by John Curran
He has his favourite cases. Cards on the Table was the murder which won his complete technical approval;30 the Death on the Nile saddened him.31 Since Appointment with Death is sub judice he must not comment on it here; let me only say that three points in it appealed to him strongly. Firstly the fact that desire for truth on the part of another man coincided with his own strong feelings on that point. [Secondly] the limitations of his investigation also appealed to him – the necessity of getting at the truth in twenty four hours with no technical evidence, post-mortems or the usual facilities of his background resources And thirdly he was fascinated by the peculiar psychological interest of the case and particularly by the strong malign personality of the dead woman.32
Well, I have told you all I can of Hercule Poirot – it is possible he has not finished with me yet – there may be more of him – facts to know which I have not fathomed.
Having drawn a line, literally, under the essay at this point Christie then decides to redraft the last paragraph and expand it slightly, although she omits the third reason for including Appointment with Death among Poirot’s favourite cases:
Firstly that he undertook the case at the express desire of a man whose passion for truth was equal to his own.33 Secondly the technical difficulty of the investigation put him on his mettle made a special appeal to him and the necessity of reaching the truth in twenty four hours without the help of expert brilliance evidence of any kind
Well, I have given you some of my impressions of Hercule Poirot – they are based on an acquaintance of many years standing. We are friends and partners. I must admit that I am considerably beholden to him financially. Poirot considers that I could not get along without him but on the other hand I consider that but for me Hercule Poirot would not exist.
There are times when I, too, have been tempted to commit murder.34 I am beholden to him financially. On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me. In moments of irritation I point out that by a few strokes of the pen (or taps on the typewriter) – I could destroy him utterly. He replies grandiloquently ‘Impossible to get rid of Hercule Poirot like that – he is much too clever! To permit such a thing to happen And so, as usual, the little man has the last word!
Chapter 6
The Third Decade 1940–1949
‘I never found any difficulty in writing during the war . . . ’
* * *
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
And Then There Were None • The Body in the Library • Curtain • Murder on the Orient Express • N or M?
* * *
During the Blitz of the Second World War Agatha Christie lived in London and worked in University College Hospital by day; and, as she explains in her Autobiography, she wrote books in the evening because ‘I had no other things to do.’ She worked on N or M? and The Body in the Library simultaneously and found that the writing of two totally different books kept each of them fresh. During this period she also wrote the final adventure of Hercule Poirot, Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case; although it was always asserted that Miss Marple’s last case, Sleeping Murder, was written at around the same time, I showed in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks that the date of composition of that novel is much later. And it was at this time too that she worked on Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946), her ‘meandering chronicle’ of life on an archaeological dig.
Production slowed down during the 1940s, but only slightly. Thirteen novels, all but one, N or M? (1941), detective stories, were published; and a collection of short stories appeared towards the end of the decade. But if the quantity decreased, the quality of the writing increased. While still adhering to the strict whodunit formula Christie began, from Sad Cypress (1940) onwards, to take a deeper interest in the creation of her characters. For some of her 1940s titles, the characters take centre stage and the detective plot moves further backstage than heretofore. The central triangle of Sad Cypress is more carefully portrayed, and the emotional element is stronger, than most of the novels of the 1930s, with the possible exception of Death on the Nile. Similarly Five Little Pigs (1943), Towards Zero (1944), Sparkling Cyanide (1945) and especially The Hollow (1946) all contain more carefully realised characters than many previous novels.
In 1946 Christie wrote an essay, ‘Detective Writers in England’, for the Ministry of Information. In it she discusses her fellow writers in the Detection Club – Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh,35 John Dickson Carr, Freeman Wills Crofts, R. Austin Freeman, H.C. Bailey, Anthony Berkeley. She then adds a few modest words about herself, including this interesting remark: ‘I have become more interested as the years go on in the preliminaries of crime. The interplay of character upon character, the deep smouldering resentments and dissatisfactions that do not always come to the surface but which may suddenly explode into violence.’ Towards Zero is an account of the inexorable events leading to a vicious murder at the zero hour of the title; Five Little Pigs, her greatest achievement, is a portrait of five people caught in a maelstrom of conflicting emotions culminating in murder; Sparkling Cyanide, adopting a similar technique to Five Little Pigs, is a whodunit told through the individual accounts of the suspects, many of them caught in the fatal consequences of an adulterous triangle. And the ‘deep smouldering resentments’ of her essay are more evident than ever in the prelude to the sudden explosion of violence at a country-house weekend in The Hollow. This novel, which could almost be a Westmacott title, features Poirot, although when Christie dramatised it some years later, she wisely dropped him. For once, his presence is unconvincing and the detective element almost a distraction, although the denouement is still a surprise. Through all of this, she managed the whodunit factor though with less emphasis on footprints and fingerprints, diagram and floor plans, and initialled handkerchiefs and red kimonos.
And still she experimented with the detective novel form – Death Comes as the End (1945), set in Ancient Egypt in 2,000 BC, is a very early example of the crime novel set in the past; N or M? is a wartime thriller; The Body in the Library (1942) takes the ultimate cliché of detective fiction and dusts it off; and for Crooked House (1949) she wrote an ending so daring that her publishers asked her to change it.
Her only short story collection of this decade, The Labours of Hercules (1947), is also her greatest (its genesis and history is discussed in detail in Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks). Apart from her detective output she also published two Westmacott novels. One of them, Absent in the Spring (1944), was written in ‘a white-heat’ over a weekend; this was followed three years later by The Rose and the Yew Tree. As further proof of her popularity, she made publishing history in 1948 when she became the first crime writer to have a million Penguin paperbacks issued on the same day, 100,000 each of ten titles.
After a lacklustre stage adaptation, by other hands, of Peril at End House in 1940, she wrote her own stage adaptation of Ten Little Niggers in 1943, thoroughly enjoying the experience; and dramatisations of two of her ‘foreign’ novels, Appointment with Death and Death on the Nile, followed onstage in 1945 and 1946 respectively. And the last play of the decade was Miss Marple’s stage debut, Murder at the Vicarage, not adapted by Christie herself, appeared in 1949. One of the best screen versions of a Christie work, René Clair’s wonderful film And Then There Were None, appeared in 1945 and was followed two years later by an inferior second version of Love from a Stranger, the inaptly titled film of the excellent short story ‘Philomel Cottage’.
Her most enduring monument, The Mousetrap, began life in May 1947 as the radio play Three Blind Mice, written as a royal commission for Queen Mary’s eightieth birthday. In October of that year it also received a one-off television broadcast. The following year another play written directly for radio, Butter in a Lordly Dish, was broadcast.
During her third decade of writing Agatha Christie consolidated her national and international career, attracted the attentions of royalty and Hollywood, and experimented with radio. In continuing to extend the boundaries of detective fiction
she graduated from a writer of detective stories to a detective novelist.
N or M?
24 November 1941
* * *
Which of the guests staying at the guest house Sans Souci is really a German agent? A middle-aged Tommy is asked to investigate and although Tuppence’s presence is not officially requested, she is determined not to be left out. Which is just as well, because Tommy disappears . . .
* * *
N or M? marked the return of Tommy and Tuppence. We last met them in 1929 in Partners in Crime, although the individual stories that make up that volume had appeared up to five years earlier. So this was the first time Christie had written about them for 15 years. By now they are the parents of twins Derek and Deborah, although the chronology of their lives does not bear much scrutiny. At the end of Partners in Crime Tuppence announces that she is pregnant, which would make her eldest child a teenager, at most; and yet both children are involved in the war effort. Like Miss Marple’s age and the timescale of Curtain, the chronology should not interfere with our enjoyment.
N or M? was serialised six months ahead of book publication in UK and two months earlier again in the USA. This tallies with a November 1940 letter from Christie to her agent, Edmund Cork, wondering if she should rewrite the last chapter. It was her intention to set it in a bomb shelter where Tommy and Tuppence find themselves after their flat has been bombed. As she explains in her Autobiography, she worked on this book in parallel with The Body in the Library, alternating between the two totally different books, thereby ensuring that each one remained fresh. This combination is mirrored in the brief mention – very formally as ‘Mr and Mrs Beresford’ – below, from Notebook 35.
As a couple, Tommy and Tuppence have not lost their sparkle and the subterfuge undertaken by Tuppence in the early chapters, which enables her to overcome the reluctance of Tommy and his superiors to involve her in events, is very much in keeping with earlier manoeuvres in both The Secret Adversary and Partners in Crime. In the novel Christie manages to combine successfully the spy adventure and the domestic murder mystery. There is the overriding question of the fifth-column spy but also the more personal mystery of the kidnapped child. With customary ingenuity Christie brings them both together.
Notebook 35 considers the as-yet-unnamed novel:
3 Books
Remembered death [published in the UK as Sparkling Cyanide]
The Body in the Library
Mr and Mrs Beresford
And six pages later she sketches in the opening of the book. It would seem from the notes that the fundamentals of the plot were clear before she began it. Most of the notes in Notebooks 35 and 62 are in keeping with the completed novel, although there are the usual minor name changes. Many of the notes for N or M? are telegrammatic in style, consisting mainly of combinations of names. These short scenes are often jumbled together in the final draft, the whole not needing as much detailed planning as a formal whodunit with its timetables, clues and alibis.
In the middle of the notes there are some pages of ‘real’ spy detail culled, presumably, from a book. It is a fascinating glimpse into a relatively unknown area of the Second World War, and somewhat surprising that Christie was able to access this information while the war was still in progress:
Holy figures of Santa containing Tetra (explosive)
Man in telephone booth – are numbers rearranged
Cables on bottom of Atlantic – submarines can lay wires and copy messages
Mention of ‘illness’ means spying is under observation. Recovery is at risk
And Christie experiments with creating a code herself. In Notebook 35 she sketches the notes of the musical scale and the lines and spaces of the musical stave. She adds words – CAFE, BABE, FACE – all composed from the notes of the scale, ABCDEFG. And she outlines a possible character who combines a musical background and a workplace with musical-scale initials: ‘A pianist at the BBC’.
Christie next considers potential characters, most of them very cryptically.
T and T
T (for Two)
Tommy approached by MI – Tuppence on phone – really listens – when T turns up at Leahampton – first person he sees is Tuppence – knitting!
Possible people
Young German, Carl – mother a German?
Col Ponsonby – old dug out [Major Bletchley]
Mrs Leacock (who keeps guest house) [Mrs Perenna]
Mr Varney [Mr Cayley]
Mrs Varney [Mrs Cayley]
Daughter with baby comes down to stay [Mrs Sprot]
Later in the same Notebook, she unequivocally states the ‘main idea’ of the book, though this description is only partly reflected in the novel itself:
Main idea of T and T
Woman head of espionage in England?
In fact, in the opening chapter we read of the ‘accidental’ death of the agent Farquhar who, with his dying breath, managed to say ‘N or M,’ confirming the suspicion that two spies, a male, N and a female, M, are at work in England. The concealment of this dangerous female is as clever as anything in Christie’s detective fiction and few readers will spot her; in particular, the psychology of the concealment is ingenious.
Notebook 13 has a concise and accurate outline of the book. Details were to change but this is the essence of the plot and would seem to be the first jottings. Not all of these details were to be included and others, not listed here, were to appear, but as a rough initial sketch it is possible to see that Christie had a good idea of where the book was going. The alternative title indicates that Christie possibly considered the book as a ‘second innings’ for Tommy and Tuppence:
N or M
2nd innings
Possible course of plot
T and T walk – meet – plan of campaign – T’s sons [Chapter 2]
Following incidents
Sheila and Carl together [Chapter 2]
Tuppence and Carl [Chapter 2]
Golf with Major Quincy (Bletchley) ‘too many omen’ – Commander Harvey [Haydock] has house on cliff – a coast watcher [Chapter 3 ii]
Mrs. O’Rourke [Chapter 4]
Mildred Skeffington – ‘Betty’ [Chapter 2]
Mr. and Mrs. Caley – (Varleys?)
Miss Keyes[Minton] [Chapter 3]
Mrs. Lambert and son
The foreign woman – speaks to Carl in German [Chapter 5 iii]
Kidnapping of child [Chapter 7 ii]
Carl tries to gas himself
Does T hide in Commander’s house?
Is he kidnapped on golflinks? Or go to Commander’s house – and be drugged there – the sailing boat [Chapter 9 ii]
A reference to ‘Little Bo Peep’ – ‘Mary has a little lamb’ Jack Warner Horner [Chapter 14 i]
Mrs. O’Rourke – her voice loud and fruity – really drugged teas with Mrs Skeffington
Notebook 35 has more about Carl and the foreign woman as well as the first mention of the death of the child’s mother, although nothing more about the subterfuge around that aspect of the plot. And it is in this Notebook that Christie gives her solution; unlike other books she does not seem to have considered any other names for the two killer spies.
Possible plots
T and T established – Carl immediate object of suspicion – unhappy – nervy – he and Margaret Parotta – Mrs P – sinister. Tommy and Col Lessing – play golf together – Col tells him something suspicious about someone (Mrs P?) also very much against German boy.
Tup meets foreign looking woman hanging round
Tup has letters – from her ‘sons’ – leaves them in drawers – they have been tampered with.
Child kidnapped – found alive – woman dead – documents planted on her
Information thus sent is true to inspire confidence – Col. L [Haydock] and Mrs Milly Turnbull Saunders [Sprott] are N and M
Notebook 62 lists a few more scenes. Scene B appears in the book despite its deletion in the notes:
A. Tommy �
� supper Haydock – discovery – hit on head – imprisoned [9 ii]
B. Deb and young man – about mothers Leamouth [10 iv]
C. Tup finds Tommy disappeared. Mrs B says never came back last night. Rung up a day later – young man says all right – not to worry. Penny plain and Tuppence coloured – Deborah – Derek [10 iii and 11 iii]
And this short final extract from the same Notebook encapsulates quite an amount of plot, although in such cryptic style that it would be impossible to make sense of it – especially the final phrase – as it stands:
The kidnapping of Betty – Mrs Sprott shoots Polish woman – with revolver taken from Mrs Keefe’s drawer – arrest of Karl – incriminating papers – initials ink on bootlaces
An accusation often levelled against Christie’s writing is that it never mirrors reality and is set in ‘Christie-time’. This adventure of the Beresfords is very much rooted in reality and features the war as part of the plot more than any other title. It is also sobering to remember that when she wrote this book the war still had five years to run. N or M? has a lot of clever touches and the interplay between Tommy and Tuppence remains as entertaining as it was on their two previous appearances. Sadly, it was the last we were to read of Tommy and Tuppence until By the Pricking of my Thumbs, over 25 years later.