Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  The Mallowans – and Mrs North, who was staying at Greenway – heard the Prime Minister’s statement on the wireless in the kitchen. Agatha calmly continued mixing a salad. Even for those who, like her, were uninterested in the intricacies of world politics, the announcement was no surprise, although, as she later wrote in her Autobiography, after Chamberlain’s reassurances, ‘we had thought … “Peace in our time” … might be the truth.’ War does not, in any case, make domestic tasks less pressing, as Agatha knew, for her perspective was essentially mundane. As she had struggled through the First World War, so she would battle in the Second. She worried about the danger for people she loved, celebrated and lamented national victories and defeats, made her own contribution in her hospital work, but her preoccupations and horizons were limited. She simply carried on.

  Max and Agatha had both spent the summer in Devon, he writing up his latest work and she busy with Sad Cypress, a collection of short stories and another book. The short stories were the twelve Labours of Hercules, delivered to Cork at intervals during 1939 for publication in the Strand magazine. They were funny, clever stories (Poirot’s exploration of a nightclub called ‘Hell’, whose stairs are paved with good intentions, is especially comic) and she seems to have had little trouble with them – until, that is, they were published as a collection in 1947, when there was a blast to Cork about the cover design Collins proposed for the book: ‘I cannot describe to you the rough for the wrapper …’, she wrote. ‘It suggests Poirot going naked to the bath!!! All sorts of obscene suggestions are being made by my family. I have, I hope, been tactful but firm. Put statuary on the cover but make it clear it is statuary – not Poirot gone peculiar in Hyde Park!!!’

  Over the years Collins became accustomed to such explosions. Another came at the end of the summer of 1939 when Agatha learnt that an item in the forthcoming Crime Club News was about to summarise the entire plot of Ten Little Niggers. Billy Collins reinforced his apologies with small gifts; on this occasion he sent Agatha copies of G.D.H. and Margaret Cole’s latest detective story, the new Rex Stout, and an advance copy of the Book Society Choice Love in the Sun, promising, too, some of Collins’s ‘good Autumn books’.

  So sustained and mollified, Agatha and Max stayed on for the winter at Greenway. ‘Dear W.A.R.’, as Agatha called Billy Collins in her happier letters, was always attentive, offering theatre tickets, seats for Wimbledon, lunches and dinners, more books from Collins’s lists. ‘May I be greedy?’ Agatha replied. ‘It’s rather like a desert island here. We don’t drive in the blackout and so the evenings are lonely.’ Those she asked for in November 1939 were Paderewski, Gardens of England, Brief Return, The Dark Star, Pamela and Dismembered Masterpieces, all but the last two, not yet published, sent within the week.

  As well as the stories in the The Labours of Hercules and Sad Cypress, in 1939 Agatha also completed One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (published in America as The Patriotic Murders). This began with Hercule Poirot’s paying a visit to a dentist, who later that day appeared to have shot himself. She had been tinkering with ‘Dentist ideas’ for some time; the thought had surfaced, for instance, when she was considering the outline of The ABC Murders and her notes briefly veered off into thinking about a crime committed by ‘legless man – sometimes tall, sometimes short. Ditto – with teeth projecting and discoloured, or white and even.’ In 1939 she asked Carlo and Mary Smith for an introduction to their dentist in Welbeck Street (where her own dentist also practised). She did not need treatment, she said, but Carlo explained to her dentist that Miss Christie wished to pay him ‘a normal fee’, ask a few questions and examine his surgery. The receptionist never forgot the sight of her employer showing Agatha the poison cabinet, as she inquired about methods and types of injection. And in the next draft Agatha was off … ‘HP in dentist’s chair – latter talks while drilling – Points (i) Never forget a face …’

  As soon as war was declared, Max had applied to join the services. This proved difficult. Unsoldierly men of thirty-five were not then being recruited and the authorities also regarded Max’s father’s Austrian birth as an obstacle. Nor could he obtain a post in Whitehall, which was at first so disorganised that no use could be found for a qualified Arabist. He therefore did the best he could by joining the Brixham Home Guard, sharing two rifles among ten men. In mid-1940, he found more demanding work. The town of Ercincan in Eastern Turkey had been devastated by an earthquake and British relief was swiftly organised, both for humanitarian reasons and because Britain depended for steel-making on Turkish supplies of chrome. An Anglo-Turkish Relief Committee was formed by Professor Garstang, founder of the British School of Archaeology in Ankara and a friend as well as colleague of Max, who was invited to be the Secretary. He set about organising an appeal and the distribution of relief, duties which preoccupied him until early 1941. Rosalind, meanwhile, looked for work as a land girl on a neighbouring farm in Devon and filled in forms for the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. She made herself useful as best she could and filled in more forms, this time for the ATS. At mid-summer, she told Agatha she was going to be married in a few days’ time to Hubert Prichard, a regular soldier in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, temporarily attached to Jack Watts’s regiment in Cheshire. Hubert was often at Abney and had stayed at Greenway. Agatha insisted on coming to Denbigh, where Captain Prichard was stationed, to see her daughter married, with, as Agatha put it, ‘the minimum of fuss’. ‘All very sudden,’ Agatha wrote to Billy Collins, ‘– but a very nice man. I do think they will be happy if only he comes through safely. However, as far as I can see, any one of us may go up in smoke. Bad luck on the young folk.’

  Life at Greenway was no longer undisturbed. The Macleods, doctors whom Agatha had first met in Mosul, had brought their children there, away from the east coast where the first raids were expected. Agatha also found her house ‘full of soldiers practising what they would do if the Germans landed – they can hardly move they’ve got so much on!’ Eventually the Macleod children were moved to their grandmother in Wales but, shortly after, Greenway was rented by a Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot, who arrived with two nurses and ten evacuees under five. Agatha meanwhile brought her dispensing knowledge up to date. She had lost Carlo to war work (‘without Miss Fisher, I lose everything!!’) and her gardener at Wallingford had joined the RAF. Agatha decided this was the moment to move to London to be with Max, first in a flat in Half Moon Street, the only building to survive in a road that had been bombed, then a service flat in Park Place, off St James’s Street, and, at last, when the tenants of 48 Sheffield Terrace decided to leave, in their own house in Kensington. She moved most of the furniture, since there were ‘bombs all round us whistling down’. She also took a course in Air Raid Precautions. In October Sheffield Terrace became very unsafe; with the help of their old friend Stephen Glanville, Max and Agatha found a flat at 22 Lawn Road, Hampstead, in the Bauhaus block where Glanville himself lived. An Egyptologist, he had known Max since 1925. He had helped Agatha with Akhnaton and had been greatly entertained by Death on the Nile. Now, a Squadron Leader in a branch of the Air Ministry, he vigorously set about getting Max a proper wartime job.

  Agatha wrote steadily on, one of her few indications of strain being a furious letter to Cork, complaining about a proposed cover design. Her protests about jackets served another purpose. Agatha’s relations with Collins, orchestrated by the tactful Cork, were generally good and she liked Billy Collins, who personally supervised her dealings there. His introduction to Agatha had been surprisingly friendly, for, shortly after joining the firm, he had been sent by the chairman, his uncle Sir Godfrey, to apologise because Collins had betrayed the identity of the murderer in a cover note. Agatha was cross with Sir Godfrey for using the young man as a shield but the tactic worked; Billy disarmed her and they became friends. It was, nonetheless, difficult for Agatha, possessive about her books, to consign them to her publishers’ care. Editing and proof-reading by successive hands, including Carlo’s and her own, still tended to le
ave misprints, untidy ends and inconsistencies, noticeable in any book but particularly obvious in works so tightly plotted and so meticulously scrutinised by hawk-eyed readers. Agatha tended to keep her temper as she went through her proofs; she would make certain changes for which her publishers – especially American magazine publishers – asked, once requests had been diplomatically rephrased by Cork. If all this became too much, she exploded, her wrath generally taking the form of complaints about covers. This time is was Sad Cypress. ‘Can’t you use all your influence?’ she begged Cork. ‘I do think they might consult me first.’ Cork explained that it was, alas, too late to change, ‘not a question only of the artists and the blockmaker taking time but supplies of the particular paper.… Collins thinks it would be unpatriotic to destroy 15000 copies of a jacket in these times of paper shortage.’ He promised that in future all jackets would have Agatha’s prior approval.

  Otherwise she remained serene. A dramatised version of Peril at End House opened in Brighton in April, adapted by Arnold Ridley. Agatha attended some of the rehearsals and much enjoyed the experience, apart from agitation afterwards as to the whereabouts of a Spanish shawl she had lent for the production. Agatha’s clothes were at this time a mixture of the well-made and respectable – dresses and suits from Harvey Nichols and Debenham and Freebody – and the joyously theatrical. She was particularly attached to this flamboyant shawl and relieved that it had not gone permanently astray. The production of Peril at End House sparked other interest in the theatrical possibilities of Agatha’s work. There was an abortive proposal to send the play to New York and – more attractive in the long run – a request from Reginald Simpson to dramatise Ten Little Niggers. ‘If anyone is going to dramatise it, I’ll have a shot at it myself first!’ Agatha told Cork, who replied cautiously: ‘Generally speaking, I’m all against such valuable professional time as yours being spent on anything so speculative as the drama, but Ten Little Niggers is different.’

  Agatha did not embark on this project straightaway. The first book she delivered in 1940 was N or M?, in which Tommy and Tuppence Beresford expose a network of spies operating on the south coast of England. ‘T & T’, as Agatha’s early notes called it – the title of the draft quickly became ‘N or M?’ or ‘2nd Innings’ – began with Agatha’s thinking about forms of code; her exercise book was full of words made up of displaced letters, dots and dashes, and numbers replacing phrases. Then she hit upon using a nursery rhyme, in this case, ‘Goosey goosey gander’, as a central device. It was published in 1941.

  N or M? was written quickly and confidently. Its fate in the American market infuriated Agatha. After an unusual delay, Cork heard from Harold Ober that it had been ‘declined by likely buyers because it deals with the War. This is a little confusing in view of Collier’s insistence on a war background being put into One, Two, but I suppose editors are afraid that such a strongly anti-Nazi story as N or M? would upset a substantial section of their readers.’ In reply to a horrified letter from Agatha, Cork assured her that ‘when the heat of the election has died down, editors might be more reasonable.’ (Franklin Roosevelt had just been re-elected President, with a Democratic but strongly isolationist Congress.) It was not until September 1941 that N or M? was sold in America and another two months before Harold Ober could write with relief to Cork: ‘We are in the War now. I wish we’d gone in before but it takes this country a good while to get started.’ Agatha was upset by Collier’s attitude, not least because N or M? was a patriotic gesture of her own, reflecting, too, her recent thinking and experience. Just after the destruction of Sheffield Terrace, for instance, she suggested enthusiastically to Cork: ‘I think that I could do a better last chapter – up-to-date – taking place in a shelter when Tommy and Tuppence had just had their flat bombed.…’

  The rejection of N or M? by the American magazine market was also worrying from a financial point of view. Until the position was clearer, Agatha was being very careful about money. ‘I expect I shall need that £1000,’ she wrote to Cork, in January 1940, ‘but will leave it to you to decide.’ By July she was less sanguine: ‘Am I going to get some money from America soon? A good deal of red ink in my bank a/c and they don’t seem as fond of overdrafts as they used to be.’ In August the American authorities stopped any export of her earnings until the tax matter was settled; in October the hearing was postponed. By December it appeared that anything she earned in the United States would actually be withheld to offset part of an eventual settlement. Strict exchange control regulations made this constraint even easier to enforce.

  On top of this, Dodd, Mead were now seeking to draw in their horns. There is no surviving copy of Agatha’s September 1940 contract with them but her 1939 contract, for Murder is Easy, Ten Little Niggers and The Regatta Mystery, required them to pay an advance of $5,000 for each book, against a 15 per cent royalty on the first 10,000 copies, rising to 20 per cent thereafter. The 1940 contract covered three books, of which the last was Evil Under the Sun, delivered to Cork in 1940. Harold Ober had received a plaintive letter from Frank Dodd asking whether Agatha would ‘consider some relief on the advances which we have been paying’. Her books sold well and steadily but her sales were not yet as impressive as they were later to be. Cork staved off such a blow; indeed, no word of it ever reached Agatha. Cork and Ober protected her when they could from bad news and hurtful criticism, suppressing or toning down what might only upset her. Their correspondence, erratic during the War years but weekly and often twice weekly in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, shows how carefully they conspired to shield their client, with whose requests they occasionally became exasperated but for whom they always felt affection and respect.

  Agatha began two other books in 1940. One was about Poirot and eventually appeared, thirty-five years later, as Curtain, the single word at the head of her first draft of the plot: ‘Poirot invents story of death believed caused by Ricin or Cobra venom – gets suspect down and takes R from him?’ The other was about Miss Marple. Its first working title was ‘Cover Her Face’, part of a quotation from The Duchess of Malfi:

  Cover her face, mine eyes dazzle,

  She died young.…

  Agatha had first written these words in her plotting books in the mid-’thirties and the reference recurred in several of her exercise books, always with allusions to the plot of The Duchess of Malfi and sometimes to Tennyson’s Enoch Arden. The ‘Enoch Arden’ theme and, indeed, a character using that name appeared after the War in her novel Taken at the Flood; the Duchess of Malfi thought occurs elsewhere in Agatha’s notes, gradually growing into a story about a performance of that play, when a girl in the audience screams and has to be taken out. Agatha later embodied this, too, in the Marple book. She also brought into her wartime novel elements of another draft, originally with Poirot at the centre, of a story about a woman returning to a house she recognises, which turns out to be the place where her young stepmother died.

  Another idea which haunted Agatha and which she took into Cover Her Face was of a dead child. She had written in her notes on voodoo, first made while she and Max were in Syria among their Yezidi labourers, about the importance of the notion of the dead child and its spirit in religions where the devil and death are central. For some reason this theme became connected in her mind with another that recurred in several plots. This was the macabre thought that a dead child might be buried in a disused fireplace, an allusion incorporated in Cover Her Face and, later, in The Pale Horse and By the Pricking of My Thumbs. ‘One in chimney’, ‘Behind the Fireplace’ – these notes reappear in Agatha’s exercise books. We do not know whether they were references to an overheard remark or to childhood memories, to an idea that occurred to her at Abney or in some other house (‘Priest’s hole good place to hide body.’ she once noted). The thought may have derived from the Venetian fireplace she and Max had admired, or from the blank wall at Cresswell Place (‘What is behind bricked-up wall.’ read another note). The image must have touched her profoundly
, for it not only repeatedly occurs but in each of the three books the reference also appears in a deeply disturbing context.

  Neither the wartime Poirot book nor the wartime Marple book were to be published straightaway. Agatha was anxious to build what she described to Cork as her ‘nest egg’, in case she found herself unable to work – if, for instance, anything should happen to Rosalind or Max. Moreover, the Poirot book was written when Agatha was finding her Belgian detective ‘insufferable’; in it he dies. As he was Agatha’s main source of income, ‘Poirot’s Last Case’ had inevitably to be put into cold storage. Cork approved, though he did not foresee the complications arising from Agatha’s decision to assign one copyright to Rosalind and the other to Max, ‘in consideration of the natural love and affection which I bear to my husband’. Her original intention was that Max should have the Poirot and Rosalind the Marple book, but by the end of the war she had changed her mind. The Marple story, eventually published as Sleeping Murder, was given to Max and Curtain to Rosalind.

  Copies were sent to New York in accordance with a general principle of dispersal which Hughes Massie was applying to all important material, for the office at 40 Fleet Street had already been bombed. Harold Ober’s reaction was that ‘Mrs Mallowan must have been in a rather despondent state when she decided to kill off Poirot.’ Indeed, Agatha had every reason to be unhappy, as Cork told Ober in a letter written in December 1940, begging for news of the tax matter. She had lost the refuge of her own houses, for Greenway, Winterbrook and Cresswell Place were let and Sheffield Place was unsafe. Rosalind was in Northern Ireland with Hubert, Max was anxious to serve abroad and – the gravest blow – there was no Carlo. Agatha had given her a house in Ladbroke Terrace Mews and saw her from time to time but now Carlo had gone to do war work in a factory. These anxieties overshadowed Agatha’s life far more than worry about money but her financial predicament was nonetheless serious. By the end of January 1941, when the tax hearing had again been postponed and the British Revenue authorities were pressing for their own payment, Cork was writing once more to Ober: ‘The situation is pretty desperate with no money coming in.… It is hard to believe that Christie will have to find money for Income Tax on money she has not received. It does not take much imagination to see what a nightmare it has produced for our most valuable client.…’