Agatha Christie_A Biography

by Janet Morgan

  Agatha’s admirers would have thought this sacrilege. Her worshippers grew more numerous by the day, as did their demands. From the nineteen-forties she was inundated with requests for photographs, financial assistance, books said to be unobtainable in Malta, Japan, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Surrey. Much of this correspondence was intercepted by her agents, although Agatha was always interested in what admirers told her, especially if they could point out slips or omissions. She answered some letters, including the zanier ones, herself. One that caught her eye was a diatribe, in verse, obviously from a madman, against the evils of life generally. It had been copied to various Heads of State. She annotated the envelope with possibly useful observations on the writer’s state of mind. Some of the enquiries she received were startling; from New Zealand came a request for a photograph to be placed in a special room containing 307 calf-bound copies of her work. An engine driver from the Antipodes wanted to know how one paid for meals on the Orient Express, a Frenchman requested permission to publish extracts from The Labours of Hercules in a book about Britain, with ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ illustrating the Underground and ‘The Arcadian Deer’ a study of English tea-drinking. A Japanese computer expert needed help with his compilation on ‘Mrs Marple’s life’, and the manager of the Sverdlovsk Film Studio a list of her books. Agatha, her publishers and agents had difficulty themselves in keeping track of her works, now translated and published all over the world. Indeed, Cork and Collins welcomed Gordon Ramsey’s book largely as an aid to straightening out her bibliography.

  She was sent innumerable questionnaires, not only by her own aspiring biographers but by those of people associated with her. ‘Why did you select a charming old lady to be your second famous detective?’ asked an admirer of Margaret Rutherford. ‘No particular reason,’ Agatha replied firmly, for she gave such enquiries short shrift. One especially imposing questionnaire came from an Italian magazine, interested in ‘the phenomenological and social character’ as well as the cultural and historical nature ‘of the participation of women in societal life’. Asked about the cause of women’s increasingly active role, Agatha attributed it to ‘the foolishness of women in relinquishing their position of privilege obtained after many centuries of civilisation. Primitive women toil incessantly. We seem determined to return to that state voluntarily – or by listening to persuasion, and therefore forfeiting the joys of leisure and creative thought and the perfecting of home conditions.’ Invited to assess the degree to which scientific and technological progress demanded the participation of women, she replied that: ‘I should say it could get on fairly well without it.’ ‘Do the answers … correspond to the general view of your country?’ the document concluded. Agatha wrote tersely: ‘Probably not.’

  The volume of her sales, as well as the amount of her correspondence, was another measure of success. The UNESCO figures published in 1961 indicated the buoyancy and steadiness of sales of her books; radio and television companies, particularly in America where audience ratings were important, applied incessantly for the right to show her work. The Mousetrap, the longest-running play on the British stage, enhanced interest in the dramatic possibilities of her books, even if it could not always sustain the popular appeal of her other plays. Agatha’s publishers and agents recognised her value; even her hardback books sold between forty and fifty thousand copies in the first weeks of publication. Their appreciation was demonstrated by the extent of the services they performed for her. Ober’s office tracked down books and engravings published only in America, and ‘the very nicest kind of maple sugar’ to be sent in one pound packages every quarter. ‘These chores for Agatha can be the very devil,’ Cork apologised to Dorothy Olding, but, as Billy Collins once told his colleagues during a particularly complex saga over repair work on her car, ‘I know these arrangements are difficult, but Agatha Christie is a very exceptional author.’ He was generous with Wimbledon tickets and books, providing Agatha with works from Collins’s list for the local primary school at Galmpton, the village nearest Greenway, of which she was, as she put it, ‘one of the managers’, and sending Agatha at Christmas a package of books chosen on her annual sortie.

  Contractual arrangements remained simple. There were no advances on royalties but the percentage on sales she received was high. In 1950 Dodd, Mead pointed out to Cork that it now exceeded the royalty paid to Bernard Shaw. Even so, Agatha’s finances were erratic and she often found herself short of money, for while her earnings were huge, so were her taxes. Furthermore, her situation was so complicated that for the greater part of her professional life she did not know how she stood. Agatha was not unused to financial precariousness. The collapse of her father’s business, the frugal years at the beginning of her first marriage and the difficult time after her separation from Archie had all been worrying. In 1938, just as she began to earn large and regular sums from her writing, there was another blow.

  Agatha employed various professional advisers to look after her affairs, her solicitor, accountant, and Edmund Cork, who saw to contracts and, in consultation with her accountant and Ober, decided when it was sensible to transfer foreign earnings to Britain. The bulk of her income in the nineteen-thirties came from the United States; ‘a non-resident alien author’ was also, it appeared, not liable for American tax on contracts negotiated in the United States. Such income might be taxed only in Britain, when it fell due there. In August 1938, however, the Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit in America heard a case between the U.S. Commissioner of Internal Revenue and Rafael Sabatini, a prolific and successful author, a British subject residing in London, and the Court decided that Sabatini was in fact liable for American tax. It was the imminence of this case which led the American Revenue authorities to pay particular attention to Agatha’s affairs and Harold Ober to engage Mr Reinheimer.

  If the Revenue Board applied the Sabatini judgement to Agatha, she would clearly be liable for enormous amounts of additional tax. How much, no one could estimate. Her American earnings were substantial (Collier’s had, for example, paid $27,500 for the right to serialise Hercule Poirot’s Christmas) but the extent to which the assessment might be made retrospective was unknown. Reinheimer, moreover, could be expected to plead that the lapse of time between Agatha’s receipt of such monies and the Revenue’s taking this stand, together with the fact that, guided by experts, she had taken all reasonable steps to fulfil the Revenue’s known requirements, certainly meant she should incur no penalty and might possibly limit the size of the actual bill.

  Unravelling these complexities took a decade. Many of the documents were discarded or went astray. Dodd, Mead and Ober Associates did not keep great quantities of past records in expensive floor space in Manhattan; at the London end, few files survived wartime bombing and successive moves. As the lawyers’ arguments unfolded, additional papers were created, confusing the issue until these, too, were lost in distribution between offices in different tax districts.

  During the early years of these discussions Agatha’s plight was severe. As we have seen, the American authorities withheld income until matters could be settled; after 1940 exchange control regulations made it difficult to transfer even the small amount they might concede. Agatha’s problems were the greater because she needed American income to pay British taxation on accumulated earnings: ‘If I could only get straight here,’ she told Cork in 1941, ‘I could live on very little and keep my head above water.’ British banks would not make loans unless they were connected with the War effort and, apart from copyrights, Agatha’s only assets were in property, which was then virtually impossible to sell. Early in 1948 a settlement was reached, but only for the years 1930 to 1941. (The sum was more than $160,000.) Further argument then arose over the details of interest levied by the Revenue, and after that there were talks with the British authorities as to whether tax should be paid in England on the money thus freed. Though the United States and Britain had signed a double taxation treaty in 1948, Agatha was still uncertain as to the p
roportion of any prospective American income she might retain, since there remained the bill for the years 1941–48. That question appeared to have been settled by the end of 1948, but then Reinheimer’s settlement was thrown into disarray by another court action in America. P.G. Wodehouse, a friend and admirer of Agatha, had himself been subject to the Sabatini judgement, being another non-resident alien, and his lawyers pursued the matter until the appeals procedure was exhausted. In December 1948 the American Supreme Court heard the Wodehouse case; in mid-June 1949 they upheld the application of the Sabatini judgement. Wodehouse’s lawyers requested a rehearing and it was not until October 1949 that the Supreme Court pronounced. The rehearing was denied. Wodehouse and Agatha at last knew where they stood. There were, in addition, large bills from lawyers and accountants.

  That episode behind her, Agatha decided to forget it. She did notice, however, the large difference between the sums she was now earning from her work and the amount she actually retained. British basic tax and super-tax rates were exceptionally high; by the mid-nineteen-fifties a large proportion of her earnings went to the Revenue. ‘Where is it all?!!’ she wrote to Cork from Iraq in the spring of 1954. He pointed out that in that year, 1953–54, the tax for a married couple with no dependent children and with, say, earnings of £30,000 a year, taxable at higher rates, would be some £25,000. He proposed that, when Agatha’s American negotiations were over, for they dragged on, her advisers might establish a Company for which she might write her novels under a service contract. Instead of paying tax at a top rate of over ninety per cent as she did at that time, she would receive an income from the Company. The Company itself would pay profits tax at the standard rate but not surtax. If shares were sold, they would be a capital gain, then not subject to tax.

  Wary by now, Agatha observed that Cork did seem to be ‘enmeshing himself in a legal net!’ She added, ‘I do hope it won’t end in disaster.’ Anxious not to do anything illegal and, indeed, not to shirk her responsibilities (she refused to contemplate moving to a ‘tax haven’), she asked for legal opinions. Reassured, she agreed that the Company should be established. Meanwhile, at the end of 1954, the British tax authorities finally agreed to the terms of the American settlement. In 1955 a trust was formed, subsequently called the Christie Settlement Trust. Agatha gave the Trustees £100, which they used to purchase one hundred shares in a Company, Agatha Christie Ltd, established simultaneously. Agatha Christie Ltd undertook to employ Agatha thereafter. Her initial salary was roughly comparable to the income she had received, after tax, since 1950. These arrangements began at the end of 1955.

  Two years later, in January 1957, another trust was formed, the Christie Copyrights Trust, to look after the copyrights of work Agatha had completed before the creation of Agatha Christie Ltd. To this second trust Agatha assigned rights to a large number of books and short stories, keeping a few for herself, largely for sentimental reasons. Agatha’s advisers had drawn her attention to the question of death duties, which might in her case be impossible to meet; it was useless to predict how much these might be, since this would depend on decisions of the Revenue. There was an alarming precedent in the case of Bernard Shaw; on his death the Revenue had valued copyright on the most successful of his plays, multiplied by the number of his works, producing an enormous sum. Cork’s nightmare was, for instance, that the Revenue would value Agatha’s copyrights by multiplying the income from Witness for the Prosecution by the total number of stories she had written. That, including film rights, might come to £20 million or so. Setting up the Christie Copyrights Trust not only avoided such possibilities but also permitted the Trustees to distribute capital sums to chosen beneficiaries. Agatha’s consent was needed, and was never refused, and, while she did not seek to influence the distributions, she was pleased when the Trustees’ thoughts coincided with her own. Relations and friends who needed help received sums from time to time, as did various charities. One of the disbursements Agatha particularly welcomed was to the Harrison Homes, an organisation providing accommodation for old people who enjoyed independence but needed somewhere safe and inexpensive to live. Carlo and her sister Mary had first spoken of the Homes to Agatha; she was pleased when the board asked whether they might name a new wing after her.

  Agatha had interrogated her advisers at the time when the trusts and the Company were founded. She feared the worry and cost of litigation and, after her American experience, had little faith in the permanence of treaties and legislation. She was right to be cynical. In 1957 there was another dispute, this time over the tax position on the copyrights Agatha had retained. This argument with the Revenue in large part depended on the outcome of a case between the tax inspectors and the executors of the estate of Peter Cheyney (himself an author of detective stories), who had died in 1951, and it took several years for that case to be settled and its implications disentangled.

  It was like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce all over again. Only at the end of 1964 was the assessment delivered. Agatha’s family and Cork agreed that she would be shaken by the size of the sum involved, some £100,000 to £125,000. In the spring they decided to appeal, to brief silk and to break the news to Agatha. Anthony pointed out that she would want to know whether she would be subject to cross-examination and whether the hearing would be reported in the press. Fortunately, the answer to these questions was no. Agatha’s attitude was robust and sensible. Had she the time and energy, she declared, she would fight the case as far as the House of Lords, representing herself. She also suggested, only half-ironically, that the Company should give the retained copyrights to the Revenue to do as they pleased. Leaving her Trustees and advisers to deal with the matter, she took herself and Max off to Talloires and Lake Annecy, prolonging a holiday in Austria and Switzerland while she could enjoy it. In November 1965, after further uncertainty, she learned that the appeal had been lost and that somehow she had to raise more than £100,000 to pay off the assessment. ‘Top Tax Counsel’ had done their best but ‘LAWYERS!!!’ she wrote to Cork in January, ‘Next time we’ll have the Bottom Tax Counsel. The result will probably be just the same and will cost less!’ For Christmas Cork sent Agatha a picture of Hercules. ‘It recalls the happier days,’ she said in her letter of thanks, ‘when one was on the upgrade instead of crashing downwards!’

  Throughout 1966 and 1967 matters remained unresolved. There were the routine baffling income tax demands. ‘I can’t understand how one is supposed to live if you get £7000-odd income from Company and pay £5000-odd surtax out of it,’ she wondered, ‘as well as three demands for different kinds of income tax as well.’ Cork tried to disentangle the muddle of notices sent by the Revenue but she was still disturbed. In March she asked for details of all her tax payments: ‘I don’t know what or why I am paying. And I find this worrying.’ There were more large bills for legal advice ‘Talk, talk, talk. Object, and no good comes of it. Lawyers!’

  Cork assured Agatha that she would always have enough to live on. Not only was Agatha Christie Ltd entirely secure but since 1966 negotiations had been under way to strengthen the Company. A large public company, Booker McConnell, the agricultural and industrial conglomerate, had since 1964 owned fifty-one per cent of Glidrose Productions, the company in which the rights to all Ian Fleming’s work, including the ‘James Bond’ books, were vested. In the summer of 1968 a subsidiary, Bookers Books, acquired a fifty-one per cent holding in Agatha Christie Ltd (subsequently increased to sixty-four per cent). The Glidrose holding was transferred to Bookers Books and in time interests in similar companies were added, to make a flourishing Authors’ Division. (It was thus, incidentally, that Booker McConnell decided to establish the Booker Prize for fiction in 1972.) In December 1968 Bookers Books acquired half of the Christie Copyrights Trust’s interest in those copyrights they owned and in April 1972 the remainder.

  The problem of meeting the special assessments was still unsolved but eventually a method was devised. Booker McConnell, the parent company, agreed to lend Agatha the ne
cessary sum, the loan being secured by Agatha’s own reserved copyrights. These arrangements were completely separate from those made between the Trustees of Agatha Christie Ltd and Bookers Books; indeed, Agatha herself saw to the payment of a full rate of interest on the loan. At last she was clear, if in debt, but that condition was familiar.

  Throughout these trials Agatha’s attitude was a mixture of airiness and resignation. Anthony was a comfort, patiently unravelling figures for her. Occasionally she panicked and wrote miserable letters to Cork, or suggested wild schemes, like lecturing in America or contriving some arrangement with Collier’s. For the most part, however, she kept a sense of proportion, joking about the mess she was in and reproaching Cork only for giving her insufficient news: ‘Your admirable habit,’ she told Cork, ‘of (like sundials!) only recording the sunny hours (or news) makes me suspicious when I don’t hear!’ She worried unless she knew roughly how her finances stood: ‘I must have some information.… And you are the Horse’s Mouth!!!’ The unexpected retrospective demands from tax authorities made her mistrustful, ‘Don’t get me into trouble by someone being “too clever” over things,’ she pleaded. ‘It makes me nervous!’ When matters were finally sorted out, with her regular cheque from Agatha Christie Ltd, enclosed with a formal statement, she remained troubled. ‘How am I to know even who it comes from?’ she wrote unhappily to Hughes Massie and, remembering past encounters, ‘If a tax man asked me … I’d have to say “I don’t know”. For years all has been easily understood.… Now with the Private and Confidential and no other information it looks as though I’d been levying blackmail on someone who pays money into my account without saying who it is from or why …’ She appreciated that her advisers had sought to regularise her tangled affairs, calling herself ‘the Hired Wage Slave’, in fun, when she delivered a book and was happy. If she thought that decisions were being made without consultation – collections of stories assembled without her knowledge, or, as her memory became less reliable, ‘forewords, blurbs, and things they may think up’ slipped by – she could be resentful. ‘I don’t believe you realise in the least how much I mind,’ she told Cork, in one exchange. ‘It’s misery to be ashamed of oneself. I’m not just a performing dog for you all – I’m the writer.’