In August 1961 UNESCO reported that Agatha was now the world’s best-selling author writing in the English language, her books being sold in 102 countries (twice as many as the runner-up, Graham Greene). From the letters that flowed unremittingly into the offices of Hughes Massie and Harold Ober Associates, it was easy to believe. Admirers were disappointed at not being received by Agatha, at her failure to sustain a lengthy correspondence, to edit their own manuscripts or send hints on writing. They did not realise not only that she was busy with her own life and work but also that such requests now totalled dozens by the week. An African who had chosen Agatha as his mother proposed to come to claim her, an Italian enquired where one might obtain Lapsang Souchong. A French magazine asked for articles on ‘les grands sujets féminins’ (‘Nothing I’d hate more!’); there were requests for help in saving the temples of Nubia (she sent a cheque) and with litigation over a sun tan lotion mentioned in Death in the Air. ‘It was just a joke people made, not a reference to a specific preparation!’ she told Cork desperately, begging him to ‘Deal with enclosed by saying I am abroad!’
Secluded at Winterbrook, Agatha pressed on with the book Collins were to publish in 1961, the bizarre story in which she commemorated the pharmacist who first gave her practical training. It took its title from the Book of Revelation: ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse; and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him.’ The Pale Horse combined two ideas. One, with the working title of ‘The Thallium Mystery’, she thought would ‘start somehow with a list of names … all of them dead.’ The other reintroduced Agatha’s earlier thoughts about ‘Voodoo etc., White Cocks, Arsenic? Childish stuff – work on the mind and what can the law do to you? Love Potions and Death Potions – the aphrodisiac and the cup of poison. Nowadays we know better – Suggestion.’
Mrs Oliver appeared in The Pale Horse, with Mrs Dane Calthrop and her husband, who had last been seen in The Moving Finger. Agatha was now finding it difficult to keep track of her creations. ‘Was he a rector or a vicar?’ she asked Cork. ‘And was there a hyphen?’
The Pale Horse was delivered in January 1961 before Agatha and Max departed once more for Persia. She also left behind the proofs of Double Sin, a collection of eight stories for publication in America, including ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’. Arrangements were made to reprint the early Mary Westmacott novels in the United States. Agatha was still sad that her cover had been blown – ‘it spoilt my fun,’ she told Cork – but she now agreed that her American publishers might indicate on the book-jackets that ‘Mary Westmacott’ and she were the same. Mary Westmacott’s name, however, was to be given greater prominence. Collins were enthusiastic about The Pale Horse, and seized on its publication as the moment to launch a special campaign, to be related, in Cork’s words, to the fact that Agatha was now ‘out of the suspense writer class’, and could be regarded as ‘a considerable novelist exciting world-wide interest’.
Cork wondered whether Agatha would give the theatre a rest. Her passion for the stage, however, was unsated. In the summer of 1961 she drafted the first acts of two different plays. ‘Don’t much like either of them,’ she informed Cork sunnily, ‘but hope for better things soon.’ These were the beginnings of The Patient and Afternoon at the Seaside, to which Agatha added The Rats, and, after Peter Saunders had read the scripts, a further seventeen pages of dialogue, so that Rule of Three, as the combined sequence was entitled, was long enough to fill an evening at the theatre. To keep abreast of current trends, she took herself to see Samuel Beckett’s plays, and found them difficult; less earnestly, she went often to the opera. The ‘Cork Intelligence Service’ was also asked how one might secure a box at Covent Garden and obtain tickets for the Bayreuth Festival; to her delight Agatha had discovered that Mathew, now eighteen, was also a Wagner enthusiast. ‘As you will perceive,’ she told Cork, ‘I am devoting a lot of attention to enjoying myself.’
The key to Agatha’s work in the nineteen-forties was books and in the ’fifties, plays. In the ‘sixties it was visual – films and paintings, though not, as yet, the television she so loathed. Early in 1960 Cork had concluded a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for the film rights to some of the Miss Marple stories. Agatha had given way reluctantly: ‘I hope there won’t be “broken hearts”,’ she warned Cork. ‘What one loses in cash one may gain in absence of worry. But don’t break your heart over it, Edmund dear.’ In the summer of 1961 the first film was released, an adaptation of The 4.50 From Paddington, now called Murder, She Said. After a preliminary glimpse Agatha had feared that the story would be ‘mixed up’ and in September gave Cork her reactions after seeing the film in Torquay. ‘My spies (daily helps!) duly tracked it down,’ she reported, ‘at the Regal at Torquay and we went en famille this afternoon. Frankly, it’s pretty poor! I thought so that evening in London, but I couldn’t say so before Margaret Rutherford. The truth is there’s no sustained interest – it’s muddling with a lot of brothers turning up in the middle, and no kind of suspense, no feeling of things happening.’ She had wondered from the start why MGM had chosen that particular book, a difficult one, she thought. Even so, she added, ‘I do think it a bad script (I could have made it more exciting).’ She also thought it badly produced and the photography poor. She went on, ‘As my eldest nephew said to me in a sad voice as we left, “It wasn’t very exciting, was it?” and I really couldn’t have agreed with him more. None of us thought much of it.’ ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ Agatha concluded, ‘I have been spared a good deal by keeping aloof from films etc. Ten Little Niggers was bad. Spider’s Web moderate. Only Witness was good.’ But, she assured Cork in a postscript, ‘Don’t think I’m upset by Murder, She Said. I’m not! It’s more or less what I expected all along.’
To Margaret Rutherford Agatha dedicated the novel she planned in the summer of 1961, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. Agatha first conceived this as a story of ‘Miss M – Unravelling’, and her initial working title was ‘Development Murder’, for she liked to speculate about the tastes and habits of the owners of the new houses ‘developed’ on the estates she saw on country drives around Oxfordshire and Berkshire. At the centre of the plot was a film star, Marina Gregg, and Agatha’s notes for the book show that she saw it first as a series of scenes:
M buys Bantry’s old home. Mrs B lives in lodge – rather like le Rougetels’ cottage. Good garden … Heather Beasley (?) – in a ‘development’ house. Miss M – out walking – falls down – Heather picks her up. Cup of tea. Talk etc. Miss M and Mrs B. Tea at Lodge.… The Do – Grounds graciously opened (for Nurses?) Or house? Encounter between M & H – husband there.… her eyes … staring – over Heather’s head – as though she saw something terrible – at what?
The plot was inspired by Agatha’s reflections on a mother’s feelings for a child born mentally or physically afflicted. Shortly before the book was to be published, the attention of Americans was drawn by the case of Gene Tierney, the actress, and a similar tragedy involving the Dutch Royal family had recently been given a great deal of publicity in Britain. Dorothy Olding and Collins’s editor, who had guessed the key to Agatha’s plot after reading only a chapter or two, recommended that she alter her draft, out of delicacy as much as the need to keep the reader guessing. This Agatha neatly did, not without a qualm, confessing to Cork that this time she felt she was cheating her readers: ‘Not quite fair – but you were all against me!’
The next novel done, in the autumn of 1962 Agatha went with Max on a three-month trip to Persia and Kashmir. Max had recovered from a slight stroke in the summer; Cork told Dorothy Olding that, though Agatha was playing it down, he looked twice his age. Max’s life was now less strenuous, since in 1962 he had left the University of London for a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, where he was not obliged to teach or to lecture. There he could concentrate on research and writing, principally the preparation of Nimrud and Its Remains, and on promoting the interests of his protégés. From Oxford it was still easy for him to go to London. He had become a Trustee of the British Museum and of the British Academy and he was a busy and conspiratorial member of academies and institutes. Rather than taking the train, he drove himself furiously along the A40 to London, maintaining that his car was ‘much heavier than anything I might barge into’. It was a miracle that he and Agatha had only a single major accident, skidding on icy roads as they drove to Wales one winter. Agatha was bruised and shaken; Max found it ‘all actually rather exciting … wasn’t it?’ Sometimes Max’s secretaries and research assistants would be persuaded to drive him but this was almost as terrifying. He urged them to perform U-turns where it was forbidden and shouted ‘Why so slow?’ when they did less than seventy in the thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The only quarrels he and Agatha ever conducted in the presence of others were about motoring: what the route should be, how long it would take and whether Max might drive more prudently.
While Max worked in college, Agatha wrote, or cultivated the garden at Winterbrook, taking special pride in her white peonies. Max had a good eye for fine things; he and Agatha made a collection of silver, a piece for every year from 1700 to 1800. (‘Wrong year,’ Max would say regretfully, putting aside a marginally interesting piece brought forward in a shop.) Agatha’s days were serene, her companion Treacle, a Manchester terrier obtained from Rosalind. The house was beginning to need a good deal of repair – the plumbing in one bathroom did not connect, but ‘it will last my time,’ observed Agatha. She still ensured that its running was orderly. Winterbrook was managed with pre-War formality but Agatha’s nephews and godchildren, however unkempt, were always welcomed to ample meals prepared by the housekeeper, Mrs Belson. Agatha did not, for instance, seem to turn a hair when a godson hitch-hiked up to the door with an equally scruffy-looking friend and bravely asked for luncheon.
Agatha was generous to children – and to adults, for she loved giving: benefactions to her small cluster of charities; unexpected presents (a guitar, a camera, opera glasses, a fishing rod, a thirty-six-piece dinner set for a wedding present, baby clothes – Agatha, like Miss Marple, sensibly sent the second size – glass bottles, copies of Pinter’s plays and Jane Austen’s novels, pieces of Lalique glass produced from a canvas shopping bag). She gave presents to the children around her, imaginative gifts to her relations (a squash court for Mathew), treasures to old friends (spring bulbs, powder puffs, glasses, real sponges). She was lavish with food and drink: a dealer in an Oxford antique shop was asked for the very largest Chinese porcelain bowl and, finally satisfying Agatha with a particularly precious piece, was told it was for holding rice. Agatha had, of course, to take care not to give to all who applied to her, for many did. If once she were to depart from her own list of beneficiaries, her disbursements would never end. Cork screened most requests and Agatha herself was sufficiently level-headed to realise that some of the ‘long-lost cousins’ who wrote to her were self-appointed. (In any case none of her elderly cousins was lost and any needy ones were helped.)
The transfer of Max’s work to Oxford did not mean that he and Agatha ceased to go to London. They continued to entertain their friends at the Detection Club and at Boodles, where Agatha liked the veal dishes and Boodles’ Orange Fool. There was also theatre and the opera. In 1962 Agatha went further in search of Wagner. Cork had obtained tickets for the Bayreuth Festival in late August and Thomas Cook made arrangements for Agatha and Max to progress gently through Germany. ‘By the way,’ Agatha told Cork, ‘tourist class by air is quite alright as they are only short hops. It’s only if I am going to be all night – or for about 24 hours – that I need enough room for my behind and my elbows.’ There they joined forces with Mathew who, Agatha insisted, studied the scores with her each day. A considerate hotel proprietor protected her from hordes of admirers by arranging that each morning, for one hour only, books might be delivered for autograph. ‘I got a great ovation in Bayreuth,’ Agatha told Cork, with mixed feelings: ‘I got a few privileges, anyway, so didn’t mind as much as I usually do!’
On her return Agatha began a Hollywood venture of her own. This was not the first time she had dipped a toe into the turbulent waters of work for film studios; in 1956 she had agreed to prepare a screenplay of Spider’s Web. Her suggestions for its treatment had been guided by the tone and direction of the plot: ‘Commence with vast spider’s web gradually dissolving into Clarissa studying a spider’s web in country house.… Angle could be (A) Shots of antique shop and house – all leading up from that, or: (B) All leading up from Clarissa. Depends on whether sinister aspect or romantic aspect is to be stressed. Personally think B is better.’ Her method was the same in 1962 when MGM asked her for a screenplay of Bleak House, her favourite Dickens novel. She began, as she had opened The Unexpected Guest, with Dickens’s description of fog, and with the scene in Chancery, where the origins of the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce were now lost in the mists of the past. That case and the people whose lives were shaped by it, she told Cork, represented the essence of the film. Through it, she emphasised, ran ‘a thriller or detective streak that Dickens nearly always had’. She found it difficult to reduce his densely worked plot: ‘Two thirds of the book I have already thrown out, and have selected for the chuck those people and incidents which, delightful in themselves, might just as well have figured in any other of Dickens’ works.… I quite realise,’ she told Cork, ‘that perhaps a third (or more!) of the present script will have to go.’ Her supposition was correct. MGM’s only concern was its length, a 270-page draft that would play for four hours. They asked Agatha to boil it down, and she therefore conferred with Larry Bachmann, the MGM producer ultimately responsible for adapting her own work. His team, however, was ruthless and eventually the project was abandoned. In a sad appendix to her notes, added in 1970, she closed the saga: ‘Two portions of it were completed and sent – they wished to complete it themselves. I did not like their ideas – I wished to end it as forming a circle to the beginning – Jarndyce v. Jarndyce. End of famous case – and fog coming over London. From my point of view it was a good film.’
Agatha still seemed in the best of health, although in 1962 her back began to give trouble. Her hearing and sight were dimming and walking was more difficult; the gardens at Greenway had several strategically placed wrought-iron and wooden seats. Even now she enjoyed bathing in the sea, and, for a woman of seventy-two, produced a prodigious amount of work. New projects excited her. For example, Mathew brought to Greenway John Wells, a former master at Eton, and Alexis Weissenberg, the pianist, to discuss the adaptation of Hickory, Dickory Dock as a musical, with John Dankworth to orchestrate the score, Peter Sellers to play Poirot and Sean Kenny to design the sets. A title was produced by John Wells – Death Beat – and some songs written. Though the project came to nothing, Agatha enjoyed these preliminaries. Then there was another idea – for a play she provisionally entitled ‘Ten Little Niggers 2’, a reunion dinner of those whose lives were touched by the earlier horrors. This proposal, perhaps fortunately, also petered out. One initiative, however, was a triumph. For the first and last time in her life, Agatha made a speech. At the end of 1962 The Mousetrap celebrated its tenth anniversary and, at another huge party at the Savoy, Agatha’s friend the actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, presented her with a copy of the original script, bound in gold. ‘Don’t let anyone ever say to you that nothing exciting ever happens to you when you are old,’ Agatha replied, as proud, surprised and shyly determined as a child.
Mathew had now left Eton, after staying an extra year to captain the cricket team. Summers of practice at Greenway had borne fruit, for he was now a considerable cricketer, and in 1961 and 1962 Agatha, who liked the game, had proudly watched him play in the annual match against Harrow at Lord’s. In 1962, when he was captain, they celebrated by taking the team to The Mousetrap, where she beamed at the way in which her play amused and tantalised even these worldly young men. There was, however, a shadow over that first match, for on that day Jack Watts died. He had never married (to the question ‘What are your favourite qualities in woman?’ in the ‘Confessions’, he had answered, half-truthfully, ‘Don’t know any well enough’) and he left Mathew much of his property and Agatha his house in London, with the furniture that had belonged to him and his mother.
Agatha’s own generation was vanishing too but Greenway was always full in summer. As well as Mathew’s friends, there were John and Peter Mallowan, and the children of neighbours and old friends who came to stay. Agatha presided, saying little but listening benevolently. She was most at ease with small children; more than one guest, missing her at tea-time, found her at the top of the house playing Animal Snap and telling stories. Those children who stayed up for supper, however, were expected to take part in conversation, which for some was an ordeal, since the regular cycle of guests who came for a weekend or a week at Greenway included scholars and diplomats who were terrified of children and who therefore needed encouraging with tactful small talk. This lively household, and the books, ideas and anecdotes that filled it, stimulated Agatha not into chat but, as always, into trying new books and plays. There, even at seventy-two, she remained adventurous.
One venture was her play Rule of Three, tried out in Aberdeen at the end of 1962. Cork sent bulletins to Persepolis, which Agatha was enjoying with Max (‘cool nights, hot sun, glorious ruins …’) Of the plays that made up the trilogy, two had pleased the audience, Afternoon at the Seaside being, he reported, ‘an absolute riot’ and The Rats needing only some tightening to convey its ‘claustrophobic sense of horror’. The Patient, the last of the three, presented more serious difficulties. It concerned the identification of the would-be murderer of a woman, pushed from a balcony and now heavily bandaged, completely paralysed and unable to speak (a sort of ‘Dressmaker’s Doll’). The play ended with a policeman telling the murderer to emerge from behind a screen and at that point, as the curtain fell, Agatha’s recorded voice was heard asking the audience whom they believed the murderer to be. This device was a flop. ‘By and large,’ Cork informed Agatha: ‘it looks as if the customers are there for easy entertainment, and are inclined to resent the riddle.…’ Backstage conferences persuaded Peter Saunders to try another version, with a recorded voice directing the audience’s attention to two clues and thus the indisputable solution. This, too, failed, and after much cabling Agatha agreed that simplicity was preferable; the murderer appeared.
Agatha came home to poor reviews of Rule of Three, which played in London for only two months, but to the better news that in the early months of 1963 The Mirror Crack’d had been a best seller. So stimulated, she told Cork, ‘I have written the first chapter of Agatha Christie’s next masterpiece.’ This was to be The Clocks. Her notes drew together two ideas now running strongly in her thoughts, awareness of the passage of time and of events being conveyed through pictures as much as words. Though doubtless stirred by old age and current experience, these perceptions were not new. In 1930, writing to Max about The Mysterious Universe, Agatha had wondered whether ‘time might be like a cinema film run backwards, so that to us life has no sequence or meaning, because until we see to the beginning we can’t see.…’In other letters she had explored the theory, fashionable in the early ‘fifties, that the narrative conventions of the stage and cinema interpreted ‘reality’ in a way quite different from literary methods.
‘Speculation – only,’ Agatha now put in her notebook: ‘A. Clocks represent a time that corresponds to houses in crescent. B. Braille in some way comes into it (Secret Service angle?) Documents taken out … photographed during lunch hour etc. Their hiding place is a stippled picture. Dots really are raised and can be felt.’ Her variants reflected other preoccupations: the way in which simply effected physical transformations can mislead, the ease with which stimulation of one sense distracts attention from signals intended for another. Her notes alluded both to events that touched her directly, like the translation of her work into Braille, and the larger world: there are references to the espionage case concerning William Vassall, convicted the previous autumn. The dedication of The Clocks, finished in May 1963, commemorated less serious pursuits; the book was for Mario Galloti, the patron at the Caprice, ‘with happy memories of delicious food’.
The remainder of 1963 was bedevilled by an argument with MGM. Larry Bachmann had bravely proposed that Agatha complete and adapt for the screen another Dickens novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a commission she firmly declined. Next, MGM proposed to make a screenplay of Murder on the Orient Express. Agatha vehemently objected. That book, she told Cork, ‘took a lot of careful planning and technique and to have it possibly transformed into a rollicking farce with Miss Marple injected into it and probably acting as the engine driver, though great fun, no doubt, would be somewhat harmful to my reputation!’
Her fears had been increased by MGM’s recently released adaptation of After the Funeral, in which Poirot had been replaced by Miss Marple, who was then shown joining a riding academy in order to investigate the death of an elderly recluse. Agatha had found Murder at the Gallop, as the film was called, ‘incredibly silly’ and complained to Bachmann about ‘these travesties!’ Unpalatable though Murder, She Said had been, she recognised that MGM had the right to adapt fairly freely, and that the first film had at least ‘satisfied basic requirements’ as to setting and plot. Margaret Rutherford, while ‘not much like Miss Marple’, gave an enjoyable performance; ‘Whether I liked it or not,’ she declared bravely, ‘was my headache!’ But with Murder at the Gallop, she considered that MGM had gone too far. Not only was the book ‘a Poirot one’ and Margaret Rutherford ludicrously unlike Miss Marple, but MGM’s alterations had caused great difficulty about acknowledgements to the original story, let alone the publishers’ publicity campaign for further editions of After the Funeral. Agatha was dreading, she confessed, what MGM would do in Murder Most Foul. (‘Can you imagine a triter title?’) to be adapted from Mrs McGinty’s Dead, one of her favourite books.
In the meantime Agatha sought refuge in drafting A Caribbean Mystery, transporting Miss Marple to the fictitious island of St Honoré. Her island was a composite; some features were remembered from Barbados, where she had noticed an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair, on whom she built the character of Mr Rafiel, who was to figure again in Nemesis. A book about the birds and flowers of Tobago provided further ideas, and recollections of people she had seen on another holiday gave the essence of the plot: ‘Rhodes, lovely siren – her husband divorced. Dark, cynical. Little brown mouse, nice little woman, wife. Plain. Stupid husband. Dark husband really has liaison with mouse.… Or a quartet. Friends. One pair appears very devoted. One day wife confides they never speak to each other in private. Husband (to girl) says wonderful life together (which is lying?).’ Agatha’s notes now had more reminders to herself (‘look up datura poisoning … And re-read Cretan Bull’) and she had begun, as the old do, to remember the distant past more clearly than yesterday. Major Palgrave, for instance, resembled Belcher, and their ‘stories … picked up in the course of travel’ were not unalike. Provisionally the book was called ‘Shadow in Sunlight’; Agatha had tired of the struggle to spell ‘Caribbean’.
Max, too, had been writing steadily and in December 1963 Nimrud and Its Remains was finished. He had severe ’flu in the winter but Agatha managed to carry him off to Upper Egypt in the New Year, sending Cork a merry letter in February: ‘I’m sitting in the sun feeling placid as a sacred cow.’ It was a deceptively calm beginning to a difficult year.
1964 began with a thundering row with MGM. Murder Most Foul turned out to be as appalling as Agatha had feared, with Poirot again transformed into Miss Marple, this time a member of a jury. Mrs McGinty, originally a charwoman, had become an actress and a blackmailer. Cork warned Collins, who were considering how Agatha’s books might be marketed to take advantage of the associated publicity, that she believed the films a source of great danger ‘in imposing their image of Marple and Poirot on a faithful public’. Billy Collins, embarrassed at having first introduced Bachmann to Agatha, agreed not to use any stills on the wrappers of soft-cover editions of her books, nor to mention the connection beyond the mere fact that a film had been made. An ‘Agatha Christie Fortnight’ was planned for early May, when some ten million paperbacks would be put into the shops. Although this would coincide with the release of Murder Most Foul, Collins promised to do their best to ignore the coincidence.
Worse was to come. Agatha learnt of MGM’s plans for another film, even now being made. This was Murder Ahoy!, in which Miss Marple was to enquire into murder and blackmail on a training ship in the Royal Navy. It was not based on one of Agatha’s own plots and, if anything, this outraged her more than the previous distortions. Larry Bachmann tried to mollify her; ‘Soft words butter no parsnips,’ she answered spiritedly. Rosalind, discouraged and upset, felt the family and Cork had let her mother down by concluding the MGM deal. She wrote a strong letter to Cork. Agatha registered extreme disapproval; she was particularly upset because ‘all this Murder Ahoy business’ had been sprung upon her, having been advanced hitherto only as a suggestion. Next she learnt that shooting would begin in a fortnight. Despite her protests, MGM insisted on proceeding. To Agatha this violated her integrity as an author. She explained that ‘to have one’s characters incorporated in somebody else’s film seems to me monstrous and highly unethical’.
MGM’s next plan horrified Agatha – and Rosalind – still more. This was to be an adaptation of The ABC Murders, in which, according to advance announcements, it seemed Poirot’s character was to be vastly changed. ‘Do MGM really think this kind of publicity is good for a film?’ Agatha asked Cork. ‘They needn’t have [Poirot]. I’d far rather they didn’t – and if their director hates him and everything about him, why not cut him out and make up one of their own?… One thing I will not have – H.P. turned into some sort of gorilla or private eye – and a lot of violence and brutality. This is a matter of principle with me. I loathe the tough kind of thriller and I think it has done untold harm. Possibly nothing like that is contemplated. But one never knows. They do so adore it in the USA. Anyway, if people have liked Poirot for about forty years as an ego-centric creep they would probably prefer him to go on that way.’
MGM were shaken by Cork’s reports. They cancelled a contract with Zero Mostel, whom they had intended to play Poirot, and Agatha was assured that the screenplay would be rewritten. The contract with MGM was terminated. (The studio maintained that the focus of their interests had changed.) George Pollock, who had directed their three ‘Miss Marple’ films, did produce Ten Little Indians for Seven Arts Films in 1965, but otherwise that was that. In 1967, when other approaches were made, Agatha told Cork emphatically: ‘Don’t talk to me about film rights!! It always makes my blood boil.… My own feeling remains the same. I have suffered enough!’
The end of 1964 brought some cheer. Collins asked whether they might publish ‘Star over Bethlehem’ the following Christmas, proposing illustrations and a jacket that, for once, Agatha found ‘exactly right’. During the winter and spring she concentrated on her next mystery, an adventure for Miss Marple based on such a skilfully and enjoyably plotted conceit that it suggested that Agatha took great pleasure in it. Her notes for At Bertram’s Hotel began, not with archetypal characters, but an archetypal place (for anthropologists. ‘an Ur-Hotel’): ‘Real bit of old England.… Edwardian comfort.…“Only get muffins at Bertrams”).’ It is a marvellous idea, another way of exploring the distinction between real and created worlds. The hotel is a fake, the respectable characters theatrical props. But are they any more artificial than their ‘real’ fellow-guests? ‘Film stars. Pop singers. Rich woman, ran away with Irish groom. Racing driver’, and, a stray from a draft made years before, ‘Frog-faced old Major’. Only Miss Marple moves easily between the two worlds, noticing discrepancies.
Agatha’s device also gently reproached those who criticised her books for being filled with ‘stock characters’, illustrating more directly than any of its predecessors that people in fact conceive of the world as being full of stock characters and that this can be exploited. So tidily, for instance, did Agatha’s portrait of the adolescent Elvira fit the notion of a rebellious, spoilt teenager, that Good Housekeeping, which was to serialise the story in America, asked her to amend the text so that the girl seemed ‘salvageable’. And so skilfully did Agatha describe the atmosphere and situation of ‘Bertram’s Hotel’ that for years readers believed they could identify it. Charles Osborne, for instance, has declared it ‘an open secret’ that the model was Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. In fact, in so far as there was a model, it was Fleming’s Hotel. Before the book was sent to Collins, Cork and Agatha between them ensured that any similarities were blurred. ‘I have altered Crescent Street to Square Street,’ Cork told Agatha, and together they changed the name of the manager from Capello, ‘too similar to Manetta, who is the real proprietor.…’
Putting the book together was not easy, with its intricate juggling between the real and the contrived. Agatha was now skating on the surface of actual memories – Miss Marple at the Army and Navy Stores, the Canon’s amnesia, a train slowing in the night, a Morris teetering through the lanes. Like Canon Pennefather, she met herself. ‘I have never liked fog,’ says Miss Marple, as it comes down over London, obscuring the everyday – or apparently everyday – pattern of things, yet distorting and highlighting people and their surroundings so they are differently perceived. It was a remarkable book for an old lady of seventy-five (the age now given for Miss Marple) and the public immediately took to it. Published on November 15th, At Bertram’s Hotel had already sold 50,000 copies by the end of December.
Both Max and Agatha were particularly happy that Christmas. ‘Star over Bethlehem’ was well received and Agatha was actually pleased at the number of requests for copies to be autographed. Nimrud and Its Remains was ready for publication. They spent the holiday at Pwllywrach, enjoying a pile of books from Billy Collins. ‘I am beginning at the Low Brow end,’ wrote Agatha, ‘which is all I am fit for on my super diet of LOTS of Turkey, Plum Pudding, Preserved Fruits and Marrons Glacés!’ She sent Cork an additional Christmas present in 1965: ‘I hope you won’t blanch too much at what I am unloading upon you! And there will be a further instalment to come, but I feel I must get rid of this now.’ It was the dictated draft of part of her memoirs – ‘not a finished product, of course. Lots will have to be cut – but I don’t feel I have the discrimination at the moment. It is really the available material from which to choose.’ When Agatha’s Autobiography was eventually published, after her death, the introduction explained that she had written it at intervals between 1950 and 1965. In fact the story was more complicated. She certainly kept notes and occasional diaries during that time but, until the beginning of 1962, she had considered using these for nothing more than a short book or books – perhaps something about Nimrud, like Come, Tell Me How You Live, or a piece about her childhood. Many people wrote to Agatha asking for permission to write an ‘authorised life’; in February 1962, for instance, she asked Cork to answer one applicant by making it clear that: ‘I have no wish for a biography of myself or anyone else – I write books to be sold and I hope people will enjoy them but I think people should be interested in books and not their authors!’
As she aged, her attitude changed – but only slightly. Three years later, in February 1965, she told Cork: ‘Someone writes to me every week wanting to write my biography – and I turn them down as I am not dead yet – and none of these people know anything about me personally.’ Now, at the end of 1965, she said: ‘I am delighted that if I die, everything is ready for me to be first in the field with my own life, cutting the ground from under the feet of others!’ For she now recognised that there would be others. In an interview with Francis Wyndham, published in the Sunday Times in 1966, an autobiography was mentioned. It is not clear how the interview was pieced together from what was presumably a rambling conversation but Agatha is reported as saying of her own book: ‘If anybody writes about my life in tne future, I’d rather they got the facts right.’
The draft Cork received was stronger on impressions and reminiscence than on facts. ‘I have purposely made it informal,’ Agatha declared. The chronology followed that of her notes, beginning with ‘Ashfield’ and ‘Father and Mother, happy marriage’, taking the draft up to the chapter describing her parting from Archie. One notebook had a list of ‘questions to ask Cork’ and special points were noted: ‘Find out date Monty’s death,’ ‘Verify dates of publication – Mary Westmacott etc.,’ ‘Ask Edmund for dates of plays produced.’ Other thoughts were grouped under: ‘Some Items’: ‘A. Barter, Soup incident; “not part with information …”; B. Reading – Henty. Charlotte Yonge …; C. Prince of Wales laying Foundation stone of Naval College …; D. Boer War. Attitude. White Feathers …; E. Father’s Health …;F. New York … Ealing, My Grandmother’s Sundays.…’
Once Agatha had the outline, she dictated swiftly, vividly recalling her childhood and youth. The most difficult part, the events of 1926, came out halting and troubled, so indistinct that her dictation could not be transcribed. The rest, from ‘Second Spring’ to the end, was easy. It took longer than the week or two Agatha promised Cork, but at the end of 1966 it was ready. She was enthusiastic: ‘A suggestion, an appendix, possibly giving a short selection of fan letters, some of the funny ones, some of the touching ones etc. And perhaps the first story I wrote might be of interest.’ Now she said: ‘I shall break to Rosalind what I have been at! I imagine she has an idea.’ Agatha suggested that three copies of the autobiography should be typed, ‘one for you, one for Rosalind, one for me.… Then we could compare notes and see how you both react.’
Agatha may have been stirred into sending Cork her draft by an interview she had given at Swan Court in December 1965 to an American friend of Phelps Platt, the President of Dodd, Mead. Gordon Ramsey, who taught at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts, proposed to write not a biography but, according to Phelps Platt, an evaluation of Agatha’s work. That, she told Cork, ‘I leave to you. I am quite indifferent.’ Ramsey was true to his word, confining his remarks about Agatha’s own life to one short chapter in Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery, which Dodd, Mead published in 1967, and Collins in 1972. Agatha cooperated cheerfully at first, seeing Ramsey at Swan Court and Greenway, passing on to Cork innumerable detailed questions about her books. Eventually even she tired. She was particularly unhappy with enquiries about the two unpublished detective stories she had written during the War. ‘Why should anyone know in advance anything about a book that belongs to someone else?’ she asked, reminding Cork that not even Max or Rosalind knew the plots of the Marple and Poirot books. Ramsey respected her wishes by refraining from mentioning ‘the final Poirot and final Marple’, although Francis Wyndham’s article had in fact alluded to them both.
Agatha was testy partly because she was worn out. It had been a bad winter, ‘nothing but domestic worries and dashing up and down to Devon in icy weather and all our roof at Wallingford more or less slipping into the back yard. What bliss 3 good servants in a small house would be nowadays. No wonder Pakistanis pity English women so deeply – they enjoy Purdah and sit in rich jewels being waited on!’ A trip to Paris with Max in January 1966 was not a complete success. Always worried about money, Max had written to Cork complaining about the price of the room at the Ritz – £18 for bed and breakfast – and, compared with the Bristol, its ‘mauvais style’. In March Agatha had greatly enjoyed but had been tired by a party Collins gave to celebrate the completion of Nimrud. Now she became unusually difficult over invitations to mark the increasing success of her own books. When her publishers proposed a collected edition of her work, she reminded Cork of her earlier objections to their typeface (particularly The Clocks) and of her half-joking remarks to Billy about the superiority of the firm’s writing paper to that of their publications. ‘A distinguished collected edition I consider most desirable – but Collins must make print and paper good and definitely high class!!’ Though ironical, she was pleased, however, with ‘the butter about the literary recognition of my high quality work!!’ The overall title for the collection was, after much pondering, to be ‘The Greenway Edition’. Agatha disapproved: ‘Not as though I’d lived here all my life.’ Throughout the spring of 1966 there were discussions about presentation and in April Agatha lunched at Collins to discuss design. There was to be no photograph of her on the jacket but it would carry a small distinguishing device, a sign of three interlinked fish. It resembled a design Agatha had seen in Baalbek, on her expeditions to the bazaars in the 1930s. Some believed it was a scribble Agatha herself made when she was preoccupied but this was not so. Max was the one who drew, always pots, some of which decorate Agatha’s plotting books. Her play was with words, trifles of codes and word games, parodies and foolish verses. The person who did idly draw three intertwined fish was a victim in ‘The House of Lurking Death’, in Partners in Crime. Agatha reproduced the device for the Greenway Edition and was pleased when Phelps Platt gave her a silver brooch in that pattern.
During the summer Agatha relaxed. She and Max enjoyed five days in Belgium in June, inspecting a museum named after Hercule Poirot, and in late August they went to Switzerland. Mathew came to stay at Greenway with a group of Oxford friends. He had just graduated, after reading first history and then politics, philosophy and economics at New College, Max’s old college, and now intended to try his hand at publishing. Allen Lane had offered him a job at Penguin. Agatha was reading science fiction. She kept up with new novels and plays, making an expedition to London to see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. After a slow start she began a new book in the autumn: ‘Back to work as promised!’ Third Girl was another complicated tissue of ideas. The underlying theme was, as so often in her work, similarity and change. At the centre of the story is a flat whose occupants advertise for a ‘third girl’ to share accommodation and expenses. Agatha’s notebooks have many drafts of stories about rooms where the decoration is altered or furniture moved either to make different places look the same or the same place look different, a device of particular relevance to blocks of service apartments which outwardly resemble each other while being distinctive within. Agatha’s recollections of her own nursery wallpaper, and the plots of ‘The Blue Geranium’, ‘The Third Floor Flat’, ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, are instances of her observing how easy it is to be disoriented by such alterations and thus in some way deceived.
Into Third Girl came, too, the idea of the deceptive picture, a reminder of Agatha’s preoccupation with hidden messages in paintings, fake ancestral portraits, galleries that are a front for some racket, pictures as misleading as her own portraits in words. Again Agatha emphasised how appearances may conceal as well as reveal: ‘Is boyfriend – a Mod? – like a Van Dyck – Brocade waistcoat – long glossy hair – is he the evil genius?’ her notes for Third Girl enquired. Is ‘an Ophelia, devoid of physical attraction’, a well-connected girl, fallen amongst bad company? One of her characters is skilful with cosmetics: another is interested in psychiatry, for personalities can also be altered. ‘Does Norman take Purple Hearts?’ Agatha wondered. Nor are neighbourhoods invariably what they seem. In parts of London where Agatha had lived for years smart streets now suddenly gave on to extraordinary avenues lined with ‘boutiques’ and ephemeral restaurants, thoroughfares crowded with oddly dressed people, some deliberately scruffy, others ultra-theatrical, all apparently aged about seventeen. Quiet squares became threatening at night, studios and alleys sinister. She drew on this as well. Far more terrifying than any journey Miss Marple makes in the altered London of ‘Bertram’s Hotel’ is Mrs Oliver’s fearful exploration of hallucinatory Chelsea.
‘You’re too old. Nobody told me you were old,’ blurts the child of the ’sixties who comes to Poirot for help in Third Girl. Like Poirot, Agatha was ageless to her admirers. Like him, she remained professionally competent. She could nonetheless be ruefully funny about her own generation. In the autumn of 1966, on a trip to America with Max, lecturing in various university cities, she encountered a good many gallant octogenarians about whom her letters and diaries were devastatingly objective. One evening at Princeton was especially memorable: ‘Everyone seemed very rich, evening dress and they put on white gloves to go out to the lecture and all nice but incredibly aged and ailing – the husbands were mostly ill in bed or in hospital and everyone I talked to was either stone deaf or paralytic, or blind, and a dear old lady hung over with deaf-aids, nearly blind and eighty-eight, accompanied us to the lecture and insisted on supporting me in case I fell down. “Of course I can’t see anything on the screen,” she explained, “only light and dark, and these hearing aids are no good, so I can’t hear anything – but I like to be in things. You’d better put on your coat again, my dear, or you’ll catch a chill.”’ ‘She was most valiant,’ Agatha recalled, ‘and went home after the reception still as bright and untired as ever – I was half dead by then – with shouting and my feet!!’
Dissuaded from lecturing herself to help with expenses, Agatha concentrated on two unshakeable resolutions. One was to visit Nathaniel Frary Miller’s grave in Greenwood Cemetery, a private ground, accessible only with a pass. Amazed, she described it to Cork: ‘looks like Luxor … granite monoliths everywhere’, her grandfather’s grave square black marble, six feet high and topped with an obelisk. Her other goal was more mundane, ‘to pick up some outsize knickers’, Cork warned Dorothy Olding, who had once located an enormous swimsuit for their favourite client. ‘She remembered your prowess and I am awfully afraid, sweetie, you are for it.’
Agatha’s obsessions figure in her notes from this trip. She was profoundly impressed by American central heating and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, by the paintings and sculpture adorning private houses as well as museums in Washington, and by the variety of people she and Max confronted: ‘Supermatriarch – femme formidable’; ‘an odious man in my opinion’, who said, ‘we always call you Aggie, you know, so you don’t mind if I call you Aggie. Cold look from me’; ‘a kind of palsy – rather pathetic – dripping with emotional hero-worship but kind …’; ‘a cultural prototype – a demon for work’; ‘a 60-year-old platinum blonde, running him.…’ She adored Vermont in the frosty fall, ‘lovely scenery and the best real butter I’ve tasted for years’. Some deficiencies had compensations: ‘a super-stopper train in the last stages of decrepitude – everyone had long ago given up cleaning the windows … and the lunch was practically uneatable. In fact I now think better of British Railways.’ Texas astounded her: ‘Austin very civilized as well as rich … a quite unexpectedly attractive city – from snow to warmth [they had been in Ohio] 80°F and almost a Near East Baghdad feeling of gardens and green trees and leisure … dinner at top of recent well-built skyscraper – very good food … Dallas … Monied – lectured to a very select audience. Much too select. Wonderful display of a loan exhibition of carpets, nobody knew a thing about them – or was interested – a dull lot.’
After Christmas in Wales, Agatha returned to chilly Winterbrook. There she wrote a book for which she had begun to make notes in America, Endless Night. It was set at Gypsy’s Acre, a strange and beautiful place which Agatha had first seen in Wales years before, when Nora Prichard, Rosalind’s mother-in-law, had told her the legend attached to it. Endless Night had few characters. Collins’s editor wondered whether this made the mystery too easy and Agatha was asked to enlarge the part played by one, Stanford Lloyd, trustee of a rich American girl who is the victim. Every character, however, is interesting, particularly Santonix, a young, dying architect, with a touch of ‘Vernon Lee’ from Giant’s Bread and of Max’s friend Esmé Howard. Another is Michael Rodgers, who dreams of Gypsy’s Acre and of the house Santonix will build there. Into Rodgers Agatha put something of her feeling about Richard III, described in her wartime letters to Max: ‘An outlaw.…’ Endless Night had some of the warmest notices Agatha ever received, with praise from friends whose discrimination she particularly respected – John Sparrow, for instance, the Warden of All Souls’, and Steven Runciman, the historian.
Stimulated by success, Agatha told Collins she intended to continue to produce a book a year and had already thought of the next one. It was drafted in the spring of 1967, after a trip she and Max made with Mortimer Wheeler to the British Institute in Persia. Max had received a knighthood in the New Year’s Honours List, so that Agatha’s latest change of name was now to ‘Lady Mallowan’. It somehow concealed ‘Agatha Christie’ even more effectively than ‘Mrs Mallowan’; there are many stories of visitors to Winterbrook or to All Souls’ being introduced to Sir Max’s unknown and unassuming wife. (Max knew, however, when Agatha should have the limelight. ‘I don’t think we’ve been introduced,’ he would say at the Detection Club dinners. ‘I’m Agatha’s husband.’) Stella Kirwan would now pencil ‘A.M.’ or ‘A.C.’ at the foot of letters, to remind Agatha in which capacity she should sign them.
The early months of 1967 were so busy that it was as well that the next book came easily. After Mathew’s marriage in May to Angela Maples, whose name had been appearing with increasing frequency in his grandmother’s Visitors’ Book, Agatha and Max went for a fortnight to Yugoslavia, to recall their own honeymoon and, more prosaically, to spend Agatha’s accumulated dinars. ‘I don’t really contemplate any Real Estate purchase,’ Agatha teased Cork, but ‘Ample funds’ means nothing. You must have some idea of whether I personally have got £50 or £100 – or £500 – or even (vain hope?) a thousand pounds at my disposal.’ They spent the summer at Greenway and part of the autumn in Spain. In July there had been treatment for her intermittent deafness: ‘Splendid time with Doctor,’ she told Cork, ‘Can hear clocks ticking again and most telephone voices!!!’ Max was less robust; in the autumn he had a second stroke while lecturing in Persia. He made little of it, simply taking a chair and delivering the rest of the lecture from there, but afterwards he was carried off to hospital. Visitors remembered that, though professing not to like detective stories, he loyally displayed Agatha’s books by his bedside. Max was flown home in late October. Agatha, who had remained at Wallingford, wrote to Cork: ‘I feel pretty awful but do believe it is a good thing he is not flying home in too much of a hurry. But waiting and wondering is Hell.’
She vented her anxiety on Collins in a series of furious letters to Billy about the proofs of her new book, By the Pricking of My Thumbs: ‘Ordinary post brought me an unmarked lot, five days later a special delivery at 7/6d arrived – typescript and half a marked lot … then yesterday the other half, also special delivery, at full expense …’ ‘Perhaps you would make it clear not to change the spelling of the author unless it is actually misspelt. If I prefer phantasy to fantasy (both words are in dictionary) I want it left alone.…’ ‘I don’t want sentences twisted round to be more grammatical when they are part of someone’s spoken conversation. Otherwise everyone’s conversation would sound exactly alike and not like ordinary variable human beings.…’
By the Pricking of My Thumbs pleased her, however, when it appeared at the end of 1968. The plot was another she had started to think out during the American tour, a story bringing together three ideas, of which one, death occurring at an old people’s home, had also crept into early drafts of Endless Night. Another was the ‘picture theme’: ‘Doctor Murray is suspicious of certain deaths in Sunny Ridge. Mrs W presented picture to her shortly beforehand – did she always do this to a prospective victim? Did she add a boat every time to picture? Signing her victim’s name underneath?’ Third was the ‘Child murder theme’: ‘mother of girl who had illegitimate baby and, perhaps, killed it’, ‘sister of Friendly Witch – a children’s nurse – confined – she used to steal children and sacrifice them’, ‘Lady Peel – barren – had had abortion – haunted by it?’ Mrs Perry, a sinister ‘Friendly Witch’, did come into By the Pricking of My Thumbs, as did the theme of child murder and child substitution. ‘Behind the Fireplace – Oct. 1967’, Agatha wrote firmly in her notebook, with the deceptively simple but sinister phrases: ‘It was your poor child, was it? No – I’d wondered – The same time every day. Behind the fireplace – at ten minutes past eleven exactly.’
Those four days Agatha spent in New England in 1966 also produced her next plot, a ‘forged will idea’, Hallowe’en Party, the novel she wrote in the spring of 1969, in which a child who boasts of having seen a murder is drowned in a tub while ducking for apples. The party itself resembles an American rather than an English celebration of Hallowe’en, though the setting of a children’s party had occurred to Agatha before. She was interested in children’s innocence and its exploitation, in their ability, as in N or M?, to perceive or reveal the truth, and, as in Crooked House and They Do It with Mirrors, children’s capacity for evil. She knew that their beauty might be deceptive, while the phenomenon of identical twins fuelled her preoccupation with disguise, resemblance and the nature of identity. Hallowe’en Party draws on several of these themes, reintroducing, too, the notion of transformation of landscape, for, as in Dead Man’s Folly and Endless Night, Agatha supplies a character who, given money and opportunity, will realise a vision of beauty. Like By the Pricking of My Thumbs and At Bertram’s Hotel, Hallowe’en Party is muddled, not least because Agatha sought to include too many ideas. For that reason, too, it is, like all her later work, remarkable.
By mid-1969 Agatha was being heavily bombarded with requests to appear here, pronounce there, contribute a story, a column or a witty saying elsewhere, in large part because producers, publishers, journalists and promoters of various kinds were making early preparation for her eightieth birthday. She did not look forward to the onslaught. ‘I suppose you and I will have to construct something about my “coming of age”,’ she wrote ruefully to Cork. ‘No television. Definitely.’ One producer assured her that television techniques had changed but she was immovable. ‘Entirely a personal idiosyncrasy,’ she explained. ‘I have to admit that I am not television-minded.… I find it useful – for watching race meetings, occasional news, misleading weather reports (in common with newspapers)! But not, to me, pleasurable.’ Her antipathy, she believed, might be because television was ‘possibly the wrong size for me. Some things are like that. Either photographs the size of postage stamps – or blown up to the most hideous proportions.’ Not only did Agatha ‘find it difficult to get any feeling of reality when watching that static box’, she was also filled with distaste for interviews that gave her ‘a feeling one would like to apologise for being present as an onlooker when anyone’s private and personal affairs are being questioned and probed – usually without any pretence of courtesy or good manners.…’ She admitted that she had enjoyed some television programmes: ‘The Forsyte Saga – and the thrill of seeing live men stumbling about on the moon – and the agony of fearing they will never get back.’ She herself, however, had no wish to appear or to write for it.
Some aspects of the forthcoming anniversary did please her, the commissioning of a photograph for the National Portrait Gallery, for instance, showing her with Max, and the china horses presented by her Danish publisher. She was delighted by Mathew’s decision to establish the Agatha Christie Trust for Children in 1969, and particularly fascinated by another exercise, also arranged by Mathew. Max had suggested she have her portrait painted and Mathew had approached Oskar Kokoschka. Though he no longer did much portraiture, Kokoschka, an admirer, agreed to paint Agatha, and they had eight two-hour sittings in London, at each of which he consumed half a bottle of whisky. Painter and sitter liked each other, not least because they found a common butt in a doctor who had recently observed that people aged eighty or more were useless and should be mercifully killed. Kokoschka’s portrait is interesting. It is of a very old woman, whom Agatha gradually grew to resemble. As in his other portraits, the sitter’s features resemble Kokoschka’s own, especially the square shape of the back of the head. Yet it caught Agatha’s appearance and bearing, indicating, for instance, her habit of tapping her fingers (now afflicted with psoriasis) on the arms of her chair. ‘It’s very frightening,’ was her reaction, when Kokoschka allowed her to see it. ‘At any rate,’ she told Cork, ‘I look like someone.’ Majestic, she triumphed over Hollywood: ‘He was a great admirer of my nose – so big and important. I see all the film stars are having their noses reduced in size. Anyway I’ll stick to my Roman glory.’ Mallowans, Kokoschkas and Prichards celebrated with luncheon at Boodle’s, the painter cabling Agatha beforehand with his requirements: three kippers and a pint of Guinness.