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

by John Curran

  UNUSED IDEAS: FIVE

  All the Unused Ideas in this selection have strong connections with published works.

  MURDER-DISCOVERED-AFTERWARDS

  Mirrors or some other book

  Murder discovered afterwards – 5 years or 2 years like Crippen? Statements taken – all quite definite – no result. (Poirot goes over it or Miss M) talk to people – or poison case because poison is so difficult to trace (exhumation)

  Possibility of husband being accused – liked a young woman (secretary?)

  Resented by his family – particularly eldest son – She is marries him going to marry him afterwards – son won’t speak to her – real rift (actually son and girl are in it together)

  This jotting immediately follows notes for The Mousetrap and They Do It with Mirrors, so it is reasonable to assume that it comes from the late 1940s or early 1950s. The phrase ‘Statements taken’ contains echoes of Five Little Pigs, the husband and secretary idea foreshadows Ordeal by Innocence and the proposed solution is somewhat similar to that of They Do It with Mirrors. The staged ‘rift’ has appeared before in Christie as early as The Mysterious Affair at Styles and in Death on the Nile, and would again in Endless Night. But while elements of the note appear in various titles, this combination of ideas does not appear in a finished work. The reference to Mirrors at the beginning is further evidence of the complicated genesis of that novel and title, as discussed in Chapter 8.

  THE VICTORY BALL

  Victory Ball idea

  Six people going to dance or dance in house

  Murderer is Harlequin? Or Pierrot?

  Possible people?

  Janey facial surgeon (murdered?)

  Columbine – sister S. American

  Pierette – girl who might have married Monteith

  Pulchinella – Mrs Carslake

  Harlequin – brother S. American

  Pierrot – Lord Monteith – in love with Lola [possibly Columbine]

  Pulchinello – brother of Monteith (heir)

  This was, presumably, to be a more elaborate variation on the very first Poirot short story, ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, published in The Sketch on 7 July 1923 and collected in Poirot’s Early Cases. In this story the solution turns on the murderer assuming at different times the costumes of both Harlequin and Pierrot. And, of course, the Harlequin theme provided Christie with one of her other characters, The Mysterious Mr Quin. There are also brief notes dated ‘June 1944’ in Notebook 31, for a play, or possibly a ballet, based around the Harlequin figures. ‘A Masque from Italy’, one of the poems in Road of Dreams, her 1924 poetry collection, is based on the same characters. Inspiration for all of these came from the china figures in the drawing room of her home, Ashfield, and they can now be seen in the restored drawing room of Greenway House. Oddly, the plastic surgeon idea (see Unused Ideas – One) recurs here in somewhat unexpected surroundings.

  THE ‘PRIME MINISTER’ AND COMPANION

  Man like Asquith or Burdett Coutts [both British MPs] – very ambitious – Junior clerk in firm – marries rich woman – head or daughter in firm – older than he is – she dies very conveniently for him. He becomes a big noise with the unreserved power she has left him.

  Now – Did he really do away with her? Evidence of weird servant or companion acquits him absolutely but girl in question knows something. Say, e.g. like Gladys in 13 Problems she really committed crime quite unwittingly following his orders – later blackmails him. Or servant girl helped him – afterwards talking with friend – confidential friend etc. helps her in 2nd murder

  Some of the ideas explored here did surface in a few later titles. Notebook 35, where these notes appear, also contains the notes for One, Two, Buckle my Shoe and there are distinct echoes of Alistair Blunt from that novel in the biographical sketch. The connivance, albeit unwitting, of a servant girl is an element of both the short story ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, the first of The Thirteen Problems, and the novel A Pocket Full of Rye. The variation of a friend helping the servant to commit a second murder is however a fresh, and distinctly original, development.

  THE FORTUNE TELLER

  Fortune teller found dead Japp and Poirot

  Greta Moscheim found by some bright young people – one of them’s a friend of Greta

  Michael O’Halloran – P. says saved him from a murder charge – Ah, now a little matter of a defaulting bookmaker.

  People – cocktail party

  Jane Brown

  John Colley B.B.C. young man

  Lady Monica Trent

  Greta Moscheim – last person to see her alive

  Mrs. Edgerton – a letter (found in flat?) from her young man in East Africa (but she hadn’t heard from him for 4 months). Greta was helping her – so psychic – husband – (suspicious) was reading her – Mrs Edgerton – says woman with a deep melancholy voice – deep contralto voice

  Death of Zenobia

  P. visits Japp have found Michael O’Halloran – they go along – flat – divisional surgeon and inspect the body

  Fortune teller woman – Mrs De Lucia. She is very successful because in partnership with young man (or girl) who tips her off. If young man – he pretends to disapprove violently – she also blackmails. Young man is in love with Sue – sister to someone in a matrimonial tangle. De Lucia is really his wife so he has to get rid of her. Stages quite a drama over someone’s fortune – something about letters? The post? Brought in from door – puts her death after 6.30 pm or whatever it is. So p[artner?] comes to flats – kills De L – goes on up to Sue – they go out to cinema. Comes back – no key – he goes up in lift – discovers body etc.

  The murder of a fortune teller appears in four Notebooks but these are the two most detailed versions. As can be seen, it was to be a variation, or an elaboration, of the short story ‘The Third Floor Flat’, first published in January 1929. The second outline appears sandwiched between pages elaborating ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ into ‘Murder in the Mews’, so this idea seems to date from the early to mid 1930s. And the presence of Japp also indicates an early 1930s outline.

  It may well be that Christie was toying with the elaboration of early short stories and this was her version of ‘The Third Floor Flat’. If so, it is indeed an elaboration, as the only plot devices common to both are the use of the service lift and the ‘finding’ of the body. A fortune-teller is an aspect ‘The Blue Geranium’ from The Thirteen Problems. But the surrounding detail is completely different.

  Chapter 11

  The Dark Lady . . .

  ‘Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having being made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage.’

  Agatha Christie was a lifelong fan of William Shakespeare. Some of her titles – Sad Cypress, Taken at the Flood, By the Pricking of my Thumbs – come from his plays. Macbeth, with its Three Witches, provides some of the background to The Pale Horse; in Chapter 4 Mark Easterbrook and his friends discuss the play after attending a performance and in the village of Much Deeping, Thyrza, Sybil and Bella have a reputation locally as three ‘witches’. Iago, from Othello, is a psychologically important plot device in Curtain; a quotation from Macbeth – ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him’ – follows the discovery of Simeon Lee’s body in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas; and Appointment with Death closes with a quotation from Cymbeline – ‘Fear no more the heat of the Sun.’ Her letters, written to Max Mallowan during the Second World War, include detailed discussions, instigated by nights at the theatre, about Othello and Hamlet.

  In The Times of 29 January 1973, the historian and Shakespeare scholar A.L. Rowse claimed that he had positively identified the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Emilia Lanier née Bassano, daughter of a court musician and a former mistress of the Lord Chamberlain. Although disputed since, this theory received much publicity. In Notebook 7, in the middle of the notes for Postern of Fate, Christie drafted her resp
onse to this discovery:

  A page of Christie’s handwritten draft of the ‘Dark Lady’ letter.

  Letter to Times – Jan 26

  I have read with great interest (your) the article written by Dr. A. L. Rowse on his discovery of the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets. She has always had a peculiar fascination for me particularly in connection with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. I have no pretensions to be in any way a historian but I am one of those who can claim to belong to those for whom Shakespeare wrote. I have gone to plays from an early age and am a great believer that that is the way one should approach Shakespeare. He wrote to entertain and he wrote for playgoers – I took my daughter and her friends to Stratford when she was twelve years old and later my grandson – at about the same age – and nephews. One young schoolboy gave an immediate criticism afterwards seeing Macbeth – ‘I never would have believed that that was Shakespeare; it was wonderful, all about gangsters – so exciting, so real.’ Shakespeare was clearly associated in his mind with a school lesson of extreme boredom, but the real thing thrilled him. After Julius Caesar [he said] ‘What a wonderful speech Marc Antony made and what a clever man.’ Take children to see Shakespeare on a stage and reading Shakespeare will be enjoyed all through their life.

  What I also particularly enjoy is to see different productions of the same play. A character such as Iago can lend himself to different renderings. But Cleopatra has always been to me a most interesting problem. Is Antony and Cleopatra a great love story? I don’t think so. Shakespeare in his sonnets shows clearly two opposite emotions; one an overwhelming sexual bondage to a woman who clearly enjoyed torturing him, the other was an equally passionate hatred. She was to him a personification of Evil. His description of her physical attributes, ‘hair cut like wire’, was all he could do to express his rancour, in those early times. But he did not forget. I think that, as writers do, he pondered and planned a play to be written some day – a study of an evil woman, a woman who would be a gorgeous courtesan and who would bring about the ruin of a man who loved her.

  Is not that the real story of Antony and Cleopatra: Did Cleopatra kill herself with her serpent for love of Antony? Did she not, having tried to approach and capture Octavius so as to retain her power and her kingdom was she not tired of Antony? Anxious to become the mistress of the next powerful leader, Augustus not Antony, and he rebuffed her. And so, could it be that she would be taken in chains to Rome? That, never [and] so, charmian and the fatal asp. Oh, how I have longed to see a production of Antony and Cleopatra where a great actress shall play the Evil Destroyer and, Antony, the great warrior, the adoring lover is defeated

  Dr. Rowse has shown in his article that Emilia Bassano (1597) was deserted by one of her lovers as an ‘incuba’, an evil spirit, and became the mistress of an elderly Lord Chamberlain, 1st Lord Hunsdon, who had control of the Burbage Players and so abandoned the gifted playwright for a rich and power-wielding admirer. Unlike Octavian he did not rebuff her. He was probably not a good actor, though one feels that that is really what he wanted to be. How odd it is that a first disappointment in his ambition forced him to a second choice, the writing of plays and so gave to England a great poet and a great genius. His Dark Lady the incuba, played her part in his career. Who but she taught him suffering and all the different aspects of jealousy, the green-eyed monster.

  The edited version of Christie’s letter as it appeared in The Times on February 3rd 1973.

  Although the Notebook is clearly dated ‘Jan. 26’, the article to which Christie refers was not published until three days later on 29 January. It is entirely possible that, because of her friendship with A.L. Rowse, she was aware of the forthcoming publication but it is more likely that she just wrote the wrong date. These notes were, presumably, tidied up when they were typed as the printed version is slightly different. The letter was published in The Times on 3 February 1973 as from ‘Agatha Mallowan, Winterbrook House, Wallingford’, with three further responses three days later. One took Dame Agatha to task for accepting ‘interesting conjectures as irrefutable proof’ and reminding her that Hercule Poirot would not have made the same mistake. Another challenges her portrayal of Cleopatra as a ‘cheap femme fatale’.

  In his book Memories of Men and Women (1980), Rowse has an affectionate chapter on his friendship with Agatha and Max, a friendship which began through Max’s election as a Research Fellow in All Souls, Oxford, Rowse’s own college. Recalling that she wrote him a ‘warm and encouraging letter’ about his Shakespeare discoveries as being ‘from the mistress of low-brow detection to the master of high-brow detection’, he mentions her support with this letter to The Times and her subsequent attendance at his lecture on the subject at the Royal Society of Literature.

  Chapter 12

  The Sixth Decade 1970–1976

  ‘Thank God for my good life, and all the love that has been given to me.’

  * * *

  SOLUTIONS REVEALED

  Nemesis

  * * *

  In 1970 Agatha Christie celebrated her eightieth birthday; with the employment of a little selective arithmetic, it was also the year of her eightieth book. Extensive press coverage, both at home and abroad, greeted the publication on her birthday – 15 September – of Passenger to Frankfurt.

  On the first day of the following year Agatha Christie became Dame Agatha, to the delight of her global audience. As she worked in Notebook 28 on that year’s book, Nemesis, she wrote ‘D.B.E.’ (Dame Commander of the British Empire) at the top of the page. A book more impressive in its emotional power than in its plotting, Nemesis is, like its 1972 successor Elephants Can Remember, a journey into the past where ‘old sins cast long shadows’. And the last novel she wrote, Postern of Fate (1973), is a similar nostalgic journey and the poorest book of her career (with the possible exception of the curiosity that is Passenger to Frankfurt); one which, in retrospect, should never have been published. To counterbalance these disappointments, 1974 saw the publication of Poirot’s Early Cases, a collection of short stories from the prime of the little Belgian and his creator, not previously published in the UK. (See Chapter 3, ‘Agatha Christie’s Favourites’.)

  Coinciding with these reminders of the vintage Poirot, one of his most challenging cases, Murder on the Orient Express, was filmed faithfully and extravagantly by Sidney Lumet, working with an all-star cast. A massive critical and popular success worldwide, it became the most successful British film ever and created a huge upsurge of interest in the now frail Agatha Christie. Her last public appearance was at the Royal Premiere in London, where she insisted on remaining standing to meet the Queen. Her publishers knew that a new book would be unable to satisfy the appetite of the vastly increased Christie audience created by the success of the film. So Sir William Collins convinced Dame Agatha to release Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, one of her most ingenious constructions, written when she was at the height of her powers. Another global success followed its appearance in October 1975, heralded by a New York Times front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot.

  On 12 January 1976, three months after her immortal creation, Dame Agatha Christie died at her Wallingford home. International media mourned the passing of, quite simply, ‘the writer who has given more enjoyment to more people than anyone else’ (Daily Telegraph); the perennial Mousetrap dimmed its lights and newspapers printed pages on ‘the woman the world hardly knows’. She was buried at Cholsey, near her Oxfordshire home, and a memorial service was held in May at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London. Sleeping Murder, another novel from Christie’s Golden Age, and the ‘final novel in a series that has delighted the world’ (to quote the blurb) was published in October and presented Miss Marple’s last book-length investigation. Dame Agatha’s Autobiography followed in 1977 and Miss Marple’s Final Cases, a collection of previously uncollected short stories, in 1979.

  Apart from the unparalleled success of Murder on the Orient Express, the much-underrated screen version of Endless Night
had appeared in 1972. Despite Dame Agatha’s objection to a love scene at the close of the film, this adaptation remains a faithful treatment of the last great novel that Christie wrote. The previous year the last Christie play, Fiddlers Five (reduced to Fiddlers Three in a subsequent version in 1972), was staged, but its lack of critical and popular success ruled out a West End production. In 1973 Collins published Akhnaton, her historical play, written in 1937 but never performed; and her poetry collection, called simply Poems, was also issued in 1973.

  The final six years of Agatha Christie’s life saw some of her greatest successes – her damehood, the universal successes, in two separate spheres, of Murder on the Orient Express and Curtain – but also the publication of some of her weakest titles. But by then it didn’t matter. Such was the esteem and affection in which she was held by her worldwide audience that anything written by Agatha Christie was avidly bought by a multitude of her fans, many of whom had had a lifelong relationship with her.

  Passenger to Frankfurt

  15 September 1970

  * * *

  Diverted by fog to Frankfurt Airport, Sir Stafford Nye agrees to the fantastic suggestion of a fellow passenger. On his return to England he realises that he has become involved in something of international importance – but what? A further assignation leaves him little wiser. What is Benvo? And who is Siegfried?

  * * *

  Published on her eightieth birthday, this was claimed to be Agatha Christie’s eightieth book and, despite the dismay with which the manuscript was greeted by both her family and her publishers, it went straight into the best-seller lists and remained there for over six months. The publicity attendant on the ‘coincidence’ of her birthday and her latest production certainly helped, but Passenger to Frankfurt remains the most extraordinary book she ever wrote. Described, wisely, on the title page as ‘An Extravaganza’ – the description went some way towards mitigating the disappointment felt by both publishers and devotees – and showing little evidence of the ingenuity with which her name is still associated, this tale of international terrorism and engineered anarchy is difficult to write about honestly. Most fans, myself included, consider it an aberration and, but for the fact that it is an ‘Agatha Christie’, would never have read it the first time, let alone re-read it over the 40 years since its first appearance. Like other weaker novels from the same era, it begins with a compelling, if somewhat implausible, situation, but it degenerates into total unbelievability long before the end. Only in the closing pages of Chapter 23, with the unmasking of a completely unexpected, albeit incredible, villainess is there a very faint trace of the Christie magic.