When Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a child she had a recurring nightmare in which pleasant occasions – family tea-times, parties, picnics – were disrupted by a scary apparition with no hands, a ghastly stare and formidable powers of disguise. “It might be Mummy or Daddy or Nannie,” she recalled, “someone you were just talking to. You looked up into Mummy’s face . . . and then you saw the light steely-blue eyes – and from the sleeve of Mummy’s dress – oh, horror! – that horrible stump.” Merging cosiness and menace, it’s a dream that eerily prefigures the 66 crime novels and 13 short story collections that made her a global literary phenomenon (over a billion copies sold in English, another billion in translation).
Comfortable stability was her ideal. Throughout later life, Laura Thompson’s biography stresses, she retained wistful memories of her serene upbringing in the late-Victorian and Edwardian Torquay of villas set among rose gardens and impeccable lawns, retinues of servants, seven-course dinner parties, tennis matches, fancy-dress balls, dance cards, picture hats and sedate flirtations over the clack of croquet mallets. In keeping with this idyll, on Christmas Eve 1914, she married Archie Christie, a dashing young officer in the Royal Flying Corps.
When the first world war took him to France, she became a volunteer nurse. The hospital’s dispensary – whose supervisor kept a lump of curare in his pocket because it gave him “a sense of power” – was the perfect crucible for her imagination. Poisons fascinated her. More than 80 characters fall prey to them in her pages. The coloured bottles in which the dispensary’s drugs were stored stirred her into poetry (“From the Borgias’ time to the present day, their power has been proved and tried! / Monkshood blue, called Aconite, and the deadly Cyanide! / . . . Here is menace and murder and sudden death! – in these phials of green and blue!”). A lethal cocktail of potassium bromide and strychnine dispatches the murder victim in her 1920 debut whodunit, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (which she was pleased to find favourably reviewed in the Pharmaceutical Journal). In that novel, Christie put her distinctive stamp on things in the bamboozling flair she brought to the plotting. Just how audaciously she could subvert readers’ expectations was displayed by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926.
After her marriage to Archie collapsed, that same year, with his revelation that he loved another woman, she channelled her energies into a succession of peerlessly inventive murder mysteries that exhibit the ill-advisability of taking anything, or anyone, for granted. Compulsively orderly, her detective Hercule Poirot reaches the truth by noting things that are jarringly out of place. Miss Marple, the spinster sleuth introduced as his counterpart (he solves crimes by deductive logic, she by processes of association), inhabits a village, St Mary Mead, of tranquil-seeming gentility. That it is also rife with slaughter epitomises Christie’s imagination. Her titles like to juxtapose the deadly with the decorous: The Murder at the Vicarage, The Body in the Library. Borrowings from nursery rhymes (A Pocketful of Rye, Hickory Dickory Dock) similarly counterpoint the innocent and sinister. They also highlight her love of pattern: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Three Blind Mice, Five Little Pigs, Ten Little Niggers (later regulated into And Then There Were None).
The title of one of her most dazzlingly ingenious books, Cards on the Table (1936), reminds you that what you are enjoying is basically a game: no emotional or psychological perturbations, no raw carnage. Her books aren’t stomach-turners but brain-teasers. When begged to write “a good violent murder with lots of blood”, she responded with Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (1938), in which a cantankerous patriarch is found with his throat slit amid a pool of gore. Typically, this isn’t what it seems, and the plot depends not on bloodshed but blood-lines: ancestry, parentage. To achieve her aim of outwitting the reader, she drew on an unsurpassed repertoire of beguilements. In her books, the killer may be the narrator, the apparently intended victim, the investigating policeman, or every one of the suspects. Thompson notes how her sometimes sniffed-at use of stereotyped characters suits her wily purposes perfectly, since the mind’s eye tends to slide over them. Likewise, her simple prose ensures that nothing impedes engagement with her intricate plots.
Showing the effort behind the intricacy, extracts from Christie’s notebooks are illuminatingly reproduced here. Thompson also enlighteningly demonstrates how the books published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott broach personal concerns: her pain at the loss of her first husband, her attachment to her mother, her semi-detached relationship with her daughter, and her second marriage to the archeologist Max Mallowan (“I adore corpses and stiffs,” she reassured him when he worried that his professional immersion in human remains might put her off).
Most engrossing of all is Thompson’s account of the notorious episode in late-1926 in which she left her car overhanging a quarry in suspicious-looking circumstances and vanished for 11 days amid press hysteria, drainings of ponds and mass searches of the North Downs, before being found in a Harrogate hotel allegedly suffering from memory loss. Her angry impulse to discomfit her errant husband, the subsequent ignoring of a letter she had sent saying she was going to Yorkshire and a fixated policeman’s obdurate determination to prove Archie had killed her combined to cause the brouhaha, Thompson convincingly argues.
Bizarrely, this eminently sensible explanation is prefaced by the breathy declaration that, “Her 11 days in the wilderness were a myth, a poem. They exist in a different sphere from that of theories and solutions.” Thompson is dismayingly prone to sugary effusions of this kind (Agatha “wandered through the sunlit gardens and dark forests of her imagination”, had “sensations that stretched her very soul to its limits” etc). But it’s worth struggling through the saccharine. Christie’s work, which once attracted admirers ranging from TS Eliot to PG Wodehouse, Clement Attlee to Robert Graves, tends to be underestimated nowadays. So it’s good to be reminded of her enduring achievement: those shoals of red herring, mounds of curiously killed corpses, heaps of clues and fragile alibis that, in the hands of this mistress of misdirection, have given so much pleasure to so many millions of readers.
The labours of Hercules
Christie sometimes jokingly complained that she was tired of her dapper Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his preening self-satisfaction with his little grey cells and his luxuriant waxed moustache. But she always protected her character’s image. She took her publisher to task over a cover illustration because it made him look too tall, and she regularly criticised actors who played him in films. Charles Laughton was ‘entirely unlike him’, she declared. Albert Finney, in Murder on the Orient Express, left, she found convincing, though his moustache wasn’t splendid enough for her. MGM’s proposed version of The ABC Murders was shelved when she objected to the script in which Poirot — to be played by the American comedian Zero Mostel as a moustachioed lecher (‘I’ll certainly give him an eye for the girls!’) — has a bedroom scene.
AGATHA CHRISTIE: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson
Headline £20 pp534
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From The Sunday Times
