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

When she had finished writing her book some months later, Agatha took it to John Lane of The Bodley Head, who had published The Mysterious Affair at Styles and who had an option on this and her next four books. Lane was disappointed at finding it was not another murder mystery, thought it would sell less well than Styles, and even considered rejecting it. In due course, however, The Bodley Head published the novel, which its author decided to call The Secret Adversary, having first considered The Joyful Venture and The Young Adventurers (‘The Young Adventurers Ltd’ in fact became the title of Chapter 1). The publishers disposed of serial rights to The Weekly Times, as they had done with Styles, and sold a reasonable number of copies. This time Mrs Christie ‘got £50 doled out’ to her by John Lane. It was, she considered, encouraging, though not encouraging enough for her to think that she had as yet adopted anything so grand as a profession. She would have been astonished if anyone had told her she would, from now until the end of her life, publish at least one book a year, sometimes one novel and one collection of short stories, sometimes two novels, and in one year (1934) a total of two crime novels, two volumes of short stories and (under a pseudonym) one romantic novel.

With The Secret Adversary in 1922, Agatha Christie introduced her readers to two characters whom she would use again in four later novels: Partners in Crime (1929), N or M? (1941), By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) and Postern of Fate (1974). It is as well, therefore, that Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to their friends as Tommy and Tuppence, are only in their twenties in 1922, for this enabled their creator to allow them to age naturally. In their final adventure in 1974 they are presented as an elderly married couple with three grandchildren. When we first meet them, however, in The Secret Adversary, they are young, and just emerging from wartime activities, he as a Lieutenant in the army, who had been in action in France, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and she as a maid-of-all-work in an officers’ hospital in London. Tuppence is, perhaps, the author as Agatha Christie liked to fantasize herself, and Tommy is the kind of young man who appealed to the fantasy Agatha.

The relationship of the young couple is lightly romantic, though they refrain from confessing their feelings for each other until the last page of The Secret Adversary, and their style of speech is positively Wodehousian. ‘Tommy, old thing!’ and ‘Tuppence, old bean!’ they exclaim when they meet unexpectedly for the first time since the war, at the exit to the Dover Street tube station. (This is not a fictitious venue: there used to be a Dover Street station on the Piccadilly line.)

Set in 1920, in the autumn and winter of which year it was written, The Secret Adversary is dedicated ‘To ALL THOSE WHO LEAD MONOTONOUS LIVES in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure’. If, in her first novel, Mrs Christie had set forth one of her two favourite subjects, the murder committed in (or at least involving the members of) an upperclass or upper-middleclass household, in her second she introduces her other favourite, the master criminal seeking to dominate the world. These two themes, domestic crime and global crime, continue to appear throughout her career, though the domestic crime novels not only greatly outnumber the thrillers involving international criminals or crime syndicates, but also are generally considered to be vastly superior to them.

The Secret Adversary begins with a prologue which takes place at 2 p.m. on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Ireland. The Lusitania has just been torpedoed by a German submarine, and is sinking fast. Women and children are lining up for the lifeboats, and a man approaches one of the women, an eighteen-year-old girl, to ask if she will take possession of some ‘vitally important papers’ which may make all the difference to the Allies in the war. The Lusitania settles with a more decided list to starboard as the girl goes forward to take her place in the lifeboat, and then suddenly we are in Mayfair, five years later, with Tommy and Tuppence blocking the exit to the Dover Street underground station, turning themselves into the Young Adventurers.

The Prologue is brief, graphic, and flings the reader in medias res. the sudden juxtaposition of a grey, grim Atlantic with the bright sunshine of post-war London and the cheerful optimism of the young adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, is startlingly effective. In the interests of accuracy, however, it should be noted that Mrs Christie thought the Lusitania was sunk by two torpedoes. In fact, the German U-boat fired only one torpedo: those among the survivors who may have thought otherwise were misled by secondary explosions from the Lusitania’s boilers.

The story proper concerns the efforts of Tommy and Tuppence to trace the girl, Jane Finn, who survived the Lusitania disaster only to disappear immediately afterwards with those secret papers which, if they were made public now, months after the end of the war, would cause great embarrassment to the British Government. Mr Carter, a mysterious individual who is very high up in the British Secret Service, recruits the Young Adventurers to save the country. We are left in no doubt of Agatha Christie’s political leanings when Mr Carter points out to the Adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, how vital it is that the documents should be retrieved and suppressed, for they could discredit a number of Conservative statesmen (–was there really a time when a government of any political persuasion contained a number of statesmen?–) and that would never do. ‘As a party cry for Labour it would be irresistible, and a Labour Government at this juncture,’ Mr Carter adds, ‘would, in my opinion, be a grave disability for British trade.’

During the course of their search, Tommy and Tuppence encounter a number of entertaining characters, some of them engaging but others distinctly unsavoury. They include Julius P. Hersheimmer, Jane Finn’s American millionaire cousin; Albert, the cockney liftboy in a Mayfair apartment block; and Sir James Peel Edgerton, a distinguished barrister, ‘the most celebrated KC in England’, a man likely to become a future Prime Minister. What links The Secret Adversary, and later Christie thrillers, with the murder mysteries on which the author’s reputation most securely rests is the fact that these and a number of other characters whom Tommy and Tuppence find themselves either collaborating with or pitted against are not only the clearcut ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of the usual thriller, but are potential suspects as well. For, although Agatha Christie clearly differentiates the thriller from the murder mystery, she retains an element of the puzzle in her thrillers. The question ‘Who?’ is asked in the thrillers; it is simply that the question ‘How?’ becomes equally important.

In The Secret Adversary, the puzzle is the identity of the adversary. The Bolshevists, we are informed, are behind the labour unrest in the country, but there is a certain man who is ‘behind the Bolshevists’ (the italics are Mrs Christie’s). ‘Who is he?’ Mr Carter asks rhetorically:

‘We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of “Mr Brown”. But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere.

Tommy manages to eavesdrop upon a meeting of Mr Brown’s organization, at which various representatives report on their activities. A Sinn Feiner guarantees to produce, within a month, ‘such a reign of terror in Ireland as shall shake the British Empire to its foundations’. Others have infiltrated the trade unions: the report from the miners is thought to be most satisfactory, but ‘We must hold back the railways. There may be trouble with the ASE.’ It is important that the principal Labour leaders should have no inkling that they are being used by the Bolshevists. ‘They are honest men,’ says the representative from Moscow, ‘and that is their value to us.’

All good clean reactionary fun, and not without a certain absurd relevance to political life today! Those who take their politics solemnly, if anyone other than politicians is still able to do so, will probably reflect that The Secret Adversary gives an interestingly distorted picture of the social and industrial unrest which followed the First World War and which, during the years which saw the consolidation of the Russian revolution, was to lead to the General Strike in Great Britain, an event which is curiously anticipated in more than one of Agatha Christie’s early novels. But Mrs Christie is politically no further to the right in her thrillers than Ian Fleming in his distinctly less amusing James Bond novels of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.

The villain is unmasked at the end of The Secret Adversary and the threatened General Strike is averted or, as we now know, postponed. Inspector Japp has made, not an appearance, but a certain effect offstage, and the reader with a knowledge of nineteenth-century French opera will probably spot a certain clue which will leave those who suffer from amusia (the inability to comprehend or produce musical sounds) mystified.

The Secret Adversary was the first Agatha Christie novel to be made into a film. This did not happen until 1928, by which time Mrs Christie was being published in a number of foreign languages. The film, produced by Julius Hagen for a German company, was called Die Abenteuer Gmbh (Adventures Ltd), was directed by Fred Sauer, and starred Carlo Aldini, Eve Gray and a Russian character actor, Michael or Mikhail Rasumny, who was to appear in a number of Hollywood movies in the nineteen-forties and fifties.

A television adaptation of The Secret Adversary was first shown on London Weekend TV on 9 October 1983.

The Murder on the Links POIROT (1923)

Archie Christie had a friend, Major Belcher, who was a larger-than-life character with the ability to bluff people into giving him positions of responsibility. Belcher came to dine one evening with the Christies at Earls Court, and explained that he was shortly to leave on a grand tour of the British Empire in order to organize ‘this Empire Exhibition we’re having in eighteen months’ time’. ‘The Dominions,’ Belcher explained to Archie and Agatha, ‘have got to be alerted, to stand on their toes and to cooperate in the whole thing,’ and it was Belcher’s mission to ensure that they did so. He invited Archie to come with him as financial adviser, with all expenses paid and a fee of £1,000. Agatha would be permitted to accompany the party, since most of the transport was being provided free of charge by the ships and railways of the various Commonwealth countries to be visited.

Archie Christie had already grown tired of his job in the City, and when Belcher announced the proposed itinerary, from South Africa to Australia and New Zealand, then on to Canada after a brief holiday in Honolulu, the Christies agreed to go. Agatha longed to travel and see as much of the world as possible, but had expected that, as the wife of a business man, two weeks abroad each summer would be all she was ever likely to get. There was a certain risk to be taken, for Colonel Christie’s employer was not willing to guarantee to keep his job open for him on his return, but the Christies did not consider themselves to be people who played safe. Like Agatha’s Tommy and Tuppence, they yearned for adventure and were perfectly willing to take risks. Off they went, around the world with Major Belcher, leaving their daughter with Agatha’s sister.

The British Empire Exhibition Mission set off in grand style on the Kildonan Castle, bound for Cape Town. But Agatha Christie’s enjoyment was soon cut short: the weather in the Bay of Biscay was atrocious, the ship was tossed about violently, and for four days Agatha suffered the most appalling seasickness. The ship’s doctor became seriously concerned about her, and a woman in a nearby cabin who had caught a glimpse of her was heard, on the fourth day, to ask the stewardess: ‘Is the lady in the cabin opposite dead yet?’ However, her condition improved when the ship docked at Madeira, and although she subsequently became ill again whenever the weather was rough at sea, it was never quite as bad as those first days. In due course, the ship reached Cape Town, and Agatha was delighted to be back on terra firma for a time. By now, she had come to know Major Belcher quite well, and to realize that travelling around the world with him was not going to be the entirely happy experience she and Archie had anticipated. The Major was very demanding, complained continually about the service, and bullied his secretary, Mr Bates, a serious, somewhat humourless young man and an excellent secretary, though nature had given him ‘the appearance of a villain in a melodrama, with black hair, flashing eyes and an altogether sinister aspect’. ‘Looks the complete thug, doesn’t he?’ Belcher said to the Christies. ‘You’d say he was going to cut your throat any moment. Actually he is the most respectable fellow you have ever known.’ Neither Belcher nor his secretary realized that they were being scrutinized, analysed and filed away for future reference by a crime novelist always ready to make use of a colourful character or two.

From Cape Town Agatha travelled on to the diamond mines at Kimberley; to Salisbury and the Victoria Falls; to Livingstone where she saw crocodiles swimming about, and hippopotami; to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. She and Archie managed to do a great deal of surfing at Muizenberg, in Cape Province, before facing the, in her case, dreaded sea voyage to Australia.

In Australia she was fascinated by the parrots,5 blue and red and green, ‘flying through the air in great clustering swarms’, and by the gigantic tree ferns in the bush outside Melbourne. The food and the sanitary arrangements left much to be desired, but staying on a sheep station in New South Wales was an unusual and enjoyable experience. In the major cities, Belcher made successful public speeches, or rather repeated the same speech which his travelling companions soon knew by heart. After visiting Tasmania, where Agatha fell in love with ‘incredibly beautiful Hobart’ and decided to go back and live there one day, the party proceeded to New Zealand.

Belcher had, by now, revealed himself in his true colours. The Christies found him for much of the time to be rude, overbearing, inconsiderate and oddly mean in small matters. He was continually sending Agatha out to buy him white cotton socks and neglecting to pay her for them. He behaved, Agatha remembered later, like a spoilt child, but had such immense charm when he was on his best behaviour that he was instantly forgiven. Tasmania forgotten, Agatha now thought New Zealand the most beautiful country she had ever seen, and vowed to go back one day. (However, by the time that air travel had made it possible to get there quickly, an elderly Agatha Christie had decided that her travelling days were over.)

After a lazy voyage, stopping at Fiji and other islands, Agatha and Archie arrived in Honolulu for two weeks’ holiday, while Belcher stayed with friends in New Zealand, after which they all embarked upon the last and most gruelling part of their journey, a tour of Canada. It was from the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff National Park, high up in the Rockies, that Mrs Christie wrote on 26 September 1922, to Basil Willett of The Bodley Head thanking him for a cheque for forty-seven pounds, eighteen shillings and ten pence. (But, in December, back in Torquay, she wrote again asking for accounts to be sent to her, and some weeks later had occasion to point out to Mr Willett that, since he had wrongly calculated the selling price of the American edition of The Secret Adversary, the exchange rate being $4.45 to the pound, The Bodley Head owed her two pounds, two shillings and three pence.)

Before setting out on her tour of the Commonwealth, Agatha had virtually completed a third novel, The Murder on the Links, the idea for which she derived from newspaper reports of a murder in France. Masked men had broken into a house, killed the owner and left his wife bound and gagged. There were discrepancies in the wife’s story, and a suggestion that she may have killed her husband. This led Agatha to invent her own plot, beginning several years later and in a different part of France.

Hercule Poirot having been a decided success on his first appearance, he and Captain Hastings were employed again in The Murder on the Links. The Bodley Head professed themselves pleased with the novel, but its author quarrelled with them over the jacket they provided for it. She thought its colours ugly and the actual drawing poor. In her autobiography she claims that the jacket was also misleading in that it appeared to represent a man in pyjamas on a golf-links, dying of an epileptic fit, whereas the character had been fully dressed and stabbed in the back. But, in fact, the murdered man, according to Mrs Christie’s text, wore only underclothes beneath an overcoat. Whoever was in the right about the jacket, a certain amount of bad feeling was engendered between author and publisher, and Agatha secured her publisher’s agreement that, in future, she should see and approve jacket designs for her books. (She had already had another difference of opinion with her publisher, during the production of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, over the spelling of the hot drink, cocoa, which Miss Howse, an eccentric employee of the firm and described by Mrs Christie as a dragon, insisted should be spelled ‘coco’. Agatha produced dictionaries and even tins of cocoa, but failed to make any impression on Miss Howse.)

With The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie returned to the murder mystery or puzzle type of novel, and to her team of Poirot and Hastings. Years later, she wrote of it:

I think Murder on the Links6 was a moderately good example of its kind – though rather melodramatic. This time I provided a love affair for Hastings. If I had to have a love interest in the book, I thought I might as well marry off Hastings. Truth to tell, I think I was getting a little tired of him. I might be stuck with Poirot, but no need to be stuck with Hastings too.7

The Murder on the Links is a more than ‘moderately good’ example of its kind. Until the diabolically ingenious solution, which perhaps fails to convince because of its very complexity, the action moves swiftly, the small seaside resort on the northern coast of France rings true and is not simply an English village in disguise, and the characters, lightly sketched though they are, all come vividly to life. The skill with which Agatha Christie manipulates her plot involving two crimes committed twenty years apart is quite brilliant. Occasionally, however, she displays an odd carelessness in matters of detail. For instance, the corpse of the murdered man is described when it is viewed by Poirot and Hastings. The face is clean-shaven, the nose thin, the eyes set rather close together, and the skin bronzed. We are told that the dead man’s ‘lips were drawn back from his teeth and an expression of absolute amazement and terror was stamped on the livid features’. The features, it is clear, are at least intact and undamaged. But Poirot finds a short piece of lead piping which, according to him, was used to ‘disfigure the victim’s face so that it would be unrecognizable’. Poirot’s theory of the crime, fortunately, does not hinge upon this point!

Since we are in France, Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard is not available to act as a foil for Poirot. This function is undertaken by Giraud, a young detective from the Sûreté who is already famous and inclined to pour scorn on Poirot’s old-fashioned methods. Agatha Christie has confessed that, in writing The Murder on the Links, she was influenced less by the Sherlock Holmes stories than by Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. She must also have been reading A. E. W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose, for certain events at the Villa Geneviève in The Murder on the Links call the 1910 mystery classic to mind.

Since their earlier adventure in Essex, Poirot and Hastings have taken furnished rooms together in London. If you did not learn from The Big Four (1927) that their address was 14 Farraway Street, you would have sworn that it was 221B Baker Street, for the ambience is distinctly Holmesian, as is their landlady, who is difficult to distinguish from Sherlock Holmes’s Mrs Hudson. Captain Hastings works as private secretary to a Member of Parliament while Poirot pursues a retirement career as private detective, and Hastings finds time to write up Poirot’s cases, just as Watson used to chronicle those of Holmes. At the end of The Murder on the Links, it seems likely that Hastings will propose marriage to the auburn-haired beauty he has met, and there is even a hint that he, or they, may emigrate to ‘a ranch across the seas’. Mrs Christie, it would seem, was already laying her plans for the removal of Hastings from Poirot’s life.

A television adaptation of The Murder on the Links, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 11 February 1996.

The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)

Back in London after their world tour, the Christies for a time found it difficult to settle down. Agatha longed for a cottage in the country, near enough to town for Archie to commute to the city, but far enough away for little Rosalind to be able to breathe air fresher than that of Earls Court. Archie took some months to find a job that suited him. Eventually, however, he was offered an excellent position with Austral Trust Ltd, a city firm run by an Australian friend, Clive Baillieu. Archie was to remain with Austral Trust Ltd for the rest of his life. Now, while they searched for their place in the country, Agatha proceeded to work on her next novel.

The egregious Belcher had suggested to her, before they went on their trip, that his house, the Mill House at Dorney, would make an excellent setting for a murder. ‘The Mystery of the Mill House,’ he had said to her one evening when the Christies were dining there. ‘Jolly good title, don’t you think?’ Agatha admitted that it had possibilities, and on their voyage to Cape Town Major Belcher continued to refer to it. ‘But mind you,’ he added, ‘if you write it you must put me in it.’ Agatha doubted if she could manage to create a character based entirely on someone she knew, but Belcher continued to pester her throughout their world tour. When he asked her, for the umpteenth time, ‘Have you begun that book yet? Am I in it?’ she replied, ‘Yes. You’re the victim.’

But Belcher did not see himself as one of life’s victims. ‘You’ve got to make me the murderer, Agatha. Do you understand?’ And Mrs Christie replied carefully, ‘I understand that you want to be the murderer.’ She had not, in fact, begun writing the book, but she did sketch out its plot while she was in South Africa, and Belcher played a leading role. ‘Give him a title,’ Archie suggested. ‘He’d like that.’ So Belcher became Sir Eustace Pedler. Agatha Christie explained later that Sir Eustace Pedler was not really meant to be Belcher,

but he used several of Belcher’s phrases, and told some of Belcher’s stories. He too was a master of the art of bluff, and behind the bluff could easily be sensed an unscrupulous and interesting character. Soon I had forgotten Belcher and had Sir Eustace Pedler himself wielding the pen. It is, I think, the only time I have tried to put a real person whom I knew well into a book, and I don’t think it succeeded. Belcher didn’t come to life, but someone called Sir Eustace Pedler did. I suddenly found that the book was becoming rather fun to write. I only hoped The Bodley Head would approve of it.8

The book was written in London and, retitled The Man in the Brown Suit since its author thought the title proposed by Belcher too similar to her earlier ones, was delivered to The Bodley Head who ‘hemmed and hawed a bit’ because it was not a proper detective story but one of those thrillers which Mrs Christie seemed to find easier to write. However, they accepted it.