In the five years after the Empire Tour Agatha was transformed from a little-known contributor to magazines and newspapers, writing imaginative stories for amusement rather than for money, to a professional author who earned her living by writing and who was so well known that it was a misery to her. As she found, acquiring and perfecting professional skills is a time-consuming process and so is the business – for it is a business – of maintaining a professional reputation for working to reliable standards and fulfilling the terms of a contract even when its first enchantment has worn off. Agatha, however, did not set out to become a professional and no one encouraged her to turn herself into one. It is easy to understand why she started to write; character, skills and circumstance all inclined her in that direction. It is more difficult to explain why she became a professional writer. Her practical nature had something to do with it; her skills were applied skills – cooking, gardening, arranging flowers. There was no point in writing stories simply to put them away. She was also, though reticent, a generous person, who most easily expressed her feelings obliquely, with a gift, a service, a performance. It was not so much that, as her family put it, ‘Agatha doesn’t like parting with information’, as that she could not part with it spontaneously but would wait for the appropriate framework – wisely, because in that way an audience was more likely to be attentive. She liked an audience and she wanted to display her craftsmanship.
At the time when Agatha had, at Clara’s suggestion, showed Eden Philpotts her work, she had no idea that she might become, like him, a professional writer. She was merely curious to know his opinion and she was also vaguely aware that there were flaws in her writing which he might help her correct. But from his first words of advice she learnt that writing was a craft as well as an art and that there were methods and tricks for overcoming stylistic and technical obstacles. She began to learn not just technique but also that, to satisfy herself, her writing had to meet other readers’ standards as well as her own. With practice she became increasingly confident that she knew what her readers required and could produce work which would please them. Her correspondence with her publisher showed a growing firmness. It also illustrated other characteristics which propelled her along the way: efficiency and conscientiousness. Orderly and methodical, she had a sense of duty, as she had shown by remaining good-tempered during the long days with the exasperating Belcher.
There are, moreover, few things more certain to galvanise a shy amateur than the discovery that he or she is more efficient and resourceful than the professional people engaged to act as advisers and intermediaries. The mystique of professionalism vanishes for ever and the amateur realises that he is himself just as much of an authority. So it was with Agatha during the early nineteen-twenties, as, more and more sure of herself, she gradually put her publisher in his place. She discovered that The Bodley Head was dependent on her and not the other way round, that she had an unusual talent and that by exercising it she could earn money. She found she must maintain expected standards and manage her work and affairs intelligently. Her attitude to her writing became professional.
This is not how Agatha herself described it in her Autobiography, where her account focusses on domestic preoccupations. Not that these were trivial. When Agatha and Archie returned to England at the end of 1922, they were faced with two immediate problems. Archie had to find a job, since his old one had gone, and something had to be done about Monty. He was as unmanageable as ever, as Agatha had discovered when, just before their departure with the Mission, Archie had been dispatched to Tilbury to meet Monty and Shebani and bring them to rooms he had found in London. Though a sick man – his old wound had become infected and he had been given no more than six months to live – and heavily dependent on sedatives, Monty had retained his charming and airy guile, inducing Archie to deposit him not in his new apartments but at his favourite, extremely expensive hotel in Jermyn Street; ‘Somehow,’ said Archie, ‘it seemed so reasonable the way he put it.’ ‘That is Monty’s strong point,’ Agatha informed him. A course of treatment by specialists in London so restored Monty’s health that his mother and his sisters could hope that by living quietly he might last a good number of years. He was accordingly moved to Ashfield, where Clara had converted several rooms and built a new bathroom for him, as well as persuading her two elderly maid-servants that they need entertain no anxiety about sharing their quarters with an African (an exotic and perplexing phenomenon in Torquay in the nineteen-twenties) but could take this opportunity to convert him to Christianity.
Agatha frequently asked about Shebani in her letters; she and Madge between them paid his wages. He was an immense success, listening patiently as the maids read the Bible to him and pacifying his master when his demands – for grilled chops one hour before sunrise, for instance – were particularly unreasonable. Monty himself, however, refused to settle down and, the better his health, the more difficult it became for him to fit into Ashfield’s sedate routine. He took to discharging his pistol from the window (just ‘keeping his eye in’, he explained to the police), terrifying those who sought to call at the house. Clara was exhausted. When, a few months after Agatha’s return to England, Shebani announced that he must return to his family in Africa, it was clear that some new scheme must be devised for Monty’s care. The solution turned out to be the purchase by Madge and Agatha, for £800, of a cottage on Dartmoor, where they installed their brother and an elderly, placid and unconventional housekeeper, a doctor’s widow, who calmed Monty down and looked after him happily. Thus, after much wear and tear, one problem was sorted out.
The other proved less straightforward. In early 1923 the City had lost the buoyancy and confidence of the immediate post-War years and Archie, at thirty-four, found it difficult to find a niche. Anxious and depressed, he fended off Agatha’s attempts to soothe him. She wanted to be helpful but could think of nothing appropriate to say or do. Untrained, she could not expect to find anything remunerative for herself, while work for which little training was necessary was in short supply. Not that she made any serious attempts to find a job; that would have made Archie feel even more inadequate. He suggested that she go with Rosalind to Clara or Madge; Agatha, however, was determined to stay. She made herself useful by cooking and cleaning – they now had no maid – and the rough patch passed. A firm in the City, thought to be slightly shady, took Archie on, and within a year an old friend, Clive Baillieu, returned from Australia and offered Archie the post he had long wanted.
Agatha’s own view of life from 1923 to 1925 is a wry, good-tempered picture of marking time, expending quantities of energy, intelligence and ingenuity in entertaining a small child, keeping the flat in order, cooking, cleaning and tidying, and at the same time trying to write. Of the series of nurses she engaged to help look after Rosalind, two out of three were hopeless, being well-intentioned but lacking imagination and authority. Agatha was constantly distracted by the importunate lamentations of the first of these, ‘Cuckoo’, a well-meaning but exasperatingly incompetent woman, who survived only because Rosalind swiftly took her in hand. Cuckoo’s successor, Miss White (‘Site’), was a success. Only seventeen, she was capable, dignified, masterful and young enough to enjoy Rosalind’s games. When Site left to take a post abroad, she was succeeded by a Swiss nursery governess, recommended by Madge. Marcelle was shy, nervous and ineffectual and Rosalind, unchecked, became rebellious and naughty. Marcelle did not last.
Rosalind was bright, affectionate, beautiful and terrifyingly direct. Archie adored her; Agatha, too, loved her child but felt a certain distance. As she wrote in her Autobiography, after describing her fun as she watched Rosalind’s development:
There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours and yet is mysteriously a stranger. You are the gate through which it came into the world, and you will be allowed to have charge of it for a period of years, and after that it will leave you and blossom out into its own free life, and there it is for you to watch living its life in freedom – it is like a strange plant which you have brought home, planted, and can hardly wait to see how it will turn out.
It was not that Agatha was uninterested in her daughter. She cared about her, worrying and celebrating on her behalf. But Agatha did not live vicariously; Rosalind had her inclinations, opportunities and disappointments, and Agatha hers, as she had indicated when, leaving Rosalind with Clara and Madge, she had accompanied Archie on the Empire Tour. Elsewhere in her Autobiography she makes the doubtful generalisation that, as in cats and kittens, so in human mothers and their babies the maternal instinct is appeased by the act of bearing children, whom the mothers, anxious but satisfied, leave to go their own way. Two of her detective stories, Ordeal by Innocence and They Do It with Mirrors, describe the consequence of woman’s overwhelming affection for an adopted child, and in other books – A Daughter’s a Daughter, and Absent in the Spring, for example – she wrote of the unhappiness caused by possessive love. It would be a waste of time to discuss whether Agatha’s fiction simply reflected or sought to rationalise her own preference for emotional independence and her feeling that close relationships can become dangerously exclusive. The process of creating fiction is more complicated than that. It is also foolish to try to fit Agatha into some general category – even of her own making – of a type of mother. What we can say, however, is that her attitude to her daughter was warm and loving but, ultimately, detached.
Again, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that Agatha was not wrapped up in her child because she was absorbed by her writing. Her attention was certainly not fixed on her books or her mind obsessed with the details of her transactions with John Lane. She did speculate on plots and wander over possible combinations of character and relationship; she had always had that habit and, as she said herself, it is while doing routine domestic chores that an imaginative mind runs loose. But neither is it correct to conclude from her Autobiography that she considered her writing to be only casual jotting, squeezed in between Cuckoo’s plaintive entreaties, the cooking and cleaning Agatha shared with Site, and the reprimands which Marcelle’s uselessness obliged her to administer to Rosalind. Agatha took her writing seriously. She was beginning to see her books as a body of work – past accomplishments, present preoccupations and future possibilities – rather than a series of happy accidents.
In late 1922 Agatha had in fact sent a letter from Canada in which she discussed the tally of further manuscripts submitted to John Lane. The Secret Adversary had been followed by Murder on the Links, which was published in 1923. From the Expedition Agatha sent home a collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot, provisionally entitled Poirot Investigates, which John Lane rechristened ‘The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot’, before restoring the original title. These had been published separately as a series for the Sketch and with them Agatha sent to John Lane the long fantasy, ‘Vision’, she had written years before. She joyfully reported his reaction to Clara: ‘He has advised against publication of latter (as I thought he would) so that counts as a book, so the next I write will be the 5th!’ It was to take some time, however, before The Bodley Head would agree with Agatha’s calculations.
The ‘next book’ was The Man in the Brown Suit, originally called ‘The Mystery of the Mill House’, a title created to pacify Belcher, who wanted a detective story about his own house and himself. He prevailed against Agatha’s not unnatural wish to make him the victim, and much of his swaggering nature can be seen in her creation of Sir Eustace Pedler. (‘Give him a title,’ suggested Archie. ‘I think he’d like that.’) The Man in the Brown Suit was a thriller – its description of a minor revolution owed everything to Agatha’s adventures in Pretoria – and it elaborated two themes which she first touched on in The Secret Adversary and to which she often returned. One was the notion of there being a hidden but vigorous international conspiracy, whose operations, whether traffic in arms, drugs, jewels, works of art or human skills, whether intended to promote a single ideology, none, or several, whether fostered via youthful zealots, naïve disciples or cynical experts, were all ultimately fuelled by money – money that could be manipulated in discreet, mysterious ways, that moved through strange, secret channels, that exerted invisible, intangible power, and, by being made immediately available or as suddenly withdrawn, caused devastation, predictable only to those who managed its flow and explicable only by them or by those to whom they answered. Money, as the Millers had found when their fortunes had been so bafflingly undermined, was not a neutral means of exchange. It was a force to be reckoned with.
Close to home, too, was Agatha’s other theme: that of a thoughtful, spirited young woman, adventurous but frustrated, constrained less by convention, sex, or youth than by lack of ready cash. Tuppence, in The Secret Adversary, had no job; Anne, in The Man in the Brown Suit, had been left with only debts on the death of her father. In some of Agatha’s books these young women were to start as gawky geese and turn into graceful swans; in others they would be recognisable, if shabby, swans from the beginning. Brave, shrewd, resourceful and endowed with remarkable stamina, they would be precipitated by fate or their own restless natures into the adventures for which they sighed. Once immersed, they generally found themselves acting as helpmeet or confederate to the sort of male companion who begins by generously condescending to allow the heroine to join the fun and ends by gratefully acknowledging that she is indispensable.
The Bodley Head received the typescript of The Man in the Brown Suit in late 1923. It was at this point that they began to discover that Agatha Christie was becoming a less tractable author. Her relationship with John Lane had moved into a new and predictable phase. During November and December the tone of Agatha’s letters to The Bodley Head became increasingly assured. They dealt with three matters: the arrangements for the publication of Poirot Investigates, her publishers’ plans for The Man in the Brown Suit, and her long-term contract. Where Poirot Investigates was concerned, she was no longer content to take whatever advance her publisher had in mind. Her letter of November 1st asked, rather, what terms they proposed. Mr Willett, John Lane’s colleague, also found himself confronted with a series of suspiciously detailed inquiries and stipulations: in her letter of November 4th, Agatha told him that, in the agreement for ‘The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot’, she did not want to include cinema, dramatic or foreign rights, adding waspishly, ‘Do your agreements always count 13 as 12?’ Five days later she asked for certain specific amendments to be made to the draft agreement – the deletion of clauses or portions of clauses – and inquired whether ten per cent was the maximum royalty they could pay on a cheap edition. By December 4th her tone was completely confident, as she announced the reception of an offer for Indian serial rights – ‘I presume you do not want to raise any objection to this, but in accordance with the request in your letter of the 12th November, I am consulting you before accepting the offer’ – and in mid-December she politely backed her own judgement: ‘The only things I should like to query are the altering of Insurance Company to Assurance Company, which seems quite unnecessary, and the striking out of the italics on page 52. They make it so much clearer which is question and which is answer … I really prefer my own original title Poirot Investigates, and you say you like it also, so why not settle upon that?’ This correspondence did not peter out until May 1926, when Agatha was obliged to write to Mr Willett regarding an error – ten per cent instead of twenty per cent – in an account sent her for the sale of twelve copies of the 7/6d edition. For all their mystique, publishers were tradesmen, whose bills should always be checked.
Argument about The Man in the Brown Suit was concentrated on the subject of the wrapper, which, Agatha told Mr Willett in June 1924, ‘looks to me like a highway robbery and murder in mediaeval times – nothing like a tube station and not in the least striking. I had in mind,’ she continued, ‘something much more clear, definite and modern. From the finished wrapper it would appear that this is the artist’s normal style, and so I do not suppose he could ever alter it to make it like what I wanted.’ Mr Willett protested, and a fortnight later Agatha wrote again: ‘I do not think I am asking for what you call a “cut out” wrapper. I felt that the one you sent me would never be anything but sombre, and would never look like a “Tube” station. I think if the background was of really white glossy tiles it would improve it greatly.’ She was always to have strong views about the presentation of her books, as her new publishers, Collins, were to discover.
For, at least since the autumn of 1922, Agatha had been contemplating a move. The letter she sent to Clara, just before embarking on the homeward journey from Canada, showed how eagerly she was awaiting the moment when she should have submitted the last book, after Styles, of those pledged to The Bodley Head. It was no surprise that they should reject the expanded version of ‘Vision’; indeed, Agatha not only expected it to be returned but told her mother she had sent it only in order to make a third in the sequence. Poirot Investigates was to be the fourth and, acording to this plan, The Man in the Brown Suit, being the fifth, would have heralded her release. The Bodley Head, however, proved stubborn. They were not only unwilling to count ‘Vision’ as a book but also declined to include Poirot Investigates in the total for which Agatha was contracted, for the curious reason that these stories had previously been serialised in a newspaper. Agatha was tenacious – and cunning, since she realised that The Bodley Head were on weak ground here and used this as a bargaining point in her own unsteady argument about the status of ‘Vision’. Mr Willett stuck to his guns and Agatha stuck to hers:
I really do not see why you should have thought that this was not submitted as one of the works provided for in the main agreement. Whether it would have been advisable to publish it or not is another matter. Perhaps you were quite right in considering that it would have affected the sales of my detective novels.… I certainly do not feel inclined to sign the agreement relating to the short stories, in which you have stipulated that these are not to count as a book under the terms of the main agreement, without getting this point about Vision cleared up first.
She won the point about Poirot Investigates but lost on ‘Vision’.
The Bodley Head now needed Agatha more than she needed them. Popular middle-class taste was increasingly for the sort of work with which she was experimenting – novels with a simple shape, a small cast of characters, short chapters and no long, convoluted sentences, with an emphasis on the facts and mechanics of situations and considerable importance given to psychology. Agatha’s thrillers and detective stories were stylistically unpretentious but intellectually interesting. She was not, and never became, a writer whose work could intimidate a nervous reader but nonetheless she made welcome demands on her public’s attention and perceptiveness. The weekly, fortnightly and monthly magazines – Grand Magazine, Sovereign Magazine, Blue Book Magazine, Royal Magazine, Novel Magazine and The Story-Teller – wanted her work and their interest quickened that of her publisher. The Bodley Head began to murmur about the terms of her next contract.
Agatha, however, had recognised the strength of her position. Not only were newspaper and magazine editors ready to print her work but even the Inland Revenue was expressing an interest. An Inspector from the tax office called to inquire about the size of her earnings as an author, to her astonishment, since she had regarded any fees as a negligible and occasional supplement to the family’s income, keeping no records and submitting no statements, as the amounts fell below the sums then allowed as ‘casual profit’. On reflection she decided to become more business-like and to put her affairs in the hands of a professional adviser. This, together with the information she had acquired from the publications of the Society of Authors, which she had discovered on her return from the Expedition, propelled her once more in the direction of Hughes Massie, the literary agency to which Eden Philpotts had recommended her years before.
The fearsome Hughes Massie was now dead and Agatha was received by his successor, Edmund Cork, a tall, elegant young man, with a charming, conspiratorial smile like a benign but artful cat. Mr Cork’s manner was not patronising nor intimidating, nor suffused with irritating genialities. He had exactly the right mixture of courtly attentiveness and considered wisdom, and the fact that he had a stammer made Agatha immediately anxious to put him at his ease. She was, in fact, rather the older of the two and by no means a naïve or unpublished author. She lost any remaining nervousness and confided in Cork, who for the next fifty years was to help realise her hopes and assuage her doubts. He was the most valuable of professional advisers, someone to whom Agatha could trust the complex and sensitive details of her life; he dealt with solicitors, tax inspectors and lawyers, steered her through entanglements with film and theatrical moguls, fended off importunate correspondents and shielded her from much that would otherwise have been demoralising and difficult. She could trust him not simply because he was discreet and sensible but also because he did not intrude. For Edmund Cork had been well schooled by Hughes Massie, who as a young man had been summoned for an interview with his client Elinor Glyn, popularly believed to compose her books while reclining, loosely draped, upon a tiger-skin rug. Though it is not clear what actually transpired during this encounter, it certainly led Hughes Massie to emphasise the wisdom of keeping a careful distance between client and literary agent; this, Edmund Cork always observed, was the most useful piece of advice Hughes Massie bequeathed him.
Cork was appropriately appalled by the terms of Agatha’s existing contract and by her minuscule royalty. This was gratifying. It was also exciting to hear him speak of film and theatrical rights, first and second serial rights, foreign translations and so on, and, although Agatha regarded all this as rather unlikely speculation, she took it sufficiently seriously to adopt the new tone that was apparent in her correspondence with Mr Willett. The spirit of Cork, perhaps even the hand of Cork, was evident in the no-nonsense letters that established the standing of ‘Vision’ and the terms for The Man in the Brown Suit.
There were other reasons for Agatha’s new confidence. One had to do as much with her sister’s success as with her own, for at the end of 1923 Madge seemed likely to make an astonishing hit with a piece of writing for the stage. The subject of Madge’s play was, as one would have expected, a celebrated case of impersonation; that of Sir Charles Doughty Tichborne, tried in 1873–4 over his claim to a baronetcy, a family mansion and a rent roll of £25,000 a year. Madge’s play, The Claimant, was a mixture of all the goings-on she adored: dressing-up, disguise, imposture, a party and suspense. To her family’s amazement, and even more to her own, Basil Dean agreed to produce the play at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End in the autumn of 1924.
The plot was complicated; the cast talented but anarchic. It quickly became clear that Madge was needed to supply and approve changes in the production and the script and to act as adviser and ally to various coalitions among factions of the cast and the management. She therefore moved to rooms in Brown’s Hotel off Piccadilly, spending the weekends with Archie and Agatha. Agatha thus heard every detail of the back-stage frenzy from ‘Punkie’ herself and, judging by the raciness of Madge’s breathless letters to Cheadle, these enthusiastic accounts of theatrical life must have been riveting. There was one character in particular for whom both sisters had a special affection, ‘Charles’, the Claimant’s extortionate accomplice, into whom Madge had put much of their infuriating, beloved brother. ‘In some occult way,’ Madge wrote, ‘Basil Dean could evoke Monty exactly, particularly when he demonstrated how “Charles” should pick up 6/8d from the table, but leaving the eightpence behind because, as Monty might have said, “Don’t care about copper. Never did.”’
Agatha, as Madge put it, was ‘mad to see a rehearsal’. The morning they chose turned out to be that on which Madge was told about arrangements for press photographs, and Agatha heard the leading actress observe, ‘When they photograph me they always make me look drunk. And when one never touches anything, it’s hard. Don’t you think so, Mrs Watts?’ Agatha liked this remark, since both she and Madge, neither of whom ‘touched anything’, were now irredeemably unphotogenic. The picture of the two sisters is an attractive one: Madge, excited, busy, the centre of attention, the wife of a respectable Mancunian but herself eccentric and a trifle manic, and Agatha, quiet, shy, amused and noticing everything. Yet it was Agatha who was the better known. As Madge generously reminded her husband and son: ‘The head of the Press Bureau approached me for an interview and I said I didn’t want to be known. He said they’d been very good …, but after the show he did want to boom me and my writing. All I told him was that I was Mrs Agatha Christie’s sister. And he simply revels in Styles and has read all her books. So perhaps,’ Madge added, in an unlikely comparison to a pair of famous dancers of the Charleston, ‘we’ll have to be the Dolly Sisters after all!’
The Claimant opened on September 11th and, although it did not run for long, its preparation had been the best entertainment. Agatha, especially, enjoyed Madge’s brief but heady success. It was not notoriety which was fun – the sisters were too well mannered and, in Agatha’s case, too shy to have taken pleasure in that. The public and the press were irrelevant; Madge and Agatha were writing for their own pleasure in the challenge, as much as for a market. Just as Agatha sent inscribed copies of her books, and dedicated them, to her family and close acquaintances, so Madge took boxes and stalls for them at the St Martin’s Theatre. They saw themselves as untrained adventurers, whose work was now, to their astonishment, taken in earnest. They were also adult, middle-class women, whose writing took second place, in their own eyes and certainly in their husbands’, to the management of their houses and the care of their children. (After describing how masterful she had become, ‘“Cut those lines, please, Mr Quartermain!” And he did, at once!!!’, Madge appeased James and her own conscience by adding: ‘I shall be unbearable at home. The only remedy will be to have Constance a good deal who will keep on telling me how badly I’ve brought up my son and that the lettuce is wet.’) They were simultaneously gratified and disconcerted to find themselves holding their own in the overwhelmingly masculine world of theatrical management and publishing. The fact that Mrs Agatha Christie, the writer, was her sister fortified Madge, and the fact that Mrs Watts, author of The Claimant, was her sister boosted Agatha’s confidence in turn.
Agatha was now thirty-four, at an age when her health and strength, looks and temper were at their most resilient, when it is easy to feel sure of one’s own nature and capacities. Greater financial security helped too. As soon as Archie secured the promised job with his friend Clive Baillieu, he and Agatha set about realising their wish to find a cottage in the country, not least because Archie had enthusiastically taken to golf. After a long search, they settled not on a cottage but on a large flat in a house, Scotswood, at Sunningdale, about thirty miles from London. In the nineteen-twenties Sunningdale was embryo ‘stockbroker country’, prosperous, easy and dull. Agatha had no circle of old friends and familiars, as she had in Torquay, nor the theatres and museums of London to distract her. On the other hand, there was a garden for Rosalind and it was convenient for both the railway to the City and for a celebrated golf course. A further advantage of Scotswood was that another of the four flats was also vacant. Here, for a time, Agatha installed Clara, still lively but with fragile health. In other respects, also, Agatha’s domestic arrangements were happy and convenient. After her difficulties with Marcelle, she had searched for someone who would be both a kindly supervisor for Rosalind and, in the mornings while Rosalind was at school, a secretary and typist. Feeling that the Scots tended to be good disciplinarians, who were not bullied by their charges, she added to her advertisement the words ‘Scottish preferred’.
Among the replies was one from Miss Charlotte Fisher, a tall, slender, brown-haired girl in her early twenties, quiet, direct and humorous, a capable and well-educated daughter of the manse. (Her father was one of the chaplains to the King in Edinburgh.) Miss Fisher, or ‘Carlo’, as the family quickly came to call her, immediately took Rosalind in hand and ‘the raging demon’ left behind by the ineffectual Marcelle became a polite and pleasant child again. The secretarial part of Carlo’s duties did not, however, evolve exactly as Agatha and she had envisaged. Agatha was even more nervous when it came to dictating her stories than Carlo was about taking them down in shorthand, and it was soon apparent that Agatha composed much more fluently and naturally when left to herself and her old Corona. Instead, Carlo dealt with letters and accounts and kept Agatha’s papers, not in any case untidy, in meticulous order. Most important, she became a steady friend, confidante and watchdog.
The crowning feature of this happy time was Agatha’s acquisition of her own car. The Evening News had offered £500 for serial rights to The Man in the Brown Suit, with which Agatha, thrilled, had thought she might realise such touchingly mundane longings as the purchase of ‘a new evening dress, gold or silver evening shoes instead of black, something rather ambitious like a new fairy cycle for Rosalind.…’ Buying a car was Archie’s suggestion; it was not a stream-lined monster but a small Morris Cowley, upright and with a snub nose. To Agatha it was one of the greatest pleasures of her life. This was not simply because, as she put it in her Autobiography, possessing a car ‘widened your horizons, it increased your territory’, magnificent though that feeling was, particularly in the days when it was a pleasure still confined to a few. This was certainly part of Agatha’s joy but it also sprang from the freedom it gave her. There was something peculiarly satisfying in being transported by a machine that went where it was instructed to go, at a pace it was directed to take, at the time when it was required to do so – in short, by a machine that was under her own control. A car meant liberation. Doubly so, since it had been acquired with money she had earned herself. To her surprise, she had achieved independence.
It is interesting that it was her husband who suggested the purchase and who taught Agatha to drive. He was, in an important way, paying his wife a compliment. Archie, who had ecstatically, if a trifle nervously, taken the controls of a rickety aeroplane in 1910, knew the sense of freedom and possibility that came from mastering a machine that moved easily and quickly away. He recognised that Agatha would appreciate this and that she was ready for it. His suggestion perhaps indicated something more. When Agatha recalled Archie’s rudimentary driving lessons, she remembered how he asserted that, if she wished to do something, she could do it. Did he also feel, unconsciously, that she would do it, would assert her independence and that he would not restrain her? Fanciful, maybe, but plausible, particularly in the light of the decision Archie and Agatha made when, a couple of years later, they again found themselves rather better-off than they had expected. Agatha proposed that they should have another child, Archie that they buy a fast and smart Delage. Agatha felt Archie had been excited by their neighbour’s Bentley, but perhaps the choice signified more than that. The Christies were moving on, not consolidating; choosing independence, not more responsibility; going, if they wished, their separate ways.
Agatha’s feeling of security, in herself as a writer and in their joint finances, is demonstrated by her decision to publish her collected poems. In 1924 The Road of Dreams appeared, at her own expense, under the imprint of Geoffrey Bles, and it produced a kind letter from Eden Philpotts, who particularly admired the sequence ‘A Masque from Italy’, the poems about Harlequin and Columbine written ten years before. ‘You have great lyric gifts,’ wrote Philpotts, ‘and I hope you will find time to develop them.’ He went on to warn her that, much as he hoped that The Road of Dreams would be a success, ‘Alas! People don’t buy poetry.’ He was right – in the nineteen-sixties Agatha’s literary agents had to write to ask her what she wanted done with the remaining unsold, unbound copies.
Cork, meanwhile, had been busy on Agatha’s behalf. He had discussed her work and her sales with Godfrey Collins, who indicated that his house would pay £200 as an advance on each of her next three books, with a generous royalty. When Cork mentioned this to John Lane, he was told grumpily that anyone who would pay that much was welcome to Agatha’s work. A three-book contract was accordingly signed with Collins in January 1924, although Agatha was still pledged to deliver one last book to The Bodley Head. This was The Secret of Chimneys, a racy thriller in which she used memories and reflections that are easily recognisable: there is a glimpse of Bulawayo; ‘Chimneys’, where the bulk of the novel is set, is an even grander version of Abney; Superintendent Battle – appearing for the first time – resembles Inspector Bucket in Bleak House; and elements of the plot not only echo The Prisoner of Zenda and some of the novels of John Buchan, where sinewy and resourceful second sons return from the colonies to plunge themselves into desperate tangles, but also suggest that Agatha had not forgotten a royalist conspiracy which had excited the visitors to Cauterets when she had stayed there as a child. In her Autobiography she wrote that these events were ‘only very dimly apprehended’ by her at the time, but, however vague, those apprehensions had seeped into the silt of her subconscious.
The summer before Chimneys appeared, Agatha had in fact visited Cauterets, to show Archie the hotel where she had had such fun. Not unusually, they were disappointed at first (‘did not like the look of the place,’ Archie wrote tersely in their joint typewritten letter to Clara) but they wisely ascribed their disenchantment to the after-effects of an uncomfortable journey – to economise they had travelled second-class all the way from Victoria, with their reserved seats occupied by interlopers, who upset cherries all over the carriage, and their neighbours ‘two young Spaniards who hugged one another without ceasing’. Walks and picnics in the Pyrenees soon improved their tempers; they climbed mountains by a zig-zag path through the hay fields to eat crêpes flavoured with anisette in the café at the top and after dinner they watched Grand Guignol. They drank from the sulphur springs and ‘did la douche nasale’, played boules and ‘perfected the knockout shot at Billard Japonais’, and made a couple of expeditions in a charabanc, about whose occupants Archie was scathing. (The first pages of The Secret of Chimneys describe this form of sightseeing.) The photograph of this vehicle in their scrap-book shows Agatha looking enthusiastic, but Archie serious and detached, with his hand over his face, as if he is trying not to be there. From Cauterets they went on to San Sebastian for more bathing and evenings at the Kursaal, with music and cards. Archie, who liked to go to bed early, found the Spanish hours trying – the ‘music hall show’ started at ten-fifteen – and he would retire at the first interval. By the end of their stay they were sufficiently relaxed to abandon economy and travel home first-class.
It was wise for Agatha and Archie to go away by themselves. Agatha had been missing the easy companionship of earlier times, the weekends when they had gone by bus or train to explore the countryside. She now found Saturday and Sunday ‘the dullest time, really, for me’, as Archie was so engrossed in his golf that she began to appreciate what was meant by being ‘a golf widow’. Most of her own friends were married, so she could not ask a wife to stay without the husband, and the only couple she could invite without a qualm was Nan and Nan’s second husband, who as a good golfer himself would not bore Archie. The Baillieus, Archie’s friends, were neighbours and Agatha was fond of Ruby, Clive Baillieu’s wife, but otherwise Sunningdale society was disappointing – ‘either,’ Agatha wrote, ‘the middle-aged who were passionately fond of gardens and talked of practically nothing else, or the gay sporting rich kind who drank a good deal, had cocktail parties, and who were not really my type or indeed, for that matter, Archie’s type either.’ In comparison with London, or comfortable Torquay, Sunningdale was, as Charlotte Fisher agreed, a dreadful place, complacent, tidy and boring.
Agatha later painted in Unfinished Portrait a reproduction of her frustrations at this stage in her marriage. Her description is exaggerated – in the evenings Dermot sits at home ‘reading books on financial subjects’ – but in essence her picture of Celia’s boredom and loneliness resembles her own state for an annoyingly large part of the time. Agatha’s difficulty was not that she did not know how to amuse herself; she had always found plenty to occupy herself when she was free to choose how to do so. The problem was that she was no longer on her own. She was part of a couple, in a society and a neighbourhood where people were invited and entertained others as couples, but with a husband who, for the time being at any rate, preferred to relax with his golf clubs on his own or, at best, with an equally fanatical golfing partner. Agatha was thus tied, without the advantages of companionship and collaboration that went with being tied. It is easy to point to the benefits of her position; she enjoyed the status and security of a married woman; she had an intelligent and beautiful child, a large and attractively furnished place to live, in peaceful surroundings that were neither dirty and noisy, like London, nor dank and desolate, as the real country can be; she owned a motor car, was assured of an adequate income, and had a good mind. There are hundreds of women in those circumstances who, because they not only possess keen minds and adventurous dispositions but are also loyal and unrebellious, nonetheless become gently frustrated within their pretty houses and trim gardens. They pick quarrels, dispute their grocers’ bills, long to move house, and resent their own apparently inexplicable behaviour. They are restless.
Agatha, however, had her writing to distract her. Rather than bothering Archie with emotional and intellectual speculation, she could indulge her curiosity and play games with her characters. She could not secure her husband’s attention but she could amuse, challenge and tease another audience, her readers. With her next book, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in late 1925 and early 1926. she settled down to do so.
‘I got hold of a very good formula there,’ Agatha later declared, ‘and I must confess that I owe it to my brother-in-law, James Watts.’ Her Autobiography itself says that James Watts’s suggestion was that ‘A Watson’, that is, the narrator, should ‘turn out to be the criminal’, so there is no need to talk too cryptically here. Indeed, maddening though it was for many readers and to professional critics and writers of detective stories that Agatha should so cleverly mislead them, the notion that the narrator should also be the perpetrator of the crime was not wholly astounding; it is, after all, an obvious variation in a type of story, set in closed worlds with a limited number of victims and suspects, where the number of variations is finite.
One of those to whom the thought had also occurred was Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had written to Agatha on March 28th, 1924, sending the letter to the Sketch for forwarding. He had read the Poirot stories in that newspaper and now presented his compliments and begged to offer (the letter is written in the third person) a suggestion for another Poirot story. The chief features of his outline were that the narrator of the story should himself be the criminal, that his alibi should be that of ‘being with the greatest living detective at a moment when the crime is committed’ and that the detective should himself be accused of the crime. Mountbatten attached to his letter a lengthy draft of a plot, whose details unfold in a series of letters between Poirot, Hastings and the man who is eventually revealed as the murderer. ‘In conclusion,’ Mountbatten wrote, ‘Lord Louis would ask to be forgiven for having written to a person unknown to him and naturally does not expect Mrs Christie to use this plot unless it appeals to her. He himself is unlikely ever to wish to use such a plot, having no time, as a naval officer, for writing, beyond a few short stories to magazines (under a nom-de-plume) for which the enclosed material is quite unsuitable.’ Nearly half a century later, in November 1969, Lord Mountbatten was to write again. After congratulating Agatha on the excitement and mystery of her play The Mousetrap, which he had just revisited, he went on to mention his earlier letter. Agatha’s reply was frank and generous.
For a number of years I have been haunted, from time to time, by a kind of guilt complex – ‘Did I ever acknowledge a letter I received from you?’ And an uneasy feeling that I had started to write a letter – but had possibly forgotten to post it. It is a real relief to know that I did post it.
… The ‘Dr Watson did it’ idea came to me from two sources. One a mere remark by my brother-in-law who said, ‘someday it ought to be Dr Watson who’s the murderer’, and I demurred and said, ‘that would be terribly difficult technically’. I do not think that I thought much more about it then, but shortly afterwards came your letter, which, if I remember rightly, outlined a most interesting plot.…
I thought it a most attractive idea – one which had never been done – but I had great doubts if I could ever do it. But it was a great challenge! It stayed at the back of my mind and I gnawed at it – rather like a dog with a bone.
Here was a letter to gladden Lord Mountbatten’s spirits. He immediately whisked off a reply, congratulating Agatha on ‘the most wonderful job of using my idea in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which I personally think is about the best detective story that has ever been written.’ He thanked Agatha for offering to send him her latest book, asking that she should inscribe it ‘and possibly mention our original contact forty-five years ago over The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, which, obligingly, Agatha did. So everyone was happy, even, one hopes, the self-effacing shade of kindly James Watts.
In the late spring of 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in England by Collins and in America by Dodd, Mead, who had acquired John Lane and Co. in 1922. The ingenuity of Agatha’s presentation of the case is always said to have caused general astonishment. The detective stories of the nineteen-twenties formed part of the staple diet of the reading public and they were expected to conform to certain strict conventions, eventually encapsulated in the rules of the Detection Club, forbidding the use by an author of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Acts of God, and the like, as means for the detection of crime. Any sensation aroused by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd seems, however, to have been on the small side. Some critics fulminated – the News Chronicle wrote of the book as being ‘a tasteless and unfortunate let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’ – and a reader wrote a letter of complaint to The Times. Agatha’s sales certainly increased and the publication of this book was the turning point in her career. The trick she played in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was, however, more of a talking point than a cause célèbre. People who were in their twenties and thirties when the book appeared later remembered discussing whether the author had fairly placed every clue before the reader (she had), but their recollections were invariably mixed with memories of a greater public disturbance Agatha was to cause later that same year. Popular memory is curious, and so are myths about popular memory. From a prim letter to The Times, a sentence here and there in the newspapers, idle chat in middle- and upper-middle-class circles, arose a vague impression that Mrs Christie was interesting, clever and manipulative. These casual opinions affected the public’s view of the puzzling events in Agatha’s private life, as they were reported and discussed, and, in turn, helped to exaggerate memories of the magnitude of the reaction to Roger Ackroyd. More than fifty years on, it is difficult, where Roger Ackroyd is concerned, to see what all the fuss was about or, indeed, how much fuss there was at all.