Agahta Christie: An autobiography

by Agatha Christie

  I was much too limp to argue more, but I assured him that I should get on all right.

  ‘You will have to be very careful,’ he warned me. ‘But it is no good saying things like that. This cabinet minister of whom I tell you–do you know how long it was before he returned to duty? A whole month.’

  I was not impressed. I told him that English stomachs were not like that. English stomachs, I assured him, recovered very quickly. The doctor threw up his hands once again, vociferated more French, and departed, more or less washing his hands of me. If I felt like it, he said, I could at any time have a small plate of plain boiled macaroni. I didn’t want anything. Least of all did I want plain boiled macaroni. I lay like a log in my green wall-papered bedroom, feeling sick as a cat, painful round the waist and stomach, and so weak that I hated to move an arm. I sent for plain boiled macaroni. I ate about three winding strings of it, and then put it aside. It seemed to me impossible that I should ever fancy eating again.

  I thought of Max. He would have arrived at Beirut by now. The following day he would be starting by Nairn convoy across the desert. Poor Max, he would be worried about me.

  Fortunately I was no longer worried about myself. In fact I felt stirring in me a determination to do something or get somewhere. I ate more plain boiled macaroni; progressed to having a little grated cheese on it; and walked three times round the room each morning to get back some strength into my legs. I told the doctor I was much better when he arrived.

  ‘That is good. Yes, you are better, I see.’

  ‘In fact,’ I said, ‘I shall be able to go home the day after tomorrow.’ do not talk such folly. I tell you, the cabinet minister–’

  I was getting very tired of the cabinet minister. I summoned the hotel clerk and made him book me a seat on the Orient Express in three days’ time. I did not break my intention to the doctor until the night before I left. Then his hands went up again. He accused me of ingratitude, of foolhardiness, and warned that I would probably be taken off the train en route and die on a railway platform. I knew quite well it was not as bad as that. English stomachs, I said again, recover quickly.

  In due course, I left. My tottering footsteps were supported by the hotel porter into the train. I collapsed in my bunk, and more or less remained there. Occasionally I got them to bring me some hot soup from the dining-car, but as it was usually greasy I did not fancy it. All this abstention would have been good for my figure a few years later, but at that time I was still slender, and at the end of my journey home I looked like a mass of bones. It was wonderful to get back and to flop into my own bed. All the same, it took me nearly a month to recover my old health and spirits.

  Max had reached Ur safely, though with tremendous trepidation about me, dispatching various telegrams en route, and waiting for the telegrams from me to arrive, which they never did. He put such energy into the work that he did far more than the Woolleys had expected.

  ‘I’11 show them,’ he said. He built Katharine’s bathroom entirely to his own specifications, as small and cramped as possible, and added such other embellishments to it and the dining-room as he thought fit.

  ‘But we didn’t mean you to do all this,’ Katharine exclaimed, when they arrived.

  ‘I thought I had better get on with it as I was here,’ said Max grimly. He explained that he had left me at death’s door in Athens.

  ‘You should have stayed with her,’ said Katharine.

  ‘I think probably I should,’ said Max. ‘But you both impressed on me how important this work was.’

  Katharine took it out of Len by telling him that the bathroom was not at all to her liking and would have to be taken down and rebuilt–and this was done, at considerable inconvenience. Later, however, she congratulated Max on the superior design of the living-room, and said what a difference it had made to her.

  At my present age I have learnt pretty well how to deal with temperamental people of all kinds–actors, producers, architects, musicians, and natural prima donnas such as Katharine Woolley. Max’s mother was what I should call a prima donna in her own right. My own mother came near to being one: she could work herself into terrific states, but had invariably forgotten all about them by the next day. ‘But you seemed so desperate!’ I would say to her. ‘Desperate?’ said my mother, highly surprised. ‘Was I? Did I sound like that?’

  Several of our acting friends can throw a temperament as well as anyone. When Charles Laughton was playing Hercule Poirot in Alibi, and sipping ice-cream sodas with me during a break in rehearsal, he explained his method. ‘It’s a good thing to pretend to have a temperament, even if you haven’t. I find it very helpful. People will say, “Don’t let’s do anything to annoy him. You know how he throws temperaments.”’

  ‘It’s tiring sometimes,’ he added, ‘especially if you don’t happen to want to. But it pays. It pays every time.’

  II

  My literary activities at this period seem curiously vague in my memory. I don’t think, even then, that I considered myself a bona fide author. I wrote things–yes–books and stories. They were published, and I was beginning to accustom myself to the fact that I could count upon them as a definite source of income. But never, when I was filling in a form and came to the line asking for Occupation, would it have occurred to me to fill it in with anything but the time-honoured ‘Married woman’. I was a married woman, that was my status, and that was my occupation. As a sideline, I wrote books. I never approached my writing by dubbing it with the grand name of ‘career’. I would have thought it ridiculous.

  My mother-in-law could not understand this. ‘You write so well, Agatha dear, and because you write so well, surely you ought to write something–well–more serious?’ Something ‘worth while’ was what she meant. I found it difficult to explain to her, and indeed did not really try, that my writing was for entertainment.

  I wanted to be a good detective story writer, yes, and indeed by this time I was conceited enough to think that I was a good detective story writer. Some of my books satisfied and pleased me. They never pleased me entirely, of course, because I don’t suppose that is what one ever achieves. Nothing turns out quite in the way you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.

  My dear mother-in-law would, I think, have liked me to write a biography of some world-famous figure. I cannot think of anything I should be worse at doing. Anyway, I remained sufficiently modest to say occasionally, without thinking, ‘Yes, but then of course I am not really an author.’ This was usually corrected by Rosalind, who would say: ‘But you are an author, mother. You are quite definitely an author by this time.’

  Poor Max had one serious penalty laid on him by marriage. He had, as far as I could find out, never read a novel. Katharine Woolley had forced The Murder of Roger Ackroyd upon him, but he had got out of reading it. Somebody had discussed the denouement in front of him, and after that, he said, ‘What on earth is the good of reading a book when you know the end of it?’ Now, however, as my husband, he started manfully on the task.

  By that time I had written ten books at least, and he started slowly to catch up with them. Since a really erudite book on archaeology or on classical subjects was Max’s idea of light reading, it was funny to see what heavy weather he made of reading light fiction. However, he stuck to it, and I am proud to say appeared to enjoy his self-imposed task in the end.

  The funny thing is that I have little memory of the books I wrote just after my marriage. I suppose I was enjoying myself so much in ordinary living that writing was a task which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write. This has caused much trouble for me in the ensuing years, since whenever I had to receive an interviewer their first wish would always be to take a photograph of me at my work. ‘Show me where you write your books.’

  ‘Oh, anywhere.’

  ‘But surely you have
a place where you always work?’

  But I hadn’t. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter. I had begun now to write straight on to the typewriter, though I still used to do the beginning chapters and occasionally others in long-hand and then type them out. A marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place to write; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.

  My family usually noticed a time of approaching activity by saying, ‘Look, Missus is broody again.’ Carlo and Mary always called me Missus, supposedly in Peter the dog’s language, and Rosalind, too, more often called me Missus than Mummy or Mother. Anyway, they all recognised the signs when I was broody, looked at me hopefully, and urged me to shut myself up in a room somewhere and get busy.

  Many friends have said to me, ‘I never know when you write your books, because I’ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.’ I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone: they depart for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same. I felt slightly embarrassed if I was going to write. Once I could get away, however, shut the door and get people not to interrupt me, then I was able to go full speed ahead, completely lost in what I was doing.

  Actually my output seems to have been rather good in the years 1929 to 1932: besides full-length books I had published two collections of short stories. One consisted of Mr Quin stories. These are my favourite. I wrote one, not very often, at intervals perhaps of three or four months, sometimes longer still. Magazines appeared to like them, and I liked them myself, but I refused all offers to do a series for any periodical. I didn’t want to do a series of Mr Quin: I only wanted to do one when I felt like it. He was a kind of carry-over for me from my early poems in the Harlequin and Columbine series.

  Mr Quin was a figure who just entered into a story–a catalyst, no more–his mere presence affected human beings. There would be some little fact, some apparently irrelevant phrase, to point him out for what he was: a man shown in a harlequin-coloured light that fell on him through a glass window; a sudden appearance or disappearance. Always he stood for the same things: he was a friend of lovers, and connected with death. Little Mr Satterthwaite, who was, as you might say, Mr Quin’s emissary, also became a favourite character of mine.

  I had also published a book of short stories called Partners in Crime.

  Each story here was written in the manner of some particular detective of the time. Some of them by now I cannot even recognise. I remember Thornley Colton, the blind detective–Austin Freeman, of course; Freeman Wills Croft with his wonderful timetables; and inevitably Sherlock Holmes. It is interesting in a way to see who of the twelve detective story writers that I chose are still well known–some are household names, others have more or less perished in oblivion. They all seemed to me at the time to write well and entertainingly in their different fashions. Partners in Crime featured in it my two young sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence, who had been the principal characters in my second book, The Secret Adversary. It was fun to get back to them for a change. Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but I cannot remember where, when or how I wrote it, why I came to write it, or even what suggested to me that I should select a new character–Miss Marple–to act as the sleuth in the story. Certainly at the time I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my life. I did not know that she was to become a rival to Hercule Poirot.

  People never stop writing to me nowadays to suggest that Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot should meet–but why should they? I am sure they would not enjoy it at all. Hercule Poirot, the complete egoist, would not like being taught his business by an elderly spinster lady. He was a professional sleuth, he would not be at home at all in Miss Marple’s world. No, they are both stars, and they are stars in their own right. I shall not let them meet unless I feel a sudden and unexpected urge to do so.

  I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book–an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home. When the book was adapted as a play, one of the things that saddened me most was Caroline’s removal. Instead, the doctor was provided with another sister–a much younger one–a pretty girl who could supply Poirot with romantic interest.

  I had no idea when the idea was first suggested what terrible suffering you go through with plays, owing to the alterations made in them. I had already written a detective play of my own, I can’t remember exactly when. It was not approved of by Hughes Massie; in fact they suggested it would be better to forget it entirely, so I didn’t press on with it. I had called it Black Coffee. It was a conventional spy thriller, and although full of cliches, it was not, I think, at all bad. Then, in due course, it came into its own. A friend of mine from Sunningdale days, Mr Burman, who was connected with the Royalty Theatre, suggested to me that it might perhaps be produced.

  It always seems strange to me that whoever plays Poirot is always an outsize man. Charles Laughton had plenty of avoirdupois, and Francis Sullivan was broad, thick, and about 6’2’ tall. He played Poirot in Black Coffee. I think the first production was at the Everyman in Hampstead, and the part of Lucia was played by Joyce Bland, whom I always thought a very good actress.

  Black Coffee ran for a mere four or five months when it finally came to the West End, but it was revived twenty-odd years later, with minor alterations and it did quite well in repertory.

  Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot–all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang a la Moriarty–provided first by the Germans, the ‘Huns’ of the first war; then the Communists, who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.

  Alibi, the first play to be produced from one of my books–The Murder of Roger Ackroyd–was adapted by Michael Morton. He was a practised hand at adapting plays. I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him. I was by this time so stuck with Poirot that I realised I was going to have him with me for life. I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier, who was producing, backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctor’s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl. As I have said, I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal: I liked the part she played in village life: and I liked the idea of village life reflected through the life of the doctor and his masterful sister.

  I think at that moment, in St. Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born, and with her Miss Hartnell, Miss Wetherby, and Colonel and Mrs Bantry–they were all there lined up below the border-line of consciousness, ready to come to life and step out on to the stage.

  Reading Murder at the Vicarage now, I am not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters, and too many sub-plots. But at any rate the main plot is sound. The village is as real to me as it could be–and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days. Little maids from orphanages, and well-trained servants on their way to higher things have faded away, but the daily women who have come to succeed them, are just as real and human–though not, I must say, nearly as skilled as their predecessors.

  Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies–old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way
a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her–though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if so-and-so isn’t going on,’ my grandmother used to say, nodding her head darkly, and although she had no grounds for these assertions, so-and-so was exactly what was going on. ‘A downy fellow, that–I don’t trust him,’ Grannie would remark, and when later a polite young bank-clerk was found to have embezzled some money, she was not at all surprised, but merely nodded her head.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve known one or two like him.’

  Nobody would ever have wheedled my grandmother out of her savings or put up a proposition to her which she would swallow gullibly. She would have fixed him with a shrewd eye and have remarked later: ‘I know his kind. I knew what he was after. I think I’ll just ask a few friends to tea and mention that a young man like that is going around.’

  Grannie’s prophecies were much dreaded. My brother and sister had had a tame squirrel as a pet in the house for about a year, when Grannie, after picking it up with a broken paw in the garden one day, had said sapiently: ‘Mark my words! That squirrel will be off up the chimney one of these days!’ It went up the chimney five days later.

  Then there was the case of the jar on a shelf over the drawing-room door. ‘I shouldn’t keep that there, if I were you, Clara,’ said Grannie. ‘One of these days someone will slam the door, or the wind will slam it, and down it will come.’

  ‘But dear Auntie-Grannie, it has been there for ten months.’ ‘That may be,’ said my grandmother.