Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  No longer clinging to what she had known but comfortable with what she had become, a successful, independent, professional woman, Agatha was ready to explore further. In the autumn of 1928, while Rosalind was at school, with, as Agatha airily wrote in her Autobiography, ‘Carlo and Punkie to visit her’, she decided to look for sunshine in the West Indies. Two days before her departure, she dined with friends and met a naval couple who had just returned from Baghdad, a city that had entranced them. Agatha was fascinated by their description and her enthusiasm increased when she learnt that Baghdad could be reached not just by sea but by the Orient Express. She was in large part intoxicated by a heady mixture of vague memories of fairy stories (Baghdad, and the Near East generally, was associated with Aladdin and Sinbad, oil lamps, sultans and genies), of mysterious tales, like those told by Scheherazade, and of the magic of curious names, especially when they are displayed on the side of that equally romantic phenomenon, a train, here the Simplon-Orient Express: London – Paris – Lausanne – Milan – Venice – Trieste – Zagreb – Belgrade – Sofia – Stamboul, and on, as the Taunus Express, to Aleppo and Beirut.

  To Agatha, like thousands before and since, a train was marvellously evocative. The engines she knew were steam engines, rearing high above the platform, overwhelming the onlooker with their noise and appearance. Promising the freedom, by the simple act of purchasing a ticket, of anonymous travel towards the horizon, the train was at the same time the most orderly of conveyances, from the regular beat of its pistons and the rhythm of its wheels to the discipline of its timetables and the strictness of its track. The train, as much as the countries through which it passed, was a different world, of travellers accidentally brought together, each with his own intentions, for the time being allied. But, however random a collection, its passengers followed certain conventions. The very geography of their conveyance, self-contained, compartmentalised, with formally arranged seating, dining car and sleeping arrangements, obliged them to do so. Each traveller, too, quickly categorised his fellows, not just by class of ticket but also by manners and appearance, nationality and age. What happened on a railway journey was, in fact, both predictable and unexpected, dangerous and safe. An ideal place for exchanging confidences with strangers, an enclosure whose occupants will disperse, it was, as Agatha had already discerned, a perfect setting for a crime. Many of her most successful murders were to occur and be resolved in a carefully bounded environment and in circumstances where a certain formality prevailed. A railway journey, embracing the familiar and the extraordinary, constructing for the travelling public a private world, was a device she often employed in her stories. It suited her plots and her own experience: a life running along conventional tracks but suddenly taking her into surprising, even frightening territory; an ordered, logical way of proceeding, interrupted by occasional glimpses of the irrationality of human beings and the randomness of events. It was a motif that suited the time at which she began to be successful: a recurring theme of British art and literature in the nineteen-thirties was the crossing of boundaries, the indistinct nature of moral, emotional and political, as well as geographical, frontiers. The train was the raw stuff of fantasy; the Orient Express the most fantastic of all. Agatha hastened to Thomas Cook’s and changed her tickets.

  Five days later she set off for Baghdad, the longest journey she had taken alone. Her Autobiography describes how it was to travel independently, to pass from Europe into Asia (‘I felt cut off, but far more interested in what I was doing and where I was going’), to find herself admired by various courtly gentlemen and – Agatha immediately recognised how relentlessly the world befriends those who travel alone – fending off insistently helpful strangers. Until she arrived at Ur, her account of her journey was less about the countries through which she passed than about the people: the Cook’s man, a French commercial traveller, a beaming Turkish lady anxious for Agatha to increase her family. She wrote, too, of the artefacts: the terrifying steam bath in the Orient Palace Hotel in Damascus; the handsome brass and silver plates, intricately designed, for sale in the bazaar in Baalbek; the rickety bus in which she crossed the desert to Baghdad. Her descriptions of other memories are, though economical, moving and effective: the first view of the Cilician Gates in the setting sun, at the entrance of the long gorge that leads to Turkey and Syria, or her breakfast in the early morning, the desert’s ‘sharp-toned air … the silence, the absence even of birds, the sand that ran through one’s fingers, the rising sun, and the taste of sausages and tea. What else could one ask of life?’

  Once in Baghdad, Agatha found herself trapped by a zealously hospitable memsahib whom she had met on the train, eluded in Trieste, but who ominously embraced her on the bus across the desert. Agatha had wished to leave England behind but she now found herself transplanted to a colony of English expatriates with decidedly English habits. She was determined to escape. A further attraction of Baghdad was its proximity to the ancient city of Ur, near the Persian Gulf. Its name was familiar to those who, like Agatha, knew their Bible, for the city of Ur was the birthplace of Sumerian civilisation, the land of Sumer being an early name for Babylonia. Here the wedge-shaped system of writing, cuneiform script, had been invented, the forerunner of the alphabet. Energetic traders and engineers, the Sumerians built a network of canals and waterways to connect their towns and cities, of which Ur, just below the confluence of two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, was among the most important. In 1922 excavations had begun there under the direction of Leonard Woolley, a gifted archaeologist who had worked before the First World War with T.E. Lawrence in Syria and, later, in Egypt. His work enabled scholars to trace the history of Ur from its earliest beginnings, in c. 4000 BC, to its final days in the fourth century BC.

  Although as a girl Agatha had shown no interest in the finds displayed in the Cairo Museum or in the Egyptian monuments, she had been fascinated by the exhibitions she later visited on the Empire Tour, writing home excitedly about African skulls and Tasmanian fossils. It was in the Illustrated London News that she had read of Leonard Woolley’s discoveries. Partly because he wished to believe it and partly because it made an exciting story, Woolley had become convinced that in the ruins of Ur he had discovered traces of the Great Flood, recorded in the Epic of Gilgamesh and later, as ‘Noah’s Flood’, in the Book of Genesis. At the bottom of a deep shaft he had come across a band of alluvial clay, mingled with windblown sand. Here he found prehistoric graves, containing, he believed, the remains of the flood’s victims, and, below these, traces of the reed huts built by Ur’s first inhabitants. Woolley’s deductions were in fact incorrect, for the flood deposits he identified derived from a much earlier inundation, some 1,100 years before the Great Flood itself. He nonetheless made the most of the associations his discovery produced in the public mind. By 1928 everyone had heard of Ur and of the Sumerian treasure found in the two thousand graves in the Royal Cemetery, particularly the gold dagger, in its sheath of lapis lazuli and gold, brought out in 1926. The well-informed English public was familiar with the drawings of the ziggurat, as striking in appearance as in its curious name, a three-stage temple-tower, dominating the plain, with its red brickwork and triple staircase, ‘standing up’, as Agatha described it, ‘faintly shadowed’, in ‘a wide sea of sand, with its lovely pale colours of apricot, rose, blue and mauve, changing every minute’.

  Eager, as Clara had always been, to see for herself what was new while she had the opportunity, Agatha set off to Ur. Though visitors to the Woolleys’ dig were not encouraged, she was warmly received. Their hospitality owed less to the fact that she came with a letter of introduction than to the happy chance that Katharine, Leonard’s wife, had recently read and vastly admired The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This was fortunate, since Katharine Woolley was not a woman to whom other women found it easy to appeal. She was one of those females, both infuriatingly self-centred and capable of bewitching grace, who preferred to find herself in a circle of men, whom she expected to su
bmit to her caprices and who for the most part did. She was a competent though unconfident sculptor, depending for encouragement on Leonard. He was her second husband; the first had shot himself, not long after their honeymoon, at the foot of the Great Pyramid, and the shock had made Katharine’s temperament even more unpredictable and her health precarious. She was beautiful and, according to Gertrude Bell, the great Arabian traveller and scholar, dangerous. Agatha, who felt a fascination composed half of liking and half annoyance, called her an ‘allumeuse’, a woman who inevitably, almost deliberately, lit a sexual bonfire, a type who was to appear from time to time in future detective stories.

  It was not unusual for the wife of the Director of an archaeological team to be difficult – there are a number of tales of the combustible atmosphere in the camps of the inter-war years to which foreceful ladies like Mrs Garstang and Lady Petrie accompanied their husbands. For a woman who enjoyed exercising emotional power, a camp offered a satisfying court, its labourers and servants exclusively male, the assistants, often impressionable young men fresh from university, ready to be awed by displays of temperament and anxious to show their devotion to their Director by extending it, if need be, to his wife. Other women, as wives of the Director’s colleagues were to find, were unwelcome.

  Agatha, however, was pressed to extend her visit. When she explained that she must go back to England for Christmas and Rosalind’s holidays, she was invited to return the following spring. Why Katharine Woolley took to Agatha is interesting. It may have been because her guest was reserved and modest and, rather than being a threat, showed herself admiring and anxious to learn. Agatha, quiet, observant and shrewd, let others impress themselves on her attention, rather than seeking to make a mark herself, and this provided a receptive audience for an egoist. On the other hand, Katharine, doubting her own ability as an artist, could respect Agatha for her undeniable success as an author; Agatha was not just any curious visitor but one to celebrate. Agatha, what is more, came alone, not as one of a happy, easy couple, who might set Katharine to jealousy and self-reproach, nor as a young, unmarried woman who might constitute a challenge. Nearly forty, she was interesting, interested and independent, neither pining for her former husband nor looking for another, simply enjoying herself and having a holiday. Agatha, as well as Katharine, was to be greatly surprised by what happened later.

  Passing through Baghdad on her way home, Agatha encountered traces of her brother Monty, in the not inappropriate setting of the Tigris Palace Hotel. Here she met a Colonel Dwyer, of the King’s African Rifles, and they talked affectionately of ‘Puffing Billy Miller’ – ‘mad as a hatter’ – and of Monty’s extraordinary capacity for charming women. As it turned out, this skill sustained him until the end of his life. He was to die in the autumn of 1929 in Marseilles (Agatha’s chronology slips in her own recollections of these events). The cottage on Dartmoor eventually proved too damp and cold for Monty and his housekeeper, so Madge and Agatha arranged rooms for them in a small pension in the South of France. Agatha saw them off on the Blue Train, but on the journey Mrs Taylor caught a chill which turned to pneumonia, and died shortly after. Monty, bereft, was taken into the hospital at Marseilles and Madge dispatched to see him. After only a week or so of the usual worry, the problem was resolved in the customary way. Monty’s nurse, Charlotte, took him home to her apartment and made herself responsible. With her, to everyone’s satisfaction, he remained until he suddenly died of a cerebral haemorrhage in a cafe on the sea-front. His talent for attracting devoted service persisted even then. A kindly retired Sergeant Major, William Archer, now the commissionaire at the branch bank of Lloyd’s in Marseilles, arranged to tend his grave at the Military Cemetery, for they had served together in the East Surreys in South Africa. Seven years later, when Mr Archer was transferred to Monte Carlo, Monty’s welfare was again entrusted to a woman’s hands: Mr Archer’s daughter, who had married a Frenchman, promised to look after his grave, decorating it from time to time with a few flowers, placing poppies there on Armistice Day.

  Agatha was reinvigorated by her travels and that year, 1929, was a busy one. She bought 22 Cresswell Place in Chelsea, a small mews house which, with the help of a builder, she rearranged to give a large downstairs room and garage, a maid’s room, and upstairs two bedrooms, one doubling as a dining-room, and a handsome bathroom, with green porcelain bath and the walls painted with green dolphins. The kitchen was minute, the stairs dark and awkwardly narrow; everyone who stayed or borrowed Cresswell Place (Agatha was always generous with her houses) wondered how she managed to manoeuvre, for, always tall, she had become heavy. From that tiny kitchen she produced meals so delicious that her friends remembered them for years: impromptu breakfasts of bacon and eggs for surprise visitors; Circassian chicken for those who came with longer notice; salads, omelettes and anchovy toast, as prepared by her more dashing heroines. The other disadvantages of Cresswell Place were that damp seeped into the interior, while from part of the house the view was only of a blank wall – not that this bothered Agatha, who told one visitor that it allowed her to speculate as to what went on at the other side.

  Agatha bought and furnished houses when she was happy. She was also now more financially secure. In mid-1928 Edmund Cork had arranged a new contract with Collins for her next six novels, with an advance of £750 for each and a royalty of twenty per cent for the first 8,000 copies, rising thereafter to twenty-five per cent. Earlier that year, he also concluded a new agreement with Dodd, Mead. That contract, for The Mystery of the Blue Train and the two succeeding novels, gave Agatha an advance of $2,500 for each work, with a royalty of fifteen per cent on the first 25,000 copies and twenty per cent after that. Her work was by now being regularly published abroad. Collins looked after the Canadian market; countries where other publishers sold translations of her books included Austria and Hungary – and Finland, which paid £15 for the right to publish a first edition of 4,000 copies of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

  At this time Agatha was working steadily; she was so prolific that it is difficult to establish the order in which she produced the play, short stories and books which were to appear in 1930. Her early correspondence with Edmund Cork and Collins has disappeared, destroyed or lost during the Second World War and in moves between offices. Some of her work in 1928–29 was for magazines, which took the ‘Mr Quin’ stories Agatha liked to write from time to time. Like some of her early poems and songs, they were based on the figure of Harlequin, of whom Agatha was fond, because he was both ever-present and elusive. Harlequin has a special care for the difficulties of lovers; an evanescent, multicoloured apparition, he comes and goes as he pleases. Mr Quin is as mysterious, manifesting himself to the kindly, quiet and rather snobbish Mr Satterthwaite, an elderly gentleman who believes himself a mere bystander but who, when inspired by Mr Quin, finds himself capable of solving problems. Agatha did not write these stories as a series but one collection was published in 1930, as The Mysterious Mr Quin.

  This was also the year in which another of her favourite creations made the first of many appearances: Miss Marple. Agatha’s notebooks suggest a connection between Mr Quin and Miss Marple, a clue that supports her own recollection of the origins of Miss Marple’s name. An outline survives of the ninth story in The Mysterious Mr Quin, the tale of ‘The Dead Harlequin’, which concerns Mr Satterthwaite’s purchase of a strange picture. The painting shows Harlequin’s body spread upon a black and white marble floor, behind it a window through which appears a figure of the same man, looking in. Mr Satterthwaite recognises the scene of the picture, the Terrace Room at Charnley, and, with the help of the artist (and of Mr Quin) proceeds to solve the mystery of the apparent suicide of its owner. Agatha’s preliminary notes, however, refer not to ‘Charnley’ but to ‘Marple Hall’ and ‘the lady of Marple’.

  Marple Hall, now replaced by a housing development, was in Cheshire and Agatha knew it from her visits to Abney. It was a striking-looking house, built of red sandstone on a terrace fr
om which there was a sharp drop to the river valley. The terrace was said to have been haunted by the ghost of King Charles I, carrying his head, and by that of a daughter of the house, weeping for the lover whom she watched from the terrace as he drowned in a nearby mere. In 1968 Agatha told a descendant of the Marple family, who had owned parts of the estate in the sixteenth century, that she had indeed taken Miss Marple’s name from this beautiful and unhappy place. Agatha described how Madge had taken her to a sale at the Manor, ‘a very good sale with fine old Elizabethan and Jacobean furniture, and at it I bought 2 Jacobean oak chairs which I still have – wanting a name for my “old maid” character, I called her Jane Marple.’

  Miss Marple’s character, however, owed something to Agatha’s earlier creation, Miss Caroline Sheppard, of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, another shrewd and observant maiden lady, whose mildly expressed omniscience is both infuriating and wonderful to her circle of patronising men. She was, as Agatha put it in her autobiography, ‘the complete detective service in the home’. St Mary Mead, where Miss Marple was said to live and Agatha now set The Murder at the Vicarage, had features of villages in which Agatha had stayed as a girl, while Miss Marple herself possessed many of the characteristics of the old ladies who called to gossip with Agatha’s Ealing grandmother. Although Agatha did not model her creation directly on Auntie-Grannie (‘she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was’), in one respect they were alike: ‘though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.’ Furthermore, in successive appearances, Miss Marple showed that she shared other habits of Agatha’s grandmother, such as her fondness for shopping at the Army and Navy Stores, and her liking for an expedition to the sales to augment her stock of table-napkins and bath towels. Miss Marple was also prettier, more humorous and more gentle than Miss Sheppard; ‘I chiefly associate her with fluffy wool,’ Agatha later told an admirer.