Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations

by Mike Holgate

  Britain needed men of Lawrence’s calibre in preparing to counter the growing threat posed by Germany. On the 13 May Lawrence received a letter from the award-winning author of Tarka the Otter, Henry Williamson, based in Georgeham, North Devon, proposing a meeting at Cloud’s Hill to discuss the possibility of Lawrence holding talks with Adolf Hitler to try and secure a lasting peace in Europe. Williamson was a member of Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and fervent admirer of the Fuhrer’s achievements. His collected novels, The Flax of Dream, contained the following dedication: ‘I salute the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is a happy child’.

  Lawrence agreed to receive Williamson and rode to the Post Office to send a telegram with the following directions: ‘Lunch Tuesday will find cottage one mile north of Bovington Camp SHAW’.

  On his way back home he swerved his motorcycle to avoid two errand boys on bicycles, crashed and flew over the handlebars, receiving severe head injuries. Lawrence was taken to Bovington Military Hospital but never recovered consciousness and died six days later. The ghost of Lawrence wearing flowing, long Arab robes was soon spotted riding a motorbike by Cloud’s Hill. Chillingly, a year before his death, Lawrence had prophesised his demise in a letter to motorbike manufacturer George Brough: ‘It looks as though I might yet break my neck on a Brough Superior’.

  Agatha Christie’s fictional hero, Fakir Carmichael, is killed while trying to relay plans to his supervisor about a secret weapon; likewise, following Lawrence’s death, rumours circulated that he had been murdered by foreign agents. Conversely, another story circulated that his death had been faked by the Secret Service to allow him to undertake espionage in the Middle East. Supporters of this theory believe he died in Morocco in 1968. In keeping with similar tales about heroic figures, including Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson and Lord Kitchener, there is also a legend that Lawrence has merely withdrawn into an Arthurian limbo from which he will emerge to save an imperilled nation.

  19

  EDEN PHILLPOTTS

  Peril at End House

  Eden Phillpotts was an odd-looking man, with a face more like a faun’s than an ordinary human being’s.

  Agatha Christie (An Autobiography, 1977)

  In Peril at End House (1932), Poirot and Hastings go to the aid of a young woman in danger at an eerie mansion, End House, whilst holidaying at the Majestic Hotel, St Loo. The properties are recognisable as Rock End and the Imperial Hotel in Torquay and Agatha Christie dedicated the mystery novel to one of the town’s most famous former residents, prolific author Eden Phillpotts, in gratitude ‘for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me many years ago’.

  Born in India, the son of an Army officer who died while he was an infant, Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960) was raised and educated in Plymouth, then for ten years worked for an insurance company in London before he successfully turned to writing for a living after failing in his ambition to become an actor. For half a century Phillpotts produced an average of four major works a year, covering novels, poems, plays, short stories and even detective stories, using the pseudonym Harrington Hext. However, he is best remembered as the ‘Hardy of Devon’ for a celebrated cycle of eighteen novels based on Dartmoor locations. Most notable was Widecombe Fair (1913), which he adapted into a play, The Farmer’s Wife, that was later directed for the silent screen by Alfred Hitchcock. From 1899-1929, Phillpotts made his home at Eltham, Torquay, where he became good friends with his neighbours, the Miller family. When Agatha was aged nineteen, she wrote a novel based in Cairo called Snow in the Desert and approached Phillpotts for advice. He was sufficiently impressed to arrange a meeting for her with his London literary agent, Hughes Massie, who considered the manuscript for a few months before deciding he would not be able to place it with a publisher.

  Phillpotts nurtured another talented writer in his own household, his daughter Adelaide Eden Phillpotts (1896-1993), who grew to admire Agatha Miller while they were attending dance classes together:

  Of all the children I recall only a flaxen-haired beauty of twelve called Agatha – later Agatha Christie – wearing a blue silk accordion-pleated dress, who danced better that anyone else and was prettier. She lived near us but we did not see much of her until she grew up. One side of the saloon held a large mirror and I recollect on my sixth birthday standing in front of it and noticing my face for the first time. Then I caught a sight of Agatha’s reflection: she was a thousand times nicer and cleverer than me. But I never envied anyone.

  However, at this same young stage of her life Adelaide was harbouring a dark secret, as her innocence was in peril at Eltham. The young girl had become sexually attractive to her own father and it was many years before she could bring herself to reveal the sordid nature of their incestuous relationship:

  He had begun deeply to love me. I think he looked on me as an extension of himself, for he would take me into his bed and fondle me, compare my limbs with his and say ‘Look! Your hands and feet are just like small editions of mine. You are so like me. And you going to be a writer too’. He kissed me all over and said: ‘You must never marry!’ At six or seven that meant nothing to me. Yet I did not forget those words, which all through my youth and afterwards were repeated. I loved him too but only as a father, and for fear of hurting him I let him do whatever he liked.

  When Adelaide was older, she was made aware of her father’s infidelities by her mother, who explained that he had always needed other women in his life, while he himself justified his licentious lifestyle to his daughter by stating his belief that ‘all artists, especially writers of fiction and drama, must gather as much knowledge as possible about the opposite sex’.

  Adelaide was a versatile writer, producing a total of forty-two major works, including four written in corroboration with her father. Unsurprisingly given the nature of her upbringing and personal experience, a core group of seven novels, including A Marriage (1928) and The Gallant Heart (1939), do not feature heroes, but heroines who commonly share a deep distrust of men. Forever fearful of her father’s cruel hold over her, she did not find the courage to break free from his evil spell until the age of fifty-five, when she fell in ‘love at first sight’ with a divorced American bookseller, Richard Ross. In 1951, the couple were married after a six-month courtship despite the vehement objections of Eden Phillpotts, whom Adelaide deemed to have ‘no power over love’. During his mid-sixties in 1929, the veteran author had married a young cousin with whom he began an affair while his first wife was dying of cancer, but in his late-eighties still could not accept his daughter’s right to happiness with another man. He obstinately refused to meet the groom and never spoke to his daughter again, presumably because she had gone against his express wish to ‘love him best until the end’.

  The blameless victim of sexual abuse was tormented by the estrangement from her father, a situation that continued to cast ‘a shadow on my joys, a tangle in my golden threads, a satin on my sunrise, some regret, fear, remorse, guilt, or pity, to mar the bliss’.

  Poignantly, Eden Phillpotts’s extreme possessiveness and jealousy also ruined his loyal and loving daughter’s chance to fulfil her greatest desire – to have a child. Two days after Agatha Christie gave birth to her daughter Rosalind in 1919, Adelaide paid a visit to see the mother and child at Ashfield. She felt ‘an indescribable thrill’ as she held the newborn infant, hopefully, though forlornly, telling herself, ‘You must have as many of these as possible’.

  20

  CHARLES LINDBERGH

  Murder on the Orient Express

  The kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby is a never-to-be-forgotten case.

  President Herbert Hoover

  Central to the plot of the mystery novel Murder on the Orient Express (1934) is the kidnapping and murder of a child, for which Agatha Christie drew inspiration from the contemporary publicity surrounding the infamous real-life tragedy that befell the family of a famous aviator. It sparked the world’s greatest manhunt for the abductor of
‘Baby Lindbergh’.

  In 1927 American Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), nicknamed ‘The Lone Eagle’, was feted as a national hero when he made the first ever non-stop solo transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in a single-engine aeroplane, The Spirit of St Louis. Sadly, he made international headlines again five years later when his twenty-one-month-old son, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr, was kidnapped from his bedroom in Hopewell, New Jersey, in March 1932. At the luxurious home, complete with an English butler, the perpetrator left behind a ransom note demanding $50,000 for the baby’s safe return. After protracted negotiation, intermediary Dr Condon journeyed to the Bronx and handed the ransom money over a cemetery wall to someone calling himself ‘John’. The anxious father was then directed to the Massachusetts coast, assured that his son was safe and sound on a boat. This proved to be a cruel hoax, for the distraught airman spent days flying over the area without locating a boat or his child. The ordeal of Lindbergh and his wife Anne continued until the baby’s body was found in a shallow grave in a wood four miles from their home. Death had been caused by a massive fracture of the skull from a blow delivered soon after he had been taken. A nationwide hunt for the killer was launched and the serial numbers of the banknotes used to pay the ransom were printed in newspapers across the country. It was to be over two years before one turned up when a German-born carpenter with a history of petty crime bought some petrol at a filling station in the Bronx in September 1934.

  Illegal immigrant Bruno ‘Richard’ Hauptmann was arrested after the sharp-eyed filling-station attendant furnished the police with his car registration number and, despite protesting his innocence, the evidence against the accused was compelling. The ransom note contained spelling errors that suggested the writer was German, whilst a search of the suspect’s house recovered $14,000 of the original ransom money found hidden in the garage. Also, a wooden floorboard missing from the attic had been used to make the homemade ladder used in the kidnapping and Dr Condon’s telephone number was found written on a piece of paper. Hauptmann was sentenced to death in February 1935 and, after being granted three postponements, went to the electric chair fifteen months later. In the words of one reporter who witnessed the execution, the murderer paid the ‘supreme penalty’ for his heinous crime ‘without uttering a word and with a wistful smile on his pallid face’. Revulsion at Hauptmann’s crime of killing the baby affectionately known as ‘The Little Eagle’ had been felt by even hardened criminals, including Chicago gangster Al Capone, the instigator of the infamous St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. At the time of the kidnapping, Capone offered a $10,000 reward and volunteered his services to locate the missing baby. However, ‘Scarface’ was unable to obtain the cooperation of the government to release him from San Francisco’s Alcatraz where he was serving a ten-year jail sentence, not for any of his prohibition rackets or violent crimes, but for failing to submit tax returns to Uncle Sam!

  Curiously, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express came to the forefront in a different context when the English Riviera became the first urban area to be granted Geopark status in 2007. Nick Powe, Managing Director of the prehistoric Kents Cavern, which featured as Hemsley Cavern in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924), welcomed the prestigious award recognising the area’s ‘fabulous wildlife, marine biology, sea grasses, dolphins, archaeological and geological heritage’. It would also enable the promotion of many more of Torbay’s assets, ‘including links to the works of… Agatha Christie’, whose keen interest in archaeology had brought about her meeting with second husband Max Mallowan. Two of the Geopark’s gateway sites, Torquay Museum and Torre Abbey, have permanent exhibitions celebrating Agatha Christie’s life. Furthermore, ‘The Queen of Crime’ has inspired a palaeontology theory developed by American Douglas Erwin, the world’s leading expert on the global catastrophe that occurred at the end of the Permian period some 250 million years ago when 90 per cent of all life on Earth became extinct. His books on the subject, described as ‘whodunnits for the ages’, are written from the perspective of a forensic scientist trying to piece together minute clues to determine the many possible causes of death that include asteroid impact, huge volcanic eruptions or the oceans losing their oxygen content. Unfolding as a sort of geological mystery story, Erwin describes a final possibility as the ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ scenario which, like fictional detective Hercule Poirot of the novel, proposes that the murder was committed by all the suspects.

  * * *

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  * * *

  In September 1976 a prosecutor told a court how a girl from the Isle of Wight, aged fifteen, attempted to kill her parents after becoming ‘immersed in the detective fiction of Agatha Christie’.

  The girl had been adopted at the age of six and was well treated by her devoted parents, who were devastated to hear her plead guilty to deliberately damaging their car and committing arson with intent to endanger life. After failing to cause an accident by cutting what she believed was the brake line on the family car, the accused set the vehicle alight in the integrated garage. The fire spread to the house, where her parents were watching television. They escaped from the inferno after making a desperate attempt to reach their daughter’s room where they believed she was trapped. However, the arsonist was admiring her handiwork from the top of a nearby cliff and later admitted, ‘I wanted to kill Mum and Dad. They expected too much of me. They expected me to be a goody-goody all the time. I wanted to show them I was not. I wanted them dead’.

  Treated sympathetically by the judge, who ordered her detention until she received treatment that would make her fit ‘to be at large in the world again’, the defence counsel added, ‘It is very difficult in dealing with a person with intense imagination to discover where play acting ends and reality begins’.

  21

  FRANK VOSPER

  Love From A Stranger

  Vosper… drowned after falling from a transatlantic liner and his death was only ruled as an accident after much media speculation, involving alleged sexual shenanigans aboard the ship. Sounds as though the bizarre and tragic episode could have provided the raw material for a fictional mystery.

  Crime writer Martin Edwards

  Agatha Christie granted her permission for ‘Philomel Cottage’, from the short story collection The Listerdale Mystery (1934), to be adapted for the stage. It was renamed Love From a Stranger by the dramatist, who subsequently became the focus of a real-life mystery when he either fell or jumped to his death from the porthole of an ocean liner off the coast of Devon.

  The play was written by actor, producer and playwright Frank Vosper (1899-1937), then at the height of his fame having established himself as one of the most versatile members of the theatrical and film world. During the interwar years he established himself as a thespian of distinction with his portrayal of Henry VIII in The Rose Without a Thorn, and a successful dramatist with the comedy No Funny Business and crime story Murder on the Second Floor. Having made his screen debut in 1926, he appeared in many films, tending to be typecast as an urbane villain – notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934).

  In 1936, Love From A Stranger opened at the New Theatre, London, with Frank Vosper starring in a plot that centres on a young woman’s fear of her husband’s past and the threat posed to her life. The success of the play resulted in the first British film adaptation of a work by Agatha Christie. Starring Basil Rathbone, who would find lasting fame in the role of Sherlock Homes, and featuring a young Joan Hickson, later endorsed by Agatha Christie as the perfect choice to play Miss Marple, the screen version was released in 1937. Earlier that year, Vosper, accompanied by his close friend Peter Willes, holidayed in Jamaica and New York. Travelling back to England on the liner SS Paris, tragedy struck at an end of voyage party shortly before the ship was due to dock at Plymouth.

  In the early hours of the morning on 6 March 1937, the reigning Miss Europe, Muriel Oxford, who had been visiting America
for screen tests with a film studio, sought an introduction and was invited for drinks in the cabin shared by Frank Vosper and Peter Willes. At 2.45 a.m., passengers summoned a steward to interrupt the party and complain about the noise being made by the threesome who were quaffing champagne, resulting in the beauty queen taking the men to her stateroom where another large bottle of champagne was opened. Twenty minutes later, a man was heard to call out, ‘If you don’t marry me, I will jump overboard!’ Minutes later, two of the revellers realised that while they had been sitting together and chatting, their fellow partygoer Frank Vosper had disappeared from the room – but had not left by the door. The alarm was raised but the captain refused to look for a ‘man overboard’ as he did not consider it possible for someone to slip and fall out of the porthole, but a search of the ship failed to find the missing person and the drowned body of the actor was eventually washed up at Eastbourne sixteen days later. In a statement to the press, Peter Willes clarified that it was he who had jokingly suggested ‘marriage’ and ‘jumping overboard’, and that his friend must have been trying to discreetly leave the party so as not appear rude. In his opinion, the actor’s poor eyesight may have led him to believe that he could alight on the deck via the porthole. At the subsequent inquest, the coroner summarised that there was no question of an accident in the ordinary sense of a man climbing on to the ledge and falling through the window. Therefore, the only question that remained to answer was why had Frank Vosper leapt through the window? Was it with the intention of ending it all, or under the misapprehension that there was a deck on which he could land? If it was a case of suicide, then it must have been on a very sudden impulse, for there was no obvious reason to imply that the actor was considering taking his own life. If it was purely an accident, then the victim must have been attempting to leave unnoticed by the window to ensure he would not spoil the party that his ‘merry’ companions Mr Willes and Miss Oxford were so obviously enjoying.