Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  On her return to England, Agatha worked furiously, completing two typescripts – Mrs McGinty’s Dead and They Do It with Mirrors – and finishing the adaptation of The Hollow. Meanwhile, Dodd, Mead put together a collection of early stories, including the one about the Clapham Cook Agatha had sent Dorothy L. Sayers, for publication in America as ‘The Underdog’. There was more. During the autumn, as she turned out some old papers, Agatha came across something by ‘Mary Westmacott’ which she had written at the end of the nineteen-thirties, a play called A Daughter’s a Daughter, dealing with the familiar Westmacott theme of possessiveness. A Daughter’s a Daughter has at its centre a widow, still young, who pushes aside a suitor and another marriage when her nineteen-year-old daughter objects. It is an obvious theme for Agatha to have considered, given her interest in the nature of maternal love, in independence and self-assertion. The relationship she described here had nothing to do with herself or Rosalind, however, though to those who knew them there were touches of Agatha’s old friend from Abney, Nan, and her daughter, Judy.

  It is not clear when this play was written, though Cork had reported in January 1940 that Basil Dean was interested in it. Now Agatha sent Cork another copy: ‘Any good …?’ He forwarded it to Peter Saunders, a young impresario who had taken over the rights to The Hollow from Meyer and whose enthusiasm and energy Agatha had admired. Saunders returned the play at the beginning of December 1950, with suggested alterations, mostly to small remarks that dated the original: Edith, for example, ‘would not ask for six-penn’orth of ice’; ‘muffins’ would probably be ‘buttered toast’; and, ‘I do not think that today one “falls back on Austrian maids”. That is pre-War.’ Agatha approved these amendments and Saunders sent the play to various actresses. To Agatha’s disappointment none was sufficiently keen. ‘Feel sure it is sentimental enough to be a success,’ she told Cork, ‘if only someone would fancy themselves in it.’ In the end the play, billed as being by ‘Mary Westmacott’, was tried out in Bath. The author’s identity was not a secret for long and the theatre was packed. Saunders, however, did not believe the play would survive in the West End but Agatha was, for once, uncritical. (He thought she judged A Daughter’s a Daughter less acutely than her other plays.) Saunders said no more and, in his words, ‘Agatha allowed it to slide from her memory.’ As a play, that is, but not otherwise, for she turned A Daughter’s a Daughter into a novel, ‘knocked off without a word to anybody’, Cork told Harold Ober, who had been enquiring repeatedly on Rinehart’s behalf as to when another ‘Mary Westmacott’ might be expected.

  The weather that summer was dreadful. Agatha stayed at Greenway, beautiful even when the garden was sodden and the estuary obscured by drizzle. It was there, at the very end of August, that she heard the news of Madge’s death. She hurried north to Abney, and on her return to Devonshire she felt the summer and her holiday had ended. ‘Do send some typewriting paper to Greenway,’ she begged Cork, for it was impossible to find locally. ‘You see, I mean to work.’ Her own generation of the family was vanishing but Greenway was not lonely. Rosalind and Anthony brought Mathew in the late spring and summer, colleagues and students came to stay, and Mrs North was a regular visitor. Agatha spent her days tranquilly but she was always ready to join an expedition along the estuary, to the moors and the beach, to bathe in the sea or take a picnic to Dartmoor. She was still, as she had once explained to Max, ‘a dog to be taken for walks’, amusing herself quietly but taking part in any fun that was proposed.

  Mid-September brought her sixtieth birthday. Cork had warned Agatha that a certain amount of fêting was inevitable, to which, she replied, she was quite agreeable, as long as she did not have to make any speeches. Collins celebrated her anniversary and her sixtieth book, A Murder Is Announced, with a festive party. Agatha had not entirely forgotten recent skirmishes: ‘Thank you for asking me to meet Agatha Christie,’ she replied to the official invitation. ‘If you don’t mind, I am bringing my old friend Mary Westmacott with me.…’ Penguin Books marked the occasion by reprinting a list advertised as the ‘Christie Million’, which in fact sold two and a half million copies, while Dodd, Mead agreed with the Avon Publishing Company to reprint eight titles in America, starting with The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

  It was at Greenway, however, that Agatha really celebrated her birthday, enjoying herself robustly: ‘Thank goodness,’ she told Cork, ‘we’ve got a wonderful temporary cook. Her Vol-au-Vents! Her Soufflés! Though rain pours down, eating is always eating!’

  1951 was a successful year. It began with Peter Saunders’s production of The Hollow, directed by Hubert Gregg, a well-known actor in light comedy but then an inexperienced director. The play opened in Cambridge at the beginning of February. Agatha had been anxious because Peter Saunders wished to produce it as a thriller: ‘Don’t like this …“Whodunnit” publicity,’ she told Cork. She was also worried about the author’s photographs. ‘Which one is it of me?… I won’t have them using pictures I have not seen or authorised. Rub it in!’ She was unable to attend the first night of the provincial tour, but arranged from Iraq for flowers to be delivered to ‘my actresses … something rather exotic for Jeanne de Casalis’ (who played Lady Angkatell) ‘and probably tulips of different colours for the others.’ She was nervous: ‘Oh dear, I hope it will be a success. I do think it is a good cast and well produced and I want it to be a success. The omens are good since it opens on St Agatha’s Day. A candle for St Agatha.’

  Peter Saunders cabled Agatha to say that the play was a hit and Cork confirmed this by air-mail, adding, however, that during the first night’s performance he had been afraid that ‘the drama might be sunk by the comedy’, particularly as Jeanne de Casalis had made the most of a part suited to ‘a natural droll’. At a six-hour conference afterwards, he, Saunders and Gregg had discussed remedies, with the result, he assured Agatha, that on the following night ‘there were no unexpected laughs and it seemed to have already got a nice balance’. ‘How maddening that I can’t see it,’ she replied. ‘It’s just got to be running in London in May.’ Saunders pleased her greatly by sending regular cables reporting the play’s progress. It proved difficult to find a suitable West End theatre but he eventually managed to secure the Fortune Theatre, starting in the first week in June. The play was taken off for a few weeks after its provincial tour, slightly recast, and brought back first to the Fortune and then to the Ambassadors. It ran in London for eleven months altogether, so Agatha was able to see it after all.

  Saunders was in favour, Bertie Meyer out. Cork, however, now reported that Meyer wished to hold them to the arrangement that ‘because of old associations’ he should put Towards Zero on the stage, if he could adapt it. Meyer had sent the play to Gerald Verner, who supplied something unobjectionable; in fact, Cork ventured, ‘we think it is damn good.’ Agatha sportingly replied, ‘I must hand it to Bertie Meyer for sticking to it!!’ Nothing, in fact, happened, nor was to happen for another five years.

  Agatha thoroughly approved of Peter Saunders. He was keen and knew she liked to be kept well-informed; he was deferential when suggesting amendments and understood how to flatter. Most important, he seemed to care about Agatha’s work as much as she did herself, believing her plays to be highly entertaining, even if he did not see them as vehicles for important statements. Furthermore, Saunders was full of ingenious ideas for attracting publicity. Agatha had always been upset when her work was insufficiently publicised in bookshops; she liked her publishers and producers to be visibly proud of it and, while she shrank from publicity herself – and had occasional qualms about some of Saunders’s more exotic notions – she welcomed his efforts. Disliking self-advertisement, she would nonetheless fall in with his schemes – perhaps because he could cajole her, possibly because somehow the theatre and everything associated with it was in a way unreal.

  There was one sadness at the beginning of 1951. A month after Agatha and Max arrived in Baghdad, they had heard from Philip Mallowan, a schoolmaster in Surr
ey and the younger of Max’s two brothers, that Agatha’s mother-in-law was not expected to live much longer than a fortnight. Her health had been poor for some time but when the Mallowans had left England they thought she had been suffering only from exhaustion after bronchitis – ‘if I’d known I’d have stayed,’ Agatha wrote to Cork. Cecil Mallowan was also abroad. In fact, Marguerite had incurable cancer. Moved to a nursing home, she asked to be taken home. Agatha arranged for nurses and for flowers to be sent twice a week. ‘I imagine she will be kept under sedatives most of the time,’ she wrote to Cork, ‘but she does love flowers.’ Agatha was also very anxious that Mrs Mallowan should have an advance copy of They Came to Baghdad; ‘If you could get hold of one and have it delivered … at once, I think it would be a great pleasure to her. Not that she can read it – but every time I went to see her she asked me for it and said, ‘I can’t wait. I want it now.’ Before Marguerite could return home, however, she died quickly and peacefully. It was a great shock to Max. Fortunately there was much to do at Nimrud.

  They were so busy that spring that there was hardly time for writing. Agatha had, however, left behind two typescripts: Mrs McGinty’s Dead and They Do It with Mirrors. Hughes Massie sent corrected copies out to Nimrud with Robert Hamilton; ‘I still feel a glow of gratitude,’ Cork wrote to Agatha, ‘for your producing all those manuscripts out of the blue.’ ‘Mrs McGinty’s Dead’ was the name of a children’s game, unknown in the United States, where the phrase caused some perplexity, but Collins were delighted: ‘It’s like a breath of fresh air,’ they told Agatha, in rather an odd simile, ‘to get away from the old blood, murder and death formulas of our title pages.’ There was, on the other hand, an argument about the jacket. Mrs McGinty, an old woman apparently done to death by her lodger, was hit on the head ‘with something rather in the nature of a meat chopper with a very sharp edge’. The weapon turned out to be a sugar hammer, or, as Agatha called it in her letter to Cork, a sugar cutter, and it was this she wanted on the jacket, photographing her own as a sample.

  The ideas in this book are familiar – the complexities of relations between mothers and daughters, the burden the innocent carry until the guilty are identified, and, as in many of Agatha’s other stories, the importance of visual clues, in this case provided by old photographs. Mrs McGinty’s Dead is in some respects a gruesome book, as a later jacket designer, Tom Adams, perceived when he chose to paint a large bluebottle hovering malevolently over what could be discerned, just, as Mrs McGinty’s dead body. Even the title was too unappetising for Woman’s Journal, which was to serialise the book in Britain. They wanted to change it to something more innocuous; Agatha wrote scathingly to Cork, ‘I really think WJ shouldn’t take murder stories if they funk labelling them as such. “Just like Mrs McGinty” doesn’t seem to make any sense, as the second murder doesn’t take place until halfway through the book. Why not put “Mrs McGinty” or something weak like “A Condemned Man” or “The Paying Guest”?’ Agatha dedicated Mrs McGinty’s Dead to Peter Saunders, ‘in gratitude for his kindness to authors’.

  They Do It with Mirrors, the second mystery Agatha left for Cork in 1951, also alluded to the theme of maternal love and to the possessiveness which, Agatha believed, was even more strongly felt by women, not themselves mothers, towards children for whom they assumed responsibility. It took up, too, another thought which had always interested her, the nature of reality and illusion. Part of the story deals with preparations for the production of a play (The Nile at Sunset) by the various inhabitants of a school for rehabilitating juvenile delinquents. In Agatha’s description, not only are some of these children confused about their identity and motivation, but the adults who look after them are for the most part equally muddled, though to themselves their theories and objectives are crystal clear. ‘The illusion is in the eye of the beholder,’ as one of the characters, a theatrical designer, says. His remarks give Miss Marple the clue to solving the mystery. The theatricality of the crime has bemused them all: ‘This is a stage scene,’ she realises, ‘only cardboard and canvas and wood.’ Miss Marple sees how illusion is created: ‘Bowls of goldfish, yards of coloured ribbon … vanishing ladies … all the panoply and misdirection of the conjuror’s art.’ Agatha, so cunning at misleading her readers, constructing a narrative to convey distracting information, spoke here through Miss Marple, and in this novel again revealed her fascination with the suspension of disbelief that can be produced on the stage. ‘They do it with mirrors’ is an expression used to explain how magicians perform their sleight of hand. It is also an apt phrase to describe Agatha’s work; much of it concerned mirrors, looking glasses, window panes, which, like the rivers she loved and by which she lived, refracted as well as reflected. A pity, then, that in America They Do It with Mirrors was considered too puzzling a title and Murder with Mirrors used instead. It completely missed the point.

  Agatha’s affection for Peter Saunders was in part for a fellow-illusionist, an ingenious theatrical producer who was also skilled at attracting attention by tricks of publicity – anniversary parties, special performances, press stories about the cast – in which the quickness of the hand deceived the eye. In the summer of 1951 she finished a piece of work which was to give his gift for advertisement its fullest scope, the adaptation for the stage of her story Three Blind Mice. The original radio play of 1947, which had been very short, had since been a great success in America, and Agatha had been pursued by American film companies for the rights, though she had not permitted Cork to negotiate. Now she expanded the play, calling it The Mousetrap, a title supplied by Rosalind’s husband Anthony. On seeing the play, Saunders was delighted. He declared that, if he could find a theatre, it would be produced in 1952. Agatha, pleased, asked Cork to look out another effort, an old play adapted from The Secret of Chimneys, which, she reminded him, ‘was going to be done at the Embassy’ and was ‘all about oil concessions’. This had never been produced. Cork, however, put that script aside, pressing rather for another ‘Mary Westmacott’. Agatha promised that something would be coming but, apart from the book based on A Daughter’s a Daughter, there was to be nothing more from that author for a year or two. Instead, she sent for copies of the American edition of ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ and brooded about dramatising that.

  Summer and autumn were happy. American sales of They Came to Baghdad outstripped those of any of Agatha’s previous books. She was chosen by the readers of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in what Frank Dodd reported to be an international poll, as one of the ‘ten greatest living mystery writers’, or, rather, ‘ten greatest active mystery writers’, the criterion being changed at the last minute to exclude Dorothy L. Sayers, ostensibly because she now wrote largely about religion, but actually to conceal the organisers’ embarrassment at disqualifying Dashiell Hammett, jailed on charges of sympathising with Communism. It took some months for Agatha to receive her prize, a small wooden plaque from which was suspended an antique pistol, which the United States Post Office refused to accept for mailing, on the grounds that, ‘even theoretically’, it could be fired. They did agree to dispatch another item marking Agatha’s apotheosis; ‘squares of yellow muslin,’ she told Cork derisively, ‘for me to sign and send back to be incorporated in a quilt! Object, a Mothers’ Milk Bank!!! I do think Americans phrase things unfortunately! I long to write back and say I thought it was a most indelicate idea – and one which I believed was only practised in Soviet Russia!!’ To have been charged with such an un-American activity would indeed have shocked the matrons proposing it.

  In 1952 the Mallowans returned to Iraq, for what was to be, as Max described it, the expedition’s annus mirabilis. A month after they arrived King George VI died in London. Agatha and Max took part in the memorial service in Baghdad, ‘all the Iraqi Cabinet attending and a procession of Sheikhs signing the book at the Embassy. All my clothes are unfortunately rather lurid,’ Agatha told Cork, ‘and I have to wear my one black dress in all weathers.’ This year there was
no difficulty in finding a typewriter, ‘they seem to be flowing in Baghdad … so I have bought myself a portable Royal which I like very much – and which I hope will encourage me to be industrious.’ In fact she did little writing that spring, managing only to provide a new ending for A Daughter’s a Daughter, ‘less sloppy, I think.’

  The exploration of Nimrud’s wells was not her sole distraction, for there was an interminable correspondence with Cork about a crisis at home. Agatha had engaged someone to oversee the gardener and two boys who looked after the struggling market garden at Greenway. In 1952 the new supervisor took up her post and immediately – and ominously – began bombarding Hughes Massie with requests for helpful literature – books about commercial glass-house crops, and the like. ‘So far, she seems rather zealous,’ was all Cork needed to report to Agatha in Iraq. Three weeks later, while on holiday in the South of France, he was summoned home: the supervisor, depressed by her failure to organise the gardeners and, it later turned out, to forecast winning horses, had tried to do away with herself, the police had called Rosalind and Anthony from Wales, while Agatha’s butler and housekeeper had decided to emigrate to Australia. Rosalind and Anthony searched for a new gardener, ‘preferably married to a treasure’; Cork dealt with a torrent of bills. The crux of the situation, however, was, as he wrote to Agatha, the whole future of the market gardening scheme. This was his first and only visit to Greenway (for he observed to the end Hughes Massie’s advice about keeping a distance from his authors) and he was astonished at its extent and expense. ‘The freshness and graciousness of everything was a dream,’ he assured Agatha, ‘but it is a big expensive dream, which increasing costs have made extremely difficult to carry on.’ Agatha’s staff had as their only object the supply of whatever she liked, rather than growing for the market: ‘There is an exceptional crop of peaches and they are almost ecstatic as to how much you will enjoy them – Excuse this digression, but it does illustrate the conflict of viewpoint.…’ At least mushrooms were showing signs of life and could be sold locally. Heroic efforts by Rosalind, Anthony and Cork, however, saved the garden; a new man was hired; Mr Heaven, the new accountant, managed to put matters on a footing that would satisfy the Revenue; and, by the end of 1952, Agatha was able to tell Cork that ‘the garden looks wonderful. All bursting with plants and lettuces, etc. It really does look professional at last.’