Looking back, Agatha wrote in her Autobiography, she realised she had produced ‘an incredible amount of stuff’ during the War years. She believed that this was because there were few social distractions and because, until 1945, she had not realised that the expenditure of time and increasingly precious energy was financially pointless, so much of any proceeds going in tax. This explanation was incomplete. As we have seen, Agatha was extremely busy throughout the War, reading a great many new books as well as old favourites and the works of history and classical literature prescribed by Max. She went often to the theatre and the cinema and saw a good deal of her friends. Old friends – Archie Whitburn was one – whom she met in the street were carried off for lunch or dinner and to the theatre and, as Max’s colleagues passed through London, she cooked them a meal. It was as if she wrote because she was busy, fully charged, anxious about Max and Rosalind, about her lack of a home, and about money.
Cork was right; after the War people were worn out, as much by prolonged uncertainty as by sustained living with danger and other privations. It took time to shake off that deep exhaustion and return to normal life. In any case, Britain’s circumstances were greatly changed. After the immediate euphoria at the end of the War, there was a long struggle not only to rebuild the fabric of the country but to reshape the framework of society. Though this was exciting, it required people to adjust – to new systems of education, health and welfare, new plans for running the transport and energy industries, new arrangements for planning the growth of towns and protecting the countryside. Regulations and restrictions did not fall away when war ended; they continued in the shape of licences, forms, controls. There were still queues, and rationing. The rest of the nineteen-forties were in some ways hopeful and promising; they were also dreary years, of bread shortages, fuel shortages, drab utility furniture, unexciting clothes. The nervous stimulus of war was lacking now. It was a long, chilly, depressing haul.
Max and Agatha did not rush off to the United States to see what could be done to Towards Zero. There had been quite enough travelling. They gradually settled into Greenway, adding to the trees and shrubs and supervising a not very prosperous market garden that had started life during the war. Max spent most of 1946 writing up the account of his pre-War digs and consulting archaeological colleagues about possible academic posts. He and Agatha began to tidy up the house and garden at Winterbrook and to review their London arrangements, leaving Lawn Road and moving back into Cresswell Place. Here too there was plenty of clearing up to do. Life in some ways seemed empty. Carlo, who was now suffering from severe arthritis, eventually moved to Eastbourne to be with her sister Mary. Madge, in her late sixties, came only rarely to London. Her son Jack could, however, be relied upon for entertainment in London and at Greenway. He had a house in Chester Street, from which he would come to Chelsea to amuse his aunt. Their tastes in books and painting were similar, for Jack liked Dickens, Compton Mackenzie and ‘All Primitives’, and he too was fond of music, though he preferred Bach to Wagner. Like Agatha, Jack was interested in theology (he never passed a church without visiting it and knew a great deal about different religions) and he shared her pleasure in simple, carefully prepared food. He always carried with him oil, vinegar, fresh pepper and salt for mixing a salad, which he then submitted to his chauffeur for appraisal, a habit that was known to head waiters all over England, from the Savoy (where legend held that he once took his entire regiment) to the railway restaurant car in which he travelled down from Cheshire.
Many of Agatha’s older friends lived quietly in the country; some of her contemporaries were dead. Younger people she and Max knew from the pre-War expeditions to Syria were scattered, while friends from the diplomatic community were taking up new posts. It would be some time before the Mallowans’ circle came together again, and friends and relations would once more flock regularly to Greenway in summer and autumn. For the time being, Agatha’s life was filled less with friends than with books, for her work was as much in demand after the War as during it. Editions multiplied, reprints were issued as fast as paper could be obtained. Agatha herself, however, was war-weary.
She wrote little in 1946. A birthday ode for Rosalind, composed in August, was rueful:
‘In my youth’, said the crone, ‘I had elegant legs
And my eyes were a beautiful blue,
I could play parlour games and go off with the prize,
I was far more accomplished than you!’
‘You are old,’ said her child, ‘And really I doubt
Whether all that you say can be true.
I admit that you still got away with the crimes,
But come now, what else can you do?’
There was no doubt that Agatha could ‘still get away with the crimes’. Since the daring Murder of Roger Ackroyd, all her books had sold well and each new one was keenly expected. It is true that in the nineteen-thirties and forties the public had a particularly ravenous appetite for detective fiction, notably the successful ‘classic’ detective story, an intellectual puzzle, set by the author for the reader, who was given a series of clues, some of them misleading. The triumphant practitioner of the technique of writing crime novels was the author who could artfully trick the reader. It was a specialised category of fiction; publishers, booksellers and advertisers on the one hand and the public on the other contrived to keep it so, the former by issuing detective stories under distinctive imprints, awarding special trophies (generally in the form of offensive weapons) for spectacular popular successes, and by emphasising their authors’ cunning and ingenuity, and the latter by their hunger for new forms of murder and detection and unwearying fondness for certain sleuths. In October 1944 the American critic Edmund Wilson wrote a celebrated article in which he sought to unravel the spell of the detective story, a type of fiction which, he confessed, he had outgrown. It had, he believed, ‘borne all its finest fruits by the end of the nineteenth century’; ingenious puzzles, like those offered in Agatha’s work, did no more than mildly entertain and astonish. Wilson was, in fact, scathing about Agatha’s style, which he found so mawkish and banal that it was ‘literally impossible to read’. She must have come across this piece, if not in 1944, for she was interested in what critics thought of detective fiction in general and her own in particular, but she did not mention Wilson’s views to her family or friends. Any dismay would have been assuaged by her steady sales and her quiet confidence in her own craftsmanship; she might have been consoled, too, by Wilson’s admission that he had read only Death Comes as the End, which may have disconcerted him.
There are several explanations for the popularity of detective fiction in the ’thirties and ’forties: that, in the pre-War years, a now largely literate public wanted books that were exciting, self-contained and not too demanding; that detective stories sold well from increasingly well-stocked railway bookstalls; that, between the wars, people looked to crime fiction for escape from a time of turmoil and economic depression, or, in a rival theory, that the public turned to the ordered world of the mystery novel to calm their nerves after the 1914–18 War and (assuming foresight) before the 1939–45 War.
In fact, however, Britain in the ’thirties was for many, particularly in London and the South, an agreeable place to live. Real incomes were rising (for those who had a job), more people had motor cars and wirelesses and were buying their own homes. Life was in many ways placid and, if the newspapers reported foreign crises, they told you what to think of them. This climate perhaps explains the detective novel’s vogue. The classic mystery story was small-scale, meticulously worked, domestic, an alternative to the smooth tenor of everyday life, yet actually not all that different from it. Insular, parochial, and, apart from the initial drama of the crime itself, reasonable – its nature suited the attitudes of the time. Perhaps the explanation for its popularity was even more simple: every class in every society needs some form of ‘soap opera’, popular sagas whose central themes – love, death, jealousy, quests, greed, conflict between good and evil – are highly coloured representations of its own preoccupations. As for the ’forties during the War existence was precarious and people wanted distraction from the chaos around them; they looked for cheap, portable, absorbing fiction to read on interminable, tedious journeys and during the long periods of waiting that irregularly punctuate a war. The crime novel provided a haven; some of its characters were old friends. It was trivial enough to be easily picked up and put down, as circumstances required. No intellectual gear-change was needed, for the prose was not difficult and the chief requirement that the reader be alert, a condition in which the majority of the population spent all the wartime years. Plots varied but the moral was predictable: good would triumph and order be restored. Readers might not only lead a variety of other lives vicariously but also hope that these held comforting lessons for their own.
In the ’thirties and ’forties there was a cluster of authors who were especially adept at the technique of the classic detective story. Their work was snatched up and they wrote prolifically. Some, like Agatha, continued to write for decades. Many belonged to that loosely organised group, the Detection Club, founded at Anthony Berkeley’s suggestion in the late nineteen-twenties. Agatha was a member, though with her dignity and acute sense of the ridiculous she must have found it hard to keep a straight face as the members went through ‘the Ceremonies’ Dorothy Sayers had devised – ‘Eric the Skull’, for instance, borne in on a black cushion, his eyes aglow with batteries. Agatha submitted to her own initiation – she took the oath on Poison – in a spirit of fun, as thirty years later she agreed to be the Club’s President, on condition that a Co-President be appointed to make speeches and orchestrate proceedings. Only with an effort did she talk shop with other detective story writers at the Club’s occasional dinners, held before the War in restaurants and after it at rooms in Kingly Street, behind Liberty in Regent Street, which Miss Sayers’s connection with Church authorities allowed them to use for a token rent. More to Agatha’s taste were the spring and summer dinners, at the Garrick Club and the Café Royal, to which members might bring guests and where a speaker – a senior policeman, a judge, and so on – would address these students and exponents of his profession. A succession of Agatha’s friends were entertained at these agreeably eccentric parties.
She was, furthermore, insufficiently reverent towards the Detection Club’s rules. (They can be found in Ronald Knox’s Detective Decalogue.) These set out the conventions which the classic detective story should observe: concealing a vital clue from the reader was abhorred, for example, as was immoderate use of such devices as conspiracies, trap-doors, and ‘Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science’. The fuss over The Murder of Roger Ackroyd indicated that these principles had even taken popular root. After the experience of Behind the Screen, The Scoop, and The Floating Admiral, Agatha also declined a part in any more collaborative ventures. It was encouraging though, even for someone who was not a joiner or an organiser, to think of herself as one of a recognised school of writers, one of those, like John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Freeman Wills Crofts, Craig Rice, Elizabeth Daly and the Lockridges, in whose fictions Agatha herself became engrossed. In one important respect, however, Agatha’s work differed from that of her colleagues. She produced a succession of dazzlingly cunning plots, whose elucidation was the sole purpose of each book. Unlike other detective story writers, she was not stylistically ambitious; her prose is pedestrian but undistracting. She did not seek to capture the reader’s sympathy for one character or another, nor to enlist support for views and theories of her own. Her characters, and the places and circumstances in which they find themselves, are sketches only; she does not make a point of displaying familiarity with various types of people and their world. She herself is as inconspicuous as can be. Some see these characteristics as flaws and criticise Agatha’s work for the flatness of her writing and its lack of emotional and topographical colour. Her admirers regard this as part of her strength; they defend her work because it appeals to pure reason. Agatha Christie’s fascination, as Robert Barnard described it in his useful appreciation, A Talent to Deceive, lies not in appeasing the reader’s appetite for sensation or emotion but in satisfying curiosity.
Her books do not make the blood run quicker. As Barnard points out, they present not a succession of incidents leading to a climax but an accumulation of evidence from which deductions may eventually be made. Each has a pattern of ‘progressive mystification and progressive enlightenment’, with each revelation and the complications it apparently causes falling, at the end, into an ordered and convincing whole. This approach underlies the popularity of Agatha’s work. Her detective stories exploit universal doubts, hopes and fears, offered as intellectual exercises. It is an addictive mixture. By the mid-’forties Agatha’s readers knew they could rely on her to produce it; while her plots were surprising, her instinct was faultless.
Publishers recognised this by offering high prices for her work. In 1945, for instance, an American film producer proposed £5,000 for the rights to Love from a Stranger and Good Housekeeping magazine $15,000 for a 30,000 to 40,000 word short story. This Week offered $2,000 for 4,000 words, while Frederick Dannay, who admittedly paid contributors to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine rates considerably higher than many similar competing magazines, concluded a contract to reprint Agatha’s short stories for the next two years, at $150 a story, paying for twelve in advance. The Mutual Network arranged a radio series in America, starring Hercule Poirot; ‘£65 a week,’ Cork told Agatha, ‘but dizzy heights are possible.’ At home, ninepenny paperback editions of Agatha’s books and cheap editions, at between two-and-sixpence and four-and-sixpence, moved as steadily after the War as during it, while eight-and-sixpenny editions would sell from 17,000 to 20,000 copies in the first year of publication. Max’s mother constantly urged Agatha to turn her hand to something ‘serious’ (by which her daughter-in-law thought she meant ‘the biography of some world-famous figure’). Agatha stuck to her last. She recognised where her skills lay and, as she admitted in preparing her article for Russia, her pre-eminence. In settling on ‘the four leading detective-story writers’, she told Max, ‘the MOI [Ministry of Information] has suggested Dorothy Sayers but I … think … she’s now an entirely different type of writer – religious plays and so on.… Rather invidious to single out 4. To set aside modesty – Myself (!!) Margery Allingham? Dickson Carr? And then who? Bentley? Ngaio Marsh? Anthony Berkeley? For Russia you must have someone who is writing now – in full spate.’
Though Agatha herself wrote little in the autumn of 1945 and early 1946, her name was everywhere. Hidden Horizon opened in Wimbledon in March and in New York, as Murder on the Nile for a brief run, in September. Come, Tell Me How You Live appeared and The Hollow, not without argument about ‘blurbs’ (Agatha preferred to write her own) and covers: ‘I do not like a naturalistic jacket of an actual incident or scene from the book and I don’t like human figures on a jacket.’ Collins capitulated. Billy provided tickets for Wimbledon (‘almost like peace, more than anything since the war …’, Agatha wrote ecstatically) and, even harder to obtain, tennis balls, sent by registered post to Devonshire.
Agatha did eventually embark on two new pieces of writing. The ‘psychological stimulus’ Cork thought she needed came in the spring of 1947, ironically from the BBC. Queen Mary, the mother of King George VI, was asked by the Corporation to suggest how her eightieth birthday might be celebrated on the wireless. It appeared that Queen Mary was a particular admirer of Agatha’s work and the BBC accordingly sounded out Cork on the telephone and then invited Agatha to write a half-hour radio play to be broadcast on May 26th. As Cork told Agatha in mid-May: ‘… all the items on the programme have been officially chosen by her.’ There was a stately minuet to make arrangements about the fee, which Agatha wished to take the form of a donation to the Southport Infirmary Children’s Toys Fund. The Corporation sent a cheque for a hundred guineas to the Fund, Cork refused commission, and everyone was pleased. The play that resulted from these negotiations was Three Blind Mice, which Agatha based on an idea she had first formulated in 1945, when she read of the death of a young boy, Daniel O’Neill, placed with his small brother in the care of foster-parents, who had maltreated both children. The tragedy had moved her deeply. Three Blind Mice next became a short story, bought by Cosmopolitan in the United States after great competition, and the title story in a collection published in America in 1950. It was to enjoy another incarnation, as The Mousetrap, two years later.
Agatha’s other preoccupation in 1946 was a novel. At the beginning of 1945, when Cork reported that ‘Mary Westmacott’ was to be published by Rinehart in the United States, she had told him she was eager for ‘MW to do some work again – but when?!!’ Like Absent in the Spring, it germinated not from a list of characters or a plot, but from a quotation. In her exercise book – after a note about the best source (Clément Faugier, she thought) of Crème des Marrons – Agatha quoted lines from various poems: by Laurence Binyon, Cecil Day Lewis, W.J. Turner and, especially, T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets suggested a number of possible titles. Her choice fell on The Rose and the Yew Tree, from an image in Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, a poem she greatly liked. She was interested in the interweaving of religion and philosophy in Eliot’s work, its elevation of the ordinary and perception of the spiritual. She also admired his theatrical technique: Murder in the Cathedral, she wrote to Max in 1943, was ‘a revelation in the effect of human voices, in tone and rhythm, on the musical senses.’ Eliot, for his part, was said (in a memoir by W.T. Levy) to have observed that Agatha Christie was his favourite detective-story writer, with ‘the best-constructed plots’. (He recommended The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.) It is appropriate that the character who unravels the mysteries in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion should have been named ‘Agatha’.
Cork liked The Rose and the Yew Tree, but it gave him a difficult time. Agatha’s story is narrated by a convalescent, disabled not in the War but, to his embarrassment, in a car smash. It is set in the Cornish constituency during the 1945 election campaign, where the local Conservative Committee has chosen as its candidate not ‘an old-fashioned chap’ but a self-made man, who holds the Victoria Cross and, though ‘slick’, ‘knows all the answers’. Like her narrator, Agatha’s understanding of politics was that of a shrewd observer only, and she distilled in this novel what she had learned from Madge and her nephew Jack, later a Conservative M.P. and formerly a Councillor in Manchester. Agatha’s editor at Collins found some of her treatment shaky, her description of a Party Whist Drive, for instance, since during an election campaign ‘Social activities are suspended.’ More woundingly, Billy Collins told Agatha: ‘We felt that it was perhaps rather unfortunate having a story round the last General Election with such an undesirable person as a candidate at a time like this.’ She replied coldly: ‘I don’t feel the new Westmacott is quite your cup of tea. Perhaps we’d better stick to crime?’ To Cork she was more blunt: ‘Do let M.W. be published by someone else. Collins never have appreciated the lady – and have you ever seen anything more idiotic than Billy Collins’s letter – missing the whole point of the book. Definitely they shall not have my “ewe lamb” so will you try it on someone else – Michael Joseph?’ (In the same week Collins had also foolishly sent the proposed wrapper for The Labours of Hercules, ‘the naked Poirot’ adding to Agatha’s wrath.) Cork duly sent The Rose and the Yew Tree to Michael Joseph, and then to Heinemann, who thought ‘Billy is crackers’ and took it for publication in 1948. Rinehart and Co. were again the American publishers.
There were other irritations. At the end of 1946 Agatha had delivered a new Hercule Poirot story, Taken at the Flood. The American magazines were cool, Ober explaining to Cork that they felt Poirot was ‘rather dragged in’ and detracted from the story’s reality. It was, he said, becoming difficult to sell ‘a mystery story solved by one of the stock detectives. This kind of story will continue to sell well in book form, but the Ngaio Marsh type of murder mystery is I think what editors are going to be looking for.’ He suggested that serialisation might be possible if Agatha ‘felt like rewriting and leaving out Poirot’ but ‘of course, I want you to use your judgment about mentioning this to Mrs Mallowan.’ Cork tactfully refrained from referring to Ngaio Marsh (another of his clients) and persuaded Agatha to change her text. To everyone’s fury, however, Ober reported in December that the American editor who had asked to buy the non-Poirot version had now let him down. The Toronto Star bought There is a Tide (the American title), with Poirot, but Agatha was annoyed: ‘Really it was a beast to alter.…’
To crown her fury, Agatha discovered that, in one of the American reviews of Absent in the Spring, ‘Mary Westmacott’s’ identity was revealed. Cork had asked the Library of Congress to catalogue Agatha’s work as ‘M.W.’ under her pseudonym only but ‘some journalistic sleuth’, he believed, had discovered the secret through the Copyright Registration Office. One embarrassment seemed to follow another, also upsetting Agatha: ‘An “interview” in the News Review,’ she wrote miserably to Cork. ‘Quite dreadful – saying I had red hair – my father was an American stockbroker and I was one of the richest women in the world!… Can they do these things?’
Agatha had ’flu in the New Year. She had been in Wales with Rosalind, helping to nurse Mathew through bronchitis. ‘How difficult everything is nowadays with no servants – it’s all the chores and the cooking to be done – I really wonder how Rosalind stands up to it all.’ After her own illness Agatha felt ‘sunk in listless depression’, until suddenly, at the end of January, ‘the clouds lifted’. Cork nonetheless wisely encouraged her not to try to work, ordering at her request theatre tickets for Born Yesterday and The Man from the Ministry, and, in June, Annie Get Your Gun. He helped arrange a trip to Switzerland and the South of France in the early spring, Agatha’s first foreign expedition since the outbreak of war, five days in Lugano and five in Cannes. (Cap Martin, her preference, had been badly damaged by Italian shelling.) Obtaining foreign exchange was complicated but Cork managed it. He flattered Agatha over the success of a BBC television broadcast of Three Blind Mice, arranged for the story called ‘Star over Bethlehem’ to be printed in an American magazine at Christmas, suggested that Sullivan might be able to take Alibi on an American tour. There were frequent delicious lunches and friendly bets on the outcome of the Derby.
Cork and Ober between them also protected Agatha on one particular matter, the objections of many readers to ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Catholic’ allusions in her work. Sensitive readers were certainly struck by Agatha’s blunt and often uncomplimentary references to her Jewish characters. (There are in fact no disparaging allusions to Catholics.) The triviality of these remarks made them no less hurtful. The Mysterious Mr Quin, for example, had a passage about ‘men of Hebraic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses, wearing flamboyant jewellery’, and Peril at End House a condescending reference to ‘the long-nosed Mr Lazarus’, an art dealer whom another character described as ‘a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one’. It was only after the War, however, that Agatha’s publishers, and then just her American publishers, began to receive protesting letters: ‘It is a downright shame,’ Dodd, Mead was told, ‘to see an institution such as yours, which could be used in the interests of a permanent peace, publish such trash.’ In 1947 the Anti-Defamation League sent an official objection to Dodd, Mead, who forwarded it to Ober. ‘This letter is typical,’ he told Cork, ‘of a number that have come in recently.’ He proposed not that Agatha should see the letters but that Cork might warn her to omit any references to Jews and Catholics in future books, since ‘these are two very delicate subjects over here.’ An unidentified reference in The Hollow had been found especially offensive. Cork handled this awkward commission with his usual tact. He did not write to Agatha about it, though he may have spoken to her, but with Ober ensured that in subsequent books the offending remarks disappeared. Indeed, Dodd, Mead was given permission to change such references. Ober also arranged that Dodd, Mead should cease to forward correspondence from the public directly to Agatha; he had recently discovered that since 1938 they had continued to send letters to Ashfield.
Agatha mirrored in her books the attitudes of her class and generation, ‘the usual tedious British anti-Semitism’, as the historian Jacques Barzun called it in A Catalogue of Crime, prejudices that were also displayed in, for example, the work of John Buchan and M.R. James. Agatha’s unsophisticated generalisations about Jews and Jewishness are a reminder that she did not share the inhibitions of a generation sensitised by the sufferings of the Jewish people since 1933, though the picture she gave of the Levinnes in Giant’s Bread shows that she could also write delicately and sympathetically about the prejudices a Jewish family encountered among upper-class English people. The phrases with which Agatha offended were painful not because they were vicious but because they seemed flippant; when she eventually met truly fanatical anti-Semitism she was, like many of her compatriots, incredulous. She described in her Autobiography her first encounter with National Socialism, in 1933, when the Director of Antiquities in Baghdad, a fierce Nazi, astounded her with a passionate outburst: ‘his face changed in an extraordinary way that I had never noticed on anyone’s face before.’
For there was much that Agatha did not notice, unless it occurred in surroundings and among people she knew. Though she travelled and was familiar with classical and European art, literature and music, she was insular. If she lived in a place, she could understand its people and their culture; she could sympathise with any sort of friends, whatever their races, ages, religions, habits and proclivities. She was at ease with what was basic and local; she was neither cosmopolitan nor intellectually sophisticated. Her horizons were limited and her perspective that of an ordinary, upper-class Edwardian Englishwoman. Yet her understanding was instinctive and her appeal universal, so that in her work she transcended her insularity. It is, for example, remarkable that an amateur adaptation of Ten Little Niggers (a story both macabre and, to some, offensively titled) should have been devised and performed by a group of prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp, who found, as a survivor later told Agatha, that it sustained them. It is, moreover, equally interesting that Agatha, though touched by this story, found nothing unusual about it.
Max was the scholar and the cosmopolitan. He loved complexity and academic intrigue. Now in his early forties, he was already greatly respected for his pre-war work in Syria, for his conscientiously written accounts of the excavations and for his encouragement of the young. In the autumn of 1947 his search for a post bore fruit, when he was appointed to the first Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in the University of London. The Institute had come officially into being in 1934, eventually moving into a commodious home in Regent’s Park, with, to Max’s delight, a rotunda. During the course of the War it had been eased into the University, which thereafter took full responsibility for it. Max’s new post required him to lecture and to teach. It also gave him access to a source of funds to use for travel and his own research, so, after all, the Mallowans could continue to dig. Agatha immediately began to think of ways in which she might justifiably return to the Near East. The amount of sterling British travellers might take abroad was strictly limited but Cork saw no difficulty in obtaining a business allowance for her, were she to base a book on her travels. ‘After all,’ he assured her, ‘a book by you with a Mesopotamian setting would bring in to the Treasury numbers of dollars!’ As a precaution, Ober sounded out Collier’s and Dodd, Mead, who sent letters expressing enthusiasm for The House in Baghdad, as Agatha called her new project.
There were two tasks to perform before the Mallowans left. One was moving from Cresswell Place, which they let, to 48 Swan Court, an apartment in a block off the King’s Road in Chelsea, which Mrs North helped Agatha find. The other was Max’s inaugural lecture. Agatha herself put the last touches to a collection, Witness for the Prosecution, and a new detective novel, Crooked House. There was a final admonition to Billy about Taken at the Flood: ‘Do NOT put any representation of my poor Hercule on the jacket – confine yourself to a stormy (or sunlit) sea or synthetic ship etc.’ Agatha and Max then joyfully departed.
They spent almost five months in Baghdad, negotiating with the authorities as to where Max might resume digging. Living first at the Hotel Zia (‘Even the rioting students,’ Agatha wrote to Cork, ‘conduce to greater laziness’), they later moved to a house which, like many of Agatha’s houses, overlooked the river. There, in a sumptuous dressing-gown, Agatha sat on the balcony each morning. She read ‘thousands of American detective stories … None of mine about except one very peculiar edition of And Then There Were None, with pictures of all the film scenes – Rather Fun.’ During her absence Cork, Ober and her financial advisers wrestled with the demands of the American and British Revenue authorities. Reinheimer believed he had reached a settlement on the American side; ‘Not one I’m proud of,’ Cork had reported, ‘but the lawyers seem to think it is the best that can be obtained amicably.’ Agatha, it appeared, might at last receive the balance of the income frozen in the United States; the problem would now be with the British tax authorities who, unfamiliar with the details of this history, would see these earnings suddenly arrive. ‘It admits,’ Cork added, gloomily, ‘of many permutations in view of varying rates of tax and exchange during the period.…’
All Agatha’s affairs had been promptly and legally dealt with at the time. The difficulty was that they were extremely complicated, her earnings subject to several different sets of laws and regulations and spread over many years. Furthermore, the more frequently Agatha’s advisers were asked to produce information, the more muddled things became, because the sets of accounts and figures, each with different corrections and amendments, multiplied, went astray, contradicted one another and altogether caused confusion. One authority wanted figures presented one way, another differently. Letters and cables crossed. Errors crept in and were perpetuated. Ober, advised by his lawyers, now made it a practice to consult Cork by cable or letter for any offer for any work by Agatha Christie, when he received it from anywhere in the world. ‘We have not yet reached finality,’ Cork wrote to Agatha. ‘Obviously the best thing to do is to put it out of your mind until someone can produce the ultimate figure.’
When Agatha returned from Baghdad she found these matters far from settled, and it was not easy to follow Cork’s advice. Her mood in the summer of 1948 varied between anxiety and reckless pleasure in each moment. ‘Oh, it is so beautiful, I shall go on enjoying myself and then have a slap-up bankruptcy!!!’ Cork feared it might come to that. At the end of September, he was writing to Ober in much the same terms as years before: ‘there seems to be little likelihood of Mrs Mallowan avoiding bankruptcy. It seems almost incredible to me that she should be liable for tax on income that arose in a foreign country and which could not be transmitted to her because of the action of the government of that country – but apparently this is how our law stands.’ He told her accountant, Dickson, that these uncertainties were affecting her work: ‘She has not written one word for over 12 months – a disastrous state of affairs for her, and incidentally pretty serious for us, as she is by far our most remunerative client.’ Cork’s letter was designed to frighten Dickson into working even more vigorously on Agatha’s behalf, but there was some basis for his anxiety.
Agatha had indeed failed to write a word all year, despite a short trip to Paris with Max in the autumn to see her French publisher and boost her spirits. Nor had she been moved to begin another book by flattering letters from Pocket Books in America, announcing the award of a ‘Golden Gertrude’, ‘a replica of our Kangaroo mascot … the equivalent of an Oscar in the film industry’, marking the sale of over five million copies of her work in their editions – an accolade, declared Cork, who cleared ‘Gertie’ through Customs, of no commercial value but ‘for merit, in the same class as a Lonsdale belt’. Fortunately her publisher had two detective stories and The Rose and the Yew Tree for 1948, and in America there was the collection, Witness for the Prosecution. The Rose and the Yew Tree was warmly received and, despite the earlier revelation, ‘Mary Westmacott’s’ identity still baffled reviewers: ‘… promises extremely well’, said Books of Today. Agatha’s earlier work was also now greatly sought after. Penguin wanted back titles and Cork was obliged to advertise for old editions, as his own stock and Collins’s had been destroyed in the Blitz. Ober hunted up file copies and Rosalind was persuaded to lend Murder at Hazelmoor, though she emphasised to Cork that he should take the greatest care: ‘My mother has always impressed on me not to let my American copies out of the house.’
Requests were made with increasing frequency for permission to adapt Agatha’s work for the stage, television and the wireless. The most persistent applicant was an American impresario and actor, who had played Poirot in a radio series and now wanted to televise his exploits. Agatha refused her blessing; he then pressed Ober to write Cork a highly technological letter about the growth of television viewing in the United States, asking whether Mrs Mallowan’s hesitation might stem from her wish to wait for the completion of ‘the cross-country coaxial cable’, which would be hungry for material and would drive up the price – not a likely explanation in Agatha’s case. The playwright Ben Hecht inquired whether he might adapt for the stage Murder in the Calais Coach, as the American edition of Murder on the Orient Express was called. Cork, however, told Ober that Agatha had not abandoned the idea that she might someday adapt this book herself, but ‘not as a conventional “whodunnit”,’ since she saw it ‘starting in New York at the time of the kidnapping’. (Much on the lines of the film that eventually appeared in 1974.) She was more sympathetic to an approach by Barbara Toy and Moie Charles, who ran a small theatre company called Farndale, to which Bertie Meyer had brought Ten Little Niggers during the War. At the end of 1948 they asked Agatha whether she would dramatise another book for them and, to their surprise, she agreed immediately. They chose The Murder at the Vicarage. ‘Sex and religion always goes down well,’ Miss Toy told Agatha. They completed a stage version in 1949.
In the New Year she started writing prolifically again. In January she and Max left England for Baghdad and at the beginning of February they started to dig at the site he had chosen, Nimrud. Layard had first explored this lovely place exactly a century before – a great green mound, grazed by sheep, full of wild flowers in spring. Two miles to the west, the Tigris flowed quickly between steep banks; northwards was downland; to the south a fertile plain and to the east the mountains of Iran, glowing softly purple. Agatha and Max set about finding a house – ‘much nicer than an Hotel’, she wrote to Cork, ‘a very peaceful and happy life’. They were assisted by Dr Mahmud al Amin from the Iraq Antiquities Department at the University of Baghdad, who kept the records in Arabic, and Robert Hamilton, a surveyor and classicist. All four lived in a wing of a Sheikh’s mud-brick house and were fed on their cook’s delicious curries, cakes and excellent mayonnaise. Agatha was ready for work. She asked Cork whether he could find her a decent typewriter but, even before he had arranged for Ober to send the ‘very latest noiseless Remington’ from the United States, she had equipped herself with a small Swiss machine ‘very neat – nothing much has come out of it yet but a few ideas are floating around in my elderly brain!’
The ideas were mostly about Miss Marple. The previous summer Agatha had mentioned to Cork that she was thinking on these lines and he encouraged her, perhaps believing that the way to ease her back into writing might be by means of one of her favourite characters, but definitely not via the ‘insufferable Poirot’. ‘Short Marples’, she now wrote in her exercise book, listing a string of ideas that included ‘Committee Crime (Poisoned glass of water?)’; ‘Infra-red Photograph’, a favourite idea since she had taken up photography; ‘Cryptogram in letter’ and ‘Extra course at dinner. Cream? Shrimps?’ There was an old friend: ‘Legless man. Tall? Short?’ She also noted more of Miss Marple’s ‘special knowledge’: ‘Maid’s day out – never Monday’; ‘Reasons for “Apple Sauce”, Ham and Spinach.…’A look at Three Blind Mice, the collection that appeared in 1950, shows what happened to some of these conceits.
She also began work on a full-length detective story, A Murder Is Announced. Agatha had already begun to think about the details of the plot the previous autumn and had conducted preliminary research with the help of neighbours at Wallingford, the Severns. ‘I want you to act it for me,’ she told old Mrs Severn and her two grown-up sons one evening, sending them outside the drawing-room while she moved the furniture, and then instructing them to come in with a torch. ‘Now what have you seen?’ she asked everyone in the room. The test, in fact, Guy Severn perceived when the book was published, was of what they had failed to see.
Cork, meanwhile, was overseeing the arrangements for publication of Crooked House, which John Bull was to serialise before Collins brought it out in May. The American market was stickier. Ober had to tell Cork that plans to serialise the book on the air had fallen through, since ‘the National Broadcasting Company in this country has become very moral.’ The network’s censorship department had ruled that Crooked House was unsuitable for broadcasting into the public’s homes on Sunday nights, for in the late ’forties and ’fifties America was passing through one of its periodic righteous phases. ‘It seems,’ Ober continued, ‘that the public has been complaining in droves about the number of murders being committed over the air.…’
Crooked House was published shortly after Agatha and Max returned to England in May 1949. But there was an immediate distraction, the appraisal of Barbara Toy’s work on The Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Toy had made few changes but Agatha thought more should be done. On the whole, she told Cork, ‘a very good job has been made of it. It still has the rather too cosy novelish atmosphere of “let’s sit down and wonder whodunnit” – but I never could see how that could be avoided in this particular book.’ She did, however, like the idea of ‘a kind of duel’ between Miss Marple and Lawrence at the end of the play. ‘Excellent,’ but, she added, showing confidence that her audience would share her own horticultural and criminological expertise: ‘Everyone knows the symptoms of weedkiller far too well – death after hours or days of sickness, vomiting etc. Suggest cyanide. Miss M always has it handy for wasps’ nest (right time of year).’ Or else ‘concentrated solution of nicotine, dilute form of which is used for green fly etc.’ On the other hand, she added, knowing the popular affection for villainous old ladies, ‘more fun to be got out of Miss M saying it was really Providential she had cyanide so handy! Audience might easily think she was mad and had done it.’
Production of The Murder at the Vicarage was delayed because Bertie Meyer was busy touring Ten Little Niggers for the Army of Occupation in Germany. Rehearsals eventually began in the summer, with Agatha attending to make suggestions, while the director, Irene Hentschel, whipped the play into shape. It opened in October in Northampton. Barbara Toy drove Agatha there from London and helped her up the stairs of the hotel – awkward for Agatha, whose ankles now tended to swell. The play was a success, ‘not at all bad,’ Cork told Agatha, ‘that they should have played to over 1200 in the same week as Bertram Mills circus.’ It was a happy time for Agatha, at ease with the cast at the backstage party, the only person not drinking alcohol but intoxicated, as always, by the theatre.
Agatha was also full of pleasure at Rosalind’s remarriage. In October Agatha and Max had received a hurried letter to say the wedding would take place in a day or two’s time, in London. Rosalind and her future husband, Anthony Hicks, would come up on the train but there would be no time for lunch, since they had to race back to Pwllywrach to feed the dogs. If Agatha and Max cared to come, they were welcome, but there was no need. Agatha was vastly amused – and delighted, for she liked Anthony, who had met Rosalind in Somerset. He was a scholarly man, knowledgeable about all sorts of things, trained as a barrister and in Oriental studies, full of curiosity about people and the world, interested in gardens, religions, unusual butterflies, rare postage stamps, fond, like Agatha, of an occasional bet, able to keep his future mother-in-law amused, and, like her, passionately keen on travel.
Agatha’s spirits were high. She began to consider dramatising a story she had first published in 1933, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, after an approach from America about the film rights. A New Yorker cartoon, published in mid-May, had amused her (Ober sent the engraver’s proof) and she had taken in her stride an accident-prone BBC broadcast in August: ‘Just as well I didn’t see 10 Little Niggers on the Television! I hear General MacArthur, after being stabbed, got up and strolled away with his hands in his pockets, quite unaware he was “in view”. I should have been livid.’ She now followed Cork’s recommendation to put aside thoughts of her financial anxieties. ‘Magnificent letter from Reinheimer,’ she told him. ‘I don’t understand a word of it! Anyway, what the Hell is what I now feel about income tax.’ Cork was now dealing with yet another Inspector from the Revenue, the Torquay office having temporarily retreated. This time a letter came from the City, and it appeared that the whole saga would begin again, since this latest raiding party was clearly ignorant of all that had gone before. ‘I understand,’ the letter ended (although this may have been bureaucratic irony), ‘that Agatha Christie is to all intents and purposes a pen name, and it would appear that the tax district of the husband is the one that is required.’ Agatha, after eating Billy Collins’s Christmas present of pheasant that ‘melted in the mouth – quite unlike my butcher’s tough productions’, escaped with Max to Nimrud.