Then just as Jochen, I could sense, was about to wrap up the proceedings, a female voice roared out from the very last row, a voice I found unsettlingly familiar even if for the moment I could put neither a face nor a name to it. Her question: ‘In “The Giant Rat of Sumatra” you have Holmes express a preference for what he calls “minor oddities” over “major monstrosities”. Yes?’ Me (suddenly all goose-pimply): ‘Yes …?’ ‘And when he draws his finger along the floorboard and holds it up for inspection, and Watson protests that he cannot see anything, Holmes answers – and a very Holmesian answer it is too, I may say – “That is the minor oddity.” I’m not misquoting you, am I?’ Me: ‘No, you aren’t.’ ‘Well then, I’d like you to explain why you employed precisely – and I mean precisely – that same conceit of the absence of dust considered as a minor oddity, and in an attic to boot, in the first of your two Agatha Christie pastiches, The Act of Roger Murgatroyd. Also, while I’ve got the floor,’ she went on, ‘is there any special reason why Dr Gable shares the same Christian name with one of the main characters in both The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and A Mysterious Affair of Style, my very dear Eustace Trubshawe, former Chief-Inspector of Scotland Yard?’
My very dear Eustace Trubshawe?
‘I’m sorry, Miss … Miss …?’
She rose to her feet. That tricorne hat! Those pince-nez! That garish two-piece suit! Evadne Mount, as I lived and breathed!
I was speechless. By that I mean, I had no speech prepared. Even if it hadn’t been she who posed the question, I doubt I could have offered a satisfactory response to it, since until that very instant I hadn’t realised I’d actually done what she’d accused me of doing. Yet the instant her accusations were aired, I knew them to be true. (Mortified as I was, however, I remained rational enough not to try mentally passing the buck, blaming my editor, my proof-reader, anybody but myself, for not having picked up on my self-plagiarism. Since I had failed to catch it, why should I have expected them to?) Mumbling some triteness about Homer nodding, I let a puzzled Jochen call the whole event to a decidedly anti-climactic close.
And now I must beg the reader’s indulgence with an unavoidable digression.
If by chance you’ve read those two Agatha Christie parodies-cum-celebrations-cum-critiques of mine which are alluded to above, you will recall that the first is set in the nineteen-thirties and the second a decade later, just after the Second World War. Also that, aided and abetted by her loyal, long-suffering partner-in-detection, ex-Chief-Inspector Eustace Trubshawe, the same amateur sleuth, Evadne Mount, author of innumerable bestselling mystery novels and the bastard offspring of Christie herself and her own fictional alter ego, the whodunit-writing, apple-munching Ariadne Oliver, presides over both. You will also recall that, just as Hercule Poirot never (or almost never) aged from his first to his last recorded case, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, to Curtain, published in 1975, so neither Evadne nor Eustace, meeting up in the Ritz tearoom in the opening chapter of A Mysterious Affair of Style, looks a day older to the other than when they had joined forces to solve the Roger Murgatroyd case a decade earlier. That, of course, was a conscious ploy on my part. I had fun with the cliché and I hoped the reader would too.
Considering, then, what I’ve just written, it would be perfectly understandable if the same reader, re-encountering Evadne Mount in this memoir, were to shrug off as more postmodern high jinks, as yet another playful subversion of the genre’s conventions, the apparent implication that the woman must now be pushing a hundred-and twenty. No need! The Evadne Mount I stared at across a crammed lecture hall in the Meiringen Kunsthalle was just a month or two short of her sixty-sixth birthday.
How come? The story started three years ago at the West London home of the writer and publisher Carmen Callil. We were lounging in the garden before dinner, we being Marina Warner, essayist and polymath; Jules and Pat, i.e. the novelist Julian Barnes and his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh; actor and man-about-town Peter Eyre; and, of course, irrepressible Carmen herself. Somebody – it was Marina, I think – had just asked me whether I had any current project and I replied that I rather fancied writing a parody of vintage Agatha Christie, a novel in black-and-white, as it were, like one of those feebly directed but sparklingly scripted and gloriously well-acted prewar British films which are for me one of the definitions of sheer, uncomplicated bliss, but that I hadn’t yet hit upon the iconographical trappings, both gestural and sartorial, of my cardboard cutout of a sleuth. Spearing one of her own cocktail sausages, Carmen said:
‘You know, darling, I may just be able to help you there.’
‘Oh. How so?’
‘Well … as it turns out, I’m personally acquainted with a parody, a living parody, of Agatha Christie.’
‘What do you mean, Carmen?’
‘I mean my friend Evadne Mount.’
‘Evadne Mount?’ I said, savouring the two strangely pleasurable words on my tongue. ‘I do like the name, but I can’t say it rings any bells for me.’
‘I didn’t think it would,’ she replied. ‘She doesn’t write the kind of books someone like you would ever condescend to read. Except,’ she spoke again after a short pause, ‘if you really are planning to do a Christie sort of thingie …’
‘Do stop teasing, Carmen,’ I said impatiently. ‘Why do you think she might interest me? It could be important.’
First asking around if anybody’s glass needed topping up, but everybody was fine, then commanding me to follow her back into the kitchen, where she had to oversee the roast, she told me about her friend.
Their first encounter had been at the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, to which they had both been invited to debate the topic ‘Feminism or Femininity?’. In spite of the fact that Evadne’s novels – or Evie’s, as I now feel more comfortable referring to her – were not really Carmen’s thing, they had taken an instant liking to one another and had begun to meet regularly for high tea at one of the posher Piccadilly tearooms. As for those novels, it seems that they were all conscious retreads of the cosy whodunits of the Golden Age of English crime fiction, Agatha Christie’s in particular, and had been mildly successful – she did have her following – if rather less so in recent years. In fact, said Carmen, Evie’s current anxiety was that, as a single lady without close family connections or any sort of private income, if and when she finally slipped off the mid-list (by which I mean those authors whose books sell just enough copies to persuade their publishers to keep on bringing them out until one fine day they decide not to), she would probably, and sooner rather than later, end up as a homeless bag lady.
I was as baffled as I was intrigued.
‘But what are these novels?’ I asked. ‘I read whodunits. Why have I never heard of hers?’
‘Oh, darling, you have me there. It’s been so awfully long since I read any of them myself. There was one, I remember, called The Hour of 12. No, no, The Stroke of 12. And another two which had kind of a gastronomic theme, The Proof of the Pudding and The Timing of the Stew. Quite good fun. Except that they weren’t really topnotch and it all became hugely embarrassing when Evie began badgering me to publish one of her books as a Virago Modern Classic.’
‘Not one of her whodunits?’
‘Good Lord, no. Even she knew better than to push her luck that far. No, it was an early effort that she’d had published privately and let go out of print, a bit Lesbian, The Urinal of Futility, can you imagine, all very simpatico in its way but just too terrible as prose. I mean to say, I know that at Virago we sometimes had to stretch the definition of classic – all in the good cause – but even so, there are limits.’
She started hunting for a spatula which, it turned out, she’d been using as her cookbook’s bookmark.
‘Well, anyway, as I was saying, it was awkward having to refuse her, in fact it became quite unpleasant, our being friends and everything, but I was a publisher, after all, and her work just wasn’t up to snuff.’
�
�And yet you still think I ought to read her?’
‘No, no, darling, you’ve completely misunderstood. I think you ought to meet her.’
‘Meet her? Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Okay, but when?’
‘Soon. I’ll have you both to supper. It’ll be just the three of us. A tête-à-tête-à-tête.’
So it was that, a fortnight later, I did meet Evadne Mount. Moreover, the moment I watched her stride into Carmen’s living-room, I knew why the meeting had been set up. Evadne Mount was not merely the author of Agatha Christieish whodunits, four of which I had in the meantime unearthed from my local library’s vaults and read with moderate enjoyment, she herself was a character straight out of their stock barrel. Although the evening was humid, she wore a two-piece, oatmeal-hued outfit in the heaviest and hairiest of Scottish tweeds. Her grey stockings were as thick and tight and unappetising as month-old bandages, and her massive feet were encased in the kind of shoes that I would later describe in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd as ‘so sensible you felt like consulting them on whether you should cash in your shares in Amalgamated Copper’. Then there was that voice of hers with its breaking-the-sound-barrier boom, a voice to whose uniqueness, in neither of the whodunits in which I cast her as my heroine, would I prove capable of doing justice. In truth, if I had been a totally free agent, and hadn’t had to worry about her own personal reaction once the books were published, I would have written about it, vulgarly but honestly, that it made her sound as though she were farting through a trumpet.
Somewhat to my surprise, though, I too liked her. We at once struck up a rapport. Even if, as soon as we had been introduced, she started calling me by my first name, standing on the absence of ceremony, so to speak, a liberty I myself never take with strangers, I found that on an unexpectedly wide range of conversational subject-matter – the superiority of Mayhem Parva mysteries to anything of the sort written nowadays, the increasing omnipresence of weirdos and deadbeats in what were once respectable residential areas of London, the charlatanism of almost all contemporary art – our views converged.
While listening to her hold forth, I soon came to the realisation that, as Carmen had foreseen, I definitely could use her as source material for the leading character of my projected whodunit. I even wondered whether it might be possible not merely to adapt her but, in a literal sense, to adopt her – in short, to have Evie herself be my sleuth. Her name, her clothes, the fact that she herself wrote whodunits in a nineteen-thirties style, were just too perfect, for the nostalgist of English eccentricity that I am, to be compromised by the fiction writer’s traditional scruples in such matters (though I was already starting to fantasise how I might actually enhance the anachronistic appeal of those clothes with an accessory that would be distinctive to her, a handbag or a hat, yes, a hat, perhaps a French matelot’s tricorne). Her voice, her galumphing mannerisms, above all her habit, when she, Carmen and I began dishing the latest dirt on the denizens (Evie’s word) of London’s literary scene, of being perpetually reminded of incidents out of her own novels, just as Jane Marple would invoke the trivia of village rumour and gossip when elucidating the ostensibly more recondite set of motivations which lay behind some diabolical metropolitan crime – no, there was no reason at all, it seemed to me, why I couldn’t transpose her, intact, into my own whodunit. Dare I ask her if she would consent to become the model for my fictional sleuth? Would she be offended? She herself was not too wellknown and, if Carmen was to be believed, financially insecure. Naturally, I would be prepared to offer her a decent percentage of my novel’s advance fee and royalties – 25%, say – no, maybe 20% – plenty of time to work out the details. Moreover, if the book turned out to be the success I hoped it would be, it could well re-boot her own languishing career. What had either she or I to lose?
I put my proposition to her. She heard me out, calmly and attentively; the sole sign of what I read as growing enthusiasm on her part was some fidgety play with her pince-nez. It would be my intention, I explained, to name my sleuth ‘Evadne Mount’. I would draw inspiration from her facial features, her gestures and clothing, her entire external appearance. I would allow her character to interrupt the storyline at regular intervals with brief little digests of her own whodunits (whose resident amateur detective, Alexis Baddeley, was also an elderly spinster), some of which, those whose twists I’d refrain from divulging, would indeed be her own, others, those whose twists I would divulge, I’d devise myself, subject to her approval. Finally, I would give her a Watson in the guise of a archetypally plodding Scotland Yard Inspector yet would also guarantee that it was she not he who solved the crime.
All this, I say, I pitched without any more input from her than a repeated twiddling of her pince-nez and a twitch of an eyebrow when, just once, she exchanged a bemused glance with Carmen. Then, when I had fallen silent, prior to saying either yes or no she made two requests.
‘Will I,’ she asked, ‘have the right to expropriate those apocryphal plot digests you mention and develop them as full-length plots for any subsequent whodunits I myself might decide to write?’
That request I hadn’t expected. But, even though a trifle wary and making a mental note to consult my agent, I saw no pressing reason not to grant it and, as I told myself, there would be nothing to prevent me from later changing my mind.
Then: ‘Will I have an absolute veto over anything I take exception to in your description of my appearance or the dialogue you attribute to me?’
‘Ah well, no,’ I answered firmly. ‘No absolute right of veto, I’m afraid. I will, of course, let you read in advance everything in the book relating to you, which, as just about everything in the book will relate to you, basically means that I’ll be showing you the typescript even before my Faber editor sees it. And I will, as I say, subject all of it to your approval, said approval not to be unreasonably withheld, pardon my legalese. But the final decision as to what does or does not go into my novel must rest with me. Being a novelist yourself,’ I craftily added, ‘you ought to understand why that has to be.’
Turning to Carmen, she said, ‘Tell me what you think.’
‘Darling, you can’t possibly expect me to advise you on something so unheard-of. How would I know how to calculate the risks involved? The ramifications? All I will say is that I’ve known Gilbert for many years and I promise you he’s to be trusted. Not for a single moment would he – Actually,’ she ebulliently interrupted herself, ‘what the hell! I will advise you. Go for it, Evie!’
And she did, opining (yes, like one of her own clichéd creations, she actually did opine) that since, whichever decision she took, it was bound to be a mistake, the essential was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.
Our gentleman’s agreement was sealed with an old-fashioned handshake and an ice-cold bottle of Veuve Clicquot that I suspect Carmen had been keeping in readiness for just such an outcome. And since I already knew what the title of my whodunit would be, I raised my glass and proposed a toast:
‘To The Act of Roger Murgatroyd.’
Up to a point, I stuck to my half of the bargain. A written contract, which we both signed without a qualm, followed our supper together and I dutifully emailed Evie, at [email protected], each chapter as I completed it. I made all of the relatively few minor amendments she insisted upon, mainly having to do with references to her weight but once or twice relating to lines of dialogue she felt were inappropriate to both her factual and fictional selves. She also emailed me in her turn a handful of conceits, most of which I ignored but one I was happy to use, and not simply in compensation for those I wasn’t, that of giving her character the catch-phrase ‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’.
Unfortunately for her, though, which is why I prefixed the preceding paragraph with the qualifier ‘up to a point’, I am less of a writer than, supremely, a rewriter. Writing, I contend, makes a book possible; only rewriting is capable of making it good. For three months after I had delivered my t
ext to Faber, I tirelessly polished it, a process, as ever with me, primarily of excision, ellipsis and elimination, of paring, cropping, thinning out, trimming off and cutting away. But I also seized the opportunity to develop certain internal relationships necessary to what I shall grandly call the narrative’s combinatoric structure.‡
One of these relationships, inspired by Carmen’s revelation of Evie’s long unobtainable and apparently unreadable Lesbian apologia, The Urinal of Futility, involved Evie herself and the stage and screen star Cora Rutherford. Cora was an invented character, of course, named after the actress Margaret Rutherford who (to Agatha Christie’s private vexation) had been hopelessly miscast as Miss Marple in a cycle of film adaptations from the sixties. And, in my revised storyline, she – Cora, that is, not Margaret Rutherford – and Evie were described as having once, during their carefree youth, shared ‘a small cold flat and a big warm bed in Bloomsbury’, before maturing, in Evie’s case, into self-elected spinsterdom and, in Cora’s, into serial heterosexual monogamy.
It wouldn’t exactly be fair to say that I never had any intention of letting Evie, as agreed, vet these late additions. But time pressed, Faber fretted, the printers clamoured, as printers have immemorially done, for the typescript, and my fear was that, if she were to take umbrage and actually demand that I edit them out again, the book’s pre-Christmas publication date, so crucial to its Boxing Day setting, would be compromised. So I never did email them to her. (It happens.)
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