Chapter Twenty-Three
Memories Shadowed

 

Despite the personal troubles that befell her after The Rose and the Yew Tree was written, it was Agatha’s favourite Mary Westmacott book. The idea behind the story had been with her since around 1929, she revealed in her memoirs. The fact that the idea came to her so soon after her divorce from Archie shows how desperately she had wanted to believe at the time that it could be possible for pure, unselfish love to redeem someone apparently beyond redemption. Max’s safe return and apparent undying loyalty meant it was written at a time when, in her owns words, she felt ‘closest to God’.

The Rose and the Yew Tree is the idealistic story of a self-centred and amoral former war hero, John Gabriel, who redeems himself by becoming a ‘messiah’ after the heroine, Isabella Charteris – whom he has seduced and mistreated – dies after throwing herself into the path of a bullet intended for him by a political fanatic.

When John Gabriel stands as a Tory candidate in the 1945 election, he is ruthless and ambitious. He privately admits that he is really a Labour supporter but that it is a matter of expediency. He needs a job, the war is almost over and ‘the plums’ will soon be snatched up. Agatha, a lifelong Tory, has one of the Conservative characters observe that nobody can help making a mess of things after a war and it is better that it not be one’s own side.

Agatha supported the Conservatives because of their connections with the aristocracy and not because she believed they always served their country well. In The Rose and the Yew Tree a character denounces politics as little more than booths at a fair offering their own cure-alls for the world’s ills. Meanwhile, an aristocratic Conservative supporter expresses the idealist view of her creator that legislators should be drawn from the class that does not need to work for a living, the class that can be indifferent to gain – that is, the ruling class.

After an unconsummated liaison with a local vet’s wife John Gabriel seduces the aristocratic and sheltered Isabella Charteris from St Loo Castle. They live together unmarried, and she copes with the squalid existence to which he subjects her through her ‘art of repose’. She has the ability to recognize the important things in life and to live in the moment. She accepts people’s different natures and never tries to manipulate anyone. Despite gaining Isabella’s love, John Gabriel complains that he never really knows what she is thinking. Archie once said much the same thing about Agatha.

John Gabriel covets Isabella partly because of his sense of being inferior, admitting that he is class-conscious and hates arrogant upper-class women who make him feel like dirt. He also shares his creator’s views on the aristocracy. It is not the title that matters but the sense of feeling sure of yourself and not having to wonder what people are thinking of you; merely being concerned with what you think of them. It had been a disappointment to him not to have been born into the aristocracy, just as it had been for Agatha.

When Isabella sacrifices her life to save John Gabriel, the choice is hers. Teresa, another character in the novel, tells the grieving narrator Hugh Norreys, who has always loved Isabella from afar, that time does not mean anything, that five minutes and a thousand years are of equal importance. No one’s life is wasted, because the life of the rose and the life of the yew tree are of equal duration. Few people recognize their true selves, their own ‘design’, but Isabella was one of them. She was difficult to understand not because she was complex but because she was extraordinarily simple and able to recognize life’s essentials. A mature Agatha was in fact describing herself.

John Gabriel is devastated by Isabella’s death, and his subsequent path to redemption is made plausible because Agatha imbues him with her own religious feelings. He says that he has never been able to believe in God the father, God of creation and of love, but that sometimes he does believe in Christ who descended into hell. He promised the repentant thief paradise but went to hell with the one who cursed and reviled Him.

The Rose and the Yew Tree gives the greatest insight of all Agatha’s novels into her renewed religious faith. The book’s main weakness lies in its use of fairy-tale motifs. These, however, make clear the enduring romanticism that lay beneath the author’s apparently pragmatic exterior.

Agatha’s idealistic belief that individuals have choice and that destiny is not entirely predetermined comes across strongly. Her more serene outlook was enhanced by her rediscovered faith and her happiness with Max, and she was dumbstruck by her publisher’s response to the book.

Billy Collins, who had succeeded his late uncle Sir Godfrey Collins as the head of her publishing house, missed the point of the book when he asked if it was wise to have a story based around the General Election, since John Gabriel was such an undesirable person as a candidate. From then on Agatha ensured that the Mary Westmacott novels were published by Heinemann, since she felt that Collins ‘hated’ Mary Westmacott and anything that distracted her from writing detective stories.

Judith and Graham Gardner recall that far greater personal upset for Agatha was to come following Max’s appointment to the first Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in London University in October 1947. Max, an articulate, dedicated scholar, was in his element teaching the subject he loved. His students found him witty and stimulating, and he loved being in the spotlight. The adulation he received from his young female students, in particular, led to a number of deepening friendships.

In a letter Max wrote to Agatha’s daughter Rosalind he claimed that ‘hundreds of persons, mostly women, prostrate themselves to the ground’ as he entered the university building. Even so, he considered himself very lucky to have landed the job, and he expressed the hope that he would be able to cope adequately with all that was expected of him.

Ironically, Agatha’s generosity had led to the situation developing. Max had been offered the academic post only after two colleagues, Sidney Smith and Vere Gordon Childe, had approached her to sponsor the position at the Institute of Archaeology, and she had readily agreed for her husband’s sake.

It was Nan who broke the news to Agatha. Max’s apparent attempt to recapture his lost youth greatly upset her. Nevertheless she was better equipped to cope with Max’s occasional liaisons with his female students than with Archie’s affair with Nancy Neele because she never loved him as much as she had loved her first husband.

Max’s generous nature was partly to blame for this blow to Agatha’s happiness. Nan had approached Max for advice because a friend’s daughter, Diana Kirkbride, had left the Wrens and was uncertain how to pursue an interest in archaeology. Max had offered to help by giving Diana a place in his class, and, although he formed no intimate relationship with her, reports of his friendships with other female students got back to Diana’s mother, who in turn told Nan.

When challenged by Agatha, Max insisted he was the victim of malicious gossip. Agatha was unsure whether or not to believe him, and her unease increased when she heard that Max had driven one of his female students home. He was shrewd enough to know that if he played his cards close to his chest Agatha would not divorce him. He was very attentive to her needs when they were together, always observing her birthdays and other special occasions with gifts, cards and letters, thus impressing on her how much she meant to him. However, his wife’s feelings of being betrayed ran deep and reopened the wounds left by Archie. Max’s instincts were right. Agatha could not bear the thought of the publicity that would ensue if she divorced a second time.

Agatha remembered her mother’s advice on maintaining a marriage and whenever possible accompanied Max on trips and social occasions. His intermittent liaisons with young women were made easier for her to endure because he was always the perfect gentleman to her in private and looked out for her interests.

Nan had moved back to London after the war, and Agatha got into a routine of visiting her friend each afternoon while Max was teaching. Having refused Max the use of their car, Agatha would pick him up in it herself. Shortly before his class was due to end Agatha would often say to Nan: ‘Look at the time. I must go and fetch Max on the dot.’

Agatha’s problems with Max were a cause of anxiety for Nan and Judith. Mother and daughter had never entirely rid themselves of the suspicion that he had married Agatha for her money. Nan remembered only too well how assiduously he had attached himself to Agatha in the Middle East and followed her back to England and asked her to marry him. It angered Nan, who knew how hard Agatha had worked all her life, that her friend’s money paid for everything in the marriage and that Max basked in the reflected glory of being her husband.

As her fame increased – she made history in 1948 when Allen Lane of Penguin Books published a million of her paperbacks in one day – Agatha did everything possible to guard her private life. The public’s perception of her was of a happily married woman who had made ‘more money out of murder since Lucrezia Borgia’, and Agatha was determined to keep it that way.

She had never sought fame. Judith Gardner recalls that when Max’s mother Marguerite Mallowan remarked to Agatha one day how much she must enjoy her fame and wealth, Agatha turned to Nan saying: ‘Tell her, Nan. Tell her it’s not true. I never wanted it!’ It was one of the few occasions Judith saw Agatha really angry. Both Nan and Judith, who often discussed Agatha’s affairs, were aware that the one thing she had wanted more than anything was a happy family life with Archie and Rosalind. When Agatha was in the prime of her writing career she once told Judith: ‘I feel like a very old woman.’

By the end of the decade a lessening of political and financial tension enabled Agatha and Max to embark once more on archaeological expeditions to the Middle East. Agatha received a distressing blow, however, when it was reported in the Sunday Times on 13 and 20 February 1949 that the author Mary Westmacott was Agatha Christie. Deeply unhappy about Max’s indiscretions, this uncovering of her literary alter ego could not have come at a worse time.

An angry Agatha wrote to her literary agent Edmund Cork in March from the British Consul in Baghdad criticizing his ‘intelligence service’ for not being the first to inform her that her identity had been exposed. Reluctantly she gave her consent to her publishers to acknowledge Mary Westmacott’s true identity on the cover of the books. Her decision to capitalize commercially on the disclosure arose from the fact that the war had left her complicated finances in an even worse mess than ever.

Meanwhile, much to the surprise and relief of her mother, Rosalind had decided to marry a barrister called Anthony Hicks. Although they wrote to tell Agatha of their impending London register office wedding in late 1949, they intimated they did not expect her to attend because they were obliged to return to Wales immediately after the ceremony to ‘feed the dogs’. It was typical of Rosalind that she did not want to celebrate the occasion with her mother since their relationship had always been tempestuous. Agatha surprised them on the day by attending the wedding anyway. Anthony was an entertaining scholar, interested in people and travel and lacking in ruthless ambition, and his marriage to Rosalind lasted up until she died many years later.

Throughout the 1950s cracks appeared in Agatha’s own marriage. Max’s flirtations, as well as their money worries, were just some of the reasons why memories of the disappearance surfaced again. One woman threatened Agatha’s marriage more than anyone else. Barbara Parker, a smiling 42-year-old spinster, was a former archaeological student of Max’s who organized their Nimrud expeditions with such skill and good cheer that she made herself indispensable to the couple. A woman of dauntless courage, she volunteered to go out to Nimrud before the beginning of every season, to repair the roof of the expedition house and make it habitable; she also paid the workmen, assumed the role of medical officer and generally took all crises in her stride.

People who met Barbara often described her as ‘alluring’. She had begun her career as a mannequin at the couture house of Worth before studying Chinese art and archaeology. During the Second World War she had joined the London Fire Brigade and served with distinction through the Blitz. Already a colleague of Max, her path had crossed with Agatha’s in 1944 when Max had asked her to find his copy of Herodotus; Barbara had duly located it in the library at Winterbrook House and sent it to him abroad. In 1949 she had been appointed Secretary and Librarian of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, which was based in a house in Baghdad that had been bought with Agatha’s money. Barbara was considered a superbly tactful negotiator with the Iraqis and worked at Nimrud both as an epigraphist and the expedition’s official photographer of archaeological finds, the latter role being one she took over from Agatha.

It was Agatha’s habit to compose odes about the members of the expedition, and in the early, carefree days out in Nimrud she unsuspectingly penned one about her husband’s future mistress. Agatha began her humorous ode ‘In Blessed Nimrud did there live Saint Barbara the Martyr’ and paid tribute to a woman who, she said, would willingly share her trousers or scrambled eggs and was happy to do accounts from morn to night. Max is described as ‘the stern director’ who gave Barbara hell. Agatha’s ode was a tribute to Barbara’s capacity to shoulder responsibility with indomitable good cheer.

Barbara’s devotion to her employers afforded both admiration and amusement to others working at the dig. Moreover her willingness and good humour in taking responsibility for whatever went wrong there led her to assume something of the role of court jester. But Barbara’s compliant nature and dog-like devotion masked unfulfilled sexual needs, and it was perhaps not altogether surprising that Max soon reached out to satisfy them.

After all, Agatha’s money paid for everything – the houses, the cars, the holidays and her husband’s archaeological expeditions. Men like Max who rely on their wives for everything can feel as if they are being controlled and yearn subconsciously to have something that is exclusively their own, and in his case this took the form of a mistress. In his marriage to the ‘Queen of Crime’, as Agatha was known, Max played the role of Prince Consort, while in his relationship with Barbara he was in control, which led those around them to observe she was his secretary, dogsbody and nanny.

In the early years of his relationship with Barbara Agatha lived in constant fear of him leaving her. The fact that he never asked her for a divorce meant she never had to face a recurrence of the press attention of the late 1920s, yet her intense dread of having her private life exposed once more remained at the back of her mind. Judith and Graham Gardner recall that ‘Max put Agatha through hell over Barbara.’

The writer’s anguish was heightened because she still loved Max and wanted to believe that he still loved her. In fact he had no desire to abandon his marriage, since he enjoyed a more affluent lifestyle with Agatha than he could have experienced through his archaeological pursuits alone, and his wife did everything in her power to ensure that he wanted for nothing.

Given her intense fear of publicity, Agatha had no alternative but to ignore Max’s relationship with Barbara. The writer sought consolation in religious faith. Judith recalls that Barbara’s love of archaeology strengthened her relationship with Max. It was their common passion. Agatha’s anxiety about her marriage led to her developing recurring outbreaks of psoriasis, a nervous inflammatory skin disorder that affected her scalp, arms, hands and feet, often making them itch painfully. She was frequently forced to wear long white cotton gloves to conceal her condition. Her marriage to Max survived to the end of her life because they had similar intellectual and aesthetic tastes as well as a shared self-deprecatory and humorous outlook on life.

In June 1950 there was a great deal of publicity surrounding the publication of A Murder Is Announced. Both Agatha’s UK and US publishers claimed it was her fiftieth book, although she had actually produced more than this. The British Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, was quoted as saying she was his favourite author, and luminaries from the world of crime-writing such as Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Mignon G. Eberhart, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Erle Stantley Gardner all paid fulsome tribute to her genius. Colonel Archie Easterbrook, one of the suspects in A Murder Is Announced, shares the same military rank and Christian name as Agatha’s first husband, which raises the possibility she was thinking about him when she wrote the book.

In September that year the story of Agatha’s disappearance came back to haunt her. A number of her readers wrote to her expressing indignation over a serial broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation containing detailed references in one of its episodes to an unnamed female novelist who had disappeared some years ago and who had obtained ‘worldwide publicity of advertising value’. It was the opinion of Agatha’s fans that the identity of the author in question could not be missed and that the interpretation of the incident was injurious to her reputation.

That same year Agatha began working intermittently on her autobiography, which was to take her almost sixteen years to complete. It was intended as a collection of happy memories, rather than a chronological examination of her past and its more painful aspects. She assumed a cheerful, self-effacing tone, which served her well as she skimmed over more sensitive or unpleasant events in her life. The book recalled in considerable detail her happy childhood and the first three-quarters of her life. Yet at no time does she state that her marriage to Max had brought her enduring happiness. Although Agatha mentions Archie more often than Max, when she came to recount the break-up of her first marriage into a tape recorder she found herself so distressed that her voice became almost inaudible. She does not mention that Archie’s affair with Nancy had lasted a year and a half and implies that her grief over her mother’s death was the reason for Archie’s defection to the other woman and his subsequent request for a divorce. Agatha suggests that he left her because he had missed his usual cheerful companion in the preceding few months owing to her pall of grief over the passing of Clarissa.

There is no mention of her disappearance at all, which is the one area of her life her fans would have particularly wanted to read about. All she says is that after illness came sorrow, despair and heartbreak and that there was no need to dwell on it. She gives a fictitious account of having been unable to remember her name when she went to sign a cheque shortly after Clarissa’s death. In a preface that was added as a tribute to the author after her death, Agatha’s unsuspecting publishers seized on this incident, suggesting that it gave the clue to the course of events at the time of the disappearance. Yet the closest she comes to talking about the incident in her autobiography is when she comments on her dislike of the press and of crowds which had developed after the breakdown of her marriage. She said that she had felt like a hunted fox. She had always hated notoriety and had had such a surfeit of it that she felt that she could hardly bear to go on living.

Since she makes no reference to the disappearance, the context in which these remarks appear is ambiguous. There is no mention of Agatha’s misleading explanation to the Daily Mail, presumably because she had no desire to cause Archie further embarrassment, since she felt they had both suffered enough. It is interesting to note that in the autobiography she portrays herself as an inexperienced and nervous driver at the time of the General Strike in May 1926 (when in fact she was a competent motorist who had been driving for two years). A few paragraphs later Agatha gives herself away when she states that one of the great joys of having the Morris Cowley was driving down to Ashfield and taking her mother Clarissa off to all the places they had never been able to visit before. As her mother had died a month before the General Strike, this negates Agatha’s claim to have been an inexperienced driver at that time. It was obviously her hope that her fans would attribute her disappearance to some sort of accident combined with mental breakdown. This was the belief of many when her autobiography was released after her death.

Despite the wall of silence Agatha constructed between herself and outsiders, her increasing fame ensured that the disappearance was never forgotten. One person who was very conscious of it was Hubert Gregg, who directed several of her plays for the London stage, beginning with The Hollow, which débuted at the Fortune Theatre on 7 June 1951. Before meeting the author he and the cast were given strict instructions by management not to mention the disappearance to her. The Hollow ran for eleven months and marked the beginning of Agatha’s golden period in the theatre.

Before writing the play Agatha had stayed with her daughter at Pwyllwrach in Wales. Rosalind, never one to hold back when it came to criticizing others, had done her utmost to persuade Agatha not to dramatize the story. This had led to considerable ill feeling towards mother and daughter, even after the play became a success. Rosalind hated the publicity her mother’s plays attracted and believed her time was better spent writing books since the financial rewards were more lucrative

Meanwhile, there was a new addition to Agatha’s circle of friends in 1951 when Nan’s daughter Judith, then thirty-four, married a handsome 24-year-old photographer called Graham Gardner, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, who she had met at a tennis club in Torquay three years earlier. Nan and Agatha approved of the match from the start, although Graham’s mother was initially inclined to suspect Judith of cradle-snatching.

Judith and Graham were always welcome visitors at Greenway. Agatha invariably greeted Judith with a broad smile and a warm hug. Graham was very shy, and Agatha took him under her wing. He soon became a firm favourite of hers since he was tall and fair like her first husband Archie. She used to place him to her right at the huge oval dining-table. Graham recalls that Agatha liked listening quietly to other people’s conversations, which often gave her ideas for her stories. She herself was not shy; she was simply wary of confiding in people she did not know intimately. Yet Agatha could approach strangers and engage them in conversation with consummate ease, as a former beau of Judith’s, Peter Korda (son of the film-maker Alexander Korda), had discovered one day at a public library when Agatha had gone up to him and introduced herself.

‘Agatha was like a second mother to me, warm, loving and considerate,’ recalls Judith. ‘We both disliked golf and often played fun, non-competitive tennis together at Greenway. She worked extremely hard as a writer. It makes me so angry when I think of how her finances plagued her through no fault of her own. The money she earned from her books from countries behind the Iron Curtain could be spent only in those countries. She once visited them shortly after she married Max but didn’t like it there and never returned.’

Quite often after a meal Judith would sit by the writer’s side in the drawing-room and, in her delightfully charming, bemused way, ‘wind Agatha up and get her to tell me things’. Other visitors from the Watts side of the family around this period included Judith’s widowed Uncle Jimmy, whose wife Madge had died in October 1950, Judith’s aunt Jean Watts and cousin Jack, the official dedicatee of The Secret of Chimneys. A jovial man with a twinkle in his eyes and dark eyebrows like a pantomime villain, Jack was enormous fun to be around and an excellent raconteur. One of his stories involved the time when, as a teenage boy, he and his Aunt Nan had hoodwinked bystanders by disguising themselves as members of the opposite sex during a car journey from London to Abney Hall. On a subsequent occasion he had dressed up as an imaginary Lady Cheadle to open a fête in Marple, Cheshire; the village had been home to the now demolished Marple Hall, which had inspired the surname of Agatha’s most famous female sleuth.

Nan, too, was a regular visitor to Greenway, where there was a pleasant absence of formality. It became a ritual for Nan and Agatha to retreat to the library after lunch to indulge in their passion for The Times newspaper crosswords, leading members of the household to dub them the ‘Crossword Queens’. Nan and Agatha enjoyed competing with each other to see who could finish their crossword first, and both women almost invariably completed it within ten minutes. The two women had not given up travelling either – Nan still went on a cruise every year, while Agatha always accompanied Max to the Middle East and took him on at least one annual holiday. Agatha nicknamed Nan the ‘Cruise Queen’, while she was ‘Nomadic Agatha’. She frequently visited Nan at Penhill, and the two friends derived considerable pleasure from regaling each other with their adventures. While Agatha still guarded her privacy, she agreed to invite a party of Swedish fans Nan had met in Oslo to Greenway in July 1951 on condition that Nan act as chaperone, and it was one of the few times in her life when Agatha enjoyed herself among her admirers. Nan was an entertaining hostess as well as a delightful guest, and on another occasion she amused Agatha’s friend the publisher Allen Lane into the small hours after dinner at Greenway.

Although Agatha never forgave Nancy Neele for taking Archie away from her, she could never really dislike Barbara, and she endured her rival’s visits to Greenway ‘on archaeological matters’. There was something so dog-like about Barbara’s devotion to Max that Agatha could not find it in herself to hate her. Knowing that Barbara was attracted to Max for the same reasons she herself had fallen in love with him caused Agatha to pity and slightly despise her rival. Agatha was never able to forget the fact that her relationship with Barbara had begun as friendship, and an ambivalence in her attitude towards Barbara remained.

In November 1952 Agatha published a new Mary Westmacott book, A Daughter’s a Daughter, which was based on an unperformed play she had written in the late 1930s inspired by Nan and Judith. Basil Dean had intended to direct a production of it in 1939, and Gertrude Lawrence’s agents had expressed interest in the role based on Nan. The book benefits from Basil Dean’s recommended alterations to the play, and the tempestuous but loving relationship between mother and daughter is finely drawn. Nan’s copy was personally inscribed by Agatha on the flyleaf: ‘To My Friend Nan from Mary Westmacott.’ Her most recent Miss Marple novel, They Do It With Mirrors, was published around the same time and ruffled several of Max’s archaeological colleagues who believed they were the basis of some of the characters in the story.

On 25 November 1952 The Mousetrap, based on a radio play Agatha had written for Queen Mary’s eightieth birthday, opened in London at the Ambassador’s Theatre, later transferring to St Martin’s Theatre. Agatha presumed it would run for six months at most and rashly made over the royalties to her grandson Mathew. It has since earned millions and outstripped all records for the longest continual run in the English theatre.

Had she known that the US tax revenue’s protracted investigation of her financial affairs would drag on endlessly until the early 1960s she would never have handed the royalties over in trust to the schoolboy at a time when her financial worries were still considerable. She never ceased to regret the hardship she had imposed on herself.

The Wattses’ ancestral home Abney Hall was described as ‘a vast Victorian mansion in the Gothic style’ and renamed Enderby Hall in After the Funeral which was published by Collins in May 1953. Agatha’s notebook cites the names of three members of Nan’s family who became forerunners of characters in the novel: James (Nan’s brother) became Richard Abernethie; Judy (Nan’s daughter) became Susan Abernethie; and Miles (Nan’s brother) became Timothy Abernethie. Judith’s photographer husband Graham was the forerunner for Susan Abernethie’s husband Gregory Banks, who underwent a change of profession from photographer to chemist’s assistant, thus making him a more likely suspect in the suspected poisoning of Richard Abernethie. Agatha was always at her best when writing about family tensions and After the Funeral is one of Hercule Poirot’s most intriguing investigations.

Of all the mysteries Agatha wrote one of the most personally revealing is Witness for the Prosecution, which opened at London’s Winter Garden Theatre in Drury Lane on 28 October 1953 and a year later appeared on Broadway, where it achieved the rare distinction for a thriller of winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best foreign play of 1954. The 1925 short story on which it was based, ‘Traitor Hands’, was written when Agatha was young, romantic and inclined to idolize Archie, and in this story she had, unusually, allowed a ruthless killer to escape justice owing to the duplicity of a besotted female. Agatha was under pressure from the play’s producer, Peter Saunders, and the cast to adhere to the original ending, but she resolutely refused to allow the play to go on unless the killer experienced full retribution. Archie’s betrayal and Max’s furtive affair with Barbara had brought home to her the belief that the innocent ought never to suffer at the hands of the guilty. Her conviction became more evident in her detective fiction as she got older, and after hanging was abolished in the late 1960s her killers almost invariably received punishment and retribution from the gods.

Nan saw all of Agatha’s plays – sometimes more than once. She had a special affinity with her brother Lyonel’s granddaughter Fernanda Marlowe that was entirely reciprocal. Fernanda enjoyed being spoilt by Nan, who took her to the matinées of Agatha’s plays and invariably revealed the identity of the killer to her in the interval. Fernanda was aware Nan and Agatha were ‘great friends’ and often enjoyed taking tea together in the cake shops in King’s Road in Chelsea in London.

A Pocket Full of Rye quickly sold in excess of 50,000 hardback copies when it was published by Collins in November 1953. This was by now the norm for all of Agatha’s books. Miss Marple upstages an Inspector Neele by solving a series of brutal murders based on the childhood nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence. Agatha’s naming of the police officer after her former rival Nancy Neele is intriguing because she must have been thinking about her when she wrote the book. Miss Marple echoes her creator’s experience when she tells a married woman who has no idea that her husband has been unfaithful to her: ‘If I might venture to advise, if anything ever – goes wrong in your life – I think the happiest thing for you would be to go back to where you were happy as a child.’

Before the publication of A Pocket Full of Rye Agatha had tried the story out on her family at Greenway by reading aloud two or three chapters each night after dinner. After the second or third session those present were invited to guess the identity of the killer. Rosalind guessed correctly and opined that the solution was crystal clear to anyone with a grain of intelligence and the novel was not worth inflicting on Agatha’s reading public. This remark, coming from someone who had never worked for a living and who constantly benefited from her mother’s generosity, was both hurtful and unnecessary. When it came to speaking her mind Rosalind was very much her father’s daughter, as Agatha was only too well aware.