Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  But this was disingenuous: another facet of the construct of ‘Agatha Christie’, the nice ordinary lady who happened to have a talent to deceive. ‘I can’t imagine why I do so much,’ she said, in her 1969 interview with the Observer. ‘Especially as I say, “This is the last one I’ll ever write,” whenever one is finished.’ She also spoke on the 1955 Close Up programme (a safe piece of publicity, presumably, since trusted people like Allen Lane and Richard Attenborough were contributors), saying: ‘I do find that one’s friends are curious about the way one works. “What is your method?” they want to know. Well, the disappointing truth is that I haven’t much method . . . And if you lead a pretty busy life, as I do, it’s very difficult to find a couple of weeks without any interruptions.’

  The guardedness about her writing went deep and was, in its way, another by-product of 1926. She wanted to keep herself hidden from view, in every possible sense. She wrote as ‘Agatha Christie’, which was a formidable protection, and she wrote as ‘Mary Westmacott’, which was a protection until 1949, when the Atticus column in the Sunday Times revealed that she and Agatha were one and the same. This had not been a state secret. Agatha must have known that the story would come out at some time, but she had not wanted it to: the Westmacott reviews tended to be far better than the reviews she got as Agatha Christie, but she did not want them for herself. Up until the end she always insisted that the Westmacotts were marketed separately, as if by a different author; never under the name of Agatha Christie. That would have brought them too close to home.

  She had felt an absolute freedom writing those books. She could go wherever she wanted, into every idea that had ever fascinated her, even into the recesses of her own past. Although she wrote two inferior (but no less interesting) Westmacotts in the 1950s, A Daughter’s a Daughter and The Burden,14 there was a sense that the revelation of her identity had closed a door: the one that opened into her most private and precious imaginative garden. ‘It’s really all washed up,’ she wrote to Cork. Almost all her best writing was done between 1930 and 1950, the years when she sheltered behind the name of her mysterious other self.

  ‘I think people should be interested in books and not their authors!’ So Agatha wrote to Edmund Cork’s daughter, Pat, in 1964. When she spoke about her writing in interviews, it was in the broadest terms. ‘I suppose it’s just like making sauce. Sometimes you get all the ingredients just right.’15 She was giving nothing away – and, indeed, why should she? The only real clues to what she did, and how she did it, come from the evidence of her own writing notebooks. Almost seventy survive and they show that, beneath the pose of ease and amateurishness, she worked extraordinarily hard to shape her plots.

  It is typical that Agatha did not buy notebooks specifically for her own use, but would scribble her ideas anywhere. She used her daughter’s school exercise books (‘Rosalind Christie, Scotswood, Devenish Road, Sunningdale 1925’) and a ‘Cahier d’Agatha Miller’ dated 1907, from her finishing-school in Paris. She jotted ideas between shopping lists, bridge scores or diary entries (‘out to dinner – 8 o’clock Morton’s’). Thoughts on A Caribbean Mystery are interrupted by ‘Peter Tones – kettle, cutlery, two pans’. Before sketching the plot for Curtain she wrote these lines on Peter: ‘You are no longer with us and the days shall go more soberly, my well beloved dog and dearest friend’. ‘Get Petrol Coupons,’ she reminded herself, before launching into a chapter breakdown of Sparkling Cyanide.16 In the middle of detailed notes about poisons she printed pairs of names with the matching letters crossed out to see what remained, and whether the couple was compatible. ‘Archibald Christie’ is paired with ‘Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie’, ‘Archibald’ is paired with ‘Agatha’. She also paired ‘Reginald Lucy’ with ‘Agatha Christie’, perhaps to see if that half-regretted suitor might still prove a good bet as a husband. Among the notes for her very last book, Postern of Fate, she wrote ‘Next make a list of characters’, as if reminding herself of what Agatha Christie did. In between her thoughts is a passage from Psalm 84 and a note about a ‘Paisley dress, hip size 46’, advertised in the Daily Express-. essence of Agatha.

  Agatha was not ritualistic, or ‘writerly’, about her notebooks. She had always been able to write anywhere – on the kitchen table at Addison Mansions with Rosalind in her cot; in a hotel bedroom; on a table in a dig house – and she could write in any kind of exercise book. She never needed a special pen, a particular typewriter, the props that most writers use to ease themselves in. Despite the external separation that Agatha made between work and life, inside there was a constant flow from one to the other.

  Ideas came easily to her: she saw them everywhere. But she went surprisingly round about to find her plots. A reader might imagine that at the heart of her books lay one central twist, or trick, around which a structure was built. In fact the process was more haphazard and empirical. Structure did not come naturally to Agatha; her first book, the teenage novel Snow in the Desert, showed that she could write dialogue and understand human motivation with no trouble at all, but had no idea whatever of how to construct a story. This she learned; but the prevalent belief that she did it mathematically, as if working out an equation, is not really accurate. The finished product might give that impression. The workings out do not. She arrived at her structure rather in the manner of a bird building a nest: taking this, rejecting that, recognising what was needed when she saw it, by some means ending up with a smooth and watertight whole.

  ‘Foreign girl (Yugoslavian) looks after old lady who lives with niece and husband or nephew and wife – She leaves her money to girl (Sonia) – Anger – Suspicion – Evidence against Sonia found.’ Thus Agatha jotted the origins of Hallowe’en Party, adding at the end: ‘Good idea. Needs working out.’

  She collected possibilities, of course. With her notebooks are various cuttings: notes on poisons – pilocarpine has ‘no post-mortem appearance’, thallium ‘similar to chronic arsenical poisoning’; a letter in the British Medical Journal about a patient living for hours after being stabbed;17 a letter from her own solicitors, Hooper and Wollen of Torquay, giving an opinion on the Legitimacy Act 1926;18 a letter from Madge in 1935, giving information she had obtained about insulin – ‘I am very glad, by the way, that your need to know is professional, not personal.’ There are also letters from Agatha’s doctor friends, the McLeods, whom she met in Iraq: ‘Peter is a bit dubious about the Evipan murdering being correct,’ wrote his wife Peggy, in response to a query about Lord Edgware Dies. ‘He says that probably after death it won’t be eliminated and so would be discovered. It is used as a sleeping draught . . .’

  In a notebook from the late 1930s Agatha wrote the heading ‘An Alphabet of Ideas’, an oddly touching challenge to herself to come up with twenty-six possibilities. Some were more substantial than others, but all show that she could see the potential in anything. ‘C’, for example, reads ‘Débutantes – Teas etc – Mothers killed off in rapid succession’, which sheds light on what was going through Agatha’s mind during Rosalind’s season. ‘D. Dangerous drugs stolen from Doctor’s car’ played a small part nearly twenty years later in Hickory Dickory Dock. ‘E. Poirot asked to go down to country – finds a house with a dead man in it and various fantastic details’ was a visual image used in The Hollow. ‘F. Legless man’ and ‘I. Arsenic taken – looks like caviar’ were ideas to which Agatha repeatedly returned, although she could never make them work. ‘J. A murderer – after execution evidence proves he was innocent’ was the central premise of Five Little Pigs. It is interesting that some of her thoughts were extremely macabre – a stabbing through the eye; a steel window shutter acting as a guillotine; a cat with its throat cut – and that they were all discarded.

  Ideas took various forms. Some related to Agatha’s knowledge of poison: ‘The poison that makes everything yellow – applied to dress. V. misleading as another girl had yellow dress.’ Some were connected to place: ‘Caribbean – Miss M – after illness . . . Bogus Major – like a f
rog. He squints’, which became A Caribbean Mystery. Others were about motive. ‘The Rubella Idea’ lay at the heart of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side; ‘Death-Broker idea’ became The Pale Horse.

  Some books came easily. The notes on Lord Edgware Dies are almost identical to the finished article. So too with Evil Under the Sun (‘Scene. Hotel on Island – Bigbury),19 which Agatha sketched to perfection, then tussled with various complicated plot permutations before returning to her original. This was something she did frequently. Her energetic mind was not easily satisfied. What would be best? This? That? Some books cost her agonies before arriving at their eventual form; among these was the boldly conceptual The ABC Murders, whose central idea seems so simple but emerged only from a good deal of muddly thought. They Do It with Mirrors went through several different forms along the way, two of which branched off to become A Pocket Pull of Rye and A Murder is Announced. Third Girl is not an especially complicated book, but Agatha went through pages of notes – even drawing a family tree – in her attempts to build a plot. Among her many thoughts was a twist about a forged will. This was discarded for Third Girl; recycled in Hallowe’en Party.

  Little was wasted, even when Agatha was in her seventies. A 1966 notebook has an idea for ‘The Cyanide Murder’ which was not developed, although its ‘National Trust tour’ setting was used in Nemesis. This was the sensible side of Agatha, completely at odds with the reckless person who travelled the world first-class and owned the majestic Greenway while owing thousands in back tax; the side she had inherited – or learned – from women like her grandmother Margaret Miller, and wrote into her character Lucy Eyelesbarrow, the Oxford graduate who becomes a housekeeper and makes use of leftover potatoes in a Spanish omelette. Agatha refused to be profligate with ideas. She was once asked by a jovial Cecil Day-Lewis (a sometime writer of detective fiction) if she would sell him a few of the ‘seventeen plots’ he believed her to have in hand. ‘Certainly not!’ she replied in the same spirit. ‘I intend to write them myself.’

  She did not need to be given ideas – although on two occasions she accepted them – because they came to her from anything. Taken at the Flood, for example, was another book that went through many changes; its starting-point, noted at least twelve years before the book was written, was simply the name ‘Enoch Arden’.20 Such a slight thing – a quotation, a phrase – could become a hook from which to hang a plot. Ideas in a notebook from February 1937 included: ‘A. “Rose without a thorn” and ‘D. “I’m afraid of being hanged”, which became Sad Cypress and Towards Zero respectively. ‘H. “old lady in train”??’ was probably the origin of Murder is Easy. So, a single page contained the germ of three books. Fragments of dialogue also abound in her notes; they were the connective tissue in her construction, as in these notes on Curtain:

  H[astings], at Styles – has heard about P[oirot]. from Egypt – his arthritis . . .

  ‘I am here because a crime is going to be committed.’

  ‘You are going to prevent it.’

  ‘No – I can’t do that . . . It is certain to happen because the person who has made up his mind will not relent. Listen . . .’

  H. stupefied.

  Agatha did not necessarily know who her murderer would be until some way into the planning of a book. She had worked out much of her plot for Crooked House, for example, before considering where to point the finger of guilt; her old friend the ‘legless man’ also made an appearance:

  Does Lawrence do it – a cripple – really no legs – therefore is always different heights. Better for Pocket Full of Rye – brother who comes from abroad.

  Or shall it be Clemency –

  Dorcas? No. Clemency – Yes. Her motive. Fanatical – slightly

  mad.

  Edith – Yes – possible . . .

  Emma – Yes – Interesting . . .21

  Similarly with Hickory Dickory Dock, ‘Hickory Road – Who is killed? And why?’ Then, when she had her victim: ‘Why did C. have to die? What did she know?’ Her notes on Dead Man’s Folly were even blunter: ‘Who wants to kill who.’ With Mrs. McGinty’s Dead Agatha had her central idea but again no culprit:

  Try-outs. Maureen’s husband did it. His wife – EK’s daughter . . . Does young woman EK’s daughter – prevail upon Robin Upward to kill Mrs McGinty – says she is blackmailing her . . . Maud is Lily Gamboll or Craig child – How about Maud?

  Under the title One, Two, Buckle My Shoe she simply wrote: ‘Who? Why? When? How? Where? Which?’

  Neither was Agatha always sure which of her detectives to use in a book, and quite often she replaced Miss Marple with Poirot: this argues against the prevalent belief that she grew to loathe Poirot. No doubt he was easier to use because, as a proper detective, he could be called into any situation, although the original idea for Cat Among the Pigeons, that Miss Marple should have a relation at the girls’ school where the book is set, was entirely plausible. Death on the Nile was originally a Marple, but this book changed almost completely from its early form and eventually became Appointment with Death.22 The Pale Horse, which has no detective, was also conceived as a Marple story.

  Occasionally Agatha changed her titles – alternatives to The Hollow were ‘Tragic Weekend’ and ‘Return Journey’ – and some of her characters acquired new names along the way. Jacko Argyle, in Ordeal by Innocence, was originally ‘Albert’; Ruby, in The Body in the Library, was ‘Queenie’; Judge Wargrave in And Then There Were None was ‘Mr Justice Swettenham’; Miss Arundell in Dumb Witness was ‘Miss Westmacott’. There was even a ‘Mrs Pooper’ in the original Nile/Appointment plot, a ‘cheap novelist’ who became the character Salome Otterbourne.

  ‘I can’t start writing till I can get names that I feel fit/ she wrote to Edmund Cork; and one of her minor talents was her instinct for the right name, the right book title. Nick Buckley, Elinor Carlisle, Caroline Crale, Lucy Angkatell, Bess Sedgwick, Franklin Clarke, Alistair Blunt, Boyd Carrington, Sir Stafford Nye, Ratchett, Blore: these are all marvellous names, flavoursome but not overdone. She rarely used the names of people she knew – although she did use Devon place names, ‘Luscombe’, ‘Christow’ – but Inspector Neele is an interesting exception;23 he investigates both A Pocket Full of Rye and Third Girl. This went unnoticed, although a Monsieur Nicolétis in France accused Agatha of libelling his mother with the portrayal of the drunk, aggressive Mrs Nicolétis in Hickory, Dickory Dock. (‘I invented the name of Nicolétis!! It’s terrible that if you invent a character it should come out so true to life. Positively uncanny!’)

  Even her apparently banal titles have a power that helped to establish her position as the definitive crime writer: Murder on the Orient Express, Lord Edgware Dies, Death on the Nile. But the title Towards Zero is masterly, as are Dumb Witness, Evil Under the Sun, A Murder is Announced, After the Funeral, Ordeal by Innocence and Nemesis (her titles were frequently changed for the American market, and invariably for the worse). Of course many of her titles are quotations, from Shakespeare, Tennyson, Blake and the Book of Revelation; or from nursery rhymes, a clever idea of which she made considerable use. It tapped into the desire in readers to have murder placed within a contradictory context: the vicarage, the country house, the luxury train. It reassured, but it had a sinister aspect, hinting as it did – literally, in the case of one of her books – at evil lurking within the world of childhood.

  It was also simply clever: clever in a simple way. This was what Agatha could do, and where she differed from a contemporary like Dorothy L. Sayers, who was clever in a complicated and ostentatious way. Sayers would never have invented the murderer who pretends to be a serial killer in order to commit a single murder, or who makes a particular bid in bridge to distract attention from a crime. These coups of Agatha are almost blinding, they are such direct hits; and they cut to the heart of her art. Sayers has coups of her own – the haemophiliac whose condition misleads as to the time of death; the arsenic eater who dines with his victim – but they are presented to the reade
r in a completely different way, with, as it were, the workings-out still visible. Simplicity sets Agatha apart. It was hard won, as her notebooks make clear, but she knew that it was the desired end. The finished product had to be impregnable. Its geometry had to be capable of being turned this way and that, like a jewel in the sunlight. It had to be constructed so that it could be satisfyingly dismantled. Then everything had to be hidden from view.

  Because of her simplicity she has been misunderstood. The removal from her books of any trace of authorial presence; the refusal to admit of any interference between the reader and the genre; the unfathomable gap between the artistic sphere in which her plots have reality, and the real world: these are the things that give her work its translucent, almost mythic quality. And yet, seen from another angle, these qualities become defects: a lack of depth and substance. Nevertheless they were deliberate on her part. She knew perfectly well how to write books that grappled with unfinished, insoluble, raggedy real life; Mary Westmacott has an honourable walk-on part in the story of the twentieth-century novel. But Agatha Christie did not choose to write in that way.

  Among the writers of ‘classic’ detective novels – Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh – Agatha Christie was the only one who did not allow herself to intrude upon her books. Ngaio Marsh, for example, was probably more interested in theatre than in detective fiction, and did not hesitate to make this plain in many of her novels. The books of Dorothy L. Sayers are full of knowledge that is obviously and proudly her own – campanology in The Nine Tailors, the advertising industry in Murder Will Advertise, academic life in Gaudy Nißht – and while this may delight or bore, according to taste, it is also obviously the knowledge of a woman who is amusing herself by writing in a genre when she could (and later would)24 do something more artistically strenuous. Agatha was also capable of doing other things, but she never felt the need to hint at them in her detective fiction: she kept to its limits and never patronised them.