Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Anthony, Rosalind and Mathew spent part of every summer at Greenway. Agatha had great pleasure in watching her grandson growing up. He was at Elstree, a preparatory school in Berkshire, and during term she would drive over from Wallingford to take him out for picnics. She sent him each of her stories as soon as they were published; vetted first by the staff, they were returned to Mathew well-thumbed. Max tried to teach Mathew cuneiform script, and he and Agatha encouraged his liking for cricket. In the summer Gowler spent hours bowling to him at the nets – and doing conjuring tricks, at which he was an expert. (Gowler was not, however, omnicompetent; he invariably failed to take the prize at Brixham for ‘A Salad’, despite his artistic pipings of mayonnaise, coming second even in the year when his was the only entry.)

  Greenway was the model for the setting of the book Agatha wrote that autumn in Wallingford, Dead Man’s Folly, in which an agitated Mrs Oliver summons Poirot to a local fête, for which she has arranged a ‘murder hunt’ at which someone is indeed killed. The book has much of Greenway, from the Battery to the boathouse, the long grassy slope leading to the ‘top gardens’, and a nearby youth hostel like that abutting on Agatha’s own land (from which errant hikers would sometimes wander into the garden, gazing dumbstruck through the tall windows at the family’s full-dress Sunday luncheon). Agatha was often asked to lend the garden for fêtes and was inundated with requests, always declined, to open others. She delighted in arranging treasure hunts for Mathew, for John and Peter, sons of her brother-in-law Cecil, and for the children of the diplomatic and archaeological friends who stayed at Greenway. All this was woven into a sprightly story that begins sunnily but ends grimly. Agatha’s preoccupation with wigs also has an airing, in the shape of Mrs Oliver’s postiche and other people’s changes of headgear.

  Another novel was drafted at Nimrud in the first months of 1955, Hickory, Dickory Dock. It was the last whose title was derived from a nursery rhyme, although Agatha had an exercise book full of other ideas: ‘Ding Dong Bell, Pussy’s in the Well – An old maid murdered; One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Catching Fishes all Alive – Mrs C has daughter by first husband (bad lot) … Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How does your garden grow?… Flowers on each body – viola, pansy’. Some of these plots she later used. The story is set in a hostel for students owned by a ‘Mrs Nicoletis’; Agatha’s picture was sufficiently realistic to provoke a Mr Nicoletis to write when the book was published, alleging that she had libelled his mother, who claimed to remember Agatha as a guest in her own pension. ‘I invented the name,’ Agatha expostulated to Cork. ‘I’m sure it’s all nonsense … If this is supposed to have happened in France, I’ve certainly never stayed in a hostel for students of any kind.… When I was with my mother, we always stayed at the Hotel d’Iéna and of later years it’s always been Hotels round about the rue de Rivoli, and the dear Bristol.’ (Agatha always capitalised ‘Hotels’, along with ‘Bathrooms’, ‘Bathes’, and her favourite food, ‘Caviare’, ‘Ham’, ‘Vol au Vents’, ‘Lobster’, etc.) Agatha added robustly, ‘Mr Nicoletis must just be obsessed by having a disagreeable mother. It’s terrible that if you invent characters they should come out so true to life. Positively uncanny!’

  Agatha gave the royalties from Hickory, Dickory Dock to a trust for her nephews, John and Peter Mallowan, and celebrated its completion by descending on the bazaars and acquiring a silk rug and pictures by Iraqi artists. Otherwise, she admitted, ‘this is a place where my immense natural spending powers have little scope.’ Max was happy, too, for they were digging a promising spot: ‘Boxes and boxes of winged genii and devils to avert evil are coming up,’ Agatha told Cork, ‘and yesterday a large something of broken ivory and charred wood appeared!’ The weather, however, turned stormy and at the end of March she caught a chill so severe that she was taken to hospital at Mosul. She recovered by Easter, apologising for the grumpy letters she had sent and attributing the ‘backwash of bad temper’ to ‘strepto-chloro etc. mycetins killing my amiability’. Her cure had been accelerated by Cork’s sending exactly the book to appeal to her, the exposure as a forgery of the ‘prehistoric’ skull of the so-called Piltdown Man: ‘What a wonderful hoax the whole thing was!’ she wrote ecstatically.

  Equally stimulating was Cork’s telegram to say that the Queen was to attend a special performance of Witness for the Prosecution at the Windsor Repertory Theatre. The play continued to flourish and, when Agatha returned to England in May 1955, Cork told her that it had also encouraged a flood of requests for dramatic rights to her other work, applications he continued to decline on her behalf. All Agatha’s theatrical ventures were prospering. It began to seem as if Peter Saunders might at last extract Towards Zero from Bertie Meyer, while the legal wrangling over the American rights to The Hollow had entered a headier realm with the death in December of their American bugbear, Lee Shubert. Though The Mousetrap had begun to flag in February, after Richard Attenborough’s engagement ended, Saunders thought it worth keeping on for the thousandth performance, since only fourteen plays in the history of the British theatre had run as long. He primed his press agent, issuing a commemorative silk programme, free of charge, to every member of the audience on that night. Business shot up. Saunders wrote in rapture to Agatha – but the letter went astray: ‘Envelope arrived with nothing in it, marked No Contents,’ she told Cork. ‘Tell him less silk programmes and more licking of envelope flaps!’

  Letters poured in from admirers and entrepreneurs. Did Agatha prefer to be called Mrs or Miss Christie? (Mrs Christie.) Would she contribute to a book of favourite dishes of famous people? (No.) Might the BBC take television pictures of Greenway? (No.) Would she take part in a BBC programme called Frankly Speaking? (‘One, I think,’ Cork advised, ‘you should turn down in person.’) The BBC had for some time been hoping to make a programme about Agatha. In 1953 they had invited her to take part in a new programme called Panorama, ‘to sit in an armchair’ and be ‘gently interviewed’. Cork had told the producer: ‘I am afraid Mrs Christie feels she would definitely not like to appear on television, under any circumstances whatever. She is, as I told you, very shy, and she hates publicity of any kind, so I fear there is nothing more we can do.’ In February 1955, nonetheless, the BBC put out a radio programme Close-Up, written by Gale Pedrick, with contributions from a number of Agatha’s friends and colleagues. She was not pleased.

  Her relations with the BBC were not always prickly. Though Agatha distrusted television, she liked working for the wireless and with one producer in particular, Martyn Webster. At the end of 1955 he produced a play she had written, based on one of her favourite phrases from the Bible, Butter in a Lordly Dish. This macabre drama, which lasted an hour, told the story of Sir Luke Enderby, K.C., a distinguished barrister and a womaniser. Sir Luke, it appeared, had persuaded the Court to hang an innocent man, a death horribly avenged, for he was destroyed much as Jael destroyed Sisera, when, having brought him ‘butter in a lordly dish’, she hammered a nail into his forehead. Luckily Agatha was able to provide only sound effects.

  In September 1955 Agatha and Max celebrated their silver wedding. Billy Collins made his first visit to Greenway: ‘Black tie for the celebrations and the bathing is still nice and warm,’ Agatha told him. Cork could not come but sent a silver candlestick: ‘But no chopper fortunately to chop off our heads,’ said Agatha speculatively. Last-minute problems were turned to advantage: ‘Some of the guests had gastric flu and we had domestic help trouble. Result – LOTS of Caviare!!’

  Agatha could also celebrate the fact that she was well ahead of her commitments. Not only was Dead Man’s Folly ready for 1956 but since the spring of 1955 she had been working, ‘at an Oriental pace’, on a new ‘Mary Westmacott’. ‘There are a good many tentative Christian names, she told Cork. ‘I can’t start writing till I can get names that I feel fit.’ This novel became The Burden. Agatha had settled from the start on its theme: ‘Two sisters – Elder loving and possessive, determined that the younger one shall be happy.’ She
added a maxim which she often cited: ‘Take what you want, and pay for it, says God.’ As she worked on the novel at Winterbrook in the autumn, Agatha developed this metaphor: ‘Sometimes you haven’t the right currency. And then someone else has to pay.’

  From the beginning Agatha was certain of one of the novel’s central notions, the conjunctions between separate lives, the way in which each can be affected by coincidence or deliberate meddling. Her proposed titles at this stage were ‘Double Entry’ (remembered from her book-keeping lessons), ‘Cross Reference’, ‘Angles of Attack’, or ‘Point of Interception’. This outline then became entangled with a different plot, taken, interestingly, from Unfinished Portrait. It concerned a small girl, Hazel, sent away from home to live with an aunt – rather as Clara had been sent to live with Margaret. ‘Witch Hazel’ believes (again like Clara) that she has second sight, and her unusual gifts are eventually exploited by an impresario. Though Agatha abandoned that narrative before the dénouement, it provided the basis for the story of the evangelist whose history is, somewhat oddly, entangled with that of the sisters in The Burden. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ Agatha wrote in the middle of her notes for ‘General Projects 1955: M.W.’; it provides the key to this idiosyncratic novel.

  Agatha was able to leave the typescript of The Burden with Cork when she set off for Nimrud at the beginning of 1956. She had become a C.B.E. in the New Year’s Honours List: ‘One up to the Low-Brows!!’ she wrote to Cork from Baghdad, reporting that ‘My social position has risen here a lot. I am asked about exclusively to parties with Ambassadors and Ministers and the Iraq Times has promoted me to a Dame!!’

  Installed at Nimrud, she completed a detective story she had begun in the autumn. This took up a notion that had often crossed her mind and had crept into an early draft of The Burden – of two trains either passing each other in opposite directions or of one train overtaking another. Long ago she had made the note: ‘Man sees girl being strangled in train’ and now she developed it as a new problem for Miss Marple. ‘Train. Coming from London, Reading – passes local – no corridors?… Now – what really happened? Man strangles woman. Her body thrown out of carriage on to embankment or field. Or tunnel? If tunnel, how far from London? Embankment or field his own.…’ So Agatha launched into the story, introducing Mrs McGillicuddy and Lucy Eyelesbarrow, ‘leg man’ for Miss Marple who, like Agatha, found it increasingly difficult to scramble about. (Miss Eyelesbarrow, being exceptionally clever, had recognised that the best-paid posts were to be found in domestic service, thereby illustrating one of Agatha’s most heart-felt lamentations.) There are, as well, some lively small boys in the story, rather like Mathew.

  The title of Agatha’s new mystery had a number of changes. First it was ‘The 4.15 from Paddington’, then ‘The 4.30’, next ‘The 4.50’ and, when Agatha sent her draft to Cork in March 1956, ‘The 4.54’. At Nimrud she consulted Peter Hulin, an epigraphist with a passion for railway trains and timetables, and on his advice fixed upon 4.54, since he assured her that no train left Paddington at that time. Otherwise, she informed Cork: ‘I thought people might write and say “but the 4.40 (or whatever it was) goes to Weston-Super-Mare.”’ Collins found this too clumsy, while Dodd, Mead suggested that American readers might not recognise the station. Exasperated, Agatha offered Cork ‘4.54 from London’ adding that, if they feared another Mr Nicoletis, ‘possibly refer to the Terminus as Padderloo – in case someone lives in a large house surrounded by railway.…’ They settled on The 4.50 from Paddington. Amid all these adjustments, Agatha overlooked the matter of Miss Marple’s age: she now appeared to be ninety. Careful excisions were made and the book was done. ‘It’s lovely to feel I haven’t got to write anything for a good long time!!!’ Agatha told Cork blissfully. ‘Just knit and read!’

  Her next project was the organisation of a visit to America with Max, who had been awarded a gold medal by the University of Pennsylvania. They were to be away for two weeks in May. Cork and Ober satisfied the authorities that Agatha, who had paid thousands of dollars in American tax, would not be a charge on public funds in the United States, while Agatha investigated railway routes – ‘I hate the idea of all this flying’ – and sought out quiet hotels. ‘It will all be very expensive,’ she confessed, ‘but I’ve got to go comfortably at my time of life.’ She thought of travelling by train to Los Angeles, where Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich were filming Witness for the Prosecution, but Ober and Cork between them tried to dissuade her from ‘this crazy idea of flitting over to Hollywood’, and Agatha promised to make ‘other plans for my week of fun’. She was ready, Cork told Ober, to do whatever was necessary or desirable during her last forty-eight hours in New York, but until then she wanted it to be understood that the star of the occasion was Max and that she was going to Philadelphia as Mrs Mallowan.

  Agatha and Max came back from Nimrud earlier than usual in 1956, and after ringing up Cork for what she described as ‘the latest dope’ and having her nails and hair dealt with ‘so as not to alight in New York looking like a savage’, they set off, Agatha arriving, Cork learnt from Ober’s colleague, Dorothy Olding, ‘full of bounce’. After the presentation, Agatha and Max had, according to her postcard, three days’ peace at the Grand Canyon: ‘Am enjoying myself terrifically. In fact couldn’t be enjoying myself more!! Must do this all again!’ She did after all go to Los Angeles; photographs of her and Max were sent to Dorothy Olding by the Swanson office, with a note from Agatha, saying that all was going well with Witness for the Prosecution. ‘We’re all enchanted with her,’ Dorothy reported, and Agatha was just as delighted with America as she had been on her first visit in the ’twenties.

  Greenway was waiting – and work. No interviews, Agatha told Cork, no articles or book reviews: ‘It will take all my time and energy to do the yearly book!!’ There was one ordeal to be faced before she could settle undisturbed to writing, Peter Saunders’s party for The Mousetrap, which on September 13th would have run for 1998 performances, becoming, he proudly announced, the longest-running play in the history of the British theatre. Special programmes were again printed, with a photograph of Agatha (approved by her) on the cover. ‘Am full of nervous apprehension,’ she confided in Cork. ‘However it may be fun? (Very doubtful.)’ With that behind her, Agatha could enjoy Greenway and, towards the end of the autumn, work at a new plot, suggested by Stella Kirwan, who helped Agatha keep her typing and letters in order. She had drawn Agatha’s attention to the story of an Antarctic explorer, who had recently been telling the newspapers about the strangeness of returning home after months without news. Agatha brooded and in October sent Cork a note: ‘I want to know,’ she wrote, ‘from one of our barrister or solicitor advisers, what would happen in a case as follows:

  Young A is charged with the murder of his stepmother, whom he hits on the head. He is tried, convicted and gets life imprisonment. His defence was an alibi: he had been with a certain person, B, a stranger, at the time of the murder. B however could never be found and the thing sounded clearly like a trumped-up story.

  If B reappears and exonerates A, who has by then died in prison, Agatha asked, ‘what would be the position legally? Would a “free pardon” be granted posthumously? What steps, if any, would be taken; also would the police be likely to re-open the case? A has left a family, wife, sisters etc. A word as to this as soon as possible would help me to get to work industriously.’

  The book was to be Ordeal by Innocence, an examination of another of Agatha’s preoccupations: the harm that is done by the guilty not only to the victim of a crime but also to the innocent, suspected themselves and suspecting each other until guilt is clearly assigned. Another familiar theme was the emotional and psychological price exacted by maternal love, particularly that of an adoptive mother. The book was submitted to Collins as The Innocent. Cork suggested the new title, celebrating with Agatha over lunch at the Caprice. The book, which her publishers thought
the best for some years, was dedicated ‘with affection and respect’ to Billy Collins.

  In the middle of her work on Ordeal by Innocence, Agatha produced a short story, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’. ‘Do tell me what you make of it,’ Cork asked Dorothy Olding. ‘She was well on with a new mystery novel when she suddenly felt she had to write this little piece.’ It may be found in two collections, Double Sin, which appeared in America in 1961, and Miss Marple’s Final Cases, published in the United Kingdom in 1979. It had, in fact, nothing to do with Miss Marple, being more weirdly exotic, the sort of story Agatha had written earlier in her career, like those in The Hound of Death. ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ is exactly that, a life-sized doll of ‘velvet and silk and a lick of paint’, lying on the sofa, ‘the Puppet Doll, the whim of Rich Women, who lolls beside the telephone, or among the cushions of the divan’. This doll, however, has an uncanny property of moving about when alone. Otherwise it sits, ‘with an extraordinary naturalness’, looking intelligent, ‘as though she knew something we didn’t’. So unnerving is the doll’s behaviour that eventually the dressmaker throws it from the window, to be claimed by an urchin. Horrified, the dressmaker tries to persuade the child to give up the frightening thing but she carries it away: ‘If you didn’t hate her you wouldn’t have pushed her out of the window. I love her, I tell you, and that’s what she wants.’ The story is so odd and powerful that it may have grown from a fear or a dream, perhaps one of Agatha’s, still reticent, as she had been as a child, but no longer ignored – or it may just be the story of a puppet animated by anxiety to be loved.