Agatha Christie

by Janet Morgan

  It is difficult to explain how writers work, not least because their readers, perversely, often wish to recognise themselves in a story, at the same time resenting the fact that, as they suspect, the writer may be secretly ‘taking notes’. Writers as prone to fantasise as Agatha cannot help but invent people and situations; they were her creations, born, as a dream takes shape, from a mixture of association, inspiration and random recollection, given form and sequence by the dreamer. This, not just pride, was why Agatha could not take up offers of plots, why other people’s detective stories were a pleasure but not a guide, and collaborative exercises like The Scoop a horror. She had to develop a story herself; composition was not a procedure but a process. The plotting books show Agatha’s mind at work, taking up an idea, playing with it, making increasingly elaborate variations, turning it inside out.

  There are more than thirty of these books, of all shapes and sizes. They cannot be indexed, though Agatha made a brave try late in life, because the notes for several stories are frequently intertwined, a single idea being developed in different ways, dropped and taken up again, or combined with others. By exploring half a dozen notebooks it is possible to disentangle the origins of each plot, and tempting, for it illuminates the way in which Agatha settled on an idea, proceeding from the first inkling to the concept, itself by association, hypothesis, paradox and logic. This, however, is not the place to explain the genesis of every plot and every story and a single example must do: One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, which Agatha drafted at the beginning of the War.

  The starting point was the notion that a body might be identified by dental records. It first seemed promising material for a short story; in one exercise book Agatha noted: ‘Railway accident – claimant to estate. Much hinges on evidence of teeth (Death of dentist?); Dentist murder etc.’ In another notebook she took up the aspect of this thought: ‘A Private life and a Public life. A blackmailer. What a marvellous chance to do away with a blackmailer, if you had him in the dentist’s chair. You can pass yourself off as a dentist,’ she went on. ‘But then – what to do with the real dentist? Bribe him – or kill him?’ At the top of this page Agatha set out the six questions the detective story writer has to settle: ‘Who? Why? When? How? What? Which? At the bottom she noted a phrase that had struck her (it comes in Stalky and Co): ‘“A downy fellow” – Dentist?’

  A single story in which a dentist identifies a body (or, as in Dorothy Sayers’s In the Teeth of the Evidence, works on a victim’s jaw) was insufficiently subtle for Agatha. In a third exercise book she investigated: ‘Sub-idea: Two “friends”, Miss B and Miss R. One goes to dentist. OR does wife go to a certain dentist? Miss B makes appointment with dentist. Miss R keeps it. Miss R’s teeth labelled under Miss B’s name. Miss B dies … attacked by tramp. Idea is that Miss B (rich) leaves money to Miss R (poor). Miss R does in Miss B and hooks it. Search out for Miss R. Really Miss B does in Miss R, so hunt is out for Miss R who is dead.’ Agatha’s imagination was now well away: ‘Miss B rich woman – opens a/c with bank – stocks, shares, etc., alters investments, enthusiastic about her ‘friend’ Miss Richards – latter has been in ‘mental home’ for some years or abroad – in Canada – or governess in Italy. Both Miss B and Miss R go to Mr Morley – car accident. One body found – Miss B – identified by teeth.…’

  Characteristically, Agatha did not stop there. Twelve ‘latest Dentist ideas’ followed. One concerned a dentist’s partner (‘unprofessional conduct?’), another the chairman of a board, ‘a little snappy – toothache – at board meeting’. An entire paragraph involves Hercule Poirot meeting on the dentist’s doorstep a man with ‘very white teeth’, or, alternatively, a woman, ‘husband secret service etc. Her face disfigured – unrecognisable’, and another a person with projecting teeth being seen in silhouette. The last two suggestions display signs of exhaustion: ‘Two friends go to dentist together. One infected with diphtheria – or dentist takes other dentist’s place – could inject novocaine – or something else – and kill his rival.’ An inspection of One, Two, Buckle my Shoe shows the plot on which Agatha eventually settled.

  No variation was discarded for ever. Agatha was as parsimonious with her plots as Handel was musically and, sometimes decades later, an idea she had failed to use for one story would appear in another. Her imagination was unflagging: ‘The Girdle of Hippolyta’, she wrote, when preparing The Labours of Hercules, ‘Headmistress? Oxford don? Precious manuscript?’ ‘Augean Stables’: A sham murder? H.P. gets medical student to produce dead body?’ She accumulated lists of ideas like a file of recipes: ‘A. Poison Pen. Big hearty girl is it; B. Cricket Story (with terms used).… E. Facing Up story … going to confess the truth, killed first; F. District Nurse. Somebody run over, in uniform but drives car well’.… H. Arty Spinster friends ‘another couple of old maids’; I. Poor Little Rich Girl (House on hill – luxury gadgets etc – original owner.…): J. Lady’s maid and parlour maid do robbery …; K. Stamp Story; Woman/Man withdraws money from bank – Miss M has found nephew’s stamp album. Found on love letters from abroad.’

  Miss Marple always stimulated Agatha’s invention. She need only look about her to see hints for plots; ‘takes down shoes; Hundreds and Thousands’. The analogies that occurred to Miss Marple derived from Agatha’s own observation of human behaviour, clues, as Miss Marple mused in They Do It with Mirrors, drawn from ‘the curious behaviour of Mr Selkirk’s delivery van, the absent-minded postman, the gardener who worked on Whit Monday, and that very curious affair of the summer weight combinations.’

  For all her verisimilitude, however, Miss Marple was unreal, a composite, created character. Assiduous readers might breathe life into her, and into Hercule Poirot, Parker Pyne, Inspector Japp, Mr Quin, Superintendent Spence and Mrs Oliver, worrying about discrepancies in successive accounts of their habits and situation, pleading for Miss Marple and Poirot to be brought together in a plot. Agatha herself was more breezy; these were her creations, members of a repertoire on which she drew, manipulating them when it suited her and her market. ‘Hercule Poirot’ and ‘Miss Marple’ were not old friends for whom Agatha sighed as she sat in the desert; ‘a Poirot’, ‘a Marple’ were ‘her children’, but they were inventions, crafted with respect and affection. In creating Mrs Oliver, Agatha made this very point, portraying a crime novelist who thinks her own readers absurd for taking her hero, a Finnish detective, too seriously. It was a good joke of Agatha’s to model Mrs Oliver on herself and to give her as a sparring partner to Poirot, an egoist who had all too successfully stolen the limelight.

  It was not possessiveness alone which made Agatha resist the blandishments of those who begged to televise her characters, put them on the wireless, on stage or on film. She – and Cork – guarded her creations with an eye as much to business as to artistry, but Agatha’s reason went deeper than either. She preferred her characters to remain nebulous; even the depiction of Poirot on a book-jacket pained her. Agatha’s people, their appearance and surroundings, were created as archetypes, intelligible anywhere, in any epoch – as Stephen Glanville recognised when he assured Max that, in Death Comes as the End, the Egyptian background was, as he put it, ‘psychologically’ no more significant than the Devon setting in Five Little Pigs. They remained recognisable, she was sure, only as long as the detail was left to her readers’ imagination. Literature permitted that; other forms did not. Giving her creations an actual voice was the first step towards imprisoning them: ‘Perish the thought,’ she told Cork in 1949, ‘that I should ever have a synthetic Poirot on the wireless in this country. It’s not easy to bear the thought of it in America.’ It is an indication of Agatha’s growing dislike of Poirot, almost as if she were jealous of him, that she gradually sold the pass where his portrayal was concerned, to the point of allowing, at the end of her life, his depiction on a Nicaraguan postage stamp commemorating the centenary of Interpol. ‘He appears,’ she exclaimed derisively to Cork, ‘to have large quantities of intestines coming out of his head. Som
ebody’s idea of little grey cells, I suppose!’ Even so, she remained convinced that Hercule Poirot was ‘utterly unsuited to appear in any detective play, because a detective must necessarily be an onlooker and an observer.’ In her own adaptations she cut him out.

  Agatha maintained that works made for one medium were not readily translated into material for another. She understood that her books could be adapted for the stage only with great care, preferring to make the necessary amendments herself: ‘This could be managed,’ she had assured Cork in 1942, in the discussions over Ten Little Niggers, ‘but I would have to do it.’ To suit the story to the stage, she drastically altered the end, as she did again in her adaptation of Death on the Nile: ‘Less explanation – more action – I think there was too much reasoning before.’ The more Agatha wrote for the stage and the radio, watching her plays in rehearsal, the more technically assured she became. She knew, as Peter Saunders admitted when Witness for the Prosecution succeeded, how to hold and manipulate her audience. She was also firm about which stories would work as theatre and which not: ‘There is a large class of my books,’ she explained to Cork, ‘which is not full of “thrills” and “humour”, such as, for instance, Towards Zero, Sparkling Cyanide, Five Little Pigs, Sad Cypress, The Hollow etc. And you really can’t turn a Class B story into a Class A story.’ Major surgery might be needed; ‘the method of killing’ in Towards Zero was, for example, ‘not at all suitable, as difficult to explain’, and The Murder at the Vicarage was as it stood too complicated, ‘particularly the clock business,… utterly confusing to an audience and one of those things which in a book you sit down and puzzle out …’ There were nevertheless limits to her willingness to pander to an audience: ‘I have become a bit bored with the perennial humorous policeman,’ she informed Lee Shubert in 1950, while Barbara Toy was reproached for having Miss Marple faint at the end of the draft script for The Murder at the Vicarage: ‘It is, it really is corny. Just done for the curtain – and absolutely untypical of her. No, that really cannot be.’ Agatha’s own suggestions were, however, not wholly dispassionate: ‘Griselda might express delight at having a real live-in servant – even if it is only Mary,’ and, ‘if it’s present day one’s little bit of boiled beef is sure to be tough.’ Finally: ‘tentative, very tentative suggestion from me. Why not, after exit of Inspector etc., a young man enters from window, note book in hand, “Excuse me, I represent the Daily Blether. I wonder if you could give me a few … etc.”… All exhibit horror and consternation.’

  Agatha had to learn the technique of writing spoken dialogue. Doing so seems to have loosened the conversation in her books and to have made her narrative and descriptive prose less awkward and contrived. She could sometimes write extraordinarily badly, her grammar uncertain and her sentences full of tired metaphors. A reader whose attention is urgently fixed on a story might overlook these deficiencies but critics, lingering on each passage, are appalled. Such sentences can sound even more strikingly stilted and freighted with clichés when read aloud and many actors, forbidden to deviate from her text for fear that artfully placed clues might thereby be lost, have found themselves struggling to make the dialogue in her pre-’fifties work sound natural. Scriptwriting and, later, using a dictaphone, had a noticeably beneficial effect on Agatha’s style. She had in any case the advantage of an excellent ear for tricks of speech and unusual phrases. Her dialogue tends to ring true in those books which venture into ‘other worlds’, whether of students, crazy ideologues, messy adolescents or Eleventh Dynasty Egyptians. She read vastly: a wide range of books, including anything that anyone (children, the cook, philosophers) brought into the house, and an assortment of newspapers, including the Daily Mirror and the Telegraph. She did not like the radio or television but listened closely to other people’s conversation, noticing popular catchphrases as soon as they became current. Agatha did not talk much herself, except among her immediate family, and some of those who recall her conversation as brilliant are in fact remembering how fluently they talked themselves, drawn out by an attentive listener, who occasionally prompted them or produced some pithy remark. If there always remained something slightly ‘stagey’ about the conversation in Agatha’s novels, it perhaps derives from that withdrawn personality; the talk in her books was vicarious, planned.

  Using a dictaphone did not, however, seriously affect the tightness of Agatha’s plotting or the consistency of the details of her narrative. In the nineteen-sixties loose ends appeared more often in her books, and there were slips and omissions, but these owed more to advancing age than to a change in working habits.

  She tried to be meticulous, reading proofs twice, once for the sense and once for the spelling. Misprints particularly vexed her but certain things escaped her eye and, especially in her paperback editions, she was not always well served by her publishers. ‘I hate silly slips in a book,’ she told Billy Collins, and in detective stories, so carefully constructed, it was all the more important to have the details right. Collins, at least, learnt to be vigilant. Year after year Agatha scolded them over the accuracy of the text, quality of the paper, nature of the jackets, their publicity material (on one terrible occasion the plot of Ten Little Niggers was nearly revealed in Crime Club News) and, with special vehemence, the language of their cover notes. ‘No, I don’t like the blurb at all!’ Agatha wrote crossly to Billy Collins, on receiving their suggestions for The Body in the Library. ‘I think a blurb ought to be aimed at arousing attention, rather than just recapitulating the opening events of the book. I enclose a suggestion of my own as being more provocative.’ Nor did she like sycophancy. To her draft note for The 4.50 from Paddington, she appended the comment: ‘The publishers can then add their favourite fulsome bit about me! In which, by the way, I would urge moderation. Too much praise I am sure annoys readers.’

  Collins did take trouble. A particularly successful series of jackets was commissioned for Fontana paperbacks from Tom Adams, whose first cover for A Murder Is Announced in 1962 was followed by over ninety other designs. Some are grisly – a knife sticks out of Lord Edgware’s jacket – and some deceptively serene. All are remarkable and perceptive, identifying Agatha’s own obsessions – reflection; refraction; transformation of people, animals, landscape; malevolence insidiously victimising innocence. Agatha, and later her family, found several of these designs disturbing, but acknowledged, rightly, that every cover was interesting, ingenious and apt.

  It was inevitable that Agatha would argue about the editing and presentation of her work, as a parent struggles with self-willed infants: ‘It is a very old war,’ she wrote to Billy Collins during one incident, ‘and I seem to have been battling over the years and getting more and more furious … it is my books, my children.’ To condense her books was to mutilate her offspring: ‘I am totally opposed to abridged versions and Basic English,’ she reminded Cork. ‘A writer’s work as written is his or her offering to the world and must not be interfered with.’ As she wrote to one publisher, ‘I know from conversation that it is often difficult for persons who are themselves not imaginative writers to appreciate that writing an abridged version of a book conceived by an imaginative author is equivalent to mutilating his or her brainchild, and this cannot be expected to give an author any satisfaction, no matter how keenly the operation and excision is performed.’ She had no objection to her books being put into Braille or ‘Large Print’ or to their being recorded for the deaf, but simplification was out of the question: ‘I am not a teacher and have nothing whatever to do with education for foreign students.’ She was particularly irritated by Thirteen for Luck, presented by Dodd, Mead in the United States in 1961 as ‘a selection of mystery stories for young readers’. ‘My books,’ she objected ‘are written for adults and always have been.… I hate this silly teenager business.’

  Some of Agatha’s critics and admirers are interested less in her methods of composition than in the fact that her thoughts turned almost invariably to one theme. Apart from the books she wrote as
‘Mary Westmacott’, her play Verdict, her poetry and those stories that were parables or riddles (like the Parker Pyne Series) or concerned psychic phenomena, everything she wrote was about crime and its detection. The explanation is very simple: she could do it, she liked doing it, and it was her life. Quiet and competent, Agatha taught herself the trick of writing detective stories. Their length was one with which she was comfortable; she discovered exactly when to break each paragraph and close each chapter, she had a genius for titles and for plotting, and she was scholarly about checking medical, legal and topographical detail. As a girl she had abandoned a career as a pianist or a singer because she was not sufficiently talented; having found her métier, she kept to it. One reason for her refusal to write for television was that she believed producers required more sensational scripts than she could comfortably provide: ‘The triumph of Evil,’ she explained to one applicant, after seeing a sensational film, ‘as in Rosemary’s Baby, makes one feel sick when seeing it, and recurs like a bad taste.’ For herself: ‘Hadn’t I better stick to my last? You’ll find plenty of people – younger people – to give you what you want – and perhaps to speak for the future.’

  Her mind returned constantly to plots and their unravelling. Secretive, oblique, clever at solving problems, she instinctively gave a twist to a tale. Agatha was, moreover, a comfortable, sensible, ordinary person, and ordinary people are interested in good and evil, innocence and guilt. ‘I am of the same belief as Dorothy Sayers,’ she told a correspondent, ‘that the detective story is the direct successor of the old Morality Play. It is the triumph of good over evil – the deliverance of the innocent from the aggressor – that is what makes it exciting.’ For all her fascination with international conspiracies, Agatha knew, too, that most murder is essentially domestic, a revelation of the passions coursing beneath apparently ordinary lives. In the front of one of her notebooks, like a talisman, she copied a quotation: ‘John Lockwood Kipling from Rabbi Hillel: “Nothing worse in the world than yourself – and nothing better.”’ She added a note of her own: ‘Substantially the R.H. says the worst men and women meet in the world is just men and women and their notions.’ It was in a way an epitaph for the Gun Man.