Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  One expedient which occurred to Agatha was to sell Greenway. She and Max were unable to use it while the War lasted and anyhow Max was now firmly settled in London. After interminable appeals to the authorities he had at last secured a proper post. ‘It is, I think, high time,’ he had written in irritation to the Ministry of Information, who had messed about with a possible appointment in Turkey, ‘that bureaucrats took a sane and just view of the services they are willing to extract from a British-born subject.’ So desperate was Max to do some useful service that to his already impressive list of references from Squadron Leaders, Colonels and Air Marshals, he added: ‘Wife, British subject. Better known as Agatha Christie, has just written an anti-Nazi book.’ And, even: ‘I have been accepted as a member of the Home Guard.’ This correspondence was copied to Stephen Glanville and in February he succeeded in pressing Max’s case. Max joined Glanville at the Air Ministry, in what became the Directorate of Allied and Foreign Liaison. With great reluctance Agatha decided to sell Greenway. ‘Two sets of people have been looking over the house,’ she wrote miserably to Cork, ‘– both unpleasant in different ways. Still, they seem to have the money.’ To which Cork gently replied: ‘I am afraid you will find anyone who wants Greenway most unpleasant. I have a feeling that what with the budget and one thing and another there are not going to be so many people who will “have the money” much longer.’ No one bought Greenway.

  Agatha’s only other way out of her troubles was work but, as she told Cork, who spurred her on: ‘Do I gather from your letter that you are urging this sausage machine to turn out a couple more of the same old hand? Feel too depressed by my financial plight at the moment. What’s the good of writing for money if I don’t get anything out of it?’ She nevertheless made a start. ‘The next Christie story,’ Cork told Ober exactly a month later, ‘will be a perfectly sweet poison pen tragedy featuring Miss Marple.’ Indeed, Cork wrote, ‘as Mrs Christie is writing hard in an effort to catch up with things, it looks as if we might have an accumulation of books on our hands before long.…’

  The poison pen idea was another Agatha had mulled over for years. Once hurt herself by rumour, she considered its destructive power in several stories; one was ‘The Augean Stables’ in The Labours of Hercules, where gossip is used by the wily Poirot against the scandal-mongers. The Moving Finger had a fairly easy birth, except that the Saturday Evening Post declined it on the grounds that the action began too slowly to make a successful serial. It was nevertheless first published in America. There were also difficulties about its title. Agatha first suggested ‘The Tangled Web’, which Collins thought too close to a recently published Spider’s Web. She then proposed The Moving Finger but Cork for some reason preferred ‘Misdirection’. Agatha won. Cork and Ober agreed that this was one of her best books. When she finished it, she felt something of an anti-climax and her worries resurfaced. Cork again attacked the financial issue, begging Ober to push Reinheimer: ‘She is being pressed remorselessly by the tax authorities here and the Bank to pay her English taxation, which for the year will be anything up to four times the total income she will receive.…’ He also found an ingenious way of giving Agatha some financial relief. There had been an offer from an American company, Milestone, for the film rights to N or M? and, since such rights were ‘world-wide in their scope’, Cork advised Ober that, ‘it would be possible for sums to be payable in this country, where Mrs Mallowan in the first instance, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the second, needs the money so desperately.’ Some money was also coming in from unexpected sources: Peril at End House, for instance, took £514.17.101/2 at the Lyceum, Sheffield, in the first week of May.

  Further irritation came in June, when Collins proposed new contractual arrangements: an advance of £1,150, rather than £1,000, for each new book but with royalty rates of 25 per cent to start after 6,000 rather than 3,000 copies. Collins’s grounds were ‘a shocking increase in production costs’. Cork did not give way. Collins next provoked what Cork dismissed as ‘a spot of bother’ over N or M? Their editor’s chief objections were that, though ‘a pretty exciting spy story’, it lacked the ‘murder-mystery and detection element’, that it was too short and had too many loose ends. Agatha wrote a stiff letter and Billy tried to soothe her. ‘He is sorry,’ his secretary replied, ‘we had to ask you to make it a bit longer, but one of the reasons for our doing this was that, as it stood, the libraries would find people read it all too quickly, and they would not give repeat orders so readily, as their original order would then last them longer than usual.’ Agatha was unconvinced by this explanation of publishing economics and proposed a move. Cork delicately dissuaded her, confessing himself, ‘very doubtful whether under present publishing conditions Mr Gollancz would do you any better.… I admire his cleverness as much as anyone, and he has done very well with a number of books I have sold him this year,’ but Collins, Cork believed, enjoyed better relationships with booksellers. Agatha stayed and, though ‘rather anti-Collins … such a thick-headed lot’, set to work again.

  ‘Things all seem to come at once,’ she told Cork in a sad letter in the autumn of 1941. ‘How interminable it all is.’ As Reinheimer advised, she gave her representatives in America power of attorney to deal with her affairs and even agreed to permit her American publishers to include in the advance publicity for N or M? ‘any soft soap you like’ about her war work. She was now giving several days a week to the dispensary at University College Hospital and there had been reports of this in the American press. ‘Hospital still standing, though flattened buildings all around,’ she told Cork. ‘If they must have some kind of pictures, let them have that.’ There were limits to the sort of stories it was sensible to permit – ‘No harm in saying Max is in RAFVR but best leave it strictly at that’ – not just because of ubiquitous official warnings against disclosing any information, however trivial, that might be of use to the enemy, but also because of her revulsion at being gossiped about. ‘I will NOT be a “Mystery Woman”,’ she wrote irately to Cork, enclosing an ‘infuriating’ clipping from the Saturday Evening Post, discussing her past and her second marriage. Equally maddening was an effusive letter sent by a well-meaning American admirer, who asserted that, ‘Agatha was a peach with a swell sense of humour with a diabolically sharp wisdom. More power to you.’

  By the end of 1941, however, things began to look up. Agatha had finished another book, The Body in the Library, with which Collins were delighted. It has a splendid opening, with Mrs Bantry gently emerging from sleep to find the maid indeed telling her there is a body in the library; something simultaneously so apt but incongruous that it is likely only in a dream – or a detective story. Another reassuring development was that two American film companies, RKO and Warner Brothers, were interested in the rights to Ten Little Niggers. (The first production, however, was eventually made in 1945 by Twentieth Century Fox, as And Then There Were None, directed by René Clair.) Cork and Ober also managed to arrange for the option on the film rights for N or M? to be paid by Milestone in London; Ober even held out some hope that, now the United States had entered the War, there might be changes in the tax regulations applying to payments to non-resident aliens. Collins parted with advances for The Moving Finger and The Body in the Library and, as for the British Revenue authorities, Cork stoutly advised Agatha to ‘take no notice of this preposterous nominal assessment.… Everyone is getting them.’ By mid-December Agatha was again able to report that she was ‘writing passionately and in consequence had paid no bills, answered no letters and am in fact getting into trouble all round!’ A week later she sent Cork the revised proofs of The Body in the Library and the typescript of another novel, Towards Zero. ‘That,’ she said triumphantly, ‘ought to help the New Year Depression a bit!’

  Agatha asked Cork to ‘take a little time’ over thinking about serialising Towards Zero. It was in this letter that she spoke of her misery when she had forced herself to finish The Big Four and The Mystery of the Blue Train and of her
wish to have at least ‘one book up her sleeve’. Towards Zero, she thought, was ‘reasonably non-dating’. It is understandable that Agatha felt insecure. Like all her fellow-countrymen she was living from day to day. Buildings and streets would be wiped out overnight, houses that still stood could be requisitioned. No one knew whether they, their families, friends and acquaintances would still be alive the next day. In squirrelling away this book, Agatha was storing up supplies, as her grandmother had done. (The Mackintoshes harboured a small cache of tinned ham and olive oil for her, in case Lawn Road was knocked flat.) Moreover, Agatha was now without Max, or ready news of him. In February he had volunteered as one of two officers to establish a branch of the Directorate in Cairo. He was promoted to Squadron Leader and set off; there, on a terrace at the Continental Hotel in Cairo, he at once spotted his brother Cecil, drinking coffee. Cecil had been interned by the Finns in 1940, evacuated to Sweden, where he worked as a lumberjack, and eventually repatriated to England, via Germany, France and Portugal. He had now been sent by the British Council to direct its Institutes in Egypt and, after this fortunate coincidence, settled down amicably with Max in a house overlooking the Nile.

  Agatha, exhausted, missing Max, and, despite his farewell present of a Jaeger dressing-gown, cold, spent most of her evenings and weekends writing. She assured Cork that, even if he took his time over placing Towards Zero, ‘I am starting on another so the serial market won’t be neglected.’ This was Five Little Pigs, one of Agatha’s ‘Artist Ideas’. The setting, ‘Alderbury’, was Greenway, and the plot a ‘story of man who has affairs – really loves his wife – his mistress intent on marriage.’ It was published in America as Murder in Retrospect. Taken together, Five Little Pigs and Towards Zero show how flexible Agatha’s style of plotting and technique was at this time. Five Little Pigs is an intimate, fast-moving story, Towards Zero a picture of long-drawn-out revenge, a tale so striking that some years later it caught the attention of Claude Chabrol, who talked of making it into a film.

  There was still no news from Reinheimer. The best Cork could report was that an American tax return had been filed for 1941: ‘I hope,’ he wrote, ‘this dreadful business is to be settled at last.’ Ober, however, no longer sent reassuring messages. Agatha’s most urgent desire was to join Max in Cairo and Cork agreed to see what might be done. If he could arrange for a magazine to commission articles, she might be allowed to go. Meanwhile, she was offered ‘the exact job I should like in England if I didn’t get out to Cairo … dispenser to a doctor in Wendover.’ Cork told her she ‘should be doing a much more important job’ than that, ‘but you’re the best judge.’ It turned out, however, that the Saturday Evening Post was interested in Cairo material and Agatha’s hopes rose.

  Cork squared his brief with Agatha: ‘articles about the Middle East, topical interest for America by describing how the war has affected life’ – and arranged to have lunch with ‘the all-powerful Quentin Reynolds’, the distinguished American journalist whose press and radio reports of Britain’s wartime efforts did much to sustain support for the Allies in the United States. Even Reynolds, Cork reported, found it impossible to remove official hurdles. By July Agatha was more resigned to Max’s absence. In any case, he might soon be moved, though everything was doubtful, she told Cork. There was also a great deal to do at Greenway, now requisitioned by the Admiralty for eventual use by the officers of an American flotilla. The Arbuthnots departed, leaving Agatha and an elderly gardener to move the furniture into the drawing-room, the only quarters the Admiralty allowed her to set aside. ‘I am sick of loading trunks and getting filthy with cobwebs and am generally fed up!’ Agatha wrote to Cork in the autumn. He thoughtfully invited her to lunch at the Ecu de France.

  ‘In spite of my sadness about it,’ Agatha wrote to Max, ‘there might be two consolation prizes. First, I should say it is quite likely that they may bring mains electricity’ (they didn’t) ‘and, second, old man Hannaford’ (the gardener) ‘might be removed without pain’. (He stayed.) She worried about the trees and shrubs, writing to Charles Williams, the former owner, asking him to keep an eye on things. As M.P. for Torquay, she hoped, ‘he might have more influence – naval and political – than I should.’ She also reported that there had been an offer for Winterbrook; ‘we must decide some time which house we are going to stick to. I don’t believe we can keep both.’ Winterbrook was not sold but, as it was let to friends of the Goodsons in Torquay, Agatha, with all her houses, stayed at 17 Lawn Road. (She had disposed of 47 Campden Street.) Her hopes for a visit to Cairo had revived with a letter from Ober saying that Collier’s would definitely send her, but Cork now discovered the full extent of the official obstruction. There was no insuperable objection from the Ministry of Information itself, he reported, but Brendan Bracken, the Minister, had written to say that the War Office was not prepared to accredit women correspondents in the Middle East. Cork tried to put a cheerful face on the news: ‘At any rate we know what we’re up against – either the War Office must be induced to make an exception, or we must wait until the military situation is retrieved.’

  Agatha consoled herself with writing long letters to Max, typed at first (though James, her new dog, disliked the noise of the machine) and later handwritten on flimsy ‘aerograms’. Many of her letters that autumn were descriptions of Greenway and the trees, with Hannaford, ‘leaf moulding and ashing before he takes on duties for the Navy’. By the end of October the house was empty.

  I stayed for a little while after the men had gone and then I walked up and sat on the seat overlooking the house and the river and made believe you were sitting beside me.… It looked very white and lovely – serene and aloof as always. I felt a kind of pang over its beauty. I discovered today that there is no personal loss in leaving it – because queerly enough I can’t really recall ever being very happy in it – when I think of it I always seem to have felt so tired.… And then, after that, the War – and then the Turks, so that you couldn’t be there that Spring. All my happy memories are of the garden and you planting your magnolias and I making my new path down by the river. And yet the house is not an unhappy home – and I love it. It is untouched by what the people in it feel and think, but it wanted to be beautiful – I consider I made it beautiful, or rather, displayed its beauty. Greenway has been a mistress rather than a wife! ‘Too dear for our possessing’ but what excitement to possess it! I thought tonight sitting there – it is the loveliest place in the world – it quite takes my breath away.

  For her wedding anniversary present from Max, Agatha bought ‘two of Mr Arbuthnot’s sketches – ‘one side view of the house showing the Delavayi and the other an impression from the Battery.’ ‘Tell me,’ she asked, ‘is that all right … or would you rather I got a ring?’

  She need not have worried about the house. The Admiralty and the American sailors were solicitous: ‘A very nice Commander Kirkwood (real Navy) came and was really very concerned about our beautiful mahogany doors, especially the curved ones.…’ These were promptly removed and, she told Max, ‘a “leading shipwright” is coming … to consult about them and possibly cover them with beaverboard.’ Commander Kirkwood was interested in trees and shrubs, telling Agatha, ‘They suggested Dittisham for headquarters – but I said this was far and away the best.’ ‘Like the old song,’ Agatha wrote, now homeless, ‘No dwelling more, by sea or shore, But only in your heart – And a very nice place to have as a dwelling, and keep me there, darling, till the War ends.’

  18

  ‘… only an interruption’

  Agatha and Max each kept all the letters of their wartime separation. It was an unusual correspondence, more like a sustained conversation, for as well as sending gossip and news Agatha wrote at great length about her theories and ideas, and Max replied with his own comments and a great deal of detailed reporting on local antiquities and unusual geological formations. Agatha’s letters are fluent, immediate, less legible and vastly entertaining. In comparison, Max’s letters are
solemn and painstaking – but it reassured and delighted her that he took such pains and wrote so regularly.

  Much of their correspondence in the autumn and winter of 1942 was about Shakespeare. Agatha was full of theories about Othello:

  Desdemona was not a ninny. She was unconventional, daring, with great strength of character.… Iago and Emilia are really a couple of common swindlers, confidence tricksters … plain sexual jealousy the crux of Iago’s hatred of the Moor.… He has suffered through Emilia again and again – not because he cares for her specially, but because of the deep humiliation to him as a man.…

  Then Agatha was puzzled by the character of Ophelia in Hamlet:

  All Shakespeare’s women are very definitely characterised – he was feminine enough himself to see men through their eyes.… I feel that in Ophelia he is describing some real character he has met or heard or seen, and that she is correct but that he himself is ignorant of the factor that made her act as she did. Just as in Shylock, he set down the villainous character of a usurer, but put the pathos and the injustice of the treatment accorded to Jews in quite unconsciously, because it was there.