The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie, author of four books, was no longer the novice who had grasped eagerly the chance to have her first novel published. As she herself put it, though she had been ignorant and foolish when she first submitted a book for publication, she had since learned a few things. She had discovered the Society of Authors and read its periodical, from which she learned that you had to be extremely careful in making contracts with publishers, ‘and especially with certain publishers’. When The Bodley Head, who still had an option on her next two books after The Man in the Brown Suit, suggested shortly before its publication that they scrap the old contract and make a new one for a further five books, Mrs Christie politely declined. She considered that they had not treated a young and inexperienced author fairly, but had taken advantage of her ignorance of publishers’ contracts and her understandable eagerness to have her first book published.

It was at this point that Agatha Christie decided she needed a literary agent and went back to the firm of Hughes Massie. Massie, who had advised her years earlier, had since died, and she was received by a young man with a slight stammer, whose name was Edmund Cork. Finding him impressive, and considerably less alarming than Hughes Massie himself had been, Mrs Christie placed her literary career, such as it was, in Cork’s hands, and left his office feeling that an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for more than fifty years until her death. Edmund Cork subsequently died, but the firm still represents the Agatha Christie Literary Estate.

The Evening News offered what seemed to Agatha Christie the unbelievable sum of £500 for the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit, which she hastily accepted, deciding not to object that the newspaper intended to call the serial version ‘Anna the Adventuress’, as silly a title as she had ever heard. That she should receive such a huge amount of money, was, she thought, an extraordinary stroke of luck and, when Archie suggested she buy a car with it, Agatha invested in a grey, bottle-nosed Morris Cowley which, she revealed many years later, was the first of the two most exciting things in her life. (The second was her invitation to dine with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace many years later.)

The Man in the Brown Suit, another of the thrillers which Agatha Christie found easier and ‘more fun’ to write than her detective stories, is one of her best in that genre. The heroine, Anne Beddingfield, is a romantic young woman whose archaeologist father dies, leaving her little more than the opportunity to be free and to seek adventure. Adventure, for Anne, begins when she witnesses the apparently accidental death of a man who falls onto the electrified rails at Hyde Park Corner tube station. Finding reason to suspect that the man’s death was not accidental, Anne persuades the great newspaper magnate Lord Nasby, ‘millionaire owner of the Daily Budget’ and several other papers, to commission her to investigate the matter. (For Nasby, we are probably meant to read Northcliffe.) A second death occurs at the Mill House, Marlow, whose owner is Sir Eustace Pedler, MP, and the trail leads Anne to sail to Cape Town on the Kilmorden Castle. On board, she meets Sir Eustace, a character whom Agatha Christie, as we know, based largely on Major Belcher, and his secretary, Guy Pagett, who, like the real-life secretary of Belcher, ‘has the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner’. Anne, like Agatha herself, proves to be a very poor sailor, and it is not until they reach Madeira that she begins to feel she might possibly recover from her seasickness.

With the exception of a Prologue set in Paris, the entire action of the novel takes place either en route to, or in South Africa and Rhodesia, and is presented through the diaries of Anne and Sir Eustace. The villain is a master criminal who organizes crime ‘as another man might organize a boot factory’. Jewel robberies, forgery, espionage, assassination, he has dabbled in them all. He is known to his underlings simply as ‘the Colonel’, and it falls to Anne finally to unmask him, with the aid of two or three friends.

Who Anne’s friends are, and who her enemies, is something which Mrs Christie keeps her readers guessing about. Like all Christie thrillers, The Man in the Brown Suit incorporates the puzzle element into its plot as well. Thus it retains a hold on the loyalties of those who prefer the murder mystery to the thriller, for it conceals until the last pages the identity of ‘the Colonel’ (who is, after all, a murderer), while at the same time including all the ingredients of the ‘international crime’ story: action, violence, suspense. Whether or not the charming old rogue Sir Eustace Pedler is at all like Major Belcher, he is one of Agatha Christie’s most convincing and memorable characters, and the author’s underestimated ability to convey a strong sense of place is very much in evidence in her discreet but effective description of the exotic African landscape through which Pedler, Anne and the others move.

It might be thought that to present the narrative through the diaries of two characters detracts somewhat from the suspense, or at least from the list of suspects. But with Agatha Christie you cannot always be certain that anyone is above suspicion. Diaries can also be published posthumously. (This is not necessarily a clue.) In The Man in the Brown Suit Mrs Christie makes use of a device which, to a certain extent, anticipates her tactics in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), though less spectacularly.

It need not impair enjoyment of the novel to know that one of the characters, a strong silent man called Colonel Race, will appear in three later Agatha Christie novels, ageing over forty years in the process. In fact, enjoyment of The Man in the Brown Suit will be impaired only if you take too seriously the African revolution which seems to be trying to foment itself offstage. Mrs Christie, never an acute political observer, rather charmingly recalls in her autobiography that ‘there was some kind of a revolutionary crisis on while we were there, and I noted down a few useful facts.’ Those facts must have got lost somewhere.

The Man in the Brown Suit was produced by Warner Brothers as a TV movie in 1987, starring Tony Randall.

Poirot Investigates POIROT SHORT STORIES (1924)

One of Hercule Poirot’s earliest fans was Bruce Ingram, editor of the London illustrated weekly, The Sketch. Ingram got in touch with Agatha Christie to suggest that she should write a series of Hercule Poirot stories for his magazine, and a thrilled and delighted Agatha agreed. She was not entirely pleased with the drawing of Hercule Poirot which The Sketch commissioned to accompany the first of the stories: it was not unlike her idea of Poirot but it made him look a little too smart and dandified. Agatha Christie wrote eight stories, and at first it was thought that eight would be sufficient. However, it was eventually decided to extend the series to twelve, and the author had to produce another four rather too hastily. When the series of stories began, in the 7 March 1923 issue of The Sketch, it was accompanied by a page of photographs of ‘The Maker of “The Grey Cells of M. Poirot” ’, showing her at home with her daughter, in her drawing-room, on the telephone, at her writing table, at work with her typewriter and so on. The author of ‘the thrilling set of detective yarns’ made it clear to The Bodley Head that she thought they should publish them quickly as a volume of stories, while the publicity from their appearance in The Sketch and from the serialization of The Man in the Brown Suit in the London Evening News was still current. The Bodley Head agreed, and the stories were collected in a volume which, at first, it was intended should be called The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot, but which, in due course, appeared as Poirot Investigates. The volume was also published in the United States (by Dodd, Mead & Co, who remain Agatha Christie’s American hardback publishers), but there is a discrepancy between the British and American editions. The British volume consisted of eleven stories while the American edition contained fourteen. (The three extra stories, ‘The Lost Mine’, ‘The Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Veiled Lady’ eventually appeared in Great Britain, along with several other stories, fifty years later in Poirot’s Early Cases. ‘The Veiled Lady’ was also published, together with two other stories, in Poirot Lends a Hand [1946: see p. 212].)

Some, though not many, of Agatha Christie’s short stories are as satisfying as the best of her novels. In general, however, her talent is not suited to the short story, or at least not to the very short mystery story of which she wrote so many. Her plots are, perforce, skeletal, and her characterization at its most perfunctory. The puzzle element is, therefore, given even greater emphasis than in the novels in which it contributes largely to the reader’s pleasure. Many of the stories, including most of the Hercule Poirot adventures collected in Poirot Investigates, are little more than puzzles or tricks given ‘a local habitation and a name’.

Prior to the emergence of Agatha Christie upon the crime writers’ scene, many of the genre’s greatest successes were with short stories. It is generally agreed, for instance, that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are superior to the Holmes novels, and most of the other mystery writers who flourished at the same time as Conan Doyle, among them G. K. Chesterton (with his Catholic priest-detective Father Brown), Baroness Orczy, Richard Austin Freeman (whose detective was the physician Dr John Thorndyke), the American Melville Davisson Post (whose mysteries are solved by Uncle Abner, a shrewd Virginian), H. C. Bailey with his Mr Fortune stories, and Ernest Bramah, all produced their most successful work in the form of the short story. However, though she wrote more than a hundred and fifty short stories, Agatha Christie’s greatest triumphs were to be achieved with her full-length novels, rather than with short stories or novellas.

That so many of Agatha Christie’s stories are little more than puzzles or tricks might not matter so much were the puzzles more varied and the tricks less repetitive. For instance, the first time that Poirot points the accusing finger accurately at the person who engaged him, the reader is surprised and delighted; but M. Poirot and Mrs Christie connive several times at this particular trick, which is also not unknown in the novels.

The stories in Poirot Investigates are, on their own level, quite entertaining, but it would be as unwise to read more than one or two at a sitting as it would be to consume a two-pound box of chocolates in one go. Occasionally, Mrs Christie’s touch falters, as when, in ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’ she is snide about Inspector Japp’s French accent and has him refer to the ‘boat train to the Continong’. Why would he not pronounce ‘continent’ as an English word? But usually her social placing is exact. In ‘The Case of the Missing Will’, Poirot’s client, a handsome young woman, explains that her father, who came of farming stock, ‘married slightly above him; my mother was the daughter of a poor artist.’

‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, in which Poirot investigates a strange series of deaths of people who were involved in the discovery and opening of the tomb of King Men-her-Ra, an event which we are told followed hard upon the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Lord Carnarvon, is interesting as evidence that Agatha Christie was conversant with the science of archaeology some years before she met Max Mallowan. (She had already introduced an archaeologist into her collection of characters in The Man in the Brown Suit.)

One of the best stories in Poirot Investigates is ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’. It is also one in which we learn something more of the author’s political opinions, or opinions which it seems reasonably safe to attribute to the author even though she issues them through the mouths of her characters and not by way of authorial comment. It is unlikely that, in 1923, any irony was intended in the opening sentence of the story (even a story narrated by the not very shrewd Hastings), which begins, ‘Now that war and the problems of war are things of the past…’ But pacifism takes a knocking at more than one point in the story, and the statement made by someone meant to be a leading British politician that ‘the Pacifist propaganda, started and maintained by the German agents in our midst, has been very active’ seems to be accepted by Poirot and Hastings without modification. The politician is ‘Lord Estair, Leader of the House of Commons’. Is it, in fact, possible for a nobleman to lead the House of Commons? Apparently, if his is a courtesy title.

It is in ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’ that Poirot most clearly describes his method. He has declined to leap into a military car at Boulogne and set off in pursuit of the kidnappers:

He shot a quick glance at us. ‘It is not so that the good detective should act, eh? I perceive your thought. He must be full of energy. He must rush to and fro. He should prostrate himself on the dusty road and seek the marks of tyres through a little glass. He must gather up the cigarette-end, the fallen match? That is your idea, is it not?’

His eyes challenged us. ‘But I – Hercule Poirot – tell you that it is not so! The true clues are within – here!’ He tapped his forehead. ‘See you, I need not have left London. It would have been sufficient for me to sit quietly in my rooms there. All that matters is the little grey cells within. Secretly and silently they do their part, until suddenly I call for a map, and I lay my finger on a spot – so – and I say: the Prime Minister is there! and it is so!’

Nevertheless, when it suits him Poirot is not at all averse to snooping about, gathering up the cigarette-end and the fallen match. He has sufficient confidence and vanity to contradict himself whenever he feels like it. In these early stories, he is at his most Holmesian, and the parallels with the minutiae of the Conan Doyle stories are most noticeable. Hastings, similarly, has become more Watsonian than ever, and in some of the stories Mrs Christie treats his relationship with Poirot mechanically. In addition to the stories already mentioned, the volume contains ‘The Adventures of “The Western Star” ’, ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’, ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’, ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’, ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’ and ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’.

All fourteen stories were adapted for television in the series which featured David Suchet as Poirot, and were first transmitted on London Weekend TV on various dates between 1990 and 1993.

The Road of Dreams POEMS (1924)

Ever since she was a child, Agatha Christie had written poetry. One of her earliest efforts, written at the age of eleven, begins: ‘I knew a little cowslip and a pretty flower too,/Who wished she was a bluebell and had a robe of blue.’ In her teens, she had occasional poems published in magazines, and by the time she was in her mid-thirties there were enough of them to be gathered into a slim volume which, in 1924, the London publishing house of Geoffrey Bles published, under the title of The Road of Dreams. This was also the title of one of the poems in the volume (‘The Road of Dreams leads up the Hill/So straight and white/And bordered wide/With almond trees on either side/In rosy flush of Spring’s delight! …’)

Agatha Christie’s talent for poetry was genuine, but modest and of no startling originality: the finest poetry is made not out of feelings but out of words, and Agatha Christie was not sufficiently in love with words to become a poet of real distinction. She did, however, enjoy relieving her feelings in verse and, in doing so, occasionally produced a pleasant little lyric poem.

The Road of Dreams is divided into four sections. The first, ‘A Masque from Italy’, is a sequence of nine poems or ‘songs’ to be performed by the commedia dell’ arte characters, Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierrette, Punchinello and Pulcinella. Written when Agatha was in her late teens, the Harlequin poems have a certain wistfulness which is appealing. They are of interest, too, in that they anticipate the Harlequin element which was later to creep into some of her short stories, those involving that mysterious character Mr Harley Quin.

The second section of the volume, ‘Ballads’, consists of six poems, among them ‘Elizabeth of England’ (‘I am Mistress of England – the Seas I hold!/I have gambled, and won, alone …’), which is presumably one of the author’s teenage efforts, and ‘Ballad of the Maytime’, a fey little ballad about bluebells which Mrs Christie wrote in 1924 in Sunningdale.

One or two of the eight poems in ‘Dreams and Fantasies’, the third section of the volume, are romantically death-obsessed – Keats’ ‘La belle dame sans merci’ is not too far away – and one of them, ‘Down in the Wood’, which forty years later Mrs Christie still liked sufficiently to reprint in her autobiography, is rather good, with a last line that lingers in the memory: ‘And Fear – naked Fear passes out of the wood!’ The volume’s final section, ‘Other Poems’, consists of thirteen poems written at various times, about the passing of love, the horror of war and the romance of the unknown. Again, there is a certain amount of evidence that the poet is ‘half in love with easeful death’:

Give me my hour within my Lover’s arms!

Vanished the doubts, the fears, the sweet alarms!

I lose myself within his quickening Breath.…

And when he tires and leaves me – there is Death …

Mystery is never completely absent from any aspect of Agatha Christie’s world, and there are one or two minor mysteries connected with this innocuous volume. The crime writer Michael Gilbert in an article on Agatha Christie9 mentions the volume’s title poem, ‘The Road of Dreams’, and quotes two stanzas from it. But the stanzas he quotes are part of a completely different poem in the volume, a poem called ‘In a Dispensary’ which Agatha Miller wrote in her mid-twenties when she was working in the hospital dispensary in Torquay.

Mystery number two is provided by the author of a book described as ‘an intimate biography of the first lady of crime’10 who says that Agatha Christie exposed her love for Max Mallowan ‘for all the world to see in a poem entitled “To M.E.L.M. in Absence” in The Road of Dreams (1924)’. But there is no such poem in The Road of Dreams, and Agatha Christie did not meet Max Mallowan until several years after 1924: to be precise, in 1930.

A stanza from ‘In a Dispensary’ which is not quoted in Michael Gilbert’s article clearly reveals the future crime writer’s interest in the poisons on the dispensary shelves among which she worked:

From the Borgia’s time to the present day, their power has been proved and tried!

Monkshead blue, called Aconite, and the deadly Cyanide!

Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain – courage and vigour new!

Here is menace and murder and sudden death! – in these phials of green and blue!

The final poem in the volume is ‘Pierrot Grown Old’, which reads as though it ought to have been part of the commedia dell’ arte sequence, ‘A Masque from Italy’, with which The Road of Dreams begins. (When the contents of The Road of Dreams were reprinted in Poems nearly fifty years later, ‘Pierrot Grown Old’ was, in fact, taken into the ‘Masque’ sequence.)

The Secret of Chimneys (1925)

Archie and Agatha did not find the cottage in the country for which they were searching. Instead, they took a flat in a large Victorian country house, which had been divided into four flats. The house, Scotswood, was at Sunningdale in Berkshire, only twenty-four miles from London and close to the Sunningdale Golf Club of which Archie had become a member. Golf was such a passion with Colonel Christie that before long Mrs Christie began to fear she was turning into ‘that well-known figure, a golf widow’. She consoled herself by writing The Secret of Chimneys, which she later described as ‘light-hearted and rather in the style of The Secret Adversary’.

Before leaving London for the country, Agatha had taken lessons in sculpture. She was a great admirer of the art, much more than of painting, and was disappointed when she became aware that she possessed no real talent for it. ‘By way of vanity’, she composed a few songs instead. Her musical education in Paris had been thorough and there had been a moment in her life when she even considered taking up the career of a professional pianist. She also had a pleasant singing voice, so it was appropriate that she should turn, however briefly, to the composition of songs, and equally appropriate that she should set some of her own verses to music. In later years, she continued to profess herself quite pleased with one group of songs in particular, settings of her Pierrot and Harlequin verses. She realized, however, that writing seemed to be the trade to which she was best suited.

After a few months at Scotswood, the Christies decided that they needed a house of their own, and they began to look at properties in the vicinity of Sunningdale. Their choice fell upon a large house with a pleasant garden, and, in 1925, after less than two years in their flat in the country, they moved into their own country house which, at Archie’s suggestion, they named Styles after the house in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Agatha’s literary agent, Edmund Cork, had been busy extricating his client from her involvement with The Bodley Head. Cork approached the firm of Collins, who had begun to add detective novels to their list, and offered them the first Agatha Christie title which did not have contractually to be offered to The Bodley Head. A three-book contract was signed with Collins as early as 27 January 1924, though there were at that time two volumes still to be published by The Bodley Head. The Secret of Chimneys was the last Agatha Christie novel to appear under The Bodley Head’s imprint. Collins became her English publishers for the rest of the author’s life.

The Secret of Chimneys is one of the best of Agatha Christie’s early thrillers. It is, in its way, as typical of its time, the twenties, as Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat or P. G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, both of which were published several months before Chimneys. It also owes something to the Ruritanian world of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, for its plot is concerned with political events in the fictitious small Balkan state of Herzoslovakia, the character of whose people appears to be of an almost Montenegran fierceness. After a beginning in Bulawayo, however, the events of the novel take place not in the Balkans but in London or at Chimneys, one of the stately homes of England and the seat of the ninth Marquis of Caterham. Chimneys, we are told, is as much a national possession as a grand country house, and history has been made at its informed weekend parties. It was perhaps not unlike Cliveden.

Diplomatic intrigue involving the possible reinstatement of the Herzoslovakian royal family and international crime concerning the attempts of a jewel thief known throughout Europe as ‘King Victor’ are ingeniously combined in The Secret of Chimneys, and at the end two characters are unmasked and revealed in their true colours, though only one of them is criminal.

It is when she is freed of some of the restrictions of the domestic murder mystery, as in this type of novel, that Mrs Christie seems able to relax into more leisurely, and, therefore, more detailed and believable characterization. Believable, that is, in the context of your willingly suspended disbelief; for, although the reader greatly enjoys making the acquaintance of, for instance, Baron Lolopretjzyl who represents in London the Loyalist Party of Herzoslovakia, it has to be admitted that the Baron’s construction of English sentences is a trifle more exotic than it need be. ‘Of many secrets he the knowledge had. Should he reveal but the quarter of them, Europe into war plunged may be,’ he says of a fellow countryman.