Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  One venture was her play Rule of Three, tried out in Aberdeen at the end of 1962. Cork sent bulletins to Persepolis, which Agatha was enjoying with Max (‘cool nights, hot sun, glorious ruins …’) Of the plays that made up the trilogy, two had pleased the audience, Afternoon at the Seaside being, he reported, ‘an absolute riot’ and The Rats needing only some tightening to convey its ‘claustrophobic sense of horror’. The Patient, the last of the three, presented more serious difficulties. It concerned the identification of the would-be murderer of a woman, pushed from a balcony and now heavily bandaged, completely paralysed and unable to speak (a sort of ‘Dressmaker’s Doll’). The play ended with a policeman telling the murderer to emerge from behind a screen and at that point, as the curtain fell, Agatha’s recorded voice was heard asking the audience whom they believed the murderer to be. This device was a flop. ‘By and large,’ Cork informed Agatha: ‘it looks as if the customers are there for easy entertainment, and are inclined to resent the riddle.…’ Backstage conferences persuaded Peter Saunders to try another version, with a recorded voice directing the audience’s attention to two clues and thus the indisputable solution. This, too, failed, and after much cabling Agatha agreed that simplicity was preferable; the murderer appeared.

  Agatha came home to poor reviews of Rule of Three, which played in London for only two months, but to the better news that in the early months of 1963 The Mirror Crack’d had been a best seller. So stimulated, she told Cork, ‘I have written the first chapter of Agatha Christie’s next masterpiece.’ This was to be The Clocks. Her notes drew together two ideas now running strongly in her thoughts, awareness of the passage of time and of events being conveyed through pictures as much as words. Though doubtless stirred by old age and current experience, these perceptions were not new. In 1930, writing to Max about The Mysterious Universe, Agatha had wondered whether ‘time might be like a cinema film run backwards, so that to us life has no sequence or meaning, because until we see to the beginning we can’t see.…’In other letters she had explored the theory, fashionable in the early ‘fifties, that the narrative conventions of the stage and cinema interpreted ‘reality’ in a way quite different from literary methods.

  ‘Speculation – only,’ Agatha now put in her notebook: ‘A. Clocks represent a time that corresponds to houses in crescent. B. Braille in some way comes into it (Secret Service angle?) Documents taken out … photographed during lunch hour etc. Their hiding place is a stippled picture. Dots really are raised and can be felt.’ Her variants reflected other preoccupations: the way in which simply effected physical transformations can mislead, the ease with which stimulation of one sense distracts attention from signals intended for another. Her notes alluded both to events that touched her directly, like the translation of her work into Braille, and the larger world: there are references to the espionage case concerning William Vassall, convicted the previous autumn. The dedication of The Clocks, finished in May 1963, commemorated less serious pursuits; the book was for Mario Galloti, the patron at the Caprice, ‘with happy memories of delicious food’.

  The remainder of 1963 was bedevilled by an argument with MGM. Larry Bachmann had bravely proposed that Agatha complete and adapt for the screen another Dickens novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a commission she firmly declined. Next, MGM proposed to make a screenplay of Murder on the Orient Express. Agatha vehemently objected. That book, she told Cork, ‘took a lot of careful planning and technique and to have it possibly transformed into a rollicking farce with Miss Marple injected into it and probably acting as the engine driver, though great fun, no doubt, would be somewhat harmful to my reputation!’

  Her fears had been increased by MGM’s recently released adaptation of After the Funeral, in which Poirot had been replaced by Miss Marple, who was then shown joining a riding academy in order to investigate the death of an elderly recluse. Agatha had found Murder at the Gallop, as the film was called, ‘incredibly silly’ and complained to Bachmann about ‘these travesties!’ Unpalatable though Murder, She Said had been, she recognised that MGM had the right to adapt fairly freely, and that the first film had at least ‘satisfied basic requirements’ as to setting and plot. Margaret Rutherford, while ‘not much like Miss Marple’, gave an enjoyable performance; ‘Whether I liked it or not,’ she declared bravely, ‘was my headache!’ But with Murder at the Gallop, she considered that MGM had gone too far. Not only was the book ‘a Poirot one’ and Margaret Rutherford ludicrously unlike Miss Marple, but MGM’s alterations had caused great difficulty about acknowledgements to the original story, let alone the publishers’ publicity campaign for further editions of After the Funeral. Agatha was dreading, she confessed, what MGM would do in Murder Most Foul. (‘Can you imagine a triter title?’) to be adapted from Mrs McGinty’s Dead, one of her favourite books.

  In the meantime Agatha sought refuge in drafting A Caribbean Mystery, transporting Miss Marple to the fictitious island of St Honoré. Her island was a composite; some features were remembered from Barbados, where she had noticed an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair, on whom she built the character of Mr Rafiel, who was to figure again in Nemesis. A book about the birds and flowers of Tobago provided further ideas, and recollections of people she had seen on another holiday gave the essence of the plot: ‘Rhodes, lovely siren – her husband divorced. Dark, cynical. Little brown mouse, nice little woman, wife. Plain. Stupid husband. Dark husband really has liaison with mouse.… Or a quartet. Friends. One pair appears very devoted. One day wife confides they never speak to each other in private. Husband (to girl) says wonderful life together (which is lying?).’ Agatha’s notes now had more reminders to herself (‘look up datura poisoning … And re-read Cretan Bull’) and she had begun, as the old do, to remember the distant past more clearly than yesterday. Major Palgrave, for instance, resembled Belcher, and their ‘stories … picked up in the course of travel’ were not unalike. Provisionally the book was called ‘Shadow in Sunlight’; Agatha had tired of the struggle to spell ‘Caribbean’.

  Max, too, had been writing steadily and in December 1963 Nimrud and Its Remains was finished. He had severe ’flu in the winter but Agatha managed to carry him off to Upper Egypt in the New Year, sending Cork a merry letter in February: ‘I’m sitting in the sun feeling placid as a sacred cow.’ It was a deceptively calm beginning to a difficult year.

  1964 began with a thundering row with MGM. Murder Most Foul turned out to be as appalling as Agatha had feared, with Poirot again transformed into Miss Marple, this time a member of a jury. Mrs McGinty, originally a charwoman, had become an actress and a blackmailer. Cork warned Collins, who were considering how Agatha’s books might be marketed to take advantage of the associated publicity, that she believed the films a source of great danger ‘in imposing their image of Marple and Poirot on a faithful public’. Billy Collins, embarrassed at having first introduced Bachmann to Agatha, agreed not to use any stills on the wrappers of soft-cover editions of her books, nor to mention the connection beyond the mere fact that a film had been made. An ‘Agatha Christie Fortnight’ was planned for early May, when some ten million paperbacks would be put into the shops. Although this would coincide with the release of Murder Most Foul, Collins promised to do their best to ignore the coincidence.

  Worse was to come. Agatha learnt of MGM’s plans for another film, even now being made. This was Murder Ahoy!, in which Miss Marple was to enquire into murder and blackmail on a training ship in the Royal Navy. It was not based on one of Agatha’s own plots and, if anything, this outraged her more than the previous distortions. Larry Bachmann tried to mollify her; ‘Soft words butter no parsnips,’ she answered spiritedly. Rosalind, discouraged and upset, felt the family and Cork had let her mother down by concluding the MGM deal. She wrote a strong letter to Cork. Agatha registered extreme disapproval; she was particularly upset because ‘all this Murder Ahoy business’ had been sprung upon her, having been advanced hitherto only as a suggestion. Next she learnt that shooting would begin in
a fortnight. Despite her protests, MGM insisted on proceeding. To Agatha this violated her integrity as an author. She explained that ‘to have one’s characters incorporated in somebody else’s film seems to me monstrous and highly unethical’.

  MGM’s next plan horrified Agatha – and Rosalind – still more. This was to be an adaptation of The ABC Murders, in which, according to advance announcements, it seemed Poirot’s character was to be vastly changed. ‘Do MGM really think this kind of publicity is good for a film?’ Agatha asked Cork. ‘They needn’t have [Poirot]. I’d far rather they didn’t – and if their director hates him and everything about him, why not cut him out and make up one of their own?… One thing I will not have – H.P. turned into some sort of gorilla or private eye – and a lot of violence and brutality. This is a matter of principle with me. I loathe the tough kind of thriller and I think it has done untold harm. Possibly nothing like that is contemplated. But one never knows. They do so adore it in the USA. Anyway, if people have liked Poirot for about forty years as an ego-centric creep they would probably prefer him to go on that way.’

  MGM were shaken by Cork’s reports. They cancelled a contract with Zero Mostel, whom they had intended to play Poirot, and Agatha was assured that the screenplay would be rewritten. The contract with MGM was terminated. (The studio maintained that the focus of their interests had changed.) George Pollock, who had directed their three ‘Miss Marple’ films, did produce Ten Little Indians for Seven Arts Films in 1965, but otherwise that was that. In 1967, when other approaches were made, Agatha told Cork emphatically: ‘Don’t talk to me about film rights!! It always makes my blood boil.… My own feeling remains the same. I have suffered enough!’

  The end of 1964 brought some cheer. Collins asked whether they might publish ‘Star over Bethlehem’ the following Christmas, proposing illustrations and a jacket that, for once, Agatha found ‘exactly right’. During the winter and spring she concentrated on her next mystery, an adventure for Miss Marple based on such a skilfully and enjoyably plotted conceit that it suggested that Agatha took great pleasure in it. Her notes for At Bertram’s Hotel began, not with archetypal characters, but an archetypal place (for anthropologists. ‘an Ur-Hotel’): ‘Real bit of old England.… Edwardian comfort.…“Only get muffins at Bertrams”).’ It is a marvellous idea, another way of exploring the distinction between real and created worlds. The hotel is a fake, the respectable characters theatrical props. But are they any more artificial than their ‘real’ fellow-guests? ‘Film stars. Pop singers. Rich woman, ran away with Irish groom. Racing driver’, and, a stray from a draft made years before, ‘Frog-faced old Major’. Only Miss Marple moves easily between the two worlds, noticing discrepancies.

  Agatha’s device also gently reproached those who criticised her books for being filled with ‘stock characters’, illustrating more directly than any of its predecessors that people in fact conceive of the world as being full of stock characters and that this can be exploited. So tidily, for instance, did Agatha’s portrait of the adolescent Elvira fit the notion of a rebellious, spoilt teenager, that Good Housekeeping, which was to serialise the story in America, asked her to amend the text so that the girl seemed ‘salvageable’. And so skilfully did Agatha describe the atmosphere and situation of ‘Bertram’s Hotel’ that for years readers believed they could identify it. Charles Osborne, for instance, has declared it ‘an open secret’ that the model was Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. In fact, in so far as there was a model, it was Fleming’s Hotel. Before the book was sent to Collins, Cork and Agatha between them ensured that any similarities were blurred. ‘I have altered Crescent Street to Square Street,’ Cork told Agatha, and together they changed the name of the manager from Capello, ‘too similar to Manetta, who is the real proprietor.…’

  Putting the book together was not easy, with its intricate juggling between the real and the contrived. Agatha was now skating on the surface of actual memories – Miss Marple at the Army and Navy Stores, the Canon’s amnesia, a train slowing in the night, a Morris teetering through the lanes. Like Canon Pennefather, she met herself. ‘I have never liked fog,’ says Miss Marple, as it comes down over London, obscuring the everyday – or apparently everyday – pattern of things, yet distorting and highlighting people and their surroundings so they are differently perceived. It was a remarkable book for an old lady of seventy-five (the age now given for Miss Marple) and the public immediately took to it. Published on November 15th, At Bertram’s Hotel had already sold 50,000 copies by the end of December.

  Both Max and Agatha were particularly happy that Christmas. ‘Star over Bethlehem’ was well received and Agatha was actually pleased at the number of requests for copies to be autographed. Nimrud and Its Remains was ready for publication. They spent the holiday at Pwllywrach, enjoying a pile of books from Billy Collins. ‘I am beginning at the Low Brow end,’ wrote Agatha, ‘which is all I am fit for on my super diet of LOTS of Turkey, Plum Pudding, Preserved Fruits and Marrons Glacés!’ She sent Cork an additional Christmas present in 1965: ‘I hope you won’t blanch too much at what I am unloading upon you! And there will be a further instalment to come, but I feel I must get rid of this now.’ It was the dictated draft of part of her memoirs – ‘not a finished product, of course. Lots will have to be cut – but I don’t feel I have the discrimination at the moment. It is really the available material from which to choose.’ When Agatha’s Autobiography was eventually published, after her death, the introduction explained that she had written it at intervals between 1950 and 1965. In fact the story was more complicated. She certainly kept notes and occasional diaries during that time but, until the beginning of 1962, she had considered using these for nothing more than a short book or books – perhaps something about Nimrud, like Come, Tell Me How You Live, or a piece about her childhood. Many people wrote to Agatha asking for permission to write an ‘authorised life’; in February 1962, for instance, she asked Cork to answer one applicant by making it clear that: ‘I have no wish for a biography of myself or anyone else – I write books to be sold and I hope people will enjoy them but I think people should be interested in books and not their authors!’

  As she aged, her attitude changed – but only slightly. Three years later, in February 1965, she told Cork: ‘Someone writes to me every week wanting to write my biography – and I turn them down as I am not dead yet – and none of these people know anything about me personally.’ Now, at the end of 1965, she said: ‘I am delighted that if I die, everything is ready for me to be first in the field with my own life, cutting the ground from under the feet of others!’ For she now recognised that there would be others. In an interview with Francis Wyndham, published in the Sunday Times in 1966, an autobiography was mentioned. It is not clear how the interview was pieced together from what was presumably a rambling conversation but Agatha is reported as saying of her own book: ‘If anybody writes about my life in tne future, I’d rather they got the facts right.’

  The draft Cork received was stronger on impressions and reminiscence than on facts. ‘I have purposely made it informal,’ Agatha declared. The chronology followed that of her notes, beginning with ‘Ashfield’ and ‘Father and Mother, happy marriage’, taking the draft up to the chapter describing her parting from Archie. One notebook had a list of ‘questions to ask Cork’ and special points were noted: ‘Find out date Monty’s death,’ ‘Verify dates of publication – Mary Westmacott etc.,’ ‘Ask Edmund for dates of plays produced.’ Other thoughts were grouped under: ‘Some Items’: ‘A. Barter, Soup incident; “not part with information …”; B. Reading – Henty. Charlotte Yonge …; C. Prince of Wales laying Foundation stone of Naval College …; D. Boer War. Attitude. White Feathers …; E. Father’s Health …;F. New York … Ealing, My Grandmother’s Sundays.…’

  Once Agatha had the outline, she dictated swiftly, vividly recalling her childhood and youth. The most difficult part, the events of 1926, came out halting and troubled, so indistinct that her dictation could not be transcr
ibed. The rest, from ‘Second Spring’ to the end, was easy. It took longer than the week or two Agatha promised Cork, but at the end of 1966 it was ready. She was enthusiastic: ‘A suggestion, an appendix, possibly giving a short selection of fan letters, some of the funny ones, some of the touching ones etc. And perhaps the first story I wrote might be of interest.’ Now she said: ‘I shall break to Rosalind what I have been at! I imagine she has an idea.’ Agatha suggested that three copies of the autobiography should be typed, ‘one for you, one for Rosalind, one for me.… Then we could compare notes and see how you both react.’

  Agatha may have been stirred into sending Cork her draft by an interview she had given at Swan Court in December 1965 to an American friend of Phelps Platt, the President of Dodd, Mead. Gordon Ramsey, who taught at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts, proposed to write not a biography but, according to Phelps Platt, an evaluation of Agatha’s work. That, she told Cork, ‘I leave to you. I am quite indifferent.’ Ramsey was true to his word, confining his remarks about Agatha’s own life to one short chapter in Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery, which Dodd, Mead published in 1967, and Collins in 1972. Agatha cooperated cheerfully at first, seeing Ramsey at Swan Court and Greenway, passing on to Cork innumerable detailed questions about her books. Eventually even she tired. She was particularly unhappy with enquiries about the two unpublished detective stories she had written during the War. ‘Why should anyone know in advance anything about a book that belongs to someone else?’ she asked, reminding Cork that not even Max or Rosalind knew the plots of the Marple and Poirot books. Ramsey respected her wishes by refraining from mentioning ‘the final Poirot and final Marple’, although Francis Wyndham’s article had in fact alluded to them both.

  Agatha was testy partly because she was worn out. It had been a bad winter, ‘nothing but domestic worries and dashing up and down to Devon in icy weather and all our roof at Wallingford more or less slipping into the back yard. What bliss 3 good servants in a small house would be nowadays. No wonder Pakistanis pity English women so deeply – they enjoy Purdah and sit in rich jewels being waited on!’ A trip to Paris with Max in January 1966 was not a complete success. Always worried about money, Max had written to Cork complaining about the price of the room at the Ritz – £18 for bed and breakfast – and, compared with the Bristol, its ‘mauvais style’. In March Agatha had greatly enjoyed but had been tired by a party Collins gave to celebrate the completion of Nimrud. Now she became unusually difficult over invitations to mark the increasing success of her own books. When her publishers proposed a collected edition of her work, she reminded Cork of her earlier objections to their typeface (particularly The Clocks) and of her half-joking remarks to Billy about the superiority of the firm’s writing paper to that of their publications. ‘A distinguished collected edition I consider most desirable – but Collins must make print and paper good and definitely high class!!’ Though ironical, she was pleased, however, with ‘the butter about the literary recognition of my high quality work!!’ The overall title for the collection was, after much pondering, to be ‘The Greenway Edition’. Agatha disapproved: ‘Not as though I’d lived here all my life.’ Throughout the spring of 1966 there were discussions about presentation and in April Agatha lunched at Collins to discuss design. There was to be no photograph of her on the jacket but it would carry a small distinguishing device, a sign of three interlinked fish. It resembled a design Agatha had seen in Baalbek, on her expeditions to the bazaars in the 1930s. Some believed it was a scribble Agatha herself made when she was preoccupied but this was not so. Max was the one who drew, always pots, some of which decorate Agatha’s plotting books. Her play was with words, trifles of codes and word games, parodies and foolish verses. The person who did idly draw three intertwined fish was a victim in ‘The House of Lurking Death’, in Partners in Crime. Agatha reproduced the device for the Greenway Edition and was pleased when Phelps Platt gave her a silver brooch in that pattern.