Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  When she is working at her best – by no means always the case – the satisfaction of the solution is intense and profound, because it solves the puzzle and resolves the human dynamic. In a book like Five Little Pigs, the plot shadows the characters so closely that the workings of the mystery are the workings of human nature, and the solution depends entirely upon the revealed truth of human nature. What a magnificent premise, that a painter should be killed because his model has fallen in love with him, and he is pretending to be in love with her because he wants to finish his painting! A remarkable, satisfying idea. Not real, but true.

  And then the idea that lies within the plot of Towards Zero: the urge for revenge by a husband upon the wife who left him for another man. He commits a murder for no other reason than to have his ex-wife hanged for it. A powerful, violent, sick idea, not described as such because Agatha did not do that; she simply let the idea become the plot. Towards Zero (in which the film director Claude Chabrol34 saw possibilities) is the sort of book that might have been imagined by Ruth Rendell, who would certainly have probed more deeply into the darkness and perversity of the motive. The character of Nevile Strange, the murderer, would have been written very differently. Ruth Rendell would have laid bare the inner workings of his psyche; Agatha Christie does no such thing, and because she merely presents a man like Nevile, rather than analysing him, she is said to be unable to create fully rounded people. With Nevile Strange she does indeed, as Raymond Chandler wrote, ‘fake character’. Nevile is a gentleman tennis player, a rich and smiling amateur, the kind of person whom Christie’s detractors would accuse her of favouring on purely snob grounds. In fact she is penetrating the gentlemanly persona with cool-eyed accuracy. Nevile uses his ‘good-loser’ act to conceal the fact that he actually cannot bear to lose; beneath layers of well-bred concealment he is desperate to settle the score with his ex-wife, and his public image helps him to do so. So it is not Agatha Christie, but Nevile himself, who is faking character; insofar as that phrase means anything at all.

  Is character really only revealed through ‘inner workings’? Surely not; surely this is an absurd idea, positively sixth-form, thrown at Agatha Christie by critics who disapprove of her on other grounds. ‘She sometimes might be apparendy simplistic in her characterisation, that doesn’t mean to say that it’s not true characterisation,’ says P. D. James. Stereotypes, her detractors say: ‘but then, many people are types’, as Bevis Hillier wrote in his 1999 essay on Christie. And, as with Nevile Strange, the books are at least as intent upon subverting stereotypes as upholding them: in fact Agatha Christie often uses stereotypes to mislead us, because she knows that we believe in them, or at least that we believe her to believe in them. In Evil Under the Sun the line throughout is that the murdered vamp Arlena has been killed in consequence of her irresistibility to men. In fact, as Hercule Poirot realises, the opposite is the truth. ‘I saw her very differently. It was not she who fatally attracted men – it was men who fatally attracted her. She was the type of woman whom men care for easily and of whom they as easily tire . . . Arlena dies because she is rendered vulnerable by her need for male affirmation of her beauty: flattery renders her helpless in every sense.

  It is simply clever, this inversion of the cliché, but it is so much more than that. This twist of Agatha’s upon the femme fatale is also the truth: women like Arlena are not so much predators as prey. And so the twist slots the whole book into position. It solves the puzzle because it solves the character: that is why it is satisfying.

  It also tends to go unnoticed, because the writer has no especial desire to draw attention to it. This, again, is a function of Agatha Christie’s supremely deceptive simplicity. Whereas in Ruth Rendell – a writer whom the modern world admires – the mysteries of character are the object of morbid scrutiny, in Agatha Christie they are a given: she assumes we know the ways of the world. For all her so-called ‘cosiness’, she is a sophisticate. Adultery, for example, is taken for granted. Henrietta Savernake is not condemned in any way for her love affair with John Christow. In The Mysterious Affair at Styles it is accepted that both partners in the central marriage are amusing themselves elsewhere. In Sparkling Cyanide there is no question but that the young, beautiful Rosemary Barton will cheat on her older, duller husband (‘He’d schooled himself to accept – incidents!’). Nor does being capable of adultery necessarily make somebody capable of murder. Agatha might allow her experiences to cast shadows in her books but she could always detach from them: they infused, but did not influence, what she wrote. It has been said that she had a tendency to cast Archie-types in the role of killer, though it is hard to see where this idea came from. It is simply not the kind of thing she did.

  If Agatha Christie could accept human fallibility as a fact of life so, too, could her detectives. In Five Little Pigs Poirot says: ‘Me, I lead a very moral life. That is not quite the same thing as having moral ideas.’ In Sleeping Murder Miss Marple is accused of being a ‘wonderful cynic’, to which she replies: ‘Oh dear, Mr Reed, I do hope not that. One always has hope for human nature.’

  Both, however, are unambiguous in their condemnation of murder. Only in Murder on the Orient Express does Poirot decide that it is excusable to kill; only in Curtain does he display ambivalence. Otherwise it is as he always says: ‘I do not approve of murder.’ Miss Marple is stronger still. ‘Really, I feel quite pleased to think of him being hanged,’ she says, at the end of The Body in the Library.

  Poirot is tempted by the arguments of the banker Alistair Blunt in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, who pleads that he has committed murder for the sake of his country, and should be let off for the same reason: ‘If I went – well, you know what would probably happen. I’m needed, Monsieur Poirot. And a damned double crossing, blackmailing rogue of a Greek was going to destroy my life work.’ Poirot agrees. He believes in the politics of conservative solvency, and fears a world without them (this book was written in 1939). Yet he speaks in his creator’s voice when he says that nonetheless Blunt must be called to account.

  ‘You are a man of great natural honesty and rectitude. You took one step aside – and outwardly it has not affected you . . . But within you the love of power grew to overwhelming heights. So you sacrificed four human lives and thought them of no account.’

  ‘Don’t you realise, Poirot, that the safety and happiness of the whole nation depends on me?’

  ‘I am not concerned with nations, Monsieur. I am concerned with the lives of private individuals who have the right not to have their lives taken from them.’

  Poirot is troubled by the arrest of Alistair Blunt; he has real sympathy for Jacqueline de Bellefort in Death on the Nile.

  ‘Don’t mind so much, M. Poirot! About me, I mean. You do mind, don’t your’

  ‘Yes, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t have occurred to you to let me off?’

  Hercule Poirot said quietly, ‘No.’

  She nodded her head in quiet agreement.

  ‘No, it’s no use being sentimental. I might do it again . . . I’m not a safe person any longer. I can feel that myself. . .’ She went on broodingly: ‘It’s so dreadfully easy – killing people. And you begin to feel that it doesn’t matter . . .

  Jacqueline is not a killer by nature; the man she loves wants to commit a murder, and she knows that he is not clever enough to do it alone. ‘So I had to come into it, too, to look after him,’ she says.

  ‘Poirot had no doubt whatever that her motive had been exactly what she said it was. She herself had not coveted Linnet Doyle’s money, but she had loved Simon Doyle, had loved him beyond reason and beyond rectitude and beyond pity.’

  Yet Poirot remains ‘bourgeois’ in his refusal to let moral ambiguity prevail. He will not weep for a murderer’s doomed soul, as Peter Wimsey does in Busman’s Honeymoon. Miss Marple, too, is understanding of frailty but obdurate in setting her face against it. They speak for their creator, who also took a utilitarian attitude towards murder: a killer
must be eliminated because he or she affects the lives of the many. Agatha was unbending on the subject of the death penalty; here her toughness outweighed her sensitivity. ‘I do think public hangings are very barbarous,’ she wrote from Baghdad,35 where she had seen a gallows being erected, ‘but I suppose they have their effect in these parts.’ If the punishment worked, that was what mattered. Similarly, Miss Marple says:

  ‘I can suspend judgement on those who kill, but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which, perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare them – because you cannot spare them any more than you would spare the man who staggers out from a plague-stricken village in the Middle Ages to mix with innocent and healthy children in a nearby village. The innocent must be protected . . .’

  This is the sort of comment that would inflame Agatha Christie’s detractors, who use her support for the death penalty as a sign of her outdated attitudes, and find something overly schematic, even crass, in her refusal to admit moral ambivalence into her solutions. In so doing they ignore the fact that ambivalence does show its face, only to be shown the door. They also take insufficient account of the reader, who experiences the profound, subliminal satisfaction that comes with restoration and resolution. If writing these books was a little catharsis every time for Agatha, so too was reading them, for her public.

  ‘There is a psychological need for that genre,’ P. D. James says. ‘I think the detective story, particularly because of its structure, provides a sort of psychological support. It is the bringing of order out of disorder. And it was particularly powerful in that Agatha Christie went through times of great social unrest, when it was possible to believe that the problems of society were beyond the capabilities of men to solve them. And there was a feeling that they can be solved, not by supernatural means but by courage and intelligence. And I think also they’re affirmations of the belief that we live in a controllable universe. I think all those things operated very powerfully in her, and very powerfully in us when we read her.’36

  So murder was a means to an end. In itself, it held little fascination for her. She was interested in the psychology of fear (as in And Then There Were None), and in suspicion (particularly in family dramas like Crooked House and Ordeal by Innocence). But when she described the psychology of murder, she was really writing about human nature; not something beyond the ordinary but the ordinary pushed to an extreme. There are very few killers in Christie who enjoy murder for its own sake: three, perhaps four. Most are like Seddon and Smith, who murdered for money (much the most common motive in her books); or Crippen and Bywaters, who murdered for love; or Armstrong and Constance Kent, who murdered out of jealousy. The other familiar motives are murder committed for self-preservation (as in Roger Ackroyd, Cards on the Table, Mrs McGinty’s Dead), and murder for revenge (Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Towards Zero, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side). A more arcane motive of unusual interest to the owner of Greenway – is murder committed in order to preserve, or create, a place of beauty {Peril at End House, Hallowe’en Party), although in the end this comes down to straightforward murder for profit. There is also murder in the name of justice, in Murder on the Orient Express and And Then Njere Were None. There is even a murder committed to acquire the means to buy a tea-shop, which perhaps qualifies as Agatha’s least convincing motive. Still, it is a reason, a reason that can be understood. And the reason is what matters.

  ‘Human nature. That, I think, is perhaps the real answer as to why I am interested in this case,’ says Poirot in Taken at the Flood and, as so often, he speaks for his creator. So too did Edmund Cork when he replied on Agatha’s behalf to a fan letter in 1961: ‘She considers that if a murder springs from characterisation and what has gone before there can really be only one possible solution.’ When Agatha is writing at her best, the two separate components of her books – the puzzle and the people – achieve a perfect synthesis. Of course she did not achieve this every time: the characters do not always fall into place with those extraordinarily clean twists, and in a weak book like The Clocks, the human interplay bears almost no relation to the pattern of the puzzle. This is extremely rare, however.

  ‘When I know what the murderer is like I shall be able to find out who he is,’ says Poirot in The ABC Murder. ‘T begin to see – not what you would like to see – the outlines of a face and form but the outlines of a mind . . . Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.’ This is the way that Agatha chose to write about murder: as a paradigm of character. In Death on the Nile Poirot is asked: ‘Do people interest you too, M. Poirot? Or do you reserve your interest for potential criminals?’ To which he replies: ‘Madame – that category would not leave many people outside it.’

  In real life this is almost certainly not the case. Most people manage to experience jealousy, passion, envy and hatred without reaching for the arsenic. Nevertheless, Poirot’s remark is true when applied to the world of Agatha Christie. She is dealing with the reasons for murder rather than the act itself, so almost everyone is a potential killer (this is, indeed, the whole premise behind Curtain). ‘My dear, these things are very common – very common indeed,’ says Miss Marple in The Thirteen Problems. What this actually means is that the motives are very common. Like Poirot – who finds people fascinating yet ‘monotonous’ – Miss Marple sees patterns in human nature, and similarities between people who on the surface appear to be very different. ‘I always find one thing very like another in this world,’ she says. It is this instinct for people, the ability to penetrate the complex surface and see the simplicity within, that makes Miss Marple such a natural detective. It is a gift very similar to that of her creator, who can cleave to the heart of her characters and find the detail, the truth, that illuminates.

  ‘I don’t find it spoils an Agatha Christie a bit knowing the end,’ P. G. Wodehouse wrote to her in 1969, ‘because the characters are so interesting.’

  Not just in the very best books, with the brilliantly conceived families like the Angkatells in The Hollow, the Crales in Five Little Figs, the Leonides in Crooked House and the Argyles in Ordeal by Innocence (‘Just as magical as ever,’ wrote Wodehouse, on rereading it). These people are drawn with evident depth, and even Agatha’s detractors would find it hard to say otherwise, although they would undoubtedly try. But how memorable are some of her other characters, flooding the page with a sudden surge of life, conjured in a sudden easy phrase: Miss Bulstrode the headmistress in Cat Among the Pigeons, sitting ‘cool and unmoved, with her lifework falling in ruins about her’; Valerie Hobhouse in Hickory Dickory Dock, with her ‘nervous, rather haggard elegance’, lying wearily on the sofa in her chic bedsitting room; Miss Hinchcliffe in A Murder is Announced, winking at the inspector as he prepares to question her sweet-natured lady friend: ‘Where were you at the time of the crime, that’s what he wants to know, Murgatroyd’; Megan Hunter in The Moving Finger, the gawky misfit with whom the narrator of the book falls stealthily in love, and whisks off to London for a transforming makeover: ‘As the head waiter hurried towards us, I felt that thrill of idiotic pride that a man feels when he has got something out of the ordinary with him’; Philip Lombard in And Then There Were None, with his feline grace and defective conscience, coolly flirting with the child-murderer Vera Claythorne: ‘So you did kill that kid after all?’; Jason Rafiel in A Caribbean Mystery, wildly rich, wonderfully rude and staunch in the face of death. ‘Ave Caesar, nos moritun te salutamus,’ he says to Miss Marple, before she boards her plane for England.

  These characters may not be deep but they are there: vivid as a splash of colour. So too is her writing style – so frequently and inexplicably criticised – with its felicitous clarity of expression, its natural sense of rhythm, its quick and zest
y idioms. Examples can be picked from almost any of her books:

  ‘There’s a type of lady,’ he said, ‘that you can’t force. You can’t frighten them, or persuade them, or diddle them.’

  No, Poirot thought, you couldn’t force or persuade or diddle Mrs Folliat.

  Lady Westholme entered the room with the assurance of a transatlantic liner coming into dock.

  Miss Amabel Pierce, an indeterminate craft, followed in the liner’s wake . . .

  ‘The jealousy of wives is proverbial. But I will tell you something. In my experience jealousy, however far-fetched and extravagant it may seem, is nearly always based on reality . . . However little concrete evidence there may be, fundamentally they are always right.’

  And quite suddenly another memory assailed him. One of many years ago. His Aunt Mildred saying, ‘She looked, you know, my dear, quite half-witted!’ and just for a minute her own sane comfortable face had borne an imbecile, mindless expression . . .