Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations

by Mike Holgate

  I didn’t think I would end my life playing endless Poirots… it’s a character performance because he seems to get his kicks in life by lip reading at a range of two hundred yards.

  Sir Peter Ustinov (Time, 1999)

  Once dubbed ‘the son of Orson Welles’ – another enfant terrible blessed with genius who enjoyed huge success but never realised his true potential – Sir Peter Ustinov (1921-2004) had an early ambition to become a great writer and the young author was compared favourably with Chekhov, Noel Coward, J.B. Priestley and George Bernard Shaw. However, due to the splendid opportunities that continually presented themselves to utilise his great diversity of talents, he never produced the literary masterpiece expected of him. The consolations were considerable in an extraordinary, multi-faceted career in the world of popular entertainment as a novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, producer, director and superb actor. He garnered two Oscars for supporting roles in the films Spartacus (1960) and Topkapi (1964), although his greatest acting fame was earned for his portrayal of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

  In all, Ustinov made six appearances as the fictional sleuth, with acclaimed performances in three star-studded films, Death on the Nile (1978), Evil Under the Sun (1981) and Appointment with Death (1987), plus three full-length television dramas, Thirteen at Dinner (1985), Dead Man’s Folly (1986) and Murder in Three Acts (1986). During this memorable phase of his career, the actor also found time to make award-winning television documentaries. While on one such assignment, he was present at an assassination that shook the world.

  While producing a television series, Peter Ustinov’s People, in 1984, the presenter journeyed to Delhi to conduct an interview with Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. On the morning of 31 October, he was waiting in the garden to greet the premier as she walked the short distance from her official residence when the leader was attacked and died in a hail of bullets. The horrified Ustinov and his film crew heard the shooting as one of the victim’s most trusted security guards, Beant Singh, drew a revolver and fired three shots at point blank range into the body of Mrs Gandhi. As she slumped to the ground another guard, Satwant Singh, pulled an automatic weapon from his shoulder and pumped its entire contents of thirty bullets into the prostrate leader. At least seven bullets penetrated the abdomen, three her chest, and one her heart. The two murderers then calmly dropped their weapons and surrendered, but were shot dead as they were taken into custody after allegedly attempting to escape. Only the day before, Indira Gandhi had evidently experienced a premonition of her tragic fate. Members of her party were startled at emotional remarks she made whilst addressing a mammoth public gathering: ‘I am not interested in a long life. I am not afraid of these things. I don’t mind if my life goes in the service of this nation. If I die today, every drop of my blood will invigorate the nation’.

  In Ustinov’s second Christie film, Evil Under the Sun, it is revealed that actress Arlena Stuart was acquitted of poisoning her first husband with arsenic. To develop this aspect of the plot, Agatha Christie drew on the celebrated case of American Florence Maybrick. She was charged with murder when it was discovered that she had recently purchased a large quantity of arsenic-treated flypapers and written a compromising letter to her lover saying that her husband ‘is sick unto death’.

  Cotton merchant James Maybrick married seventeen-year-old Southern belle Florence Chandler in 1881. After living in the USA for three years, the Maybricks returned to England and took up residence at Battlecrease House in Liverpool. The couple had two children before matrimonial difficulties surfaced. It came as a surprise to Florence to discover that her spouse was still seeing and maintaining a long-term lover, who had also borne him children. The cheated woman promptly gained revenge by finding comfort in the arms of her husband’s friend and business associate Alfred Brierley. In March 1889, the hypocritical Maybrick exploded with fury when he found out about his wife’s affair and during a heated exchange gave her a black eye, then drew up a new will excluding her as a beneficiary, before a sudden illness brought about his death on 11 May.

  Although the evidence against Florence Maybrick seemed damning, especially the flypapers which she claimed were boiled to make an arsenical cosmetic preparation, the defence contended that the deceased had been in the habit of self-administering arsenic as an aphrodisiac, which accounted for the traces of poison found in his system. This was confirmed by a postmortem that found arsenic in the liver, kidney and intestines, though none in the heart or blood, which would have indicated that the dead man consumed a lethal dose of poison. However, the court was totally unsympathetic with a woman who admitted adultery and she was sentenced to death. Upon appeal the Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor concluded ‘that the evidence clearly establishes that Mrs Maybrick administered poison to her husband with intent to murder; but that there is ground for reasonable doubt whether the arsenic so administered was in fact the cause of death’. Acting on their recommendation, Queen Victoria reluctantly exercised the royal prerogative for the death penalty to be commuted to life imprisonment, commenting through her secretary ‘the only regret she feels is that so wicked a woman should escape by a mere legal quibble’.

  * * *

  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  * * *

  In 1962, fifteen-year-old Graham Young confessed to attempted murder having administered poison to his father, sister and a school friend, then spent nine years in Broadmoor. Despite being diagnosed with a psychopathic disorder, the patient was freed on licence; however, his obsession with poisons compelled him to commit murder and he received a sentence of life imprisonment in June 1972.

  Unbelievably, following his release in 1971, Young was helped by the probation service to obtain work as an assistant storekeeper in a photographic laboratory at Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, where he was given ready access to poisons. Carefully selecting victims among his work colleagues, he liberally dosed their tea or coffee with thallium or antimony and kept meticulous notes of his experiments in a ‘diary of death’. At first the spate of illnesses, caused by what was thought to be a mystery ‘bug’ in the factory, bewildered doctors. It was not until the death of two men, Robert Egle and Frederick Biggs, that a pathologist had his suspicions aroused through reading about the effects of thallium poisoning in Agatha Christie’s novel The Pale Horse (1961).

  Young died of a heart attack in his cell in Parkhurst Prison in 1990, at the age of forty-two, and the man dubbed ‘The Teacup Poisoner’ inspired the black comedy film The Young Poisoner’s Handbook (1995).

  29

  VANESSA REDGRAVE

  Agatha

  ‘Petronella will be there’ is an affectionate glance at Vanessa Redgrave… the most prominent member of the Socialist Workers Party at demos.

  Christie biographer Martin Fido on a quote from Passenger to Frankfurt

  Agatha Christie’s personal account of her life was published a year after her death in An Autobiography (1977). Despite writing frankly about the breakdown of her first marriage, she chose not to discuss the mystery of her subsequent eleven-day disappearance in December 1926. The decision not to mention this aspect of her past only increased speculation and led to a stream of published investigations and theories to rival the myths surrounding Jack the Ripper and the Loch Ness Monster.

  The first book to emerge about the case of the missing author was ‘an imaginary solution to an authentic mystery’ by Kathleen Tynan in Agatha: A Mystery Novel (1978). Several months before the work was published, it was announced that it was to be adapted into a film produced by David Puttnam. The news brought an indignant response from Agatha’s daughter, Rosalind, who wrote a letter to The Times complaining that the family had not been consulted about the forthcoming ‘fairytale’:

  It is, however, the idea of the positive identification of my parents – both in the proposed title of the film Agatha, and also presumably in the names of characters in an admitted work of fiction – that I find particularly objectionable and morally beneath
contempt.

  Kathleen Tynan dedicated the book to her husband, controversial theatre critic Kenneth Tynan. The couple had themselves been involved in a divorce scandal when Kathleen abandoned her marriage to set up home with Tynan, then became his second wife when she was six months pregnant. In 1967, the couple were married before a New York Justice of the Peace. During the ceremony, star guest Marlene Dietrich, who ten years earlier had played the role of Christine Vole in the acclaimed film production of the Agatha Christie play Witness for the Prosecution, attempted to discreetly back across the office in order to close the doors that had been left ajar, causing the judge to briefly interrupt the marriage vows by issuing a warning: ‘And do you, Kenneth, take Kathleen for your lawful wedded – I wouldn’t stand with your ass to an open door in this office lady – wife to have and to hold?’

  A theatre critic famed for his vitriolic reviews in the same mould as Kenneth Tynan, is the central character in another work that shamelessly exploited the reputation of the recently deceased ‘Queen of Crime’. First produced in 1978, Who Killed ‘Agatha’ Christie?, a play by Tudor Gates, toured the provinces before opening in October at the Ambassadors Theatre, London. As reviewer Ned Chaillet wryly observed in The Times: ‘Of course, the Agatha Christie referred to is not the sweet old lady who wrote fantasies of murder, but really Arthur Christie, the dramatic critic who butchered plays and players with his criticism and had a secret homosexual life. Agatha is a term of endearment’. In the story, playwright John Terry (originally played by James Bolam), whose productions have been malevolently savaged by the critic, lures Arthur, aka Agatha, (Gerald Flood) to a rented flat to listen to recorded sex acts between the critic’s boyfriend and the playwright’s wife. John Terry’s intent is to have his revenge by killing the love cheats and his poison pen friend in this ‘thrilling psychological drama with a devilish dash of macabre humour’.

  In Kathleen Tynan’s Agatha, a highly imaginative reconstruction of the famous author’s disappearance, the missing woman is not suffering from amnesia but, distraught over her husband’s other woman, plans to commit suicide at a hotel by means of electrocution in the hydro-bath. By utilising her crime writing skills, the death is to be staged to appear like murder at the hands of Archie’s ‘other woman’. Starring in the title role of the film version Agatha (1979) was Oscar-winning actress Vanessa Redgrave (b. 1937), who five years earlier had appeared as governess Mary Debenham in Murder on the Orient Express.

  A prominent political activist, Redgrave donated her £40,000 fee for the part of ‘Agatha’ to the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. In 2003, she hit the headlines by providing a £50,000 surety to support Akhmed Zakayev, a Chechen separatist campaigner. He was fighting a legal action to extradite him to Russia, where he was accused of thirteen serious offences including: armed rebellion, kidnapping two priests, torturing a suspected informer, taking part in a firing squad, and the murder of 300 troops and twelve civilians. The former Culture Minister and actor was likened to Islamic terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden and said to be implicated in the 2002 Moscow theatre siege. This tragic episode resulted in the death of 130 people when armed Chechen rebels, with explosives strapped to their waists, held a theatre audience of 800 people to ransom, demanding that Russian forces be withdrawn from their homeland. Three days later, when negotiations had failed to bring about a peaceful solution to the crisis, Russian troops stormed the building after sedative gas was pumped into the theatre in an attempt to render the terrorists unconscious. The military intervention resulted in the deaths of eighty members of the public and all fifty of the suicide bombers. At a hearing at Bow Street Court, a judge rejected Russia’s request for extradition on the grounds of fears that Zakeyev faced torture if he was forced to return to face questioning and because the crimes allegedly involving the defendant were committed during an ‘internal armed conflict’. Vanessa Redgrave pronounced that the political asylum seeker was a highly respected actor in his home state, ‘not a warlord and not a terrorist’.

  Mass murder in a theatre had previously been attempted in South Africa during the showing of Agatha Christie’s play The Hollow, in which glamorous actress Veronica Crane attempts to rekindle a romance with former fiancé Dr John Christow. When the ex-lovers meet at a secret rendezvous, the physician is shot dead and the killer later dies drinking tea laced with poison. Under the headline, ‘A Real Life Whodunnit’, the Sunday Express reported in March 1984:

  A stage hand has been charged with attempted murder in a real-life ‘whodunnit’ backstage at a Johannesburg theatre where an Agatha Christie play was showing. The man was charged after poison was found in the cast’s kettle only fifteen minutes before the villain in The Hollow ‘died’ on stage… of poisoning.

  30

  AGATHA CHRISTIE

  Ordeal by Innocence

  It is a case where the innocent suffer most horribly for sins they have never committed. They live in a haze of publicity, acquaintances and friends look at them curiously; there are continually autograph hunters, curious idle crowds. Any decent happy private life is made impossible for them.

  Agatha Christie on the Croydon Murders (The Sunday Chronicle 1929)

  Throughout her long writing career, Agatha Christie had an ongoing fascination with the Bravo Case and the Croydon Murders – unsolved true crimes that formed the premise of one of her best detective novels, Ordeal by Innocence (1958), the story of a family thrown into turmoil when they are forced to consider which one of them might be a murderer.

  The first mystery that took the author’s interest was the case of barrister Charles Bravo, who married wealthy young widow Florence Ricardo after a whirlwind courtship in December 1875. The newlyweds lived at The Priory in Balham with Florence’s companion, widow Jane Cox, who witnessed arguments between the couple over her mistress’s association with a former lover, Dr James Gully. After four months of married life, Charles was taken ill after eating dinner with the two women. He died three days later after being attended by his love rival, Dr Gully. A post-mortem concluded that he had been poisoned by a single dose of antimony and an inquest returned an open verdict, although it was widely believed that the victim had committed suicide as Jane Cox testified that he had told her, ‘I have taken poison for Dr Gully. Don’t tell Florence’. However, revelations in the press about the widow’s relationship with the family doctor and the fact that Jane Cox had been on bad terms with the deceased resulted in a second inquest being held, which virtually developed into a trial of the two women. This time, the verdict was ‘wilful murder’, although there was insufficient evidence to place the blame against anyone. By this time, Florence and Jane were no longer friends and a contemporary broadsheet ballad summed up the popular belief that a cunning wife had laced her husband’s wine and cast suspicion on her companion:

  When lovely woman stoops to folly

  And finds her husband in the way,

  What charm can soothe her melancholy?

  What art can turn him into clay?

  The only means her aim to cover,

  And save herself from prison locks,

  And repossess her ancient lover

  Are Burgundy and Mrs Cox!

  A character in Ordeal by Innocence comments on the unresolved aspects of the case:

  And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her family, died alone of drink, and Mrs Cox, ostracised, and with three little boys, lived to be an old woman with most of the people she knew believing her to be a murderer, and Dr Gully was ruined professionally and socially. Someone was guilty – and got away with it. But the others were innocent – and didn’t get away with anything.

  In a letter to Francis Wyndham, editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, written in 1968, Agatha dismissed the case against the two women as Florence Bravo ‘had the money’, whilst Mrs Cox was ‘an obvious suspect at first hand, but not when you look into it’. The crime writer firmly believed it was Dr Gully who killed Charles Bravo: ‘I’ve always felt that he was the only person who had an
overwhelming motive and who was the right type: exceedingly competent, successful, and always considered above suspicion’.

  In the second case that attracted Agatha Christie’s interest, a serial murderer escaped detection in Croydon when three members of the same family died of poisoning between April 1928 and March 1929. Retired colonial civil servant Edmund Duff passed away after a brief illness, considered to be caused by a heart condition. Suspicions about his death were only aroused when his daughter-in-law Vera Sidney and her mother, Violet Sidney, died within a month of each other. All three bodies were then exhumed and found to contain arsenic. It was thought that poison had been administered to the victims in food or medicine by a close family member. Although there was insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution, the chief suspect was Grace Duff, widow of Edmund, who was alleged to have wanted rid of her husband as she was having an affair with a doctor, while the female relatives were murdered for financial gain.

  In her letter published by the Sunday Times in 1968, Agatha Christie revealed that she was unable to offer a solution to the mystery but would continue her investigation into ‘whodunnit’ beyond the grave: ‘All I can say is, dear Francis Wyndham, that if I die and go to heaven, or the other place, and so it happens that the Public Prosecutor of that time is also there, I shall beg him to reveal the secret to me’.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

  General Sources

  Agatha Christie Collection, Nos 1-85 (Agatha Christie Ltd, a Chorion company, 2001-2005)

  Bunson, Matthew, The Complete Christie Encyclopedia (London, Pocket Books, 2000)

  Ellis, Arthur, An Historical Survey of Torquay (Subscribers Edition, 1930)

  Harris, Martin, The Official Guide to Agatha Christie in Devon (Produced under licence from Agatha Christie Ltd) (Paignton, Creative Media Publishing, 2009)