Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Agatha did eventually embark on two new pieces of writing. The ‘psychological stimulus’ Cork thought she needed came in the spring of 1947, ironically from the BBC. Queen Mary, the mother of King George VI, was asked by the Corporation to suggest how her eightieth birthday might be celebrated on the wireless. It appeared that Queen Mary was a particular admirer of Agatha’s work and the BBC accordingly sounded out Cork on the telephone and then invited Agatha to write a half-hour radio play to be broadcast on May 26th. As Cork told Agatha in mid-May: ‘… all the items on the programme have been officially chosen by her.’ There was a stately minuet to make arrangements about the fee, which Agatha wished to take the form of a donation to the Southport Infirmary Children’s Toys Fund. The Corporation sent a cheque for a hundred guineas to the Fund, Cork refused commission, and everyone was pleased. The play that resulted from these negotiations was Three Blind Mice, which Agatha based on an idea she had first formulated in 1945, when she read of the death of a young boy, Daniel O’Neill, placed with his small brother in the care of foster-parents, who had maltreated both children. The tragedy had moved her deeply. Three Blind Mice next became a short story, bought by Cosmopolitan in the United States after great competition, and the title story in a collection published in America in 1950. It was to enjoy another incarnation, as The Mousetrap, two years later.

  Agatha’s other preoccupation in 1946 was a novel. At the beginning of 1945, when Cork reported that ‘Mary Westmacott’ was to be published by Rinehart in the United States, she had told him she was eager for ‘MW to do some work again – but when?!!’ Like Absent in the Spring, it germinated not from a list of characters or a plot, but from a quotation. In her exercise book – after a note about the best source (Clément Faugier, she thought) of Crème des Marrons – Agatha quoted lines from various poems: by Laurence Binyon, Cecil Day Lewis, W.J. Turner and, especially, T.S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets suggested a number of possible titles. Her choice fell on The Rose and the Yew Tree, from an image in Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’, a poem she greatly liked. She was interested in the interweaving of religion and philosophy in Eliot’s work, its elevation of the ordinary and perception of the spiritual. She also admired his theatrical technique: Murder in the Cathedral, she wrote to Max in 1943, was ‘a revelation in the effect of human voices, in tone and rhythm, on the musical senses.’ Eliot, for his part, was said (in a memoir by W.T. Levy) to have observed that Agatha Christie was his favourite detective-story writer, with ‘the best-constructed plots’. (He recommended The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.) It is appropriate that the character who unravels the mysteries in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion should have been named ‘Agatha’.

  Cork liked The Rose and the Yew Tree, but it gave him a difficult time. Agatha’s story is narrated by a convalescent, disabled not in the War but, to his embarrassment, in a car smash. It is set in the Cornish constituency during the 1945 election campaign, where the local Conservative Committee has chosen as its candidate not ‘an old-fashioned chap’ but a self-made man, who holds the Victoria Cross and, though ‘slick’, ‘knows all the answers’. Like her narrator, Agatha’s understanding of politics was that of a shrewd observer only, and she distilled in this novel what she had learned from Madge and her nephew Jack, later a Conservative M.P. and formerly a Councillor in Manchester. Agatha’s editor at Collins found some of her treatment shaky, her description of a Party Whist Drive, for instance, since during an election campaign ‘Social activities are suspended.’ More woundingly, Billy Collins told Agatha: ‘We felt that it was perhaps rather unfortunate having a story round the last General Election with such an undesirable person as a candidate at a time like this.’ She replied coldly: ‘I don’t feel the new Westmacott is quite your cup of tea. Perhaps we’d better stick to crime?’ To Cork she was more blunt: ‘Do let M.W. be published by someone else. Collins never have appreciated the lady – and have you ever seen anything more idiotic than Billy Collins’s letter – missing the whole point of the book. Definitely they shall not have my “ewe lamb” so will you try it on someone else – Michael Joseph?’ (In the same week Collins had also foolishly sent the proposed wrapper for The Labours of Hercules, ‘the naked Poirot’ adding to Agatha’s wrath.) Cork duly sent The Rose and the Yew Tree to Michael Joseph, and then to Heinemann, who thought ‘Billy is crackers’ and took it for publication in 1948. Rinehart and Co. were again the American publishers.

  There were other irritations. At the end of 1946 Agatha had delivered a new Hercule Poirot story, Taken at the Flood. The American magazines were cool, Ober explaining to Cork that they felt Poirot was ‘rather dragged in’ and detracted from the story’s reality. It was, he said, becoming difficult to sell ‘a mystery story solved by one of the stock detectives. This kind of story will continue to sell well in book form, but the Ngaio Marsh type of murder mystery is I think what editors are going to be looking for.’ He suggested that serialisation might be possible if Agatha ‘felt like rewriting and leaving out Poirot’ but ‘of course, I want you to use your judgment about mentioning this to Mrs Mallowan.’ Cork tactfully refrained from referring to Ngaio Marsh (another of his clients) and persuaded Agatha to change her text. To everyone’s fury, however, Ober reported in December that the American editor who had asked to buy the non-Poirot version had now let him down. The Toronto Star bought There is a Tide (the American title), with Poirot, but Agatha was annoyed: ‘Really it was a beast to alter.…’

  To crown her fury, Agatha discovered that, in one of the American reviews of Absent in the Spring, ‘Mary Westmacott’s’ identity was revealed. Cork had asked the Library of Congress to catalogue Agatha’s work as ‘M.W.’ under her pseudonym only but ‘some journalistic sleuth’, he believed, had discovered the secret through the Copyright Registration Office. One embarrassment seemed to follow another, also upsetting Agatha: ‘An “interview” in the News Review,’ she wrote miserably to Cork. ‘Quite dreadful – saying I had red hair – my father was an American stockbroker and I was one of the richest women in the world!… Can they do these things?’

  Agatha had ’flu in the New Year. She had been in Wales with Rosalind, helping to nurse Mathew through bronchitis. ‘How difficult everything is nowadays with no servants – it’s all the chores and the cooking to be done – I really wonder how Rosalind stands up to it all.’ After her own illness Agatha felt ‘sunk in listless depression’, until suddenly, at the end of January, ‘the clouds lifted’. Cork nonetheless wisely encouraged her not to try to work, ordering at her request theatre tickets for Born Yesterday and The Man from the Ministry, and, in June, Annie Get Your Gun. He helped arrange a trip to Switzerland and the South of France in the early spring, Agatha’s first foreign expedition since the outbreak of war, five days in Lugano and five in Cannes. (Cap Martin, her preference, had been badly damaged by Italian shelling.) Obtaining foreign exchange was complicated but Cork managed it. He flattered Agatha over the success of a BBC television broadcast of Three Blind Mice, arranged for the story called ‘Star over Bethlehem’ to be printed in an American magazine at Christmas, suggested that Sullivan might be able to take Alibi on an American tour. There were frequent delicious lunches and friendly bets on the outcome of the Derby.

  Cork and Ober between them also protected Agatha on one particular matter, the objections of many readers to ‘anti-Semitic’ and ‘anti-Catholic’ allusions in her work. Sensitive readers were certainly struck by Agatha’s blunt and often uncomplimentary references to her Jewish characters. (There are in fact no disparaging allusions to Catholics.) The triviality of these remarks made them no less hurtful. The Mysterious Mr Quin, for example, had a passage about ‘men of Hebraic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses, wearing flamboyant jewellery’, and Peril at End House a condescending reference to ‘the long-nosed Mr Lazarus’, an art dealer whom another character described as ‘a Jew, of course, but a frightfully decent one’. It was only after the War, however, that Agatha’s publishers, and then just her American publishers, b
egan to receive protesting letters: ‘It is a downright shame,’ Dodd, Mead was told, ‘to see an institution such as yours, which could be used in the interests of a permanent peace, publish such trash.’ In 1947 the Anti-Defamation League sent an official objection to Dodd, Mead, who forwarded it to Ober. ‘This letter is typical,’ he told Cork, ‘of a number that have come in recently.’ He proposed not that Agatha should see the letters but that Cork might warn her to omit any references to Jews and Catholics in future books, since ‘these are two very delicate subjects over here.’ An unidentified reference in The Hollow had been found especially offensive. Cork handled this awkward commission with his usual tact. He did not write to Agatha about it, though he may have spoken to her, but with Ober ensured that in subsequent books the offending remarks disappeared. Indeed, Dodd, Mead was given permission to change such references. Ober also arranged that Dodd, Mead should cease to forward correspondence from the public directly to Agatha; he had recently discovered that since 1938 they had continued to send letters to Ashfield.

  Agatha mirrored in her books the attitudes of her class and generation, ‘the usual tedious British anti-Semitism’, as the historian Jacques Barzun called it in A Catalogue of Crime, prejudices that were also displayed in, for example, the work of John Buchan and M.R. James. Agatha’s unsophisticated generalisations about Jews and Jewishness are a reminder that she did not share the inhibitions of a generation sensitised by the sufferings of the Jewish people since 1933, though the picture she gave of the Levinnes in Giant’s Bread shows that she could also write delicately and sympathetically about the prejudices a Jewish family encountered among upper-class English people. The phrases with which Agatha offended were painful not because they were vicious but because they seemed flippant; when she eventually met truly fanatical anti-Semitism she was, like many of her compatriots, incredulous. She described in her Autobiography her first encounter with National Socialism, in 1933, when the Director of Antiquities in Baghdad, a fierce Nazi, astounded her with a passionate outburst: ‘his face changed in an extraordinary way that I had never noticed on anyone’s face before.’

  For there was much that Agatha did not notice, unless it occurred in surroundings and among people she knew. Though she travelled and was familiar with classical and European art, literature and music, she was insular. If she lived in a place, she could understand its people and their culture; she could sympathise with any sort of friends, whatever their races, ages, religions, habits and proclivities. She was at ease with what was basic and local; she was neither cosmopolitan nor intellectually sophisticated. Her horizons were limited and her perspective that of an ordinary, upper-class Edwardian Englishwoman. Yet her understanding was instinctive and her appeal universal, so that in her work she transcended her insularity. It is, for example, remarkable that an amateur adaptation of Ten Little Niggers (a story both macabre and, to some, offensively titled) should have been devised and performed by a group of prisoners in Buchenwald concentration camp, who found, as a survivor later told Agatha, that it sustained them. It is, moreover, equally interesting that Agatha, though touched by this story, found nothing unusual about it.

  Max was the scholar and the cosmopolitan. He loved complexity and academic intrigue. Now in his early forties, he was already greatly respected for his pre-war work in Syria, for his conscientiously written accounts of the excavations and for his encouragement of the young. In the autumn of 1947 his search for a post bore fruit, when he was appointed to the first Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology in the University of London. The Institute had come officially into being in 1934, eventually moving into a commodious home in Regent’s Park, with, to Max’s delight, a rotunda. During the course of the War it had been eased into the University, which thereafter took full responsibility for it. Max’s new post required him to lecture and to teach. It also gave him access to a source of funds to use for travel and his own research, so, after all, the Mallowans could continue to dig. Agatha immediately began to think of ways in which she might justifiably return to the Near East. The amount of sterling British travellers might take abroad was strictly limited but Cork saw no difficulty in obtaining a business allowance for her, were she to base a book on her travels. ‘After all,’ he assured her, ‘a book by you with a Mesopotamian setting would bring in to the Treasury numbers of dollars!’ As a precaution, Ober sounded out Collier’s and Dodd, Mead, who sent letters expressing enthusiasm for The House in Baghdad, as Agatha called her new project.

  There were two tasks to perform before the Mallowans left. One was moving from Cresswell Place, which they let, to 48 Swan Court, an apartment in a block off the King’s Road in Chelsea, which Mrs North helped Agatha find. The other was Max’s inaugural lecture. Agatha herself put the last touches to a collection, Witness for the Prosecution, and a new detective novel, Crooked House. There was a final admonition to Billy about Taken at the Flood: ‘Do NOT put any representation of my poor Hercule on the jacket – confine yourself to a stormy (or sunlit) sea or synthetic ship etc.’ Agatha and Max then joyfully departed.

  They spent almost five months in Baghdad, negotiating with the authorities as to where Max might resume digging. Living first at the Hotel Zia (‘Even the rioting students,’ Agatha wrote to Cork, ‘conduce to greater laziness’), they later moved to a house which, like many of Agatha’s houses, overlooked the river. There, in a sumptuous dressing-gown, Agatha sat on the balcony each morning. She read ‘thousands of American detective stories … None of mine about except one very peculiar edition of And Then There Were None, with pictures of all the film scenes – Rather Fun.’ During her absence Cork, Ober and her financial advisers wrestled with the demands of the American and British Revenue authorities. Reinheimer believed he had reached a settlement on the American side; ‘Not one I’m proud of,’ Cork had reported, ‘but the lawyers seem to think it is the best that can be obtained amicably.’ Agatha, it appeared, might at last receive the balance of the income frozen in the United States; the problem would now be with the British tax authorities who, unfamiliar with the details of this history, would see these earnings suddenly arrive. ‘It admits,’ Cork added, gloomily, ‘of many permutations in view of varying rates of tax and exchange during the period.…’

  All Agatha’s affairs had been promptly and legally dealt with at the time. The difficulty was that they were extremely complicated, her earnings subject to several different sets of laws and regulations and spread over many years. Furthermore, the more frequently Agatha’s advisers were asked to produce information, the more muddled things became, because the sets of accounts and figures, each with different corrections and amendments, multiplied, went astray, contradicted one another and altogether caused confusion. One authority wanted figures presented one way, another differently. Letters and cables crossed. Errors crept in and were perpetuated. Ober, advised by his lawyers, now made it a practice to consult Cork by cable or letter for any offer for any work by Agatha Christie, when he received it from anywhere in the world. ‘We have not yet reached finality,’ Cork wrote to Agatha. ‘Obviously the best thing to do is to put it out of your mind until someone can produce the ultimate figure.’

  When Agatha returned from Baghdad she found these matters far from settled, and it was not easy to follow Cork’s advice. Her mood in the summer of 1948 varied between anxiety and reckless pleasure in each moment. ‘Oh, it is so beautiful, I shall go on enjoying myself and then have a slap-up bankruptcy!!!’ Cork feared it might come to that. At the end of September, he was writing to Ober in much the same terms as years before: ‘there seems to be little likelihood of Mrs Mallowan avoiding bankruptcy. It seems almost incredible to me that she should be liable for tax on income that arose in a foreign country and which could not be transmitted to her because of the action of the government of that country – but apparently this is how our law stands.’ He told her accountant, Dickson, that these uncertainties were affecting her work: ‘She has not written one word for
over 12 months – a disastrous state of affairs for her, and incidentally pretty serious for us, as she is by far our most remunerative client.’ Cork’s letter was designed to frighten Dickson into working even more vigorously on Agatha’s behalf, but there was some basis for his anxiety.

  Agatha had indeed failed to write a word all year, despite a short trip to Paris with Max in the autumn to see her French publisher and boost her spirits. Nor had she been moved to begin another book by flattering letters from Pocket Books in America, announcing the award of a ‘Golden Gertrude’, ‘a replica of our Kangaroo mascot … the equivalent of an Oscar in the film industry’, marking the sale of over five million copies of her work in their editions – an accolade, declared Cork, who cleared ‘Gertie’ through Customs, of no commercial value but ‘for merit, in the same class as a Lonsdale belt’. Fortunately her publisher had two detective stories and The Rose and the Yew Tree for 1948, and in America there was the collection, Witness for the Prosecution. The Rose and the Yew Tree was warmly received and, despite the earlier revelation, ‘Mary Westmacott’s’ identity still baffled reviewers: ‘… promises extremely well’, said Books of Today. Agatha’s earlier work was also now greatly sought after. Penguin wanted back titles and Cork was obliged to advertise for old editions, as his own stock and Collins’s had been destroyed in the Blitz. Ober hunted up file copies and Rosalind was persuaded to lend Murder at Hazelmoor, though she emphasised to Cork that he should take the greatest care: ‘My mother has always impressed on me not to let my American copies out of the house.’

  Requests were made with increasing frequency for permission to adapt Agatha’s work for the stage, television and the wireless. The most persistent applicant was an American impresario and actor, who had played Poirot in a radio series and now wanted to televise his exploits. Agatha refused her blessing; he then pressed Ober to write Cork a highly technological letter about the growth of television viewing in the United States, asking whether Mrs Mallowan’s hesitation might stem from her wish to wait for the completion of ‘the cross-country coaxial cable’, which would be hungry for material and would drive up the price – not a likely explanation in Agatha’s case. The playwright Ben Hecht inquired whether he might adapt for the stage Murder in the Calais Coach, as the American edition of Murder on the Orient Express was called. Cork, however, told Ober that Agatha had not abandoned the idea that she might someday adapt this book herself, but ‘not as a conventional “whodunnit”,’ since she saw it ‘starting in New York at the time of the kidnapping’. (Much on the lines of the film that eventually appeared in 1974.) She was more sympathetic to an approach by Barbara Toy and Moie Charles, who ran a small theatre company called Farndale, to which Bertie Meyer had brought Ten Little Niggers during the War. At the end of 1948 they asked Agatha whether she would dramatise another book for them and, to their surprise, she agreed immediately. They chose The Murder at the Vicarage. ‘Sex and religion always goes down well,’ Miss Toy told Agatha. They completed a stage version in 1949.