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The Mysterious Affair at Styles POIROT (1920)

It was while she was married to Archie Christie that Agatha Christie, neé Miller, wrote and published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. That marriage lasted for less than fourteen years, ending in divorce at about the time of publication of her ninth book, The Mystery of the Blue Train, but her career as a writer of crime fiction continued for a further half-century and a further eighty-five titles (excluding the plays). Having become known to a vast reading public as Agatha Christie, the author continued to use that name for professional purposes throughout the rest of her life, although privately she became Mrs Max Mallowan soon after her divorce from Christie.

Agatha Miller was born in the elegant, sedate seaside resort of Torquay, Devonshire, on the south coast of England, on 15 September 1890, at Ashfield, the home of her parents, Frederick and Clarissa Miller. Frederick Alvah Miller was a well-to-do young American who lived as much in England, where he had relatives, as in America, on an income derived from the family business. After he married Clarissa Margaret Beochmer (his stepmother’s niece) he and his wife planned to live in America. However, they first spent some time in Torquay, at the height of the winter season, and Mr Miller, who loved the sea, became enchanted with the town, its attractive bay and the dramatic south Devon coast. The Millers’ first child, Marjorie (Madge) was born in Torquay, shortly after which the family left for America, where they expected to make their permanent home. It was while they were staying with Frederick Miller’s grandparents in New England that their second child, Louis (Monty), was born.

The Millers returned to England for a visit, but Mr Miller was almost immediately recalled to New York by business concerns, and therefore suggested to his wife that she should take the children and rent a furnished house in Torquay until his return. What Clara Miller did, instead, was to buy a house in Torquay from a Quaker family called Brown. Extremely placid by temperament, Mr Miller, though surprised, did not remonstrate. The house could, after all, be sold again in a year’s time. The Millers and their two children moved into the house, Ashfield, and Mr Miller found life in Torquay so agreeable that in due course he decided that they may as well settle there. Ashfield, a large and comfortable villa with green lawns, a garden of about two acres, and great beech trees, made a splendid home for Mrs Miller and the children even though it was not in the most fashionable part of Torquay but in Barton Road, in the older, upper-middleclass district of Tor Mohun.

When a third child was born to the Millers, a good eight years after the second, she was christened Agatha May Clarissa. The second and third were family names, but ‘Agatha’ appears to have been suggested by a friend of Mrs Miller on the way to the christening. A chubby redhead, Agatha turned out to be a quiet, imaginative child who played a great deal on her own or with her elderly nannie, ‘Nursy’, since her brother and sister were away at school for much of the time and were, in any case, so much older than she. Agatha did not go to school but taught herself to read, and learned something of elementary mathematics from her father. Her formal education did not begin until, at the age of sixteen, she was sent to a finishing school in Paris. Her father had died when she was eleven, and the family income had dwindled. Mrs Miller considered selling Ashfield but was prevailed upon by her two elder children merely to reduce the number of servants and make certain other economies.

The Millers were still able to live comfortably. With Madge married and living in New York, and Monty serving with the army in India, Mrs Miller decided shortly after Agatha’s return from finishing school in Paris that she would let Ashfield furnished for three months and take her teenage daughter off to Egypt. Her own health had not been good, but three months with Agatha in and around Cairo, sight-seeing, going to dances and parties and on excursions to the sites of antiquity, seemed to improve her condition and certainly helped Agatha to overcome her childhood and adolescent gaucherie. The attractive young lady even received several proposals of marriage from officers serving in the British Army in Egypt, but took none of them seriously. She was still very young, and she was also now her mother’s only comfort and companion. When they returned to Torquay, Agatha continued to live at home with her mother, though she also led an active social life with friends of her own age.

Agatha had already begun to write. During her childhood, when she was lying in bed recovering from influenza, her mother had suggested that, instead of telling stories which she enjoyed doing, she should write one of them down. Soon Agatha had produced a number of stories, and began to write poems as well. It was as a poet that she made her first appearance in print, at the age of eleven, with a poem about the new electric trams which she had seen when visiting her grandmother at Ealing, a suburb of London. The poem, which was printed in the local Ealing newspaper, began: ‘When first the electric trams did run/In all their scarlet glory,/’Twas well, but ere the day was done,/ It was another story.’

Her poems improved, and by the time she was in her late teens Agatha had won a few prizes with them, usually of a guinea or so offered by the Poetry Society, and had had several poems published in The Poetry Review. She had also written a number of stories which, as she said later, usually revealed the influence of whomever she had been reading the previous week, as often as not D. H. Lawrence. Under various pseudonyms, among them Mack Miller and Nathanael Miller (her grandfather’s name), she would send her stories off to magazines and they would invariably come back to her accompanied by a printed rejection slip. She even attempted a novel, which she called Snow Upon the Desert, and at the suggestion of her mother sent it off to Eden Phillpotts, the author of popular novels of Devon rural life in the tradition of Thomas Hardy. (In the twenties and thirties, Phillpotts was to write murder mysteries, both under his own name and as Harrington Hext.)

Phillpotts, who was a neighbour of the Millers and a friend of the family, gave generously of his time and advice. Though he was critical of Snow Upon the Desert, and advised its author to cut out the moralizing of which he considered she was much too fond, he thought Agatha had a ‘great feeling for dialogue’, and introduced her to his literary agent, Hughes Massie. Agatha went to London and was interviewed by Mr Massie, a large, swarthy man who, she said, terrified her. Massie read her novel, and advised her to put it aside and begin another. Instead, she returned to writing her poems and stories.

Agatha was now in her early twenties and fending off young men who wished to marry her. After what she referred to as two near escapes, she became engaged in 1912 to Reggie Lucy, a Major in the Gunners, but while Lucy was serving with his regiment in Hongkong, she fell in love with a handsome young Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, whom she had met at a house party in Chudleigh, not far from Torquay. He was Lieutenant Archibald Christie, the son of a Judge in the Indian Civil Service. They danced together several times at their first meeting, and a few days later Christie arrived on his motorcycle at Ashfield and was allowed by Mrs Miller to stay to supper. Within days, he and Agatha had become engaged, and Agatha eventually plucked up the courage to write to Reggie Lucy in Hongkong ending their engagement.

It was eighteen months later that Agatha Miller married Archie Christie, now a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps. The wedding took place on Christmas Eve, 1914. During the period of their engagement, the Miller family income had been further depleted by the liquidation of a firm in New York, and Britain had declared war on Germany. Captain Christie went off to war two days after the wedding, while his bride went to work at the Torbay Hospital in Torquay, nursing the first casualties who were being brought back from the Front. After two years of nursing, and a number of reunions with Archie when he came home on leave, Agatha transferred to the hospital’s dispensary, where she acquired the accurate knowledge of poisons which was later to prove so useful to her.

Years earlier, Agatha and her sister Madge had one day been discussing a murder mystery they were reading, and Agatha had mentioned, idly, that she would like to try her hand at a detective story. Madge was of the opinion that Agatha would find this too difficult a task, an opinion which Agatha remembered in 1916, while working in the hospital dispensary at Torquay. She decided to devote her occasional slack periods at the dispensary to the composition of a detective novel, in the hope of proving her sister wrong.

Her first problem, as Agatha Christie revealed many years later in her autobiography, was to decide what kind of detective story she would write. Since she was surrounded by poisons, it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method she selected. She settled on one particular fact or donné which seemed to her to have possibilities, toyed with the idea for a time, and finally decided upon it. Next she turned to the dramatis personae. Who should be poisoned? Who would be the poisoner? When? Where? How? Why? It would, she decided, have to be ‘very much of an intime murder’, because of the method chosen. It would have to be all in the family, so to speak.

And, of course, there would have to be a detective to unravel the mystery and unmask the evil-doer. An avid reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha pondered upon the personality and methods of Holmes and his relationship with Dr Watson, his friend and the chronicler of his cases. Her detective, she decided, would have to be as different in personality from Sherlock Holmes as possible. However, the device of the friend and helper, the Dr Watson-figure whose obtuseness sets off the brilliant deductive powers of the great detective, was too useful to discard. Her detective would, therefore, have such a figure in attendance, and he could be the narrator of the story. The budding crime writer now had an idea for the actual crime, and a detective and his aide. But who were the other characters to be? Who was to be murdered? Husbands frequently murdered their wives, of course, but perhaps it would be better to opt for a more unusual kind of murder and for a very unusual motive. But then the whole point of a really good murder mystery was that the criminal should be someone obvious, whose obviousness was not apparent until pointed out in the last chapter by the brilliant detective. At this point in her reasoning, Agatha Christie confessed later, she became confused and went away to make up a couple of extra bottles of hypo-chlorous lotion, so that she would have more free time the following day to give further consideration to her crime project.

Over the next few days, her plot began to develop in some detail, though in a somewhat unorthodox manner. Having first decided what she wanted her murderer to look like, Agatha next began to search around among her acquaintances for someone who fitted the description, in order to study his physical characteristics. She soon realized, however, that it was pointless to attempt to base a fictional character upon a real person’s characteristics. Later, with experience, she would find ways of doing this to some extent, but for the present she was in need of a starting-off point. She found it when, sitting in a tram, she saw exactly what she wanted: ‘a man with a black beard, sitting next to an elderly lady who was chattering like a magpie.’ As she did not know these people, her imagination was unfettered; she could invent characters for them, and place them in situations of her own invention.

She continued to give consideration to the question of the detective. It was important that he should not be simply an imitation Sherlock Holmes. What other models were there? Arsène Lupin? The young journalist Rouletabille in The Mystery of the Yellow Room?¹ Perhaps the detective could be a scientist. Or a schoolboy? A schoolboy would be too difficult, and Agatha was not acquainted with any scientists. Then she remembered the colony of Belgian war refugees who were living in the parish of Tor, in Torquay. Might not one of them be a Belgian police officer? A retired Belgian police officer, not too young:

I allowed him slowly to grow into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy, I thought to myself, as I cleared away a good many untidy odds and ends in my own bedroom. A tidy little man. I could see him as a tidy little man, always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes, he would have little grey cells. He would have rather a grand name – one of those names that Sherlock Holmes and his family had. Who was it his brother had been? Mycroft Holmes.²

Since he was to be a little man, it seemed an amusing idea to name the retired detective Hercules, the hero of Greek myth. Where did ‘Poirot’ come from? Did Agatha Christie think of her little detective as also being pear (poire)-shaped? Later, she was unable to remember. But she liked the sound of ‘Hercule Poirot’, and enthusiastically set to work on the other characters and on the plot, inventing situations, revelations and false clues during her leisure time at the dispensary and at home. Eventually, she began to write her novel, using a battered old typewriter that had belonged to her sister. Her method was to produce a first draft of each chapter in longhand and then revise the chapter as she typed it.

About halfway through, Agatha began to find herself in difficulties with her complicated plot, at which point her mother suggested that, if she was ever going to bring her novel to a successful conclusion, she should take the typescript away with her on her holiday from the hospital, and work at it with nothing else to distract her. And so, in the summer of 1916, Mrs Archibald Christie took herself off to beautiful, grey, remote Dartmoor, quite near Torquay in distance, but a world away in atmosphere with its rugged moorland, giant granite tors on craggy hills, ancient stone circles, and prehistoric remains.

Much of the 365 square miles of Dartmoor is bleak country, with treacherous bogs. But a few hundred yards from the summit of Hay Tor, the Moorland Hotel is situated, partially hidden by trees, with views over the moor and across south Devon to the sea, and it was there that Agatha Christie lived for two weeks while she finished writing the murder mystery which she had decided to call The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The hotel is still there, though it has been closed since fire destroyed some of its rooms in March 1970. Years later, Agatha Christie described her two weeks’ stay at the Moorland Hotel in 1916:

It was a large, dreary hotel with plenty of rooms. There were few people staying there. I don’t think I spoke to any of them – it would have taken my mind away from what I was doing. I used to write laboriously all morning till my hand ached. Then I would have lunch, reading a book. Afterwards I would go out for a good walk on the moor, perhaps for a couple of hours. I think I learned to love the moor in those days. I loved the tors and the heather and all the wild part of it away from the roads. Everybody who went there – and of course there were not many in wartime – would be clustering around Hay Tor itself, but I left Hay Tor severely alone and struck out on my own across country. As I walked, I muttered to myself, enacting the chapter that I was next going to write; speaking as John to Mary, and as Mary to John; as Evelyn to her employer, and so on. I became quite excited by this. I would come home, have dinner, fall into bed and sleep for about twelve hours. Then I would get up and write passionately again all morning.

When Archie Christie came home on leave, he read his wife’s novel and enjoyed it. A friend of his in the Air Force was a director of a publishing house, and Archie suggested that he should provide her with a letter from his friend which she could enclose with the typescript and send off to Methuen’s. This plan was duly followed but, although Methuen’s sat on the typescript for about six months, perhaps to prove to Archie’s friend that they were giving it their most earnest consideration, they eventually concluded that it was not quite suitable for them, and returned it to its author.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles was submitted to another publisher, again without success, after which Agatha decided to try The Bodley Head, having noticed that they had recently published one or two detective novels. She packed the manuscript off to them, heard nothing, and forgot all about it.

Towards the end of the war, Archie Christie, now a Colonel, was posted to the Air Ministry in London, so Agatha was able to leave Torquay and live at last with her husband. They took a small flat in St John’s Wood, at 5 Northwick Terrace, which was really no more than two rooms on the second floor of a house (now demolished), and Agatha started a course of book-keeping and shorthand to occupy her days. The war came to an end, and a few months later, in 1919, Mrs Christie gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind, at Ashfield, the family home in Torquay.

The Christies now needed a larger London flat, and in due course found what they were looking for on the fourth floor of Addison Mansions (Flat 96), a huge double apartment block behind Olympia in Earls Court. Archie was demobilized, and went to work for a firm in the City. It was towards the end of 1919, nearly two years after she had sent the typescript of The Mysterious Affair at Styles to The Bodley Head, that Agatha Christie received a letter from John Lane, the Managing Director of the publishing house, asking her to call and see him. When they met, John Lane explained that several people had read her novel and thought it showed promise. However, the dénouement, which she had written as a court-room scene, did not ring true. If Mrs Christie would rewrite that chapter, in a different setting, and make some other minor changes, The Bodley Head would be willing to publish her book.

After explaining what a risk he was taking by offering to publish a new and unknown writer, and how little money he was likely to make with her novel, John Lane produced a contract from the drawer of his desk, and an excited young author who had given up hope of ever having anything published, other than the occasional story or poem, immediately signed it. She was to receive a small royalty, but only after the first 2,000 copies had been sold. All subsidiary rights, such as serialization and film rights, would be shared fifty-fifty between author and publisher, and there was a clause binding the author to offer The Bodley Head her next five novels, at an only slightly increased royalty rate. A jubilant Agatha rushed home to inform her husband of her good fortune, and that evening they celebrated at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse.

When The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, it sold nearly 2,000 copies. The £25 which Agatha Christie earned from her first book came, not from royalties, for there were none due to her under the terms of a distinctly unfair contract, but from a half share of the serial rights which had been sold for £50 to The Weekly Times. Taking the view that £25 was not a very satisfactory return for all the time and energy she had expended upon the writing of her novel, Agatha did not envisage ever attempting to write another. At least, this is what she was to claim, years later, in her autobiography. She had been dared by her sister to write a detective story, she had done so, and she had got it published. There, as far as she was concerned, the matter ended. She would probably write stories from time to time, but she had no intention of turning herself into a professional writer. To her, writing was fun.

In this, as in one or two other matters, Agatha Christie’s An Autobiography is less than completely reliable. Writing it over a number of years between 1950 and 1965, she did not always remember with accuracy events which had taken place thirty or forty years earlier. In fact, in a letter to Basil Willett of The Bodley Head, written in the autumn of 1920, she inquired about the publication date of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, adding that she was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to appear, as she had already nearly finished a second novel, The Secret Adversary. She also wanted to know what the cover of The Mysterious Affair at Styles would look like. After she had seen the cover design, she agreed that it would do as it was ‘quite artistic and mysterious’. She also asked that a dedication, ‘To my mother’, should appear at the beginning of the book.

Most of the qualities which were to make Agatha Christie the most popular crime writer there has ever been were already on display in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and it is astonishing that several publishers turned the novel down before it was accepted by The Bodley Head. Characterization is no more detailed than Agatha Christie needed it to be for her purpose, the setting is an English country house in or near a small village, there is a proliferation of clues which are there for the reader to discover, if he is not dazzled by the author’s sleight of hand, and the method used by the murderer is poisoning.

The young Agatha Christie had learned a great deal about poisons through her work at the hospital dispensary in Torquay, and she was to put her knowledge to good use in several of her murder mysteries. Among the many favourable reviews her excellent first novel received, Agatha was especially proud of that in the Pharmaceutical Journal, which praised ‘this detective story for dealing with poisons in a knowledgeable way, and not with the nonsense about untraceable substances that so often happens. Miss Agatha Christie knows her job.’

The ‘Styles’ of the title is Styles Court, a country house in Essex, a mile outside the village of Styles St Mary. In later novels, Mrs Christie tended not to specify the county, and even in this first novel she avoids using real names of towns. Characters may take the train up to London from the country, but if they have to visit a nearby country town it will not be identified as Chelmsford or Colchester, but will be given a fictitious name. The fictitious village of Styles St Mary is, for instance, seven miles away from the fictitious town of Tadminster, where one of the characters works in the dispensary of the Red Cross Hospital.

The Mysterious Affair at Styles, though not published until 1920, had been written during the First World War, and was set in the summer of 1916. Its narrator, Captain Hastings, is a young officer who has been invalided home from the Front and who, after spending some months ‘in a rather depressing Convalescent Home’, is still on sick leave when he runs into someone he had known as a boy: the forty-five-year-old John Cavendish who is ‘a good fifteen years’ Hastings’ senior. Hastings, then, is about thirty. Reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles now, the reader interests himself more in Captain Hastings’ personal details than Agatha Christie’s readers would have done in 1920, for they were not to know that Mrs Christie would go on to write scores of crime novels over the years and that Hastings would figure in eight of them (and in numerous short stories) as the associate of her detective, Hercule Poirot.

John Cavendish invites the convalescent Hastings to spend his leave in Essex at Styles Court. Cavendish’s stepmother, whom Hastings remembered as a handsome, middle-aged woman, is now an autocratic grande dame of seventy or more. After several years of widowhood, she has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, who is about twenty years younger than she, and ‘an absolute bounder’ in the opinion of John Cavendish because he has ‘a great black beard, and wears patent leather boots in all weathers’. Clearly, Alfred Inglethorp is a fortune-hunter, for Mrs Inglethorp has a sizeable fortune to dispose of. When she is found murdered, he is the chief and favourite suspect.

The other inhabitants of Styles Court include John Cavendish’s wife Mary, his younger brother Lawrence, a girl called Cynthia, who is a protégé of Mrs Inglethorp and who works in the dispensary of the nearby hospital, and Evelyn Howard, a forty-year-old woman who has been the old lady’s companion, factotum and general assistant. There is also a tall, bearded and somewhat mysterious foreigner, a Dr Bauerstein, who is staying in the village, recuperating after a nervous breakdown. He is said to be one of the greatest living experts on poisons.

When Mrs Inglethorp’s death, at first thought to be due to a heart attack, is found to have been caused by strychnine poisoning, suspicion falls not only upon her husband but, in turn, on most of her nearest and dearest. The local police are called in, but Hastings has encountered in the village an old friend of his, Hercule Poirot, a famous detective now retired, and it is Hastings who persuades his friend John Cavendish to allow Poirot as well to investigate the crime.

Before the First World War, young Hastings had worked for Lloyd’s of London. (Not until The ABC Murders in 1935 shall we learn Hastings’ first name to be Arthur, for Agatha Christie’s men habitually address each other in what used to be the approved English upper-middleclass fashion, by their surnames.) It was while he was working for Lloyd’s that Hastings had first met Poirot, in Belgium. Poirot had already retired from the Belgian Police Force, after a long career as its most illustrious detective, and had set himself up in private practice as an investigator. Hastings is surprised and delighted to meet him again unexpectedly in the village of Styles St Mary where Poirot, together with a number of other Belgian refugees, is living. Poirot accepts with alacrity the commission to find Mrs Inglethorp’s murderer, for, as he explains to Hastings, ‘she had kindly extended hospitality to seven of my countrypeople who, alas, are refugees from their native land.’ ‘We Belgians,’ he adds, ‘will always remember her with gratitude.’ Poirot, on his first appearance, is described in some detail:

He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible; I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.³

Later, we shall discover that Poirot is not only fanatically neat but is also obsessed with symmetry. He is forever rearranging the objects he encounters, putting them into straight rows. He probably wished that eggs were square: he certainly, on one occasion, deplored the fact that hens lay eggs of different sizes (‘What symmetry can there be on the breakfast table?’) It is odd, therefore, that he should habitually carry his head tilted a little to one side. He cannot have been aware that he did so.

Poirot will acquire other personality traits in later books, or at least we shall learn more about him, but already apparent in Styles are his genuine affection for Hastings, of whose perspicacity he has a justifiably low opinion, his endearing vanity, his odd misuse of the English language and still odder occasional misuse of his native tongue, French (for, despite her Paris finishing school, Mrs Christie’s French was to remain obstinately unidiomatic). Incidentally, when he sees his old friend for the first time in several years, Hastings notices that Poirot now limps badly. But the limp is never referred to again: we must assume that it was a temporary disability from which Poirot soon recovered. Indeed, when he inspects Mrs Inglethorp’s room at Styles Court, Poirot, we are told, ‘darted from one object to the other with the agility of a grasshopper.’

Just as ‘Elementary, my dear Watson’, (which is not a direct quotation from any story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) is the phrase you most associate with Sherlock Holmes, so a habit of constantly referring to ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain is something closely associated with Hercule Poirot. But, though he is continually having ‘little ideas’, and recommending order and method to Hastings, Poirot mentions the ‘little grey cells’ for the first time only towards the end of Styles. He makes a point, however, of informing Hastings (and the reader of the book) well before the dénouement that ‘I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.’ Hastings, however, never wins a battle of wits with Hercule Poirot, and it is a reasonable assumption that even the most assiduous reader of Agatha Christie will do so only rarely.

Agatha Christie was conscious of the necessity to make Poirot very different from the most famous fictional detective of his day, Sherlock Holmes. After all, Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes adventures were still appearing. The Valley of Fear was published in 1915, His Last Bow in 1917, and The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes in 1927. But it is only physically that Poirot differs greatly from Holmes. The two detectives share a number of qualities, among which vanity is by no means the least noticeable. Still, if Poirot owes something to Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, does he not also owe something to another crime novelist? Mrs Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, and writer of a number of historical and mystery novels and stories, was the creator of a detective who, like Poirot, was foreign, retired (in his case, from the Paris Sûreté), and incredibly vain. His name was Hercules Popeau. Agatha Christie must certainly have been aware of him when she began to write her first Hercule Poirot novel, and indeed throughout the nineteen-twenties and thirties when stories by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, featuring Popeau, appeared in the same anthologies as stories of Hercule Poirot’s exploits. In the mid-thirties, Mrs Belloc Lowndes published a Popeau story, ‘A Labour of Hercules’, which did not deter Mrs Christie in the mid-forties from calling a collection of Poirot stories The Labours of Hercules.

Devoted Christieans, who delight in assembling the ‘facts’ about Poirot in the same manner that Conan Doyle’s more fanatical admirers tend to research the great Sherlock Holmes, have somehow convinced themselves that Poirot retired from the Belgian Police Force in 1904, and that this fact is revealed in The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is not. We are told that Poirot ‘had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian Police.’ When, late in the story, Inspector James Japp of Scotland Yard puts in an appearance (he is the Christiean equivalent of Sherlock Holmes’s sparring partner, Inspector Lestrade), he greets Poirot and then, turning to a colleague says: ‘You’ve heard me speak of Mr Poirot? It was in 1904 he and I worked together – the Abercrombie forgery case – you remember, he was run down in Brussels. Ah, those were great days, moosier. Then do you remember “Baron” Altara? There was a pretty rogue for you! He eluded the clutches of half the police in Europe. But we nailed him in Antwerp – thanks to Mr Poirot here.’

Poirot, then, was active in his post in 1904, and the ‘Baron’ Altera affair may well have occurred after 1904. It is possible that Poirot’s retirement did not take place until 1914, in which case he could have been as young as sixty-seven at the time of the Styles murder in 1916. (In Murder on the Links, published three years after Styles, we learn that Poirot was still active in Ostend in 1909.) Agatha Christie later declared that, if she had realized how long she was going to be saddled with Poirot, she would have made him a much younger man on his first appearance. It is fortunate that fictional chronology can be flexible, for otherwise Poirot would have been at least one hundred and twenty years of age when he came to solve his final case in 1974, after having featured in thirty-three novels and fifty-two short stories. That he was still in his sixties, and not older, when Mrs Christie first introduces us to him in The Mysterious Affair at Styles is suggested by a remark of Hastings, when he fails to understand Poirot’s train of thought: ‘The idea crossed my mind, not for the first time, that poor old Poirot was growing old.’ If Poirot had appeared to be in his seventies, the idea that he might be growing old would probably not have crossed even Hastings’ mind.

One of Agatha Christie’s great achievements as a crime writer was to make murder cosy enough to be palatable to refined middleclass tastes. She abhorred violence,⁴ and those who see in it the only reality will seek that kind of reality in vain in the Christiean oeuvre. Her appeal is incredibly wide – ça va sans dire, as Poirot might say – and it is an appeal not to the blood lust but to a civilized delight in the puzzle shared by her readers of all social and intellectual classes. One can discuss Agatha Christie novels with cleaning ladies and classical scholars, with dustmen and dons.

This cosiness is, of course, in itself unreal. The Mysterious Affair at Styles has the inhuman remoteness of the puzzle, but it also, curiously, has something of the texture of a social document as well, especially now, more than half a century after it was written, when its social world has all but disappeared. To Agatha Christie, it would seem to have been already disappearing in 1916. The atmosphere in Styles Court and in the nearby village of Styles St Mary is of a country at war. The war may be only a lightly sketched background, but it is there. The servants necessary to staff a large country house are there, too, but only just. Of Dorcus, the faithful old family retainer, Hastings says, ‘I thought what a fine specimen she was of the old-fashioned servant that is so fast dying out.’

The values implicitly subscribed to, and the opinions expressed by many of her characters, can reasonably be assumed to be shared by the young author of Styles. Evidence in a good many of the early Christie novels seems to point to an unthinking, casual anti-semitism of the kind then prevalent in the English upperclasses. In Styles, Dr Bauerstein, a Polish Jew, is suspected of spying. ‘A very clever man – a Jew of course,’ says Poirot, at which Hastings exclaims, ‘The blackguard!’ Not too worrying, though there is a suggestion that the doctor’s Jewish cleverness is as reprehensible as his espionage activities. In any case, the balance is redressed somewhat with this exchange between a jealous husband and his wife who is infatuated with Bauerstein:

‘I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.’

‘A tinge of Jewish blood is not a bad thing. It leavens the’ – she looked at him – ‘stolid stupidity of the ordinary Englishman.’

The tactics, though not the actual method of murder, used by the killer of Mrs Inglethorp were adopted successfully by a real-life murderer about ten years after the publication of Agatha Christie’s first novel. It is quite possible that he derived his inspiration from a reading of the book. Other odd facts to be noted about The Mysterious Affair at Styles are that the author emphasizes the puzzle-solving aspect of the reading experience by including two plans, one of the first floor of Styles Court and one of Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom, and a number of illustrations of clues, letters, fragments of handwriting and cryptic messages; that Hastings gives evidence of his propensity for redheads, which will continue to be displayed in later stories, by unsuccessfully proposing marriage to one; and that Agatha Christie signals to the reader in the final paragraph of the novel that she is prepared to produce one or more sequels to Styles. ‘Console yourself, my friend,’ Poirot says to Hastings who has failed to capture his redhead. ‘We may hunt together again, who knows? And then –’

Though her gift for tight and ingenious plotting and her flair for creating believable characters mainly through convincing dialogue were to develop greatly in the next ten or fifteen years, with The Mysterious Affair at Styles Mrs Christie made an extraordinarily successful début as a crime writer. Her novel is a distinct improvement on the average level of the genre as it was then practised, and looking back on it more than half a century later you can see that, in fact, it ushered in a new era for the detective story, an era which Agatha Christie would come to dominate with her engaging and fiendishly ingenious puzzles, an era which lasted for more than three decades and which is referred to now as the Golden Age of crime fiction.

Between 1989 and 1997, nine of Agatha Christie’s novels and thirty-four short stories, all featuring Hercule Poirot as the investigator, were adapted for television with David Suchet as Poirot. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was first transmitted on London Weekend TV on 16 September 1990.

The Secret Adversary TOMMY & TUPPENCE (1922)

With Archibald and Agatha Christie living in a flat in London, and Agatha’s mother still attempting to keep up Ashfield, the Torquay house, on an inadequate income to which Agatha could not afford to contribute, the question of selling Ashfield was raised by Archie. When Agatha received the suggestion with horror, Archie then proposed that she should try to raise funds towards the upkeep of Ashfield by writing another murder mystery. After all, although she had earned only £25 from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it had been well received and had sold a respectable number of copies. The Bodley Head had presumably not lost money on it, and would no doubt be willing a pay a little more for a second novel.

Agatha, apparently, had already begun a second novel, but was not sure whether The Bodley Head would like it. It was not another detective story, but a thriller, so there was no place in it for Hercule Poirot. The idea for the book had first come to her one day in an A.B.C. teashop, one of a chain of London cafés, when she had overheard two people at a nearby table talking about a girl called Jane Fish. That, she thought, would make quite a good beginning: someone overhearing an unusual name in a café, and then remembering it when it came up again in a different context. Jane Fish, however, was perhaps just a little too comical, so Agatha altered it to Jane Finn, and set to work to invent a plot. Young people in their twenties were being demobilized from the armed forces after the First World War and finding it difficult to settle down to civilian life. Many were unable to find jobs, or were having to act as door-to-door salesmen. Mrs Christie, who found herself frequently answering the doorbell to ex-servicemen, and buying stockings, household gadgets or even poems from them, decided to have such a pair as the young hero and heroine of her thriller.

When she had finished writing her book some months later, Agatha took it to John Lane of The Bodley Head, who had published The Mysterious Affair at Styles and who had an option on this and her next four books. Lane was disappointed at finding it was not another murder mystery, thought it would sell less well than Styles, and even considered rejecting it. In due course, however, The Bodley Head published the novel, which its author decided to call The Secret Adversary, having first considered The Joyful Venture and The Young Adventurers (‘The Young Adventurers Ltd’ in fact became the title of Chapter 1). The publishers disposed of serial rights to The Weekly Times, as they had done with Styles, and sold a reasonable number of copies. This time Mrs Christie ‘got £50 doled out’ to her by John Lane. It was, she considered, encouraging, though not encouraging enough for her to think that she had as yet adopted anything so grand as a profession. She would have been astonished if anyone had told her she would, from now until the end of her life, publish at least one book a year, sometimes one novel and one collection of short stories, sometimes two novels, and in one year (1934) a total of two crime novels, two volumes of short stories and (under a pseudonym) one romantic novel.

With The Secret Adversary in 1922, Agatha Christie introduced her readers to two characters whom she would use again in four later novels: Partners in Crime (1929), N or M? (1941), By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968) and Postern of Fate (1974). It is as well, therefore, that Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to their friends as Tommy and Tuppence, are only in their twenties in 1922, for this enabled their creator to allow them to age naturally. In their final adventure in 1974 they are presented as an elderly married couple with three grandchildren. When we first meet them, however, in The Secret Adversary, they are young, and just emerging from wartime activities, he as a Lieutenant in the army, who had been in action in France, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and she as a maid-of-all-work in an officers’ hospital in London. Tuppence is, perhaps, the author as Agatha Christie liked to fantasize herself, and Tommy is the kind of young man who appealed to the fantasy Agatha.

The relationship of the young couple is lightly romantic, though they refrain from confessing their feelings for each other until the last page of The Secret Adversary, and their style of speech is positively Wodehousian. ‘Tommy, old thing!’ and ‘Tuppence, old bean!’ they exclaim when they meet unexpectedly for the first time since the war, at the exit to the Dover Street tube station. (This is not a fictitious venue: there used to be a Dover Street station on the Piccadilly line.)

Set in 1920, in the autumn and winter of which year it was written, The Secret Adversary is dedicated ‘To ALL THOSE WHO LEAD MONOTONOUS LIVES in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure’. If, in her first novel, Mrs Christie had set forth one of her two favourite subjects, the murder committed in (or at least involving the members of) an upperclass or upper-middleclass household, in her second she introduces her other favourite, the master criminal seeking to dominate the world. These two themes, domestic crime and global crime, continue to appear throughout her career, though the domestic crime novels not only greatly outnumber the thrillers involving international criminals or crime syndicates, but also are generally considered to be vastly superior to them.

The Secret Adversary begins with a prologue which takes place at 2 p.m. on the afternoon of 7 May 1915, in the Atlantic Ocean off the south coast of Ireland. The Lusitania has just been torpedoed by a German submarine, and is sinking fast. Women and children are lining up for the lifeboats, and a man approaches one of the women, an eighteen-year-old girl, to ask if she will take possession of some ‘vitally important papers’ which may make all the difference to the Allies in the war. The Lusitania settles with a more decided list to starboard as the girl goes forward to take her place in the lifeboat, and then suddenly we are in Mayfair, five years later, with Tommy and Tuppence blocking the exit to the Dover Street underground station, turning themselves into the Young Adventurers.

The Prologue is brief, graphic, and flings the reader in medias res. the sudden juxtaposition of a grey, grim Atlantic with the bright sunshine of post-war London and the cheerful optimism of the young adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, is startlingly effective. In the interests of accuracy, however, it should be noted that Mrs Christie thought the Lusitania was sunk by two torpedoes. In fact, the German U-boat fired only one torpedo: those among the survivors who may have thought otherwise were misled by secondary explosions from the Lusitania’s boilers.

The story proper concerns the efforts of Tommy and Tuppence to trace the girl, Jane Finn, who survived the Lusitania disaster only to disappear immediately afterwards with those secret papers which, if they were made public now, months after the end of the war, would cause great embarrassment to the British Government. Mr Carter, a mysterious individual who is very high up in the British Secret Service, recruits the Young Adventurers to save the country. We are left in no doubt of Agatha Christie’s political leanings when Mr Carter points out to the Adventurers, Tommy and Tuppence, how vital it is that the documents should be retrieved and suppressed, for they could discredit a number of Conservative statesmen (–was there really a time when a government of any political persuasion contained a number of statesmen?–) and that would never do. ‘As a party cry for Labour it would be irresistible, and a Labour Government at this juncture,’ Mr Carter adds, ‘would, in my opinion, be a grave disability for British trade.’

During the course of their search, Tommy and Tuppence encounter a number of entertaining characters, some of them engaging but others distinctly unsavoury. They include Julius P. Hersheimmer, Jane Finn’s American millionaire cousin; Albert, the cockney liftboy in a Mayfair apartment block; and Sir James Peel Edgerton, a distinguished barrister, ‘the most celebrated KC in England’, a man likely to become a future Prime Minister. What links The Secret Adversary, and later Christie thrillers, with the murder mysteries on which the author’s reputation most securely rests is the fact that these and a number of other characters whom Tommy and Tuppence find themselves either collaborating with or pitted against are not only the clearcut ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of the usual thriller, but are potential suspects as well. For, although Agatha Christie clearly differentiates the thriller from the murder mystery, she retains an element of the puzzle in her thrillers. The question ‘Who?’ is asked in the thrillers; it is simply that the question ‘How?’ becomes equally important.

In The Secret Adversary, the puzzle is the identity of the adversary. The Bolshevists, we are informed, are behind the labour unrest in the country, but there is a certain man who is ‘behind the Bolshevists’ (the italics are Mrs Christie’s). ‘Who is he?’ Mr Carter asks rhetorically:

‘We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of “Mr Brown”. But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere.

Tommy manages to eavesdrop upon a meeting of Mr Brown’s organization, at which various representatives report on their activities. A Sinn Feiner guarantees to produce, within a month, ‘such a reign of terror in Ireland as shall shake the British Empire to its foundations’. Others have infiltrated the trade unions: the report from the miners is thought to be most satisfactory, but ‘We must hold back the railways. There may be trouble with the ASE.’ It is important that the principal Labour leaders should have no inkling that they are being used by the Bolshevists. ‘They are honest men,’ says the representative from Moscow, ‘and that is their value to us.’

All good clean reactionary fun, and not without a certain absurd relevance to political life today! Those who take their politics solemnly, if anyone other than politicians is still able to do so, will probably reflect that The Secret Adversary gives an interestingly distorted picture of the social and industrial unrest which followed the First World War and which, during the years which saw the consolidation of the Russian revolution, was to lead to the General Strike in Great Britain, an event which is curiously anticipated in more than one of Agatha Christie’s early novels. But Mrs Christie is politically no further to the right in her thrillers than Ian Fleming in his distinctly less amusing James Bond novels of the nineteen-fifties and sixties.

The villain is unmasked at the end of The Secret Adversary and the threatened General Strike is averted or, as we now know, postponed. Inspector Japp has made, not an appearance, but a certain effect offstage, and the reader with a knowledge of nineteenth-century French opera will probably spot a certain clue which will leave those who suffer from amusia (the inability to comprehend or produce musical sounds) mystified.

The Secret Adversary was the first Agatha Christie novel to be made into a film. This did not happen until 1928, by which time Mrs Christie was being published in a number of foreign languages. The film, produced by Julius Hagen for a German company, was called Die Abenteuer Gmbh (Adventures Ltd), was directed by Fred Sauer, and starred Carlo Aldini, Eve Gray and a Russian character actor, Michael or Mikhail Rasumny, who was to appear in a number of Hollywood movies in the nineteen-forties and fifties.

A television adaptation of The Secret Adversary was first shown on London Weekend TV on 9 October 1983.

The Murder on the Links POIROT (1923)

Archie Christie had a friend, Major Belcher, who was a larger-than-life character with the ability to bluff people into giving him positions of responsibility. Belcher came to dine one evening with the Christies at Earls Court, and explained that he was shortly to leave on a grand tour of the British Empire in order to organize ‘this Empire Exhibition we’re having in eighteen months’ time’. ‘The Dominions,’ Belcher explained to Archie and Agatha, ‘have got to be alerted, to stand on their toes and to cooperate in the whole thing,’ and it was Belcher’s mission to ensure that they did so. He invited Archie to come with him as financial adviser, with all expenses paid and a fee of £1,000. Agatha would be permitted to accompany the party, since most of the transport was being provided free of charge by the ships and railways of the various Commonwealth countries to be visited.

Archie Christie had already grown tired of his job in the City, and when Belcher announced the proposed itinerary, from South Africa to Australia and New Zealand, then on to Canada after a brief holiday in Honolulu, the Christies agreed to go. Agatha longed to travel and see as much of the world as possible, but had expected that, as the wife of a business man, two weeks abroad each summer would be all she was ever likely to get. There was a certain risk to be taken, for Colonel Christie’s employer was not willing to guarantee to keep his job open for him on his return, but the Christies did not consider themselves to be people who played safe. Like Agatha’s Tommy and Tuppence, they yearned for adventure and were perfectly willing to take risks. Off they went, around the world with Major Belcher, leaving their daughter with Agatha’s sister.

The British Empire Exhibition Mission set off in grand style on the Kildonan Castle, bound for Cape Town. But Agatha Christie’s enjoyment was soon cut short: the weather in the Bay of Biscay was atrocious, the ship was tossed about violently, and for four days Agatha suffered the most appalling seasickness. The ship’s doctor became seriously concerned about her, and a woman in a nearby cabin who had caught a glimpse of her was heard, on the fourth day, to ask the stewardess: ‘Is the lady in the cabin opposite dead yet?’ However, her condition improved when the ship docked at Madeira, and although she subsequently became ill again whenever the weather was rough at sea, it was never quite as bad as those first days. In due course, the ship reached Cape Town, and Agatha was delighted to be back on terra firma for a time. By now, she had come to know Major Belcher quite well, and to realize that travelling around the world with him was not going to be the entirely happy experience she and Archie had anticipated. The Major was very demanding, complained continually about the service, and bullied his secretary, Mr Bates, a serious, somewhat humourless young man and an excellent secretary, though nature had given him ‘the appearance of a villain in a melodrama, with black hair, flashing eyes and an altogether sinister aspect’. ‘Looks the complete thug, doesn’t he?’ Belcher said to the Christies. ‘You’d say he was going to cut your throat any moment. Actually he is the most respectable fellow you have ever known.’ Neither Belcher nor his secretary realized that they were being scrutinized, analysed and filed away for future reference by a crime novelist always ready to make use of a colourful character or two.

From Cape Town Agatha travelled on to the diamond mines at Kimberley; to Salisbury and the Victoria Falls; to Livingstone where she saw crocodiles swimming about, and hippopotami; to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Durban. She and Archie managed to do a great deal of surfing at Muizenberg, in Cape Province, before facing the, in her case, dreaded sea voyage to Australia.

In Australia she was fascinated by the parrots,⁵ blue and red and green, ‘flying through the air in great clustering swarms’, and by the gigantic tree ferns in the bush outside Melbourne. The food and the sanitary arrangements left much to be desired, but staying on a sheep station in New South Wales was an unusual and enjoyable experience. In the major cities, Belcher made successful public speeches, or rather repeated the same speech which his travelling companions soon knew by heart. After visiting Tasmania, where Agatha fell in love with ‘incredibly beautiful Hobart’ and decided to go back and live there one day, the party proceeded to New Zealand.

Belcher had, by now, revealed himself in his true colours. The Christies found him for much of the time to be rude, overbearing, inconsiderate and oddly mean in small matters. He was continually sending Agatha out to buy him white cotton socks and neglecting to pay her for them. He behaved, Agatha remembered later, like a spoilt child, but had such immense charm when he was on his best behaviour that he was instantly forgiven. Tasmania forgotten, Agatha now thought New Zealand the most beautiful country she had ever seen, and vowed to go back one day. (However, by the time that air travel had made it possible to get there quickly, an elderly Agatha Christie had decided that her travelling days were over.)

After a lazy voyage, stopping at Fiji and other islands, Agatha and Archie arrived in Honolulu for two weeks’ holiday, while Belcher stayed with friends in New Zealand, after which they all embarked upon the last and most gruelling part of their journey, a tour of Canada. It was from the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff National Park, high up in the Rockies, that Mrs Christie wrote on 26 September 1922, to Basil Willett of The Bodley Head thanking him for a cheque for forty-seven pounds, eighteen shillings and ten pence. (But, in December, back in Torquay, she wrote again asking for accounts to be sent to her, and some weeks later had occasion to point out to Mr Willett that, since he had wrongly calculated the selling price of the American edition of The Secret Adversary, the exchange rate being $4.45 to the pound, The Bodley Head owed her two pounds, two shillings and three pence.)

Before setting out on her tour of the Commonwealth, Agatha had virtually completed a third novel, The Murder on the Links, the idea for which she derived from newspaper reports of a murder in France. Masked men had broken into a house, killed the owner and left his wife bound and gagged. There were discrepancies in the wife’s story, and a suggestion that she may have killed her husband. This led Agatha to invent her own plot, beginning several years later and in a different part of France.

Hercule Poirot having been a decided success on his first appearance, he and Captain Hastings were employed again in The Murder on the Links. The Bodley Head professed themselves pleased with the novel, but its author quarrelled with them over the jacket they provided for it. She thought its colours ugly and the actual drawing poor. In her autobiography she claims that the jacket was also misleading in that it appeared to represent a man in pyjamas on a golf-links, dying of an epileptic fit, whereas the character had been fully dressed and stabbed in the back. But, in fact, the murdered man, according to Mrs Christie’s text, wore only underclothes beneath an overcoat. Whoever was in the right about the jacket, a certain amount of bad feeling was engendered between author and publisher, and Agatha secured her publisher’s agreement that, in future, she should see and approve jacket designs for her books. (She had already had another difference of opinion with her publisher, during the production of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, over the spelling of the hot drink, cocoa, which Miss Howse, an eccentric employee of the firm and described by Mrs Christie as a dragon, insisted should be spelled ‘coco’. Agatha produced dictionaries and even tins of cocoa, but failed to make any impression on Miss Howse.)

With The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie returned to the murder mystery or puzzle type of novel, and to her team of Poirot and Hastings. Years later, she wrote of it:

I think Murder on the Links⁶ was a moderately good example of its kind – though rather melodramatic. This time I provided a love affair for Hastings. If I had to have a love interest in the book, I thought I might as well marry off Hastings. Truth to tell, I think I was getting a little tired of him. I might be stuck with Poirot, but no need to be stuck with Hastings too.⁷

The Murder on the Links is a more than ‘moderately good’ example of its kind. Until the diabolically ingenious solution, which perhaps fails to convince because of its very complexity, the action moves swiftly, the small seaside resort on the northern coast of France rings true and is not simply an English village in disguise, and the characters, lightly sketched though they are, all come vividly to life. The skill with which Agatha Christie manipulates her plot involving two crimes committed twenty years apart is quite brilliant. Occasionally, however, she displays an odd carelessness in matters of detail. For instance, the corpse of the murdered man is described when it is viewed by Poirot and Hastings. The face is clean-shaven, the nose thin, the eyes set rather close together, and the skin bronzed. We are told that the dead man’s ‘lips were drawn back from his teeth and an expression of absolute amazement and terror was stamped on the livid features’. The features, it is clear, are at least intact and undamaged. But Poirot finds a short piece of lead piping which, according to him, was used to ‘disfigure the victim’s face so that it would be unrecognizable’. Poirot’s theory of the crime, fortunately, does not hinge upon this point!

Since we are in France, Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard is not available to act as a foil for Poirot. This function is undertaken by Giraud, a young detective from the Sûreté who is already famous and inclined to pour scorn on Poirot’s old-fashioned methods. Agatha Christie has confessed that, in writing The Murder on the Links, she was influenced less by the Sherlock Holmes stories than by Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. She must also have been reading A. E. W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose, for certain events at the Villa Geneviève in The Murder on the Links call the 1910 mystery classic to mind.

Since their earlier adventure in Essex, Poirot and Hastings have taken furnished rooms together in London. If you did not learn from The Big Four (1927) that their address was 14 Farraway Street, you would have sworn that it was 221B Baker Street, for the ambience is distinctly Holmesian, as is their landlady, who is difficult to distinguish from Sherlock Holmes’s Mrs Hudson. Captain Hastings works as private secretary to a Member of Parliament while Poirot pursues a retirement career as private detective, and Hastings finds time to write up Poirot’s cases, just as Watson used to chronicle those of Holmes. At the end of The Murder on the Links, it seems likely that Hastings will propose marriage to the auburn-haired beauty he has met, and there is even a hint that he, or they, may emigrate to ‘a ranch across the seas’. Mrs Christie, it would seem, was already laying her plans for the removal of Hastings from Poirot’s life.

A television adaptation of The Murder on the Links, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 11 February 1996.

The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)

Back in London after their world tour, the Christies for a time found it difficult to settle down. Agatha longed for a cottage in the country, near enough to town for Archie to commute to the city, but far enough away for little Rosalind to be able to breathe air fresher than that of Earls Court. Archie took some months to find a job that suited him. Eventually, however, he was offered an excellent position with Austral Trust Ltd, a city firm run by an Australian friend, Clive Baillieu. Archie was to remain with Austral Trust Ltd for the rest of his life. Now, while they searched for their place in the country, Agatha proceeded to work on her next novel.

The egregious Belcher had suggested to her, before they went on their trip, that his house, the Mill House at Dorney, would make an excellent setting for a murder. ‘The Mystery of the Mill House,’ he had said to her one evening when the Christies were dining there. ‘Jolly good title, don’t you think?’ Agatha admitted that it had possibilities, and on their voyage to Cape Town Major Belcher continued to refer to it. ‘But mind you,’ he added, ‘if you write it you must put me in it.’ Agatha doubted if she could manage to create a character based entirely on someone she knew, but Belcher continued to pester her throughout their world tour. When he asked her, for the umpteenth time, ‘Have you begun that book yet? Am I in it?’ she replied, ‘Yes. You’re the victim.’

But Belcher did not see himself as one of life’s victims. ‘You’ve got to make me the murderer, Agatha. Do you understand?’ And Mrs Christie replied carefully, ‘I understand that you want to be the murderer.’ She had not, in fact, begun writing the book, but she did sketch out its plot while she was in South Africa, and Belcher played a leading role. ‘Give him a title,’ Archie suggested. ‘He’d like that.’ So Belcher became Sir Eustace Pedler. Agatha Christie explained later that Sir Eustace Pedler was not really meant to be Belcher,

but he used several of Belcher’s phrases, and told some of Belcher’s stories. He too was a master of the art of bluff, and behind the bluff could easily be sensed an unscrupulous and interesting character. Soon I had forgotten Belcher and had Sir Eustace Pedler himself wielding the pen. It is, I think, the only time I have tried to put a real person whom I knew well into a book, and I don’t think it succeeded. Belcher didn’t come to life, but someone called Sir Eustace Pedler did. I suddenly found that the book was becoming rather fun to write. I only hoped The Bodley Head would approve of it.⁸

The book was written in London and, retitled The Man in the Brown Suit since its author thought the title proposed by Belcher too similar to her earlier ones, was delivered to The Bodley Head who ‘hemmed and hawed a bit’ because it was not a proper detective story but one of those thrillers which Mrs Christie seemed to find easier to write. However, they accepted it.

Agatha Christie, author of four books, was no longer the novice who had grasped eagerly the chance to have her first novel published. As she herself put it, though she had been ignorant and foolish when she first submitted a book for publication, she had since learned a few things. She had discovered the Society of Authors and read its periodical, from which she learned that you had to be extremely careful in making contracts with publishers, ‘and especially with certain publishers’. When The Bodley Head, who still had an option on her next two books after The Man in the Brown Suit, suggested shortly before its publication that they scrap the old contract and make a new one for a further five books, Mrs Christie politely declined. She considered that they had not treated a young and inexperienced author fairly, but had taken advantage of her ignorance of publishers’ contracts and her understandable eagerness to have her first book published.

It was at this point that Agatha Christie decided she needed a literary agent and went back to the firm of Hughes Massie. Massie, who had advised her years earlier, had since died, and she was received by a young man with a slight stammer, whose name was Edmund Cork. Finding him impressive, and considerably less alarming than Hughes Massie himself had been, Mrs Christie placed her literary career, such as it was, in Cork’s hands, and left his office feeling that an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for more than fifty years until her death. Edmund Cork subsequently died, but the firm still represents the Agatha Christie Literary Estate.

The Evening News offered what seemed to Agatha Christie the unbelievable sum of £500 for the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit, which she hastily accepted, deciding not to object that the newspaper intended to call the serial version ‘Anna the Adventuress’, as silly a title as she had ever heard. That she should receive such a huge amount of money, was, she thought, an extraordinary stroke of luck and, when Archie suggested she buy a car with it, Agatha invested in a grey, bottle-nosed Morris Cowley which, she revealed many years later, was the first of the two most exciting things in her life. (The second was her invitation to dine with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace many years later.)

The Man in the Brown Suit, another of the thrillers which Agatha Christie found easier and ‘more fun’ to write than her detective stories, is one of her best in that genre. The heroine, Anne Beddingfield, is a romantic young woman whose archaeologist father dies, leaving her little more than the opportunity to be free and to seek adventure. Adventure, for Anne, begins when she witnesses the apparently accidental death of a man who falls onto the electrified rails at Hyde Park Corner tube station. Finding reason to suspect that the man’s death was not accidental, Anne persuades the great newspaper magnate Lord Nasby, ‘millionaire owner of the Daily Budget’ and several other papers, to commission her to investigate the matter. (For Nasby, we are probably meant to read Northcliffe.) A second death occurs at the Mill House, Marlow, whose owner is Sir Eustace Pedler, MP, and the trail leads Anne to sail to Cape Town on the Kilmorden Castle. On board, she meets Sir Eustace, a character whom Agatha Christie, as we know, based largely on Major Belcher, and his secretary, Guy Pagett, who, like the real-life secretary of Belcher, ‘has the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner’. Anne, like Agatha herself, proves to be a very poor sailor, and it is not until they reach Madeira that she begins to feel she might possibly recover from her seasickness.

With the exception of a Prologue set in Paris, the entire action of the novel takes place either en route to, or in South Africa and Rhodesia, and is presented through the diaries of Anne and Sir Eustace. The villain is a master criminal who organizes crime ‘as another man might organize a boot factory’. Jewel robberies, forgery, espionage, assassination, he has dabbled in them all. He is known to his underlings simply as ‘the Colonel’, and it falls to Anne finally to unmask him, with the aid of two or three friends.

Who Anne’s friends are, and who her enemies, is something which Mrs Christie keeps her readers guessing about. Like all Christie thrillers, The Man in the Brown Suit incorporates the puzzle element into its plot as well. Thus it retains a hold on the loyalties of those who prefer the murder mystery to the thriller, for it conceals until the last pages the identity of ‘the Colonel’ (who is, after all, a murderer), while at the same time including all the ingredients of the ‘international crime’ story: action, violence, suspense. Whether or not the charming old rogue Sir Eustace Pedler is at all like Major Belcher, he is one of Agatha Christie’s most convincing and memorable characters, and the author’s underestimated ability to convey a strong sense of place is very much in evidence in her discreet but effective description of the exotic African landscape through which Pedler, Anne and the others move.

It might be thought that to present the narrative through the diaries of two characters detracts somewhat from the suspense, or at least from the list of suspects. But with Agatha Christie you cannot always be certain that anyone is above suspicion. Diaries can also be published posthumously. (This is not necessarily a clue.) In The Man in the Brown Suit Mrs Christie makes use of a device which, to a certain extent, anticipates her tactics in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), though less spectacularly.

It need not impair enjoyment of the novel to know that one of the characters, a strong silent man called Colonel Race, will appear in three later Agatha Christie novels, ageing over forty years in the process. In fact, enjoyment of The Man in the Brown Suit will be impaired only if you take too seriously the African revolution which seems to be trying to foment itself offstage. Mrs Christie, never an acute political observer, rather charmingly recalls in her autobiography that ‘there was some kind of a revolutionary crisis on while we were there, and I noted down a few useful facts.’ Those facts must have got lost somewhere.

The Man in the Brown Suit was produced by Warner Brothers as a TV movie in 1987, starring Tony Randall.

Poirot Investigates POIROT SHORT STORIES (1924)

One of Hercule Poirot’s earliest fans was Bruce Ingram, editor of the London illustrated weekly, The Sketch. Ingram got in touch with Agatha Christie to suggest that she should write a series of Hercule Poirot stories for his magazine, and a thrilled and delighted Agatha agreed. She was not entirely pleased with the drawing of Hercule Poirot which The Sketch commissioned to accompany the first of the stories: it was not unlike her idea of Poirot but it made him look a little too smart and dandified. Agatha Christie wrote eight stories, and at first it was thought that eight would be sufficient. However, it was eventually decided to extend the series to twelve, and the author had to produce another four rather too hastily. When the series of stories began, in the 7 March 1923 issue of The Sketch, it was accompanied by a page of photographs of ‘The Maker of “The Grey Cells of M. Poirot” ’, showing her at home with her daughter, in her drawing-room, on the telephone, at her writing table, at work with her typewriter and so on. The author of ‘the thrilling set of detective yarns’ made it clear to The Bodley Head that she thought they should publish them quickly as a volume of stories, while the publicity from their appearance in The Sketch and from the serialization of The Man in the Brown Suit in the London Evening News was still current. The Bodley Head agreed, and the stories were collected in a volume which, at first, it was intended should be called The Grey Cells of Monsieur Poirot, but which, in due course, appeared as Poirot Investigates. The volume was also published in the United States (by Dodd, Mead & Co, who remain Agatha Christie’s American hardback publishers), but there is a discrepancy between the British and American editions. The British volume consisted of eleven stories while the American edition contained fourteen. (The three extra stories, ‘The Lost Mine’, ‘The Chocolate Box’ and ‘The Veiled Lady’ eventually appeared in Great Britain, along with several other stories, fifty years later in Poirot’s Early Cases. ‘The Veiled Lady’ was also published, together with two other stories, in Poirot Lends a Hand [1946: see p. 212].)

Some, though not many, of Agatha Christie’s short stories are as satisfying as the best of her novels. In general, however, her talent is not suited to the short story, or at least not to the very short mystery story of which she wrote so many. Her plots are, perforce, skeletal, and her characterization at its most perfunctory. The puzzle element is, therefore, given even greater emphasis than in the novels in which it contributes largely to the reader’s pleasure. Many of the stories, including most of the Hercule Poirot adventures collected in Poirot Investigates, are little more than puzzles or tricks given ‘a local habitation and a name’.

Prior to the emergence of Agatha Christie upon the crime writers’ scene, many of the genre’s greatest successes were with short stories. It is generally agreed, for instance, that Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are superior to the Holmes novels, and most of the other mystery writers who flourished at the same time as Conan Doyle, among them G. K. Chesterton (with his Catholic priest-detective Father Brown), Baroness Orczy, Richard Austin Freeman (whose detective was the physician Dr John Thorndyke), the American Melville Davisson Post (whose mysteries are solved by Uncle Abner, a shrewd Virginian), H. C. Bailey with his Mr Fortune stories, and Ernest Bramah, all produced their most successful work in the form of the short story. However, though she wrote more than a hundred and fifty short stories, Agatha Christie’s greatest triumphs were to be achieved with her full-length novels, rather than with short stories or novellas.

That so many of Agatha Christie’s stories are little more than puzzles or tricks might not matter so much were the puzzles more varied and the tricks less repetitive. For instance, the first time that Poirot points the accusing finger accurately at the person who engaged him, the reader is surprised and delighted; but M. Poirot and Mrs Christie connive several times at this particular trick, which is also not unknown in the novels.

The stories in Poirot Investigates are, on their own level, quite entertaining, but it would be as unwise to read more than one or two at a sitting as it would be to consume a two-pound box of chocolates in one go. Occasionally, Mrs Christie’s touch falters, as when, in ‘The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman’ she is snide about Inspector Japp’s French accent and has him refer to the ‘boat train to the Continong’. Why would he not pronounce ‘continent’ as an English word? But usually her social placing is exact. In ‘The Case of the Missing Will’, Poirot’s client, a handsome young woman, explains that her father, who came of farming stock, ‘married slightly above him; my mother was the daughter of a poor artist.’

‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’, in which Poirot investigates a strange series of deaths of people who were involved in the discovery and opening of the tomb of King Men-her-Ra, an event which we are told followed hard upon the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Lord Carnarvon, is interesting as evidence that Agatha Christie was conversant with the science of archaeology some years before she met Max Mallowan. (She had already introduced an archaeologist into her collection of characters in The Man in the Brown Suit.)

One of the best stories in Poirot Investigates is ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’. It is also one in which we learn something more of the author’s political opinions, or opinions which it seems reasonably safe to attribute to the author even though she issues them through the mouths of her characters and not by way of authorial comment. It is unlikely that, in 1923, any irony was intended in the opening sentence of the story (even a story narrated by the not very shrewd Hastings), which begins, ‘Now that war and the problems of war are things of the past…’ But pacifism takes a knocking at more than one point in the story, and the statement made by someone meant to be a leading British politician that ‘the Pacifist propaganda, started and maintained by the German agents in our midst, has been very active’ seems to be accepted by Poirot and Hastings without modification. The politician is ‘Lord Estair, Leader of the House of Commons’. Is it, in fact, possible for a nobleman to lead the House of Commons? Apparently, if his is a courtesy title.

It is in ‘The Kidnapped Prime Minister’ that Poirot most clearly describes his method. He has declined to leap into a military car at Boulogne and set off in pursuit of the kidnappers:

He shot a quick glance at us. ‘It is not so that the good detective should act, eh? I perceive your thought. He must be full of energy. He must rush to and fro. He should prostrate himself on the dusty road and seek the marks of tyres through a little glass. He must gather up the cigarette-end, the fallen match? That is your idea, is it not?’

His eyes challenged us. ‘But I – Hercule Poirot – tell you that it is not so! The true clues are within – here!’ He tapped his forehead. ‘See you, I need not have left London. It would have been sufficient for me to sit quietly in my rooms there. All that matters is the little grey cells within. Secretly and silently they do their part, until suddenly I call for a map, and I lay my finger on a spot – so – and I say: the Prime Minister is there! and it is so!’

Nevertheless, when it suits him Poirot is not at all averse to snooping about, gathering up the cigarette-end and the fallen match. He has sufficient confidence and vanity to contradict himself whenever he feels like it. In these early stories, he is at his most Holmesian, and the parallels with the minutiae of the Conan Doyle stories are most noticeable. Hastings, similarly, has become more Watsonian than ever, and in some of the stories Mrs Christie treats his relationship with Poirot mechanically. In addition to the stories already mentioned, the volume contains ‘The Adventures of “The Western Star” ’, ‘The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor’, ‘The Adventure of the Cheap Flat’, ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’, ‘The Million Dollar Bond Robbery’, ‘The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan’ and ‘The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim’.

All fourteen stories were adapted for television in the series which featured David Suchet as Poirot, and were first transmitted on London Weekend TV on various dates between 1990 and 1993.

The Road of Dreams POEMS (1924)

Ever since she was a child, Agatha Christie had written poetry. One of her earliest efforts, written at the age of eleven, begins: ‘I knew a little cowslip and a pretty flower too,/Who wished she was a bluebell and had a robe of blue.’ In her teens, she had occasional poems published in magazines, and by the time she was in her mid-thirties there were enough of them to be gathered into a slim volume which, in 1924, the London publishing house of Geoffrey Bles published, under the title of The Road of Dreams. This was also the title of one of the poems in the volume (‘The Road of Dreams leads up the Hill/So straight and white/And bordered wide/With almond trees on either side/In rosy flush of Spring’s delight! …’)

Agatha Christie’s talent for poetry was genuine, but modest and of no startling originality: the finest poetry is made not out of feelings but out of words, and Agatha Christie was not sufficiently in love with words to become a poet of real distinction. She did, however, enjoy relieving her feelings in verse and, in doing so, occasionally produced a pleasant little lyric poem.

The Road of Dreams is divided into four sections. The first, ‘A Masque from Italy’, is a sequence of nine poems or ‘songs’ to be performed by the commedia dell’ arte characters, Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierrette, Punchinello and Pulcinella. Written when Agatha was in her late teens, the Harlequin poems have a certain wistfulness which is appealing. They are of interest, too, in that they anticipate the Harlequin element which was later to creep into some of her short stories, those involving that mysterious character Mr Harley Quin.

The second section of the volume, ‘Ballads’, consists of six poems, among them ‘Elizabeth of England’ (‘I am Mistress of England – the Seas I hold!/I have gambled, and won, alone …’), which is presumably one of the author’s teenage efforts, and ‘Ballad of the Maytime’, a fey little ballad about bluebells which Mrs Christie wrote in 1924 in Sunningdale.

One or two of the eight poems in ‘Dreams and Fantasies’, the third section of the volume, are romantically death-obsessed – Keats’ ‘La belle dame sans merci’ is not too far away – and one of them, ‘Down in the Wood’, which forty years later Mrs Christie still liked sufficiently to reprint in her autobiography, is rather good, with a last line that lingers in the memory: ‘And Fear – naked Fear passes out of the wood!’ The volume’s final section, ‘Other Poems’, consists of thirteen poems written at various times, about the passing of love, the horror of war and the romance of the unknown. Again, there is a certain amount of evidence that the poet is ‘half in love with easeful death’:

Give me my hour within my Lover’s arms!

Vanished the doubts, the fears, the sweet alarms!

I lose myself within his quickening Breath.…

And when he tires and leaves me – there is Death …

Mystery is never completely absent from any aspect of Agatha Christie’s world, and there are one or two minor mysteries connected with this innocuous volume. The crime writer Michael Gilbert in an article on Agatha Christie⁹ mentions the volume’s title poem, ‘The Road of Dreams’, and quotes two stanzas from it. But the stanzas he quotes are part of a completely different poem in the volume, a poem called ‘In a Dispensary’ which Agatha Miller wrote in her mid-twenties when she was working in the hospital dispensary in Torquay.

Mystery number two is provided by the author of a book described as ‘an intimate biography of the first lady of crime’¹⁰ who says that Agatha Christie exposed her love for Max Mallowan ‘for all the world to see in a poem entitled “To M.E.L.M. in Absence” in The Road of Dreams (1924)’. But there is no such poem in The Road of Dreams, and Agatha Christie did not meet Max Mallowan until several years after 1924: to be precise, in 1930.

A stanza from ‘In a Dispensary’ which is not quoted in Michael Gilbert’s article clearly reveals the future crime writer’s interest in the poisons on the dispensary shelves among which she worked:

From the Borgia’s time to the present day, their power has been proved and tried!

Monkshead blue, called Aconite, and the deadly Cyanide!

Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain – courage and vigour new!

Here is menace and murder and sudden death! – in these phials of green and blue!

The final poem in the volume is ‘Pierrot Grown Old’, which reads as though it ought to have been part of the commedia dell’ arte sequence, ‘A Masque from Italy’, with which The Road of Dreams begins. (When the contents of The Road of Dreams were reprinted in Poems nearly fifty years later, ‘Pierrot Grown Old’ was, in fact, taken into the ‘Masque’ sequence.)

The Secret of Chimneys (1925)

Archie and Agatha did not find the cottage in the country for which they were searching. Instead, they took a flat in a large Victorian country house, which had been divided into four flats. The house, Scotswood, was at Sunningdale in Berkshire, only twenty-four miles from London and close to the Sunningdale Golf Club of which Archie had become a member. Golf was such a passion with Colonel Christie that before long Mrs Christie began to fear she was turning into ‘that well-known figure, a golf widow’. She consoled herself by writing The Secret of Chimneys, which she later described as ‘light-hearted and rather in the style of The Secret Adversary’.

Before leaving London for the country, Agatha had taken lessons in sculpture. She was a great admirer of the art, much more than of painting, and was disappointed when she became aware that she possessed no real talent for it. ‘By way of vanity’, she composed a few songs instead. Her musical education in Paris had been thorough and there had been a moment in her life when she even considered taking up the career of a professional pianist. She also had a pleasant singing voice, so it was appropriate that she should turn, however briefly, to the composition of songs, and equally appropriate that she should set some of her own verses to music. In later years, she continued to profess herself quite pleased with one group of songs in particular, settings of her Pierrot and Harlequin verses. She realized, however, that writing seemed to be the trade to which she was best suited.

After a few months at Scotswood, the Christies decided that they needed a house of their own, and they began to look at properties in the vicinity of Sunningdale. Their choice fell upon a large house with a pleasant garden, and, in 1925, after less than two years in their flat in the country, they moved into their own country house which, at Archie’s suggestion, they named Styles after the house in The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Agatha’s literary agent, Edmund Cork, had been busy extricating his client from her involvement with The Bodley Head. Cork approached the firm of Collins, who had begun to add detective novels to their list, and offered them the first Agatha Christie title which did not have contractually to be offered to The Bodley Head. A three-book contract was signed with Collins as early as 27 January 1924, though there were at that time two volumes still to be published by The Bodley Head. The Secret of Chimneys was the last Agatha Christie novel to appear under The Bodley Head’s imprint. Collins became her English publishers for the rest of the author’s life.

The Secret of Chimneys is one of the best of Agatha Christie’s early thrillers. It is, in its way, as typical of its time, the twenties, as Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat or P. G. Wodehouse’s The Inimitable Jeeves, both of which were published several months before Chimneys. It also owes something to the Ruritanian world of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, for its plot is concerned with political events in the fictitious small Balkan state of Herzoslovakia, the character of whose people appears to be of an almost Montenegran fierceness. After a beginning in Bulawayo, however, the events of the novel take place not in the Balkans but in London or at Chimneys, one of the stately homes of England and the seat of the ninth Marquis of Caterham. Chimneys, we are told, is as much a national possession as a grand country house, and history has been made at its informed weekend parties. It was perhaps not unlike Cliveden.

Diplomatic intrigue involving the possible reinstatement of the Herzoslovakian royal family and international crime concerning the attempts of a jewel thief known throughout Europe as ‘King Victor’ are ingeniously combined in The Secret of Chimneys, and at the end two characters are unmasked and revealed in their true colours, though only one of them is criminal.

It is when she is freed of some of the restrictions of the domestic murder mystery, as in this type of novel, that Mrs Christie seems able to relax into more leisurely, and, therefore, more detailed and believable characterization. Believable, that is, in the context of your willingly suspended disbelief; for, although the reader greatly enjoys making the acquaintance of, for instance, Baron Lolopretjzyl who represents in London the Loyalist Party of Herzoslovakia, it has to be admitted that the Baron’s construction of English sentences is a trifle more exotic than it need be. ‘Of many secrets he the knowledge had. Should he reveal but the quarter of them, Europe into war plunged may be,’ he says of a fellow countryman.

The Baron resides in a suite at Harridge’s Hotel. Mrs Christie’s London hotels are only lightly disguised. Mr Anthony Cade, who may or may not be the hero of the story, stays at the Blitz, which seems an inappropriate, indeed irreverent, name for an hotel clearly based on the Ritz. The Blitz, however, is oddly situated. Although, at one point, it appears to be where it ought to be, in Piccadilly, when Anthony Cade first arrives he strolls outside for a brief walk on the Embankment, for all the world as though he were staying at the Savoy.

Though it is not he but one of the upperclass amateurs who solves the secret of Chimneys, Superintendent Battle who is in charge of the case is no plodding and unimaginative policeman inserted into the plot to be the butt of the amateur genius’s humour. Battle is not at all like Inspector Japp (who is mentally continually trailing along some steps behind Hercule Poirot’s thought processes): he is an intelligent and successful officer whose speciality appears to be crimes in which politics or international diplomacy are involved. Outwardly a stolid and impassive figure, Battle reaches his conclusions by a dogged application of common sense. After The Secret of Chimneys, he was to appear in four more Christie novels in some of which he would deal with purely domestic crimes.

Occasionally, Agatha Christie carried over from one book to another characters other than her detectives and policemen. Not only Superintendent Battle but also four other characters from The Secret of Chimneys appear again four years later in The Seven Dials Mystery, as does the house, Chimneys. The house itself, and the kind of life lived in it, play a lively part in both novels. Chroniclers of a fast disappearing scene will be interested to note that the lavish English breakfast was still very much in evidence in the twenties. On the sideboard in the dining-room were half a score of heavy silver dishes, ‘ingeniously kept hot by patent arrangements’. Lord Caterham lifts each lid in turn. ‘Omelette,’ he mutters, ‘eggs and bacon, kidneys, devilled bird, haddock, cold ham, cold pheasant.’ Deciding he cares for none of these things, he tells his butler to ‘ask the cook to poach me an egg.’

The mandatory racial slurs occur in The Secret of Chimneys, though apparently they have been edited out of more recent American editions. ‘Dagos will be dagos’, ‘Like all dagos, he couldn’t swim’, and other remarks are cheerfully exchanged, and of course all references to Jews are uncomplimentary. People are beginning to be interested in Herzoslovakia, Anthony Cade tells his friend Jimmy, and, when asked what kind of people, he replies, ‘Hebraic people. Yellow-faced financiers in city offices.’ When we meet one of these financiers, Herman Isaacstein, we are invited to smile at Lord Caterham’s references to him as ‘Mr Ikey Isaacstein’, ‘Noseystein’, and ‘Fat Ikey’. But the true-blue British unemployed are treated with equal contempt. When Anthony Cade disguises himself as an out-of-work ex-serviceman, the upperclass Virginia Revel takes one look at him and decides that he is ‘a more pleasing specimen than usual of London’s unemployed’.

Her attitude to democracy is so unsympathetic, at least as expressed by a character of whom Mrs Christie evidently approves, that it reveals an unexpectedly authoritarian aspect of the author’s nature:

Mind you, I still believe in democracy. But you’ve got to force it on people with a strong hand – ram it down their throats. Men don’t want to be brothers – they may some day, but they don’t now. My belief in the brotherhood of man died the day I arrived in London last week, when I observed the people standing in a Tube train resolutely refuse to move up and make room for those who entered. You won’t turn people into angels by appealing to their better natures yet awhile – but by judicious force you can coerce them into behaving more or less decently to one another to go on with.

It is true that people on the Moscow underground are less surly in their behaviour than those in London and New York, but you would hesitate to use the citizenry of Moscow as a kind of democratic barometer. Even Agatha Christie, one imagines, if she had been offered the choice would have preferred to be bad-tempered in a democracy than polite in a police state.

The danger of pontificating solemnly on the subject of Agatha Christie’s politics must, however, be guarded against. The author tells us in The Secret of Chimneys that there was nothing that bored Lord Caterham more than politics, unless it was politicians, and one suspects that she shared his Lordship’s feelings. No one need be deterred from enjoying The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie’s politics, nor even by occasional infelicities in her prose style, though prose is more serious a matter than politics. Is there not something endearing about an author who can write the phrase, ‘eyeing a taxi that was crawling past with longing eyes’?

In general, Mrs Christie’s grasp of style is firm: The Secret of Chimneys is enjoyable because its style is light and humorous. It is not, like Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda, an adventure-romance, but a comedy-adventure, which is perhaps a new category.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd POIROT (1926)

It seems now to be generally accepted that the basic idea for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was given to Agatha Christie by Lord Mountbatten. Mountbatten certainly continued to claim, on every possible occasion, that this was so. But a variant of the idea, whether you regard it as an outrageous fraud or remarkably original or both, had earlier been suggested by Mrs Christie’s brother-in-law, James Watts, and the author was already mulling it over. It appealed greatly to her, but before starting to write the novel she had to work out just how to make use of the startling suggestion (which will not be revealed in these pages), in such a way that it could not be regarded as cheating the reader. Of course, as Mrs Christie was to admit in her autobiography, a number of people do consider themselves cheated when they come to the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but if they read it carefully they will see that they are wrong, for ‘such little lapses of time as there have to be are nicely concealed in an ambiguous sentence’.

It was with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by far the most ingenious crime novel she had written, that Agatha Christie’s reputation took a great leap forward, and so did her sales. The author’s solution to the mystery is still debated in books and articles on crime fiction more than half a century after the novel’s first publication, and although its immediate success meant no more than that an edition of approximately five thousand copies sold out, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd must by now have sold well over a million copies.

Critics and readers were divided on the propriety of Mrs Christie’s brilliant trick. Though the Daily Sketch thought it ‘the best thriller ever’, the News Chronicle considered The Murder of Roger Ackroyd a ‘tasteless and unfortunate let-down by a writer we had grown to admire’. One reader wrote a letter to The Times in which he announced that, having been a great admirer of Agatha Christie, he was so shocked by the dénouement of Roger Ackroyd that he proposed ‘in the future not to buy any more of her books’. Even some of her fellow crime novelists thought she had not played fair, though Dorothy L. Sayers, author of a number of detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey as investigator, defended Mrs Christie by pointing out that ‘it’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody’.

Agatha Christie herself remained unrepentant. In an interview with Francis Wyndham in 1966, she explained: ‘I have a certain amount of rules. No false words must be uttered by me. To write “Mrs Armstrong walked home wondering who had committed the murder” would be unfair if she had done it herself. But it’s not unfair to leave things out. In Roger Ackroyd … there’s lack of explanation there, but no false statement. Whoever my villain is, it has to be someone I feel could do the murder.’¹¹

Lord Mountbatten’s claim to be responsible for having given Agatha Christie the idea for Roger Ackroyd should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. It is true that, at Christmas in 1969, he received from the author a copy of the book, inscribed: ‘To Lord Mountbatten in grateful remembrance of a letter he wrote to me forty-five years ago which contained the suggestion which I subsequently used in a book called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Here once more is my thanks.’ However, this was in response to a letter from Mountbatten reminding her that he had written to her forty-five years earlier.

Whether Agatha Christie thought Roger Ackroyd her best book is uncertain, but she usually mentioned it as among her three or four favourites.

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, dedicated not to Lord Mountbatten but ‘to PUNKIE,¹² who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on every one in turn!’, Agatha Christie returned to the classical domestic crime novel for the first time since Murder on the Links three years earlier, and at the same time reintroduced Hercule Poirot who, apart from the short stories in Poirot Investigates, had also been missing for three years.

The story, narrated not by Poirot’s usual associate, Hastings, but by the local doctor whose name is Sheppard, begins with the death of someone other than Roger Ackroyd. Mrs Ferrars, a wealthy widow, has been found dead in her bed, and Dr Sheppard has been sent for. He suspects suicide, but sees no point in saying so publicly. The following evening Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy widower whom village gossip had prophesied would marry Mrs Ferrars, is murdered in the study of his house.

We are soon introduced to Dr Sheppard’s sister Caroline, who keeps house for him, and to the Sheppards’ neighbour, a recent arrival in the village of King’s Abbot. He is a foreign gentleman with ‘an egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes’. He has retired from whatever his profession may have been, grows vegetable marrows, and is thought to be called Porrott.

Porrott, of course, is simply the King’s Abbot pronunciation of Poirot, and soon the retired detective has introduced himself to Dr Sheppard, has admitted how bored he is with his vegetable marrows, and how much he misses his friend (‘who for many years never left my side’) who is now living in the Argentine. When Poirot is asked to investigate the murder of Roger Ackroyd, he allows Dr Sheppard to take the place of his old friend Hastings as assistant and part-confidant; and also as Boswell to Poirot’s Johnson, for it is Sheppard who writes up the case and is the chronicler of Poirot’s eventual success.

It is not a success which comes easily to Poirot, for the suspects are many and varied. Most of them were staying in Ackroyd’s house when he was murdered. Major Blunt, a big-game hunter, is an old friend, and appears to have a romantic interest in Ackroyd’s niece, Flora. Flora and her mother, who is Ackroyd’s widowed sister-in-law, are poor relations living on a rich man’s charity. Geoffrey Raymond, the dead man’s secretary, Ursula Bourne, a somewhat unusual parlourmaid, and Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s adopted son who is burdened with gambling debts, all come under suspicion.

Poirot is assisted not only by Dr Sheppard but by the doctor’s sister Caroline, a middle-aged spinster who seems to know everything that goes on in the village. Many years later, in discussing the character of Miss Marple, an unconventional solver of puzzles whom she was to introduce in Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie said she thought it possible that Miss Marple ‘arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.’

It is not simply because of its startling dénouement that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has remained one of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels. The story is believable, the characters convincing, and Mrs Christie’s ear for dialogue is accurate. That she can occasionally be clumsy ought not to obscure the fact that, on form, she writes speech which sounds natural, whether it issues from the mouth of a peeress or a parlourmaid. Even more impressive is her ability to enter into the thought processes of her male characters. Dr Sheppard, the narrator of Roger Ackroyd, is a fully rounded and perfectly convincing character, and his loving, exasperated relationship with his sister Caroline, an amusing and acutely observed character, is beautifully conveyed. Another important ingredient in the success of the novel is the background of English village life which Mrs Christie provides. It is never obtrusive but it is there, and it is important.

From The Murder of Roger Ackroyd onwards, Agatha Christie’s readers knew what to expect, or rather knew that they would never know what to expect. And it is this quality of unexpectedness which makes Mrs Christie unique among crime writers. Dorothy L. Sayers writes more elegantly but also, at times, more ploddingly. Her stories do not move quickly. Ngaio Marsh is in the Christie tradition but can get bogged down in endless interviews with suspects. Patricia Wentworth is pastiche Christie and her villains can usually be guessed. After the trick Christie played on her public in Roger Ackroyd (though some of those who remembered The Man in the Brown Suit ought perhaps not to have been taken in), clearly there were no holds barred. It is this realization that no one, absolutely no one, is exempt from suspicion in an Agatha Christie novel that makes reading the finest ones such a delight. Here she will kill off all the characters, there she will make virtually everyone the murderer, somewhere else the crime will be committed by – no, surely not by him? But how could she possibly justify that? Well, she does.

Her puzzles endure to delight and surprise readers towards the end of the twentieth century just as much as they did in the twenties because they are not mechanical but concerned with human character. The locked-room mysteries beloved of John Dickson Carr are of no great interest to Agatha Christie, nor are the fiendish devices, the evaporating ice darts or any of the other paraphernalia used by some of the earlier crime writers. Her tricks are sometimes verbal, sometimes visual. If you listen carefully and watch her all the time, you may catch Mrs Christie, but it is highly unlikely that you will. The solution which she has somehow persuaded you quite early in the narrative is not the correct one very frequently is – but not invariably.

Mrs Christie is at her best throughout The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The occasional Christie carelessness is there, as when she tells us that Ackroyd is nearly fifty years of age, and a paragraph or two later it becomes clear that he could not have been older than forty-three. And Poirot’s years in England have caused his command of French to deteriorate. He says ‘Je ne pense pas’ when he clearly means ‘Je crois que non’, and in any case is perfectly capable of saying ‘I think not’ in English. But these are minor quibbles. In Dr Sheppard and his sister Mrs Christie has created a pair of highly engaging characters, and her description of Caroline Sheppard, tempted to gossip, but wavering for a second or two ‘much as a roulette ball might coyly hover between two numbers’, is especially felicitous.

You can usually expect a little music in her books and, at least in the early Christies, a little anti-semitism. Both are to be found in Roger Ackroyd. Oddly, it is the unmusical Major Blunt who provides the two references to opera when he talks of ‘the johnny who sold his soul to the devil’, adding that ‘there’s an opera about it’, and later reveals his knowledge that Mélisande is someone in an opera. Agatha Christie probably saw both Faust and Pelléas et Mélisande during her period at finishing school in Paris, but you would not have expected Major Blunt to know Debussy’s opera though he might just have been aware of the more popular Faust of Gounod. Blunt, incidentally, is a name Mrs Christie seems to have been fond of using. Three more Blunts, one of them an Admiral, will turn up in later works.

The mandatory anti-semitic reference occurs when one of the characters receives demands from debt collectors (Scotch [sic] gentlemen named McPherson and MacDonald), and Dr Sheppard comments: ‘They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.’

Two years after its publication, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was adapted for the stage by Michael Morton. Mrs Christie much disliked Morton’s first suggestion which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot, and have lots of girls in love with him. With the support of Gerald Du Maurier who produced the play, she persuaded the adaptor not to change the character and personality of Poirot, but agreed to allow Caroline Sheppard to be turned into a young and attractive girl, in order to supply Poirot with romantic interest. Mrs Christie’s agreement was reluctant. She resented the removal of the spinster Caroline, for she liked the role played by this character in the life of the village, and she liked the idea of that village life being reflected through Dr Sheppard and his sister. In the play, Poirot confesses to Dr Sheppard that he loves Caryl, as she is now called and, although at the end the great detective announces his intention to leave ‘for my own country’, the final moments suggest that he may, one day, come back for Caryl:

POIROT (taking both her hands and kissing them): Un

de ces jours …

CARYL: What do you mean?

POIROT: Perhaps one day …

(Caryl goes out slowly. Poirot turns back to table, takes rose out of specimen glass which is on table, kisses it, and puts it in his button-hole, looking off towards the garden where Caryl has gone out.) The curtain falls.

The play, which was called Alibi, opened on 15 May 1928, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End of London, with the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot, J. H. Roberts as Dr Sheppard, Basil Loder as Major Blunt, Henry Daniell (who went to Hollywood the following year to play suave villains in countless American films) as Parker, the butler, Lady Tree as Mrs Ackroyd, Jane Welsh as her daughter Flora, Cyril Nash as Ralph Paton, Henry Forbes Robertson as Geoffrey Raymond, Iris Noel as Ursula Bourne, and Gillian Lind as Caryl Sheppard. The Sketch said that Laughton ‘admirably impersonated’ Poirot, and Mrs Christie thought he was a good actor but ‘entirely unlike Hercule Poirot’. The play was a commercial success, running for 250 performances in London before being taken up elsewhere and eventually by amateur dramatic societies with whom it is still highly popular.

In 1931, the play became a film, still with the title of Alibi. Produced by Julius Hagen, who had already made an Agatha Christie movie in 1928 and directed by Leslie Hiscott, Alibi was filmed at the Twickenham studios near London, with Austin Trevor, who was even less like Hercule Poirot than Laughton had been, and who made no attempt at a characterization, but played the role ‘straight’. Others in the cast were Franklin Dyall, Elizabeth Allan, Clare Greet and Milton Rosmer. (Max Mallowan in his autobiography, Mallowan’s Memoirs, wrongly identifies the actor who played Poirot in this film as Francis Sullivan, who played Poirot twice on the stage, but who was not in either the film or the stage version of Alibi.)

Retitled The Fatal Alibi, the play was staged in New York on 28 February 1932, with Charles Laughton directing and also playing Poirot. It closed after twenty-four performances.

The first of Agatha Christie’s books to be produced in Great Britain by Collins and in America by Dodd, Mead & Co who had bought John Lane and Co, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in the spring of 1926. Seven months later, on Friday, 3 December, Mrs Christie disappeared in mysterious circumstances worthy of one of her crime novels.

The year 1926 had been far from a happy one for Agatha Christie. It began well enough with a brief holiday in Corsica with her sister, during which she worked on The Mystery of the Blue Train, but shortly after the sisters arrived home they learned that their mother was ill and some months later Agatha found herself also having to cope with the realization that her marriage to Archie Christie had badly deteriorated. For some time Colonel Christie had seemed to be more interested in golf than in his wife, and now Agatha discovered that she had a more serious rival for her husband’s affections, a young woman called Nancy Neele who lived at Godalming in Surrey and who was also an acquaintance of hers. Archie confessed that he was in love with Miss Neele and wanted to marry her. He asked Agatha to divorce him.

On the morning of Friday, 3 December 1926, after a quarrel with his wife, Colonel Christie packed his bags and left home to spend the weekend with Miss Neele in Godalming. That evening, leaving her daughter Rosalind asleep in the house, Mrs Christie drove off in her car. She left two letters, one addressed to Archie, and one requesting her secretary to cancel her appointments as she was going to Yorkshire. According to the daughter of the then Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey, she posted a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable, in which she said she feared for her life, and appealed for his help. Her car was found next morning by George Best, a fifteen-year-old gypsy lad. It had been abandoned on the embankment at the side of the road at a popular ‘beauty spot’ called Newlands Corner, near a lake known as the Silent Pool. The bodywork of the car was covered in frost, and the lights were still on. Inside the car the police found a fur coat, and a small case which had burst open and which contained three dresses, two pairs of shoes and an expired driving licence in the name of Mrs Agatha Christie.

For the next few days the newspapers were full of stories about the well-known mystery writer’s disappearance, with huge banner headlines announcing new so-called developments, interviews with and comments by several people, and speculation by many more. Suicide was not ruled out, nor was murder.

On 7 December, the Daily News offered ‘£100 reward to the first person furnishing us with information leading to the whereabouts, if alive, of Mrs Christie’. The Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey said, in the best tradition of the detective novel: ‘I have handled many important cases during my career, but this is the most baffling mystery ever set me for solution.’ Also in the best tradition of crime fiction, suspicion centred for a time upon the husband of the missing woman.

By the following weekend, hundreds of policemen and thousands of members of the general public had joined in the search for Agatha Christie. The Silent Pool was dredged with special machinery, light aircraft scoured the countryside from above, and packs of airedales and bloodhounds went over the ground more closely. Police from four counties, Surrey, Essex, Berkshire and Kent, were brought in. As in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, a number of clues were found, only to be discarded as red herrings: a local chemist said that Mrs Christie had often discussed with him methods of committing suicide; a woman claimed that she had seen someone, whom she identified from photographs as Mrs Christie, wandering about, dazed; and two other people remembered that a woman answering to her description, her clothes covered in frost, had asked them the way to Petersfield, a town in Hampshire. The police guarded Colonel Christie’s house, monitored his phone calls, and followed him to his office. Christie told a city colleague, ‘They think I’ve murdered my wife.’ The weekend after her disappearance, in answer to an appeal from the police fifteen thousand volunteers searched the Downs. On the Saturday afternoon, three thousand of their cars were parked on Merrow Downs, and they set off in groups of thirty with a police officer in charge of each group. The Daily Mail played its part by publishing an article by the famous thriller writer, Edgar Wallace, in which he expounded his theory of Mrs Christie’s disappearance. He did not suspect foul play, but considered it

a typical case of ‘mental reprisal’ on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly her first intention seems to have been to ‘spite’ an unknown person who would be distressed by her disappearance.

That she did not contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by abandonment of her car.

Loss of memory, that is to say mental confusion, might easily have followed but a person so afflicted could not possibly escape notice … If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car was found, she must be alive and in full possession of her faculties, probably in London. It is impossible to lose your memory and find your way to a determined destination.

Edgar Wallace’s theory was perfectly tenable, and indeed in its essentials was correct. It was certainly quite proper for him to have suggested it, but perhaps unwise of the chief suspect, Colonel Christie, to put forward the same idea to the Daily News: ‘My wife said to me, some time ago, that she could disappear at will and would defy anyone to find her. This shows that the possibility of engineering her disappearance was running through her mind.’

During the week in which Agatha Christie remained missing, the banjo player in the band at the Hydropathic Hotel at Harrogate, in those days an elegant spa resort in Yorkshire, informed the Harrogate police of his suspicion that the Mrs Neele who had been staying at the hotel since the previous Saturday was, in fact, Mrs Christie. The police stationed a detective in the hotel for two days to keep an eye on Mrs Neele, and the manager of the hotel (which is now called the Old Swan Hotel) made a statement to the police about Mrs Neele:

She arrived by taxi on Saturday morning with only a small suitcase and asked for a bedroom on en pension terms and was given a good room on the first floor with hot and cold water.

I did not see her myself but I believe that the price quoted to her was seven guineas a week. She accepted this without hesitation. Indeed, from the first day she has been here she seems to have as much money as she wants. From the first her life in the Hydro has been exactly similar to that of our other guests. She takes her meals in the dining-room and only once or twice has had breakfast in bed. She is a very agreeable guest.

When the story that a Mrs Neele at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate might well be Agatha Christie was leaked to the press, several newspapers sent reporters to Harrogate, and the Daily Mail sent a special train with a team of reporters and photographers. It was, however, a Daily News reporter, the twenty-year-old Ritchie Calder (the late Baron Ritchie-Calder) who walked up to Mrs Neele in the lounge of the hotel and addressed her as Mrs Christie. ‘Mrs Neele’ admitted to him that she was Mrs Christie, but, when asked how she had got to Harrogate, said she did not know as she was suffering from amnesia. She then left Calder abruptly, went up to her room and stayed there for the remainder of the afternoon.

On Tuesday, 14 December, the London Evening Standard published the news that Agatha Christie had been found. The Daily News sent Mrs Christie a telegram, which they also published: ‘In view widespread criticism your disappearance strongly urge desirability authentic explanation from yourself to thousands of public who joined in costly search and cannot understand your loss of memory theory.’

No ‘authentic explanation’ was ever vouchsafed by Agatha Christie. She had registered at the Hydro Hotel as Mrs Teresa Neele, and had let it be known to fellow guests¹³ that she was a visitor from Cape Town. On the evening of the day she arrived, Saturday, 4 December, there was a dance at the hotel, and when the band played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, Mrs Neele got up and danced the Charleston. She spent her week at Harrogate shopping (‘she was constantly buying new clothes,’ Miss Corbett, the hotel pianist, told the police), taking tea in a local tea shop, and going on long walks. In the evening she played billiards at the Hydro, and on more than one occasion was prevailed upon to sing in her small but sweet soprano, accompanying herself at the piano. Once in the middle of a sentimental song, she faltered and seemed close to tears, but this was attributed to the fact that ‘Mrs Neele’ was recovering from the loss of a child in South Africa. During the week she posted an announcement to The Times, which appeared in the newspaper’s personal column on Saturday, 11 December: ‘Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele, late of South Africa, please communicate – Write Box R 702, The Times, EC4’.

When he accosted her at the hotel, the young journalist Ritchie Calder thought that ‘amnesia’, which Mrs Christie flung glibly at him, ‘was much too clinical a word for someone supposedly surprised into conversation, and if, as her doctor later suggested, she had an “identity crisis”, well, by golly, there was no “Teresa Neele” lurking in the self-possessed woman I met.’

Archie Christie arrived in Harrogate at 6.45 p.m. on Tuesday, 14 December, and identified his wife as she walked through the lounge of the hotel wearing an orchid pink dinner gown. She appeared unembarrassed as he walked up to her, merely turning to a group of fellow guests and saying, ‘Fancy, my brother has just arrived’. One of the guests who watched the reunion said later that the Christies then sat down in front of the fire in the lounge, but several chairs apart from each other as though they had been quarrelling. They stayed overnight, not in Mrs Neele’s room but in a suite. Colonel Christie made an announcement to the press:

There is no question about the identity. It is my wife. She has suffered from the most complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is. She does not know me and she does not know where she is. I am hoping that the rest and quiet will restore her. I am hoping to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and specialists.

Two doctors, a neurologist and a general practitioner, issued a statement to the effect that Mrs Christie was ‘suffering from an unquestionable loss of memory and that for her future welfare she should be spared all anxiety and excitement.’ In other words, ask no questions.

The press accused Mrs Christie of having planned her disappearance merely to obtain publicity. That was a nonsensical accusation, for she was not only a shy woman who avoided publicity as much as possible, she was also in no need of it. But she was certainly not the victim of amnesia. The week before her disappearance, Agatha Christie had lost a diamond ring at Harrods. She wrote to the Knightsbridge department store from Harrogate, describing the ring and asking that, if it were found, it be sent to Mrs Teresa Neele at the Hydro Hotel. Harrods did, in fact, return Mrs Christie’s ring to Mrs Neele.

In 1980, in a magazine called The Bookseller, a very elderly journalist claimed to remember that, in 1926, on the morning after Mrs Christie disappeared, her publisher Sir Godfrey Collins had told him not to talk to anyone about it, as Mrs Christie was in Harrogate, resting.

The strongest likelihood is that a very unhappy Mrs Archibald Christie had come close to nervous collapse, and that it was in a condition of considerable mental turmoil that she, nonetheless deliberately, staged her disappearance in such a way as to cause the maximum distress to the man whom she loved and who had caused her such anguish. She probably hoped that he would think she had killed herself and would suffer remorse. She may even have hoped that he would be suspected of having murdered her. Perhaps she thought her disappearance would bring Archie to a realization of how much he needed her. Normal, warm-hearted and affectionate a creature though she was, Mrs Christie was not necessarily more so than many another who had been driven by extreme mental anguish to commit actions which seem wildly out of character. Far from disappearing in order to court publicity, she was so distraught at the collapse of her marriage that she was driven to a course of extremely neurotic behaviour despite her fear of publicity. And, her most successful novel having been published seven months earlier and sold extremely well, she had no need of publicity.

In her autobiography, written in old age, Agatha Christie made no direct reference to these exciting events of 1926, contenting herself merely with the observation that after illness came sorrow, despair and heartbreak, and that there was no need to dwell on it. Further clues to the mystery of her behaviour in December 1926 are inextricably embedded in the crypto-autobiographical novel, Unfinished Portrait, which she wrote a few years later.