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

Much of the 365 square miles of Dartmoor is bleak country, with treacherous bogs. But a few hundred yards from the summit of Hay Tor, the Moorland Hotel is situated, partially hidden by trees, with views over the moor and across south Devon to the sea, and it was there that Agatha Christie lived for two weeks while she finished writing the murder mystery which she had decided to call The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The hotel is still there, though it has been closed since fire destroyed some of its rooms in March 1970. Years later, Agatha Christie described her two weeks’ stay at the Moorland Hotel in 1916:

It was a large, dreary hotel with plenty of rooms. There were few people staying there. I don’t think I spoke to any of them – it would have taken my mind away from what I was doing. I used to write laboriously all morning till my hand ached. Then I would have lunch, reading a book. Afterwards I would go out for a good walk on the moor, perhaps for a couple of hours. I think I learned to love the moor in those days. I loved the tors and the heather and all the wild part of it away from the roads. Everybody who went there – and of course there were not many in wartime – would be clustering around Hay Tor itself, but I left Hay Tor severely alone and struck out on my own across country. As I walked, I muttered to myself, enacting the chapter that I was next going to write; speaking as John to Mary, and as Mary to John; as Evelyn to her employer, and so on. I became quite excited by this. I would come home, have dinner, fall into bed and sleep for about twelve hours. Then I would get up and write passionately again all morning.

When Archie Christie came home on leave, he read his wife’s novel and enjoyed it. A friend of his in the Air Force was a director of a publishing house, and Archie suggested that he should provide her with a letter from his friend which she could enclose with the typescript and send off to Methuen’s. This plan was duly followed but, although Methuen’s sat on the typescript for about six months, perhaps to prove to Archie’s friend that they were giving it their most earnest consideration, they eventually concluded that it was not quite suitable for them, and returned it to its author.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was submitted to another publisher, again without success, after which Agatha decided to try The Bodley Head, having noticed that they had recently published one or two detective novels. She packed the manuscript off to them, heard nothing, and forgot all about it.

Towards the end of the war, Archie Christie, now a Colonel, was posted to the Air Ministry in London, so Agatha was able to leave Torquay and live at last with her husband. They took a small flat in St John’s Wood, at 5 Northwick Terrace, which was really no more than two rooms on the second floor of a house (now demolished), and Agatha started a course of book-keeping and shorthand to occupy her days. The war came to an end, and a few months later, in 1919, Mrs Christie gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind, at Ashfield, the family home in Torquay.

The Christies now needed a larger London flat, and in due course found what they were looking for on the fourth floor of Addison Mansions (Flat 96), a huge double apartment block behind Olympia in Earls Court. Archie was demobilized, and went to work for a firm in the City. It was towards the end of 1919, nearly two years after she had sent the typescript of The Mysterious Affair at Styles to The Bodley Head, that Agatha Christie received a letter from John Lane, the Managing Director of the publishing house, asking her to call and see him. When they met, John Lane explained that several people had read her novel and thought it showed promise. However, the dénouement, which she had written as a court-room scene, did not ring true. If Mrs Christie would rewrite that chapter, in a different setting, and make some other minor changes, The Bodley Head would be willing to publish her book.

After explaining what a risk he was taking by offering to publish a new and unknown writer, and how little money he was likely to make with her novel, John Lane produced a contract from the drawer of his desk, and an excited young author who had given up hope of ever having anything published, other than the occasional story or poem, immediately signed it. She was to receive a small royalty, but only after the first 2,000 copies had been sold. All subsidiary rights, such as serialization and film rights, would be shared fifty-fifty between author and publisher, and there was a clause binding the author to offer The Bodley Head her next five novels, at an only slightly increased royalty rate. A jubilant Agatha rushed home to inform her husband of her good fortune, and that evening they celebrated at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse.

When The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, it sold nearly 2,000 copies. The £25 which Agatha Christie earned from her first book came, not from royalties, for there were none due to her under the terms of a distinctly unfair contract, but from a half share of the serial rights which had been sold for £50 to The Weekly Times. Taking the view that £25 was not a very satisfactory return for all the time and energy she had expended upon the writing of her novel, Agatha did not envisage ever attempting to write another. At least, this is what she was to claim, years later, in her autobiography. She had been dared by her sister to write a detective story, she had done so, and she had got it published. There, as far as she was concerned, the matter ended. She would probably write stories from time to time, but she had no intention of turning herself into a professional writer. To her, writing was fun.

In this, as in one or two other matters, Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography is less than completely reliable. Writing it over a number of years between 1950 and 1965, she did not always remember with accuracy events which had taken place thirty or forty years earlier. In fact, in a letter to Basil Willett of The Bodley Head, written in the autumn of 1920, she inquired about the publication date of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, adding that she was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to appear, as she had already nearly finished a second novel, The Secret Adversary. She also wanted to know what the cover of The Mysterious Affair at Styles would look like. After she had seen the cover design, she agreed that it would do as it was ‘quite artistic and mysterious’. She also asked that a dedication, ‘To my mother’, should appear at the beginning of the book.

Most of the qualities which were to make Agatha Christie the most popular crime writer there has ever been were already on display in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and it is astonishing that several publishers turned the novel down before it was accepted by The Bodley Head. Characterization is no more detailed than Agatha Christie needed it to be for her purpose, the setting is an English country house in or near a small village, there is a proliferation of clues which are there for the reader to discover, if he is not dazzled by the author’s sleight of hand, and the method used by the murderer is poisoning.

The young Agatha Christie had learned a great deal about poisons through her work at the hospital dispensary in Torquay, and she was to put her knowledge to good use in several of her murder mysteries. Among the many favourable reviews her excellent first novel received, Agatha was especially proud of that in the Pharmaceutical Journal, which praised ‘this detective story for dealing with poisons in a knowledgeable way, and not with the nonsense about untraceable substances that so often happens. Miss Agatha Christie knows her job.’

The ‘Styles’ of the title is Styles Court, a country house in Essex, a mile outside the village of Styles St Mary. In later novels, Mrs Christie tended not to specify the county, and even in this first novel she avoids using real names of towns. Characters may take the train up to London from the country, but if they have to visit a nearby country town it will not be identified as Chelmsford or Colchester, but will be given a fictitious name. The fictitious village of Styles St Mary is, for instance, seven miles away from the fictitious town of Tadminster, where one of the characters works in the dispensary of the Red Cross Hospital.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, though not published until 1920, had been written during the First World War, and was set in the summer of 1916. Its narrator, Captain Hastings, is a young officer who has been invalided home from the Front and who, after spending some months ‘in a rather depressing Convalescent Home’, is still on sick leave when he runs into someone he had known as a boy: the forty-five-year-old John Cavendish who is ‘a good fifteen years’ Hastings’ senior. Hastings, then, is about thirty. Reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles now, the reader interests himself more in Captain Hastings’ personal details than Agatha Christie’s readers would have done in 1920, for they were not to know that Mrs Christie would go on to write scores of crime novels over the years and that Hastings would figure in eight of them (and in numerous short stories) as the associate of her detective, Hercule Poirot.

John Cavendish invites the convalescent Hastings to spend his leave in Essex at Styles Court. Cavendish’s stepmother, whom Hastings remembered as a handsome, middle-aged woman, is now an autocratic grande dame of seventy or more. After several years of widowhood, she has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, who is about twenty years younger than she, and ‘an absolute bounder’ in the opinion of John Cavendish because he has ‘a great black beard, and wears patent leather boots in all weathers’. Clearly, Alfred Inglethorp is a fortune-hunter, for Mrs Inglethorp has a sizeable fortune to dispose of. When she is found murdered, he is the chief and favourite suspect.

The other inhabitants of Styles Court include John Cavendish’s wife Mary, his younger brother Lawrence, a girl called Cynthia, who is a protégé of Mrs Inglethorp and who works in the dispensary of the nearby hospital, and Evelyn Howard, a forty-year-old woman who has been the old lady’s companion, factotum and general assistant. There is also a tall, bearded and somewhat mysterious foreigner, a Dr Bauerstein, who is staying in the village, recuperating after a nervous breakdown. He is said to be one of the greatest living experts on poisons.

When Mrs Inglethorp’s death, at first thought to be due to a heart attack, is found to have been caused by strychnine poisoning, suspicion falls not only upon her husband but, in turn, on most of her nearest and dearest. The local police are called in, but Hastings has encountered in the village an old friend of his, Hercule Poirot, a famous detective now retired, and it is Hastings who persuades his friend John Cavendish to allow Poirot as well to investigate the crime.

Before the First World War, young Hastings had worked for Lloyd’s of London. (Not until The ABC Murders in 1935 shall we learn Hastings’ first name to be Arthur, for Agatha Christie’s men habitually address each other in what used to be the approved English upper-middleclass fashion, by their surnames.) It was while he was working for Lloyd’s that Hastings had first met Poirot, in Belgium. Poirot had already retired from the Belgian Police Force, after a long career as its most illustrious detective, and had set himself up in private practice as an investigator. Hastings is surprised and delighted to meet him again unexpectedly in the village of Styles St Mary where Poirot, together with a number of other Belgian refugees, is living. Poirot accepts with alacrity the commission to find Mrs Inglethorp’s murderer, for, as he explains to Hastings, ‘she had kindly extended hospitality to seven of my countrypeople who, alas, are refugees from their native land.’ ‘We Belgians,’ he adds, ‘will always remember her with gratitude.’ Poirot, on his first appearance, is described in some detail:

He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.3

Later, we shall discover that Poirot is not only fanatically neat but is also obsessed with symmetry. He is forever rearranging the objects he encounters, putting them into straight rows. He probably wished that eggs were square: he certainly, on one occasion, deplored the fact that hens lay eggs of different sizes (‘What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table?’) It is odd, therefore, that he should habitually carry his head tilted a little to one side. He cannot have been aware that he did so.

Poirot will acquire other personality traits in later books, or at least we shall learn more about him, but already apparent in Styles are his genuine affection for Hastings, of whose perspicacity he has a justifiably low opinion, his endearing vanity, his odd misuse of the English language and still odder occasional misuse of his native tongue, French (for, despite her Paris finishing school, Mrs Christie’s French was to remain obstinately unidiomatic). Incidentally, when he sees his old friend for the first time in several years, Hastings notices that Poirot now limps badly. But the limp is never referred to again: we must assume that it was a temporary disability from which Poirot soon recovered. Indeed, when he inspects Mrs Inglethorp’s room at Styles Court, Poirot, we are told, ‘darted from one object to the other with the agility of a grasshopper.’

Just as ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, (which is not a direct quotation from any story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) is the phrase you most associate with Sherlock Holmes, so a habit of constantly referring to ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain is something closely associated with Hercule Poirot. But, though he is continually having ‘little ideas’, and recommending order and method to Hastings, Poirot mentions the ‘little grey cells’ for the first time only towards the end of Styles. He makes a point, however, of informing Hastings (and the reader of the book) well before the dénouement that ‘I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.’ Hastings, however, never wins a battle of wits with Hercule Poirot, and it is a reasonable assumption that even the most assiduous reader of Agatha Christie will do so only rarely.

Agatha Christie was conscious of the necessity to make Poirot very different from the most famous fictional detective of his day, Sherlock Holmes. After all, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures were still appearing. The Valley of Fear was published in 1915, His Last Bow in 1917, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. But it is only physically that Poirot differs greatly from Holmes. The two detectives share a number of qualities, among which vanity is by no means the least noticeable. Still, if Poirot owes something to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, does he not also owe something to another crime novelist? Mrs Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, and writer of a number of historical and mystery novels and stories, was the creator of a detective who, like Poirot, was foreign, retired (in his case, from the Paris Sûreté), and incredibly vain. His name was Hercules Popeau. Agatha Christie must certainly have been aware of him when she began to write her first Hercule Poirot novel, and indeed throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties when stories by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, featuring Popeau, appeared in the same anthologies as stories of Hercule Poirot’s exploits. In the mid-thirties, Mrs Belloc Lowndes published a Popeau story, ‘A Labour of Hercules’, which did not deter Mrs Christie in the mid-forties from calling a collection of Poirot stories The Labours of Hercules.

Devoted Christieans, who delight in assembling the ‘facts’ about Poirot in the same manner that Conan Doyle’s more fanatical admirers tend to research the great Sherlock Holmes, have somehow convinced themselves that Poirot retired from the Belgian Police Force in 1904, and that this fact is revealed in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is not. We are told that Poirot ‘had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian Police.’ When, late in the story, Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard puts in an appearance (he is the Christiean equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s sparring partner, Inspector Lestrade), he greets Poirot and then, turning to a colleague says: ‘You’ve heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then do you remember “Baron” Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr Poirot here.’

Poirot, then, was active in his post in 1904, and the ‘Baron’ Altera affair may well have occurred after 1904. It is possible that Poirot’s retirement did not take place until 1914, in which case he could have been as young as sixty-seven at the time of the Styles murder in 1916. (In Murder on the Links, published three years after Styles, we learn that Poirot was still active in Ostend in 1909.) Agatha Christie later declared that, if she had realized how long she was going to be saddled with Poirot, she would have made him a much younger man on his first appearance. It is fortunate that fictional chronology can be flexible, for otherwise Poirot would have been at least one hundred and twenty years of age when he came to solve his final case in 1974, after having featured in thirty-three novels and fifty-two short stories. That he was still in his sixties, and not older, when Mrs Christie first introduces us to him in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is suggested by a remark of Hastings, when he fails to understand Poirot’s train of thought: ‘The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old.’ If Poirot had appeared to be in his seventies, the idea that he might be growing old would probably not have crossed even Hastings’ mind.

One of Agatha Christie’s great achievements as a crime writer was to make murder cosy enough to be palatable to refined middleclass tastes. She abhorred violence,4 and those who see in it the only reality will seek that kind of reality in vain in the Christiean oeuvre. Her appeal is incredibly wide – ça va sans dire, as Poirot might say – and it is an appeal not to the blood lust but to a civilized delight in the puzzle shared by her readers of all social and intellectual classes. One can discuss Agatha Christie novels with cleaning ladies and classical scholars, with dustmen and dons.

This cosiness is, of course, in itself unreal. The Mysterious Affair at Styles has the inhuman remoteness of the puzzle, but it also, curiously, has something of the texture of a social document as well, especially now, more than half a century after it was written, when its social world has all but disappeared. To Agatha Christie, it would seem to have been already disappearing in 1916. The atmosphere in Styles Court and in the nearby village of Styles St Mary is of a country at war. The war may be only a lightly sketched background, but it is there. The servants necessary to staff a large country house are there, too, but only just. Of Dorcus, the faithful old family retainer, Hastings says, ‘I thought what a fine specimen she was of the old-fashioned servant that is so fast dying out.’

The values implicitly subscribed to, and the opinions expressed by many of her characters, can reasonably be assumed to be shared by the young author of Styles. Evidence in a good many of the early Christie novels seems to point to an unthinking, casual anti-semitism of the kind then prevalent in the English upperclasses. In Styles, Dr Bauerstein, a Polish Jew, is suspected of spying. ‘A very clever man – a Jew of course,’ says Poirot, at which Hastings exclaims, ‘The blackguard!’ Not too worrying, though there is a suggestion that the doctor’s Jewish cleverness is as reprehensible as his espionage activities. In any case, the balance is redressed somewhat with this exchange between a jealous husband and his wife who is infatuated with Bauerstein:

‘I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.’

‘A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the’ – she looked at him – ‘stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.’

The tactics, though not the actual method of murder, used by the killer of Mrs Inglethorp were adopted successfully by a real-life murderer about ten years after the publication of Agatha Christie’s first novel. It is quite possible that he derived his inspiration from a reading of the book. Other odd facts to be noted about The Mysterious Affair at Styles are that the author emphasizes the puzzle-solving aspect of the reading experience by including two plans, one of the first floor of Styles Court and one of Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom, and a number of illustrations of clues, letters, fragments of handwriting and cryptic messages; that Hastings gives evidence of his propensity for redheads, which will continue to be displayed in later stories, by unsuccessfully proposing marriage to one; and that Agatha Christie signals to the reader in the final paragraph of the novel that she is prepared to produce one or more sequels to Styles. ‘Console yourself, my friend,’ Poirot says to Hastings who has failed to capture his redhead. ‘We may hunt together again, who knows? And then –’

Though her gift for tight and ingenious plotting and her flair for creating believable characters mainly through convincing dialogue were to develop greatly in the next ten or fifteen years, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles Mrs Christie made an extraordinarily successful début as a crime writer. Her novel is a distinct improvement on the average level of the genre as it was then practised, and looking back on it more than half a century later you can see that, in fact, it ushered in a new era for the detective story, an era which Agatha Christie would come to dominate with her engaging and fiendishly ingenious puzzles, an era which lasted for more than three decades and which is referred to now as the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Between 1989 and 1997, nine of Agatha Christie’s novels and thirty-four short stories, all featuring Hercule Poirot as the investigator, were adapted for television with David Suchet as Poirot. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was first transmitted on London Weekend TV on 16 September 1990.

The Secret Adversary TOMMY & TUPPENCE (1922)

With Archibald and Agatha Christie living in a flat in London, and Agatha’s mother still attempting to keep up Ashfield, the Torquay house, on an inadequate income to which Agatha could not afford to contribute, the question of selling Ashfield was raised by Archie. When Agatha received the suggestion with horror, Archie then proposed that she should try to raise funds towards the upkeep of Ashfield by writing another murder mystery. After all, although she had earned only £25 from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it had been well received and had sold a respectable number of copies. The Bodley Head had presumably not lost money on it, and would no doubt be willing a pay a little more for a second novel.

Agatha, apparently, had already begun a second novel, but was not sure whether The Bodley Head would like it. It was not another detective story, but a thriller, so there was no place in it for Hercule Poirot. The idea for the book had first come to her one day in an A.B.C. teashop, one of a chain of London cafés, when she had overheard two people at a nearby table talking about a girl called Jane Fish. That, she thought, would make quite a good beginning: someone overhearing an unusual name in a café, and then remembering it when it came up again in a different context. Jane Fish, however, was perhaps just a little too comical, so Agatha altered it to Jane Finn, and set to work to invent a plot. Young people in their twenties were being demobilized from the armed forces after the First World War and finding it difficult to settle down to civilian life. Many were unable to find jobs, or were having to act as door-to-door salesmen. Mrs Christie, who found herself frequently answering the doorbell to ex-servicemen, and buying stockings, household gadgets or even poems from them, decided to have such a pair as the young hero and heroine of her thriller.