From this moment it is as if Agatha gradually became two people. One, Agatha Christie, was regarded by the press and to some degree the public as their property, someone in whom there would be continuing interest, about whom there would always be talk, a popular author who every year would apparently without difficulty produce at least one detective story and several shorter pieces. The merits of her work, its technique and fairness would be constantly dissected. There would be unceasing speculation as to her nature and, in particular, about her actions and motives during that time of her life when she had been at her most vulnerable. This Agatha Christie, the subject of public admiration and curiosity, would nonetheless manage to remain extremely private, neither courting publicity nor feeling it necessary to explain herself. That reticence and restraint would only quicken public attention and serve to enhance her mystique. The more she eluded her devotees, the more firmly they appropriated her. The less she said about herself, the more they claimed to know. Agatha Christie was to become a public institution; ‘an Agatha Christie’ the term, immediately intelligible all over the world, for one of her detective stories.
The other person was Agatha, natural, domestic, an ordinary human being rather than a myth, the person whose development she would herself eventually chart in her Autobiography. This woman did not wear a single label, ‘Agatha Christie’, a guarantee of certain unvarying characteristics. She assumed, rather, a succession of guises at varying moments in her life: ‘Agatha-Pagatha, my black hen’, trussed up by her grandmother; Agatha Miller, a thoughtful and interested child; ‘Mac Miller’ and ‘Nathaniel Miller’, ‘Martin West’ and ‘Mostyn Grey’, the pseudonyms under which she first wrote; Mrs Christie, Archie’s ‘Angel’; and Theresa Neele, who lost herself. There was ‘Mary Westmacott’, the novelist; ‘Miss Agatha Christie’, as the detective story writer was often erroneously called; Mrs Mallowan, after her remarriage, and, later, Lady Mallowan, ‘Nima’ to her grandson and great-grandchildren, and ‘Ange’, as Punkie and her nephew Jack first called her; and, finally, Dame Agatha, whom the Post Office unhesitatingly recognised as the person to whom they should deliver a letter addressed simply to ‘Greatest Novelist, Berkshire’. The public read Agatha Christie’s books and saw her plays; it was the other, complex Agatha who wrote them.
Nor was their composition effortless, particularly after the turmoil of 1926. The beginning of the following year found Agatha undergoing treatment in Harley Street, still not knowing what would become of her marriage, where she would live and what the effects of these upheavals would be on Rosalind. Agatha owed her publishers a book and she needed money but, completely unable to write, she could resolve neither of these problems. Fifteen years later, when she asked her agent to hold a manuscript in reserve, she remembered that time. ‘I have been, once, in a position where I wanted to write just for the sake of money coming in,’ she told him, ‘and when I felt I couldn’t – it is a nerve-racking feeling. If I had had one MS then “up my sleeve” it would have made a big difference. That was the time I had to produce that rotten book The Big Four and had to force myself in The Mystery of the Blue Train’.
The Big Four was a stopgap, a compilation of the last twelve Poirot stories, published in the Sketch. Agatha put them together at Campbell’s suggestion and with his help. The book sold well but Agatha was not proud of it. She and Rosalind spent the summer in Devon, calmly with old friends, and in the autumn Agatha tried again to finish the book with which she had been struggling at the time of Clara’s death. She attempted to dictate it to Carlo, now living with Agatha and Rosalind in Chelsea. Rosalind went to a small private day school, where she shone – Agatha kept all her reports – but she missed her father, though Archie used regularly to take her out. She wrote to him on Sunday evenings; other girls, Rosalind said regretfully, had only one letter to write. Agatha still hoped her marriage might revive. Archie, however, was convinced that only marriage to Nancy would make him happy. With great reluctance Agatha agreed to divorce him. She was deeply troubled by this decision, partly because she loved and missed her husband, partly because divorce was at that time regarded as something of a disgrace. Agatha’s distress was the greater because she felt that she had somehow betrayed Rosalind and, wise though she became about the nature of marriage and the problems people have in sustaining that complicated and demanding tie, she was always to feel a small ache of guilt, in her own eyes and before God. After her divorce, she did not take Communion in Church, fearing that now she might be refused. At this difficult time Agatha greatly depended on two people, her brother-in-law James, who helped her recognise that Archie really had made up his mind and that she should now try to concentrate on her own work and life, and Carlo, who had from the first believed that, once gone, Archie would not return. Encouraged by these two staunch allies, Agatha left England in February 1928, taking Rosalind and Carlo to the Canary Islands, to make a final attack on The Mystery of the Blue Train. They moved around in search of good bathing, finding it eventually at Las Palmas, where there was a beach for surfing. Agatha’s photographs show her sitting in the sun and paddling among the rocks with Rosalind but she looks drawn around the eyes and her shoulders are tense.
Painfully, the book was finished. A notebook she took with her shows how hard a task it was: beside the heading for each laboriously completed chapter she has written the accumulated total of words. The narrative has strikingly bright patches, as if the sparkling sea, strong sunlight and stripey shadows of the Canaries helped Agatha, and Carlo, with the description of that part of the French Riviera where much of the story occurs. The heroine, Katherine Grey, is one of the humorous, self-sufficient, independent young women Agatha took pleasure in drawing. Like Agatha, she was in her thirties – there are a number of references to her reconciling herself to a single life – but, unlike Agatha, she has just been left a fortune, with which she proceeds to dress and equip herself in a way which makes the most of her natural beauty, hitherto obscured. The Mystery of the Blue Train was not well written – it is full of well-worn expressions and soulful sentiment – but as well as being an exciting story it is somehow touching, and not simply for the brooding references in the early chapters to the fading of love and the practicality of divorce. Agatha is trying hard to be spirited and adventurous and there is a good deal of wishful thinking in her picture of Katherine Grey determinedly setting off for the Riviera. The last lines of the book are particularly interesting when we know Agatha’s state of mind, and their self-consciousness is perhaps one reason why she always thought of this book with embarrassment. Hercule Poirot is discussing the Blue Train, that runs between London and the Riviera, with a young, lovelorn American girl, who has observed how relentless a thing is a train: ‘People are murdered and die, but [trains] go on just the same.’ Poirot, reflective and paternal, replies that, in that sense, life is like a train which will at last reach its journey’s end. ‘Trust the train, Mademoiselle,’ he murmurs, ‘for it is le bon Dieu who drives it.’ Agatha is reassuring herself. Not surprisingly, however, her wounds were still raw. The Mystery of the Blue Train is dedicated to the two companions to whom, in the difficult days at Styles, she had confided her troubles – Carlo and Peter. The inscription at the front of the book – ‘To the two distinguished members of the OFD, Carlotta and Peter’ – refers to the ‘acid test’ Agatha and Carlo applied to their friends and acquaintance, putting the loyal into the honourable Order of the Faithful Dogs. Agatha still felt that Archie had betrayed her. Into a writing-case, with his letters and various mementos, she put a cutting from a copy of Psalm 55, verses 12, 13 and 14:
For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour: for then I could have borne it.
Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me: for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.
But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend.
In April 1928 Agatha was given her divorce. In her Autobiography she says little about the year that followed, except for a short account of her search for a school for Rosalind, who wanted to go to somewhere large, ‘the biggest there was’. After much hunting, Agatha chose a preparatory school at Bexhill, Caledonia, whose staff, pupils and routine were later successfully blended with those of her next school, Benenden, to provide the background for Agatha’s story Cat Among the Pigeons. It is interesting that in her search for a preparatory school Agatha turned to her old friend and colleague Eileen Morris. True, Eileen’s brother John was the headmaster of a boys’ preparatory school, so that she might be well placed to assist in the search. But it is also the case that at certain difficult moments in her life, when her resolution needed strengthening, Agatha looked to Eileen for moral reinforcement. It had been Eileen, strong-minded, self-assured, who had encouraged Agatha to write and to send her work to magazines, who had brought her into the dispensary, and who now helped her into her new and independent life as if there were nothing unusual about it. A photograph of the two, taken then, shows Eileen striding out in a smart overcoat, forthright and slightly grim, while Agatha, more slight and soft, is catching up. It is obvious that Eileen would be an unshakeable and confident ally in an emergency.
At this time Agatha was doubtless lonely. She had Carlo, of course, and a circle of married friends in London but, having been used to having a husband, it was not the same to go about alone or even with another woman. As she had always done in such troughs, Agatha worked. In late 1928 and 1929 she produced a number of short stories which she sold to magazines. These, and her next two books, The Seven Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime, paid the bills.
Agatha’s first notes for The Seven Dials Mystery were made in a small black notebook Archie had left behind. Its first few pages are taken up with jottings for other stories (‘The Stain on the Pavement: Drops on a Tube train? Umbrella that has rested on blood …’). Agatha habitually took up any handy notebook – including Rosalind’s old school exercise books, half-completed account books, out-of-date diaries partly occupied by recipes and lists of bulbs, things to be packed, and inventories – and scribbled her ideas for stories on whatever pages happened to be blank. She wrote fast and illegibly, in pencil or ink, approaching her task in a workmanlike fashion: ‘New Book’ heads the page on which she started to concoct Seven Dials. She was not at first sure of the title (‘The Secret Six’ was an alternative) nor of the plot, for her initial try begins: ‘Bundle and her father. She drives up to London – runs over man – or rather swerves to avoid him – but finds she has killed him – not quite dead – says Secret Six. Tell Jimmy Thesiger – doctor is got – says man has been shot.…’ A page later, however, her notes settle into the story as it eventually appeared. Seven Dials is firmly written at the top of the page and her draft goes steadily on: ‘Country House Party – at Chequers? – One man can’t get up in the morning. Everyone gets up a joke – They buy alarum clocks – and hide them round his room. In the morning man does not appear. He is dead. One clock has disappeared. 7 left.…’
Although she experimented before settling on the names of the rest of the cast in Seven Dials, Agatha decided from the beginning that she would revive the energetic and aristocratic ‘Bundle’, who had first appeared in The Secret of Chimneys. Her other novel of that year, Partners in Crime, also reintroduced a previous invention, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, now married, slightly older and, perhaps for that reason, even more irritatingly perky. Albert, the assistant porter in The Secret Adversary, has become their factotum. Both Seven Dials and Partners in Crime are cheerful books, with sprightly conversation and deftly worked plots. Indeed, in Partners in Crime some of the mysteries are so delicately fashioned as to be like fragile puddings, delicious but wholly unmemorable, as Agatha herself admitted nearly fifty years later in a letter to Edmund Cork. To show Tommy and Tuppence parodying the speech and mannerisms of characters created by other detective story writers – Freeman Wills Croft’s ‘Inspector French’, for instance, or G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Father Brown’ – seemed, she wrote, ‘an amusing idea at the time but doesn’t really come off now’. The only story she felt people still remembered was ‘The Man Who Was No. 16’, in which she was actually making a joke at the expense of her own Hercule Poirot. The fact that Agatha was sufficiently confident to make jokes at all, let alone a pastiche of other crime novelists’ creations, indicates that she was regaining her self-esteem and that she was happier. Rather than turning miserable memories over in her mind, in idle moments she spun parodies for herself, as she had done during the companionable days in the dispensary, and was later to do on birthdays and holidays in Devon and the desert, celebrating with verse in the style of Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc or Lewis Carroll. Agatha was also now less anxious about money. Her books sold well, newspapers and magazines were ready to serialise them, and she had rediscovered her zest for writing. She was fertile with ideas, happy with her new publisher and secure in the hands of an able and understanding agent.
Agatha’s state of mind in late 1928 is particularly evident from the fact that at this moment she chose to undertake an experiment, the writing of a long novel, ‘straight’ only in the sense that it was not a detective story, for its plot was complicated and its theme ambitious. This was Giant’s Bread, published in 1930 but delivered to Collins in January 1929. She wrote it under the pseudonym of ‘Mary Westmacott’; some jottings show that she first tried ‘Nathaniel Westmacott’, a development of her old disguise of ‘Nathaniel West’, after her grandfather and great-grandfather. It is possible that she chose to write under another name partly because, as she later put it, she felt ‘guilty at departing from the usual type of story’; detective fiction was her profession and this something of an indulgence. This novel is, moreover, very revealing, more discursive and speculative than a detective story, without the formal conventions and disciplined construction which in crime fiction distract the reader’s attention. Giant’s Bread takes in many themes, too many, written with an immediacy that betrays their closeness to the author’s own experience. The hero’s recollection of his childhood is rooted in Agatha’s own memories and other moments, like the retort the small boy hopes to make on meeting God, derive from her observations of her nephew Jack. The experience of the hero’s wife, Nell Deyre, as she works as a ward-maid during the First World War, echoes Agatha’s own and the picture of Jane, a singer who eventually overstrains her voice, having her breathing, endurance and aptitude tested by the composer, Radmaager, suggests Agatha’s own ordeal as an aspiring opera singer.
More disturbing, in that they seem to expose too much of Agatha’s own feelings, are those themes and passages in Giant’s Bread which describe how her characters face impossible choices, how greatly they mind about things, how much they hurt themselves thereby. The novel explores painful subjects: frustrated longing for a particular place (in this case ‘Abbots Puissants’, the home of the hero and his ancestors); appeals for love, affection and vindication; the desire for recognition and for anonymity. The plot is, on reflection, daft, but – as in her crime fiction – Agatha convinces, in part because the pace of events leaves little time for consideration, in part because, however sketchily they are shown, her characters’ appearance, remarks and emotions are as they should be. Agatha ensures that the detail is right. Just as poisons, topography and legal niceties are correctly and unobtrusively described in her crime novels, so in Giant’s Bread she exactly depicts the cultural setting of her story, in the years before and immediately after the First World War. Her references to the ballet are right, her descriptions of popular reaction to contemporary music appropriate, she conveys perfectly the state of the theatre, the ambitions of the Futurists and Vorticists, the hope that was placed in post-Revolutionary Soviet art, and, particularly, the nature and objectives of contemporary musical composition. She was interested in new theories and Giant’s Bread is most thoughtful when it examines changing attitudes to new forms of artistic expression. Agatha had mulled over the difficulties of the composer’s struggle with experimental forms while watching the efforts of Roger Coke, whose mother was a friend of Madge Watts. Coke offered a stimulus and a sounding-board for Agatha’s description of Vernon Deyre but her ideas for Deyre’s opera The Giant were very much her own. The final form of that opera almost exactly resembles her first notes.
Agatha’s portrait of Vernon Deyre, obliged to compose despite himself, is not autobiographical, save for one moment at which Vernon’s adult experience comes uncomfortably close. His friends persuade him to see a hypnotist, who tries to restore the memories he has suppressed. The doctor, ‘a tall, thin man with eyes that seemed to see right into the centre of you and to read there things that you didn’t even know about yourself …’ made you ‘see all the things you didn’t want to see’. That passage is certainly an allusion to Agatha’s treatment in 1927. So is the novel’s preoccupation with the idea of personal identity and with the nature of fear, for Vernon Deyre’s terror of the ‘Beast’ resembles Agatha’s horror of the Gun Man and, as Vernon faces his nightmare, Agatha, by writing this book, confronts her own. Between the first and second pages of her notes is pressed a four-leaf clover. No one knows when it was put there, or by whom, but it is a fitting symbol.
No longer clinging to what she had known but comfortable with what she had become, a successful, independent, professional woman, Agatha was ready to explore further. In the autumn of 1928, while Rosalind was at school, with, as Agatha airily wrote in her Autobiography, ‘Carlo and Punkie to visit her’, she decided to look for sunshine in the West Indies. Two days before her departure, she dined with friends and met a naval couple who had just returned from Baghdad, a city that had entranced them. Agatha was fascinated by their description and her enthusiasm increased when she learnt that Baghdad could be reached not just by sea but by the Orient Express. She was in large part intoxicated by a heady mixture of vague memories of fairy stories (Baghdad, and the Near East generally, was associated with Aladdin and Sinbad, oil lamps, sultans and genies), of mysterious tales, like those told by Scheherazade, and of the magic of curious names, especially when they are displayed on the side of that equally romantic phenomenon, a train, here the Simplon-Orient Express: London – Paris – Lausanne – Milan – Venice – Trieste – Zagreb – Belgrade – Sofia – Stamboul, and on, as the Taunus Express, to Aleppo and Beirut.
To Agatha, like thousands before and since, a train was marvellously evocative. The engines she knew were steam engines, rearing high above the platform, overwhelming the onlooker with their noise and appearance. Promising the freedom, by the simple act of purchasing a ticket, of anonymous travel towards the horizon, the train was at the same time the most orderly of conveyances, from the regular beat of its pistons and the rhythm of its wheels to the discipline of its timetables and the strictness of its track. The train, as much as the countries through which it passed, was a different world, of travellers accidentally brought together, each with his own intentions, for the time being allied. But, however random a collection, its passengers followed certain conventions. The very geography of their conveyance, self-contained, compartmentalised, with formally arranged seating, dining car and sleeping arrangements, obliged them to do so. Each traveller, too, quickly categorised his fellows, not just by class of ticket but also by manners and appearance, nationality and age. What happened on a railway journey was, in fact, both predictable and unexpected, dangerous and safe. An ideal place for exchanging confidences with strangers, an enclosure whose occupants will disperse, it was, as Agatha had already discerned, a perfect setting for a crime. Many of her most successful murders were to occur and be resolved in a carefully bounded environment and in circumstances where a certain formality prevailed. A railway journey, embracing the familiar and the extraordinary, constructing for the travelling public a private world, was a device she often employed in her stories. It suited her plots and her own experience: a life running along conventional tracks but suddenly taking her into surprising, even frightening territory; an ordered, logical way of proceeding, interrupted by occasional glimpses of the irrationality of human beings and the randomness of events. It was a motif that suited the time at which she began to be successful: a recurring theme of British art and literature in the nineteen-thirties was the crossing of boundaries, the indistinct nature of moral, emotional and political, as well as geographical, frontiers. The train was the raw stuff of fantasy; the Orient Express the most fantastic of all. Agatha hastened to Thomas Cook’s and changed her tickets.
Five days later she set off for Baghdad, the longest journey she had taken alone. Her Autobiography describes how it was to travel independently, to pass from Europe into Asia (‘I felt cut off, but far more interested in what I was doing and where I was going’), to find herself admired by various courtly gentlemen and – Agatha immediately recognised how relentlessly the world befriends those who travel alone – fending off insistently helpful strangers. Until she arrived at Ur, her account of her journey was less about the countries through which she passed than about the people: the Cook’s man, a French commercial traveller, a beaming Turkish lady anxious for Agatha to increase her family. She wrote, too, of the artefacts: the terrifying steam bath in the Orient Palace Hotel in Damascus; the handsome brass and silver plates, intricately designed, for sale in the bazaar in Baalbek; the rickety bus in which she crossed the desert to Baghdad. Her descriptions of other memories are, though economical, moving and effective: the first view of the Cilician Gates in the setting sun, at the entrance of the long gorge that leads to Turkey and Syria, or her breakfast in the early morning, the desert’s ‘sharp-toned air … the silence, the absence even of birds, the sand that ran through one’s fingers, the rising sun, and the taste of sausages and tea. What else could one ask of life?’
Once in Baghdad, Agatha found herself trapped by a zealously hospitable memsahib whom she had met on the train, eluded in Trieste, but who ominously embraced her on the bus across the desert. Agatha had wished to leave England behind but she now found herself transplanted to a colony of English expatriates with decidedly English habits. She was determined to escape. A further attraction of Baghdad was its proximity to the ancient city of Ur, near the Persian Gulf. Its name was familiar to those who, like Agatha, knew their Bible, for the city of Ur was the birthplace of Sumerian civilisation, the land of Sumer being an early name for Babylonia. Here the wedge-shaped system of writing, cuneiform script, had been invented, the forerunner of the alphabet. Energetic traders and engineers, the Sumerians built a network of canals and waterways to connect their towns and cities, of which Ur, just below the confluence of two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, was among the most important. In 1922 excavations had begun there under the direction of Leonard Woolley, a gifted archaeologist who had worked before the First World War with T.E. Lawrence in Syria and, later, in Egypt. His work enabled scholars to trace the history of Ur from its earliest beginnings, in c. 4000 BC, to its final days in the fourth century BC.
Although as a girl Agatha had shown no interest in the finds displayed in the Cairo Museum or in the Egyptian monuments, she had been fascinated by the exhibitions she later visited on the Empire Tour, writing home excitedly about African skulls and Tasmanian fossils. It was in the Illustrated London News that she had read of Leonard Woolley’s discoveries. Partly because he wished to believe it and partly because it made an exciting story, Woolley had become convinced that in the ruins of Ur he had discovered traces of the Great Flood, recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh and later, as ‘Noah’s Flood’, in the Book of Genesis. At the bottom of a deep shaft he had come across a band of alluvial clay, mingled with windblown sand. Here he found prehistoric graves, containing, he believed, the remains of the flood’s victims, and, below these, traces of the reed huts built by Ur’s first inhabitants. Woolley’s deductions were in fact incorrect, for the flood deposits he identified derived from a much earlier inundation, some 1,100 years before the Great Flood itself. He nonetheless made the most of the associations his discovery produced in the public mind. By 1928 everyone had heard of Ur and of the Sumerian treasure found in the two thousand graves in the Royal Cemetery, particularly the gold dagger, in its sheath of lapis lazuli and gold, brought out in 1926. The well-informed English public was familiar with the drawings of the ziggurat, as striking in appearance as in its curious name, a three-stage temple-tower, dominating the plain, with its red brickwork and triple staircase, ‘standing up’, as Agatha described it, ‘faintly shadowed’, in ‘a wide sea of sand, with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve, changing every minute’.
Eager, as Clara had always been, to see for herself what was new while she had the opportunity, Agatha set off to Ur. Though visitors to the Woolleys’ dig were not encouraged, she was warmly received. Their hospitality owed less to the fact that she came with a letter of introduction than to the happy chance that Katharine, Leonard’s wife, had recently read and vastly admired The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was fortunate, since Katharine Woolley was not a woman to whom other women found it easy to appeal. She was one of those females, both infuriatingly self-centred and capable of bewitching grace, who preferred to find herself in a circle of men, whom she expected to submit to her caprices and who for the most part did. She was a competent though unconfident sculptor, depending for encouragement on Leonard. He was her second husband; the first had shot himself, not long after their honeymoon, at the foot of the Great Pyramid, and the shock had made Katharine’s temperament even more unpredictable and her health precarious. She was beautiful and, according to Gertrude Bell, the great Arabian traveller and scholar, dangerous. Agatha, who felt a fascination composed half of liking and half annoyance, called her an ‘allumeuse’, a woman who inevitably, almost deliberately, lit a sexual bonfire, a type who was to appear from time to time in future detective stories.
It was not unusual for the wife of the Director of an archaeological team to be difficult – there are a number of tales of the combustible atmosphere in the camps of the inter-war years to which foreceful ladies like Mrs Garstang and Lady Petrie accompanied their husbands. For a woman who enjoyed exercising emotional power, a camp offered a satisfying court, its labourers and servants exclusively male, the assistants, often impressionable young men fresh from university, ready to be awed by displays of temperament and anxious to show their devotion to their Director by extending it, if need be, to his wife. Other women, as wives of the Director’s colleagues were to find, were unwelcome.
Agatha, however, was pressed to extend her visit. When she explained that she must go back to England for Christmas and Rosalind’s holidays, she was invited to return the following spring. Why Katharine Woolley took to Agatha is interesting. It may have been because her guest was reserved and modest and, rather than being a threat, showed herself admiring and anxious to learn. Agatha, quiet, observant and shrewd, let others impress themselves on her attention, rather than seeking to make a mark herself, and this provided a receptive audience for an egoist. On the other hand, Katharine, doubting her own ability as an artist, could respect Agatha for her undeniable success as an author; Agatha was not just any curious visitor but one to celebrate. Agatha, what is more, came alone, not as one of a happy, easy couple, who might set Katharine to jealousy and self-reproach, nor as a young, unmarried woman who might constitute a challenge. Nearly forty, she was interesting, interested and independent, neither pining for her former husband nor looking for another, simply enjoying herself and having a holiday. Agatha, as well as Katharine, was to be greatly surprised by what happened later.
Passing through Baghdad on her way home, Agatha encountered traces of her brother Monty, in the not inappropriate setting of the Tigris Palace Hotel. Here she met a Colonel Dwyer, of the King’s African Rifles, and they talked affectionately of ‘Puffing Billy Miller’ – ‘mad as a hatter’ – and of Monty’s extraordinary capacity for charming women. As it turned out, this skill sustained him until the end of his life. He was to die in the autumn of 1929 in Marseilles (Agatha’s chronology slips in her own recollections of these events). The cottage on Dartmoor eventually proved too damp and cold for Monty and his housekeeper, so Madge and Agatha arranged rooms for them in a small pension in the South of France. Agatha saw them off on the Blue Train, but on the journey Mrs Taylor caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died shortly after. Monty, bereft, was taken into the hospital at Marseilles and Madge dispatched to see him. After only a week or so of the usual worry, the problem was resolved in the customary way. Monty’s nurse, Charlotte, took him home to her apartment and made herself responsible. With her, to everyone’s satisfaction, he remained until he suddenly died of a cerebral haemorrhage in a cafe on the sea-front. His talent for attracting devoted service persisted even then. A kindly retired Sergeant Major, William Archer, now the commissionaire at the branch bank of Lloyd’s in Marseilles, arranged to tend his grave at the Military Cemetery, for they had served together in the East Surreys in South Africa. Seven years later, when Mr Archer was transferred to Monte Carlo, Monty’s welfare was again entrusted to a woman’s hands: Mr Archer’s daughter, who had married a Frenchman, promised to look after his grave, decorating it from time to time with a few flowers, placing poppies there on Armistice Day.
Agatha was reinvigorated by her travels and that year, 1929, was a busy one. She bought 22 Cresswell Place in Chelsea, a small mews house which, with the help of a builder, she rearranged to give a large downstairs room and garage, a maid’s room, and upstairs two bedrooms, one doubling as a dining-room, and a handsome bathroom, with green porcelain bath and the walls painted with green dolphins. The kitchen was minute, the stairs dark and awkwardly narrow; everyone who stayed or borrowed Cresswell Place (Agatha was always generous with her houses) wondered how she managed to manoeuvre, for, always tall, she had become heavy. From that tiny kitchen she produced meals so delicious that her friends remembered them for years: impromptu breakfasts of bacon and eggs for surprise visitors; Circassian chicken for those who came with longer notice; salads, omelettes and anchovy toast, as prepared by her more dashing heroines. The other disadvantages of Cresswell Place were that damp seeped into the interior, while from part of the house the view was only of a blank wall – not that this bothered Agatha, who told one visitor that it allowed her to speculate as to what went on at the other side.
Agatha bought and furnished houses when she was happy. She was also now more financially secure. In mid-1928 Edmund Cork had arranged a new contract with Collins for her next six novels, with an advance of £750 for each and a royalty of twenty per cent for the first 8,000 copies, rising thereafter to twenty-five per cent. Earlier that year, he also concluded a new agreement with Dodd, Mead. That contract, for The Mystery of the Blue Train and the two succeeding novels, gave Agatha an advance of $2,500 for each work, with a royalty of fifteen per cent on the first 25,000 copies and twenty per cent after that. Her work was by now being regularly published abroad. Collins looked after the Canadian market; countries where other publishers sold translations of her books included Austria and Hungary – and Finland, which paid £15 for the right to publish a first edition of 4,000 copies of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
At this time Agatha was working steadily; she was so prolific that it is difficult to establish the order in which she produced the play, short stories and books which were to appear in 1930. Her early correspondence with Edmund Cork and Collins has disappeared, destroyed or lost during the Second World War and in moves between offices. Some of her work in 1928–29 was for magazines, which took the ‘Mr Quin’ stories Agatha liked to write from time to time. Like some of her early poems and songs, they were based on the figure of Harlequin, of whom Agatha was fond, because he was both ever-present and elusive. Harlequin has a special care for the difficulties of lovers; an evanescent, multicoloured apparition, he comes and goes as he pleases. Mr Quin is as mysterious, manifesting himself to the kindly, quiet and rather snobbish Mr Satterthwaite, an elderly gentleman who believes himself a mere bystander but who, when inspired by Mr Quin, finds himself capable of solving problems. Agatha did not write these stories as a series but one collection was published in 1930, as The Mysterious Mr Quin.
This was also the year in which another of her favourite creations made the first of many appearances: Miss Marple. Agatha’s notebooks suggest a connection between Mr Quin and Miss Marple, a clue that supports her own recollection of the origins of Miss Marple’s name. An outline survives of the ninth story in The Mysterious Mr Quin, the tale of ‘The Dead Harlequin’, which concerns Mr Satterthwaite’s purchase of a strange picture. The painting shows Harlequin’s body spread upon a black and white marble floor, behind it a window through which appears a figure of the same man, looking in. Mr Satterthwaite recognises the scene of the picture, the Terrace Room at Charnley, and, with the help of the artist (and of Mr Quin) proceeds to solve the mystery of the apparent suicide of its owner. Agatha’s preliminary notes, however, refer not to ‘Charnley’ but to ‘Marple Hall’ and ‘the lady of Marple’.
Marple Hall, now replaced by a housing development, was in Cheshire and Agatha knew it from her visits to Abney. It was a striking-looking house, built of red sandstone on a terrace from which there was a sharp drop to the river valley. The terrace was said to have been haunted by the ghost of King Charles I, carrying his head, and by that of a daughter of the house, weeping for the lover whom she watched from the terrace as he drowned in a nearby mere. In 1968 Agatha told a descendant of the Marple family, who had owned parts of the estate in the sixteenth century, that she had indeed taken Miss Marple’s name from this beautiful and unhappy place. Agatha described how Madge had taken her to a sale at the Manor, ‘a very good sale with fine old Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture, and at it I bought 2 Jacobean oak chairs which I still have – wanting a name for my “old maid” character, I called her Jane Marple.’
Miss Marple’s character, however, owed something to Agatha’s earlier creation, Miss Caroline Sheppard, of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, another shrewd and observant maiden lady, whose mildly expressed omniscience is both infuriating and wonderful to her circle of patronising men. She was, as Agatha put it in her autobiography, ‘the complete detective service in the home’. St Mary Mead, where Miss Marple was said to live and Agatha now set The Murder at the Vicarage, had features of villages in which Agatha had stayed as a girl, while Miss Marple herself possessed many of the characteristics of the old ladies who called to gossip with Agatha’s Ealing grandmother. Although Agatha did not model her creation directly on Auntie-Grannie (‘she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was’), in one respect they were alike: ‘though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.’ Furthermore, in successive appearances, Miss Marple showed that she shared other habits of Agatha’s grandmother, such as her fondness for shopping at the Army and Navy Stores, and her liking for an expedition to the sales to augment her stock of table-napkins and bath towels. Miss Marple was also prettier, more humorous and more gentle than Miss Sheppard; ‘I chiefly associate her with fluffy wool,’ Agatha later told an admirer.
In 1929 Agatha also worked at her first play, Black Coffee, which concerned the murder of an eminent scientist and the theft of a formula for making dangerous weapons – exactly the sort of theme to strike the popular imagination. She had been disappointed in the portrayal of Hercule Poirot in the play Alibi that Michael Morton had adapted from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, although it had enjoyed a good run in London in 1928. She had been equally unhappy with a film, made in the same year, based on ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’. More satisfying was another film, Die Abenteuer GmbH, (Adventure Inc.), made by a German company from The Secret Adversary, but Agatha’s displeasure with the way her novels had generally been adapted for performance decided her to make a start herself. She had always been good at writing plausible dialogue, and had prepared herself for fashioning stage directions by her experience at plotting detective stories, where careful attention had to be given to placing and timing. Black Coffee was a success. It was tried out at the end of 1930, a year in which she was to make an even greater departure.