Agatha in 1957
A 1937 BBC radio production of Agatha’s story The Yellow Iris; centre right is Anthony Holles, who played Poirot
With Patricia Jessel, going over the script of Witness for the Prosecution, 1953
With Margaret Rutherford in 1961. The first MGM Marple, Murder She Said, was about to be released; although Agatha liked Margaret Rutherford very much, her facial expression is indicative of her opinion of the film
Agatha’s friends, Richard Attenborough and his wife Sheila Sim, in the original 1952 cast of The Mousetrap
The Ambassadors Theatre – note the House Full sign. The play moved to the St Martin’s Theatre in 1973
A 1958 party to celebrate the 6th anniversary of The Mousetrap. The actress Mary Law is to Agatha’s right; to her left is Peter Saunders, so influential upon her career as a playwright
Some of the many faces who have played Poirot and Miss Marp1e. . .
Charles Laughton
David Suchet
Peter Ustinov
Joan Hickson
Angela Lansbury
Helen Hayes
Ann Harding and Basil Rathbone from Love From a Stranger, 1937
And Then There Were None, 1945
Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution, 1957
Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express, 1974, with his stellar cast of suspects
In bridge-playing matron mode, at a 1957 party for The Mousetrap
This marvellous portrait was from a 1969 shoot by John Hedgecoe
Agatha near the end of her life; and (inset) in her prime
Outside the door of her publisher in St Tames’s Place. Agatha was attending a party given to celebrate her eightieth birthday
The Works of Agatha Christie
Where a book has been published in the United States under a different title, this is given in parenthesis
1920 The Mysterious Affair at Styles
1922 The Secret Adversary
1923 Murder on the Links
1924 The Man in the Brown Suit
1924 Poirot Investigates (collected short stories)
1924 The Road of Dreams (collected poems)
1925 The Secret of Chimneys
1926 The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
1927 The Big Four
1928 The Mystery of the Blue Train
1929 The Seven Dials Mystery
1929 Partners in Crime (short stories)
1929 The Underdog
1930 The Mysterious Mr. Quin (collected short stories)
1930 The Murder at the Vicarage
1930 Black Coffee (play)
1930 The Secret of Chimneys (adapted play)
1930 Giant’s Bread (Mary Westmacott)
1931 The Sittaford Mystery (Murder at Hazelmoor)
1932 Peril at End House
1932 The Thirteen Problems (collected short stories) (The Tuesday Club Murders)
1933 Lord Edgware Dies (Thirteen at Dinner)
1933 The Sunningdale Mystery
1934 Murder on the Orient Express (Murder in the Calais Coach)
1934 The Listerdale Mystery (collected short stories)
1934 Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (The Boomerang Clue)
1934 Parker Pyne Investigates (short stories) (Mr. Parker Pyne – Detective)
1934 Unfinished Portrait (Mary Westmacott)
1935 Three Act Tragedy (Murder in Three Acts)
1935 Death in the Clouds (Death in the Air)
1936 The ABC Murders
1936 The Hound of Death (collected short stories)
1936 Murder in Mesopotamia
1936 Cards on the Table
1936 Love from a Stranger (play)
1937 Murder in the Mews (Dead Man’s Mirror)
1937 Dumb Witness (Poirot Loses a Client / Murder at Littlegreen House)
1937 Death on the Nile
1937 Akhnaton (play; published 1973)
1938 Appointment with Death
1938 Hercule Poirot’s Christmas (Murder for Christmas / A Holiday for Murder)
1939 Murder is Easy (Easy to Kill)
1939 And Then There Were None
1939 The Regatta Mystery (short stories)
1940 Sad Cypress
1940 One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (The Patriotic Murders)
1941 Evil Under the Sun
1941 N or M?
1942 The Body in the Library
1942 Five Little Pigs (Murder in Retrospect)
1943 The Moving Finger
1943 Ten Little Niggers (adapted play)
1944 Towards Zero
1944 Death Comes as the End
1944 Absent in the Spring (Mary Westmacott)
1945 Sparkling Cyanide (Remembered Death)
1945 Appointment with Death (adapted play)
1945 Hidden Horizon (play adapted from Death on the Nile)
1946 The Hollow (Murder After Hours)
1946 Come, Tell Me How you Live (memoir by Agatha Christie Mallowan)
1947 The Labours of Hercules (short stories)
1948 Taken at the Flood (There is a Tide)
1948 The Rose and the Yew Tree (Mary Westmacott)
1948 Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories
1949 Crooked House
1950 A Murder is Announced
1950 Three Blind Mice and Other Stories
1951 They Came to Baghdad
1951 The Hollow (adapted play)
1952 Mrs. McGinty's Dead
1952 They Do It with Mirrors (Murder with Mirrors)
1952 The Mousetrap (play)
1952 A Daughter’s a Daughter (Mary Westmacott)
1953 After the Funeral (Funerals are Fatal)
1953 A Pocket Full of Rye
1953 Witness for the Prosecution (play)
1954 Destination Unknown (So Many Steps to Death)
1954 Spider’s Web (play)
1955 Hickory Dickory Dock (Hickory Dicker y Death)
1956 Dead Man’s Folly
1957 The Burden (Mary Westmacott)
1957 4.50 from Paddington (What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw!)
1958 Ordeal by Innocence
1958 Verdict (play)
1958 The Unexpected Guest (play)
1959 Cat Among the Pigeons
1959 Go Back for Murder (play adapted from Five Little Pigs)
1960 The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (short stories)
1961 The Pale Horse
1962 The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (The Mirror Crack’d)
1962 Rule of Three (plays)
1963 The Clocks
1964 A Caribbean Mystery
1965 At Bertram’s Hotel
1965 Star Over Bethlehem (short stories and poems)
1966 Third Girl
1967 Endless Night
1968 By the Pricking of My Thumbs
1969 Hallowe’en Party
1970 Passenger to Frankfurt
1971 Nemesis
1971 Fiddler’s Five (play; 1972 renamed Fiddler’s Three)
1972 Elephants Can Remember
1973 Postern of Fate
1973 Poems
1974 Poirot’s Early Cases (Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases)
1975 Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
1976 Sleeping Murder
1977 An Autobiography
1979 Miss Marple’s Final Cases
1992 The Problem at Pollensa Bay (collected stories)
1997 While the Light Lasts (collected stories)
There are other collected volumes of the same short stories, put together in different editions – for example, for the American market.
All quotations used in this book have been taken from the following editions:
The Agatha Christie Collection
Published by Agatha Christie Ltd/Planet Three Publishing Network Ltd 2003
Poems
Published by Collins 1973
Mary Westmacott novels
Published by St. Martin’s Minotaur (US)
2001
Endnotes
At the time of writing, most of the sources for this book were stored at Greenway House in Devon. They did not in any way constitute an ‘archive’: indeed, much of the charm of what I found at the house was its disorganised nature, the fact that any drawer or suitcase might yield treasure. Many of the writings, cuttings etc. I have used are mere scraps of paper: their meaning is clear, but they cannot be fully annotated.
Also, much of the correspondence kept at the house is undated. Agatha almost never wrote the year on her letters, and sometimes wrote no date at all (although this could usually be worked out from the content: reference to an event or a book she was working on, sometimes from the name of a horse she had backed). So, again, not all correspondence is annotated.
Abbreviations: ‘АС’ for Agatha Christie; ‘MM’ for Max Mallowan; ‘CM’ for Clara Miller
The contemporary value of the sums of money mentioned in this book can be gauged from the following:
In 1890, the year of Agatha’s birth, £1 = £63.38 as at January 2007
In 1901, the year of her father’s death, £1 = £60.87
In 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, £1 = £52.33
In 1926, the year of the disappearance, £1 = £32.41
In 1930, the year of her second marriage, £1 = £35.37
In 1938, when she bought Greenway House, £1 = £35.73
In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, £1 = £27.47
In 1952, the opening year of The Mousetrap, £1 = £20.23
In 1955, when Agatha Christie Ltd was formed, £1 = £17.56
In 1964, the year of Agatha’s £100,000-plus tax assessment, £1 = £14.26
In 1970, the year of Agatha’s eightieth birthday celebrations, £1 = £10.88
In 1976, the year of her death, £1 = £5.06
The Villa at Torquay
1 From The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
2 From Passenger to Frankfurt
3 In the poem ‘The Road of Dreams’
4 Letter from MM to AC, 6/8/1930
5 From An Autobiography
6 In 1989 the sixty ‘belts’, or tapes, on which Agatha had recorded Postern of Fate were sold at Sotheby’s to a French collector for £7,480. This was contrary to the wishes of her daughter, Rosalind, who said: ‘If this had to be made public I would rather it had been made when she was younger’. The tapes had fallen into the hands of the anonymous seller on the death of Agatha’s typist, Mrs Jolly, for whose use the recordings had been made
7 Letter from Adelaide Ross to AC, 15/3/1966
8 Letter from AC to Bruce Way, who had contacted her to say ‘I believe we are third cousins!’, 15/6/1968
9 Letter from AC to MM, 23/7/1944
10 Interview with the Sunday Telegraph, 10/5/1964
11 From a story called ‘Mrs Jordan’s Ghost’, written under the pseudonym ‘Callis Miller’
12 Letter from AC to Enid Duncan (who was compiling a catalogue of Baird’s works), 21/2/1967
13 Letter from Fred Lock to AC, 26/11/1943
14 As an old lady Agatha wrote a letter of praise to Lionel Jeffreys, director of the 1970 film adaptation of Nesbit’s The Railway Children. She gave a love of Nesbit to the ‘railway-minded’ killer in her detective novel, The ABC Murders
15 From A Caribbean Mystery
16 From the essay entided ‘The Guilty Vicarage’
17 The 1901 census shows the household to consist, at that time, of Frederick, Clara, Margaret and Agatha Miller, Jane Rowe (‘Cook’), Marie Sijé (then employed as Agatha’s French-speaking companion), Elizabeth Wilhams (‘Parlourmaid’) and Louise Baxter (‘Housemaid’). The name ‘Janet Rowe’ was, incidentally, used for the nanny in Crooked House
18 From An Autobiography, and referred to again in Postern of Fate
19 From After the Funeral
20 From a letter sent in 1968 to Francis Wyndham, then editor of the Sunday Times magazine. Agatha quotes her grandmother, then goes on: ‘I bet there was something wrong! And I bet that, deep down, people knew it all right’
21 From Giant ’s Bread
22 From An Autobiography
23 A further answer, to the question of whether scientific progress demanded the participation of women, was: ‘I should say it could get on quite well widiout it’
24 In fact Scot was Monty’s dog; he was then at Harrow. Scot was the painter Baird’s first commission for the Millers, in 1893. He was run over at the age of fifteen and buried in the Dogs’ Cemetery by Monty
25 Letter from Frederick Miller to CM, 9/5/1901
26 Letter from Frederick Miller to CM, 24/10/1901
27 From An Autobiography
28 In conversation with the author, 2003
29 From Unfinished Portrait
30 From An Autobiography
The Young Miss Miller
1 Agatha’s brother Monty was named after this family friend
2 From Sparkling Cyanide
3 Letter from AC to CM, 9/5/1922
4 From An Autobiography
5 Letter from MM to AC, 15/6/1942
6 Letter from AC to MM, 5/11/1930
7 From An Autobiography
8 From Mary Westmacott’s The Burden, when the young girl Laura is left alone at home with the servants
9 The House of Beauty was first published in 1926 (as The House of Dreams), in Sovereign magazine
10 In conversation with the author, 2004
11 From An Autobiography
12 From Murder is Easy
13 From Taken at the Flood
14 In Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade (Peter Owen, 1998)
15 Adelaide Ross to AC, 15/3/1966
16 Completed in 1848, this was described as the ‘finest crescent of houses in the West of England’
17 From an interview with Francis Wyndham in the Sunday Times, 27/2/1966
18 From An Autobiography
19 Rosalind Hicks, in conversation with the author, 2004
20 This phrase was not forgotten: John Gabriel, the central male character in The Rose and the Yew Tree, is pitied for his common legs
21 From An Autobiography
22 ‘The Call of Wings’ was first published in 1933 in The Hound of Death
23 Janet Morgan’s biography (Agatha Christie, Collins, 1984), makes interesting mention of the way Agatha referred to the end of her music career. In successive drafts of her autobiography she increasingly downplayed the genuine hopes she had cherished: ‘“faint possibility” in the first draft . . . becomes “illusion” in the second and “dream” in the last’
24 Writing about Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in the Independent in 2006, the playwright Howard Brenton described how the ‘music swirls round and round in a vortex of such power that you almost see the sound’
25 From ‘A Masque from Italy’, first published in 1924 in The Road of Dreams
26 The name of this house, owned by Sir Walter and Lady Barttelot, was used for the setting of Dumb Witness and featured in its original title, Murder at Littlegreen House (retained for the US edition)
27 From Unfinished Portrait
28 From Sad Cypress
29 From An Autobiography
30 In an interview with Marcelle Bernstein in the Observer, 14/12/1969
31 From a letter to Lord Louis Mountbatten, 2/12/1969. Agatha had been looking for an old letter sent by Mountbatten, regarding his suggestion of the original idea for Roger Ackroyd, and during her search had found eight of her old dance cards: ‘It was sad to find I could not now remember any of the names on it.’ She also, as she told him, found Margaret Miller’s sealskin coat containing two £5 notes and ‘six needlebooks labelled, “For the servants next Christmas” (you see where I get data for Miss Marple’s life) . ,
32 From the 1964 interview with the Sunday Telegraph
33 From Triangle at Rhodes
34 From An Autobiography
35 From A Caribbean Mystery
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br /> 36 From An Autobiography
The Husband
1 From A Daughter’s a Daughter
2 From 4.50 to Paddington
3 From Dumb Witness
4 One of Agatha’s favourite writers, May Sinclair (1863–1946) wrote about the occult but was also a considerable intellectual figure of the Edwardian era, moving in literary circles with Henry James, Ford Madox Ford, T. S. Eliot and Rebecca West. She wrote ‘social problem’ novels and pioneered the idea of the ‘stream of consciousness’ narrative. Ironically, in view of Agatha’s own attitudes, she was a vociferous campaigner for women’s suffrage and equal educational opportunities, and was latterly taken up by the feminist movement
5 Published in The Thirteen Problems
6 From Death on the Nile
7 From Sad Cypress
8 The 1901 census shows Ellen Christie, aged thirty-seven, living in part of 43 Upper Belgrave Road, Bristol with seven-year-old Campbell
9 Miss Marple’s mother was also named Clara
10 In The Thirteen Problems
11 To Francis Wyndham in the Sunday Times
12 From An Autobiography
13 In her autobiography Agatha wrote that she saw the influence of The Plumed Serpent, Sons and Lovers and The White Peacock – ‘great favourites of mine about then’ – upon her story ‘The House of Beauty’
14 To Francis Wyndham in the Sunday Times
15 Pearl Craigie (1867-1906) wrote – as Agatha had tried at first to do – under a male pseudonym (John Oliver Hobbes). Her early works were society novels but, after the breakdown of her marriage, she turned to the Catholic church and a far more serious style
16 Eden Philpotts to AC, 6/2/1909
17 From Endless Night
18 From Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
19 From Idylls of the King
20 From The Burden, which contains a version of the incident in which Archie arrived unannounced at Ashfield
21 From A Murder is Announced
22 AC to MM, 21/5/1930
23 From The Rose and the Yew Tree
24 Archie Christie to AC, 4/4/1917
25 From Unfinished Portrait
Agatha Christie Page 57
