During the Golden Age, prize competitions linked to detective stories were highly popular. They can be cost-effective marketing devices – if carefully handled. In 1905, Edgar Wallace offered £1,000 in prize money for readers who solved the puzzle in his debut thriller, The Four Just Men, and found himself courting bankruptcy as a result. Almost sixty years later, Len Deighton’s second spy novel, Horse Under Water, included a crossword with clues which could be solved through reading the novel. The clues were printed on the endpapers of first editions, and readers were given ten days to complete the puzzle; the first ten to send in correct solutions were awarded book tokens.
4
The Mystery of the Silent Pool
On the morning of Saturday 4 December 1926, a gypsy boy called George Best came across a Morris Cowley motor car at Newlands Corner, near Guildford in Surrey. The lights were on, but nobody was inside, although a fur coat and small suitcase had been left. The police soon traced the car to Agatha Christie, who lived with her husband in the stockbroker belt at Sunningdale in Berkshire. At the age of thirty-six, Christie had already established a reputation as a detective novelist, and the couple had named their house Styles, after the scene of the crime in her debut novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
When the police called at Styles, they spoke to Charlotte (‘Carlo’) Fisher, who acted as Christie’s secretary and helped to look after her daughter Rosalind. Carlo said the author had left home, driving off without telling anyone where she was going. According to Carlo, Christie had been unwell recently, and her family were worried about her. Christie’s husband Archie was staying with friends, along with his secretary Nancy Neele. He’d recently confessed to Agatha that he’d fallen in love with Nancy.
The police took Archie and Carlo to the spot where the car had been found. The news had already leaked out, and the car was surrounded by a crowd. The area rapidly became a magnet for sensation-seekers, and the Press salivated over the puzzle, indulging in feverish guesswork about the mysterious affair of the beautiful young writer, and her dashing war hero husband. Words of wisdom from Superintendent Kenward, the Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey Police, featured prominently in their reports.
‘The most baffling mystery ever set me for solution’ was Kenward’s quotable description of the case. An early theory was that Agatha had crashed her car and wandered into nearby woodland in a disorientated state and become lost. The area was searched, with help from members of the public, but there was no sign of Agatha. When questioned by the police and newspapers, Archie was defensive. He dreaded the truth about his relationship with Nancy coming to light. The police guarded his house, and monitored his phone calls.
‘They suspect me of doing away with Agatha,’ he told a business colleague. To deflect suspicion, he revealed to the Daily News that his wife had been thinking of ‘engineering her disappearance’. The newspaper offered a £100 reward for information leading to her discovery, helpfully printing a set of photographs showing how she might have altered her appearance with a disguise.
Close to Newlands Corner, in a hollow shaded by box trees, lay the Silent Pool. Fed by underground springs, the water was clear and still. A woodcutter’s daughter had been surprised there by wicked King John, so legend said, while she was bathing naked. She drowned while trying to flee from him. Her ghost was seen by local people from time to time, floating on the surface of the pool.
Had Christie chosen this serene yet spooky place to end her life? There was only one way to find out. The Silent Pool was dredged with the aid of a pump and large grappling irons to slash the weeds. Tractors and a light aircraft scoured the countryside, and dogs searched the land. They found no sign of a corpse.
With each passing day, the theories became wilder. A clairvoyant called in by the Daily Sketch suggested that Agatha’s body might be found in a log-house. Cynics suggested that the ‘disappearance’ was a stunt to publicize her latest novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Or had she disguised herself in male clothing and gone into hiding, like Dr Crippen’s mistress Ethel Le Neve sixteen years earlier? The Daily Express consulted a former Chief Inspector of the CID, Walter Dew, renowned as ‘the man who caught Crippen’, who reinvented himself as an occasional media pundit on matters criminal and mysterious after retiring from Scotland Yard. Dew doubted whether Christie was the victim of foul play, or had vanished for publicity or financial reasons. ‘All women are subject to hysteria at times,’ he pronounced, opining that perhaps the fact that she ‘thought about crooks and murder all day’ had affected her. Reporters thirsting for sensation found leading crime writers equally keen to share their wisdom.
On Friday 10 December, Dorothy L. Sayers (whose father had jumped to ‘a scandalous explanation’ of the puzzle) wrote about the case for the Daily News. She assessed the possible scenarios: loss of memory, foul play, suicide, and voluntary disappearance, but her article was apparently written without personal knowledge of Christie’s character. Her speculations highlighted the questions about the case, but yielded no answers.
Was Agatha conducting a form of ‘mental reprisal’ against someone who had hurt her? Edgar Wallace advanced this theory in the Daily Mail, guessing that she was taking revenge on Archie for his adultery. A year or so later, Wallace wrote a story inspired by the case, ‘The Sunningdale Murder’. The Daily Mail also featured Max Pemberton, author of several bestselling Victorian thrillers, fearing the worst. He thought Agatha was dead.
Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a former Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey, although he had resigned after developing a passionate belief in spiritualism. He had investigated real-life crimes, such as the Edalji and Oscar Slater cases, with much success. The Surrey police supplied him with one of Agatha’s gloves, which he took to a medium and psychometrist named Horace Leaf. Leaf’s considered opinion was that ‘trouble’ was connected to the glove. If this insight was of limited value, Leaf did say that Agatha was still alive. Conan Doyle informed Archie of this breakthrough, and announced that the case was ‘an excellent example of the uses of psychometry as an aid to the detective’.
The police appealed for public help in searching the Surrey Downs, and ‘the Great Sunday Hunt’ took place on 12 December. About two thousand civilians took part, wrapped up warm against the cold. It was like a massive outdoor pre-Christmas party. Ice creams and hot drinks were sold from vans to refresh the spectators. Sayers could not resist joining in the excitement, and persuaded John Gilroy, her artist friend from Benson’s, to drive her to the Silent Pool. The outcome for her was even more of an anticlimax than her foray to France to investigate the Nurse Daniels mystery. During a brief look around, Sayers failed to spot any tell-tale clues that the police had missed, and was left to pronounce, with all the authority she could muster, ‘No, she isn’t here.’ Yet if she failed to contribute to the detective effort, at least her day out amounted to useful research. Aspects of her visit featured in Unnatural Death, in which two women go missing from a car left abandoned on the south coast.
As darkness fell, the hunt was called off. A flare was lit to help searchers who had lost their bearings find their way home. Weary and deflated, Kenward told journalists that he did not believe Agatha Christie’s disappearance was a gimmick designed to sell her books.
What he did not know was that the answer lay more than two hundred miles north. A banjo player and a fellow bandsman performing at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, the North Yorkshire spa town, were keeping a close eye on a woman guest. They concluded she was the missing novelist, and their detective work proved superior to anyone else’s. Within forty-eight hours, the whole world learned that Agatha Christie had been discovered, safe and well.
After travelling by train to Harrogate, Christie had taken a first-floor room at five guineas a week and bought herself some new clothes, including a glamorous pink georgette evening dress. She followed the reports about her disappearance in the Press, and played bridge – and billiards – in the public rooms. At n
ight she danced in the Winter Garden Ballroom to the music of the Happy Hydro Boys. Otherwise she relaxed by having massages, solving crossword puzzles and borrowing books from the W.H. Smith’s lending library. Her favourite reading comprised thrillers rejoicing in titles such as The Double Thumb and The Phantom Train. She had assumed the identity of a Mrs Teresa Neele, recently returned to Britain from Cape Town. Her chosen surname was that of her husband’s mistress.
Today Agatha Christie remains, almost half a century after her death, a household name. More than that, she has become a global brand. Big business. Two billion (or is it four billion? – estimates vary, and at such a stratospheric level, it scarcely seems to matter) copies of her books have been sold, and she has been translated more often than any other author. About two hundred film and television versions of her work have been screened, and the stories have been adapted into video games, graphic novels and Japanese anime. She was the most performed female British playwright of the twentieth century, and The Mousetrap is the longest-running stage play of all time, with more than 25,000 performances in London alone. The sixtieth anniversary of its first performance was celebrated by sixty specially licensed performances worldwide. Her home overlooking the River Dart is in the care of the National Trust and a popular tourist destination, while her native Torquay boasts an Agatha Christie Mile, along which visitors can retrace her steps.
A statue featuring a bust of Christie stands in Covent Garden, the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul has an Agatha Christie room, and her face smiles from a billboard welcoming tourists to Gran Canaria. On the 120th anniversary of her birth, cooks around the world baked a Delicious Death cake from a recipe by Jane Asher. The book with the thickest spine in the world has been created from the complete Miss Marple stories. In Harrogate, a plaque in the Old Swan Hotel (formerly the Hydropathic Hydro) commemorates her disappearance, the reason for which continues to provoke debate. Agatha Christie is, in short, an icon whose name is synonymous with detective fiction and mystery.
The enduring nature and astonishing scale of her fame would have amazed, and possibly appalled her. Not only was she genuinely modest, she was fanatical about preserving her privacy. She had always been shy, but the media frenzy that surrounded her disappearance left her with a lifelong detestation of the Press.
At first sight, Christie seems as genteel as her books are supposed to be. With Christie, however, nothing was quite as it seemed. In person, she combined a straightforward outlook on life with hidden depths, just as her simple and accessible writing style contrasted with her devious plots. Her father was American, and from childhood she spent long periods abroad, gaining a breadth of understanding and experience of the world that helps to explain why her work has enjoyed unceasing popularity when so much more sophisticated fiction has vanished from sight.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890, the third child of Frederick and Clara Miller. Frederick had inherited enough money from the family business not to need to work, and not long after Agatha’s elder sister Margaret (known as Madge) was born, the family settled in Torquay. Frederick was good-natured but lazy, and his failure to keep a close eye on the family fortune proved financially calamitous. To economize, he let the Torquay house, and took his family to France for over six months. Agatha enjoyed such an idyllic summer in Pau that she never went back there, unwilling to diminish the magical memories of that first foreign adventure. Her novels are stereotypically associated with settings in country houses and seemingly Home Counties villages for which detective novelist Colin Watson coined the generic term ‘Mayhem Parva’. In fact, a high proportion of her stories are set overseas. This reflects her love of travel, but above all her core belief that, in its fundamentals, human nature is much the same everywhere.
Madge was regarded as ‘the clever one’ in the family, and attended boarding school, but one of Clara’s unorthodox ideas was to school Agatha at home. Frederick Miller’s health deteriorated along with the family finances, and he died in 1901. Money was short, but Madge had married James Watt, who came from a wealthy Mancunian family, and Agatha often stayed with them at Abney Hall in Cheshire. She loved Abney, and fictitious versions of it appeared in After the Funeral and ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. After a brief and unsatisfactory spell at a Torquay school, attending two days a week, she completed her education at three pensions in France.
She lived in her imagination, and loved writing stories and poems. Her instinct was to watch and listen to others rather than take centre stage herself. A keen eavesdropper, she gathered plot ideas from stray phrases in overheard conversations between strangers. She was as curious about other people as she was reluctant to reveal her own thoughts. Her innate modesty meant she felt under no compulsion to talk too much, and so she never gave herself away.
She wrote a novel set in Cairo, where she and her mother had taken a three-month holiday, but a literary agent, Hughes Massie, turned Snow upon the Desert down. Undaunted, she continued to write, as well as taking singing lessons, while receiving plenty of overtures from young men attracted by her serene manner and quiet good looks. Tall, slim and pale-haired, she rejected several marriage proposals before becoming engaged to Reggie Lucy, a major in the Gunners. Yet she broke with Reggie after meeting a dashing young airman.
Lieutenant Archie Christie was the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service, and Christie later said she fell for him because she found him unpredictable and fascinating. When war broke out, she realized he was likely to be killed. Three days before Christmas, he suddenly obtained leave from duty and they decided to marry. The wedding took place on Christmas Eve 1914, and Archie returned to France on Boxing Day. Life at this time was heady, exhilarating, and impulsive. It was also frighteningly insecure. Agatha’s brother Monty, a feckless charmer, was badly wounded while serving with the King’s African Rifles, and although he survived, he suffered psychological damage. To Clara’s distress, he liked to take up his revolver and shoot at people passing the family home in Torquay – a hobby Christie gave to a character, decades later, in her play The Unexpected Guest.
Archie was decorated for bravery and promoted to the rank of colonel before being invalided out of the Royal Flying Corps. At one point the couple did not see each other for almost two years. Agatha became a V.A.D. (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurse, later transferring to the dispensary. A rather sinister pharmacist who told her he enjoyed the power afforded by dealing with poisons stuck in her mind, and nearly fifty years later, provided her with a key character in The Pale Horse. She blew up a Cona coffee maker whilst attempting the Marsh test to detect the presence of arsenic, but acquired an extensive knowledge of poisons, which she soon put to use – in fiction.
Madge shared Agatha’s enthusiasm for detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and his French rivals Arsène Lupin and Joseph Rouletabille, and challenged her to write a whodunit. Having encountered a few Belgian war refugees, Christie decided that her detective would be Belgian too. She created someone who was vain but brilliant: Hercule Poirot. His foreign nationality was a clever stroke, and so was his conceit: British people were often suspicious of foreigners, and distrustful of cleverness. Christie poked fun at her fellow countrymen’s insularity, while making it plausible that suspects who concocted ingenious murder schemes made the catastrophic mistake of underestimating this seemingly ridiculous figure, with his broken English, extravagant moustache and insistence on using ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain. Christie’s prime literary influence was Conan Doyle, and she equipped Poirot with an amiable if rather obtuse Watson in Captain Arthur Hastings.
Christie finished The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1918, and the following year she gave birth to Rosalind. After a series of rejections from publishers, John Lane offered a less-than-generous contract which gave him an option over her next five books. She made the revisions he asked for, and her ingenious country house mystery finally appeared in the US in 1920 and in Britain the following year. Next came The Secre
t Adversary, a light and breezy thriller which introduced a young couple who went on to marry and to feature in four subsequent books, the last published more than half a century after the first. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford represent wish fulfilment on Christie’s part. She imagined herself as the lovely, sharp-witted Tuppence, while the courageous and eternally reliable Tommy was an idealized portrait of the man she thought she had married.
In January 1922, Christie and Archie took the extraordinary step of leaving their young daughter for almost a year so that they could take part in a ‘Mission to the Dominions’. This was an international publicity exercise meant to pave the way for the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. The grand tour was the brainchild of Major Belcher, a friend of Archie’s with a genius for self-promotion, the highlight of whose war service was a spell as Controller of the Supplies of Potatoes. Belcher offered Archie, who had worked in the City since the war, the job of financial adviser to the mission, and Agatha’s travel expenses were covered, with a month’s holiday in Honolulu thrown in. Archie’s employers were unwilling to keep his job open for him, but he was bored with civilian life, and Agatha loved to travel. She said in her autobiography: ‘We had never been people who played safe.’
Although Madge and her mother agreed to look after Rosalind, Madge felt Agatha should have stayed in England, but Clara Miller was supportive, arguing that a wife’s priority was to be with her husband. Agatha fell in love with South Africa, and the experience provided material not only for her next book, but also for creating the make-believe life of Mrs Teresa Neele. On board ship, she often played bridge, and sometimes quoits, once defeating the captain. In Waikiki, the couple were among the first British people to master the art of stand-up surfing. An added pleasure for Agatha was the chance to show off her figure in an emerald green wool bathing dress.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 7