by Janet Morgan
The Claimant opened on September 11th and, although it did not run for long, its preparation had been the best entertainment. Agatha, especially, enjoyed Madge’s brief but heady success. It was not notoriety which was fun – the sisters were too well mannered and, in Agatha’s case, too shy to have taken pleasure in that. The public and the press were irrelevant; Madge and Agatha were writing for their own pleasure in the challenge, as much as for a market. Just as Agatha sent inscribed copies of her books, and dedicated them, to her family and close acquaintances, so Madge took boxes and stalls for them at the St Martin’s Theatre. They saw themselves as untrained adventurers, whose work was now, to their astonishment, taken in earnest. They were also adult, middle-class women, whose writing took second place, in their own eyes and certainly in their husbands’, to the management of their houses and the care of their children. (After describing how masterful she had become, ‘“Cut those lines, please, Mr Quartermain!” And he did, at once!!!’, Madge appeased James and her own conscience by adding: ‘I shall be unbearable at home. The only remedy will be to have Constance a good deal who will keep on telling me how badly I’ve brought up my son and that the lettuce is wet.’) They were simultaneously gratified and disconcerted to find themselves holding their own in the overwhelmingly masculine world of theatrical management and publishing. The fact that Mrs Agatha Christie, the writer, was her sister fortified Madge, and the fact that Mrs Watts, author of The Claimant, was her sister boosted Agatha’s confidence in turn.
Agatha was now thirty-four, at an age when her health and strength, looks and temper were at their most resilient, when it is easy to feel sure of one’s own nature and capacities. Greater financial security helped too. As soon as Archie secured the promised job with his friend Clive Baillieu, he and Agatha set about realising their wish to find a cottage in the country, not least because Archie had enthusiastically taken to golf. After a long search, they settled not on a cottage but on a large flat in a house, Scotswood, at Sunningdale, about thirty miles from London. In the nineteen-twenties Sunningdale was embryo ‘stockbroker country’, prosperous, easy and dull. Agatha had no circle of old friends and familiars, as she had in Torquay, nor the theatres and museums of London to distract her. On the other hand, there was a garden for Rosalind and it was convenient for both the railway to the City and for a celebrated golf course. A further advantage of Scotswood was that another of the four flats was also vacant. Here, for a time, Agatha installed Clara, still lively but with fragile health. In other respects, also, Agatha’s domestic arrangements were happy and convenient. After her difficulties with Marcelle, she had searched for someone who would be both a kindly supervisor for Rosalind and, in the mornings while Rosalind was at school, a secretary and typist. Feeling that the Scots tended to be good disciplinarians, who were not bullied by their charges, she added to her advertisement the words ‘Scottish preferred’.
Among the replies was one from Miss Charlotte Fisher, a tall, slender, brown-haired girl in her early twenties, quiet, direct and humorous, a capable and well-educated daughter of the manse. (Her father was one of the chaplains to the King in Edinburgh.) Miss Fisher, or ‘Carlo’, as the family quickly came to call her, immediately took Rosalind in hand and ‘the raging demon’ left behind by the ineffectual Marcelle became a polite and pleasant child again. The secretarial part of Carlo’s duties did not, however, evolve exactly as Agatha and she had envisaged. Agatha was even more nervous when it came to dictating her stories than Carlo was about taking them down in shorthand, and it was soon apparent that Agatha composed much more fluently and naturally when left to herself and her old Corona. Instead, Carlo dealt with letters and accounts and kept Agatha’s papers, not in any case untidy, in meticulous order. Most important, she became a steady friend, confidante and watchdog.
The crowning feature of this happy time was Agatha’s acquisition of her own car. The Evening News had offered £500 for serial rights to The Man in the Brown Suit, with which Agatha, thrilled, had thought she might realise such touchingly mundane longings as the purchase of ‘a new evening dress, gold or silver evening shoes instead of black, something rather ambitious like a new fairy cycle for Rosalind.…’ Buying a car was Archie’s suggestion; it was not a stream-lined monster but a small Morris Cowley, upright and with a snub nose. To Agatha it was one of the greatest pleasures of her life. This was not simply because, as she put it in her Autobiography, possessing a car ‘widened your horizons, it increased your territory’, magnificent though that feeling was, particularly in the days when it was a pleasure still confined to a few. This was certainly part of Agatha’s joy but it also sprang from the freedom it gave her. There was something peculiarly satisfying in being transported by a machine that went where it was instructed to go, at a pace it was directed to take, at the time when it was required to do so – in short, by a machine that was under her own control. A car meant liberation. Doubly so, since it had been acquired with money she had earned herself. To her surprise, she had achieved independence.
It is interesting that it was her husband who suggested the purchase and who taught Agatha to drive. He was, in an important way, paying his wife a compliment. Archie, who had ecstatically, if a trifle nervously, taken the controls of a rickety aeroplane in 1910, knew the sense of freedom and possibility that came from mastering a machine that moved easily and quickly away. He recognised that Agatha would appreciate this and that she was ready for it. His suggestion perhaps indicated something more. When Agatha recalled Archie’s rudimentary driving lessons, she remembered how he asserted that, if she wished to do something, she could do it. Did he also feel, unconsciously, that she would do it, would assert her independence and that he would not restrain her? Fanciful, maybe, but plausible, particularly in the light of the decision Archie and Agatha made when, a couple of years later, they again found themselves rather better-off than they had expected. Agatha proposed that they should have another child, Archie that they buy a fast and smart Delage. Agatha felt Archie had been excited by their neighbour’s Bentley, but perhaps the choice signified more than that. The Christies were moving on, not consolidating; choosing independence, not more responsibility; going, if they wished, their separate ways.
Agatha’s feeling of security, in herself as a writer and in their joint finances, is demonstrated by her decision to publish her collected poems. In 1924 The Road of Dreams appeared, at her own expense, under the imprint of Geoffrey Bles, and it produced a kind letter from Eden Philpotts, who particularly admired the sequence ‘A Masque from Italy’, the poems about Harlequin and Columbine written ten years before. ‘You have great lyric gifts,’ wrote Philpotts, ‘and I hope you will find time to develop them.’ He went on to warn her that, much as he hoped that The Road of Dreams would be a success, ‘Alas! People don’t buy poetry.’ He was right – in the nineteen-sixties Agatha’s literary agents had to write to ask her what she wanted done with the remaining unsold, unbound copies.
Cork, meanwhile, had been busy on Agatha’s behalf. He had discussed her work and her sales with Godfrey Collins, who indicated that his house would pay £200 as an advance on each of her next three books, with a generous royalty. When Cork mentioned this to John Lane, he was told grumpily that anyone who would pay that much was welcome to Agatha’s work. A three-book contract was accordingly signed with Collins in January 1924, although Agatha was still pledged to deliver one last book to The Bodley Head. This was The Secret of Chimneys, a racy thriller in which she used memories and reflections that are easily recognisable: there is a glimpse of Bulawayo; ‘Chimneys’, where the bulk of the novel is set, is an even grander version of Abney; Superintendent Battle – appearing for the first time – resembles Inspector Bucket in Bleak House; and elements of the plot not only echo The Prisoner of Zenda and some of the novels of John Buchan, where sinewy and resourceful second sons return from the colonies to plunge themselves into desperate tangles, but also suggest that Agatha had not forgotten a royalist conspiracy which had excit
ed the visitors to Cauterets when she had stayed there as a child. In her Autobiography she wrote that these events were ‘only very dimly apprehended’ by her at the time, but, however vague, those apprehensions had seeped into the silt of her subconscious.
The summer before Chimneys appeared, Agatha had in fact visited Cauterets, to show Archie the hotel where she had had such fun. Not unusually, they were disappointed at first (‘did not like the look of the place,’ Archie wrote tersely in their joint typewritten letter to Clara) but they wisely ascribed their disenchantment to the after-effects of an uncomfortable journey – to economise they had travelled second-class all the way from Victoria, with their reserved seats occupied by interlopers, who upset cherries all over the carriage, and their neighbours ‘two young Spaniards who hugged one another without ceasing’. Walks and picnics in the Pyrenees soon improved their tempers; they climbed mountains by a zig-zag path through the hay fields to eat crêpes flavoured with anisette in the café at the top and after dinner they watched Grand Guignol. They drank from the sulphur springs and ‘did la douche nasale’, played boules and ‘perfected the knockout shot at Billard Japonais’, and made a couple of expeditions in a charabanc, about whose occupants Archie was scathing. (The first pages of The Secret of Chimneys describe this form of sightseeing.) The photograph of this vehicle in their scrap-book shows Agatha looking enthusiastic, but Archie serious and detached, with his hand over his face, as if he is trying not to be there. From Cauterets they went on to San Sebastian for more bathing and evenings at the Kursaal, with music and cards. Archie, who liked to go to bed early, found the Spanish hours trying – the ‘music hall show’ started at ten-fifteen – and he would retire at the first interval. By the end of their stay they were sufficiently relaxed to abandon economy and travel home first-class.
It was wise for Agatha and Archie to go away by themselves. Agatha had been missing the easy companionship of earlier times, the weekends when they had gone by bus or train to explore the countryside. She now found Saturday and Sunday ‘the dullest time, really, for me’, as Archie was so engrossed in his golf that she began to appreciate what was meant by being ‘a golf widow’. Most of her own friends were married, so she could not ask a wife to stay without the husband, and the only couple she could invite without a qualm was Nan and Nan’s second husband, who as a good golfer himself would not bore Archie. The Baillieus, Archie’s friends, were neighbours and Agatha was fond of Ruby, Clive Baillieu’s wife, but otherwise Sunningdale society was disappointing – ‘either,’ Agatha wrote, ‘the middle-aged who were passionately fond of gardens and talked of practically nothing else, or the gay sporting rich kind who drank a good deal, had cocktail parties, and who were not really my type or indeed, for that matter, Archie’s type either.’ In comparison with London, or comfortable Torquay, Sunningdale was, as Charlotte Fisher agreed, a dreadful place, complacent, tidy and boring.
Agatha later painted in Unfinished Portrait a reproduction of her frustrations at this stage in her marriage. Her description is exaggerated – in the evenings Dermot sits at home ‘reading books on financial subjects’ – but in essence her picture of Celia’s boredom and loneliness resembles her own state for an annoyingly large part of the time. Agatha’s difficulty was not that she did not know how to amuse herself; she had always found plenty to occupy herself when she was free to choose how to do so. The problem was that she was no longer on her own. She was part of a couple, in a society and a neighbourhood where people were invited and entertained others as couples, but with a husband who, for the time being at any rate, preferred to relax with his golf clubs on his own or, at best, with an equally fanatical golfing partner. Agatha was thus tied, without the advantages of companionship and collaboration that went with being tied. It is easy to point to the benefits of her position; she enjoyed the status and security of a married woman; she had an intelligent and beautiful child, a large and attractively furnished place to live, in peaceful surroundings that were neither dirty and noisy, like London, nor dank and desolate, as the real country can be; she owned a motor car, was assured of an adequate income, and had a good mind. There are hundreds of women in those circumstances who, because they not only possess keen minds and adventurous dispositions but are also loyal and unrebellious, nonetheless become gently frustrated within their pretty houses and trim gardens. They pick quarrels, dispute their grocers’ bills, long to move house, and resent their own apparently inexplicable behaviour. They are restless.
Agatha, however, had her writing to distract her. Rather than bothering Archie with emotional and intellectual speculation, she could indulge her curiosity and play games with her characters. She could not secure her husband’s attention but she could amuse, challenge and tease another audience, her readers. With her next book, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, written in late 1925 and early 1926. she settled down to do so.
‘I got hold of a very good formula there,’ Agatha later declared, ‘and I must confess that I owe it to my brother-in-law, James Watts.’ Her Autobiography itself says that James Watts’s suggestion was that ‘A Watson’, that is, the narrator, should ‘turn out to be the criminal’, so there is no need to talk too cryptically here. Indeed, maddening though it was for many readers and to professional critics and writers of detective stories that Agatha should so cleverly mislead them, the notion that the narrator should also be the perpetrator of the crime was not wholly astounding; it is, after all, an obvious variation in a type of story, set in closed worlds with a limited number of victims and suspects, where the number of variations is finite.
One of those to whom the thought had also occurred was Lord Louis Mountbatten, who had written to Agatha on March 28th, 1924, sending the letter to the Sketch for forwarding. He had read the Poirot stories in that newspaper and now presented his compliments and begged to offer (the letter is written in the third person) a suggestion for another Poirot story. The chief features of his outline were that the narrator of the story should himself be the criminal, that his alibi should be that of ‘being with the greatest living detective at a moment when the crime is committed’ and that the detective should himself be accused of the crime. Mountbatten attached to his letter a lengthy draft of a plot, whose details unfold in a series of letters between Poirot, Hastings and the man who is eventually revealed as the murderer. ‘In conclusion,’ Mountbatten wrote, ‘Lord Louis would ask to be forgiven for having written to a person unknown to him and naturally does not expect Mrs Christie to use this plot unless it appeals to her. He himself is unlikely ever to wish to use such a plot, having no time, as a naval officer, for writing, beyond a few short stories to magazines (under a nom-de-plume) for which the enclosed material is quite unsuitable.’ Nearly half a century later, in November 1969, Lord Mountbatten was to write again. After congratulating Agatha on the excitement and mystery of her play The Mousetrap, which he had just revisited, he went on to mention his earlier letter. Agatha’s reply was frank and generous.
For a number of years I have been haunted, from time to time, by a kind of guilt complex – ‘Did I ever acknowledge a letter I received from you?’ And an uneasy feeling that I had started to write a letter – but had possibly forgotten to post it. It is a real relief to know that I did post it.
… The ‘Dr Watson did it’ idea came to me from two sources. One a mere remark by my brother-in-law who said, ‘someday it ought to be Dr Watson who’s the murderer’, and I demurred and said, ‘that would be terribly difficult technically’. I do not think that I thought much more about it then, but shortly afterwards came your letter, which, if I remember rightly, outlined a most interesting plot.…
I thought it a most attractive idea – one which had never been done – but I had great doubts if I could ever do it. But it was a great challenge! It stayed at the back of my mind and I gnawed at it – rather like a dog with a bone.
Here was a letter to gladden Lord Mountbatten’s spirits. He immediately whisked off a reply, congratulating Agatha on ‘the most
wonderful job of using my idea in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which I personally think is about the best detective story that has ever been written.’ He thanked Agatha for offering to send him her latest book, asking that she should inscribe it ‘and possibly mention our original contact forty-five years ago over The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, which, obligingly, Agatha did. So everyone was happy, even, one hopes, the self-effacing shade of kindly James Watts.
In the late spring of 1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in England by Collins and in America by Dodd, Mead, who had acquired John Lane and Co. in 1922. The ingenuity of Agatha’s presentation of the case is always said to have caused general astonishment. The detective stories of the nineteen-twenties formed part of the staple diet of the reading public and they were expected to conform to certain strict conventions, eventually encapsulated in the rules of the Detection Club, forbidding the use by an author of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Acts of God, and the like, as means for the detection of crime. Any sensation aroused by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd seems, however, to have been on the small side. Some critics fulminated – the News Chronicle wrote of the book as being ‘a tasteless and unfortunate let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’ – and a reader wrote a letter of complaint to The Times. Agatha’s sales certainly increased and the publication of this book was the turning point in her career. The trick she played in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was, however, more of a talking point than a cause célèbre. People who were in their twenties and thirties when the book appeared later remembered discussing whether the author had fairly placed every clue before the reader (she had), but their recollections were invariably mixed with memories of a greater public disturbance Agatha was to cause later that same year. Popular memory is curious, and so are myths about popular memory. From a prim letter to The Times, a sentence here and there in the newspapers, idle chat in middle- and upper-middle-class circles, arose a vague impression that Mrs Christie was interesting, clever and manipulative. These casual opinions affected the public’s view of the puzzling events in Agatha’s private life, as they were reported and discussed, and, in turn, helped to exaggerate memories of the magnitude of the reaction to Roger Ackroyd. More than fifty years on, it is difficult, where Roger Ackroyd is concerned, to see what all the fuss was about or, indeed, how much fuss there was at all.