3
War and Peace

Sad Cypress
POIROT (1940)

Soon after the outbreak of war the Mallowans agreed to allow Greenway House, their newly acquired home on the river Dart, to become a nursery for children evacuated from London. For some months, however, they themselves continued to live there. Max joined the Home Guard which, according to Agatha, ‘was really like a comic opera at that time’. He soon tired of their pointless inactivities and took himself off to London, hoping to be sent abroad on some useful mission, while Agatha remained in Devon and went back to work in the dispensary at the hospital in Torquay. The chief dispenser, glad to have someone with her knowledge and experience of poisons, brought Agatha up to date with the various new drugs then in use, and found her to be an invaluable assistant.

After some months, Agatha decided to join her husband in London where, after living briefly in service flats, first in Half Moon Street and then in Park Place, ‘with noisy sessions of bombs going off all around us’, they were about to move into their house in Sheffield Terrace, the people to whom they had rented it having asked if they could be allowed to relinquish the lease, as they wished to leave London. Max, to his great joy, managed to get a job in the Intelligence branch of the Royal Air Force, and went off to work every day at the Air Ministry. When the Sheffield Terrace house was bombed, the Mallowans moved to a modern block of flats in Lawn Road, Hampstead, not far from the Heath. Agatha went to work as a dispenser again, this time at University College Hospital, and Max was sent to the Middle East, where his knowledge of Arabic could be put to good use. He was seconded to the British military authorities in North Africa, to act as Adviser on Arab affairs in Tripolitania.

Unable to travel, and unhappy at her husband’s absence, Agatha spent all her free time writing: detective novels and stories, plays, Mary Westmacott novels, and memoirs of the archaeological expeditions she and Max had been on together. She had agreed to allow her Poirot novel, Peril at End House, to be dramatized by Arnold Ridley. The play opened on tour early in 1940, and came to the Vaudeville theatre, in the Strand, London, on 1 May, with Francis L. Sullivan as Poirot. ‘Larry’ Sullivan was an old friend of Agatha Christie, and had first played Poirot in Black Coffee in 1930.

Two Poirot novels were published during 1940: Sad Cypress and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.

The song in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night from which Sad Cypress derives its title is printed at the beginning of the novel:

        Come away, come away, death,

           And in sad cypress let me be laid;

         Fly away, fly away, breath:

           I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

        My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

           Oh! prepare it.

        My part of death no one so true

           Did share it.

Surely the reader is not being given a clue, is not being told to scrutinize closely every fair cruel maid he encounters in the course of the novel?

A prologue describes Elinor Carlisle in court, pleading not guilty to the charge of having murdered Mary Gerrard. As the prosecuting attorney for the Crown begins his case, and the ghoulish spectators lean forward, ‘listening with a kind of slow, cruel relish to what that tall man with the Jewish nose was saying about her’, Elinor allows her mind to go back to the day she received an illiterate anonymous letter warning her that ‘there’s Someone sucking up to your Aunt and if you’re not kareful you’ll get Cut out of Everything’.

A melodramatic and unpromising beginning, but it is the beginning not only of an engrossing Hercule Poirot case but also of a novel which could easily have become not a Christie but a Westmacott. In few other Agatha Christie murder mysteries does harsh reality intrude as frequently as in Sad Cypress with its very real and curiously sympathetic characters, and its moving descriptions of the pain and indignity of old age and illness. Elinor’s elderly Aunt Laura is a helpless invalid after suffering a stroke, mentally alert but physically incapable of looking after herself. Told that she might live on for many years, she replies: ‘I’m not at all anxious to, thank you! I told [the doctor] the other day that, in a decently civilized state, all there would be to do would be for me to intimate to him that I wished to end it, and he’d finish me off painlessly with some nice drug.’ Aunt Laura is finished off by someone, with morphine. Another death follows soon afterwards.

The arguments for and against euthanasia are fleetingly but fairly rehearsed: our impression is that Mrs Christie’s sympathies are with the doctor, who says that ‘one’s got an instinct to live. One doesn’t live because one’s reason assents to living. People who, as we say, would be better dead, don’t want to die.’¹ The distress of Laura Welman’s relatives at the old lady’s helplessness, the ashamed inability of one of them to face visits to her sick-room, and, after her death, the conflicting feelings of sadness, relief and cupidity felt by more than one of the surviving friends and relatives, all are skilfully conveyed.

If Sad Cypress has a flaw, it is in the weakness and clumsiness of the exposition, immediately after the Prologue. But once it gets into its stride, this is one of the most real, least schematic of crime novels. It is also unusual in that it employs the device of the possible miscarriage of justice, a miscarriage averted, in this case, by Hercule Poirot. British justice, in the works of Agatha Christie, is rarely allowed to be thought likely to make a mistake.

In addition to those qualities which might seem to place it outside the genre of the traditional crime novel, Sad Cypress also works, and works superbly, as a murder mystery. The clues are most ingeniously placed, Mrs Christie’s veneniferous knowledge is well to the fore but is never used to daunt the reader who is less well up in poisons, and the rather sad but very real mood which permeates the entire novel in no way weakens the mystery element. The characters are convincing, and stay in the memory, and the actual writing is, as almost invariably with Agatha Christie, easy and natural. A comparison with Strong Poison by Dorothy L. Sayers, a 1930 murder mystery which is also about a young woman charged with murder by poison, and which also contains courtroom scenes, reveals Christie to be far ahead of Sayers in pace, atmosphere, credibility and sheer readability.

Interviewed by Francis Wyndham a quarter of a century later, Agatha Christie said: ‘Sad Cypress could have been good, but it was quite ruined by having Poirot in it. I always thought something was wrong with it but didn’t discover what until I read it again sometime after.’² Perhaps she regretted not having written it as a Mary Westmacott novel. Nevertheless, Poirot does not seem an excrescence. He is called in by Peter Lord, the young doctor, to prove Elinor Carlisle innocent: ‘I’ve heard Stillingfleet talk about you; he’s told me what you did in that Benedict Farley case,’ Lord says to Poirot. The reference is to the short story, ‘The Dream’,³ in which Poirot discovered the murderer of Benedict Farley, an eccentric millionaire. (Stillingfleet is known to Peter Lord, presumably because they are in the same profession. At the end of ‘The Dream’, Dr John Stillingfleet, ‘a tall, long-faced young man of thirty’, appeared to be contemplating the courtship of the millionaire’s daughter. He will be encountered again in Third Girl [1966]. In that novel he marries someone else.)

One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
Alternative Title: The Patriotic Murders
POIROT (1940)

A highly successful example of the murder mystery inspired by nursery rhyme, the category which Agatha Christie virtually invented and certainly made her speciality, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe is prefaced by the rhyme itself:

        One, two, buckle my shoe,

        Three, four, shut the door,

        Five, six, pick up sticks,⁴

        Seven, eight, lay them straight,

        Nine, ten, a good fat hen,

        Eleven, twelve, men must delve,

        Thirteen; fourteen, maids are courting,

        Fifteen, sixteen, maids in the kitchen,

        Seventeen, eighteen, maids in waiting,

        Nineteen, twenty, my plate’s empty.

Each of the novel’s ten chapters corresponds, loosely, to a line of the verse: the shoe buckle of the first line is not without significance. The first person to die is an apparently harmless London dentist, with a fashionable practice in Harley Street. He is at first thought to have committed suicide, but he seemed in good spirits when Hercule Poirot was a patient in his chair an hour or so before his death, and so Poirot joins his old colleague Chief Inspector Japp in investigating the affair, which soon proves to have wider ramifications than were at first foreseen. International politics may be involved, hence the change of title for US publication to The Patriotic Murders. (An American paperback reprint in 1953 used a third title: An Overdose of Death.)

This is one of those Christie crime novels whose donnée the reader would be wise to scrutinize very closely, for things are not necessarily what they seem. The plot is a particularly complicated one but is clearly and unconfusingly presented, except at moments when Mrs Christie intends to confuse. References to politics and to international intrigue abound, but they are both more specific and somewhat more sophisticated than in such Agatha Christie thrillers of the twenties as The Seven Dials Mystery and The Big Four. Left-wing agitators are more lightly satirized, conservative financiers no longer have to be treated as sacrosanct, both ‘the Reds’ and ‘our Blackshirted friends’ (Mosley’s Fascists) are seen as threats to democracy, and there is even a mention of the IRA. References are to the real world of 1939, teetering on the brink of war, and not to a cosily recalled, more stable past.

It is odd, surely, that Poirot, who has elsewhere described himself as bon catholique, should have known his way around the Anglican forms of service sufficiently to take part, even if ‘in a hesitant baritone’, in the chanting of Psalm 140 when he accompanies a family to morning prayers in the parish church. ‘The proud hath laid a snare for me,’ he sang, ‘and spread a net with cards; yea, and set traps in my way,’ and suddenly he sees clearly the trap into which he had so nearly fallen. It is comforting to think that Poirot has derived some benefit from his visit, for this is the only church service he is known to have attended in the course of his abnormally long career.

Walking through Regent’s Park at one point in the story, Poirot notices young lovers sitting under ‘nearly every tree’. He compared the figures of the ‘little London girls’ unfavourably with that of the Countess Vera Rossokoff, a Russian aristocrat and thief whose path had crossed his many years earlier in The Big Four, and who has lingered in his thoughts and dreams ever since. The Countess plays no part in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, but she will appear again, seven years later, in The Labours of Hercules.

Elsewhere during his investigation Poirot recalls another of his cases, one ‘that he had named the Case of the Augean Stables’. This, along with the other labours of Hercules, had not yet been collected into a volume, but will be found in 1947’s The Labours of Hercules.

A television adaptation of One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first transmitted on London Weekend TV on 19 January 1992.

Evil Under the Sun
POIROT (1941)

The work routine of Mrs Christie, or Mrs Mallowan as she was known to her colleagues at University College Hospital, was an exhausting one. Officially she worked a two-day week at the hospital (‘three half-days and alternate Saturday mornings’), but whenever other members of the dispensing staff were unable to get to work because of the bombing, she was ready to put in additional days.

In the evenings, the dispenser reverted to being an author. There was, after all, very little else to do. A break in the monotony was provided when she was informed by her daughter Rosalind of her intention to marry Major Hubert Prichard a few days later. Not at all disconcerted by this, Mrs Christie commented later: ‘There was something oyster-like about Rosalind that always made one laugh, and I couldn’t help laughing now.’⁵

Two novels were published in 1941: Evil Under the Sun and N or M?

In Evil Under the Sun, Hercule Poirot enjoys a few days away from his West End apartment in Whitehaven Mansions, London Wl. Relaxing on a holiday resort island off the coast of Devon, he feels certain that there will be a murder committed. But, ‘as he had said once before in Egypt’, if a person is determined to commit murder it is not easy to prevent them. He does not blame himself for what happened. It was, according to him, inevitable.

This is one of Mrs Christie’s emotional triangle affairs and, as such, it has affinities with the stories, ‘The Blood-Stained Pavement’ (in Thirteen Problems: 1932) and ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ (in Murder in the Mews: 1937). There are also certain correspondences with Death on the Nile. To say that Evil Under the Sun is good average Christie would be fair, but misleading unless one made it clear that Mrs Christie’s average standard is a remarkably high one, and that it is only her very few belowaverage novels which are not thoroughly entertaining to read. The victim in Evil Under the Sun is someone envied and disliked by many, and the suspects, the other guests at the Jolly Roger Hotel, Smuggler’s Island, are a well-varied assortment of characters.

Characterization in the crime novels of Agatha Christie tends to be of three kinds: there are the fully-rounded characters who are conceived in great detail, others who are merely sketched in lightly, and a third category of comic characters sometimes presented satirically, and sometimes farcically. Usually, though not necessarily always, the function of this type of character is to provide comic relief, like the Porter in Macbeth. In Evil Under the Sun, the American couple, Mr and Mrs Odell C. Gardener, would appear to be examples of this third category.

Given Mrs Christie’s occasional vagueness in matters of unimportant detail – she is never vague in matters of important detail – to delve too deeply into topographical questions would no doubt be pointless and unproductive. However, it is interesting to note the presence of Colonel Weston, as Chief Constable. As Dartmoor is said to be easy to get to from Smuggler’s Island, we are presumably off the coast of Devon, and not Cornwall.⁶ Also, Poirot had met the Colonel in his official capacity, a few years earlier, in Peril at End House, which takes place in St Loo, a thinly disguised Torquay, and therefore also in Devon. So far, so good. But, in the Mary Westmacott novel The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947), St Loo will give the distinct impression that it is further down the coast, in Cornwall. If we must accept that Agatha Christie’s St Loo is in Devon and Mary Westmacott’s St Loo is in Cornwall, then so be it.

Evil Under the Sun was enthusiastically greeted by reviewers. It ‘will take a lot of beating … she springs her secret like a land-mine’, said The Times Literary Supplement. ‘As gratifying as anything that peace-time standards could require’, said the Sunday Times somewhat inscrutably, adding less equivocally that ‘her characters are vivacious and entertaining’. In the judgment of the Sunday Chronicle, Mrs Christie was ‘still the best of all detective story writers’, while the Daily Telegraph assured its readers that the author had ‘never written anything better than Evil Under the Sun which is detective story writing at its best’. Not to be outdone by London literary critics, a native cult in New Guinea used the front cover of the paperback edition of Evil Under the Sun as an object of veneration.

In 1981, the British team of film-makers who had done so well with Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, though less well with The Mirror Crack’d, made a film version of Evil Under the Sun, which was released the following year. The film had been planned as early as the mid-1970s, when it was intended as a follow-up to Murder on the Orient Express. In the event it became the fourth in the series of lavishly cast Christie movies made by EMI Films. The plot has undergone certain changes and the island is no longer English but somewhere in the Adriatic, although filming of the exterior scenes actually took place in Majorca. As in Death on the Nile, Poirot is played by Peter Ustinov. The cast includes Maggie Smith, Diana Bigg, Dennis Quilley, Colin Blakely, James Mason, Sylvia Miles, Roddy McDowall, Nicholas Clay and Jane Birkin.

N or M?
TOMMY & TUPPENCE (1941)

On one or two occasions, Mrs Christie went to stay with the actor Francis L. Sullivan and his wife in their house in the country at Haslemere, Surrey. Most of her spare time, however, she continued to spend in Lawn Road, Hampstead, writing and attempting to ignore the falling bombs and the flying glass:

I had decided to write two books at once, since one of the difficulties of writing a book is that it suddenly goes stale on you. Then you have to put it by, and do other things – but I believed that if I wrote two books, and alternated the writing of them, it would keep me fresh at the task. One was The Body in the Library, which I had been thinking of writing for some time, and the other one was N or M?, a spy story, which was in a way a continuation of the second book of mine, The Secret Adversary, featuring Tommy and Tuppence. Now with a grown-up son and daughter, Tommy and Tuppence were bored by finding that nobody wanted them in wartime. However, they made a splendid come-back as a middle-aged pair, and tracked down spies with all their old enthusiasm.⁷

What their author saw as Tommy and Tuppence’s ‘old enthusiasm’ was described by one of her critics⁸ as ‘their intolerable high spirits’. Mr and Mrs Thomas Beresford had appeared not only in The Secret Adversary in 1922 but also in Partners in Crime in 1929. Some Agatha Christie enthusiasts acquire a taste for them, while others do not: they are an engaging couple, though occasionally somewhat too ebullient.

The events in N or M?, the first Christie novel to be set in the Second World War, take place in 1940, and it must be said that something has gone wrong with Mrs Christie’s chronology. At the end of Partners in Crime in 1929, Tuppence Beresford was pregnant for the first time. It is revealed in N or M? that she must have given birth to twins, Derek and Deborah, for these two young people are now playing their part in helping to win the war – Deborah in the coding and code-breaking department of British Intelligence, and Derek in the RAF – though they can surely be no more than eleven years of age at the most!

Albert, whose full name we now discover to be Albert Batt, has aged more normally. Fifteen when last heard of in Partners in Crime, he married in 1934 when he was twenty, and is now, in 1940, the proprietor of a pub in Kennington, a south London suburb. Albert enthusiastically agrees to help the Beresfords, who have been informally asked by the Secret Service to join them in rounding up a group of Fifth Columnists. Too old in their mid-forties for official war service, Tommy and Tuppence leap at the chance to do something useful, and in due course they triumph over various dangers and near-disasters to discover the identity of the chief spy and foil the enemy’s plans.

It has been a long time since the last Tommy and Tuppence adventure: it has also been a long time since the last thriller, as distinct from domestic crime story. N or M? is a trifle less silly than the thrillers of the twenties, and it comes as a relief to find Jews mentioned as victims of Hitler rather than as objects of British racial prejudice. If, finally, N or M? is less convincing on its level than the Poirot murder mysteries of the war years are on theirs, it is nevertheless easy to read, undemanding and, unless one is temperamentally allergic to Tommy and Tuppence, rather enjoyable. The Christiean obsession with nursery rhyme raises its interesting head again, for a child’s Mother Goose picture book plays its part in the scheme of things. When Tuppence utters the phrase, ‘Goosey, goosey, gander’, a certain German spy goes quite purple with rage.

A distinctly less sophisticated, home-made British equivalent of Dashiell Hammett’s husband-and-wife team of Nick and Nora Charles,⁹ the Beresfords share with the American couple a habit of being able to change moods with swiftness and ease from light-hearted insouciance to deadly seriousness. N or M? has its fair quota of detection, excitement and humour, though it is not the best of the five adventures of Tommy and Tuppence.

The Body in the Library
MISS MARPLE (1942)

A prolific author in peacetime, Agatha Christie found herself producing even more during the war. Among the twelve books she wrote during the war years were two, completed in the early forties, which were not intended for immediate publication. These were crime novels featuring Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and they were written as her two most popular detectives’ final cases. Mrs Christie’s intention at the time was that these two novels should be published after her death. The Poirot, which she wrote first, was a gift to her daughter Rosalind, and the Miss Marple was for her husband Max. The type-scripts were deposited in the vaults of a bank, heavily insured against destruction, and were made over formally by deed of gift to Rosalind and to Max Mallowan. (Although the Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, did appear posthumously, Agatha Christie changed her mind in the case of the Poirot novel, Curtain, which she allowed to be published in 1975, the year of her eighty-fifth birthday.) Two novels were published in 1942: The Body in the Library and The Moving Finger.

It was in Cards on the Table (1936) that Hercule Poirot had occasion to answer a question about Mrs Ariadne Oliver. Is she the woman who wrote The Body in the Library? he was asked, to which he replied, ‘That identical one’. Agatha Christie enjoyed indicating the resemblances between herself and Mrs Oliver, so it must have amused her to appropriate the title of her creation’s non-existent novel when, five years later, the idea for a new Miss Marple novel came to her. Or perhaps she remembered the title first, and then invented a plot to fit it. The body in the library is such a cliché of detective fiction, she might well have thought, but can it be stood on its head, gently satirized and at the same time made to work as a serious murder mystery? If those are the questions Mrs Christie asked herself, she certainly answered them conclusively in this superb story, the first full-length Miss Marple mystery since the lady’s novel début in Murder at the Vicarage twelve years earlier.¹⁰

Several years later, Mrs Christie told an interviewer that she thought the opening of The Body in the Library the best first chapter she had ever written. In their country house, Gossington Hall, in the village of St Mary Mead, Colonel Bantry’s wife, Dolly, is abruptly awakened from her early morning dream, not by the usual calm arrival of early morning tea, but by her maid rushing in, sobbing hysterically, ‘Oh, ma’am, oh, ma’am, there’s a body in the library’, and rushing out again.

Many of the characters from Murder at the Vicarage and from the 1932 volume of Miss Marple stories (The Thirteen Problems or The Tuesday Club Murders) reappear in The Body in the Library, which is hardly surprising, as St Mary Mead is only a small village. One thinks of some of the regulars as a kind of Miss Marple repertory or summer stock company: the Reverend Leonard Clement, he in whose vicarage the murder of the 1930 novel had been committed; his wife, Griselda, now blessed with an infant child who can crawl, but only in reverse; the rude and overbearing Inspector Slack; Dr Haydock, Miss Marple’s own physician and the Police Surgeon in St Mary Mead; Colonel Melchett, Chief Constable of ‘Redfordshire’; Mrs Price Ridley, ‘a rich and dictatorial widow’ the village gossip and busy body; Colonel and Mrs Bantry, in whose house the body is found; and Sir Henry Clithering, former Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard, and a friend of the Bantrys.¹¹ Several of these characters will turn up again in later adventures of Miss Marple. The criminal element must therefore be looked for among other inhabitants of the village, or among transients.

There are, fortunately, a large number of candidates for suspicion in The Body in the Library. The body is that of a young woman unknown to the Bantrys, or so they claim. It is soon identified by the police as that of Ruby Keene, an eighteen-year-old ‘dance hostess or something at the Majestic’, the leading hotel at Danemouth, a large and fashionable watering-place on the coast not far away. The activities of a number of people at the Majestic are investigated before the reason for the body being found in Colonel Bantry’s library is firmly established. Finally it is, of course, not the universally disliked Inspector Slack who solves the case, or any of his official colleagues, but Dolly Bantry’s friend, Jane Marple. Miss Marple’s cosiness and conventionality mask an inner steeliness of mind not unlike that of her creator. ‘Really, I feel quite pleased to think of [the murderer] being hanged,’ says this sweet old pussy with the cold blue eyes, at the end of The Body in the Library.

How old is Miss Marple? In 1930, in Murder at the Vicarage, she is described as a white-haired old lady. She appears to be the same age in The Body in the Library: at least, she reveals no signs of becoming decrepit. In They Do It With Mirrors (1952) she is, disconcertingly, only in her mid-sixties, but in 4.50 From Paddington (1957) she says, ‘I shall be ninety next year.’ Miss Marple may be lying, but it has to be a plausible lie, surely? In Nemesis (1971), the last Miss Marple to be written, the old lady is thought to be ‘seventy if she is a day – nearer eighty perhaps’. By the time she reaches these last cases in the 1970s, Miss Marple has become extremely frail, though her mind still functions as clearly as ever. This is quite a feat, as she ought to have been well over a hundred years old by then.

The Bantrys’ house, Gossington Hall, features in more than one Jane Marple adventure, and of course the country house in general is one of Mrs Christie’s favourite settings. ‘The one thing that infuriates me,’ the author said to Francis Wyndham in 1966,¹² ‘is when people complain that I always set my books in country houses. You have to be concerned with a house, with where people live.’ Ten years later, explaining that she wrote about the world she knew, she added to this: ‘I could never manage miners talking in pubs, because I don’t know what miners talk about in pubs’. She confined herself to what she knew and, by extension, what she could most easily imagine: hence, in her novels, many more deaths by poison than by, for instance, shooting.

The Body in the Library initiated a series of television adaptations of all twelve Miss Marple novels. It was produced in three episodes, the first of which was transmitted by BBC TV on Boxing Day 1984. Joan Hickson played Miss Marple throughout the series.

The Moving Finger
MISS MARPLE (1942)

The events of The Moving Finger takes place, not in Miss Marple’s village of St Mary Mead, but in Lymstock, a small backwater of a market town somewhere in the south of England. It is only when an outbreak of poison-pen letters in Lymstock leads to two deaths, the first apparently suicide but the second definitely murder, that the vicar’s wife, Maud Dane Calthrop, decides to call in an expert. She invites her friend Miss Marple to come and stay at the vicarage: thus it is that, about three-quarters of the way through the novel, ‘an amiable elderly lady who was knitting something with white fleecy wool’, appears at tea at the vicarage, and begins to make her views known, along with those of the local ciutizenry and the police. The story is narrated by Jerry Burton, a young man who has come to Lymstock with his sister, Joanna, in order to recuperate after an unspecified flying accident. The Burtons first become aware of Lymstock’s poison-pen letters when they receive one which expresses, in extremely coarse terms, the opinion that the Burtons are not brother and sister. Other Lymstock residents, they soon discover, have had similar letters, accusing the recipients of the most unlikely illicit sexual activities.

This is one of those Christie crime novels which could easily have become novels of a different, non-generic kind. The nastiness of the anonymous letter activity is graphically conveyed, and the characterization is strong and convincing. Megan Hunter, the twenty-year-old, tall, awkward stepdaughter of the solicitor, Richard Simmington, is an especially well-drawn character, far removed from the faceless piece of ‘romantic interest’ a more conventional crime novelist might have made of her. And, as the author herself later remarked, ‘The Moving Finger had good misdirection. There is a trap set at the very beginning and, as arranged by the murderer, you fall right in it.’¹³

In her autobiography, Mrs Christie mentioned The Moving Finger as one of her novels that she was ‘really pleased with’. ‘It is a great test,’ she added, ‘to re-read what one has written some seventeen or eighteen years later. One’s view changes. Some do not stand the test of time, others do.’

Two mild and minor comments on the text of The Moving Finger are perhaps worth making. The first is that, even in the middle of the Second World War, a skerrick of the old attitude remains: ‘Mary Grey was being firm with a stout Jewess who was enamoured of a skin-tight powder-blue evening dress’ (Chapter II). The second is that, near the beginning of Chapter I, a doctor tells his patient to take life slowly and easily, adding ‘the tempo is marked legato’: to a musician, or for that matter, to any one who remembers his school Latin, this verges on the solecistic, for legato tells you how to phrase, not how quickly or slowly to play, and is thus not a quality of tempo. It is an odd mistake for Mrs Christie to have made; but then Beethoven in his time made even sloppier use of Latin, so one should perhaps be no more than lightly censorious.

Sidney and Mary Smith, to whom The Moving Finger is dedicated, were close friends of the Mallowans with whom Agatha Christie was able to keep in touch during the war years, for Sidney Smith was Keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum. His wife, Mary, ‘was an extremely clever painter, and a beautiful woman’. Sidney Smith enjoyed Agatha Christie’s crime novels, though his criticisms of them were, according to the author herself, unlike anyone else’s. ‘About something that I didn’t think good he would often say, “That’s the best point in that book of yours.” Anything that I was pleased with he would say, “No, it’s not up to your best – you were below standard there.” ’

Usually, New York publication of the Christie novels followed shortly after London publication. The Moving Finger, however, was published first in New York, in 1942, and in the UK in the spring of the following year.

An adaptation for television, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, was first transmitted by BBC TV in two episodes, the first of which was seen on 21 February 1985.

Five Little Pigs
Alternative title: Murder in Retrospect
POIROT (1943)

Stephen Glanville, a Professor of Egyptology working at the Air Ministry, was another friend of the Mallowans whom Agatha kept in touch with during the war years in London. It was Glanville who, in 1943, suggested to her that she should write a crime novel set in ancient Egypt, which, after a certain amount of persuasion, Agatha agreed to attempt. She had also completed an adaptation for the stage play of her novel, Ten Little Niggers, and this ran successfully in London throughout most of 1943, first at the St James’s Theatre and later at the Cambridge.

Greenway House, the Mallowans’ Devonshire home, ceased to be a home for evacuated children when it was taken over at short notice by the Admiralty, and used as accommodation for United States Navy personnel. The Americans took good care of the house, and apparently appreciated its beauty. Many of the officers who were billeted in the house came from Louisiana, and the big magnolia trees in the grounds made them feel at home.

During the war, after she had completed her ancient Egyptian murder mystery Death Comes as the End, Agatha Christie produced another of her Mary Westmacott novels, the first for ten years. This was Absent in the Spring , which she wrote one weekend, ‘in three days flat’. On the third day, a Monday, she sent an excuse to University College Hospital, ‘because I did not dare leave my book at that point – I had to go on until I had finished it’:

I was so frightened of interruptions, of anything breaking the flow of continuity, that after I had written the first chapter in a white heat, I proceeded to write the last chapter, because I knew so clearly where I was going that I felt I must get it down on paper. Otherwise I did not have to interrupt anything – I went straight through.

I don’t think I have ever been so tired. When I finished, when I had seen that the chapter I had written earlier needed not a word changed, I fell on my bed, and as far as I remember slept more or less for twenty-four hours straight through. Then I got up and had an enormous dinner, and the following day I was able to go to the Hospital again.¹⁴

At a nursing home in Cheshire on 21 September 1943, Mrs Christie’s daughter Rosalind gave birth to a son, Mathew.

The Agatha Christie title to be published during the year was Five Little Pigs or, as it was more sensibly retitled for American publication, Murder in Retrospect. This is the earliest and by far the best of those novels in which Poirot or another investigator is called upon to solve a crime committed some years in the past. References to the nursery rhyme recalled by the English title, ‘This little pig went to market, this little pig stayed at home …’, are injected awkwardly and unnecessarily into the text; the five characters whom Mrs Christie chooses to identify with the little pigs, to the extent of heading each of five consecutive chapters of the novel (chapters 6 to 10) with the appropriate line of the nursery rhyme, do not have any light thrown upon them by being so identified. The author’s obsession with nursery rhyme has run away with her, though she pretends it is not hers but her detective’s:

A jingle ran through Poirot’s head. He repressed it. He must not always be thinking of nursery rhymes. It seemed an obsession with him lately and yet the jingle persisted.

Once the nursery rhyme is forgotten, Five Little Pigs or Murder in Retrospect can be seen for what it is: an excellent novel which happens also to be a first-rate murder mystery, more complex in structure than the majority of Poirot’s cases, and containing much vivid yet subtle characterization. The murder victim, a famous painter named Amyas Crale, is no romanticized artist-figure, but a real and convincing personality, some of whose less attractive traits suggest that they might have been borrowed from Augustus John. (Had Joyce Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth, been published not in 1944 but a year or two earlier, you would have suspected that a trace of Cary’s artist-hero, Gulley Jimson, had crept into Mrs Christie’s Amyas Crale.)

The unusual psychological depth and complexity of Five Little Pigs, and the fact that, written in 1942, it investigates a crime committed sixteen years earlier in 1926 (the year of Mrs Christie’s celebrated ‘disappearance’), taken together suggest that, whether consciously or not, she was somehow commenting upon herself and her marriage to Archie Christie, whose initials, incidentally, are the same as those of Amyas Crale. In the novel, Caroline Crale contemplates suicide by poison: ‘I had received a bad shock. My husband was proposing to leave me for another woman. If that was so, I didn’t want to live.’ Crale had said to her, ‘Do try and be reasonable about this, Caroline, I’m fond of you and will always wish you well – you and the children. But I’m going to marry Elsa.’ But it is Crale who is poisoned. Caroline is found guilty of his murder and dies in prison. Sixteen years later her daughter, now a young woman in her early twenties, asks Hercule Poirot to clear her mother’s name. The other five principal suspects are still alive, and Poirot not only interviews them but also persuades each of them to write his or her own memoir of those events of sixteen years ago. The five different interpretations of those events, and the tensions between the characters as they are in the present and as they were in the past, are set forth in masterly fashion. Agatha Christie is not generally praised for her ability to create character through dialogue, but she should be. A comparison of her minor characters and their speech with, for instance, that of Conan Doyle’s in the Sherlock Holmes stories reveals Mrs Christie to have by far the keener ear, the more fluent style.

The solution of the mystery in Five Little Pigs is not only immediately convincing but satisfying as well, and even moving in its inevitability and its bleakness. The murderer is identified, but it is doubtful if prosecution will follow. There are some crimes which can be atoned for only by being lived with.

Some minor points of interest: the Mallowans’ Greenway House would appear to have been used as model for Amyas Crale’s house; the novel is dedicated to Stephen Glanville, who had amiably bullied the author into writing Death Comes as the End; Five Little Pigs was the first Christie novel to reach a sale of 20,000 copies in its first edition; Lady Mary Lytton Gore, mentioned briefly at the beginning of Chapter 7, is someone whom Poirot had encountered in Three-Act Tragedy (1935).

Many years later, Agatha Christie adapted Five Little Pigs for the stage, under the title, Go Back for Murder. The play opened in Edinburgh, and came to the Duchess Theatre, London, on 23 March 1960. Poirot was banished from the story, and it is a personable young solicitor, Justin Fogg, who helps Miss Crale establish her mother’s innocence. The thoroughness with which the author has completely refashioned her material for stage presentation is impressive, but the play limps badly, and the flashback scenes of the second act are unsatisfactory. Robert Urquhart played Justin Fogg, Ann Firbank was both Caroline Crale and Caroline’s daughter, and other leading roles were played by Anthony Marlowe, Laurence Hardy and, as the painter Amyas Crale, Nigel Green. Hubert Gregg directed. The play closed after 31 performances, and has rarely been revived. ‘It has the usual Christie ingredients,’ said the critic of the London Daily Mail, ‘and is well acted, well produced and thoroughly enjoyable. But for the first time I left a Christie play actually annoyed that I had not guessed whodunit. Normally one is perfectly happy to have theories and suspicions proved wrong by Mrs Christie’s logic. But I felt cheated by this one.’

Towards Zero
Alternative title: Come and Be Hanged
(1944)

One day in 1944 Agatha Christie in London received a telephone call from her daughter Rosalind in Wales, who told her that Rosalind’s husband Hubert Prichard had been reported missing in action, and was believed killed. It was not until several months later that Prichard’s death was confirmed.

A happier event in the same year was the New York opening of the stage adaptation of Ten Little Niggers, called in America Ten Little Indians.

One Christie and one Westmacott novel were published during 1944.

Dedicated to the poet Robert Graves, Towards Zero is a superb, intricately plotted and somewhat sinister piece of work, in which Superintendent Battle, last encountered in Murder is Easy (1939), is the investigator. Poirot does not appear, but is mentioned on two occasions by Battle, who wishes his erstwhile colleague were present and who to some extent adopts Poirot’s method.

Detective stories, says one of the characters in Towards Zero, begin in the wrong place, with the murder. ‘But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that – years before, sometimes – with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.’ In other words, destiny manipulates us, moving us towards a decisive zero hour. This is Agatha Christie’s assertion in Towards Zero, and the reader’s opinion of the novel will depend largely upon whether he is willing to accept pre-destination, or at least to suspend, while reading it, his non-acceptance.

Most of the action takes place at Gull’s Point, a large country house on a steep cliff overlooking the estuary of the river Tern. A map of the area is provided in some printings, and the curious may like to compare an imagined world with the real world, by consulting a map of the estuary of the Yealm at Salcombe. All the landmarks in the novel are discernible, and the area is, as Max Mallowan suggested,¹⁵ ‘a place of pilgrimage for those who are disposed to identify the setting of a most ingeniously planned crime’. It is amusing to note that, in the map of the fictitious area provided in the novel, Mrs Christie helpfully includes an arrow indicating the direction of St Loo, which would appear to support the identification of that town as Torquay.

An unusual feature of Towards Zero is that the murder, or what perhaps ought to be called the principal murder, occurs later, which gives the characters and the characterization a chance to breathe, to expand. Nevile Strange, ‘first-class tennis player and all-round sportsman’, is an especially fascinating and well-developed character, but so are several others, including the old lawyer, Mr Treves, and the suicidal Angus MacWhirter. The prologue, in which the strands of fate begin to be woven together, and in which Treves, MacWhirter, Battle, Mr and Mrs Nevile Strange, Lady Tressilian and her household, Audrey Strange, Thomas Royde, Ted Latimer, and an anonymous murderer who may be one of the above, are introduced, is a masterpiece of technique. So is the entire novel, whether considered as a murder mystery or as a portrait of a certain type of psychopathic mentality.

At one point in the narrative, a character looks straight ahead of him, over the shoulder of the person addressing him, and is affected by what he sees. The reader is not told what has been seen, but is given a clue elsewhere. This is a device which Mrs Christie has used before and will use again: it is a tantalizingly effective one.

An example of the occasional Christie carelessness occurs in Towards Zero: it is helpful to the police when they discover puddles of water on the floor of a certain person’s room the morning after the murder. But Superintendent Battle a few paragraphs later remarks that the person ‘had all night to clear up his traces and fix things’. Why, then, did he leave the tell-tale water on the floor?

Angus MacWhirter, whom we discover in the first pages of the novel to have failed in a suicide attempt, is instrumental much later in rescuing another would-be suicide. This, the author appears to be telling us, is why he was prevented (by fate or God) from taking his own life.

Three minor points: ‘old Depleach’, mentioned in the fifth paragraph of the prologue, is clearly the distinguished lawyer, Sir Montague Depleach, whom Poirot interviewed in Five Little Pigs (1943); Agatha Christie’s fondness for wire-haired terriers leads her to introduce into her narrative ‘Don, a wire-haired terrier of amiable and loving disposition’, who finds an important clue; the alternative title Come and Be Hanged, was not that of the first American edition, which retained the British title, but that of a post-war American paperback reprint.

Ten years later, working in collaboration with Gerald Verner, Agatha Christie adapted Towards Zero for the stage. Directed by Murray MacDonald, the play was presented by the Peter Saunders management at the St James’s Theatre, London, on 4 September 1956. A London evening newspaper reviewer churlishly revealed the name of the murderer in his final sentence, which cannot have helped at the box office, but Towards Zero nevertheless managed to survive for six months. One evening, Queen Elizabeth paid a surprise visit, having booked seats through a ticket agency for the front row of the circle. Peter Saunders years later described¹⁶ the problems this presented:

It was a night when business was quite terrible, and I hastily brought the gallery circle and the upper circle down into the dress circle and virtually filled it. I was rather pleased with myself, and when the play started quietly walked to the side of the dress circle, and then to my horror realized that the Queen could see the stalls from where she was sitting, and there, in splendid isolation, were about fifty people.

The entire action of the play passes in the drawing-room of Lady Tressilian’s house, Gull’s Point, which is said to be ‘at Saltcreek, Cornwall’, though, as we know, it was the neighbouring county, her own Devon, that Agatha Christie had in mind. The suicidal MacWhirter of the novel has been dispensed with, and his most important function is now fulfilled by Mr Treves, the elderly solicitor. The first and minor death of the novel does not occur: that particular character stays alive to the end. People do not pair off in quite the same way, and the play offers an additional thrill just before the final curtain, for which there is no precedent in the novel. Unless the acting edition of the play contains a misprint, the co-authors are not too sure of their Latin genders: ‘Mens sana in corpore sane’, they allow Thomas Royde to say in Act I.

The cast of the première of Towards Zero was a strong one. Leading roles were played by Cyril Raymond (Thomas Royde), Mary Law (Kay Strange), George Baker (Nevil Strange), Gwen Cherrell (Audrey Strange), Michael Scott (Ted Latimer) and William Kendall (Superintendent Battle).

Mary Law recalled later that Mrs Christie, who had been present at the auditions and a number of the rehearsals, was painfully shy and ill at ease socially, but that her personality toughened up as the rehearsals progressed. ‘We all found her lines very difficult to say, and if someone in the cast said to her, “Do you mind if I alter this line?” Agatha Christie replied from the stalls, “Yes, I do mind. I want you to say, ‘I hate her, I hate her, I hate her.”’

Absent in the Spring
MARY WESTMACOTT (1944)

Written in three days,¹⁷ Agatha Christie’s first Mary Westmacott novel in ten years is a tour de force. It is not a long novel, no more than about 50,000 words, but it is set down on the page with such intensity, and indeed inevitability, that its effect is out of all proportion to its length. Joan Scudamore, a middleclass English woman in her late forties, has been visiting her married daughter, whose husband is employed in the Public Works Department in Iraq. Delayed by floods for several days at a small rest house at Tell Abu Hamid on the Turkish border, she soon finishes reading the two books she has brought with her, tires of writing letters, and is forced into a mood of introspection which is alien to her.

Mrs Scudamore has always considered herself to be a good wife to her husband, a solicitor in an English country town, and an understanding and sympathetic mother to their three children, now all grown up and leading their own lives. But when she brings herself to think deeply about her life and her family, she comes to realize that underneath her surface of sweet reasonableness she has, in fact, been a destructive force, and that her relationship to those most dear to her has been quite different from what she had always thought it to be.

Most of the novel consists of Joan Scudamore’s thoughts and memories as she now painfully reinterprets the past: her husband’s friendship with another woman, his unhappiness in his profession, his youthful wish to become a farmer. The events in Mrs Scudamore’s life, unlike those experienced by the heroine of Unfinished Portrait, bear no especially close resemblance to the events in the life of Agatha Christie. This is, perhaps, spiritual or emotional autobiography; but that, to the reader, should be irrelevant. In Joan Scudamore, Mrs Christie has created a thoroughly believable character, whose identity crisis, brought on by silence, loneliness, the desert sun, and middle-age, is presented with imaginative power and a certain wisdom.

Eventually, the Turkish train which will take Joan Scudamore to Aleppo and on to Istanbul and the Orient Express, arrives. For part of the journey between Aleppo and Istanbul she shares a compartment with a cosmopolitan Russian woman to whom she unburdens herself and then, in embarrassment, regrets having done so.¹⁸ Resolving to confess to her husband her knowledge that, though conventionally she has been a good wife to him, she has essentially failed him, Mrs Scudamore finally arrives in London at Victoria Station.

The ending of the novel is neither happy nor unhappy, unless you are made happy or unhappy by, on the one hand, self-deception or, on the other, self-knowledge. Mrs Christie understands both states, and knows something about alienation as well. Her novel derives its title from the Shakespeare sonnet which begins, ‘From you have I been absent in the spring,/ When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,/Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.’ The essence of the novel, however, could be more accurately summed up by two lines from Shakespeare’s contemporary, Francis Quarles: ‘No man is born unto himself alone;/Who lives unto himself, he lives to none.’ The human dilemma, so simply and unpretentiously presented by Agatha Christie in Absent in the Spring, lies in the necessity and the impossibility of sharing your skin, your prison and protection, with those you love.

The American novelist and critic, Dorothy B. Hughes, reviewing a reprint of the novel some years later, wrote in the New York Timer. ‘I’ve not been so emotionally moved by a story since the memorable Brief Encounter … Absent in the Spring is a tour de force which should be recognized as a classic.’ And, in an article on the Westmacott novels which she contributed to a symposium on Agatha Christie,¹⁹ Dorothy Hughes suggests that this, of all the books created by either Christie or Westmacott, is the one which must have given the writer the most satisfaction, ‘possibly even the exaltation which comes so rarely to a writer’. A cooler look at the novel by Robert Barnard²⁰ also recognizes its achievement: ‘That Christie was also capable of casting a typically cold stare at her own class is suggested by the Mary Westmacott novel Absent in the Spring, in which the central character – a managing, middleclass woman, cold, interfering, emotionally undeveloped – is seen very much as a representative of the worst kind of middleclass values. It is an analysis of considerable skill.’ It is also a more sympathetic and understanding portrayal of character than that comment would suggest. It is not, nor are any of the other Westmacott books, one of those ‘somewhat juvenile romantic novels’ which is how they are described by a recent Christie commentator²¹ who, it must be assumed, has not read them.

In Deadlier Than the Male, sub-titled ‘an investigation into feminine crime writing’,²² Jessica Mann praises Absent in the Spring for being ‘well organized technically’, but says that ‘it gives the impression of being about a type of person, if not an actual person, whom Agatha knew and hated.’ Others have been convinced that, on the deepest level, it is about the author herself. Here is what Agatha Christie wrote about it in An Autobiography.

Shortly, after that, I wrote the one book that has satisfied me completely. It was a new Mary Westmacott, the book that I had always wanted to write, that had been clear in my mind. It was the picture of a woman with a complete image of herself, of what she was, but about which she was completely mistaken. Through her own actions, her own feelings and thoughts, this would be revealed to the reader. She would be, as it were, continually meeting herself, not recognizing herself, but becoming increasingly uneasy …

It is an odd feeling to have a book growing inside you, for perhaps six or seven years, knowing that one day you will write it, knowing that it is building up, all the time, to what it already is …

… I don’t know myself, of course, what it is really like. It may be stupid, badly written, no good at all. But it was written with integrity, with sincerity, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy an author can have.

She might well have taken pride, also, in the fact that it was written in three days.

Death Comes as the End
(1945)

In 1941 the novelist Graham Greene, who worked for the Foreign Office for most of the war, wrote to Agatha Christie asking if she would be interested in doing some propaganda work. She refused, because she thought she would have no aptitude for it. ‘I lacked the single-mindedness to see only one side of the case,’ she wrote later. ‘Nothing could be more ineffectual than a lukewarm propagandist. You want to be able to say “X is black as night” and feel it. I didn’t think I could ever be like that.’ She was of more use to the war effort, in her view, working as a dispenser in a hospital.

Towards the end of the war, however, she began to feel restless. The situation at University College Hospital had changed, many of the patients had moved out of London, and Mrs Christie became bored with spending half her working time handing out ‘large quantities of pills to epileptics’. It was, she realized, necessary work, but it lacked that involvement with the war which she felt she needed. Through a young friend in the WAAF, she was given the opportunity to do some intelligence photographic work, and was interviewed by a grave young lieutenant in an office deep underneath the War Office. Shown a number of aerial photographs and asked to comment on or to recognize them, she failed the test. ‘I think you had better go back to hospital work’, the lieutenant said gently.

There was, however, another possibility. It was suggested that Mrs Christie might join an ENSA company on a tour of North Africa. She was thrilled by the prospect until, a few weeks before she expected to leave, she received a letter from her husband announcing that he would be returning from North Africa within two or three weeks. Depressed at the thought that she might arrive in North Africa as Max was leaving for England, she went down to Wales to stay with Rosalind for a weekend. Returning to her Hampstead flat later on the Sunday evening, having endured a journey of several hours from Wales in a freezingly cold train, followed by a much shorter though circuitous suburban train ride from Paddington to Hampstead, she had just begun to fry some kippers, when she heard a ‘peculiar clanking noise’ outside. She went out into the corridor and looked down the stairs:

Up them came a figure burdened with everything imaginable … rather like the caricatures of Old Bill in the first war – clanking things hung all over him … But there was no doubt who it was – it was my husband! Two minutes later I knew that all my fears that things might be different, that he would have changed, were baseless. This was Max! He might have left yesterday. He was back again. We were back again. A terrible smell of frying kippers came to our noses and we rushed into the flat … What a wonderful evening it was! We ate burnt kippers, and were happy.²³

Within months, the war in Europe was over.

Professionally, as well as personally, 1945 had been a happy year for Agatha Christie. She had seen two of her plays produced – Appointment with Death and Murder on the Nile – and had published two novels, Death Comes as the End and Sparkling Cyanide.

It was a friend of the Mallowans, Professor Stephen Glanville, who, over dinner one evening in 1943, persuaded Agatha Christie to write a crime novel set, not in the England of 1943, but in the Egypt of four thousand years earlier. Glanville thought that such a novel would be of interest both to the crime fiction enthusiast and to readers interested in ancient times. Agatha claimed that she was too ignorant on the subject of Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, but by the end of an evening of argument Glanville had virtually convinced her that she could do it. ‘You’ve read a lot of Egyptology,’ he said. ‘You are not only interested in Mesopotamia.’ This was true: one of her favourite books was The Dawn of Conscience by the American historian James Henry Breasted, an authority on ancient Egyptian history, and she had read widely in the field of Egyptology a few years earlier when she was writing her play, Akhnaton. When Glanville drew her attention to certain incidents in Egyptian history, and thrust half a dozen or more books upon her, Agatha realized that the die was cast.

The ‘recently published letters’ on which Death Comes as the End was based were the Henanakhte Papers, letters from a farmer which had been discovered in a rock tomb opposite Luxor in 1920–21 by the Egyptian Expedition of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. During the writing of the book, Agatha Christie found it necessary to bombard Stephen Glanville with questions, most of which he managed to answer although many of the queries involved him in hours of research. What did the Egyptians eat? How was their meat cooked? Were there special dishes for certain feasts? Did the men and women eat together? What were their sleeping arrangements? Did they eat at a table, or on the floor? Did the women occupy a separate part of the house? Did they keep linen in chests or in cupboards? What kind of houses did they have? Houses were far more difficult to find out about than temples or palaces, for many of the temples remain, whereas domestic buildings were made of less durable material than stone and have not survived.

Glanville read and commented upon the typescript, chapter by chapter. He objected to an important passage in the dénouement, and argued his case so strongly that the author finally gave in to him, and altered it against, as she continued to maintain, her better judgment. Her own ending would have been more dramatic, and, when she came to write her autobiography twenty years or more later, she noted: ‘I still think now, when I re-read the book, that I would like to rewrite the end of it – which shows that you should stick to your guns in the first place, or you will be dissatisfied with yourself.’ But, of course, she had at the time felt such gratitude to Stephen Glanville for having caused the book to be written and for having taken so much trouble in helping her with it that it would have seemed to her churlish not to take very seriously his objection to the dénouement. Max Mallowan noted that Glanville was, to his knowledge, the only person ever to have persuaded Agatha to alter the end of a book. His comment²⁴ suggests that he himself may, on occasion, have tried.

There were no equivalents of Hercule Poirot or Jane Marple in ancient Egypt so the family murders in Death Comes as the End have to be solved by the survivors, of whom indeed there are precious few by the end of the novel. Dedicated to Professor Glanville with a letter of thanks from his ‘affectionate and grateful friend’, and preceded by a note in which some background information is given, Death Comes as the End does not require of its reader any special knowledge of Egypt under the Pharaohs. People, beneath changing customs, remain the same, Mrs Christie would appear to be telling us. Certainly this family in ancient Egypt contrives both to be convincing as such and to suggest parallels with a contemporary middleclass rural household. More specifically, the reader may detect certain similarities with a Poirot mystery, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), in which Poirot solves a family murder in a country house in the English Midlands.

One must admire the flair with which Mrs Christie has created and made believable her picture of life in a vanished civilization of four thousand years ago. However, the plot of Death Comes as the End is by no means one of her most ingenious; and, although the novel is pleasant to read, the fact that it makes fewer demands on the reader than so many of the author’s finest murder mysteries might be thought to render this particular attempt to strike out along new and original paths somewhat disappointing, though worthy. The novel is undoubtedly unique, and it must have the highest number of murders (eight) of any Christie domestic crime novel. But the reader’s expectations are pitched high by the prospect of enjoying a cosy English-type murder mystery surrealistically set in the land of the Pharaohs, and the subsequent disappointment is perhaps greater than it has a right to be. Death Comes as the End, if you discount the trappings, is no better than average Christie. There is little real detection, and the experienced reader of Agatha Christie may not be surprised when the identity of the murderer is revealed.

Sparkling Cyanide
Alternative title: Remembered Death
(1945)

Sparkling Cyanide, or Remembered Death as it is called in America, is one of those novels in which a crime is investigated some time after it has been perpetrated: in this case, on its first anniversary. Rosemary Barton had died at a dinner party in a West End restaurant, after swallowing a glass of champagne which happened to be laced with cyanide. After a thorough police investigation, the official verdict was that Rosemary had committed suicide. However, her widower, George Barton, believes Rosemary to have been murdered, and one year later he assembles the same guests at the same restaurant for an experiment the precise nature of which he does not disclose, though clearly its purpose is to apprehend or at least to identify his wife’s murderer.

The murder of Rosemary, for such it proves to have been, is, however, not the only crime to come under investigation in Sparkling Cyanide, for George’s plans go sadly awry and his anniversary party ends with another death. Someone who was invited on both occasions but who failed to put in an appearance at either was Colonel Race. Race, the one-time Secret Service agent who was first encountered in The Man in the Brown Suit in 1924, is now over sixty. In Sparkling Cyanide he helps another investigator to discover the murderer; this will prove to be the last of Colonel Race’s appearances in the works of Agatha Christie.

The reconstruction of a fatal dinner party and the methods by which one of the murders is committed had already been used by Mrs Christie in ‘Yellow Iris’, a Poirot short story published in the USA in The Regatta Mystery (1939). In Sparkling Cyanide the second murder involves a mistake made jointly by a group of people which strains the reader’s credulity rather dangerously. Up to that point, however, the story has been told with a compulsive ease and a conviction which place the novel among the author’s most successful. It is, however, difficult to believe that, after dancing, people would return to the wrong places at their table simply because a purse had inadvertently been moved one place to the left.

Especially impressive, though noticeable only if you take the trouble to re-read the passage after having finished the novel, is Mrs Christie’s skating on extremely thin ice, in the second chapter where she quite blatantly reveals the solution but reveals so much else as well that you fail to notice what is being offered. As the sly author said to an interviewer many years later, ‘I don’t cheat, you know. I just say things that might be taken two ways.’²⁵

It was with Five Little Pigs, two years earlier, that an Agatha Christie novel had first achieved sales of 20,000. Now, with Sparkling Cyanide, sales in the first year of publication reached 30,000. From this point on, every Christie title would become, to use publishers’ jargon, a ‘bestseller’.

Warner Brothers produced a TV movie version of Sparkling Cyanide in 1983, with Anthony Andrews, Deborah Raffin and Nancy Marchand in key roles.

Come, Tell Me How You Live
ARCHAEOLOGICAL MEMOIR (1946)

As soon as the war was over, the Mallowans gave up their Hampstead flat, moved into their London house at 22 Cresswell Place, off Old Brompton Road, in South Kensington, and began to resume their pre-war routine, with summers spent in Devon as the Admiralty had relinquished Greenway House. Max Mallowan returned, for the time being, to his job at the Air Ministry, and Agatha settled down to invent more adventures for her two most popular sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple.

Two slim volumes containing Poirot short stories were published, both in London and in New York, in 1946. Poirot Knows the Murderer contained ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, which is also to be found in The Regatta Mystery (1939: USA only), and ‘The Mystery of the Crime in Cabin 66’ which, under another title (‘Problem at Sea’) was in the 1939 American volume, The Regatta Mystery, and will turn up again in Poirot’s Early Cases in 1974. Poirot Lends a Hand consisted of three stories, all of which are also to be found in Thirteen for Luck, a selection of Agatha Christie mystery stories for young readers, collected from previously published material and issued as a volume in New York in 1961 and in London in 1966. Two of the stories, ‘The Regatta Mystery’ and ‘Problem at Pollensa Bay’ are also to be found in The Regatta Mystery, while the third, ‘The Veiled Lady’ is included in [Hercule] Poirot’s Early Cases (1974).

Also published during 1946 were Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan, and The Hollow by Agatha Christie.

It was both appropriate and desirable that Come, Tell Me How You Live should have been published under Agatha Christie’s married name: appropriate, since it dealt with her adventures on archaeological digs in the thirties with Max Mallowan; desirable because, had it been publicized as being by Agatha Christie, many of her public would no doubt have bought the book on the assumption that it was crime fiction, and might perhaps been disappointed when they discovered that it was not.

Based upon journals which she had kept assiduously during her archaeological expeditions to the Middle East with Mallowan, Come, Tell Me How You Live was written by Agatha Christie at odd moments during the Second World War years, and finished in the spring of 1944. She was driven to writing the book by nostalgia for those years of peaceful travel in the thirties, by sadness at her enforced wartime separation from Mallowan, and by a desire to relive past happiness. Smith of the British Museum’s Department of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities read the typescript and advised Mrs Christie not to publish it, as he thought that Max Mallowan was likely to find it trivial and unscholarly. Also, according to the author, her publishers, Collins, disapproved of the book. They had ‘hated’ the Mary Westmacott novels, and were suspicious of anything that enticed Mrs Christie away from the crime fiction which they found so lucrative. Nevertheless, they agreed to publish Come, Tell Me How You Live. Paper was scarce, so the edition was a small one. The book, however, was a success, ‘and I think they then regretted that paper was so short’.²⁶

The title derives from Lewis Carroll,²⁷ to whom apologies are made by the author for ten stanzas of very poor Carroll pastiche which describe the first meeting of Mr Mallowan and Mrs Christie. Here are the first three stanzas:

    I’ll tell you everything I can

        If you will listen well:

    I met an erudite young man

        A-sitting on a Tell.

    ‘Who are you, sir?’ to him I said,

        ‘For what is it you look?’

    His answer trickled through my head

        Like bloodstains in a book.

    He said: ‘I look for aged pots

        Of prehistoric days,

    And then I measure them in lots

        And lots of different ways.

    And then (like you) I start to write,

    My words are twice as long

        As yours, and far more erudite.

        They prove my colleagues wrong!’

    But I was thinking of a plan

        To kill a millionaire

    And hide the body in a van

        Or some large Frigidaire.

    So, having no reply to give,

        And feeling rather shy,

    I cried: ‘Come, tell me how you live!

        And when, and where, and why?’

The dedication of Come, Tell Me How You Live reads: ‘To my husband, Max Mallowan; to the Colonel, Bumps, Mac and Guilford, this meandering chronicle is affectionately dedicated.’ A meandering chronicle it may be, but it is also a perfectly delightful one, in the picture it gives of life on archaeological expeditions in Iraq and Syria in the thirties, and in the good nature and humanity which inform it throughout. The Mallowan team of regulars were clearly agreeable, interesting and amusing people to be with, and Mrs Mallowan’s stores of the Arab workmen, the Turks and the desert Sheikhs are colourful, lively, and occasionally touching and thought-provoking:

An old woman comes up to Hamoudi, leading a boy of about twelve by the hand.

‘Has the Khwaja medicine?’

‘He has some medicines – yes.’

‘Will he give me medicine for my son here?’

‘What is the matter with your son?’

It is hardly necessary to ask. The imbecile face is only too clear.

‘He has not his proper senses.’

Hamoudi shakes his head sadly, but says he will ask the Khwaja.

The men have started digging trenches. Hamoudi, the woman and the boy come up to Max.

Max looks at the boy and turns gently to the woman.

‘The boy is as he is by the will of Allah,’ he says. ‘There is no medicine I can give you for the boy.’

The woman sighs – I think a tear runs down her cheek. Then she says in a matter-of-fact voice:

‘Then, Khwaja, will you give me some poison, for it is better he should not live?’

Max says gently that he cannot do that either.

She stares at him uncomprehendingly, then shakes her head angrily and goes away with the boy.

After this, the stories of Mallowan’s attempts to impress upon the Christian Arabs in his employ that they really must refrain from killing Mohammedans read as light relief. Keeping the peace between Mohammedan and Christian Arabs is a major task of the Europeans in the party.

You do not need to have any special interest in the Middle East or in archaeology to enjoy this gentle and charming account of the Mallowans’ adventures while digging in Syria and the Mesopotamian area in Iraq between 1935 and 1938. On the other hand, the erudite archaeologist who plays so important a role in it did not think the book at all trivial. ‘Agatha’s gift for narrative, and for relating humorous exchanges of conversation between all manner of men and women in unusual situations, is rewardingly displayed. There have been many calls for the republishing of this exceptionally entertaining book and it was reissued in 1975. Many have been called to Oriental archaeology, but few have been able to leave so happy a record of it.’²⁸

Not even Agatha Christie Mallowan can make Arab indifference to death, and thus to life, at all engaging, and faced with examples of the more callous behaviour of the followers of Allah she can note only that ‘Max says death isn’t really important out here’. Agatha Mallowan takes a liberal view, and learns to love ‘simple people … to whom death is not terrible.’²⁹

But Agatha Christie, to whom death is her stock-in-trade, must have been profoundly shocked.

Modestly, the author does not push herself into the forefront of her narrative. That she was a gay and lively participant in the life of the camp, however, is confirmed by the description of Agatha Christie in Iraq given by a London archaeologist who visited the Mallowans there:

It was quite a different Agatha Christie from anyone I had known in England. There was no shy psychological hang-up. Here was a woman in a man’s world who knew that she was being accepted at face value. She worked like a beaver, sometimes in heats as high as 120°F, photographing and mending the finds as they were catalogued at the end of the day. No professional could have done it better and the conditions under which she worked were far from easy. Whereas the men could sometimes be tetchy when things went wrong, she always saw the funny side and was mainly responsible for the good humour that prevailed on all the ‘digs’ organized by her husband.

The Hollow
Alternative title: Murder After Hours
POIROT (1946)

‘The Hollow’ in the title is Sir Henry and Lady Angkatell’s country house, in which most of the action takes place, though at one point in the narrative Hercule Poirot, displaying an astonishing knowledge of English poetry, quotes the opening lines of Tennyson’s Maud:

I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood; Its Ups in the field above are dabbled with blood red heath, The red ribb’d ledges drip with a silent horror of blood, And Echo there, whatever is ask’d her, answers ‘Death’.

One trusts that this was not Agatha Christie’s view of the real house on which she modelled ‘The Hollow’, for that was the home at Haslemere, Surrey, of the actor Francis L. Sullivan and his wife, to whom the author dedicated her novel: ‘For Larry and Danae, with apologies for using their swimming pool as the scene of a murder.’ Sullivan later recalled that, on one of the several weekends during the war when Agatha came to stay, he observed the idea for The Hollow³⁰ occurring to the author:

At the back of the house my wife, in a moment of insane optimism of the English weather, had caused a swimming pool to be made with half a dozen paths leading down to it through the chestnut wood. One fine Sunday morning I discovered Agatha wandering up and down these paths with an expression of intense concentration.³¹

Sullivan asked what she was doing but received no real answer until more than a year later when an advance copy of The Hollow arrived in the post.

In some of the earliest Poirot murder mysteries, the plots are highly ingenious but the characterization is negligible: the puzzle is all. The puzzle in The Hollow is as important as ever it was, but by now Mrs Christie has amassed years of experience and a consequent building up of confidence in her technique as a novelist. The actual plot-line of The Hollow is not one of her best, in the sense that it is not one of her most complex, but the characterization is superb and the writing unostentatiously impressive. Gerda, the slow-thinking but by no means stupid widow of Dr John Christow, the murder victim, is very acutely and sympathetically observed, and there is a delightful portrait of a vague, upperclass lady in Lucy Angkatell, who is slightly reminiscent of Judith Bliss in Noël Coward’s play, Hay Fever. Lady Angkatell is allowed an anti-Arab joke, which makes a change in the pages of Agatha Christie!

It is not only the characterization that is so commendable in The Hollow: the description of the house and grounds, and of that other, larger country estate, Ainswick, mentioned so often by several of the characters, is evocative, and highly important to the narrative. If The Hollow is in the top flight of Christie novels, it is as something both more and less than a murder mystery.

Poirot finds himself involved in the proceedings because he is a neighbour of the Angkatells, having purchased a ‘weekend’ cottage nearby. He is invited to The Hollow for lunch, and arrives to find Lady Angkatell and her guests down by the swimming pool, staring at the body of a dying man who is lying by the pool, with a woman standing over him clutching a revolver. Poirot’s first thought is that it is a tasteless, childish, very English kind of joke.

When a character experiences one of those moments of irrational ecstasy in which it seems that ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world’, visionary moments which most of us will have experienced at some time in our lives, moments at which we have the illusion that the gates of perception have been opened, Mrs Christie proves more capable of describing the occasion than a number of novelists classified as literary. No words are adequate to convey the visionary experience: Mrs Christie’s, precise, simple and brief, are less inadequate than many another’s.

It is disconcerting to find, in a novel written during the Second World War, that the author still cannot resist waving her little anti-semitic flag. One of the characters, Midge, has a telephone conversation with her employer, the proprietress of a West End dress shop, whose voice, ‘the raucous voice of the vitriolic little Jewess’, comes angrily over the wires: ‘What ith that, Mith Hardcathle? A death? A Funeral? Do you not know very well I am short-handed? Do you think I am going to stand for these excutheth? Oh, yeth, you are having a good time, I dare thay!’ Midge describes her employer a few paragraphs later as ‘a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corn-crake’. Granted that the voice at the end of the phone needed to be that of a mean, money-grasping employer, Mrs Christie might have found some other victim.

Sales of the first edition of The Hollow outdid those of the previous year’s Sparkling Cyanide and reached an impressive 40,000.

Five years later, in 1951, The Hollow, a play based by Agatha Christie on her novel, was produced in London. Mrs Christie had written the play simply because it came to her suddenly one day that her novel, The Hollow, would make a good play, and she had by this time become somewhat disillusioned with other people’s stage adaptations of her books. However, when she mentioned to Rosalind that she was considering such an adaptation, her daughter (‘who has had the valuable role in life of eternally trying to discourage me without success’³²) replied that, although The Hollow was a good book, it was completely unsuitable material for the theatre. The undiscouraged writer proceeded with her project and later commented shrewdly on the transition from novel to play:

It was, of course, in some ways rather more of a novel than a detective story. The Hollow was a book I always thought I had ruined by the introduction of Poirot. I had got used to having Poirot in my books, and so naturally he had come into this one, but he was all wrong there. He did his stuff all right, but how much better, I kept thinking, would the book have been without him. So when I came to sketch out the play, out went Poirot.³³

When the play was completed, it was given to Bertie Meyer, who had presented Alibi and Black Coffee, the earliest Christie plays. However he thought it would be too difficult to cast and, in any case, did not like it sufficiently to make the attempt. It is at this stage that Peter Saunders (now Sir Peter), who was to be associated with the most successful period of Agatha Christie’s career as a playwright, enters upon the scene. Saunders, a relative newcomer to theatrical management, had put out a tour of Murder at the Vicarage, with which he had done so well that he longed to acquire a new Christie play. He approached her agents, with the result that pressure was placed upon Bertie Meyer either to stage The Hollow within six months or relinquish it. Meyer chose to relinquish the play, whereupon Saunders tentatively engaged Hubert Gregg, an experienced light comedy actor and inexperienced director, to stage The Hollow.

Saunders, accompanied by Gregg, gave lunch at the Carlton Grill (at the bottom of the Haymarket, on the site now occupied by New Zealand House) to Mrs Christie, who brought along her husband, her daughter and her son-in-law. Despite Gregg’s gaffe when he revealed that he thought Black Coffee to be an adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, thus provoking mirthless laughter from the author, Mrs Christie and her advisers sufficiently approved of Saunders as impresario and Gregg as director to allow the venture to proceed. Gregg was even entrusted with the task of rewriting a number of passages, for in its first draft the play too clearly revealed its provenance, the printed page. It had, after all, begun life as a novel of characterization and motive rather than as a mystery full of plot and dialogue.

The play went into rehearsal. A lively picture of Mrs Christie’s involvement at this stage was given much later by Hubert Gregg:

We were forever fiddling with the text, trying to take it off the printed page, where it was doggedly at home, and make it come alive. At one rehearsal – in a theatre, with Christie spreading over a seat in the stalls and me walking up and down the centre aisle – my ear was drawn to the Detective Inspector. The word ‘peremptory’ came into a speech of his. I can’t think how I had come to leave it there. But what disturbed me more was his mispronunciation of the word. He wasn’t to blame, the word is hardly ever given its correct sound. He plumped for the general mis-stressing of the second syllable.… ‘It isn’t “peremptory”,’ I said, ‘it’s “peremptory”.’ The cast all turned in surprise to look at me. So did Christie.

‘It isn’t, you know,’ she said.

‘It is, you know,’ I said. ‘Look it up.’

‘I bet you a pound,’ she said.

‘Done!’ said I.

The actor made another stab at the word, getting it right for me but wrong for everyone else.

The following day, Christie inserted herself into her accustomed seat and I began my perambulation as this same scene was played. I was standing beside her – not coincidentally – when the actor came to his verbal Becher’s Brook. He sailed over it and turned to me with a ‘How’s that?’ expression on his face. Christie was handing me a pound note. I took it. But, at the same time, I called out to the actor, ‘Change the word.’ (With a side glance at Christie.) ‘I don’t think this detective would use it anyway. Make it “short”.’

‘Why?’ asked Christie. By now she was ceasing to object to changes. This question was merely a request for information.

‘Apart from anything else,’ I said, ‘if you and I had a difference of opinion about the pronunciation to the extent of risking a pound on it, the word may fuss an audience. In my view they’ll be more fussed if he says it my way because they’ll think he’s wrong. If he says it your way – which, mainly, will be their way – they’ll think he’s right but the odd philologist in the audience will know he’s wrong and be fussed. Then there’s the point that a detective, this kind of detective, even if he used the word, probably wouldn’t get it right anyway. Now. For whom is he to make it wrong – you or me?’

‘Have a peppermint,’ said Christie.³⁴

The Hollow began a pre-London tour at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 5 February 1951, and came into the tiny Fortune Theatre in the West End of London (opposite the Drury Lane’s stage-door) on 7 June. It subsequently transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre, achieving a very respectable run in London of eleven months (376 performances). On tour, the role of Dr Christow, who is murdered near the beginning of Act II, was played by the director, Hubert Gregg. In the West End, Gregg having gone off to appear in a Walt Disney film, Christow was played by Ernest Clark. Top billing went to Jeanne de Casalis who, as Lady Angkatell, found all the humour of the part but could not be restrained from adding some of her own. Max Mallowan thought she ‘acted throughout as the Queen Bee, to the detriment of the hive.’³⁵

The cast at the Fortune Theatre also included George Thorpe (Sir Henry), Colin Douglas (Edward), Jessica Spencer (Midge), Martin Myldeck (Inspector Colquhoun) and Richard Shaw Taylor (Detective Sergeant Penny).³⁶

Agatha Christie’s instinct in substituting a Scotland Yard detective for Hercule Poirot was a sound one, for the flamboyant Poirot would have drawn attention away from the other characters, whereas the comparatively colourless policeman helps to focus attention upon them. Although the play is necessarily less complex than the novel, its dialogue is lively, and it holds the attention firmly. There is usually a gasp from the audience at the moment just before the end when the apparent situation of murderer and potential second victim is reversed with one line of dialogue, and the identity of the killer thus revealed.

In the play, Midge still has a telephone conversation with her employer, whose voice is heard. It is however, no longer the ‘raucous voice of a vitriolic little Jewess’ from Whitechapel. ‘Allo,’ it says, ‘this is Madame Henri speaking … Why are you not ‘ere? You are coming back this afternoon, yes? … If you do not return today, you will not ‘ave any job. There are plenty of girls who would be ‘appy to ‘ave it.’ This unpleasant French lady may or may not be Jewish: the question does not arise.

With the success of The Hollow, Agatha Christie’s golden period in the theatre began. In the next three years she was to go on to even greater commercial and artistic success. ‘I find,’ she said during this period,

that writing plays is much more fun than writing books. For one thing you need not worry about those long descriptions of places and people. And you must write quickly if only to keep the mood while it lasts, and to keep the dialogue flowing naturally. I didn’t care much for what occurred when other people tried to turn my books into plays, so in the end I felt I had to do it myself.

Agatha Christie’s plays are, of course, continually being staged throughout the world, in English and in translation. While this book was being written, I encountered several productions in the United States and in Great Britain, on tour or in provincial repertory theatres. A 1981 production at the Theatre Royal, Windsor, of The Hollow had as its only major blemish a misguided injection of current idioms or references into the thirty-year-old text (‘How does that grab you?’; ‘I’ve been jogging for the past hour’; and references to ‘The Sweeney’ and ‘Starsky and Hutch’).

The Rose and the Yew Tree
MARY WESTMACOTT (1947)

The opportunity to begin travelling abroad again offered itself in 1947, when Max Mallowan became the first Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in the University of London. His post allowed him to take up work overseas for a period of some months in each year; and thus it was that, in the autumn of 1947, Agatha accompanied him to Baghdad, where Mallowan entered into negotiations with the Iraq Department of Antiquities for a resumption of the excavations which had been interrupted by the war.

1947 was also the year in which Queen Mary, mother of the reigning British monarch George VI, celebrated her eightieth birthday. When the BBC enquired how she would like the event celebrated on the radio, Queen Mary’s private secretary replied that Her Majesty would like nothing better than a play by Agatha Christie. For many years Queen Mary had been a devoted reader of Mrs Christie’s crime novels, and had a standing order with her bookseller for each new title as it was published. She was not the only Agatha Christie fan in the British royal family, for her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth (now the Queen Mother) and her grand-daughters Elizabeth (now Queen Elizabeth II) and Margaret were also Christie readers.

The BBC therefore commissioned from Agatha Christie a half-hour radio play,³⁷ to be broadcast in celebration of Queen Mary’s birthday. Mrs Christie had an idea in mind which she had intended to work up into a story. Instead, within a week she turned it into a radio play, and ‘Three Blind Mice’ was, in due course, broadcast. Queen Mary with members of her family and friends listened to it in the sitting-room of Marlborough House, and Her Majesty professed to be delighted by it. Agatha Christie subsequently turned ‘Three Blind Mice’ into a long story, or novella, and it was published in a volume, Three Blind Mice and Other Stories, in the United States of America only, in 1950. The story was not published in Great Britain because, by this time, the author had decided to turn it back into a play, not for radio but for the theatre. This is the play which, entitled ‘The Mousetrap’, opened in London in 1952, and is still running.

During the year 1947, a new Mary Westmacott novel, The Rose and the Yew Tree, and a Hercule Poirot volume, The Labours of Hercules, were published. Although Agatha Christie’s fourth Mary Westmacott novel was written and published in the forties, the idea behind the book had been in her mind, according to the author, since 1929: ‘Just a sketchy picture, that I knew would come to life one day.’ What that idea was it is not easy to discern, for on one level The Rose and the Yew Tree is a simpler piece of story-telling than the earlier Westmacott novels, though on another it can be read as being about time and choice: the mystery of the former, the non-existence of the latter. The title derives from a sentence in ‘Little Gidding’, the last of the four long, meditative poems which make up T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, and the sentence is placed at the beginning of the novel as an epigraph: ‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.’

The story, narrated by a middle-aged man who is crippled after being knocked down by a lorry, concerns a beautiful, highborn maiden who inexplicably forsakes her fairy-tale prince to go off with a coarse workingclass opportunist who, physically brave or perhaps foolhardy, has been awarded a VC during the 1939–45 war and who stands for parliament in the first post-war election. The characters, though closely observed, or at least observed in close-up, seem less real than in the earlier Westmacott novels, and you can quite easily imagine them removed to the middle distance, as it were, and placed in an Agatha Christie murder mystery. The beautiful, somewhat fey girl who lives in the castle on the headland with her grandmother, Lady St Loo; her handsome cousin Rupert, Lord St Loo, whom she is expected to marry; the unpleasant Labour MP, John Gabriel, who undergoes a kind of metamorphosis; the understanding, self-effacing narrator; the artist and his intelligent, articulate wife. The MP would be murdered, Poirot would investigate, and would discover the killer to be, probably, the artist. The Rose and the Yew Tree is even set in Agatha Christie country, the seaside resort of St Loo. Peril at End House (1932) was set in St Loo which, in the absence of precise information from the author, was identified earlier as being in Devon: its leading hotel certainly seemed to be based on the Imperial, Torquay. But, in The Rose and the Yew Tree, St Loo is placed further down the coast, in Cornwall.

If the structure of The Rose and the Yew Tree appears less complex than that of the earlier Westmacott novels, the quality of the thought, as distinct from that of the creative imagination, is, if not more complex, then certainly very impressive. The full impact of the scene in which the narrator, Hugh Norreys, and the young woman with whom for a time he imagines he is in love go to a concert at the Wigmore Hall and hear Elisabeth Schumann sing a Richard Strauss Lied, ‘Morgen’, will be made only on those readers who know the song and its emotive force, and can identify it from the few words of English translation given in the text. But few will fail to recognize the wisdom and maturity of the narrator’s comments on ‘nature’s last and most cunning piece of deceit’, the illusion that accompanies physical attraction. The difference between love and that ‘whole monstrous fabric of self-deception’ erected by passion disguised as love is not easy to distinguish when you are in the throes of one or the other, but it is real, and it was clearly understood by this most unromantic of novelists.

The Rose and the Yew Tree is also concerned marginally with politics, and a mature disillusion with the political game informs Mrs Christie’s outlook. She has travelled a long road since The Secret of Chimneys. ‘What are politics after all,’ Hugh Norreys ponders, ‘but adjacent booths at the world’s fair, each offering their own cheap-jack specific to cure all ills?’ Elsewhere, through her narrator, Mrs Christie reveals a capacity for speculative and abstract thought, and a mystical acceptance of the natural world, which are all the more fascinating because they surface but rarely in her works:

Across the terrace came running a brown squirrel. It sat up, looking at us. It chattered a while, then darted off to run up a tree.

I felt suddenly as though a kaleidoscopic universe had shifted, setting into a different pattern. What I saw now was the pattern of a sentient world where existence was everything, thought and speculation nothing. Here were morning and evening, day and night, food and drink, cold and heat – here movement, purpose, consciousness that did not yet know it was consciousness. This was the squirrel’s world, the world of green grass pushing steadily upwards, of trees living and breathing.

Finally, however, The Rose and the Yew Tree is about consciousness and the illusory nature of choice. ‘Does one ever really have any choice? About anything?’ asks Isabella, who would not comprehend any real answer to her metaphysical question. She asks the question, having left her fairy-tale castle in Cornwall to share a degraded life with the rascally yet saintlike John Gabriel in a squalid room in the Christie-invented Eastern European town of Zagrade, which is not, as one might expect, in Yugoslavia and equidistant from Zagreb and Belgrade, but in Slovakia.

‘Romantically saccharine,’ says the unperceptive Jeffrey Feinman.³⁸ Dorothy B. Hughes, however, understands The Rose and the Yew Tree and its companion novels: ‘The Westmacotts bear as little relation to women-type novels as to Winnie-the-Pooh. You cannot but wonder if any of those who proffered opinions had ever read her work.’³⁹ Max Mallowan thought The Rose and the Yew Tree ‘the most powerful and dramatic’ of all the novels.

The Labours of Hercules
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1947)

Twelve Hercule Poirot stories comprise The Labours of Hercules, but they are not simply individual stories collected together to make up a volume: the book has been planned around a theme. In a Foreword, or introductory chapter, in which the celebrated detective is giving dinner in his modern London flat to an old friend, the classical scholar Dr Burton, Fellow of All Souls, the conversation turns to the classics. Poirot, contemplating retirement and the cultivation of vegetable marrows, regrets that a certain richness of the spirit may have eluded him because of his lack of a classical education. A joke is made about his Christian name, Hercule. ‘Hardly a Christian name,’ says Dr Burton. ‘Definitely pagan.’ And he goes on to make an unflattering distinction between his friend and the Hercules of Greek legend. Burton does not take seriously Poirot’s expressed intention to retire from his profession as a private investigator. ‘Yours aren’t the Labours of Hercules,’ he tells Poirot, ‘yours are labours of love.’ As he leaves, he prophesies that Poirot will make as many farewell appearances as a prima donna.

Burton goes, but he leaves the germ of an idea in the mind of Hercule Poirot who, the following morning, instructs his secretary, the efficient Miss Lemon, to collect for him information about the labours of Hercules. What he reads leads him not to any great admiration of the classical Hercules – ‘What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies!’ – but to a determination to accept only twelve more cases, cases which would have to correspond in the modern world to the twelve labours of the classical Greek hero: ‘Poirot picked up the Classical Dictionary and immersed himself once more in classical lore. He did not intend to follow his prototype too closely. There should be no woman, no shirt of Nessus … The Labours and the Labours only.’

The twelve stories in The Labours of Hercules are accounts of the twelve cases which Poirot accepts. But, of course, his friend Dr Burton was right. Poirot continued to bring murderers to justice for many years after completing the last of his twelve labours.

The labours of the Greek Hercules were imposed upon the hero by Eurystheus, King of Tiryns, at the command of the Delphic oracle, as a penance when Hercules killed his own wife Megara in a fit of madness. Poirot’s labours were self-imposed, and necessarily involved a certain amount of symbolism, for the dangers of the modern world are not those of classical Greece. Hercules’ first task, for instance, was to kill the Nemean lion, a frightful beast which had been ravaging the country. In ‘The Nemean Lion’, Poirot’s first Herculean adventure, he solves a mystery concerning the kidnapping of a beast which could be said to look like a lion, is indeed said by one of the characters in the story to have the heart of a lion, but is, in fact, a Pekingese dog.

The Lernean Hydra, slain by Hercules, was a monstrous snake which inhabited the swamps and which was able to grow replacements of its many heads if they were lopped off. The many-headed monster which Poirot destroys in ‘The Lernean Hydra’ is malicious gossip. Whereas the earlier Hercules persuaded his friend Iolaus to burn the stumps before new heads could grow, his modern counterpart finds that he has to solve a murder before he can suppress the many tongues of rumour and gossip.

In ‘The Arcadian Deer’ Poirot functions less as detective than as a sentimental matchmaker, at the request of someone who, ‘he thought, was one of the handsomest specimens of humanity he had ever seen, a simple young man with the outward semblance of a Greek god.’ He solves a little mystery as well, but his satisfaction is chiefly derived from uniting the Greek God with his stricken Arcadian deer. In the classical legend, it is, surely, an Arcadian stag which Hercules captures. It is as well for conventional morality that Poirot gives himself a certain licence in interpreting his brief.

Poirot’s equivalent of the fourth labour of Hercules, in ‘The Erymanthian Boar’, is to achieve the capture not of a wild boar but of a violent murderer and gang-leader. In the course of this adventure, high up in the Swiss Alps whither he had journeyed in search of the Arcadian deer, Poirot indulges in some distinctly un-Poirot-like physical activity, exposing himself to dangerous violence.

In ‘The Augean Stables’ Poirot averts a political scandal of the greatest magnitude by adopting the methods of Hercules who cleansed the stables belonging to King Augeas by redirecting a river through them. ‘What Hercules used was a river,’ Poirot exclaims, ‘that is to say one of the great forces of nature. Modernize that! what is a great force of nature? Sex, is it not?’ And he goes on to argue that scandal allied to sex will divert people’s attention from scandal allied to political chicanery or fraud. He is a bit of an old fraud, himself, n’est-ce pas?

Poirot’s ‘man-eating birds’ in ‘The Stymphalean Birds’ are either two middle-aged women with long, curved noses like birds, and loose cloaks which flap in the wind like wings, or they are two other birds of prey and of ill omen. Hercules chased his birds from their hiding-place in the woods by banging a bronze rattle, and then brought them down. Hercule adopts subtler but equally efficacious methods in modern Herzoslovakia. We were last concerned with this small Balkan state (allied, surely, to Ruritania and Pontevedro) in The Secret of Chimneys (1925).

‘The Cretan Bull’, in the story of that name, proves not easy to identify. There is, in any case, only the remotest connection between the Poirot story and the legend of Hercules’ capture of the bull which may have been the father of the Minotaur. There is also a clue embedded in the sentence before this.

The eighth labour of Hercules was to capture the horses of Diomedes. These animals were fed on human flesh by their owner, the King of the Bistonians. They suddenly became tame when Hercules fed their master to them. Poirot equates them with beasts of another kind who symbolically feed upon humanity, and he seems to expect that at least one of the breed will be tamed.

‘The Girdle of Hyppolita’ was captured by Hercules after he had defeated the Amazons in battle and either killed their Queen or held one of her generals for ransom. Poirot’s ‘girdle of Hyppolita’ is a recently discovered masterpiece by Rubens, stolen from a West End art gallery. Inspector Japp appears, and a schoolgirl disappears. Poirot brings all the strands together with ease.

To obtain possession of the flock of cattle of the monster Geryon, Hercules first killed the monster. In ‘The Flock of Geryon’ Hercule Poirot kills no one. Geryon, the monster, is Dr Anderson, leader of a religious sect, The Flock of the Shepherd, and Poirot investigates Anderson’s activities at the instigation of a Miss Carnaby, who had played a part in the first of the Labours (‘The Nemean Lion’). The story ends with the arrest of a murderer, the destruction of a monster.

‘The Apples of the Hesperides’ grew on a tree guarded by a terrible dragon. There are several versions of the legend: Hercules either plucked the apples himself after killing the dragon, or sent Atlas for them, meanwhile holding the world on his own shoulders. Poirot’s apples are a detail of the design on an Italian renaissance goblet, a design representing a tree around which a jewelled serpent is coiled. The apples are formed of very beautiful emeralds. Poirot locates the missing goblet, but there is a twist in the tail of the dragon. (The goblet is said to have been made by Benvenuto Cellini and used by Pope Alexander VI, or Roderigo Borgia. This would mean that Cellini made it while he was less than three years old!) At one point in the story Poirot quotes a Spanish proverb: ‘Take what you want – and pay for it, says God.’ It must have been a proverb which appealed to Mrs Christie, for she also put it into the mouth of Lady Dittisham in Five Little Pigs (1943).

The final labour of both Hercules and Hercule is ‘The Capture of Cerberus’. To capture the Cerberus of legend, Hercules had to make his way down to Hades, or hell, where Cerberus, a three-headed dog, guarded the gates. Hercule Poirot does likewise, except that Hell is the name of a London night club run by the Countess Vera Rossakoff, whom Poirot had first met more than twenty years earlier, and for whom he had always entertained a tender regard. Cerberus is the ‘largest and ugliest and blackest’ (one-headed) dog Poirot has ever seen, and it guards the entrance to the club, which is at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs. Entrance is effected by throwing a sop to Cerberus from the basket of dog biscuits provided by the management. Poirot helps Japp foil a dope ring, and emerges from Hell with his affection for the dubious Russian Countess unscathed. He rests from his labours, murmuring contentedly, ‘From the Nemean Lion to the Capture of Cerberus. It is complete.’

The Labours of Hercules is generally regarded as the best of Agatha Christie’s short story collections. The idea is an amusing one, cleverly implemented, and Poirot is at his most engaging throughout. The parallels between modern reality and ancient myth are wittily and skilfully made, and most of the individual stories are really first-rate. Reviewing the volume in the Daily Graphic, Agatha Christie’s rival, Margery Allingham, wrote that it was ‘as satisfactory as its title’. ‘I have often thought,’ she continued, ‘that Mrs Christie was not so much the best as the only living writer of the true or classic detective story.’

Taken at the Flood
Alternative title: There is a Tide
POIROT (1948)

Max Mallowan returned to his excavations in the Middle East in 1948, which meant that Agatha Christie was able also to return to the way of life she had enjoyed before the war. It was, of course, not quite the same. The Orient Express was no longer the cheapest way to travel to Syria and Iraq, nor was it even possible to make the entire journey on that train, which was not what it used to be. This time, as Mrs Christie puts it in her autobiography, it was ‘the beginning of that dull routine, travelling by air’. The desert bus service no longer functioned: ‘you flew from London to Baghdad and that was that.’

But she enjoyed participating in the life and work of the dig during the excavation season, and equally enjoyed quite different kinds of pleasure in England, such as going to the opera in London, or enjoying summers surrounded by family in Devon. As before, she frequently wrote her crime novels in the Middle East, and now she also began to think about an autobiography, the actual writing of which was to occupy her, on and off, from 1950 to 1965. This took time away from the novels, but from now until the year of her death, she continued to publish at least one title each year. In 1948, there were two, a novel (Taken at the Flood) and a volume of stories (Witness for the Prosecution).

Both the British and the American tides of the novel came from Brutus’s speech in Act IV, scene iii of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, printed as epigraph at the beginning of the novel:

There is a title in the affairs of men,

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

(Poirot carelessly misquotes the first two lines in Chapter XIV of Book Two.)

Taken at the Flood was written, and is set, in a post-war England whose buoyant 1945 mood of triumph has given way to a certain restlessness and dissatisfaction. The troubles which beset the Cloade family involve murder, suicide and accidental death, but the sense of disillusion felt by Lynn Marchmont, niece of Gordon Cloade (who was killed in an air-raid) and fiancée of her cousin, Rowley Cloade, has more general causes as well, typifying something of the feeling abroad in the country. ‘It’s the aftermath war has left,’ Lynn thinks to herself. ‘Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and among workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will.’ Agatha Christie comes dangerously close to a realism which could easily have destroyed her cosy murder mystery world. She flirts with it, emphasizing the irrational pessimism of the forties, and even identifying and listing a number of petty domestic causes of it, as for instance when Superintendent Spence complains of the shortcomings of his local laundry, and describes the difficulties experienced by his wife in coping with the housekeeping.

It is against this drably realistic background that Mrs Christie with superb confidence and unerring judgment paints her picture of a family of landed gentry who have never been encouraged or even allowed to attempt to make their own way in the world, but have been shackled to family wealth which, it now seems, is about to pass into the hands of a stranger. Questions of identity arise, there is a husband presumed dead and there is the arrival in the village of a stranger calling himself Enoch Arden. Those readers who know Tennyson’s narrative poem of that name will have an advantage over those who do not, but only for a few pages. ‘Wasn’t there a poem, David – something about a man coming back – ?’ someone asks. It is Hercule Poirot who eventually produces the answer, with the aid of a new police detective, Superintendent Spence, who will appear in three later Poirot novels. Except for three early stories not collected into volumes until The Under Dog (USA: 1951) or Poirot’s Early Cases (UK: 1974), we shall not encounter again Poirot’s old friend and colleague Inspector Japp, whom we must presume to have retired from the force shortly after his involvement in three of The Labours of Hercules (1947).

The characters in Taken at the Flood are unusually vivid and convincing, and the plot is one of Mrs Christie’s most complex. In Chapter I of Book Two, the reader is likely to jump on what seems to be a not sufficiently well hidden clue. The clue is a legitimate one, though it would be unwise to assume that the author has not placed it precisely where she meant to. A minor point of interest: the house, Warmsley Heath, is based on Archibald and Agatha Christie’s country house near the golf course, at Sunningdale, remembered and described after many years away from it. It will also serve as model for houses in two later novels.

Favourable reviews of Agatha Christie’s novels were by now the rule rather than the exception, and distinguished fellow-novelists were just as impressed as journalist-reviewers. In The Tatler, Elizabeth Bowen wrote of Taken at the Flood that it was ‘one of the best … her gift for blending the cosy with the macabre has seldom been more in evidence than it is here.’

Witness for the Prosecution
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1948)

The play, Witness for the Prosecution, first staged in 1953, will be discussed later. The 1948 Witness for the Prosecution is a volume, published in the United States of America but not in Great Britain, containing ten stories, all of which had already appeared in collections published in Great Britain, with one exception which is noted below. The title story is still printed with its definite article, as ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’, though the volume’s title anticipates that of the 1953 stage version, Witness for the Prosecution.

Of the ten stories in Witness for the Prosecution, six come from the 1933 British volume, The Hound of Death, and three from the 1934 British volume, The Listerdale Mystery, these two volumes having never been published in the United States. The stories from The Hound of Death are ‘The Witness for the Prosecution’, ‘The Red Signal’, ‘The Fourth Man’, ‘SOS’, ‘Where There’s a Will’ (called ‘Wireless’ in the UK) and ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’. Those from The Listerdale Mystery are ‘Philomel Cottage’, ‘Accident’ and ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’. ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ is omitted from the 1956 American paperback edition of Witness for the Prosecution, which contains only nine stories.

In the remaining story, ‘The Second Gong’, Hercule Poirot proves that the death of an eccentric millionaire in the study of his palatial country house is not suicide, and unmasks the murderer. This is a much shorter version of the novella, ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, which is to be found in the 1937 volume entitled Dead Man’s Mirror (USA) or Murder in the Mews (UK). The plot and several characters are common to the two stories, though the characters’ names differ, but the stories end differently. The murderer in ‘The Second Gong’ is not a character who corresponds to the murderer in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’. The motives, too, are different. It is fascinating to compare the two stories, one a reworking of the other. ‘The Second Gong’ was not published in the UK until the appearance of Problem at Pollensa Bay in 1991.

Witness for the Prosecution is a splendid collection of favourite Christie stories.

Crooked House
(1949)

Max Mallowan’s excavations at Nimrud, the ancient military capital of Assyria, got under way in 1949. For the first season, the supervisory staff amounted to no more than four people: Mallowan, Agatha Christie, Robert Hamilton, who had been Director of the Antiquities Department in Palestine, and Dr Mahmud el Amin of the Iraq Antiquities Department. They lodged in a wing of the local Sheikh’s mudbrick house in what Mallowan described as near-slum conditions, but they were happy, even when the three men were banished from the living-room by Agatha, who occasionally needed it as a dark room for developing negatives. Work was to continue at Nimrud every season for the next ten years.

During the year, the widowed Rosalind married Anthony Hicks, an oriental scholar who later turned his attention to horticulture. It was in 1949, too, that a Sunday Times journalist discovered and revealed that the novelist Mary Westmacott was none other than Agatha Christie. This did not, however, prevent Agatha Christie publishing a further two novels, in 1952 and 1956, as Mary Westmacott.

In December 1949, the play, Murder at the Vicarage, a dramatization by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy of the 1930 novel, was staged in London at the Playhouse. It was to be the last dramatization of Agatha Christie by other hands until after the author’s death. After 1949, Mrs Christie herself either adapted her novels or wrote new plays for the stage, refusing requests by others for permission to make stage versions of any of her works.

The only volume to be published during 1949 was Crooked House, one of those Christie crime novels which makes do without any of the author’s regular detectives. There is an investigator of sorts, who is also the narrator: he is Charles Hayward whose father, Sir Arthur Hayward, is Assistant Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard. It cannot be said, however, that the quality of detection in Crooked House is high. This is a novel to be appreciated for its startling dénouement rather than for the intricacy of its puzzle or the skill with which the truth is uncovered.

This is also one of those Christie novels connected with nursery rhymes, though in this case the connection does not extend beyond the title:

There was a crooked man and he went a crooked mile,

He found a crooked sixpence beside a crooked stile.

He had a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,

And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

Aristide Leonides, though enormously wealthy, was no more crooked than anyone else who amasses great wealth. He had a crooked house, though not a little one and his entire family lived in it with him, but the important fact about Leonides was that he was murdered by a crooked member of his family. Charles Hayward, in love with the old patriach's grand-daughter, unofficially helps the investigating team assigned to the case by his father, the Assistant Commissioner. But it is someone else who arrives first at the truth, and takes drastic steps to deal with the situation.

With the exception of the teenage Linda Marshall in Evil Under the Sun (1941), Mrs Christie has not, until now, produced especially penetrating character portraits of children: but the two children of Philip and Magda Leonides, sixteen-year-old Eustace and eleven-year-old Josephine, are interesting, if not particularly pleasant. The adult inhabitants of the crooked house (a house based on Scotswood in Sunningdale, the old home of Archie and Agatha) are not all equally well characterized, some of them being distinctly more real than others. The actual plot is not one of Mrs Christie’s liveliest, but perhaps the solution compensates for any earlier disappointments.

The author herself was not disappointed with Crooked House. In fact, on more than one occasion she announced that it was one of her favourites, if not the absolute favourite. ‘Of my detective books’, she wrote in An Autobiography, ‘I think the two that satisfy me best are Crooked House and Ordeal by Innocence.’ Elsewhere, she revealed that she had saved up the plot of Crooked House for years, thinking about it and working it out: ‘I don’t know what put the Leonides family into my head – they just came. I feel that I myself was only their scribe.’⁴⁰ In 1970, interviewed by Godfrey Winn in the London Daily Mail, she said that Crooked House was her favourite among her crime novels, while in another interview she is quoted as saying: ‘Yes, Crooked House is one of my favourites. But I had difficulty with that one. The publishers wanted me to change the end … but that’s how I’d written it; and some things you can’t change.’⁴¹ Agatha Christie was right not to change the end, which is the most satisfactory part of a readable but somewhat patchy novel.

One of the characters reminds the narrator of Athene Seyler. Older readers in England will not need to be told that Athene Seyler was one of the most delightful of comedy actresses on the English stage and in films. She was at the height of her career at the time that Crooked House was published.

Three Blind Mice
POIROT & MISS MARPLE SHORT STORIES (1950)

For their second season at Nimrud, the Mallowan party were able to move from their portion of the Sheikh’s house into a new mudbrick house of their own. Again, Agatha found time both to help with her husband’s work and to continue with her own. As she was to explain in her autobiography, their fields of interest differed widely, yet she came to acquire a real interest in and knowledge of many aspects of her husband’s work, and he was able to help with hers:

I am a lowbrow and he a highbrow, yet we complement each other, I think, and have both helped each other. Often he has asked me for my judgment on certain points, and whilst I shall always remain an amateur, I do know quite a lot about his special branch of archaeology – indeed, many years ago, when I was once saying sadly to Max it was a pity I couldn’t have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject, he said, ‘Don’t you realize that at this moment you know more about pre-historic pottery than almost any woman in England?’

In 1950, the ‘low-brow’ Agatha Christie was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. During the year, A Murder is Announced, a new Miss Marple novel, was published and, in the USA only, a volume of stories as well. At the time of publication in the USA, none of the nine stories in Three Blind Mice and other stories had appeared in British volumes. Eight of them were in due course to be published in the UK in Poirot’s Early Cases (1974), the posthumous Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979) Problem at Pollensa Bay (1991), and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and a Selection of Entrées (1960). The eponymous ‘Three Blind Mice’ has still not appeared in the UK.

The title story is an adaptation of the radio play which Agatha Christie wrote on the occasion of Queen Mary’s eightieth birthday, a novella-length murder mystery whose murderer, like so many of Mrs Christie’s criminals, likes to find a parallel, or at least a pattern, for his crimes in old English nursery rhymes. He is given to whistling ‘Three Blind Mice’ which other characters in the story aid and abet him by playing on the piano or singing.

Set in a remote country guesthouse isolated by a snow storm, ‘Three Blind Mice’ was to lend itself easily to stage adaptation in 1952 as The Mousetrap. The story has not been published in Great Britain, and presumably will remain unpublished there until the play comes to the end of its London run, which after forty-seven years it shows no sign of doing. ‘Three Blind Mice’ borrows one element of its plot from The Sittaford Mystery or Murder at Hazelmoor (1931) and, more significantly, another from Hercule Poirot’s Christmas or Murder for Christmas (1938). Pace Jacques Barzun, who finds it ‘a poor variation of the pattern “Here we are, cut off from help, and a killer is among us” ’, it is an ingenious tale and well told.

The other stories in the volume are much shorter, and some of them first appeared in magazines as early as the mid-1920s. The four Miss Marple stories present that lady in early rather than late old age, yet they were to be included in the volume entitled Miss Marple’s Final Cases: perhaps it is best not to inquire too closely. In ‘Strange Jest’, the problem Miss Marple solves does not involve a crime of any kind. It is, in fact, the most amiable of mysteries. ‘Tape Measure Murder’ finds her back in familiar and murderous territory, assisting such old friends as Colonel Melchett, Inspector Slack and Constable Palk. (Constable Palk, is, perhaps, not such an old friend, but he will be remembered for having behaved courteously to Miss Marple and her friend Dolly Bantry in The Body in the Library [1942].) Inspector Slack has reason to be grateful to the spinster sleuth again in ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’, one of the best of all Miss Marple stories, and the problem with which Dr Haydock presents the old lady in ‘The Case of the Caretaker’ adumbrates an important aspect of the plot of the much later novel, Endless Night (1967).

The three Poirot cases are ‘The Third-Floor Flat’, which is first-rate and has extraordinarily well-delineated characters for so short a story; ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’ (also called ‘The Kidnapping of Johnnie Waverly’) which asks the reader to accept behaviour from a three-year-old which is so good that it is unbelievable, and also to accept a third buder called Tredwell;⁴² and ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds’, which has very little to do with the nursery rhyme, ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ in which four and twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie, but in which a crime is solved because of Poirot’s interest in the eating habits of others.

The remaining story in the volume, ‘The Love Detectives’, brings Mr Satterthwaite and his mysterious friend Harley Quin back after an absence of many years, in an adventure dating from the twenties, the period in which most of the Harley Quin stories were set.

An excellent collection of Christie stories, Three Blind Mice was retitled The Mousetrap when it went into a paperback edition in the USA in 1952. Later, it reverted to its original title. The three Poirot stories were adapted for television, with David Suchet as Poirot, and first shown on London Weekend TV in 1989.

A Murder is Announced
MISS MARPLE (1950)

Those inhabitants of the village of Chipping Cleghorn who had the weekly North Benham News and Chipping Cleghorn Gazette delivered to their homes were able to read, over breakfast one Friday morning in October, a somewhat unusual notice in the Personal column: ‘A murder is announced and will take place on Friday, 29 October at Little Paddocks at 6.30 p.m. Friends please accept this, the only intimation.’ A number of them turned up at Little Paddocks, where Letitia Blacklock lived with a companion, two young relatives, and a paying guest. They were not disappointed, for there was a murder, although not, it would seem, the right one.

Chipping Cleghorn is not St Mary Mead, so you do not expect to find Miss Marple upon the scene. But the old lady happens to be staying at the Royal Spa Hotel in nearby Medenham Wells, where she is taking the waters for her rheumatism, and it seems that she knows something about the young man who got himself killed at Little Paddocks. She writes to the Chief Constable, who shows her letter to Sir Henry Clithering, ex-Commissioner of Scotland Yard, who of course knows Miss Marple of old. ‘George,’ says Sir Henry to the Chief Constable, ‘it’s my own particular, one and only, four-starred Pussy. The super Pussy of all old Pussies.’ And the old pussy proceeds to solve a particularly ingenious murder plot, involving past illness, present identity, the expectations of relatives, the sex of certain characters, and perhaps a little too much coincidence for comfort.

Miss Marple, as always, disclaims any special gifts, ‘except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature’ and a tendency always to believe the worst, a tendency fostered by her having lived all her life in an English village where human nature, apparently, is seen at its worst. In A Murder is Announced, she works in association with a new police detective, Chief Inspector Dermot Craddock, a pleasant and intelligent young man who happens to be Sir Henry Clithering’s godson. Craddock will participate in three further Miss Marple cases: ‘Sanctuary’ from Double Sin (1961) and Miss Marple’s Final Cases (1979); 4.50 From Faddington or What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw (1957); and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962).

A Murder is Announced is, despite its flaws, one of the most entertaining of the Jane Marple novels. It is also fascinating for the picture it gives of an England still in the throes of post-war muddle and discomfort. A great deal of minor social history can be gleaned from the pages of Agatha Christie: such novels of the twenties and thirties as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder at the Vicarage and Murder is Easy give a number of details of what life was like in an English village in the years between the wars. The Second World War years themselves are only obliquely chronicled, but England in the immediate post-war period is portrayed in Taken at the Flood and A Murder is Announced, and the inevitable breaking-up of the old village life is woven into the pages of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, several years later in 1962.

The flaws in A Murder is Announced, however, are not to be overlooked. The reworking of such old Christie ploys as the ambiguity of names is not exactly a flaw if the author gets away with it, as Mrs Christie does. But she relies on coincidence a little too heavily this time, and she surely is wrong to allow Miss Marple not only to indulge in so unlikely an expression as ‘fall guy’, even if the old lady does claim to have picked it up from reading Dashiell Hammett, but also to hide in a broom cupboard and imitate a dead person’s voice in order to frighten a murderer into a confession. (‘I could always mimic people’s voices,’ said Miss Marple.) And do people really change so much in ten years that they can reasonably expect not to be recognized by old acquaintances?

Despite these quibbles, it has to be admitted that A Murder is Announced is one of Mrs Christie’s most successful conjuring tricks. As usual, some of the best and, in retrospect, most infuriating clues are verbal: in this case, you could even say typographical. It is well worth re-reading the earlier parts of the best Christie novels, in the light of the knowledge of the conclusions, to see precisely how you have been misled, how the quickness of the author’s hand has deceived the reader’s eye. Even though, at the end of A Murder is Announced, there are more cases of false identity than there are dead bodies at the end of Hamlet, you are likely to finish the novel feeling exasperated with yourself rather than with Mrs Christie. You will also have learned about a cake, known to Miss Blacklock’s family as ‘Delicious Death.’ It is the masterpiece of the temperamental cook Mitzi, who is a refugee from Nazi Germany. The recipe, unfortunately, is not divulged.

Some of the characterization is superb; some is sketchy. The lesbian couple are crudely labelled: one has a ‘short, man-like crop’ of hair, and a ‘manly stance’, while the other is ‘fat and amiable’. Mrs Christie never progressed beyond the most superficial descriptions of her homosexual characters (‘My dears,’ says Christopher Wren of the young detective in ‘Three Blind Mice’, ‘he’s very handsome, isn’t he? I do admire the police. So stern and hard-boiled.’).

There is a certain connection between A Murder is Announced and an early Miss Marple Story, ‘The Companion’, in The Thirteen Problems (1932), which is about ‘two English ladies’ holidaying in Las Palmas. That Agatha Christie consciously bore the story in mind when she was planning the novel is attested to by the fact that the home address of the two women, as given in the hotel register, is ‘Little Paddocks, Caughton Weir, Bucks’. Little Paddocks, the reader may remember, is the name of Letitia Blacklock’s house in A Murder is Announced.

One of the characters in the novel, an aspiring young writer named Edmund Swettenham, succeeds in having one of his plays produced in London. Its title, Elephants Do Forget, is adversely commented upon by another character. More than twenty years later, Mrs Christie was to publish a Poirot novel called Elephants Can Remember.

Published on 5 June 1950, A Murder is Announced was widely publicized as Agatha Christie’s fiftieth murder mystery (which it was, if one discounts volumes of short stories published only in the USA), and a first printing of a record number of 50,000 copies soon sold out. (Sales of her subsequent crime novels were always in excess of that number.) The author’s British and American publishers issued a booklet filled with comments on her work by famous people, including the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who claimed Agatha Christie as his favourite writer.

Reviews of the novel were, not surprisingly, highly laudatory. In The Spectator, A. A. Milne wrote: ‘A new novel by Miss Agatha Christie always deserves to be placed at the head of any list of detective fiction, and her fiftieth book, A Murder is Announced, establishes firmly her claim to the throne of detection. The plot is as ingenious as ever, the writing more careful, the dialogue both wise and witty … Long may she flourish.’ ‘Breathlessly exciting and entirely original’, ‘a perfect model of construction and enchantingly clever characterization’, ‘artistry and ingenuity’, and ‘a heady wine’ are but a few of the flattering phrases strewn in the novelist’s path by other enthusiastic reviewers. Margery Allingham, one of Agatha Christie’s rivals, writing about the novelist in the New York Times Book Review⁴³ on the eve of publication of A Murder is Announced, said that Mrs Christie’s ‘appeal is made directly to the honest human curiosity in all of us. The invitation she gives her readers is to listen to the details surrounding the perfectly horrid screams from the apartment next door … In her own sphere there is no one to touch her, and her millions of readers are going to buy her new story, A Murder is Announced, and like it.’ They did.

It was not until more than twenty-five years later that A Murder is Announced was dramatized for the stage. In 1975, not many months before she died, Agatha Christie gave her consent for a stage adaptation to be made by Leslie Darbon and presented by Peter Saunders. In due course, the play was staged, posthumously, first at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, and subsequently at the Vaudeville Theatre, London, where it opened on 21 September 1977. The critic of the Financial Times wrote: ‘There is no reason, intellectual or dramatic, why it shouldn’t run as long as The Mousetrap.’ In the event, however, it did not run as long as The Mousetrap. The adaptation, faithful to the original and with dialogue which was a convincing pastiche of Agatha Christie’s style whenever it did not actually quote from her, was competently done, but the complications of the plot were such that they must have proved too perplexing for the average audience. Revelations about the various family relationships, and surprises concerning people’s identities come thick and fast in the play, and there is no going back to check that you have got it right! The facetious ending, with Inspector Craddock and Miss Marple tucking into Mitzi’s ‘Delicious Death’ cake cannot have helped. The play ostensibly takes place in ‘the present’ (i.e. 1977), though the directions in the published acting edition rather whimsically require it to be set in ‘Agatha Christie time’. Mitzi, in the novel a refugee from the Nazis, is given snippets of dialogue in Hungarian, and is now presumably on the run from Communist Hungary.

The 1977 production of the play was directed by Robert Chetwyn, and the cast was headed by Dulcie Gray (Miss Marple), Dinah Sheridan (Letitia Blacklock), Eleanor Summerfield (Dora Bunner) and James Grout (Inspector Craddock).

The BBC transmitted a TV adaptation, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, in three episodes, the first of which was seen on 28 February 1985.

They Came to Baghdad
(1951)

At the beginning of 1951, Agatha Christie’s dramatization of her novel, The Hollow opened in Cambridge. After touring for four months, it came into the West End, where it played for a further eleven months to large and appreciative audiences.

During the excavation season at Nimrud, a small room was added to the team’s house for Agatha Christie’s exclusive use and at her expense. For £50 she acquired a square, mudbrick room with a table and two chairs. On the walls she hung two pictures by young Iraqi artists. ‘One was of a sad-looking cow by a tree; the other a kaleidoscope of every colour imaginable, which looked like patchwork at first, but suddenly could be seen to be two donkeys with men leading them through the Suq.’⁴⁴ On the door, one of the party fixed a placard in cuneiform, announcing that this was the Beit Agatha, or Agatha’s house. It was here that she settled down seriously to write her autobiography.

The year 1951 saw the publication of a novel, They Came to. Baghdad, and, in the United States only, a volume of stories, The Under Dog.

With the novel, They Came to Baghdad, Agatha Christie returned to the thriller for the first time since the Tommy and Tuppence adventure, N or M? (1941). And N or M? had been the first since the twenties. Thrillers, as opposed to domestic murder mysteries, are few and far between in the oeuvre of Mrs Christie, though she never abandoned the genre because, as she admitted on more than one occasion, she found the thriller not only very satisfying to write but also much easier than the domestic crime story. A major difference between a detective novel and a thriller is the difference between ‘who did it’ and ‘will they get away with it’, but Agatha Christie always retained in her thrillers an element of mystery from the domestic murder mystery novel. The question ‘Who?’ always has to be answered in a Christie thriller, and it is this question which provides most of the interest in They Came to Baghdad.

The heroine is another of those idealized young Agathas, intrepid, over-imaginative girls bored with life at home and longing for adventure abroad. Victoria Jones, sacked from an office job in London, get into conversation on a park bench with an attractive young man. She falls heavily in love with him, and knowing no more than that his first name is Edward and that he is about to leave to take up a job (‘Culture – poetry, all that sort of thing’) in Baghdad, she determines to follow him. Soon she is involved in helping to foil the plans of a vaguely described authoritarian political group who intend to sabotage the imminent summit meeting of the great nations on which the peace of the world depends.

The plot is engaging and highly readable hokum. What distinguishes Agatha Christie’s thrillers from most others is not only the traces of mystery which are carried over from her domestic crime stories but also her lightness of touch and an air of self-mocking humour, far removed from the lifeless, mechanical spoofing which passes as humour in the works of Ian Fleming and his followers. An additional enjoyment is derived in They Came to Baghdad from the lively authenticity of the background, and especially the use of Baghdad, a city the archaeologist’s wife knew very well. There is also a diverting picture of an archaeological camp in the desert, and of its absent-minded leader, Dr Pauncefoot Jones.

The villains, this time, appear not to be Marxists but fanatical and bloody-minded idealists of the centre, dedicated to destroying both Capitalism and Communism. ‘The bad old things must destroy each other. The fat old men grasping at their profits, impeding progress. The bigoted, stupid Communists, trying to establish their Marxian heaven. There must be total war – total destruction. And then – the new Heaven and the new Earth.’

A preposterous plot, a delightful and typical Christiean heroine, and well-drawn minor characters, these are the ingredients which combine to make They Came to Baghdad so easy to read. You even forgive Mrs Christie her dreadful French, though surely her editor ought to have corrected (twice) her spelling of empressement into which she inserts an unwanted ‘é’ which must do strange things to the pronunciation of the word. But then, literacy is not what it was, anywhere. The punctuation of the New York Times in its praise of They Came to Baghdad is such that the intended compliment is impressively multiplied: ‘The most satisfying novel in years, from one of the most satisfying novelists!’ The London Times Literary Supplement thought that They Came to Baghdad contained one of the best surprises since the unmasking of the criminal in The Seven Dials Mystery. Well, yes, but the assiduous reader might just, this time, find himself prepared for that particular surprise.

The Under Dog
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1951)

Though this volume of Hercule Poirot adventures was published only in the USA, all of the stories in it were later to appear in Great Britain as well: the title-story in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960: Great Britain only) and the others in (Hercule) Poirot’s Early Cases (UK and USA, 1974). All are very early Christie stories, dating from the mid-twenties, but they had not previously appeared in a volume, with the exception of ‘The Under Dog’, which was first published in 1929 in Great Britain by the Readers Library Publishing Company Ltd, in a volume together with ‘Black-man’s Wood’, a long story by E. Phillips Oppenheim, under the title Two New Crime Stories by Agatha Christie and E. Phillips Oppenheim (reprinted by the Daily Express Fiction Library in 1936 as Two Thrillers).

Inspector Miller, who appears in the long story, ‘The Under Dog’ (and three Poirot stories in other volumes), is not one of Hercule Poirot’s warmest admirers: in his view, the little Belgian was ‘much overrated’. Poirot, of course, proves him wrong and correctly identifies the murderer of Sir Reuben Astwell, a bad-tempered financier, in a conventional story whose length is not entirely justified by its content.

Poirot’s other early cases, in three of which Inspector Japp is also involved, are recorded more briefly, perhaps because they are all narrated by Hastings, who does not waste words. ‘The Plymouth Express’ was made use of, and part of its plot recycled, when Agatha Christie came to write The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928). In an American paperback edition of The Under Dog, both ‘The Plymouth Express’ and ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ have their narratives interrupted near the end by an editorial note, inviting the reader to pause at this point, arrive at his own solution to the mystery, and then see how close he comes to that of the author. The characters of the commedia dell’ arte, or at least their costumes, play a leading part in the Victory Ball murder. This links the story, somewhat tenuously, with the author’s Harlequinade poems and her Harley Quin stories (p. 78).

In ‘The King of Clubs’ Poirot is able to be of service to Prince Paul of Maurania. The young prince has a weak chin and ‘the famous Mauranberg mouth’. We are not told what that is: perhaps it is similar to the prominent Habsburg chin.

‘The Submarine Plans’ was later expanded into a much longer story, ‘The Incredible Theft’ in which form it appeared in Murder in the Mews (1937), but not in Dead Man’s Mirror, the American edition of Murder in the Mews. The later version, more than three times the length of ‘The Submarine Plans’, is more satisfying than the earlier, which leads one to note Mrs Christie’s opinion⁴⁵ that ‘The short story technique … is not really suited to the detective story at all. A thriller, possibly – but a detective story, no.’ It is certainly true that the average short story length does not allow Agatha Christie to do that which she does best, which is to weave complex strands of mystification. Her longer stories are almost invariably better than her shorter ones.

‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ finds Poirot investigating a crime in a distinctly lower-middleclass milieu, which makes a change for him as well as for the reader. This and ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’ are the outstanding stories in The Under Dog, which also contains ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ and ‘The Cornish Mystery’.

Mrs McGinty’s Dead
Alternative title: Blood Will Tell
POIROT (1952)

The year 1952 was an important and memorable one for Agatha Christie. On her sixty-second birthday, on 15 September, it might have seemed to her likely to be memorable only because on that day she fell and broke her wrist. Three months later, however, she knew that her play, The Mousetrap, was destined for a very long run at the Ambassadors Theatre in London, for it had opened on 25 November to great acclaim. Even so, she could hardly have guessed that the play would outlast her and still not have come to the end of its first run in London forty-seven years after.

The dampest journalistic squib of the year was produced by a columnist in the Daily Mail who, unaware that, to use an un-Christiean phrase, the author’s cover had already been blown three years earlier in the Sunday Times, announced, ‘I learned yesterday that Miss Agatha Christie has for fifteen years been publishing books under a nom-de-plume.’ Mrs Christie had, in any case, been doing it not for fifteen but for twenty-two years.

During 1952 Agatha Christie published three tides, two of them detective fiction and the third a Mary Westmacott novel. The first of the crime novels was Mrs McGinty’s Dead (Blood Will Tell is an alternative American title, but the novel is known in some editions in the United States by its British title.)

At the beginning of Mrs McGinty’s Dead, Poirot the gourmet is leaving one of his favourite Soho restaurants, having dined alone but exceedingly well. He walks back to his Mayfair flat, a trifle bored, wishing that his old friend Hastings were not on the other side of the world. He glances without interest at a newspaper placard about the McGinty trial, for he recalls a brief paragraph he had read about it. Not a very interesting murder, merely some wretched old woman knocked on the head for a few pounds. But he arrives home to find that he has a visitor. It is Superintendent Spence, whom he had worked with four years earlier (Taken at the Flood: 1948), and who wishes to consult him about the murder of Mrs McGinty, an old washerwoman who lived in a cottage in the village of Broadhinny. Her lodger, James Bentley, has been found guilty, but Spence is not satisfied with the verdict, and he manages to persuade Poirot to visit the scene of the crime.

This is one of those rare Christie murder mysteries in which the author steps down a rung or two on the social ladder to concern herself with working people. Some of them may be middleclass, but they are the new post-war impoverished middleclass, the nouveau pauvre. There are, for example, Major and Mrs Summerhayes, who run in slovenly fashion the horrid guest house where Poirot stays while he is pursuing his investigations. There is Mrs McGinty’s niece, Bessie Burch, who does not grieve for her aunt, and there are, or there may be, a few ‘Women Victims of Bygone Tragedies’. There is, of course, languishing in gaol awaiting execution, the unprepossessing James Bentley, ‘a deceitful fellow with an ungracious, muttering way of talking’.

The character of Bentley is especially well drawn. He is so unsympathetic that you almost cease to care whether or not he is innocent of Mrs McGinty’s murder. Poirot, fortunately, does care, and devotes his attention to discovering why the old lady was killed: it was not for the thirty pounds she had saved and hidden in her cottage. The fact that, unless Poirot discovers the real murderer, James Bentley will soon be hanged does, of course, add an element of tension to the story, for this is 1952 when murder in England could still be punished by sentence of death. No one is executed in England nowadays, which is for the most part a sign of progress. It does, however, make life rather more difficult for the writer of murder mysteries. When murderers are given sentences so light as virtually to encourage the committing of the act, a particular frisson is removed from the literary genre of the crime novel. If James Bentley had been facing not the rope but a suspended two-year sentence, Poirot might still have devoted his energy to proving Bentley innocent, but would the reader have cared? The puzzle element becomes more important as the punishment of the criminal becomes more and more negligible.

The crime novelist Ariadne Oliver is present in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, making her first appearance since Cards on the Table sixteen years earlier. She is now more than ever like her creator, expressing her dislike of the Finnish detective she has created:

How do I know why I ever thought of the revolting man? I must have been mad! Why a Finn when I know nothing about Finland? Why a vegetarian? Why all the idiotic mannerisms he’s got? … Fond of him? If I met that bony, gangling, vegetable-eating Finn in real life, I’d do a better murder than any I’ve ever invented.

But she makes it clear that she enjoys the fame and fortune Sven Hjerson has brought her. When Robin Upward, a talented young playwright who is adapting one of Mrs Oliver’s crime novels for the stage, suggests that she write a novel to be published posthumously, in which she, Ariadne Oliver, murders the detective, Mrs Oliver replies: ‘No fear! What about the money? Any money to be made out of murders I want now.’ You can almost hear Mrs Christie’s gleeful chuckle as she types that sentence. She probably also took one or two ideas about Robin Upward from Hubert Gregg, who directed her play, The Hollow, in 1951, who certainly made suggestions to her for changes in the dialogue, and some of whose conversations with Mrs Christie may well have been similar to those of Robin Upward with Mrs Oliver.

This picture of life and death among the rural proletariat and bourgeoisie is a lively and entertaining one, and the solution is vintage Christie. As the New York Herald Tribune said, ‘We have gone up the garden path, led by the most delicate misdirection in English prose.’

In the early 1960s, a series of four rather poorly made British films featuring Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple was released, with the popular English comedy actress Margaret Rutherford as Jane Marple. The first and the best of them, Murder, She Said, was based on 4.50 From Paddington, a Miss Marple adventure. The second, Murder at the Gallop, however, was based on a Poirot novel, After the Funeral, with Poirot transformed into Miss Marple for the film. And the third, Murder Most Foul (1964), is based, very loosely and distantly, on Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and again turns Hercule Poirot into Jane Marple! Apart from Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, who finds herself on a jury and in disagreement with her fellow jurors who think the accused guilty, the cast includes Ron Moody, Charles Tingwell, Megs Jenkins and Margaret Rutherford’s husband, Stringer Davis, a mediocre actor who, at his wife’s insistence, had a role written into the series for him. The murdered woman is no longer an old charlady but a blackmailing actress. The limp screenplay is by David Pursall and Jack Seddon, who wrote three of the four Miss Marple films, as well as two other Christie film adaptations (Ten Little Indians and The Alphabet Murders, both in 1965), and the director is George Pollock, who was responsible for all of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple films and for Ten Little Indians.

Incidentally, in this year of The Mousetrap Agatha Christie dedicated Mrs McGinty’s Dead to her theatrical impresario, Peter Saunders, ‘in gratitude for his kindness to authors’.

They Do It With Mirrors
Alternative title: Murder with Mirrors
MISS MARPLE (1952)

The second 1952 crime novel was They Do It With Mirrors. Presumably the title of this Miss Marple story was considered too ambiguous for the United States. ‘What,’ American readers might have wondered, ‘is it that they do?’ The answer has nothing to do with sex but much to do with violence, hence the explicit Murder with Mirrors for the American edition. The novel begins with the elderly Miss Marple reminiscing with one of her oldest friends, one of two American sisters whom she had known when they were all girls together at a finishing school in Florence. Ruth is worried about her sister, Carrie Louise, the unworldly one of the two who is now into her third marriage and living in a huge country house in the south of England which her husband, Lewis Serrocold, has turned into a home for delinquent boys. One of Carrie Louise’s earlier husbands was Gulbrandsen, he whose name was known internationally through the Gulbrandsen Trust, the Gulbrandsen Research Fellowships and so on. And it is a Gulbrandsen, the brother of Carrie Louise’s late husband, who is murdered when he visits the Serrocolds.

No doubt Agatha Christie had the internationally famous Gulbenkian family in mind when she created the Gulbrandsens. Through the utterances of Miss Marple and sundry other characters in the novel, Mrs Christie appears to be sympathetic to the Gulbenkian–Gulbrandsen brand of idealism but less so to that of Lewis Serrocold: ‘Another crank! Another man with ideals … bitten by that same bug of wanting to improve everybody’s lives for them. And really, you know, nobody can do that but yourself.’ That observation was made by Carrie Louise’s sister, but it could easily have been issued from the lips of Agatha Christie herself, whose ideas about self-help were formed early and were to undergo only slight modification throughout her life. La Fontaine’s ‘Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera’ must have come to her mind as frequently as that Spanish proverb she was so fond of, about taking what you want but being prepared to pay for it.

Miss Marple shrewdly comments upon the English fondness for failure, the habit of celebrating defeat (Gallipoli, Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade) rather than victory, failure rather than success, and she links it to the coddling of failure, the penalizing of success, which is, as she says, ‘a very odd characteristic’ of the Anglo-Saxon mind. She is not opposed to compassion, but she argues for a sense of proportion. Miss Marple’s views are of help to her when she goes to stay with the Serrocolds to keep an eye on her old friend Carrie Louise, whose life, she comes to fear, may be in danger. There are three murders before the end is reached.

They Do It With Mirrors is perhaps not one of the most stunning of crime mysteries where complexity of plot is concerned, though the actual solution does indeed display Mrs Christie at the top of her form, performing one of those audacious conjuring tricks which infuriate and delight simultaneously when you go back to see how they were done.

That normally reliable guide to crime fiction, Barzun and Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime, gives so inaccurate a description of the plot of Murder with Mirrors (They Do It With Mirrors), calling it a ‘school story’ in which Miss Marple goes back as an ‘Old girl’ and investigates ‘a fatal accident in a gym’, that the authors must have confused it with some other novel of similar title.

A TV movie version was produced by Warner Brothers in 1985, as Murder with Mirrors. Helen Hayes played Miss Marple, and the cast included Bette Davis, John Mills and Dorothy Turin. Under its original English title, the novel was later adapted for television and first shown on BBC TV on 29 December 1991, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.

A Daughter’s a Daughter
MARY WESTMACOTT (1952)

It had been five years since the most recent Westmacott novel, The Rose and the Yew Tree. In A Daughter’s a Daughter, Westmacott-Christie did not develop the technique of that novel or pursue the kind of characters she had dealt with there; instead, she reverted to her exploration of various aspects of human relationships with special reference to family life, and to its more destructive aspects.

‘Leicht muss man sein, mit leichtem Herz und leichten Händen’, the Marschallin teils Octavian in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Richard Strauss’s opera, Der Rosenkavalier. (‘One must be light, light of heart and light of hand.’) ‘Know when to grasp, but know when to let go,’ she continues. Agatha Christie may have known Strauss’s opera, or may have been led to it by her half-Austrian husband Max Mallowan, who certainly knew his Hofmannsthal. ‘Die nicht so sind, die straft das Leben, und Gott erbarmt sich ihrer nicht.’ ‘Those who are not (light of spirit) are punished by life, and God has no mercy on them.’ This is really what A Daughter’s a Daughter is about.

The plot concerns a widow in early middle-age, still attractive but apparently resigned to her widowhood. However, when the possibility of a second marriage does arise, her nineteen-year-old daughter thwarts it by her possessiveness and jealousy. Placing her daughter’s happiness before her own, the mother sends her suitor away, but this leads not only to misery for her but also to a disastrous marriage for her daughter. Eventually, the daughter is able to make a fresh start, but the mother is left alone, sadder and presumably wiser.

Such a synopsis could as easily cover the glib artificiality of a Barbara Cartland as the stylish warmth of a Daphne du Maurier or the psychological common-sense and shrewdness of a Mary Westmacott. Westmacott-Christie, in fact, persuades her readers that she, the author, knows these characters well and that, to a certain extent, she can sympathize with even the least pleasant of them. She does not deal in idealized portraiture: her young lovers have their defects; and even when she invents a character, Dame Laura Whitstable, a popular psychologist and television personality who is clearly meant to be as wise as she is witty, we are allowed to see that Dame Laura’s admirable trait of refraining ever from giving advice to others can be carried too far.

A Daughter’s a Daughter paints so convincing a picture of the destructiveness of sacrificial mother-love that you are tempted to seek in it clues to some of the events in Mrs Christie’s earlier life. But the artist has covered her tracks, as artists will, and must, and should be allowed to do. A number of emotional truths which Agatha Christie must have learned from her own family experiences have led her to the imaginative and creative art of inventing a work of fiction embodying them. ‘That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

Both Agatha Christie and Mary Westmacott occasionally use the same name for two entirely different characters. This is hardly surprising in a writer who is so prolific, and it is probably not in the least significant that Colonel James Grant, a middle-aged army officer in A Daughter’s a Daughter, should have the same name as a young farmer in Unfinished Portrait, which was written nearly twenty years earlier.