Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  The next day Agatha went to Cook’s and changed her tickets. She would take the Orient Express to Stamboul, then go on to Damascus in Syria and finally to Baghdad. Carlo expressed concerns – the East, a woman, unaccompanied? – but for the first time in more than two years Agatha felt alive again. She would travel alone to new worlds. She would dare. Her course was set.

  ‘One of my pet theories (quite unrealisable, of course, that’s the pleasant part about theories) is that everybody should spend one month a year in the middle of a desert . . . With enough to eat and drink, and nothing – absolutely nothing – to do, you’d have, at last, a fairly good chance to make acquaintance with yourself.’

  Thus speaks Laura Whitstable in A Daughter’s a Daughter. Nothing, she says, is more important than that people should know themselves (‘a man should have knowledge of himself and belief in God’). Yet this was an extraordinarily hard thing to achieve, as Agatha herself now recognised. And what did it mean? In early 1927 she had gone, at her sister’s suggestion, to a psychiatrist in Harley Street; did she believe that this would help in any way? As much as anything she went to maintain the fiction that she had lost her memory and needed to recover it: in other words, she was lying about herself to find out the truth about herself. According to Agatha’s Daily Mail interview in 1928, she had been told that ‘for the health of my mind there should be no hiatus of any kind in my recollections. That is why I can now recall at the same time my existence as Mrs Christie and as Mrs Neele.’ This, of course, was a kind of nonsense. Agatha may well have duped her doctors – she was quite clever enough to do that, to fake confusion like Jane Finn in The Secret Adversary – yet at the same time being forced to talk, to remember, was genuinely painful.

  Vernon was listening, trying to understand what the doctor was saying to him. He looked across the table at him. A tall thin man, with eyes that seemed to see right into the centre of you and to read there things that you didn’t even know about yourself.

  And he made you see all the things you didn’t want to see. Made you bring things up out of the depths. He was saying: ‘Now that you have remembered, tell me again exactly how you saw the announcement of your wife’s marriage.’

  Vernon cried out: ‘Must we go over it again and again? It was all so horrible. I don’t want to think of it any more.’

  Agatha was interested in psychiatry – she was interested in almost everything – but her own means to self-knowledge was self-reliance. For all that she engaged with twentieth-century ideas she was, in the deepest sense, a creature of her Edwardian upbringing. And by 1928 she knew that she had to strike out on her own.

  She was not alone in the desert when she went east – this fate would befall another of her characters, Joan Scudamore in Absent in the Spring – but it was the first time that she had been thrown completely on her own resources. As a girl, solitude had been her secret delight, its pleasures enhanced by the sense of protection all around her. As a woman she had sacrificed solitude to the demands of adult life. Now she did not know how she felt about it. It was necessary for her imagination; but the loneliness of the past two years had been so great. ‘I should find out now what kind of person I was,’ she wrote in her autobiography, of her trip to Baghdad, ‘whether I had become entirely dependent on other people as I feared. I could indulge my passion for seeing places – any place I wanted to see. I could change my mind at a moment’s notice, just as I had done when I chose Baghdad instead of the West Indies. I would have no-one to consider but myself. I would see how I liked that.’

  She entered a different world: in every sense. All at once she was a grown woman of means, sitting alone on the Orient Express, taking her pleasures as she chose. She threw off the hunted, haunted creature of London and lifted her eyes to the new things around her. The Cilician Gates, for example, which form the passage through the Taurus Mountains into Turkey, and take the traveller from the Mediterranean into Anatolia: Alexander the Great and Paul of Tarsus had passed here, and now Agatha, at sunset, disembarked from her train and confronted this ‘indescribable’ beauty. ‘I was so glad then that I had come – so full of thankfulness and joy.’ At the entrance to the East she began to find her way back to her Christian God, in whom she had always believed but had doubted of late. And something else. Later she described the Cilician Gates as ‘like standing on the rim of the world and looking down on the promised land . . . a land one will never reach’. This was her most precious, private dream: of the numinous, of the world that existed outside reality. She was back in the imagination of childhood, when she had dreamed a river at the end of the garden at Ashfield.

  The last thing she needed was the Englishwoman who shared her wagon-lit compartment on the Orient Express, and who instandy set herself to the task of directing Agatha’s itinerary. ‘You can’t possibly stay in a hotel in Baghdad. I tell you what you must do: you must come to us!’ Baghdad, in those days, was thirty years away from the revolution that would change Iraq for ever. It was a city where the British traveller could find racing, tennis, clubs and no doubt Marmite on toast; in the pre-war years it was not at all unusual to find people of Agatha’s class in such places. But Agatha was possessed with the spirit of adventure, not of colonialism. She had gone to the East to avoid her fellow-countrymen, not to socialise with them. At the end of her magical journey she found herself in what she called Memsahib Land: ‘I felt ashamed of myself for the caged feeling from which I suffered.’14 To sit in Baghdad among the kind of people she had known all her life was not merely pointless, it was painfully retrograde: here was the world she had inhabited before 1926, but with worse food and without Archie at her side. Everything had to be new and different. She would go away from this thin, bare, polite society to the city of Ur, below the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates in what had once been the land of Sumer, where civilisation had begun; although, like a good memsahib, she carried a letter of introduction to the dig.

  As shown in her novel The Man in the Brown Suit, Agatha had been interested in antiquity for some years; she had visited anthropological museums on the Empire Tour, and had written to her mother that looking at early human skulls ‘was altogether one of the best afternoons I have ever spent!’. But archaeology became modish in the 1920s, and her interest was kept alive. It was in 1922 that Leonard Woolley began his work at Ur, for which he obtained a level of publicity rivalling that of Lord Carnarvon and Howard Carter, who had unearthed the tomb of Tutankhamun in Egypt. Woolley was a good journalist and a clever salesman, although his work was so fascinating that, really, it sold itself. ‘It is’, wrote Woolley, ‘with the third Dynasty of Ur that connected history begins.’ The excavations were from the late third millennium BC – the kingdom of Ur fell in around 2000 BC – and were of great importance. From Sumer (or southern Mesopotamia) had come the first recognised work of ‘literature’, The Epic of Gilgamcsh, and the earliest concept of religion: the pyramid-like ziggurats, or temple towers, such as Woolley was excavating, were believed by the Sumerians to be homes to their gods. Agatha’s knowledge of the Old Testament gave her some grasp of the mythical history of Mesopotamia. This was the land of the biblical patriarchs, of the ten tribes of Israel that had been swept away by the Assyrians, of the Babylonian empire and its last king, Nebuchadnezzar. But Nebuchadnezzar, who had reigned in the sixth century BC, was absurdly recent in this context: Woolley’s dig unearthed houses dating back to his time and, beneath them, to the time of Abraham. Agatha was mesmerised. It was the idea of history itself that gripped her, the fact that ‘then’ could be ‘now’ if one chose to make the connection. Again this was a world away from Archie, in every sense.

  As a young girl in Egypt Agatha’s attention had been on men rather than pyramids, but men were now out of the picture, and she exerted herself to engage with the life of the mind. Like many autodidacts, she wanted to carry on learning, but this was a decision that she took in the late 1920s: not to go under, not to lose interest. ‘I have been struck by the extraordin
ary number of things she did know, the sheer range of her experience,’ wrote A. L. Rowse.15

  She was an honoured guest at Ur. Woolley normally found visitors a terrible nuisance but his wife Katherine was a fan of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and that decided the matter. What Katherine wanted, happened. Subsequently Agatha would realise that this beautiful woman was also strange, controlling and dangerous, but on her first visit Katherine was extremely charming. It was a wonderful thing for Agatha to be known not as the troublesome hysteric of 1926 but as a writer, a celebrity, a person worthy of respect. Roger Ackroyd had, after all, been rather special. Katherine thought its creator a remarkable person; although she quite obviously preferred the company of men, she took to Agatha and invited her to return to the dig. This, too, was a healing thing. What had half killed Agatha was the reality of how the world – and Archie – saw her, which was so different from how she saw herself. Now at Ur she was viewed in a new way. It was unfamiliar, it still felt like a disguise, but she was quietly inclined to accept it. There may have been a hollow where her heart had been but at least her life was interesting, in a way that it could never have been with Archie: he would not have thrilled to the sight of the Cilician Gates, nor of black buffaloes watering on the road into Baghdad, nor of the colours of the desert, ‘pale pink, apricots and blues’. He would not have eaten the strange food – greasy meat, leathery tomato omelettes, huge cauliflowers – without falling ill. He would have stood on the dig at Ur, watched ‘a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand’, and thought of the golf he was missing at Sunningdale.

  So Agatha told herself, as she sought to remake her life, to collect experiences. It was a brave venture; for she was a wounded creature, damaged, hardened and highly suspicious (‘If Dermot could be treacherous, then anyone could be treacherous. The world itself became unsure. I couldn’t trust anyone or anything any more . . .’) Yet for all her vulnerability she had a latent strength. The men of her family – Frederick, Monty – were lovable and weak. The women could see life for what it was and bear it. Agatha was not innately of that type; she was a dreamer, a child; but she had studied these women and, with her artist’s temperament, she was able to assume something of their character for herself.

  ‘Things have to happen to all of us . . . That’s the way life is. You just have to take it. Some of us can, some of us can’t.’ So Agatha wrote in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and, having been one of the people who couldn’t ‘take it’, she thereafter remade herself into one of those who could. At the root of this shift was her writing. That was her refuge, her protection, her outlet: her real life.

  It was also increasingly successful. In 1928 a new contract with Collins gave her a £750 advance for her next six books, while an American contract with Dodd Mead gave $2,500. The Secret Adversary became the first of her books to be filmed (in German), as was a story, ‘The Coming of Mr Quin’. A theatrical version of Roger Ackroyd was staged in 1928 as Alibi (this, too, would soon be filmed), with Charles Laughton the first of several superb actors to be miscast as Poirot.16 Agatha enjoyed the novelty of Alibi, attending rehearsals with her dog Peter, but she was sufficiently irritated by the changes to the original to want to write a play of her own: Black Coffee would be produced in 1930. This, as A. L. Rowse later wrote, was the irony about the disappearance: ‘Everybody thought it a publicity stunt; but it was genuine – so much better than the best of jobs. After that every book was a best-seller, everything fell into her hands.’ The Big Four was one of the worst pieces of writing she ever published but in the wake of 1926 it sold well, as did the other offerings of the 1920s: The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Seven Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime. These last two are, respectively, a thriller and a series of short stories. It is easy to see that Agatha’s real creative attention was on Giant’s Bread; although Seven Dials has a dry wit that reveals a slightly acid state of mind. It has the same setting as The Secret of Chimneys, but comparing it with that wonderfully joyful book shows, albeit obliquely, the road that Agatha had travelled in between. The country house Chimneys has been let by Lord Caterham to a rich businessman, Sir Oswald Coote, and these are the thoughts of Lord Caterham’s daughter: ‘She had a nightmare vision of England with innumerable Cootes in innumerable counterparts of Chimneys – all, be it understood, with an entirely new system of plumbing installed . . . A hundred delicate appreciations of life which Lord Caterham could and did enjoy were a sealed book to Sir Oswald.’

  But Lord Caterham has all the pragmatism of his class, and remains one of Agatha’s finest creations. ‘Coote got me in as a director of something or other. Very good business for me – nothing to do except go down to the city once or twice a year . . . and sit around a table where they have very nice new blotting paper. Then Coote or some clever Johnny makes a speech simply bristling with figures, but fortunately you needn’t listen to it – and I can tell you, you often get a jolly good lunch out of it.’

  Seven Dials is proof that Agatha could be very funny (a young man describes his new showgirl conquest as ‘one of the eight girls who made the living bridge’), although this is hard to believe when reading the ghastly Partners in Crime. Tommy and Tuppence are back, jollier than ever, enacting parodies of other detective writers in appallingly twee fashion: back in 1929 these may have had a certain élan but, as with many of Agatha’s early short stories, they hold almost nothing of her essence.

  The Murder at the Vicarage, however, is all essence, all assurance. With the arrival of Miss Marple17 centre stage (she had appeared in a series of six short stories in 1927, later used in The Thirteen Problems), Agatha found the means to convey a complete world-view. It was not quite her own view, although it has been seen as such. Nor was it quite her own world, although she knew it very well. But it was her own creation; and if in real life she would have grown wildly irritated with her generic English village, in her imagination she lived there most happily: among the hierarchies, the familiar roles, the morality that can be both petty and solid. St Mary Mead, where Miss Marple lives and where The Murder at the Vicarage is set, is the prototype. There are also Lymstock in The Moving Finger, Chipping Cleghorn in A Murder is Announced, Wychwood-under-Ashe in Murder is Easy and Much Deeping in The Pale Horse-, all of these are as defined, and as real to the author, as the world of Highbury was to Jane Austen. ‘Real to the author’ may imply that Agatha’s England is anything but real to anyone else. This criticism is often levelled, yet it is actually meaningless. Art does not reflect reality, it creates it: in that sense, the world of St Mary Mead is real. It must be, else people would not believe in it as they do. It is said that the trick of Agatha’s England is that it so lacks a proper sense of place, readers from anywhere can rewrite it in their heads with a setting familiar to themselves. This is not quite true (nobody who has read the accurate trot along the main street of Long Basing in Third Girl can complain of deficit of detail), nor is it quite the point. Agatha was not a ‘descriptive’ writer. But she could sketch an atmospheric setting, by means so direct at times that it almost goes unnoticed (as, for example, in And Then There Were None, when she took the brilliant step of staging mass murder in a bright-lit, modern house with no atmosphere at all).

  ‘She has’, says P. D. James, ‘the ability to conjure a world without actually describing it.’18 Her villages are especially alive; and what is rarely appreciated is that they move with the times. A Murder is Announced, written in 1949, is full of post-war uncertainty (‘Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys . . .’), while The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side opens with an unusually precise evocation of a 1960s housing estate (‘It was like a neat model built with child’s bricks. It hardly seemed real to Miss Marple’). But the village essence remains: ‘The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the hu
man beings were the same as they always had been.’

  This is the reassuring wisdom of Miss Marple: to see past what is frightening and unfamiliar and find the sanity, the common bond, the truth. Miss Marple knows that ‘there’s a great deal of – well, queerness about’. But she would have agreed, on the whole, with a remark Agatha made in 1955: ‘Do you know, people always fall back on madness as an explanation when they don’t understand a criminal’s behaviour.’ What interested Miss Marple and her creator was the way in which behaviour relates to normality, even when it is murderous. Agatha was intrigued by the Croydon case because she saw in it a complex family puzzle, a recognisable pattern pushed to an extreme. Although in her 1929 article she touched upon the idea that the murders had been committed because of a ‘strange lust for killing’, such a solution would not have interested her at all. Motive, for her, was everything.

  In The Moving Finger Miss Marple realises that the crime is not, as everybody else believes, motivated by something weird and impersonal. In fact it is all too human. This book is perhaps Agatha’s most wholly satisfactory, and was admired by clever friends like the epigraphist Sidney Smith, who called it Marple in her best vein.19 The setting is magnificently drawn, a Christie village in all its abundant life: hearty Aimée Griffith bounding unwanted up to front doors (‘Hello, slackers!’), organising the Girl Guides while her heart burns for the local solicitor; the little aesthete Mr Pye, whose ‘voice rose to a falsetto squeak as he narrated the exciting circumstances under which he had brought his Italian bedstead home from Verona’; the vicar’s wife, Mrs Dane Calthrop, with her lean greyhound face and her eccentric perceptiveness. Perhaps the setting comes across particularly well because it is narrated by an outsider, a London man who has something of Agatha’s own detachment. I have much business to transact,’ he says. ‘I shall call in at the baker’s and complain about the currant loaf.’ And later, when murder comes to the village: ‘Just for a moment I hated Lymstock and its narrow boundaries, and its gossiping whispering women.’