Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  In 1958 Raymond Chandler wrote to a French literary critic, Robert Campigny: ‘The idea that Mrs Christie baffles her readers without trickery seems almost impossible for me to believe. Isn’t it true to say that rather she creates her surprises by destroying the portrait of a character or of a person in a novel whom she has up to this point depicted in colours completely opposed to the finished portrait?’ Chandler was irritated by Agatha Christie, whose And Then There Were None had been sold to him as ‘the perfect crime story’ but which he found full of impossibilities.

  I’m very glad I’ve read the book because it finally and for all time settled a question in my mind that had at least some lingering doubt attached to it [he wrote to a friend in 1940]. Whether it is possible to write a strictly honest mystery of the classic type. It isn’t. To get the complication you fake the clues, the timing, the play of coincidence, assume certainties where only fifty % chances exist at most. To get the surprise murderer you fake character, which hits me hardest of all, because I have a sense of character . . .

  Since then Agatha has been described by other crime writers in similar terms. According to Julian Symons, she wrote ‘riddles rather than books’. H. R. F. Keating said of her: ‘She never tried to be clever in her writing, only ingenious in her plots.’ Even admiration was expressed with reservations. But in 1992 the criticism got nasty, reflecting a growing view that she was outdated to the point of offensiveness: a Channel Four television programme, J’Accuse, took the view that Agatha Christie had murdered the genre, no less. She ‘was a killer, and her victim was the British crime novel’, as the writer Michael Dibdin put it.

  Her aim was to fool the readers, and she sacrificed everything to achieve it. The plots in Christie’s novels were all basically the same – an ill-assortment of people gathered at an out-of-the-way place where a murder takes place. The characters were all generalised types. There were never any complex psychological characters. They were devoid of any emotional depth. Her books were artificially pure, and she ignored the problems faced by society.

  He went on to make the accusations of snobbery and xenophobia that have frequently been levelled. On the same programme, Ruth Rendell said: ‘When I read one of her books, I don’t feel as though I have a piece of fiction worthy of the name in front of me. With death, I do feel there should be an element of shock and horror and pain – but pain and passion aren’t there in Agatha Christie novels.’

  Agatha had a cold eye, for sure. The ‘Rubella Idea’ that she jotted in her notebooks is one whose real-life origin can be identified: it came from the pharmacist with whom she worked in the Second World War, whose daughter was registered blind, the victim of German measles. Agatha was extremely kind to this child and gave her as a gift a Manchester terrier bred by Rosalind; at the same time, part of her mind was ticking away on what would later become The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. This book – in which a child is born imbecilic as a result of its mother having contracted German measles – was uneasily received by her American agency, which thought the subject matter potentially offensive:30 ‘It was out for the women’s magazines,’ Edmund Cork wrote with reference to the serialisation market. But this would not have stopped Agatha writing the book. ‘She was a tough old lady in that regard,’ says P. D. James.31 ‘She’s perhaps the only writer who would have a child as a murderer, and quite happy to have a child murdered. Most of us would shy away from that. But she doesn’t. Anybody could be murdered in Agatha Christie, and anybody was.’

  P. D. James does not take quite the same view as most of the crime-writing fraternity – or sorority – although she does see Agatha Christie’s plots as frequently absurd. ‘I particularly like – from the point of view of incredibility – The Body in the Library. Now here we are expected to believe that this blonde dancer who they wanted to get out of the way (and they could quite easily have murdered the old man, put a pillow over his face) – instead we have this extraordinary plot in which they kidnap a Girl Guide who doesn’t look anything like her . . . For one thing the time sequence is impossible. Any woman would know that to dye a brunette blonde you’ve got to bleach the hair first, and it would take hours and be quite a skilled job. The pathologist would know just by looking at the other hair on her body that this is not a natural blonde! But of course there isn’t a pathologist . . . But that doesn’t matter, because we are in Christie Land. We’re not dealing with reality. We’re dealing with a different form of reality.’

  This, of course, is the point; and a rather more subtle point than it is generally allowed to be. ‘Christie Land’ is all too often understood in the most banal possible terms, not as an artistic construct but as a stage set. Agatha Christie is stuck for all eternity at a tea-party in a country vicarage, sticking a fork into her seedcake as the bank manager’s wife chokes on a strychnine sandwich. Around her the real world turns, but she remains fixed in 1932: a time when servants were adenoidal, ladies never showed their feelings in public and Jews had to be asked for the weekend, damn them.

  The J’Accuse criticisms are not without substance. Ideas that range free in the Mary Westmacott books are clipped to the demands of detective fiction; while The Rose and the Yew Tree examines the issue of class with an open, questing mind, Agatha Christie deploys what would now be called snobbishness without a second thought. In The Body in the Library, for example, a young hotel dancer is taken up by a rich old man in the weeks before her murder, much to the horror of the old man’s family, to whom she was a ‘common little piece’ on the make. When her body is found, the dead girl is wearing an old white dress; from this Miss Marple deduces that she was not prepared to go on a date, else her clothes would have been new. ‘A well bred girl’, she explains, ‘is always very particular to wear the right clothes for the right occasion. I mean, however hot the day was, a well bred girl would never turn up at a point to point in a silk flowered frock. [But] Ruby, of course, wasn’t – well, to put it bluntly – Ruby wasn’t a lady. She belonged to the class that wear their best clothes however unsuitable to the occasion.’

  In real life Agatha probably was something of a snob; even people who liked her will say so. She was not offensively snobbish, and she could empathise with those who, like working-class Michael in Endless Night, see life from the other side. But she had grown up with social hierarchies and preferred to maintain them (‘Life is so hard without SERVANTS!’ she wrote in the 1930s). Fond though she was of both Charlotte Fisher and Edmund Cork, in a sense she still saw them as staff.

  More serious are the frequently levelled accusations of xenophobia, even racism. This last chiefly derives from the original title of And Then There Were None: somewhat absurd, as in 1938 ‘Ten Little Niggers’ was simply the name of a nursery rhyme. But by the 1960s the title had become decidedly offensive – as, albeit less so, was its replacement title, Ten Little Indians – and when the play of the book was staged in Birmingham in 1966, placards reading ‘Contemptuous Reference to Coloured People’ were held outside the theatre.32 More damningly, Agatha’s books do harbour some highly unfortunate references to black people. ‘I’m not a damned nigger,’ says a drunk young man in Lord Edypmre Dies and, in Death in the Clouds, a young couple agree that they ‘disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants and negroes’. Hickory Dickory Dock also has a ‘Mr Akibombo’ whose primitive speech patterns would certainly offend modern sensitivities, although Agatha herself had no such intention (‘There’s no feelings of that sort [racial] here amongst the students, and Sally certainly isn’t like that. She and Mr Akibombo have lunch together quite often, and nobody could be blacker than he is.’)

  When Agatha was a child her father, Frederick Miller, wrote a short story called ‘Jenkins Gives a Dinner’. It contains, within its depiction of New York club life, a description of a game in which the young blue bloods of the Union Club gamble on the number of black people walking up or down the street outside: the game is called ‘Nigger Up, Nigger Down’.

  In other words, Agatha was born in
to a world that thought this way and said such things. ‘It really is so silly!’ she replied to Edmund Cork, who before the 1962 revival of the play had written, ‘We have had a spot of bother over the title.’ But a late poem called ‘Racial Musings’ proves that her casual prejudices had no real or lasting substance; in it she takes issue with the white man for his ‘unpigmented pride’.

  It was probably her remarks against Jews, however, that got her into most trouble. After the war, complaints were made to both Collins and Dodd Mead, her American publishers, and in 1947 an official objection was sent to Dodd Mead by the Anti-Defamation League, Edmund Cork did not tell Agatha of the extent of the problem although in 1953 he wrote to his American counterpart, Harold Ober, saying, ‘Yes, by all means authorise Dodd to omit the word “Jew” when it refers to an unpleasant character in future books.’ It has been noted in Agatha’s defence that the Westmacott novel Giant’s Bread presents a sympathetic Jewish character, Sebastian Levinne, who ‘had always had that curious maturity of outlook which is the Semitic inheritance’. Two years later, however, in Lord Edgware Dies, she had a character make reference to ‘the fair (I beg her pardon, dark) Rachel in her box at Covent Garden’, whose ‘long Jewish nose is quivering with emotion’.

  In real life Agatha was no serious anti-Semite; she would not, like others of her class, have enjoyed the ambassadorial hospitality of von Ribbentrop. In 1933 she had met a Nazi in the unlikely setting of Baghdad. The Director of Antiquities, an apparently highly civilised man, was playing the piano when he suddenly reacted to a casual reference to Jews: ‘They should be exterminated. Nothing else will really do but that.’ She was shocked to the core by this although, rather amazingly, it did not put a stop to the cheap anti-Semitism in her books: The Hollow contains a lisping ‘Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake’. Perhaps this proves, as nothing else could, how meaningless such references really were.

  Of course Agatha was not alone in writing these things (‘Mr Antoine . . . was rather surprisingly neither Jew nor South-American dago, nor Central European mongrel,’ wrote Dorothy L. Sayers, in the Wimsey novel Have His Carcase). But she fails when measured against contemporary levels of prejudice, which we believe to be lower although they are, on the whole, merely different. According to modern judgements, a person is the sum of their opinions; Agatha might have made crass remarks about Jews or blacks or servants but it would never have occurred to her that conclusions about her own character might be drawn from this, any more than from her relaxed and ‘liberal’ portrayal of a lesbian couple in A Murder is Announced. To her, life was not so simple. She loathed what would now be called – in the convenient shorthand – political correctness, the belief systems that give the illusion of thought to stupid people (‘Don’t you think you go in too much for labels?’ says Hilary Craven in Destination Unknown, as another character spouts about Communism and Fascism). Agatha knew that human nature would always, in the end, resist ideology and false solutions. As a very old woman she tried to vote against British entry into the European Community, believing the whole thing a doomed and unnecessary enterprise; an opinion that many now share (although at the time Max convinced her to change her mind). In ‘Racial Musings’ she wrote: ‘Some think, and more than one/That coffee-coloured children meet the case’. But she could not bear the vision of a future in which the divine human muddle has been tidied up in the name of ‘progress’. ‘Oh, coffee-coloured world/You’ll be a BORE.’

  For all that she was a product of her background, Agatha was also a creature of her time: she engaged deeply with the middle years of the twentieth century. ‘Agatha Christie’ may be fossilised in time but Agatha herself was not. She wrote about the world she lived in: about class mobility in Endless Night, political fanaticism in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Destination Unknown and The Clocks.; the effects of war in Taken at the Flood, The 4.50 from Paddington and A Murder is Announced; social engineering in They Do It with Mirrors.; virtual reality in At Bertram’s Hotel; café culture in The Pale Horse; drug culture in Third Girl; changing attitudes towards the death penalty, heredity, the nature of justice, guilt and criminal responsibility. She did not draw attention to the fact that she was writing about these things. That was not her way. Nor did she particularly agree with much contemporary thinking, even though she engaged with it. She was still, at root, a late Victorian who believed in God and the human spirit rather than ‘ideas’.

  In Appointment with Death, for example, she dealt in some depth with the fashionable notion of the subconscious mind. An eager young doctor sees it as a problem to be solved – the ‘modern’ view – but her older counterpart knows better.

  ‘There are such strange things buried down in the unconscious. A lust for power – a lust for cruelty – a savage desire to tear and rend – all the inheritance of our past racial memories . . . They are all there, Miss King, all the cruelty and savagery and lust. . . We shut the door on them and deny them conscious life, but sometimes – they are too strong.’

  Then he goes on, developing his theme to take in the dangerous political nonsense spoken in the pre-war years:

  ‘We see it all round us today – in political creeds, in the conduct of nations. A reaction from humanitarianism – from pity – from brotherly goodwill. The creeds sound well sometimes – a wise regime – a beneficent government – but imposed by force – resting on a basis of cruelty and fear. They are opening the door, these apostles of violence, they are letting out the old savagery, the old delight in cruelty for its own sake! Oh, it is difficult – Man is an animal very delicately balanced. He has one prime necessity – to survive. To advance too quickly is as fatal as to lag behind. He must survive! He must, perhaps, retain some of the old savagery, but he must not – no definitely he must not – deify it! ’

  This, in 1938, was really rather prescient. But because it was written by ‘Agatha Christie’, it was not noticed as such. It was subsumed within the whole, the construct. Yet this was one of the moments when Agatha herself was briefly glimpsed from behind her persona. There are many such examples – most of them, again, hidden from view – such as this in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe:

  ‘If I was ruined and disgraced – the country, my country was hit as well. For I’ve done something for England, Monsieur Poirot. I’ve held it firm and kept it solvent. It’s free from Dictators – from Fascism and from Communism . . . I do like power – I like to rule – but I don’t want to tyrannise . . . We’re free. I care for all that – it’s been my life work.’

  These were Agatha’s beliefs, unchanging within the fluidity of her imagination and the upheavals of her century. They are the still centre of ‘Agatha Christie’: without them the construct would have crumbled long ago, like the fake Edwardian façade of Bertram’s Hotel.

  But at the heart was her fascination with human nature. This is the great joke: Agatha Christie was not interested in murder. She was interested in ‘English murder’, which is a different thing, relating to the human dynamic rather than the act of violence. She has been criticised for failing to show the effects of murder, the blood and gore and grief; but naturally she does not show these things, because they were not her subject. Similarly it has been said that the murders she describes could never happen in actuality. In real life, nobody would kill by dropping a quern through a window on to their victim’s head; they would not give themselves an alibi by having their wife masquerade as a dead body; nor would they plan a murder by running around a ship deck then shooting themselves in the leg to appear incapacitated: these things cannot happen. But then, Agatha never thought they could. Why would anyone imagine that she intended these plots to be seen as credible events? They were ‘animated algebra’, a puzzle to be solved.

  Raymond Chandler’s criticisms of And Then There Were None33are totally accurate: ‘It is as complete and shameless a bamboozling of the reader as ever was perpetrated. And I won’t go into the mechanism of the crimes, most of which were predicated on pure chance, a
nd some actually impossible.’ All true. But all, in a way, sublimely irrelevant. The puzzle in Agatha Christie has nothing to do with the actual fact of murder: the fact that a murder might be a physical near-impossibility does not affect the puzzle. It is there to be solved, not to be compared with reality. And what is being solved is not the act of murder, but the human dynamic. That is where the reader seeks clarity: within the suspects, the characters, the people.

  Now this, of course, is the opposite of the accepted view, which says that Agatha Christie writes brilliant puzzles devoid of insight into either emotion or character. Her books are still read because readers want to solve the puzzle; having done so, they do not read the book again; or, if they do, it is because they are guiltily fascinated by the image of a vanished era in which servants are adenoidal, ladies never show their feelings in public etc., etc.

  And yet: how can this be true? How can these books have survived, when clever detective writers like John Dickson Carr (creator of the ‘locked-room’ mysteries), Margery Allingham (capable of a stylish phrase: ‘He looked proudly puzzled, like a spaniel which has unexpectedly retrieved a dodo’) and even Sayers (excellent, in her singular fashion) are no longer part of the common currency? Can it really be due to the quality of the puzzle, when half the world knows that the narrator did it, they all did it or the policeman did it? Might it not be due to something else, something within the puzzle, invisible most of the time and yet sensed, all the same?

  Is it not that the quality of Agatha’s imagination – so powerful in her other writings – underpins this disciplined geometric structure, and makes it durable? ‘All the time, yes, we get the sense that there’s rather more there than is apparent,’ says P. D. James, whose book A Certain Justice is based upon an identical idea to Murder on the Orient Express. Both books turn upon the vexed question of justice versus legality: an insoluble question, within books that demand solutions. If the murderer of a child has escaped prosecution, do the child’s connections have the right to exact justice? In A Certain Justice this idea is expanded into a novel – realistic, detailed, very fine – in which the solution of the ‘puzzle’ plays a minor and deliberately sidelined part; in Orient Express the puzzle and its solution are the novel, the mythic resonance of the theme barely sketched but present in the structure, the plot, the very bones of the book. Of course ‘they were all in it’: what other solution could be possible, or could give the necessary satisfaction, in this book of Agatha’s?