The Clocks
POIROT (1963)
When a man is found murdered in the seaside town of Crowdean, in the house of a blind woman, in a room full of clocks most of which do not belong there, the problem is at first one for the local police, and for a young man named Colin Lamb who just ‘happened’ to be passing by as the body was discovered by a typist who, understandably, screamed and ran out of the house. Colin Lamb, it soon transpires, is not what he at first had seemed to be: he is a British Intelligence agent of some kind, and he is working on a case which involves the nearby Naval Station at Portlebury (for which read, probably, Portsmouth). Colin Lamb takes the problem to his old friend and mentor, Hercule Poirot, for his father and Poirot used to be colleagues.
Colin has changed his name (‘My young friend Colin – but why do you call yourself by the name of Lamb?’ asked Poirot). His father had been a Police Superintendent (‘I thought the good Superintendent was going to write his memoirs?’: Poirot again), so it is safe to assume that Colin is the son of Superintendent Battle. In fact, Mrs Christie made the same assumption, for she is quoted1 as having said of Colin Lamb, ‘I rather think that he is Superintendent Battle’s son’.
The Clocks begins promisingly, with its plethora of those instruments, and although its plot becomes somewhat diffuse and loses impetus well before the end, it is one of the more unusual late Christies. There are, really, two separate plots which the author twists together at the end.
An incidental delight in The Clocks is the sequence in which Poirot instructs Colin Lamb in the art of detection, lecturing him on famous murder cases of the past (Charles Bravo, Constance Kent, Lizzie Borden) before turning to the detective in fiction and criticizing the murder mysteries he has been reading. (As we shall discover in a later novel, Poirot is at work on a book of his own on the subject of crime detection.) He finds The Leavenworth Case admirable for ‘its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama’. Modern readers will not have heard of it: it is the first of a number of murder mysteries by Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935), and was published in 1878. Poirot finds vigour and life in The Adventures of Arsène Lupin. Arsène Lupin, a character invented by Maurice Leblanc, was the hero of a series of American films in the thirties but is also forgotten today. Nor is The Mystery of the Yellow Room, by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, any longer in circulation, although Poirot thinks it a masterpiece. Agatha Christie read The Mystery of the Yellow Room as a teenager, when it first came out in 1908, and found it ‘a particularly baffling mystery, well worked out and planned, of the type some call unfair and others have to admit is almost unfair, but not quite: one could just have seen a neat little clue cleverly slipped in.’2 It undoubtedly influenced the kind of story she was to write.
Poirot goes on to criticize such fictional writers of crime novels as Cyril Quain, Garry Gregson (a character in The Clocks) and Ariadne Oliver, before lashing into the American West Coast school. He ends by picking up The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and uttering reverently the one word, ‘Maistre!’ None of this is at all helpful to Colin Lamb, who has come to Poirot with his clocks mystery, but it is a delightful interlude for the reader. Poirot sends Colin away with a few lines of verse from Lewis Carroll (‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘to talk of many things …’) which, he says, is ‘the best I can do for you, mon cher’. But, in the long run, he does considerably better, even though luck plays its part as well. Poirot might not have arrived at the solution to the problem had he not been engaged upon reading all those murder mysteries. Perhaps the little seminar on crime fiction was not, after all, an irrelevant aside.
A Caribbean Mystery
MISS MARPLE (1964)
During a visit to Torquay in 1964, Agatha Christie ‘summoned up the resolution’ to drive up Barton Road, where her childhood home, Ashfield, had once stood. Two or three years earlier, when she first learned that the house was to be demolished to make way for a new housing estate, she had attempted to buy it back and perhaps make a gift of Ashfield to an old people’s home. But she had been too late, and now she found herself being driven slowly up the hill to the cluster of new houses:
There was nothing that could even stir a memory. They were the meanest, shoddiest little houses I had ever seen. None of the great trees remained. The ash-trees in the wood had gone, the remains of the big beech-tree, the Wellingtonia, the pines, the elms that bordered the kitchen garden, the dark ilex – I could not even determine in my mind where the house had stood. And then I saw the only clue – the defiant remains of what had once been a monkey puzzle, struggling to exist in a cluttered back yard. There was no scrap of garden anywhere. All was asphalt. No blade of grass showed green.
I said ‘Brave monkey puzzle’ to it, and turned away.3
By 1981, not even the monkey puzzle4 remained. The houses may not have deserved Agatha Christie’s adjectives, but they were cramped, suburban and ordinary. The view across to the bay was still there, at least from the roadway and intermittently, though probably not from any of the houses which clustered about the space once occupied by Ashfield.
The series of Miss Marple films which had begun two years earlier with Murder, She Said (see p. 286) and had continued in 1963 with Murder at the Gallop, ended in 1964 with Murder Most Foul and Murder Ahoy! Murder Ahoy! made a most ignominious conclusion to the series for, unlike the earlier three films, it was not even remotely based on an Agatha Christie novel or story, but had an original screenplay by David Pursall and Jack Seddon which involved Miss Marple in investigating murder and blackmail on a Royal Navy training ship. Margaret Rutherford was again Jane Marple, Charles Tingwell and Stringer Davis were also retained from the earlier films, and Lionel Jeffries played a leading role. The director, as with the other Miss Marple films, was George Pollock. Murder Ahoy! was received so unenthusiastically by audiences that plans for a fifth Jane Marple film, to be based on The Body in the Library, were abandoned.
Agatha Christie’s attitude to these British MGM movies was unequivocal:
I kept off films for years because I thought they’d give me too many heartaches. Then I sold the rights to MGM, hoping they’d use them for television. But they chose films. It was too awful! They did things like taking a Poirot and putting Miss Marple in it! And all the climaxes were so poor, you could see them coming! I get an unregenerate pleasure when I think they’re not being a success. They wrote their own script for the last one – nothing to do with me at all – Murder Ahoy! One of the silliest things you ever saw! It got very bad reviews, I’m delighted to say.5
A new Jane Marple title, A Caribbean Mystery, was published during 1964.
In A Caribbean Mystery, one of the best of the later Miss Marple novels, Jane Marple is sent by her affectionate and generous nephew, Raymond West (the ‘modern’ novelist), on a holiday to the West Indies. Agatha Christie had visited the West Indies in the late fifties, and chose to place Jane Marple’s adventure on the fictitious small island of St Honoré. So here is the frail but resilient old dear, ‘far from the rigours of the English climate, with a nice little bungalow of her own’, friendly West Indian girls to wait on her, and for company a few other guests, among them the elderly and extremely wealthy Jason Rafiel.
One of the guests, a not unpleasant but somewhat boring old ex-Indian Army Major, has been regaling Miss Marple with tales from his repertoire and is about to show what he claims is ‘the picture of a murderer’ when suddenly he stares fixedly over Miss Marple’s shoulder, abandons his story abruptly, blushes in embarrassment and changes the subject. A few hours later he is dead, and Miss Marple finds herself investigating the circumstances of his death. In this she is encouraged by old Mr Rafiel.
The fixed look of surprise or horror, over the shoulder of the person addressed, a hypnotized stare at – what? – has been offered by Mrs Christie more than once previously. There are instances in Appointment with Death, Towards Zero and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It is a device she was always able to use effectively. What, you wonder, can the character have seen? The answer is embedded somewhere in the narrative, or at least a clue will be given, though you may have to search for it, for the author continues to play fair. Or does she?
The concealed relationship is another of Mrs Christie’s ploys, and here the reader is really at her mercy. If it is represented to us, as well as to the other characters in the novel, that A detests B but loves C, what can we say when it is subsequently revealed that A and B are, in fact, lovers and have been plotting against C? What but ‘Well, who would have guessed it?’ Mrs Christie is fascinated by hidden relationships of this kind; and they do, in some curious and slightly disturbing manner, relate to the kinds of subterfuge that can be encountered in real life, where A and B may, for reasons of politeness or expedience as well as for less innocent reasons, be concerned to conceal the real nature of their relationship.
It is unusual to encounter Miss Marple away from the south of England. Indeed, this is the only known occasion on which she has ventured abroad. Yet she fits as cosily into the picture at the Golden Palm Hotel, St Honoré, as she does at the vicarage in St Mary Mead. And the relationship she establishes with Mr Rafiel, a character who posthumously will influence a later Jane Marple adventure, Nemesis, is both charming and touching. Mr Rafiel is crippled and in ill health. As he takes his leave of Miss Marple who is about to catch her plane back to England, he says to her, paraphrasing Suetonius, ‘Ave Caesar, nos morituri te salutamus’. Though she has no Latin, Miss Marple understands what he is telling her. Little does she realize that she will hear, indirectly, from Mr Rafiel again.
A TV movie with Helen Hayes as Miss Marple was produced by Warner Brothers in 1983. A later television adaptation with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple was first seen on BBC TV on Christmas Day 1989.
At Bertram’s Hotel
MISS MARPLE (1965)
In September 1965, Agatha Christie celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday. A few weeks later, she finished writing the autobiography which she had been working on, spasmodically, for fifteen years. She decided to end it at the age of seventy-five because, as she put it, ‘it seems the right moment to stop. Because, as far as life is concerned, that is all there is to say.’ The final paragraph of her typescript reads:
A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner.’ What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’
An Autobiography was published posthumously in 1977.
Surprise! Surprise!, a volume of stories published in the United States during the year, consisted of thirteen stories, all of which had already appeared in earlier volumes. The new Christie title in 1965 was At Bertram’s Hotel.
In At Bertram’s Hotel, Raymond and Joan West decide once again to do something for ‘poor old Aunt Jane’. Joan West remarks that, ‘She enjoyed her trip to the West Indies, I think, though it is a pity she had to get mixed up in a murder case.’ (Actually, this leads to an inconsistency in Nemesis in which Miss Marple says that she did not tell Joan or Raymond about the murders. Both Agatha Christie and Jane Marple were by now considerably advanced in years. Let us assume that the error was Jane Marple’s. Perhaps she did tell the Wests, and later forgot she had done so.)
This time, offered two weeks at one of Bournemouth’s best hotels, Miss Marple murmurs that what she would really like is a week at Bertram’s Hotel in London. She had stayed there with her uncle, who was Canon of Ely, when she was fourteen. Bertram’s, an elegant, though somewhat dowdy hotel in a quiet street in Mayfair, had been patronized over a long stretch of years ‘by the higher échelons of the clergy, dowager ladies of the aristocracy up from the country, girls on their way home for the holidays from expensive finishing schools.’ The more glamorous rich might prefer the Savoy, the Dorchester or Claridges, but, as one of the characters in At Bertram’s Hotel puts it, ‘there are a lot of people who come from abroad at rare intervals and who expect this country to be – well, I won’t go back as far as Dickens, but they’ve read Cranford and Henry James, and they don’t want to find this country just the same as their own! So they go back home and say: “There’s a wonderful place in London; Bertram’s Hotel, it’s called. It’s just like stepping back a hundred years. It just is old England!”’
It is an open secret that Agatha Christie used, as the model for Bertram’s, Brown’s Hotel, which has entrances in both Dover and Albemarle Streets. Many have thought that Brown’s, whose atmosphere is so restful and agreeable, is simply too good to be true. Mrs Christie may have had this feeling, for her Bertram’s Hotel certainly is too good to be true. Miss Marple finds, during her stay, that some very strange things are happening. There is, in due course, a murder, but it does not occur until quite late in the narrative. Murder is not, after all, the only crime in the book, and the great virtue of At Bertram’s Hotel is that its pace is leisurely enough for Miss Marple’s by now somewhat woolly thought processes to be explored in detail, but not so leisurely that your attention is in danger of wandering.
In her mid-seventies, the Miss Marple who stays at Bertram’s is much more like her creator Agatha Christie than was the younger (sixtyish) Miss Marple of Murder at the Vicarage (1930). This is understandable: Mrs Christie was in her late thirties when she first created the character of Jane Marple. At seventy-five, having allowed Miss Marple to age no more than fifteen years between 1930 and 1965, she is writing now about a woman of her own age. Some of Jane Marple’s reflections on comfortable chairs, horrid modern loos, and the latest fashions would not be at all out of place in Mrs Christie’s autobiography.
Bertram’s itself is the chief character in the novel. It is presented in such a way that you cannot fail to respond warmly to the old place. But, just as Agatha Christie’s ostensibly pleasant characters sometimes turn out to be killers, so, too, a favourite place may well not be what it at first appears to be. Bertram’s repays close scrutiny. Having encouraged us to indulge in nostalgia, the cynical old crime novelist ends by laughing at our sentimentality.
Not all the human characters are upstaged by the hotel itself. Elvira Blake is one of the most interesting of the elderly novelist’s portrayals of modern youth, and the paternal figure of Chief Inspector Davy (nicknamed ‘Father’ by his staff) is engaging enough for the reader to regret that this is his only appearance in the pages of Agatha Christie. The enigmatic and mysterious Mr Robinson, whom we met in a Poirot novel, Cat Among the Pigeons, and who will also appear in Passenger to Frankfurt (1970) and Postern of Fate (1973), is visited by Chief Inspector Davy, to whom he gives some useful information.
In addition to Brown’s – Bertram’s, another London landmark appears in At Bertram’s Hotel, but under its own name: the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street, a favourite department store which ‘had been a haunt of Miss Marple’s aunt in days long gone’. It was not, of course, quite the same nowadays, Miss Marple thought to herself, but at least she did not suspect it of having been put to criminal use. This is not the only Christie work in which there is mention of the Army and Navy Stores. Clearly Mrs Christie felt an affection for the old place. Would her affection have survived its renovation and rebuilding in the mid-seventies? Probably.
At Bertram’s Hotel collected a number of highly favourable reviews. Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, wrote in Queen that it was ‘marvellous’ and that Miss Marple was ‘in cracking form’. In the New Statesman, however, Brigid Brophy complained that the author offered nothing like enough signposts to give the reader a chance to beat Miss Marple or the police to the solution. This is a fair comment. At Bertram’s Hotel is a murder mystery almost by accident.
Part One of a television adaptation in two episodes was first transmitted by BBC TV on 25 January 1987, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
Star Over Bethlehem
CHRISTMAS STORIES AND POEMS (1965)
In addition to the usual ‘Christie for Christmas’, in 1965 there was also a ‘Christie Mallowan for Christmas’ for, under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan, Star Over Bethlehem, a slim volume of stories and poems on religious themes, was published in the autumn. Accompanied by decorative drawings, the volume was reviewed by some newspapers in their childrens’ book section, and indeed the presentation of the book was such that it seemed to be directed at children. But it was not easy to discern exactly whom the stories and poems were written for, except, of course, for the author herself. On the surface, the stories and poems are not only religious but also charming and verging on the sentimental. But one or two of the stories are not likely to be understood by any but the most precocious of children.
For the pious adult, perhaps: though piety, too, will find certain aspects of this little book somewhat disturbing. Perhaps the best description of the contents of Star Over Bethlehem is that suggested by Max Mallowan,6 who thought that they must ‘fairly be styled “Holy Detective Stories”’. ‘They were rather fun to do,’ Mrs Christie said of these stories. ‘It’s astonishing how one always wants to do something that isn’t quite one’s work. Like papering walls – which one does exceedingly badly, but enjoys because it doesn’t count as work.’7
There are six stories and five poems in the volume. The poems are not very remarkable: ‘A Greeting’ is conventionally Christmas-like; ‘A Wreath for Christmas’ and ‘Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh’ no less so; and ‘The Saints of God’ is interesting, in context, only because it does in verse what the story preceding it (‘Promotion in the Highest’) has done in prose. ‘Jenny by the Sky’, an odd and passionate poem, is the only one which Agatha Christie chose to reprint (with its punctuation improved) in her Poems of 1973.
The title-story, ‘Star Over Bethlehem’, offers what is for the most part a pious gloss on the accounts of the nativity in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke, though it has its unconventional aspects, and very few children would be likely to grasp all its implications. The idea of involving Lucifer in the Annunciation is an interesting one. The eponymous hero of the anthropomorphic little tale, ‘The Naughty Donkey’, is an engaging creature whose story can safely be told to the youngest child: a gentie and poetic invention which is perhaps a little too cloyingly pious. The Holy Family are involved in these two stories and in ‘The Island’, a story about a reunion between the resurrected Christ and his beloved disciple, John, now an elderly man. Too confusing for children, and probably too naive for most adults.
The remaining three stories, though still religious, are set in modern times. In ‘The Water Bus’, a somewhat uncharitable woman is touched by the cloak of Christ on a launch going down the Thames to Greenwich. This tale takes abortion in its stride. A backward child encounters God in a country garden in the story called ‘In the Cool of the Evening’. ‘Promotion in the Highest’ brings to fife, on 1 January in the year AD 2000, the saints from a fourteenth-century wooden screen.
These are stories and poems which Agatha Christie wrote purely to please herself, and thus they are of interest as an indication of the way she thought about her religion. They show that her views are really conventional Church of England with a twist.
In 1966 Max Mallowan visited the United States of America, at the invitation of the Smithsonian Institute and the American Institute of Archaeology, to lecture in connection with his two-volume work, Nimrud and its Remains, which was published in that year. Enormous public interest in whether or not his famous wife would accompany him was expressed in advance, and in the event she did, appearing with him at interviews and sitting in the front row of the audience at his public lectures.
Mrs Christie herself gave a number of interviews. She told one reporter that it now took her ‘six weeks of hard work’ to produce a novel, and said to another, ‘When I re-read those first books, I’m amazed at the number of servants drifting about. And nobody is really doing any work, they’re always having tea on the lawn.’
She accepted a lucrative offer from an American television company to write a three-part script based on Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, but became so disenchanted with script conferences, discussions, and interference of various kinds, that after having written two parts of the script and received her fee she withdrew from the project. She told her friend A. L. Rowse that she had found the work fascinating but that the constant interference of others had given her ‘headaches from worry over her work’, which had never happened to her in the past.
The previous year, The Mousetrap had celebrated its 5,000th performance, and in 1966 at the August meeting of the Devon and Exeter Steeplechases and Hurdle Races, the ‘Mousetrap’ Challenge Cup Handicap Steeple Chase was inaugurated, with a prize of £350. This subsequently became an annual event, with a cup donated by Agatha Christie and competed for yearly.
In the autumn, a collection of Jane Marple stories, all of which had previously appeared in other volumes, was published in the United States under the title, Thirteen Clues for Miss Marple.
Most published interviews with Agatha Christie are disappointing; she was rarely at ease talking to strangers. She must, however, have enjoyed her conversation with Francis Wyndham, who had visited her at Wallingford in the autumn of 1965, for the long article, ‘The Algebra of Agatha Christie’, which Wyndham published in the London Sunday Times on 27 February 1966, is enlivened by a number of fascinating observations by Mrs Christie, in addition to those which have already been mentioned:
‘Modern taste has changed very largely from detective stories to crime stories. What are known in American as “gabblers” – just a series of violent episodes succeeding each other. I find these very boring.’
‘If I’d known it was for life, I’d have chosen some rather younger detectives: God knows how old they must be by now! I’m afraid Poirot gets more and more unreal as time goes by. A private detective who takes cases just doesn’t exist these days, so it becomes more difficult to involve him and make him convincing in so doing. The problem doesn’t arise with Miss Marple: there are still plenty of them drifting about.’
‘Oh, I’m an incredible sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine! I always think it must end soon. Then I’m so glad when the next one comes along and it’s not so difficult to think of something new after all. And, of course, as you get older you change, you see things from another angle. But probably I could write the same book again and again, and nobody would notice. Perhaps I’d better keep that up my sleeve, in case I ever run completely out of ideas!’
‘A terrible lot of girls write fan letters from America. They’re always so earnest!. And Indians are worse. “I have loved all your books and think you must be a very noble woman”. Now what on earth is there in my books to make anybody think I’m noble? I’m afraid the fans are sometimes disappointed in my photographs – they write “I had no idea you were so old.” I get a good many asking curious questions: “What emotions do you experience when you write?” All a great deal too sincere. What I’m writing is meant to be entertainment. I got one rather upsetting letter from a West African: “I’m filled with enthusiasm for you and want you to be my mother. I’m arriving in England next month …” I had to write back that I was going abroad indefinitely.’
‘Usually you think of the basic design – you know, “That would be an awfully good double-cross or trick.” You start with the wish to deceive, and then work backwards. I begin with a fairly complete diagram, though small things may be changed in the writing, of course. One’s always a little self-conscious over the murderer’s first appearance. He must never come in too late; that’s uninteresting for the reader at the end of the book. And the dénouement has to be worked out frightfully carefully. The further it comes towards the end, the better. That’s even more important in a play, where an anti-climax ruins everything.’
‘I was brought up on Dickens. Always loved him and hated Thackeray. I love Jane Austen, too – who doesn’t?’
‘One is very lucky to have writing as a trade. One can work hard at it but also have delicious days of leisure and idleness. Young people nowadays have no time at all for what I call leisure, thinking, and all that. They’re overshadowed by education. They’re so desperate that they won’t get jobs unless they have degrees. At that age they should be really enjoying themselves – kicking up their heels like a filly in the fields. All the people I remember best in my girlhood – the married women of thirty or forty whom I respected most – lived in complete leisure but had good minds, they’d read and studied and were exceedingly interesting to talk to. Now people can very often only talk about one subject. So much education tends to specialize you – it makes you more interested in taking things in than in giving things out. Very few people really stimulate you with the things they say. And those are usually men. Men have much better brains than women, don’t you think? So much more originality.’
The new Christie in 1966 was Third Girl, a Poirot mystery. Poirot is now incredibly aged. He ought, by rights, to be well over a hundred, but we are probably meant to think of him in the context of the novel as approaching eighty. At the beginning of Chapter I, he is lingering over his breakfast of a brioche and hot chocolate. He had recently completed his magnum opus, an analysis of great writers of detective fiction which he had been working on, you realize, during the events narrated in The Clocks (1963). At least, he had at that time been doing some preliminary reading and research. We now discover that, in his monograph,
He had dared to speak scathingly of Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, he had complained of the lack of method or order in the romantic outpourings of Wilkie Collins, had lauded to the skies two American authors who were practically unknown, and had in various other ways given honour where honour was due and sternly withheld it where he considered it was not. He had seen the volume through the press, had looked upon the results and, apart from a really incredible number of printer’s errors, pronounced that it was good.
All very well, but now he had no task in hand, and he was bored. Thus, when his manservant, George, announces that a young lady has called to consult Poirot ‘about a murder she might have committed’, the great detective condescends to see her. He is intrigued by that ‘might have’. When the visitor, a girl of about twenty, enters, Poirot is disappointed. Here is no beauty in distress, but merely a scruffy modern miss in a state of some perplexity.
His visitor is equally disconcerted by her first sight of Poirot. ‘I’m awfully sorry and I really don’t want to be rude,’ she blurts out, ‘but – you’re too old. Nobody told me you were so old.’ And she rushes away before Poirot has a chance to question her. But his interest has been aroused, he consults his old friend Mrs Ariadne Oliver, and soon they are collaborating on the case of Norma Restarick, the ‘third girl’ – the third of three girls sharing a flat – who may or may not have committed murder.
The plot of Third Girl is not lacking in Christiean complexity or ingenuity, but it is by no means faultlessly constructed, and one or two incidents will not bear close examination. How Poirot manages to ensure that X is on the scene when an attempt is made on Ys life is not revealed, nor is his explanation of the double life led by Z at all feasible. The strength of Third Girl lies rather in its elderly author’s shrewd and not too uncharitable observation of modern youth, its manners and morals. She has turned a critical eye on the ‘hippies’ of the sixties:
Long straggly hair of indeterminate colour strayed over her shoulders. Her eyes, which were large, bore a vacant expression and were of a greenish blue. She wore what were presumably the chosen clothes of her generation. Black high leather boots, white open-work woollen stockings of doubtful cleanliness, a skimpy skirt, and a long and sloppy pullover of heavy wool. Anyone of Poirot’s age and generation would have had only one desire. To drop the girl into a bath as soon as possible. Such girls, he reflected, were not perhaps really dirty. They merely took enormous care and pains to look so.
The boys get off comparatively lightly:
He was a figure familiar enough to Poirot in different conditions, a figure often met in the streets of London or even at parties. A representative of the youth of today. He wore a black coat, an elaborate velvet waistcoat, skin-tight pants, and rich curls of chestnut hair hung down on his neck. He looked exotic and rather beautiful, and it needed a few moments to be certain of his sex.
Later, Poirot likens this youth to a Van Dyke portrait, and defends him against a charge of effeminacy. It is not that Poirot is unnaturally interested in young men, simply that his author is more sharply critical of her own sex. She is critical, too, of modern craftsmanship. When Mrs Oliver visits a flat in Borodene Mansions, she comes to a door marked 67 in metal numbers affixed to the centre of the door: ‘The numeral 7 detached itself and fell on her feet as she arrived.’
Mrs Oliver (or, through her, Mrs Christie) also takes a dig at her publisher – ‘I don’t believe you know whether anything I write is good or bad’ – and complains of the things strangers say to her in public, such as ‘how much they like my books, and how they’ve been longing to meet me’. Cynicism infects one or two of the other characters as well, among them the incredibly ancient ex-soldier, Sir Roderick Horsefield, who is engaged in writing his memoirs: ‘All the chaps are doing it nowadays. We’ve had Montgomery and Alanbrooke all shooting their mouths off in print, mostly saying what they thought of the other generals. We’ve even had old Moran, a respectable physician, blabbing about his important patient.’ (Lord Moran, former President of the Royal College of Physicians, published his Winston Churchill, the Struggle for Survival in 1966.)
Several characters from Third Girl have appeared or will appear, in other works of Agatha Christie. Mr Goby had begun gathering information for Poirot as early as The Mystery of the Blue Train in 1928, and will be called upon again in Elephants Can Remember in 1972. Dr Stillingfleet, a friend of Poirot, appeared in the story, ‘The Dream’ (The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding. 1960). At the end of Third Girl, he is planning to go to Australia and marry someone he has met during Poirot’s investigation of the murders in which Norma Restarick was involved. Chief Inspector Neele had become a friend of Miss Marple in A Pocket Full of Rye (1953), at which time he held the rank of Inspector.
A ‘ridiculous nursery rhyme’ comes into Poirot’s mind and helps him to find the solution to the Third Girl mystery, though exactly how ‘Rub a dub dub, three men in a tub’ manages to do this is not vouchsafed to the reader. Third Girl is more impressive as an elderly author’s picture of the ‘swinging sixties’ than as a murder mystery. Some Christie commentators will not even allow it this merit. Robert Barnard8 calls it ‘one of Christie’s more embarrassing attempts to haul herself abreast of the swinging sixties’, and Barzun and Taylor9 incline to the belief that ‘admirers of the author will not blemish their vision of her by reading this late one.’
Admirers of Agatha Christie will doubtless make up their own minds. In the view of this writer, they would be unwise to ignore Third Girl.
Endless Night
(1967)
It was in 1967 that a Swedish academic, Frank Behre, published Studies in Agatha Christie’s Writings, a misleadingly titled philological treatise that can have been of very little interest to anyone who was not a grammarian, or deeply interested in linguistics. The following is a relatively readable excerpt from the book’s introductory chapter (later on, the text becomes considerably less interesting or relevant to the non-specialist reader):
There are no doubt many other words that are particularly favoured by the characters at one time or another, maybe under the influence of the fashion prevailing at the time of the publication of the book in which the words occur. But to deal with them falls beyond the scope of the present study. By way of narrowing down the scope, let us instead compare our quantifiers and intensifiers a good deal, a lot, much, plenty, (= set A) with a set of ‘appreciatory intensives’ such as marvellous(ly), amazing(ly) (= set B). The comparison works as follows:
(1) In the pattern N + V + x(-ly) as measurers of degree the two sets may touch upon each other occasionally: ‘he has improved marvellously (= very much)’ …
Why, you might wonder, did the learned Professor Behre pick on Agatha Christie? The lady herself certainly wondered why, and wrote to the author that, though she was charmed and flattered by his attention, she had not understood a word of his book. At the same time she described her own work as ‘half-way between a crossword puzzle and a hunt in which you can pursue the trail sitting comfortably at home in your armchair.’
The 1967 Christie, Endless Night, triggered off one of Mrs Christie’s frequent minor rows with her publisher. Her advance copies had not arrived before she left to go on a holiday trip to Spain, but when she got to London airport to board her plane she was astonished and irritated to see a huge stack of copies of the novel on display at the airport bookstall. Her own copies had arrived by the time she returned home a few weeks later but, as she pointed out to her publisher, these could hardly be called ‘advance’ copies!
‘Usually I spent three to four months on a book,’ Agatha Christie told an interviewer, ‘but I wrote Endless Night in six weeks. If I can write fairly quickly, the result is more spontaneous.’ The result, in the case of Endless Night, is a novel which, despite the fact that she resorts to one of her most impudent confidence tricks which she had already used many years earlier, is almost completely different from anything else she had written.
It is more than usually difficult to discuss Endless Night, other than in the most general terms, without revealing the identity of the murderer. What can be said, however, is that the novel is virtually unique in Mrs Christie’s oeuvre in its portrait in depth of a psychotic killer, and in the manner in which it maintains suspense with the minimum of actual detection. The killer’s plans do come unstuck, but through two instances of bad luck, not through any ingenious detective-work. There are, in fact, no investigators, or none who performs a significant role in the narrative.
Does the author play fair? This is a question which has been raised on earlier occasions, and Mrs Christie has always been given the benefit of the doubt. She does, it is true, keep the reader ignorant of certain facts until she is ready to reveal them, but that, surely, is a legitimate part of the game. It would even be a legitimate aspect of technique if Endless Night were a pure and simple murder mystery which, in a sense, it is not.
The character of Michael Rogers, the young narrator of the novel who falls in love and marries, is superbly presented; and his individualistic classlessness, his relationship with his mother, and his determination to make his own way in the world, are all perfectly conveyed. Michael’s attitudes, you suspect, are shared in large part by the author:
They wanted me to go steady with a nice girl, save money, get married to her and then settle down to a nice steady job. Day after day, year after year, world without end, amen. Not for yours truly! There must be something better than that. Not just all this tame security, the good old welfare state limping along in its half-baked way! Surely, I thought, in a world where man has been able to put satellites in the sky and where men talk big about visiting the stars, there must be something that rouses you, that makes your heart beat, that’s worth while searching all over the world to find!
Michael falls in love first with a piece of land, before he falls in love with a woman. Gipsy’s Acre, as it is called in the novel, was a field which made a deep impression on Agatha Christie when she saw it on a Welsh moorland. She transferred it to the south of England in Endless Night. Another striking character in the novel is the architect genius Rudolf Santonix, whom Michael commissions to build a marvellous house on Gipsy’s Acre.
Ellie, the girl whom Michael marries, likes to sing to her own guitar accompaniment. One of Michael’s favourites among her songs is a ‘sweet-sad, haunting little tune’ whose words are from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:
Every Night and Every Morn
Some to Misery are born.
Every Morn and every Night
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Sweet Delight,
Some are born to Endless Night.
The murderer in Endless Night is one of Mrs Christie’s most interesting. In an essay, ‘The Inheritance of the Meek: Two Novels by Agatha Christie and Henry James’10 which appeared in an American magazine, Endless Night is compared with James’s Wings of the Dove and the point is made that the message of the two novels is the same: ‘that life and love built on victimized innocence cannot endure’.
There are links between Endless Night and several earlier works of Agatha Christie: with the story, ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, which is to be found in the volume, Three Blind Mice (published in the USA only); with Death on the Nile and with an earlier novel which it would be imprudent to mention here. The relationship between the wealthy Linnet Ridgeway and her American trustee ‘Uncle’ Andrew Pennington in Death on the Nile, is not dissimilar to that between Ellie and her solicitor-guardian, ‘Uncle’ Andrew Lippincott in Endless Night. Nor are the characters themselves dissimilar in certain respects.
This is one of the finest of the later Christie novels, and one with which the author herself was especially pleased. As the critic of the London Sun wrote, ‘The best Christie since she used the basic plot gimmick in the 1920s. And if old crime hands think this is a clue, let me say that she fooled me this time too.’ ‘The crashing, not to say horrific, suspense at the end is perhaps the most devastating that this suspenseful author has ever brought off,’ said the crime writer Francis Iles in the Guardian. Another of her rivals, Edmund Crispin, writing in the Sunday Times, thought Endless Night ‘one of the best things Mrs Christie has ever done’.
In 1972, Endless Night was filmed in England by United Artists. The director was Sidney Gilliat, who was also responsible for the screenplay which was reasonably faithful to the novel, and the leading players included Hywel Bennett (as Michael), Hayley Mills (Ellie), George Sanders (Andrew Lippincott), Per Oscarsson (Santonix) and Britt Ekland (Ellie’s friend, Greta). Firmer direction, and perhaps a less emphatic musical score than that provided by Bernard Herrmann, would have resulted in an excellent movie, for most of the performances were first-rate, and Harry Waxman’s colour photography made the most of Gipsy’s Acre. But, as Max Mallowan said in his memoirs, ‘for Agatha and many of her readers all was ruined by the introduction at the end of an erotic scene altogether alien to Agatha’s ideas.’
By the Pricking of My Thumbs
TOMMY & TUPPENCE (1968)
Though she was now in her late seventies, Agatha Christie continued to produce at least one new title each year. The ‘Christie for Christmas’ had become a tradition. Once or twice, her publishers feared that she might not produce her typescript in time. But the suggestion made to her one year, that they might bring out instead a ‘Ngaio Marsh for Christmas’ produced a novel from Agatha Christie, as Collins’ Editorial Director put it, virtually by return of post’. There were no signs of flagging energy: she could no doubt have written more in her old age but she abhorred ‘working for the taxman’. With an annual income now for each new title said to be approximately £100,000, but probably considerably higher, Mrs Christie had no need to exert herself. She told a friend, ‘I only write one book a year now, which is sufficient to give a very good income. If I wrote more I’d enlarge the finances of the Inland Revenue, who would spend it mostly on idiotic things.’
In 1968, Max Mallowan was knighted, in recognition of his services to archaeology.
The title of the 1968 novel, a new Tommy and Tuppence adventure, derives from the Shakespeare play which Mrs Christie was most fond of quoting, Macbeth: ‘By the pricking of my thumbs/Something wicked this way comes.’ In a brief address to her readers the author writes: ‘This book is dedicated to the many readers in this and other countries who write to me, asking “What has happened to Tommy and Tuppence? What are they doing now?” My best wishes to you all, and I hope you will enjoy meeting Tommy and Tuppence again, years older, but with spirit unquenched!’
Years older they certainly are. When last heard of, during the Second World War in N or M?, Tommy was in his forties and Tuppence must have been thirty-nine. Now, twenty-seven years later, Tommy is over seventy and Tuppence is sixty-six. Their man-of-all-work, the cockney Albert whom they first encountered when he was nine (in The Secret Adversary in 1922) is therefore now fifty-five. Yet Tommy and Tuppence still hanker after adventure, and go more than halfway to meet it. They decide that it is time to pay a visit to Tommy’s aged Aunt Ada, who is in a nursing-home, and while Tuppence is sitting in a reception room she meets another elderly inhabitant of the nursing-home whose mind is clearly wandering, for she asks Tuppence: ‘Was it your poor child?’, with the implication that there is a child walled up in the fireplace.
This incident, or a variant of it, has already been used twice by Mrs Christie: in The Pale Horse (1961) and in a Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, which she wrote during the forties but put aside for posthumous publication (see p. 374). It must surely have emanated from words overheard by the author, or perhaps spoken to her, which lodged in her mind because of their rather sinister connotation. In By the Pricking of My Thumbs, it is when Tommy’s aunt dies some weeks later that Tuppence finds an excuse to make further inquiries about the old lady who had asked that odd question. The old lady has been taken away by a relative, and she is not easy to find. If the plot does not thicken, it certainly takes on some very odd aspects.
This is one of those novels about crimes in the past which Agatha Christie was fond of asking her sleuths to solve several years after they were committed. It is also one in which an air of inconsequentiality, which is found in some of her very late novels, tends to make itself felt. One of the virtues of early and middle Christie is the economy of the author’s dialogue, which is always pointed and anything but inconsequential. But Tommy and Tuppence, in old age, tend to allow their conversations to meander (although less disastrously here than in their next, and final, adventure, Postern of Fate) and they are occasionally repetitious. What saves them, and saves By the Pricking of My Thumbs, is their author’s sense of humour, to which she usually gave freer rein in the Tommy and Tuppence novels than in those involving Poirot or Miss Marple.
Tommy and Tuppence are more light-hearted about crime than Poirot or Jane Marple, relishing their adventures in a spirit of adolescent fun. And adolescents they remain in their old age. Their frivolity affects their author, leading her to an even more casual attitude to chronology than usual.
The ages of various characters in By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and the timing of some of the past events, do not bear too close an examination. The reader is advised not to attempt to fight Mrs Christie’s assault upon his commonsense, but to lie back and enjoy it; allow Tommy to expatiate irrelevantly upon Macbeth, and Tuppence to indulge her highly unsuitable yearning for adventure. They are still, after nearly half a century, in love with each other and, although their bodies may be more than slightly arthritic, their spirits are, as their author says, unquenched. Think of By the Pricking of My Thumbs as Agatha Christie’s comic dissertation on old age.
Hallowe’en Party
POIROT (1969)
As she approached her eightieth year, Agatha Christie was careful to conserve her energy. Public appearances, always infrequent, now became fewer, and her family, her garden, and her writing occupied most of her time. Writing remained enormously important to her. ‘I am like a sausage machine,’ she had told Francis Wyndham. ‘As soon as one is made and cut off the string, I have to think of the next one.’ But equally important to her was Max Mallowan’s archaeology. ‘I retreat into myself with fiction,’ she said. ‘I emerge from myself in my husband’s work.’
In 1969, asked to contribute to Adam, a literary magazine, a short article on the French novelist Simenon, Agatha Christie wrote a very brief letter of refusal which the editor published: ‘I do not really feel that authors should comment on their own opinion of other authors’ work unless they are doing so as a professional reviewer, and I never review or criticize books. One talks about authors one likes to one’s friends, but I never give my views professionally.’ In the autumn, the new Christie title was a Poirot crime novel, Hallowe’en Party, dedicated to P. G. Wodehouse, ‘whose books and stories have brightened my life for many years. Also, to show my pleasure in his having been kind enough to tell me that he enjoys my books.’ That the most widely read novelist of all should want to boast of being praised by a fellow writer is touching, for it indicates, surely, that even at this late stage of her career she valued what might be called intellectual respectability. She must have known that her readers ranged from the near cretinous to the intellectually brilliant. Many, in both categories, were university professors, even more were shop assistants and factory hands. Among the geniuses, Sigmund Freud was a devoted reader of Agatha Christie (and, it must be admitted, of Dorothy L. Sayers as well),11 as was the great orchestral conductor, Otto Klemperer.
At a Hallowe’en party attended by Mrs Ariadne Oliver, a thirteen-year-old girl who has been telling all and sundry she once witnessed a murder is drowned in a tub of floating apples. Mrs Oliver enlists the aid of her old friend Poirot in finding the murderer. Poirot discovers that his ex-colleague, Superintendent Spence, who had been involved years earlier in the Mrs McGinty affair (Mrs McGinty’s Dead: 1952), is living in the district, and he asks Spence to provide him with information about the locals. He is unable to prevent a second murder (this is a not uncommon occurrence in Poirot’s cases) but identifies the killer just as he is about to strike for the third time.
The characters in Hallowe’en Party are not all as sharply drawn as in vintage Christie, and although the plot is typically convoluted there are a number of careless loose ends which could easily (and should) have been attended to. The Poirot–Ariadne Oliver relationship, however, is engagingly described, and it is always fascinating to hear Mrs Oliver holding forth about her method as a crime novelist. We think we know what Mrs Oliver, and perhaps Dame Agatha Christie, think of Poirot. In Hallowe’en Party we find Poirot murmuring to himself about Mrs Oliver: ‘It is a pity that she is so scatty. And yet, she had originality of mind.’ This might almost be Agatha Christie’s summing-up of herself.
In The Secret of Chimneys in 1925 the country of Herzoslovakia was invented. A story in The Labours of Hercules (1947) is set in the same country. In Hallowe’en Party (and in Third Girl: 1966) there is passing reference to a country called Her(t)-zogovinia. The question of whether or not it is spelt with a ‘t’ can be put down to the vagaries of transliteration from Balkan Cyrillic script, but is this country a neighbour of Herzoslovakia, or the same country after a no doubt violent change of regime? Who can tell?
Hallowe’en Party is an odd novel. Perhaps it is not so odd that Poirot should have a close friend called Solomon Levy, though it would not have happened in the early Poirot stories of the 1920s. But it is curious that Poirot, as he grows older, should be so moved by male beauty. There was an instance in Third Girl, and now in Hallowe’en Party he is struck by
… a young man, so Poirot now recognized, of an unusual beauty. One didn’t think of young men that way nowadays. You said of a young man that he was sexy or madly attractive, and these evidences of praise are quite often justly made. A man with a craggy face, a man with wild greasy hair and whose features were far from regular. You didn’t say a young man was beautiful. If you did say it, you said it apologetically as though you were praising some quality that had been long dead …
Poirot goes on at some length about this young man who ‘was tall, slender, with features of great perfection such as a classical sculptor might have produced.’ We should probably remind ourselves at this point that, although Poirot is male, his author is female and is momentarily allowing herself to assess ideals of beauty in the nineteen sixties. And, in any case, appreciation of beauty is life-enhancing, whereas Poirot’s views on justice and mercy have a certain Old Testament rigour about them: ‘Too much mercy, as he knew from former experience both in Belgium and this country, often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.’ Surely, all that men can do is to act justly and leave mercy to God. If there should turn out to be no God, then the concept of mercy is without meaning.
Thirty and forty years earlier, Agatha Christie was extremely circumspect in dealing with sexual inversion. In the sixties, however, she begins to talk of ‘queers’ and even, in Hallowe’en Party, allows a discussion of a lesbian relationship. Tempora mutantur, et nos mutamur in illis.
A certain trick with a person’s will in Hallowe’en Party has been used in an earlier Christie novel, but even if the reader happens to remember it he will not be helped thereby to discover the murderer. Although she may be beginning to fail in one or two other aspects of her craft, Dame Agatha retains her ability to surprise.
Passenger to Frankfurt
(1970)
On 15 September 1970, Agatha Christie celebrated her eightieth birthday, and to mark the event Sir Max Mallowan produced an offering in the form of a pastiche of one of Agatha’s Odes:
Our Bingo has bitten the Mail and Express,
For those two reporters there is no redress.
But to bite Peter Grosvenor and nip Godfrey Winn
Shall not be accounted to him as a sin:
Tis better than when he indulges in passes
At Cocoa’s and Golly’s protruding arses.
But today all our dogs are joined in full amity
To spare you the shame of such a calamity.
Such conduct they say would now be atrocious;
For this day at least we shall not be ferocious.
When Godfrey Winn’s interview with Agatha Christie appeared in the London Daily Mail, three days before her birthday, it contained no mention of his having been nipped by Bingo. He described the house by the river Dart, and the lady herself, ‘dressed in a becoming shade of red, her white hair full of vitality, who reminded me, sitting so upright, of one of the more aristocratic-looking members of my bridge club’. ‘I once heard two women discussing me in a railway carriage,’ Agatha Christie told him, ‘both with copies of my paperback editions on their knees. “I hear she drinks like a fish,” one said.’
When asked the expected question about the permissive society, the author replied, ‘The old have been through too much themselves to be shocked by anything. It is the in-between generation, who throw up their hands and go through the motions of being outraged.’ On the subject of marriage, she and Sir Max having now been married for forty years, she gave it as her view that mutual tastes were not necessary. ‘Those of my husband are academic and intellectual, while mine could be described as frivolous and fictional. However, we seem to manage splendidly. Mutual respect. Now that is important. Equally so in all lasting relationships.’
‘A writer,’ she thought, ‘must have a genuine respect for the intelligence of his or her readers. I myself never cheat. It is the one rule in writing that I have never broken.’ She ended the interview by announcing that she would go to see The Mousetrap again on her birthday. ‘I feel that would be only appropriate since I wrote the original story, “Three Blind Mice”, to commemorate Queen Mary’s own eightieth birthday.’ ‘Do you know,’ she added, ‘they change the cast of The Mousetrap every year to prevent staleness? But there is one character they have never succeeded yet in casting exactly right.’
‘Which part is that?’ Winn asked.
‘Oh, it wouldn’t be fair to say. It would be cheating.’
Though Agatha Christie referred to her tastes as frivolous and fictional, she asked her publishers to send her the tides in their paperback series, Modern Masters, edited by Professor Frank Kermode. These were scholarly and erudite introductions to the work of such intellectual giants as Freud and Wittgenstein and such fashionable gurus of the sixties as Chomsky and Marcuse. Hence the passing reference to Marcuse and three other key names in Passenger to Frankfurt, the Christie novel published to coincide with its author’s eightieth birthday.
Near the desk [in a Gasthaus bedroom somewhere ‘in the Tyrol or Bavaria’], by the stove of period porcelain, were paperback editions of certain preachings and tenets by the modern prophets of the world. Those who were now or had recently been crying in the wilderness were here to be studied and approved by young followers with haloes of hair, strange raiment, and earnest hearts. Marcuse, Guevara, Lévi-Strauss, Fanon.
It is as a desperate, indeed despairing, warning against these modern prophets that Passenger to Frankfurt is to be read. The last of Agatha Christie’s free-ranging thrillers (one more Tommy and Tuppence thriller was to follow), it is vague and disjointed, its plot so attenuated that at times its existence is difficult to discern. Her publishers had grave doubts as to the wisdom of publishing the novel, but there it was, the ‘eightieth’ Agatha Christie title to celebrate her eightieth birthday (though it took some Lewis Carroll-like counting to arrive at eighty as the number of tides, for Dame Agatha had produced considerably more than that, even if the count is limited to crime and thriller tides). There is no doubt that it must have seemed an extremely odd and highly disappointing typescript to whomever read it at Collins. Could it be called a novel at all? The author was persuaded to describe it on the title-page as ‘an extravaganza’.
Passenger to Frankfurt introduces its most engaging character right at the beginning. He is the forty-five-year-old Sir Stafford Nye, who had failed to fulfil his early promise as a diplomat mainly because ‘a peculiar and diabolical sense of humour was wont to afflict him in what should have been his most serious moments.’ As Sir Stafford remarks later in the narrative, ‘One cannot go entirely through life taking oneself and other people seriously.’ How one’s heart warms to him.
Sitting in the transit lounge of the airport at Frankfurt, on his way back to England from a commission of enquiry in Malaya, Nye finds himself plunged into adventure when a young woman with a faintly foreign accent persuades him to relinquish his passport to her. Soon, he is pitting his wits against nothing so definite as an organization dedicated to world-wide anarchy but something infinitely more dangerous. The young woman has become his ally. Or perhaps she has not. Familiar figures from the worlds of espionage and international finance such as Colonel Pikeaway (from Cat Among the Pigeons) and Mr Robinson (‘that yellow whale of a fellow’ from Cat Among the Pigeons and At Bertram’s Hotel) are encountered. Stafford Nye’s elderly Aunt Matilda (Lady Matilda Cleckheaton) also plays a part in helping to keep the world on an even course for a little longer. The Almanach de Gotha is consulted, and the works of Wagner, with special reference to Siegfried, are of great significance to the events, if so solid a noun as ‘events’ is not inappropriate in a description of Passenger to Frankfurt. One sympathizes with Nye when he quotes (in English) Hans Sachs’s world-weary cry, Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn’ from Die Meistersinger.
Is the crux of what meaning there is to this extravaganza to be found in the statement of Henry Horsham, a Security man? ‘There are bits of it sticking out, you know, like a badly done up parcel. You get a peep here and a peep there. One moment you think it’s going on at the Bayreuth Festival and the next minute you think it’s tucking out of a South American estancia and then you get a bit of a lead in the USA.’ You could, in fact, describe Passenger to Frankfurt unkindly as a badly done up parcel, but you would have to add, in all fairness, that it is a distinctly intriguing parcel. It contains, among other surprises, Adolf Hitler’s marriage in South America, and the subsequent birth of a child, a child branded on the foot with the mark of the swastika.
To the sound of Siegfried’s horn call, there appears through a doorway (we are in an ‘Eagle’s Nest in Bavaria’) ‘One of the handsomest young men Stafford Nye had ever seen. Golden-haired, blue-eyed, perfectly proportioned, conjured up as it were by the wave of a magician’s wand, he came forth out of the world of myth.’ This is Franz Joseph (also known as the Young Siegfried), presumably the child of Hitler, who is going to lead a super-race of heroic Aryan youth against the inferior races of mankind. ‘It has to be Aryan youth in this part of the world,’ a character remarks cynically.
Cynicism pervades the pages of this weird and absorbing Pilgrim’s Progress of the modern world. ‘Don’t pass it on to any one of those idiots in the Government, or connected with government or hoping to be participating in government after this lot runs out,’ Lady Matilda advises her nephew. And Colonel Pikeaway remarks: ‘One of our politicians the other day, I remember, said we were a splendid nation, chiefly because we were permissive, we had demonstrations, we smashed things, we beat up anyone if we hadn’t anything better to do, we got rid of our high spirits by showing violence, and our moral purity by taking most of our clothes off. I don’t know what he thought he was talking about – politicians seldom do – but they can make it sound all right. That’s why they are politicians.’
Passenger to Frankfurt, however, whatever else it is, is no simple-minded tract against the permissive society, or call to fascists of the world to unite against those who are ‘arseing around with Russkies’ (the language Dame Agatha uses in old age!). It is, rather, an appeal to the deeply frivolous of the world to join her in deploring extremism of all kinds. ‘The news from Italy is very bad,’ says Colonel Pikeaway. ‘The news from Russia, I imagine, could be very bad if they let much out about it. They’ve got trouble there too. Marching bands of students in the street, shop windows smashed, Embassies attacked. News from Egypt is very bad. News from Jerusalem is very bad. News from Syria is very bad. That’s all more or less normal, so we needn’t worry too much. News from Argentine is what I’d call peculiar. Very peculiar indeed. Argentine, Brazil, Cuba, they’ve all got together. Call themselves the Golden Youth Federated States, or something like that. It’s got an army, too. Properly drilled, properly armed, properly commanded. They’ve got planes, they’ve got bombs, they’ve got God-knows-what.’
This bleak vision of world anarchy is perfunctorily dispelled in the final stages by some John Buchan-type action which is singularly unconvincing. What remains with the reader, if he does not consider that the ‘extravaganza’ would have been more aptly named a farrago, is a pessimistic daydream of the futility of life and of endeavour. Nor is there much comfort to be derived from the Introduction, entitled ‘The Author Speaks’. After describing how ideas for earlier books have come to her, through a cruise on the Nile, a journey on the Orient Express, a fight between two girls in a Chelsea café, Dame Agatha turns to what is going on in the world around her:
What is everyone saying, thinking, doing? Hold up a mirror to 1970 in England.
Look at that front page every day for a month, take notes, consider and classify.
Every day there is a killing.
A girl strangled.
Elderly woman attacked and robbed of her meagre savings.
Young men or boys – attacking or attacked. Buildings and telephone kiosks smashed and gutted. Drug smuggling. Robbery and assault.
Children missing and children’s murdered bodies found not far from their homes.
Can this be England? Is England really like this? One feels – no – not yet, but it could be.
As epigraph, there is a line from Jan Smuts, which is also quoted by a character in the narrative: ‘Leadership, besides being a great creative force, can be diabolical …’
Agatha Christie wrote Passenger to Frankfurt not as a diversion in the style of her earlier thrillers but as a serious picture of the world as she saw it, using the means of the thriller, just as Verdi made use of the operatic language he knew best when he came to compose his Requiem Mass. Her distrust of utopianism, her scorn for the inanities uttered by politicians of all hues, her firmly held belief that human nature is not to be changed, her horror at the cynical exploitation of youth by the commercial manipulators of ‘pop’ culture, all are balanced by a faith in the rare attribute of reason and the even rarer virtue of goodwill. Can those qualities win in the end? On the bad day, or in the bad six weeks, when Agatha Christie wrote Passenger to Frankfurt, she tended to think not.
Despite less than enthusiastic reviews,12 this eightieth birthday extravaganza did well, no doubt because of the occasion with which its publication coincided. The largest printing ever of a Christie first edition, 58,000 copies, sold quickly. Four years later, on the occasion of the première of the film of Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie told Lord Brabourne, the producer, that she thought Passenger to Frankfurt might make a good film. Brabourne disagreed.
The Golden Ball
SHORT STORIES (1971)
The Mallowans were now dividing their time between three homes, one in Chelsea, another, Winterbrook House, in Wallingford, Berkshire, and, of course, Greenway House, on the river Dart in Devon. Agatha Christie found it easiest to write in Chelsea. ‘In the country,’ she told an interviewer, ‘there’s always some nice distraction, and I’m only too eager for any excuse to stop work.’
Max Mallowan had been knighted in 1968, for his services to archaeology, which entitled his wife to be called Lady Mallowan. Now, in 1971, Agatha Christie, who had been awarded the CBE in 1956, was given the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire. Dame Agatha solved the problem of her two titles by deciding to be Lady Mallowan when she was being her husband’s wife and Dame Agatha when she was being herself, the crime novelist!
The year 1971 had begun well, with the announcement of Agatha Christie’s new honour on New Year’s Day, but it continued less well when, in mid-June, Dame Agatha suffered a fall at her Berkshire home, and broke her leg. She was successfully operated upon at the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre in Oxford, but for the rest of her life she usually walked with the aid of a stick. A happier event during the year was the painting of her portrait by the distinguished Austrian artist, Oskar Kokoschka, who was her senior by four years.
For the first time since Rule of Three, her three one-act plays of ten years earlier, Dame Agatha had written a new play, Fiddlers Five. It toured briefly in the provinces in the summer of 1971, but closed before reaching the West End. (After thorough revision, it was presented again the following year as Fiddlers Three.)
During the year, Agatha Christie contributed a story, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, to an anthology, Winter’s Crimes 3, which was published by Macmillan. Two Christie volumes were published in 1971: The Golden Ball and Nemesis.
Published only in the USA, The Golden Ball contains fifteen stories, all but two of which had appeared in volumes published in Great Britain nearly forty years earlier. The title-story, as well as ‘The Listerdale Mystery’, “The Girl in the Train’, ‘The Manhood of Edward Robinson’., ‘Jane in Search of a Job’, ‘A Fruitful Sunday’, ‘The Rajah’s Emerald’ and ‘Swan Song’ are all to be found in The Listerdale Mystery (1934). Five stories come from the 1933 volume, The Hound of Death: ‘The Hound of Death’, ‘The Gipsy’, ‘The Lamp’, ‘The Strange Case of Sir Andrew Carmichael’ and ‘The Call of Wings’.
It is only the remaining two stories in The Golden Ball which were new. Neither is a crime story or a mystery, and both could almost be fragments from one of the Mary Westmacott novels. Perhaps they were originally intended by Agatha Christie to be Westmacott short stories, and were published under her own name simply because she had not written sufficient Westmacott stories to make up a volume by that author. ‘Magnolia Blossom’ is about a woman who has to make a difficult choice between her husband, to whom she wishes to remain loyal in his financial difficulties, and the man she loves. The behaviour of one of the two men removes some of the difficulty. In ‘Next to a Dog’, Agatha Christie indulges her well-known love of dogs, especially wire-haired terriers, in a story about a young woman who contemplates desperate measures in order not to be parted from Terry, ‘an aged wire-haired terrier very shaggy as to coat and suspiciously bleary as to eyes’. A sentimental and attractive story.
Though the majority of the stories from the earlier two volumes are mysteries of a kind, most of them concern crimes considerably less reprehensible than murder. The operatic ‘Swan Song’ is a notable exception. Those of the stories which were first published in The Hound of Death are, in fact, not about crime but about the supernatural. All in all, the fifteen stories in The Golden Ball make up an extremely entertaining collection.
Four of the stories were first seen on Thames TV in 1982 as part of the ten-part weekly series, The Agatha Christie Hour. They are ‘The Girl in the Train’, ‘Magnolia Blossom’, ‘Jane in Search of a Job’ and ‘The Manhood of Edward Robinson’.
Nemesis
MISS MARPLE (1971)
Nemesis is the last book that Agatha Christie was to write about Miss Marple. Two more titles were to be published posthumously, but one, Sleeping Murder (1976), had been written during the Second World War and deliberately put aside for posthumous publication, while the other, Miss Marple’s Final Cases, contains stories also written earlier. Nemesis is not exactly a sequel to the 1965 Miss Marple novel, A Caribbean Mystery, but it does, in a way, grow out of the earlier book and out of Jane Marple’s collaboration with the elderly, wealthy Jason Rafiel in the West Indies.
At the beginning of Nemesis, Miss Marple comes across Mr Rafiel’s name in the Deaths column of The Times. A week or so later, the late gentleman’s solicitors write to her with an offer of a legacy of £20,000 from Mr Rafiel on condition that she investigate a certain crime. Miss Marple is given no more detail than this, but some days later she is invited to join a tour of Famous Houses and Gardens of Great Britain, at the expense of the late Mr Rafiel. The hunt is on, and another of Agatha Christie’s ‘crime in the past’ novels is off to a highly promising start.
Miss Marple mentions more than once that it is a year, or perhaps even two, since the Caribbean adventure during which she had met Mr Rafiel. However, A Caribbean Mystery was published in 1964, a good seven years before Nemesis. The reader should perhaps consider the events of Nemesis as occurring in 1968: either that or, as happens with the old, Miss Marple’s memory has contracted periods of time.
Critics tend to be severe with the later works of Agatha Christie, and it has to be admitted that, now in her eighties, Dame Agatha is more careless than ever. Improbabilities are not explained, certain things do not quite add up, and it is as well, as far as Nemesis is concerned, not to worry unduly about how X knew that Y was investigating a death and would be at a certain place at a certain time, or why a somewhat anarchistic young man in his teens should join a tour of largely middle-aged people on a tour of historic homes and gardens.
Nevertheless, Nemesis is a highly enjoyable mystery novel, especially if you have recently read A Caribbean Mystery, two characters from which reappear briefly. Agatha Christie’s observation is as sharp as Miss Marple’s has always been, though both ladies are now grown somewhat frail. It is interesting, incidentally, to contrast the Old Manor House and its one elderly servant with Styles Court of The Mysterious Affair at Styles fifty years earlier, buzzing with servants. The decline of the upper-middleclass in England had occurred during those fifty years.
Miss Marple finds her thoughts wandering to the witches in Macbeth, and she imagines to herself how she would produce their scenes. This is not the first time Agatha Christie has addressed herself to this problem: there was a character who had appeared in The Pale Horse ten years earlier with precisely the same production ideas.
‘I have never read books on criminology as a subject or really been interested in such a thing,’ Miss Marple notes. ‘No, it has just happened that I have found myself in the vicinity of murder rather more often than would seem normal.’ In Nemesis, she confronts not only the challenge of a murder in the past which has first to be identified before it can be solved, but also a lesbian relationship which, as far as one knows, is not something Miss Marple has previously known about at first hand. She copes, with tact, sympathy and determination. The reader is almost surprised that she does not quote De La Mare’s ‘Everything human we comprehend’, for she does indulge in rather more than her usual amount of quotation, from Longfellow’s ‘ships that pass in the night’ through T. S. Eliot’s ‘moment of the rose’ to the Bible’s ‘Let Justice roll down like waters’.
Mr Rafiel’s interest in having the crime solved becomes understandable quite early in the narrative. It is not only murder which is involved but rape; though as one of Miss Marple’s companions, a criminologist and adviser to the Home Office, remarks: ‘Girls, you must remember, are far more ready to be raped nowadays than they used to be. Their mothers insist, very often, that they should call it rape.’ An interesting and, no doubt, to feminists an infuriating point of view.
Nemesis is by no means one of the best Jane Marple mysteries, but it is enjoyable, unusual, and as easy to read as the most successful of them.
The first episode of a TV adaptation in two parts was transmitted by BBC TV on 8 February 1987, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
Elephants Can Remember
POIROT (1972)
In March 1972, Dame Agatha was approached by the management of Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London, who wished to add her to their collection of wax figures. She allowed herself to be measured with tapes and calipers, and in due course a life-size figure of the author took its place in the Museum.
In the summer a revised version of the previous year’s play was presented, as Fiddlers Three, and in November The Mousetrap celebrated its twentieth birthday.
A new Poirot novel, Elephants Can Remember, was published in time for Christmas. The impresario Peter Saunders published his memoirs, The Mousetrap Man, and Agatha Christie wrote a friendly Introduction in which she recalled the many occasions on which they had collaborated.
Elephants Can Remember, although no one realized this at the rime of its publication, was to be Poirot’s penultimate case. It was, in fact, the last Poirot novel that Agatha Christie wrote, for the final Poirot, Curtain, which would appear in 1975, was one which she had written during the Second World War with the intention that it be published posthumously as the final case of Hercule Poirot. Elephants Can Remember also marks the last appearance of Ariadne Oliver, who plays a leading part in the investigation.
Mrs Oliver is at her most delightful, and most scatty, in this, her farewell appearance. Her similarity in some respects to her creator has been mentioned several times: like Dame Agatha, Mrs Oliver is no conventional feminist, for she is relieved when a luncheon in honour of celebrated female writers, which she is obliged to attend, turns out not to be confined to female writers. She is as vague as Agatha Christie, too, concerning Hercule Poirot’s address. Dame Agatha has given it in the past both as Whitehaven and as Whitehouse Mansions. Miss Oliver thinks it might be Whitefriars Mansions. Now we shall never know for certain. (Mrs Oliver complains of her new secretary, Miss Livingstone, and bewails the loss of Miss Sedgwick, of whom we have never heard until that moment.) Max Mallowan, in his memoirs, mentions that Mrs Oliver was ‘a portrayal of Agatha herself’, and adds, somewhat mischievously, that a pretended scattiness was one of Mrs Oliver’s assets.
This is one of those stories about crime committed in the past. In this case, a girl’s father murdered her mother, or perhaps it was the mother who murdered the father. All that is certain is that both parents died, the murderer having committed suicide immediately afterwards. Twelve years later, when the girl is now a young woman engaged to be married, her prospective mother-in-law thinks it important to know who killed whom. The elephants of the title are people whose memories of the events of twelve years earlier are accurate. Mrs Oliver goes on rather tiresomely about elephants never forgetting: it becomes a dreadfully winsome joke between her and Poirot, and at least five of the nine references to it ought to have been deleted.
This is one of the more meandering Christies. Elephants may never forget, but the author who is now over eighty frequently does. Her publisher ought to have provided her with an editor to help her deal with dates, ages and calculations, for these frequently go awry in Elephants Can Remember. At one point we are told that a man is twenty-five years older than his wife; later we learn that ‘as a young man’ he had been in love with his wife’s twin sister. How young a man was he? If he was under forty, then she was under fifteen! No one is ever quite certain whether the deaths of Celia Ravencroft’s parents occurred ten, twelve, fifteen or twenty years in the past. Poirot reminisces with his old friend Superintendent Spence about cases on which they have collaborated in the past, and gets an important detail about Five Little Pigs wrong. But then Poirot, too, is getting old. Even his author realizes this, and wittily reminds us of the fact:
Hercule Poirot stopped himself with a slight effort from saying firmly ‘Most people have heard of me.’ It was not quite as true as it used to be, because many people who had heard of Hercule Poirot, and known him, were now reposing with suitable memorial stones over them, in country churchyards.
Young Celia is made to say that she knows very little about the family tragedy, never having read any account of the inquest, and then two pages later says, ‘I think about it nearly all the time’, and reveals that she is by no means ignorant of the details. These narrative weaknesses, infrequent in the earlier novels, make themselves particularly noticeable in the late Tommy and Tuppence adventures, By the Pricking of My Thumbs and Postern of Fate, as well as in Elephants Can Remember.
The story is actually an ingenious one, and the pace is not quite as leisurely as when the elderly team of Tommy and Tuppence amble into action. Also, it is enjoyable to encounter again such earlier colleagues of Poirot as Superintendent Spence and Mr Goby, the latter still gathering information for Poirot, forty-four years after his first appearance in The Mystery of the Blue Train. A certain premise is repeated from a story, ‘Greenshaw’s Folly’, which appeared in the volumes The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (UK: 1960) and Double Sin (USA: 1961). A final query: Why should a hand be covered with blood when all it has done is to push someone over a cliff?
Elephants Can Remember was fortunate to collect some highly favourable reviews on its initial publication in London. ‘A quiet but consistently interesting whodunnit with ingenious monozygotic solution,’ wrote Maurice Richardson in The Observer, adding cryptically, ‘Any young elephant would be proud to have written it.’ ‘A beautiful example of latter-day Christie,’ said the Birmingham Post, while the Sunday Express thought it ‘a classic example of the ingenious three-card trick (now you see it, now you don’t) that she has been playing on her readers for so many years’.
Fiddlers Three
PLAY (1972)
No other writer on Agatha Christie makes any mention of her last play, and at least three of them state that Dame Agatha never wrote specifically for the stage after the comparative failure of Rule of Three in 1962. The final Christie play, nevertheless, is Fiddlers Three, which was toured in 1971 by the actor-manager, J. Grant Anderson, in its first version when it was called Fiddlers Five. The play had first been offered to Peter Saunders who had presented every new Christie play for more than twenty years, but Saunders thought the script disappointing and was reluctant to stage it.
He said later: ‘I would, of course, have put it on out of gratitude to her, but felt it would not do her reputation any good. When it was tried out later on I think everyone agreed that it was not vintage Christie, and as far as I know it has not been done again.’13
Under the headline ‘Haggis in an Agatha Christie’, the London Sunday Telegraph on 11 July 1971 told its readers:
Agatha Christie, who was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the New Year Honours, has written a new play, her first for ten years, at the age of 80.
The play is called Fiddlers Five. In it Dame Agatha has combined a thriller theme with comedy situations.
Among the questions posed are ‘Who put the body in the deep freeze?’ and ‘Who choked to death on a haggis in the wilds of Scotland?’
The play is about a tycoon who reaches his 70th birthday and concerns a £100,000 inheritance. It is to be presented by Mr James Grant Anderson, the 74-year-old actor-manager who has been playing the judge in Dame Agatha’s earlier play, Witness for the Prosecution, in a recent provincial tour.
Dame Agatha may have to miss the première of her play, which opens at the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, on 16 August, as she is recovering from a broken leg after a fall at her home at Wallingford, Berkshire.
Her last play to be staged was Rule of Three in 1960 [sic: actually 1962] but four months ago she went to Paris to see the French version of her perennial The Mousetrap, now in its nineteenth year in the West End.
Fiddlers Five goes to the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, from Cambridge, which is treating the production, by John Downing, as ‘the theatrical event of the year’. Booking there opens tomorrow week.
Curiously, or you might even say mysteriously, the information given to the Sunday Telegraph by James Grant Anderson’s press representatives proved to be inaccurate in several details, and had to be corrected in the following Sunday’s edition of the newspaper. The play, it transpired, had already been touring for some weeks and without the haggis:
Fiddlers Five, the first Agatha Christie play in ten years, opens at Wimbledon Theatre tomorrow without the haggis claimed in a publicity handout.
The reference to the haggis was made in a leaflet distributed by a firm for the production company and referred to by the Sunday Telegraph last week. Dame Agatha’s agent, Hughes Massie Ltd, said yesterday: ‘There is no reference to a haggis in the play. In fact the food from which a character meets its death is a veal and ham pie.’
Dame Agatha, who saw the play at the King’s Theatre, Southsea, on 7 June, despite pain from an injured hip, may attend tomorrow. Several West End managers are also expected.
Though the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, has been advertizing the thriller as a coming attraction, no contract has been signed yet for it to play there, its producer, Mr James Grant Anderson, said.
No West End management wanted to bring the play into London as it was, but Cameron Mackintosh took Allan Davis14 to see it at Brighton in September, as a result of which Davis agreed, after a meeting with Agatha Christie in October at Winterbrook House, to redirect the play the following year for Lenver Theatre Productions, after it had been rewritten. Davis’s suggestions for improving what he considered to be an entertaining but ‘slightly broken-backed’ play were accepted by Dame Agatha. These included turning two of the principal characters, ‘a middle-aged and a younger woman who cancelled each other out’, into one new character, and led in due course to a change of title to the familiar Fiddlers Three of the ‘Old King Cole’ nursery rhyme.
On 1 August 1972, Fiddlers Three, directed by Allan Davis, opened at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, with a cast headed by Doris Hare, Arthur Howard, Raymond Francis and Gabor Baraker. It toured quite successfully for several weeks, but did not succeed in finding a suitable West End theatre available, and eventually closed. In the opinion of Allan Davis, the play’s failure to reach London was due as much to bad luck as to anything else. He still thought it an entertaining comedy-thriller, though by no means one of Agatha Christie’s best.
In Fiddlers Three, as distinct from Fiddlers Five, neither haggis nor veal and ham pie is mentioned: a character who does not appear in the play dies in Scotland from unspecified ‘food poisoning’. The play, in two acts, the first set in a London office, the second a hotel in Bognor Regis, cannot really be described as a thriller or a murder mystery, though there is a murder towards the end of Act I and it is not until near the end of Act II that you discover who committed it.
Fiddlers Three combines crime and comedy in a somewhat inconsequential manner, with a plot concerning four collaborators who slip from deviousness into actual crime when they decide to conceal the identity of a corpse in order to get their hands on a large sum of money which they need for a legitimate business enterprise. They at first have no reason to suspect that their corpse achieved his status by unnatural means, and by the rime they do realize that a murder has been committed they are too deeply involved in their plot to pull out. There are four conspirators or four fiddlers, despite the title and the use, stipulated in the stage directions, of the tune of ‘Old King Cole’ (he called for, amongst other things, his ‘fiddlers three’) as music to accompany the rise and fall of the curtain.
The dialogue is light, rather than witty. The characters of Sam Fletcher and Sally Blunt, the chief conspirators, give some scope for players of strong personality without themselves being invested with much in the way of personality, for which Dame Agatha substituted a few characteristics. The dénouement is rather flat, the final curtain comes down on a note of forced jollity, and it would require performances of extraordinary insouciance to keep Fiddlers Three alive in the theatre.
Agatha Christie was guest of honour at the opening night of Fiddlers Three at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, on Tuesday, 1 August 1972. On 4 August, the Surrey Advertiser published this review:
The gods love the goddesses
In all the creative arts there are exponents who transcend the rules. That Dame Agatha Christie is among them was manifest at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, on Tuesday, where an audience which filled the auditorium gave her a standing ovation as she entered the theatre on the arm of Mr Laurier Lister, the director, and then spent two hours demonstrating its enjoyment of the latest brain-child of this still productive octogenarian.
The euphoria induced by the presence of greatness may well last until the run ends on 19 August for it was handsomely reinforced on the first night by a presence on the stage. Doris Hare would be justified in feeling (if she does so feel) that Dame Agatha’s Sally Blunt is not the most rewarding role she has ever played, but she can seldom have encountered a friendlier audience. Indeed, all the players were bathing in the reflected warmth to some extent.
Despite her tremendous box-office successes, Agatha Christie has never been a favourite author of drama critics. Indeed, many theatre enthusiasts feel that most ‘whodunits’ make unsatisfactory plays because of the inevitable superficiality of the characterization. Her gifts as a storyteller, in print or on the boards, are, however, beyond challenge.
The great criticism of Fiddlers Three, alas, is that it fails to live up to the author’s standards in this respect. A plot of mystifying complexity and total implausibility finds its development and resolution through coincidences which would be acceptable in farce, but rob the more sober medium of credibility.
It is all too easy to stop bothering about the play and sit back to enjoy the personalities and creative comedy touches of the players. Doris Hare is splendidly ebullient as the secretary in a real estate office, who draws on her experience as a petty crook, trained pharmacist and professional actress (quite a career!) to extricate the firm from a threat of bankruptcy. She even persuades a doctor to certify the cause of death without examining the corpse, and her employer to masquerade as the dead man.
The other fiddlers in the trio are played by Raymond Francis, whose firm and accomplished acting gives the production a stable hub, and Gabor Baraker, whose impish style of comedy accentuates the fun to be made of his immense girth.
Mark Wing-Davey, as a young man whose mental attributes are less obvious than his physical grace, reproduces the smile, and something of the style, of that firm favourite of Guildford audiences who is his mother, Anna Wing. He should not wish for better praise than this comparison. There are two very pretty girls involved, one a goodie, the other a baddie, but both adornments to the stage in their Bognor beach costumes – Julia Knight and Suzanne Barrett.
The play’s dying moments are enlivened by an undertaker with a positively regal mastery of his craft, played, in an amusing cameo performance, by George Lacey. Arthur Howard, as the family solicitor, bears the burden of narrative development and makes light of it.
Allan Davis’s production has the advantage of Anthony Holland’s pleasing sets and Michael Saddington’s lighting.
No one could disguise the play’s basic weaknesses, but a playwright whose box office support outstrips that of Coward, Rattigan and Bolt, not to mention Shaw and Sheridan, can afford to make her own laws. And a mere journalist denigrates a cult goddess at his peril.
Poems
POEMS (1973)
In May 1973, Akhnaton, the play Agatha Christie had written in 1937, was published for the first time. In November, The Mousetrap came of age with a lavish twenty-first birthday party given at the Savoy Hotel by Peter Saunders. On the day following the party all the major London newspapers carried photographs of it, among them a group photograph of all twenty-one actresses who had played the leading female role in The Mousetrap.
Asked whether she still enjoyed writing, Agatha Christie said, ‘I wouldn’t say that anyone enjoys their work. I mean, you have chosen something as your profession so you just get on with it. It’s great fun thinking about writing, and planning it, and getting ready to do it, but when it gets down to the hard work it isn’t so much fun.’ She had got down to the hard work for the last time with Postern of Fate, which was published in the autumn. Also published during the year was a volume in which she collected together those of her poems which she wished to preserve.
Poems, a collection of 62 poems, is divided into two ‘volumes’. Volume I, according to the verso of the title page, consists of the poems published in 1924 under the title The Road of Dreams, while the poems in Volume II are new. However, there are discrepancies between the contents of The Road of Dreams (1924) and Volume I of the 1973 Poems. ‘Pierrot Grown Old’, the final poem of the 1924 volume, is inserted in 1973, appropriately, into the opening sequence, ‘A Masque from Italy’; an odd little poem of love’s duplicity, ‘Isolt of Brittany’, is added in 1973 to the section of ‘Ballads’; a poem called ‘Beatrice Passes’ has been removed from ‘Dreams and Fantasies’ and put among the new poems in Volume II of the 1973 book; ‘A Palm Tree in Egypt’ has been retitled ‘A Palm Tree in the Desert’; and ‘In a Dispensary’, an engaging poem with a certain autobiographical interest, has been removed.
The poems in Volume II of the 1973 publication are presumably the only ones which Agatha Christie wished to preserve from her poetic output between 1924 and 1973. There are four sections, ‘Things’, ‘Places’, ‘Love Poems and Others’ and ‘Verses of Nowadays’.
The four poems in ‘Things’ are of little interest, unoriginal in feeling and lacking the sense of form of much of Agatha Christie’s earlier verse. The ‘Places’ of the next section include Baghdad, the Nile, Dartmoor, Calvary, an anonymous island, and a cedar tree in Lebanon. The best of the poems is ‘Dartmoor’, unambitious and inoffensive, making up in sincerity what it lacks in originality:
I shall not return again the way I came.
Back to the quiet country where the hills
Are purple in the evenings, and the tors
Are grey and quiet, and the tall standing stones
Lead out across the moorland till they end
At water’s edge.
One has occasionally been asked to admire worse poems than this about Dartmoor.
‘Love Poems and Others’ begins with an imaginative little lyric, ‘Count Fersen to the Queen’, in which Count Fersen addresses Marie Antoinette. Among the twelve poems in this section are an odd love poem, ‘The Lament of the Tortured Lover’, written as though by a man to a woman:
In twenty years your face will be haggard,
Your eyes will be cold,
Your sagging breasts will not stir my desire
and an affectionate sonnet, ‘To M.E.L.M. in Absence’, written to Max Mallowan, which begins:
Now is the winter past, but for my part
Still winter stays until we meet again.
Dear love, I have your promise and your heart
But lacking touch and sight, spring buds bring pain.
The final poem in this section is ‘Jenny by the Sky’, reprinted from the 1965 volume of stories and poems for children, Star Over Bethlehem.
The concluding section of the volume, ‘Verses of Nowadays’, consists of four poems, two of which are very slight, and one (‘Picnic 1960’) no less slight, perhaps, but of interest as being à la Betjeman:
Afternoon tea by the side of the road,
That is the meal that I love,
Hundreds of cars rushing past all the time,
Sunshine and clouds up above!
Get out the chairs and set up the tea, Serviettes, too, are a must.
Never a moment that’s quiet or dull,
Sausage rolls flavoured with dust!
Time to go home? Strew the orange peel round,
Leave paper and portions of pie,
Pack up the crocks and get into the queue,
Perfect picnic place, love, and goodbye …
Rather more strongly felt than its fellows in ‘Verses of Nowadays’ is ‘Racial Musings’, especially in the second of its two stanzas:
Some think, and more than one,
That coffee-coloured children meet the case,
It is our duty so to take one’s fun
That the resulting mixture has a face
That nicely illustrates Mendelian lore.
Oh, coffee-coloured world,
You’ll be a BORE.
Satiety but no variety,
A BORE. A BORE. A BORE.
However, the most touching poem in the book, presumably addressed privately to Mallowan, is ‘Remembrance’ in which Agatha Christie envisages dying before her husband, which in due course she was to do. It ends with the lines,
I died – but not my love for you,
That lives for aye – though dumb,
Remember this
If I should leave you in the days to come.
The publication of Poems did not excite a great amount of critical interest. Several reviewers did not quite know what to make of Dame Agatha’s verses, though William Weaver in the London Financial Times found them ‘deft and ladylike and never cloying’.
Postern of Fate
TOMMY & TUPPENCE (1973)
The last of Agatha Christie’s ‘crime in the past’ novels, Postern of Fate is also the last novel she wrote. Eight more titles were to be published (two novels, five volumes of stories, and an autobiography), five of them posthumously, but all had been written earlier.
The eighty-two-year-old author’s final novel was a mystery-thriller involving Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, now a somewhat arthritic but still young-hearted pair in their seventies. The title of the novel derives from James Elroy Flecker’s poem, Gates of Damascus, some lines from which are printed as an epigraph:
Four great gates has the city of Damascus …
Postern of Fate, the Desert Gate, Disaster’s Cavern, Fort of Fear …
Pass not beneath, O Caravan, or pass not singing. Have you heard
That silence where the birds are dead, yet something pipeth like a bird?
The aged Tommy and Tuppence have moved into a new house, and their faithful factotum Albert Batt is still with them. (We are told that Albert’s wife, Amy, has been dead for some years; however, when she was alive her name, we were told in By the Pricking of My Thumbs, was Milly.) A number of popular novels and children’s books have been left in the house, and as Tuppence is sorting them out, she notices certain letters underlined in red in a copy of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Black Arrow. The letters spelled out a message: ‘Mary Jordan did not die naturally. It was one of us. I think I know which.’ Naturally, Tuppence is determined to find out more; asking questions of a number of local and not so local people, she and Tommy eventually arrive at – well, not exactly an answer, but something that might be thought to resemble, in other circumstances, an answer.
The circumlocutionary style of that last sentence is not unlike that of Dame Agatha in the highly self-indulgent Postern of Fate. After Tuppence’s discovery of the marked copy of The Black Arrow, very little happens until eighteen chapters later, when a minor character is killed and it becomes clear that those spies or evildoers who were active fifty or more years ago when Mary Jordan died unnaturally are still in business.
Among those who give Tommy and Tuppence help, advice and encouragement in their quest are such characters from past Christie novels as Colonel Pikeaway, ex-head of the Special Branch, and the enigmatic financier, Mr Robinson. Neither has appeared in earlier Tommy and Tuppence adventures, but both were encountered in the Poirot mystery, Cat Among the Pigeons, and the thriller, Passenger to Frankfurt.
This is a rambling, highly self-indulgent and not always coherent novel: if it is readable, this is because of information it indirectly provides about Dame Agatha’s view of the world in her last years, and about the books she loved as a child. Tuppence, browsing among the books she finds on the shelves in their newly acquired house, The Laurels, comments on several of them:
‘Oh fancy! All these. I really have forgotten a lot of these. Oh, here’s The Amulet and here’s The Psammead. Here’s The New Treasure Seekers. Oh, I love all those. No, don’t put them in shelves yet, Albert. I think I’ll have to read them first. Well, I mean, one or two of them first, perhaps. Now, what’s this one? Let me see. The Red Cockade. Oh yes, that was one of the historical ones. That was very exciting. And there’s Under the Red Robe, too. Lots of Stanley Weyman. Lots and lots. Of course I used to read those when I was about ten or eleven. I shouldn’t be surprised if I don’t come across The Prisoner of Zenda.’ She sighed with enormous pleasure at the remembrance. ‘The Prisoner of Zenda. One’s first introduction, really, to the romantic novel. The romance of Princess Flavia. The King of Ruritania. Rudolph Rassendyll, some name like that whom one dreamt of at night.’ Albert handed down another selection.
‘Oh yes,’ said Tuppence, ‘that’s better, really. That’s earlier again. I must put the early ones all together. Now, let me see. What have we got here? Treasure Island. Well, that’s nice but of course I have read Treasure Island again, and I’ve seen, I think, two films of it. I don’t like seeing it on films, it never seems right. Oh – and here’s Kidnapped. Yes, I always liked that.’
Amiable padding, but clearly this is Dame Agatha remembering her childhood, which she does at some length. Similarly, when a disproportionate amount of space is devoted to Tommy’s thoughts on modern tradesmen, you have the feeling that the passage was inserted because Dame Agatha had just been let down by one of them:
Some days before he had had the same kind of trouble. Electricians arriving in a kindly tangle of optimism and efficiency had started work. ‘Coming along fine now, not much more to do,’ they said. ‘We’ll be back this afternoon.’ But they hadn’t been back that afternoon. Tommy was not precisely surprised. He was used, now, to the general pattern of labour in the building trade, electrical trade, gas employees and others. They came, they showed efficiency, they made optimistic remarks, they went away to fetch something. They didn’t come back. One rang up numbers on the telephone but they always seemed to be the wrong numbers. If they were the right numbers, the right man was not working at this particular branch of the trade, whatever it was …
There is much more of this sort of thing in Postern of Fate than there is of mystery or action. There are also far too many meandering conversations about nothing very much at all, and some extraordinarily unlight banter:
‘All right,’ said Tommy. ‘You were tempted. You felt it was a good buy.’
‘Yes. At least – what d’you mean “a goodbye”?’
‘I mean b-u-y,’ said Tommy.
‘Oh. I thought you were going to leave the room and were saying goodbye to me.’
Not surprisingly, in some of these conversations, Dame Agatha forgets who it is who is supposed to be speaking. For instance:
‘I shouldn’t think there would be anything hidden here, do you, Tommy?’
‘It doesn’t seem the sort of house where anything would have been likely to be hidden. Lots of other people have lived in the house since those days.’
‘Yes. Family after family, as far as I can make out. Well, I suppose it might be hidden up in an attic or down in the cellar. Or perhaps buried under the summerhouse floor. Anywhere.’
‘Anyway, it’ll be quite fun,’ said Tuppence.…
The to-and-fro of conversation then proceeds as though the partners have mentally changed step. As it happens, the conversational styles of Tommy and Tuppence are so alike that it hardly matters which of them is speaking at any given moment.
On one page Tommy sets out for an appointment in Harrow, and arrives instead in Hampstead, at a house near the heath. No matter, it appears to be the right place. Elsewhere, a twelve-year-old boy is given dialogue which would sound impossibly stilted for an adult, and is simply impossible for a child.
Verbs are certainly more inclined to be passive than active in Postern of Fate. Certain facts become known, certain actions are taken, several identities are revealed. The dénouement is as vague as that. Some of the clues on a list which Tuppence has compiled are explained – though we were not exactly on tenterhooks to know whether Grin-hen-Lo would turn out to be Lohengrin backwards. (It is from another Wagner opera, Die Meistersinger, that Mr Robinson unexpectedly quotes Hans Sachs’ ‘Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn’, and he is courteous enough to say it in English: ‘Mad, mad, all the whole world is mad.’)15 Unless this reader has missed it (and he has read the novel more than twice), the reason why a certain greenhouse used to be known as ‘??’ is never explained. Since an Austrian spy is involved, can it be something to do with ‘Königlich und Kaiserlich’? It is another of life’s minor mysteries which will remain unsolved.
By far the most engaging character in the book is Hannibal, the small, black Manchester terrier who helps his master and mistress in their investigations, and who has a nice line in dialogue and, for that matter, stream-of-consciousness thought. Agatha Christie was always able to write about her canine characters with insight and sympathy. Hannibal is one of her most successful dogged detectives, and thoroughly deserves the honour accorded him in the closing lines of the novel, when he is made a Count of the Realm. (Tuppence – and Agatha? – had been re-reading Stanley Weyman’s Count Hannibal.) Hannibal also deserves the photograph of himself which appeared on the back of the dust-jacket of the first edition of Postern of Fate. (The photograph is actually of the Mallowans’ Manchester terrier, Bingo, whom they loved dearly. Sir Max revealed in his memoirs that Hannibal was based upon Bingo: Agatha Christie, however, dedicated the novel to ‘Hannibal and his master’.)
There is not much point in listing all the inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Postern of Fate; or the improbabilities, among them the Beresford grandchildren, aged fifteen, eleven and seven, two of whom are supposed to be twins! The greatest improbability is that the novel should be, in spite of all, enjoy-ably readable: at least to readers who have followed Agatha Christie through the years. It is not, however, recommended as an introduction to her oeuvre. As Tommy rather unwisely remarks in the penultimate chapter, in answer to his daughter Deborah, who doubts that his and Tuppence’s latest adventure would make much of a book, ‘You’d be surprised what people will read and enjoy!’
A trace of cynicism from the distinguished author? Let us hope not. Her credo, in these her last years, would seem to be disillusioned rather than cynical. There are traces of that disillusionment in the autobiography, finished eight years earlier, and surely also in these words of Colonel Pikeaway in this, Agatha Christie’s last novel:
… big fortunes made out of drugs, drug pushers, drugs being sent all over the world, being marketed, a worship of money. Money not just for buying yourself a big house and two Rolls-Royces, but money for making more money and doing down, doing away with the old beliefs. Beliefs in honesty, in fair trading. You don’t want equality in the world, you want the strong to help the weak. You want the rich to finance the poor. You want the honest and the good to be looked up to and admired. Finance! Things are coming back now to finance all the time. What finance is doing, where it’s going, what it’s supporting, how far hidden it is.
A final comment: the story ‘The Herb of Death’ from The Thirteen Problems (or The Tuesday Club Murders), written more than forty years earlier, contains material which is not altogether irrelevant to a consideration of Postern of Fate.
Poirot’s Early Cases
Alternative title: Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1974)
On Saturday, 23 March 1974, The Mousetrap closed at the Ambassadors Theatre, but only in order to move next door to the slightly larger St Martin’s Theatre, where it opened on Monday the 25th, without missing a single night’s performance.
The film version of Agatha Christie’s 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express, opened in London in November at the ABC Cinema in Shaftesbury Avenue, its première attended by Her Majesty the Queen, to whom Dame Agatha and the stars of the film were presented. After the screening there was a banquet at Claridge’s, and this proved to be the occasion of the last public appearance which Agatha Christie, now approaching eight-five, was to make in London. Max Mallowan in his memoirs recalled watching as Lord Mountbatten (whose son-in-law Lord Brabourne had produced the film) escorted Dame Agatha out of the dining-room at midnight. Agatha ‘raised her arm in farewell. Shy as always, she enjoyed this occasion to the full.’ When A. L. Rowse sent her a copy of his book about his cat, Peter the White Cat of Trenarren, Agatha Christie wrote: ‘I enjoyed your book about the White Cat so much that I really must ponder seriously about your suggestion of a little book about my eats and dogs, possibly in the Christmas season, though I rather doubt whether my publisher would care for the idea.’
As it seemed unlikely that Agatha Christie would find the stamina to complete another novel, her publishers issued, as the 1974 Christie, a collection of early Poirot stories, under the title of Poirot’s Early Cases. (For America, this became Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases.) All of the eighteen stories, fourteen of which are narrated by Hastings, had been written between 1923 and 1936, and most had appeared originally in magazines or newspapers. All but two were new to Great Britain in volume form, but none was new to the United States.
Three of the stories (‘The Lost Mine’, ‘The Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Veiled Lady’) had appeared in the US edition of Poirot Investigates in 1925 (though not in the 1924 original British edition, which contains three stories fewer than the American). Two (‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’ and ‘Problem at Sea’) come from the 1939 American volume of stories, The Regatta Mystery. Two (‘The Third-Floor Flat’ and ‘The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly’) are to be found in Three Blind Mice, published in the USA in 1950. Three stories (‘Double Sin’, ‘The Double Clue’ and ‘Wasps’ Nest’) come from the 1961 American volume, Double Sin. The Under Dog (USA only: 1951) finds its entire contents, with the exception of its title-story, reissued in (Hercule) Poirot’s Early Cases. ‘The Market Basing Mystery’, ‘The Lemesurier Inheritance’, ‘The Cornish Mystery’, ‘The King of Clubs’, ‘The Submarine Plans’, ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’ and ‘The Plymouth Express’.
Comments on most of these stories will be found earlier in these pages. As already mentioned, although ‘The Submarine Plans’ had not appeared in an earlier British volume, an expanded version of the same story, entitled ‘The Incredible Theft’, was included in Murder in the Mews or Dead Man’s Mirror (1937).
The only two stories in Poirot’s Early Cases to have appeared earlier in a British volume are ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ and ‘The Veiled Lady’, both of which were in a volume of mystery stories for young readers, Thirteen for Luck (US: 1961; UK 1966). This consists of stories from other collections, selected as being suitable for children. ‘The Veiled Lady’ had also appeared earlier in Great Britain, in the sixty-four-page booklet, Poirot Lends a Hand, which contained three Poirot stories (Polybooks: London and New York, 1946).
It is odd that, although most of these stories date from the same period as those in Poirot Investigates (1924), they had not been published at that time in a volume, for they are certainly not inferior to the stories in Poirot Investigates. ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’ would appear to be the earliest Poirot short story, narrated by Hastings shortly after the events related in Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. ‘Pure chance,’ Hastings begins his narrative,
led my friend Hercule Poirot, formerly chief of the Belgian force, to be connected with the Styles case. His success brought him notoriety, and he decided to devote himself to the solving of problems in crime. Having been wounded on the Somme and invalided out of the Army, I finally took up my quarters with him in London. Since I have a first-hand knowledge of most of his cases, it has been suggested to me that I select some of the most interesting and place them on record.
‘The Chocolate Box’ is the famous quasi-failure, the one not completely successful case in Poirot’s career. It took place during Poirot’s early days on the Belgian police force, and he tells Hastings of it in order that, if he, Poirot, ever shows signs of becoming conceited, Hastings should murmur ‘Chocolate Box’ and recall him to a becoming modesty. Naturally, Poirot tells his story in such a way that, although he failed to solve the case at the time, (‘My grey cells, they functioned not at all’) he comes quite well out of the narrative.
This is one of two stories which are narrated not by Hastings to the reader but by Poirot to Hastings. The other is ‘The Lost Mine’. Four of the eighteen stories are not first-person narrations either by Hastings or Poirot, and Hastings does not feature in them. They were written later than the others, after Agatha Christie had tired of Hastings and banished him to South America, but before she had relented and brought him back again. These stories are ‘The Third-Floor Flat’, ‘Wasps’ Nest’, ‘Problem at Sea’ and ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’
Nine of the stories were adapted for television, with David Suchet as Poirot, and were first seen on London Weekend TV on various dates between 1989 and 1991. They were: ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, ‘The Adventure of Johnny Waverly’, ‘The Third Floor Flat’, ‘Problem at Sea’, ‘King of Clubs’, ‘The Cornish Mystery’, ‘How Does Your Garden Grow?’, ‘The Plymouth Express’ and ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’.
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
POIROT (1975)
As her publishers had feared, Agatha Christie was no longer able to sustain the effort and concentration necessary to complete another novel. She had, of course, no need to. She had gone on writing for as long as it remained not too difficult a task, but for many years now her income had been such that it was pointless for her to earn any more. A company, Agatha Christie Ltd, set up as long ago as 1955 to handle incoming royalties on all her works after that date, had been reorganized in 1968 when the firm of Booker McConnell bought a fifty-one per cent stake for an unspecified sum. Later, some pre-1955 Agatha Christie rides were taken under the wing of the company, and Booker McConnell extended its holding to sixty-four per cent. It was now by far the major shareholder, the remainder of the company being partly owned by Agatha Christie’s daughter and grandson and partly vested in various family and charitable trusts. In June 1998 Booker sold their shares to Chorion plc, the company that also owned and managed Enid Blyton’s works.
With royalties from books, films and plays for the year ending 31 December 1974 totalling £366,000, Agatha Christie and her family may have had no need of a new ‘Christie for Christmas’ in 1975, but her publishers, understandably, felt differently. Remembering the two crime novels (one featuring Poirot and the other Miss Marple) which their author had written during the Second World War and salted away for posthumous publication, her publishers, in the person of Sir William Collins, approached Dame Agatha with the request that she release one of the two novels for publication in 1975. She was at first reluctant to do so, but eventually agreed that Curtain, the earlier novel of the two, and the one in which Poirot conducts his final investigation, could appear in time for the Christmas season.
Agatha Christie had already assigned the author’s rights in Curtain to her daughter Rosalind (and those in the Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, to Max Mallowan). (‘I thought it a useful way of benefiting my relations,’ she explained to an interviewer. ‘I gave one to my husband and one to my daughter – definitely made over to them, by deed of gift. So when I am no more they can bring them out and have a jaunt on the proceeds – I hope!’)
Rosalind was able to have, or at least to begin, her ‘jaunt on the proceeds’ in her mother’s lifetime, for the amount of money earned by Curtain was remarkable, even by Agatha Christie’s standards. A first British edition of 120,000 sold out quickly, American hardback rights were sold for an advance of 300,000 dollars, and American paperback rights for one million dollars. No doubt Agatha Christie had not realized how generous she was being when she assigned those rights away in the forties; but her own earnings in 1975 were close to £1,000,000. (In the United States, the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express had resulted in sales of 3,000,000 copies of a paperback reprint of the novel.)
In Curtain, whose sub-title is ‘Poirot’s Last Case’, Hastings returns as narrator for the first time since Dumb Witness in 1937 (except for a few short stories written earlier but not collected into volumes until the sixties), and immediately the problem of chronology arose. To some extent, Hastings’ place as Poirot’s colleague had been taken over in the post-war years by Ariadne Oliver. Now, at the end, Hastings comes back to visit his old friend Poirot, who is staying at, of all places, Styles, the country house which had been the scene of their first case, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920. But when is this end, when must this last case, in the course of which Poirot dies, be presumed to happen? We know that Curtain was written during the war years of the forties, but there is, of course, no reference to the war in the novel, for Agatha Christie had to remain vague as regards the year in which Poirot was to die. She had determined that it would be shortly after her own death, and she was, at the time of writing Curtain, a healthy woman in her early fifties.
This plays havoc with the ages of the characters in the novel, and not least with that of Poirot and Hastings. It must be assumed that the events in Curtain take place after those in Elephants Can Remember, Poirot’s penultimate case in 1972. Hastings mentions that their earlier Styles adventure had been in 1916. He and Poirot are therefore fifty-six years older than they were in Agatha Christie’s first novel. This would make Hastings eighty-six years of age, and Poirot at least one hundred and twenty! From what is often called internal evidence, however, the reader can work out Hastings’ age in Curtain as being just over fifty, while the description of Poirot is of a man close to death, but nearer to eighty-five than to one hundred and twenty. We should simply be grateful that Agatha Christie, while the bombs were falling on London, had given thought to the rounding-off of Poirot’s career, and refrain from looking a gift detective in the mouth.
Curtain is a sad, muted and nostalgic book. Sad, in that Poirot dies, and apparently without having brought the murderer to justice; muted, in that the inhabitants of Styles, no longer a country manor house but a private hotel or guesthouse not unlike the one in The Mousetrap, are, with one or two exceptions, people who are old or disappointed or embittered; nostalgic, in that Hastings is continually aware of the wheel having come full circle, of Poirot and himself ending their long and productive collaboration in the house in which they had begun it. Hastings learns, or is at least momentarily aware, that nostalgia for the happy past is a snare and a delusion. The past, after all, is happy mainly because it is past, because it has been endured.
Hastings’ wife has died in Argentina, but one of his four children, his daughter Judith, is among the guests at Styles. It is because of a problem concerning Judith that Hastings is driven to contemplate, and even to take steps to commit, murder. Poirot, during the course of events, fulfils a prophecy made jokingly by Inspector Japp forty years earlier in The ABC Murders.
Confined to a wheelchair, his face thin, lined and wrinkled, though with moustache (dyed) and hair (a wig) still as black as ever, Poirot has to rely more than ever on his little grey cells. ‘This, Hastings,’ he is forced to admit, ‘will be my last case. It will be, too, my most interesting case – and my most interesting criminal. For in X we have a technique superb, magnificent, that arouses admiration in spite of oneself. So far, mon cher, this X has operated with so much ability that he has defeated me, Hercule Poirot! He has developed the attack to which I can find no answer.’
X, the murderer, does indeed operate in such a manner (a more than usually improbable manner, it must be confessed) that the law cannot touch him. Nor, it seems, can Hercule Poirot. It is only four months after Poirot’s death, when Hastings comes into possession of a manuscript bequeathed to him by his old friend, that the truth is revealed. A knowledge of Shakespeare’s Othello and of the character of Iago, in particular, has helped Poirot considerably. In fact, he leaves Hastings, as clues, copies of Othello and of the play John Ferguson by St John Ervine, an interesting playwright of Agatha Christie’s generation who is now almost forgotten. John Ferguson (which Christie misspells) is Ervine’s finest play.
The ending of Curtain is one of the most surprising that Agatha Christie ever devised. If it somehow fails to make the effect that it ought to, this may be because the character of the murderer has been too lightly sketched throughout the novel, and his motivation not made sufficiently convincing. The basic idea behind Curtain had been adumbrated in one chapter of the 1932 novel, Peril at End House; had its characters been more fully developed, Poirot’s last case could have become Christie’s finest novel.
If Curtain is not Agatha Christie’s finest, it is, surely, her saddest novel. Who among her readers could fail to be affected by the death of the lovable and infuriating Hercule Poirot? What other character of fiction has had his obituary published on the front page of the New York Times?
HERCULE POIROT IS DEAD:
FAMED BELGIAN DETECTIVE
Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.
Mr Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.
At the end of his life, he was arthritic and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false moustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.
The news of his death, given by Dame Agatha, was not unexpected. Word that he was near death reached here last May.
Dame Agatha reports in Curtain that he managed, in one final gesture, to perform one more act of cerebration that saved an innocent bystander from disaster. ‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it,’ to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.16
Sleeping Murder
MISS MARPLE (1976)
The Mallowans and their family celebrated Christmas, 1975, in their Berkshire house at Wallingford. Dame Agatha was by now very frail, but she participated in the family Christmas and also observed Christmas as a religious festival when she insisted on being carried downstairs and placed on the sofa in the drawing-room in order to receive Holy Communion for what was to be the last time.
Ten years earlier, at the age of seventy-five, Agatha Christie had written:17
I am ready now to accept death. I have been singularly fortunate. I have with me my husband, my daughter, my grandson, my kind son-in-law – the people who make up my world. I have not yet quite reached the time when I am a complete nuisance to them all.
I have always admired the Esquimaux. One fine day a delicious meal is cooked for dear old mother, and then she goes walking away over the ice – and doesn’t come back …
One should be proud of leaving life like that – with dignity and resolution.
It is, of course, all very well to write these grand words. What will really happen is that I shall probably live to be ninety-three, drive everyone mad by being unable to hear what they say to me, complain bitterly of the latest scientific hearing aids, ask innumerable questions, immediately forget the answers and ask the same questions again. I shall quarrel violently with some patient nurse-attendant and accuse her of poisoning me, or walk out of the latest establishment for genteel old ladies, causing endless trouble to my suffering family. And when I finally succumb to bronchitis, a murmur will go around of ‘One can’t help feeling that it really is a merciful relief…’
And it will be a merciful relief (to them) and much the best thing to happen.
It happened on 12 January 1976. Max Mallowan added this brief Epilogue to the book18 he had just finished writing:
As I came to the last few pages of these memoirs my beloved Agatha died, peacefully and gently, as I wheeled her out in her chair after luncheon to the drawing-room. She had been failing for some time and death came as a merciful release, though it has left me with a feeling of emptiness after forty-five years of a loving and merry companionship. Few men know what it is to live in harmony beside an imaginative, creative mind which inspires life with zest. To me, the greatest consolation has been the recognition, which has come from many hundreds of letters, that admiration was blended in equal measure with love – a love and happiness which Agatha radiated both in her person and in her looks. Requiescat.
Agatha Christie died in a week when Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case was still heading the bestseller lists in the United Kingdom, the USA and Japan. Her death made front page news all over the world, and there were lengthy obituaries in the leading newspapers. The London Daily Telegraph19 published two pieces whose titles indicate the two kinds of public interest in Agatha Christie: a literary appraisal whose headline was ‘Like Poirot, Agatha Christie’s Last Case is Over’, and a financial report headed ‘Richest Writer Britain Has Produced’. The front page of the newspaper also carried the story of Agatha Christie’s death: ‘Lights dimmed as Dame Agatha dies.’ The two West End theatres in which her plays were running, the St Martin’s and the Savoy, dimmed their outside lights as a mark of respect. At the St Martin’s Theatre, The Mousetrap was in its twenty-fourth year, while at the Savoy a successful revival of Murder at the Vicarage was approaching its two hundredth performance.
The Daily Telegraph obituary thoughtlessly revealed the solutions of two of Dame Agatha’s finest mysteries, as a result of which the Editor received a number of angry or indignant letters from Christie fans.
Agatha Christie was buried, on 16 January, in St Mary’s churchyard, in the village of Cholsey, Berkshire, on a site which she had chosen herself ten years earlier, and where she is now joined by Max Mallowan, who died on 19 August 1978. These lines from Spenser’s The Faerie Queen are inscribed on her tombstone.
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas,
Ease after war, death after life, does greatly please.
‘She was beyond question,’ as the London Times obituary claimed, ‘one of the half-dozen best detective story writers in the world.’ And she was, beyond any shadow of doubt, far and away the most popular. Though perhaps not in every part of the world. Several days after her death, The Times20 printed this story under the heading, ‘Agatha Christie denounced in communist press’:
The late Dame Agatha Christie has been denounced in Hongkong’s communist press as a running-dog for ‘the rich and the powerful’.
In a rare and curious anti-British tirade in the party’s leading daily, Ta Rung Pao, she is said to have ‘described crimes committed by the middle and lower-classes of British society but never exposed their social causes’.
The newspaper’s film critic writes: In her book Witness for the Prosecution she extolled the great lawyer and judge as ‘the best people’. This explains clearly whom her works are serving and what political functions they are performing. Accordingly in 1971 the Queen made her a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a knighthood.
In October, 1976, Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case was posthumously published. This, the second of the two novels she had written during the Second World War, was the one Agatha Christie had made over, by deed of gift, to Max Mallowan. Until it appeared, a number of readers had continued to entertain the hope that, one day, their author would allow Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple to meet and to work together on a murder case. But this idea had never appealed to Agatha Christie. ‘Why should they?’ she wrote.21 ‘I am sure they would not enjoy it at all. Hercule Poirot, the complete egoist, would not like being taught his business by an elderly spinster lady. He was a professional sleuth, he would not be at home at all in Miss Marple’s world. No, they are both stars, and they are stars in their own right. I shall not let them meet unless I feel a sudden and unexpected urge to do so.’
She never felt that urge. Unlike Poirot in Curtain, Miss Marple is allowed to survive her last case, but as with Curtain the chronology of Sleeping Murder will not bear too close a scrutiny. Although it was written in the early forties, the reader must imagine it is happening after 1971 and Nemesis, if he is to regard it as really being Miss Marple’s last case. (A further posthumous volume, entitled Miss Marple’s Final Cases, was to appear three years later, but would turn out to consist of stories written and previously published at least thirty years earlier.)
The heroine of Sleeping Murder attends a performance in London of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi with John Gielgud in the cast. This can only have been during the Gielgud repertory season at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in 1944, when Gielgud played Ferdinand to Peggy Ashcroft’s Duchess, which makes it difficult not to envisage the events of the narrative as occurring in the mid-forties. And, indeed, Miss Marple is presented as ‘an attractive old lady, tall and thin, with pink cheeks and blue eyes and a gentie, rather fussy manner’. There is no hint of that fragility of extreme old age which had crept up on her by the time of At Bertram’s Hotel (1965), or Nemesis which, published in 1971, must be regarded as Miss Marple’s real last case.
Towards the end of the performance of The Duchess of Malfi, when she hears the actor playing Ferdinand utter the famous line, ‘Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young’, Gwenda Reed reacts in an extraordinary manner:
She sprang up from her seat, pushed blindly past the others out into the aisle, through the exit and up the stairs and so to the street. She did not stop, even then, but half walked, half ran, in a blind panic up the Haymarket.
Yes, it was clearly the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (though Agatha Christie calls it His Majesty’s Theatre, which is opposite). What, one wonders, can John Gielgud, who played Ferdinand, have thought? He is an actor who would have noticed a member of his audience walking, nay, running out on him.
Gwenda had experienced a sudden flash of revelation. She had heard that line before, as a child, and it had been accompanied by a vision of murder and of a murderer. Inexplicably, it seemed to have taken place in the house by the sea in South Devon which she, a young married woman of twenty-one and just arrived from New Zealand, had only recently bought.
Gwenda’s husband Giles is a distant cousin of the well-known novelist Raymond West, and so it comes to pass that Raymond’s aunt, Miss Marple, agrees to help Gwenda unravel her mystery. This is one of Agatha Christie’s favourite ‘crimes in the past’, and it is one of the most baffling, for there are several questions to be answered. Who, if anyone, was killed, and where, and when, and why? Also, of course, by whom? There is one enormous coincidence to be swallowed, but Dame Agatha disarmingly dares the reader not to swallow it: ‘It’s not impossible, my dear,’ Miss Marple says to Gwenda. ‘It’s just a very remarkable coincidence – and remarkable coincidences do happen.’
Does the line from The Duchess of Malfi offer too helpful a clue to those who know their Webster? Or is that merely a red herring? Incest does play a part in Sleeping Murder as well as in Webster’s play. One or two characters from St Mary Mead make brief appearances, there is an enjoyable postscript set on the terrace of the Imperial Hotel, Torquay, and there is also an odd little mystery which has been referred to earlier. At the beginning of Chapter 10 of Sleeping Murder Gwenda visits a Sanatorium in Norfolk, and has an odd, chance encounter with an old lady while she is sitting in a waiting-room:
Her eyes rested thoughtfully on Gwenda and presently she leaned forward towards her and spoke in what was almost a whisper.
‘Is it your poor child, my dear?
Gwenda looked slightly taken aback. She said doubtfully: ‘No – no. It isn’t.’
‘Ah, I wondered.’ The old lady nodded her head and sipped her milk. Then she said conversationally, ‘Half past ten – that’s the rime. It’s always at half past ten. Most remarkable.’ She lowered her voice and leaned forward again.
‘Behind the fireplace,’ she breathed. ‘But don’t say I told you.’
In Sleeping Murder this leads to nothing, and we are to assume that the old lady is merely a senile patient of the nursing home. But perhaps she is the Julia Lancaster who in 1968 will say (or has said?) very much the same thing to Tuppence Beresford in By the Pricking of My Thumbs (see p. 332). A similar incident is referred to by a character in The Pale Horse of 1961. Is there some deeper meaning to this recurrent Christiean motif? Should research students be set to work on it? Or is it, as seems most likely, based on something once said in the waiting room of a nursing home to Agatha Christie, and never forgotten by her? But could she really have used it for the second and third times without realizing that she had already made use of it? Again, did no editor at her publisher’s ever draw her attention to it? Let it remain ‘a marvel and a mystery to the world’.
Once again, life chose to imitate Agatha Christie’s art. The following news story from its Washington correspondent appeared in the London Times on 17 December 1979, under the heading ‘Visions find an “Agatha Christie” murderer’:
A particularly gruesome murder has been uncovered in North Carolina, in circumstances very similar to Agatha Christie’s last novel, Sleeping Murder. In the book, a woman returns to her childhood home, where events trigger memories long suppressed of the time when she saw.… 22
In the North Carolina case, Mrs Annie Perry recently started having ‘visions’ of the time her father disappeared in April, 1944. She was then 10. She told the police last week that ‘on Easter morning she saw her mother in the kitchen and the sink full of pots and pans of bloody water.’
Later that day she saw her father’s body almost naked in an unused room. During the night she heard ‘butchering sounds’.
The family lived on a farm, and had an outside privy. In the following week, when using the privy she looked down the hole and saw her father’s face floating.
Her mother, Mrs Winnie Cameron, reported her husband missing and in due course obtained a divorce, on grounds of desertion.
When the daughter recently began to have ‘visions’, she went to a psychiatrist who sent her to the police.
They took the matter seriously enough to obtain a search warrant. She took them to the site of the privy, where they dug and found human bones.
On Friday afternoon the police found Mrs Cameron. She had shot herself, leaving a suicide note in which she confessed to the murder of her husband.
Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case was enormously successful, attracting more favourable reviews than had been accorded to Poirot’s last case. The Chicago Tribune put it succinctly: ‘Agatha Christie saved the best for last.’
Part One of a two-part television adaptation, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple, was first seen on BBC TV on 11 January 1987.
An Autobiography
(1977)
Published posthumously, An Autobiography by Agatha Christie was begun in Iraq in 1950 and finished in England in 1965. It is a very long book, and although it is but intermittently revealing it is immensely readable. What it fails, no doubt deliberately, to reveal, except very occasionally, is the kind of intimate detail of personal relationships which so many memoirs, and certainly biographies, do nowadays delight in presenting. Agatha Christie was essentially a private person. She enjoyed, in this volume, sharing with her readers a huge amount of detail concerning her childhood and youth, her family life in the early years of the century, her parents and grandparents, but she tells only what she wants to tell; she remembers a great deal, and she conveniently forgets much else.
Three-quarters of the book’s length is devoted to the first forty years of the author’s life, of which she seems to have had almost total recall. The second forty or more years are squeezed into the remaining and more reticent quarter, and you are given the distinct impression that, as she grew older, it is those early years that Agatha Christie most enjoyed recalling and writing about. ‘What I plan to do,’ she noted in her Foreword which, unlike most Forewords, was written at the outset and not after completion of the rest of the book, ‘is to enjoy the pleasures of memory – not hurrying myself – writing a few pages from time to time. It is a task that will probably go on for years.’ And so it did.
Though you cannot completely trust the elderly author’s memory, An Autobiography is valuable not only for the information it provides but also for revealing Agatha Christie’s opinions on a number of important issues; opinions which she had often attributed to Poirot or Miss Marple or Mrs Oliver in the novels and which it is fascinating to find repeated by the author in propria persona. Equally valuable are her comments on her own working methods. ‘Plots,’ she reveals, ‘come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hatshop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, “Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.” Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book.’
An Autobiography has proved to be as popular as any Christie murder mystery. ‘Agatha Christie has done it again,’ said The Times, ‘… a book that is wonderfully easy to read and as engrossing as Ten Little Niggers’.
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
MISS MARPLE SHORT STORIES (1979)
Miss Marple’s Final Cases and two other stories was published in the UK only, for the stories were already available in other volumes published in the USA. Two of the stories, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘Sanctuary’, are to be found in Double Sin (1961); four stories, ‘Strange Jest’, ‘Tape Measure Murder’, ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’ and ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, are from Three Blind Mice (1950); and the remaining two stories, ‘Miss Marple Tells a Story’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’, come from The Regatta Mystery (1939).
Of the eight stories, two (‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ and ‘In a Glass Darkly’) are not Miss Marple adventures. The remaining six ought not really to have been called Miss Marple’s Final Cases, for they are examples of that redoubtable lady in mid-career. The publisher’s justification for putting together a collection of them was that, although they had appeared in magazines in the past, the stories were being published in volume form for the first time in Great Britain. A statement to this effect appeared in the ‘blurb’ on the inside of the front jacket. It is, however, slightly inaccurate, for ‘Tape-Measure Murder’ had found its way into Thirteen for Luck, ‘a selection of mystery stories for young readers’ which Collins had published in 1966.
Problem at Pollensa Bay
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1991)
Not published in the USA, Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories contains the stories ‘Problem at Pollensa Bay’, ‘The Second Gong’, ‘Yellow Iris’, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, ‘The Regatta Mystery’, ‘The Love Detectives’, ‘Next to a Dog’ and ‘Magnolia Blossom’. All had appeared previously in American volumes and are discussed in more detail under The Regatta Mystery (1939), Witness for the Prosecution (1948), Three Blind Mice (1950) and The Golden Ball (1971).
While the Light Lasts
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1997)
Published only in the United Kingdom and Commonwealth countries (i.e. there was no American edition), While the Light Lasts and Other Stories contains nine stories. ‘The House of Dreams’, first published in Sovereign magazine in 1926, is a revised version of ‘The House of Beauty’, which Agatha Christie wrote when she was a teenager, and which she thought ‘the first thing I ever wrote that showed any sign of promise’. It is not a crime story but a poetic evocation of the supernatural. ‘The Actress’, which first appeared in Novel magazine in 1923, offers a lesson in how to deal with a blackmailer. ‘The Edge’, written just before its author’s celebrated disappearance in 1926 and first published in Pearson’s magazine in February 1927, tells of a woman’s plan for revenge that went wrong. ‘Christmas Adventure’, featuring Hercule Poirot, is the original version of ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, the title-story of a volume published in 1960. ‘The Lonely God’, which first appeared in Royal magazine in 1926, is a romantic story which its author later considered to be ‘regrettably sentimental’. ‘Manx Gold’ came into existence as an aid to the entrants in a treasure hunt competition on the Isle of Man in 1930. The curiously ambiguous ‘Within a Wall’ was published in Royal magazine in 1925. ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’, a Poirot adventure, is the original version of ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’ which had been included in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960). The title-story, ‘While the Light Lasts’, first published in Novel magazine in 1924, later provided the plot for Giant’s Bread (1930), the first of the six romantic novels that Agatha Christie wrote under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. While the Light Lasts includes notes about each story by Tony Medawar.
The Harlequin Tea Set
POIROT SHORT STORIES (1997)
Published in the United States only, this consists of nine stories, seven of which had already appeared in While the Light Lasts. They are ‘The Edge’, ‘The Actress’, ‘While the Light Lasts’, ‘The House of Dreams’, ‘The Lonely God’, ‘Manx Gold’ and ‘Within a Wall’. ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’, previously unpublished in the US, replaced its ‘Baghdad’ counterpart, while one new story is the title-piece, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, in which that mysterious investigator Mr Harley Quin, comes to the aid of an old friend. This story had been published in Winter’s Crimes 3 (1971) and Ellery Queen’s Murdercade (1975), as well as Problem at Pollensa Bay (1991) in the UK
Unless a few more fugitive stories are collected to make a further volume, The Harlequin Tea Set is the final book to appear by the most widely read British author of all time (although the subsequent novelisations of Black Coffee in 1998, The Unexpected Guest in 1999, and Spider’s Web in 2000 have opened up some intriguing possibilities). Let the last comments be statements of a contrasting character from Dame Agatha’s one-time agent, Edmund Cork, and from the author herself. Mr Cork was quoted 23 in 1975 as saying: ‘Her sales go up every year. A million-and-a-half paperbacks a year in Britain alone. She is unquestionably the bestselling author of all time. Every estimate of her sales I have seen is a gross underestimate.’ Fair enough: that is the language of agents. Interviewed by Lord Snowdon24 who asked her what she hoped to be remembered for, Agatha Christie replied: ‘Well, I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.’
Agatha Christie was an exceptionally good writer of detective and thriller stories.