Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  On and on it dragged, with no end in sight. By 1944 Cork was receiving tax demands on Agatha’s income dating back to 1930, plus huge amounts of interest, despite what he called ‘the honest doubt’ about whether the money was owed in the first place. ‘Mrs Mallowan is particularly interest-conscious at this time,’ he wrote to Harold Ober, ‘as she is having to pay vast sums in interest on the Bank loans on which she is living during the hold-up. I am sure you must wish for the final settlement of this matter as much as we do.’ But in November 1944 Ober informed Cork that it ‘had been put on the reserve calendar’; probably until the war was over. By that time more than $188,000 of Agatha’s money was being held, the majority of it impounded by the government and none of it available to her. ‘I realise’, Ober wrote, ‘that this whole business may seem inexplicable to Mrs Mallowan and to you, and I hope it can be straightened out before many years.’

  As she had done all along, Agatha kept working. At the start of 1944 she was back at Dundee with Hidden Horizon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she viewed this interlude as restful. Despite what she often saw as the idiocies of actors, she always enjoyed the company of Larry Sullivan and his wife Danae. ‘Oh! it does make me so mad that you have not been with me for my plays,’ she wrote to Max. ‘I shall probably never have a play on again [sic].’ But ideas were already rolling around for dramatising both Appointment with Death and Towards Zero. She completed the first by March, then wrote two books: Sparkling Cyanide and The Hollow.

  In September she told Cork, ‘I have finished The Hollow must get down to Towards Zero.’ But it was, as she said, ‘a cruel time’. On 25 August she learned from Rosalind that Hubert had been reported missing in France. ‘Poor child,’ she wrote to Max. ‘How I hope he will turn out to be a prisoner . . . I am going down there right away . . . How I wish you were here .. . I must be very offhand and confident with Ros. The only way to help her.’

  A week later she wrote again:

  It is terrible for Ros – She is wonderful – never turns a hair – carries on exactly as usual – with food, dogs, Mathew – we act as though nothing has happened . . . But I can’t bear the unhappiness for her. If only he is not killed. They were so well suited and would be so happy here in Hubert’s house which he loved. Oh! darling, how sick I am of war and misery.

  So deep was her sickness that the very next week she was debating with Max whether or not she might go to Egypt: ‘My longing to see you is so very great,’ she wrote on 6 September. So too was her longing for straightforward escape. ‘I am so dreadfully tired, Max darling, I could sleep and sleep and sleep . . . If only I do get out to Egypt how wonderful it will be and if you come we can sleep a lot!! . . . I wish Rosalind could get some permanent help here.’81

  Surely she would not have left Rosalind at this time? The idea was dangerously alluring, nonetheless. Agatha had pretty much reached the end of the line; her stamina was extraordinary, but she was fifty-four, and weary in her very bones. Returning to Greenway and ‘getting it habitable again is a task one rather dreads – I couldn’t do it alone without any help’. Turning Towards Zero into a play ‘lies heavy on my conscience as I promised to deliver it by end of October – sometimes feel I just can’t write anything ever again’; ‘I get deadbeat here and my feet ache and my back hurts.’ Perhaps it was not so strange that she yearned to be elsewhere. This had been her instinct back in 1926; although the circumstances now were very different, the impulse remained the same.

  But of course she stayed at Pwllywrach, where news of Hubert’s death came in October. Rosalind ‘let it make no difference to her – took Mathew out to tea with some people as arranged – eats her meals well and calmly makes arrangements about obituary notices, etc. That stoical temperament is wonderful.’ Agatha was left helpless, uncomprehending and admiring, but said: ‘I sometimes think too much bottling up must be bad.’82 In fact, the wound went very deep with Rosalind. Her outward appearance did not change – she had always been dry, direct and brusque, and she remained these things to the end – but her outlook on life became fundamentally pessimistic. This was another difference between herself and her mother, whose determination was always to find the joy in living.

  But for a time things were even more nightmarish: fate became vicious and mischievous, and a mass of complications entangled Agatha’s misery. One of her uncles died, and she and Madge were charged with handling the arrangements. She returned to Pwllywrach for Hubert’s church service, only to learn that it had been postponed. A call came from University College Hospital asking her to be on hand for emergency cover. Dispensers were scarce, duty called, so at the end of October she left Rosalind and went back to her seven-hour days at the hospital. Meanwhile the play of Towards Zero had to be finished. ‘Everyone keeps saying I look ill and tired and I feel worried that you may think I look very plain and much older.’83

  Her depression was brief but very real. Her London confidant, Stephen Glanville, was now too engrossed in his affair to be of much use to her. ‘I have never felt like it before,’ she told Max. ‘Write me some words of faith and courage so that I shall have them to read if another bad spell comes.’84 ‘Cheer up lovely,’ he wrote in reply. And this, for Agatha, seems to have been consolation.

  As the year ended she found herself dreaming of a future utterly unlike the cold grey life she was living. ‘I don’t think, darling, that our happiness is a selfish thing,’ she wrote in January 1945. Greenway was reclaimed in February (‘chaos’), Appointment with Denth85 opened at the Piccadilly in March. ‘Notices haven’t been very good . . . Even if it’s not a success I don’t care – Max is coming home – that’s the great thing and nothing else matters at all!’

  It was on 9 April 1945 that Max finally wrote to say, ‘My time is up now hooray!’ Agatha – described as ‘expectantly wagging your tail for master to come home’ – sent a list of telephone numbers, as she was roaming around England with Hidden Horizon86. ‘Won’t it be exciting ringing you up and saying, Mr Puper calling.’ In fact he simply arrived at Lawn Road one evening in May. For Agatha, the war was over.

  She remembered it, though, in her books. Taken at the Flood and The Rose and the Yew Tree deal with the aftermath of war. The strange thing is how restless these books feel. For all Agatha’s delighted anticipation of reunion and restoration, a sense of dissatisfaction pervades her post-war writing.

  ‘Lynn thought suddenly, “But that’s what’s the matter everywhere. I’ve noticed it ever since I got home. It’s the aftermath war has left. Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere,” wrote Agatha in Taken at the Flood.

  Lynn Marchmont is returning home from work overseas. She had longed for the end of war and now finds herself prey to inner turmoil. ‘When I was out East, I longed for home,’ she says to Hercule Poirot, who replies, ‘Yes, yes, where you are not, there you will want to be!’ It is this state of mind that lays Lynn open to the advances of David Hunter, a sexually desirable misfit, dealing in his own way with the post-war world.

  Of David it is said: ‘In wartime, a man like that is a hero. But in peace – well, in peace such men usually end up in prison. They like excitement, they can’t run straight, and they don’t give a damn for society – and finally they’ve no regard for human life.’ Through this character (and, later, that of Bryan Eastley in The 4.50 from Paddington), Agatha understood at last the disorientation felt by her first husband when he returned, apparently whole and unchanged, from the horrors of France. She understood that he could so easily have shared the fate of Hubert Prichard, whose ‘gallant but senseless’ death still haunted her. Men like these, brave and unpredictable and, in David’s case, not quite straight, fascinated Agatha. That is why she has Lynn Marchmont so bored with the fiancé that she left behind, the farmer Rowley Cloade, who feels himself less of a man because he did not go to fight. Later Rowley reveals that he, too, can be something of a savage. His actions, which are genuinely violent, reawaken Lynn’s interest in him. ‘I’ve never, really, cared very much fo
r being safe,’ she says.

  Taken at the Flood is a dark book: its mood is that of grey, confused, bomb-wrecked England. There is a sense that hitherto normal people are living by the law of the jungle. When a character says that ‘There have been dreadful things in the papers lately. All these discharged soldiers – they attack girls’, the reply is ‘I expect the girls ask for it.’ It is as though the rules of behaviour have changed for ever. Criminality has become commonplace. The roots of society have been torn out and thrown about and anything – including murder – might be acceptable if it leads to individual advancement. Identities are fluid: the tricky old Christie device of having, say, Miss Durrant pretend to be Miss Barton – ‘the whole thing hinged upon one old woman being so like any other old woman’87 – now has a real resonance.

  ‘Can you love someone you don’t trust?’ asks Lynn; to which Poirot replies, ‘Unfortunately, yes.’

  These unsettled and troubling emotions had been stirred by war, and they suffused The Rose and the Yew Tree. This book was written in 1946 and is set at the time of the post-war election won by Attlee. Although Collins criticised it for mistakes in its depiction of an election campaign,88 its wider view was both acute and prescient. The Labour victory symbolised, very obviously, the end of an era for Britain, but although Agatha used this metaphor she also made subtler points about both class and politics. St Loo, the Cornwall constituency where the novel is set – a Conservative stronghold – is won by John Gabriel, a ‘downy fellow’ who belongs to the thrusting new world. He is a salesman, ‘positively slick, if you know what I mean’: a Blair, but a Blair with self-knowledge. ‘Oh, I’ve no beliefs,’ he tells Hugh Norreys, the crippled young man who narrates the book. ‘With me it’s purely a matter of expediency.’ His natural home is the Labour Party, but he knows that his natural gifts will shine brighter amid the Tories.

  What John Gabriel says about politics is almost shocking to read, it is so cynical and accurate. He is in it for himself, he admits:

  ‘And you can thank your stars that’s all I do want! Men who are greedy and self-seeking don’t hurt the world – the world’s got room for them. And they’re the right kind of men to have governing you. Heaven help any country that has men in power with ideas! A man with an idea will grind down the common people . . . But a selfish grasping bloke won’t do much harm – he only wants his own little corner made comfortable, and once he’s got that, he’s quite agreeable to having the average man happy and contented. In fact, he prefers him happy and contented – it’s less trouble. I know pretty well what most people want – it isn’t much. Just to feel important and to have a chance of doing a bit better than the other man and not to be too much pushed around. You mark my words, Norreys, that’s where the Labour Party will make their big mistake when they get in . . . They’ll start pushing people round. All with the best intentions.’

  Of course Agatha herself was a Conservative voter, but the things she was saying went deeper than mere Attlee-aversion.89 They were about the relationship between politician and voter, and what this said about human vanity. ‘Now don’t make any mistake, Norreys, I probably could become Prime Minister if I wanted to. It’s amazing what you can do, if you just study what people want to hear said and then say it to them!’

  But John Gabriel – a brilliant character, attractive and repellent at one and the same time – is also vulnerable. Too intelligent for the life he has decided upon, he fools most people with ease but comes up hard against the world of St Loo Castle, where Isabella lives with her grandmother and two great-aunts. (‘Did it with an eye on the gallery, of course,’ is Lady St Loo’s amused reaction, when John Gabriel sees a chance to help his election campaign by saving a drowning child.)

  ‘I know they don’t count,’ he says. ‘I know their day is over. They’re living, all over the country, in houses that are tumbling down, on incomes that have shrunk to practically nothing . . . But they’ve got something that I can’t get hold of – some damned feeling of superiority. I’m as good as they are – in many ways I’m better, but when I’m with them I don’t feel it.’

  He seizes upon Isabella, taking the opportunity to drag her down when she falls in love with him. She is compelled by what he represents: vitality, ambition, sex. For all that he is a ‘common little man’, as the Conservative Association describes him, he sweeps aside Isabella’s other suitor, her cousin Rupert, heir to the castle and a ‘verray parfit gentil knight’. To Isabella, Rupert is dying blood. With the certainty of an animal she moves towards John Gabriel instead: thus Agatha shows the changing class structure, while saying something more profound about the aristocratic instinct for renewal. But John Gabriel gets no pleasure from his prize. ‘All the things I’d wanted and minded about all my life seemed to crystallise in her.’ He destroys her, although Isabella is proof even against death. ‘You persist in seeing Isabella’s life as a thing cut short, twisted out of shape, broken off,’ Hugh Norreys is told. ‘But I have a strong suspicion that it was a thing complete in itself . . .’

  Isabella is the heart of the book: the ‘rose’ whose life is shorter, but no less fulfilled, than that of the ‘yew tree’ (the title is from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’). One afternoon she is sitting in the sun with Hugh. He has railed against his fate after the road accident that crippled him; he has planned his own death. Now he sits silently with Isabella, and watches as

  across the terrace came running a brown squirrel. It sat up, looking at us. It chattered a while, then darted off to run up a tree.

  I felt suddenly as though a kaleidoscopic universe had shifted, setting into a different pattern. What I saw now was the pattern of a sentient world where existence was everything, thought and speculation nothing. Here was morning and evening, day and night, food and drink, cold and heat – here movement, purpose, consciousness that did not yet know it was consciousness. This was the squirrel’s world, the world of green grass pushing steadily upward, of trees, living and breathing. Here in this world, Isabella had her place. And strangely enough I, the broken wreck of a man, could find my place also . . .

  It is like a description of a primitive Italian painting, a Pisanello, where animals of different species inhabit the same dreamscape. It is also like the mysterious garden at Greenway, which became Agatha’s home again at the end of 1945.

  ‘The feeling did not last,’ says Hugh. ‘But for a moment or two I had known a world in which I belonged.’

  English Murder

  ‘To Hercule Poirot there was only one thing more fascinating than

  the study of human beings, and that was the pursuit of truth’

  (from The Hollow by Agatha Christie)

  ‘All I can say is, dear Francis Wyndham, that if I die and go to heaven,

  or the other place, and it so happens that the Public Prosecutor

  of that time is also there, I shall beg him to reveal the secret to me’

  (from a letter written by Agatha in 1968 to the editor of the Sunday Times

  magazine, on the subject of the Croydon murders)

  It was around the middle of the twentieth century that Agatha became the phenomenon that is ‘Agatha Christie’. In 1945 she was a successful author whose books would sell out a UK hardback print run of around twenty-five thousand copies. By 1950 she was estimated to have sold fifty million books worldwide, and from then on her sales simply grew and grew.

  It is a paradox, although perhaps not a surprise, that Agatha’s popularity should have increased as her powers declined. After 1950 she wrote a handful of brilliant and unusual books – Destination Unknown, Ordeal by Innocence, The Pale Horse, Endless Night and Passenger to Frankfurt – but she produced her best work in the twenty previous years, particularly in that period of intense, sustained creativity around the war which marks the high point of her career. In 1950 she published A Murder is Announced, and this set the standard for much of what followed: supremely accomplished, utterly readable, but the product of ‘Agatha Christie’ the p
henomenon, rather than Agatha the writer.

  A further paradox is that the leap into fame did not really come about from the books. It was the adaptations that did the trick; particularly the stage and film versions of And Then There Were None. The conceptual daring of this book had been recognised by readers back in 1939, but a whole new audience was hooked with the wartime dramatisation and, in 1945, with the 20th Century Fox film directed by René Clair. This was Agatha’s first big cinema release, a much larger-scale affair than, for instance, the 1937 British film of Love From a Stranger. Agatha later called it ‘bad’ – although it was far better than the two subsequent films of the book1 – and it did good box office. The play of the book also ran on Broadway where it caught, the attention of the theatrical impresario Lee Shubert, who took an interest in the dramatised versions of Towards Zero and The Hollow. Later Shubert proved to be a nightmare (he delayed horribly over The Hollow while refusing to let anyone else near it; only his death in 1953 released the rights), but that was not the point. The fact was that Agatha was now moving in a different world, the world of success, where everything a writer produces has value and possibilities. Hercule Poirot had become a feature on American radio (although Agatha despised these weekly broadcasts, and turned down repeated requests from television; including those from her former Poirot, Francis Sullivan, extremely persistent on the subject). The play Hidden Horizon flourished after its initial difficulties and it, too, went to New York; in 1949 Agatha’s version of Murder at the Vicarage opened in London, followed by The Hollow in 1951, which according to Edmund Cork ‘almost burst the Fortune Theatre’.

  And so it went on, reaching a golden peak when a story entitled ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, originally titled ‘Traitor Hands’ and published in 1925, was dramatised for the West End stage. Out in Iraq in early 1953, Agatha wrote a new ending for the play which she knew to be sensational. Cork had his doubts about the additional twist; but she was right. Produced by Peter Saunders – the architect of Agatha’s theatrical career, who had launched The Mousetrap to minimal fanfare a year earlier – Witness was a staggering triumph. ‘The play is the biggest success we have had for years,’ wrote Cork to Harold Ober in December. ‘It was put on at the worst time of year in the worst theatre in the West End [the Winter Garden, Drury Lane], and it is just packing out.’ At the beginning of 1954 Agatha threw a party at the Savoy to celebrate the play’s success: among the guests was Campbell Christie, her former brother-in-law, himself now a West End playwright in partnership with his wife, Dorothy.2