Detectives incredibly stupid
And villains unspeakably vile,
The usual presence of Cupid,
The usual absence of style.
A heroine brave and resourceful,
Dread poisons, infernal machines,
A hero alert and of course full,
Whenever they down him, of beans.
Thus (with three further stanzas of similar import) does a Punch reviewer of 1925 dismiss his current batch of detective stories, including, it so happened, one by Agatha Christie. There was little sign at this period that Punch (usually an incomparable seismograph of current sociological trends) had as yet recognized the name ‘Agatha Christie’ as being anything at all special. True, her second book The Secret Adversary had been favourably reviewed some three years earlier, but this seems to have been a single swallow, heralding nothing. Since that review was to be almost the sole attention she was to receive from Punch for many a long year, it is perhaps worth quoting. ‘The cleverest thing about this most fresh and attractive mystery is that Miss A. Christie has succeeded in keeping her adversary secret up to the very end of the book. It rankles, honestly, to have to confess to such fallibility, but the fact is that I made up my mind time after time as to which unlikely character was the evil “Mr Brown”, the “Man behind Bolshevism”, only to decide, after I had read a few more pages, that I had been wrong in my guess.’ When the now-famous name was mentioned after this, comments tended to be brief and patronizing for many a year. Thus of her collection of short stories, Poirot Investigates, the critic remarked: ‘The more I read of detective fiction, the sorrier do I become for the assistants of these wonderful unravellers of crime. Unblushingly, Miss Christie allows Poirot to pour contempt on Captain Hastings, and I found myself hoping with all my might that Hastings would turn and rend the great man.’
After this little stir of recognition, silence descended (as far as Punch was concerned) for a decade or more. A few lukewarm lines were devoted to The Blue Train (1928), and to Murder at the Vicarage (1930), and that was all. It was not that Punch simply disdained detection-writers as being beneath their notice. On the contrary, writers such as Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Francis Grierson, John Rhode and others were given generous space in the ‘Booking Office’ columns.
However, there were journals of the period that were beginning to recognize the name of Agatha Christie as something new and important. The Daily Express in particular seems (to its great credit) to have spotted her in the very earliest days of her career, and though I have been unable to trace in their columns any actual review of her first book, a subsequent reviewer of Murder on the Links wrote: ‘No one who read The Mysterious Affair at Styles will need reminding of the fact that Agatha Christie stands in a class by herself as a writer of detective stories.’
Alone among the contemporary newspapers, the Express seems to have recognized Agatha Christie as ‘news’, even as early as 1922. In January of that year, they are already treating her as enough of a VIP as to rate a twelve-inch interview, complete with photograph – a plump, schoolgirlish face under a schoolgirlish velour hat. ‘Crime is like drugs,’ said Mrs Christie in this interview. ‘Once a writer of detective stories and, though you may stray into the by-paths of poetry or psychology, you inevitably return – the public expect it of you.’
‘The public expect it of you.’ Already, then, at the beginning of 1922, Agatha Christie had a public, a band of devoted and importunate followers, though as yet beneath the notice of The Times and the Daily Telegraph.
Who were this public? At this distance of time, of course, the echoes are faint. Those of the early fans who survive are well into their sixties or beyond. From this age group I sought memories of the first impact of Agatha Christie. A retired British Rail manager, aged seventy-four said: ‘I can’t remember which one I read first, but I do remember that I couldn’t put it down, and after I’d finished it I couldn’t rest until I’d read the lot. I’d get up at five to read them before I started for work. I’ll never forget those summer mornings.’ And a housewife, aged sixty-five, added: ‘She was already a famous name, I suppose, when I first came across her – about fifteen or sixteen I suppose I was. I remember having a vague feeling that my mother disapproved of her.’ An aeronautical engineer, aged sixty, also had memories of a certain illicitness: ‘I read The Seven Dials Mystery all through in church, hidden under my prayer-book!’
In 1926 there came, of course, the Great Divide in Agatha Christie’s career: the year of her disappearance, and also of that most controversial – and, in the opinion of many of her admirers, the best and most powerful – of her books, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The clamour aroused by the identity of the murderer has even now not entirely died down. In serious studies of the detective novel it is still debated as hotly and as inconclusively as it was at the time of publication. Opinions of critics then ranged from ‘a brilliant psychological tour-de-force’ to ‘a rotten, unfair trick’ – and they still do. ‘The best thriller ever!’ chortled the Daily Sketch, while ‘tasteless and unforgivable let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’ growled the News Chronicle.
The heat generated was extraordinary, and there are people alive today who still, after half a century, are ready to boil all over again at the memory of that long-ago shock-ending. A great-grandmother, aged eighty-two said to me: ‘I couldn’t believe it! I just couldn’t! That our very own Agatha Christie should do such a thing to us! It spoilt her books for me ever afterwards.’ And a doctor still practising, aged seventy-six, exclaimed: ‘I thought it was awful… so unfair! And making him a doctor, too! I’d just qualified, and I felt it was an insult aimed at me personally, at the whole medical profession. That a doctor could be a murderer… I thought it was wicked. I still do…’
Whatever may have been its merits or demerits, there is no doubt that Roger Ackroyd, and the storm surrounding its publication, put Agatha Christie firmly and for ever on the map. From now on, her name rapidly became a household word, as did that of her detective, Hercule Poirot; indeed, it was not long before he was by way of becoming a national figure of fun. ‘Above all, there is Hercule Poirot, with his egg-shaped head,’ remarked a Daily Express reviewer. ‘The suggestion of the shape of the head is a stroke of something like genius. It is so vague that it haunts. Was the egg right-way up, or upside-down, or sideways? There is no clue to the solution of this mystery.’
Within the next decade, Hercule Poirot and his egg-shaped head had become part of our cultural heritage, and writing send-ups of him was more or less a national sport. With great good humour, Agatha Christie herself occasionally joined in the game, as (for example) in an interview she gave to the Daily Mail in 1938: ‘Let me confess it – there has been at times a coolness between us. There are moments when I have felt: “Why – why – why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature?… Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head…” Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head…? I am beholden to him financially… On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me. In moments of irritation, I point out that by a few strokes of the pen (or taps on the typewriter) I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently: “Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.” ’
And he was too. His career was now unstoppable, his place in our national culture unassailable. By the end of the thirties, he had featured in an important murder trial, that of Horace Budd, accused of poisoning a certain Francis Cyril Newlands. In summing up, the judge remarked (on the alleged method of poisoning) that: ‘Even in the most dramatic stories in the realm of detective fiction, there has surely never been a similar instance. I do not think that M. Poirot or any other great detective of fiction has ever had to deal with such a case.’
But despite the growing fame of Poirot and his creator throughout the thirties, and despite their millions of fans, the review space given to Agatha Christie in most papers remained niggardly, and the reviews for the most part less than ecstatic. ‘Pleasantly readable’ was the kind of phrase used; ‘a clever twist’ and ‘a writer of remarkable virtuosity’; and often there was a sting in the tail of even the most favourable notice, such as the Sunday Express notice of Murder on the Orient Express: ‘This provides one of the most remarkable and improbable solutions ever offered by a detective story writer, but Mrs Christie writes with such unfailing humour and high-spirits that its improbability does not bother the reader in the least.’
Even the wholly laudatory reviews of this period tend to be slightly arch in tone, as if the reviewer is anxious to assure his readers that he does not really set much store by this sort of thing. Thus a Daily Telegraph reviewer in 1930: ‘How many vicars must long to murder their church wardens, and here is one who actually has the luck to find one murdered in his study.’
Unsympathetic reviews continued numerous during this decade, forming a substantial minority of all press comments. Critics delighted to pick holes in the plausibility of the Christie plots, and to fasten on points of detail. ‘Who in their senses would use hammer and nails and varnish in the middle of the night within a few feet of an open door?’ asked The Times, reviewing Dumb Witness in 1937. ‘And do ladies wear large brooches in their dressing-gowns?’
Sometimes, the critics were not merely hostile, but downright unfair, and when this happened there was invariably an outcry from Christie fans. On one occasion, no less a personage than John Dickson Carr (then Secretary of the Detection Club) took up the cudgels on her behalf. The occasion was the appearance, in the Evening Standard in 1938, of a review by Howard Spring of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Mr Dickson Carr protested: ‘Mr Spring has carefully removed every element of mystery. He discloses (a) the identity of the murderer, (b) the murderer’s motive, (c) nearly every trick by which the murder was committed, and (d) how the detective knew it. After this massacre it is safe to say that little more harm to the book could possibly have been done.’
But in the teeth of reviews unfair, mediocre, patronizing, or downright hostile, the popularity of Agatha Christie’s books rose like an unstoppable tide. In the autumn of 1935, the Daily Express ran The A.B.C. Murders as a serial, setting up simultaneously a column of ‘Readers’ Guesses’ to the solution. But a Mr R. A. Harman of West Norwood, while congratulating the paper, also carped: ‘How can M. Poirot hope to solve an ABC murder when he cannot read this publication to his best advantage? He is anxious to reach Churston, and so takes the midnight train from Paddington, arriving at 7.15. Had he looked more carefully, he would have found that by leaving nearly two hours later – 1.40 a.m. – he would have arrived an hour earlier – at 6.10 a.m.’ It was Mrs A. V. Freshfield, of Wanstead, who got the solution ‘Correct in every detail’ and wrote: ‘I suddenly felt I knew the murderer, the motive, alibi, everything… I decided to write it down, and send you the result herewith.’
With virulent detractors, passionately devoted fans, and ever-creasing press coverage, Agatha Christie by the end of the thirties was already becoming one of the famous names of the world. Her books were reported to be the teenage Princess Elizabeth’s favourite reading. ‘Queen of Crime’ was by now her acknowledged title. It had already been said of her (and has been quoted hundreds of times since) that she ‘made more money by crime than any woman since Lucrezia Borgia’.
Perhaps most flattering of all, she had become a butt for humorists who felt no need even to mention her name, so sure were they of the public’s recognition. ‘But in whose Library was the body originally found?’ enquires a puzzled cartoon policeman in The Humorist of 1938 when confronted by a motor accident. And in Reveille, a forensic scientist is depicted peering down a microscope and asking testily for the ‘little grey cells’.
Then came the war. At the outset, many were the literary prophets of doom, total eclipse being widely predicted not only for Agatha Christie, but for the whole genre of detective fiction. Who, demanded columnists far and wide, was going to be bothered with fictional death and horror when the real thing was going on all around them? Millions, apparently. To the astonishment of sociologists, critics – and even of writers and publishers – the reading of detective stories not only showed no decline but even, during the winter of the Blitz, showed an unmistakable increase.
In his book Murder for Pleasure Howard Haycraft reported that, in the London shelters during the Blitz, ‘raid’ libraries were set up which, in response to popular demand, lent out detective stories and almost nothing else. This rather startling finding was amply corroborated by a Mass Observation survey of reading which reported: ‘Of detective authors mentioned, Agatha Christie certainly tops the poll at the moment.’ A fifty-year-old widow confessed in an interview: ‘I always used to look at the end first, but I don’t now. Now I like to have to concentrate. The suspects, and working it all out – you know – it soothes your nerves.’ ‘Many people,’ the report continued, ‘would appear to have a special feeling for Agatha Christie, over and above their general preference for detection and mystery. “Cosy” and “comforting” were words used over and over again.’
The feeling of comfort persisted after the war. A teacher at a polytechnic, now in her forties, recalled to me what the books had meant to her in a lonely and miserable period of her youth when she faced for the first time the realities of bed-sitter life in London. ‘Agatha Christie was my one comfort and support during those first desperate weeks. I had never been away from home before, and I was lonely and depressed beyond anything I can describe. The one thing that made it endurable, going back to that awful little dark room in the evenings, was knowing that my Agatha Christies were waiting for me there. I had all of them, mostly in paperback, a whole shelf of them. I caught sight of them as soon as I opened the door, it was like coming home. People say that the Agatha Christie characters are cardboard, but if they are, then cardboard friends were what I needed at that time. I felt so close to them… so secure in their company.’
That very same autumn it so happened that Moscow also was devoting some attention to the Agatha Christie books. ‘A deliberate attempt by the Cripps-Bevin-Attlee-Churchill hyenas… to distract the attention of the masses from the machinations of the warmongers,’ was the Soviet verdict. Nor was this the last time that Agatha Christie was to incur the disapprobation of a Communist regime. After her death, Hong Kong’s leading Communist paper, Ta Kung Pao, described her as a ‘running dog for the rich and powerful’ and accused her of having ‘described crimes committed by the middle and lower classes of British Society without ever exposing their social causes’.
Despite such reproofs, Agatha Christie’s books continued to go from strength to strength. In 1948, the publication by Penguin of ten of her best-known stories marked a new high in her career. A first printing of 100,000 of each of these books was followed, over the next two years, by further reprints, totalling over two million copies in all. As remarked in the Observer: ‘Between now and the end of the year, some four or five million members of the island race will have been seduced, captivated, misled, mystified, titillated, surprised, startled, and altogether thoroughly entertained by the acknowledged queen of crime-fiction the world over.’
For the following two decades and more, praise was so sustained as to become almost tedious to quote. As Julian Symons asked in his review of Cat Among the Pigeons in the Sunday Times, ‘What fresh words can one find to praise Agatha Christie, that infinitely cunning and various serpent of Old Nile?’ Lacking fresh ones, reviewers for the next decade and a half had to make do with the old words and phrases. ‘Brilliant’, ‘incredibly ingenious’, ‘incomparable skill’ and so on fill the columns devoted to her work. Only here and there does one encounter a dissident voice, such as that of Francis Iles in the Sunday Times reviewing Hickory, Dickory, Dock, a mystery set in a multiracial students’ hostel: ‘It reads like a tired effort. The usual sparkle is missing, the plot is far-fetched and the humour too easy (all foreigners are funny, but coloured foreigners are funnier).’ But on the same Sunday Maurice Richardson was saying in the Observer: ‘One is pleased, though not in the least surprised, to find her so vociferously sound on the colour problem.’
There is just one of her books during this halcyon period over which a shadow fell, albeit one utterly outside the author’s control and in no way reflecting on the quality of the book itself. The book I refer to is The Pale Horse, published in 1961, and at the time of publication it received every bit as much praise as its predecessors – ‘brilliantly ingenious’ (Violet Grant, in the Daily Telegraph) was typical of reviewers’ opinions. It was eleven years later that the book encountered a brief but harsh spell of criticism when the horrifying case of Graham Young, the mass-poisoner, was filling the headlines. It was noted by many people at the time – both journalists and ordinary citizens – that this real-life poisoner had followed a method terrifyingly similar to that of the fictional criminal. The Daily Mail set out in meticulous detail the resemblances between the two cases and quoted ‘a senior detective’ as saying of the fictional hero, ‘This is Young to a T.’ Agatha Christie was reported as being ‘naturally upset’ by this unnerving resemblance between the recent atrocity and the plot of a book she had written more than ten years before – though the fact that Young’s bookshelves were ‘crammed with poison reference books’ may have reassured her; she could hardly have taught him anything he did not know already.
So we come to the final phase – a sad one, indeed, for those of us who have enjoyed Agatha Christie’s books for as long as we can remember. In Curtain, published in 1975, Poirot – to a sigh of dismay all over the world – actually died. But he triumphed in death with newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic printing mock obituaries, a unique tribute to a fictional detective and to his creator.