Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  She was free of the Bodley Head, having moved to another publishing house, Collins, on greatly improved terms. She had been vexed with John Lane for some time, believing that he had taken advantage of her inexperience when he tied her into a five-book deal. She had brooded on this during the round-the-world trip, encouraged to do so by the news that Madge’s play was being considered for production: ‘It seems as though there was such a thing as an agent who is some good,’ she wrote snappishly to Clara. On her return she hastened to Hughes Massie – the literary agency to whom Eden Philpotts had recommended her back in 1909 – and this time was welcomed with open arms by the agency’s new head, a young man named Edmund Cork. He could not have known quite how lucky a day it was for him when Agatha Christie walked through his door in Fleet Street, but he certainly treated her with serious respect. His manner, which was gentlemanly but direct, made him a person that Agatha could do business with; he would handle her affairs until the end of her life.

  For all her dreaminess Agatha was tough when it came to selling her work. Cork encouraged this, and helped her write the terse, cool letters that would extricate her from the Bodley Head contract.3 But the toughness was there anyway: she was, after all, the descendant of her businessman grandfather, Nathaniel, and of his wife Margaret, who always emphasised the importance of money in a woman’s life (‘Keep £50 in five-pound notes somewhere safe, you never know when you might need it’). In 1924 Agatha was offered five hundred pounds by the Evening News for serialisation of The Man in the Brown Suit, a sum that greatly astounded her husband and sister although not, of course, her mother. From around that time she realised that her writing had a measurable worth, and put a price on herself. Only very rarely could she be prevailed upon to do something for love rather than money.

  This was not a particularly English literary attitude. It surprised people, not least the BBC, which was stunned by Agatha’s refusal to accept that it had the right to pay less than anybody else. ‘Her entire approach was commercial,’ bitched an internal memo in 1948.4 The BBC was not really Agatha’s kind of set-up; she never liked anything state-controlled, and she certainly disliked low wages. She occasionally worked for BBC Radio but in 1932, in a letter to the producer, she refused to write a series of short stories: ‘They really are not profitable. I don’t mind an odd one now and again, but the energy to devise a series is much better employed in writing a couple of books. So there it is!’ This would always be her attitude. She worked extremely hard and, in return, she expected her fair reward.

  She had seen her father lose the Miller fortune through sheer blithe ignorance and, however much she had admired Frederick, she could not share his aristocratic airiness about money. She always understood that money had a value beyond that of simple currency and she was, instinctively, a capitalist. She approved of the banker Alastair Blunt in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe for his belief that a country should be governed by the same economic principles that apply to a properly run household. This was Agatha’s kind of thinking: those who despised it as petty-bourgeois were indulging in mere adolescent fantasy. ‘Yes, but how can you be satisfied with things as they are?’ Alastair Blunt’s niece says to him. ‘All the waste and the inequality and the unfairness. Something must be done about it!’ To which Blunt replies, in the voice of his creator: ‘We get along pretty well in this country, Jane, all things considered.’

  Jane Olivera is rich – not least thanks to Alastair Blunt – as is the upper-class David Angkatell in The Hollow, who has the similar luxury of despising his relations for their lack of political principle. ‘I must have a talk with you, David, and learn all the new ideas,’ says his cousin Lucy. ‘As far as I can see, one must hate everybody, but at the same time give them free medical attention and a lot of extra education (poor things, all those helpless little children herded into school-houses every day) . . .’ David’s socialist ideals are laid bare by Midge Hardcastle, who as a worker lives what David merely talks about, and has a justifiable – far more ambivalent – resentment of her idle relations with their protective layers of money.

  Money is central to Agatha’s writings. It can override any other consideration in the minds of her characters. As both Poirot and Miss Marple are aware, it constitutes the prime motive for crime: of her fifty-five full-length detective novels, murder for financial gain is at the centre of thirty-six. But it is not just killers who like money: nice girls like Tuppence, or Jane Cleveland in ‘Jane in Search of a Job’;5 clever women like Lucy Eyelesbarrow in 4.50 from Paddington; sweet old ladies like Dora Bunner in A Murder is Announced – they are obsessed with it. The lack of it dominates lives. For all her own supposed obsession with the privileged classes, Agatha had plenty of sympathy for the desperate. ‘I’ve heard people say so often “I’d rather have flowers on the table than a meal without them.” But how many meals have those people ever missed?’ says Dora Bunner. ‘They don’t know what it is – nobody knows who hasn’t been through it – to be really hungry. Bread, you know, and a jar of meat paste, and a scrape of margarine . . . And the shabbiness.’

  Agatha had a fear of poverty, deriving from her memory of the sudden downward swoop of the Miller fortunes. It alarmed her just to think of the way money had trickled like sand through her father’s hands. In later life she too would have money problems, which she attempted to treat with hauteur but which in fact completely terrified her; the difference was that these came about through no fault of her own. Although she loved to spend, she always treated money with absolute respect.

  And it was money that changed her attitude towards her work. She was no longer writing for the love of it. She was a professional. That was how it happened. She signed a three-book contract with Collins at the beginning of 1924, which gave her an advance of two hundred pounds per book and an improved royalty rate, negotiated by Edmund Cork, although she still had to deliver one more book to the Bodley Head, The Secret of Chimneys, published in 1925. John Lane had told Cork that Collins were welcome to Agatha if they were willing to pay that kind of money. The Bodley Head had wanted to keep hold of her and had offered another contract, but Agatha felt no obligation to them for giving her a first break. She had something of the smiling grandeur of her sister, Madge, who breezed through rehearsals of her West End play The Claimant with the air of a duchess (‘You’re quite emphatic, Mrs Watts!’); these two were ladies, after all, with a core of impregnable assurance. From early on Agatha was confident in the sphere of her work. She treated the Bodley Head with disdain, she ‘bullied Edmund Cork’6 – albeit politely – and she always stood her ground on issues like blurbs and book jackets (in 1922 she had had an altercation with her publishers over the cover of Murder on the Links, which showed the victim ‘having apparently an epileptic fit, and as he had never had an epileptic fit in his life, it seemed to me rather . . . Well, they made rather a fuss about that.’)7

  In 1924 she used her own money to publish her poems, The Road of Dreams, under the imprint of Geoffrey Bles; the sales were negligible, and the works had clearly been written for the poet’s own pleasure, but Agatha liked the idea of them being in print. She was enjoying her success, which was as new and miraculous as a sudden spring sun. Through 1924 to 1926 she wrote stories not just for the Sketch but for other magazines, including the Grand, the Novel, Flynn’s Weekly and the Royal: they would be published later in collections like Poirot Investigates, The Mysterious Mr, Quin and The Lister dale Mystery. Even her first story, ‘The House of Beauty’, which she had written as a teenager convalescing in bed, was published in 1926. It seemed that every piece of prose she wrote – or had ever written – was wanted.

  With the money from the serialisation of The Man in the Brown Suit she bought a grey Morris Cowley car. Her pleasure in it is impossible to comprehend in these days of instant travel: she could scarcely believe the rapture of being able to go to places beyond where her feet or a bus route would take her. Many years later, in her autobiography, she was still possessed by the sense of amaze
ment that this first car had brought (she compared the excitement with that of dining at Buckingham Palace with the Queen).

  The Morris was hers: did Archie resent this? Surely not, as it had been his idea to buy it, and he who taught her to drive it. Why should he have cared? It has been suggested8 that he did care, that he was increasingly disturbed by Agatha’s career, the independent income and the attention it brought her. However his own career was now flourishing. A friend in the City named Clive Baillieu had invited him to join his firm, Austral Development Ltd; this made Archie ‘immediately, wonderfully, completely happy’, wrote Agatha. He was now properly established in the world of finance, for which he had a decided aptitude. Things were good. Money was no longer a worry. Agatha received irregular but satisfying sums; Archie was earning around two thousand a year, and surely even Clara would be satisfied with that?

  Nor was it just his new job that delighted Archie. He had fallen in love with golf. Agatha had introduced him to it after the war, during their weekends spent in East Croydon, and from the early 1920s onwards it became for him a way of life. He played every weekend if he possibly could on any nearby course and then, as his game improved, at Sunningdale. ‘I was,’ wrote Agatha wryly in her autobiography, ‘becoming that well-known figure, a golf widow.’ In Unfinished Portrait she is unable to hide her sense of loss, saying, ‘We’ve always spent the weekends together, you and I.’ He is patiently reassuring in reply.

  ‘It isn’t that I don’t love you. I love you just as much as ever. But a man likes doing things with other men. And he needs exercise. If I was wanting to go off with other women, well, then you might have something to complain about. But I never want to be bothered with any other woman but you. I hate women.

  I just want to play a decent game of golf with another man. I do think you’re being rather unreasonable about it.’

  Yes, probably she was being unreasonable . . .

  And so it was that Agatha agreed to live at Sunningdale. She had wanted to leave London for some time but Archie would only countenance a place near a good golf course. Like Anne Beddingfeld in The Man in the Brown Suit, Agatha gave in for the sake of her own happiness: ‘There is really nothing a woman enjoys so much as doing all the things she doesn’t like for the sake of someone she does like.’ Of course the dark-leafed Surrey-Berkshire border was not her idea of the country. Having been brought up in Devon, having known pink and gold hills and the gleam of the sea every morning, Sunningdale looked to her cramped and meretricious. But Archie’s upbringing had been very different. He had never lived with space and relaxed grandeur, and he liked the comfortable feel of the Home Counties. He could get along with the people – City types such as he himself was now becoming – although Agatha found them alien, cautiously social in a way that she had never before encountered. So unlike the families she had known in Torquay, ranging happily around their large villas with the peeling paint and the good old furniture.

  The Christies found a flat in a house called Scotswood, which seemed to Agatha typical of Sunningdale: a vast jumble of gables, half-timbering and mock Tudor. It stood at the end of a short drive, behind trees, off one of the well-tended avenues. At night, the lights in all the differently shaped windows gave it a disoriented look. But it cost little more than Addison Mansions, which decided the question, and Agatha set to decorating it. With her usual creative delight in home-making, she hung curtains, patterned with different flowers: tulips for the dining room, buttercups and daisies for Rosalind’s room, bluebells for the main bedroom ‘which was not really a good choice’. They looked ‘grey and dispirited’, as the room received almost no sun. Like a little girl she cheered herself up by writing a poem about ‘Bluebell, wild Bluebell, who dances in the wood’.

  She was happy, having made Archie happy. Her newly contented husband was the person she wanted to be with. ‘We had been through so much worry since we came back from our world tour that it seemed wonderful to enter on this halcyon period.’ Everything seemed set fair. She had her dog, her daughter, her writing, her man. She even had Clara – now aged seventy, dividing her time between Ashfield and her daughters – staying in the other top-floor flat at Scotswood. ‘Wandering out into the garden in the early morning with Aubrey at her heels, Celia felt that life had become almost perfect. No more dirt and dust and fog. This was Home . . .’

  The first book that Agatha wrote for Collins was the one that changed her reputation for ever; no doubt she knew, as through 1925 she turned the idea over in her mind, that here she had a winner. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the supreme, the ultimate detective novel. It rests upon the most elegant of all twists, the narrator who is revealed to be the murderer. This twist is not merely a function of plot: it puts the whole concept of detective fiction on an armature and sculpts it into a dazzling new shape. It was not an entirely new idea – Agatha had played with it before, when she had Sir Eustace Pedler narrate part of The Mem in the Brown Suit – nor was it entirely her own idea, since it was suggested to her by both James Watts (‘Why not have a Watson do the murder?’) and in a rather self-important letter sent by Lord Louis Mountbatten, which did not merely offer the device but explained exactly how it should be used.9 Agatha very rarely took advice on her plots – although a great deal was offered in the course of her career – but here, she realised, was an idea worth having. And only she could have pulled it off so completely. Only she had the requisite control, the willingness to absent herself from the authorial scene and let her plot shine clear.

  ‘The artist is only the glass through which we see nature and the cleaner and more absolutely pure that glass, so much the more perfect the picture we can see through it . . .’ So wrote Eden Philpotts to Agatha, back in 1909. The manner in which she took his advice was perhaps not quite what he had intended, as he had been thinking of her as a straightforward novelist, whose model should be Flaubert. But she applied the Flaubertian principle to her detective fiction. In Roger Ackroyd she revealed for the first time her natural quality of translucency: her ability to control every sentence of her books, yet allow them to breathe free. Agatha did not impose. Nor did she interpose one atom of herself between her writing and her readers. Her words communicate exactly and only what is required; which is not the same as saying that they have no life beyond what is on the page. They have, in fact, the mystery of simplicity. They are the conduits for her plots, which are also ultimately simple. And her plots are the conduits for her ideas of character; which are complex.

  In fact, in Roger Ackroyd, character is not yet as important as it would become when Agatha was writing at her peak, in the years between 1935 and 1950. By then she would know fully how to integrate character with plot, how to make plot an immaculate distillation of character. Thus a novel such as Five Little Pigs one of her very best – is a mystery resolved into simplicity by an understanding of human complexity. A beautiful process, and a beautiful book. The beauty of Roger Ackroyd is of a different kind: that of a diamond whose every facet gleams, whose geometry is perfection. Every line, every angle leads towards resolution. The plot progresses not in linear form, as a story with a beginning, middle and end, but by the architectural construction of a shape that eventually reveals its true dimensions. It is masterly: exquisite. And although the book is more of a mathematical exercise in ingenuity than a full-blown novel, it does hint at profundity. The character of the narrator, Dr Sheppard, is shadowy because he is, by definition, obfuscating. Yet this reticence translates into a sense of a hollow man, a man whose extreme self-control conceals guilt, grief, emotions that he can never express. ‘I have lost the quality of resilience long since myself,’ he says. And his sister, who knows more about him than he would wish, tells Poirot that he is ‘weak as water. You are weak, James . . . With a bad bringing up, Heaven knows what mischief you might have got into by now.’ These are clues; they are also truths. At the end of the book Sheppard kills himself in order to spare his sister suffering. His last words are bleak, bathetic, and somehow ver
y real.

  ‘Not that I take any responsibility for Mrs Ferrars’ death. It was the direct consequence of her own actions. I feel no pity for her.

  ‘I have no pity for myself either.

  ‘So let it be veronal.

  ‘But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.’

  How did Agatha develop from the amateur, ‘trying things, as one does’, into the creator of this dazzlingly accomplished book? By degrees. By intelligence; by instinct; by confidence; by courage. By trusting her own judgement about what made her writing work. By having a mind uncluttered with received ideas, and an imagination that naturally ran so free she could enjoy the exercise of its restraint. It was a relief, in fact, to trammel it within a genre. Although the structural work of a detective novel was very difficult, there was joy in the discipline. She was ordering her brain like a well-run establishment. Like Lucy Eyelesbarrow in 4.50 from Paddington, she was shining the silver and scrubbing the kitchen table and making a Spanish omelette with the leftover potatoes. She was living in a world where all could be known, all motives uncovered, all ambiguities penetrated. Where mysteries were within her control.