It was no moment for trying to seem English. No, one must be a foreigner – frankly a foreigner – and be magnanimously forgiven for the fact. ‘Of course, these foreigners don’t quite know the ropes. Will shake hands at breakfast. Still, a decent fellow really . . .’
‘Well, he can’t have been a real gardener, can he?’ said Miss Marple. ‘Gardeners don’t work on Whit Monday. Everybody knows that.’ ‘We were young and virile and we looked the girls over we met and we appreciated their curves and their legs and the kind of eye they gave you, and you thought to yourself: “Will they or won’t they? Should I be wasting my time?”’
‘. . . he was Elvira’s boy – I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. Ah well, you’re a righteous woman, Jane Marple, and right must prevail.’
‘You can go to the rock, Cyril...’
That was what murder was – as easy as that!
But afterwards you went on remembering . . .
. . . she had loved Simon Doyle, had loved him beyond reason and beyond rectitude and beyond pity.37
What a gift Agatha had for those quick creative sweeps, and how well she hid that gift! So perfectly does she fit the genre of detective fiction that only the construct is seen; she herself is subsumed into it, and rendered invisible. And yet, when it is turned towards a different light, the translucent structure reveals the mass of stuff within.
There have always been people who divined what was hidden: illustrious admirers, not just P. G. Wodehouse, Clement Attlee and Stephen Glanville, but T. S. Eliot, whose Four Quartets had yielded the title The Rose and the Yew Tree, and who, in The Family Reunion, took the name ‘Agatha’ for the character who unravels the mysteries in the play.38 There was also John Sparrow, the Warden of All Souls’, Oxford, whom Agatha knew through Max, a fellow of the college from 1962. After the publication of Endless Night Sparrow wrote to Agatha that he had read the book twice: ‘I particularly relished a number of calculated ambiguities that I had missed before.’ He was impressed by the character of Michael, who narrates the book: ‘His classlessness (or, rather, his between-classness, if I may put it so) and also his schizophrenia (or, rather, his practically dual personality – displayed especially in his ambivalent feelings about Ellie – absolutely convincing).’ Later he praised By the Pricking of My Thumbs-. ‘Sheer joy, from beginning to end.’ The dialogue had ‘never a word, never an inflection, wrong’, while ‘the sad world of Old People’s Homes can never have been more truthfully, more vividly rendered . . . And village life – it’s all there!’39
In 1955 Agatha’s old friend and kind mentor, Eden Philpotts, wrote to commend her ‘splendid work’: ‘[I] watch with admiration how you maintain your great gifts of invention, of character creation, for your people are as full of life still as they have always been. That is a rare quality in a novelist . . .’ A remarkable and perceptive tribute came from Sidney Smith, the epigraphist, with whom Agatha had become friendly during the war. She dedicated The Moving Finger to Sidney and his wife, Mary, and he wrote to her from the British Museum:
One of these days (it may be long after our time, but I hope much sooner), some critic will wake up to the fact that you are practising, and have perfected, an art of story telling which men like George Moore theorised about, and that your backgrounds, done with great economy and an elimination of all but harmonious detail, represent a social study with more truth than the longer efforts by the biographical school of novelists. Accept honest admiration for the skill that devises new effects.40
The Shakespearean scholar Robert Speaight knew Agatha after the war and, in 1970, wrote to inform her that she was all the rage in French intellectual circles.41 The Catholic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, had called her ‘la gloire’ of the genre, and said: ‘Son intelligence et son humeur sont depuis longtemps pour moi un précieux réconfort.’ And ‘Gabriel Marcel, the Christian existentialist, philosophically opposed to Maritain, admires you just as much!’ wrote Speaight, who then went on to relay a somewhat spiteful compliment. Marcel had said of Agatha: ‘C’est presque un grand écrivain.’42
But more straightforward praise came from A. L. Rowse, whose essay on Agatha described her as ‘a better novelist than people realise’, with a first-rate brain and an ‘abnormal intuition about human beings’. He wrote: ‘We must not underrate her literary ambition and accomplishment, as her publishers did, simply because she was the first of detective story writers.’
As so often, Rowse gets it right. The genre fitted Agatha to perfection, and she was its mistress. But inside those clean, clear mysteries there was much more; so much that had been distilled down to evanescence; and her books simply could not have survived for so long without that quantity of hidden substance.
‘The woman herself does remain a mystery,’ says P. D. James. ‘So that may have affected the books.’
Part of what was hidden was 1926, the mystery that hovered over everything. Yet Agatha does make the odd, oblique reference to it, almost as if she is daring herself, like a child in a state of trepidation, to walk up to the forbidden subject. ‘I had a Welsh nurse and she took me to Harrogate one day and went home having forgotten all about me. Very unstable,’ says Mrs Oliver in Cards on the Table. Then, five years later, in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe:
‘It is so extraordinary that she has disappeared like this. I feel sure, Monsieur Poirot, that it must be loss of memory.’
Poirot said that it was very probably. He had known cases of the kind.
‘Yes – I remember a friend of one of my cousins. She’d had a lot of nursing and worry, and it brought it on. Amnesia, I think they called it.’
Poirot said that he believed that that was the technical term.
In Destination Unknown the central character, Hilary Craven, walks even closer towards the secret centre of Agatha’s life. She prepares for suicide, having decided that she can take no more unhappiness. ‘She had borne her long illness, she had borne Nigel’s defection and the cruel and brutal circumstances in which it had operated.’ But instead of killing herself she adopts the persona of a woman who has survived an accident. ‘The last twenty-four hours before the crash are still quite vague to me,’ she says, to which the reply is:
‘Ah, yes. That is the result of the concussion. That happened once to a sister of mine. She was in London in the war. A bomb came, she was knocked unconscious. But presently she gets up, she walks about London and she takes a train from the station of Euston and, figurez-vous, she wakes up at Liverpool and she cannot remember anything of the bomb, of going across London, of the train or of getting there! The last she remembers is hanging up her skirt in the wardrobe in London. Very curious these things, are they not?’
This reads like Agatha excusing herself, peddling the official line about her disappearance; but of course Hilary is lying when she says she has been concussed – she was never in a ‘crash’ at all – so Destination Unknown is both honest and disingenuous. Hilary is told: ‘You are to be envied. You have had an experience. I should like the experience of having come so near to death. To have that, yet survive – do you not feel yourself different since then, Madame?’ Again, this comment refers to the crash that never happened. But Hilary did come near to death, when she prepared to take her own life; again, therefore, the comment is both true and untrue; again, it constitutes a complex reference to Agatha herself.
In At Bertram’s Hotel an elderly clergyman disappears (genuinely, as it happens), and a senior policeman makes this throwaway remark: ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘a lot of these disappearances are voluntary.’ This was Agatha marching up to the forbidden subject in a different way; almost defiantly. In the book that followed, Third Girl, she took it on again. Poirot is talking to a man whose daughter has disappeared, and analysing for him the reasons why she might have done so.
‘Your daughter dislikes her stepmother . . . It is a very natural reaction. You must remember that she may have secretly idealised you for many many years. That is quite possible in the case of a br
oken marriage where a child has had a severe blow in her affections . . . You went away. She wanted you to come back. Her mother, no doubt, discouraged her from talking about you, and therefore she thought about you perhaps all the more . . . And because she could not talk about you to her own mother she had what is a very natural reaction with a child – the blaming of the parent who remains for the absence of the parent who has gone. She said to herself something in the nature of “Father was fond of me. It’s Mother he didn’t like,” and from that was born a kind of idealisation, a kind of secret liaison between you and her. What had happened was not her father’s fault. She will not believe it!’
Later, Poirot is asked: ‘Do you think she may have lost her memory? One hears of such things.’
Despite – because of – the limitations of the genre Agatha had a quite extraordinary freedom to write in this way: to reveal whatever she liked, knowing that she was hidden from view. For instance she referred to the reasons why suicide should always be resisted, however powerful the urge:
‘I will put a case to you. A man comes to a certain place – to commit suicide, shall we say? But by chance he finds another man there, so he fails in his purpose and goes away – to live. The second man has saved the first man’s life, not by being necessary to him or prominent in his life, but just by the mere physical fact of having been in a certain place at a certain moment. You take your life today and perhaps . . . someone will go to death or disaster simply for lack of your presence in a given spot or place.
‘You say your life is your own. But can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? . . . You as you may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.’
This was written in 1929, in ‘The Man from the Sea’, one of the stories that would be published the following year in The Mysterious Mr. Quin. The speaker is Mr Satterthwaite: a recurring character in Agatha’s work, an observer rather than a participant, with the soul of an artist and an instinct for human nature. ‘Perhaps,’ he is told, ‘as a result of the price you have paid, you see things that other people – do not.’ So Mr Satterthwaite voices Agatha’s thoughts on suicide, the long hard conclusions she had come to more than two years after she stood at the edge of the quarry. ‘You’ve got to go on living whether you like it or not’; ‘God may need you.’ She wrote this again in Towards Zero, when precisely the instance conjured by Mr Satterthwaite takes place: a man who has botched a suicide attempt saves a woman from killing herself. And then, in Destination Unknown:
‘You don’t think of it as – wrong?’
Hilary said heatedly: ‘Why should it be wrong? It’s my life.’
‘Oh yes, yes,’ Jessop repeated hastily. ‘I’m not taking a high moral line myself, but there are people, you know, who think it’s wrong.’
Jessop then proposes that, rather than commit suicide, Hilary should assume the person of another woman: act as a spy, a role that might itself result in death, but at least carries the possibility of doing some good. And so Hilary chooses life. Like Celia at the end of Unfinished Portrait – also saved from death by a failed suicide – she carries on.
This, for Agatha, amounted to a philosophy. She never made direct reference to her own quiet religious faith – shared by Miss Marple who, like her creator, reads regularly from a ‘small devotional book’ – but having once committed the sin of despair she was determined to believe in the blessing of life (‘And when God walks beside you/You are not afraid . . .’).
That is why her books are innately virtuous: because they are on the side of the living. They take life – but not themselves – extremely seriously. They inhabit a world free of the creep of moral relativity. They exemplify harmony and order, clarity and optimism. ‘I was asked what I read during my recent spell of captivity in South America,’ wrote a man named Geoffrey Jackson to Agatha in 1971. ‘My captors actually produced Spanish editions of your detective stories for me, which I read with vast enjoyment. What particularly helped was to be reminded by Miss Marple and Monsieur Poirot that there was indeed another world where absolute values still applied.’
This could scarcely be more inimical to the modern sensibility, which throws a veil of doubt and ambivalence over everything except its own politicised opinions. And yet Agatha Christie survives, to the point where it seems as if she is still, indeed, fulfilling a purpose.
Everything she stood for is devalued. Her books are still adapted for screen and stage, as successfully as ever, but there is scant understanding of what she was actually saying: her stories are used merely as vehicles. A recent dramatisation of Five Little Pigs43 seized upon the human drama and turned its power in all the wrong directions, creating a meaningless homosexual dynamic that destroyed the book’s delicate emotional balance, and adding a semi-pornographic execution scene. In the television film a terrified Caroline Crale is hanged, in error, for her husband’s murder. In the book she dies in prison, and is happy to do so. She believes that she is taking the blame for the crime on behalf of her younger sister, whom in youth she badly injured: she is therefore expiating a lesser guilt. That was Agatha’s careful intention. She did not deal in injustice. Although in her plotting notebook she had the idea of a ‘murderer wrongfully executed’, which developed into Five Little Pigs, she modified the idea according to her own morality.
Yet it is hangings and couplings that the modern world feels it must bring to Agatha Christie: the realities of death and forbidden passion, the things she left out of her books. She did so deliberately, not because she knew nothing about them; she knew a good deal. But the belief today is that these gaps should be filled, and that poor old ladies born in 1890 need help to express what their uptight upbringing left them unable to say. That is why the most recent screen incarnation of Miss Marple44 has been given a back story – a doomed love affair with a married man killed in the First World War – in order to flesh her out, to make her human and ‘real’. Of course the books make it perfectly clear that nothing has ever happened to Miss Marple. Everything happens around her, and this is the point: she has become wise through observation, not through experience.
But the idea of innate wisdom is a hard one for the modern world to grasp. So it is that when, in the latest adaptation of The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple realises that the crime was motivated by thwarted passion, she does so not because she is wise but because she recognises the situation. She empathises. She has been there.
Twenty years earlier, when Joan Hickson played Miss Marple on BBC Television45 with a definitive, detached compassion, she could judge and still be magnificently human; but the intervening years have changed a great deal, including our relationship with Agatha Christie. They have rendered her finally and definitively at odds with the modern world. Not because she is a snob, or a racist, or a xénophobe, not because her characters live in well-ordered country houses and have maids who serve afternoon tea; but because she deals in constancy and certainty and fundamental hope, and those qualities are no longer ours.
Yet we seem to need her, still.
So, most mysteriously of all, did her own creator. In 1956 Agatha wrote her last Westmacott novel, The Burden, a diffuse and barely structured book (two ideas brought loosely together, to judge by her notes) into which she poured every question she ever asked herself. The central story is that of Laura who, as a child, is so jealous of her younger sister, Shirley, that she wants her to die. But when the chance comes to abandon Shirley in a house fire, Laura unaccountably saves her life, and thereafter is obsessed with her sister’s happiness. Shirley marries a ne’er-do-well, Henry, who becomes an impossibly difficult invalid. In order to free her sister from a life of misery, Laura allows Henry to take (unwittingly) a fatal second dose of pills.
This is not an Agatha Christie murder: its consequences are unexpected and unforeseeable. There are no simple rules against what Laura has done, and no simple means by which
she can atone for it.
The secondary story in The Burden is that of Llewellyn Knox, a former evangelist who has lost not his faith but the simplicity of his religious calling. He asks:
‘What is doing good? Burning people at the stake to save their souls? Perhaps. Burning witches alive because they are evil personified? There’s a very good case for it. Raising the standard of living for the unfortunate? We think nowadays that that is important. Fighting against cruelty and injustice?
‘What is good to do? What is right to do? What is wrong to do? We are human beings, and we have to answer those questions to the best of our ability.’
After fifteen years as a ‘messenger’ for God, Llewellyn Knox now seeks a way to live in the world. How to do it? he asks himself.
It all came back, perhaps, to Kant’s three questions:
What do I know?
What can I hope?
What ought I to do?
A strange echo of ‘Who? Why? When? How? Where? Which?’, the questions that Agatha Christie asked in her plotting notebooks, and to which she always knew the answers.
The Late Years
‘Et s’il revenait un jour
Que faut-il lui dire?
Dîtes-lui qu’on l’attendit
Jusqu’à s’en mourir’
(verse written on a slip of paper, kept by Agatha Christie)
‘The only people who really know what other people are like are artists
- and they don’t know why they know it!’
(from The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie)
In The Burden, Shirley remarries after the death of her invalid husband, Henry. Her second husband is clever and kindly while Henry – who had courted Shirley by appearing at her home, unannounced, when she was out at a tennis party – was charming, handsome and unfaithful. ‘I’ve been married twice,’ Shirley tells Llewellyn Knox, who asks:
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