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The domestics in St Mary Mead are a dim lot, and rather unsympathetically described by Mrs Christie. This may be because she wishes her readers not to consider them as ‘real people’ and therefore potential suspects, but you cannot help observing that Mary, the vicar’s all-purpose servant, is presented as a truculent dim-wit and an appalling cook, that the artist, Lawrence Redding, describes his cleaning woman as ‘practically a half-wit, as far as I can make out’, and that Gladys, kitchen-maid at the Old Hall, is ‘more like a shivering rabbit than anything human’. It should also be noted that Mrs Christie, like the Almighty, helps those who help themselves. The vicar is, for the most part, the essence of Christian charity, but he is prone to make cynical remarks about the ‘thorough-going humanitarian’ and to sneer at Dr Haydock’s sympathy for what the vicar calls ‘a lame dog of any kind’. Sentiments more Christiean than Christian. The police in Agatha Christie novels are not always the comic incompetent butts of the private detective, but Inspector Slack (who also appears in two short stories and in the 1942 novel, The Body in the Library) is a satirically characterized stupid police officer disliked by all, rude and overbearing, and foolhardy enough to allow his contempt for Miss Marple’s suggestions to show.
There is no formula by which you can forecast guilt in the works of Agatha Christie. Nevertheless, for some years after the collapse of the novelist’s marriage to Archie Christie, her readers would do well to cast a wary eye upon any handsome young men in the novels, while keeping in mind the fact that resemblances to Colonel Christie do not automatically stamp a character as the murderer!
On 16 December 1949, nineteen years after the novel’s first publication, Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, dramatized by Moie Charles and Barbara Toy, was produced in London at the Playhouse or, as it was tautologically called at the time, the Playhouse Theatre. (The Playhouse still stands, at the Thames Embankment end of Northumberland Avenue.)
A reasonably faithful and straightforward adaptation of the novel, Murder at the Vicarage simplifies the original plot somewhat, and alters the ending, though not the murderer’s identity, in the interests of dramatic effect. The play is set, not in the 1930 of the novel, but in ‘the present time’, i.e. 1949, with references to American airmen being stationed in the village during the war.
With Barbara Mullen as Miss Marple, Reginald Tate (who also directed the play) as Lawrence Redding, Jack Lambert as the Vicar, and Genine Graham as his wife, Griselda, Murder at the Vicarage had a reasonably successful run of four months, and later became popular with repertory companies and amateurs. A production at the Savoy Theatre in the West End of London in 1975, with Barbara Mullen returning to her role of Miss Marple, and Derek Bond as the Vicar, ran for two years.
A television adaptation in two episodes was produced by BBC TV, the first part being shown on Christmas Day 1986, with Joan Hickson as Miss Marple.
The Mysterious Mr Quin SHORT STORIES (1930)
1930 was professionally a busy year for Agatha Christie. In addition to The Murder at the Vicarage, she had two books published and her first play produced. One of the books was a volume in which were collected a number of stories featuring Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, stories which she had written at the rate of one every three or four months for publication in magazines. Mrs Christie refused to produce a series of Mr Quin stories for any one magazine. She considered them to be something special and apart from her usual crime stories, and preferred to write about Mr Quin only when she really felt like doing so.
Twelve of the stories were collected in The Mysterious Mr Quin (published in March 1930). The game is given away almost immediately when one notes that the volume is dedicated ‘To Harlequin the invisible’ and that, in the opening story, an unexpected visitor who ‘appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass above the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow’ announces, ‘By the way, my name is Quin – Harley Quin’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Whenever Mr Quin makes a first appearance in these stories, some trick of the light makes him seem momentarily to be dressed in the motley costume of Harlequin and to wear the commedia dell’ arte character’s mask. Then the illusion vanishes, as Mr Quin is seen to be merely a tall, thin, dark man – and young, according to a fugitive Mr Quin story not collected in this volume – conventionally dressed.
A by-product of Agatha Christie’s youthful interest in the characters of the commedia dell’ arte and of the sequence of Harlequin and Columbine poems, ‘A Masque from Italy’, in The Road of Dreams (1924), Mr Quin is the friend of lovers, and appears when some crime which threatens the happiness of lovers is committed. Usually, however, he does not himself directly intervene to solve a problem, but works through his intermediary, Mr Satterthwaite, ‘a little bent, dried-up man with a peering face oddly elf-like, and an intense and inordinate interest in other people’s lives’.
Despite the elf-like face, there is nothing supernatural about Mr Satterthwaite, a gentleman of means, in his sixties, and someone whom life has passed by, who has always been merely an onlooker. After his first meeting with Mr Quin in ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’, he discovers within himself an ability to penetrate to the heart of mysteries and to solve problems, but only when Mr Quin is there to act as catalyst, to reveal to him what it is that, unconsciously, he already knows.
Mr Quin and his emissary Mr Satterthwaite were, according to Mrs Christie, two of her favourite characters, so it is hardly surprising that their stories should be among her very best. Sometimes Mr Satterthwaite encounters Harley Quin at the Arlecchino, a Soho restaurant. At other times, they meet, as if by accident, at a country pub, the Bells and Motley. Once, very appropriately, Mr Satterthwaite (who, oddly for such a connoisseur of the arts, thinks the opera Cavalleria Rusticana ends with ‘Santuzza’s death agony’) encounters Mr Quin at Covent Garden in the interval between Cav and Pag. (The clowns in Pagliacci perform a Harlequinade, and one of them, Beppe, impersonates Harlequin.)
On one occasion, Mr Quin persuades Mr Satterthwaite to travel all the way to Banff, in the Canadian Rockies, to find a clue which brings a criminal to justice and reunites two young lovers. Not surprisingly, Mr Quin turns up at Monte Carlo at Carnival time to intervene in a story involving a soi-disant Countess who consorts with men (‘of Hebraic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses, wearing rather flamboyant jewellery’!)
One of the most curious stories in the volume is ‘The Man from the Sea’, which takes place on a Mediterranean island. Mr Satterthwaite muses on the role of Isolde which a young protégée of his is about to sing in Germany, and encounters a young man contemplating suicide. It is a story in which, you sense from the quality of the prose as much as from anything else, Mrs Christie’s beliefs concerning the meaning of life, not very original, perhaps, but her own and deeply held, are involved. And there are four paragraphs, not essential to the plot, in which the last moments of a dog’s life are described: paragraphs whose observation, imagination and compassion are the equal of many a novelist generally thought vastly superior in literary ability to Agatha Christie.
In his memoirs, Sir Max Mallowan describes his wife’s Mr Quin stories as ‘detection written in a fanciful vein, touching on the fairy story, a natural product of Agatha’s peculiar imagination.’ He mentions that there is a Mr Quin story, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, not in The Mysterious Mr Quin, but published separately in Winter’s Crimes 3 (1971), an anthology of stories by several writers. Sir Max was apparently not aware of a fourteenth story featuring Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite, ‘The Love Detectives’, which finally appeared in Great Britain in Problem at Pollensa Bay and Other Stories in 1991, although it could already be found in Three Blind Mice and other stories first published in America in 1950 and sometimes reprinted as, confusingly, The Mousetrap.
In ‘The Love Detectives’, Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite assist Colonel Melrose (whom we remember as Chief Constable in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery) in the investigation of a murder. It is a story which fits easily into the canon, and clearly dates from the period in the twenties when most of the Quin stories were written.
The fugitive Harley Quin story mentioned by Max Mallowan, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’, is a pendant to the series, written much later, after the Second World War, containing an oblique reference to the Mau Mau troubles in Kenya in the early 1950s. Mr Satterthwaite, ‘now of an advanced age’, has a final adventure involving Mr Quin whom he encounters, as always apparently by chance, at the Harlequin Café in a village whose name, Kingsbourne Ducis, suggests that it is in Dorset. It is many years since he last met Mr Quin: ‘A large number of years. Was it the day he had seen Mr Quin walking away from him down a country lane’ in the final story in The Mysterious Mr Quin? It was, indeed, and they were not to meet again after this single late adventure, for Mr Quin, who has now acquired a small black dog called Hermes, contrives to turn himself into a burning scarecrow at the end of the story. The supernatural has come too close for comfort.
Perhaps the most charming story in The Mysterious Mr Quin is the final one, ‘Harlequin’s Lane’, despite the fact that the author sees fit to describe one of its characters as ‘a fat Jewess with a penchant for young men of the artistic persuasion’. Mrs Christie’s fat Aryans, whatever their sexual proclivities, tend to attract their creator’s venom neither so fiercely nor so frequently. In general, however, the Mr Quin stories are both unusual and pleasantly rewarding to read. Incidentally, Mr Satterthwaite appears, without Mr Quin, in Three-Act Tragedy (1935), a Poirot novel, and ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, one of the four long Poirot stories which make up Murder in the Mews (1937: in the USA the volume itself was called Dead Man’s Mirror, probably because ‘Mews’ is a much less familiar word in America than in England).
After its initial magazine publication, but before it had been collected into The Mysterious Mr Quin, one of the stories, ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’, was filmed in Great Britain in 1928. In addition to having its title changed to The Passing of Mr Quinn (Did the film makers fear their audiences would read a sexual connotation into ‘coming’? And why the additional ‘n’ in ‘Quinn’?), the story underwent such violent changes in the course of its adaptation for the screen that you wonder why the producers of the film bothered to acquire it in the first place. Perhaps their interest was simply in acquiring the name of Agatha Christie. Made by Strand Films, and both produced and directed by Julius Hagen, The Passing of Mr Quinn was the first British film to be made from a work by Agatha Christie. (The German film industry had got in a few months earlier, with its adaptation of The Secret Adversary. The leading roles were played by Stewart Rome, Trilby Clark and Ursula Jeans, and the script was written by Leslie Hiscott who, three years later, was to direct two Christie films, Alibi and Black Coffee.
In 1929, in a cheaply produced series, ‘The Novel Library’,
(#litres_trial_promo) The London Book Company published The Passing of Mr Quinn, described as ‘The book of the film adapted from a short story by Agatha Christie, novelized by G. Roy McRae’. It was prefaced by a note: ‘Readers are requested to note that Mr Quinny of this book is the same person as the Mr Quinn of the film.’ But neither Mr Quinn nor Mr Quinny is Agatha Christie’s Mr Quin, for this Quinn-Quinny reveals himself at the end to be the murderer. The victim is a Professor Appleby, who also bears little resemblance to anyone in ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’. Here is a sample of the narrative style of G. Roy McRae’s ‘novelization’:
Such was Professor Appleby, a monstrous figure of ebony and white in his dinner suit, as he wrestled under the soft-shaded lamp with the Haje snake.
There sounded all at once a slight hiss. The Haje’s long body wriggled and coiled sinuously, so that its black and white diamond markings seemed to blur. A glass vessel fell to the carpet, knocked over by the snake in its struggles, and Professor Appleby’s monocle dropped on its black cord as he smiled grimly.
In Agatha Christie’s original story, Appleton (not Appleby) has been dead for ten years, and there is no suggestion that he was given to playing with poisonous snakes when he was alive.
Black Coffee POIROT PLAY (1930)
Perhaps because of her dissatisfaction with Alibi, the play which Michael Morton had made in 1928 out of her Poirot novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie decided to try her hand at putting Hercule Poirot on the stage in a play of her own. The result was Black Coffee. ‘It was a conventional spy thriller,’ she said of it later, ‘and although full of clichés it was not, I think, at all bad.’ She showed it to her agent, who advised her not to bother submitting it to any theatrical management, as it was not good enough to be staged. However, a friend of Mrs Christie who was connected with theatrical management thought otherwise, and Black Coffee was tried out, in 1930, at the Embassy Theatre in Swiss Cottage, London. (The Embassy is now used as a drama school.) In April the following year, it opened in the West End where it ran for a few months at the St Martin’s Theatre (where a later Christie play, The Mousetrap, was to run forever).
In 1930, Poirot had been played by Francis L. Sullivan, with John Boxer as Captain Hastings, Joyce Bland as Lucia Amory, and Donald Wolfit as Dr Carelli.
(#litres_trial_promo) In the West End production, Francis L. Sullivan was still Poirot, but Hastings was now played by Roland Culver, and Dr Carelli by Dino Galvani. The London Daily Telegraph thought the play a ‘sound piece of detective-story writing’, and preferred Sullivan’s rendering of the part of Poirot ‘to the one which Mr Charles Laughton gave us in Alibi. Mr Laughton’s Poirot was a diabolically clever oddity. Mr Sullivan’s is a lovable human being.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Agatha Christie did not see the production. ‘I believe it came on for a short run in London,’ she wrote in 1972, ‘but I didn’t see it because I was abroad in Mesopotamia.’
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The play, which is in three acts, is set in the library of Sir Claud Amory’s house at Abbot’s Cleve, about twenty-five miles from London. Sir Claud is a scientist engaged in atomic research and had just discovered the formula for Amorite, whose force ‘is such that where we have hitherto killed by thousands, we can now kill by hundreds of thousands.’ Unfortunately, the formula is stolen by one of Sir Claud’s household, and the scientist foolishly offers the thief a chance to replace the formula with no questions asked. The lights in the library are switched off to enable this to happen, but when the lights come on again, the formula is still missing, Sir Claud is dead, and Hercule Poirot has arrived. By the end of the evening, with a certain amount of assistance from Hastings and Inspector Japp, Poirot has unmasked the murderer and retrieved the formula. However, the way is not thus paved for Hiroshima fifteen years later, and the horror of nuclear war, for something else happens just before the end of the play.
Sir Claud’s butler is called Tredwell, but whether he is related to the Tredwell who was the butler at Chimneys in The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Mystery is not known. He cannot be the same man, for Lord Caterham would surely not have let his treasure of a butler go. Sir Claud’s family are an impressively dubious collection of characters, and the suspects also include the scientist’s secretary, Edward Raynor, and a sinister Italian, Dr Carelli.
Black Coffee, which was successfully revived some years after its first production, has remained a favourite with repertory companies and amateurs throughout the world, as have so many plays either by or adapted from Agatha Christie. Though Black Coffee lacks the complexity and fiendish cunning of Agatha Christie’s later plays, it would probably repay major revival not only as a period piece but, if impressively enough cast, as a highly entertaining murder mystery. The casting of Poirot would, however, have to be very carefully undertaken.
(#litres_trial_promo) Agatha Christie used to complain that, although a number of very fine actors had played Poirot, none was physically very like the character she had created. Charles Laughton, she pointed out, had too much avoirdupois, and so had Francis L. Sullivan who was ‘broad, thick, and about 6 feet 2 inches tall’. Austin Trevor, in three Poirot movies, did not even attempt physically to represent the character. A publicist for the film company actually announced that ‘the detective is described by the authoress as an elderly man with an egg-shaped head and bristling moustache’, whereas ‘Austin Trevor is a good-looking young man and clean-shaven into the bargain!’
In 1931, Black Coffee was filmed at the Twickenham Studios, with Austin Trevor (who had already played Poirot in the film, Alibi) replacing Francis L. Sullivan, Richard Cooper as Hastings, Dino Galvani as Dr Carelli, Melville Cooper as Inspector Japp, Adrienne Allen as Lucia Amory, Philip Strange as Richard Amory, and C. V. France as Sir Claud. The film was directed by Leslie Hiscott, but was generally considered to be inferior to the same director’s Alibi.
Adapted by Charles Osborne as a novel, Black Coffee was first published in England and the USA in 1998. It was simultaneously translated and published in several other languages. (The Finnish edition was actually the first of all to appear, in 1997.)
Giant’s Bread MARY WESTMACOTT (1930)
It is no longer a secret that, between 1930 and 1956, Agatha Christie published six non-crime novels under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. (It was, however, a well-kept secret until 1949.) As these novels are often referred to as ‘romantic’ or ‘women’s fiction’, it is important to state that they are not examples of what is generally thought of as the genre of the romantic novel (they are, for instance, much closer to Daphne du Maurier than to Barbara Cartland), and that they are ‘women’s fiction’ only in the sense that they can share that description with the works of Jane Austen or Iris Murdoch. The six Mary Westmacott titles belong to no genre: they are simply novels.
In her autobiography Agatha Christie described how she came to write these books:
It had been exciting, to begin with, to be writing books – partly because, as I did not feel I was a real author, it was each time astonishing that I should be able to write books that were actually published. Now I wrote books as a matter of course. It was my business to do so. People would not only publish them – they would urge me to get on with writing them. But the eternal longing to do something that is not my proper job, was sure to unsettle me; in fact it would be a dull life if it didn’t.
What I wanted to do now was to write something other than a detective story. So, with a rather guilty feeling, I enjoyed myself writing a straight novel called Giant’s Bread. It was mainly about music, and betrayed here and there that I knew little about the subject from the technical point of view. It was well reviewed and sold reasonably for what was thought to be a ‘first novel’. I used the name of Mary Westmacott, and nobody knew that it was written by me. I managed to keep that fact a secret for fifteen years.
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Published in March, 1930 and dedicated ‘to the memory of my best and truest friend, my mother’, Giant’s Bread is a long novel of 438 pages (approximately 140,000 words), which is about twice as long as a Christie murder mystery.
(#litres_trial_promo) It is also a rather remarkable novel, which is ostensibly about music, as its author claimed it was, but which is really about obsession, friendship, genius, childhood and identity. In other words, it is a novel about real people, in which the author is freed of the requirement to steer her characters along certain paths so that they can be manipulated into making the right moves to establish the necessary pattern that a crime novel must have. She could allow her characters to develop freely, could write about those aspects of them that moved and excited her, and could, in the process, explore and come closer to understanding her own nature and desires.
Without the self-imposed restraints of the mystery novel, Mrs Christie might easily have found herself floundering and confused, but she did not. She found, instead, that she was not only a brilliant creator of puzzles but also a real novelist, with an ability to create fully rounded characters and with the confidence not to worry about the exigencies of plot. Giant’s Bread is, in a sense, autobiographical, as is all good fiction. And, for that matter, all bad fiction. Human beings are condemned to tell the truth about themselves, though some find oddly devious ways of doing so. Later Mary Westmacott novels will wear their autobiographical aspects on their sleeves, but those truths about Agatha Christie which exist in Giant’s Bread are very deeply embedded within the novel, and are not so much factual as psychological or spiritual. The novel examines a number of characters, but concentrates upon its hero, or anti-hero. Vernon Deyre, whom we meet first as a sensitive child in a sheltered, upperclass environment in Edwardian England, and whose development we follow into adult life.
Vernon becomes a composer, and what is most remarkable about Giant’s Bread is the understanding with which Mrs Christie, despite her disclaiming ‘technical knowledge’, describes the total possession of Vernon’s personality by music. She has created a totally believable composer, believable not simply because Vernon flings the right names about – Prokofiev, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, even ‘Feinberg’
(#litres_trial_promo) – but because his own music, experimental and avant garde, is convincingly described and because his total absorption in music is so clinically and unromantically conveyed. Vernon Deyre could be Bliss or Goossens or an anglicized Scriabin. In fact, although Vernon is not based on any real person, Mrs Christie was helped by Roger Sacheverell Coke, a seventeen-year-old pianist and composer whose parents were friends of her sister. (Roger Coke studied composition under Alan Bush, and went on to compose an opera on Shelley’s The Cenci, several symphonies and concertos and a great deal of chamber music. Coke’s music, most of which has not been published, is thought to be pre-Debussian in idiom, and so not at all like the music of Agatha Christie’s Vernon Deyre.)
Giant’s Bread contains fascinating portraits of an opera soprano who loses her voice by insisting on singing Strauss’s Elektra, a role too strenuous for her, and of an impresario, Sebastian Levinne, a friend of Vernon’s since their childhood, and ‘the sole owner of the National Opera House’. Although, in the prologue to the novel in which a new opera is having its première at the National Opera House, Sebastian is referred to by a member of the audience as ‘a dirty foreign Jew’, Mrs Christie has produced in Levinne and his parents an unexpectedly sympathetic and understanding portrait of a Jewish family coping with genteel English upperclass resentment and prejudice.
It is the apparent ease with which Agatha Christie was able, in Giant’s Bread, to examine various aspects of human behaviour that is impressive, rather than the actual quality of her writing, though her prose is never less than adequate to convey mood and meaning. She was always too fond of the verb ‘to twinkle’: Poirot’s and Miss Marple’s eyes are forever twinkling as they make their little jokes, and in Giant’s Bread there is a pianist whose hands ‘twinkled up and down the keyboard’ with marvellous speed and dexterity. But for the most part Mrs Christie’s first ‘straight’ novel reads very smoothly, and indeed grippingly. If the author’s attitude to some of her characters is romantic, it is never sentimental, and not even romantic in the diminishing sense in which the word is used to denote a blinkered view of reality. Twice in the course of the novel she quotes that greatest of realists, Dostoevsky, and is fully justified in doing so. She even gets away, towards the end, with a scene in which Vernon, shipwrecked, can drag to the safety of a raft, only one of two drowning women, and has to make a choice between his wife and his ex-lover.
Agatha Christie must have known the real worth of her Mary Westmacott novels, and must surely have been disappointed that they did not arouse more interest in the literary world. But when she was interviewed many years later, after it was known that she had written several non-mystery novels, she merely remarked with an ambiguously arrogant modesty: ‘I found with straight novels that they didn’t need much thinking out beforehand. Detective stories are much more trouble – even if you have no high ideals in writing them.’
The Sittaford Mystery Alternative title: Murder at Hazelmoor (1931)
Mr and Mrs Mallowan had bought a house in London, at 22 Cresswell Place, Earls Court, which Agatha completely redecorated, and which contained a music room on the top floor where she could both write and play the piano. They also kept up Ashfield, the house in Torquay, where Agatha loved to go during the summer holidays when Rosalind was home from school. After their honeymoon, Agatha spent the winter of 1930–31 in London while Max was at Ur, and it was not until March that she joined him at Ur for a few days and then travelled home with him.
The journey back to England was an adventurous one. Having decided to go by way of Persia (Iran), the Mallowans flew from Baghdad to Shiraz, via Teheran, in a small, single-engined plane which ‘seemed to be flying into mountain peaks the entire time’. In Shiraz, they visited a beautiful house with a number of medallion paintings on the walls, one of which was of Holborn Viaduct in London! Apparently a Shah of Victorian times, after visiting London, had sent an artist there with instructions to paint various medallions of scenes the Shah wanted to remember, and these included Holborn Viaduct. Agatha Christie used the house as the setting for a short story called ‘The House at Shiraz’, which she included in a volume, Parker Pyne Investigates (1934).
From Shiraz the Mallowans travelled by car to Isfahan, which Agatha maintained to the end of her life was the most beautiful city in the world. Its colours of rose, blue and gold, its noble Islamic buildings with their courtyards, tiles and fountains, the birds and the flowers, all entranced her. They next made a sudden decision to continue their journey home by way of Russia. Hiring a car, they made their way down to the Caspian sea where, at Rasht, they caught a Russian boat across to Baku, capital of the Soviet province of Azerbaydzhan. In Baku, an Intourist agent asked if they would like to see a performance of Faust at the local opera house. They declined, and instead ‘were forced to go and look at various building sites and half-built blocks of flats’. Their hotel was one of faded splendour, but everything in Baku ‘seemed like a Scottish Sunday’. By train, they made their way to Batum on the Black Sea, having been forbidden to break their journey at Tiflis, a town Max Mallowan very much wanted to see. A French ship took them down the Black Sea to Istanbul, where they joined Agatha’s beloved Orient Express.
Max Mallowan had arranged not to go back to Leonard Woolley and his dig at Ur, the following season, but instead to accept an invitation from Dr Campbell Thompson to join him in excavating at Ninevah. So, in late September 1931, Max travelled to Ninevah, and it was arranged that Agatha should join him there at the end of October. Her plan was to spend a few weeks writing and relaxing on the island of Rhodes, and then sail to the port of Alexandretta and hire a car to take her to Aleppo. At Aleppo she would take the train to the Turkish-Iraqi frontier, and then drive on to Mosul where she would be met by Max. But a rough Mediterranean Sea prevented the steamer from putting in at Alexandretta, so Agatha was carried on to Beirut, made her adventurous way by train up to Aleppo, and eventually arrived at Mosul three days late.
The big mound of Ninevah was a mile and a half outside Mosul, and the Mallowans shared a small house with Dr Campbell Thompson and his wife, quite close to the mound which was being excavated. The country was fascinating, with the distant Kurdish mountains to be seen in one direction, and the river Tigris with the minarets of the city of Mosul in the other. At the bazaar in Mosul, Agatha bought herself a table. This cost her £10, according to her memoirs, or £3, according to Max Mallowan’s memoirs. Both agree that, on it, she wrote a Poirot detective novel, Lord Edgware Dies. When a skeleton was dug up in a grave mound at Ninevah, it was promptly christened Lord Edgware.
The Sittaford Mystery, published in Great Britain in 1931, and in America as Murder at Hazelmoor,
(#litres_trial_promo) was written during a few weeks in 1929, and is one of those Agatha Christie crime novels in which the murderer is unmasked not by Poirot or Miss Marple or one of the author’s other ‘regulars’, but by the heroine of the novel, who is usually a courageous and determined young woman with something of the spirit of Tuppence Beresford in her.
Anne Beddingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) is the earliest of these adventurous ladies, and Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) is potentially one of them, although she does not develop her potentiality since she has Poirot on hand. In The Sittaford Mystery Emily Trefusis is engaged to be married to a young man who has been arrested for the murder of his uncle, Captain Trevelyan. Convinced of his innocence, she sets out to discover the identity of the murderer, and eventually succeeds with the help of the police Inspector in charge of the case. The police, in Christie novels, are not always Inspector Japp-like incompetents brought into the story merely to set off the brilliance of the private detective.
For the first time, Mrs Christie makes use of Dartmoor, virtually her native heath and the place where she wrote her very first crime novel. Normally, her settings are in less bleak and inhospitable parts of the English countryside, but in The Sittaford Mystery she takes advantage of the snow-bound moorland village, using it not simply for atmosphere but making it contribute to the plot as well. You cannot fail to be reminded of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, not only by the setting but also by the fact that, in both novels, a prisoner escapes from Princetown, the prison in the centre of Dartmoor.
Agatha Christie was interested in the supernatural, and indeed was to write some of her finest short stories on supernatural subjects. The Sittaford Mystery begins with a seance in which the assembled sitters are informed by the rapping of the table that Captain Trevelyan, six miles away in Exhampton, is dead. And it is discovered that Trevelyan has indeed been murdered, probably at the precise moment that the message was received in the seance six miles away. But The Sittaford Mystery is not necessarily a supernatural one. There are, in fact, two mysteries, and Mrs Christie juggles them superbly so that, until she is ready to tell us, we are never sure whether they are connected or even what one of them is. Who murdered Captain Trevelyan? And why have Mrs Willett and her daughter come to live in Sittaford? These would appear to be the mysteries, and presumably they are related.
The Sittaford Mystery is strongly plotted, and the solutions to its puzzles are not likely to be arrived at by deduction on the reader’s part. It is also one of Mrs Christie’s most entertaining crime novels, and her use of the Dartmoor background is masterly. But you cannot help thinking that, given the characters of those involved, the actual motive for the murder when it is revealed seems rather inadequate. Real life produces murders committed for motives which seem even more inadequate, but that is not the point. Usually the reader is convinced by Mrs Christie’s explanations, but on this occasion he may well consider it unlikely that this particular person would have committed that particular crime for the reason given. This reader would have liked a stronger motivation and also to have had loose ends tied up. What, for instance, is the significance of the information given in Chapter 37, that the maiden name of Martin Derring’s mother was Martha Elizabeth Rycroft? What is her connection with Mr Rycroft the ornithologist? Why does Rycroft refer to the Derrings as ‘my niece … and her husband’? There is an irrelevant and unnecessary confusion here.
Mrs Christie, the most objective of authors, who usually keeps herself in the background, intrudes at one or two points in the story: once, inadvertently, when she has Emily think to herself that a tall, blue-eyed invalid looks ‘as Tristan ought to look in the third act of Tristan und Isolde and as no Wagnerian tenor has ever looked yet’, for Emily is not the kind of girl to have been at all interested in the operas of Wagner, and the comment is clearly not hers but her author’s; on the other occasion, Mrs Christie describes a character’s voice by telling us that it ‘had that faintly complaining note in it which is about the most annoying sound a human voice can contain’. The qualifying clause is the opinion not of anyone in the novel but, again, of the author. It is possible to pick up pieces of information about Agatha Christie’s personal likes and dislikes in this way, but not often.
In one or two details, there is a similarity between The Sittaford Mystery and the long story, ‘Three Blind Mice’, of about sixteen years later, a story which was subsequently used as the basis of the play, The Mousetrap.
Several months before The Sittaford Mystery was published, the crime novelist Anthony Berkeley had written, in the preface to one of his Roger Sheringham mysteries, The Second Shot.
I am personally convinced that the days of the old crime-puzzle, pure and simple, relying entirely upon the plot and without any added attractions of character, style, or even humour, are in the hands of the auditor; and that the detective story is in the process of developing into the novel with a detective or crime interest, holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.
Berkeley would seem here to be looking ahead to Simenon, whose first Maigret stories were soon to appear, or to writers of the type of Patricia Highsmith. But, until the end of her life, Agatha Christie was able to retain and increase a huge readership with precisely the kind of novel which Berkeley thought was on the way out. She did so, of course, by the cunning and subtle injection of those qualities of character, style and humour into a form which, in the hands of some of her rivals, seemed to offer little more than the donnish delights of puzzle-solving.
The Floating Admiral COLLABORATIVE NOVEL (1931)
An oddity, published in 1931,
(#litres_trial_promo) was the crime novel, The Floating Admiral, written by ‘Certain members of the Detection Club’.
The Detection Club of London, founded in London in 1928 by Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, is a private club to which a number of leading crime writers belong. Its first President was G. K. Chesterton.
For many years, the club dinners were held in a private room at L’Escargot Bienvenu in Greek Street, Soho. Later, they moved to the more luxurious Café Royal. Agatha Christie was a member of the Detection Club, and from 1958 until her death its Co-President. She was one of fourteen members who combined to write The Floating Admiral, a murder mystery to which each of its authors contributed one chapter. The conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written were described in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Introduction:
… the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection. Except in the case of Mr Chesterton’s picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely ‘to make it more difficult’. He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and, to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.
Set in the classical murder mystery country of southern England, the events in The Floating Admiral take place in and near Whynmouth, a fictitious south coast holiday resort. The corpse of Admiral Penistone is found floating down the river Whyn, in the vicar’s boat, and the detective whose task it is to discover the killer is not Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey or Father Brown or anyone associated with an individual contributor, but Inspector Rudge of the Whynmouth police, ‘a tall, thin man with a sallow, clean-shaven face’.
The authors of The Floating Admiral, in the order of their contributions, are G. K. Chesterton, Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, G.D.H. and M. Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald A. Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. The book is a remarkably successful group effort, and the fact that the story twists and turns even more than it would have done had it been the work of a single writer merely adds to its effectiveness as a mystery. The New York Times Book Review
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