Agatha Christie

by H. R. F. Keating

  In 1926 there came, of course, the Great Divide in Agatha Christie’s career: the year of her disappearance, and also of that most controversial – and, in the opinion of many of her admirers, the best and most powerful – of her books, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The clamour aroused by the identity of the murderer has even now not entirely died down. In serious studies of the detective novel it is still debated as hotly and as inconclusively as it was at the time of publication. Opinions of critics then ranged from ‘a brilliant psychological tour-de-force’ to ‘a rotten, unfair trick’ – and they still do. ‘The best thriller ever!’ chortled the Daily Sketch, while ‘tasteless and unforgivable let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’ growled the News Chronicle.

  The heat generated was extraordinary, and there are people alive today who still, after half a century, are ready to boil all over again at the memory of that long-ago shock-ending. A great-grandmother, aged eighty-two said to me: ‘I couldn’t believe it! I just couldn’t! That our very own Agatha Christie should do such a thing to us! It spoilt her books for me ever afterwards.’ And a doctor still practising, aged seventy-six, exclaimed: ‘I thought it was awful… so unfair! And making him a doctor, too! I’d just qualified, and I felt it was an insult aimed at me personally, at the whole medical profession. That a doctor could be a murderer… I thought it was wicked. I still do…’

  Whatever may have been its merits or demerits, there is no doubt that Roger Ackroyd, and the storm surrounding its publication, put Agatha Christie firmly and for ever on the map. From now on, her name rapidly became a household word, as did that of her detective, Hercule Poirot; indeed, it was not long before he was by way of becoming a national figure of fun. ‘Above all, there is Hercule Poirot, with his egg-shaped head,’ remarked a Daily Express reviewer. ‘The suggestion of the shape of the head is a stroke of something like genius. It is so vague that it haunts. Was the egg right-way up, or upside-down, or sideways? There is no clue to the solution of this mystery.’

  Within the next decade, Hercule Poirot and his egg-shaped head had become part of our cultural heritage, and writing send-ups of him was more or less a national sport. With great good humour, Agatha Christie herself occasionally joined in the game, as (for example) in an interview she gave to the Daily Mail in 1938: ‘Let me confess it – there has been at times a coolness between us. There are moments when I have felt: “Why – why – why did I ever invent this detestable, bombastic, tiresome little creature?… Eternally straightening things, eternally boasting, eternally twirling his moustache and tilting his egg-shaped head…” Anyway, what is an egg-shaped head…? I am beholden to him financially… On the other hand, he owes his very existence to me. In moments of irritation, I point out that by a few strokes of the pen (or taps on the typewriter) I could destroy him utterly. He replies, grandiloquently: “Impossible to get rid of Poirot like that! He is much too clever.” ’

  And he was too. His career was now unstoppable, his place in our national culture unassailable. By the end of the thirties, he had featured in an important murder trial, that of Horace Budd, accused of poisoning a certain Francis Cyril Newlands. In summing up, the judge remarked (on the alleged method of poisoning) that: ‘Even in the most dramatic stories in the realm of detective fiction, there has surely never been a similar instance. I do not think that M. Poirot or any other great detective of fiction has ever had to deal with such a case.’

  But despite the growing fame of Poirot and his creator throughout the thirties, and despite their millions of fans, the review space given to Agatha Christie in most papers remained niggardly, and the reviews for the most part less than ecstatic. ‘Pleasantly readable’ was the kind of phrase used; ‘a clever twist’ and ‘a writer of remarkable virtuosity’; and often there was a sting in the tail of even the most favourable notice, such as the Sunday Express notice of Murder on the Orient Express: ‘This provides one of the most remarkable and improbable solutions ever offered by a detective story writer, but Mrs Christie writes with such unfailing humour and high-spirits that its improbability does not bother the reader in the least.’

  Even the wholly laudatory reviews of this period tend to be slightly arch in tone, as if the reviewer is anxious to assure his readers that he does not really set much store by this sort of thing. Thus a Daily Telegraph reviewer in 1930: ‘How many vicars must long to murder their church wardens, and here is one who actually has the luck to find one murdered in his study.’

  Unsympathetic reviews continued numerous during this decade, forming a substantial minority of all press comments. Critics delighted to pick holes in the plausibility of the Christie plots, and to fasten on points of detail. ‘Who in their senses would use hammer and nails and varnish in the middle of the night within a few feet of an open door?’ asked The Times, reviewing Dumb Witness in 1937. ‘And do ladies wear large brooches in their dressing-gowns?’

  Sometimes, the critics were not merely hostile, but downright unfair, and when this happened there was invariably an outcry from Christie fans. On one occasion, no less a personage than John Dickson Carr (then Secretary of the Detection Club) took up the cudgels on her behalf. The occasion was the appearance, in the Evening Standard in 1938, of a review by Howard Spring of Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. Mr Dickson Carr protested: ‘Mr Spring has carefully removed every element of mystery. He discloses (a) the identity of the murderer, (b) the murderer’s motive, (c) nearly every trick by which the murder was committed, and (d) how the detective knew it. After this massacre it is safe to say that little more harm to the book could possibly have been done.’

  But in the teeth of reviews unfair, mediocre, patronizing, or downright hostile, the popularity of Agatha Christie’s books rose like an unstoppable tide. In the autumn of 1935, the Daily Express ran The A.B.C. Murders as a serial, setting up simultaneously a column of ‘Readers’ Guesses’ to the solution. But a Mr R. A. Harman of West Norwood, while congratulating the paper, also carped: ‘How can M. Poirot hope to solve an ABC murder when he cannot read this publication to his best advantage? He is anxious to reach Churston, and so takes the midnight train from Paddington, arriving at 7.15. Had he looked more carefully, he would have found that by leaving nearly two hours later – 1.40 a.m. – he would have arrived an hour earlier – at 6.10 a.m.’ It was Mrs A. V. Freshfield, of Wanstead, who got the solution ‘Correct in every detail’ and wrote: ‘I suddenly felt I knew the murderer, the motive, alibi, everything… I decided to write it down, and send you the result herewith.’

  With virulent detractors, passionately devoted fans, and ever-creasing press coverage, Agatha Christie by the end of the thirties was already becoming one of the famous names of the world. Her books were reported to be the teenage Princess Elizabeth’s favourite reading. ‘Queen of Crime’ was by now her acknowledged title. It had already been said of her (and has been quoted hundreds of times since) that she ‘made more money by crime than any woman since Lucrezia Borgia’.

  Perhaps most flattering of all, she had become a butt for humorists who felt no need even to mention her name, so sure were they of the public’s recognition. ‘But in whose Library was the body originally found?’ enquires a puzzled cartoon policeman in The Humorist of 1938 when confronted by a motor accident. And in Reveille, a forensic scientist is depicted peering down a microscope and asking testily for the ‘little grey cells’.

  Then came the war. At the outset, many were the literary prophets of doom, total eclipse being widely predicted not only for Agatha Christie, but for the whole genre of detective fiction. Who, demanded columnists far and wide, was going to be bothered with fictional death and horror when the real thing was going on all around them? Millions, apparently. To the astonishment of sociologists, critics – and even of writers and publishers – the reading of detective stories not only showed no decline but even, during the winter of the Blitz, showed an unmistakable increase.

  In his book Murder for Pleasure Howard Haycraft reported that, in the London shelters dur
ing the Blitz, ‘raid’ libraries were set up which, in response to popular demand, lent out detective stories and almost nothing else. This rather startling finding was amply corroborated by a Mass Observation survey of reading which reported: ‘Of detective authors mentioned, Agatha Christie certainly tops the poll at the moment.’ A fifty-year-old widow confessed in an interview: ‘I always used to look at the end first, but I don’t now. Now I like to have to concentrate. The suspects, and working it all out – you know – it soothes your nerves.’ ‘Many people,’ the report continued, ‘would appear to have a special feeling for Agatha Christie, over and above their general preference for detection and mystery. “Cosy” and “comforting” were words used over and over again.’

  The feeling of comfort persisted after the war. A teacher at a polytechnic, now in her forties, recalled to me what the books had meant to her in a lonely and miserable period of her youth when she faced for the first time the realities of bed-sitter life in London. ‘Agatha Christie was my one comfort and support during those first desperate weeks. I had never been away from home before, and I was lonely and depressed beyond anything I can describe. The one thing that made it endurable, going back to that awful little dark room in the evenings, was knowing that my Agatha Christies were waiting for me there. I had all of them, mostly in paperback, a whole shelf of them. I caught sight of them as soon as I opened the door, it was like coming home. People say that the Agatha Christie characters are cardboard, but if they are, then cardboard friends were what I needed at that time. I felt so close to them… so secure in their company.’

  That very same autumn it so happened that Moscow also was devoting some attention to the Agatha Christie books. ‘A deliberate attempt by the Cripps-Bevin-Attlee-Churchill hyenas… to distract the attention of the masses from the machinations of the warmongers,’ was the Soviet verdict. Nor was this the last time that Agatha Christie was to incur the disapprobation of a Communist regime. After her death, Hong Kong’s leading Communist paper, Ta Kung Pao, described her as a ‘running dog for the rich and powerful’ and accused her of having ‘described crimes committed by the middle and lower classes of British Society without ever exposing their social causes’.

  Despite such reproofs, Agatha Christie’s books continued to go from strength to strength. In 1948, the publication by Penguin of ten of her best-known stories marked a new high in her career. A first printing of 100,000 of each of these books was followed, over the next two years, by further reprints, totalling over two million copies in all. As remarked in the Observer: ‘Between now and the end of the year, some four or five million members of the island race will have been seduced, captivated, misled, mystified, titillated, surprised, startled, and altogether thoroughly entertained by the acknowledged queen of crime-fiction the world over.’

  For the following two decades and more, praise was so sustained as to become almost tedious to quote. As Julian Symons asked in his review of Cat Among the Pigeons in the Sunday Times, ‘What fresh words can one find to praise Agatha Christie, that infinitely cunning and various serpent of Old Nile?’ Lacking fresh ones, reviewers for the next decade and a half had to make do with the old words and phrases. ‘Brilliant’, ‘incredibly ingenious’, ‘incomparable skill’ and so on fill the columns devoted to her work. Only here and there does one encounter a dissident voice, such as that of Francis Iles in the Sunday Times reviewing Hickory, Dickory, Dock, a mystery set in a multiracial students’ hostel: ‘It reads like a tired effort. The usual sparkle is missing, the plot is far-fetched and the humour too easy (all foreigners are funny, but coloured foreigners are funnier).’ But on the same Sunday Maurice Richardson was saying in the Observer: ‘One is pleased, though not in the least surprised, to find her so vociferously sound on the colour problem.’

  There is just one of her books during this halcyon period over which a shadow fell, albeit one utterly outside the author’s control and in no way reflecting on the quality of the book itself. The book I refer to is The Pale Horse, published in 1961, and at the time of publication it received every bit as much praise as its predecessors – ‘brilliantly ingenious’ (Violet Grant, in the Daily Telegraph) was typical of reviewers’ opinions. It was eleven years later that the book encountered a brief but harsh spell of criticism when the horrifying case of Graham Young, the mass-poisoner, was filling the headlines. It was noted by many people at the time – both journalists and ordinary citizens – that this real-life poisoner had followed a method terrifyingly similar to that of the fictional criminal. The Daily Mail set out in meticulous detail the resemblances between the two cases and quoted ‘a senior detective’ as saying of the fictional hero, ‘This is Young to a T.’ Agatha Christie was reported as being ‘naturally upset’ by this unnerving resemblance between the recent atrocity and the plot of a book she had written more than ten years before – though the fact that Young’s bookshelves were ‘crammed with poison reference books’ may have reassured her; she could hardly have taught him anything he did not know already.

  So we come to the final phase – a sad one, indeed, for those of us who have enjoyed Agatha Christie’s books for as long as we can remember. In Curtain, published in 1975, Poirot – to a sigh of dismay all over the world – actually died. But he triumphed in death with newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic printing mock obituaries, a unique tribute to a fictional detective and to his creator.

  The Christie Nobody Knew DOROTHY B. HUGHES

  Everyone knew the Agatha Christie who created Hercule Poirot. She was the clever Christie, the one who thought up all manner of intricacies to tempt the attention of the reader and of the little Belgian detective. Almost as many knew the Mrs Christie who wrote of Miss Marple, illuminator of the English village, a lady in the complete sense of the word, genteel and imperturbable. In later years she would become a part of the Christie self-portrait. There were many who knew the Christie who, more or less as a pastime, wrote of that bright young couple, Tuppence and Tommy. And certainly, known to all her admirers was the Christie of centre stage, she who proved a writer could be at one and the same time equally successful as a playwright and as a novelist.

  There was yet another Christie whom nobody knew, or so few as to amount to almost nobody. This was Mary Westmacott. Even today, and even in book circles, there are more who do not know than who do know her true identity.

  Agatha Christie became Mary Westmacott in 1930 to write an unmystery novel, Giant’s Bread. It caused rather less than a sensation. Four years later, Mary Westmacott tried again. Her second novel, Unfinished Portrait, like the first, made little to no imprint on the literary annals of the season.

  And so, Mary Westmacott disappeared. For ten years. Until 1944, when once again she entered the lists. It would seem her return was because she had a story that had to be told, a story which Agatha Christie could not tell. It was Absent in the Spring, and it is la crême of her small body of works. As before, all the beauty and emotion she poured into a work was as a libation wasted upon barren earth. She followed this one in 1947 with The Rose and the Yew Tree. It created no more stir than its predecessors.

  Five years elapsed before she tried again. In 1952, A Daughter’s a Daughter appeared, and in 1956 The Burden. They were received with the same lack of interest. With these she completed her six-novel offering. This was the end of Mary Westmacott’s career.

  Why? Why the waste of six unusual books, six fine books, six books which encompass some of the best of Christie’s writing? There is no reason why anyone should pay a lick of attention to my answer to my question. True, it comes from a good many years of observation of the way of books. But it is no more than a personal opinion.

  In my opinion then, Mary Westmacott’s work was mishandled. Why else, before the secret was out, when it was no more than a murmur, was there always the addition of that disparaging throwaway line, ‘not very good, woman-type stuff’. Woman-type indeed! As if Christie under whatever name would fashion a damsel shrinking through cold stony
hallways and winding towers, her heart given to a dark and dour character whose bad manners and worse temper she mistakes for dislike, not affection, until the final passionate Gothic embrace. Or that Christie would have wasted her time telling of some silly modern girl who takes herself up into attics and down into cellars when she knows there is a killer loose and that she holds the clues to his or her identity.

  The Westmacotts bear as little relation to women-type novels as to Winnie-the-Pooh. One cannot but wonder if any of those who proffered opinions had ever read her work. Had they, they would know that in its own way, each of these books, whose heroes lead lives of quiet desperation and whose villains are villainous only in that they do not understand, presents a fragment of the human comedy. Each tells a tale of the procession of days which add up to the years, and which resolve not in a crashing dissonance but in a whimper. And life goes on, but down a different lane and to a different bird call.

  These are works in which Christie is trying to fathom herself and those who were a part of her world. The stories are the revelations of a woman of perception, a woman who is searching human emotions to preserve and heighten moments which must be remembered. She is writing of men and women whose dreams bleed when pricked, who are not beset by the gods or the fates, but who are made bereft by human frailties and a wanton expenditure of the loving heart.