Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  On Broadway Witness caused the same furore, and received a New York Drama Critics Circle award for best foreign play. ‘We are receiving numerous inquiries about the play for motion pictures,’ wrote Ober. After detailed and often excruciating negotiations – ‘the best we could do – with blood sweat and tears’, as Cork wrote to Ober – the rights were sold for the then newsworthy sum of £116,000, which was given to Rosalind in a tax-evading Deed of Gift.3 The film was made by Billy Wilder4 and starred Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich. Stylish, caustic and relentlessly entertaining, it was the only cinematic version of her writing that Agatha ever liked. It was also a raging hit.

  Here, though, was another paradox: the greater Agatha’s success, the more disastrous became her financial situation. In 1948 she had written to Edmund Cork: ‘I shall go on enjoying myself and have a slap-up bankruptcy!!!’ If this had been meant as a joke, the fact is that it was anything but. How could such a thing have happened? There was now a possibility of the US tax authorities returning to Agatha some of the money that had been impounded since 1941, but as soon as it reached her it would be taxed into nothing by the British government, even though she needed the American money precisely in order to meet the demands on her depredated British income. ‘The British tax authorities are becoming very difficult indeed, and there seems to be very little likelihood of Mrs Mallowan avoiding bankruptcy,’ Cork wrote to Harold Ober in September 1948. ‘It seems almost incredible to a layman that she should be liable for tax on income which arose in a foreign country, and which could not be transmitted to her.’

  The insane fight to avoid bankruptcy would drag on for years yet; the logic of the position was that the British authorities would prefer to destroy Agatha’s powerful work ethic – or oblige her to move to a tax haven – rather than see reason about her liabilities. In March 1949 Agatha wrote to Cork from Baghdad: ‘Anyway, what the hell, is what I now feel about income tax.’ Later she would buckle under the strain of the situation, but at that time she refused to do so (perhaps refused to believe it could be true). Cork sent her a steady stream of cheques for serial rights, play receipts and so on, and in an act of rather splendid defiance she behaved as though the shadow of the taxman did not exist, living in the grand style of what she had called her ‘former plutocracy’. She no longer thought of selling Greenway – although for tax purposes it was run as a ‘marketgardening’ business – and, as well as Winterbrook and Cresswell Place, Agatha acquired a new flat in Chelsea’s Swan Court,5 decorated with what she described as ‘paintings that can be lived with’. She loved her homes, she loved her gardens, she loved travel, she loved good food, she loved bathing, she loved selective company, she loved freedom and space and munificence, and she continued to revel in these pleasures. They flowered around the work that was the core of her life.

  She did write less than before, and this caused Cork to panic, as he attributed it to her dislike of working in order to enrich Stafford Cripps: ‘We are very worried indeed that this anxiety about the tax position has had such a bad effect on Mrs Mallowan,’ he wrote to one of her accountants, Norman Dixon, in 1948. Cork’s agency, Hughes Massie, had come to rely upon ‘by far our most remunerative client’ and her miraculous ability to deliver irresistible manuscripts. But throughout 1948 she wrote nothing. When the war ended she had had a burst of creativity, almost like an aftershock, which produced three of her best books: The Rose and the Yew Tree, Taken at the Flood and Crooked House. Then: a spell of silence. Her next full-length book was A Murder is Announced, written in early 1949 and a very different kind of beast. Thereafter came books like Mrs McGinty’s Dead, They Do It with Mirrors, After the Funeral and A Pocket Full of Rye – all highly competent, Agatha Christie on majestic auto-pilot – and a great deal of theatrical activity: most notably, the adaptation for the stage of the radio play Three Blind Mice, which had been written to honour the eightieth birthday of Queen Mary in 1947, and in 1952 would open at the Ambassadors Theatre as The Mousetrap.6

  Agatha loved her theatrical successes of the mid-twentieth century. I ENJOYED writing plays,’ she later wrote, in a tribute to her friend and producer Sir Peter Saunders, whom she had first met when he produced The Hollow. ‘Not a life project by which to support oneself like books – but enormous fun because of the interesting technique.’ Despite the extreme popularity of what she wrote, however, Agatha’s plays were lightweight things on the whole. Only Akhnaton, set in ancient Egypt, written in 1937 but not produced in her lifetime, and Verdict, a failure when produced in 1958, have any real depth. The dramatisations of the novels show an understanding of the medium – Agatha always knew what ‘worked’ when it came to writing – but they leech all the subtlety from the originals: The Hollow and Five Little Pigs (or Go Back for Murder, as it was retitled) are greatly enfeebled as plays, almost as if Agatha herself did not realise what had made them such good books. The Westmacott novel A Daughter’s a Daughter was also first conceived as a play. Although the book does not manage to cut loose from its inherent ‘staginess’, it has vastly more light and shade than the theatrical version.

  But through the 1950s it was the theatre that engaged much of Agatha’s attention, in between producing what Collins began to call its ‘Christie for Christmas’ (a slogan that, in 1961, William Collins said was ‘good for an extra 26,000 copies’). If the profound and compassionate Crooked House had marked the end of an era, then nobody much noticed; least of all the public, which would have been most surprised to learn that a woman reported to earn two thousand pounds a week was a prospective inhabitant of Queer Street; and which could not get enough of Agatha Christie.

  It wanted to read her thoughts in newspapers, hear her voice on the radio, study her photograph, collect her autograph, learn her opinions, plague her with fan letters, abusive letters, begging letters, worshipping letters. ‘It gives me such a respectable feeling to write to a person I adore,’ a young girl wrote from Pakistan. ‘You are the second best author in the history of the Human Race and only Shakespeare, whom I regret to say I have hardly read though of course I should have done, is better than you,’ wrote another fan. A letter came from a woman in Stockport: ‘I have had another shock this morning, my electric bill came and it is over £6, where the money is coming from to pay it, I do not know. Do please be an angel and help me.’ More forceful was the man who wrote: ‘Two days ago I tried to rob the bank in Brecon in Wales . . . I have written to no less than forty rich people, even the richest man in the world, not one of them would even see me, I feel there must be something wrong with me. Only you can save me.’ From Aberystwyth a man wrote to protest about a joke remark from Mrs Oliver – ‘I never trust the Welsh’ – in Cards on the Table: ‘Your veiled attack on the people of Wales has done and will do you and your books much harm.’ Another man wrote to tell her to ‘lose that insufferable Belgian; he had become very wearisome’. A young man in Hong Kong (T am of the height of Hercule Poirot’) wrote to say, ‘I admire you and respect you and love you, Miss Christie, more than anything else in the world). ’ She was asked for her thoughts on America (‘Have you ever met any anti-Americanism in England?’; ‘No’); on ‘les grands sujets féminins’ (‘Nothing I’d hate more – tell them so!’); on the early life of both Poirot and Miss Marple. She was asked where Lapsang Souchong tea could be bought (‘Fortnum’s,’ Cork replied). Editors of quotation anthologies asked to use her alleged remark that ‘An archaeologist is the best husband a woman could have, as the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.’ (Cork: ‘Agatha did not in fact say this, and nothing infuriates her more than to have it attributed to her.’) Vogue asked if she would tell them what Christmas presents she most wanted to receive (‘NO,’ she scrawled on the request). The BBC hoped to televise a series of ‘famous people in their homes’ and film her at Greenway. Literary societies wanted her to speak, the organisers of fêtes wanted her to cut ribbons, writers wanted her to read their manuscripts. ‘What silly letters one does get,’ she
wrote to Edmund Cork.

  ‘People wish to interview her, to know what she thinks about such subjects as student unrest, socialism, girls’ clothing, should sex be permissive, and many other things that are no concern of hers.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Poirot, ‘deplorable, I think.’7

  Almost all of this she shunned. Occasionally she gave in to a demand or a plea, as when a company of Dutch ex-PoWs wanted to stage a production of Ten Little Nigger^ during the war they had had a copy of the book and dramatised it for performance at Buchenwald concentration camp. This was clearly a very special request. The more usual response was ‘Get me out of this unless you strongly advise it’, which Agatha scrawled to Cork in 1951 when asked to do a feature with the Pictorial Press. ‘The Sunday Express are threatening to telephone you to ask you to contribute to a new publicity feature,’ wrote Cork in the same year. ‘(One of the questions is “What do you dislike most about your career” – which is, I suppose, publicity.)’ A photographic session in 1953 was reluctantly agreed to and instantly regretted. ‘Look here, Edmund, have I got to stand for this? Just about fit for the psychopathic ward, is what I should say . . . from now on, photography is OUT. I don’t see why I should be constantly humiliated and made to suffer.’ (‘We seem to deal with about three photographers a week!’ Cork wrote to her the following year.) In late 1953 an invitation to appear on Panorama was turned down: ‘I am afraid Mrs Christie feels that she would definitely not like to appear on television, under any circumstances whatever. She is, as I have told you, very shy, and she hates publicity of any kind.’ It drove her American agency, Obers, to distraction. ‘Will Agatha Christie ever consent to be interviewed?’ they asked in 1965.

  This, then, was yet another paradox. The more famous Agatha became, the more she retreated into her private world: her gardens, the dig house with the view across the desert, her intimate circle, her writing. What the public saw instead was the construct of ‘Agatha Christie’. In the eyes of the world she became an entity rather than a person.

  She allowed occasional photographic shoots, such as the sixtieth birthday pictures taken by Angus McBean, and she appeared, beaming radiantly from inside the collar of one of her fur coats, at openings of her own plays (‘Best you’ve written yet, dearie,’ she was told as she emerged on to Drury Lane after the first night of Witness for the Prosecution). She gave occasional interviews in which she said almost nothing. And she encouraged the image of the ‘Queen of Crime’, the ‘Duchess of Death’, the woman who looked like a bridge-playing pillar of the community yet had ‘made more money out of murder than Lucrezia Borgia’.8 What a useful creature this Agatha Christie was! Even when she revealed the inner emotions of her creator, which she frequently did in the years around the war, nobody really noticed. The world was too smitten with the persona.

  Agatha further complicated the situation by inventing a character, Ariadne Oliver, who is a fictional take on ‘Agatha Christie’. Mrs Oliver, who first appeared in Parker Pyne Investigates, is a large grey-haired woman who writes murder mysteries, eats apples and is saddled with an imaginary detective – the Finn, Sven Hjerson – whom she cannot bear (‘Of course he’s idiotic, but people like him’). It is a wonderful joke, and Mrs Oliver is a wonderful creation, but she is not Agatha; although occasionally she does speak in her authentic voice:

  A deal table, her typewriter, black coffee, apples everywhere . . . What bliss, what glorious and solitary bliss! What a mistake for an author to emerge from her secret fastness. Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.

  ‘ . . The truth is I’m not very good with people.’

  ‘I adore people, don’t you?’ said Robin happily.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Oliver firmly.

  ‘But you must. Look at all the people in your books.’

  ‘That’s different . . ,’9

  But Agatha’s famed ‘shyness’ was of a different order from Ariadne Oliver’s. Like most things in her older life, it traced back to the events of 1926. As a young married woman she showed very little evidence of being shy; quite the opposite, in fact, if her behaviour on the Empire Tour is anything to go by, when she socialised willingly and went off without a qualm to stay with the Bell family in Australia, even though she knew none of them beforehand. She also did photographic shoots for the Sketch (including some pictures with the very young Rosalind) and showed no dislike of publicising her books. She enjoyed it, in fact. At this point, admittedly, her fame was of a minor order. Nevertheless it is easy to imagine that, if she had remained married to Archie, she would have been less retiring in later life. Her hatred of publicity derived almost entirely from the period of her notoriety, when journalists had written a story that was not merely wrong but that would not have existed at all, had it not been for their desire to create it. Also, and more subtly, it was not enough for her to hate publicity: she wanted her hatred to be made public. In so doing, she was continuing to suppress any lingering belief that she had ‘disappeared’ in order to advance her career.

  Of course if Agatha had remained married to Archie – that great imponderable – she might never have become ‘Agatha Christie’ at all. Almost certainly she would not have looked like her. Her large, comfortable physicality was a defence against wounds, and after the war it grew more massive still. She lost the last trace of the attraction she had held, until her early fifties, for a man like Stephen Glanville. Her weight rose to nearly fifteen stone, her legs swelled immensely and she became extraordinarily sensitive about photographs. Those taken at Greenway show a relaxed, rather splendid woman with a sweet smile, a penetrating eye and, as often as not, one of Rosalind’s Manchester terriers10 perched upon her like a tiny black-and-tan deer. These images are charming, but they were intensely private. The wider world was less forgiving; as Agatha was only too aware.

  So her shyness may have arisen partly from a desire only to be seen by people who knew her well. A friend of Stephen Glanville’s daughter met Agatha at lunch in the 1950s, at the Provost’s Lodge at King’s College: ‘I know I thought the sight of her surprising, with a fat, somewhat uncoordinated body and messily applied lipstick.’ This was the truth, as Agatha herself knew. But seeing it confirmed in photographs saddened her, as she confessed to Edmund Cork. ‘One doesn’t really (thank the Lord!) know just how awful one looks,’ she wrote in April 1957. ‘Oh well, good for one? No.’ It was the same feeling she had had after 1926: of a terrible divergence between the way she was seen and the way she saw herself. She felt its poignancy as she created girls like the radiant Gina Hudd in They Do It with Mirrors, who says of her beauty: ‘It doesn’t last very long, you know.’ In her secret imaginative self Agatha was still in touch with the Gina she had once been: sitting in her garden at Greenway she felt the presence of the young Miss Miller, sunlit and joyful, within the massive, becalmed woman she had become. Out in the world, this illusion was not really possible. Too much reality obtruded. Thus the fame that exposed and constrained Agatha’s life also became necessary to her, because it brought her the means to be private and free.

  She was secretive too, however, about the cause of the fame: her writing. ‘How on earth is it done?’ said her Penguin publisher and friend Allen Lane,11 in Close Up, a radio programme about Agatha broadcast in 1955. This was, indeed, the question. ‘The time came when we reprinted ten Agatha Christie titles – a hundred thousand of each. We sold something like two and a half million of these ten stories alone. I know, from her output alone, that she is a prodigious worker; and yet I’ve never been conscious of her having done any work at all.’12

  Even her family knew nothing of her writing. ‘She would just announce, at dinner, that she had something to read to us,’ said her son-in-law Anthony, ‘and we’d all groan.’13 Unlike most writers Agatha had no desire to inflict her creative anguish on those around her. She simply disappeared to a room – rarely at Greenway: her books were chiefly written
at Winterbrook or in the East – and got on with it.

  It was impressive, to achieve such a separation, and it had never been Agatha’s way to mystify what she did. Yet somehow this made it all the more mysterious. Although she never again wrote with the fervour of the years around the war, she was still possessed by a creative compulsion; what she called lazy (one book a year) was what most writers would consider highly industrous, particularly when aged over sixty. Writing was the centre of her life, a demonstrable truth that she sought always to deny. In Come, Tell Me How You Live she portrayed herself as a dutiful archaeologist’s wife, and in her autobiography as a very normal person who lived her life, with delighted gusto, and wrote books on the side – such a nuisance! – in order to pay for her pleasures. Dear Agatha, the talented amateur who happened to hit the jackpot and who never thought of herself as a real writer, just a lucky and hard-working craftswoman! What did books matter, compared with cooking meals and going for drives and cleaning ivories with Pond’s cold cream on Max’s digs?