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

The Baron resides in a suite at Harridge’s Hotel. Mrs Christie’s London hotels are only lightly disguised. Mr Anthony Cade, who may or may not be the hero of the story, stays at the Blitz, which seems an inappropriate, indeed irreverent, name for an hotel clearly based on the Ritz. The Blitz, however, is oddly situated. Although, at one point, it appears to be where it ought to be, in Piccadilly, when Anthony Cade first arrives he strolls outside for a brief walk on the Embankment, for all the world as though he were staying at the Savoy.

Though it is not he but one of the upperclass amateurs who solves the secret of Chimneys, Superintendent Battle who is in charge of the case is no plodding and unimaginative policeman inserted into the plot to be the butt of the amateur genius’s humour. Battle is not at all like Inspector Japp (who is mentally continually trailing along some steps behind Hercule Poirot’s thought processes): he is an intelligent and successful officer whose speciality appears to be crimes in which politics or international diplomacy are involved. Outwardly a stolid and impassive figure, Battle reaches his conclusions by a dogged application of common sense. After The Secret of Chimneys, he was to appear in four more Christie novels in some of which he would deal with purely domestic crimes.

Occasionally, Agatha Christie carried over from one book to another characters other than her detectives and policemen. Not only Superintendent Battle but also four other characters from The Secret of Chimneys appear again four years later in The Seven Dials Mystery, as does the house, Chimneys. The house itself, and the kind of life lived in it, play a lively part in both novels. Chroniclers of a fast disappearing scene will be interested to note that the lavish English breakfast was still very much in evidence in the twenties. On the sideboard in the dining-room were half a score of heavy silver dishes, ‘ingeniously kept hot by patent arrangements’. Lord Caterham lifts each lid in turn. ‘Omelette,’ he mutters, ‘eggs and bacon, kidneys, devilled bird, haddock, cold ham, cold pheasant.’ Deciding he cares for none of these things, he tells his butler to ‘ask the cook to poach me an egg.’

The mandatory racial slurs occur in The Secret of Chimneys, though apparently they have been edited out of more recent American editions. ‘Dagos will be dagos’, ‘Like all dagos, he couldn’t swim’, and other remarks are cheerfully exchanged, and of course all references to Jews are uncomplimentary. People are beginning to be interested in Herzoslovakia, Anthony Cade tells his friend Jimmy, and, when asked what kind of people, he replies, ‘Hebraic people. Yellow-faced financiers in city offices.’ When we meet one of these financiers, Herman Isaacstein, we are invited to smile at Lord Caterham’s references to him as ‘Mr Ikey Isaacstein’, ‘Noseystein’, and ‘Fat Ikey’. But the true-blue British unemployed are treated with equal contempt. When Anthony Cade disguises himself as an out-of-work ex-serviceman, the upperclass Virginia Revel takes one look at him and decides that he is ‘a more pleasing specimen than usual of London’s unemployed’.

Her attitude to democracy is so unsympathetic, at least as expressed by a character of whom Mrs Christie evidently approves, that it reveals an unexpectedly authoritarian aspect of the author’s nature:

Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on people with a strong hand – ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers – they may some day, but they don’t now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures yet awhile – but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with.

It is true that people on the Moscow underground are less surly in their behaviour than those in London and New York, but you would hesitate to use the citizenry of Moscow as a kind of democratic barometer. Even Agatha Christie, one imagines, if she had been offered the choice would have preferred to be bad-tempered in a democracy than polite in a police state.

The danger of pontificating solemnly on the subject of Agatha Christie’s politics must, however, be guarded against. The author tells us in The Secret of Chimneys that there was nothing that bored Lord Caterham more than politics, unless it was politicians, and one suspects that she shared his Lordship’s feelings. No one need be deterred from enjoying The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie’s politics, nor even by occasional infelicities in her prose style, though prose is more serious a matter than politics. Is there not something endearing about an author who can write the phrase, ‘eyeing a taxi that was crawling past with longing eyes’?

In general, Mrs Christie’s grasp of style is firm: The Secret of Chimneys is enjoyable because its style is light and humorous. It is not, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an adventure-romance, but a comedy-adventure, which is perhaps a new category.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd POIROT (1926)

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so. But a variant of the idea, whether you regard it as an outrageous fraud or remarkably original or both, had earlier been suggested by Mrs Christie’s brother-in-law, James Watts, and the author was already mulling it over. It appealed greatly to her, but before starting to write the novel she had to work out just how to make use of the startling suggestion (which will not be revealed in these pages), in such a way that it could not be regarded as cheating the reader. Of course, as Mrs Christie was to admit in her autobiography, a number of people do consider themselves cheated when they come to the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong, for ‘such little lapses of time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an ambiguous sentence’.

It was with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by far the most ingenious crime novel she had written, that Agatha Christie’s reputation took a great leap forward, and so did her sales. The author’s solution to the mystery is still debated in books and articles on crime fiction more than half a century after the novel’s first publication, and although its immediate success meant no more than that an edition of approximately five thousand copies sold out, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd must by now have sold well over a million copies.

Critics and readers were divided on the propriety of Mrs Christie’s brilliant trick. Though the Daily Sketch thought it ‘the best thriller ever’, the News Chronicle considered The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a ‘tasteless and unfortunate let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’. One reader wrote a letter to The Times in which he announced that, having been a great admirer of Agatha Christie, he was so shocked by the dénouement of Roger Ackroyd that he proposed ‘in the future not to buy any more of her books’. Even some of her fellow crime novelists thought she had not played fair, though Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a number of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey as investigator, defended Mrs Christie by pointing out that ‘it’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody’.

Agatha Christie herself remained unrepentant. In an interview with Francis Wyndham in 1966, she explained: ‘I have a certain amount of rules. No false words must be uttered by me. To write “Mrs Armstrong walked home wondering who had committed the murder” would be unfair if she had done it herself. But it’s not unfair to leave things out. In Roger Ackroyd … there’s lack of explanation there, but no false statement. Whoever my villain is, it has to be someone I feel could do the murder.’11

Lord Mountbatten’s claim to be responsible for having given Agatha Christie the idea for Roger Ackroyd should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. It is true that, at Christmas in 1969, he received from the author a copy of the book, inscribed: ‘To Lord Mountbatten in grateful remembrance of a letter he wrote to me forty-five years ago which contained the suggestion which I subsequently used in a book called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Here once more is my thanks.’ However, this was in response to a letter from Mountbatten reminding her that he had written to her forty-five years earlier.

Whether Agatha Christie thought Roger Ackroyd her best book is uncertain, but she usually mentioned it as among her three or four favourites.

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, dedicated not to Lord Mountbatten but ‘to PUNKIE,12 who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on every one in turn!’, Agatha Christie returned to the classical domestic crime novel for the first time since Murder on the Links three years earlier, and at the same time reintroduced Hercule Poirot who, apart from the short stories in Poirot Investigates, had also been missing for three years.

The story, narrated not by Poirot’s usual associate, Hastings, but by the local doctor whose name is Sheppard, begins with the death of someone other than Roger Ackroyd. Mrs Ferrars, a wealthy widow, has been found dead in her bed, and Dr Sheppard has been sent for. He suspects suicide, but sees no point in saying so publicly. The following evening Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy widower whom village gossip had prophesied would marry Mrs Ferrars, is murdered in the study of his house.

We are soon introduced to Dr Sheppard’s sister Caroline, who keeps house for him, and to the Sheppards’ neighbour, a recent arrival in the village of King’s Abbot. He is a foreign gentleman with ‘an egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes’. He has retired from whatever his profession may have been, grows vegetable marrows, and is thought to be called Porrott.

Porrott, of course, is simply the King’s Abbot pronunciation of Poirot, and soon the retired detective has introduced himself to Dr Sheppard, has admitted how bored he is with his vegetable marrows, and how much he misses his friend (‘who for many years never left my side’) who is now living in the Argentine. When Poirot is asked to investigate the murder of Roger Ackroyd, he allows Dr Sheppard to take the place of his old friend Hastings as assistant and part-confidant; and also as Boswell to Poirot’s Johnson, for it is Sheppard who writes up the case and is the chronicler of Poirot’s eventual success.

It is not a success which comes easily to Poirot, for the suspects are many and varied. Most of them were staying in Ackroyd’s house when he was murdered. Major Blunt, a big-game hunter, is an old friend, and appears to have a romantic interest in Ackroyd’s niece, Flora. Flora and her mother, who is Ackroyd’s widowed sister-in-law, are poor relations living on a rich man’s charity. Geoffrey Raymond, the dead man’s secretary, Ursula Bourne, a somewhat unusual parlourmaid, and Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s adopted son who is burdened with gambling debts, all come under suspicion.

Poirot is assisted not only by Dr Sheppard but by the doctor’s sister Caroline, a middle-aged spinster who seems to know everything that goes on in the village. Many years later, in discussing the character of Miss Marple, an unconventional solver of puzzles whom she was to introduce in Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie said she thought it possible that Miss Marple ‘arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.’

It is not simply because of its startling dénouement that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has remained one of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels. The story is believable, the characters convincing, and Mrs Christie’s ear for dialogue is accurate. That she can occasionally be clumsy ought not to obscure the fact that, on form, she writes speech which sounds natural, whether it issues from the mouth of a peeress or a parlourmaid. Even more impressive is her ability to enter into the thought processes of her male characters. Dr Sheppard, the narrator of Roger Ackroyd, is a fully rounded and perfectly convincing character, and his loving, exasperated relationship with his sister Caroline, an amusing and acutely observed character, is beautifully conveyed. Another important ingredient in the success of the novel is the background of English village life which Mrs Christie provides. It is never obtrusive but it is there, and it is important.

From The Murder of Roger Ackroyd onwards, Agatha Christie’s readers knew what to expect, or rather knew that they would never know what to expect. And it is this quality of unexpectedness which makes Mrs Christie unique among crime writers. Dorothy L. Sayers writes more elegantly but also, at times, more ploddingly. Her stories do not move quickly. Ngaio Marsh is in the Christie tradition but can get bogged down in endless interviews with suspects. Patricia Wentworth is pastiche Christie and her villains can usually be guessed. After the trick Christie played on her public in Roger Ackroyd (though some of those who remembered The Man in the Brown Suit ought perhaps not to have been taken in), clearly there were no holds barred. It is this realization that no one, absolutely no one, is exempt from suspicion in an Agatha Christie novel that makes reading the finest ones such a delight. Here she will kill off all the characters, there she will make virtually everyone the murderer, somewhere else the crime will be committed by – no, surely not by him? But how could she possibly justify that? Well, she does.

Her puzzles endure to delight and surprise readers towards the end of the twentieth century just as much as they did in the twenties because they are not mechanical but concerned with human character. The locked-room mysteries beloved of John Dickson Carr are of no great interest to Agatha Christie, nor are the fiendish devices, the evaporating ice darts or any of the other paraphernalia used by some of the earlier crime writers. Her tricks are sometimes verbal, sometimes visual. If you listen carefully and watch her all the time, you may catch Mrs Christie, but it is highly unlikely that you will. The solution which she has somehow persuaded you quite early in the narrative is not the correct one very frequently is – but not invariably.

Mrs Christie is at her best throughout The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The occasional Christie carelessness is there, as when she tells us that Ackroyd is nearly fifty years of age, and a paragraph or two later it becomes clear that he could not have been older than forty-three. And Poirot’s years in England have caused his command of French to deteriorate. He says ‘Je ne pense pas’ when he clearly means ‘Je crois que non’, and in any case is perfectly capable of saying ‘I think not’ in English. But these are minor quibbles. In Dr Sheppard and his sister Mrs Christie has created a pair of highly engaging characters, and her description of Caroline Sheppard, tempted to gossip, but wavering for a second or two ‘much as a roulette ball might coyly hover between two numbers’, is especially felicitous.

You can usually expect a little music in her books and, at least in the early Christies, a little anti-semitism. Both are to be found in Roger Ackroyd. Oddly, it is the unmusical Major Blunt who provides the two references to opera when he talks of ‘the johnny who sold his soul to the devil’, adding that ‘there’s an opera about it’, and later reveals his knowledge that Mélisande is someone in an opera. Agatha Christie probably saw both Faust and Pelléas et Mélisande during her period at finishing school in Paris, but you would not have expected Major Blunt to know Debussy’s opera though he might just have been aware of the more popular Faust of Gounod. Blunt, incidentally, is a name Mrs Christie seems to have been fond of using. Three more Blunts, one of them an Admiral, will turn up in later works.

The mandatory anti-semitic reference occurs when one of the characters receives demands from debt collectors (Scotch [sic] gentlemen named McPherson and MacDonald), and Dr Sheppard comments: ‘They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.’

Two years after its publication, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was adapted for the stage by Michael Morton. Mrs Christie much disliked Morton’s first suggestion which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot, and have lots of girls in love with him. With the support of Gerald Du Maurier who produced the play, she persuaded the adaptor not to change the character and personality of Poirot, but agreed to allow Caroline Sheppard to be turned into a young and attractive girl, in order to supply Poirot with romantic interest. Mrs Christie’s agreement was reluctant. She resented the removal of the spinster Caroline, for she liked the role played by this character in the life of the village, and she liked the idea of that village life being reflected through Dr Sheppard and his sister. In the play, Poirot confesses to Dr Sheppard that he loves Caryl, as she is now called and, although at the end the great detective announces his intention to leave ‘for my own country’, the final moments suggest that he may, one day, come back for Caryl:

POIROT (taking both her hands and kissing them): Un

de ces jours …

CARYL: What do you mean?

POIROT: Perhaps one day …

(Caryl goes out slowly. Poirot turns back to table, takes rose out of specimen glass which is on table, kisses it, and puts it in his button-hole, looking off towards the garden where Caryl has gone out.) The curtain falls.

The play, which was called Alibi, opened on 15 May 1928, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End of London, with the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot, J. H. Roberts as Dr Sheppard, Basil Loder as Major Blunt, Henry Daniell (who went to Hollywood the following year to play suave villains in countless American films) as Parker, the butler, Lady Tree as Mrs Ackroyd, Jane Welsh as her daughter Flora, Cyril Nash as Ralph Paton, Henry Forbes Robertson as Geoffrey Raymond, Iris Noel as Ursula Bourne, and Gillian Lind as Caryl Sheppard. The Sketch said that Laughton ‘admirably impersonated’ Poirot, and Mrs Christie thought he was a good actor but ‘entirely unlike Hercule Poirot’. The play was a commercial success, running for 250 performances in London before being taken up elsewhere and eventually by amateur dramatic societies with whom it is still highly popular.

In 1931, the play became a film, still with the title of Alibi. Produced by Julius Hagen, who had already made an Agatha Christie movie in 1928 and directed by Leslie Hiscott, Alibi was filmed at the Twickenham studios near London, with Austin Trevor, who was even less like Hercule Poirot than Laughton had been, and who made no attempt at a characterization, but played the role ‘straight’. Others in the cast were Franklin Dyall, Elizabeth Allan, Clare Greet and Milton Rosmer. (Max Mallowan in his autobiography, Mallowan’s Memoirs, wrongly identifies the actor who played Poirot in this film as Francis Sullivan, who played Poirot twice on the stage, but who was not in either the film or the stage version of Alibi.)

Retitled The Fatal Alibi, the play was staged in New York on 28 February 1932, with Charles Laughton directing and also playing Poirot. It closed after twenty-four performances.

The first of Agatha Christie’s books to be produced in Great Britain by Collins and in America by Dodd, Mead & Co who had bought John Lane and Co, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in the spring of 1926. Seven months later, on Friday, 3 December, Mrs Christie disappeared in mysterious circumstances worthy of one of her crime novels.

The year 1926 had been far from a happy one for Agatha Christie. It began well enough with a brief holiday in Corsica with her sister, during which she worked on The Mystery of the Blue Train, but shortly after the sisters arrived home they learned that their mother was ill and some months later Agatha found herself also having to cope with the realization that her marriage to Archie Christie had badly deteriorated. For some time Colonel Christie had seemed to be more interested in golf than in his wife, and now Agatha discovered that she had a more serious rival for her husband’s affections, a young woman called Nancy Neele who lived at Godalming in Surrey and who was also an acquaintance of hers. Archie confessed that he was in love with Miss Neele and wanted to marry her. He asked Agatha to divorce him.

On the morning of Friday, 3 December 1926, after a quarrel with his wife, Colonel Christie packed his bags and left home to spend the weekend with Miss Neele in Godalming. That evening, leaving her daughter Rosalind asleep in the house, Mrs Christie drove off in her car. She left two letters, one addressed to Archie, and one requesting her secretary to cancel her appointments as she was going to Yorkshire. According to the daughter of the then Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey, she posted a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable, in which she said she feared for her life, and appealed for his help. Her car was found next morning by George Best, a fifteen-year-old gypsy lad. It had been abandoned on the embankment at the side of the road at a popular ‘beauty spot’ called Newlands Corner, near a lake known as the Silent Pool. The bodywork of the car was covered in frost, and the lights were still on. Inside the car the police found a fur coat, and a small case which had burst open and which contained three dresses, two pairs of shoes and an expired driving licence in the name of Mrs Agatha Christie.

For the next few days the newspapers were full of stories about the well-known mystery writer’s disappearance, with huge banner headlines announcing new so-called developments, interviews with and comments by several people, and speculation by many more. Suicide was not ruled out, nor was murder.

On 7 December, the Daily News offered ‘£100 reward to the first person furnishing us with information leading to the whereabouts, if alive, of Mrs Christie’. The Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey said, in the best tradition of the detective novel: ‘I have handled many important cases during my career, but this is the most baffling mystery ever set me for solution.’ Also in the best tradition of crime fiction, suspicion centred for a time upon the husband of the missing woman.

By the following weekend, hundreds of policemen and thousands of members of the general public had joined in the search for Agatha Christie. The Silent Pool was dredged with special machinery, light aircraft scoured the countryside from above, and packs of airedales and bloodhounds went over the ground more closely. Police from four counties, Surrey, Essex, Berkshire and Kent, were brought in. As in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, a number of clues were found, only to be discarded as red herrings: a local chemist said that Mrs Christie had often discussed with him methods of committing suicide; a woman claimed that she had seen someone, whom she identified from photographs as Mrs Christie, wandering about, dazed; and two other people remembered that a woman answering to her description, her clothes covered in frost, had asked them the way to Petersfield, a town in Hampshire. The police guarded Colonel Christie’s house, monitored his phone calls, and followed him to his office. Christie told a city colleague, ‘They think I’ve murdered my wife.’ The weekend after her disappearance, in answer to an appeal from the police fifteen thousand volunteers searched the Downs. On the Saturday afternoon, three thousand of their cars were parked on Merrow Downs, and they set off in groups of thirty with a police officer in charge of each group. The Daily Mail played its part by publishing an article by the famous thriller writer, Edgar Wallace, in which he expounded his theory of Mrs Christie’s disappearance. He did not suspect foul play, but considered it