Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations

by Mike Holgate

  Devonport-born naval captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) bettered Shackleton’s achievement during an ill-fated journey to the South Pole completed in 1912. After successfully reaching his destination, he was disappointed to discover that Roald Amundsen and his party had become the first men to reach the pole only one month earlier. The Norwegian had switched his attention to the South Pole when American Robert Peary became the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. Dejected and faced with severe storms and blizzards on the way back, Scott and his four companions perished from hunger and exposure only eleven miles from the safety of a food and fuel depot. Scott was the last member of the party to die and patriotically wrote in his diary: ‘Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardiest endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…’

  When Amundsen and Scott conquered the South Pole, Shackleton decided to attempt the first crossing of the Antarctic, a daunting 2,000 mile trip from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. The expedition, involving twenty-eight men, became a spectacular failure when their ship Endurance became trapped and crushed by ice. Hopelessly marooned, Shackleton ordered his men onto the ice and after four months drifting on their ‘iceberg’ they landed at Elephant Island in April 1916. Shackleton then realised that their only hope of survival was to reach the whaling stations on South Georgia Island, 800 miles away. In one of the greatest small boat journeys ever made, he and five companions completed the crossing in seventeen days. To summon help from the whaling stations on the far side of the island, Shackleton and two of his men climbed the unsurveyed Alladyce Range in ten days and commandeered a Chilean steamer to rescue the three remaining members of the party on Elephant Island, finding them ‘All safe. All well!’

  Feted for his heroics in South America, Shackleton travelled to San Francisco before sailing to New Zealand, where a ship was provided to relieve the party stranded in the Ross Sea. Led by the indefatigable Shackleton, the rescuers arrived in January 1917 and discovered that all but three of the twenty-three men had survived the year-long ordeal. In a subsequent book, South, about the doomed venture that took place in the midst of the First World War, Shackleton dedicated it: ‘To my comrades who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders’.

  While embarking on his fourth polar expedition to explore ‘all the oceanic and sub-Antarctic islands’ in 1922, the intrepid Shackleton died from a heart attack on board his ship Quest at Grytviken, South Georgia Island, where he lies buried. The last words written in his diary shortly before his sudden death read: ‘In the darkening twilight, I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay’.

  Agatha Christie wrote a short mystery story, ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ (1960) and, if ever a true-life adventure involving this festive treat occurred, it was in 1902 when Scott and Shackleton were jointly making their first attempt to reach the South Pole (an expedition obliquely referred to in the short-story collection The Thirteen Problems (1932), when a polar explorer writes an important letter before perishing during the plot of ‘The Idol House of Astarte’). On Christmas Day, Shackleton conjured up a surprise to raise the morale of his fellow polar explorer, who recorded the joyous occasion:

  I had observed Shackleton ferreting about in his bundle, out of which he presently produced a spare sock. Stored away in that sock was a small round object about the size of a cricket ball, which when brought to light, proved to be a notable plum pudding. Another dive into his lucky bag and out came a crumpled piece of artificial holly. Heated in the cocoa, our plum pudding was soon steaming hot, and stood on the cooker-lid crowned with its decoration. Our Christmas Day had proved a delightful break in an otherwise uninterrupted spell of semi-starvation. Some days elapsed before its pleasing effects wore off.

  16

  BILLIE CARLETON

  The Affair at the Victory Ball

  Billie Carleton had a certain frail beauty of that perishable, moth-like substance that does not last long in the wear and tear of this rough-and-ready world.

  Evening News

  A collection of Agatha Christie short stories, which originally appeared in magazines between 1923 to 1926, was published as The Underdog and Other Stories (1951) and included ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, in which Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings investigate a well-publicised society mystery where a young woman has been found dead of a cocaine overdose. With the addition of another death on the same night, where the drug victim’s aristocratic fiancé is found stabbed to death, the mystery is based on the first great sex and drugs scandal of the twentieth century, in which the promising show-business career of actress, dancer and singer Billie Carleton came to a tragic end. A member of a fast-living set, the beautiful actress died from an overdose of cocaine. She was found dead in bed after an all-night party following the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the First World War in November 1918. Her Chinese drug suppliers became the target of hysterical press coverage about the growing threat of a ‘yellow peril’ in the Limehouse area of London. The case inspired several books, plays and films, notably Noël Coward’s The Vortex, D.W. Griffiths’s Broken Blossoms, based on a story by Thomas Burke, and Sax Rohmer’s incredibly successful novels, adapted into over thirty films, about an evil empire in Limehouse controlled by ‘Dr Fu Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man’.

  Billie Carleton (1886-1918) was given leading roles in musical plays and revues produced by the top impresarios of the day, André Charlot and Charles B. Cochran, before she developed a serious drug habit that impeded her progress to becoming a star. During the run of Watch Your Step in 1914, Cochran was told that Carleton was being ‘influenced by some undesirable people and was going to opium parties’.

  The actress enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, backed by three men in her life: ‘Sugar daddy’ John Marsh, twenty years her senior, whose wealth provided a permanent flat in Saville Row, Knightsbridge; physician Frederick Stuart, who managed her finances; and Bond Street costumier Reggie de Veulle, the man responsible for introducing her to drugs.

  Arriving at the Victory Ball escorted by Dr Stuart, Carleton wore a daringly provocative dress made of transparent black georgette commissioned from de Veulle, who had asked heroin addict and actor Lionel Belcher to pass a silver box containing cocaine to the actress. Next day, Carleton’s maid could not wake her mistress and called Dr Stuart, who administered an injection of strychnine and brandy in a vain attempt to revive the patient from the effects of ‘cocaine poisoning’.

  Lurid details of the late actress’s lifestyle disclosed how Carleton and de Veulle held ‘opium parties’ and ‘disgusting orgies’ during which Ada Ping You, the Scottish wife of a Limehouse drug dealer, Lau Ping You, would arrive to cook the intoxicating concoction. The normally staid Times reported these activities in a headline article ‘An Opium Circle. Chinaman’s Wife Sent to Prison. High Priestess of Unholy Rites’:

  After dinner the party… provided themselves with cushions and pillows, placed these on the floor, and sat themselves in a circle. The men divested themselves of their clothing and got into pyjamas, and the women into chiffon dresses… Miss Carleton arrived later at the flat from the theatre, and she, after disrobing, took her place in this circle of degenerates.

  The trial of the drug dealers at the centre of the scandal resulted in Ada Ping You being sentenced to five months hard labour, although her husband escaped with just a £10 fine. In court it emerged that the married Reggie de Veulle had previously been involved in a homosexual blackmail case. However, contrary to the judge’s direction, the jury acquitted him of the manslaughter of Billie Carleton. He admitted, however, to supplying the victim with cocaine and was sentenced to eight months imprisonment.

  In ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, Agatha Christie’s murderous drug peddlers are an English couple, a scenario that happily avoids the xenophobic approach
to the true-life case employed by other authors; an unfortunate reflection of contemporary press coverage, typified by the Evening News. The fear of the evil influence of foreign men on the behaviour of innocent women drove them to issue a dire warning about the spectre of the opium den and the white slave trade, stating that it was the ‘duty of every Englishman and Englishwoman to know the truth about the degradation of young white girls’, published under the banner headline: ‘White Girls Hypnotised by Yellow Men’.

  * * *

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  * * *

  Following Agatha Christie’s death, her final novel Sleeping Murder (1976) was published featuring the last case of Miss Marple, written during the Second World War and then kept in a vault. In the book a woman returns to her childhood home, where events trigger long-suppressed memories of the time when he saw the murdered body of her mother.

  Amazingly, in 1979 real-life similarities with Christie’s story occurred in North Carolina, where Annie Perry started having terrifying ‘visions’ of the time when she was aged ten and her father suddenly disappeared from the family farm in April 1944. Annie’s flashbacks recalled how on Easter Sunday, she had seen her mother in the kitchen with the sink full of pots and pans in bloody water, the naked body of her father in an unused room and the noise of butchering sounds in the night. The week after her father’s disappearance, when using the outside privy, she clearly remembered seeing his face floating in the water. After consulting a psychiatrist about these disturbing visions, she was advised to make a report to the police. They took the matter seriously and dug up the site of the old privy, where human remains were duly found.

  Annie’s mother, Winnie Cameron, had reported her husband missing and in due course obtained a divorce on grounds of desertion. When the gruesome discovery was made thirty-five years later, she shot herself, leaving a note confessing to the murder.

  17

  THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA

  The Secret Adversary

  The torpedoing of the Lusitania was a premeditated crime… This could only be done by vampires in human form.

  Western Morning News

  Agatha Christie introduced courting ‘partners in crime’ Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Crowley in The Secret Adversary (1922). The novel is not a murder mystery but a thriller, cleverly mixing fact with fiction. Set after the end of the First World War, the childhood friends meet up and, seeking excitement and gainful employment, they form a business called ‘Young Adventurers’. After placing a newspaper advertisement offering to do anything and go anywhere, they are recruited by the Secret Service and become embroiled in the murky world of espionage, seeking the whereabouts of a young woman, Jane Finn, who, as she queued for a lifeboat, was handed highly sensitive wartime documents by an intelligence agent about to go down on a ship attacked by a U-boat, including a treaty that could still embarrass the government in peacetime. Tommy and Tuppence begin their investigation by tracking down surviving passengers to learn what they can of Jane Finn’s fate in what was a true-life international incident, the sinking of the SS Lusitania.

  In May 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania set sail on her last voyage, with 1,257 passengers and 702 crew aboard. Travelling from New York to Liverpool, she was sunk by a U-boat eight miles off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,198 lives. Too late, a lookout on the bow sounded the alarm through a megaphone, ‘Torpedoes coming on the starboard side!’ The torpedo struck the Lusitania under the bridge and triggered a second explosion of a deadly cargo onboard the ship. A shocked survivor recalled, ‘It sounded like a million-ton hammer hitting a steam boiler a hundred feet high’.

  The barbarism of an attack on an unarmed and unescorted passenger ship without warning brought widespread condemnation, summed up by the following comment in the press: ‘Fifteen hundred non-combatants murdered in cold-blood… has produced a feeling of horror and abhorrence which cannot, and should not, be confined to impotent fury’. However, it was not generally known at the time that apart from passengers, the liner was also carrying munitions, arguably making it a legitimate military target. Only a week earlier, the German embassy had warned US citizens of the dangers of travelling on a published list of vessels that included the Lusitania. When news of the loss broke in England, rioters took to the streets and attacked shops with German-sounding names in cities across the country, including London, Manchester and Liverpool. Mobs then targeted other minority groups, including Jewish and Chinese communities, forcing the government to send in troops to restore order and the introduction of a policy to intern ‘enemy aliens’ for the duration of the war.

  Although outraged, there was no comparable violent reaction in the USA, despite the fact that 128 US citizens had drowned in the atrocity. A year later Woodrow Wilson was elected President on a peace platform, naïvely asserting that ‘there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right’. Continuing to pursue a policy of neutrality in spite of continued provocation, he delivered his famous ‘Peace without Victory’ speech in January 1917. However, at the end of that same month, Germany dropped any pretence that that it would show any restraint towards ‘neutral shipping’ – officially making any merchant vessel a target for U-boats – when a message from the German Foreign Minister, Dr Arthur Zimmerman, was intercepted. It revealed plans to recommence unrestricted submarine warfare and proposed an alliance between Germany and Mexico if America entered the war, with a promise that the disputed ownership of the lands of Texas and Arizona would be resolved by handing them back to Mexico. When this news was leaked by British intelligence, isolationist feelings dissolved and had the desired effect for the cause of the Allies. Fury ensued in the US following the sinking of three cargo vessels in March 1917, forcing Wilson to abandon his neutral stance. American forces were soon on their way to Europe after the President reluctantly approached Congress to endorse a declaration of war on Germany. He won their full support with an eloquent address, accepting that, ‘The world must be made safe for democracy’.

  18

  LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

  They Came to Baghdad

  Fakir Carmichael is modelled on soldier, scholar and Arabist T.E. Lawrence.

  The Agatha Christie Collection No. 42, They Came to Baghdad

  Agatha Christie’s light-hearted thriller They Came to Baghdad (1951) features a multilingual member of British intelligence, Henry ‘Fakir’ Carmichael, a character based on the real-life persona of the enigmatic T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935). The real-life hero turned down a recommendation for the Victoria Cross and the offer of a knighthood for his role as guerrilla leader of the Arab Revolt against Germany’s allies, the Turks, during the First World War. The ‘Uncrowned King of the Desert’ was a brilliant scholar, philosopher, archaeologist, linguist, author, diplomat and statesman who shunned fame and fortune to become an aircraft mechanic in what was a forlorn attempt to escape the charismatic image he had engendered as the world-renowned ‘Lawrence of Arabia’.

  One of Lawrence’s ancestors was the cousin of Sir Walter Raleigh, a connection of which he was extremely proud. Therefore, it was fitting that in February 1929 Lawrence journeyed to the county of Raleigh’s birth to be stationed at RAF Mountbatten, Plymouth. In an effort to escape undue attention he had assumed the alias ‘Shaw’, in honour of one of his great friends, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, who introduced him to the vivacious Lady Nancy Astor. She was one of the most glamorous figures of the interwar period and had the distinction of being the first female to enter Parliament after women had been given their long overdue right to vote in 1918. She succeeded her husband, Waldorf, as member for Plymouth Sutton when he moved to the Lords, and continued to serve the city until she retired from politics in 1945.

  Lawrence was asexual and a cynical woman-hater, but became an ardent admirer of American-born Nancy and her incredible zest for life. She was the only female allowed to ride pillion on his motorbike. The pair would often shoot off
on his powerful 1,000cc Brough Superior for a high-speed ride around the city and boasted of reaching speeds of 90mph along Plymouth Embankment. In October 1930, Lawrence wrote to tell Nancy how he had overtaken a Bentley sports car ‘which only did 88’ on Salisbury Plain: ‘I wished I had had a peeress or two on my flapper bracket’.

  Lawrence called his bike Boanerges (meaning ‘Sons of Thunder’, the name which Jesus gave to two of his disciples, James and John), but his love of speed was to cause his tragic death shortly after his discharge from the RAF in March 1935. Taking up residence at Cloud’s Hill, a rented cottage in Dorset, he found it difficult to face an uncertain future and friends became concerned as he had attempted suicide in the past. He wrote to Nancy:

  I am so tired that it feels like heaven drawing near: only there are people who whisper that heaven will bore me. When they tell me that I almost wish I were dead for I have done everything in life except rest, and if rest is to prove no refuge, then what is left?

  Lady Astor tried to cheer Lawrence with the promise of a forthcoming government post and invited him to her country house in Buckinghamshire: ‘I believe... you will be asked to help reorganise the Defence Forces. If you will come to Cliveden, the last Saturday in May... you will never regret it’.