Agatha Christie

by H. R. F. Keating

  Such a library opened daily and remained open until late in the evening. Husbands home from the city might then accompany the wives who, at other times, would regard ‘changing the books’ as part of the shopping and go in for a new Zane Grey or Ethel M. Dell between buying a few mixed pastries from Clark’s cake shop and choosing cheese and bacon from Sainsbury’s, before whose glacial-tiled walls a man in white stood all day deftly sculpting half-pounds of butter with a pair of wooden paddles. Just as his seemed a full-time job, so was that of the librarian who stamped the stream of outgoing books and took the tuppences and threepences on all those Oppenheims and Glynns and Jefferson Farjeons and Wallaces and Agatha Christies.

  By definition, ‘escapist’ literature all.

  But what those respectable, placid and, in general, reasonably secure citizens of Addiscombe might have wished to escape from is not immediately evident. Not, certainly, from the hardship and squalor that afflicted great numbers of people in the industrial areas. Nor from the deep and abiding poverty of the agricultural labourers. Compared with them, the clerks and civil servants and shopkeepers and salesmen who were forming the colonies of commuters around London and other big cities had already arrived at a desirable existence.

  Escape from dullness, then? From the monotony of the daily circuit, the triviality of suburban social intercourse, the narrowing of physical and spiritual prospects once the first few payments on the mortgage had been made? That is a more persuasive supposition, particularly in relation to the popularity of ‘high society’ novels with their portraiture, so often splendidly spurious, of gracious living at the top; also of the Ruritanian fantasies of Anthony Hope and Farjeon, and of P. C. Wren’s sand-strewn exoticisms. However, the detective story – specifically as conceived by Agatha Christie – cannot qualify as escapist in any such obvious sense.

  It offered more subtle comfort.

  Addiscombe and its hundreds of counterparts elsewhere may have seemed safe and peaceful, settled and pleasant, but the world outside was manifestly none of these things. The Great War had only recently relinquished the last of the fathers, brothers and sons lucky enough to survive and bring back their souvenir shell cases and Jerry bayonets for the embellishment of an English fireplace. Europe was in a mess. Russia had gone Bolshie. Even at home, where the economy had settled into slow subsidence, troops had been called out against strikers and unemployed and the unthinkable had briefly come about in the shape of a police strike. Small wonder that Mrs Belloc Lowndes’s brother, Hilaire, pronounced England ‘done’ – though the actual immediate cause of his despair was not industrial strife but the mechanization of farming.

  The middle class, the Addiscombians, might have been largely insulated from these worrying matters by distance and a press dedicated to the Northcliffe canon ‘Give the public what it wants’ to a degree not far short of asininity, but hints of present trouble and intimations of dark future possibilities did filter through. It was not very nice to see – as one did every day then – the limbless ex-soldiers begging in the gutters and the bands of locked-out miners who had walked from Wales to sing for pennies outside Wilson’s coffee shop or the Zeeta restaurant. Here was inescapable evidence that something was amiss, and only the most complacent or obtuse could dismiss it with that attitude of censorious contempt shown by detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers to those she called ‘out-of-works’.

  Agatha Christie, in her written work at least, seems to have been virtually apolitical. The emphasis throughout her books is upon the value of common sense in solving crime, which we see as a flaw in a canvas of ordinariness. True, a printed verse about the unemployed which crops up in Sing a Song of Sixpence as a clue to the desperate nature of a suspect (he proves to be the murderer) is described as ‘trashy’, but that could as easily be a literary comment as a political one: poetry other than the ‘proper’ kind received short shrift in England between the wars. And although, in ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’, references to the advocacy of international negotiation and to pacifism with a capital letter are unmistakably disapproving, Mrs Christie takes care not to make them herself but to put them into the mouth of the monumentally thick Captain Hastings. It is Hastings also who is made to say, as if making casual mention of a self-evident fact, ‘now that war and the problems of war are things of the past…’ And that was about as much political argument as the buyers and borrowers of books really wanted to hear in those days.

  Poirot himself personified an orderly and sensible approach to such problems as refused to be things of the past but kept irrupting into the present, despite the efforts of politicians. British politicians in the 1920s were invariably elderly men in frock coats and top hats who kept up a rapid, convivial strut in front of newsreel cameras, at which they nodded a great deal; they liked to be called statesmen, not politicians. Poirot, too, might be a strutter, but he had an appealing continental politeness, was whimsically aware that to be foreign is to be funny, respected True Love, British Justice and Le Bon Dieu, and, albeit rarely, was capable of acknowledging his own human frailty (‘I, Poirot, am the imbecile! Hurry, Hastings, and let us hope we are not too late!’) It mattered little that a great deal of his apparently deeply significant reasoning eventually proved to have almost nothing to do with the case. Readers felt that here was true intuition – the sort of thing all too obviously lacking in the top-hatted gentlemen on the newsreels.

  If the little Belgian habitually postponed giving society the full benefit of his power of deduction until the last or penultimate chapter, by which time the law was three or four corpses down, no reader was ungracious enough to observe that on a points system it was always the murderer who won. The stories, after all, had been written not as academic exercises in logic but as diversionary entertainment. For the customers of the Oppenheim and Le Queux type of thriller writers, there had been provided transport into a land of riches and romance, of beautiful women and handsome men, where millionaires and maitres d’hôtel abounded but where no one, apparently, ever delivered milk or drove a tram or went home to Oldham or Ongar. Agatha Christie and her imitators offered something very different. It was a dream, but not of marble halls. The vision was one of familiar homeliness and it was populated not with gamblers and duellists and international jewel thieves, but with stock characters from village and suburb who observed rules of behaviour according to station, and were isolated utterly from all such anxieties and unpleasantness as were not responsive to religion, medicine, or the law. In book after book they appeared: the diffident, decent young pipe-smokers; plucky girls with nice complexions; the assorted house-party guests, forever dressing for dinner or hunting missing daggers; the wooden policemen, crotchety spinsters, gruff colonels, woolly-minded vicars; and the ubiquitous chauffeurs, butlers, housemaids and the rest of the lower orders, all comic, surly or sinister, but none quite human, their talk modelled on middle-class notions of the vernacular of shop assistants and garage hands.

  The setting for the crime stories by the Christie, or Mayhem Parva, school was generally a hybrid between village and commuters’ dormitory somewhere in the Home Counties, self-contained and substantially self-sufficient. There would be a church, well attended by regulars, and an inn with reasonable accommodation for visiting detective inspectors. There might be a library and a village institute as well as the police station, and the several shops might include a chemist’s where weed killer and hair dye would conveniently be stocked. In the larger, set-apart, houses would dwell a doctor, that irascible colonel, a successful businessman, perhaps an eccentric or, much the same thing, an artist, and a moneyed old woman given to bullying her dowdy companion and mucking about with her will.

  There would exist for these people none of the sordid and intractable problems of the real world, such as growing old or losing faith or being abandoned or going mad. Even that favourite plot device, the incurable disease, would be introduced smoothly and painlessly. Of course, one of the characters would have to get murdered – perhaps two or
three or more – but death was almost invariably off stage. For the regular Christie reader the fact of murder soon acquired a sort of bland inconsequentiality, like getting into the Honours List.

  England as represented by Mayhem Parva was as much a mythical kingdom as any realm of musical comedy, but the fantasy derived from nostalgia, not invention. It was a fly-in-amber land, in which were perpetuated the ways and the values of a society that had begun to fade away from the moment of the shots at Sarajevo. ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?’ Rupert Brooke had asked, and, ignoring their favourite, because dead in the war, young poet’s sardonic undertones, the English middle-class townies desperately wanted the answer to be yes, because Grantchester (wherever that was) sounded just the place to have a bungalow when father took his pension: an old-fashioned, picturesque sort of place, where there would be a nice church service if you wanted to go, and the doctor’s surgery wouldn’t be crowded, and the grocer would deliver.

  The word ‘cosy’ has often been applied to the work of Mrs Christie and her followers, and in no contemptuous sense. Their choice of setting is believed by many to have been calculated on the principle that the eruption of violence in the midst of the familiar, the respectable, the ordinary, is more shocking – hence more satisfactory as a device of fiction – than the presentation of evil in a locality itself unusual or sinister. The theory is attractive, and it is true that a few writers have succeeded in creating a sort of cottage Grand Guignol. Very occasionally, Agatha Christie herself seems to be trying out a chill, but she is ready at the first sniff of scepticism to disown the idea and return to that good-natured, slightly spinsterish urbanity with which she normally treats of crime in Mayhem Parva. After all, it would require a singularly confident, self-regarding writer to suppose her readers to be really horror-stricken by the discovery of a corpse in the tea tent at the church garden fête. Standing aghast is an indulgence to be kept to a minimum in the detective story, the policy of whose writers in the 1920s and 1930s was to make the griefs of the characters short and formal and to hurry everybody along to the interviews in the library in good time to dress for dinner – a social obligation that not even the most extravagant multiple of homicide could be allowed to disrupt.

  Those English families who were changing their library books as regularly as they changed the accumulators in their battery-powered wireless sets had no desire to be harrowed or depressed by either medium. The immeasurable carnage of the recent war was a curiously private obscenity, brooded over by the tired, quiet men who had come back. Only now were those who had remained at home beginning to learn that whatever they thought they had shared with the men overseas in those four years, it was not the war. And out of the silence of the returned soldiers and the fear of the others lest they hear the unendurable, there was formed a vacuum in which, for more than twenty years, little but the trivial and the fatuous and the make-believe seemed capable of flourishing. And games. Games were the thing to cheer everybody up. In those two decades began the process whereby game-playing became first a preoccupation, then an obsession, and ultimately, when renamed sport, a national religion.

  The detective-story game was a puzzle, pure if not simple. It was related to real life only in respect of a common vocabulary and a set of mores epitomized by Poirot’s declaration: ‘I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it.’ This game did not require belief in the commission of a crime in the sense of finding room in the mind for the true blackness of spilled blood, for its haunting smell, for the pitiable surprise upon a murdered face. One noted instead the game’s familiar counters, harmless as play money: gun, dagger, paperweight (what an unconscionable number of paperweights people seemed to need in Mayhem Parva), poisoned thorn, spreading stain, tumbler smelling of almonds, watch-glass smashed at 5.24, expression of terror as if… acrid reek of cordite. Did the victim matter? No, not really. Sympathy for the departed was never solicited, even by implication. He or she was generally someone widely disliked: someone rich or with expectations of wealth; someone powerful, malevolent or mean; very often an extortionist; sometimes a character hiding former criminality behind a presently prestigious appearance. An innocent or venerable person scarcely ever got murdered. Just as rare was the death of a pretty girl, although one subject to moral lapses would seem to have been expendable. The rule against the slaughter of children was absolute.

  To deplore the two-dimensional nature of these stories is to miss the point of why they were written in that form. They could not have offered what they did – relaxation and, in a subtle way, reassurance – if they had possessed that third dimension which gives a book the power to affect the reader in much the same way as actual experience. Mayhem Parva was a flat representation of a community blessed with contentedness and regulated by what people who do not much care for explorative thought call ‘common sense’. It featured neither dramatic heights nor chasms of desperation, just the neat little hedges of the maze, the puzzle, at whose centre awaited a mysterious figure labelled Murderer. This figure inspired no dread, merely curiosity.

  One cumulative effect of constantly reading this kind of fiction might have been to blunt temporarily the fear of death. The circumstances of the murder were seldom credible enough to be really shocking. On the other hand, the victim’s death was so often described as ‘instantaneous’ that it must have encouraged in the reader the personal hope that lingering ends were exceptional. Finally, the inevitable solving of the puzzle, the identification and rendering harmless of the murderer at the end of the game, somehow had the effect of cancelling out the death or deaths that had gone before. It made the world seem a safer place. And that, in any age, is one of the most devoutly desired of delusions.

  The Christie Everybody Knew CELIA FREMLIN

  Detectives incredibly stupid

  And villains unspeakably vile,

  The usual presence of Cupid,

  The usual absence of style.

  A heroine brave and resourceful,

  Dread poisons, infernal machines,

  A hero alert and of course full,

  Whenever they down him, of beans.

  Thus (with three further stanzas of similar import) does a Punch reviewer of 1925 dismiss his current batch of detective stories, including, it so happened, one by Agatha Christie. There was little sign at this period that Punch (usually an incomparable seismograph of current sociological trends) had as yet recognized the name ‘Agatha Christie’ as being anything at all special. True, her second book The Secret Adversary had been favourably reviewed some three years earlier, but this seems to have been a single swallow, heralding nothing. Since that review was to be almost the sole attention she was to receive from Punch for many a long year, it is perhaps worth quoting. ‘The cleverest thing about this most fresh and attractive mystery is that Miss A. Christie has succeeded in keeping her adversary secret up to the very end of the book. It rankles, honestly, to have to confess to such fallibility, but the fact is that I made up my mind time after time as to which unlikely character was the evil “Mr Brown”, the “Man behind Bolshevism”, only to decide, after I had read a few more pages, that I had been wrong in my guess.’ When the now-famous name was mentioned after this, comments tended to be brief and patronizing for many a year. Thus of her collection of short stories, Poirot Investigates, the critic remarked: ‘The more I read of detective fiction, the sorrier do I become for the assistants of these wonderful unravellers of crime. Unblushingly, Miss Christie allows Poirot to pour contempt on Captain Hastings, and I found myself hoping with all my might that Hastings would turn and rend the great man.’

  After this little stir of recognition, silence descended (as far as Punch was concerned) for a decade or more. A few lukewarm lines were devoted to The Blue Train (1928), and to Murder at the Vicarage (1930), and that was all. It was not that Punch simply disdained detection-writers as being beneath their notice. On the contrary, writers such as Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Francis Grier
son, John Rhode and others were given generous space in the ‘Booking Office’ columns.

  However, there were journals of the period that were beginning to recognize the name of Agatha Christie as something new and important. The Daily Express in particular seems (to its great credit) to have spotted her in the very earliest days of her career, and though I have been unable to trace in their columns any actual review of her first book, a subsequent reviewer of Murder on the Links wrote: ‘No one who read The Mysterious Affair at Styles will need reminding of the fact that Agatha Christie stands in a class by herself as a writer of detective stories.’

  Alone among the contemporary newspapers, the Express seems to have recognized Agatha Christie as ‘news’, even as early as 1922. In January of that year, they are already treating her as enough of a VIP as to rate a twelve-inch interview, complete with photograph – a plump, schoolgirlish face under a schoolgirlish velour hat. ‘Crime is like drugs,’ said Mrs Christie in this interview. ‘Once a writer of detective stories and, though you may stray into the by-paths of poetry or psychology, you inevitably return – the public expect it of you.’

  ‘The public expect it of you.’ Already, then, at the beginning of 1922, Agatha Christie had a public, a band of devoted and importunate followers, though as yet beneath the notice of The Times and the Daily Telegraph.

  Who were this public? At this distance of time, of course, the echoes are faint. Those of the early fans who survive are well into their sixties or beyond. From this age group I sought memories of the first impact of Agatha Christie. A retired British Rail manager, aged seventy-four said: ‘I can’t remember which one I read first, but I do remember that I couldn’t put it down, and after I’d finished it I couldn’t rest until I’d read the lot. I’d get up at five to read them before I started for work. I’ll never forget those summer mornings.’ And a housewife, aged sixty-five, added: ‘She was already a famous name, I suppose, when I first came across her – about fifteen or sixteen I suppose I was. I remember having a vague feeling that my mother disapproved of her.’ An aeronautical engineer, aged sixty, also had memories of a certain illicitness: ‘I read The Seven Dials Mystery all through in church, hidden under my prayer-book!’