Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days

by Jared Cade

  These two stories, along with ten others, had first appeared in The Sketch between September and December 1924 under the title Tommy and Tuppence: A Series of Adventures. Agatha often edited her stories before they were issued in collections and a previous mention of events of ‘four’ years ago was updated by her to ‘six’ before Partners in Crime was published in 1929, leading many people, including Agatha’s authorized biographer, Janet Morgan, to assume that all fourteens stories were written after the disappearance. This was true only of ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ which appeared in the December 1928 edition of Holly Leaves Magazine, while ‘The Clergyman’s Daughter’ first appeared in the Grand Magazine in December 1923 under the title ‘The First Wish’.

  The most overt reminder of the disappearance that year came when Sir Godfrey Collins released The Sunningdale Mystery. The cover blurb emphasized that it was by the author of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and fans anticipating a new detective novel from Agatha found it was merely Chapters 11 and 12 of Partners in Crime.

  On 20 September 1929 Monty died of a cerebral haemorrhage, and Agatha was forced to confront her feelings about her estranged older brother. He was buried in France, and his elder sister Madge cried at the funeral. Her patient and long-suffering husband Jimmy, who had footed Monty’s bills and had provided him with a succession of minders for the last few years of his life, greeted the news of his death with a mixture of private relief and concern for Madge. Nan’s daughter and son-in-law, Judith and Graham Gardner, recall that it was Uncle Jimmy’s financial intervention that ensured Monty’s drug problem was hushed up, thus preventing family scandal. According to Judith, by the end of his life Monty was less difficult to deal with because his drug abuse had caused him ‘to get to the stage where he was a bit blank’.

  Nan was saddened to learn of Monty’s death, for she had loved him as she might a recalcitrant child. The special affinity they had had for each other had arisen from their mutual recognition that they were, in their different ways, both rebels. Nan always cherished a ring Monty had bought back for her from South Africa.

  Nan’s affection for Monty helped Agatha to reconcile her ambiguous feelings towards him. He had never figured greatly in her life and, although she was aware that he had had great charm, she had often found his lack of consideration towards others maddening and frustrating. She had also been shocked by his indulgent and reckless use of illicit drugs.

  Agatha’s autobiography makes no mention of Monty’s drug problem, although she does say he was attracted to Nan Watts and took her out to theatres and expensive restaurants after his return to England. Agatha is understandably guarded in the few remarks she makes about Monty, stating only that his various schemes, such as starting a boat-running business in East Africa after the war, had never come to anything because he lacked the ability to apply himself.

  Not long after his death, Agatha met a Colonel Dwyer of the King’s African Rifles at the Tigris Hotel in Baghdad. The colonel had known Monty well and spoke at great length of the heroism of ‘Puffing Billy’ and the respect his men had for him. Agatha was forced to reconsider her brother in the light of this conversation. She came to realize that despite his selfishness, his considerable debts and his reckless lifestyle he had done what he wanted to in life because he had seldom cared what others thought of him. He expected people to take him as he was and had never attempted to impose his own lifestyle or morality on others.

  The closest Agatha came to depicting her brother in her writings was in the unflattering role of Richard Warwick in her 1958 play The Unexpected Guest. Richard, like Monty, was a former safari hunter and invalid, who out of boredom would fire random gunshots out of the window at visitors to the house in order to frighten them.

  Archie continued to occupy Agatha’s thoughts, and the October 1929 edition of Britannia and Eve saw the publication of an intriguing Mr Quin story, ‘The Man from the Sea’, which reveals the author’s guilt and feelings of inadequacy after the divorce. When the main character, Mr Satterthwaite, wanders into the garden of a neglected villa on a cliff top, he challenges a man he finds there, realizing that he is intending to jump off the cliff into the sea.

  The man, Anthony Cosden, confesses that he is terminally ill and that he came to the garden the night before to kill himself, only the presence of a stranger, who, it transpires, is Mr Satterthwaite’s fellow sleuth Mr Quin, deterred him. Anthony Cosden has no idea who owns the villa. He says that his one regret in life is that he has never fathered a son. When Mr Satterthwaite refuses to leave the garden, the young man reluctantly departs.

  The owner of the villa appears and Mr Satterthwaite learns from her that twenty-three years earlier she had watched from the cliff top as her cruel and sadistic husband had drowned in the sea. The marriage had begun passionately, but, because of their conflicting personalities, things had soon gone drastically wrong and she had been glad to be rid of him. A year had passed, then a chance night of passion with a stranger had left her pregnant. The offspring of that union, a boy, turned out so like his father that she had learned to love the stranger through his child and she confides that she would instantly know him if she met him again.

  The widow is contemplating ending her life because her son is demanding to know about his father to convince his fiancée’s parents that he is a suitable match for their daughter. The widow says that unless she kills herself the truth of her son’s illegitimacy will emerge and wreck his chance of happiness with the girl.

  Mr Satterthwaite averts a tragedy when he realizes, through parallels in their stories, that the father of the widow’s son must be Anthony Cosden. He arranges a meeting and the happily reunited couple resolve to marry that very day. When their son comes home they will tell him there was some misunderstanding in the past. The overjoyed widow is confident that her son will marry his fiancée without his being any the wiser about the past. She is also determined to do everything in her power to prevent the man she loves, Anthony Cosden, from dying.

  The story concludes when Mr Satterthwaite meets his enigmatic friend, Mr Quin, in the garden. Mr Quin states that he is ‘an advocate for the dead’ and that on instructions from ‘the other side’ he had come to prevent Anthony Cosden from taking his life. He tells Mr Satterthwaite that he is here on behalf of the widow’s cruel, but now repentant husband who wishes to make sure his widow finally gets the happiness she deserves. Mr Quin points out that love can make men into devils as well as angels. She had had a girlish adoration for her husband, but he could never reach the woman in her and it drove him mad, he says. The husband tortured her because he loved her. The story ends with Mr Quin – the woman’s husband reincarnated – walking towards the cliff to return to the sea, from whence he came.

  Although aspects of Archie’s character would appear several times in Agatha’s writings, along with allusions to their ill-fated love, Mr Quin’s final remarks are the closest she ever came to admitting that she had contributed to the breakdown of her marriage. She never shook off the feeling that she had failed her daughter, and ‘The Man from the Sea’ gave expression to her belief that a child needed to be raised by both parents to feel properly loved and that for a child to be denied his or her parents is to be denied potential happiness. Agatha cited ‘Harelequin’s Lane’ and ‘The Man from the Sea’ as her two favourite Mr Quin stories; together, with ten others, they formed the 1930 collection The Mysterious Mr Quin.

  The Woolleys extended an invitation to Agatha to stay with them during 1930 at Ur, and her decision to take them up on the offer would alter the course of her life and lead to her becoming Mrs Max Mallowan. The decade that followed was to be one of the happiest of her life.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Golden Decade

  In a letter Agatha wrote in 1930 to her friend Allen Lane, the nephew of her former publisher, she stated that it had been a marvellous year. She was very happy because in March she had been introduced to her future husband at the archaeological site at Ur.

/>   Max Mallowan had been ill with appendicitis when Agatha had met the Woolleys the previous season. But when Katherine Woolley asked her husband’s quiet 25-year-old assistant to take the 39-year-old novelist sightseeing the stage was set for romance.

  Max was dark-haired with a fashionable pencil moustache. His outward placidity and even temperament belied an inner idealism and determination. He had been raised in England by a tyrannical agnostic Austrian father and a French mother with a passion for romantic novels and painting. His parents’ stormy relationship cultivated in him a deep desire for peace and calm. The bullying regime of his public school had left deep scars on his psyche, and later, at Oxford, he had delighted in the feeling of camaraderie that he felt from being treated as a gentleman.

  When Agatha met him he was a budding scholar and, as she had inherited Clarissa’s enormous appetite for learning and history, they connected intellectually, aesthetically and artistically in a way that Agatha never had managed with Archie. She was still a very attractive woman, and her growing fame and prosperity meant she was not uninteresting to men.

  Agatha was forced to return to England sooner than she had hoped. Her daughter Rosalind had fallen ill with pneumonia at Abney Hall. Rosalind was out of danger by the time her mother reached her side and Agatha took her to Ashfield to recuperate. Max arrived as a guest soon afterwards and asked Agatha to marry him. She found that she was taken with the idea. She was not without qualms, after the experience of her first marriage, and she admitted to Max that she was afraid of being hurt. He refused to be put off and finally persuaded her to accept his proposal. Determined to heed the lessons of the past she accepted him on two conditions.

  First, she insisted that they must divide all their money and possessions down the middle; what was hers was his. Given that Agatha was much better off than Max this desire to learn from her mistakes with Archie spoke volumes. Secondly, she extracted a promise from Max never to play golf. Although he was somewhat taken aback by this stipulation he had no difficulty agreeing to it – cricket was the sport he most enjoyed.

  Nan’s daughter Judith recalls that Madge, who was considered within family circles ‘a funny, crafty devil’, did her utmost to prevent the alliance since she suspected Max was attracted to her sister because she was well off. Madge refused to go to the wedding although in the end she did send a gift of handkerchiefs. Her husband Jimmy, who also shared her fears, urged Agatha to consider whether she had fallen in love with Max or his way of life. Meanwhile Katherine Woolley, a shrewd judge of character despite her temperamental nature, told Agatha she should make Max wait two years before they married because she thought it would be bad for his character if he assumed he could have anything he wanted while he was still so young. Unwisely, Agatha did not heed their advice.

  Her own doubts about the marriage arose only when she was apart from him. With Max around, she said, she felt safe and happy. She begged him to be patient with her because she had become secure in her distrust of life and people and needed time to adjust to the idea of marrying again. The tone of her early correspondence to him is reminiscent of an excited young girl bubbling over with joy. Despite being younger than Agatha, it is clear that Max adopted the parental role in their relationship, and Agatha acknowledged this in one of her letters to him. One of Max’s letters openly challenged her with the suggestion that her eleven-year-old daughter Rosalind was more grown up than her. He told Agatha he didn’t love her with merely the glorious eyes of the blind but that he saw her as she was. He said that Agatha was like a child and would always remain a child. One of Agatha’s letters to Max stated when they were together she felt they were ‘companion dogs’, the world seemed a wonderful place and there was no feeling ‘of restraint or captivity’.

  There were further problems for the couple: Clarissa had raised Agatha as an Anglican and Max was a practising Roman Catholic. She offered to be converted to Roman Catholicism, but because Max’s religion would not sanctify his marriage to a divorcée, he left the Catholic Church. Meanwhile the person with the greatest influence on Agatha gave her blessing. Ten-year-old Rosalind, who treated the idea of her mother marrying again as a huge joke, approved of Max.

  In May that year Agatha and Nan were delighted when their nephew Jack Watts publicly announced his engagement to Lady Rosemary Bootle-Wilbraham, the youngest daughter of the second Earl of Lathom. The wedding was scheduled to take place on 11 June at Westminster Cathedral. Rosalind, who agreed to be one of the bridesmaids, looked forward to walking up the aisle in a sprigged muslin frock and carrying a posy of feather and glass flowers. But within weeks Jack was left broken-hearted when Lady Rosemary jilted him in favour of a former flame.

  Despite the ill-omen of Jack’s broken romance, Max invariably knew what to say to Agatha to reassure her about their own impending nuptials. After the publicity over the disappearance Agatha was fearful the press would hear of her wedding plans and spoil her happiness. For this reason, accompanied by Peter the dog, Rosalind, Charlotte and Mary Fisher, Agatha travelled to the secluded Scottish island of Skye at the end of August and lived there while her banns were read out in church. In her autobiography Agatha asserts that she married Max in ‘the small chapel’ of St Columba’s, Edinburgh (St Columba’s is, in fact, a cathedral). The couple actually took their vows, seven months after they met, on 11 September at the Edinburgh church of St Cuthbert’s. By getting married in Scotland, with Charlotte and Mary Fisher acting as witnesses, they successfully eluded journalists. In order to minimize their fourteen-year age gap Agatha gave her age on their marriage certificate as thirty-seven, while Max gave his as thirty-one. In fact Agatha was four days off her fortieth birthday and Max was twenty-six. Rosalind did not attend the ceremony. Immediately afterwards the newly-weds parted at the church door. Max, who had come up by the overnight train, went back to London to finish his work on Ur. The following day Agatha and Rosalind returned to Cresswell Place in London. Two days later Max turned up in a hired Daimler and whisked her off on their honeymoon

  Before their departure to the Continent, Agatha excitedly wrote to Allen Lane that she was off to Venice and Greece with her husband. She said she did not quite know how it had happened as she had been determined not to be so foolish as to marry again. Still, she felt that safety at all costs was a ‘repulsive creed’.

  On Wednesday 17 September the London press broke the story of their secret wedding. A picture of Agatha and a smaller one of Max appeared on the Daily Mirror’s front page. It was one of several newspapers to remind the public about her sensational disappearance four years earlier.

  The couple’s honeymoon ended in Athens in mid-October when Max was obliged to return to the dig at Ur. He was reluctant to leave Agatha because she was sick with food poisoning at the time, but she urged him to prioritize his work. The Woolleys had made it clear to him that there was only room for one wife at the dig – and that was Katherine. Max’s employers felt that women were an encumbrance to their activities at the site. In fact, the Woolleys returned a week late from their summer break, and Max, furious at being parted unnecessarily early from Agatha, took his revenge by erecting a new wing to the house on the site of the dig, in which he intentionally made Katherine’s bathroom so cramped that it later had to be pulled down and rebuilt.

  After the honeymoon Agatha found that the usual dread occasioned in her by memories of the disappearance was absent when she returned to England. She wrote to Max from the Paddington Hotel that for the first time in several years she had felt London, even in the rain, was a pleasant place after all. She added that he had lifted a great weight from her shoulders and that the wounds were slowly healing. She admitted that it would take little to open them up again, but she was convinced they would heal once and for all.

  One of the pleasures of returning to England was being reunited with her dog Peter. In a letter she wrote soon afterwards from Ashfield detailing her activities, she described Peter as her child. She referred to him in another missive
as ‘my little friend and loving companion in affliction’. Rosalind, true to form, continued to blame her mother for her father Archie’s absence. Agatha was also concerned about her second marriage, writing to Max that she couldn’t bear it if he was ever less nice than he was now. She said men often are at their best at about Max’s age since they have a finer vision and a bigger ideal of life. She added shrewdly that very often life narrows them and they become egotistical, self-centred, petty, self-indulgent and censorious. ‘You mustn’t,’ she urged him; ‘you must always be Max.’

  By 1930 the sales of her latest mystery, The Murder at the Vicarage, were a mere 5,500; as far as her books were concerned the publicity bonanza from the disappearance had ended. Giant’s Bread appeared in April that same year under the secret pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Nan immediately realized the novel was by Agatha. The two friends were sitting down to lunch one day at Abney Hall when Nan remarked that she had been sent on loan an interesting book by The Times Book Club: ‘Now what was it called? Dwarf’s Blood, I think.’ Agatha knew that her secret was out, and the two women laughed. Knowing Agatha as well as she did the style of writing, together with a poem and a childhood incident in the book, convinced Nan of the certainty that Agatha had written the novel. Nan used to tease Agatha at intervals by saying mischievously, ‘Dwarf’s Blood . . . Dwarf’s Blood!’, although the writer’s secret remained perfectly safe with her. Agatha, in turn, gave her a copy of the book inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘Nan from Mary Westmacott with love. Dwarf’s Blood ha ha!’

  Max’s quiet devotion to Agatha and their shared mutual interests went a long way to healing the wounds of her previous marriage. So much so that she began to reassess her faith in God, badly shaken by the collapse of her first marriage.