Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Yet in 1961 the offices of both Hughes Massie and Harold Ober had issued to their staff a list of Christie manuscripts that might now be destroyed. ‘The curve continues to rise,’ Edmund Cork had written of her sales in 1955. Six years later it was thought that the curve had peaked. Even those who worked for her were unable to believe in the strength of the phenomenon.

  Nor were her manuscripts necessarily greeted with boundless joy and respect by those whose living they helped to make; quite often there would be niggling little snipes at them. Harold Ober wrote to Cork of A Pocket Full of Rye that the use of the nursery rhyme seemed forced and that she had not been ‘quite fair to the reader’; of Destination Unknown, ‘I don’t suppose she would consider doing another ending so we will do our best to sell it [as a serial] as it is.’ Of Curtain he wrote bluntly: ‘I did not like the story.’ After Ober’s death in 1959, Cork dealt with Dorothy Olding, a lively correspondent who sent gossipy little criticisms.7 ‘I don’t brow what to say about this story,’ she wrote of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, ‘except that from the moment Mrs Badcock was murdered I read with the fear that Agatha might be using the effect of German measles on pregnancy as the main clue.’ ‘Don’t quote me to Agatha but this isn’t the strongest story she ever wrote, is it?’ was her judgement on ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, and when Cork asked her to try to sell an unusual short story, ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’, she said of a particular magazine editor: ‘It will break his heart, I know, if he doesn’t feel he can buy it. My guess is that his heart will break.’ ‘Has anyone wondered, as I did, how Miss Marple knew that Elvira Blake was Bess Sedgwick’s daughter?’ she asked chirpily, after reading At Bertram’s Hotel. ‘I wondered whether she was just so bright that she deduced it or what.’ And, more strongly, on Passenger to Frankfurt. ‘Confidentially, I was bitterly disappointed in the book. It seemed to me a bad imitation of a spy story and a damned weak one at that . . .’8

  The key issue in America was whether Agatha’s books were suitable for the serialisation market. In her younger days she would rewrite, if required, in order to sell to magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, but in later years she refused. Hence Ober’s concerns about Destination Unknown, whose ending was indeed described by the SEP as ‘utterly preposterous’, and the general alarm about the subject matter of The Mirror Crack’d. It is somewhat extraordinary that the American magazine market should have been so picky at a time when Agatha’s fame and popularity were so very great; before the war it had snapped up almost everything she wrote. Now she was seen as out of touch. In 1968 the Saturday Evening Post turned down By the Pricking of My Thumbs, saying, ‘Not for us, I’m afraid. The plot is certainly ingenious, but the people are all so bloody decrepit,’ and this kind of downright refusal was not uncommon. Good Housekeeping turned down Curtain: ‘I wish I could be making you a nice fat offer . . . but I’m afraid I can’t even make you a small or reasonably adequate one . . . I must admit I found it tedious. Everybody was so old and all the characters seemed to me to mesh into one Colonel Blimp . . .’

  The modern world was speaking, loud and clear; yet despite itself the modern world kept reading Agatha Christie. And, in the light of this, Agatha rose up against what she considered casual treatment by both her literary agents and her publishers. She had always been critical of poor covers, idiotic blurbs and the like. Now she could get very irritated indeed. After reading the blurb for the US edition of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, she wrote to Cork: ‘Having published my books for about thirty-odd years my publishers ought to know how to spell Miss Marple’s village – St Mary Mead, not Meade.’ Then, on New Year’s Eve 1966, she exploded, rather as she would in the 1971 letter to Rosalind about her plays. She wrote to wish Cork a happy new year – ‘if such a thing is possible for any of us’ – before launching into a litany of distressed complaints: ‘FIRST I’ve got to have more strict control over the idiotic and very annoying things that my publisher and others seem to take upon themselves to do.’ She was particularly annoyed about an edition of short stories, Thirteen for Luck, published by Dodd Mead and marketed as ‘mystery stories for young readers’.

  My books are written for adults and always have been.

  I don’t believe you realise in the least how much I mind having things slipped over on me – I hate the publishing of Thirteen for Luck – just when Third Girl ought to have had the field to itself . . . Haven’t I got any control on how things I have written come into print? If I can forbid it, I say here and now I don’t want any of the Labours of Hercules to appear separately again. They are a designed series . . . Both you and Harold Ober have jjot to consider me and what I feel . . . it’s a misery to be ashamed of oneself – really for what I haven’t asked for or wanted. You’ve got to keep a firm eye on Collins – I don’t trust them . . . The same for Dodd Mead. When they next get one of their bright ideas, there is to be no going ahead until I have been consulted and agreed. I like Dorothy Olding very much indeed personally, but the firm has got to keep control over Dodd Mead on my behalf – otherwise how can I know what they are doing? . . .

  Now then – any other complaints, Agatha?!

  In 1960 Agatha had written to Cork from the ‘Mount Lavinia Hotel, Ceylon’ at the start of her travels around Sri Lanka, India and Pakistan. She had been bathing, she said. ‘I feel almost girlishly carefree!!!’

  But in December 1962 her health – always robust, sometimes susceptible – showed the first signs of deterioration, although she recovered well. The newspapers reported that she had influenza while staying in Baghdad and had delayed her departure ‘indefinitely’. In fact her flu had also comprised bronchitis and gastritis. She left, ‘still rather fragile’, just before the end of the year; her secretary Stella Kirwan wrote to Edmund Cork, saying, ‘I will go to the airport myself with Agatha’s mink coat to wrap her up in.’9

  Agatha also suffered from psoriasis, a nervous complaint that afflicted her hands, and she wished, she said, that ‘the Almighty would give me a new pair of feet’. But this was a sign of her desire to continue life as before. When she gave a series of little interviews in 1970 to mark her eightieth birthday celebrations, most journalists commented on how fit and spry she looked.

  Max’s health was less good. Although much younger than Agatha he had smoked and drunk all his life, as she had not, and suffered several minor strokes from the early 1960s onwards: ‘He has suddenly come to look twice his age, and pretty feeble,’ Cork wrote to Dorothy Olding in August 1961. Like Agatha, however, Max had a good deal of courage and vitality, and right until the end he carried on as if all his life was still ahead of him. The night before he died, in his bed at Greenway, he told his young friend D. that the next day he would teach her to play bridge.

  But by 1967 the days of adventure were almost over. In spring the Mallowans went to Iran; this was Agatha’s last visit to the East, the place that almost forty years earlier had given her the gift of hope, when she had dared to go to Baghdad and seek new worlds. The previous year she and Max had gone to America. Agatha had wanted to see the country of her father’s ancestors: she had been ‘driven through the town of Easthampton Mass, where the Millers came from’, and a young woman from the Ober office took her to the grave of Nathaniel Miller, her grandfather, at the Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn. All the representatives of Obers and Dodd Mead were ‘enchanted’ by Agatha, as they had been when she visited America in 1956, although behind her back she was treated as a sweet and slightly tiresome old eccentric. ‘Be warned Dorothy dear!’ wrote Cork, somewhat infected by Dorothy Olding’s jaunty irreverence. ‘Agatha told me yesterday that the real object of her visit to America is to pick up some outsize knickers . . . She recalled your prowess with the swimsuit, and I am awfully afraid sweetie you are for it.’ There was a good deal of this kind of thing by now. There had, for example, been a drawn-out search for a certain kind of ‘Gold Leaf Maple Sugar’ that Agatha had eaten in 1956, which Obers were obliged to try and f
ind for her: ‘These chores for Agatha can be the devil, taking up so much time and energy,’ wrote Cork, although – as with Barbara and the fruit trees – there was no question that they had to be done. Before Agatha and Max arrived in America there had been a mass of communication between Obers and Hughes Massie about arrangements for the two-month stay. ‘Sorry, dear, to bother you,’ wrote Cork to Dorothy Olding, ‘but it is probable your reply might make it easier for me to stand up to the repetitive questions, which I am sure will be my lot when the Mallowans come back from Switzerland.’10

  Europe, now, was Agatha’s destination of choice: Paris, Belgium, Bayreuth, Oberammergau, Merlingen. ‘Don’t forward anything on to me at Merlingen unless of such urgency it can’t be helped!!’ she wrote to Cork in July 1966. ‘No letters is the greatest joy in life to me!!’ A luxurious car was arranged for this Swiss holiday, although Max asked for something ‘more modest’. They also travelled economy to America; as John Mallowan says, ‘My aunt and uncle always said they didn’t have any money.’11 The paradoxes remained extraordinary. They stayed at the Paris Ritz but Max complained about the prices; they lived much of the time at Winterbrook but ‘hardly spent anything on the house’.12 When it was sold the roof was found to be in a terrible condition. Greenway was better, because it was in the care of Rosalind and Anthony. Mathew took over Pwllywrach after his marriage in 1967 and, in order to be on site at all times, the Hickses moved into Ferry Cottage at the bottom of Greenway’s gardens.

  Agatha needed more looking after as she moved towards her eightieth birthday. Yet the books she produced during the 1960s were arguably stronger, more creative, than those of the previous decade. No longer writing on majestic auto-pilot, she was moving into new areas, taking on the new world with which she was supposedly so out of step. The quality of her work varied: The Pale Horse – stunningly inventive – was followed by The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side – insightful, elegiac – which was followed by The Clocks: mystifyingly bad. A Caribbean Mystery was straightforward Christie, as on the whole was Hallowe’en Party. But At Bertram’s Hotel, Third Girl, Endless Night and, in 1970, Passenger to Frankfurt had a brilliant, confident grasp upon modernity, which Agatha looked full in its unfamiliar face.

  Third Girl is set in Swinging London, the city of beatniks, casual sex and drugs, girls like ‘unattractive Ophelias’ and boys like beautiful van Dycks. ‘Your editor is amazed at the way you have “got” the young people,’ Cork told her admiringly in August 1966. Agatha wrote much of the book in the strong, clear voice of Ariadne Oliver – in fact she now used a Dictaphone – and in Third Girl this worked to her advantage. Mrs Oliver is openly intrigued by fashionable London and her thought processes, which are a simplified version of Agatha’s own, bring the milieu to life. For example she shadows a young man (‘the Peacock’, as she calls him) to a ramshackle painter’s studio in Chelsea. The scene is utterly convincing, as are the three people that Mrs Oliver finds there, who treat her with a typically youthful mixture of matiness, lack of respect and slight menace. Mrs Oliver is teetotal, like Agatha, and refuses a drink when it is offered. ‘The lady doesn’t drink,’ says the Peacock. ‘Who would have thought it?’

  But there is far greater menace in Endless Night, perhaps the most remarkable Agatha Christie of them all. At the age of seventy-six Agatha took an extraordinarily audacious step: she chose to write a book from the point of view of a young working-class man, Michael Rogers, who is abundant in natural advantages and in thrall to dreams he barely understands. He longs for a life that is different and magnificent: a house of ineffable beauty, a girl like a goddess. He kills in order to help realise his dreams, and then killing itself becomes his dream. As he strangles his goddess-girl he says: ‘I didn’t belong to her now. I was myself. I was coming into another kind of kingdom to the one I’d dreamed of.’

  Agatha spoke about the book as if it were not much different from anything else she had written: ‘People shook their heads [when she told them what she was writing] as much as to say, “What is a county lady like that doing with such a character? She’ll make a terrible mess of it!” Well I don’t think I did – and it wasn’t terribly hard. I listen to my cleaning woman talking and to her relatives. I’ve always loved shops and buses and cafés. And I keep my ears open. That’s the secret.’13

  She had had a natural ear from the very first, when she picked up the nuances and rhythms she had heard out in Egypt and wrote them into her teenage novel, Snow Upon the Desert. But the impressive thing about Endless Night is not the accuracy of Michael’s speech, it is the rendering of his thoughts. Agatha understood instinctively the creed of the late twentieth century, so inimical to her own: the sense of entitlement that leads people to believe that anything they want they should be able to have. Mike Rogers is not merely a psychopath, he is a creature of his morally impoverished age, and Agatha – whose upbringing was steeped in ideas of duty and selflessness – realised him absolutely. She understood his charm, his casual urges, his rootlessness, his egotism; his belief that he can create his own destiny, and that achieving a desire is the same thing as fulfilment. The space where his soul should be is at the centre of the book: a confusion of desire and desolation pervade Endless Night.

  Agatha had grown to mistrust young people. This was not a by product of old age – despite what the American magazines thought of her – but a realistic appraisal of what she saw in the world. She knew that the cult of youth brought danger, since by definition it negated wisdom and experience: it had helped to make Mike Rogers what he was, since it said that strength and virility would get him what he wanted far more quickly than sense and virtue. Her late novels are full of warnings against youth, light and selfish and free of conscience. Elvira Blake in At Bertram’s Hotel is ‘one of the children of Lucifer’; the cool handsome creatures in Third Girl commit murder, assault and forgery; privileged young Michael Rafiel in Nemesis is convicted of assault, possibly rape (although ‘girls, you must remember, are far more ready to be raped nowadays than they used to be’).14

  In Hallowe’en Party two children are killed and neither is much lamented: one was a liar, the other a blackmailer. This book is very much a meditation on the nature of youth, and on the credulousness of those who see it as inevitably innocent. ‘It was not unknown in the present age for children to commit crimes, quite young children. Children of seven, of nine and so on . . .’ Hallowe’en Party does contain a child who is as good as she is beautiful: the twelve-year-old Miranda (a clear Shakespearean allusion in that name). But the feeling is very much that the innocence of the youth is not innate; that it is easily corrupted in a world that values youth too highly, and is too ready to excuse its faults. ‘There are times when I get tired of hearing those words: “Remanded for a psychiatrist’s report”,’ says a policeman, ‘after a lad has broken in somewhere, smashed the looking glasses, pinched the bottles of whisky, stolen the silver, knocked an old woman on the head,’

  But it was in Passenger to Frankfurt that Agatha’s fear of the youth cult found its clearest expression. The book – disliked by Agatha’s agents and her publishers – sold hugely in her eightieth birthday year, at least seventy thousand copies in hardback alone; admittedly it was backed by a lot of anniversary publicity, but it also touched a nerve. With her ‘unerring instinct’ (as Poirot says of Mrs Oliver), Agatha now gravitated towards themes of global terror, the growth of evil, the increase in violence for its own sake. Humanity had always been her subject matter. All her life she had looked for the recognisable, the familiar, within people who committed unusual acts. Now she perceived that the very things that made people recognisable to one another were being eroded and supplanted; were no longer even necessary.

  She had hinted at this in They Came to Baghdad, whose villains are post-war believers in the Aryan ideal: ‘Angels with wicked faces who wanted to make a new world and who didn’t care whom they hurt to do it.’ Destination Unknown has a similar theme, although this time the fight is with fanatical
Communists. By 1970 the enemy is different, less identifiable. But its conduit is youth: ‘Young people are much more easily influenced than older people,’ she said, in reply to a series of questions about Passenger to Frankfurt, ‘and evil can put on a better presentation of magnificence and importance than good can. Humility is and should be the first of the Christian virtues. I think nowadays that the worship of violence, and of cruelty, and the people who think that no aim can be achieved without it, is a very evil influence, and it is successful in many countries and in many places. At the present moment the things taking place in Ulster are the main expression of this . . .

  ‘I have never been in the least interested in politics as such. My interest was aroused by the youth attitude of rebellion and anarchy, chronicled in news from all over the world.’

  The hero, or anti-hero, of Passenger to Frankfurt is an unorthodox Foreign Office man, Sir Stafford Nye, whose faintly troublesome eccentricity has hampered his career, but gives him the ability to think for himself and resist the attractions of ideology. ‘I wish I loved the Human Race; I wish I loved its silly face,’ he says to himself. Indiscriminate love is as dangerous as hate; paradoxically, it is not ‘human’ to view the human race as lovable. Sir Stafford’s morality is fallible, flexible, somewhat world-weary; it enables him to join the fight for humanity, a fight that Agatha is not sure can be won. In a sinister echo of Huxley’s Brave New World it is suggested that the aggression in people will now be tamed only through the use of drugs. ‘Benvo’, as Agatha calls it, is a kind of soma, or Prozac: it calms to the extent that it induces ‘artificial goodness’. Should it be widely used? Passenger to Frankfurt is ambivalent.