Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations

by Mike Holgate

  The Claimant

  There is no doubt that Madge was the talented member of our family.

  Agatha Christie (An Autobiography, 1977)

  Agatha Christie’s sister Madge, affectionately known as ‘Punkie’, was also a talented writer who had several stories published in magazines, including the prestigious Vanity Fair. Following her marriage to James Watts, Madge enjoyed what would be her sole success on the professional stage with a play that ran in the West End in 1924. The Claimant opened at the Queen’s Theatre, produced by Basil Dean, who later founded the legendary film company Ealing Studios. Despite a cautionary note by the theatre critic of The Times, who commented that ‘inexperienced dramatists are apt to be over-lavish with their plots’, the play was well received and praised for its ‘competent acting by an exceptionally choice cast’, that included rising star Fay Compton. The ‘hero’ of Madge Watts’s play is Roger Tunstall, a young man who returns from Africa claiming to be the rightful heir to a wealthy estate. It is based on the true story of an elaborate fraud which led to one of the most celebrated legal cases of the Victorian age – the Tichborne Claimant.

  At the age of twenty-four, Roger Charles Doughty-Tichborne, heir to vast estates and a baronetcy, had a romance with his cousin, Katherine Doughty, until their proposed engagement was opposed by her family, who objected to his habitual drunkenness. Reeling from this rejection, the suitor resigned his commission in the Army and set sail for South America. He was last seen alive on the ship Bella, which was lost during a voyage from Rio de Janeiro,

  Brazil, to Kingston, Jamaica, in April 1854. When Sir James Tichborne died in 1862, his second son Alfred succeeded to the title but his mother, Lady Henrietta Tichborne, believed that Roger was still alive and placed advertisements in the world’s press seeking information about his whereabouts. In 1865 a reply was received from an Australian lawyer acting on behalf of a bankrupt butcher from Wagga Wagga known as Tomas Castro, who claimed to be the missing Sir Roger. According to the claimant’s story, he had survived the shipwreck in a lifeboat before being rescued by a ship that landed at Melbourne, where he changed his name and started a new life. He later married an illiterate woman, Mary Bryant, with whom he had four children. When Sir Alfred died in 1866, his infant son Henry was the legal successor, but ‘Roger’ was summoned to England and accepted as the rightful heir by Lady Tichborne – despite the fact that his once slim figure had ballooned to twenty-seven stone. Furthermore, he had no recollection of where he had served with his regiment and had totally lost the ability to speak French, a language in which he had once been fluent. Following the death of Lady Henrietta in 1868, members of the Tichborne family denounced the ‘claimant’ as an impostor after making enquiries that revealed that Tomas Castro was in all probability Arthur Orton, the son of a London butcher who had emigrated to Australia and worked as a cattle rancher before becoming an outlaw suspected of involvement in murder. ‘Roger’ then launched a legal challenge to establish his right to the title.

  The case was heard in 1871 and lasted 103 days, during which time the claimant had 100 witnesses to support him before the court, while his detractors produced 250 witnesses to testify against him. The trial came to a sensational end when the court accepted the testimony of Lord Bellow, who during his schooldays had been a friend of Sir Roger and tattooed his arm – marks that were not visible on the claimant.

  The fraudster was immediately arrested and faced charges of perjury. Having no means to defend himself, he launched an appeal for funds and won popular support from mainly working-class people who embraced his cause, believing that he had been denied justice. The trial became one of the longest criminal cases in British legal history. Lasting 188 days, the defendant called 300 witnesses but it was to no avail; he was found guilty on all charges, declared to be Arthur Orton and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment. Released on parole in 1884, the claimant’s wife had deserted him for another man while he was in prison and he subsequently married Lily Enever, a singer he met whilst cashing in on his celebrity by appearing on the music hall circuit. A lecture tour of America followed but by 1895 he was reduced to poverty, forcing him to sell his story to the People newspaper in which he confessed to being Arthur Orton. He immediately retracted the statement after publication and used the money to set up as a tobacconist. Inevitably the business failed and Orton died in destitution in April 1898. Although buried in an unmarked grave at Paddington Cemetery, his coffin bore the name ‘Sir Roger Tichborne’. This was done with the gracious consent of the Tichborne family, but did not appease a daughter from the claimant’s first marriage. Using her ‘stage name’ Theresa Alexander, she continued her father’s crusade and after pestering the Tichborne family with a series of begging letters, fell foul of the law in June 1913 by making a threat to murder Denise Grenville shortly before her wedding to Sir Joseph Tichborne, the latest holder of the contentious title since the death of his father Henry. The defendant was sentenced to six months imprisonment after writing, ‘I am going to shoot that girl rather than Joseph marry her and they shall live on my money’.

  * * *

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  * * *

  A short story collection featuring Miss Marple, The Thirteen Problems (1932), provided a useful ‘recipe’ for murder suspect Roland Roussell. A copy of the thriller, left open at the first mystery, ‘The Tuesday Club Murder’, with an underlined passage on poison was found at his flat in Créances, France. The fifty-eight year-old office worker poured an eye medicine into a bottle of red wine which killed his eighty-year-old uncle, Maxime Masseron, when he opened it on Christmas Day 1977. Roussel’s aunt also consumed the potion and went into a coma. However, the arrested man told the police that the poisoning had all been a terrible accident as he had forgotten all about the bottle, which he admitted preparing the previous summer fully intending to murder a woman he believed had killed his mother.

  Police were only called into investigate the incident when further casualties were admitted to hospital. The village carpenter and the victim’s son-in-law went to the old couple’s home to put the dead man in a coffin. The two men became violently ill when they helped themselves to the poisoned wine, which was still on the table. An hour later they were rendered unconscious and required emergency medical treatment before their lives were out of danger.

  13

  RUDYARD KIPLING

  The House Surgeon

  Torquay is such a place that I do desire acutely to upset by dancing through with nothing on but my spectacles.

  Rudyard Kipling (1897)

  The Miller family’s status in Torquay resulted in them receiving many interesting visitors at Ashfield. Among them was Rudyard Kipling, the world-famous creator of the children’s literary classics The Jungle Book and the Just So stories, and a future recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, young Agatha’s only recollection of this momentous event were derogatory comments made by a friend of her mother’s as to why the author had ever married his wife, Caroline Baleister, before reaching the conclusion that the couple were the ‘perfect complement to each other’.

  The Kiplings had also made themselves deeply unpopular in Caroline’s hometown of Battleboro, Vermont, where the couple settled following their marriage in 1892. They left the country under a cloud after irrevocably falling out with the Baleister family. The quarrel resulted in Rudyard having his brother-in-law arrested for making violent threats, followed by a damaging court appearance and embarrassing publicity. In the autumn of 1896, the Kiplings left this bitter episode behind them and moved to England. They rented Rock House at Maidencombe, Torquay, built on a cliff overlooking a small cove. The author described the villa as ‘almost too good to be true’, and waxed lyrical about the location: ‘I look straight from my work table on to the decks of the fishing craft who come in to look after their lobster pots’. With the publication of his latest work The Seven Seas, Kipling proudly accepted an invitation to spend several days with the naval c
adets based on the training ship Britannia at Dartmouth.

  Kipling’s enthusiasm for his new home quickly declined as a sense of evil and brooding depression enveloped the household, which would later inspire a short ghost story entitled ‘The House Surgeon’. He revealed a gathering blackness of mind and sorrow of the heart: ‘It was the Feng-shui – the Spirit of the house itself – that darkened the sunshine and fell upon us every time we entered, checking the very words on our lips’. For a time, the writer took up the current craze for cycling. The gossip columnist of a local paper reported, ‘I saw Mr Rudyard Kipling careering along the Tor Abbey sands on wheels one day last week’. The hobby ended when he and his wife shared pedalling duties on ‘a tandem bicycle, whose double steering-bars made good dependence for continuous domestic quarrel’. The couple crashed off their ‘devil’s toast rack’ and walked home pushing the bike they dubbed ‘Hell Spider’.

  Mrs Miller and her friend may have been unimpressed with the Kiplings, and likewise Rudyard could not bear mingling with the posturing, wealthy residents of the town, but before his unhappy sojourn on the English Riviera came to an abrupt end, Kipling fictionalised his Devon schooldays. Author Eden Phillpotts, famed for his novels set in the locality, sent a copy of his latest book to Kipling, which immediately triggered an idea. Early in 1897, he broached the subject with his editor: ‘The notion of writing a Devonshire tale is new to me but, now I come to think of it, I was educated at Westward Ho! nigh Bideford and for six puppy years talked vernacular with the natives whose apples I stole. What will E.P. give to buy me off?’

  The result was Stalky & Co., based on the adventures of himself and his two closest friends at United Services College, an establishment fondly remembered by Kipling as ‘the school before its time’. Founded to prepare boys for a military or naval career, this was never the intention for Kipling, as the college was chosen solely because his mother was a close friend of the headmaster, Cormwell Price. Despite a miserable initiation period at the school, which he later recalled was ‘primitive in its appointments, and our food would now raise a mutiny in Dartmoor [Prison]’, the budding author flourished when the head realised, ‘I was irretrievably committed to the ink-pot’ and Rudyard was appointed editor of the school magazine. A collection of his poems written at the college was published by his parents living in India and he joyously returned to his family and embarked upon a journalistic career. He also drew inspiration from the land of his birth for his early literary successes. His output was stupendous and he became a marvellous storyteller, standing by the maxim that: ‘A word – should fall in its place like a bell in a full chime’.

  Kipling’s revered former headmaster, Cormwell Price, accepted an invitation to spend some time at Rock House, where he heard passages from the new book read to him by the excited author. Kipling’s happiness seemed complete when Caroline learned she was expecting their third child. However, by May 1897 the couple were unable to reconcile themselves with the gloomy atmosphere of Rock House and suddenly decided to execute ‘our flight from Torquay’ to seek refuge with relatives near Brighton. John Kipling, the son conceived in Torquay, was doomed to die in action during the First World War. His father had to live with the guilt of his son’s fate after ‘pulling strings’ to arrange for his enlistment after John had been rejected on medical grounds with extremely poor eyesight. Little wonder that when Rudyard made a pilgrimage to his former Torquay home shortly before his own death, the writer detected ‘the same brooding Spirit of deep, deep Despondency within the open lit rooms’.

  14

  DR CRIPPEN

  Three Act Tragedy

  I’ve always wondered if Ethel le Neve was in it with him [Dr Crippen] or not.

  Quote from The Labours of Hercules (1947)

  The plot of Agatha Christie’s Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), a murder mystery investigated by Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver, is transparently based on the notorious crime committed by Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who was famously brought to justice when wireless was used for the first time in a murder hunt.

  In 1900, the American-born dentist and his actress wife, Belle Elmore, had moved to England where Crippen’s US qualifications did not allow him to practice medicine. Therefore, he took various jobs selling patent medicines. Ten years later he killed his domineering wife by administering a lethal dose of poison, then carved up her body and buried the remains in the cellar. The mild-mannered doctor explained Belle’s disappearance by telling enquirers that she had returned to America because of a relative’s illness. Meanwhile, he moved his secretary and mistress, Ethel le Neve, into his London home and when she began to openly wear Belle’s furs and jewellery, suspicions were aroused and the police called in. A search of the house failed to throw any light on the matter, but the guilt-ridden couple fled to Antwerp and boarded the liner SS Montrose bound for Canada. Their hurried departure caused the police to make a more thorough search of the house and human remains were uncovered in the cellar. A torso was recovered but the head and limbs were never found and the body of Belle Crippen was identified by a piece of abdominal tissue.

  With a warrant out for his arrest, Crippen tried to avoid detection by travelling under the name of ‘Roberts’. He also shaved off his moustache and removed his glasses, while Ethel dressed as a boy during the transatlantic voyage. The ruse failed to fool the ship’s captain who, observing the amorous behaviour of the couple, utilised the newly installed Marconi wireless system to radio an urgent message to London: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers’. Alerted to the whereabouts of the runaways, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Walter Dew boarded a faster White Star liner and boarded the Montrose from the St Lawrence River in the guise of a river pilot before arresting the fugitives in July 1910. Despite protesting his innocence, Crippen was tried at the Old Bailey and hanged for murder at Pentonville Prison in November 1910, while his mistress was tried separately and acquitted on charges of being an accessory after the fact.

  Dr Crippen is also mentioned in Three Act Tragedy (1935), along with a reference to ‘a man in the barrel’. This alluded to the real-life case of the defrocked rector of Stiffkey, the Revd Harold Davidson, who was prosecuted for trying to starve himself to death on Blackpool’s ‘Golden Mile’ in 1935. Acquitted of intentionally attempting to commit suicide and awarded costs for false imprisonment, Davidson, a former professional entertainer, had been making a protest by exhibiting himself standing in a barrel and threatening to ‘fast until death’ unless the Church authorities reinstated him. He had been defrocked three years earlier when investigations discovered that he spent six days of the week in London and only visited his parish on Sundays. In the capital, the married vicar pursued girls with the religious fervour of an evangelist, although his motives were seemingly driven by sexual gratification. A Church Court heard evidence of how he had pestered teashop waitresses and lavished gifts on prostitutes. The defendant claimed that he was guilty of no more than indiscretion in his redemptive approaches to fallen women. Improbably, he explained that he tried to help the ladies he had befriended by paying for their lodgings and had taken one girl, described as ‘feeble-minded’, to Paris to give her an opportunity to ‘get her a situation and pick up the language’. After a prolonged hearing lasting for several months, some charges were dropped, but Davidson was found guilty on five counts of immoral conduct and removed from the Church position he had held for twenty-six years.

  Taking up the life of a showman to air his grievances about his treatment by the Church, his bizarre career came to a tragic end at the age of sixty-two while appearing at Skegness Amusement Park in July 1937. Taking his inspiration from the Bible story of Daniel, Davidson was engaged to address the public from a cage containing a ‘docile’ lion and a lioness, which were normally fed and cared for by the amusement park owner’s eight-year-old daughter. However at Davidson’s first, and last, appearance, he was making a speech to an audience of 100 people w
hen he stepped backwards and accidentally tripped over the lioness, causing Freddie the lion to protect his mate by springing up to maul the intruder. The victim was hospitalised and lapsed into a coma before passing away two days later. At the inquest, sixteen-yearold attendant Irene Summner was praised by the coroner for her bravery. Describing the accident she said:

  When Mr Davidson tried to get out of the way Freddie reared up on his haunches to get him with his front paws. I got into the cage and tried to beat the lion off, but it dragged Mr Davidson to a corner near the other locked gate and we could not move him until Freddie dropped him.

  15

  ERNEST SHACKLETON AND ROBERT FALCON SCOTT

  The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

  Ordeal by Innocence… was inspired by a number of real-life heroes.

  The Agatha Christie Collection No. 39, Ordeal by Innocence

  In Ordeal by Innocence (1958), geophysicist Dr Arthur Calgary returns from an Antarctic expedition too late to prevent a miscarriage of justice. It transpires that he is the only man who could have verified an alibi and saved the life of a man who died from pneumonia in prison after being wrongfully jailed for the murder of his adoptive mother.

  Agatha Christie’s fictional polar explorer was inspired by two courageous men with Devon connections – Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. In August 1907, shortly before Agatha’s seventeenth birthday, the supply ship Terra Nova steamed into Torquay on its last port of call before setting off on the first leg of an expedition to attempt to reach the South Pole. The leader, Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton RN (1874-1922), stayed behind in the resort for a further three months at his brother’s home, The Knoll, before travelling on a liner to join his ship in New Zealand. The party returned to Torquay two years later having narrowly failed to reach their goal by less than 100 miles. The consolation was a knighthood, conferred by King George V on Ernest Shackleton. Bad weather and low rations had forced Shackleton to turn back within sight of his objective, but in view of the tragedy that was soon to befall a fellow polar explorer, he made a suitably ‘chilling’ remark: ‘better a live donkey than a dead lion’.