Agatha Christie

by H. R. F. Keating

  As yours, and far more erudite

  They prove my colleagues wrong.

  But I was thinking of a plan

  To kill a millionaire

  And hide the body in a van

  Or some large Frigidaire –

  And so on, through eight or nine verses parodying Lewis Carroll, dedicated to the memory

  Of that young man I used to know

  Whose thoughts were in the long ago

  Whose pockets sagged with potsherds so

  Who lectured learnedly and low,

  Who used long words I didn’t know

  Whose eyes, with fervour all aglow

  Upon the ground looked to and fro

  Who sought conclusively to show

  That there were things I ought to know

  And that with him I ought to go

  And dig upon a Tell.

  It is a delightful book, full of the pleasure of youth refound at the age of forty; of a new life to live; a mixture of ancient pots and modern plots; of friends known by nicknames and a solitary skull which was named Lord Edgware in advance of the book in which the peer of that name dies.

  We also pick up some rare, but very human, references to Agatha’s family. Her mother who, thrilled by the novelty of the zip fastener, had a pair of corsets specially made for her which zipped up in front. ‘The results were unfortunate in the extreme. Not only was the zipping up fraught with agony, but the corsets then obstinately refused to de-zip. Owing to my mother’s Victorian modesty it seemed possible that she would remain in those corsets for the remainder of her life. A woman in the Iron Corset.’

  There is a glimpse too of her sister Madge, coming to see the party off from Victoria: ‘My sister says tearfully that she has a feeling that she will never see me again. I am not very much impressed, because she has felt this every time I go to the East. And what, she asks, is she to do if Rosalind gets appendicitis? There seems no reason why my fourteen-year-old daughter should get appendicitis and all I can think of to reply is, “Don’t operate on her yourself!” For my sister has a reputation for hasty action with her scissors, attacking impartially boils, haircutting, and dress-making – usually, I must admit, with great success.’

  The accepted period for Middle East digging, in those more spacious pre-war days, was from October to March and the book deals, in detail, with two such digs, in the years 1935–6 and 1936-7, at Chagar Bazar and at Brak. They were uneasy years in England, with Hitler and Mussolini strutting before their troops in Europe, and our own Abdication crisis at home. In a remote region of Syria, they passed very happily.

  The ‘family’ was increased by the advent of ‘The Colonel’, ‘Bumps’, and ‘Mac’. The Colonel was Colonel Alec Burn, of the Indian Army, a friend of the Mallowans both on excavations in the Middle East and at home, where he and Agatha used to explore old London together. He was a keen amateur archaeologist, with a sense of humour, a man for all seasons. Bumps, who joined the party for the second dig, was a young architect. His nickname arose out of an incautious remark made by him to the Colonel in the train on their journey out. In the early dawn, as they were approaching their destination, he pulled up the blind, and gazed with interest at the country where the next few months of his life were to be spent. ‘Curious place this,’ he remarks. ‘It’s all over bumps.’ ‘Bumps, indeed,’ cried the Colonel. ‘Don’t you realize that each of those bumps is a buried city, dating back thousands of years.’ Mac, another young architect, was the son of Sir George Macartney, who was, for over thirty years, Consul-General in Kashgar. Despite the fact that Mac hardly opened his mouth unless directly provoked, and seemed, at first blush, to be totally lacking in any sense of humour, he was quite clearly one of Agatha’s favourite characters.

  ‘Fleas and bugs don’t bite him,’ she tells an incredulous Bumps. ‘He doesn’t mind what he sleeps on. He never seems to have any luggage or personal possessions. Just his plaid rug and his diary.’

  The interaction of these disparate characters was observed by Agatha with a novelist’s eye.

  The Good Samaritan story has a reality here which it cannot have among crowded streets, police, ambulances, hospitals and public assistance. If a man fell by the wayside on the broad desert track from Hasetshe to Der-ez-zor the story could easily happen today and it illustrates the enormous value which compassion has in the eyes of desert folk.

  ‘How many of us,’ Max asks suddenly, ‘would really succour another human being in conditions where there were no witnesses, no force of public opinion, no knowledge or censure of a failure to extend aid?’

  ‘Everyone, of course,’ says the Colonel firmly.

  ‘No, but would they?’ persists Max. ‘A man is lying there, dying. Death is not very important here. You are in a hurry. You have business to do. You do not want delay or bother. The man is nothing whatever to you. And nobody will ever know –’

  We all sit back and think, and we are all, I think, a little shattered. Are we so sure, after all, of our essential humanity?

  After a long pause Bumps says slowly, ‘I think I would… Yes, I think I would. I might go on, and then, perhaps feel ashamed and come back.’

  The Colonel agrees.

  ‘Just so. One wouldn’t feel comfortable.’

  Max says he thinks so, too, but he isn’t nearly so sure about himself as he would like to be, and I concur with him.

  We all sit silent for a while, and then I realise that, as usual Mac has made no contribution.

  ‘What would you do, Mac?’

  Mac starts slightly, coming out of a pleasant abstraction.

  ‘Me?’ His tone is surprised. ‘Oh, I would go on. I wouldn’t stop.’

  We all look interestedly at Mac, who shakes his head.

  ‘People die so much out here. One feels that a little sooner or later doesn’t matter. I really wouldn’t expect anyone to stop for me.’

  No, that is true. Mac wouldn’t.

  His gentle voice goes on. ‘It is much better, I think, to go straight on with what one is doing, without being continually deflected by outside people and happenings.’

  Our interested gaze persists. Suddenly an idea strikes me.

  ‘But suppose, Mac,’ I say, ‘that it was a horse?’

  ‘Oh, a horse,’ says Mac, becoming quite human and alive, and not remote at all. ‘That would be quite different, of course. I’d do everything I possibly could for a horse.’

  ‘This is not a profound book,’ says the authoress in the foreword. ‘It will give you no interesting side-lights on archaeology, there will be no beautiful descriptions of scenery, no treating of economic problems, no racial reflections, no history.’

  Perhaps not, but there is something even more valuable. The real Agatha Christie, so carefully concealed behind the formal list of novels in Who’s Who, behind the façade of the novels themselves, behind the very occasional anecdote, peeps out, for me, from the pages of this one book, begun before the war, laid aside, and completed among the sirens and the searchlights and the shortages and the dangers of wartime London.

  A chronicle of small beer maybe, but when other vintages are turning sour small beer can be very refreshing.

  ‘Writing this simple record has been not a task but a labour of love. For I love that gentle, fertile country and its simple people, who know how to laugh and how to enjoy life; who are idle and gay, and who have dignity, good manners and a great sense of humour, and to whom death is not terrible.’

  The war had separated husband and wife. Max had joined the RAFVR and had been posted with the rank of Wing Commander to Allied Headquarters, Middle East, as an adviser on Arab Affairs. He later became Secretary of Arab Affairs at Tripoli, and ultimately Deputy Chief Secretary for Western Libya.

  Agatha, meanwhile, went on writing and working. She got a job as a VAD dispenser at University College Hospital in London and refamiliarized herself in practice with some of the drugs and poisons which she had been using in fiction. Her knowledge of them was, by th
is time, far from superficial. Martindale’s Extra Pharmacopoeia was one of the most studied books in what had become a considerable medico-legal library in the flat she had taken for the duration of the war in Lawn Road, Hampstead.

  ‘No horrific experiences,’ says Max, ‘but, like other Londoners, she was continuously being chased by flying bombs when she returned home from work at the hospital.’ Work was the anodyne. It was a good time for writing (if you could distract your mind from noises off). There was little else to do in the evenings.

  The war years produced twelve completed novels, among them some of her best known, such as the fantastically ingenious And Then There Were None and Sparkling Cyanide (in America Remembered Death). Most of them are who-dunnits in traditional form, but in one of them (N or M?) we have the indomitable, and ageless, Tommy and Tuppence dealing with Fifth Columnists and spies. There were also three plays: a dramatization of And Then There Were None, Peril at End House and Appointment with Death; and one of the six straight novels which she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott dates from this period.

  This was a remarkable output for an authoress who was working long hours at the hospital, and was faced with the problem, which many Londoners will remember, of getting to and from her work, through the shattered streets of a blacked-out city. The normal shortages affected her very little. She was a non-smoker and a non-drinker. Max had done his best about this, and every alcoholic drink from wine and whisky up to vodka and rum had been dutifully sampled by Agatha and successively rejected. They simply did not appeal.

  When Max came back, they gave up the wartime flat and went off to their house at 22 Cresswell Place, South Kensington, and the pre-war routine was gradually resumed. In 1947 and 1949 there were expeditions to Nimrud, the ancient military capital of Assyria, and in the Tigris Valley. The wartime spate of writing was reduced to a steady stream, much of it done on these expeditions. (‘Splendid conditions. No telephone.’) Every year from 1947 onwards produced its novel. At first she was one of three queens of crime-writing. After Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham died, she reigned alone, in undisputed pre-eminence. She was no longer merely well known. She was famous. Her books were translated into almost every spoken language. Her world sales were reckoned to be more than two hundred million.

  It was not her books, however, which put the cap-stone on her triumphal arch. In 1947 Queen Mary, who was a Christie fan, asked her to try her hand at a radio play. A royal request is a command. Agatha wrote a forty-five minute radio play, based on an idea which she had been saving up for a short story. As far as could be judged from the reactions of a radio audience it seemed to be effective. Queen Mary liked it. Agatha decided to elaborate it and turn it into a stage play. It was called The Mousetrap, and was produced at the Ambassadors Theatre, in 1952.

  It is still running, having overtaken, broken and annihilated every previous record for a continuous theatrical run anywhere in the world.

  Others will analyse the reasons for this staggering success. Its effects on Agatha were minimal. She came to consider it ‘not a bad play’ but it was not the one she liked best. Her favourite, beyond question, was Witness for the Prosecution. Most critics agreed with this choice. It is commonly said that an intricate ‘who-dunnit’, which depends for its effect on a surprise revelation in the last chapter, will never succeed on the stage, since by that point the audience will be furtively collecting their coats and handbags and worrying not about the identity of the murderer but about the time of the last train home. One can only record that the theatrical ingenuity of the last minutes of Witness for the Prosecution kept the most restive members of the audience nailed to their seats. On the first night, at the Winter Garden Theatre, a unique and spontaneous tribute was paid. The whole cast lined the front of the stage and bowed to the box where the authoress was seated.

  The financial rewards of The Mousetrap meant nothing to Agatha. She had more income from her books than she could reasonably use. A major proportion of it had, in any event, to be handed straight back to the Revenue. By this time her way of life was settled. She and Max had two houses, Greenway House, on the upper reaches of the River Dart, in Devonshire, which they had bought as a holiday house in 1939, and Winterbrook House near Oxford. There were occasional visits to London to see her agents, Hughes Massie, or for the annual dinners of the Detection Club and other private functions. Public appearances were out. If she could not refuse to make a speech at some local function, she stipulated that it should not be longer than two minutes (an admirable rule that others might follow).

  Inevitably there were honours. An honorary Doctorate of Literature, and the CBE in 1956. Finally, in 1971, she was made a Dame of the British Empire.

  Life went on, peacefully and happily. Rosalind had married and there was a grandson and in due course great-grandchildren; and more plays; and a book every year, in time for the Christmas market. Until, in the end, death came, at the last, for this very English lady on 12 January 1976.

  Cornwallis’s Revenge EMMA LATHEN

  In 1781 Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown and, for all practical purposes, the Revolutionary War was over. The viscount went on to a distinguished career in India, the rebels became preoccupied with the problems of forging a new political state, and the world assumed that British dominion over the colonies was at an end. There the matter rested until 1920, which saw the publication of the first American edition of The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Now, many years later, any detached observer on these shores would have to admit that the second British Expeditionary Force has been considerably more successful than the first.

  The invasion, of course, has not gone unresisted. Powerful troops with a knowledge of the terrain have tried to stem the tide. For instance, all across America in big cities and small towns, there are Christian Science Reading Rooms stocked with inspirational and uplifting literature. Science and Health is on every table. Das Kapital is not available and neither is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Similarly, the indefatigable Gideon Society optimistically equips all our motel rooms with a Holy Bible. Tourists wishing to read Imperialism or The A.B.C. Murders must provide their own copies. And so it goes. Utah, the ‘Sagebrush State’, is virtually blanketed with The Book of Mormon.

  With such forces at their disposal it is small wonder that, purely as authors, Mary Baker Eddy et al. have beaten Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin hands down over here. But they haven’t made a dent in Agatha Christie. Without divine intercession – or coercive methods of distributiona – Dame Agatha has achieved Napoleonic triumphs which her publishers persistently and vainly attempt to describe: forty-eight million hardback Christies sold since 1923 (Alaska and Hawaii not included), 200 million (or is it billion?) paperbacks. Then there are book club sales, triple deckers, boxed gift sets and more short stories than O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, and Damon Runyon combined. When sales figures no longer have any meaning, evocative collateral details are produced:

  A column composed of all US editions of Peril at End House would stretch from Peoria, Illinois, to the moon.

  Merely keeping What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw! in print in the United States deforests 5,000 woodland acres in Maine every year (and in England it’s being kept in print as 4.50 From Paddington).

  Of all departing passengers on United Airlines – going anywhere – 58.6 per cent carry hand luggage and 47.2 per cent carry an Agatha Christie.

  Naturally statistics like these awe publishers, agents and even critics. Nevertheless, they are not the best way to take Agatha Christie’s transatlantic measure. For that Herculean task, books published, sold, borrowed and stolen are irrelevant. Population trends are the only reliable index. The more Americans there are, the more people there are reading The Body in the Library. It is that simple. Agatha Christie has become an integral element of the American way of life, and there are demographic studies to prove it.

  Consider childhood as an example. There are over nine million pre-schoolers in these fifty states.
Fragmentary data suggests that as many as 17.4 per cent of them are read to sleep by parents. Is Mother Goose likely to be meaningful to the modern toddler, let alone his mother and father? No, far more consonant with lifestyles from New York to California is:

  THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD

  RETOLD BY GEORGE WEAR

  Tales Retold for Easy Reading

  Oxford University Press, 1948

  When these infants leave the nest they very soon learn that Agatha Christie occupies an important place in the process of educating responsible citizens of the Republic. Having mastered the alphabet (A is for Arsenic, B is for Belladonna…?), they are now ready to enter the world of literature under their own steam. And there, waiting for them, is a student edition of And Then There Were None (edited by Harry Shefter et al., Washington Square Press). Gone are David Copperfield, Silas Marner and, for that matter, Holden Caulfield. The future belongs to Hercule Poirot.

  After secondary school comes college. And in many a curriculum Agatha Christie is a recognized discipline, comparable to social psychology or thermal dynamics. The aspiring undergraduate can start with an introductory survey, The Modern Mystery Novel from S. S. Van Dine to A. Christie, move on through more specialized courses, and finally proceed to a research seminar. If he has been sufficiently diligent, the fruits of his labours may appear in The Journal of Popular Culture, Bowling Green University, Bowling Green, Ohio.

  In a world teeming with improbable statistics, it still requires fortitude to admit that, of all Americans between the ages of three and thirty-four, over sixty-one million (53.6 per cent) are attending school in some fashion. This percentage tells its own tale of thousands of postgraduates jostling for a little plot of virgin scholarship to call their own. Gone are the days when there existed a single flower in Proust, a single musical motif in Thomas Mann, that had not been analysed to smithereens. Inexorably the horde has advanced on the last frontier. To date the results have been disappointing. America still awaits a seminal work rivalling Sweden’s contribution to modern linguistics: Frank Behre, Studies in Agatha Christie’s Writings: The Behavior of ‘a good (great) deal, a lot, lots, much, plenty, many, a good (great) many’, Goteborg Universitet, 1967.