by Jared Cade
In the early years of his relationship with Barbara Agatha lived in constant fear of him leaving her. The fact that he never asked her for a divorce meant she never had to face a recurrence of the press attention of the late 1920s, yet her intense dread of having her private life exposed once more remained at the back of her mind. Judith and Graham Gardner recall that ‘Max put Agatha through hell over Barbara.’
The writer’s anguish was heightened because she still loved Max and wanted to believe that he still loved her. In fact he had no desire to abandon his marriage, since he enjoyed a more affluent lifestyle with Agatha than he could have experienced through his archaeological pursuits alone, and his wife did everything in her power to ensure that he wanted for nothing.
Given her intense fear of publicity, Agatha had no alternative but to ignore Max’s relationship with Barbara. The writer sought consolation in religious faith. Judith recalls that Barbara’s love of archaeology strengthened her relationship with Max. It was their common passion. Agatha’s anxiety about her marriage led to her developing recurring outbreaks of psoriasis, a nervous inflammatory skin disorder that affected her scalp, arms, hands and feet, often making them itch painfully. She was frequently forced to wear long white cotton gloves to conceal her condition. Her marriage to Max survived to the end of her life because they had similar intellectual and aesthetic tastes as well as a shared self-deprecatory and humorous outlook on life.
In June 1950 there was a great deal of publicity surrounding the publication of A Murder Is Announced. Both Agatha’s UK and US publishers claimed it was her fiftieth book, although she had actually produced more than this. The British Prime Minister, Clement Atlee, was quoted as saying she was his favourite author, and luminaries from the world of crime-writing such as Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Mignon G. Eberhart, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Erle Stantley Gardner all paid fulsome tribute to her genius. Colonel Archie Easterbrook, one of the suspects in A Murder Is Announced, shares the same military rank and Christian name as Agatha’s first husband, which raises the possibility she was thinking about him when she wrote the book.
In September that year the story of Agatha’s disappearance came back to haunt her. A number of her readers wrote to her expressing indignation over a serial broadcast by the South African Broadcasting Corporation containing detailed references in one of its episodes to an unnamed female novelist who had disappeared some years ago and who had obtained ‘worldwide publicity of advertising value’. It was the opinion of Agatha’s fans that the identity of the author in question could not be missed and that the interpretation of the incident was injurious to her reputation.
That same year Agatha began working intermittently on her autobiography, which was to take her almost sixteen years to complete. It was intended as a collection of happy memories, rather than a chronological examination of her past and its more painful aspects. She assumed a cheerful, self-effacing tone, which served her well as she skimmed over more sensitive or unpleasant events in her life. The book recalled in considerable detail her happy childhood and the first three-quarters of her life. Yet at no time does she state that her marriage to Max had brought her enduring happiness. Although Agatha mentions Archie more often than Max, when she came to recount the break-up of her first marriage into a tape recorder she found herself so distressed that her voice became almost inaudible. She does not mention that Archie’s affair with Nancy had lasted a year and a half and implies that her grief over her mother’s death was the reason for Archie’s defection to the other woman and his subsequent request for a divorce. Agatha suggests that he left her because he had missed his usual cheerful companion in the preceding few months owing to her pall of grief over the passing of Clarissa.
There is no mention of her disappearance at all, which is the one area of her life her fans would have particularly wanted to read about. All she says is that after illness came sorrow, despair and heartbreak and that there was no need to dwell on it. She gives a fictitious account of having been unable to remember her name when she went to sign a cheque shortly after Clarissa’s death. In a preface that was added as a tribute to the author after her death, Agatha’s unsuspecting publishers seized on this incident, suggesting that it gave the clue to the course of events at the time of the disappearance. Yet the closest she comes to talking about the incident in her autobiography is when she comments on her dislike of the press and of crowds which had developed after the breakdown of her marriage. She said that she had felt like a hunted fox. She had always hated notoriety and had had such a surfeit of it that she felt that she could hardly bear to go on living.
Since she makes no reference to the disappearance, the context in which these remarks appear is ambiguous. There is no mention of Agatha’s misleading explanation to the Daily Mail, presumably because she had no desire to cause Archie further embarrassment, since she felt they had both suffered enough. It is interesting to note that in the autobiography she portrays herself as an inexperienced and nervous driver at the time of the General Strike in May 1926 (when in fact she was a competent motorist who had been driving for two years). A few paragraphs later Agatha gives herself away when she states that one of the great joys of having the Morris Cowley was driving down to Ashfield and taking her mother Clarissa off to all the places they had never been able to visit before. As her mother had died a month before the General Strike, this negates Agatha’s claim to have been an inexperienced driver at that time. It was obviously her hope that her fans would attribute her disappearance to some sort of accident combined with mental breakdown. This was the belief of many when her autobiography was released after her death.
Despite the wall of silence Agatha constructed between herself and outsiders, her increasing fame ensured that the disappearance was never forgotten. One person who was very conscious of it was Hubert Gregg, who directed several of her plays for the London stage, beginning with The Hollow, which débuted at the Fortune Theatre on 7 June 1951. Before meeting the author he and the cast were given strict instructions by management not to mention the disappearance to her. The Hollow ran for eleven months and marked the beginning of Agatha’s golden period in the theatre.
Before writing the play Agatha had stayed with her daughter at Pwyllwrach in Wales. Rosalind, never one to hold back when it came to criticizing others, had done her utmost to persuade Agatha not to dramatize the story. This had led to considerable ill feeling towards mother and daughter, even after the play became a success. Rosalind hated the publicity her mother’s plays attracted and believed her time was better spent writing books since the financial rewards were more lucrative
Meanwhile, there was a new addition to Agatha’s circle of friends in 1951 when Nan’s daughter Judith, then thirty-four, married a handsome 24-year-old photographer called Graham Gardner, formerly of the Coldstream Guards, who she had met at a tennis club in Torquay three years earlier. Nan and Agatha approved of the match from the start, although Graham’s mother was initially inclined to suspect Judith of cradle-snatching.
Judith and Graham were always welcome visitors at Greenway. Agatha invariably greeted Judith with a broad smile and a warm hug. Graham was very shy, and Agatha took him under her wing. He soon became a firm favourite of hers since he was tall and fair like her first husband Archie. She used to place him to her right at the huge oval dining-table. Graham recalls that Agatha liked listening quietly to other people’s conversations, which often gave her ideas for her stories. She herself was not shy; she was simply wary of confiding in people she did not know intimately. Yet Agatha could approach strangers and engage them in conversation with consummate ease, as a former beau of Judith’s, Peter Korda (son of the film-maker Alexander Korda), had discovered one day at a public library when Agatha had gone up to him and introduced herself.
‘Agatha was like a second mother to me, warm, loving and considerate,’ recalls Judith. ‘We both disliked golf and often played fun, non-competitive tennis together at Gree
nway. She worked extremely hard as a writer. It makes me so angry when I think of how her finances plagued her through no fault of her own. The money she earned from her books from countries behind the Iron Curtain could be spent only in those countries. She once visited them shortly after she married Max but didn’t like it there and never returned.’
Quite often after a meal Judith would sit by the writer’s side in the drawing-room and, in her delightfully charming, bemused way, ‘wind Agatha up and get her to tell me things’. Other visitors from the Watts side of the family around this period included Judith’s widowed Uncle Jimmy, whose wife Madge had died in October 1950, Judith’s aunt Jean Watts and cousin Jack, the official dedicatee of The Secret of Chimneys. A jovial man with a twinkle in his eyes and dark eyebrows like a pantomime villain, Jack was enormous fun to be around and an excellent raconteur. One of his stories involved the time when, as a teenage boy, he and his Aunt Nan had hoodwinked bystanders by disguising themselves as members of the opposite sex during a car journey from London to Abney Hall. On a subsequent occasion he had dressed up as an imaginary Lady Cheadle to open a fête in Marple, Cheshire; the village had been home to the now demolished Marple Hall, which had inspired the surname of Agatha’s most famous female sleuth.
Nan, too, was a regular visitor to Greenway, where there was a pleasant absence of formality. It became a ritual for Nan and Agatha to retreat to the library after lunch to indulge in their passion for The Times newspaper crosswords, leading members of the household to dub them the ‘Crossword Queens’. Nan and Agatha enjoyed competing with each other to see who could finish their crossword first, and both women almost invariably completed it within ten minutes. The two women had not given up travelling either – Nan still went on a cruise every year, while Agatha always accompanied Max to the Middle East and took him on at least one annual holiday. Agatha nicknamed Nan the ‘Cruise Queen’, while she was ‘Nomadic Agatha’. She frequently visited Nan at Penhill, and the two friends derived considerable pleasure from regaling each other with their adventures. While Agatha still guarded her privacy, she agreed to invite a party of Swedish fans Nan had met in Oslo to Greenway in July 1951 on condition that Nan act as chaperone, and it was one of the few times in her life when Agatha enjoyed herself among her admirers. Nan was an entertaining hostess as well as a delightful guest, and on another occasion she amused Agatha’s friend the publisher Allen Lane into the small hours after dinner at Greenway.
Although Agatha never forgave Nancy Neele for taking Archie away from her, she could never really dislike Barbara, and she endured her rival’s visits to Greenway ‘on archaeological matters’. There was something so dog-like about Barbara’s devotion to Max that Agatha could not find it in herself to hate her. Knowing that Barbara was attracted to Max for the same reasons she herself had fallen in love with him caused Agatha to pity and slightly despise her rival. Agatha was never able to forget the fact that her relationship with Barbara had begun as friendship, and an ambivalence in her attitude towards Barbara remained.
In November 1952 Agatha published a new Mary Westmacott book, A Daughter’s a Daughter, which was based on an unperformed play she had written in the late 1930s inspired by Nan and Judith. Basil Dean had intended to direct a production of it in 1939, and Gertrude Lawrence’s agents had expressed interest in the role based on Nan. The book benefits from Basil Dean’s recommended alterations to the play, and the tempestuous but loving relationship between mother and daughter is finely drawn. Nan’s copy was personally inscribed by Agatha on the flyleaf: ‘To My Friend Nan from Mary Westmacott.’ Her most recent Miss Marple novel, They Do It With Mirrors, was published around the same time and ruffled several of Max’s archaeological colleagues who believed they were the basis of some of the characters in the story.
On 25 November 1952 The Mousetrap, based on a radio play Agatha had written for Queen Mary’s eightieth birthday, opened in London at the Ambassador’s Theatre, later transferring to St Martin’s Theatre. Agatha presumed it would run for six months at most and rashly made over the royalties to her grandson Mathew. It has since earned millions and outstripped all records for the longest continual run in the English theatre.
Had she known that the US tax revenue’s protracted investigation of her financial affairs would drag on endlessly until the early 1960s she would never have handed the royalties over in trust to the schoolboy at a time when her financial worries were still considerable. She never ceased to regret the hardship she had imposed on herself.
The Wattses’ ancestral home Abney Hall was described as ‘a vast Victorian mansion in the Gothic style’ and renamed Enderby Hall in After the Funeral which was published by Collins in May 1953. Agatha’s notebook cites the names of three members of Nan’s family who became forerunners of characters in the novel: James (Nan’s brother) became Richard Abernethie; Judy (Nan’s daughter) became Susan Abernethie; and Miles (Nan’s brother) became Timothy Abernethie. Judith’s photographer husband Graham was the forerunner for Susan Abernethie’s husband Gregory Banks, who underwent a change of profession from photographer to chemist’s assistant, thus making him a more likely suspect in the suspected poisoning of Richard Abernethie. Agatha was always at her best when writing about family tensions and After the Funeral is one of Hercule Poirot’s most intriguing investigations.
Of all the mysteries Agatha wrote one of the most personally revealing is Witness for the Prosecution, which opened at London’s Winter Garden Theatre in Drury Lane on 28 October 1953 and a year later appeared on Broadway, where it achieved the rare distinction for a thriller of winning the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best foreign play of 1954. The 1925 short story on which it was based, ‘Traitor Hands’, was written when Agatha was young, romantic and inclined to idolize Archie, and in this story she had, unusually, allowed a ruthless killer to escape justice owing to the duplicity of a besotted female. Agatha was under pressure from the play’s producer, Peter Saunders, and the cast to adhere to the original ending, but she resolutely refused to allow the play to go on unless the killer experienced full retribution. Archie’s betrayal and Max’s furtive affair with Barbara had brought home to her the belief that the innocent ought never to suffer at the hands of the guilty. Her conviction became more evident in her detective fiction as she got older, and after hanging was abolished in the late 1960s her killers almost invariably received punishment and retribution from the gods.
Nan saw all of Agatha’s plays – sometimes more than once. She had a special affinity with her brother Lyonel’s granddaughter Fernanda Marlowe that was entirely reciprocal. Fernanda enjoyed being spoilt by Nan, who took her to the matinées of Agatha’s plays and invariably revealed the identity of the killer to her in the interval. Fernanda was aware Nan and Agatha were ‘great friends’ and often enjoyed taking tea together in the cake shops in King’s Road in Chelsea in London.
A Pocket Full of Rye quickly sold in excess of 50,000 hardback copies when it was published by Collins in November 1953. This was by now the norm for all of Agatha’s books. Miss Marple upstages an Inspector Neele by solving a series of brutal murders based on the childhood nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence. Agatha’s naming of the police officer after her former rival Nancy Neele is intriguing because she must have been thinking about her when she wrote the book. Miss Marple echoes her creator’s experience when she tells a married woman who has no idea that her husband has been unfaithful to her: ‘If I might venture to advise, if anything ever – goes wrong in your life – I think the happiest thing for you would be to go back to where you were happy as a child.’
Before the publication of A Pocket Full of Rye Agatha had tried the story out on her family at Greenway by reading aloud two or three chapters each night after dinner. After the second or third session those present were invited to guess the identity of the killer. Rosalind guessed correctly and opined that the solution was crystal clear to anyone with a grain of intelligence and the novel was not worth inflicting on Agatha’
s reading public. This remark, coming from someone who had never worked for a living and who constantly benefited from her mother’s generosity, was both hurtful and unnecessary. When it came to speaking her mind Rosalind was very much her father’s daughter, as Agatha was only too well aware.
Chapter Twenty-Four
No Fields of Amaranth
The first five seasons at Nimrud were so successful that Agatha and Max did not return to the Middle East in 1954. Max had got behind in keeping his archaeological reports up to date, and he devoted the year to writing. The couple divided their time between their London flat, Winterbrook House and Greenway.
Agatha’s outlook was calm and serene at this time because her husband’s mistress Barbara Parker was out of reach in Baghdad, writing up her epigraphic finds and running the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. When Agatha filled in a private family confessional album on 19 April that year she cited her state of mind as ‘deeply happy’. Agatha’s daughter Rosalind also took part in the activity of writing in the confessional album; assisted by her stepfather Max she gave an accurate assessment of her character when she described her favourite occupation as ‘sitting in the sun and doing nothing’. Her chief characteristic was ‘criticising others’, and the fault for which she had the most toleration was stated as ‘none’.
Agatha’s notebook shows that in May she was working on ideas to enlarge and improve what became her 1955 book Hickory Dickory Dock. One of the characters, the elegant and sarcastic Valerie Hobhouse, works in a beauty parlour. The physical model for her was almost certainly Barbara Parker, since one of Agatha’s notes reads, ‘Valerie rather like Barbara!’