Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  In the New Year she started writing prolifically again. In January she and Max left England for Baghdad and at the beginning of February they started to dig at the site he had chosen, Nimrud. Layard had first explored this lovely place exactly a century before – a great green mound, grazed by sheep, full of wild flowers in spring. Two miles to the west, the Tigris flowed quickly between steep banks; northwards was downland; to the south a fertile plain and to the east the mountains of Iran, glowing softly purple. Agatha and Max set about finding a house – ‘much nicer than an Hotel’, she wrote to Cork, ‘a very peaceful and happy life’. They were assisted by Dr Mahmud al Amin from the Iraq Antiquities Department at the University of Baghdad, who kept the records in Arabic, and Robert Hamilton, a surveyor and classicist. All four lived in a wing of a Sheikh’s mud-brick house and were fed on their cook’s delicious curries, cakes and excellent mayonnaise. Agatha was ready for work. She asked Cork whether he could find her a decent typewriter but, even before he had arranged for Ober to send the ‘very latest noiseless Remington’ from the United States, she had equipped herself with a small Swiss machine ‘very neat – nothing much has come out of it yet but a few ideas are floating around in my elderly brain!’

  The ideas were mostly about Miss Marple. The previous summer Agatha had mentioned to Cork that she was thinking on these lines and he encouraged her, perhaps believing that the way to ease her back into writing might be by means of one of her favourite characters, but definitely not via the ‘insufferable Poirot’. ‘Short Marples’, she now wrote in her exercise book, listing a string of ideas that included ‘Committee Crime (Poisoned glass of water?)’; ‘Infra-red Photograph’, a favourite idea since she had taken up photography; ‘Cryptogram in letter’ and ‘Extra course at dinner. Cream? Shrimps?’ There was an old friend: ‘Legless man. Tall? Short?’ She also noted more of Miss Marple’s ‘special knowledge’: ‘Maid’s day out – never Monday’; ‘Reasons for “Apple Sauce”, Ham and Spinach.…’A look at Three Blind Mice, the collection that appeared in 1950, shows what happened to some of these conceits.

  She also began work on a full-length detective story, A Murder Is Announced. Agatha had already begun to think about the details of the plot the previous autumn and had conducted preliminary research with the help of neighbours at Wallingford, the Severns. ‘I want you to act it for me,’ she told old Mrs Severn and her two grown-up sons one evening, sending them outside the drawing-room while she moved the furniture, and then instructing them to come in with a torch. ‘Now what have you seen?’ she asked everyone in the room. The test, in fact, Guy Severn perceived when the book was published, was of what they had failed to see.

  Cork, meanwhile, was overseeing the arrangements for publication of Crooked House, which John Bull was to serialise before Collins brought it out in May. The American market was stickier. Ober had to tell Cork that plans to serialise the book on the air had fallen through, since ‘the National Broadcasting Company in this country has become very moral.’ The network’s censorship department had ruled that Crooked House was unsuitable for broadcasting into the public’s homes on Sunday nights, for in the late ’forties and ’fifties America was passing through one of its periodic righteous phases. ‘It seems,’ Ober continued, ‘that the public has been complaining in droves about the number of murders being committed over the air.…’

  Crooked House was published shortly after Agatha and Max returned to England in May 1949. But there was an immediate distraction, the appraisal of Barbara Toy’s work on The Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Toy had made few changes but Agatha thought more should be done. On the whole, she told Cork, ‘a very good job has been made of it. It still has the rather too cosy novelish atmosphere of “let’s sit down and wonder whodunnit” – but I never could see how that could be avoided in this particular book.’ She did, however, like the idea of ‘a kind of duel’ between Miss Marple and Lawrence at the end of the play. ‘Excellent,’ but, she added, showing confidence that her audience would share her own horticultural and criminological expertise: ‘Everyone knows the symptoms of weedkiller far too well – death after hours or days of sickness, vomiting etc. Suggest cyanide. Miss M always has it handy for wasps’ nest (right time of year).’ Or else ‘concentrated solution of nicotine, dilute form of which is used for green fly etc.’ On the other hand, she added, knowing the popular affection for villainous old ladies, ‘more fun to be got out of Miss M saying it was really Providential she had cyanide so handy! Audience might easily think she was mad and had done it.’

  Production of The Murder at the Vicarage was delayed because Bertie Meyer was busy touring Ten Little Niggers for the Army of Occupation in Germany. Rehearsals eventually began in the summer, with Agatha attending to make suggestions, while the director, Irene Hentschel, whipped the play into shape. It opened in October in Northampton. Barbara Toy drove Agatha there from London and helped her up the stairs of the hotel – awkward for Agatha, whose ankles now tended to swell. The play was a success, ‘not at all bad,’ Cork told Agatha, ‘that they should have played to over 1200 in the same week as Bertram Mills circus.’ It was a happy time for Agatha, at ease with the cast at the backstage party, the only person not drinking alcohol but intoxicated, as always, by the theatre.

  Agatha was also full of pleasure at Rosalind’s remarriage. In October Agatha and Max had received a hurried letter to say the wedding would take place in a day or two’s time, in London. Rosalind and her future husband, Anthony Hicks, would come up on the train but there would be no time for lunch, since they had to race back to Pwllywrach to feed the dogs. If Agatha and Max cared to come, they were welcome, but there was no need. Agatha was vastly amused – and delighted, for she liked Anthony, who had met Rosalind in Somerset. He was a scholarly man, knowledgeable about all sorts of things, trained as a barrister and in Oriental studies, full of curiosity about people and the world, interested in gardens, religions, unusual butterflies, rare postage stamps, fond, like Agatha, of an occasional bet, able to keep his future mother-in-law amused, and, like her, passionately keen on travel.

  Agatha’s spirits were high. She began to consider dramatising a story she had first published in 1933, ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, after an approach from America about the film rights. A New Yorker cartoon, published in mid-May, had amused her (Ober sent the engraver’s proof) and she had taken in her stride an accident-prone BBC broadcast in August: ‘Just as well I didn’t see 10 Little Niggers on the Television! I hear General MacArthur, after being stabbed, got up and strolled away with his hands in his pockets, quite unaware he was “in view”. I should have been livid.’ She now followed Cork’s recommendation to put aside thoughts of her financial anxieties. ‘Magnificent letter from Reinheimer,’ she told him. ‘I don’t understand a word of it! Anyway, what the Hell is what I now feel about income tax.’ Cork was now dealing with yet another Inspector from the Revenue, the Torquay office having temporarily retreated. This time a letter came from the City, and it appeared that the whole saga would begin again, since this latest raiding party was clearly ignorant of all that had gone before. ‘I understand,’ the letter ended (although this may have been bureaucratic irony), ‘that Agatha Christie is to all intents and purposes a pen name, and it would appear that the tax district of the husband is the one that is required.’ Agatha, after eating Billy Collins’s Christmas present of pheasant that ‘melted in the mouth – quite unlike my butcher’s tough productions’, escaped with Max to Nimrud.

  20

  ‘… digging up the dead…’

  At sixty, Agatha remained energetic and productive; her wits were sharp, her health was good, and during the next ten years she produced work that, though lacking the sparkle of her postwar books, remained interesting and popular. If that decade followed a routine, it was an unusual one: the creation of at least one annual detective story, sometimes accompanied by a novel, a play, a collection of short stories, and a yearly expedition to Iraq. The Mallowans would leave England in D
ecember or January, going first to Baghdad and on to Nimrud, returning in March after a season’s digging. During those expeditions Agatha would plan and write her books. The simplicity of life in the desert and her absence from England during the worst of the winter, added to her strong constitution and remarkable stamina, account for her physical and intellectual resilience, while Max, her family and a group of much-loved friends buoyed up her spirits. At the School of Archaeology in Baghdad or in the camp in the desert Agatha was serene, busy and at home.

  In many respects archaeology was like detection. It required its practitioners to recognise, match and arrange fragments of clues, to reconstruct what might have happened from evidence that remained. Luck and intuition were needed, as well as persistence. Like detection, too, archaeology had changed since Agatha had been first enraptured by it in the nineteen-thirties. Even then it was no longer the preserve of enthusiastic amateurs, supporting expeditions from private fortunes, using methods that were often ruthless and slapdash. By the time Max had joined Woolley at Ur, archaeologists tended to be trained professionals, competing for posts, staff and funds within the universities, museums and learned societies. They looked for resources from public institutions; their finds were not all hauled triumphantly home but distributed among their benefactors, including the countries that had given them permission to dig. Their goals – sifting through the remnants of a mound rather than unveiling monumental buildings – were more modest than those of their nineteenth-century forebears and their techniques more sophisticated, for after the First World War significant advances had been made in methods of digging, recording stratification, analysing and cataloguing finds.

  During the years Agatha spent in Syria and Iraq, archaeology gradually became even more scientific, as complicated techniques of detection and dating developed in laboratories reduced the part played by instinct and chance in unravelling the past. Fewer of the public were familiar with Biblical and classical literature, but other means of popularising archaeology, including television, sustained attention – and thereby a flow of small and large donations. The past was still accessible, although those who wished to investigate it were finding it more difficult to do so. The authorities in those countries where an excavation was taking place were becoming increasingly sensitive to exploration of their soil, although nationalism and isolationism had not yet grown so fervent that all access by aliens was forbidden.

  In temperament and attitude, however, the archaeologists among whom Max and Agatha worked in the nineteen-fifties and sixties resembled their colleagues before the War and, indeed, their Victorian predecessors. Members of a close-knit profession, with fierce rivalries among different schools, often obsessional but capable of extraordinary patience, they were specialists who worked in teams. An expedition brought together many different experts: an architect, surveyor, epigraphist, historian, people who knew about theology, geology, photography, drawing, and so on. Max’s expeditions were small and economical, with each member serving more than one role. Agatha was an important member of the team.

  The photographic record of the finds was, for instance, still largely her responsibility; in 1951 she asked Cork to arrange for Ober to acquire a special camera, complete with flash equipment. She also took charge of cleaning the pieces of broken ivories, part of the treasure found at Nimrud, spreading the fragments on towels and meticulously sponging them with Innoxa cleansing milk, a method she had hit upon herself. She was equally inventive in her domestic arrangements, inspiring the creation of éclairs with cream from water buffalo and nut or hot chocolate soufflés cooked in a tin box by successive cooks, ‘drunk or mad or both’, one guest remembered. If a soufflé dropped, one cook would apologise to her with the refrain, ‘Squeeze me, madam, squeeze me!’ Compared with other expeditions, the Mallowans’ team lived, as Max put it, ‘like fighting cocks’, enjoying Stilton sent by Allen Lane from England, and the airmail copy of The Times, delivered to Mosul by special arrangement. Cork forwarded post, which took only four or five days to arrive. At Nimrud, as everywhere else, the Mallowans changed for dinner, Agatha wearing a fur jacket with voluminous sleeves, which tended to knock glasses of water into her neighbour’s lap. She dressed in the desert much as at home, in sensible tweed, silk and cashmere, with dresses from Worth for special occasions and a variety of clothes from cheap shops for ordinary days. There is a remarkable photograph of her pottering across the sand, silhouetted against the mound, like a thoughtful bird, in stockings and laced-up shoes, carrying a handbag. Hats were tied on with scarves to keep them from vanishing in the constant wind. On her return to London each year Agatha, always tidy, rushed immediately to a hairdresser to be rearranged. Like everyone on the dig, she slept in a tent, but she had a room of her own for writing at the end of the expedition house. There she was not to be disturbed, even though groups of visitors constantly arrived, not so much to see the excavations, some of Max’s colleagues thought, as to try to catch a glimpse of Agatha – at least in the case of Finns and Swedes, among whom her books were now enormously popular.

  The camp was sparsely furnished but the British School of Archaeology in Baghdad quickly became a repository for the objects Agatha acquired on frequent shopping expeditions over the seasons. Accompanied by women friends from the British diplomatic community and the School, she descended on the bazaars, buying ornaments, lamps, fabrics and great quantities of rugs. It was not always entirely clear for whom these purchases were intended. Sometimes Agatha’s companions, ostensibly recruited to help her buy presents for other people, would find her bestowing the articles on themselves on the way home. Purchases might be packed up for sending to London or taken back to the School, where they would remain for a season or two and then suddenly be despatched to England, for Agatha and Max regarded the School as in many respects an extension of their home and saw their colleagues, particularly the younger ones, as part of their family. Indeed, a clause of Max’s will was to provide for a sum to be set aside to furnish an annual dinner for members of the British School of Archaeology in Persia and Iraq, at which at least one member of the Mallowan – Hicks – Prichard family would try to be present, and where a toast would be drunk in memory of Max and Agatha.

  It was, however, an extended family, as people came and went at different stages in their careers, with a core of those who were at Nimrud every year, of whom perhaps the most faithful and indispensable were the foreman, Hamoudi, and the tireless Barbara Parker, who organised the details of the expedition and took the blame when things went wrong. Agatha presided, like an eccentric mother – rather like Clara, in fact – watching with amusement as members of the expedition fell for one another, or infuriated each other, counselling the younger married women on the dangers of miscarrying in the difficult surroundings of Iraq (almost before they themselves knew they were expecting babies) and building up the scraggier young men on a diet of chocolate truffles. Max has described the members of successive expeditions in his Memoirs, where he included extracts from some of the ‘Cautionary Verses for Archaeologists’ with which Agatha commemorated each person. The Memoirs also give some of the ‘Nimrud Odes’, with which, as at Greenway and Pwllywrach, she marked birthdays and other celebrations. There was a ‘Nimrud Book of Dreams’, as well, the outcome of Agatha’s protesting that Max refused to listen to her recital at breakfast of what she had discovered in sleep the night before. ‘Dear Professor Mallowan,’ she wrote in the covering letter, ‘it has been brought to my notice that you adopt a somewhat unsympathetic attitude towards dreams. You have heard, no doubt, of Napoleon’s famous Dream Book. I am submitting for your attention the Nimrud Book of Dreams. This contains certain well authenticated dreams … both curious and interesting and [which] shed a valuable light on the psychology of the dreamers … we hope to publish a further series shortly and hope we may enrol you as a regular subscriber … Yours faithfully, Snore and Moonshine. PP’ (for Agatha now tended to nod off) ‘A. Snooze.’

  Max’s team worked hard a
nd by the beginning of 1951 their excavations began to produce interesting finds. As well as the Governor’s Palace and the Burnt Palace in the eastern section of the mound, they were by then examining the buildings in the western sector, looking particularly at the northern and southern wings of Ashurnasirpal’s North-West Palace. Layard’s excavations a century before had concentrated on the State Apartments; Max and his assistants began to look at the domestic wing, where a rich collection of ivories came to light, including a large figure of a bull and what Max’s Memoirs describe as ‘little feminine trinkets’, among them a collection of shells, sometimes engraved, containing cosmetics. A grave contained the remains of a princess, wearing a jewelled pendant – ‘the Nimrud jewel’ – her tunic held by a pin twenty-six and a half centuries old. In the Administrative Wing of the Palace were treasures of a different kind, the royal archives, and, most wonderful, a sandstone monument erected by Ashurnasirpal, inscribed with the record of the completion of the city in 879 BC, which concluded, appropriately, with ‘an account of a sumptuous banquet’ given on the acropolis over a period of ten days to nearly 7,000 persons. It gave, Max claimed, a living vision of the feasts held in the spring of 879 BC, vast alfresco meals served in the spacious courtyards.