Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  This, too, Agatha could see: the danger in villages, the lack of outlets, the way inhabitants can turn in on themselves and fester. In Murder is Easy the sinister undercurrent is made explicit. Again the book is narrated by a male outsider, who has returned from the East and finds himself, initially sceptical, falling under the spell of a village whose comfortable face glints with danger. ‘The sky was dull and menacing, and wind came in sudden erratic little puffs. It was as though he had stepped out of normal everyday life into that queer half world of enchantment, the consciousness of which had enveloped him ever since he came to Wychwood.’ There is devilry in this village – sacrifices to Satan, a girl like a witch – but, as always with Agatha’s detective fiction, the real evil is all too human. The serial killer is a person whom life has thwarted and who, in a village, has nothing to do but brood on it. Class also plays a convincing part in this book; not because Agatha was an irredeemable snob but because class did – still does – loom large in closed communities.

  Murder is Easy is not a Miss Marple (although it contains a substitute of sorts) but it is born of her world. Miss Marple herself was cast in the mould of Caroline Sheppard, the doctor’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Miss Sheppard has a gift for unearthing information – usually from servants – and a terrific curiosity: offered two separate snippets of gossip to pursue she visibly wavers, ‘much as a roulette ball might coyly hover between two numbers’. But her deductive powers are wayward. Miss Marple tries far less hard because her innate wisdom is so much greater. In The Murder at the Vicarage, though, she is decidedly Carolinian: ‘I must admit that her rapid appearance on the scene and eager curiosity repelled me slightly,’ says the vicar, who narrates the book. The later Miss Marple would never behave in such a way, which teeters upon the unladylike. Nor would she be described by the vicar’s wife, Griselda, as ‘that terrible Miss Marple’; although the later emphasis upon her ‘fluffiness’ is deceptive. As Books and Bookmen put it in an essay published after Agatha’s death, ‘Jane Marple is a tough old boot. If she was a “nice old knitting lady”, so was Madame Defarge.’

  Miss Marple shows her mettle early on in The Murder at the Vicarage. She is the only one of the elderly ladies – congregating at the vicarage for ‘tea and scandal’ – to realise where the attentions of the local glamour boy are directed (‘Not Lettice. Quite another person, I should have said . . .’). She also reveals her creed: her way of looking at the world that makes her a natural detective. Griselda says that Miss Marple ought to be able to solve the case,

  ‘like you did the time Miss Wetherby’s gill of pickled shrimps disappeared. And all because it reminded you of something quite different about a sack of coals.’

  ‘You’re laughing, my dear,’ said Miss Marple, ‘but after all, that is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about.’

  Now this, of course, was straight from Agatha’s grandmothers. Like Miss Marple, both Margaret Miller and Mary Ann Boehmer managed to hold a Christian faith in human nature with a realistic knowledge of its dire capabilities. Expect the worst, because the worst is so often true, but have belief, have faith, have compassion. That was the way of such women: upright, wise, Victorian: infinitely consoling to Agatha.

  She was not yet forty. Yet she took comfort in the creation of a woman who was far older, and whose relationship with life was serene, not disturbing as her own had been. Miss Marple’s emotional experience was almost non-existent, although her knowledge and understanding was immense; she was at a remove from life and happy to be so. Wisdom brought contentment. Agatha was wise in her books, less so in life. An exchange from the collection of short stories The Thirteen Problems shows the difference between Miss Marple and her creator. The character speaking is a painter, Joyce Lempriere:20

  ‘I am an artist . . . I see things that you don’t. And then, too, as an artist I have knocked about among all sorts and conditions of people. I know life as darling Miss Marple here cannot possibly know it.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, dear,’ said Miss Marple. ‘Very painful and distressing things happen in villages sometimes.’

  This was what Agatha liked: the distillation of life into a containable microcosm – such as St Mary Mead – from which the answer to any problem could be deduced. She knew that it was, in a way, nonsense. She had lived through her own personal mystery story and she knew, none better, that there are no true solutions: that reality always has an unfinished, untidy quality. At the same time the world of her creation both fascinated and soothed her.

  Omniscience is the greatest gift that the fictional detective can offer to readers: what infinite reassurance there is in the idea of the brain that understands everything, that sheds light on every dark area. But this quality is a gift, too, for writers. Agatha found support in her detectives, in their omniscience and detachment, which showed itself differently in Poirot and Marple. It is frequently said that Agatha disliked Poirot, although there is no real evidence for this; in later life she sought to protect him against misrepresentation as powerfully as if he were her own flesh and blood; but she had a deeper involvement with Miss Marple. ‘Miss Jane Marple does not exist in the flesh and never has,’ she wrote, ‘She is entirely a creation of the brain,’21 But this was not entirely true, Post-1926, Agatha intensely disliked any implication that she wrote from life; nevertheless it was the reality of Miss Marple – her resemblance to those strong, wise, benign women of Agatha’s childhood – that gave her creator the greatest succour. Agatha enjoyed Poirot, but she needed Miss Marple. She craved the sound of that quiet, ladylike voice. Like detective fiction itself, it was a bulwark against the mad and intrusive world beyond: a voice from the grave, from the Army and Navy Stores, from Ashfield.

  So comforting was Miss Marple that, in one of the stories from The Thirteen Problems, Agatha had the confidence to plant her in a ‘Hydro’. This was an oblique reference to Harrogate, made very shortly after the event, and one of the male characters helps to lance the boil of memory by declaring that hydros are ‘absolutely beastly! Got to get up early and drink filthy-tasting water. Lot of old women sitting about. Ill-natured tittle-tattle.’

  Miss Marple freely admits the truth of this (as if she would not have known that Mrs Christie was sitting opposite her in the lounge! And exactly why she was there!). Then she launches into a very characteristic defence:

  ‘Talking scandal, as you say – well, it is done a good deal. And people are very down on it – especially young people . . . But what I say is that none of these young people ever stop to think. They really don’t examine the facts. Surely the whole crux of the matter is this: How often is tittle-tattle, as you call it, truel And I think if, as I say, they really examined the facts they would find that it was true nine times out of ten! That’s really just what makes people so annoyed about it.’

  ‘The inspired guess,’ said Sir Henry.

  ‘No, not that, not that at all! It’s really a matter of practice and experience . . . What my nephew calls “superfluous women” have a lot of time on their hands, and their chief interest is usually people. And so, you see, they get to be what one might call experts. Now young people nowadays – they talk very freely about things that weren’t mentioned in my young days, but on the other hand their minds are terribly innocent. They believe in everyone and everything . . .’

  Agatha herself had believed, had trusted. She had suspected nothing; how she had needed Miss Marple by her side, to hint delicately that a man who wishes to play golf quite so often, well, of course, one wonders. . . . Now it was too late. And, although she would never have guessed it, Agatha was about to plunge again.

  She returned to Ur in February 1930, at the end of the digging season, having forged a firm friendship with the Woolleys. The previous May the couple had stayed at her new London house, a charming little mews at 22 Cresswell Place, off the Old Brompton Road, which she had bought in 1928 (‘a radiantly green sprin
g tree among grey roofs’ was how the Star described it). The house still had its stables until Agatha had it redesigned: a large room downstairs, and above, a tiny kitchen, dining room, bedroom and marvellous green bathroom painted with dolphins. Soon she would buy another house, at 47-8 Campden Street in Kensington, then three more in the 1930s. The pre-war years were indeed, as she later said, her ‘plutocratic period’, before taxation prevented her keeping the better part of the money she earned.

  In 1929 Agatha’s brother Monty died and she herself was very ill after a vaccination (which she believed to have been double strength) against Rosalind’s measles. However, after spending the end of the year at Ashfield she felt ready for more adventure. Travel was in her blood now: much as she loved her home, she became restless if she stayed in England too long.

  This time at Ur she met a member of the expedition who had been away the previous season with appendicitis: Max Mallowan. ‘If he had been there the year before, it would have been too soon for her after Archie,’22 says his biographer. When Max met Agatha he was twenty-five, the same age as her nephew Jack Watts, whose contemporary he had been at New College. Max was so much younger than Agatha that she viewed him from a benign distance, although she noted his tact with the Woolleys and thought him clever. She got to know him better when Katherine, in typical autocratic fashion, ordered him to take Agatha on a tour of the local sights on the way from Ur to Baghdad. Agatha was somewhat embarrassed, thinking that this poor young man was being imposed upon. Max, however, was unperturbed, and the two discovered that they got along.

  Katherine Woolley was, by now, revealing the oddity of her character. She had had an unusual life: half German on her father’s side, she had gone up to Somerville in 1910 to read history (although she did not take her degree) and met her first husband while working in a prison camp during the First World War. Within six months of the wedding in 1919, Colonel Keeling shot himself. After this Katherine – who was highly intelligent, and a gifted artist (‘nearly an artist’, wrote Agatha in her autobiography, a trifle cattily) – gravitated towards archaeology, which was at that time a small, amateurish and gentlemanly world. She became part of the set-up at Ur as a volunteer assistant, but women were rare creatures on digs and, after a while, pressure was put on Leonard Woolley to regularise the situation. He and Katherine were married in 1927.

  Although two years older than Agatha, Katherine looked far younger and was still extremely beautiful. Yet she lacked all normal sexual feeling. Her first husband’s suicide may well have been linked to this. The extent of Woolley’s congress with his wife was, apparently, to watch her having her bath at night (the fact that he did this gives the lie to the bizarre rumour that Katherine was, in truth, a man).

  However, if Katherine had no desire to sleep with men she still wanted them in her thrall. The young men on the dig at Ur – including Max – would be commanded to brush her hair: ‘They actually found this really embarrassing, oppressive, but impossible to refuse,’23 says Agatha’s friend, Dr Joan Oates. ‘It was really very, very peculiar.’ Katherine would also ask them to walk ten miles or so to the souk and buy two kilos of her favourite Arab confectionery. This had its advantages, however, as the sweets would keep her quiet for a day or two. ‘She used to eat the whole lot, and then be sick.’

  Hardly the behaviour of a femme fatale, yet such Katherine undoubtedly was, and it fascinated Agatha, so much so that she wrote her friend into Murder in Mesopotamia as the victim. ‘We all thought that was a marvellous way of getting back at someone that you couldn’t get back at any other way,’ says Joan Oates. The portrayal of Louise Leidner is, unusually for Agatha, absolutely that of a real person, and this knocks the book slightly off-balance; not least because the actual solution is one of Agatha’s weakest. What interests her is not the detective puzzle but the mystery of this singular woman, an allumeuse, as she is called, whose delight is to inflame passion, not to experience it.

  ‘I was convinced’, says Poirot, ‘that Mrs Leidner was a woman who essentially worshipped herself and who enjoyed more than anything else the sense of power. Wherever she was, she must be the centre of the universe . . .’

  Another character says of her that ‘She didn’t really care a damn. And that’s why I hate her so. She’s not sensual. She doesn’t want affairs . . . She’s a kind of female Iago. She must have drama. But she doesn’t want to be involved herself. She’s always outside pulling strings – looking on – enjoying it.’

  This, then, was Katherine Woolley: beautiful, clever, fiercely independent, destructive. But Agatha’s writerly instinct made her push the character further. She imagined what would happen if Katherine were to meet her match and fall helplessly in love. She imagined, too, a streak that was fatalistic to the point of self-destruction: beneath the detective-fiction ending there is a strange, subtle hint that Louise Leidner has placed herself in a situation that invites her own death. Simple in plot, complex in characterisation, this book – like two or three other Christies – would have made a magnificent Mary Westmacott.

  Its narrative voice, that of Nurse Amy Leatheran, is determinedly prosaic: a foil to Mrs Leidner’s weary allure. She sounds a little death knell for Archie Christie when told that Mrs Leidner’s first husband was killed in the war: ‘I think that’s very pathetic and romantic, don’t you, nurse?’ To which she replies: ‘It’s one way of calling a goose a swan.’ In other words, if the man had lived – if Archie had stayed – there would have been time for glamour to fade into curmudgeonly middle age.

  So Nurse Leatheran speaks for a side of Agatha, the plain and sane side. This can also be seen in the character’s reaction to the East – ‘Frankly, what had struck me was the mess everywhere’ – and to archaeology: ‘Would you believe it, there was nothing to see but mud Dirty mud walls about two feet high and that’s all there was to it. Mr Carey took me here and there telling me things . . . all I thought was, “But how does he knowThis was not, of course, exactly what Agatha thought. She was entranced with the work on the dig, sporting in her attitude to ‘so-called bathrooms’ and non-European hygiene. There was nothing parochial about her whatsoever; yet she understood the parochial mind – this, indeed, was part of her genius – and relished its homely good sense. She, too, would have had her sceptical moments in the face of Leonard Woolley’s blind assurance that he was digging at the site of the Flood (but how did he know? He did not: he was wrong). What she liked about archaeology were the moments – despised by intellectuals like Woolley – when past came to meet present, and the buried fragments of human daily life were magically lifted into the air.

  Also in Murder in Mesopotamia there is a hint of how Agatha perceived the young Max Mallowan, semi-portrayed as David Emmott, the quiet American who refuses to be bullied by Mrs Leidner and earns her grudging respect. ‘I may say that of all the expedition, as far as character and capacity were concerned, Mr Emmott seemed to me the most fitted to bring a clever and well timed crime off satisfactorily,’ says Poirot: an oblique semi-compliment. In fact Max was rather more under Katherine’s spell than his fictional counterpart. The portrait of David Emmott was somewhat idealised, although Agatha shared Amy Leatheran’s view that ‘There was something about him that seemed very steadfast and reassuring.’

  She enjoyed her time sightseeing with him in Iraq. A kind of friendly intimacy was established, not least because of what she described as the ‘strenuous way of living’: Max was required to escort Agatha to the lavatory when they stayed the night at the police post at Kerbala (sleeping in separate cells), and on the dreary road to Ukhaidir they sang songs before stripping off to their underwear to bathe in a desert lake. Agatha was relaxed with Max from early on, probably because the age difference dispersed the usual male-female tensions. Her joy of living returned during this strange journey through hot, exotic, dreamlike landscapes. The whole thing was fun, which was not something Agatha had experienced for a very long time (dashing and handsome though he undoubtedly was, Archie had neve
r been fun). It felt like an interlude: surprising, serendipitous and, she felt, not to be repeated.

  Yet there would be a further opportunity. Agatha was travelling through Greece with the Woolleys (Katherine somewhat vexed at her friend’s closeness to her protégé) when a bundle of telegrams arrived at Athens to say that Rosalind was extremely ill with pneumonia. Agatha panicked – no doubt from guilt – then fell over and sprained her ankle. Whereupon Max announced that she would need a companion on her journey and he would return to England with her.

  Throughout the four-day train journey (no flights in those days), the two got to know each other properly. Max knew a certain amount already, of course, but the whole Archie-Harrogate business would have sailed over his head. Not so for the rest of the world, whose judgement upon her had turned Agatha defensive and brittle: a woman who met her at the time wrote in her diary, ‘Mrs Christie is actually Agatha!! Rather nice, very hard.’ But Max divined the childlike vulnerability within. He understood her very well, in fact. He set about gaining her confidence.