Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks

by John Curran

  Knox 9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts that pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

  Hastings has been dubbed ‘the stupidest of Watsons’ and there are times when we wonder how Poirot endured his intellectual company. And, of course, Agatha Christie herself tired of him and banished him to Argentina in 1937 after Dumb Witness, although he was to return for Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, written during the Second World War but not published until 1975. It can be argued that the intelligence of the Watson character has to be below average because it is necessary for the Great Detective to explain his deductions to the reader through the Watson character. If the Watson were as clever as the detective there would be no need for an explanation at all. If Poirot were to look at the scene of the crime and announce, ‘We must look for a left-handed female from Scotland with red hair and a limp,’ and Hastings were to reply, ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ the reader would feel, justifiably, more than a little exasperated. And, of course, this Rule overlaps with Knox 1 (see below) in the case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd because Dr Sheppard in that famous case was acting as Poirot’s Watson.

  Van Dine 2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played by the criminal on the detective.

  This Rule seems to negate the whole purpose of a good detective novel. Surely the challenge is the struggle between reader and writer. In essence, the writer says: ‘I present you with a challenge to spot the culprit before I am ready to reveal him/her. To make it easier for you, I will give you hints and clues along the way but I still defy you to anticipate my solution. However, I give you fair warning that I will use every trick in my writer’s repertoire to fool you but I still promise to abide by the fair play rule.’ As Dorothy L. Sayers said in the aftermath of the Roger Ackroyd controversy, ‘It is the reader’s business to suspect everybody.’

  Into this category come Christie’s greatest conjuring tricks, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night. In both these novels the reader is fooled into accepting the bona fides of a character who is taken for granted but not ‘seen’ in the same way that all the other protagonists are. The narrator is a ‘given’ whose presence and veracity the reader accepts unquestioningly. And, indeed, the narrator’s veracity in each case is above reproach. They do not actually lie at any stage. There are certainly some ambiguous statements and judicious omissions but their significance is obvious only on a re-reading, when the secret is known. In Chapter 27 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Dr Sheppard himself states:

  I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following? ‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door-handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.’ All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after that first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?

  All true; but not one reader in a thousand will stop to examine the details, especially not in the more innocent era of the 1920s, when the local doctor had a status just below that of the Creator.

  Michael Rogers, in Endless Night, is also scrupulously fair in his account of his life. He tells us the truth but, as with Dr Sheppard, not the whole truth. But if we re-read Chapter 6, which recounts a telling conversation with his mother about ‘his plan’, what a new significance it all takes on when we know the truth. The ‘plan’, and even ‘the girl’, are no longer what we had originally supposed. This novel has much in common with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Death on the Nile, as well as with The Man in the Brown Suit and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In the first two titles, two lovers collude, as in Endless Night, in the murder of an inconvenient wife, stage a dramatic quarrel and have seemingly foolproof alibis; The Mysterious Affair at Styles also features a poisoning which happens in the absence of the conspirators. In the latter two titles, the narrator (a diarist in The Man in the Brown Suit) is exposed as the villain.

  Van Dine 5. The culprit must be determined by logical deduction – not by accident, coincidence or unmotivated confession.

  An example of confession (albeit not unmotivated) as a solution in Christie’s output is And Then There Were None. Here the entire explanation is given in the form of a confession. In this most ingenious novel, Agatha Christie set herself an almost insoluble problem – how to kill off the entire ten characters of the book and yet have an explanation at the end. The only solution would seem to be the one that she actually adopted – a confession. Confessions do feature in other novels, for example Lord Edgware Dies, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and Crooked House, but only as confirmation of what has already been revealed, while Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case contains one of the most shocking confessions in literary history . . .

  Van Dine 15. The truth of the problem must be at all times apparent – provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.

  Although tautological, this is intended as an elaboration of the earlier Rules regarding fairness to the reader. One of the clearest examples of this in the Christie output is Lord Edgware Dies where a very audacious plot is, in retrospect, glaringly obvious with all the clues staring the reader in the face. Other blindingly evident clues include the final words – ‘Evil Eye . . . Eye . . . Eye . . .’ – of Chapter 23 of A Caribbean Mystery; or the description of Lewis Serrocold emerging from the study in Chapter 7 of They Do It with Mirrors; or the thoughts of Ruth Lessing in Chapter 2 of Sparkling Cyanide after her meeting with Victor; or, most controversially of all, Dr Sheppard’s leave-taking of Roger Ackroyd in Chapter 4 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

  Knox 6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right.

  There are, unfortunately, a few examples in Christie’s oeuvre of ‘deductions’ not based on any tangible evidence. It must be conceded that they can only be accounted for by intuition. How, for example, does Miss Marple alight on Dr Quimper in 4.50 from Paddington? And only the ‘Divine Revelation’ forbidden by The Detection Club Oath can explain how Poirot knows that Lady Westholme from Appointment with Death spent time in prison in her early life.

  The crime

  The crime itself did not feature strongly in the Rules, although Christie enjoyed the challenge of Van Dine 18 below.

  Van Dine 7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel.

  The first detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1878), concerns a robbery rather than a murder, but a mysterious death is the sine qua non of most detective novels. Although she broke this Rule often in her short story output, Christie never short-changed her readers in novel form, generously providing a multitude of corpses in And Then There Were None, Death Comes as the End and Endless Night.

  Van Dine 18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.

  The rejection of this Rule could mean a huge disappointment for a reader who discovers, after 250 pages, that the death under investigation is not a crime at all. See how cleverly Agatha Christie overcomes this. In Taken at the Flood, none of the deaths is what it first seems. The seeming murder of ‘Enoch Arden’ is an accident, the death of Major Porter is suicide and the seeming suicide of Rosaleen Cloade is murder. In one brilliant plot she effortlessly breaks both aspects of Van Dine’s Rule. In the Poirot cases ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ and ‘Murder in the Mews’ – both essentially the same story, the latter being a more elaborate version, 15 years later, of the former – we have not murder disguised to look like suicide but suicide disguised to look like murder. But there is another twist; the real murder plan is to get someone else hanged (and therefore murdered) for a crime they did not commit. Both suicide scenes are subtly altered to give an impression exactly opposite to the reality.

 
; Van Dine 19. The motives for all the crimes in detective stories should be personal.

  This Rule essentially outlawed murder committed for ideological reasons, specifically political motivation. Van Dine goes on to suggest that this should be confined to secret-service stories and this type of plot is indeed a feature of some of Christie’s international thriller novels – They Came to Baghdad, Destination Unknown, Passenger to Frankfurt – as well as some of the early titles – The Secret Adversary, The Secret of Chimneys – but it is not a feature of her classical detective stories. But into which category does the motive for the first murder in Three Act Tragedy fall?

  The detective

  The supposedly all-important figure of the detective occupied both writers: Van Dine 4 and Knox 7 are identical, although Van Dine added further embellishments in Rules 6 and 9. Some of Christie’s greatest triumphs involve these Rules; she has joyously shattered all of them.

  Van Dine 4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the criminal.

  Knox 7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

  From the very beginning of the detective novel the unmasking of the official investigator was considered a valid ploy. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) by Gaston Leroux, creator of The Phantom of the Opera, is credited by Agatha Christie herself as being one of the two detective novels that she had actually read before embarking on The Mysterious Affair at Styles and contains one of the earliest examples of the criminal investigator. In The Clocks, Poirot, talking about his magnum opus on detective fiction, is unstinting in his praise for this groundbreaking novel. Some of Christie’s most deftly plotted books featured this ploy. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was chosen by Robert Barnard in his Agatha Christie: A Talent to Deceive (1980) as one of the three best novels of Dame Agatha’s career, and indeed it is a classic English detective story of the type considered synonymous with the Christie school of whodunit, in other words a snowbound country mansion with a group of suspects and among them a killer. While her intentions when originally plotting this novel were completely different from those realised in the book we now know (see Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks), the solution is breathtaking in its daring and simplicity. We are given numerous clues to the true identity of Simeon Lee’s killer – the good looks, the habit of stroking the jaw, the subterfuge with the piece of rubber, the insistence on the family ‘on the other side of the blanket’, the daring exchange with Pilar in the chapter ‘December 24th’. But, like the presence of a narrator, Superintendent Sugden is not really seen by the reader, just accepted. With his unmasking, an ingenious (if somewhat unlikely) plot is revealed. An early foreshadowing of this ploy can also be found in ‘The Man in the Mist’ in Partners in Crime.

  The Mousetrap, in both its stage and novella versions, and its earlier incarnation as the radio play Three Blind Mice, all unmask the investigator as the villain. Sergeant Trotter arrives like a deus ex machina in Monkswell Manor and is accepted unquestioningly both by its snowbound inhabitants and by the audience. In fairness, it should be said that although we think he is a policeman, he is actually an imposter, although the overall effect is the same. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the policeman, like the village doctor, was perceived as uncorrupted and incorruptible. Nowadays, unfortunately, we know differently and modern audiences are more likely to spot this type of villain than their more innocent counterparts of an earlier age.

  In Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, Agatha Christie played her last and greatest trick of all on her readers; and they loved her all the more for it. This is the ultimate sleight of hand from the supreme prestidigitator in the crime-writing pantheon. Who but Agatha Christie would have thought of, and then carried out, this almost sacrilegious trick? After 55 years of partnership, she unmasks Poirot as the killer. Certainly the book is contrived (which detective story is not?), but only the most churlish of readers would complain after such a dazzling culmination of two careers.

  Van Dine 6. The detective novel must have a detective in it.

  This is a perfectly reasonable Rule. But Agatha Christie made a career out of breaking the Rules, reasonable or otherwise, and she managed to demolish this one also. The most famous and best-selling crime novel of all time, And Then There Were None, has no detective. An epilogue is set at Scotland Yard where Inspector Maine and Sir Thomas Legge, the Assistant Commissioner, discuss the mass slaughter on the island but can offer no explanation that covers all the facts. It is left to a confession (breaking yet another Rule) to pinpoint the guilty party. Death Comes as the End is another example of a detective novel with no detective. Set as it is in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago, the absence of a detective is not remarkable. Clues also are necessarily in short supply; the fingerprints, cigarette ash and telephone alibis beloved of writers and readers alike are notable only by their absence.

  Van Dine 9. There must be but one detective.

  In the sense that Poirot and Miss Marple never meet between the covers of any of her books Agatha Christie abided by this Rule. But in many novels they work in close collaboration with the official investigators. And in other titles there is an unofficial coming-together of, effectively, suspects in order to solve the crime. In Three Act Tragedy, Death in the Clouds and The A.B.C. Murders Poirot agrees to co-operate with some of those under suspicion in order to arrive at the truth. And in all three cases one of his group of collaborators is unmasked in the last chapter. Coincidentally or otherwise, these novels were all published in the same 12-month period between January 1935 and January 1936.

  The murderer

  The other important figure, the murderer, also exercised both rule-makers. But Christie had broken most of these Rules before either Knox or Van Dine sat down to compose them.

  Knox 1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

  While adhering to the former part of this injunction, the circumvention of the latter became almost a motif throughout Agatha Christie’s writing life. As early as 1924 with The Man in the Brown Suit she neatly and unobtrusively breaks this rule. Throughout the book we are presented with passages from Sir Eustace Pedler’s diary in which he shares his thoughts with the reader, before his eventual unmasking as the villain of the piece. The most famous, or infamous, example is, of course, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This title, her first for the publisher Collins, caused a major stir on its first appearance with its revelation of the narrator as a cold-blooded killer and blackmailer. The book immediately ensured her fame and success and it is safe to assert that, even if she had never written another word, her name would still be remembered today in recognition of this stunning conjuring trick. Forty years later she replayed it but in such a different guise that most of her readers were not aware of the repetition. While a doctor in a small 1920s village narrates The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a young, working-class, charming ne’er-do-well narrates Endless Night. But it is essentially the same sleight of hand at work. (See also ‘Fairness’ above.)

  More subtly, we share the thoughts of a group of characters, which includes the killer, in And Then There Were None, but without identifying which thoughts belong to which character (Chapter 11). And in The A.B.C. Murders we think we are sharing the thoughts of a serial killer when, in fact, he is the innocent dupe of the real killer. Less overtly, we are given an insight into the minds of the killer in Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero and Sparkling Cyanide.

  Van Dine 10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story.

  Never one to cheat her readers, this is one of the Rules that Christie did not break, or not in the way that Van Dine intended. She never unmasked the second cousin of the under-housemaid as the killer in the last chapter. But adhering to the hidden-in-plain-sight ploy, the more prominent a part a character played the more suspicious should the reader be.

  Van Dine 11. A servant must
not be chosen as the culprit.

  This is not mere social prejudice (although there is plenty of that in the work of Van Dine himself) but a practical solution to the problem of the unmasking, in the last chapter, of a member of the domestic staff whose presence in the novel was fleeting at best. Consider how Christie overcame this stricture. Kirsten Lindstrom in Ordeal by Innocence is, strictly speaking, a domestic servant but her significance to the Argyle family can be interpreted as placing her outside this category. But it is as a servant that we meet, and continue to perceive, her. This same consideration applies to Miss Gilchrist in After the Funeral; witness the telling scene at the denouement when she bitterly recriminates the Abernethie family. Gladys, in A Pocket Full of Rye, is a clearer example of domestic servitude. Indeed, it is her status as such that makes her a necessary part of Lance’s murderous plan. It is her job to poison the breakfast marmalade while Lance is demonstrably miles away, thereby giving him an impeccable alibi. But it is also a fact that, in defence of Christie’s oft-criticised attitude to domestic servants, it is the subsequent death of Gladys that causes Miss Marple to arrive at Yewtree Lodge to avenge the death of a foolish and gullible former maid.2 And the closing pages of the book, as Miss Marple reads a letter from Gladys written just before her murder, are very affecting. The same plot device, and much of the same plot, can be seen in the earlier short story ‘The Tuesday Night Club’ in The Thirteen Problems.

  Van Dine 17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt in a detective novel.

  This Rule was adhered to and, apart from brief forays into organised crime in The Big Four, The Secret of Chimneys and At Bertram’s Hotel, no use is made of a professional criminal in Christie’s solutions.

  Van Dine 12. There must be but one culprit no matter how many murders are committed.