Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Agatha had slackened speed now Max was home. ‘What a bore!’ she complained to Cork, when Ober pressed for a reply to the American magazine editor’s comments on The Hollow. Collier’s wanted the story to be shortened for serialisation, with the murder brought into the story much earlier – ‘a very considerable job of reorganisation and revision’, they acknowledged. ‘Maddening …’ Agatha said, returning her copy, ‘suitably mutilated’, adding hopefully, ‘Money in the USA to blue someday?’ Collins had asked for revisions too, obliging Agatha to spend part of the autumn modifying the book itself. ‘I feel most guilty in urging these nasty little jobs on you when you have better things to do,’ Cork assured her, consolingly promising that Collins’s cheque for £2,000 could now be collected at any time. But ‘I am afraid there is another chore.…’

  This was the adaptation of Towards Zero for the stage. Lee Shubert, the American impresario, had taken it at the end of 1944 but had proposed a number of alterations. ‘I hope they only want me to OK them and don’t want anything requiring any concentration,’ Agatha had written in January 1945, overwhelmed with work on Appointment with Death. Shubert’s proposal was for the Mallowans to come to the United States in 1946, for Agatha to make the necessary revisions there. She was at first excited but by the end of 1945 she was happily settled at Greenway: ‘Trying to restrain my pullets which fly into the kitchen garden … but they are laying eggs!’ She was willing to leave Devon only for Christmas at Pwllywrach: ‘We’re going to Wales. Hard work there – but lovely eats!! Ducks, geese, a turkey, all walking about waiting their doom.’ Her letters at the end of 1945 were happy and relaxed, signed simply ‘Agatha’, those to Cork closing with cheerful admonitions. She was no longer writing compulsively and, indeed, took mischievous delight in being lazy. As Cork explained to Ober, ‘Mrs Mallowan is going through one of those phases when she needs some psychological stimulus to write, and I feel you may be able to provide it.… Some sort of an account is needed – how well her stuff is doing. This weakness,’ he added, ‘may seem strange to you, but we find it quite usual here for sensitive folk to find themselves more war weary since VE Day than when they were strung up to meet the unknown.’

  19

  ‘… a certain amount of fêting …’

  Looking back, Agatha wrote in her Autobiography, she realised she had produced ‘an incredible amount of stuff’ during the War years. She believed that this was because there were few social distractions and because, until 1945, she had not realised that the expenditure of time and increasingly precious energy was financially pointless, so much of any proceeds going in tax. This explanation was incomplete. As we have seen, Agatha was extremely busy throughout the War, reading a great many new books as well as old favourites and the works of history and classical literature prescribed by Max. She went often to the theatre and the cinema and saw a good deal of her friends. Old friends – Archie Whitburn was one – whom she met in the street were carried off for lunch or dinner and to the theatre and, as Max’s colleagues passed through London, she cooked them a meal. It was as if she wrote because she was busy, fully charged, anxious about Max and Rosalind, about her lack of a home, and about money.

  Cork was right; after the War people were worn out, as much by prolonged uncertainty as by sustained living with danger and other privations. It took time to shake off that deep exhaustion and return to normal life. In any case, Britain’s circumstances were greatly changed. After the immediate euphoria at the end of the War, there was a long struggle not only to rebuild the fabric of the country but to reshape the framework of society. Though this was exciting, it required people to adjust – to new systems of education, health and welfare, new plans for running the transport and energy industries, new arrangements for planning the growth of towns and protecting the countryside. Regulations and restrictions did not fall away when war ended; they continued in the shape of licences, forms, controls. There were still queues, and rationing. The rest of the nineteen-forties were in some ways hopeful and promising; they were also dreary years, of bread shortages, fuel shortages, drab utility furniture, unexciting clothes. The nervous stimulus of war was lacking now. It was a long, chilly, depressing haul.

  Max and Agatha did not rush off to the United States to see what could be done to Towards Zero. There had been quite enough travelling. They gradually settled into Greenway, adding to the trees and shrubs and supervising a not very prosperous market garden that had started life during the war. Max spent most of 1946 writing up the account of his pre-War digs and consulting archaeological colleagues about possible academic posts. He and Agatha began to tidy up the house and garden at Winterbrook and to review their London arrangements, leaving Lawn Road and moving back into Cresswell Place. Here too there was plenty of clearing up to do. Life in some ways seemed empty. Carlo, who was now suffering from severe arthritis, eventually moved to Eastbourne to be with her sister Mary. Madge, in her late sixties, came only rarely to London. Her son Jack could, however, be relied upon for entertainment in London and at Greenway. He had a house in Chester Street, from which he would come to Chelsea to amuse his aunt. Their tastes in books and painting were similar, for Jack liked Dickens, Compton Mackenzie and ‘All Primitives’, and he too was fond of music, though he preferred Bach to Wagner. Like Agatha, Jack was interested in theology (he never passed a church without visiting it and knew a great deal about different religions) and he shared her pleasure in simple, carefully prepared food. He always carried with him oil, vinegar, fresh pepper and salt for mixing a salad, which he then submitted to his chauffeur for appraisal, a habit that was known to head waiters all over England, from the Savoy (where legend held that he once took his entire regiment) to the railway restaurant car in which he travelled down from Cheshire.

  Many of Agatha’s older friends lived quietly in the country; some of her contemporaries were dead. Younger people she and Max knew from the pre-War expeditions to Syria were scattered, while friends from the diplomatic community were taking up new posts. It would be some time before the Mallowans’ circle came together again, and friends and relations would once more flock regularly to Greenway in summer and autumn. For the time being, Agatha’s life was filled less with friends than with books, for her work was as much in demand after the War as during it. Editions multiplied, reprints were issued as fast as paper could be obtained. Agatha herself, however, was war-weary.

  She wrote little in 1946. A birthday ode for Rosalind, composed in August, was rueful:

  ‘In my youth’, said the crone, ‘I had elegant legs

  And my eyes were a beautiful blue,

  I could play parlour games and go off with the prize,

  I was far more accomplished than you!’

  ‘You are old,’ said her child, ‘And really I doubt

  Whether all that you say can be true.

  I admit that you still got away with the crimes,

  But come now, what else can you do?’

  There was no doubt that Agatha could ‘still get away with the crimes’. Since the daring Murder of Roger Ackroyd, all her books had sold well and each new one was keenly expected. It is true that in the nineteen-thirties and forties the public had a particularly ravenous appetite for detective fiction, notably the successful ‘classic’ detective story, an intellectual puzzle, set by the author for the reader, who was given a series of clues, some of them misleading. The triumphant practitioner of the technique of writing crime novels was the author who could artfully trick the reader. It was a specialised category of fiction; publishers, booksellers and advertisers on the one hand and the public on the other contrived to keep it so, the former by issuing detective stories under distinctive imprints, awarding special trophies (generally in the form of offensive weapons) for spectacular popular successes, and by emphasising their authors’ cunning and ingenuity, and the latter by their hunger for new forms of murder and detection and unwearying fondness for certain sleuths. In October 1944 the American critic Edmund Wilson wrote a cele
brated article in which he sought to unravel the spell of the detective story, a type of fiction which, he confessed, he had outgrown. It had, he believed, ‘borne all its finest fruits by the end of the nineteenth century’; ingenious puzzles, like those offered in Agatha’s work, did no more than mildly entertain and astonish. Wilson was, in fact, scathing about Agatha’s style, which he found so mawkish and banal that it was ‘literally impossible to read’. She must have come across this piece, if not in 1944, for she was interested in what critics thought of detective fiction in general and her own in particular, but she did not mention Wilson’s views to her family or friends. Any dismay would have been assuaged by her steady sales and her quiet confidence in her own craftsmanship; she might have been consoled, too, by Wilson’s admission that he had read only Death Comes as the End, which may have disconcerted him.

  There are several explanations for the popularity of detective fiction in the ’thirties and ’forties: that, in the pre-War years, a now largely literate public wanted books that were exciting, self-contained and not too demanding; that detective stories sold well from increasingly well-stocked railway bookstalls; that, between the wars, people looked to crime fiction for escape from a time of turmoil and economic depression, or, in a rival theory, that the public turned to the ordered world of the mystery novel to calm their nerves after the 1914–18 War and (assuming foresight) before the 1939–45 War.

  In fact, however, Britain in the ’thirties was for many, particularly in London and the South, an agreeable place to live. Real incomes were rising (for those who had a job), more people had motor cars and wirelesses and were buying their own homes. Life was in many ways placid and, if the newspapers reported foreign crises, they told you what to think of them. This climate perhaps explains the detective novel’s vogue. The classic mystery story was small-scale, meticulously worked, domestic, an alternative to the smooth tenor of everyday life, yet actually not all that different from it. Insular, parochial, and, apart from the initial drama of the crime itself, reasonable – its nature suited the attitudes of the time. Perhaps the explanation for its popularity was even more simple: every class in every society needs some form of ‘soap opera’, popular sagas whose central themes – love, death, jealousy, quests, greed, conflict between good and evil – are highly coloured representations of its own preoccupations. As for the ’forties during the War existence was precarious and people wanted distraction from the chaos around them; they looked for cheap, portable, absorbing fiction to read on interminable, tedious journeys and during the long periods of waiting that irregularly punctuate a war. The crime novel provided a haven; some of its characters were old friends. It was trivial enough to be easily picked up and put down, as circumstances required. No intellectual gear-change was needed, for the prose was not difficult and the chief requirement that the reader be alert, a condition in which the majority of the population spent all the wartime years. Plots varied but the moral was predictable: good would triumph and order be restored. Readers might not only lead a variety of other lives vicariously but also hope that these held comforting lessons for their own.

  In the ’thirties and ’forties there was a cluster of authors who were especially adept at the technique of the classic detective story. Their work was snatched up and they wrote prolifically. Some, like Agatha, continued to write for decades. Many belonged to that loosely organised group, the Detection Club, founded at Anthony Berkeley’s suggestion in the late nineteen-twenties. Agatha was a member, though with her dignity and acute sense of the ridiculous she must have found it hard to keep a straight face as the members went through ‘the Ceremonies’ Dorothy Sayers had devised – ‘Eric the Skull’, for instance, borne in on a black cushion, his eyes aglow with batteries. Agatha submitted to her own initiation – she took the oath on Poison – in a spirit of fun, as thirty years later she agreed to be the Club’s President, on condition that a Co-President be appointed to make speeches and orchestrate proceedings. Only with an effort did she talk shop with other detective story writers at the Club’s occasional dinners, held before the War in restaurants and after it at rooms in Kingly Street, behind Liberty in Regent Street, which Miss Sayers’s connection with Church authorities allowed them to use for a token rent. More to Agatha’s taste were the spring and summer dinners, at the Garrick Club and the Café Royal, to which members might bring guests and where a speaker – a senior policeman, a judge, and so on – would address these students and exponents of his profession. A succession of Agatha’s friends were entertained at these agreeably eccentric parties.

  She was, furthermore, insufficiently reverent towards the Detection Club’s rules. (They can be found in Ronald Knox’s Detective Decalogue.) These set out the conventions which the classic detective story should observe: concealing a vital clue from the reader was abhorred, for example, as was immoderate use of such devices as conspiracies, trap-doors, and ‘Mysterious Poisons unknown to Science’. The fuss over The Murder of Roger Ackroyd indicated that these principles had even taken popular root. After the experience of Behind the Screen, The Scoop, and The Floating Admiral, Agatha also declined a part in any more collaborative ventures. It was encouraging though, even for someone who was not a joiner or an organiser, to think of herself as one of a recognised school of writers, one of those, like John Dickson Carr, Margery Allingham, Freeman Wills Crofts, Craig Rice, Elizabeth Daly and the Lockridges, in whose fictions Agatha herself became engrossed. In one important respect, however, Agatha’s work differed from that of her colleagues. She produced a succession of dazzlingly cunning plots, whose elucidation was the sole purpose of each book. Unlike other detective story writers, she was not stylistically ambitious; her prose is pedestrian but undistracting. She did not seek to capture the reader’s sympathy for one character or another, nor to enlist support for views and theories of her own. Her characters, and the places and circumstances in which they find themselves, are sketches only; she does not make a point of displaying familiarity with various types of people and their world. She herself is as inconspicuous as can be. Some see these characteristics as flaws and criticise Agatha’s work for the flatness of her writing and its lack of emotional and topographical colour. Her admirers regard this as part of her strength; they defend her work because it appeals to pure reason. Agatha Christie’s fascination, as Robert Barnard described it in his useful appreciation, A Talent to Deceive, lies not in appeasing the reader’s appetite for sensation or emotion but in satisfying curiosity.

  Her books do not make the blood run quicker. As Barnard points out, they present not a succession of incidents leading to a climax but an accumulation of evidence from which deductions may eventually be made. Each has a pattern of ‘progressive mystification and progressive enlightenment’, with each revelation and the complications it apparently causes falling, at the end, into an ordered and convincing whole. This approach underlies the popularity of Agatha’s work. Her detective stories exploit universal doubts, hopes and fears, offered as intellectual exercises. It is an addictive mixture. By the mid-’forties Agatha’s readers knew they could rely on her to produce it; while her plots were surprising, her instinct was faultless.

  Publishers recognised this by offering high prices for her work. In 1945, for instance, an American film producer proposed £5,000 for the rights to Love from a Stranger and Good Housekeeping magazine $15,000 for a 30,000 to 40,000 word short story. This Week offered $2,000 for 4,000 words, while Frederick Dannay, who admittedly paid contributors to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine rates considerably higher than many similar competing magazines, concluded a contract to reprint Agatha’s short stories for the next two years, at $150 a story, paying for twelve in advance. The Mutual Network arranged a radio series in America, starring Hercule Poirot; ‘£65 a week,’ Cork told Agatha, ‘but dizzy heights are possible.’ At home, ninepenny paperback editions of Agatha’s books and cheap editions, at between two-and-sixpence and four-and-sixpence, moved as steadily after the War as during it, whil
e eight-and-sixpenny editions would sell from 17,000 to 20,000 copies in the first year of publication. Max’s mother constantly urged Agatha to turn her hand to something ‘serious’ (by which her daughter-in-law thought she meant ‘the biography of some world-famous figure’). Agatha stuck to her last. She recognised where her skills lay and, as she admitted in preparing her article for Russia, her pre-eminence. In settling on ‘the four leading detective-story writers’, she told Max, ‘the MOI [Ministry of Information] has suggested Dorothy Sayers but I … think … she’s now an entirely different type of writer – religious plays and so on.… Rather invidious to single out 4. To set aside modesty – Myself (!!) Margery Allingham? Dickson Carr? And then who? Bentley? Ngaio Marsh? Anthony Berkeley? For Russia you must have someone who is writing now – in full spate.’

  Though Agatha herself wrote little in the autumn of 1945 and early 1946, her name was everywhere. Hidden Horizon opened in Wimbledon in March and in New York, as Murder on the Nile for a brief run, in September. Come, Tell Me How You Live appeared and The Hollow, not without argument about ‘blurbs’ (Agatha preferred to write her own) and covers: ‘I do not like a naturalistic jacket of an actual incident or scene from the book and I don’t like human figures on a jacket.’ Collins capitulated. Billy provided tickets for Wimbledon (‘almost like peace, more than anything since the war …’, Agatha wrote ecstatically) and, even harder to obtain, tennis balls, sent by registered post to Devonshire.