiration in the Belgian refugees who had settled near to her home. ‘People always think you have a real person starting you off, but it isn’t the case,’ she said later. ‘Some characters are suggested to you by strangers you’ve never spoken to – you see someone at a picnic and make up stories about them like a child. I was worried about finding a detective for my first book, and we’d had Belgian refugees at the beginning of the war, so I thought that quite a good idea. But I didn’t really know any.’[6]

Once the broad background of the detective had been settled, why not make this detective character a retired police officer, she reasoned. ‘What a mistake there,’ she later conceded, as Poirot must surely have been well over 100 by the time of his later cases.[7] Christie also decided to make him ‘very neat – very orderly’, before wondering ‘Is this because I was a wildly untidy person myself?’[8] Certainly she saw some elements of Poirot’s character as a reaction against her own personality. ‘If you are doubly damned – first by acute shyness and secondly by only seeing the right thing to do or say twenty-four hours late what can you do? Only write about quick witted men and resourceful girls whose reactions are like greased lightning!’[9]

All that was left was to decide his name. Christie fancied that, like Sherlock Holmes and his brother Mycroft, the name should be a ‘grand’ one, and so she settled on the amusement of this small man being named Hercules. When a surname of Poirot was decided upon (Christie claimed not to remember how or why), Hercules didn’t seem to fit, and so the Belgian sleuth was christened Hercule instead.[10] Just as Holmes had been an outsider due to his egotistical attitude and obsessions, so Poirot can never truly blend into the scenery; he stands out from his English contemporaries while his idiosyncrasies allow much of society to underestimate his powers of deduction. The Bodley Head’s request to rework the courtroom setting of the ending to take place elsewhere would unwittingly reinforce this template of Poirot as an outsider. The original ending had the retired detective testifying in court at length, describing his solution to the case, which effectively made him part of the traditional system of law and order, rather than set apart from it as a private individual. Conversely, the final version leaves the likes of Inspector Japp (also introduced in this first novel) with the more mundane tasks of ensuring that the law is upheld and the villain prosecuted; for Poirot, the simple satisfaction of piecing together the puzzle can now be the prize.

The plot of Styles balances interesting and plausible elements (the nature of the poisoning, for example, is effectively depicted – unsurprisingly, given Christie’s familiarity with poisons from her wartime service in a dispensary) with first class misdirections and a vivid set of characters, alongside some less convincing elements that Christie would soon offer better examples of, such as a less than believable disguise and a highly unlikely disposal of key evidence. If the story sometimes requires an excessive suspension of disbelief then at least it happens infrequently and briefly, and the unconvincing elements soon fade away while the overarching story grips the reader as the puzzle pieces slot into place. Essentially, the novel is an exercise in distraction, as Christie works to keep the reader from looking too closely at some suspects and events by employing a layer of obfuscation from multiple characters and with a highly satisfying double bluff at its centre. Compared to her later novels, these distractions are overly complicated, as Christie seems to signify a slight lack of confidence in her technique by throwing in so many clues and red herrings that the reader would have to be very astute indeed to ignore them all and tread the correct path to the solution. The result is a busy mystery that shines because of the overall impression it leaves once the author shows her hand at the end.

As was common during this era, the first appearance of The Mysterious Affair at Styles in print was as a newspaper serialisation rather than as a novel. In this case, Christie was paid £25 for the rights for the story to appear in The Times’s ‘Colonial Edition’, also known as The Weekly Times, between February and June 1920. By October 1920 the book was finally published as a novel in America, but not yet in Britain, which prompted Christie to write a letter to her publishers that dispensed with niceties and opened with a simple question: ‘What about my book? I am beginning to wonder if it is ever coming out’.[11] It’s worth bearing in mind that at this point a year had passed since the positive reader reports, and the wartime events of the story were threatening to make it feel like a period piece by the time it was available in bookshops. Meanwhile, Christie had gone into battle with The Bodley Head over a single detail, the spelling of the word ‘cocoa’. Christie correctly insisted on the final ‘a’, but (to use Christie’s own description) the ‘dragon’ at the publisher who oversaw such details insisted that ‘coco’ was correct. The debate might seem innocuous, but the memory of the incident was strong enough that Christie remembered it for her autobiography decades later. This seems to have been something of a turning point in the relationship between author and publisher – whereas Christie had earlier assumed that The Bodley Head would know best, she now knew that not to be true. ‘I was not a good speller, I am still not a good speller, but at any rate I could spell cocoa the proper way,’ she explained in her autobiography. ‘What I was, though, was a weak character. It was my first book – and I thought they must know better than I did.’[12]

Despite requesting pre-Christmas publication, it wasn’t until 21 January 1921 that the novel was made available in Christie’s own country, with the requested dedication to her mother, and a cover depicting characters in candlelight that Christie approved of, calling it ‘artistic and “mysterious”!’[13] The novel was well received, with The Church Times saying that ‘the book held the attention well’, while commending the first-time author for offering a surprising solution that the reader had not worked out beforehand. ‘Looking back, knowing the solution, it is possible to point to a good many faults,’ the review also claimed, but ‘a book of this type must be judged on the first reading.’[14] The Times Literary Supplement received the book even more warmly, with the reviewer writing that ‘The only fault in his book is that it is almost too ingenious … In spite of its intricacy, the story is very clearly and brightly told.’ Referring to the bet between Christie and her sister regarding the writing of a satisfying mystery, the review judged that ‘Every reader must admit that the bet was won.’[15]

Almost five years after it had been written, The Mysterious Affair at Styles had finally found an audience, quickly selling out of its initial run of 2,000 copies. Agatha Christie had continued her writing in the meantime – having signed a six-book contract with The Bodley Head, she had ‘nearly finished a second one’ by the end of 1920. This second novel, The Secret Adversary, was published in 1922, but it didn’t feature any characters from her first book. However, for her third novel Christie brought the Belgian detective with the egg-shaped head with her, ready to solve an even more complex case, having established a style of mystery writing that her publishers were keen to see repeated. ‘So I went on writing detective stories,’ she later said. ‘I found I couldn’t get out.’[16]

The Murder on the Links
(Novel, 1923)

While Arthur Conan Doyle had been the clearest influence on The Mysterious Affair at Styles it was another mystery writer, Gaston Leroux, who Christie claimed had had the biggest impact on the second Poirot novel, The Murder on the Links. Christie had enjoyed Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a locked-room mystery that had been first published as a novel in 1908 – in fact, she once claimed that it was the only mystery she’d read prior to Styles, apart from Sherlock Holmes. Regarding such influences, Christie later conceded that ‘When one starts writing, one is most influenced by the last person one has read or enjoyed’.[17] Her interest in Leroux’s style and story was combined with the influence of a real-life case in France in which the wealthy inhabitants of a house were attacked by an apparently random gang robbery, only for facts to emerge later that turn the story on its head, although in later years she felt that Leroux’s novel ‘reads rather peculiarly now’.[18] It may also be that Christie misremembered the influence of The Mystery of the Yellow Room on The Murder on the Links as, aside from the French setting and the use of rival detectives, Leroux’s mystery has rather more in common with The Mysterious Affair at Styles.[19] In an unpublished portion of her autobiography she ponders on a more straightforward reason for Poirot’s new locale: ‘I suppose I had been reading a lot of French detective stories lately, and it seemed to be rather fun to have one over there.’[20]

Whatever the origins, Christie had been encouraged to bring Poirot back to help solve this case, and in retrospect felt that she should have started to resist such demands. ‘Now I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so old,’ she wrote. ‘I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun again with someone much younger.’[21] Despite these later sentiments, Christie is perhaps rather clutching at straws here to justify her eventual frustration with the character himself – she had never been much concerned with accurate continuity or a definitive idea of the world of Poirot, and considering that readers have generally been unfazed by Poirot’s miraculous lack of ageing it hardly seems to be a good reason to have abandoned him.

Neither Christie nor Poirot had been idle since the publication of Styles, with Christie introducing the young investigators Tommy and Tuppence in the novel The Secret Adversary, while keeping Poirot alive in the pages of British magazine The Sketch, which had commissioned a series of short stories, published from March 1923 (more of which shortly). Although it would be a few years before Christie felt that she was a full-time professional author, she and Archie hadn’t neglected the most important business of being a writer, as they consistently wrote to The Bodley Head in order to ensure that the royalties received were accurate and punctual (which, judging by the surviving correspondence, they rarely were). For Poirot’s second novel, we are once more told the story through the eyes of Hastings, whose self-aware opening ruminates on the best way to captivate the reader from the off. In this case, a trip on the Calais express train results in a fortuitous meeting that eventually results in marriage for Hastings, but not before some baffling murders are solved. While Styles had seen Christie telling a story that, in summary, would eventually be revealed to be rather straightforward, albeit operating between layers of red herrings and misdirection, The Murder on the Links has a clever but convoluted tale at its core. Christie herself would later acknowledge that her early books could be ‘unnecessarily complicated, with quantities of clues and subplots’.[22] Perhaps there’s also the sense of a difficult second Poirot novel for Christie, as the author seems to be working out and developing her style, in this case even more determinedly operating sleights of hand to ensure that she is always one step ahead of the reader. However, the reader may take solace from the fact that they generally feel one step ahead of Hastings, making deductions that he misses, often due to his rather short-sighted attitudes and dismissal of key evidence.

Readers who are familiar with the genial Hastings of most adaptations may be surprised to see his misanthropic side, occasionally apparent in Styles but even more evident here. While Hastings may share rooms with Poirot, this is no good-natured and jovial relationship. Instead, Hastings is rather defensive and dismissive, often seeming to be rather irate with Poirot, although it isn’t always clear if we should be siding with his more questionable opinions or not: ‘A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a Billingsgate fishwoman blush!’ By the time we are re-introduced to Poirot we have insight into his methods that start to differentiate him from the evidence-based detective of Styles, as we’re now told that ‘He had a certain disdain for tangible evidence, such as footprints and cigarette ash, and would maintain that, taken by themselves, they would never enable a detective to solve a problem. Then he would tap his egg-shaped head with absurd complacency, and remark with great satisfaction: “The true work, it is done from within. The little grey cells – remember always the little grey cells, mon ami.”’ However, there’s little time for rumination, as the book heads straight into its central mystery, as Hastings and Poirot travel to France, having been summoned by a potential client to discuss an urgent matter in person, only to arrive and discover that he has been found dead on the local golf course that morning, stabbed in the back. Before the mystery is solved another person will meet their demise, while Poirot looks to the past to help solve the case, as the cast of characters (and suspects) discuss all manner of evidence while being overheard by others, leading to an overly tangled web of deceit and misunderstandings. However, in 1969 the crime author Michael Gilbert introduced a reissue of the book, and found such misdirection to be a positive trait: ‘If you have not read the book before, I would be willing to bet that you will still be doubtful of the killer one page before it is revealed to you. All the craft of Miss Christie is employed in this book, and when she is in form her bowling is practically unplayable.’[23]

We learn more about our two protagonists throughout the book, as Poirot’s presence and somewhat enigmatic questioning and examinations irritates rival local detective Giraud, while Hastings finds love in the form of Dulcie Duveen, whom he nicknames ‘Cinderella’. Christie wasn’t sentimental about the coupling: ‘If I had to have a love interest in the book, I thought I might as well marry off Hastings!’, she wrote in her autobiography. ‘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.’[24]

The Murder on the Links was initially serialised under the title The Girl with the Anxious Eyes in The Grand magazine from December 1922 before its British publication as a novel in May 1923. Christie had been dissatisfied with the cover for The Secret Adversary, and this time she stipulated her recommended design in a letter to her publisher: ‘I suggest for the cover a green patch of grass on the links, the grave and near it the man’s body with a dagger sticking out of it.’[25] Once presented with the publisher’s chosen design she was annoyed enough that she recalled the disagreement in her autobiography decades later. ‘Apart from being in ugly colours, it was badly drawn, and represented, as far as I could make out, a man in pyjamas on golf-links, dying of an epileptic fit.’[26] In the end, a different cover was used for publication, no doubt due to the strength of Christie’s feelings regarding the original version. As a result of this sort of dispute, three titles into her six book contract with The Bodley Head Christie’s dissatisfaction was starting to solidify into an exit plan, with the aim of finding a better – and more rewarding – outlet for her creative labours.

The Times Literary Supplement considered the novel to be ‘a most complicated affair, the unravelling of which by the Belgian detective provides the reader with an enthralling mystery story of an unusual kind.’[27] The Observer cited Christie as the frontrunner in the competition of new mystery writers, saying that ‘she has an unusual gift of mechanical complication’. Its review also carried a note of warning about such a talent, saying that ‘it is a mistake to carry the art of bewilderment to the point of making the brain reel’ and that ‘it is possible to be fatigued with wandering up and down blind alleys’.[28] However, it was a succinct review in the Daily Express that most clearly alluded to Christie’s elevated status as a mystery writer with only her third novel. ‘The Murder on the Links is one of the best mystery stories I have read,’ it said. ‘Miss Agatha Christie stands in a class by herself as a writer of detective stories.’[29]

Poirot Investigates
(Short stories, 1924)

By January 1923 Agatha Christie was already making plans that looked beyond The Bodley Head. At the request of Bruce Ingram, the editor of British magazine The Sketch, she had compiled a collection of short stories featuring Poirot, which she also sent to an agent in order to find suitable international periodicals for their publication. While The Bodley Head seemed unsure of the short stories’ relevance to them, Christie was arranging serialisations of the collection in the United States and India, while she was exploring ways to curtail her contract with her current publisher as soon as possible.[30] Although The Bodley Head had accepted her standalone thriller The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), they had refused a manuscript called Vision, a story that Christie had written around fifteen years earlier. A typescript for an unpublished short story called Vision survives, but at fourteen pages it’s rather unlikely to be the same one that was sent to her publishers as a potential novel, but it may well have provided the basis for an expanded version. The surviving version opens atmospherically (‘As the night mail for Scotland steamed out of St Pancras, Roden West felt a subtle sense of relief steal over him. A sensation as of the loosening of a chain’) before exploring our protagonist’s feelings for another character, Nina, after which the story moves into the realms of science fiction, with a thought transference process that has the potential for dramatic consequences that are not properly explored or explained in a story that feels incomplete. If this tale was indeed expanded and sent to The Bodley Head, then it’s obvious why it would have been rejected as it’s quite unlike Christie’s previous novels.[31]

The Bodley Head’s refusal to consider Vision led to a dispute over whether Christie could count this as one of the six books stipulated by the contract.[32] In truth, Christie had never expected Vision to be published, but was using it as leverage to ensure that the forthcoming collection of Poirot short stories would be accepted as one of the contracted books.[33] She would win that portion of the fight, and Poirot Investigates was eventually counted as the fifth book of the six-book deal, although not before some stern words had been exchanged when it came to the nature of the contract: ‘I do not want to include cinema, dramatic or foreign rights,’ Christie scolded them, disputing their automatic inclusion without consultation or agreeable terms.[34]

In all, twenty-four Poirot short stories were published by The Sketch during 1923, in two sequences of twelve. Once more narrated by Hastings, they offer a substantial range of quality and ingenuity. Often they are light confections, and those that are most successful have germs of genius that Christie would later revisit and exploit in more substantial works. It’s certainly worth remembering that the stories were designed to be read in the context of a magazine that elsewhere deals with the lighter end of society and fashion; there was no expectation for weightier matters to be brought into the publication via these mysteries, and on these terms the stories work extremely well. As a collection they are best enjoyed in small doses. Of the initial run of stories from The Sketch only eleven were selected for inclusion in Poirot Investigates, and Christie initially suggested only eight.[35] Three of these, ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’, ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’ and ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’, are reasonably straightforward stories of thefts, generally hinging on one important piece of misdirection, which Poirot reveals to the reader without too much effort being expended. There’s also ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, which opens with the unfortunate claim that ‘war and the problems of war are a thing of the past’, and has the British government rush to Poirot for help. Intriguing deaths are the focus of ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ and ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, which result in satisfying cases for Poirot, even if one of them relies on a questionable understanding of psychoanalysis. In 1936 ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’ was reprinted in several newspapers, this time as part of a series of stories selected by Christie’s peer in detective fiction authorship, Dorothy L. Sayers. Sayers introduced the story by discussing Poirot:

Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective, has his full complement of little vanities, which are as endearing to his readers as they are irritating to his rather stiff English friend, Captain Hastings. He likes to blow his own trumpet; he is fond of delivering little lectures on detective method; he is as ready as any woman to attract public attention – a trait offensive to the right-minded British male.

He is not a specialist in any particular branch of detection; his tools are logic, and the faculty for disentangling the essential from the inessential. In this tale his personality is a little clouded by influenza and tisane; yet he contrives, characteristically, to find an excessively simple solution to an apparently complicated problem.[36]

Meanwhile, ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’ operates as rather a mystery in reverse, as Poirot and assorted characters try to ascertain the whole story behind what appears to be a harmless surprise of a couple’s good fortune when flat hunting. For this book collection, Christie agreed with her publisher’s suggestion also to include both ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ and ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’, the latter which she preferred over their other suggestion, ‘The Case of the Missing Will’, although eventually The Bodley Head got the author to agree to the inclusion of this other story as well (‘I hope it will make an immense difference in the sale of the book!’ she wrote sarcastically), explaining the rather odd length of the collection as eleven stories.[37], [38] In fact, three stories suggested by the publisher were sensible additions – both ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ and ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’ have satisfying twists (the former is clearly influenced by the Sherlock Holmes story ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’), and while ‘The Case of the Missing Will’ may be a lesser story in its own right, as a straightforward adventure that has very little in the way of deduction it operates as a neat palate cleanser at the conclusion of this collection. Christie’s personal preferences didn’t always chime with those of her reviewers and readers, and some have argued that the stories collected herein were actually weaker than those left out, which subsequently appeared in assorted short story collections in the USA and were finally brought together to form Poirot’s Early Cases, a collection created in order to ensure that an Agatha Christie book was published in time for Christmas some half a century later.[39]

Relatively few changes were made to the original stories for book publication, and at Christie’s suggestion it sported a portrait of Poirot from The Sketch on its dustjacket.[40] The proposed title for the collection alternated between The Grey Cells of M. Poirot, which had been the overarching title for the stories as collected in The Sketch, and Poirot Investigates, with Christie expressing a preference for the latter. The story ‘Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’ retained Christie’s original title, having been renamed ‘The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls’ for the magazine. The Bodley Head did request that the text of ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ was elaborated on, but the eventual changes were relatively small, including an extra section that cements Poirot’s apparent belief in the power of the supernatural, and a lengthier discussion with the cast of suspects in Egypt. ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’ added a few more details to Poirot’s meeting with his client’s fiancé compared to the magazine version, while in ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’ the mechanics of the murderous deed are expanded upon. Finally, ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’ has a handful of significant changes from The Sketch, including the removal of some details regarding Poirot’s fussiness when it comes to dust and crumbs. This story also loses some of the crueller character touches in its transition to book publication. In this mystery, Poirot has a bet with Inspector Japp that he will be able to solve the case without visiting the scene of the crime. When Poirot appears to lose, both Hastings and Japp joke at his expense to a greater extent in the original The Sketch publication. In the magazine, Hastings originally wrote ‘I replied that in this case Poirot had certainly brought his fate upon himself, and that there was no need for Japp to reproach himself’, with Japp agreeing:

That’s true. He certainly did ask for it! Past his day, of course, but a shrewd old fellow in many ways. But in a case like this he’s out of his depth. Fancies himself though, doesn’t he? Thinks there’s nothing on God’s earth like Hercule Poirot!

Perhaps to spare the characters’ blushes, this exchange was removed for the book. The stories in Poirot Investigates show a still developing set of characteristics for both Poirot and Hastings, who share rooms, sometimes interrupted by their landlady (unnamed at this point but elsewhere revealed to be called Mrs Pearson). In ‘The Adventure of the Western Star’ it’s Poirot rather than Hastings who recognises a film star, whereas the opposite scenario had occurred in The Murder on the Links, showing his knowledge of popular culture to be changeable – and we learn that both he and Hastings are readers of Society Gossip magazine. The relationship between the two is still strained at times, with Hastings looking ‘coldly’ at Poirot during ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’ after a gentle joke regarding his interest in beautiful women, as Hastings’ sensitivities often relieve him of his sense of humour, especially when being goaded by Inspector Japp.

The book was well received upon its publication in March 1924, with The Observer pointing out that the short story form could be even more difficult for a mystery author, and that Christie had succeeded in her attempts, further proving herself to be a ‘first rank’ detective story writer. ‘All of [the stories] have point and ingenuity,’ the review read, ‘and if M. Poirot is infallibly and exasperatingly omniscient, well, that is the function of the detective in fiction.’[41]

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
(Novel, 1926)

In what would become a recurring theme with Christie, it was the taxman that motivated some of the decisions she made in the mid-1920s. Now an established author, she entered into a remarkably cordial correspondence with the Inland Revenue which wondered, in a gentle sort of way, exactly where her earnings were going. It transpired that Christie had little idea herself – she occasionally received cheques, which she cashed and spent. While the tax office seemed more amused than annoyed, it suggested she take her financial affairs more seriously. The result was that Christie returned to the literary agency of Hughes Massie (having initially sought advice there before her first book was published) and met with the man who would represent her for the rest of her career, Edmund Cork. ‘He seemed suitably horrified at my ignorance,’ she later wrote, ‘and was willing to guide my footsteps in future.’[42] One of the first of those steps was to move Christie away from The Bodley Head once her six-book contract had been fulfilled following the publication of the adventure-mystery The Secret of Chimneys (1925), and settle her with a new publisher that could offer better terms. The chosen company was William Collins, Sons & Co. (now HarperCollins), which has remained her publisher ever since. Surely Collins could scarcely believe its luck when Christie delivered her first manuscript for them, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a novel that would outshine all that she had written before and become acknowledged as one of the greatest pieces of detective fiction ever written.

Elements of the surprise that is eventually revealed to be central to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd were independently suggested to Agatha Christie by two people – her brother-in-law, James Watts, and Lord Mountbatten, although she had already undertaken similar subterfuge in The Man in the Brown Suit. However, while the twist is clever in itself, the fact that Christie finds a way to make it work is what deserves the most acclaim. Initially, the mystery seems straightforward, as a wealthy businessman is found murdered in his study near to the village where Poirot has retired to grow marrows. His retirement is interrupted by the case, and for this investigation he’s joined not by Hastings, but by his new neighbour, Dr Sheppard, who lives with his sister Caroline, an unforgettable character who gossips her way through the unravelling of the mystery. Caroline was a favourite creation of Christie’s, who described her as ‘an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home’, while also citing her as influential in the later development of Miss Marple, who would make her print debut in 1927 in the short story ‘The Tuesday Night Club’.[43],[44] Dr Sheppard’s presence as narrator allows us to reacquaint ourselves with the (to British society eyes) odd little Belgian with his curious quirks. When the doctor’s peaceful gardening is interrupted by a marrow whizzing its way from the detective’s side of the fence, Sheppard describes his neighbour’s ‘egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes’, before getting his name wrong (‘Mr Porrott’) in a sign that Poirot’s fame had not reached the heights he may have imagined. Certainly, Sheppard underestimates Poirot’s abilities and gives us a first-hand account of his surprise that the detective is able to piece together the ingenious truth of the mystery. The narration allows us new insight to Poirot’s methods, and the doctor is presented as more amiable than Hastings, but he is also prone to character flaws that mark him out to be someone unsuited to a long-term friendship with the detective.

At the time of its publication as a novel in May 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd initiated a great deal of discussion about the ‘rules’ of crime fiction, and especially the question of whether or not Christie had played fair with the reader.[45] Christie mulled over this argument many years later, but was always satisfied that she had misdirected rather than misled: ‘I have a certain amount of rules. No false words may 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.’[46]

The reviews of the book itself were almost universally positive, but generally indicated some unease with the nature of the solution, which was often seen as exceptionally clever but potentially problematic, raising questions of whether all readers would be happy with Christie’s sleight of hand. However, in the decades since its publication, the reputation of the book has only grown, and in 2013 the Crime Writers’ Association named it the greatest crime novel of all time. The solution is generally regarded as masterful and satisfying, perhaps only disappointing those who feel annoyed that Christie has caught them out so absolutely. An astute reader has every chance to work out the murderer’s identity if they can bid goodbye to their preconceptions of the genre and its form. The nature of the novel’s structure means that it has been widely discussed, and the writer Pierre Bayard devoted an entire book to an analysis of the mystery, called Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, in which he postulates a fascinating alternative theory regarding the culprit, which will not be spoiled here.

In the context of Christie’s development as an author, we can see the book as an example of her restlessness with the crime genre. She would describe her writings as ‘half way between a crossword puzzle and a hunt in which you can pursue the trail sitting comfortably at home in your armchair’, but the puzzles themselves were ever changing, even in this early period.[47] Despite the perceived clichés in her work as she revisits the same broad scenarios and locations in multiple mysteries, she was never happy just to rework the same plot beats and structure by simply swapping out names and motive. She relished challenging the form, which in turn made her more sophisticated as a writer than many have credited her for. Here, a reading of the novel’s blurb may indicate a retread of themes explored in her first two Poirot novels, but the reader will eventually discover that this is far from true.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is now generally referred to as Christie’s masterpiece, perhaps because of its combination of traditional Christie mystery elements with the astonishing solution. Christie was pleased by the fact that it was her greatest success to date, but in her autobiography seems slightly bemused that it was still being discussed and read many years later. Although Christie placed it in the top ten of her own books when asked in 1972, in 1975 the writer Julian Symons claimed that the author was not particularly enamoured with the book, as he recounted that ‘When The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is mentioned she says “oh dear oh dear, surely I’ve written something better than that?”’.[48]

The Big Four
(Novel/short stories, 1927)

Given that Collins can only have been pleased with the quality and reception of Agatha Christie’s first book for them, the publisher would surely have been concerned when the novelist disappeared following the breakdown of her marriage, and then perhaps privately thrilled when she returned accompanied by exceptional levels of attendant publicity. Over the years, the story of Agatha Christie’s disappearance in December 1926 has attracted extraordinary levels of attention from writers in all areas of fact and fiction, but the facts are simple. Following the death of her mother earlier in 1926 and then the breakdown of her marriage to Archie, Agatha left the family home and retreated to The Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, where she stayed under a pseudonym influenced by the name of her husband’s mistress. It seems likely that Agatha had had some form of breakdown. ‘I married at twenty-four and we were very happy for eleven years,’ she later remembered. ‘Then my mother died a very painful death and my husband found a young woman. Well, you can’t write your own fate. Your fate comes to you.’[49]

Understandably, the very public search for Christie appeared to embarrass her, having never been keen on publicity. ‘Being an author is very difficult because it spoils a lot of your private life,’ she would tell an interviewer many years later. ‘People come up to you and say “How do you do? I did enjoy so-and-so”. You thank them and then they want to get away and you want to get away and it is all very embarrassing.’[50] When she was eventually found Christie claimed amnesia and rarely referred to the event again.[51] The events would haunt her for the rest of her life – following the abduction of Muriel McKay in December 1969 (in an apparent case of mistaken identity in an attempt to extort money from media mogul Rupert Murdoch, whose wife was the intended target) the press quickly turned to Christie to comment on the mystery. ‘BBC rang me up (so did a lot of newspapers!) to suggest I would like to comment on disappearance of Mrs McKay “as disappearing tricks are right up your street, aren’t they?”,’ Christie wrote to Cork in January 1970. ‘A very brash and impertinent young man. I refused and was rude to him.’[52]

Although the experience instilled an understandable distrust of the press for capitalising on a deeply personal trauma, the crises leading up to Christie’s brief disappearance would have little impact in the long term on the mysteries she wrote. In the short term, however, they created something of a bump in the road. Unable to concentrate on writing, Christie was nevertheless in need of money and so reworked two existing ideas for her next two Poirot novels in order to make it as easy as possible to fulfil her contractual obligations. For The Big Four the alterations were minimal, as the book would essentially reprint a twelve-part serial novel already published in The Sketch in 1924 under the umbrella title The Man Who Was Number Four. These linked short stories outlined the nefarious deeds of a ‘big four’ of criminals, who were setting out to disrupt world order. It was Christie’s brother-in-law, Campbell Christie, who suggested that these stories could be minimally reworked to create a ‘new’ novel, and there is still some debate regarding his contribution – it’s possible that he wrote most (or even all) of the new linking material ready for its publication in January 1927.[53]

However, if anything, stringing the serial together as a novel only weakens the mysteries, as they manage to be both inconsistent and repetitive (twice in the first hundred pages Poirot is inspired to make a sudden exit from a train before it reaches its destination), littered with non-sequiturs that are more jarring when read in quick succession. While the reader may detect a mellowing of Hastings, who’s happy to indulge in light-hearted laughter about the case with both Japp and Poirot, this perhaps signals another problem with the book – that Poirot simply doesn’t fit into The Big Four’s world of spies and international politics, which leads to awkward adjustments to his character. It might be better to imagine Tommy and Tuppence, married investigators always looking for a big adventure, in Poirot’s place – thrill-seekers who would be happy to run around the world in order to unmask the evil cartel behind a collection of murders and thefts of sensitive material. They would also have imbued the novel with a better sense of fun, whereas Poirot’s established grounding in real-life domestic cases makes the image of him battling a group of spies like an action hero feel unconvincing rather than exciting.

Nevertheless, there are still some great ideas on display in The Big Four, notably the explanation of the apparently invisible murderer in the chapter ‘The Importance of a Leg of Mutton’, which has some prime Poirot deduction, and the shocking story behind the death of a premier chess player in ‘A Chess Problem’. Given the early publication date of the short stories it’s no surprise that after The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the novel feels like a regression of Christie’s style, but the presence of Poirot in this adventure of international conspiracy also shows us a glimpse of a road not travelled by Christie.

As far as the author was concerned, she considered The Big Four to be ‘rotten’ and, along with the subsequent Poirot novel The Mystery of the Blue Train, the first time that she had to force herself to work to order for financial and contractual reasons. This led to her determination always to have a manuscript ‘in hand’ wherever possible, to alleviate the pressure of deadlines and allow for the realities of life to interrupt her writing when needed. Nevertheless, upon its publication in January 1927 the novel was a commercial success, no doubt helped by Christie’s name having been so prominently featured in the press. It was also reviewed positively by many critics, with the Daily Express describing it as ‘one of the liveliest and most entertaining mystery stories that has been written for some time’, while The Observer made the point that ‘the short interpolated mysteries within the mystery are really much more interesting than the machinations of the “Big Four”’, once more revealing where Christie’s strengths lay.[54] Although it deserves credit for satisfying so many of its readers when published, one can only imagine the shock of murder mystery aficionados picking up the next Poirot book by the author of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd only to find an international thriller with evil masterminds, laser-like energy beams, thefts of radium, and an exploding mountain inhabited by spies.

In April 1927 Collins took out an advert in The Manchester Guardian to showcase some of its newer books. The Big Four was one of the titles to be mentioned (‘a thrilling story’), while it claimed that ‘The publishers hope to receive Mrs Christie’s manuscript for her next detective novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, very soon,’ before giving a somewhat coy update on the author herself: ‘Mrs Christie has been recuperating in the Canary Islands after her recent illness.’[55] The dramas of 1926 had been put to one side, and it would soon be business as usual once more.

The Mystery of the Blue Train
(Novel, 1928)

Personal insights from Agatha Christie regarding her own stories are relatively rare for an author with such a lengthy and distinguished career. Much of her autobiography covers her childhood and matters away from her writing – but, when she did discuss her own works, there was one recurring opinion. As she said in 1966, ‘Easily the worst book I ever wrote was The Mystery of the Blue Train. I hate it.’[56] Objectively, it’s not difficult to imagine that it was really this period of Christie’s life that she was so unhappy with, rather than her writing, but there’s no doubt that Christie made this novel the focus of her misery at this time. In an unpublished portion of her autobiography, she elaborated on her feelings further:

I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train. Presumably I turned out a fairly decent piece of work, since some people say it is their favourite book (and if they say so they always go down in my estimation). It was terribly full of clichés, the plot was predictable, the people were unreal. It got better towards the end because when you have lived with a thing long enough, and pushed yourself on, you cannot help allying yourself a little with what you are writing about. But it certainly had no zest, no joie de vivre, no faintest flash of enjoyment about it.[57]

While The Mystery of the Blue Train is not without its flaws, few readers could agree with Christie’s complete dismissal of it even though such feelings lingered long in her memory.

Perhaps any reader with no knowledge of the context of the writing of the novel could view it as simply a slightly lesser Poirot mystery. However, read with a recuperating Christie in mind, forcing herself to complete a book in the shadow of the death of her beloved mother and the end of her marriage, it’s not difficult to see evidence of the laborious hard work and systematic processes that Christie has undertaken to transform a good Poirot short story into a full-length novel. This short story was ‘The Mystery of the Plymouth Express’, originally published during The Sketch’s run of Poirot short stories in 1923, and much remains unchanged.[58] The basic story concerns a woman who is found murdered in a train carriage (in the novel she is travelling towards the French Riviera, rather than the short story’s Devon), having apparently been the victim of a plot to steal valuable jewellery that she was travelling with. The book then expands on some obvious potential villains in both the victim’s husband and the lover of the dead woman, a mysterious Count. There’s also a web of alibis that will take the considerable powers of deduction of Poirot to untangle.

The struggle to expand the original story is all too obvious from the opening, however, as Christie offers both narrative dead-ends and disorientating shifts of focus in an attempt to lend some atmosphere and mystery early on. While this material may have been added for stylistic reasons, much of it is also evident as padding, especially when re-read with the knowledge of which plot threads remain relevant, and which come to nothing. In fact, the story itself is a relatively rare Christie that is only really satisfying on its first reading as she works to obfuscate and distract from the actually rather simple (if ingenious) plotting of the murderer. The truth is that the neatly plotted short story does not offer enough material for the fully expanded novel, something that Christie was clearly well aware of, and so she provides a plethora of distractions, particularly extraneous characters, to ensure that the bare bones of the mystery are not inspected too closely, lest the reader should work out the case rather quicker than the author would like.

One remarkable element of the novel lies in its coldness – and even viciousness – towards many of the key characters. Our murder victim, the American heiress Ruth Kettering, is disfigured by a blow to the face following her strangulation with a length of cord, a brutal way to kill a young woman (and further evidence that however one might describe Christie ‘cosy’ is not an apt adjective). Inevitably there are plot reasons for the attack that makes Kettering’s face unrecognisable, but it provides a lingering image for the reader to digest over the course of the novel. This harshness is accentuated by the lack of a narrator who would usually filter such brutality through their own squeamishness or respect for the victim, as Hastings remains in the Argentine. Instead, we get a third-person narrative and our first appearance of Poirot’s valet George, ‘an intensely English, rather wooden-faced individual’. George (or, as Poirot is wont to pronounce, ‘Georges’) doesn’t intrude on the mysteries in which he is present, as he usually functions as a solid sounding-board for Poirot’s ruminations. On this occasion Poirot doesn’t play a part in the novel for quite some time, and keeping the detective off-stage for so long means that the mystery takes longer to develop than usual. However, Poirot seems sure that he will be able to solve this case whatever his involvement, as this is the novel in which he quietly but confidently introduces himself as ‘probably the greatest detective in the world’.

In a typical bout of hyperbole, The Mystery of the Blue Train was publicised as ‘Poirot’s greatest case’ by Collins upon its British publication in March 1928, with some adverts even featuring a bizarre introduction to the story by Poirot himself (but surely not penned by Agatha Christie), in which he wrote:

Mesdames et Messieurs,

Oui, c’est moi, Poirot, back from ze long retiral. I have done something zis time so clevaire with my leetle “grey cells”. You will be thrilled and surpris. Mais oui, you will gasp with ze mouth as I spread my net. I am … what you say? … swell head, yes? Ah well, but I am not such a top ‘ole detective? … je crois que oui!

Hercule Poirot, P.O.I.

(Prince of Investigators)

Nice, Le 25 Mars, 1928

If divorced from its origins and read simply as a new Poirot murder investigation then there is much to admire in the ingenuity of the murderer’s plan and way it is initially presented to the authorities in The Mystery of the Blue Train. Certainly The Times Literary Supplement received the novel as warmly as ever, although the reviewer seemed to be more in awe of Poirot’s detective skills than Christie’s construction, which is a perspective that is difficult to untangle. However, it’s true that without Belgium’s greatest detective on board the police would surely have struggled to make sense of the case, which only adds to his increasingly legendary reputation. In the course of the investigation Poirot allies himself with Katherine Grey, a thirty-three-year-old woman who has worked as an elderly lady’s companion and is now resident in St Mary Mead – we can only speculate on how The Mystery of the Blue Train would be remembered if one of Katherine’s neighbours, Miss Jane Marple, had caught Le Train Bleu in her place …

Alibi
(Play by Michael Morton, 1928)

Agatha Christie was highly proprietorial over her works when it came to adaptations. This was particularly true when it came to film and television, but it was also the case regarding the stage. With this in mind, why was it that Christie allowed another person, the dramatist Michael Morton, to write Poirot’s first appearance away from the world of magazines and books in the play Alibi? Julius Green, in his history of Christie’s writing for the stage, suggests that this may have been the result of pressure from her agents who would have felt that Christie should concentrate on writing novels (which were known to be profitable), and certainly it seems to have been a financially judicious move.[59]

Agatha Christie made no secret of her general unhappiness with changes made by Morton in order to present her mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd for the stage. ‘I much disliked his 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,’ she wrote in her autobiography. In an unpublished section she elaborated on the personal impact of this, writing that Morton ‘upset me, although I fought as valiantly as I could at that time. I was too nervous and submissive to be a good fighter at that period’.[60] Nevertheless, Christie accepted that her creation was only growing in stature:

I was by this time so stuck with Poirot that I realised I was going to have him with me for life. I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier, who was producing, backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor’s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl … I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal: I liked the part she played in village life: and I liked the idea of village life reflected through the life of the doctor and his masterful sister.[61]

Caroline’s replacement was the younger Caryl, and there’s something of a romantic frisson in her relationship with Poirot at the play’s denouement. After they say their final goodbyes (‘Perhaps one day …’ says Poirot as she leaves), stage directions inform us that ‘Poirot turns back to table, takes rose out of specimen glass which is on table, kisses it, and puts it in his button-hole’. One other crucial amendment not mentioned by Christie is the fact that the Poirot of this play is described as ‘the great French detective’, rather than Belgian – an identity change that would have horrified him.

If The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s greatest success was in its experimentation with the mystery form, then Alibi’s greatest weakness is the way it tries to force the story into a more conventional mould. Its translation to the stage inevitably means that the literary twist so central to the original novel must be lost, leaving only a rather mundane skeleton of a story behind. Although the range of Poirot stories available at the time was relatively small, perhaps The Mysterious Affair at Styles would have been a better choice for the theatre because, even if it’s a weaker novel, it has greater reliance on simple but important visuals. If well staged, Styles’s emphasis on these physical clues could be a satisfying part of the puzzle for the audience, alongside the spoken word and alibis, with the placement of a door bolt and the arrangement of ornaments allowing the most observant audience members to make some important deductions. In fact, one of her notebooks that covers stories written in the early 1950s shows a plan for the first two acts of a potential adaptation of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, involving Poirot. The plan is incomplete, and another page that may have included more text has been ripped out, but even though the idea doesn’t seem to have progressed any further it’s intriguing that Christie was even considering this. If time had allowed her to mellow regarding Poirot in the theatre, it certainly didn’t last, as she continued to remove the character from stage adaptations of novels that had featured him. In 1956, she justified her dislike of Poirot on stage by saying that ‘However impeccably acted, they would never quite be my Hercule Poirot’.[62]

When Alibi opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in May 1928 it was the slow plotting of the first few scenes that seems to have grated with several critics. ‘In the first act, drearily long and annoying, characters kept walking on and off the stage,’ wrote the critic for the Daily Express, who went on to clarify that ‘when the action really started, and the detective got to work, Alibi became a most interesting play.’[63] However, the most plaudits were reserved not for Morton or Christie, but Charles Laughton, a rising star of theatre whose performance as Poirot was the highlight of nearly all those who reviewed the play. Laughton was the first person to play Poirot in any dramatic form – before any films, radio plays or television productions – and it’s difficult to imagine now that here he was on stage, setting the template. Pictures show a non-ostentatious moustache nestling on the upper lip of the twenty-eight-year-old, dressed in black tie with a flourishing flower in his buttonhole, while he seems to be surprisingly serious in these posed shots. The Church Times stated that it was Laughton’s portrayal of Poirot ‘which more than anything else contributes to the success of Alibi’, and that the play ‘has been received with the greatest cordiality; but calmly considered, the story of a murderer and its carefully concealed denouement is an affair of words rather than action.’[64] The Daily Express described Laughton’s performance as ‘so subtle, and yet so dominating, that it gripped the house. At the end the shout “Laughton! Laughton!”, to which we are now becoming accustomed, was heard on every hand. The play was an adaptation by Michael Morton of Alibi, a book by Agatha Christie [sic], once famous as the missing woman novelist. She was missing again at the end last night when they shouted “Author!” for she hid in a box.’[65]

When Alibi toured Britain Laughton was replaced by Francis L. Sullivan in the role of Poirot. Photographs of Sullivan make him look slightly jauntier than Laughton – how much this is down to the photographer we can’t know, although Sullivan’s moustache curves upwards at the edges in a rather more impressive way than Laughton’s more demure effort. Sullivan received positive, if slightly more muted, reviews, with The Manchester Guardian saying that ‘Mr Sullivan as Poirot brought a capable finish to the part’.[66] This wasn’t the last time that Sullivan would play the role of Poirot, but Laughton would also reprise the part for a brief Broadway run in 1932, which ran for only twenty-four performances under the title The Fatal Alibi.[67] Although the play wasn’t popular there (unlike in London, where it ran for 250 performances) the overall success of the production demonstrated that, with the right care and attention, Poirot could live and breathe outside of the confines of the written word. In the event, the next time he was to appear on stage Christie would ensure that it was her own words that he was speaking.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.