1 Reprinted in Classics and Commercials by Edmund Wilson (1950).
2 Reprinted in The Dyer’s Hand by W. H. Auden (1962).
1 Gaston Leroux’s Le Mystère de la Chambre Jaune (1907) had appeared in English translation in 1909 as The Mystery of the Yellow Room.
2 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography (London, 1977).
3 Did the teenage Agatha Christie attend in Paris a concert conducted by Pierre Monteux? Poirot, as described, certainly resembled Monteux.
4 But someone, once, must have accused her of a love of violence, for journalists who have clearly not read her still parrot the cry. In The Times of 8 December 1981, for instance, Sheridan Morley refers to ‘that mix of snobbery with violence which has always been at the heart of Dame Agatha’s writing.’ Must he not have been thinking rather of Ian Fleming?
5 Which, in her autobiography, she mistakenly refers to as ‘macaws’.
6 As also with The Murder at the Vicarage, some later editions dropped the definite article from the title.
7 Agatha Christie: op. cit.
8 Agatha Christie: op. cit.
9 In Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime (ed. H. R F. Keating, London, 1977). Mr Gilbert appears not to have consulted the volume of poems but to have taken this information from an unreliable book, Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery by G. C. Ramsey (1967).
10 Gwen Robyns: The Mystery of Agatha Christie (1978).
11 London Sunday Times, 27 February 1966.
12 Agatha Christie’s sister, Madge.
13 These included a fourteen-year-old boy who was to become a novelist in later life. ‘The only time I saw Harrogate was with my family at the same hotel and historic moment when Agatha Christie checked in without her memory,’ wrote Patrick White in Flaws in the Glass (1981).
1 In 1972 a pop singer named Harley Quinne reached the British ‘best-seller’ charts with a song, ‘New Orleans’.
2 Other tides in the series are by Hardy, Flaubert, A. E. W. Mason and H. de Vere Stacpoole.
3 A role played by the present author in a repertory company’s revival in Tunbridge Wells in 1955.
4 Daily Telegraph, 10 April 1931.
5 Introduction to Peter Saunders: The Mousetrap Man (1972).
6 A first-class production of the play which toured very successfully in Great Britain in 1981 starred Patrick Cargill as a delightful and convincing Poirot.
7 Actually, for nineteen years.
8 In Agatha Christie’s view, as expressed in her autobiography, 50,000 words was ‘the right length’ for a detective story. However, at the urging of her publishers, she usually wrote between 60,000 and 70,000 words.
9 This is probably Mrs Christie’s transliteration of the Russian composer whose name is usually westernized as Weinberg. Jacob Weinberg (1879–1956) taught at the Odessa Conservatory for several years before emigrating first to Palestine and then to the USA. His opera Hecha Rutz, was staged in New York in 1934 as The Lioness of Israel.
10 Sittaford is the village in which much of the action takes place. Hazelmoor is the name of the house in which the murder is committed.
11 By Hodder and Stoughton in Great Britain and Doubleday in America.
12 In his survey of crime fiction, Bloody Murder (1972), Julian Symons mistakenly asserts that Agatha Christie refused to allow Poirot to be impersonated on the stage after the nineteen-thirties. Other Christie commentators guilty of occasional errors include Jeffrey Feinman, who in The Mysterious World of Agatha Christie (1975) thinks that Hastings does not appear in Peril at End House, and Gwen Robyns who, in The Mystery of Agatha Christie (1978), gets so many things wrong that it would be pointless to list them, and who appears not to realize that Black Coffee is an original play by Agatha Christie and not an adaptation by another hand.
13 Agatha Christie: op. cit.
14 Max Mallowan: Mallwan’s Memoirs (London, 1977).
15 The London News-Chronicle, 7 June 1933.
16 In A Catalogue of Crime (1971).
17 A wadi is a ravine or valley which in the rainy season becomes a watercourse; a khan, a caravanserai or inn.
18 In An Autobiography.
19 For a history of ‘the world’s most famous train’, from its beginning in 1883 to near the time of its demise, the reader is referred to Orient Express by Michael Barsley (London, 1966).
20 Quoted in Gwen Robyns: The Mystery of Agatha Christie.
21 Close textual examination will reveal his first name to be Christopher, the son of Charles and Harriet Parker Pyne, even though in ‘Have You Got Everything You Want?’ his pigskin bag is marked ‘J. Parker Pyne’.
22 In Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive (London, 1980).
23 In Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor: A Catalogue of Crime (New York, 1971).
24 The Oxford Companion to the Theatre (third edition, Oxford, 1967).
25 In A Catalogue of Crime.
26 The edition consulted was that of July 1981.
27 Max Mallowan: Mallowan’s Memoirs.
28 Mallowan was writing about forty years later in Mallowan’s Memoirs.
29 In an article, ‘Genteel Queen of Crime’, in Life (14 May 1956).
30 See Gordon C. Ramsey: Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery (N.Y., 1967).
31 Superintendent Battle was to appear in two later novels, Murder is Easy and Towards Zero; Race assists Poirot later in Death on the Nile and plays a leading part in Sparkling Cyanide; Mrs Oliver, pace Robert Barnard (op. cit.) who thinks she is making her first appearance in Cards on the Table, was introduced in Parker Pyne Investigates.
32 Vosper was homosexually inclined. It is generally believed that he committed suicide. In Flaws in the Glass (London, 1981), Patrick White refers to his having ‘thrown himself off a liner after finding his lover flirting with a beauty queen’!
33 Not (pace Philip Jenkinson in Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime) A Stranger Passes.
34 Come, Tell Me How You Live.
35 Quoted in Feinman: op. cit.
36 However, the American critic Edmund Wilson said of it (in Classics and Commercials, 1950) that the writing is ‘of a mawkishness and banality which seems to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book. You run through it to see the problem worked out.’
37 See illustration showing the S.S. Nefertari.
38 The first was Appointment with Death, also staged in 1945.
39 An Autobiography.
40 The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery.
41 In A Talent to Deceive.
42 Collected in The Under Dog (1951) and Poirot’s Early Cases (1974), as was ‘The Submarine Plans’.
43 Collected in Witness for the Prosecution (1948), a volume published in the USA but not in Great Britain.
44 Max Mallowan: op. cit.
45 Quoted in Earl F. Bargainnier: The Gentle Art of Murder (1980).
46 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
47 In the American edition, she is called Lavinia Fullerton, perhaps because of the well-known American Pinkerton Detective Agency, though in the English edition Luke makes the comment that Miss Pinkerton is very suitably named, which bewilders her.
48 A ‘little Jew’ is referred to sneeringly in Ten Little Niggers (‘that was the damnable part about Jews, you couldn’t deceive them about money – they knew’), but one would expect the character in question to hold such an attitude.
49 Gwen Robyns in The Mystery of Agatha Christie claims that the novel now has a new title in the USA, The Nursery Rhyme Murders. This is not so. The Nursery Rhyme Murders is the title of an omnibus volume (1976) which contains A Pocket Full of Rye, Hickory, Dickory Death and Crooked House.
50 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
51 In Mallowan’s Memoirs.
52 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
53 An excellent production at the Churchill Theatre, Bromley (a London suburb), in the spring of 1981 revealed the play to be as effective as ever. The cast included Ewen Solon, Willoughby Gray, Barbara Bolton and David Warbeck.
54 Jeffrey Feinman: op. cit.
55 The thirteen stories in Thirteen for Luck are ‘Accident’, ‘The Bird with the Broken Wing’, ‘The Blue Geranium’, ‘The Face of Helen’, ‘The Four Suspects’, ‘The Girdle of Hippolyta’, “The Market Basing Mystery’, ‘The Nemean Lion’, ‘Problem at Pollensa Bay’, “The Regatta Mystery’, ‘The Tape-Measure Murder’, ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’, and ‘The Veiled Lady’. All the stories had been previously published. (See the alphabetical list of stories for details.)
56 Before coming to Poirot, Miss Lemon had worked for Mr Parker Pyne.
1 A Q.C., writing to The Times in 1980 in support of voluntary euthanasia, claimed that ‘information on unusual poisons gleaned from two of Agatha Christie’s novels have [sic] been used to kill people in Britain and France’.
2 Francis Wyndham: ‘The Algebra of Agatha Christie’, in the London Sunday Times, 27 February 1966.
3 In The Regatta Mystery (1939: USA) and The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960: UK).
4 The novel uses the variant, ‘Five, six, picking up sticks’.
5 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
6 In fact, anyone who has visited
Burgh Island, off the Devon coast near Bigbury, can have little doubt that it is the unglamourized original of Smuggler’s Island.
7 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
8 Robert Barnard: op. cit.
9 In The Thin Man.
10 The short stories collected in volume form in 1932 in The Thirteen Problems had begun to appear earlier. The very first Miss Marple story, ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, was published in 1928.
11 Raymond West, Miss Marple’s writer nephew, is mentioned in The Body in the Library, but does not appear.
12 The London Sunday Times, 27 February 1966.
13 Quoted in Jeffrey Feinman: The Mysterious World of Agatha Christie.
14 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
15 In Mallowan’s Memoirs.
16 In The Mousetrap Man (1972).
17 See earlier reference
18 The Russian woman is travelling to Vienna for a surgical operation; ‘But they are good surgeons in Vienna. This one to whom I am going – he is very clever – a Jew. I have always said it would be stupid to annihilate all the Jews in Europe. They are clever doctors and surgeons, yes, and they are clever artistically too.’
19 H. R F. Keating (Ed.): Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime (London, 1977).
20 Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive (London, 1980).
21 Jeffrey Feinman: The Mysterious World of Agatha Christie (New York, 1975).
22 By Jessica Mann (London, 1981): the author uses ‘feminine’ incorrectly, since she clearly means ‘female’.
23 An Autobiography.
24 In Mallowan’s Memoirs.
25 Charleston Evening Post, 14 September 1970.
26 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
27 ‘The White Knight’s Song’ from Alice Through the Looking Glass. the appropriate line, ‘Come, tell me how you live, I cried’, is also quoted by a character in Giant’s Bread by Mary Westmacott (1930).
28 Mallowan’s Memoirs.
29 Gwen Robyns: The Mystery of Agatha Christie.
30 The Hollow was also the title of the first American edition of the novel. The alternative title, Murder After Hours, was first used for an American paperback edition in 1954.
31 Quoted in Gwen Robyns: The Mystery of Agatha Christie.
32 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
33 An Autobiography.
34 Hubert Gregg: Agatha Christie and All That Mousetrap (1980).
35 Max Mallowan: op. cit.
36 Later to achieve a certain fame on British TV as Shaw Taylor.
37 According to the BBC, it played for 29 minutes, 55 seconds.
38 In The Mysterious World of Agatha Christie.
39 In Agatha Christie, First Lady of Crime.
40 Quoted in G. C. Ramsey: Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery (1967).
41 Interview with Francis Wyndham in the London Sunday Times, 27 February 1966.
42 Tredwell (Mark I) was in the
employ of Lord Caterham in The Secret of Chimneys (1925) and The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), and Tredwell (Mark II) in Black Coffee (1930).
43 4 June 1950.
44 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
45 In An Autobiography.
1 In An Autobiography.
2 Mallowan’s Memoirs.
3 The story had appeared in the 1934 volume of stories The Hound of Death (UK only) and in Witness for the Prosecution, a volume of stories published in the USA in 1948.
4 The splendid, huge old theatre has since been demolished, and a monstrosity of a new theatre, the New London, built in its place.
5 There are thirty roles, but two were ‘doubled’. The play can, in fact, be performed with a cast of ten men and five women by doubling some minor roles and dispensing with others.
6 In An Autobiography.
7 An Autobiography.
8 The Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (ed. Michael Davie) (London, 1976).
9 France and Britain had begun to bomb Cairo and the Suez Canal area on 31 October. By 20 November, a United Nations emergency force was supervising a cease-fire.
10 See the photograph of the boathouse at Greenway House, between pp. 120–121.
11 A. L. Rowse: Memories of Men and Women (London, 1980).
12 Max Mallowan: Mallowan’s Memoirs (London, 1977).
13 To Gwen Robyns.
14 In A Talent to Deceive (1980), and An Agatha Christie Chronology (1976).
15 Nemesis (1971). Tommy Beresford in By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) is also allowed to have views on Macbeth.
16 Robert Barnard: A Talent to Deceive (1980). The reference is to Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957).
17 A forensic specialist’s remembrance of The Pale Horse led to the identification and capture of the murderer. The London Daily Telegraph report of the trial, on 24 June 1972, appeared under the heading, ‘Agatha Christie Gave Doctor Clue to Poison’.
18 It was quoted appropriately in Dead Man’s Mirror.
19 Quoted in Hubert Gregg: Agatha Christie and All That Mousetrap (London, 1980).
1 In Earl F. Bargainnier: The Gentle Art of Murder (1980). Barzun and Taylor wrongly identify Colin as Japp’s son, in A Catalogue of Crime.
2 Agatha Christie: An Autobiography.
3 An Autobiography.
4 Or monkey puzzler, a popular name for the Araucaria tree.
5 Quoted in ‘The Algebra of Agatha Christie’ by Francis Wyndham (London Sunday Times 17 February 1966).
6 In Mallowan’s Memoirs.
7 Quoted in the Francis Wyndham article in the Sunday Times, 27 February 1966.
8 In A Talent to Deceive (1980).
9 In A Catalogue of Crime (1971).
10 By Abigail Ann Hamblen, in Discourse (Summer, 1969).
11 ‘Jones was disheartened to hear from Anna Freud of Freud’s great love for detective stories, especially following operations. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers were special favourites.’ Paul Roazen: Freud and His Followers (1974).
12 Not all the reviews were unfavourable. The New York Times complimented the author on her topicality: ‘Last week, with attention still fixed on the airplane hi-jackings in the Middle East, Miss Christie came out with Passenger to Frankfurt, which just happens to include four hi-jackings.’ And Maurice Richardson in the London Observer thought the novel ‘marvellously entertaining’, though he added that ‘at moments one wonders whether the old dear knows the difference between a hippie and a skinhead’.
13 Letter from Peter Saunders to Charles Osborne, 24 November 1981.
14 A well-known stage director whose production of the comedy No Sex Please, We’re British ran in London for nearly seventeen years.
15 Stafford Nye quotes the same phrase in Passenger to Frankfurt (1970).
16 New York Times, 6 August 1975. There are three inaccurate or misleading statements here: Styles was not ‘a nursing home’ but a guesthouse; it is by no means certain that Poirot retired from the Belgian police force as early as 1904; and Poirot cannot fairly be said to have ‘frequently’ misquoted Shakespeare.
17 In An Autobiography.
18 Mallowan’s Memoirs.
19 On 13 January 1976.
20 On 22 January 1976.
21 In An Autobiography.
22 Remainder of sentence suppressed by C.O.
23 Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 3 August 1975.
24 Toronto Star, 14 December 1974.