Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  Rosalind was bright, affectionate, beautiful and terrifyingly direct. Archie adored her; Agatha, too, loved her child but felt a certain distance. As she wrote in her Autobiography, after describing her fun as she watched Rosalind’s development:

  There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours and yet is mysteriously a stranger. You are the gate through which it came into the world, and you will be allowed to have charge of it for a period of years, and after that it will leave you and blossom out into its own free life, and there it is for you to watch living its life in freedom – it is like a strange plant which you have brought home, planted, and can hardly wait to see how it will turn out.

  It was not that Agatha was uninterested in her daughter. She cared about her, worrying and celebrating on her behalf. But Agatha did not live vicariously; Rosalind had her inclinations, opportunities and disappointments, and Agatha hers, as she had indicated when, leaving Rosalind with Clara and Madge, she had accompanied Archie on the Empire Tour. Elsewhere in her Autobiography she makes the doubtful generalisation that, as in cats and kittens, so in human mothers and their babies the maternal instinct is appeased by the act of bearing children, whom the mothers, anxious but satisfied, leave to go their own way. Two of her detective stories, Ordeal by Innocence and They Do It with Mirrors, describe the consequence of woman’s overwhelming affection for an adopted child, and in other books – A Daughter’s a Daughter, and Absent in the Spring, for example – she wrote of the unhappiness caused by possessive love. It would be a waste of time to discuss whether Agatha’s fiction simply reflected or sought to rationalise her own preference for emotional independence and her feeling that close relationships can become dangerously exclusive. The process of creating fiction is more complicated than that. It is also foolish to try to fit Agatha into some general category – even of her own making – of a type of mother. What we can say, however, is that her attitude to her daughter was warm and loving but, ultimately, detached.

  Again, it would be an oversimplification to suggest that Agatha was not wrapped up in her child because she was absorbed by her writing. Her attention was certainly not fixed on her books or her mind obsessed with the details of her transactions with John Lane. She did speculate on plots and wander over possible combinations of character and relationship; she had always had that habit and, as she said herself, it is while doing routine domestic chores that an imaginative mind runs loose. But neither is it correct to conclude from her Autobiography that she considered her writing to be only casual jotting, squeezed in between Cuckoo’s plaintive entreaties, the cooking and cleaning Agatha shared with Site, and the reprimands which Marcelle’s uselessness obliged her to administer to Rosalind. Agatha took her writing seriously. She was beginning to see her books as a body of work – past accomplishments, present preoccupations and future possibilities – rather than a series of happy accidents.

  In late 1922 Agatha had in fact sent a letter from Canada in which she discussed the tally of further manuscripts submitted to John Lane. The Secret Adversary had been followed by Murder on the Links, which was published in 1923. From the Expedition Agatha sent home a collection of short stories about Hercule Poirot, provisionally entitled Poirot Investigates, which John Lane rechristened ‘The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot’, before restoring the original title. These had been published separately as a series for the Sketch and with them Agatha sent to John Lane the long fantasy, ‘Vision’, she had written years before. She joyfully reported his reaction to Clara: ‘He has advised against publication of latter (as I thought he would) so that counts as a book, so the next I write will be the 5th!’ It was to take some time, however, before The Bodley Head would agree with Agatha’s calculations.

  The ‘next book’ was The Man in the Brown Suit, originally called ‘The Mystery of the Mill House’, a title created to pacify Belcher, who wanted a detective story about his own house and himself. He prevailed against Agatha’s not unnatural wish to make him the victim, and much of his swaggering nature can be seen in her creation of Sir Eustace Pedler. (‘Give him a title,’ suggested Archie. ‘I think he’d like that.’) The Man in the Brown Suit was a thriller – its description of a minor revolution owed everything to Agatha’s adventures in Pretoria – and it elaborated two themes which she first touched on in The Secret Adversary and to which she often returned. One was the notion of there being a hidden but vigorous international conspiracy, whose operations, whether traffic in arms, drugs, jewels, works of art or human skills, whether intended to promote a single ideology, none, or several, whether fostered via youthful zealots, naïve disciples or cynical experts, were all ultimately fuelled by money – money that could be manipulated in discreet, mysterious ways, that moved through strange, secret channels, that exerted invisible, intangible power, and, by being made immediately available or as suddenly withdrawn, caused devastation, predictable only to those who managed its flow and explicable only by them or by those to whom they answered. Money, as the Millers had found when their fortunes had been so bafflingly undermined, was not a neutral means of exchange. It was a force to be reckoned with.

  Close to home, too, was Agatha’s other theme: that of a thoughtful, spirited young woman, adventurous but frustrated, constrained less by convention, sex, or youth than by lack of ready cash. Tuppence, in The Secret Adversary, had no job; Anne, in The Man in the Brown Suit, had been left with only debts on the death of her father. In some of Agatha’s books these young women were to start as gawky geese and turn into graceful swans; in others they would be recognisable, if shabby, swans from the beginning. Brave, shrewd, resourceful and endowed with remarkable stamina, they would be precipitated by fate or their own restless natures into the adventures for which they sighed. Once immersed, they generally found themselves acting as helpmeet or confederate to the sort of male companion who begins by generously condescending to allow the heroine to join the fun and ends by gratefully acknowledging that she is indispensable.

  The Bodley Head received the typescript of The Man in the Brown Suit in late 1923. It was at this point that they began to discover that Agatha Christie was becoming a less tractable author. Her relationship with John Lane had moved into a new and predictable phase. During November and December the tone of Agatha’s letters to The Bodley Head became increasingly assured. They dealt with three matters: the arrangements for the publication of Poirot Investigates, her publishers’ plans for The Man in the Brown Suit, and her long-term contract. Where Poirot Investigates was concerned, she was no longer content to take whatever advance her publisher had in mind. Her letter of November 1st asked, rather, what terms they proposed. Mr Willett, John Lane’s colleague, also found himself confronted with a series of suspiciously detailed inquiries and stipulations: in her letter of November 4th, Agatha told him that, in the agreement for ‘The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot’, she did not want to include cinema, dramatic or foreign rights, adding waspishly, ‘Do your agreements always count 13 as 12?’ Five days later she asked for certain specific amendments to be made to the draft agreement – the deletion of clauses or portions of clauses – and inquired whether ten per cent was the maximum royalty they could pay on a cheap edition. By December 4th her tone was completely confident, as she announced the reception of an offer for Indian serial rights – ‘I presume you do not want to raise any objection to this, but in accordance with the request in your letter of the 12th November, I am consulting you before accepting the offer’ – and in mid-December she politely backed her own judgement: ‘The only things I should like to query are the altering of Insurance Company to Assurance Company, which seems quite unnecessary, and the striking out of the italics on page 52. They make it so much clearer which is question and which is answer … I really prefer my own original title Poirot Investigates, and you say you like it also, so why not settle upon that?’ This correspondence did not peter out until May 1926, when Agatha was obliged to write to Mr Willett regarding an error – ten per
cent instead of twenty per cent – in an account sent her for the sale of twelve copies of the 7/6d edition. For all their mystique, publishers were tradesmen, whose bills should always be checked.

  Argument about The Man in the Brown Suit was concentrated on the subject of the wrapper, which, Agatha told Mr Willett in June 1924, ‘looks to me like a highway robbery and murder in mediaeval times – nothing like a tube station and not in the least striking. I had in mind,’ she continued, ‘something much more clear, definite and modern. From the finished wrapper it would appear that this is the artist’s normal style, and so I do not suppose he could ever alter it to make it like what I wanted.’ Mr Willett protested, and a fortnight later Agatha wrote again: ‘I do not think I am asking for what you call a “cut out” wrapper. I felt that the one you sent me would never be anything but sombre, and would never look like a “Tube” station. I think if the background was of really white glossy tiles it would improve it greatly.’ She was always to have strong views about the presentation of her books, as her new publishers, Collins, were to discover.

  For, at least since the autumn of 1922, Agatha had been contemplating a move. The letter she sent to Clara, just before embarking on the homeward journey from Canada, showed how eagerly she was awaiting the moment when she should have submitted the last book, after Styles, of those pledged to The Bodley Head. It was no surprise that they should reject the expanded version of ‘Vision’; indeed, Agatha not only expected it to be returned but told her mother she had sent it only in order to make a third in the sequence. Poirot Investigates was to be the fourth and, acording to this plan, The Man in the Brown Suit, being the fifth, would have heralded her release. The Bodley Head, however, proved stubborn. They were not only unwilling to count ‘Vision’ as a book but also declined to include Poirot Investigates in the total for which Agatha was contracted, for the curious reason that these stories had previously been serialised in a newspaper. Agatha was tenacious – and cunning, since she realised that The Bodley Head were on weak ground here and used this as a bargaining point in her own unsteady argument about the status of ‘Vision’. Mr Willett stuck to his guns and Agatha stuck to hers:

  I really do not see why you should have thought that this was not submitted as one of the works provided for in the main agreement. Whether it would have been advisable to publish it or not is another matter. Perhaps you were quite right in considering that it would have affected the sales of my detective novels.… I certainly do not feel inclined to sign the agreement relating to the short stories, in which you have stipulated that these are not to count as a book under the terms of the main agreement, without getting this point about Vision cleared up first.

  She won the point about Poirot Investigates but lost on ‘Vision’.

  The Bodley Head now needed Agatha more than she needed them. Popular middle-class taste was increasingly for the sort of work with which she was experimenting – novels with a simple shape, a small cast of characters, short chapters and no long, convoluted sentences, with an emphasis on the facts and mechanics of situations and considerable importance given to psychology. Agatha’s thrillers and detective stories were stylistically unpretentious but intellectually interesting. She was not, and never became, a writer whose work could intimidate a nervous reader but nonetheless she made welcome demands on her public’s attention and perceptiveness. The weekly, fortnightly and monthly magazines – Grand Magazine, Sovereign Magazine, Blue Book Magazine, Royal Magazine, Novel Magazine and The Story-Teller – wanted her work and their interest quickened that of her publisher. The Bodley Head began to murmur about the terms of her next contract.

  Agatha, however, had recognised the strength of her position. Not only were newspaper and magazine editors ready to print her work but even the Inland Revenue was expressing an interest. An Inspector from the tax office called to inquire about the size of her earnings as an author, to her astonishment, since she had regarded any fees as a negligible and occasional supplement to the family’s income, keeping no records and submitting no statements, as the amounts fell below the sums then allowed as ‘casual profit’. On reflection she decided to become more business-like and to put her affairs in the hands of a professional adviser. This, together with the information she had acquired from the publications of the Society of Authors, which she had discovered on her return from the Expedition, propelled her once more in the direction of Hughes Massie, the literary agency to which Eden Philpotts had recommended her years before.

  The fearsome Hughes Massie was now dead and Agatha was received by his successor, Edmund Cork, a tall, elegant young man, with a charming, conspiratorial smile like a benign but artful cat. Mr Cork’s manner was not patronising nor intimidating, nor suffused with irritating genialities. He had exactly the right mixture of courtly attentiveness and considered wisdom, and the fact that he had a stammer made Agatha immediately anxious to put him at his ease. She was, in fact, rather the older of the two and by no means a naïve or unpublished author. She lost any remaining nervousness and confided in Cork, who for the next fifty years was to help realise her hopes and assuage her doubts. He was the most valuable of professional advisers, someone to whom Agatha could trust the complex and sensitive details of her life; he dealt with solicitors, tax inspectors and lawyers, steered her through entanglements with film and theatrical moguls, fended off importunate correspondents and shielded her from much that would otherwise have been demoralising and difficult. She could trust him not simply because he was discreet and sensible but also because he did not intrude. For Edmund Cork had been well schooled by Hughes Massie, who as a young man had been summoned for an interview with his client Elinor Glyn, popularly believed to compose her books while reclining, loosely draped, upon a tiger-skin rug. Though it is not clear what actually transpired during this encounter, it certainly led Hughes Massie to emphasise the wisdom of keeping a careful distance between client and literary agent; this, Edmund Cork always observed, was the most useful piece of advice Hughes Massie bequeathed him.

  Cork was appropriately appalled by the terms of Agatha’s existing contract and by her minuscule royalty. This was gratifying. It was also exciting to hear him speak of film and theatrical rights, first and second serial rights, foreign translations and so on, and, although Agatha regarded all this as rather unlikely speculation, she took it sufficiently seriously to adopt the new tone that was apparent in her correspondence with Mr Willett. The spirit of Cork, perhaps even the hand of Cork, was evident in the no-nonsense letters that established the standing of ‘Vision’ and the terms for The Man in the Brown Suit.

  There were other reasons for Agatha’s new confidence. One had to do as much with her sister’s success as with her own, for at the end of 1923 Madge seemed likely to make an astonishing hit with a piece of writing for the stage. The subject of Madge’s play was, as one would have expected, a celebrated case of impersonation; that of Sir Charles Doughty Tichborne, tried in 1873–4 over his claim to a baronetcy, a family mansion and a rent roll of £25,000 a year. Madge’s play, The Claimant, was a mixture of all the goings-on she adored: dressing-up, disguise, imposture, a party and suspense. To her family’s amazement, and even more to her own, Basil Dean agreed to produce the play at St Martin’s Theatre in the West End in the autumn of 1924.

  The plot was complicated; the cast talented but anarchic. It quickly became clear that Madge was needed to supply and approve changes in the production and the script and to act as adviser and ally to various coalitions among factions of the cast and the management. She therefore moved to rooms in Brown’s Hotel off Piccadilly, spending the weekends with Archie and Agatha. Agatha thus heard every detail of the back-stage frenzy from ‘Punkie’ herself and, judging by the raciness of Madge’s breathless letters to Cheadle, these enthusiastic accounts of theatrical life must have been riveting. There was one character in particular for whom both sisters had a special affection, ‘Charles’, the Claimant’s extortionate accomplice, into whom Madge had put much of th
eir infuriating, beloved brother. ‘In some occult way,’ Madge wrote, ‘Basil Dean could evoke Monty exactly, particularly when he demonstrated how “Charles” should pick up 6/8d from the table, but leaving the eightpence behind because, as Monty might have said, “Don’t care about copper. Never did.”’

  Agatha, as Madge put it, was ‘mad to see a rehearsal’. The morning they chose turned out to be that on which Madge was told about arrangements for press photographs, and Agatha heard the leading actress observe, ‘When they photograph me they always make me look drunk. And when one never touches anything, it’s hard. Don’t you think so, Mrs Watts?’ Agatha liked this remark, since both she and Madge, neither of whom ‘touched anything’, were now irredeemably unphotogenic. The picture of the two sisters is an attractive one: Madge, excited, busy, the centre of attention, the wife of a respectable Mancunian but herself eccentric and a trifle manic, and Agatha, quiet, shy, amused and noticing everything. Yet it was Agatha who was the better known. As Madge generously reminded her husband and son: ‘The head of the Press Bureau approached me for an interview and I said I didn’t want to be known. He said they’d been very good …, but after the show he did want to boom me and my writing. All I told him was that I was Mrs Agatha Christie’s sister. And he simply revels in Styles and has read all her books. So perhaps,’ Madge added, in an unlikely comparison to a pair of famous dancers of the Charleston, ‘we’ll have to be the Dolly Sisters after all!’