A Very British Murder

by Lucy Worsley

  While the literary marketplace could be lucrative, it was also crowded. With the exception of Agatha Christie, the writers of these crime novels of the 1920s and 1930s were not, on the whole, made vastly rich by their detectives. Dorothy L. Sayers left a very moderate estate of £36,277 when she died in 1957 and even Conan Doyle left an estate of only £63,491. And these were writers who mainly hailed from a middle-class background. Conan Doyle trained as a doctor; G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a journalist; the very successful Freeman Wills Crofts (1879–1957) was a railway engineer.

  One of the most distinctive features of the Golden Age is the fact that its longest lasting and best remembered writers were female. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh – the four Queens of Crime – came, at least in retrospect, to dominate our picture of crime-writing in the 1930s. Why did these women come to the fore, and why are they still read today more often than their brilliantly talented male counterparts Nicholas Blake and G. K. Chesterton? In part, it could have been the subject matter towards which they leaned: the detailed and the domestic, stories with lots of female characters, the layering up of a densely constructed plot through a process rather like knitting. Perhaps a more feminine view of the world was welcome after the violence of the First World War. Then there was the ‘problem’ of what the ‘spare’ women, left widowed or unmarried by the loss of a generation of males, should do with themselves in the absence of potential husbands. This sometimes turned out to be an opportunity to try new professions. Women (at least those over 30) now had the vote. They’d experienced the world of work while contributing to the war effort. They were stepping forward boldly in many areas of public life, and not least into publishing, and they brought their own experience with them. ‘To read the detective novels of these four women,’ P. D. James has written, ‘is to learn more about the England in which they lived and worked than most popular social histories can provide, and in particular about the status of women between the wars.’

  What impresses about the four Queens is not so much their work (although I would make the case for Dorothy L. Sayers as one of the great writers of the twentieth century) but the way in which they set about doing it. They were all writing to make a living, of course; Christie herself makes very modest claims, calling herself ‘an industrious craftsman’. But more than that, she and her colleagues were also writing to make themselves heard, to stake a claim, to win an independence and a place in the world. They also all used their writing, as P. D. James has pointed out, to keep secrets. All four women were in some way scarred by the earlier parts of their lives, and were reinventing themselves, through writing, into the successes that they later were.fn1

  Ngaio Marsh (1885–1982), for example, born in New Zealand, was a person who moved easily between worlds. The actual year of her birth was in some doubt for many years as her father failed to register it at the time, and Marsh failed to elucidate matters. She studied art before travelling to England and embedding herself into a circle of aristocratic friends. Yet she was only observing, rather than participating, in debutante circles: her real passion was for the theatre. Her experience of country house life would transform itself, when she was nearly 40, into her first published novel, A Man Lay Dead (1934). It was one of many to follow featuring Roderick ‘Handsome’ Alleyn (he takes his name from the stage, being called after the Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn), a detective from Scotland Yard who often investigates crime in upper-class circles.

  Marsh wrote her books at night, using green ink and sitting in a deep armchair. Spending her time between Britain and New Zealand, hanging out with theatrical folk, pretending to be younger than she really was, this woman from a colonial background seemed constantly to reinvent herself. ‘For an incurable & unrepentant traveller,’ she wrote, ‘a landfall, a foreign port, the great white lights of a foreign city still unexplored, or the modest lamps of a strange village at the end of a darkling road – these things are happiness.’

  Margery Allingham (1904–66), creator of Albert Campion, led a similarly unconventional life. She was the child of professional hacks, who swapped plots among themselves as valuable commodities, and published her first novel at 19. Allingham’s mother was the creator of Phinella Martin, ‘the beautiful and famous lady-detective’, who appeared in the Woman’s Weekly from 1916 onwards. One of her family’s housemaids found it very odd to be part of this household of writers, based in an Essex village, with frequent visits from other authors. She once grabbed a notebook from the young Margery’s hands in disgust, saying: ‘Master, missus and three strangers all sitting in different rooms writing down lies and now YOU startin!’

  But Margery did fall back on writing as a back-up plan, having overcome a terrible childhood stammer and a failed career as an actress before settling down to her work. In some ways it seemed unavoidable because of her heritage. ‘I have been trained to remark since I was seven,’ she wrote, ‘and must always be watching and noting and putting experience into communicable form.’ Yet she wrote away diligently for the money, too, to support an illustrator husband – who went on to have a secret and unacknowledged child with another woman.

  According to Pip, Allingham’s husband, ‘sex was of minor importance’ in their marriage and this is another theme of the four. Ngaio Marsh never married, but is buried beside a long-standing female partner, Sylvia Fox. Dorothy L. Sayers did marry, but not the father of her child, and Agatha Christie sought refuge from a failed marriage to a damaged First World War pilot in a companionable relationship, like Allingham’s, with a much younger archaeologist.

  None of them was what their 1930s contemporaries would have called a conventional wife or mother. And yet this did not stand in the way of a career as a writer. A crime novelist is not obliged to expose too much of him or herself in her work, and an air of privacy, indeed mystery, still shrouds each of the four. ‘Nobody cared what the mystery writer thought,’ wrote Margery Allingham, ‘as long as he did his work and told his story.’

  fn1 James’s insight into the motivation of these four hard-working writers seems equally revealing of her own. She left school at 16 because her family needed her to work; she told me that she would have liked to have studied history instead. She has had to deal, in her own family life, with a mother, and then a husband, damaged by psychiatric illness. She never felt secure enough, even in her great success as a novelist, to give up her day job at the Home Office. She maintained a punishing schedule as a civil servant and an author, exhibiting exactly the same qualities of steely determination and dedicated craftsmanship – as well as the creativity – of the Queens of Crime.

  20

  The Duchess of Death

  ‘Perhaps her greatest strength was that she never overstepped the limits of her talent. She knew precisely what she could do and she did it well.’

  P. D. James on Agatha Christie

  DURING THE FIRST World War, a young woman was training to be a pharmacist’s assistant in a Torquay chemist’s shop. One day, her boss showed her something he always carried in his pocket: a dark-coloured lump of curare, the poison used on the tips of arrows by certain exotic tribes. He warned her that if curare reached her bloodstream it would kill her. Understandably, the young woman asked the pharmacist why he kept such a deadly substance on his person. The answer was striking and intriguing.

  ‘Well, you know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it makes me feel powerful.’

  This was a taste that Agatha Christie, known by her American fans as the ‘Duchess of Death’, would develop for herself: a taste for power and for control over her own destiny. She ended up with a much younger and amenable husband (she contributed financially to his archaeological investigations), substantial property including country houses in Oxfordshire and Devon, and an almost reclusive lifestyle that allowed her to avoid strangers and publicity.

  And despite all her sales, and biographies, and TV adaptations, something about Christie’s success still seems mysterious, its exp
lanation elusive. The criticisms made of her books are longstanding and valid. Her characters are wooden and she cannot conjure up atmosphere, even while her plots and dialogue are excellent. While her two main detectives, Poirot and Marple, are memorable and lovable, they can hardly explain the remarkable popularity of her work.

  It’s widely accepted by historians that Christie was a particularly well-loved and cosseted child, living a life of comfort and leisure with her parents in Torquay, or staying with her numerous relatives (she sometimes entertained her grandmother by reading the crime stories aloud from the newspaper). Christie moved smoothly on from teenage dances and country house parties to a loving marriage with a handsome hero, an aeroplane pilot of the First World War. They had two children, a boy and a girl, and travelled round the world together.

  They looked like the perfect family, and it seems that nothing went wrong at all for Agatha Christie until she reached the age of 35. She had even, egged on by a challenge from her sister, become a moderately successful detective novelist.

  Then, in 1926, she touched down upon adult life with a bump, finding herself stuck, with two children, in a large house near a golf club in Surrey. Her beloved mother had recently died and she was married to a man who worked all week in the City, spent his weekends with his mistress and who never seemed to open up to her at all. Probably he couldn’t: his experiences in the war had seen to that. ‘His own determined casualness and flippancy – almost gaiety – upset me,’ she wrote, years later, about Archie’s demeanour when on leave from France.

  Agatha Christie’s pharmacy training as a young lady during the First world war gave her experience of drugs and poisons that showed in her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1921).

  I was too young then to appreciate that that was for him the best way of facing … life. I, on the other hand, had become far more earnest, emotional, and had put aside my own light flippancy of happy girlhood. It was as though we were trying to reach each other, and finding, almost with dismay, that we had forgotten how to do so.

  Christie responded to her feeling of being trapped in a frozen, lifeless marriage in a way that seems in some lights to be bold and dramatic, or in others to be remarkably emotionally immature. She simply ran away, in the middle of the night, leaving her car on the edge of a chalk pit in the North Downs. The event would become known in Christie circles as ‘The Disappearance’.

  Some people thought that this was a publicity stunt by a professional novelist. Others assumed suicide, or else thought that Christie herself had been the victim of crime. Countryside and ponds across southern England were searched, and Christie’s fellow writers did not neglect to help out. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle consulted a medium, and Dorothy L. Sayers joined the crowds of hundreds of people trying to find her, or at least her body. The police issued a description of the missing woman: ‘hair reddish and shingled, eyes grey, complexion fair … dark grey cardigan, small green velour hat, wearing a platinum ring with one pearl, but no wedding ring’.

  At the time of ‘The Disappearance’, The Daily News printed an image of Agatha Christie in various disguises in the hope that someone would recognize her.

  But it turns out that Christie was alive, and well, and staying in a hotel in Yorkshire. The missing wedding ring shows what was on her mind: she had even checked into the hotel under the name of her husband’s mistress, Nancy Neele. Eventually Christie was recognized in her Harrogate bolthole by a maid who had been alerted by the endless newspaper articles illustrated with her picture. Amid huge publicity, and complaints about the waste of police time and money, the search for her corpse was called off.

  In her autobiography, Christie herself describes her state of mind at this time as some kind of mental breakdown, while her family and ex-husband posited a period of amnesia brought on by mental stress. Her most recent biographer, Laura Thompson, stoutly defends Christie, pointing out that she had written a letter to her brother-in-law telling him that she was going away for a while, and that she had been taken completely by surprise by what she thought an unwarrantable level of interference and concern.

  Christie enthusiasts seem united in their inability to talk about what was quite clearly a period of mental illness. But ‘The Disappearance’, embarrassing, pointless and perhaps painful as it might have been, had a silver lining. It propelled the fame of this already successful crime novelist to stratospheric heights. Margery Allingham drew a conclusion about the popularity of the detective novel of the Golden Age that also seems to apply, in miniature, to the private life of Agatha Christie: ‘When the moralists cite the modern murder mystery as evidence of an unnatural love of violence in a decadent age, I wonder if it is nothing of the sort, but rather a sign of a popular instinct for order and form in a period of sudden and chaotic change.’

  When I interviewed Christie’s grandson, Mathew Pritchard, about his grandmother, he painted a picture of a woman quite lacking the flamboyance of Ngaio Marsh or the theatrical ambitions of Margery Allingham. He described her as shy, almost reclusive, generous to a fault with family and friends, but quite the opposite of gregarious. In 2008, he came across a Dictaphone machine and tapes into which Christie had dictated notes towards her published autobiography. Once recordings were converted into a digital format, he told me that the greatest shock of hearing her voice once again was hearing her say quite so much at once. In person she was briefly and softly spoken, never gave a speech or a monologue and always refused to appear on television. This shunning of the limelight and retreat into domesticity stemmed, Mathew has said, ‘from the unhappy time in her life when she lost her first husband and mother in quick succession … she felt rather hounded by the press’.

  Writing seems to have provided Christie with a different and much more satisfactory world, where the confusion, dismay and broken relationships she had experienced are simplified into the more straightforward world of detective fiction. ‘Each book was a kind of catharsis,’ P. D. James has said, ‘all of them, a little catharsis.’ ‘At times of great sorrow,’ her grandson says, ‘what she held on to was her ability to write.’

  Much of the skill of Christie’s detective, Hercule Poirot, lies in predicting what people will think and feel, and in this he is aided by his own minute understanding of the rules and regulations of social behaviour. ‘Poirot, you old villain,’ cries his sidekick Captain Hastings on one occasion. ‘What do you mean by deceiving me as you have done?’ ‘I did not deceive you, mon ami,’ Poirot replies. ‘At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself … you see, my friend, you have a nature so honest, and a countenance so transparent, that – enfin, to conceal your feelings is impossible!’

  Poirot can read other people exceptionally well, and Christie’s own autobiography discusses the training in psychology and courtesy that she had received from her family as a well-brought-up Edwardian girl. She knew ‘back to front’ the rules of flirtation, the inadvisability of ever showing an open preference for a man, but the satisfaction of knowing that oneself was preferred. Like Poirot, Christie seems an arch-assimilator of the rules of society. But also like him, she was an observer, not a follower. Quietly scrutinizing the social scene of her family, friends and middle-class contemporaries, she purified it down to its essence and transformed it into words.

  One of Christie’s ladylike tricks was to minimize or disguise the amount of time she put into her work. During summers at Greenway, her house in Devon, her grandson Mathew never saw her writing: ‘she could manage to write a book almost without one noticing’. That’s partly because it was a holiday home, and there she took a break, but even her publishers were astonished by her productivity.

  Christie described getting ideas for plots from newspaper accounts of crime, but also from everyday experiences such as looking into a hat-shop window. Her own first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), an affair of poisoning, reprocessed Christie’s own experience in the pharmacy:

  ‘What a lot of bottles!’ I exclaimed, as my
eye travelled round the small room. ‘Do you really know what’s in them all?’

  ‘Say something original,’ groaned Cynthia. ‘Every single person who comes up here says that. We are really thinking of bestowing a prize on the first individual who does not say: “What a lot of bottles!” And I know the next thing you’re going to say is: “How many people have you poisoned?”’

  Of course, although Cynthia distracts us from them, these bottles hold the clue to the crime. According to P. D. James, Christie’s clues are ‘brilliantly designed to confuse. The butler goes over to peer closely at a calendar. She has planted in our mind the suspicion that a crucial clue relates to dates and times, but the clue is, in fact, that the butler is short-sighted.’

  And yet, despite all this, something about Agatha Christie’s success still seems odd. Just why has she been translated into more languages than Shakespeare? Barry Forshaw, editor of British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia (2008) ascribes her continued saleability to the lowest common denominator: ‘There is no single author … who manages to translate so well into so many different languages. She keeps the language fairly straightforward and simple but the plots are constructed incredibly well, like a finely-tuned machine.’

  Christie, though, tells us her own views on the secret of her success, on one of the Dictaphone recordings that I listened to in the company of her grandson, in the drawing room at Greenway. ‘I was eminently a writer for entertainment,’ she says. She did not set out to be ‘serious’ or ‘worthwhile’, and, in this aim, her work falls firmly into the grand British tradition of art inspired by crime.