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 said of it: ‘The plotting is ingenious, the pace sustained, the solution satisfying’.
In her chapter, Agatha Christie plays one of her typical tricks, and in her proposed solution she attempts to foist the crime upon a young man in drag. She is, however, foiled by the writers who follow her, and who send the plot off in several different directions.
The Floating Admiral, out of print and forgotten for many years, was reissued in the United States in a paperback edition in 1980, and in Great Britain in hardback in the autumn of 1981, fifty years after its initial publication.
Peril at End House
POIROT (1932)
Agatha Christie published two books in 1932, one a new Poirot mystery and the other a volume of stories featuring Miss Marple. The Poirot novel, Peril at End House, was dedicated to Eden Phillpotts ‘to whom’, said the author, ‘I shall always be grateful for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me many years ago.’
Though it is one of her best murder mysteries, when she came to write her memoirs about thirty years later Mrs Christie had to confess that Peril at End House had left so little impression on her mind that she could not even remember having written it. This seems to have led some recent critics to undervalue what is, in fact, one of Agatha Christie’s most ingenious puzzle stories with a brilliant plot and some very lively characterization.
The action at Peril at End House takes place at ‘the Queen of Watering Places’ on the south coast of England, a town called St Loo which reminds Hastings forcibly of the Riviera. Although it is supposed to be in the adjoining county of Cornwall, from the author’s description of its topography St Loo is obviously her home town of Torquay in Devon, and the Majestic Hotel where Poirot and Hastings are holidaying is the famous Imperial Hotel, lightly disguised. Hastings is in England on one of his periodical visits from the Argentine: reference is made to the murder on the Blue Train two or three years earlier, which Poirot had been forced to solve without Hastings’ assistance.
At the Majestic Hotel, Poirot and Hastings make the acquaintance of a charming though somewhat brittle young lady, Nick Buckley, who lives at End House up on the cliffs, and who, it seems, has recently been having some very narrow escapes from death. Poirot is convinced that someone is trying to kill her, but Nick appears to treat the matter as a huge joke until her cousin is killed at End House, perhaps having been mistaken for her. This is one of those novels in which Mrs Christie behaves most like the stage conjuror who confuses his audience by compelling them to watch his right hand while he deceives them with his left. It is also one of those novels in which she plays tricks with people’s names.
The particular deception which she practises in Peril at End House is one which Mrs Christie liked so much that she resorted to it again in more than one future novel. Some readers might think it as unfair as the infamous trick she played in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, though no one appears to have objected to it when the novel first appeared. The characters are an especially lively bunch, most of them friends or relatives of the ultramodern Miss Buckley, and among them is the young Jewish art dealer, Jim Lazarus. Mr Lazarus is marginally less unsympathetically described than others of his race have been in earlier Christie novels. Condescension appears to have replaced active dislike. ‘He’s a Jew, of course,’ someone says of him, ‘but a frightfully decent one.’ But when he offers fifty pounds for a picture which is worth no more than twenty, the point is made by Poirot, that ‘the long-nosed M. Lazarus’ has behaved in a manner ‘most uncharacteristic of his race’. You are saddened to hear this from Poirot, who must himself frequently have been the butt of other people’s xenophobia.
The characters include a mysterious Australian couple who, as Poirot observes, are almost too good to be true, with their cries of ‘Cooee’ and their not quite properly employed antipodean slang (‘And now you tell me you’re a bonza detective’). The Australia she had visited some years earlier was perhaps beginning to fade in Mrs Christie’s memory. Hastings has a decidedly odd lapse of memory when, in response to a comment by Poirot on the success which he and his wife have made of their ranch in the Argentine, he says, ‘Bella always goes by my judgment.’ But Hastings’ wife is called Dulcie. Bella, one recalls from The Murder on the Links in which Hastings met both girls, is the name of Dulcie’s sister.
Some years after its publication, Peril at End House was adapted for the stage by Arnold Ridley, author of the popular comedy-thriller, The Ghost Train. With Francis L. Sullivan as Poirot12 (whom he had already impersonated in 1930 in Black Coffee), the play began a pre-London tour on 2 January 1940, and opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, on 1 May. The cast included Ian Fleming (Hastings), Olga Edwards (Nick Buckley) and Brian Oulton (Charles Vyse). As it was 1940, and anti-semitism was no longer fashionable, the ‘long-nosed M. Lazarus’ of the 1932 novel became Terry Ord, ‘a tall good-looking man of about thirty-five’ and presumably a gentile.
A television adaptation of Peril at End House, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 7 January 1990.
The Thirteen Problems
Alternative title: The Tuesday Club Murders
MISS MARPLE (1932)
Having successfully introduced her amateur detective, Miss Jane Marple, in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930), Agatha Christie wrote for a magazine a series of six short stories featuring Miss Marple. In the first story, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, the old lady is entertaining a group of friends at her house in the village of St Mary Mead. Her guests are her nephew Raymond West, the novelist, and his fiancé, an artist named Joyce Lemprière; Dr Pender, the elderly clergyman of the parish (what, one wonders, has happened to the Rev. Leonard Clement, the vicar in The Murder at the Vicarage?); Mr Petherick, a local solicitor; and a visitor to St Mary Mead, Sir Henry Clithering, who is a retired Commissioner of Scotland Yard.
The talk turns to crime, and Joyce Lemprière suggests that they form a club, to meet every Tuesday evening. Each week, a different member of the group will propound a problem, some mystery or other of which they have personal knowledge, which the others will be invited to solve. In the first story, Sir Henry is invited to start the ball rolling. Of course, Miss Marple is the one to arrive at the correct solution every time, not because she possesses any brilliant deductive powers but because, as she puts it, ‘human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village’.
In a second series of six stories, Mrs Christie repeated the formula, the setting this time being the country house of Colonel and Mrs Bantry, near St Mary Mead, and the assembled company including Sir Henry again, the local doctor, a famous actress and, of course, Miss Marple. A separate, single story, in which Sir Henry visits St Mary Mead yet again, to stay with his friends the Bantrys, and finds himself drawn by Miss Marple into the investigation of a local crime, was added to the earlier twelve, and the collection, dedicated to Leonard and Katherine Woolley, with whom Agatha Christie had stayed in the Middle East, was published in Great Britain as The Thirteen Problems and in the United States as The Tuesday Club Murders, though only the first six cases appear to have been discussed at meetings of the Tuesday Club.
Some of the stories are especially ingenious, and all are entertaining, though if more than one or two are read at one sitting they can become monotonous, for they are all very sedentary stories whose action is recounted in retrospect. Miss Marple solves most of the mysteries without rising from her chair, and almost without dropping a stitch in her knitting. The exception is the final story, ‘Death by Drowning’, which is also one of the few occasions when Agatha Christie strayed into workingclass territory. Usually, it is only the crimes of the middle and upperclasses which commend themselves to her investigators.
For all her old-world charm, and the twinkle which is never far from her china-blue eyes, Miss Marple can be stern in her opinions. Talking of a murderer whom she had brought to justice and who had been hanged, she remarks that it was a good job and that she had no patience with modern humanitarian scruples about capital punishment. Miss Marple is speaking not only for herself but also for her creator, for many years later Mrs Christie was to write:
I can suspend judgment on those who kill – but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which, perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare them – because you cannot spare them any more than you could spare the man who staggers out from a plague-stricken village in the Middle Ages to mix with innocent and healthy children in a nearby village. The innocent must be protected; they must be able to live at peace and charity with their neighbours.
It frightens me that nobody seems to care about the innocent. When you read about a murder case, nobody seems to be horrified by the picture, say, of a fragile old woman in a small cigarette shop, turning away to get a packet of cigarettes for a young thug, and being attacked and battered to death. No one seems to care about her terror and her pain, and the final merciful unconsciousness. Nobody seems to go through the agony of the victim – they are only full of pity for the young killer, because of his youth.
Why should they not execute him? We have taken the lives of wolves, in this country; we didn’t try to teach the wolf to lie down with the lamb – I doubt really if we could have. We hunted down the wild boar in the mountains before he came down and killed the children by the brook. Those were our enemies – and we destroyed them.13
Imprisonment for life, Mrs Christie goes on to say, is more cruel than the cup of hemlock in ancient Greece. The best answer ever found, she suspects, was transportation: ‘A vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings, where man could live in simpler surroundings.’ Well, yes, but of course the price one pays for that is the Australia of today!
Five minor points about The Thirteen Problems, two concerned with Christie carelessness and three with Christie parsimony: (i) in one of the stories, ‘phenomena’ is used as though it were a singular, and not the plural of ‘phenomenon’; (ii) in The Thirteen Problems, Raymond West’s fiancée is called Joyce but, in later Christie stories, after they are married, she is always referred to as Joan; (iii) variations on the plot of one of the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’, will be presented in the story ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ in Murder in the Mews (1937) and in the novel, Evil Under the Sun (1941); (iv) the plot of another story, ‘The Companion’, will be made use of again in the novel, A Murder is Announced (1950); (v) an element in the plot of ‘The Herb of Death’ will re-occur in Postern of Fate (1973).
Agatha Christie always considered that Miss Marple was at her best in the solving of short problems, which did not involve her in doing anything other than sitting and thinking, and that the real essence of her character was to be found in the stories collected together in The Thirteen Problems.
Lord Edgware Dies
Alternative title: Thirteen at Dinner
POIROT (1933)
In 1933, Max Mallowan was ready to conduct a dig of his own in the Middle East, and he was fortunate enough to be sponsored by the British Museum to lead an expedition to Iraq to excavate for two months at Arpachiyah, not far from the site of Ninevah where he had worked the previous year. His party consisted only of his wife, Agatha, and a young architect, John Rose. Such was Agatha Christie’s fame by this time that the British press announcements of the expedition emphasized her involvement in it.
After the Mallowans had arrived in Iraq, the beginning of the enterprise was unpropitious, for the rain poured down so heavily that it was almost impossible to move about, and finding out who owned the land on which it was proposed to dig proved incredibly difficult. As Agatha explained in her memoirs years later, questions of land ownership in the Middle East were always fraught with difficulty. If the land was far enough away from cities it was under the jurisdiction of a Sheikh, but anything classified as a tell, that is a hillock or mound thought to be covering the ruins of an ancient city, was considered the property of the government. The tell of Arpachiyah was apparently not large enough to have been classified as such, so the Mallowan party had to negotiate with the owner of the land.
This was less simple than it appeared to be, for the huge, cheerful man who assured Max Mallowan that he was the owner was contradicted the following day by his wife’s second cousin who claimed ownership, and by the third day of negotiations Mallowan had identified fourteen (according to Agatha, nineteen) owners, who were rounded up in two horse-drawn cabs, conveyed to the Ottoman Bank in Mosul and persuaded to append their thumb-marks to a contract.
The dig produced some extraordinary finds; among them a potter’s shop with numerous dishes, vases, cups and plates, a cemetery dating from 4,000 bc which contained forty-five graves, and a rich collection of small objects such as amulets, necklaces, knives and pieces of pottery. Agatha’s tasks included washing, labelling and sometimes mending the objects discovered. She loved the work, and soon became highly competent at any job assigned to her. She was to assist her husband on all of his digs in the Middle East throughout the nineteen-thirties, learning in the process a great deal about the sites of antiquity which were being uncovered. At Arpachiyah, Agatha found time to write Murder on the Orient Express.
To celebrate the end of the season, the three members of the expedition decided to organize a cross-country race, open to all the Arab workers who had taken part in the excavations. Agatha dignified the proceedings with a name: the Arpachiyah Amateur Athletic Association, or AAAA, and Max Mallowan described the occasion in his memoirs:14
The rules were announced to all would-be competitors on the dig, and it was decreed that the race should be run from the Nergal gate at Ninevah on the Mosul side of the river Khusr, thus involving a river crossing, over a length of about three-and-a-half miles, the finishing point to be just below the tholos in Arpachiyah. We offered substantial rewards to the competitors, the first prize to consist of a cow and a calf, second prize a sheep and a lamb, the third price a goat and a kid and the fourth, as far as I remember, was a substantial sack of dates. The fifth prize was a hundred eggs, and after15 that in descending denominations there were nine more prizes of eggs in all; moreover, every competitor who finished and did not fall out of the race was to be rewarded by a presentation of as much helawa, that is as much sweetmeat as could be covered by the span of two hands – a generous ration. Our cook was kept busy for many days organizing the purchase of these goods in the market at Mosul. He was an Indian; ‘Too much work, Memsahib,’ he said to Agatha, and I think did not particularly enjoy collecting the prizes, which on the day of the race were motored out to Arpachiyah in our lorry.
According to Agatha, the first thing that happened when the starting pistol was fired was that everyone made a concerted rush forward and most of them fell flat on their faces into the river. There had been a great deal of betting on the race, and when it was over a huge feast was held at night at which most of the prizes were consumed in a very short time. It was a great day for the AAAA.
It was early in May when the expedition departed first for Baghdad, where an equitable division of the objects found was made at the Baghdad Museum, and it was then back home to England. The Director of Antiquities in Baghdad, Dr Julius Jordan, a German, was a Nazi agent who did all he could to undermine British authority in Iraq. Personally, he could not have been more charming to the Mallowans. He was an excellent pianist, played Beethoven sonatas for them, and seemed always a gentle, considerate and cultured human being. But, at tea one day in his house, someone mentioned Jews. Agatha noticed that the expression on Dr Jordan’s face changed suddenly, ‘in an extraordinary way that I had never noticed on anyone’s face before’. ‘You do not understand,’ said the Doctor. ‘Our Jews are perhaps different from yours. They are a danger. They should be exterminated. Nothing else will really do but that.’
Agatha stared at him unbelievingly. It was, she wrote later, the first time she had come across any hint of what was soon to happen in Germany. She had met her first Nazi, and she discovered later that Dr Jordan’s wife was an even more fanatical Nazi than her husband. It must have been, you cannot help thinking, a salutary experience for Agatha Christie, for the casual anti-semitic comments which disfigure most of her earlier books are not to be found in such profusion in those published after the mid-thirties. Probably, too, her outlook was broadened by her contact with the more cosmopolitan mind of Max Mallowan.
After the Mallowans arrived back in England, Max spent a busy summer writing up his account of the expedition. An exhibition of some of their finds was held at the British Museum, and Max’s book on Arpachiyah was published several months later. But on the actual day of their return to London from the Middle East, it was the novelist, not the archaeologist, whom the journalists were most concerned to interview.
The novel which Agatha Christie had written in the autumn of 1931 at Ninevah, on the table she purchased at the Mosul bazaar, was published in the spring of 1933 in Great Britain as Lord Edgware Dies and in the United States as Thirteen at Dinner, and dedicated to Dr and Mrs Campbell Thompson, the leader of the Ninevah expedition and his wife.
Poirot, who has solved murders in English villages and French seaside resorts, finds himself this time investigating a crime in the West End of London, supping at the Savoy, interviewing suspects in a mansion in Regent’s Park, and venturing no farther from the metropolis than Sir Montagu Corner’s house on the river at Chiswick, which is where the dinner party for thirteen takes place.
When Lord Edgware, a thoroughly unsympathetic character, is murdered, suspicion falls upon his wife, the beautiful actress, Jane Wilkinson. An important character in the story is Carlotta Adams, an American actress who has taken the West End by storm with her one-woman show in which she impersonates a number of different characters. ‘Her sketch of an evening in a foreign hotel was really wonderful. In turn, American tourists, German tourists, middleclass English families, questionable ladies, impoverished Russian aristocrats and weary discreet waiters all flitted across the scene.’ Carlotta Adams includes in her performance an amazingly accurate impersonation of Jane Wilkinson.
Agatha Christie revealed in her autobiography that the idea for Lord Edgware Dies had first come to her after she had been to a performance by the famous American entertainer, Ruth Draper. ‘I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were; the wonderful way she could transform herself from a nagging wife to a peasant girl kneeling in a cathedral.’ Carlotta Adams was clearly based on Ruth Draper, whom older playgoers in London will remember, for, although she first appeared in London in 1920 with her dramatic monologues at two matinées at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street (Carlotta Adams in Lord Edgware Dies ‘had given a couple of matinées which had been a wild success’ before doing a three weeks’ season the following year), Ruth Draper continued to visit London for the following thirty-six years, giving her final performance at the St James’s Theatre (now, alas, demolished) in July 1956, the year of her death. She possessed, to an extraordinary extent, the ability to alter her appearance with the minimum of help from props or costumes, merely by thinking herself into the character she wished to impersonate.
In Lord Edgware Dies, there are witnesses willing to swear that the woman who visited the victim shortly before his death was his estranged wife, Jane Wilkinson, who had rather melodramatically announced her intention of killing him. Of course, it is possible that Jane Wilkinson was impersonated by Carlotta Adams. On the other hand, there are several other hands involved. Agatha Christie is not one to make life easy for her detectives, or for her readers, and this particular Poirot murder mystery is one of her most brilliantly plotted. The characterization, too, is richly enjoyable, for Mrs Christie seems as much at home with these peers, actresses, and Jewish financiers as with the villagers of St Mary Mead.
The anti-semitism is still to be found, not so much in the portrait of Sir Montagu Corner, who does no worse than show off his knowledge of ‘Japanese prints, of Chinese lacquer, of Persian carpets, of the French impressionists, of modern music and of the theories of Einstein’ before allowing Poirot to get a word in, but in a young and impoverished aristocrat’s comments on the wealthy Rachel Dortheimer, with whom he flirts in a box at the opera, but of whom he later comments that ‘her long Jewish nose is quivering with emotion’. This is by no means the last Christie novel which will be disfigured by what Jacques Barzun16 has called ‘the usual tedious British anti-Semitism’, which will continue to surface in her pages until the war years, though less frequently than heretofore.
Hastings is at Poirot’s side throughout this adventure. Why he is not at home with his wife in the Argentine is not explained: he is recalled home at the end of the story. Incidentally, it is in this novel that we discover Hastings to have a small ‘tooth-brush’ moustache, for Poirot contrasts it scornfully with his own ludicrously luxuriant waxed creation. We discover, too, that young men, if they are too good-looking (‘It isn’t natural for a man to have good looks like that’) are likely to have very dubious morals. ‘Not the usual thing. Something a great deal more recherché and nasty,’ says Inspector Japp of a suspect’s sex-life, though probably all he means is ‘Not girls but boys’.
Poirot’s investigation is interrupted by his being called away to solve the case of ‘The Ambassador’s Boots’. This is an example of Mrs Christie’s occasional absent-mindedness, for the case in question was solved not by Poirot but by Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. ‘The Ambassador’s Boots’ is an episode in Partners in Crime.
In 1934, Lord Edgware Dies was filmed by Read Art Films, with Austin Trevor playing Poirot for the third and last time, Richard Cooper as Hastings and Melville Cooper as Inspector Japp, roles they had played in the film of Black Coffee. Jane Wilkinson was played by Jane Carr, and the film was produced by Julius Hagen and directed by Henry Edwards. Though well acted, it did only moderately well at the box office, and was dismissed by one unsympathetic reviewer as ‘just another conventional mystery play’.
As Thirteen at Dinner, a TV movie version was produced by Warner Brothers in 1985, with Peter Ustinov as Poirot.
The Hound of Death
SHORT STORIES (1933)
It was in the thirties that Agatha Christie was most productive, for between 1931 and 1943 there was not a year in which she did not publish at least two titles. In 1933, her second title was The Hound of Death, a volume of twelve stories, the majority of which defy classification as murder mysteries or crime stories but which could perhaps be collectively described as stories about mental or psychic disturbance.
Some are about the supernatural world. Mrs Christie throughout her life retained a healthy respect for phenomena not susceptible to rational explanation, though her natural scepticism led her to seek first an explanation in rationalism. But, as a devout Anglican, in an age when the Church of England still adhered to most of its traditional beliefs, she did not find it necessary to shy away from problems of the spirit or the psyche: in The Hound of Death she tackled one or two such problems head-on. Some of these stories of the bizarre, the occult and the macabre are among her most interesting, whether they are concerned with apparently genuine psychic phenomena or with dishonest manipulation.
The title story, ‘The Hound of Death’, if it were written today would be classified as science fiction, although at the time of its publication it must have seemed to be more in the tradition of M. R. James and his tales of the occult. In an interview with Nigel Dennis in 1956, Agatha Christie professed a keen interest in science fiction. Had she been a few years younger, she would probably have made major contributions to that particular genre. What today is scientific was yesterday considered occult, and ‘The Hound of Death’ concerns itself with a phenomenon which could be either, and with a Belgian nun who is able to harness thought, or prayer, to unleash destructive forces.
‘The Red Signal’, though a crime story, involves a genuine case not necessarily of spiritualism but certainly of extra-sensory perception, and introduces Mrs Thompson, a plump, middle-aged medium, ‘atrociously dressed in magenta velvet’ who, with her Japanese spirit control and her fondness for Welsh rarebit, is a forerunner of Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s play, Blithe Spirit (1941). Extra-sensory perception is also the basis of ‘The Gypsy’; a moving little ghost story, ‘The Lamp’, has echoes of Henry James and The Turn of the Screw, and ‘Wireless’ (known in the United States as ‘Where There’s a Will’) brings an ironic twist to crime and the spirit world.
‘The Call of Wings’, in which a phrase from Wagner’s Rienzi exemplifies the mystical, transforming power of music, is one of the earliest short stories Agatha Christie wrote, dating from before the First World War. Towards the end of her life, the author herself still thought it ‘not bad’. You wish she had pursued this particular vein of fantasy more thoroughly, for ‘The Call of Wings’ is a fascinating little parable about the nature and perhaps the purpose of art.
The most ingenious story in the volume is a piece of crime fiction, ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’ which, twenty years later, Agatha Christie turned into a play with (almost) the same title, and which subsequently became a film. This is one of her finest stories. It is interesting to note that, in the story, the criminal escapes justice, but that, by the time she came to write the stage adaptation, Mrs Christie wanted her murderer punished, if not by the law then by some other agency. She altered the ending accordingly, and fought successfully to have her new ending accepted, for those concerned with the production of the play apparently would have preferred the original ending.
‘The Fourth Man’, which is about dual personality, and ‘The Last Seance’, a powerful and frightening supernatural tale, are among the other very successful stories in The Hound of Death, but there is really not one failure among the entire twelve.
The Hound of Death was not published as a collection in the US. All twelve stories have appeared in America, but spread, together with other stories, between three volumes. ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, ‘The Red Signal’, ‘The Fourth Man’,
‘Wireless’ (under the title ‘Where There’s a Will’), ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’ and ‘S.O.S.’ are to be found with three other stories in a volume published only in the United States, Witness for the Prosecution (1948). ‘The Last Seance’ is in a volume of eight stories, Double Sin, published in the United States in 1961, its contents drawn from several English collections. The remaining stories, ‘The Hound of Death’, ‘The Gypsy’, ‘The Lamp’, ‘The Strange Case of Sir Arthur Carmichael’ and ‘The Call of Wings’ are in The Golden Ball, a volume of fifteen stories published in the United States in 1971. (All but two of the other stories in The Golden Ball come from a 1934 English volume, The Listerdale Mystery.)
Two of the stories, ‘The Fourth Man’ and ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, were seen on Thames TV in 1982 as episodes in a ten-part series, The Agatha Christie Hour. A television adaptation of ‘The Last Seance’, starring Jeanne Moreau, was first shown on Granada TV on 27 September 1986.
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
Alternative title: The Boomerang Clue
(1934)
For most of the nineteen-thirties, until shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Mallowans spent part of every year on archaeological excavations in Syria. Agatha helped Max in various ways, and managed to write a number of her books at times when she was not washing or marking pottery, taking photographs, or dealing with the expedition’s paper work. The usual season for excavation in the Middle East was from October to March, and much of the spring and summer period from April to September was spent happily in Devon, at Agatha’s family home in Torquay.
After successfully leading his expedition at Arpachiyah, Max Mallowan turned his attention to another part of Mesopotamia. Syria, which was then under French Mandate, offered generous terms to the archaeological excavator and granted licences for digging with a minimum of red tape. Mallowan’s special interests at this time were prehistoric, but he wanted to widen them. Western Syria and the Lebanon were already the scene of intense archaeological activity, so Mallowan decided to conduct a survey in the Habur Valley in the northeast of Syria, and he and Agatha spent November and December of 1934 in the Middle East in connection with this. The preparations for their survey involved a long stay in Beirut, where they found a modest little hotel named Bassoul, with what Max Mallowan described as a delightful terrace overlooking the waterfront. In Beirut they purchased a four-cylinder Ford van for £150, had its chassis raised to make it more suitable for the rough terrain they intended to survey, painted it lavender and christened it ‘Queen Mary’ because of its great dignity and height. This remarkable vehicle conveyed equipment and four tents, two for the Europeans, one for the servants, and one which housed the lavatory.
On leaving Beirut, the party headed for Homas and then crossed to Palmyra. They established a camp near Hasaka, at the junction of the upper and lower Habur and one of the wadis. Later, they went a few miles south and pitched camp at a place called Meyadin in the courtyard of a huge khan.17 The pillar of the expedition, according to Mallowan, was a young architect named Robin Macartney, ‘a man endowed with a cast-iron stomach and few words’. Agatha at first found Mac extremely difficult to get to know. She was convinced that his taciturnity and monosyllabic replies to her conversational gambits meant that he disapproved of her. It was not until Mac’s reserve was broken down when he fell headlong into thick, slimy mud while attempting to put up a tent, and his spontaneous language was discovered to be less stuffy than his usual speech, that the barriers fell and Mac and Agatha became firm friends.
The expedition examined various tells, until finally Mallowan decided to concentrate upon Tell Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak. Chagar Bazar seemed to him the most tempting, rewarding and practical prospect, so this became his immediate objective for the following season, after which he planned to make an attempt on the mighty mound of Tell Brak. Mallowan recognized that Tell Brak was probably the most important archaeological site he would have the opportunity to explore, and made a resolution that he would dig there one day. However, he decided to get his bearings by first excavating the lesser but important mound of Chagar Bazar.
In due course, the party made its way back to the Mediterranean coast, Mrs Mallowan electing to travel by train and meet Max and Mac at Aleppo. From Aleppo they all went on by train to Beirut where the Mallowans parted from Mac, who was going to Palestine. Max and Agatha spent the winter in Egypt.
1934 was the year in which five titles by Agatha Christie were published: two crime novels, two volumes of short stories and, under her pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, a crypto-autobiographical novel. Both crime novels are among Mrs Christie’s best.
The first to appear, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (published in the United States as The Boomerang Clue) is in the same category as The Secret Adversary, The Man in the Brown Suit, The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery, in that its characters do not include any one of Mrs Christie’s regular detectives. The mystery or crime is solved by one or more of the people involved, with little help from police or other professional investigators. The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery, in both of which Lady Eileen Brent, familiarly known as ‘Bundle’, played a major part, had both been more than faintly Wodehousian. Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? also has a somewhat bossy young lady of the aristocratic class, Lady Frances Derwent (Frankie) who helps her middleclass chum, Bobby Jones, the vicar’s son, to investigate a murder, but its tone is more akin to the early novels of Evelyn Waugh than to Wodehouse. At moments, the world of Vile Bodies (published in 1930) is not far away. As a team, Frankie and Bobby have much in common with Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and like the Beresfords they are motivated as much by a desire for adventure as by any pressing need to become involved with the mystery which confronts them.
The title, both in its English and American versions, derives from the cryptic question uttered shortly before he dies by a man who has apparently fallen over a cliff on the west coast of Wales. He has been found by Bobby, who stays with the dying man while his golfing companion, the local doctor, goes off for help. The man opens his eyes, murmurs, ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’, and dies. It is, as we shall discover more than thirty chapters later, a boomerang clue, indeed. But Bobby and Lady Frances undergo a number of adventures before the meaning of the question is revealed to them, adventures which include being bound and gagged by the villain and left in an attic to die, and all related in the light-hearted style which Agatha Christie adopted for her thrillers. A certain economy with plot devices becomes apparent, when Bobby climbs a tree to look through a window into a nursing home and falls from the tree. Julius P. Hersheimmer had done exactly the same in The Secret Adversary twelve years earlier. Frankie’s trick, in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, of deliberately crashing her car, will be imitated by Oliver Manders in Three-Act Tragedy, and for the same reason.
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is both thriller and mystery, and is thoroughly satisfying as either. In 1980, it was filmed by a British television company, London Weekend. A faithful adaptation of the novel, it was impeccably directed by Tony Wharmby and John Davies. A first-rate cast included Francesca Annis as Frankie; James Warwick as Bobby; John Gielgud as Bobby’s father, the vicar; with Eric Porter, Bernard Miles, Leigh Lawson, Madeline Smith, Connie Booth and Robert Longden in other leading roles.
Murder on the Orient Express
Alternative title: Murder in the Calais Coach
POIROT (1934)
Written on the dig at Arpachiyah in 1933, and dedicated to her husband, Murder on the Orient Express is one of Agatha Christie’s most popular and, in the audacity of its solution, most outrageous murder mysteries. Almost the entire action takes place on the famous train on which, by the time she came to write the novel, Mrs Christie had travelled a number of times. For years before she set foot on the Orient Express, she had longed to travel on it. ‘When I had travelled to France or Spain or Italy,’ she wrote much later,18 ‘the Orient Express had often been standing at Calais, and I had longed to climb up into it.’ She had travelled most of the way to and from Arpachiyah in 1933 on the Orient Express and, as she told an interviewer much later, was able to ensure that her details were accurate: ‘On the way back I was able to check on things I had thought about on the way out. I had to see where all the switches were. After he had read my book, one man actually made the journey to check up on this.’
The confidence trick Mrs Christie plays on her readers this time is even more dazzling than the one in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The plot must by now be well known, especially since the very successful 1974 film of the novel; but Christie fans tend to play fair and not reveal dénouements to the uninitiated, and so future generations will probably still be able to enjoy pitting their wits against the cunning authoress. It gives little away to reveal that Mrs Christie clearly was inspired to write Murder on the Orient Express not only by the romantic image of the train which had intrigued her for years before she travelled on it for the first time but also by the tragic Lindbergh kidnapping. (The American aviator Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. In March 1932, his infant son was kidnapped and killed.) The startling solution to the problem posed by Murder on the Orient Express was first suggested to Agatha Christie by her husband Max Mallowan, to whom the novel is dedicated.
The murder is committed in one of the sleeping compartments in the Istanbul-Calais coach of the train, and much of the subsequent action takes place in that coach and the adjoining one, which is the restaurant car. Hercule Poirot is on the train, returning from a visit to Syria, where he has solved a difficult problem for the government of France. Shortly after the murder has been committed the train is brought to a halt in the middle of Yugoslavia by a snowstorm, and Poirot is prevailed upon by his old friend, M. Bouc, a Director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits, to investigate, in the hope that, by the time the train reaches the Italian border, the murderer will have been apprehended and can be handed over to the Yugoslav police.
The suspects are a colourful and international collection of travellers: Mrs Hubbard, a loquacious American who has been visiting her daughter in Smyrna; the Princess Dragomiroff, an exotic Russian accompanied by her German maid; the Count and Countess Andrenyi, a Hungarian diplomat and his wife; a young English governess; a British Colonel on his way home from India on leave; Greta Ohlsson, a Swedish missionary (‘Poor creature,’ someone says of her, ‘she’s a Swede’); and two or three others. The murder victim is an American businessman named Ratchett. At least some of these individuals are not what, at first sight, they appear to be.
The famous American crime novelist Raymond Chandler was known to have despised Agatha Christie’s solution to the Orient Express mystery, but he was one of a very small minority. Oddly, Agatha Christie revealed the ending by referring to it in a Poirot novel, Cards on the Table, two years later. All that will be said here of the solution is that, though perhaps improbable, it does explain an earlier improbability in the story.
Poirot, in fact, propounds two theories, one of which is more likely than the other, and allows M. Bouc of the Wagon Lit company to choose between them. The question of whether to allow the criminal to escape is raised, and it becomes clear that Poirot is, under certain circumstances, not averse to allowing someone to take the law into his own hands, if justice cannot be achieved by legal means. Mrs Christie appears to condone this, not only in Murder on the Orient Express but also, a quarter of a century later, in a play, The Unexpected Guest. In other words, not only did she not disapprove of capital punishment, she was also willing, under certain circumstances, for that punishment to be inflicted by agencies outside the legal system.
The murder mystery is usually at its best when a group of people are isolated from the world at large, on an ocean liner, in a snow-bound country house or, as in this instance, on a train. The train has a fascination of its own, especially the glamorous international train, and none more so than the Orient Express, which is now only a memory, though a London-Venice rail service, calling itself Venice Simplon-Orient Express Ltd and using four of the old Pullman carriages, recommenced in 1982.19
Agatha Christie’s murder mystery is not the first novel of adventure to have been set on the famous train. La Madonne des Sleepings by Maurice Dekobra (1925) had appeared in an English translation in 1927 as The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, and Graham Greene’s Stamboul Train was published in 1932, two years before Agatha Christie’s novel. It is curious that Greene’s title was changed for American publication to Orient Express, since Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express was published in America as Murder in the Calais Coach. Could it have been that the Christie title was changed in order to avoid confusion in the United States with Graham Greene’s novel?
On its first publication, Murder on the Orient Express was widely and favourably reviewed. The distinguished novelist Compton Mackenzie, writing in the London Daily Mail, called it ‘a capital example of its class’, and even Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie’s rival in the field of crime fiction, wrote in the Sunday Times that it was ‘a murder mystery conceived and carried out on the finest classical lines’. Reviewing the American edition, Time Magazine said: ‘Basing the tale on America’s great kidnapping, the author brings the arch-criminal on a snow-bound Yugoslavian express. Coincidentally, the rotund, penetrating Poirot is aboard. Clues abound. Alibis are frequent and unassailable. But nothing confounds the great Hercule who, after propounding alternative solutions to his jury of two, retires modestly.’
Murder on the Orient Express was made into a film, but not until 1974 when it became the most successful British film ever made, with gross profits of more than £20,000,000. EMI was the production company, the producers were John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin, and the director was Sidney Lumet. All the roles were played by stars or very well-known feature actors: Albert Finney (Poirot), Richard Widmark (Ratchett, the victim), Lauren Bacall (Mrs Hubbard), Wendy Hiller (Princess Dragomiroff), Rachel Roberts (Hildegarde Schmidt, the German maid), Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset (the Andrenyis), Vanessa Redgrave (Mary Debenham, the English governess), Sean Connery (Colonel Arbuthnot), Ingrid Bergman (Greta Ohlsson), Martin Balsam (M. Bouc, whose name was changed, presumably for reasons of euphony, to Bianchi), John Gielgud (the victim’s valet, with again a change of name from Masterman to Beddoes), Anthony Perkins, Colin Blakely, Denis Quilley, and Jean Pierre Cassel.
This was altogether a different affair from the cheaply made Agatha Christie movies of the thirties. Expensively and stylishly produced in colour, it was highly entertaining, though the profusion of famous faces on the screen tended to detract from the dramatic effect. Albert Finney took great pains to sink himself into the character of Poirot, with the help of an excellent make-up artist, but the other stars were instantly recognizable. Recreated at the studio in Elstree by the designer Tony Walton, who had managed to borrow parts of the old Orient Express from the museum of the Compagnie des Wagons Lits in Paris, the train almost stole the show.
Paul Dehn’s screenplay was highly respectful to the novel. Max Mallowan revealed that Agatha Christie, who generally disliked the film versions of her books, ‘gave a rather grudging appreciation to this one’, which was described in the London Times as ‘touchingly loyal’ to its source. The Times critic added, ‘It stays precisely at the level of Agatha Christie, demands the same adjustments, the same precarious suspension of disbelief’.
Agatha Christie said of the film: ‘It was very well made except for one mistake I cannot find in my heart to forgive. It was Albert Finney as my detective Hercule Poirot. I wrote that he had the finest moustache in England – and he didn’t in the film. I thought that a pity. Why shouldn’t he have the best moustache?’20
On 3 May 1981, the London News of the World reported a murder in Bamberg, West Germany, which it called ‘a carbon-copy crime of Agatha Christie’s thriller, Murder on the Orient Express’. The method by which a sixteen-year-old girl was killed certainly suggested a knowledge of the novel or the film.
The Listerdale Mystery
SHORT STORIES (1934)
Of the twelve stories which comprise The Listerdale Mystery, no more than seven are concerned with crime, although deception of one kind or another is practised in most of them. They are, with one or two exceptions, frivolous and amusing in tone, agreeable though rather slight. The ‘romantic interest’ which Mrs Christie tended to minimize in her crime novels is indulged in several of the stories in which young couples are thrown together because of crimes or swindles of some kind, and fall in love. This happens in the title story, ‘The Listerdale Mystery’, though the ‘swindle’ is a charitable one and the couple are not exactly in the first flush of youth. There is a snobbishly slighting reference to ‘half-castes’.
In ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’, the old nursery rhyme is used in the detection of a crime. It must have been one of Agatha Christie’s favourite nursery rhymes, for it was later to feature in a Miss Marple novel, A Pocket Full of Rye (1953) as well as in the short story ‘Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds’ (in Three Blind Mice, USA, 1948, and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, UK, 1960).
The hero of ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’ is a resourceful young man named James Bond, who is almost as adept in the apprehension of criminals as Ian Fleming’s less agreeable character of the same name who flourished in the 1950s. The final story in the volume, ‘Swan Song’, will appeal to opera buffs, for it concerns a prima donna who gives a charity performance of Tosca, at which her Scarpia dies in earnest. The plot is rather obvious, but at least Agatha Christie is familiar with Puccini’s opera, and the references to Maria Jeritza suggest that the author may have attended that temperamental prima donna’s sole performance in Tosca at Covent Garden on 16 June 1925, when Jeritza sang the aria, ‘Vissi d’arte’, lying on her stomach on the floor. (‘And why not?’ is the response of Agatha Christie’s soprano, Paula Nazorkoff. ‘I will sing it on my back with my legs waving in the air.’) Since Agatha Christie retained a love of music throughout her life, it is odd that ‘Swan Song’ should be her only story, apart from Giants’ Bread, to concern that art, and odder still that she should not know that Radames in Aida is a tenor role.
‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’ has caused some bibliographical confusion amongst writers on Agatha Christie. In it, Anthony Eastwood, a young writer, is attempting to produce a story called ‘The Mystery of the Second Cucumber’. Eventually, he changes his mind and begins another story which he intends to call ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Shawl’. Agatha Christie’s story, ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’, has appeared in the United States in the volume, Surprise! Surprise! under the title of ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Shawl’. ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Shawl’ is the same story as ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’, and has no connection with another Christie story which exists not only under two titles but in two versions (one with and one without Hastings): ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ and ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’.
The two best-known stories in The Listerdale Mystery are ‘Accident’ and ‘Philomel Cottage’. The former, a clever and chillingly ironic little tale about a murderer who is not caught at the end, has been reprinted in several anthologies of crime stories, while the latter, a first-rate story of suspense with a dénouement which is open to more than one interpretation, was expanded in 1936 by the actor and playwright, Frank Vosper, into a play, Love from a Stranger.
The Listerdale Mystery was not published in the United States. Two of its stories, ‘Philomel Cottage’ and ‘Accident’, first appeared in America in 1948 in the collection Witness for the Prosecution (which also contained ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ and five other stories from the 1933 English collection, The Hound of Death, and ‘The Second Gong’, a shorter, earlier version of a long story which is to be found in the 1937 collection published in England as Murder in the Mews and in the USA as Dead Man’s Mirror). With the exception of ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ and ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’, the remainder of the stories in The Listerdale Mystery are to be found in the American collection, The Golden Ball, which did not appear until 1971. ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’ is to be found in Surprise!. Surprise! (1965), a collection of stories which have all appeared in other volumes, but ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ has not been published in the USA.
Parker Pyne Investigates
Alternative title: Mr Parker Pyne, Detective
SHORT STORIES (1934)
The American title of Agatha Christie’s only volume in which the character of Parker Pyne is introduced is inappropriate, for in one of the stories Mr Pyne states quite categorically: ‘You must remember I am not a detective. I am, if you like to put it that way, a heart specialist.’ The British title is not quite accurate either, for Mr Parker Pyne does not so much investigate as arrange. But Mrs Christie seems to have been in two minds about her new character, for the twelve stories in the volume divide neatly into two categories, with six stories in each category.
In the first six, all of whose titles begin ‘The Case of…’, Mr Parker Pyne21 is presented as a retired civil servant who, after thirty-five years of compiling statistics in a government office, has decided to use in a novel fashion the experience he has gained. Engaging a secretary, Felicity Lemon, he rents a small office in London and inserts an advertisement in the Personal column of The Times: ‘ARE YOU HAPPY? IF NOT, CONSULT MR PARKER PYNE, 17 Richmond Street.’ The unhappy begin to trickle in to him with their problems: ‘The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife’, ‘The Case of the Discontented Soldier’, and four others.
In the remaining half-dozen stories in the volume, Mr Parker Pyne is on holiday and reluctant to accept cases. However, he finds himself involved in acting as an adviser and occasionally as an investigator when odd things happen or crimes are revealed or contemplated. In these six stories, he behaves rather as Poirot or Miss Marple might. Mr Parker Pyne’s holiday takes him via the Orient Express to the Middle East, ground which Mrs Christie had covered more than once and which she knew rather well by this time. ‘Have You Got Everything You Want?’ is set mainly on her favourite train, and the other five stories take us to Baghdad, Shiraz, Petra, Delphi, and on a cruise up the Nile.
Parker Pyne is an engaging character, plump, bald and probably in his sixties. His theory is that there are five principal types of unhappiness, and that once the cause of the malady is known, a remedy should be possible. His cures are arrived at by unconventional means, but he guarantees them. In cases where no treatment can be of any avail, he says frankly that he can do nothing and refuses to accept the client. Mr Parker Pyne has one or two part-time helpers as well as his secretary, Felicity Lemon, who will later become Hercule Poirot’s secretary. There is, for instance, a young man named Claude Luttrell, ‘one of the handsomest specimens of lounge lizard to be found in England’. He is used in ‘The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife’ to make a straying husband jealous of the wife he has been neglecting. In ‘The Case of the Distressed Lady’, which is about the theft of an emerald ring, Claude Luttrell and another of Mr Parker Pyne’s regulars, Madeleine de Sara, ‘the most seductive of vamps’, are required to pose as internationally famous exhibition dancers at a huge party given by the wealthy Dortheimers. This particular case proved more complex than at first it seemed to be, and Mr Parker Pyne revealed a startling investigative talent.
The first six stories are the more unusual, but the second six, in which the author draws on her own experience of the Middle East, are especially interesting. ‘The Pearl of Price’ was written after a visit Agatha and Max Mallowan made to the temples and rock tombs of Petra; ‘The House at Shiraz’, an imaginative and psychologically penetrating little tale, is set in the house they saw at Shiraz; and the potted crime novel which is encapsulated in ‘Death on the Nile’, a story which gave only its title, none of its plot, to the 1937 Christie novel, Death on the Nile, is a gem. Prodigal in the almost wasteful ease with which she threw plots away, Mrs Christie parsimoniously stored up fragments of experience with which to garnish those plots. The minor incident of Mr Parker Pyne’s bug powder is found to have its basis in fact when one reads Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946), Agatha Christie’s account of her visits to Syria in the thirties. In one of these stories, the criminal is an archaeologist.
Critics of Agatha Christie are divided on the merits of the Parker Pyne stories, opinions ranging from Robert Barnard’s ‘mediocre’22 to the view expressed by Barzun and Taylor23 that, ‘On rereading, the collection holds up very well’. The Parker Pyne stories, slight though they are, are well worth seeking out, for their hero is a delightful and unusual character, whom Agatha Christie wrote about again only in two further stories, ‘Problem at Pollensa Bay’ and ‘The Regatta Mystery’, both of which are to be found in the 1939 American collection, The Regatta Mystery and the 1991 Problem at Pollensa Bay.
One of Mr Parker Pyne’s occasional helpers, whom we meet in ‘The Case of the Discontented Soldier’, is Mrs Ariadne Oliver, ‘the sensational novelist’. Ariadne Oliver is an amusing and satirical self-portrait of Agatha Christie. Like Mrs Christie, she is addicted to munching apples as she types her stories, and she is agreeably untidy. As we come to know Mrs Oliver better in seven novels written between the mid-thirties and the early seventies we shall discover other similarities to her author. We find in ‘The Case of the Discontented Soldier’, in which she presents Mr Parker Pyne with a plot, that Mrs Oliver is the author of ‘forty-six successful works of fiction, all bestsellers in England and America, and freely translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and Abyssinian’. If this was not true of Agatha Christie in 1934, it certainly would be a decade or two later. Mrs Ariadne Oliver is referred to in a second Parker Pyne story, ‘The Case of the Rich Woman’, but does not put in an appearance. We next encounter her in the 1936 novel, Cards on the Table, when she makes the acquaintance of Hercule Poirot. Her involvement with Poirot in six of his most celebrated cases provides Mrs Christie with numerous opportunities to poke fun at herself, which she does with unfailing good humour. It is in Cards on the Table that Ariadne Oliver is revealed to be not simply a bestselling novelist but a bestselling crime novelist!
A minor inconsistency, due either to Mrs Christie’s well-known occasional carelessness in matters of detail or to that of her editors, occurs in ‘The Case of the City Clerk’ when the client is introduced as ‘a man of forty-five’ on the first page only to age three years on the following page.
Two of the stories, ‘The Case of the Middle-Aged Wife’ and ‘The Case of the Discontented Soldier’, were adapted for television and transmitted by Thames TV as episodes in the ten-part weekly series, The Agatha Christie Hour, in 1982.
Unfinished Portrait
MARY WESTMACOTT (1934)
The last of Agatha Christie’s 1934 publications, Unfinished Portrait appeared under the name of Mary Westmacott, the nom de plume Mrs Christie had first adopted for Giant’s Bread in 1930. This second Mary Westmacott novel differs from the other five which Agatha Christie published under that name in that it is much more overtly and directly autobiographical than the others. There is something of autobiography in the work of every writer of fiction, however slight or however disguised that element of autobiography may be. Some novelists reveal themselves in more devious ways than others, some use more and finer filters than others. Some, perhaps the majority, progress from lightly disguised autobiography in their earlier works to imaginative reworking of their spiritual if not their physical lives and experiences. Agatha Christie was a novelist of skill and imagination. Her acceptance of a certain discipline of the creative imagination in her crime novels should not lead one to the belief that she was incapable of exploring the psychology of character much more deeply than in those murder mysteries. In most of her Mary Westmacott novels, Mrs Christie can be seen to revel in the lifting of restraints, as she pursues character and motivation and allows her personages to develop in a more complex way than would be suitable in a Poirot or Miss Marple story.
In Unfinished Portrait, however, Agatha Christie’s aim was to produce a fictionalized and necessarily unfinished portrait of herself. The story is told by Larraby, a portrait painter who meets the heroine, Celia, on an island (which could be one of the Canary Islands) when Celia is on the point of committing suicide. He is instrumental in saving her life or at least in delaying her decision, becomes fascinated by what she tells him of herself, and proceeds to create her portrait. For a reason which becomes clear only at the end of the novel, Larraby elects to produce his portrait of Celia in words instead of in paint.
The story of Celia is remarkably similar to the story of Agatha as readers were eventually to be offered it in An Autobiography more than forty years later. Several incidents are common to An Autobiography and Unfinished Portrait, and the novel is quite clearly a fictionalized, more detailed, and emotionally more forthcoming version of the first third of the autobiography. The portraits of Celia’s mother and her grandmother are really of young Agatha Miller’s mother and the grandmother with whom she stayed in Ealing. The men in Celia’s life are the men in Agatha’s life, and Dermot, whom Celia marries, is Archie Christie.
Writing only a few years after the end of her first marriage, Agatha Christie in Unfinished Portrait was concerned to produce her own portrait, perhaps in order to attempt to understand herself and her behaviour. In the novel, Celia makes a first suicide attempt during a period of nervous collapse, and is rescued by a young cockney from the river into which she has jumped. On the island, having surveyed the mess she has made of her life, and fearful that she may not even be able to continue as a novelist since she can no longer summon up much interest in other people or in herself, Celia intends to attempt suicide a second time. Much of what we learn about her throws light upon Mrs Christie’s nervous breakdown and her disappearance in 1926.
Agatha Christie’s second husband, Max Mallowan, wrote of Unfinished Portrait: ‘The book is not one of her best because, exceptionally, it is a blend of real people and events with imagination. Only the initiated can know how much actual history is contained therein, but in Celia we have more nearly than anywhere else a portrait of Agatha.’ Mallowan wrote those words after having read his wife’s autobiography. You can therefore confidently accept Celia as a recognizable portrait of Agatha, and a much more candid and revealing portrait than that which she chose to present to the readers of her autobiography. Wearing the protective cloak of fiction, she was able to confess to aspects of herself which she could not bring herself to acknowledge in a non-fiction format.
Unfinished Portrait, as a novel, is the least satisfactory of the six Mary Westmacott titles, though it is thoroughly readable, and interesting in its account of a woman trying to come to terms with her own nature. It is most valuable for what it tells us about Agatha Christie, who was both a conventional middleclass wife and mother and a cold-blooded artist adept at posing as middleclass wife and mother. She was equable of temperament, yet curiously ill-balanced. She contained, and somehow depended upon, her opposites. In Unfinished Portrait, Larraby says of Celia: ‘Like all people who live chiefly by the inner vision, Celia was peculiarly impervious to influence from outside. She was stupid when it came to realities.’ This, we should remember, is also Agatha Christie talking of Agatha Christie.
The next Westmacott novel was not to appear until ten years later.
Three-Act Tragedy
Alternative title: Murder in Three Acts
POIROT (1935)
It was in 1935 that Max Mallowan began his excavations at Chagar Bazar in Syria. Agatha accompanied him, and the party also included Robin Macartney (Mac) and Richard Barnett, a ‘mine of esoteric learning’. They employed approximately one hundred and forty-five workmen, described by Mallowan as ‘a mixed gang of Arabs and Kurds, with a sprinkling of Yezidis, the mild devil-worshippers from the Jebel Sunjar, and a few odd Christians.’ Some of their best men, however, proved to be Turks who had entered the country illegally. They were usually tougher physical specimens than the Arabs, and the expedition was happy to employ them.
As they were to spend two seasons at Chagar Bazar, the party set about building a mudbrick house, to designs by Mac. They were proud of it when it was completed, and somewhat annoyed when the local Sheikh bespattered all four corners with the blood of a newly slain sheep, an act of propitiation towards supernatural forces which spoiled the appearance of the freshly plastered brickwork. The seven-roomed house had cost about £150 to build, including labour and all the woodwork fittings.
The archaeological significance of his work in Syria in the thirties is described in non-technical terms by Max Mallowan in Mallowan’s Memoirs, while the details of life on the digs is brought to life admirably by Agatha Christie in Come, Tell Me How You Live, which she was not to publish until 1946, although she began keeping a diary in Syria, with a view to expanding her notes eventually into a book. The life suited her. Max would depart every morning at dawn to work at the mound, and on most days Agatha would accompany him, though occasionally she would stay at home to deal with various chores. There was pottery to be mended, there were objects to be labelled, and of course there was usually an Agatha Christie novel to be created on the typewriter.
In addition to her other duties, Agatha was given the job of developing photographs, for which purpose a dark room was allotted to her which she considered rather similar to the ‘Little Ease’ of mediaeval times. Unable either to sit or stand in what was, in effect, a small cupboard, she would crawl in on all fours, develop plates, and emerge almost asphyxiated with heat and unable to stand upright. Though her husband occasionally murmured, ‘I think you’re wonderful, dear’, he was interested much less in her account of her sufferings in the dark room than in the negatives she brought out of it. Small wonder that, although she enjoyed her Middle East experience every year, toward the end of each season Agatha would begin to daydream of Devon, of red rocks and blue sea, of her daughter, her dog, bowls of Devonshire cream, apples, and bathing.
1935 saw the publication of three Agatha Christie crime novels, all of them featuring Hercule Poirot: Three-Act Tragedy (whose American title was Murder in Three Acts), Death in the Clouds (or, in America, Death in the Air) and The ABC Murders. Hastings is absent from the first two but makes an appearance in the third.
The first five chapters of Three-Act Tragedy constitute the ‘First Act: Suspicion’, the next seven are ‘Second Act: Certainty’, and the remaining fifteen are ‘Third Act: Discovery’. As in a theatre programme there are credits at the beginning of the book:
Directed by
SIR CHARLES CARTWRIGHT
Assistant Directors
MR SATTERTHWAITE
MISS HERMIONE LYTTON GORE
CLOTHES BY
AMBROSINE LTD
Illumination by
HERCULE POIROT
There is no ‘cast of characters’, but if there were it would have to include the same people, for Sir Charles Cartwright, a famous actor living in retirement in Cornwall by the sea, not only directs the proceedings or at least sets them in motion by giving a dinner party at which one of the guests dies, but also plays a leading role in the subsequent events, as do the somewhat callow but engaging Miss Lytton Gore, Cynthia Dacres who is the proprietress of Ambrosine Ltd, Mr Satterthwaite who makes here the first of his only two appearances outside a Harley Quin story and, of course, Hercule Poirot. Other guests at the fateful dinner party, not all of whom survive to the end of the story, include Sir Bartholomew Strange, a distinguished Harley Street physician; Angela Sutcliffe, a well-known actress; Freddie Dacres, husband of Cynthia; Miss Wills, better known as the playwright Anthony Astor, and ‘cut off by success’, as Mrs Christie rather bitchily puts it, ‘from her spiritual home – a boarding house in Bournemouth’.
Also at the dinner party is Oliver Manders; ‘A handsome young fellow, twenty-five at a guess. Something, perhaps, a little sleek about his good looks. Something else – something – was it foreign? Something unEnglish about him.’ It is only when Miss Lytton Gore jokingly calls him a ‘slippery Shylock’ that Mr Satterthwaite realizes ‘that’s it – not foreign – Jew!’ But this is 1935, and Oliver’s Semitic ancestry is not held against him. Even the snobbish Mr Satterthwaite admits that Hermione Lytton Gore and Oliver Manders make an attractive pair. ‘Both so young and good-looking … and quarrelling, too – always a healthy sign.’
The particular kind of deception played by the author on her readers in Three-Act Tragedy is one which some of them might on this occasion see through, for this is by no means one of the best examples of it. The novel is a delight to read, for the characters are a more varied lot than usual. However, few of them are brought to life as fully as you would wish them to be. Mrs Christie seems this time to have been so interested in her murderer that she has neglected to round out some of the other characters. A minor mystery is that, when some of the suspects are entertained by Poirot in London, it is ‘in his slightly florid suite at the Ritz’. Why does he need to stay at the Ritz? Is his apartment being redecorated? We are never told.
Though the characters of the actor (Sir Charles Cartwright) and the female playwright with the male nom de plume (Anthony Astor) are certainly not based upon real people in those professions, Mrs Christie surely intended her readers to note a light-hearted superficial resemblance to certain personality traits of the celebrated actor-manager, Sir Gerald du Maurier, and the playwright, Gordon Daviot. Du Maurier, ‘a great exponent of natural acting and of the art that conceals art, was virtually the leader of the English stage.’24 He died in 1934 at the age of sixty-one. The pseudonym of Gordon Daviot (in whose Richard of Bordeaux John Gielgud achieved his first big success in 1932) concealed the identity of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896–1952) who also wrote detective fiction, first as Gordon Daviot and later as Josephine Tey.
Though it is no longer likely to be thought one of the best of Agatha Christie’s crime novels of the thirties, Three-Act Tragedy was initially very favourably received, and became the first Christie novel to sell more than 10,000 copies within a year of publication.
The New English Weekly thought Three-Act Tragedy ‘her wittiest novel so far’, The Times Literary Supplement was of the opinion that ‘very few readers will guess the murderer before Mr Hercule Poirot reveals the secret’, the Manchester Guardian thought the author ‘in great form’ and found ‘the characters (as always with Mrs Christie) … lifelike and lively’, and Ralph Partridge in the New Statesman was enormously impressed:
Mrs Christie can be trusted to turn out at least one book a year up to her own impeccable standard. Three-Act Tragedy has given scope for all her art. The power to wrap up clues in the easiest and most natural conversation; the choice of contrasting characters, each outlined with just sufficient sharpness to give them all individuality; the steady pulse of events in chapter after chapter; the originality of the murder plot itself, and the dramatic suspense of the solution hold you until the latest possible minute. These are the characteristics of a Christie novel in the Roger Ackroyd tradition, and it is here that Three-Act Tragedy takes its place in the succession, a worthy descendant of Lord Edgware Dies … Nothing could be more baffling to any reader or detective than the opening crime. Even Poirot could find nothing to suggest foul play.
And even the famous drama critic, James Agate, writing in the Daily Express, succumbed to Mrs Christie’s ‘tender strokes of art’:
In my opinion, Three-Act Tragedy succeeds, because as a hardened reader of crime stories I have ceased to care who murders anybody so long as up to the last chapter the story has held me. Here Mrs Christie succeeds abundantly for the simple reason that she is an amusing writer.
The ending of Three-Act Tragedy is certainly an amusing example of Poirot’s endearingly childlike egotism. When Mr Satterthwaite remarks that he might accidentally have drunk the poisoned cocktail, ‘There is an even more terrible possibility that you have not considered,’ said Poirot. ‘Eh?’ ‘It might have been ME,’ said Hercule Poirot.
Death in the Clouds
Alternative title: Death in the Air
POIROT (1935)
The title of Death in the Clouds, the second of the 1935 Hercule Poirot crime novels, was changed for publication in the USA to Death in the Air, presumably to avoid confusion with some other novel of the same or similar title. However, Barzun and Taylor list no other ‘Death in the Clouds’, but another ‘Death in the Air’, a short story by the American crime writer, Cornell Woolrich.25
Hastings is absent from this inventively plotted Poirot mystery, in which the murder is committed on the aircraft ‘Prometheus’, during the midday Universal Airlines flight from Paris (Le Bourget) to London (Croydon). The murderer can therefore only be one of the eleven passengers in the rear compartment of the plane, or one of the two stewards. Since one of the passengers is Hercule Poirot, he has to be considered a suspect along with everyone else. But surely Agatha Christie wouldn’t dare – or would she? The reader may relax, for Hercule Poirot is not the murderer. But, as usual with Mrs Christie, hardly anyone else is to be trusted.
The point has been made that the most satisfying Agatha Christie crime novels are those in which a group of people is somehow isolated from the world at large, and one of them is killed. The country house party, the international express train, a remote archaeological site in the Middle East, the small village community in which a stranger would certainly be noticed, each of these Mrs Christie used more than once. Now the modern method of travelling, the air flight, is also put to nefarious use. Poirot does not succeed in solving the mystery before the plane touches down at the old, pre-Heathrow airport (or aerodrome to use the thirties term) of Croydon, for not until the plane is about five minutes’ flying time away from its destination is it realized that Madame Giselle is not asleep but dead. The investigation takes place in London and Paris, and Poirot works in co-operation not only with his old friend and colleague, Inspector Japp, but also with M. Fournier of the Sûreté, a more sympathetic French police officer than Giraud (from The Murder on the Links). ‘I have also heard of you from M. Giraud,’ says M. Fournier, as he is introduced to Poirot.
It is not quite clear, at first, how Madame Giselle has been murdered. There is a minute puncture mark on the side of her throat, and speculation encompasses a blowpipe containing ‘the famous arrow poison of the South American Indians’ with which Poirot makes much satirical play, an injection of some kind, and even a wasp which had been buzzing about the cabin at the time until it was killed by one of the other passengers. Those other passengers vary widely in character and class, with two types of aristocracy (landed gentry and ex-chorus girl), two young whitecollar workers who appear to be supplying ‘romantic interest’, the middleclasses (a doctor, a business man) and a French middle-aged father and adult son whom Inspector Japp mistakes for a pair of toughs. This is Agatha Christie’s little joke at the expense of her husband’s profession, for Poirot has to explain to Japp that the two men are not the toughs or cut-throats suggested by their appearance and manner, but ‘two very learned and distinguished archaeologists’.
There is also what at the time of publication was a strictly private joke at the expense of Max Mallowan personally, for Mrs Christie’s readers would not have known of the occasion when Mallowan abandoned his sick wife in Athens because it was important for him to get to Syria by a certain date. In Death in the Clouds, the younger of the two Frenchmen, in support of his thesis that the English care more for their work than for their wives, recounts the story of an Englishman whose wife had been taken ill while they were staying in a little hotel in Syria. ‘He himself had to be somewhere in Iraq by a certain date. Eh bien, would you believe it, he left his wife and went on, so as to be “on duty” in time. And both he and his wife thought that quite natural; they thought him noble, unselfish. But the Doctor, who was not English, thought him a barbarian.’
Mrs Christie also satirizes her own profession of crime novelist in the character of Daniel Clancy, a writer of detective stories and the creator of the fictional detective, Wilbraham Rice. Clancy is Inspector Japp’s favourite suspect: ‘This is just the sort of damn-fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.’ Incidentally, the French detective is seen to be distinctly superior to Japp in intelligence and imagination. Between them, Fournier, Japp and Poirot suspect everyone, including the two stewards, and the clues are fairly presented and discussed. Poirot, of course, plays fair with no one, but if he is watched closely throughout the investigation he may inadvertently reveal something of his thought processes earlier than he intended.
The murder is an audacious one, committed in full view of a cabin full of passengers, and the fact that none of them seems to have noticed it happening is commented upon more than once. As a puzzle, Death in the Clouds must be rated highly, though it is less exciting than Mrs Christie at her very best. Read now, fifty years or more after its publication, it retains a marvellous period flavour: the old Le Bourget–Croydon run is as richly nostalgic, surely, as the route of the Orient Express. Two minor points: there is a careless mistake – and it is a mistake, not a significant clue – in Chapter 1, where a sentence about ‘the passengers in the forward compartment’ thinking their various thoughts clearly should refer to the passengers in the rear compartment, the one in which the murder takes place. The second point concerns a minor character, met briefly during the investigation in London. He is M. Antoine the hairdresser, the employer of Jane Grey, one of the passengers. M. Antoine’s real name, we are informed, was Andrew Leech, and his only claim to foreign nationality lay in his ‘having had a Jewish mother’. Sad to say, Mrs Christie allows him to be referred to by his employees as ‘Ikey Andrew’. Her old prejudices, (or those of her characters, and many of her readers), though dying, are dying hard!
A television adaptation of Death in the Clouds, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 12 January 1992.
The ABC Murders
POIROT (1935)
Having been absent from the three most recent Poirot novels, Hastings is allowed to make a reappearance in The ABC Murders, which in fact he narrates in his capacity as occasional chronicler of the adventures of Hercule Poirot. He begins by explaining that in June 1935 he came home from his ranch in South America for a stay of about six months: ‘It had been a difficult time for us out there. Like everyone else, we had suffered from world depression. I had various affairs to see to in England that I felt could only be successful if a personal touch was introduced. My wife remained to manage the ranch.’ This is by no means the first time, nor will it be the last, that Hastings has persuaded himself he has business in London, and stayed away from home for months on end. This is ‘staying late at the office’ carried to extraordinary lengths.
Hastings finds that Poirot has moved from the rooms they used to share in Farraway Street, and is now installed ‘in one of the newest type of service flats in London’ which Hastings accuses his old friend of having chosen entirely on account of its strictly geometrical appearance and proportions. Poirot, who does not deny that he was influenced by ‘the most pleasing symmetry’ of the apartment block (whose name, we learn later, is Whitehaven Mansions), admits that he is ‘like the prima donna who makes positively that farewell performance’. That farewell performance repeats itself an indefinite number of times.
In a Foreword ‘by Captain Arthur Hastings, OBE’, the narrator explains that he has departed from his usual practice of relating only those incidents and scenes at which he himself was present, and that certain chapters are written in the third person. He assures his readers that he can vouch for the occurrences related in those chapters. He is referring to his descriptions of the thoughts and actions of Mr Alexander Bonaparte Cust.
The ABC murders begin a few days after Poirot receives this letter:
Mr Hercule Poirot, – You fancy yourself, don’t you, at solving mysteries that are too difficult for our poor thick-headed British police? Let us see, Mr Clever Poirot, just how clever you can be. Perhaps you’ll find this nut too hard to crack. Look out for Andover on the 21st of the month.
Yours, etc.
ABC
At Andover, in Hampshire, an old woman who keeps a tobacco shop is murdered on the 21st. A second letter invites Poirot to direct his attention to Bexhill-on-Sea on the 25th of the following month, and on that day a young waitress is murdered. Churston, in Devon, is the next town chosen by ABC, who taunts Poirot in his third letter: ‘Not so good at these little criminal matters as you thought yourself, are you? Rather past your prime, perhaps?’ There is a fourth murder, in Doncaster.
There appears to be no connection between the victims, and Poirot’s task is rendered almost impossible for this apparent madman would seem merely to be making his way through the alphabet, not only with places but also with people. The Andover victim was a Mrs Alice Ascher; in Bexhill, the murdered waitress was Betty Barnard; in Churston, Sir Carmichael Clarke; and in Doncaster – in Doncaster, something goes wrong, and the killer strikes at a man named Earlsfield. In each case, a copy of the monthly railway timetable, the ABC Rail Guide (still published monthly in Great Britain), open at the page listing the town of the murder, is found close by the victim. Poirot arrives at the truth before a fifth murder can be committed.
The truth is that there is method in ABC’s madness or pretended madness. Poirot does not simply foil a madman, he solves a mystery: the mystery of why the murderer is proceeding through the alphabet. Would he have continued to Z, if Poirot had not arrived at the truth? Probably not. And who is Alexander Bonaparte Cust? He would appear to be the murderer. But is he?
The plot of The ABC Murders is positively brilliant in its imagination and originality, and its characters are splendidly brought to life in what is one of Agatha Christie’s masterpieces. The apparently motiveless murders certainly perplex Hercule Poirot, but it is he alone who arrives at the truth, and he does so through the application of logic to the problem, and through the exercise of the little grey cells of the brain.
The ABC Murders was serialized in a London newspaper, the Daily Express, in the autumn of 1935, and the newspaper published simultaneously a column of ‘Readers’ Guesses’ at the solution. One reader accused Poirot of not making intelligent use of the ABC Rail Guide: ‘He is anxious to reach Churston, and so takes the midnight train from Paddington, arriving at 7.15. Had he looked more carefully, he would have found that by leaving nearly two hours later – 1.40 a.m. – he would have arrived an hour earlier – at 6.10 a.m.’ But it is Hastings, not Poirot, who chooses that particular train from the ABC, and he may well have been choosing the most convenient, rather than the fastest train. ‘There’s a midnight train – sleeping-car to Newton Abbot – gets there at 6.08 a.m., and to Churston at 7.15,’ Hastings tells Poirot, adding that the ABC Rail Guide identifies Churston as a small town in Devon, 204¾ miles from Paddington, and with a population of 656. (The ABC Rail Guide26 no longer deals in fractions of a mile. It now lists Churston as being 205 miles from Paddington Station, London, with a population of 1,582. Sadly, it reveals that trains no longer run to Churston, and that the nearest British Rail station is three miles away, at Paignton. From Paignton, there is a bus service to Churston which takes fourteen minutes. The midnight train gets to Newton Abbot at 4.17 a.m., knocking 1 hour, 51 minutes off its 1935 time.)
A number of crime writers have more or less plagiarized various aspects of The ABC Murders. In Greenmask! by the American novelist, Elizabeth Linington, one of a pair of homosexuals is an Agatha Christie fan. He and his partner decide to make use of her ABC plot in the murders they commit: they place a copy of the relevant California county guide on the body of each victim. Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails leans heavily on The ABC Murders. A French novel, The Sleeping Car Murders (filmed in 1966 with Simone Signoret and Yves Montand), was obviously inspired by Mrs Christie’s Hercule Poirot adventure.
In Chapter 3 of The ABC Murders Poirot curiously adumbrates the plot of a later Agatha Christie novel which, although she did not write it until several months after The ABC Murders, must already have been clearly formed in the author’s mind:
‘Supposing,’ murmured Poirot, ‘that four people sit down to play bridge and one, the odd man out, sits in a chair by the fire. One of the four, while he is dummy, has gone over and killed him, and intent on the play of the hand, the other three have not noticed. Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’
No one can say that Agatha Christie made things easy for herself.
‘Shouldn’t wonder if you ended by detecting your own death,’ Inspector Japp says to Poirot, laughing heartily. In due course Poirot was to do precisely this, in his last and, in many ways, most extraordinary case, Curtain.
In 1966, more than thirty years after the novel’s initial publication, a film version of The ABC Murders was made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer at their English studio in Elstree, near London. It was released as The Alphabet Murders. The American director of the film, Frank Tashlin, had made his name with comedies such as The Paleface, starring Bob Hope, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and had also worked on Bugs Bunny cartoons. He turned the film into an exercise in visual comedy, aided and abetted by a cast which included Tony Randall as Poirot, Robert Morley as Hastings, Anita Ekberg, Maurice Denham, and Austin Trevor (who had played Poirot in films in the thirties), and by an adaptation by David Pursall and Jack Seddon which was a travesty of the novel. Guest appearances were made by Margaret Rutherford and Stringer Davis, who had appeared in MGM’s four Miss Marple movies earlier in the sixties, three of which had also been scripted by Pursall and Seddon.
The film was originally to have been directed by Seth Holt, a British director, with the American comedian Zero Mostel as Poirot, but this project came to grief on what should have been the first day of shooting when Agatha Christie took strong objection to the script, which included a bedroom scene for Poirot.
A television adaptation of The ABC Murders, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 5 January 1992.
Murder in Mesopotamia
POIROT (1936)
Agatha Christie returned to the archaeological dig at Chagar Bazar with Max Mallowan and his party in the spring of 1936, ‘and a pretty wet season and a most enjoyable one it was,’ wrote Mallowan. They enjoyed residing in their ‘lovely airy and light house’ which, somewhat to their surprise, showed no signs of collapsing upon them. In addition to Agatha, Mallowan’s assistants in the spring were a retired Colonel from the Indian army and a young architectural assistant who was nicknamed ‘Bumps’ since he referred to the ancient tells scattered about the plain as bumps and was astonished to learn that they represented the formerly inhabited places that the mission had come to dig. The retired Colonel ‘was inclined to be a trifle military and expect [the Arab workers] to keep orderly ranks and line up in columns of four for their pay, but this they seemed to enjoy and looked on with amused tolerance.27
One day, when the team was digging near the town of Mosul, their old foreman approached Mallowan in great excitement, saying ‘You must take your wife to Mosul tomorrow. There is to be a great event. There will be a hanging – a woman!’ When Agatha expressed her repugnance at the thought, the old Arab was stupefied. ‘But it is a woman,’ he repeated. ‘Very seldom do we have the hanging of a woman. It is a Kurdish woman who has poisoned three husbands! Surely the Khatun would not like to miss that!’
Their last season at Chagar Bazar was in the autumn when they were joined by ‘Mac’, their companion from the previous year. It was now that they made their greatest find, seventy cuneiform tablets, mostly written within a single year about a decade before 1800 BC ‘when Shamshi-Adad I was king of Assyria and his younger son Iasmah-Adad was in charge of the district’. These tablets gave a chronological orientation and established the dating of the painted Harbur pottery which the team had dug up. The connection of Chagar Bazar with the royal house of Assyria, as asserted by the tablets, was of extraordinary interest to archaeologists and historians, and fully justified Mallowan’s choice of the site for excavation. He now decided to turn his attention the following season to the great mound of Tell Brak, ‘much the most important centre in the Habur, and one that cried out for excavation’.
Hercule Poirot novels continued to pour from Agatha Christie’s typewriter, and as so many were conceived and partly written in the Middle East it was hardly surprising that Mrs Christie should begin to set some of them in that part of the world. The first of these was Murder in Mesopotamia, which takes place on an archaeological dig in that part of Iraq formerly known as Mesopotamia, and is dedicated to ‘my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria’. The murder victim is the wife of the archaeologist. It is possible that Mrs Christie’s concentration upon Poirot throughout the middle and late thirties, and her consequent neglect of Miss Marple, are due to the fact that she herself was engaged in travelling with her husband and thus tended to make increasing use of foreign locations, into which it was considerably easier to fit Poirot than Miss Marple, who would have seemed out of place away from her English village. In Murder in Mesopotamia, for example, Poirot’s presence in the Middle East is explained on the grounds that he has been ‘disentangling some military scandal in Syria’ and happens to be passing through Hassanieh, the site of the dig, on his way to Baghdad. This military scandal, presumably, is the affair referred to at the beginning of Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Indeed, we are informed by the narrator at the end of Murder in Mesopotamia that ‘M. Poirot went back to Syria and about a week later he went home on the Orient Express and got himself mixed up in another murder’.
The narrator is not Hastings, whom we must presume to be spending a little time at home with his wife in the Argentine, but Nurse Amy Leatheran, who had travelled to Iraq to look after a mother and child, and who is engaged by Dr Leidner, the leader of the archaeological expedition, to care for his wife Louise. Nurse Leatheran is encouraged, after it is all over, to write her account of the case. A Foreword by one of the other characters explains that the events took place ‘some four years ago’, thus explaining the chronology in relation to Murder on the Orient Express: not that Agatha Christie ever gave an undertaking to her readers that she would present Poirot’s cases in chronological order.
The murder victim, Louise Leidner, wife of the leader of the archaeological dig, has a number of characteristics in common with Katharine Woolley, the overbearing wife of Leonard Woolley, who had been in charge of the archaeological expedition to Ur of the Chaldees in 1929–30 with Mallowan as his assistant. The real Dr Woolley and the fictional Dr Leidner also have points of similarity. In his memoirs, Max Mallowan described Katharine Woolley:
His wife, Katharine Woolley, who always accompanied him, was a dominating and powerful personality of whom even at this time28 it is difficult to speak fairly. Her first marriage had been a disaster, for not long after the honeymoon her husband shot himself at the foot of the Great Pyramid and it was only with reluctance that she brought herself to marry Woolley – she needed a man to look after her, but was not intended for the physical side of matrimony. Katharine was a gifted woman, of great charm when she liked to apply it, but feline and described by Gertrude Bell, not inaptly, as a dangerous woman. She had the power of entrancing those associated with her when she was in the mood, or on the contrary of creating a charged poisonous atmosphere; to live with her was to walk on a tightrope.
It was through Leonard and Katharine Woolley that Agatha Christie had met Max Mallowan, at Ur, but Mrs Christie found Mrs Woolley as difficult and infuriating a personality to cope with as did virtually everyone else who came into contact with her. A comparison of the reference to Katharine Woolley in the Christie autobiography with the character of Louise Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia clearly reveals the latter to be based on the former. Whatever her feelings about Katharine Woolley may have been, Agatha Christie relieved or sublimated them by turning her into Louise Leidner and having her murdered. By whom? Like Mrs (later, Lady) Woolley, Mrs Leidner has a dead first husband in her past, but there is some doubt as to whether he is really dead, for Mrs Leidner has been receiving threatening letters purporting to come from him, for quite some time before she is murdered.
Mrs Christie obviously enjoyed herself writing Murder in Mesopotamia and turning Katharine Woolley into a murder victim, though, as Max Mallowan revealed, ‘here perhaps Agatha touched rather near the bone and for once was apprehensive about what this dramatis persona might say’. Fortunately, the Woolleys appeared not to recognize any character traits which might have been taken as applicable to them. They were, in any case, not the only victims of the crime novelist. Max Mallowan was aware that he was the original of David Emmott, the quiet assistant archaeologist who ‘seemed to be the best and most dispassionate judge of Mrs Leidner’s personality’. And at least one other member of Woolley’s team provided a starting-point for Mrs Christie’s imagination in Murder in Mesopotamia. It is, perhaps, not too fanciful to discern elements of Christiean self-portrait in the character of Nurse Leatheran.
Murder in Mesopotamia is fascinating for its seemingly audientic picture of life on an archaeological dig in the Middle East, and for its description of passions which fortunately do not very frequently lead to murder, as well as for its amusing fictionalization of the dominating Katharine Woolley. It must be said, however, that the more than usually extravagant plotting is at times rather too far-fetched to be convincing even on the level of the murder mystery novel, though the novel as a whole is undeniably entertaining.
Here, at the end of a discussion of archaeologists and their wives, fictional and real, is probably as good a place as any to dispose, once and for all, of the frequently quoted remark which Agatha Christie insisted she never made: ‘An archaeologist is the best possible husband, for the older you get the more interested he is in you.’ Nigel Dennis29 claimed that Mrs Christie was ‘fond of quoting’ this, but she herself insisted on more than one occasion that she had ‘neither made the remark nor did she consider it particularly complimentary or amusing’.30
Cards on the Table
POIROT (1936)
In Chapter 3 of The ABC Murders (1935), Poirot asks Hastings, ‘If you could order a crime as one orders a dinner, what would you choose?’ Hastings reveals a preference for a body, preferably that of some highly important personage, discovered in the library, and suspicion falling upon a houseful of guests. Poirot disdainfully comments that what Hastings has described is ‘a very pretty resumé of nearly all the detective stories that have ever been written’. He, Poirot, would prefer ‘a very simple crime. A crime with no complications. A crime of quiet domestic life … very unimpassioned – very intime.’ As he might have said, un crime pas passionel! Then, as his imagination warms to the task, he proceeds to describe the kind of crime he would most like to investigate. Four people in a room are playing bridge, while a fifth reads in a chair by the fire. At the end of the evening, it is discovered that the man by the fire has been killed. No one has been in or out of the room, and the murderer must have been one of the four players while he or she was dummy. ‘Ah, there would be a crime for you! Which of the four was it?’
It is well known that life frequently imitates art, and a year or so after imagining such a crime, Poirot finds himself actually investigating it. Mr Shaitana, an exotic connoisseur of the bizarre, who exists ‘richly and beautifully in a super flat in Park Lane’, gives a supper party to which he invites four people who, in one way or another, are detectives or investigators of crime, and four people who have each, according to him, at some time in the past committed murder and got away with it. After dinner, two games of bridge are set up: the four investigators play in one room, and Mr Shaitana’s four successful murderers in another, while their host, a non-player, sits by the fire to read or observe. When the four investigators finish their five rubbers of bridge, and go into the next room to say goodnight to their host, they find the other game still in progress. Mr Shaitana is sitting by the fire, but he has been stabbed in the chest with an ornamental dagger, one of a number of ‘knick-knacks’ displayed in the room. Mr Shaitana is dead.
In a Foreword to Cards on the Table, her account of Poirot’s investigation of the murder of Mr Shaitana, Agatha Christie makes reference to the usual type of murder mystery in which, nine times out of ten, the least likely person is the criminal, and then goes on to describe her new novel:
Since I do not want my faithful readers to fling away this book in disgust, I prefer to warn them beforehand that this is not that kind of book. There are only four starters and any one of them, given the right circumstances, might have committed the crime. That knocks out forcibly the element of surprise. Nevertheless there should be, I think, an equal interest attached to four persons, each of whom has committed murder and is capable of committing further murders. They are four widely divergent types; the motive that drives each one of them to crime is peculiar to that person, and each one would employ a different method. The deduction must, therefore, be entirely psychological, but it is none the less interesting for that, because when all is said and done it is the mind of the murderer that is of supreme interest.
Mrs Christie ends her Foreword by informing the reader that Hercule Poirot considered the Shaitana murder one of his favourite cases but that, when he described it to Captain Hastings, his friend thought it very dull.
The four bridge players, one of whom murdered Shaitana, are a young woman who may once have poisoned her employer, a doctor who may have removed one or two troublesome patients, a widow whose husband died under suspicious circumstances, and a Major who may have killed a noted botanist during an expedition up the Amazon. The other four guests, the investigators of one kind or another whom it had amused Shaitana to invite along with his collection of murderers, were Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard, whom Agatha Christie introduced to her readers in The Secret of Chimneys and who also appeared in The Seven Dials Mystery, Colonel Race, the Secret Service agent who is ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of the Empire where trouble was brewing’, and who was first encountered in The Man in the Brown Suit, Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the famous author of detective stories, here beginning an association with Poirot which was to endure through six novels; and, of course, Hercule Poirot himself.31
Cards on the Table is one of Agatha Christie’s finest and most original pieces of crime fiction: even though the murderer is, as the author has promised, one of the four bridge players, the ending is positively brilliant and a complete surprise. The novel is of particular interest to bridge enthusiasts, and it has been said that by carefully studying the players’ scores (reproduced in the volume) alongside the text it is possible to come up with the right answer. But those with no knowledge of bridge need not feel at a disadvantage, for the superb construction of the plot and the detailed characterization make this a positively gripping novel. Until the exciting conclusion, it is the puzzle that grips, for Poirot is here at his most cerebral.
Mrs Ariadne Oliver, the celebrated crime novelist, one of Agatha Christie’s most endearing characters, is a satirical self-portrait, as Max Mallowan confirms in his memoirs. Mallowan also points out that, in Cards on the Table, there is a very good description of the pain and toil of writing and that some of Mrs Oliver’s remarks must have been written with a view to debunking those of Agatha Christie’s fans ‘who so often wrote saying what a wonderful pleasure writing must be’. Just as Mrs Christie became somewhat bored with Hercule Poirot, Mrs Oliver detested her Finnish detective, Sven Hjerson. ‘I only regret one thing,’ she exclaims to Superintendent Battle, ‘– making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done.’ Mrs Christie must have received a good many letters criticizing Poirot’s French!
One of the suspects from Cards on the Table survives to reappear twenty-five years later, and married to another character from the same book, in The Pale Horse, the only novel in which Ariadne Oliver appears without her friend Hercule Poirot. Poirot, incidentally, in Cards on the Table quite gratuitously reveals the solution to the Murder on the Orient Express mystery. It is difficult to understand why Agatha Christie allowed this to happen. Perhaps she imagined at this stage of her career that, after its initial sales, each of her books would die a natural death and would not be likely to be reprinted. Although Poirot does not mention the title of the earlier novel, his comment on a gift presented to him by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon Lits really does give the game away. Readers of Cards on the Table who have not already read Murder on the Orient Express should get a friend to block out the sentence beginning ‘A knife, mademoiselle’ which will be found near the end of Chapter 23. Their enjoyment and understanding of Cards on the Table will in no way be impaired.
Nearly six years after the death of Agatha Christie, Peter Saunders presented a dramatization of Cards on the Table by Leslie Darbon (who had been responsible for the other posthumous Christie adaptation, A Murder is Announced, in 1977).
Cards on the Table opened at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, after a short provincial tour, on 9 December 1981. Taking a leaf from the author’s book where adaptations of Poirot novels were concerned, Darbon removed Poirot from the plot, but in so doing ruined the symmetry of the two groups of bridge players in the novel. Colonel Race is also absent from the proceedings, which leaves the burden of detection to be shared by Superintendent Battle and Mrs Ariadne Oliver.
Cards on the Table is one of the Christie novels least suited to stage adaptation, and it must be said that the task defeated Leslie Darbon. His plodding first act, in which Battle conducts formal interviews with each of the four suspects in succession, would never have been passed by Dame Agatha; in Act II the murders committed in the past by the various suspects are mentioned too perfunctorily to be properly understood by an audience. The West End first-night audience was never certain when it ought to laugh; it is clear that some of the lines were meant to be funny but probably not, for instance, this exchange:
POLICE SERGEANT: He’s been seen driving along Piccadilly in the direction of Green Park.
BATTLE (excitedly): Then he’s travelling West!
A first-rate cast was headed by Gordon Jackson (Battle), Margaret Courtenay (Mrs Oliver), Derek Waring (Dr Roberts), Pauline Jameson (Mrs Lorrimer), Belinda Carroll (Anne Meredith), Mary Tamm (Rhoda Dawes) and Gary Raymond (Major Despard). The play was directed by Peter Dews. It received generally dismissive reviews, but nevertheless enjoyed a run of several months at the Vaudeville Theatre.
Love from a Stranger
PLAY (1936)
The play, Love from a Stranger, is not an original work by Agatha Christie, but an adaptation by Frank Vosper of the Christie short story, ‘Philomel Cottage’, from the volume entitled The Listerdale Mystery which was published in 1934.
Frank Vosper, a popular leading man in British theatre in the twenties and thirties, was also the author of several plays. He disappeared, mysteriously, from an ocean liner in 1937.32 Vosper preserved the plot of the story in his play, merely adding scenes and characters to deliver in dialogue on the stage information embedded in the expository prose of the story.
The play, like the story, is a thriller rather than a mystery, in that it becomes clear well before the end precisely who is planning to do what and to whom. The question is, will the murder plot succeed? Vosper wrote the leading male role of Bruce Lovell (the names are different from those of Agatha Christie’s characters) for himself to play, though, as it happened, on the try-out tour it was played by Basil Sydney, with Edna Best as Cecily Harrington (Gerald Martin and Alix King are the characters’ names in the Christie story).
When the play opened in the West End of London, at the New Theatre, St Martin’s Lane, on 31 March 1936, Frank Vosper and Marie Ney headed the cast. The play was directed by Murray Macdonald. The final scene was so thrilling that some members of the audience literally fainted with fright. ‘The climax was brilliantly handled by Miss Ney and Mr Vosper, and brought down the curtain to a storm of applause,’ wrote the critic of the Daily Mail. ‘Thanks to Miss Agatha Christie who wrote the story, to Mr Frank Vosper who adapted it … Love from a Stranger is first-class entertainment.’
The other critics agreed. ‘Brilliant terror play. Our blood was gloriously curdled last night by Frank Vosper,’ reported the Daily Herald, while W. A Darlington in the Daily Telegraph prophesied that ‘quite obviously it is going to hit the present taste for cleverly manipulated horror and will have an enormous success’. In The Times, the play was reviewed by the distinguished novelist Charles Morgan:
This final act is very sure of its effect. The suspense is maintained; each turn of the story is clear and striking; the terror-stricken self-control of the girl and the man’s gross and abominable insanity are depicted by Miss Marie Ney and Mr Frank Vosper with every refinement of a murderous thriller … a successful thriller it certainly is.
Love from a Stranger clocked up a respectable 149 performances in London, but when Vosper took it to New York, where it opened on 29 September with Jessie Royce Landis as his co-star, it closed after 31 performances. It has remained popular with repertory, summer stock and amateur theatres through the years. Other writers on Agatha Christie have described the play as having been adapted jointly by Christie and Vosper. This is incorrect: it was the work of Frank Vosper alone, and the credit for its shape and dialogue must be entirely his. But the plot and indeed the suspense of that final scene are all there in Agatha Christie’s story.
In 1937, Love from a Stranger was filmed in England by United Artists, with an American director, Rowland V. Lee (whose successes had included such films as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers). The leading roles were played by Basil Rathbone and Ann Harding, and the screenplay was by Frances Marion. This was the first film from an Agatha Christie work to be released in the United States of America. The suavely sinister performance of Basil Rathbone was greatly admired, and the final scene, superbly directed and acted, is still effective. Love from a Stranger occasionally surfaces on television, or at special screenings by film societies.
The film was remade in 1947 in Hollywood, by Eagle Lion, when it was directed by Richard Whorf. The leading roles were played by John Hodiak and Sylvia Sidney, and others in the cast included Ann Richards, John Howard and Isobel Elsom. The screenplay this time was by the American crime novelist, Philip Macdonald. The name of the leading male character was changed from Bruce Lovell to Manuel Cortez, presumably because John Hodiak looked more like a Manuel than a Bruce, and the ending of the play was changed, not for the better. Because the earlier and better film of the play was still occasionally shown in Great Britain, the title of the 1947 version was changed to A Stranger Walked In33 for its British release.
At one point in the 1947 Hollywood film, the heroine is made to say: ‘We’re going to places nobody ever heard of – India, the Persian Gulf, Baghdad.’ Nobody in Hollywood, perhaps.
Death on the Nile
POIROT (1937)
In the spring of 1937 Agatha Christie accompanied her husband to Syria again, to his new archaeological dig at Tell Brak. The great mound of Brak dominates the plain around it, standing three hundred miles east of the Mediterranean and one hundred and thirty miles west of the Tigris, the nearest towns being Nisibin about twenty-five miles to the north, and Hasaka about the same distance to the south. As usual, Agatha subjugated her own life to that of the archaeological expedition, taking on a variety of tasks, and fitting her writing in as best she could. When they first arrived at Brak, she and Mallowan lodged in a high, bat-infested tower: later, a huge, empty caravanserai, consisting of ten rooms, servants’ quarters and kitchen, was put at the team’s disposal.
The discoveries made at Tell Brak were of extraordinary interest, archaeologically, historically and artistically, and are fully described in Mallowan’s Memoirs. Agatha, in her book about life as an archaeologist’s wife,34 fills in the domestic background: entertaining local Sheikhs, and being entertained by them; outwitting dishonest Arab workmen by the use of superior cunning; preventing, and sometimes failing to prevent, acts of violence. Reading both accounts of life in Syria, you sense that she came to grips more easily than he with the Arabs’ indifference to death and consequent lack of respect for life.
Agatha Christie’s interest in the Middle East as a locale for her novels and stories was not confined to those parts where she and Max Mallowan had been engaged in archaeological endeavours. They had also travelled in Egypt for pleasure, and the first fruits of her interest in Egypt, both ancient and modern, began to appear in 1937. She wrote a Poirot murder mystery set in modern Egypt, and a non-mystery play, set in the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The novel was published in 1937; the play, written during that year, was neither performed nor published until more than three decades later.
Many years after she had written it, Agatha Christie said of Death on the Nile, ‘I think, myself, that the book is one of the best of my “foreign travel” ones. I think the central situation is intriguing and has dramatic possibilities, and the three characters, Simon, Linnet, and Jacqueline, seem to me to be real and alive.’35 It is, in fact, the favourite Christie novel of many readers, and certainly one of her very finest.36 Not only is it one of the most splendidly plotted of her mysteries, with a superb exposition, colourful and engaging characters, and a masterly dénouement, it also benefits from its exotic setting, on an old river-steamer, the S.S. Karnak, cruising between the First and Second Cataracts on the Nile. Again, as in Murder on the Orient Express and Death in the Clouds, Mrs Christie has isolated a group of travellers and placed one or more murderers among them. Unlike those two earlier novels, however, the travel experience itself need not be viewed by modern readers merely as something from the nostalgic pre-war past. At least until fairly recently, in addition to the modern, air-conditioned boats which ply the Nile, two old steamers of the S.S. Karnak type still carried passengers on the river.37 Some of those passengers still break their journey at the Cataract Hotel at Aswan, as Poirot and his fellow travellers do, though the attractive old colonial-style hotel is now called the Old Cataract to distinguish it from the modern horror adjacent to it.
In the first chapter of Death on the Nile, the leading characters (amongst them the murderer) are introduced and you discover the reasons why they will all be found, in the second chapter, in Egypt. The experienced reader of Agatha Christie will, of course, be on his guard, but Mrs Christie seemed uncannily to know her readers better than they knew her: she manipulated them as Pavlov his dogs, and here she plays upon her knowledge of how her readers will react to certain situations drawn, if not from life, then at least from popular romantic literature’s view of life. In a curious kind of way, Death on the Nile is more of a love story than are most murder mysteries.
The wealthy and beautiful Linnet Ridgeway has lured handsome but penurious Simon Doyle away from her best friend, Jacqueline, and has married him. Jacqueline reacts by turning up at all the places the couple visit on their honeymoon, not to threaten or harass, but simply to establish a presence. Linnet and Simon are surprised and dismayed to find Jacqueline amongst the fifteen or so passengers on the Karnak. During the cruise, Linnet is murdered. The other passengers, not all of whom are what they appear to be, include, in addition to an ostensibly retired Poirot moodily travelling for pleasure, an American grande dame and her mousy paid companion (rather like Mrs Van Hopper and companion in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, which was published the following year), a lady novelist and her daughter, an upperclass Englishwoman and her son, Linnet Ridgeway’s American solicitor who would have Linnet believe his presence to be a coincidence, an eccentric Italian archaeologist, a fierce young socialist, and an equally young English solicitor.
Also on board is Colonel Race, the member of the British Secret Service who was ‘usually to be found in one of the outposts of the Empire where trouble was brewing’ and who was involved in the events of The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) and Cards on the Table (1936). Poirot is surprised to find Race on board. They had met only once before when they were fellow-guests ‘at a very strange dinner-party’ in London (a reference to Cards on the Table). Race has reason to suspect that a certain political agitator and murderer is travelling, incognito, on the Karnak. It is interesting to note that, as Europe approaches its second world war, spies and agitators begin to invade Mrs Christie’s pages. (Akhnaton, her play about ancient Egypt, written simultaneously with Death on the Nile, can be read as a parable of the dangers of twentieth-century saintly pacifism.)
As so often in the works of Mrs Christie, a murderer is presented as being in some ways a sympathetic character. The victim in Death on the Nile, Linnet Ridgeway, is physically attractive but not very likeable: the unsympathetic victim is another Christie characteristic. The fact that so many of her victims are either nasty or merely ciphers with whom the reader can in no way identify suggests that she planned this deliberately as a means of keeping sordid reality at bay. The novels remain puzzles; they are never violent descriptions of brutal slayings. The victim becomes ‘the body’ as soon as possible. As often as not, within minutes of the discovery of a murder the victim’s nearest and dearest will be found referring to the dear departed not by name but as ‘the body’ or ‘the corpse’. We are rarely in danger of mourning the passing of an Agatha Christie victim.
The author’s sense of place always emerges particularly strongly in those of her novels with un-English settings. The Nile and its banks, and the oppressive feeling that the awesome past of the Pharaohs co-exists with the present in the extraordinarily well-preserved temples, are conveyed with a confident touch. The morning sun striking the colossal figures at the great temple of Abu Simbel, the cool stealth of the temple’s interior, these pervade the chapter in which the first attempt on Linnet’s life is made. The atmosphere on board the Karnak is no less convincingly suggested.
In Chapter 1, when Poirot visits the restaurant Chez Ma Tante in London, he is greeted by the proprietor, M. Blondin, and remembers ‘that past incident wherein a dead body, a waiter, M. Blondin, and a very lovely lady had played a part’. Usually, such a reference would be to one of Poirot’s past cases already known to Agatha Christie’s readers. But whatever the incident involving M. Blondin may have been, it forms no part of the Christie oeuvre. An example of the kind of cross-reference which you find quite frequently in Agatha Christie occurs in Chapter 11 when the elderly American lady, Miss Van Schuyler, tells Poirot that she has heard about him ‘from my old friend Rufus Van Aldin’. Rufus Van Aldin was an American millionaire whose daughter’s murder was investigated by Poirot in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928). Van Aldin must have been extremely impressed by Poirot, for he is mentioned in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) as having recommended the Belgian detective to the American archaeologist, Eric Leidner.
In 1945, Agatha Christie adapted Death on the Nile for the stage, changing the title slightly to Murder on the Nile. This was the second38 of four Poirot novels she was to adapt for the stage, and in each case she removed her great detective from the proceedings. She had begun her playwriting career with Black Coffee (1930) in which Poirot is the leading character. At that time, she had already seen her eccentric little Belgian on the stage in Alibi (1928), Michael Morton’s adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. By the time she came to adapt Appointment with Death and Death on the Nile for the stage, she had also seen Poirot portrayed in Arnold Ridley’s dramatization of Peril at End House (1940). She may have come to the conclusion that Poirot simply did not work on stage, perhaps because he was too overwhelming a personality and thus tended to dwarf the other characters, or perhaps because he was nothing but a collection of mannerisms and was all too clearly revealed as such when impersonated on stage. Many years later, Agatha Christie told Lord Brabourne, producer of the film version of the novel, Death on the Nile, that she had taken Poirot out of the play because he was too difficult to cast satisfactorily.
The alterations made to Death on the Nile to turn it into Murder on the Nile are less far-reaching than those made in the dramatization of Appointment with Death. The plot of Murder on the Nile remains the same as that of Death on the Nile. There are differences of detail, and there are fewer characters in the play than in the novel. Gone are several of the novel’s choicest suspects. The Otterbournes, mother and daughter, are replaced by a Miss ffoliot-ffoulkes and her niece, though there is also something of the Van Schuyler duo in these two. Linnet and Simon Doyle are renamed Kay and Simon Mostyn for no obvious reason, and Jacqueline de Bellefort has become Jacqueline de Severac. Kay Mostyn’s legal guardian is not Uncle Andrew Pennington from New York, but a man of the cloth, Canon Pennefather, and it is he who brings the guilty to justice, and perhaps to repentance. There is a significant difference between the endings of novel and play.
Murder on the Nile opened at the Wimbledon Theatre in 1945 and came to the West End of London where it opened at the Ambassadors Theatre on 19 March 1946. It opened in New York on 19 September 1946, under a new, and surely less effective title, Hidden Horizon, with David Manners and Halliwell Hobbes in the leading roles, but lasted for only twelve performances.
EMI had done so well with their film of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974 that in 1977, a year after Agatha Christie’s death, they made a second star-studded colour film based on a Christie novel. This was Death on the Nile (the film reverted to the original title of the novel), which was released (by Paramount Films) in 1978. The producers were again John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin. A British director of no particular distinction called John Guillermin was engaged, the playwright Anthony Shaffer (who wrote Sleuth) provided the screenplay, and the stars whose names helped to sell the film were Peter Ustinov (as Poirot), Bette Davis (Miss Van Schuyler), Angela Lansbury, David Niven, Maggie Smith, Jack Warden, and Mia Farrow. Less ‘starry’ names in the cast included I. S. Johan, Simon McCorkindale, Jane Birkin, Jon Finch, George Kennedy, Lois Chiles and Olivia Hussey. The name which dominated the posters and credit titles, however, was, quite rightly, that of Agatha Christie. Much of the film was made on location in Egypt, over a period of seven weeks, at the places referred to in the novel. It was the first time in many years that a foreign film had been made in Egypt. The interior scenes were shot in England.
Akhnaton
PLAY (written 1937; published 1973)
The vast majority of Agatha Christie’s works reached her public shortly after they were written: usually, no more than a few months separate the completion of a novel from its publication or a play from its production. Exceptions are the ‘final cases’ of her major detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, which she wrote during the Second World War and deliberately set aside for posthumous publication; these will be dealt with in chronological sequence related to their publication dates. Though written in 1937, the play Akhnaton was not published until 1973. However, in this case, no particular significance attaches to the year of publication, whereas the period of the play’s conception and creation does throws some light on the work itself. Exceptionally, therefore, Akhnaton is dealt with here instead of later.
Written at about the same time that its author was at work on Death on the Nile, Akhnaton is a play in three acts and an epilogue (eleven scenes in all), with a cast of twenty-two characters plus such ‘extras’ as peasant men and women, soldiers, guards, and young artists. It is set in ancient Egypt, spanning a period of seventeen years from 1375 to 1358 BC, the years of the reign of the Pharaoh, Akhnaton. The leading characters are Akhnaton, his wife Nefertiti, his mother Tyi, Nefertiti’s sister Nezzemut, a young army officer named Horemheb, and Akhnaton’s successor, the teenage Tutankhaton.
The play is concerned with the attempt of Akhnaton to persuade a polytheistic Egypt to turn to the worship of one deity, Aton, the Sun God. Son and successor of Amenhotep III, the Pharaoh had changed his name to Akhnaton, son of Aton, to indicate his devotion to the sun god. As presented by Agatha Christie, he is a man whose gentleness is not offset by strength but undermined by a weakness of character; a ruler whose attempts to lead his people along paths of peace and amity have the unfortunate effect of delivering an enervated and demoralized country into the hands of its enemies. Akhnaton’s closest friend is the young soldier Horemheb, a follower, though not a fanatical one, of the sect of Amon, the most powerful of the old gods. The affection of Akhnaton and Horemheb for each other survives their differences of temperament and even, for many years, survives Horemheb’s conviction that Akhnaton’s saintly, other-worldly idealism will lead to the subjugation of Egypt by its enemies. Akhnaton’s dream of ‘a kingdom where men dwell in peace and brotherhood, foreign countries given back to rule themselves, fewer priests, fewer sacrifices,’ a dream of the triumph of reason, wisdom and goodwill over the baser attributes of human nature, leads him to neglect the defence of his country, and to become increasingly obsessed with the view that the only evil in the land is, as he explains to Horemheb,
the power of the priesthood of Amon. I know – none better – I grew up in its shadow. This is the war, Horemheb, the real war that must be fought. Between Light and Darkness, between Truth and Falsehood – between Life and Death. Amon and the priests of Amon are the dark power that strangle the land of Egypt. I will deliver my land. I will bring it from darkness into light – the Eternal Light of the everliving God. From now on the battle is between me and the priests. And Light shall conquer Darkness.
As Akhnaton retreats further into his vision of universal peace, refusing to fight the enemies of his country, preferring instead to exhort them to change their warlike ways, Egypt’s situation deteriorates until Horemheb, a simple soldier who has always loved his king and his country, is forced to realize that the interests of king and country have diverged, and that he must, while loving both, betray one. Finally, Akhnaton is deposed, and when Tutankhaton succeeds to the Pharaoh’s throne, he swears to the High Priest of Amon that he will abandon the name of Tutankhaton and take instead that of Tutankhamun.
Whether or not Agatha Christie intended her play to be seen as a comment on the opposing forces of aggression and appeasement in the 1930s, a comment pointing, albeit ironically and sadly, to the folly of pacifism, it is clear that such a comment is firmly embedded in this play about the Pharaohs. A few years later, their country overrun by the invading Germans, such dramatists of the French resistance as Camus, Sartre, Giraudoux and Anouilh wrote plays in which they used the classical past to make statements about the present condition of their country. Whether consciously or not, Agatha Christie had done so as well.
More than thirty years later, Agatha Christie said of Akhnaton:
I like it enormously. John Gielgud was later kind enough to write to me. He said it had interesting points, but was far too expensive to produce and had not enough humour. I had not connected humour with Akhnaton, but I saw that I was wrong. Egypt was just as full of humour as anywhere else – so was life at any time or place – and tragedy had its humour too.39
This is a generous reaction to criticism, but Akhnaton would not necessarily have been improved by injections of humour, nor was it by any means a bad play as it stood. Agatha Christie’s literary agents probably did not try very hard to place it, for it clearly was not commercial, and it was also not the kind of thing expected from Agatha Christie. She had, at the time, written only one other play, Black Coffee, a Poirot murder mystery, and her agents no doubt considered it in their best interests that their author should confine herself to the steady production of crime fiction.
Akhnaton is, in fact, a fascinating play. It deals in a complex way with a number of issues: with the difference between superstition and reverence; the clanger of rash iconoclasm, the value of the arts, the nature of love, the conflicts set up by the concept of loyalty, and the tragedy apparently inherent in the inevitability of change. Yet Akhnaton is no didactic tract, but a drama of ruthless logic and theatrical power, its characters sharply delineated, its arguments humanized and convincingly set forth.
No doubt it was when she visited the tomb of Tutankhamun at Luxor in 1931 with Max Mallowan, and met Howard Carter, the Egyptologist who in 1922 had been associated with Lord Carnarvon in discovering the tomb, that Agatha Christie became particularly interested in Ancient Egypt. According to Mallowan, she was also helped, when she began to plan her play, by another renowned Egyptologist, Stephen Glanville, who ‘discreetly fed Agatha with the ancient literature … until she became deeply versed in the subject’. Mallowan himself can hardly be considered an objective commentator on Agatha Christie but, as an archaeologist with some knowledge of ancient Egypt, his comment on Akhnaton is surely not without value:
The treatment comes as near to historical plausibility as any play about the past can be. The Egyptian court life and the vagaries of Egyptian religion come alive. This is the way to learn painlessly about Ancient Egypt and to become imbued with an interest in it. It seems to me that the characters themselves are here submitted to exceptionally penetrating analytical treatment, because they are not merely subservient to the dénouement of a murder plot, but each one is a prime agent in the development of a real historical drama. The play is studded with some lovely passages of Ancient Egyptian poetry …
For thirty-five years Akhnaton was forgotten, until one day in 1972 Agatha Christie came across a typescript of it, in the course of spring-cleaning. Although the play had never been performed, she decided that she would at least like to see it in print, so Akhnaton was duly published by her regular publishers, Collins, in 1973, thirty-six years after she had written it.
Though it bears some of the marks of theatrical inexperience, among them a certain self-indulgence as far as sets and numbers of characters are concerned, Akhnaton’s failure to achieve production in the late nineteen-thirties may also have been due, to some extent, to its anti-appeasement stance. Many people in positions of authority in England at that time thought that ‘peace in our time’ had, at any cost, to be maintained. The contemporary Akhnatons failed, and Great Britain went to war. After that, there was even less chance than before of Agatha Christie’s Akhnaton being produced on the stage.
First seen when performed by amateurs, it has occasionally been produced by repertory companies.
Dumb Witness
Alternative title: Poirot Loses a Client
POIROT (1937)
In addition to Death oh the Nile, two other Agatha Christie titles were published during 1937.
Dumb Witness, published in the United States as Poirot Loses a Client, is known in some of its reprint editions as Mystery at Littlegreen House or Murder at Littlegreen House. Littlegreen House is in the small country town of Market Basing in the county of Berkshire in the south of England, about an hour and a half by car from London. This is the heart of the Christie country which stretches from London in the southeast to the moors and coastal resorts of Devon and Cornwall in the southwest. Market Basing (a fictitious name) has been mentioned in several earlier works of Agatha Christie: it is near both the famous house, Chimneys, which is the setting of two novels,40 and the village of St Mary Mead, home of Miss Marple.
It was from Littlegreen House in Market Basing that Emily Arundell, an elderly spinster, wrote to Hercule Poirot a long and rambling letter, asking him to undertake an investigation for her, but failing to outline its nature. Oddly, the letter is not received by Poirot until two months after the date on which it was written. He and Hastings pay a visit to Littlegreen House, only to discover that Miss Arundell has died of a heart attack several weeks earlier. Poirot investigates: a commission is a commission.
Dumb Witness may not be among the ‘top ten’ Christies, but dog owners have a special place in their affections for it, because a leading character, the dumb witness of the title, is a charming wire-haired terrier called Bob, and the novel is dedicated to the author’s own wire-haired terrier: ‘To Dear Peter, most faithful of friends and dearest of companions. A dog in a thousand.’ Bob plays an important and quite feasible role in the plot. He is also given a certain amount of dialogue to speak, but this is simply Agatha Christie indulging herself. Those who do not care for dogs will agree with Robert Barnard that ‘the doggy stuff is rather embarrassing, though done with affection and knowledge’,41 but those who number wire-haired terriers among their friends will enjoy making Bob’s acquaintance as much as Captain Hastings did:
His feet were planted wide apart, slightly to one side, and he barked with an obvious enjoyment of his own performance that showed him to be actuated by the most amiable motives.
‘Good watchdog, aren’t I?’ he seemed to be saying. ‘Don’t mind me! This is just my fun! My duty, too, of course. Just have to let ‘em know there’s a dog about the place! Deadly dull morning. Quite a blessing to have something to do. Coming into our place? Hope so. It’s durned dull. I could do with a little conversation.’
‘Hello, old man,’ I said and shoved forward a fist.
In addition to Bob, the terrier, Dumb Witness contains all those ingredients which are to be found in so many of the finest Christie novels: the small village, the domestic murder with a relatively small number of suspects, and death by poisoning. The beginning of Dumb Witness, with Poirot arriving on the scene in response to a vaguely expressed request for help, only to discover that the elderly lady who had written to him has since died, is the same as the beginning of a short story, ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, which will be found in the collection, Poirot’s Early Cases. The characters and plots, however, have nothing in common. The astute reader may be fortunate enough to solve the mystery in Dumb Witness before Poirot announces the solution, for a major clue given by the author is really quite helpful, if not obvious.
Hastings, who narrates the events, and who has most of the conversations with the wire-haired terrier, ends by happily accepting custody of the dog, and presumably takes him back to Argentina. We shall not encounter Hastings again until Curtain, Poirot’s final case, in 1975.
In Chapter 18, the author allows Poirot to mention the names of four ‘delightful personalities’, all of whom were murderers. In other words, she reveals, to those whose memories are retentive enough to keep the names in mind, the identity of the criminal in the following four books: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mystery of the Blue Train and Death in the Clouds. She surely would not have done this had she realized that generations to come would continue to buy and read these earlier titles. She must have assumed that the earlier books had already reached and been read by everyone likely to read them. In this modest assumption Agatha Christie was, as we now know, mistaken. Had her agent or someone in her publisher’s office drawn the matter to her attention, surely she would have agreed to delete Poirot’s remark. The danger could be avoided by deleting five or six lines from ‘I am reflecting …’ to ‘… delightful personalities’, and substituting the following sentence for Poirot to speak: ‘I am reflecting on various people, all of whom were delightful personalities, and all of whom were also murderers.’ Why do not her publishers, as an act of charity, make this slight editorial change? The Christie Estate could have no good reason to object.
A television adaptation of Dumb Witness, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 16 March 1997.