by Janet Morgan
As a child Agatha had felt much the same. Thoughtful, diffident, comfortable with those she knew but embarrassed by effusive strangers, she wanted to convey feelings which she could not frame in speech. One of the most memorable and significant stories in her autobiography is of the occasion when a mountain guide, taking Frederick and his daughters on an excursion in the Pyrenees, caught a butterfly and pinned it, still alive, on Agatha’s hat, where, to her horror, it flapped and fluttered until at last it died. The point of the story, as Agatha emphasises, is not so much her misery at the butterfly’s condition as her desperate inability either to express her tangled feelings – distress at seeming to spurn the guide’s effort to be kind, sorrow at the butterfly’s fate, disgust at the beastly flapping noise – or to find anyone who would intuitively understand. Only Clara saw the cause of her tears, as Agatha looked at her in ‘that long bondage of silence’. Her mother was a friend to whom Agatha did not need to explain. This basic, instinctive understanding Agatha shared with Peter, who, she felt, had recognised that she was ill and unhappy in the bleak days at Styles and had unquestioningly welcomed her back when that time was over. A ‘Faithful Dog’ was Agatha’s term for a loyal human being; her trust in Max rested on her belief that he, too, understood her silent feelings and needs – she was, as she put it, his ‘Dog to be taken for Walks’.
Peter recovered and Agatha resumed her other distractions. She had taken up drawing, though she told Max that ‘competent young women … drawing from life’, ‘red-haired young women in paint-stained overalls’, gave her an inferiority complex. However, having lost nearly a stone after her illness in Athens (‘Married life has reduced me’), she at least felt she was ‘elegantly thin still – or thin for me’. She also tried clay modelling, not very successfully, sending Max pictures of ‘a super pot, side elevation, from the NE, the SW etc’. He forwarded reading lists from Ur (Herodotus was the latest addition) and Agatha had her own programme. She was interested in scientific and mathematical theory – the reference to Sir Claude Amory’s studies of the disintegration of the atom in Black Coffee shows she kept up-to-date – and especially in current hypotheses regarding notions of time and the nature of identity.
On her first trip to the Near East an acquaintance had introduced Agatha to a book that had some influence at the end of the nineteen-twenties, J.W. Dunne’s Experiment with Time. Agatha had been profoundly affected by it: ‘Somehow,’ she wrote in her Autobiography, ‘I saw things more in proportion; myself as less large; as only one facet of a whole, in a vast world with hundreds of interconnections.’ Now, in November 1930, she had been equally moved by Sir James Jeans’s book, The Mysterious Universe. ‘I understand very little of it but it fills me with nebulous ideas,’ she wrote to Max.
How queer it would be if God were in the future – something we never created or imagined but who is not yet – supposing him to be not Cause but Effect. The creation of God is what we are moving to – is one goal – the aim and purpose of all evolution – all our beliefs of God creating the world (on a very wasteful and cruel plan) and allowing pain etc – are all wrong. But all pain and all waste wouldn’t matter – the mere cost of production so to speak. I am very incoherent – but you can see what I mean.… It’s fun to play with ideas – That God has made the world as it is and is pleased with it seems certainly not so. Originally man starved to death and froze to death (on top of coal in the ground) and every plague and pestilence caused by Man’s stupidity was put down to ‘God’s Will’. If life on this planet is an accident, quite unforeseen, and against all the principles of the solar system – how amazingly interesting – and when may it end? In some complete and marvellous Consciousness …?
There were at this time plenty of new theories for Agatha to struggle with and attempt to square with familiar teaching: ‘If time is infinite it would be the same thing – we could move through it either way. But I like my idea of God being in the future and our working every day and hour nearer to Him. In every cell of matter (even in a jelly fish!!) every potentiality of Man is present – only latent – so supposing God is latent in Man?’ (Agatha had less faith in new inventions than in new ideas. This letter to Max continued: ‘Your p.c. to Carlo arrived today – so Air Mail is quicker by far – or at least it is when it happens. I suppose having killed those people last week, they are flying a bit carefully this week’.) With relief, she turned, ‘somewhat addled’, from The Mysterious Universe to ‘the Scarab Murder Case … very soothing after too much Relativity’.
Agatha was prevented from much procrastination by immediate professional demands. The most pressing was a request from Dorothy Sayers to help five other crime novelists compose a serial for the BBC, to be broadcast only a few weeks ahead in January 1931. This was the second enterprise of its kind, its predecessor being a six-part serial, broadcast in June and July 1930, just before Agatha left for Skye. The contributors to the first serial were Hugh Walpole, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley, Ronald Knox and Agatha, who had written the second episode of the story, whose overall title was Behind the Screen. The idea for the series had come from J.R. Ackerley, then an Assistant Producer in the BBC’s Talks Department, and the contributors’ task was complex, since each episode had to be dovetailed into the others. Each writer, nonetheless, sought to make matters difficult for those whose turn came later. Furthermore, despite the producer’s efforts to make the story cohesive and coherent, each author succeeded in colouring the episode in question with his or her own idiosyncratic style (Agatha’s introduced several false clues, a number of details as to timing and a great deal of conversation), and in giving it a special flavour by the way in which he or she read it aloud. The huge BBC microphones behaved unpredictably and practising an address to the nation was complicated. Three days before Agatha’s broadcast on June 21st she was given a voice test, and, after she had read her instalment, the audience was invited to send the Editor of the Listener the answers to various complicated questions as to the motives for the crime and its solution.
That earlier venture was sufficiently successful for the BBC to try it again and early in November Dorothy Sayers told Agatha that, ‘Feeling their own organisation last time was a trifle rocky’, they had now asked her to take the matter in hand and approach the contributors. The other writers, the BBC hoped, would be Anthony Berkeley, E.C. Bentley, Clemence Dane and Freeman Wills Crofts, ‘Six eminent detective story writers’, Max learnt in a letter from Agatha. This time the serial was to have twelve instalments and at the preliminary meeting on December 5th it was agreed that Agatha should write the second and fourth episodes of the story, called The Scoop. The team’s method was together to make a rough outline of the plot, after which each author sketched his own episode, consulting the others on points of detail. The BBC producers were wise to leave the task of organising these proceedings to Miss Sayers, for the whole undertaking proved extremely complicated.
The plot of The Scoop (which was republished by Gollancz, with Behind the Screen, in 1983) concerns the killing of a newspaper reporter who has been covering a murder case. The intricacies of the story and the clutter of victims, suspects, weaponry and motivations reflect the compromises that had to be made to accommodate every author’s whim. As Dorothy Sayers told Agatha, there was also ‘great trouble with the BBC, who ring up every other day to demand that the story shall be simple, with very few characters, no time-table and no complications or suspects to speak of.’ Little did the BBC know how mystery stories are created. Matters were made more difficult by the fact that, early in the planning stages, the contributors dispersed for Christmas. Dorothy Sayers found Agatha particularly hard to track down, as she moved between Campden Street, Cresswell Place and Abney. They had many frenzied conversations on the telephone and letters passed busily between them, with embellishments for already ornate bits of plotting. One of Miss Sayers’s memoranda to Agatha began with a paragraph of compliments for The Murder at the Vicarage: ‘Dear old Tabbies,’ she obser
ved, ‘are the only possible right kind of female detective and Miss M is lovely.… I think this is the best you have done – almost – though I am very fond of Roger Ackroyd. But I like this better because it hasn’t got a dictaphone in it; I have an anti-dicta-gramophone complex.’ Miss Sayers’s current concern, however, was with holding together her team for The Scoop: ‘Mr Crofts has just rung me up (on a wire on which, I should say, the GPO must have been hanging out washing, for it was full of strange bangings and flappings) to say that something has gone wrong with the alibi and that the 9.48 may have to get in late. I hope not, because this will upset my newspaper office scene rather badly.…’
The BBC, unaware of these ramifications, had meanwhile sent each contributor a solemn warning: ‘Very difficult complications such as the significance of minutes or seconds of time should be avoided.… Dialogue should be written in such a way that the listener is never in any doubt as to who is speaking.… The characters in the story should be kept to a minimum.…’ Miss Sayers gave them short shrift, saying breezily to Agatha that ‘Ackerley tells me he has sent you one of his silly letters. I shouldn’t give any heed to him. If he keeps on bothering us, I suggest we write as one man, to tell him that he apparently doesn’t want a detective story, but a simple love-tale or something.’
Ackerley was oblivious of the mire in which his contributors struggled. Desperate, Dorothy Sayers arranged for them all to meet for lunch – but even that was confused: ‘The line was rather noisy, but I thought it was Monday you said.’ Early in the new year Agatha, driven almost frantic by this correspondence, meetings at the BBC and the final rehearsals for Black Coffee, escaped to Switzerland with Rosalind. ‘We will never never come to one of these places together,’ she wrote to Max. ‘I already know two women who have lost husbands to beautiful Amazonian girls who come leaping down mountain sides on skis.’ Agatha’s disappearance threw Ackerley into a turmoil; ‘There are already about fifteen characters in these two instalments,’ he wrote to Agatha, and, made treacherous to his listeners by his desperation, he emphasised, ‘it has to be written almost as if for children.’
The second half of the serial was still unwritten when the broadcasts began. Miss Sayers read the first instalment on January 10th and Agatha broadcast hers the following week, having persuaded the BBC to allow her to do so ‘from a station in Devonshire’. The BBC had sent a last-minute letter, threatening dreadful repercussions if she should overrun her time. She had more important anxieties – whether, for instance, Max would be able to find a radio with a sufficiently strong signal to hear her in Iraq. He managed to do so by galloping over the desert (riding a horse for the first time in his life) to Major Berry, the Political Officer at Nasiryeh, who had ‘a very fine wireless set – he gets London regularly’. Max’s admiring letter to ‘my EMINENT Ange’ did not arrive until several weeks after the serial was finished; he added, ‘I wish you could work in a cryptic message!’ The idea had also occurred to Agatha, whose letter crossed with his: ‘I had a frightful cold and when I broadcasted on Saturday I could not think of a suitable plug to put in for you. Also the BBC question every single sentence as being ‘relevant or not’. Shall have better wits on the 31st – perhaps I will say something about the East!’
The Scoop involved a great deal of work but for Agatha the tangible reward was relatively small: a fee of fifty guineas, to include the writing and broadcasting of the two instalments and first serial publication in the Listener. By now her fee for a short story in a magazine was at least £100. Agatha participated in only one more collaborative venture, The Floating Admiral, published in 1931, in which her own chapter was ‘Mainly Conversation’. As she lamented to Max, though it was amusing to be regarded as one of the ‘eminent’ mystery novelists, ‘It takes hours and I can’t get any fun out of it.’ In February 1931 she did send Dorothy Sayers a short tale, ‘The Adventure of the Clapham Cook’, for a collection later in the year. ‘A most intriguing little problem for Hercule!’ Miss Sayers observed. ‘My last volume was much the poorer by his absence.’ But Agatha, and her agent, did not find such exercises a useful expenditure of time and energy. ‘I have an awful feeling,’ wrote Miss Sayers, ‘that Hughes Massie wanted an awful (two awfuls) lot of money. I’m not really supposed to offer more than about £7.7.0 for the British rights.’ Agatha was now sufficiently professional to put an intelligent price on her work and her agent discouraged her from lowering its market valuation. She preferred to sell her writing for a realistic fee and give the money away than to underprice herself. Sometimes this attitude was difficult for potential purchasers to understand. In September 1932, for instance, she heard again from J.R. Ackerley, proposing that she compose another serial: ‘Your idea of giving certain problems to a number of different people to discuss together would be really just what we wanted.’ He wondered whether she would write some as ‘little plays … conversation only and the text and descriptive parts omitted’, ‘with Mrs Marple [sic] coming out on top’. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Agatha wrote him a brief but firm letter: ‘The truth of the matter is I hate writing short things and they really are not profitable. I don’t mind an odd one now and again, but the energy to devise a series is much better employed in writing a couple of books. So there it is! With apologies.’
Ackerley did not see the point at all. People who work as salaried employees in large organisations, however creative themselves, can find it extraordinarily difficult to grasp that freelance contributors have their livings to earn and, indeed, their overheads to carry. Such obtuseness is particularly irritating when it is coupled with the assumption, often conveyed in unconsciously patronising language, that it is the organisation which is granting the contributor a favour. Producers – not, fortunately, all of them – who condescended to Agatha in this way damaged the BBC in her eyes more than the Corporation ever knew. Ackerley’s temper had, perhaps, been soured by the glorious complications of The Scoop. Asked for his recollections in 1938, he told his successor:
So far as I recall Agatha Christie, she was surprisingly good-looking and extremely tiresome. She was always late sending in her stuff, very difficult to pin down to any engagements and invariably late for them. I recall these memories with pain, for she is my favourite detective story writer. Her success as a broadcaster has made less impression upon me. I believe she was quite adequate but nothing more; a little on the feeble side, if I recollect aright, but then anyone in that series would have seemed feeble against the terrific vitality, bullying and bounce of that dreadful woman Dorothy L. Sayers.
His judgements were unjust to both of them but he was obviously still shell-shocked.
Apart from these bits and pieces Agatha published only one full-length book in 1931, The Sittaford Mystery, set in a snowbound village on Dartmoor. It begins with a séance, whose participants are informed that Captain Trevelyan, living six miles distant, has been murdered. The story is clever and slightly bizarre; it reflects one side of Agatha’s attitude to the occult and to those who, half-guiltily, entertained mediums, hunched over ouija boards and marvelled at ectoplasmic manifestations. There was a good deal of such dotty indulgence in the ‘thirties and to some extent Agatha regarded it with tolerant scepticism. On the other hand, some of the stories she was writing for magazines, which appeared in the collection The Hound of Death in 1933, show a serious interest in hypothetical phenomena like telepathy, extrasensory perception, and so on. Her early story, ‘The Call of Wings’, reprinted in this volume, was a reminder that the theme of the power and purpose of art, the significance of emotion and dreams, had intrigued her from adolescence. Like The Sittaford Mystery, these are clever stories, appealing both to sceptics and the gullible.
In the spring of 1931 Agatha travelled to Ur to join Max for the last few days of the dig. His moustache had grown again (Katharine had been the only one to comment on its absence) and was to stay, as Agatha could not bear him without it. Tactful letters to Katharine and a copy of The Murder at the Vicarage (sent at Max’s
suggestion: ‘Don’t forget PROTHEROE,’ he kept urging her, remembering only the victim’s name) had smoothed Agatha’s path and she was graciously received. The Mallowans came home by way of Persia, which Agatha had begged to see; she had been ‘simply wild with excitement’ after seeing the Persian Exhibition in London in January. Agatha’s Autobiography gives a rapt account of their visit to Shiraz and Isfahan and tells the entertaining tale of their journey home through the Soviet Union. One of Agatha’s chief memories of that trip was their consumption of large amounts of delicious and very cheap caviare, a dish she continued to love all her life. (A not untypical surprise invitation Agatha sent a friend in 1961 read: ‘Damn and blast your telephone!… How would it appeal to you to come about 8.30 and eat a Great Deal of Caviare? NB There won’t be anything else but coffee. But possibly if we eat enough Caviare we shan’t want anything more. Anyway there’s always Ham.’) Its grainy grey appearance also gave Agatha a vague idea for a plot; she scrawled in a notebook: ‘Arsenic … looks like Caviare – plum pudding – passion fruit’.
That summer Agatha worked at two books, Peril at End House and The Thirteen Problems, a collection of stories featuring Miss Marple. Peril at End House seems to have been a straightforward exercise. Agatha thought of the plot and, in a tiny black notebook hitherto used only for noting the railway connections between Stockport and Torquay, listed the characters and sketched every chapter in telegraphese: ‘The Crofts. Miss Buckley is dead. Terrific agitation. Then – Apparently some relief.… At Nursing Home. P says – you have not told me everything?’ A notebook of Rosalind’s appropriated by Agatha, who has written ‘Ideas 1931’ at the top of the first page, gives the origins of The Thirteen Problems, which brings together the stories told by Miss Marple and a group of friends, meeting each Tuesday evening. Agatha’s initial scheme was for the gathering to consist of some of her collaborators of the winter and spring: ‘Mr Wills Crofts and wife, Mr Bentley, Miss Sayers and husband …’ but she thought better of it. Miss Marple is the member who tranquilly perceives the solution to each problem, with her analogies and what her creator describes as her ‘special knowledge’. This book was dedicated to the Woolleys.