Chapter 3
Favourite Stories and ‘The Man Who Knew’
‘Looking back over the past, I become increasingly sure of one thing. My tastes have remained fundamentally the same.’
What were Agatha Christie’s own personal favourites among the many stories she wrote? In February 1972, in reply to a Japanese fan, she listed, with brief comments, her favourite books. But she makes an important point when she writes that her list of favourites would ‘vary from time to time, as every now and then I re-read an early book . . . and then I alter my opinion, sometimes thinking that it is much better than I thought it was – or nor as good as I had thought’. Although the choices are numbered it is not clear if they are in order of preference; she adds brief comments and reiterates her earlier point when she heads the list:
At the moment my own list would possibly be:
And Then There Were None – ‘a difficult technique which was a challenge . . .’
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – ‘a general favourite . . .’
A Murder is Announced – ‘all the characters interesting . . .’
Murder on the Orient Express – ‘. . . it was a new idea for a plot.’
The Thirteen Problems – ‘a good series of short stories.’
Towards Zero – ‘. . . interesting idea of people from different places coming towards a murder instead of starting with the murder and working from that.’
Endless Night – ‘my own favourite at present.’
Crooked House – ‘. . . a study of a certain family interesting to explore.’
Ordeal by Innocence – ‘an idea I had for some time before starting to work upon it.’
The Moving Finger – ‘re-read lately and enjoyed reading it again, very much.’
The list does not contain any great surprises and most fans would probably also select most of the same titles, perhaps replacing The Thirteen Problems and The Moving Finger with The Labours of Hercules and The A.B.C. Murders respectively. Despite, or perhaps because of, Christie’s lifelong association with Hercule Poirot, there are only two of his cases included, while Miss Marple is represented by three. Each decade of her writing career is represented and no less than five of the list are non-series titles.
A further insight, this time into some of her favourite short stories, came two years later. In March 1974 negotiations began between Collins and the author on the thorny subject of that year’s ‘Christie for Christmas’. ‘Thorny’ because the previous year’s Postern of Fate had been a disappointment and, at the request of Christie’s daughter Rosalind, the publisher was not pressing for a new book. The compromise was to be a collection of previously published short stories. Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins mooted the idea of a collection of Poirot short stories but, in a letter (‘Dear Billy’), his creator felt that a book of stories entirely devoted to Hercule Poirot would be ‘terribly monotonous’ and ‘no fun at all’. She hoped to persuade him that the collection ‘could also include what you might describe as Agatha Christie’s own favourites among her own early stories’. To this end she sent him a list described as ‘my own favourite stories written soon after The Mysterious Affair at Styles, some before that’.
Before looking at this list it is important to remember that Dame Agatha was now in her eighty-fourth year, in failing health and a pale shadow of the creative genius of earlier years. She had not written a pure whodunit since A Caribbean Mystery in 1964 and the novels of recent years were all journeys into the past (both her own and her characters’), lacking the ingenious plots and coherent writing of her prime. If she had compiled a similar list even ten years earlier is it entirely possible that it would have been significantly different. Even the description of ‘early stories’ was, as we shall see, misleading.
Christie’s 1974 list reads as follows:
The Red Signal
The Lamp
The Gypsy
The Mystery of the Blue Jar
The Case of Sir Andrew Carmichael
The Call of Wings
The Last Séance
S.O.S.
In a Glass Darkly
The Dressmaker’s Doll
Sanctuary
Swan Song
The Love Detectives
Death by Drowning
Also included are two full-length novels, Dumb Witness and Death Comes as the End, although she acknowledges that the former is too long for inclusion. Perhaps significantly, in both these titles, like her recent publications, there are strong elements of ‘murder in retrospect’; Death Comes as the End deals with murder in ancient Egypt and Dumb Witness finds Poirot investigating a death that occurred some months before the book begins. On her list the titles are numbered but there is no indication that the order is significant. I have regrouped them for ease of discussion.
The first eight titles are all from the 1933 UK-only collection The Hound of Death. As Christie suspected, many of them had been published prior to this in various magazines, the earliest (so far traced) as far back as June 1924 when ‘The Red Signal’ appeared in The Grand. The supernatural is the common theme linking these stories, with only ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, published in The Grand the following month, offering a rational explanation. This type of story was on Christie’s mind as, later in the accompanying letter, she explains that she was planning a ‘semi-ghost story’, adding poignantly, ‘when I am really quite myself again.’ Some of these titles are particularly effective – ‘The Lamp’ has a chilling last line and ‘The Red Signal’, despite its supernatural overtones, shows Christie at her tricky best. ‘The Last Séance’ (March 1927) is a very dark and, unusually for Christie, gruesome story, which also exists in a full-length play version among her papers; while ‘The Call of Wings’ is one of the earliest stories she wrote, described in her Autobiography as ‘not bad’.
Of the remaining six titles, ‘In a Glass Darkly’ (December 1934) and ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ (December 1958) are also concerned with supernatural events. The former is a very short story involving precognition while the latter is a late story that Christie felt that she ‘had to write’ while plotting Ordeal by Innocence. She passed it to her agent in mid-December 1957 and it was published the following year; in a note she describes it as a ‘very favourite’ story. ‘Sanctuary’ is also a late story, written in January 1954 and published in October of that year, for the Fund for the Restoration of Westminster Abbey. Appropriately it features a dying man found on the chancel steps while the sun pours in through the stained-glass window, this picture carrying echoes of similar scenes in the Mr Quin stories. Its setting is Chipping Cleghorn, featured four years earlier in A Murder is Announced, and Rev. Harmon and his delightful wife, Bunch, are the main protagonists alongside Miss Marple.
‘Swan Song’, published in The Grand in September 1926, is a surprising inclusion and appears probably due to Christie’s lifelong love of music; despite its country house setting of an opera production, it is a lacklustre revenge story with neither a whodunit nor supernatural element. ‘The Love Detectives’, published in December of the same year, foreshadows the plot of The Murder at the Vicarage and features Mr Satterthwaite, usually the partner of Mr Quin but here making a solo appearance.
The final story, ‘Death by Drowning’, is the last of The Thirteen Problems, although its inclusion jars with the rest of the stories in that collection. Unlike the first 12 problems, ‘Death by Drowning’, first published in November 1931, the year before its book appearance, does not follow the pattern of a group of armchair detectives solving a crime that has hitherto baffled the police. Miss Marple solves this case without her fellow-detectives and makes one of her very rare forays into working-class territory in a story involving a woman who keeps lodgers and takes in washing. As an untypical Miss Marple story, it is another unpredictable inclusion.
Overall, the list is, like much of her fiction, very unexpected. Though the absence of Poirot can be explained by the fact that this list is an effort to persuade Billy Collins to experiment with characters other than the little Belgian, there is, for instance, only one Mr Quin story, although she describes them in her Autobiography as ‘her favourite’; and there are only two cases for Miss Marple, neither of which shows her at her best. Why, moreover, no ‘Accident’, no ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, no ‘Philomel Cottage’? And only three (‘Sanctuary’, ‘The Love Detectives’, ‘Death by Drowning’) can be described as Christie whodunits, albeit not very typical examples. The over-reliance on the supernatural is surprising, although this had been a feature of Christie’s fiction from her early days – The Mysterious Mr Quin, The Hound of Death – and is a plot feature, although usually in the red herring category, of such novels as The Sittaford Mystery, Peril at End House, Dumb Witness, The Pale Horse and Sleeping Murder.
In the event, the proposed book never came to fruition and, despite Christie’s reservations, Poirot’s Early Cases was published in November 1974.
Pre-dating both theses lists, in her Autobiography Christie names yet another selection of ‘favourites’. Here she describes Crooked House and Ordeal by Innocence as ‘the two [books] that satisfy me best’, and goes on to state that ‘on re-reading them the other day, I find that another one I am really pleased with is The Moving Finger’. A Sunday Times interview with literary critic Francis Wyndham in February 1966 confirms these three titles as favourites, although the interview may have been contemporaneous with the completion of her Autobiography in October 1965 where the mention of the three titles comes in the closing pages. In the specially written Introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of Crooked House she wrote: ‘This book is one of my own special favourites. I saved it up for years, thinking about, working it out, saying to myself “One day when I’ve plenty of time, and really want to enjoy myself – I’ll begin it.”’
Whatever her favourites, there seems little doubt about her least favourite title. Not only was The Mystery of the Blue Train difficult to compose (See Chapter 2) but in her Autobiography she writes ‘Each time I read it again, I think it commonplace, full of clichés, with an uninteresting plot.’ In the Japanese fan letter referred to above, she calls it ‘conventionally written . . . [it] does not seem to me to be a very original plot.’ She is even more disparaging in the Wyndham interview when she says, ‘Easily the worst book I ever wrote was The Mystery of the Blue Train. I hate it.’
THE RED SIGNAL/THE MAN WHO KNEW
In view of the inclusion of ‘The Red Signal’ on the 1974 list above, it is appropriate that ‘The Man Who Knew’, a very short short story from the Christie Archive, should appear here in print for the first time; and it is interesting to compare and contrast it with its later incarnation as ‘The Red Signal’.
‘The Man Who Knew’ is very short, less than 2,000 words, and the typescript is undated. The only guidance we have for a possible date of composition is the reference in the first paragraph to No Man’s Land, suggesting that the First World War is over. In all probability, its composition pre-dates the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles; and this makes its very existence surprising. Very few short story manuscripts or typescripts, even from later in Christie’s career, have survived, so one from the very start of her writing life is remarkable.
The only handwritten amendments are insignificant ones (‘minute service flat’ is changed to ‘little service flat’), but some minor errors of spelling and punctuation have here been corrected.
The Man Who Knew
Something was wrong . . .
Derek Lawson, halting on the threshold of his flat, peering into the darkness, knew it instinctively. In France, amongst the perils of No Man’s Land, he had learned to trust this strange sense that warned him of danger. There was danger now – close to him . . .
Rallying, he told himself the thing was impossible. Withdrawing his latchkey from the door, he switched on the electric light. The hall of the flat, prosaic and commonplace, confronted him. Nothing. What should there be? And still, he knew, insistently and undeniably, that something was wrong . . .
Methodically and systematically, he searched the flat. It was just possible that some intruder was concealed there. Yet all the time he knew that the matter was graver than a mere attempted burglary. The menace was to him, not to his property. At last he desisted, convinced that he was alone in the flat.
‘Nerves,’ he said aloud. ‘That’s what it is. Nerves!’
By sheer force of will, he strove to drive the obsession of imminent peril from him. And then his eyes fell on the theatre programme that he still held, carelessly clasped in his hand. On the margin of it were three words, scrawled in pencil.
‘Don’t go home.’
For a moment, he was lost in astonishment – as though the writing partook of the supernatural. Then he pulled himself together. His instinct had been right – there wassomething. Again he searched the little service flat, but this time his eyes, alert and observant, sought carefully some detail, some faint deviation from the normal, which should give him the clue to the affair. And at last he found it. One of the bureau drawers was not shut to, something hanging out prevented it closing, and he remembered, with perfect clearness, closing the drawer himself earlier in the evening. There had been nothing hanging out then.
His lips setting in a determined line, he pulled the drawer open. Underneath the ties and handkerchiefs, he felt the outline of something hard – something that had not been there previously. With amazement on his countenance, he drew out – a revolver!
He examined it attentively, but beyond the fact that it was of somewhat unusual calibre, and that a shot had lately been fired from it, it told him nothing.
He sat down on the bed, the revolver in his hand. Once again he studied the pencilled words on the programme. Who had been at the theatre party? Cyril Dalton, Noel Western and his wife, Agnes Haverfield and young Frensham. Which of them had written that message? Which of them knew– knew what? His speculations were brought up with a jerk. He was as far as ever from understanding the meaning of that revolver in his drawer. Was it, perhaps, some practical joke? But instantly his inner self negatived that, and the conviction that he was in danger, in grave immediate peril, heightened. A voice within him seemed to be crying out, insistently and urgently: ‘Unless you understand, you are lost.’
And then, in the street below, he heard a newsboy calling. Acting on impulse, he slipped the revolver into his pocket, and, banging the door of the flat behind him, hurriedly descended the stairs. Outside the block of buildings, he came face to face with the newsvendor.
‘’Orrible murder of a well known physician. ’Orrible murder of a – paper, sir?’
He shoved a coin into the boy’s hand, and seized the flimsy sheet. In staring headlines he found what he wanted.
HARLEY STREET SPECIALIST MURDERED. SIR JAMES LAWSON FOUND SHOT THROUGH THE HEART.
His uncle: Shot!
He read on. The bullet had been fired from a revolver, but the weapon had not been found, thus disposing of the idea of suicide.
The weapon – it was in his pocket now: why he knew this with such certainty, he could not have said. But it was so. He accepted it without doubt, and in a blinding flash the terrible peril of his position became clear to him.
He was his uncle’s heir – he was in grave financial difficulties. And only that morning he had quarrelled with the old man. It had been a loud bitter quarrel, doubtless overheard by the servants. He had said more than he meant, of course – used threats – it would all tell against him! And as a culminating proof of his guilt, they would have found the revolver in his drawer . . .
Who had placed it there?
It all hung on that. There might still be time. He thought desperately, his brain, keen and quick, selecting and rejecting the various arguments. And at last he saw . . .
A taxi deposited him at the door of the house he sought.
‘Mr Weston still up?’
‘Yes, sir. He’s in the study.’
‘Ah!’ Derek arrrested the old butler’s progress. ‘You needn’t announce me. I know the way.’
Walking almost noiselessly upon the thick pile of the carpet, he opened the door at the end of the hall and entered the room. Noel Western was sitting by the table, his back to the door. A fair, florid man; good looking, yet with a something in his eyes that baffled and eluded. Not till Derek’s hand touched his shoulder, was he aware of the other’s presence. He leaped in his chair.
‘My God, you!’ He forced a laugh. ‘What a start you gave me, old chap. What is it? Did you leave something behind here?’
‘No.’ Derek advanced a step. ‘I came to return you – this!’
Taking the revolver from his pocket he threw it on the table. If he had had any doubts, they vanished now before the look on the other’s face.
‘What-what is it?’ stammered Western.
‘The revolver with which you shot James Lawson.’
‘That’s a lie.’ The denial came feebly.
‘It’s the truth. You took my latchkey out of my overcoat pocket this evening. You remember that your wife and I went in the first taxi to the theatre. You followed in another, arriving rather late. You were late because you had been to my rooms to place the revolver in my drawer.’
Derek spoke with absolute certainty and conviction. An almost supernatural fear showed upon Noel Western’s face.
‘How – how did you know?’ he muttered, as it were in spite of himself.
‘Iwarned him.’
Both men started and turned. Stella Western, tall and beautiful, stood in the doorway which connected with an adjoining room. Her fairness gleamed white against the sombre green of the window curtains.
‘I warned him,’ she repeated, her eyes full on her husband. ‘Tonight, when Mr Lawson mentioned casually something about returning home, I saw your face. I was just beside you, although you did not notice me, and I heard you mutter between your teeth “There’ll be a surprise for you when you do get home!” And the look on your face was – devilish. I was afraid. I had no chance of saying anything to Mr Lawson, but I wrote a few words on the programme and passed it to him. I didn’t know what you meant, or what you had planned – but I was afraid.’
‘Afraid, were you?’ cried Western. ‘Afraid for him! You still may be! That’s why I did it! That’s why he’ll hang – yes, hang – hang – hang! Because you love him!’ His voice had risen almost to a scream, as he thrust his head forward with blazing eyes. ‘Yes – I knew! You loved him! That’s why you wanted me to see that meddling old fool, Lawson, who called himself a mental specialist. You wanted to make out I was mad. You wanted me put away – shut up – so that you could go to your lover!’
‘By God, Western,’ said Derek, taking a step forward with blazing eyes. He dared not look at Stella. But behind his anger and indignation, a wild exultation possessed him. She loved him! Only too well he knew that he loved her. From the first moment he had set eyes on her, his doom was sealed. But she was another man’s wife – and that man his friend. He had fought down his love valiantly, and never, for one moment, had he suspected there was any feeling on her side. If he had known that – he struggled to be calm. He must defend her from these raving accusations.
‘It was a conspiracy – a great conspiracy.’ The high unnatural voice took no heed of Derek. ‘Old Lawson was in it. He questioned me – he trapped me – found out all about my mother having died in an asylum (Ha ha! Stella, you never knew that, did you?). Then he spoke about a sanitorium – a rest cure – all lies! Lies – so that you could get rid of me and go to your lover here.’
‘Western, you lie! I’ve never spoken a word to your wife that the whole world couldn’t hear.’
Noel Western laughed, and the laugh frightened them both, for in it was all the low cunning of a maniac.
‘You say so, do you? Yousay so!’ Carried away by fury, his voice rose higher and higher, drowning the protests of the other, drowning the sound of the opening door. ‘But I’ve been too clever for you! Old Lawson’s dead. I shot him. Lord! what fun it was – knowing who’d hang for it! You see, I’d heard of your quarrel, and I knew you were in pretty deep financial water. The whole thing would look ugly. I saw it all clearly before me. Lawson dead, you hung, and Stella – pretty Stella – all to myself! Ha ha!’
For the first time, the woman flinched. She put up her hands to her face with a shivering sob.
‘You say you saw it all clearly before you,’ said Derek. There was a new note in his voice, a note of solemnity. ‘Did you never think that there was something behindyou?’
Quelled in spite of himself, Noel Western stared fearfully at the man before him.
‘What – what do you mean?’
‘Justice.’ The word cut the air with the sharpness of steel.
A mocking smile came to Western’s lips.
‘The justice of God, oh?’ he laughed.
‘And the justice of men. Look behind you!’
Western spun round to face a group of three standing in the doorway, whilst the old butler repeated the sentence that his master’s words had drowned before.
‘Two gentlemen from Scotland Yard to see Mr Lawson, sir.’
An awful change came over Noel Western’s face. He flung up his arms and fell. Derek bent over him, then straightened himself.
‘The justice of God is more merciful than that of men,’ he said. ‘You do not wish to detain me, gentlemen? No? Then I will go.’ For a moment his eyes met Stella’s, and he added softly: ‘But I shall come back . . .’
The expansion of ‘The Man Who Knew’ into ‘The Red Signal’ suggests that Christie rewrote this after some experience in plotting a detective story. ‘The Red Signal’ was first published in June 1924, so we can assume that it was written probably the previous year and, therefore, after the publication of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and The Murder on the Links, both novels with carefully constructed plots and unsuspected denouements. By the beginning of 1924 she had also published a dozen Poirot short stories. Technically, she was now more adept at laying clues, both true and false, misdirecting the reader and springing a surprise.
Plot-wise both versions of the story are identical, the later one merely longer and more elaborate than the earlier. Some elements remain exactly the same – the description of Stella’s husband as ‘florid’, the ominous words ‘Don’t go home’, the revolver found in the handkerchief drawer. But ‘The Red Signal’ has a larger cast of characters, a greater emphasis on the supernatural and a more unexpected revelation at the end. Unlike the earlier version the reader is encouraged to trust the character unmasked as the villain; in the earlier version Noel Western is unknown to the reader until his unmasking. The cunning hand of Christie the detective novelist can be seen in some of the plot expansion – the ambiguous conversation between Dermot and his uncle when we are mistakenly confident, after subtle misdirection, that the subject of the conversation about insanity is Clair; the red signal of the title, the warning ‘Don’t go home’, which applies equally to Sir Arlington and to Dermot; and the ruse of Dermot masquerading as his own servant, which would become one of Christie’s favourite stratagems for hoodwinking her readers. On a more mundane note however, is it likely that a newsboy would sell newspapers and shout headlines at close to midnight? If the party has just returned from the theatre it cannot be much earlier.
While by no means a typical Christie tale, we can see how, after writing a mere handful of detective stories, Agatha Christie was able to transform a slight short story such as ‘The Man Who Knew’ into a clever exercise in misdirection.