The tour was long and often gruelling, but although Belcher proved a cantankerous and selfish companion, who sent Agatha out to buy socks or on other errands, and then forget to reimburse her, she had no regrets. On their return, however, Rosalind treated them as strangers. Perhaps her mother’s long absence during her childhood accounted for some of the complexities in the relationship between mother and daughter that persisted for the rest of Christie’s life.
Christie’s naïveté is illustrated by the fact that she did not realize that the money she earned from writing was subject to income tax, and this was the start of a long and unhappy relationship with the Revenue. She needed a literary agent, and although Hughes Massie had died, she was taken on by his youthful successor whose trustworthiness made him someone she relied on for the rest of her life. This was Edmund Cork, who later escorted Ngaio Marsh to Bentley’s installation as President of the Detection Club.
Poirot had returned in The Murder on the Links, whose plot was influenced by a recent murder in France, and she tried to supplement her finances by entering newspaper competitions. The Daily Sketch serialized The Mystery of Norman’s Court, by John Chancellor, a crime writer who enjoyed a brief vogue but is now forgotten. The first prize for the solution to Chancellor’s puzzle was an eye-watering £1,300, illustrating the lengths newspapers were willing to go to in order to attract readers. Christie did not win, but was one of twelve people who shared in the runners-up prize of £800.
At this time, she did not have the loathing of publicity stunts that developed later. She even took part in a mock trial to promote a mystery play, In the Next Room, a dramatization of a locked room mystery by Burton E. Stevenson. Christie was one of four writers on a jury presided over by G. K. Chesterton. The accused was found not guilty, and Chesterton announced that in any case he would have ‘refused to convict a Frenchman for the humane and understandable act of murdering an American millionaire’.
Poirot’s popularity prompted her to feature him in a string of sub-Sherlockian short stories, but The Man in the Brown Suit broke fresh ground. It is almost unique among early Golden Age novels in being narrated (mostly) by a woman. Anne Bedingfeld, the heroine, was an idealized self-portrait of an independently minded young woman with a taste for adventure. After arriving in South Africa, Anne goes surfing at Muizenberg, as Christie had done, and finds the sport equally exhilarating. By the end of the book, she has also found love, and is happily married, with a child.
At Belcher’s request, a character based upon him played a prominent part. Much of the story is presented through extracts from two diaries, and the surprise solution paved the way for an even more daring and skilful means of confounding the reader’s expectations in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Christie took care to ensure that this breakthrough novel did not appear until after she had completed her contractual obligation to John Lane with a collection of the Poirot tales and a third light-hearted thriller, The Secret of Chimneys.
The events of 1926 changed everything. The year began pleasantly, with a holiday in Corsica, and winning the prize (under husband Archie’s name) for solving Berkeley’s serial, The Wintringham Mystery. In June, the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd catapulted her into the front rank of crime novelists. The book remains a landmark title of classic detective fiction. The story is told not by Captain Hastings but by Dr Sheppard, who lives with his busybody sister Caroline in the sleepy village of King’s Abbot, and their new neighbour is Poirot, who has retired to grow vegetable marrows.
The arrival of a fictional detective in a tranquil location invariably presages an outbreak of homicide, and when the little Belgian starts to investigate, Dr Sheppard acts as a surrogate Hastings. Christie enjoyed writing about the doctor’s sister, Caroline Sheppard, someone who is intensely inquisitive, ‘knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home’. More fully developed than most of Christie’s puppets, Caroline was the prototype for Jane Marple. The village setting and dazzling plot combine to make this the definitive Christie novel.
Christie’s masterstroke was to give an ingenious extra twist to Berkeley’s central idea in The Layton Court Mystery. Her spin on the ‘least likely person’ theme resembled the trick in a book written more than forty years earlier. The Shooting Party was a remarkable early novel by that least likely of crime writers, Anton Chekhov. The Swedish writer Major Samuel August Duse (it is not true that Swedish crime fiction began with Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson) had previously used a comparable device in Dr Smirno’s Diary and The Dagmar Case. However, since Chekhov’s book was not translated into English until 1926, and Duse’s books not at all, it is unlikely that Christie was aware of them.
A minority moaned that Christie had failed to ‘play fair’. One reader wrote a letter of complaint to The Times, and the News Chronicle harrumphed that the book was a ‘tasteless and unfortunate letdown by a writer we had grown to admire.’ This was an absurdly harsh judgment, even though Christie’s telling of the story was economical with the truth. T. S. Eliot reckoned it was a ‘brilliant Maskelyne trick’, while Sayers insisted, ‘It’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody.’
Before the year was out, Christie’s comfortable existence was ripped apart. Clara died, and as Christie struggled to cope with grief and the task of sorting out her mother’s affairs in Torquay, she felt increasingly run down and lonely. She was acutely conscious that she was no longer the svelte young woman who made admirers swoon. Her delicate beauty was fading, and since Rosalind’s birth, she had put on weight. Archie stayed in London, and when he rejoined her, he broke the news that he had fallen in love with Belcher’s former secretary, Nancy Neele. At that moment, Agatha’s ‘happy, successful, confident life’ ended.
She tried to persuade Archie to stay, but he became increasingly unkind, perhaps a sign of a guilty conscience. He walked out on his family on the morning of 3 December to be with Nancy. That same evening, Agatha drove away from home, leaving Rosalind asleep in the house.
After Agatha was tracked down to Harrogate, Archie maintained in public that she had been suffering from amnesia, a claim supported by two doctors. In a forerunner of a tabloid witch-hunt, hostile journalists accused her of simply seeking publicity. She also found herself caught up in a row between two formidable bruisers from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
When the Home Office announced that the cost to Scotland Yard of the search for Christie was twelve pounds, 10 shillings, the MP and former miner William Lunn ranted about the expense of a ‘cruel hoax’. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, promptly revised the cost to nil, on the basis that it was absorbed by the general police budget. The real argument was not about Christie, but the bitter aftermath of the failed General Strike. Lunn was angry about expenditure on the moneyed classes when the poor were suffering. Joynson-Hicks was a right-wing hawk, unwilling to give his opponents an inch, and quite prepared to juggle the figures to suit his purpose.
Lunn’s condemnation was as brutal as the Press coverage. Christie was a victim, though she was too strong to wallow in victimhood, and too proud to seek help before she cracked. Her experiences left a mark on her future writing, in which the idea of the ‘ordeal by innocence’ undergone by ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by murder crops up as often as the ‘wronged man’ in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.
The trauma left her barely able to work. Drained of energy and enthusiasm for writing, she recuperated at Abney Hall and then took a holiday in the Canary Islands; her visit features in their tourist literature to this day. But the process of recovery was slow and tortuous. She had lost her trust in people, and had developed a loathing for crowds and for the Press. She admitted in her autobiography that she could hardly bear to go on living. Yet she, like Sayers, had a young child to whom she felt not only devotion but a sense of duty. Suicide was not an option.
With her marriage in ruins, and her confidence shattered, she struggled to earn money to look after
herself and Rosalind. Inspiration had deserted her. As a stop-gap measure, she was helped by Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, to cobble some previously published short stories together to form The Big Four. The resulting thriller was lively but ludicrous, featuring not only an evil Chinese mastermind and an exotic femme fatale, but also, in a nod to Mycroft Holmes, Poirot’s smarter brother, Achille.
When Christie did force herself to produce a fresh novel, it was simply an expanded version of an earlier short story. By her standards, it was dismally dull. Even Christie admitted she hated The Mystery of the Blue Train. The book is dedicated to Carlo Fisher, one of the few people whom Christie felt she could trust. In April 1928, she was granted a divorce, and Archie promptly married Nancy Neele. Hoping to rid herself of her former husband’s name, she tried to persuade her publishers to allow her to adopt a male pseudonym, but they refused. The Agatha Christie brand was already too valuable to be sacrificed.
She tried her hand at various types of story in an attempt to recapture her joy in writing, but struggled to recapture her zest and originality. The Seven Dials Mystery, another thriller, resurrected characters from The Secret of Chimneys, while Tommy and Tuppence Beresford returned in Partners in Crime, a collection of short stories which had mostly appeared five years earlier.
The worst was not yet over, as Agatha’s brother died. She and Madge had paid for Monty to live in a house on Dartmoor; his poor health was exacerbated by a drug habit, although his personal magnetism attracted women willing to look after him. He emigrated to the south of France, and his final companion was a nurse. A stroke killed him while he was having a drink in a seafront café in Marseilles. Christie had been fond of him, but acutely aware of his failings. Attractive but weak-willed men like Monty often figure in her novels.
As Partners in Crime was published, there was at last a hint of better times to come. Anthony Berkeley introduced Christie to a new social circle, which gave her the chance to meet people with whom she had a great deal in common. Crucially, they were people whom she could trust. Her determination to stay out of the public gaze was shared by many of her new friends. They believed their books should speak for themselves. The camaraderie of their dinners helped her to patch up her self-confidence as she embarked on the long journey towards a new life.
Notes to Chapter 4
Christie had already established a reputation as a detective novelist
The principal sources for my account of Christie’s life and work, including her disappearance, are listed in the Select Bibliography. The tireless research work undertaken by both Tony Medawar and John Curran has proved especially valuable.
his French rivals Arsene Lupin and Joseph Rouletabille
Created respectively by Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) and Gaston Leroux (1868–1927). Rouletabille first appeared in the classic ‘locked room’ novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, but thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Leroux is now better remembered as author of The Phantom of the Opera.
she tried to supplement her finances by entering newspaper competitions
See Tony Medawar, ‘On this Day’, CADS 64, November 2012, for accounts of Christie’s prize competition entry, and the mock trials mentioned here and in chapter 6.
The Swedish writer Major Samuel August Duse … had previously used a comparable device
Duse’s work is discussed by Bo Lundin in The Swedish Crime Story (1981).
T. S. Eliot reckoned it was a ‘brilliant Maskelyne trick’
Jasper Maskelyne (1902–73) was a British stage magician, and a member of a family of stage magicians, the son of Nevil Maskelyne and a grandson of John Nevil Maskelyne. The Maskelynes’ claims to fame include not only the creation of countless tricks that fascinated Carr, but also the invention of the coin-in-the-slot toilet door, which has yet to be deployed in a locked cubicle whodunit. John Nevil invented a character dressed in a Chinese-style silk tunic, capable of playing hands of the card games whist and nap, and named Psycho. Psycho appeared to move of its own accord, but was in fact operated by concealed bellows.
5
A Bolshevik Soul in a Fabian Muzzle
A tediously repetitive complaint about Sayers and other Golden Age novelists is that their books were dominated by ‘snobbery with violence’. This is a neat phrase, but a lazy criticism. In reality, Golden Age writers suffered under snobbish attitudes (and still do) at least as often as they were guilty of them. Douglas Cole, a leading socialist intellectual, liked to tell a story from his time as an Oxford don. He remarked to a reactionary acquaintance, Colonel Farquharson, that the BBC had broadcast one of his detective stories the previous week. The Colonel replied: ‘What a pity. Had I known earlier, I could have asked the servants to listen to it.’
Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were conservative in outlook, and their success has caused a peculiar amnesia to afflict critical discussion of the Golden Age. Detective novelists with radical views have become the men – and women – who never were. Even the distinguished historian of the genre Julian Symons, who should have known better, thought it ‘safe to say that almost all of the British writers of the Twenties and Thirties … were unquestionably right-wing.’ In fact, the Liberal Party and centre-left were well represented among Golden Age authors, while others joined the Communist Party or flirted with it. One led the Jarrow Crusade, another married one of Stalin’s senior lieutenants, yet another was killed fighting for the Republican cause in Spain. Some mocked Nazis and Fascists in their detective novels long before it was fashionable to do so. Others wrote mysteries which debated the merits of assassinating dictators.
Douglas and Margaret Cole were the leading lights of the Left among Golden Age detective novelists. Their personal lives seem, at first glance, more straightforward than the emotionally turbulent experiences of Sayers, Berkeley and Christie. Yet the Coles’ apparently happy marriage was more complicated than it seemed.
Douglas Cole was already a pillar of the Labour Research Department, when Margaret Postgate joined after a spell teaching classics at Hammersmith’s prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School. Margaret was a dynamic young woman, with ‘a mop of short thick black wavy hair in which is set swarthy complexion, sharp nose and chin and most brilliantly defiant eyes’. Instantly smitten by Douglas, she wrote the name ‘Mrs G. D. H. Cole’ on a piece of paper to see how it looked before hastily crumpling it up.
Her brother Raymond described Douglas as ‘slender, fairly tall and quite handsome; his eyes were set in a curiously straight line and he could look at you in an oddly hypnotic manner.’ This expression reminded Raymond of a snake, while Raymond’s son Oliver gave Douglas a curious immortality by taking him as the model for the character of Professor Yaffle in the children’s television series Bagpuss. Yaffle was a woodpecker carved from wood, a brilliant academic with a grumpy demeanour, who at times of inactivity served as a bookend.
Margaret debated political theory with Douglas, and secretly wrote ‘a bad poem or two about him’, but was dismayed to find the Department ‘as nearly as possible sexless – it did not fornicate – hardly even“neck”.’ One wet winter night, she spent the evening in Douglas’ flat in Battersea, discussing a propaganda pamphlet. When he offered her the loan of an umbrella for her walk back to Fulham, rather than a bed for the night, she felt aggrieved. Although he did not seem to reciprocate the physical desire she felt for him, she put this down to the all-consuming nature of his dedication to socialism.
After a year or so, it dawned on him that Margaret’s interest in his company was not solely due to her love of politics, and he took her out to the theatre and a concert. When he invited her for a country walk, it turned into ‘a pretty fast march’ along the Thames towpath. He brought along dates and biscuits for them to eat, but forgot about anything to drink. The walk passed mostly in silence. Margaret’s throat was dry with thirst, and she could not think of anything to say. Douglas did not help her out.
Undeterred, a couple of months later, she accepted a
nother invitation for a walk. They went down to Hampden Woods on a fine day in May. ‘Some kind of tension seemed to develop,’ she recalled, and they sat down on a log in the midst of the young beech trees. No-one else was around, apart from an ‘indignant pigeon’ which flew out of the log. With something less than the panache of a born Casanova, Douglas stretched an arm around her and said, ‘I suppose this has got to happen.’
On returning to the Labour Research Department, the couple announced their engagement. The wedding took place at a registry office adorned by a sign warning: ‘No Confetti: Defence of the Realm Act.’ Margaret wrote a poem, ‘Beechwood’, about that close encounter on the log: the pigeon was mentioned, but not the fact that Douglas fell asleep on the train home. People were startled by their marriage, since Douglas was widely assumed to be more interested in men than women. His idea of a stab at humour was to claim he had been forced into matrimony, but Margaret did not care.
‘Physically,’ she said, ‘he was always under-sexed – low-powered. If he had not married, I doubt very much whether he would have had any sex life at all in the ordinary sense … Up to this time, his physical affections, his desire to caress, had been generally directed towards his own sex; he had fallen in love with various young men … and had written poems to them. But it was all very mild, and needed no sort of legal sanction … his sympathy with homosexuals was intellectual chiefly. For women generally, except his wife, he never seemed to have any sexual use at all … he thought that the mass of women were not good Socialist material.’
In 1926, Christie lost a husband, Sayers found one, and Berkeley was contemplating a change of wife. That year was equally momentous for Douglas and Margaret Cole, but for different reasons. Having abandoned the plans they had discussed with Sayers for forming a crime-writing syndicate, they were now writing detective stories together to supplement their academic income. Fiction, however, was put on hold as they rallied to the cause of the workers during the General Strike.
The Golden Age of Murder Page 8