Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  Nor did she invent a detective who was anything other than a function of the genre. Hercule Poirot has a mysterious artistic reality but he is also, and only, a detective: an omniscient brain, a deusex machina, an emblem of impersonal truth. Because of his profession he has a detachment from life (which he is once heard to regret, after reading the first lines of Homer’s Odyssey in The Labours of Hercules: ‘Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him’). Miss Marple, too, lives aside from the world. She is essentially an observer, although she does play a recognisable social role in a way that Poirot does not.

  The other detectives of the classic murder mystery are not so much detached from the world as from the genre they inhabit. They are all surprising people for the job; unlike Poirot, who is a natural. Margery Allingham’s Campion and Ngaio Marsh’s Alleyn are gentlemen, set above their genre by class and, in Alleyn’s case, by an encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and a powerful sex appeal (nobody has ever met a policeman quite like him). Lord Peter Wimsey is also a gentleman, but so much else besides: Balliol scholar, war hero, glass of fashion, advocate of equal rights for women and highly accomplished lover. Midway through his career Sayers gives him a passion for Harriet Vane, an independent-spirited woman who writes detective fiction. A version of her creator, of course, although there is also an intriguing – subconscious? – hint of Agatha. In Strong Poison Harriet is accused of murdering her lover; she is triumphantly acquitted, but her reputation suffers for some years afterwards. At the time of the trial it is said that ‘The wretched woman’s sales are going up by leaps and bounds’, and another character offers the opinion ‘that the whole thing is a publicity stunt gone wrong’. Being tried on a capital charge is not at all the same thing as disappearing for eleven days, but in both cases the women were innocent of the central charges against them and guilty of more minor sins. And there is something of Agatha during the period after 1926 in Have His Carcase, which depicts Harriet’s life after her acquittal: in that book she is portrayed as ‘scathed and embittered’, bracing herself for recognition every time she gives her name. At the same time she has never been more successful: ‘Harriet Vane thrillers were booming.’

  Wimsey, who falls in love with Harriet despite the scandal, is Dorothy L. Sayers’s ideal man (her crush on him caused much mirth among her fellow members of the Detection Club), and it seems that the female crime writer does tend to invest her detective with the qualities she admires in a man. She also uses him as a symbol of her own literary ambition, which goes way beyond the limitations of the genre. Wimsey is far too deep and sensitive a person to inhabit the world of detective fiction; so is P. D. James’s Adam Dalgieish, a highly romantic figure with a tragic past and a poetic gift; so, too, Ruth Rendell’s Wexford, a broad-minded liberal with a complex family life and a deep love of English literature. They are all too good to be detectives; all too good for the genre; all, that is, except Poirot. He alone is happy in his world.

  So was his creator. This was not lack of ambition on Agatha’s part: it was simply her instinct. She could always do more than she let on, but she did not want to draw attention to the fact. For reasons that were both personal and artistic, she liked to subsume herself within the genre. When she invented complex characters – like Henrietta Savernake in The Hollow or the Crales in Five Little Pigs – she did not allow them to cloud the shining simplicity. When she dealt in complex themes – like the nature of justice in Murder on the Orient Express – she refused to explore them outside the geometry.

  It is, very often, women who write (and read) these books; but Agatha, for all her genteel settings, domestic detail and unwillingness to describe physical violence, was probably the least feminine of any of the writers of classic detective fiction. Usually there is a sense that female crime writers are using the genre because it is fantastical and safe. It enables them to go so far, in their contemplation of death, and sex and darkness, then to be thankfully reined in again; it enables them to explore relationships within a grid, a pattern, rather than in the vast expanses opened up by ordinary fiction; it allows the creation of an idealised figure, the detective, whom they can colour in with whatever characteristics they choose; it allows them to transcend the genre as much and as cleverly as they wish in the comforting knowledge that it will, in the end, provide a literary safety-net. However much depth is put into a piece of detective fiction, it will never have the power that it would within a straight novel: it will always be bound within the rules of its world. That is the delight and limitation of the genre; for both writer and reader.

  Agatha worked with it rather than against it. She accepted and embraced its impersonal structure. She did not want to be like Dorothy Sayers, making herself vulnerable, even ridiculous, as she paraded too much of her knowledge and her unfulfilled passions. If Agatha revealed herself she would do so either under another name or within a highly controlled environment: the impregnable world of ‘Agatha Christie’.

  In 1966, Francis Wyndham wrote in the Sunday Times, ‘Agatha Christie epitomises the “cosy” school of crime fiction.’ All classic detective fiction is ‘cosy’, up to a point, but there is no doubt that she came to symbolise the genre. She acknowledged as much when she wrote The Body in the Library, a title that comes close to being ironic. She was also, of course, a mystery in her own right. Although it had not been her intention, the 1926 disappearance had fixed her in the public mind as a woman whose smiling façade concealed impenetrable depths.

  This was the real point about her image. It became synonymous with what she wrote. ‘Agatha Christie’ became the living definition of classic English mystery fiction: the respectable veneer that hides the mayhem beneath. ‘While Mrs Christie looks and dresses like a happy provincial matron who has experienced nothing worse than the thunderstorm which wrecked the flower show, she has, in fact, been getting away with murder,’ wrote the Daily Express in 1950. This was the way she wanted to present herself, because it protected her so completely from view. But the image took on a greater significance. It came to embody the very idea of English murder.

  Raymond West waved murder away with his cigarette. ‘Murder is so crude,’ he said. ‘I take no interest in it.’

  That statement did not take me in for a moment. They say all the world loves a lover – apply that saying to murder and you have an even more infallible truth.

  So wrote Agatha Christie in The Murder at the Vicarage, published in 1930, five years after the period delineated by George Orwell as the golden era of murder: ‘our Elizabethan period’, as he calls it drily, in his essay ‘Decline of the English Murder’.25 For him English murder was at its most fascinating between 1850 and 1925, a span of time that takes in cases like those of Constance Kent, Charles Bravo, Madeleine Smith, Frederick Seddon, Hawley Harvey Crippen, George Joseph Smith, Herbert Armstrong and Thompson-Bywaters.

  Orwell viewed such murder cases with a mesmerised artistic eye, as a perverse symbol of middle England. He saw in them an irreducible paradox, because they used the ultimate act of disorder as a means to maintain the status quo: for example, murder committed in order to get money to maintain the life one had before the murder. This was murder for gain, the favoured Christie motive. Like Orwell, though, Agatha was also intrigued by the notion of guilty passion leading people into an impossible situation from which the easiest means of escape becomes murder. The motivation is the desire to preserve appearances, to keep everything as it was; as Orwell put it, ‘not to forfeit one’s social position by some scandal such as a divorce’.

  Crippen is the template of the Orwellian murderer. Married to a lascivious harridan, he fell for his quiet and ladylike secretary, Ethel le Neve, but divorce in 1909, from a partner who was determined not to agree to it, was a near-impossibility. Crippen took the other escape route. After burying his wife under the cellar he told their friends that she had gone on a trip to America and, yes, of course, he would send her their regards. Then he looked forw
ard to a life of bliss with Miss le Neve. This would have been the kind of murder of which Archie Christie was suspected in 1926; and which, according to Unfinished Portrait, Agatha feared briefly he might commit.

  The Thompson-Bywaters murder was born of a similar situation. Edith Thompson, whose husband was stabbed in 1922 by her young lover, had no hand in the actual crime. But she was certainly guilty of wanting to keep up her respectable lifestyle while conducting a romantic affair; an untenable situation which eventually led Bywaters to commit his crime passionel. Unless her husband had been amenable to divorce – which, like Cora Crippen, he emphatically was not – Mrs Thompson could not leave him without losing her reputation, her job and, although she earned more than her husband, her comfortable Edwardian villa in the then genteel suburb of Ilford. She was stuck, because divorce was simply too difficult to deal with. It required her to lose too much. And, human nature being what it is, she was not prepared to give up her lover either. For those who wanted – in the cheap phrase – ‘to have it all’, murder was often quite simply the only option.

  ‘He wanted to marry the girl, you see. She’s very respectable and so is he. And besides, he’s devoted to his children and didn’t want to give them up. He wanted everything, his home, his children, his respectability and Elsie. And the price he would have to pay for that was murder.’ So says Miss Marple in The Moving Finger, in a passage that might well be called the sacred text of English murder.

  It is the ordinariness that is at the heart of it: Crippen standing outside his front door in Hilldrop Crescent, waving to his neighbours, chatting politely about the wife whose body lay a few feet away from them. ‘Most of the interest and part of the terror of great crime are due not to what is abnormal, but to what is normal in it,’ wrote Filson Young in his essay on Crippen.26 That is what fascinated Agatha, the same tension that Orwell described, between the life that goes on as before and the terrible unseen rupture at its heart. George Joseph Smith marrying yet another wife, standing at the altar, smiling happily, one part of his mind fixed upon the moment when he will drag her feet up from the bottom of the bath and let her head go under; Herbert Armstrong strutting along the streets of Wye, the local solicitor saying his good mornings, with a neat little packet of arsenic in his pocket. It is called ‘cosy’, this distancing of death by turning it into stories, dressing it up in frock coats and cloche hats, focusing on the quotidian to accentuate all the more the one moment in the day that is not ordinary, not familiar, that is a small black impenetrable mystery. It is childish, in a way: Grimm’s fairytales for grown-ups. Real death, real murder, is not English murder: it is dirty and smeared and grief-stricken. We know that. But the other is irresistible because it is a story: a story that follows the rules of behaviour so perfectly in every way bar one, and leaves the human dynamic so beautifully plain to see.

  In English murder, motive is always at the heart of the matter. It is money, or it is passion, or it is fear: it is the ordinary made extreme. This was what interested Agatha. Murder without recognisable motive, human motive, ordinary motive, meant nothing to her.

  Hence her lifelong obsession with the Croydon murders – the members of the Duff family, in and out of the kitchen, talking about everyday things, one of them with the hidden intent to kill – and, later, the unsolved Bravo case, about which she wrote a letter to Francis Wyndham which was published in 1968, in the Sunday Times magazine. ‘I myself think it was Dr Gully who killed Charles Bravo.’ There were two other chief suspects, the wife Florence and the companion Mrs Cox. All three had opportunity, so Agatha considered the far more interesting question of human nature: ‘I’ve always felt that he [Gully] was the only person who had an overwhelming motive and who was the right type: exceedingly competent, successful, and always considered above suspicion.’ Agatha dismissed Florence Bravo because she ‘had all the money’ and thus no motive: ‘She always had the whiphand.’ Mrs Cox was ‘an obvious suspect at first glance, but not when you look into it – a timid and prudent character’.

  ‘The Bravo idea – would entail woman widow having affair with a doctor’ was an idea jotted in one of Agatha’s notebooks, but she did not develop it. However, both the Croydon and the Bravo cases were in Agatha’s mind when she conceived Ordeal by Innocence, the story of a family thrown into turmoil when a murder case, considered solved, is reopened and they are forced to consider which of them might have killed Rachel Argyle, wife and adoptive mother to four children.

  It reminds me, you know, of the Bravo Case . . . no one now can ever know the truth. And so Florence Bravo, abandoned by her family, died alone of drink, and Mrs Cox, ostracised, and with three little boys, lived to be an old woman with most of the people she knew believing her to be a murderess, and Dr Gully was ruined professionally and socially – Someone was guilty – and got away with it. But the others were innocent – and didn’t get away with anything.

  Agatha also alluded to the Crippen case: directly, but glancingly, in one of the short stories in The Labours of Hercules, which contains the line ‘I’ve always wondered if Ethel le Neve was in it with him or not.’27 Perhaps the answer to this question is given in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead. Mrs McGinty is murdered because she has recognised someone in her village from a newspaper cutting, a ‘Where Are They Now?’ story relating to four murderesses. One of the cases in the newspaper is clearly based upon Crippen and le Neve. ‘Craig’ kills his wife, is hanged for the crime and protects his mistress, ‘Eva Kane’, throughout the trial, but the story makes plain that she had encouraged the idea of murder.

  In Crooked House there are echoes of the Thompson-Bywaters murder: an actress, Magda Leonides, hopes to play the part of Edith Thompson in a new play. Occasional references are made to this and it becomes a delicate motif throughout. When a cache of love letters is found, written by Brenda, the young wife of the victim, anyone familiar with the Thompson-Bywaters case will recognise the allusion: Edith Thompson was convicted of conspiracy to murder almost solely on the evidence of her letters to Frederick Bywaters.

  I was thinking of the desperate terror on Brenda’s face. It had seemed familiar to me and suddenly I realised why. It was the same expression that I had seen on Magda Leonides’ face the first day I had come to the Crooked House when she had been talking about the Edith Thompson play.

  ‘And then,’ she had said, ‘sheer terror, don’t you think so?’

  A detective novel by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Documents in the Case, is also – as the title implies – reminiscent of the Thompson-Bywaters case. In it, a character makes this remarkable little speech:

  ‘The suburbs are the only places left where men and women will die and persecute for their beliefs . . . the blessed people of the suburbs – they do believe in something. They believe in Respectability. They’ll lie, die, commit murder to keep up appearances. Look at Crippen. Look at Bywaters. Look at the man who hid his dead wife in a bath and ate his meals on the lid for fear somebody should suspect a scandal. My God!’

  It is not entirely superficial, this idea of the English murder. It is not merely cosy, this fascination with an ordered universe in which a disordered act is committed and hopes to go unnoticed. It is a fascination with people, in the end. People are not just their emotions: they are the interplay between their inner and outer selves; and this is what English murder distils to its essence. It is what Agatha Christie distilled.

  She did have a ‘knack’ for creating puzzles. She had a brain that seized upon potential plots. She had a conceptual daring that enabled her to imagine a different kind of solution, wherein the culprit was not simply one of a set of possible suspects, as in almost every other example of crime fiction. With her, the solution was not merely a question of one guilty party among a cast of innocents: it could be everybody, or nobody, or a child, or the apparent victim: the surprise was not in ‘who did it’, but in the possibilities within the very idea of the solution.

  Because of her facility – which nonetheless did not come easily –
and her unusual clarity of exposition, Agatha Christie has been regarded as a craftsperson rather than a writer. She herself used this description in her autobiography. When she was awarded the CBE in 1956 (‘It ought to have been at least a damedom!’ wrote Edmund Cork), she replied: ‘I feel it’s one up to the Low Brows!!’ But this was another example of the disingenuous persona that she adopted, very much at odds with the possessive pride in her work that she displayed in much of her correspondence with her literary agent. ‘I’m not just a performing dog for you all,’ she wrote in 1966. ‘I’m the writer.’28

  But it is as the performing dog that she is seen. ‘Agatha Christie writes animated algebra,’ wrote Francis Wyndham, in his essentially admiring and perceptive 1966 piece. ‘[She] keeps her distance, according to the rules of a craft which she herself laid down and seldom breaks. This best of all sellers is abstract, enigmatic, logical and completely ruthless.’ Other commentators have said the same thing in less flattering terms. ‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ was the famous question posed by Edmund Wilson in 1944, who wrote an essay dissecting the entire genre and – according to a Times column written by Bernard Levin in 1977 ‘found not one of the books worth the time of an intelligent adult. Nor are they, for they are really nothing more than a verbal equivalent of those bent-steel puzzles in which the two bits of tangled metal look inextricably joined until you twist them so . . . when they come apart without further difficulty.’ Agatha Christie, wrote Levin, was the best of them, but such praise meant quite literally nothing. He would have agreed with Agatha’s so-called friend Robert Graves (who in fact preferred the company of Max Mallowan), who praised her books to her face and behind it stated that ‘her English was schoolgirlish, her situations for the most part artificial, and her detail faulty’.29