Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  Max and Agatha spent several weeks in Beirut, preparing for the expedition. During that time and later, when they had established their base camp, Agatha drafted and typed her books, three in 1934. One was Death in the Clouds, in which she used another ‘closed circle’ by having a passenger murdered during a flight from Le Bourget to Croydon. Agatha’s joke about dutiful Englishmen who abandon sick wives was not the only entertainment she and Max had from this book, for it also reflects a private joke they shared about the deficiencies of the airline services that were just being established. Agatha herself had felt little confidence in them since a first lamentable encounter with Imperial Airways in 1930. ‘I suppose all airlines are amateurish,’ she wrote resignedly to Max, ‘they’ve not had time to become professional yet.’ She herself made a rare slip in this book for, as a reader pointed out, the blowpipe featured in the plot was too long to fit into an aeroplane of the type she described, let alone be used. The two other novels Agatha wrote that year, for publication in 1935, were Three Act Tragedy, in which Mr Satterthwaite reappeared, and The ABC Murders, where Hercule Poirot investigated a series of crimes in which a copy of the ‘ABC’ railway timetable was prominently displayed. This was an ingenious novel, cleverly misleading. It was later made into a film, retitled The Alphabet Murders so that the public would not shun the chain of ABC cinemas that showed it.

  As well as writing and helping Max, Agatha busied herself with friends and houses. Another acquisition was 48 Sheffield Terrace, a house of large, well-proportioned rooms, on Campden Hill. There was enough space for Max to have a library, with a large table on which he could spread bits of pottery, and for Agatha to enjoy for the first and last time in her life a room of her own for working and retiring. Here she had ‘a large firm table’, an upright chair for typing, an armchair and sofa, a Steinway grand piano, and nothing else. In December 1934 she had also bought a house in the country, for Ashfield was now chiefly used during Rosalind’s holidays, Torquay being too far from London to be reached easily at weekends. As Max was particularly fond of Oxford, he and Agatha searched that part of the Thames Valley, looking for a small country cottage but eventually finding Winterbrook House at Wallingford. It was a Queen Anne house, close to the road – then much quieter than today – but shielded from it by slightly sinister holly trees. The back of the house was the most attractive part, for the drawing-room window looked out on to the garden and a meadow and down to the river bank. In the middle of a field, soon reclaimed as part of the lawn, was a large cedar, beneath which Agatha immediately decided they would take their tea on summer afternoons. In fact, so naturally did the house give on to the garden that Agatha and her visitors tended always to drift outside after meals on fine days, carrying their cups. Winterbrook House was large, with three bedrooms and three good sitting-rooms. Agatha decorated the drawing-room in her favourite pale mauve, with white woodwork and curtains, the furniture covered in white quilted chintz. The triumph of the house was Max’s library, a room he enlarged to double its original length, from which he could look down the river. A walled kitchen garden was Agatha’s paradise; she occasionally lent the house to friends but never in the soft fruit season.

  The Thames Valley is cold and damp in winter, particularly in January and February, but these were the months when the Mallowans were in the East. In 1935 they began to dig at Chagar Bazar, a relatively convenient site, since only twenty-five miles to the north was a town with shops, a bank and a post office. At first they rented a spacious mud-brick house, overrun by mice, which Agatha loathed, until they acquired an intelligent cat. They then moved to a house built at the site itself. During that first season their staff consisted of Robin Macartney and Richard Barnett, with 140 or so labourers, mostly Arabs and Kurds, and, as Max described them, ‘a sprinkling of Yezidis, the mild devil-worshippers from the Jebel Sinjar, and a few odd Christians’. Some of the best workers were Turks, who had smuggled themselves across the frontier into this unruly part of Syria, controlled at that time by French military officers. Agatha and Max spent the 1935 and 1936 seasons at Chagar Bazar. Agatha found camp life agreeable. She liked its simplicity, the open air, the expedition’s intimacy. Not that the Mallowans’ camps were without comforts. Agatha organised the supply of much of the furniture and provisions, making sure that fresh local produce (including cream from water buffalo) was used wherever possible, augmented by tinned and dried goods brought from England. The workmen regarded her as a mother and a queen, and she and the cook shared their mysteries. By now Agatha had also learned a good deal of archaeology. Her particular, and gentle, contribution was to remove the dirt and dust from fragments of pottery with her favourite tools, orange sticks and face-cream.

  Max’s reputation was growing. He was efficient in publishing his reports and had a reputation for hard work and the archaeologist’s necessary lucky instinct. He continued to gain confidence and talked entertainingly about his work. This was partly because he was older – he was now in his early thirties – and partly, as their friends remarked, because of Agatha’s influence. She liked the fact that her husband was an archaeologist, half-scientist, half-historian, in a profession both practical and scholarly. (What she did not like, and never said, was that one of the pleasures of being married to an archaeologist was that the older you became, the more interesting you were to him. It was a quip which first appeared in the Gothenburg Trade and Shipping Journal, and followed Agatha ever after.)

  The Mallowans’ camps were known to be among the most serene in the Near East. Agatha was no Katharine but she had not forgotten her. In 1935, egged on by her old friend Algy Whitburn, Woolley’s architect, she drew up the outline of a detective story in which a Katharine-like figure was to feature, Murder in Mesopotamia. The first three names on the list in her draft are old acquaintances: ‘Woolleys, C.T.s, Father Burrows’ (the Campbell Thompsons and the epigraphist at Ur). She developed two or three possible plots for Murder in Mesopotamia, clarifying her thoughts with a sketch map of the expedition house and a timetable of its occupants’ movements, and thinking aloud about various devices: ‘Can we work in the window idea?’ she asked herself. The expedition house resembled their quarters at Chagar Bazar but the mood was that of Ur. Her notes began: ‘The wife – very queer – (? Is she being doped against her own knowledge) – atmosphere gradually develops in intensity – a bomb may explode any minute.…’ Agatha mischievously dedicated the novel to ‘my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria’; one or two were annoyed, whether because they believed they figured in its pages or because they did not was never entirely clear. Robin Macartney designed a splendid cover for the Crime Club edition, with a bearded sage on horseback gazing into a deep pit cut into land curving alongside the river, and labourers hacking and sifting the soil from an excavation like a tomb.

  In her second book of 1935, Cards on the Table, Agatha enjoyed a joke against herself in her role of crime novelist. Mrs Ariadne Oliver, who had first appeared in an earlier short story as an assistant to Mr Parker Pyne, shared some of Agatha’s own characteristics and habits, in particular her taste for eating apples in the bath. Cards on the Table is about a murder during a bridge party, a game of bridge being a typical nineteen-thirties pastime, friendly with a touch of daring (rather like a séance), riveting for those who were engaged in it and dull for those who were not, apt to degenerate into a quarrel. Agatha herself often played bridge after dinner. She enjoyed cards and, when alone with Max, played Poker Patience with him. The bridge game provided her with another ‘closed circle’ within which a crime might be committed and investigated, the very setting to which Agatha had referred in Chapter Three of The ABC Murders. It was a circle in another sense, too, for into Cards on the Table Agatha brought four familiar characters. As well as Mrs Oliver and Poirot, there was Superintendent Battle (from Chimneys and Seven Dials) and Colonel Race (from The Man in the Brown Suit). There were four suspects only; as Agatha explained in a preface, any of them, given the right circumstances, might
have committed the crime.

  In one of the books Agatha wrote during the following year, 1936, was a portrait even more firmly drawn from life – of Peter, who appeared in Dumb Witness as Bob, Miss Arundell’s wirehaired terrier. There is something, too, of Wallingford about Market Basing, a location Agatha found so evocative that she considered using it for another plot. Set, however, not in a small market town but in ‘No. 14 Bardsley Gardens Mews’, that draft became the title story in the collection Murder in the Mews, also finished in 1936. ‘A case of death, apparently murder’, ran her notes; ‘pistol in right hand (or taken away) windows shut but the smell of smoke in room’. The Crime Club edition of this book again carried one of Macartney’s striking covers, an arch framing the Mews, all the windows dark but one, and the headlamps of a black saloon, with curving mudguards and bumpers, approaching over the cobbles.

  Agatha’s other novel for 1936 was Death on the Nile. Its origins were complicated. In 1933 she had journeyed up the river with Max and Rosalind and the following year had published in the Parker Pyne collection a short story, ‘Death on the Nile’, describing a poisoning aboard a Nile steamer. During their own voyage, Agatha and Rosalind had speculated about their fellow-passengers, particularly one, a sadistic, domineering woman, on whom Agatha based the character of ‘Mrs Boynton’, a former prison wardress. These thoughts Agatha first used in a play, Moon on the Nile, which she then put aside in favour of a detective novel, also called Death on the Nile but different from the earlier short story. The first outline of this book introduced ‘Mrs Boynton’ and her cowed but resentful family but Agatha soon dismissed them. She did, however, draw on recollections of her own journey, particularly of the arrangement of the boat. The topography of the S S Karnak is crucial to the plot; indeed, when a film was made in 1978, the producer had diffuculty in finding a steamer of the requisite size and lay-out. Death on the Nile was a success and the cover, too, one of Macartney’s best.

  Agatha was at this time deeply interested in Egypt and its history. In the ancient Egyptian religion she found something sinister – a strange mixture of human and animal in the deities, an emphasis on death and the ritual surrounding it – but also reassuring, the ‘comfortable structure’, as she called it, of the ‘old gods’. She had also been thinking about parallels between the past and present, the similarity of relations between old and young, male and female, the conflict between good and evil that might be found anywhere at any time. She enjoyed playing with ‘nebulous ideas’: the manner in which new intellectual and aesthetic fashions took root, the tension between ‘warmongers’, seeking to defend the fabric of the state, and ‘appeasers’, believing there were other routes to peace and security, the differences between those who saw the value of system and hierarchy and those who emphasised the importance of change and idiosyncrasy. Agatha was not a rigorous thinker; she argued about these questions with Max but her ideas really surfaced only in her books, as themes and in talk between her characters. She was inclined to laugh at ideologues who merely discussed the path to progress: Death on the Nile is only one of her books in which the exponent of some fashionable creed is gently ridiculed.

  She nonetheless admired idealists and tried to put some of their beliefs into practice. In a three-act play she wrote in 1937, Akhnaton, she made Akhnaton, King Amenhotep IV, a sympathetic figure, whose fall is inevitable but tragic. In his story it was the characters who first attracted Agatha’s attention – the King himself; Horenheb, the faithful soldier who betrays his master for a higher cause; Queen Tyi, Akhnaton’s mother; his Queen, Nefertiti; Tutankhaton, who promises to restore the old gods and take the throne from Akhnaton; and the High Priest. Agatha was clear about the dramatic side of things – ‘Act I, Scene I: Amenhotep the Magnificent is near death. The King of Mitanni sends the image of Ishtar of Nineveh to Egypt (second time such a procedure had happened)’ but shaky on the historical side: ‘when was first time?’ she scribbled in the margin. She was pleased with the play, though it was too difficult and expensive to stage.

  In the spring of 1937 Agatha and Max began excavating Tell Brak, a great mound he had resolved to explore when he had first seen it years before. It was some twenty miles from Chagar Bazar, where there was still much digging to do. The Mallowans divided their efforts between the two sites, assisted by their foreman Hamoudi, a defector from Woolley’s team, and a group of industrious young people: Guilford Bell, nephew of Agatha’s Australian friend Aileen; an ex-Colonel from the Indian Army, Colonel Burn; Louis Osman, known by the name with which he had once wonderingly referred to the Tells, ‘Bumps’; and Rosalind, on her first expedition. She took over some of the drawing, as Agatha’s artistry had finally been acknowledged to be abysmal. Rosalind was deeply impressed by Max’s organisation of the dig. She had not known that he was capable of rising so early and working so rigorously out of doors, and she admired his firm but paternal handling of the labourers. The young men were excellent company for Rosalind; Agatha, too, was interested and encouraging at an important time in their careers. She later gave an affectionate picture of this group in Come, Tell Me How You Live and always spoke proudly of their subsequent success, for Louis Osman was to distinguish himself as a craftsman in gold and silver, Guilford as the architect of many original houses, Macartney as a painter, John Rose, another of the Mallowans’ architects in Syria, for rebuilding Castries in St Lucia, and Ian Threlfall, a gifted archaeologist, as a leading barrister. All became and remained friends, regularly visiting Greenway and Winterbrook (where ‘Bumps’ built Agatha a squash court). John Rose entertained Agatha and Max in Barbados, while Guilford made regular pilgrimages from Australia.

  Agatha did not neglect her writing while she was in Syria. As usual, she took with her an old exercise book or two, and in one, feelingly labelled ‘Hôtel de l‘Expédition, Chagar Bazar’, outlined various ideas for that season’s writing. The second idea on her list quickly developed into a book, a thought that began with a title, ‘Rose Red Murder’, or ‘Rose Red Death’.

  This became Appointment with Death, a mystery that unfolded at Petra, which Agatha and Max had visited on one of their journeys home. From the first Agatha had conceived the central figure, and victim, as a greedy, tyrannical matriarch; the location of the crime and the fact that the victim, Mrs Boynton, was the former prison wardress dropped from the first draft of Death on the Nile were the two points from which she began. They were naturally associated, for Agatha had retained from her visit not just the memory of Petra’s rose-red walls but of the city’s confinement within the narrow gorge. Agatha also wanted for her story a forceful woman Member of Parliament, ‘given to good works etc’. This was ‘Lady Copeman’, then ‘Lady Bridgeman’ and, eventually, ‘Lady Westholme’, modelled not, as some have suggested, on Lady Astor, M.P., but on the ‘excessively fierce-looking Miss Wilbraham’, whom Agatha had encountered leading a party of Anglo-Catholic ladies to Iraq in the spring of 1930.

  Lady Westholme’s companion, Miss Pierce, bore some resemblance to Miss Wilbraham’s second-in-command. Agatha had been particularly struck by Miss Wilbraham’s enormous topee, a memory which invaded the early planning of ‘the Petra Murder’. Agatha’s notes explore two ideas simultaneously: one that the murderer should wear a distinctive hat, and the other that the death should be induced by means of an injection. Ever-fertile, she proceeded to play with variations on these themes. The injection idea split into two more: ‘sodium citrate injected in blood before death. Blood keeps liquid’; ‘Diabetes gives p.m. [post mortem] stiffening at once. (Clue, sugar in pocket).’ The hat idea produced complex ramifications: ‘“Same man, different hat”, in this case, “Different man, same hat”’; ‘Y suddenly sees dead man.… It’s Mr X.… Meets Z.… Kills him and lays him down.… Conceal’s X’s body in cave.…Hats. Y wears topee.… Z wears felt hat.… X wears topee.… Who are Y, X and Z? Is Z plastic surgeon? Is Y former patient? Is X just a man of the requisite size? Topee may be important thing in this kind of country?’ At this p
oint Agatha discarded the entire topee idea and started again with a substantially different plot: ‘Method of death. Camera? Husband guilty. He is clever with faking things. Arranges a Brownie camera – takes it out – at right moment substitutes it for Mrs B.’s. She lies dead. They rush to her. He drops her camera – picks up his. Later, child’s camera is missing OR,’ Agatha wrote, pulling herself together, ‘insulin idea.’ Mrs Boynton was eventually killed with a hypodermic syringe – but Miss Wilbraham’s topee was not completely discarded. The X, Y, Z plot appeared three years later in Evil Under the Sun, amalgamated with some thoughts inspired by Punkie’s wig.

  Nor was the idea that a murderer might use sodium citrate entirely set aside. In another notebook (beginning with a list of things to bring to London: ‘Flower pictures.… Clothes for Collins’), Agatha headed a page with another working title, ‘Who Would Have Thought?’, the words of Lady Macbeth: ‘Who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?’ The swift notes that follow constituted an outline for Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. It was not just with murderous devices that Agatha was economical, taking a left-over fragment of a possible plot from one setting for use elsewhere. Her sketch for this latest book shows how resourceful she had grown at drawing on moods and scenes stored in her memory. Gorston Hall is a little like Abney, even if the family reunion is less festive than Agatha’s Christmases in Cheshire; the cerulean skies, blue convolvulus and hedges of plumbago for which Stephen Farr is homesick are taken from Agatha’s recollections of South Africa. In planning the shape of her books, too, she was learning stylistic tricks from past experience. Her suggestions to herself for this book began with the notion of ‘Short Bits like Death on the Nile?’