Max was now anxious to lead an expedition of his own and set about raising funds. Agatha shared this goal; indeed, in a Christmas letter to him in 1932 she had joyfully announced that she had been approached by some ‘film people who want to engage a few well-known authors’ and that, although suggestions she might ‘make £200,000 out of it’ were obviously ludicrous, it might bring ‘a nice little sum and with it we’d raze a mound to the ground!’ Nothing came of these advances, though she perhaps had them in mind as she drafted a dramatised version, never performed, of The Secret of Chimneys.
Agatha was writing prolifically and well. She was now just in her forties, happy and creative. There had been one sad moment, for the baby she was expecting the year before had miscarried and it was felt that she and Max should not now try to have another child. She was at Abney when this happened. Punkie was concerned and Rosalind alarmed at seeing her mother looking frail and ill, until Agatha assured her that, though shocked, she would be perfectly all right. This sorrow, too, was known to only a few friends, including, later, two or three young archaeologists at the time of their own pregnancies. Despite Agatha’s belief that a wife should always go with her husband on his travels, she would advise these women friends to stay at home for their confinement, avoiding the unsteady journeys to the desert. Her marriage to Max was a success and Rosalind got on well with her step-father, who was a natural teacher. He even succeeded with her where he had failed with Agatha, interesting Rosalind in philosophy and drinking wine. She had adjusted well to the new situation, and saw Archie regularly – though he and Agatha did not meet again after the divorce. Rosalind enjoyed her father’s games and teasing and managed to remain staunchly loyal to both her parents.
In the spring of 1933 Max eventually managed to attract as sponsors the Trustees of the British Museum and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. The mound he chose was at Arpachiyah, some miles north-east of Nineveh, and, after some anxious weeks, he proved to have chosen well, as considerable quantities of beautifully decorated pottery and figures came to the surface. Max’s whole expedition, including publication of the results, cost only £2,000. The staff was small; apart from the cook, houseboy, labourers, and Gallaher, an Irishman who drove the lorry, it consisted of only three persons: Max, his friend John Rose the architect, and Agatha. Agatha was by no means a passenger. Her duties included keeping a written record and helping to arrange and reassemble pottery fragments. She had continued her lessons in drawing to scale, and, though not the most confident draughtsman, did her best. She also continued her practice, begun at Nineveh, of writing a chapter or two in quiet moments; two detective stories, two collections of short stories and a novel written under the name of Mary Westmacott were all completed in 1933.
One of the full-length detective novels was Murder on the Orient Express, which she dedicated to ‘M.E.M. Arpachiyah 1933’. The other took its title from a sentence Agatha had noted in her list of ideas for 1931, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, there part of the outline of a complex plot in which Poirot pursued a poisoner (‘the poison that makes everything yellow… poison applied to dress – very misleading as another girl had yellow dress’). Like Evans in the story itself, ‘Evans’ in the notebook is a maid, and, confusingly, also the gardener and baker. ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ is an odd and memorable phrase, just the sort of question which, overheard, would stimulate Agatha to spin a story.
The two collections of short stories she wrote in 1933 were Parker Pyne Investigates and The Listerdale Mystery. One of the tales in The Listerdale Mystery. ‘Philomel Cottage’ was later adapted for the theatre, as Love from a Stranger, and subsequently filmed. Another, ‘Accident’, almost enjoyed a more interesting fate, for in 1957 Alfred Hitchcock expressed an interest in using the plot for a film, a suggestion, however, that eventually came to nothing. The first working title of the other collection was The Reminiscences of Mr Parker Pyne. Some of these stories describe the clients who reply to the advertisement placed in The Times by this retired civil servant: ‘Are you happy? If not, consult Mr Parker Pyne, 17 Richmond Street.’ Others show how Mr Parker Pyne is able to help distressed people whom he meets on his travels (In ‘The House at Shiraz’ and ‘The Oracle at Delphi’ Agatha remembered some of the places and people she and Max had seen together.) They are charming stories, particularly because they are a wise and generous mixture of Mr Parker Pyne’s own observations about human nature – a statistician, he has concluded that there is a limited number of identifiable ways in which people can be unhappy – and Agatha’s own observations and preoccupations – her knowledge of the desire for adventure, her interest in marital jealousy, her understanding (as in ‘The Case of the Rich Woman’) of the glorious freedom loss of memory affords. Agatha was fond of Parker Pyne, whom she saw as a more realistic figure than, say, Poirot: ‘Much more suitable for an American radio series,’ she was to tell her agent in 1947. (The larger than life creation of Poirot nonetheless smothered Parker Pyne and the series appeared as ‘Starring Hercule Poirot’ instead.)
The last book Agatha wrote in 1933 was Unfinished Portrait, the novel in which two of the principal characters, Celia and Dermot, derive from Agatha herself and from Archie. Agatha was now sufficiently secure to be able to reflect more calmly on her first marriage; in 1930, on what had until now been a sad anniversary, she had written a thoughtful letter to Max, thanking him for all he had restored to her. Not that she discussed even with her closest friends the end of her first marriage, her illness and recovery. The shock had gone too deep. In any case, it was a private matter and talking about it would have been invading Archie’s confidence as much as her own. Moreover, such matters were probably best not dissected in chat; Agatha was one of a generation that knew the value of discreet silence. It is interesting that she did allude to and analyse her private experience in her books, as if there she could not keep from returning to something so important. By building her recollections of that terrible time into other characters and other stories, she avoided exposing herself, except on her own terms. ‘Mary Westmacott’ was further protection; indeed, her contract with Collins for this and two other novels, drawn up in early 1934, provided yet another disguise, for it is between her publisher and ‘Nathaniel Miller’, amended before signature to ‘Daniel Miller’.
The excavations at Arpachiyah were the last that Max was to conduct in Iraq for many years. There was an increasingly nationalistic mood in the country, whose manifestations had included worrying disputes and delays over the division of the finds between the Iraqi Government and the expedition. Max thought it prudent to move on. He and Agatha accordingly spent the last two months of 1934 in Syria, with the blessing of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, surveying the Habur Valley and examining a number of mounds, or ‘tells’, which might be suitable for excavation. They were assisted by a young architect called Robin Macartney, shy and silent but conscientious. As well as being a skilled draughtsman, he was a clever painter. Two of his water-colours of the desert, its sinuous curves painted with firm lines and delicate colours, hung in Agatha’s house to the end of her life. She was always entranced by the desert’s clear air and cool colours and when she returned to wintry London one year she asked Marion Mackintosh, one of her more artistic friends, to make her a pair of lounging pyjamas, the trousers apricot and the jacket blue, as a reminder of the desert sand and sky. (The effort was not wholly successful, since crêpe de chine tended to slither off Agatha’s sloping shoulders.)
Max and Agatha spent several weeks in Beirut, preparing for the expedition. During that time and later, when they had established their base camp, Agatha drafted and typed her books, three in 1934. One was Death in the Clouds, in which she used another ‘closed circle’ by having a passenger murdered during a flight from Le Bourget to Croydon. Agatha’s joke about dutiful Englishmen who abandon sick wives was not the only entertainment she and Max had from this book, for it also reflects a private joke they shared about the deficiencies of the airline services that were just being established. Agatha herself had felt little confidence in them since a first lamentable encounter with Imperial Airways in 1930. ‘I suppose all airlines are amateurish,’ she wrote resignedly to Max, ‘they’ve not had time to become professional yet.’ She herself made a rare slip in this book for, as a reader pointed out, the blowpipe featured in the plot was too long to fit into an aeroplane of the type she described, let alone be used. The two other novels Agatha wrote that year, for publication in 1935, were Three Act Tragedy, in which Mr Satterthwaite reappeared, and The ABC Murders, where Hercule Poirot investigated a series of crimes in which a copy of the ‘ABC’ railway timetable was prominently displayed. This was an ingenious novel, cleverly misleading. It was later made into a film, retitled The Alphabet Murders so that the public would not shun the chain of ABC cinemas that showed it.
As well as writing and helping Max, Agatha busied herself with friends and houses. Another acquisition was 48 Sheffield Terrace, a house of large, well-proportioned rooms, on Campden Hill. There was enough space for Max to have a library, with a large table on which he could spread bits of pottery, and for Agatha to enjoy for the first and last time in her life a room of her own for working and retiring. Here she had ‘a large firm table’, an upright chair for typing, an armchair and sofa, a Steinway grand piano, and nothing else. In December 1934 she had also bought a house in the country, for Ashfield was now chiefly used during Rosalind’s holidays, Torquay being too far from London to be reached easily at weekends. As Max was particularly fond of Oxford, he and Agatha searched that part of the Thames Valley, looking for a small country cottage but eventually finding Winterbrook House at Wallingford. It was a Queen Anne house, close to the road – then much quieter than today – but shielded from it by slightly sinister holly trees. The back of the house was the most attractive part, for the drawing-room window looked out on to the garden and a meadow and down to the river bank. In the middle of a field, soon reclaimed as part of the lawn, was a large cedar, beneath which Agatha immediately decided they would take their tea on summer afternoons. In fact, so naturally did the house give on to the garden that Agatha and her visitors tended always to drift outside after meals on fine days, carrying their cups. Winterbrook House was large, with three bedrooms and three good sitting-rooms. Agatha decorated the drawing-room in her favourite pale mauve, with white woodwork and curtains, the furniture covered in white quilted chintz. The triumph of the house was Max’s library, a room he enlarged to double its original length, from which he could look down the river. A walled kitchen garden was Agatha’s paradise; she occasionally lent the house to friends but never in the soft fruit season.
The Thames Valley is cold and damp in winter, particularly in January and February, but these were the months when the Mallowans were in the East. In 1935 they began to dig at Chagar Bazar, a relatively convenient site, since only twenty-five miles to the north was a town with shops, a bank and a post office. At first they rented a spacious mud-brick house, overrun by mice, which Agatha loathed, until they acquired an intelligent cat. They then moved to a house built at the site itself. During that first season their staff consisted of Robin Macartney and Richard Barnett, with 140 or so labourers, mostly Arabs and Kurds, and, as Max described them, ‘a sprinkling of Yezidis, the mild devil-worshippers from the Jebel Sinjar, and a few odd Christians’. Some of the best workers were Turks, who had smuggled themselves across the frontier into this unruly part of Syria, controlled at that time by French military officers. Agatha and Max spent the 1935 and 1936 seasons at Chagar Bazar. Agatha found camp life agreeable. She liked its simplicity, the open air, the expedition’s intimacy. Not that the Mallowans’ camps were without comforts. Agatha organised the supply of much of the furniture and provisions, making sure that fresh local produce (including cream from water buffalo) was used wherever possible, augmented by tinned and dried goods brought from England. The workmen regarded her as a mother and a queen, and she and the cook shared their mysteries. By now Agatha had also learned a good deal of archaeology. Her particular, and gentle, contribution was to remove the dirt and dust from fragments of pottery with her favourite tools, orange sticks and face-cream.
Max’s reputation was growing. He was efficient in publishing his reports and had a reputation for hard work and the archaeologist’s necessary lucky instinct. He continued to gain confidence and talked entertainingly about his work. This was partly because he was older – he was now in his early thirties – and partly, as their friends remarked, because of Agatha’s influence. She liked the fact that her husband was an archaeologist, half-scientist, half-historian, in a profession both practical and scholarly. (What she did not like, and never said, was that one of the pleasures of being married to an archaeologist was that the older you became, the more interesting you were to him. It was a quip which first appeared in the Gothenburg Trade and Shipping Journal, and followed Agatha ever after.)
The Mallowans’ camps were known to be among the most serene in the Near East. Agatha was no Katharine but she had not forgotten her. In 1935, egged on by her old friend Algy Whitburn, Woolley’s architect, she drew up the outline of a detective story in which a Katharine-like figure was to feature, Murder in Mesopotamia. The first three names on the list in her draft are old acquaintances: ‘Woolleys, C.T.s, Father Burrows’ (the Campbell Thompsons and the epigraphist at Ur). She developed two or three possible plots for Murder in Mesopotamia, clarifying her thoughts with a sketch map of the expedition house and a timetable of its occupants’ movements, and thinking aloud about various devices: ‘Can we work in the window idea?’ she asked herself. The expedition house resembled their quarters at Chagar Bazar but the mood was that of Ur. Her notes began: ‘The wife – very queer – (? Is she being doped against her own knowledge) – atmosphere gradually develops in intensity – a bomb may explode any minute.…’ Agatha mischievously dedicated the novel to ‘my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria’; one or two were annoyed, whether because they believed they figured in its pages or because they did not was never entirely clear. Robin Macartney designed a splendid cover for the Crime Club edition, with a bearded sage on horseback gazing into a deep pit cut into land curving alongside the river, and labourers hacking and sifting the soil from an excavation like a tomb.
In her second book of 1935, Cards on the Table, Agatha enjoyed a joke against herself in her role of crime novelist. Mrs Ariadne Oliver, who had first appeared in an earlier short story as an assistant to Mr Parker Pyne, shared some of Agatha’s own characteristics and habits, in particular her taste for eating apples in the bath. Cards on the Table is about a murder during a bridge party, a game of bridge being a typical nineteen-thirties pastime, friendly with a touch of daring (rather like a séance), riveting for those who were engaged in it and dull for those who were not, apt to degenerate into a quarrel. Agatha herself often played bridge after dinner. She enjoyed cards and, when alone with Max, played Poker Patience with him. The bridge game provided her with another ‘closed circle’ within which a crime might be committed and investigated, the very setting to which Agatha had referred in Chapter Three of The ABC Murders. It was a circle in another sense, too, for into Cards on the Table Agatha brought four familiar characters. As well as Mrs Oliver and Poirot, there was Superintendent Battle (from Chimneys and Seven Dials) and Colonel Race (from The Man in the Brown Suit). There were four suspects only; as Agatha explained in a preface, any of them, given the right circumstances, might have committed the crime.
In one of the books Agatha wrote during the following year, 1936, was a portrait even more firmly drawn from life – of Peter, who appeared in Dumb Witness as Bob, Miss Arundell’s wirehaired terrier. There is something, too, of Wallingford about Market Basing, a location Agatha found so evocative that she considered using it for another plot. Set, however, not in a small market town but in ‘No. 14 Bardsley Gardens Mews’, that draft became the title story in the collection Murder in the Mews, also finished in 1936. ‘A case of death, apparently murder’, ran her notes; ‘pistol in right hand (or taken away) windows shut but the smell of smoke in room’. The Crime Club edition of this book again carried one of Macartney’s striking covers, an arch framing the Mews, all the windows dark but one, and the headlamps of a black saloon, with curving mudguards and bumpers, approaching over the cobbles.
Agatha’s other novel for 1936 was Death on the Nile. Its origins were complicated. In 1933 she had journeyed up the river with Max and Rosalind and the following year had published in the Parker Pyne collection a short story, ‘Death on the Nile’, describing a poisoning aboard a Nile steamer. During their own voyage, Agatha and Rosalind had speculated about their fellow-passengers, particularly one, a sadistic, domineering woman, on whom Agatha based the character of ‘Mrs Boynton’, a former prison wardress. These thoughts Agatha first used in a play, Moon on the Nile, which she then put aside in favour of a detective novel, also called Death on the Nile but different from the earlier short story. The first outline of this book introduced ‘Mrs Boynton’ and her cowed but resentful family but Agatha soon dismissed them. She did, however, draw on recollections of her own journey, particularly of the arrangement of the boat. The topography of the S S Karnak is crucial to the plot; indeed, when a film was made in 1978, the producer had diffuculty in finding a steamer of the requisite size and lay-out. Death on the Nile was a success and the cover, too, one of Macartney’s best.
Agatha was at this time deeply interested in Egypt and its history. In the ancient Egyptian religion she found something sinister – a strange mixture of human and animal in the deities, an emphasis on death and the ritual surrounding it – but also reassuring, the ‘comfortable structure’, as she called it, of the ‘old gods’. She had also been thinking about parallels between the past and present, the similarity of relations between old and young, male and female, the conflict between good and evil that might be found anywhere at any time. She enjoyed playing with ‘nebulous ideas’: the manner in which new intellectual and aesthetic fashions took root, the tension between ‘warmongers’, seeking to defend the fabric of the state, and ‘appeasers’, believing there were other routes to peace and security, the differences between those who saw the value of system and hierarchy and those who emphasised the importance of change and idiosyncrasy. Agatha was not a rigorous thinker; she argued about these questions with Max but her ideas really surfaced only in her books, as themes and in talk between her characters. She was inclined to laugh at ideologues who merely discussed the path to progress: Death on the Nile is only one of her books in which the exponent of some fashionable creed is gently ridiculed.
She nonetheless admired idealists and tried to put some of their beliefs into practice. In a three-act play she wrote in 1937, Akhnaton, she made Akhnaton, King Amenhotep IV, a sympathetic figure, whose fall is inevitable but tragic. In his story it was the characters who first attracted Agatha’s attention – the King himself; Horenheb, the faithful soldier who betrays his master for a higher cause; Queen Tyi, Akhnaton’s mother; his Queen, Nefertiti; Tutankhaton, who promises to restore the old gods and take the throne from Akhnaton; and the High Priest. Agatha was clear about the dramatic side of things – ‘Act I, Scene I: Amenhotep the Magnificent is near death. The King of Mitanni sends the image of Ishtar of Nineveh to Egypt (second time such a procedure had happened)’ but shaky on the historical side: ‘when was first time?’ she scribbled in the margin. She was pleased with the play, though it was too difficult and expensive to stage.
In the spring of 1937 Agatha and Max began excavating Tell Brak, a great mound he had resolved to explore when he had first seen it years before. It was some twenty miles from Chagar Bazar, where there was still much digging to do. The Mallowans divided their efforts between the two sites, assisted by their foreman Hamoudi, a defector from Woolley’s team, and a group of industrious young people: Guilford Bell, nephew of Agatha’s Australian friend Aileen; an ex-Colonel from the Indian Army, Colonel Burn; Louis Osman, known by the name with which he had once wonderingly referred to the Tells, ‘Bumps’; and Rosalind, on her first expedition. She took over some of the drawing, as Agatha’s artistry had finally been acknowledged to be abysmal. Rosalind was deeply impressed by Max’s organisation of the dig. She had not known that he was capable of rising so early and working so rigorously out of doors, and she admired his firm but paternal handling of the labourers. The young men were excellent company for Rosalind; Agatha, too, was interested and encouraging at an important time in their careers. She later gave an affectionate picture of this group in Come, Tell Me How You Live and always spoke proudly of their subsequent success, for Louis Osman was to distinguish himself as a craftsman in gold and silver, Guilford as the architect of many original houses, Macartney as a painter, John Rose, another of the Mallowans’ architects in Syria, for rebuilding Castries in St Lucia, and Ian Threlfall, a gifted archaeologist, as a leading barrister. All became and remained friends, regularly visiting Greenway and Winterbrook (where ‘Bumps’ built Agatha a squash court). John Rose entertained Agatha and Max in Barbados, while Guilford made regular pilgrimages from Australia.
Agatha did not neglect her writing while she was in Syria. As usual, she took with her an old exercise book or two, and in one, feelingly labelled ‘Hôtel de l‘Expédition, Chagar Bazar’, outlined various ideas for that season’s writing. The second idea on her list quickly developed into a book, a thought that began with a title, ‘Rose Red Murder’, or ‘Rose Red Death’.
This became Appointment with Death, a mystery that unfolded at Petra, which Agatha and Max had visited on one of their journeys home. From the first Agatha had conceived the central figure, and victim, as a greedy, tyrannical matriarch; the location of the crime and the fact that the victim, Mrs Boynton, was the former prison wardress dropped from the first draft of Death on the Nile were the two points from which she began. They were naturally associated, for Agatha had retained from her visit not just the memory of Petra’s rose-red walls but of the city’s confinement within the narrow gorge. Agatha also wanted for her story a forceful woman Member of Parliament, ‘given to good works etc’. This was ‘Lady Copeman’, then ‘Lady Bridgeman’ and, eventually, ‘Lady Westholme’, modelled not, as some have suggested, on Lady Astor, M.P., but on the ‘excessively fierce-looking Miss Wilbraham’, whom Agatha had encountered leading a party of Anglo-Catholic ladies to Iraq in the spring of 1930.
Lady Westholme’s companion, Miss Pierce, bore some resemblance to Miss Wilbraham’s second-in-command. Agatha had been particularly struck by Miss Wilbraham’s enormous topee, a memory which invaded the early planning of ‘the Petra Murder’. Agatha’s notes explore two ideas simultaneously: one that the murderer should wear a distinctive hat, and the other that the death should be induced by means of an injection. Ever-fertile, she proceeded to play with variations on these themes. The injection idea split into two more: ‘sodium citrate injected in blood before death. Blood keeps liquid’; ‘Diabetes gives p.m. [post mortem] stiffening at once. (Clue, sugar in pocket).’ The hat idea produced complex ramifications: ‘“Same man, different hat”, in this case, “Different man, same hat”’; ‘Y suddenly sees dead man.… It’s Mr X.… Meets Z.… Kills him and lays him down.… Conceal’s X’s body in cave.…Hats. Y wears topee.… Z wears felt hat.… X wears topee.… Who are Y, X and Z? Is Z plastic surgeon? Is Y former patient? Is X just a man of the requisite size? Topee may be important thing in this kind of country?’ At this point Agatha discarded the entire topee idea and started again with a substantially different plot: ‘Method of death. Camera? Husband guilty. He is clever with faking things. Arranges a Brownie camera – takes it out – at right moment substitutes it for Mrs B.’s. She lies dead. They rush to her. He drops her camera – picks up his. Later, child’s camera is missing OR,’ Agatha wrote, pulling herself together, ‘insulin idea.’ Mrs Boynton was eventually killed with a hypodermic syringe – but Miss Wilbraham’s topee was not completely discarded. The X, Y, Z plot appeared three years later in Evil Under the Sun, amalgamated with some thoughts inspired by Punkie’s wig.
Nor was the idea that a murderer might use sodium citrate entirely set aside. In another notebook (beginning with a list of things to bring to London: ‘Flower pictures.… Clothes for Collins’), Agatha headed a page with another working title, ‘Who Would Have Thought?’, the words of Lady Macbeth: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’ The swift notes that follow constituted an outline for Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. It was not just with murderous devices that Agatha was economical, taking a left-over fragment of a possible plot from one setting for use elsewhere. Her sketch for this latest book shows how resourceful she had grown at drawing on moods and scenes stored in her memory. Gorston Hall is a little like Abney, even if the family reunion is less festive than Agatha’s Christmases in Cheshire; the cerulean skies, blue convolvulus and hedges of plumbago for which Stephen Farr is homesick are taken from Agatha’s recollections of South Africa. In planning the shape of her books, too, she was learning stylistic tricks from past experience. Her suggestions to herself for this book began with the notion of ‘Short Bits like Death on the Nile?’
A similar scene of a traveller returning to London from the tropics opened Murder Is Easy, on which Agatha worked in the following year, 1938, while the expedition finished its work at Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak. In the autumn, anticipating trouble from some local Sheikhs determined to persuade the Mallowans’ workmen to strike, they moved a hundred miles west to the marshy country of the Balikh Valley, where, with the help of John Rose, they quickly examined five mounds before the winter rains began. Max had continued to spend the months between digging seasons writing his account of their procedures and discoveries; Agatha now decided that she might tell the story of the expedition from her own perspective. In July 1938 she suggested this to Edmund Cork, proposing a book that would ‘Roughly … deal with life on the dig. Not at all serious or archaeological.’ Though Cork encouraged Agatha to start, she did not in fact begin until the nineteen-forties. But already she was keeping voluminous notes to draw upon – occasional anecdotes, a long account of what she learned of devil-worship, sections of diary:
… Dinner with the Hudsons – they had real plumbing. Most enjoyable. Accounts by the Hudsons why the French differ utterly – as to weather – malaria – and drinking water. Started the ABC Murders.…‘Le camping’ – rose at dawn. Cold sausages but hot tea.… Got back in the lorry – very perilous as none of the doors are reliable.
It was nearly ten years since Agatha had made her first visit to a dig and five since she had begun to come out on expeditions with Max. This had been a happy time, a regular annual cycle of summers at Ashfield with Rosalind, Christmas at Abney, the late autumn and spring in the desert and the rest of the year in London and Wallingford. As a rule she had produced two or three books a year, Edmund Cork managing the complicated details of contracts, serial rights, translations and so on, and Harold Ober, his American associate, looking after her interests in the United States. They were smooth and even years, one book appearing after another in a flow that, as far as anyone could tell, would continue uninterrupted. (As Max once instructed a younger colleague, ‘There are two sorts of people in the world, ladies and gentlemen, and both work till they drop.’) It was therefore appropriate that in mid-1938 Agatha, now in her late forties, should wish to draw these years together by writing about her expeditions with Max in the Near East.
In some ways Agatha seemed to be drifting on a warm and comfortable tide, but there were signs of change in the familiar pattern of her life. For one thing, Rosalind was now grown up. Caledonia had been stimulating – like Archie, she was head of the school – but at Benenden she was bored. Though she did not want to go on to university, her headmistress insisted that she take her School Certificate, in which she did well, before leaving just before her seventeenth birthday. After an exhaustive search she was installed in Switzerland at a pension in Gstaad, which she disliked intensely. Rescued, she went to a pension at Château d’Oex at which she learnt no French. Agatha then sent her to a family in Paris, who spoke no English, so that Rosalind was obliged to learn the French language, habits and history, much as her mother had done, by experience. This was followed by several months with another family near Munich, before she came home to be launched officially into the world with a London ‘season’. Agatha was fortunately spared the demands of organising her daughter’s attendance at luncheons, tea parties, dinners and dances, managing her wardrobe and scrutinising her friends, for Rosalind shared her season with another debutante, Susan North, whose mother supervised them both. Agatha did, however, scribble an idea in her notebook: ‘Debutante teas etc. Mothers killed off in rapid succession.’ Agatha had not herself been presented as a girl, her own season being spent quietly in Cairo, and now, having been divorced, she could not present her daughter at Court. Rosalind, in ostrich feathers and train, was therefore taken to the Palace by their friends the Mackintoshes. Ernest Mackintosh, who had been a companion of Monty’s and had danced with Madge at balls in Torquay, was now Director of the Science Museum in London and the families saw a great deal of each other. Agatha and Marion Mackintosh would go to matinees, without the men, who, according to Max, found many of the plays ‘unsettling’.
Mrs North also became a good friend, with whom Agatha went to exhibitions, opera and the ballet. Allen Lane was another. Agatha had first met him when she called at The Bodley Head to protest to his uncle, John Lane, about the jacket for Murder on the Links. In 1935, when Allen, now chairman of the firm, started a series of sixpenny paperbacks, Agatha was among the first to offer her own work to Penguin Books, despite her break with The Bodley Head, and Max edited the archaeological series. Allen Lane’s venture was successful – indeed, he was able to wind up his uncle’s firm – and he thanked Agatha for her support by giving financial help, as well as an annual Stilton, to Max’s expeditions.
Rosalind’s season was a success. She was tall, good-looking and forthright. It was difficult to settle on what she and Susan would now do with themselves. Their first idea was, as they put it, ‘to take up photography’. When Agatha realised that they meant that their pictures should be taken, in bathing dresses, for advertisements, she was horrified, persuading them instead to take photography classes. As she enquired about courses, however, she became so interested that she booked for herself instead, assiduously practising taking pictures of buckets and spades, flowerpots and balls of string, for she thought her new skills would be useful on the dig. Artistically placed shadows were the vogue but, when Agatha showed her efforts to Max, he thoroughly disapproved. He wanted objects shown clearly, with a scale rod in each picture to indicate their size. Agatha revised her technique for archaeological purposes but her experiments with camera angles and coloured filters provided ideas for her plotting books.
Meanwhile the question of Rosalind’s future was settled, for the time being. Mrs North offered to take her and Susan to South Africa, to visit her son, who was at Simonstown with the Navy; Rosalind’s photograph album did, after all, display fetching pictures of the two women in bathing dresses, sunning themselves on the ship’s deck, but for private enjoyment only.
Agatha had never felt herself constrained by Rosalind, leaving her with Clara during the Empire tour and afterwards regularly consigning her to Punkie’s and Carlo’s care. Agatha loved her daughter and was proud of her but it was not the demanding close relationship she had had with Clara. Those who knew Agatha and her daughter offered various explanations, some believing that Agatha’s memories of happiness with Archie and the later pain of her first marriage had put a gap between her and Rosalind, others suggesting that Agatha felt guilty for divorcing Archie and placing Rosalind in a position where her loyalties would be torn and her childhood complicated. At any rate, both Agatha and Rosalind were strong characters; each cared for the other, in turn, without smothering her or losing too much independence. So it was not that the late nineteen-thirties brought Agatha freedom from maternal duties, for she had never regarded them as fetters; more, that the shape of her year was now no longer influenced by the timetable of Rosalind’s school and holidays.
There had been another break with the past. Ashfield, to which Agatha had so relentlessly clung after her father’s death and again after Clara’s, was no longer a peaceful retreat. Torquay was spreading, its lanes and fields swallowed by small houses, and the large villas of Agatha’s childhood had been broken up, converted into nursing homes or demolished. When she and Max had bought Winterbrook, it was, she said, ‘Max’s house’; Ashfield she regarded as hers, ‘and, I think, Rosalind’s’. Agatha thought, too, that Max had never liked Ashfield, as being part of her life before their marriage. Rosalind’s childhood was over – and Agatha herself, as much as Ashfield, had greatly changed. Her childhood there had shaped her but so, and more immediately, had her work and marriage to Max. She was free to leave Ashfield behind.
Doing so was easier because she had fallen for a large Georgian house, built in the late seventeen-eighties in thirty acres of woodland on the bank of the Dart, some ten miles from Torquay. This was Greenway House. It looked down the estuary towards Dartmouth.
Agatha bought Greenway in October 1938 for £6,000. The purchase was arranged by her solicitor in Torquay, whose father had looked after Clara’s and Frederick’s affairs; it was not easy to-raise the money, even with the sale of Ashfield, but somehow she managed it. Agatha showed the house to Guilford Bell and gave him one of his first major commissions; he boldly recommended that she pull half the existing house to the ground. She did – removing among various unsightly additions a large billiards room. Guilford tidied up the place, bringing back its lovely proportions, added a cloakroom with a round window, and helped Agatha instal several bathrooms. On one side of a wide pillared porch was an airy morning-room, giving on to a drawing-room with a curved window and steps to the garden, on the other the library, light and square, and next to that a rectangular dining-room, with two distinctive curved mahogany doors. A square hall led to the back doors and to kitchens, sculleries and pantries. A narrow hall connected the front porch to the stairs, wide and easy. There were five main rooms on the first floor; one became a study, one a dressing-room for Agatha and another one for Max, and the fourth, at the front of the house, the bedroom she shared with Max, her large bed in the middle of the room and his smaller one at the side. There was a fifth bedroom on that floor, the rest being taken up by bathrooms and a room for keeping medicines and arranging flowers. The top floor had a big bedsitting-room for Rosalind, whose windows overlooked the river and the woods, a double room and three smaller rooms with two bathrooms, and various deep cupboards and storage places. At the back of the house, above the kitchen quarters, was a warren of rooms for staff. Agatha was a splendid client, interested but trusting, and not unexpectedly she took special care over the plumbing arrangements. ‘I want to come with you, Guilford,’ she said, before one expedition to choose basins, baths and lavatories, ‘I want a big bath and I need a ledge because I like to eat apples.’ To London they went, whereupon Agatha stepped into the showroom window and the bath displayed there, drawing an admiring crowd, for she insisted she could not possibly choose a bath unless she sat in it first.
The choice of paint and fabrics was Agatha’s and she planned what was to be done with the garden. It had been at one time extremely beautiful. A house had stood here in the sixteenth century and originally the estate had been parkland almost to the river banks. In the late eighteen-sixties new trees were added and in the early years of the twentieth century another owner continued the planting. A garden magazine for 1899 considered the Liriodendron, or tulip tree, growing near the house, to be one of the finest specimens in the country. Early in the First World War the house passed to Charles Williams and his wife, both from famous West Country gardening families, and for the next twenty years there was much new planting, particularly of rhododendrons, magnolias, rare trees and unusual shrubs. In 1937 the house was sold to the father of a childhood friend of Agatha’s, Sir Alfred Goodson. The Goodsons did not live at Greenway and by the time Agatha bought it the gardens were in disarray. She set about planning their replanting; some of her outlines for plots are interrupted by lists of roses and bulbs.
Surprises lay among the tangled paths: a landing-place for boats, with a covered swimming-pool for decent but spooky bathing, inside what now became a boathouse; a battery, with ancient mortars, at the spot where Sir Walter Raleigh was reputed to have landed, bringing the first tobacco and potatoes from the New World. There were extensive kitchen gardens, stables and a grass tennis court. Under a nearby farm ran the tunnel of the main London to Dartmouth railway line.
Devonshire was the scene for the other full-length novel Agatha wrote in 1938, Ten Little Niggers, whose setting ‘Nigger Island’ was modelled on Burgh Island off the coast at Kings-bridge. The form of the story is like Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony, in which different sections of the orchestra gradually steal away at the end. Agatha took her title from the children’s chant – where one by one, each of ten small boys disappears until none is left. The words of the song – which is different in the United States – and its anachronistic idiom were to give Agatha’s publishers interminable trouble when the book came to be published in America and in later British editions.
Another work Agatha completed in 1938 was set nearer Greenway, the title story in The Regatta Mystery (a collection published in the United States in 1939), in which Hercule Poirot discovers the perpetrator of a robbery at ‘The Royal George in Dartmouth Harbour’. Parker Pyne appeared again in this volume, too, as did Miss Marple, telling a story whose solution depended as always on her ‘special knowledge’, in this case what Agatha had noted years before as ‘Housemaid Idea’: ‘One of party dressed as housemaid – so no one ever looks at her. Or man has an idea he has seen the housemaid before.’ (In another set of notes she described it as ‘G.K.C. Idea’, for Chesterton’s story The Invisible Man turns on the fact that no one thinks it worthwhile to mention the postman’s visit to the scene of a crime.) Agatha’s device has since been stupendously misunderstood, for some critics have alleged that it indicated lamentable arrogance, a disposition to regard servants as automata, not individuals. This misses the point entirely. Agatha (and her creation Miss Marple) was thoroughly familiar with the fact that gardeners, cooks and parlourmaids – and Colonels, vicars, doctors and maiden ladies – are each a prey to special obsessions, adopt idiosyncratic habits of speech and dress and follow an eccentric personal routine. She also knew how easily human beings fall into a professional role, performing certain tasks as they have been trained to do, assuming an appropriate style, speech and demeanour: doctors behaving in a doctor-like manner, fishmongers as fishmongers are expected to do, detectives and policemen – and archaeologists and lady crime novelists – each with their déformation professionelle. Uniforms help, encouraging the wearer to behave aptly, evoking certain expectations in onlookers and reinforcing these effects by inducing the wearer to conform to them.
This was the trick Agatha’s criminals were playing. Dressing up as a housemaid was not a way of being anonymous, but of becoming a housemaid – and, in a later development of this device, Agatha noted the idea that the same trick might be played by a fake policeman. A housemaid is remembered as a housemaid, not as a murderer. But, Agatha’s critics complain, why does she believe ‘no one ever looks at a housemaid?’ The answer is that, unless there is exceptional cause, one doesn’t, while the housemaid is carrying out her professional duties. Far from being inconsiderate, it is respectful to allow the housemaid – or the postman, waiter, or any professional person – to continue with whatever service she is performing without intruding into her personal affairs. That is partly why she wears a uniform, as a sign saying ‘busy’, and why it is so convenient for a criminal to borrow it.
Agatha would have been amazed at the need for an explanation. Her attitude had less to do with the class and background from which she came or with the age in which she lived than with common sense. Further, readers know that she uses such a device in many of her books. Her ‘stock’ characters – as she sets them out in her lists: ‘twittery companion’, ‘prim, irritable, respectable gentleman’, even ‘BBC type’ – are designed not only to carry the story but to fox the reader, whom she knows will have certain expectations and will thus be more easily deluded into overlooking the clues that eventually reveal the criminal beneath the camouflage.
Agatha also wrote most of another detective story, Sad Cypress, in 1938, finishing it in July. Her American publishers were uneasy about the title, feeling that readers might confuse the cypress tree with the island of Cyprus. Agatha suggested as an alternative ‘I Am Slain’, from the same song in Twelfth Night that gave her the first title; in the end the Americans kept the original. Agatha later told Francis Wyndham, in an interview for the Sunday Times in 1966, that she subsequently realised that Sad Cypress was spoilt by having Poirot in it. By the end of the ’thirties she was occasionally irritated because Poirot was such a favourite of her readers and publishers – particularly of the American magazine publishers at Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, which took most of her work and paid high prices. ‘Poirot is rather insufferable,’ she wrote to Cork. ‘Most public men are who have lived too long. But none of them like retiring! So I am afraid Poirot won’t either – certainly not while he is my chief source of income.’ For, surprising though it may seem (in 1938, for instance, her earnings from Collins alone came to nearly £2,500), Agatha was again anxious about money. Her worries, moreover, had not come singly.