Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  In 1952 Max decided to explore the wells in the Administrative Wing of the Palace, a difficult and perilous operation. Despite the warning from an American oil expert, ‘Every well claims a life,’ the undertaking was completed without a single loss. In earlier excavations Layard had investigated the wells down as far as the water level. Max’s team now looked below, finding in the first shaft the remains of a number of texts, fragments of cuneiform writing on wax, ivory binding and boards, before the bottom of the well collapsed. Max was more prudent in his investigation of the second well, thus missing remarkable discoveries which the Iraq Department of Antiquities were to make thirty years later of ivories, ivory heads and bowls, painted and decorated in gold leaf. He made stunning finds, however, in the third shaft. Brick-lined, it was very deep, with a corkscrew bend in the middle. Seventy or eighty feet down, in the sludge beneath the oozing water, digging all day and, by the light of hurricane lamps, all night, they unearthed a cache of treasure: the ivory head of a beauty and, in contrast, of one they christened ‘The Ugly Sister’; horses’ cheek-pieces decorated with a relief of a female sphinx; a winged cobra emerging from her skirt – all the objects Max subsequently described in Nimrud and Its Remains, and which may be seen in the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. Agatha carefully wrapped these objects in damp towels, realising that after two thousand years they needed gently drying out. The most marvellous discovery was a pair of plaques in chryselephantine, one of which remained in Baghdad, the other being flown to London in May. Max described in his Memoirs the cruel scene they showed: a man being mauled by a lioness in a thicket of papyrus reeds and lotus flowers, waving in the wind. The colours of the flowers were indicated by touches of lapis lazuli and carnelian and the man’s curly hair was of fine ivory capped with gold. The British Museum published a poster displaying this treasure; a copy hung at Winterbrook and hangs at Greenway today.

  The hazards of these undertakings were sometimes increased by appalling weather, particularly in the 1953 season: ‘Living in constant damp seems to be a cure for rheumatism,’ Agatha wrote to Cork, ‘I can’t think why!!!’ The beginning of that year was exceptionally difficult: ‘The weather has been awful, roads cut as well as bridges. Snow on the foothills and we have been breaking ice on the water tubs each morning.’ Machinery sent by the Iraq Petroleum Company for exploring the second well was delayed when the lorry became bogged down in the mud: ‘Thunderstorms, rain, and we all huddle in quantities of jerseys and woolly knickers. Tents keep out the rain all right, but, oh, how clammy to creep into the sheets each night – and clothes like damp fish in the morning.’ These were uncomfortable surroundings for a woman of sixty-three but Agatha retained her good humour. Meals were important to keep up the expedition’s spirits: ‘I wish I could bring home our charming Persian cook,’ Agatha wrote. ‘He makes lovely walnut soufflés. He has just been discoursing on meat. “You can tell me when you want turkey. I kill. That day, tough very. Next day, tough. Next day, not very tender. Day after that he good tender very nice. Chicken he very good lay eggs. If not good, not lay eggs, him cock.”

  Another season – 1955 – also started unpromisingly, when they were assailed by dust storms and thunderstorms alternately. Agatha was a good sport, clambering in and out of trucks with the rest, despite her heavy frame and swollen ankles, enduring bumpy roads and nightmarish fording of rivers. When spring came, however, the desert became beautiful again, with fields of delicate wild flowers in glowing colours, under a clear sky.

  After seven years at Nimrud it seemed that Max’s work on the acropolis might be done. He began to discuss with Cork his plans for publishing a large, lavishly illustrated book, on Nimrud and its remains. His expedition had by then recovered and distributed an outstanding collection of finds; it appeared, moreover, that the political situation in Iraq was becoming increasingly unstable. The young King Feisal (to whom Agatha had presented one of her books when he came to lay the foundation stone of the new museum in Baghdad) and his Prime Minister, Nuri-es-Said, were being threatened by various subversive factions, some vehemently nationalist. The atmosphere was growing unfriendly and suspicious; even the books Cork sent to Baghdad for Agatha were detained by Customs, which believed that, because the ends of the parcels were closed, they must contain at worst bombs, at best Communist propaganda.

  In March, however, the expedition discovered traces of another palace, Fort Shalmaneser. More of an arsenal, it was enormous, over two hundred rooms spread over some twelve acres. The sides of the Fort were protected by towers, walls and canals, and on the western side were two great mounds of mud-brick. Max’s team began to investigate the eastern and higher mound, where they discovered the debris of King Shalmaneser’s throne-room, whose massive walls had toppled. After days of digging, they unearthed the huge throne base inscribed with scenes of the King’s triumphs. Max’s Memoirs describe the other discoveries made by his indefatigable team of twelve, including Agatha – and a large force of labourers: beautifully executed murals; a talisman in five colours, showing the King beneath a winged disk and the tree of life, surrounded by foliage and gazelle; superb ivories, some ‘burned blue and grey in the avenging fire’, found in the rooms Max believed to have been the Queen’s apartments and the harem, including an ivory lunette illustrating a winged sphinx and a winged cobra. Despite the uncertain political climate, he decided to continue these excavations; their completion was to take another three years.

  During the decade of Max and Agatha’s labours at Nimrud, much extra work fell to Edmund Cork, now more than Agatha’s literary agent. She had entrusted him with power of attorney and he knew, as far as anyone could, the intricacies of her financial and literary affairs. He also found himself acting every spring as general factotum, chivvying Agatha’s tenant at Cresswell Place, who constantly forgot to pay the rent, dealing with her gas, telephone and electricity bills and forwarding correspondence for collection to the British Consul in Mosul. There were some hiccoughs in these long distance operations: ‘By the way, I usually have to pay about 11/2d on letters from you,’ Agatha wrote to Cork one season. ‘It’s not the money that worries me! But occasionally if I and the Persian cook (reasonably opulent) are out, there’s only the bottle washer who apparently never has more than 2d in his possession and so the postman won’t leave it! Also don’t want the Consulate in future to have to pay.’

  Cork sent Agatha’s proofs (A Pocket Full of Rye, suspected of being ‘Agricultural Propaganda’, was detained by Customs), and books: in 1953 she asked for ‘recent French novels, not too heavy’; in 1957 the list included The Fountain Overflows, The Comforters, In Defence of Colonies, Maine Architecture, and The Life of Marie Antoinette. Some of Cork’s commissions were odd: ‘there may be a parcel of Ham from Australia. Better be passed on to Miss Fisher to Eat or Keep …’ and ‘please forward nylon stockings to Mosul, my only hope in life, as nothing here fits me!’

  In 1958 there was a revolution in Iraq. Young King Feisal, his uncle and the Prime Minister were murdered. The Mallowans were deeply upset, not simply because, like many in the West, they feared the international consequences of these events, but also because they had known and liked many of those who now suffered at the hands of the revolutionaries. They were not harassed by the new régime but it was time to leave. Nimrud itself was changing. The extension of a rough track, linking the dig to the main road, and the tarring of much of the main road to Mosul had brought a great many visitors in the last three or four years of the expedition’s work, more, indeed, than were welcome. ‘Latest Holiday Resort’, Agatha wrote in ‘The Last Days of Nimrud’; ‘All Amenities. Highly Mechanised. Visitors Welcomed. Bring the Kiddies. Combine Culture and Amusement. Visitors’ Car Park 50 fils. Admission to Mound Quarter Dinar. Ascent of the Ziggurat and view of surrounding country through telescope 100 fils. Don’t miss NIMRUD-ON-TIGRIS:

  A guaranteed Epigraphist

  In Kurdish trousers gay

 
For fifty fils will write your name

  In cuneiform on clay.

  A famous Novelist’s on view

  For forty fils a peep,

  But if you want a photograph

  It will not be so cheap!’

  The mound had anyway lost its beauty. Scarred by the archaeologists’ bulldozers, it no longer had its innocent simplicity, with the stone heads poking up out of the green grass, studded with spring flowers. The last ‘Nursery Rhyme of Nimrud’ was not light-hearted:

  Hush a bye, children, the storm’s coming fast.

  The roof it is leaking, the House cannot last.

  When the wind rises, the tents too will fall.

  And that is the end, RIP, of you all.

  In the early months of 1960 Max and Agatha left Nimrud for the last time. Her straw hat still hangs in the British School of Archaeology.

  21

  ‘… all the panoply and misdirection of the conjuror’s art’

  Dramatic change is unusual in people in their sixties. Agatha welcomed new friends, new books, plays and films, she discussed new ideas and visited new places, but her tastes and habits were fixed. Though she accepted and adjusted to change, advancing age reinforced her natural conservatism. This was also true of her work. Throughout the nineteen-fifties she produced a succession of detective stories that in superficial respects changed with the times; as her work of the ’forties had reflected attitudes, circumstances and tricks of speech of the late ’thirties, so the books she wrote between 1950 and 1960 suggested the manners, situation and expectations of English middle-class society in the decade following the war. These changes were, however, so subtle, and her books came so regularly, that they were barely perceptible. Moreover, shifts in her tone of voice were easily overlooked because stylistically she made few experiments. She continued to impress the public by the way in which she manipulated her characters and her readers and by the sleight-of-hand she demonstrated in her plots. She did not wish to try new forms.

  This is disappointing if one believes that had Agatha written fewer books with greater care, she might have polished her style and explored other avenues. That, however, is an unrealistic assumption. Agatha knew what she did well and stuck to it. Writing was not the most important aspect of her life; she drafted her books, as she had always done, in interludes between other occupations – gardening, cooking, outings, helping Max – and she would willingly abandon a chapter for a walk, a conversation or a picnic. She did not talk about her detective stories and her friends knew better than to discuss them with her. Where her writing was concerned, Agatha was self-sufficient. She understood her market, knew how to satisfy it, and was content with that.

  It was hard work, ‘a chore’, she called it. Ideas for plots came easily but she found writing difficult and tedious. It is a mistake to think that because her technique did not vary and her style remained simple in book after book, Agatha took few pains with her work. It was not effortless. She had developed a certain knack which needed constant practice. She was unambitious but industrious.

  She was, as she had admitted to Max, unadventurous. If invited, she would go with a guide but her disposition was to wait prudently at home. As a child, she had amused herself privately and in her own time; grown up and growing old, she was reflective, unhurried. She was, however, immensely energetic. In her sixties she walked, gardened, drove and ran errands enthusiastically and, though she ran more slowly on the tennis court, placed the ball as firmly as ever. Her emotions were active, too. There were no displays, for Agatha had never been quarrelsome or complaining, but she cared intensely about the way people behaved towards each other, their behaviour to children and animals, the beauty and misery of the world. She seemed calm but from time to time psoriasis, a sure sign of tension, inflamed her feet, hands and scalp.

  Her imagination was unceasingly busy. She dreamt at night and mused during the day, jotting down her ideas for plots and characters on any scrap of paper. These energies fuelled her writing and gave her books their force. They did not change them. Though each plot was a surprise, her technique varied little. Her detective stories continued to follow a pattern of progressive mystification interwoven with progressive enlightenment and there was to be only one more Mary Westmacott. Her style was unaltered, though she still had a sharp ear for colloquial speech, and by this time could invent convincing dialogue. Writing books was demanding but it was routine. Now, rather than producing a different sort of book, she turned increasingly to the theatre. By the end of the decade she had proved herself as much a popular dramatist as a novelist.

  There was initially little sign of this. Her first delivery to Cork, before setting off for Nimrud at the beginning of 1950, had been a typescript she had completed at Greenway the previous summer, They Came to Baghdad, the book the currency authorities had been told Agatha intended to write when she and Max had first set out again for Iraq after the war. She had been true to her word; as much a thriller as a detective story, the book was set in places where she had stayed, including the Hotel Zia, and her own house, Karradet Mariam 17. The fourth edition of Brentano’s Baghdad: How To See It, saved from 1939, also came in useful. There was something familiar about one of the characters, too: the figure of Sir Rupert Crofton Lee, with ‘curling grey hair growing down over a muscular red-brown neck’, had a strong suggestion of Max’s archaeological colleague, Mortimer Wheeler. Cork and Ober both liked this book, Ober thinking it in some ways the best novel she had done recently, though he was bothered by ‘a feeling of unreality’ towards the end.

  Collins’s editor was blunt: ‘difficult to believe that Mrs Christie regards this as more than a joke … Plot and many of the situations far-fetched and puerile to a degree.’ He was obliged to admit, however, that it was ‘eminently readable’; as with all Agatha’s novels, the reader whose attention has been engaged by the first page will generally pursue the story to the end, disregarding the improbability of the plot, the contrivance of the situation, or even banalities of style. Agatha, who certainly did not regard the book as a joke, was anxious that it should be published as soon as possible, since the political situation in the Near East was precarious and she was afraid the story would date. Collins promised publication in early 1951 and Dodd, Mead’s American edition appeared shortly afterwards.

  Agatha had arrived in Baghdad in 1950 with a heavy cold. She felt very ill for a fortnight: ‘lay in bed and groaned’, she informed Cork, but ‘enforced meditation has given me heaps of brilliant ideas.’ Once at Nimrud, she was cheered by glorious weather and a hoard they discovered in the Governor’s Palace. She began to work enthusiastically, drafting nearly all the book that became Mrs McGinty’s Dead, thinking about plans for ‘Mary Westmacott’, and tinkering with older ideas. One typescript she dusted off was the Marple book she had written during the War. ‘As I seem to be well ahead,’ she told Cork, ‘I thought I might as well go over it thoroughly, as a lot of it seems to date very much. I have removed all political references, etc., or remarks which seem to echo the trend of the time. The scene of it must remain laid in that period, as so much of the action depends on servants (plentiful then) and ample meals, etc.!’ Rightly, she observed, ‘It’s more catchwords and particular phrases that seem to make a book old-fashioned.’ Nevertheless, she concluded, ‘On rereading it, I think it’s quite a good one. I am not sure I haven’t gone down the hill since then!’

  Agatha also brought herself to look over the dramatised version of Towards Zero, with which Lee Shubert had been vaguely dissatisfied at the end of the War. She, too, felt uncomfortable about this play. As she told Cork, ‘the Whodunnit with everyone suspected in turn, and plenty of comic red herrings thrown in, really by now quite sickens me on the stage! And it’s not the kind of story that Towards Zero is!’ She went on, ‘Lots of my books are what I should describe as “light-hearted thrillers” (10 Little Niggers was) and, if you want that kind of play, dramatise one of them. Don’t twist the kind of book that hasn’t the right atmosp
here. You might just as well start with an entirely new story.’ ‘Frankly,’ Agatha observed, ‘I have never seen Towards Zero as good material for a play … its point is not suspicion on everybody – but suspicion and everything pointing toward the incrimination of one person – and rescue of that victim at the moment when she seems to be hopelessly doomed. But, if fun and thrills are wanted, go to some other of my fifty offspring!’ She concluded, ‘It might be better to pass the whole thing up. What do you think?’ Cork advised Agatha to wait.

  During her absence he took care to keep her fully informed about the progress of The Murder at the Vicarage, her play, and A Murder Is Announced, her novel, now in proof. (‘Quite unobjectionable,’ he wrote of the jacket, ‘no silly hooded figures.’) The play was still doing. well at the end of January 1950, though Bertie Meyer had been disappointed in his hope of gaining extra publicity by holding a party on the stage ‘to say farewell to a famous authoress going off to the Middle East to dig with famous husband’. Cork had been sceptical and Agatha had firmly dished that idea. At the beginning of February, audiences dropped in ‘the wettest and most dismal weather on record’, Cork reported, and, it was believed, because of the imminent general election. Everyone, including Bertie Meyer, took cuts, hoping for what Cork termed ‘an uplift’. Cork also arranged to bring forward the serialisation of A Murder Is Announced in the Daily Express, which might remind readers that The Murder at the Vicarage was still playing. In April, however, the play had come, in Cork’s words, to ‘an ignominious conclusion’, but, he assured Agatha, ‘it was on long enough to build a fine property for repertory and amateurs.’ He now encouraged her to pursue another idea, the dramatisation of The Hollow. A contract with Bertie Meyer was signed, Cork’s plan being that the play should be ‘presented in a de luxe manner in time for the Festival next year’. (The Festival of Britain was to be opened in May 1951 as a celebration, in the words of the official guide, of ‘faith in the Nation’s future’, after the difficult struggles of the dreary post-war years). ‘I really am delighted,’ Agatha assured Cork. ‘Do hope it goes well when the time comes (or if, of course – it’s always “if” in theatrical matters, isn’t it?).’