I do not mind death as long it is reasonably peaceful and satisfying death.
Lord Mountbatten (BBC interview, 1979)
In 1974, Agatha Christie made her final public appearance at the London premiere of Murder on the Orient Express, attended by Queen Elizabeth, one of many members of the royal family said to be avid readers of Christie. The author was escorted to the glittering cinematic event by Lord Louis Mountbatten (1900-1979). The revered royal figure, who was the great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the great uncle of the present heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, had acted as an emissary on behalf of his son-in-law, film producer Lord John Brabourne (1924-2005), and gently persuaded the reluctant author to give her consent to the project. It was well known that Agatha Christie had little faith in the film industry’s ability to do her stories justice and she had previously only enjoyed Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution (1957). The decision to give the go-ahead to Lord Brabourne and his co-producer Richard Goodwin heralded a whole new era of lavish Agatha Christie films brought to the screen. The first in the series, starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, was nominated for six Oscars, and in a star-studded cast Ingrid Bergman received the award for Best Supporting Actress.
Following the death of Poirot’s creator in 1976, Peter Ustinov took over the role of the detective for a further three films: Death on the Nile (1978), Evil Under the Sun (1981) and Appointment with Death (1987). During this period, violent deaths were suffered by Mountbatten and members of the Brabourne family who were victims of a despicable act of terrorism committed in Ireland by the Provisional IRA.
In August 1979, the Mountbatten-Brabourne family took their annual one-month holiday at a castle in the fishing village of Mullaghmore, Donegal. On Monday 27 August, the party boarded the Shadow V for a relaxing cruise along the coast, unaware that Provo Thomas McMahon had sneaked aboard the boat and planted a remote-controlled bomb. The terrorist then stationed himself on a cliff overlooking the harbour and waited for his chance to detonate the charge and cause carnage. Shortly before noon the craft set off to inspect lobster pots that Lord Mountbatten had placed earlier. Suddenly, a terrific explosion blew the boat into smithereens and all seven occupants were hurled into the sea. Local boatmen rushed to the spot and fished out Lord Mountbatten, whose legs had been almost torn off by the blast, and he died within minutes. Doctors worked throughout the night in a vain attempt to save the life of Lord Brabourne’s mother, Dowager Lady Brabourne, while her grandson Nicholas and an Ulster boat boy Paul Maxwell also died, having been found floating face down in the bloodstained water. The only survivors to recover from their serious injuries were Lord Brabourne, his wife Patricia, and their son, Nicholas’s identical twin brother, Timothy.
The IRA triumphantly issued a sickening statement claiming credit for the outrage: ‘The IRA claim responsibility for the execution of Lord Mountbatten. This operation is one of the discriminate ways we can bring to the attention of the English people the continuing occupation of our country’. Three hours after the murder, Thomas McMahon was arrested at a roadblock. Evidence of nitro-glycerine and flakes of paint from Shadow V were found on the killer’s clothing, and he was convicted of the assassination and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was released in 1998 as part of the Ulster agreement that restored peace to the province.
In his entry for Who’s Who, Lord Mounbatten conceded, ‘I am the most conceited man I know’. Another proud boast of his concerned his involvement in coming up with the key element for the ending used in Agatha Christie’s masterpiece, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), an idea that had also been mooted by her brother-in-law James Watts. In response to Lord Mountbatten’s advice, Agatha replied that ‘the idea was most ingenious’ and, in response to his request many years later, she sent a copy of the book with a handwritten inscription: ‘To Lord Mountbatten in grateful remembrance of a letter he wrote to me forty-five years ago which contained the suggestion which I subsequently used in a book called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’. Her solution to the mystery is the most controversial of the brilliant surprise endings for which she became famous and it instantly elevated her to the front rank of writers. Although the book was Agatha Christie’s first big seller, some readers and reviewers felt aggrieved that her choice of the narrator as the murderer had broken the unwritten rules of crime fiction. These ‘rules’ were addressed two years later when the Detection Club was formed by writers to maintain high standards about the use of evidence. Agatha Christie became a member of the association whose authority came too late to prevent the clever and perfectly acceptable deception, for whom the author generously acknowledged the role of her co-conspirator Lord Mountbatten: ‘Thank you for presenting me with a first-class idea – no one else ever has’.