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

The Seven Dials of the title can be taken to mean either the district of Seven Dials in the West End of London, or the dials of seven alarm clocks (Mrs Christie favours the older spelling, ‘alarum’) which are discovered ranged along the mantelpiece in the room at Chimneys in which a young man is found dead in his bed. The action takes place partly at Chimneys, the country seat of Lord Caterham, and partly in various other places, among them the sinister Seven Dials Club, in Seven Dials, which ‘used to be a shimmy sort of district round about Tottenham Court Road way’. Seven Dials is actually a block or two southeast of the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and not noticeably less slummy now than in 1929. (Two of its theatres which stand side by side, the Ambassadors and St Martin’s, acquired Christiean connections when, in 1952, Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap, opened at the Ambassadors, and in 1974 transferred next door to the St Martin’s where, at the time of writing, it is still running.)

As usual with Agatha Christie’s thrillers, the mystery element is not neglected. Not only does the reader have to discover who killed two of the house guests at Chimneys, he also has to worry about the secret society at Seven Dials and the identity of its leader, referred to by his cronies as ‘Number Seven’. Among the characters from The Secret of Chimneys who reappear in The Seven Dials Mystery are some of the representatives of law and order, including Colonel Melrose, the Chief Constable, and the stolid, reliable Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard. Lord Caterham’s daughter, Lady Eileen Brent, familiarly known as ‘Bundle’, who had played an important role in The Secret of Chimneys, is the amateur sleuth who attempts to solve the Seven Dials Mystery with the aid of a couple of amiably silly young men, one of whom, Bill Eversleigh (also in Chimneys), works at the Foreign Office.

The Seven Dials secret society is in many ways similar to the secret organization headed by the mysterious Mr Brown in The Secret Adversary, but its aims turn out to be not at all similar to those of Mr Brown’s group. The reader is not likely to discover the identity of Number Seven before it is revealed to Bundle Brent, and whether one discovers the identity of the murderer (not the same person) will depend on how one interprets an ambiguous utterance quite early in the piece. The solution to the mystery of the Seven Dials secret society is, in fact, more than usually ludicrous, but such is the air of Wodehousian inconsequentiality and charm with which Agatha Christie has imbued the characters and the atmosphere of her story that it hardly matters. The Seven Dials Mystery has not quite the freshness and insouciance of The Secret of Chimneys but it is in very much the same mould, and is one of the more engaging of the early thrillers.

As an author, Mrs Christie was not given to making comments in propria persona, but you gain a certain amount of information about her attitudes by noting what is said by characters of whom she approves. Superintendent Battle reveals a tough edge to his cosy, bourgeois normality when he speaks contemptuously of those who play safe on their journey through life. ‘In my opinion,’ he tells Bundle, ‘half the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They’re no good.’ Even Bundle is shocked by the brutality of Superintendent Battle’s sentiments, which will issue a few years later from the lips of kindly Major Despard in Cards on the Table, in almost the same words: ‘I don’t set as much value on human life as most people do … The moment you begin being careful of yourself – adopting as your motto “Safety First” – you might as well be dead, in my opinion.’ (‘I have never refrained from doing anything on the grounds of security,’ Mrs Christie was to reveal in her autobiography.)

‘Hearts just as pure and fair/May beat in Belgrave Square/As in the lowly air/Of Seven Dials’, wrote W. S. Gilbert in Iolanthe. Oddly, Mrs Christie said very much the same thing in The Seven Dials Mystery, and was rewarded with initial sales of over 8,000 copies. This was thought by all concerned to be highly satisfactory: it was to be a good twenty years before the first printing of a Christie novel reached 50,000 copies.

More than fifty years later, by which time The Seven Dials Mystery had become a quaint old period piece without losing its power to entertain and to mystify, a British commercial television company produced a film of Agatha Christie’s thriller, in a faithful adaptation by Pat Sandys which was first transmitted in Great Britain on 8 March 1981, and on 16 April in the United States. Sir John Gielgud made a convincing Lord Caterham, with Cheryl Campbell very much in period as Bundle, Harry Andrews as an excellent Superintendent Battle, Christopher Scoular as Bill Eversleigh, and James Warwick, Leslie Sands and Lucy Gutteridge in other important roles. The director was Tony Wharmby. ‘The millions around the world,’ wrote the television critic of The Times the following day, ‘on whom television co-productions are regularly foisted will in this case get their vicariously spent money’s worth…. Mere entertainment? Yes, and why not? There is at present no dearth of Plays for Today purporting to school us in the so-called realities of life.’ On its first showing on London Weekend TV the film, which ran for two-and-a-half hours with commercial breaks, topped the ratings with fifteen million viewers.

Partners in Crime TOMMY & TUPPENCE SHORT STORIES (1929)

In Partners in Crime, a collection of short stories, and the second Agatha Christie title to appear in 1929, the author reintroduced Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, the two engaging young sleuths from her second book, The Secret Adversary. Tommy and Tuppence have now been married for six years, and life has become a little too dull and predictable for them, at least for Tuppence. Tommy works for the Secret Service, but apparently in an administrative capacity, so there are no thrills to be had from that direction. When Tommy’s boss, Mr Carter, the chief of British Intelligence who was responsible in The Secret Adversary for starting them off on their adventures, offers Tommy and Tuppence a new assignment, they eagerly accept his offer. They are to take over for six months the running of the International Detective Agency, which had been a front for Bolshevik spying activities. In addition to keeping an eye open for letters with Russian postmarks, they may also take on any genuine cases which happen to come their way.

Having read, as he claims, ‘every detective novel that’s been published in the last ten years’, Tommy decides to adopt the character and methods of a different detective of fiction for each case, thus giving Mrs Christie the opportunity to produce a number of satires on the detectives of her rival crime writers. The Beresfords have acquired Albert, the young Cockney assistant porter from The Secret Adversary, who has become their all-purpose domestic servant, and who now takes on the job of office-boy for the International Detective Agency. At least, one supposes it is the same lad, for he has the same name and personality as the earlier Albert. But he is described now as being a tall lad of fifteen, which means that he can have been no more than nine when he was a lift-boy in Mayfair. This, if not impossible, is unlikely; but then, Agatha Christie’s chronology was ever inexact. Albert apparently stays in the employ of the Beresfords: we shall meet him in middle-age in N or M? and By the Pricking of My Thumbs, and as an elderly servant in Postern of Fate.

The Bolsheviks make an occasional appearance in Partners in Crime, and are routed in the final episode, but most of the stories in the book are self-contained adventures, with Tommy and Tuppence assuming the methods of a different detective of fiction for each case. In ‘The Affair of the Pink Pearl’, Tommy decides to solve the mystery in the manner of Dr John Thorndyke, the physician-detective hero of the stories of Richard Austin Freeman. In ‘The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger’ Tommy and Tuppence are the Okewood brothers, Desmond and Francis, who were popular crime solvers of the period. They are American detectives McCarty and Riordan for their next case, and Tommy is Sherlock Holmes in the one after that. For ‘Blindman’s Buff’ Tommy decides, appropriately, to be Thornley Colton, ‘the Blind Problemist’. Chesterton’s Father Brown, an Edgar Wallace investigator, ‘The Old Man in the Corner’, A. E. W. Mason’s Inspector Hanaud, Freeman Wills Crofts’ Inspector French, Roger Sheringham and Dr Reginald Fortune are all impersonated, until the final episode, ‘The Man Who Was Number 16’, when Tommy has the gall to pretend to be Hercule Poirot and Mrs Christie has a joke at the expense of The Big Four. ‘You recall, do you not,’ Tommy-Poirot says to Tuppence-Hastings, ‘the man who was No. 4. Him whom I crushed like an egg shell in the Dolomites … But he was not really dead … This is the man, but even more so, if I may put it. He is the 4 squared – in other words he is now the No. 16.’

When Agatha Christie wrote Partners in Crime, all those detectives would have been familiar names to readers of crime stories, but when she came to write her memoirs many years later, she could not even remember who some of them were, for many had faded into oblivion. If they had not been created by Mrs Christie, one feels certain that Tommy and Tuppence would also have failed to survive, for their adventures in Partners in Crime are really rather unmemorable. Most of the separate stories are too slight and far too brief for any suspense to be generated, and the reader has to make do with the light comedy of the Tommy-Tuppence relationship, for their ‘little grey cells’ are by no means the equal of Poirot’s. As parodies, the stories are superb; but, since the majority of the writers parodied are hardly known at all today, much of Mrs Christie’s skill has to be taken on trust.

The volume entitled The Sunningdale Mystery, published by Collins in 1929 as a 6d paperback, is in fact merely Chapters 11 to 22 of Partners in Crime.

Several of the stories in Partners in Crime were seen as part of a weekly Tommy and Tuppence series on London Weekend TV in 1993.

As no attempt has previously been made by writers on Agatha Christie to identify all of the crime writers parodied in Partners in Crime, the following table which lists them all may be of interest:

Chapter Detective(s) impersonated Author (and some titles) 3 Dr John Thorndyke Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943): The Cat’s Eye; Dr Thorndyke Intervenes 5 the brothers Desmond and Major Okewood (there is a passing reference to Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond stories) Valentine Williams (1883–1946), writing as Douglas Valentine. The Oakwood brothers appear in The Secret Hand, also entitled Okewood of the Secret Service 7 (Timothy) McCarty and Riordan Isabel Ostrander (1885–1924). McCarty and Riordan appear in McCarty Incog. 9 Sherlock Holmes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930); The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; His Last Bow; The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes 10 Thornley Colton Clinton H. Stagg. Thornley Colton is the hero of Thornley Colton, Blind Detective 11 Father Brown G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936): The Innocence of Father Brown; The Secret of Father Brown; The Scandal of Father Brown 13 The Busies Edgar Wallace (1875–1932): The Clue of the Twisted Candle; The Ringer 15 The Old Man in the Corner Baroness Orczy (1865–1947): The Case of Miss Elliott; The Old Man in the Corner, Unravelled Knots 17 Inspector Hanaud A. E. W. Mason (1865–1948): At the Villa Rose; The House of the Arrow 19 Inspector French Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957): Inspector French’s Greatest Case; Tragedy in the Hollow 20 Roger Sheringham Anthony Berkeley: The Wychford Poisoning Case; Top Story Murder, Murder in the Basement 22 Reggie Fortune H. C. Bailey (1878–1961): Mr Fortune’s Practice; Mr Fortune Objects 23 Hercule Poirot Agatha Christie (1890–1976): The Mysterious Affair at Styles; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

The Murder at the Vicarage MISS MARPLE (1930)

In the autumn of 1929, Agatha Christie decided to take a holiday alone. Rosalind was at school, and would not be at home until the Christmas holidays, so Agatha planned a visit to the West Indies and made all the necessary arrangements through Thomas Cook’s. Two days before she was to leave, a married couple at a dinner party spoke to her of the Middle East, where they had been stationed, and of the fascination of Baghdad. When they mentioned that you could travel most of the way there on the Orient Express, Agatha became extremely interested, for she had always wanted to travel on the famous international train which went from Calais to Istanbul. And when she realized that, from Baghdad, she would be able to visit the excavations at Ur, the biblical Ur of the Chaldees, the matter was decided. The following morning she rushed to Cook’s, cancelled her West Indian arrangements and made reservations on the Orient Express to Istanbul, and further on to Damascus and Baghdad.

The journey on the Orient Express, through France, Switzerland, Italy and the Balkans, was all that she had hoped it would be. After an overnight stay in old Stamboul, Mrs Christie crossed the Bosphorus into Asia and continued her train journey through Asiatic Turkey, entering Syria at Aleppo, and continuing south to Damascus. She spent three days in Damascus at the Orient Palace Hotel, a magnificent edifice with large marble halls but extremely poor electric light, and then set off into the desert by bus (the Nairn Line fleet of buses was operated by two Australian brothers, Gerry and Norman Nairn). After a forty-eight-hour journey which she found both fascinating and rather sinister because of the complete absence of landmarks of any kind in the desert, she finally reached her destination, the ancient city of Baghdad, capital of modern Iraq and of old Mesopotamia.

One of the first things Agatha did was arrange to visit the excavations at Ur, about halfway between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf, where Leonard Woolley was in charge of the joint British Museum and Museum of the University of Pennsylvania Expedition. As Woolley’s wife Katharine, a formidable lady, was a Christie fan and had just finished reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd with great enjoyment, the author was accorded special treatment and was not only allowed to remain with the digging team but was invited to join them again the following season. Having fallen in love with the beauty of Ur, and the excitement of excavating the past, Mrs Christie enthusiastically agreed to return. Meanwhile, she enjoyed the rest of her stay in Baghdad until, in November, it was time to go back to England. In March of the following year, 1930, travelling from Rome to Beirut by sea, she made her way back to Baghdad and to Ur.

This time, Agatha Christie met Woolley’s assistant, Max Mallowan, who had been absent with appendicitis on her first visit. Of mixed Austrian and French parentage, his father being an Austrian who had emigrated to England, Mallowan was a twenty-six-year-old archaeologist who had been Woolley’s assistant at Ur since coming down from Oxford five years previously. At the conclusion of Agatha’s visit, the imperious Katherine Woolley ordered young Mallowan to take their distinguished guest on a round trip to Baghdad and to show her something of the desert before escorting her home on the Orient Express. They enjoyed each other’s company and, by the time they arrived back in England, Mallowan had decided to ask Mrs Christie to marry him.

When he proposed to her, she was taken completely by surprise. They had become close friends, but that was all, and she was fourteen years older than he, she told him. Yes, he knew that, and he had always wanted to marry an older woman. She agreed to think about it, and although she had grave doubts as to the wisdom of marrying again, let alone marrying a man so much younger than herself, she did like him and they had so much in common. She consulted her daughter, Rosalind, who gave her unqualified approval. At the end of the summer, Agatha Christie said yes, and on 11 September 1930, after she returned from a holiday in the Hebrides, they were married in the small chapel of St Columba’s Church in Edinburgh.

The Orient Express took the newly married couple on the first stage of their honeymoon to Venice, whence they made their way to Dubrovnik and Split and then down the Dalmatian coast and along the coast of Greece to Patras in a small Serbian cargo boat. After a tour of Greece with a few idyllic days at Delphi, they parted in Athens, Max to rejoin the dig at Ur, and Agatha to return to London, suffering from an especially violent form of Middle Eastern stomach upset or possibly, as diagnosed by the Greek doctor she consulted, ptomaine poisoning.

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie writes that Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but that she cannot remember where, when or how she wrote it, or even what suggested to her that she should introduce a new detective, Miss Marple. (As with The Murder on the Links, the title originally began with the definite article, which it lost in some later editions.) Mrs Christie claimed that it was certainly not her intention at the time to continue to use Miss Marple and allow her to become a rival of Hercule Poirot. It merely happened that way. Poirot was to remain her most frequently employed detective, appearing altogether in thirty-three novels, as well as ten volumes of stories, while Miss Marple was allowed to solve no more than twelve full-length mysteries. In the post-Second World War years, Poirot and Miss Marple novels tended roughly to alternate, but Miss Marple titles were thin on the ground in the earlier years. After her initial appearance in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and in a volume of stories in 1932, Miss Marple is not heard of again until the end of the thirties.

The vicarage in The Murder at the Vicarage is in the small village of St Mary Mead, a village in which Miss Marple had always lived and from which she was rarely to stray for the rest of her life. She did not go out into the world in search of murder; it came to her. We are not meant to wonder at the fact that so much violence should be concentrated in so small and, in all other respects, so apparently innocuous a village, and indeed to wonder would be churlish. In her introduction to murder, in The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple acquits herself well. Although she is not trained to detect crime, she is inquisitive, has a good memory, a rather sour opinion of human nature (though she would deny this) and a habit of solving problems by analogy. She does not possess little grey cells of the quality of Hercule Poirot’s, and when congratulated upon her success is likely to attribute it to the fact that she has lived in an English village all her life and thus has seen human nature in the raw.

The surface cosiness of village life, disturbed by violent crime and then found to be somewhat murky under the surface, is something which Agatha Christie is extremely adept at conveying. In The Murder at the Vicarage, one of the vicar’s more irritating parishioners, Colonel Protheroe, is found dead in the vicar’s study. There is no shortage of suspects, including the vicar himself who narrates the story, his flighty young wife, Griselda, and his teenage nephew, Dennis. The relationship between the vicar and his wife is amusingly presented. More likely suspects are the Colonel’s widow, his daughter, a slightly dubious anthropologist, and a mysterious Mrs Lestrange. Dr Haydock, Miss Marple’s physician and next-door neighbour, must be above suspicion as he is to appear in a number of later Miss Marple stories, and the same applies, surely, to Miss Marple’s nephew, Raymond West, a novelist and poet who writes the kind of novels and poems, all pessimism and squalor, which Miss Marple rather detests, though of course she is proud of her nephew’s reputation.

Like Poirot, Miss Marple is elderly when we first meet her in 1930, and over the next forty years she will age some more, but not as much as forty years. Agatha Christie based Miss Marple on the kind of old lady she had met often in west country villages when she was a girl, and described her also as being rather like the fussy old spinsters who were her grandmother’s ‘Ealing cronies’. With Agatha Christie’s grandmother, Miss Marple shared a propensity to expect the worst of everyone and, usually, to be proved right. She was to exhibit this propensity in twelve novels and twenty short stories.

The Murder at the Vicarage provides an auspicious début for Miss Marple, and a mystery which few of her readers will solve before the amateur sleuth of St Mary Mead even though Mrs Christie’s tactics are not dissimilar to those she adopted in her first novel. In later years, Agatha Christie professed to be less pleased with The Murder at the Vicarage than when she had written it, having come to the conclusion that there were far too many characters and too many sub-plots. But she still thought the main plot sound, and added, ‘The village is as real to me as it could be – and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days [the early 1960s].’

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!