Agatha Christie

by Laura Thompson

  8 In conversation with the author, 2004

  9 Letter from Rosalind to AC, sent from Caledonia school, no date

  10 Rosalind to AC, 7/6/1931

  11 Rosalind to AC, 14/6/1931

  12 ‘I have always hated The Mystery of the Blue Train,' she wrote in her autobiography

  13 This was wildly overdone in the 2005 ITV adaptation of the book, which made Poirot sick with unrequited love and entirely missed the delicate point of his relationship with Katherine

  14 From An Autobiography

  15 In Memories of Men and Women

  16 Although the film is a triumph, it is hard to imagine how anyone came up with the idea of casting big, manly Albert Finney as Poirot in Murder on the Orient Express. In Rosalind’s view ‘he looked stuffed’. Similarly David Suchet, a gifted Shakespearean actor, whose mincing walk and beachball stomach have dominated the long-running Poirot series on ITV. Closest to the spirit of Poirot was, perhaps, the portrayal by Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile (his subsequent Christie films were far less good). Ustinov was physically wrong – made few attempts not to be, bar sticking on a small moustache – but he infused the part with his own sharp and benign intelligence. He did not act, he just was, his scenes with Mia Farrow as Jacqueline de Bellefort are extremely touching

  17 Agatha later explained to a reader that the name ‘Marple’ had come while she was staying with Madge at Abney ‘and we went together to a sale at Marple Hall’. The house, she wrote, ‘was a beautiful old manor, belonging to the Bradshaws descended from Judge Bradshaw who sentenced Charles I. I bought two Jacobean oak chairs which I still have . . .’

  18 In conversation with the author, 2005

  19 In a letter to AC, 18/6/1943, her friend Robert Graves also claimed to have admired the book. But he took Agatha to task over the plot; while noting that she had used his name for her policeman. His very funny letter is not unlike a John Sutherland literary mystery (Sutherland did in fact write one of these essays on Curtain: Poirot’s Last Cast). ‘Elsie too was incriminated’, he wrote. ‘I think that Inspector Graves let the family down by not putting the bracelets on her too for failing to report the presence of Agnes’ body in the cupboard when she returned the fishing rods there. No, Agatha, the boys didn’t keep their fishing rods in the nursery . . .’

  20 Joyce marries Miss Marple’s novelist nephew, Raymond West, and thereafter becomes ‘Joan’. This kind of sloppy editing plagued Agatha’s books

  21 In a 1970 letter to Yasuo Suto, who was writing a book on Miss Marple. ‘If you know “the career of Miss Marple” from childhood upwards, you know more than I do!’ wrote Agatha

  22 Henrietta McCall, author of The Life of Max Mallowan (British Museum Press, 2001); in conversation with the author, 2006

  23 In conversation with the author, 2006

  24 Mailowan’s Memoirs (Collins, 1977), dedicated ‘To Rosalind With Love’

  25 John Mallowan, in conversation with the author, 2005

  26 Letter from AC to MM, no date

  27 From Mailowan’s Memoirs

  28 Dr Julian Reade, in conversation with the author, 2006

  29 AC to MM, sent from Ashfield, no date

  30 AC to MM, sent from Ashfield, May 1930

  31 Ibid

  32 As compared with Dorothy L. Sayers, whose wedding night scene in Busman’s Honeymoon between Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane (‘before I’ve done I mean to be king and emperor’) was once described by Ruth Rendell as the most embarrassing passage in literature

  33 Letter from MM to AC, 14/5/1930

  34 AC to MM, sent from Ashfield, no date

  35 Ibid

  36 AC to MM, 21/5/1930

  37 Jared Cade claimed in Agatha and the Eleven Missing Days that Max was never invited to spend Christmas at Abney Hall, although there is no corroborative evidence for this

  38 AC to MM, sent from Ashfield, no date

  39 AC to MM, sent from the Broadford Hotel, Skye, no date

  40 AC to MM, sent from Ashfield, no date

  41 Ibid

  42 In conversation with the author, 2006

  43 AC to MM, dated ‘Wed. 10am’

  44 MM to AC, 29/10/1930

  45 AC to MM, no date

  46 Ibid

  47 This referred to a collaborative BBC radio play, the second of its kind that Agatha had worked on at the request of Dorothy Sayers (with whom she had an arm’s-length friendship: no two women could have been less alike but they respected each other). The first play was broadcast in six parts in summer 1930. The second, The Scoop, went out in 1931 and was something of a nightmare for all concerned, not least the BBC itself. Agatha had to write and personally broadcast two instalments, quite a lot of work for just fifty guineas; consequently she treated the whole enterprise in slightly cavalier fashion, asking if she could record her episodes in Plymouth rather than London, then disappearing with Rosalind to Switzerland for a holiday. ‘Will you explain to Mrs Mallowan, please,’ wrote the producer J. R. Ackerley to Charlotte Fisher, ‘the extreme difficulties her being unavailable has involved us in.’ Later he said of Agatha that she was ‘surprisingly good looking and extremely tiresome’, which would not have bothered her one whit. The chief pleasure for her was the knowledge that Max was listening to her broadcast: ‘my EMINENT ange . . . wish you could work in a cryptic message into the story!’

  48 The Chimneys play in fact received its British premiere in 2006

  49 AC to MM, 23/10/1930

  50 AC to MM, 13/10/1931

  51 Agatha once said to Rowse, after attending one of his lusty Elizabethan lectures, ‘I hope it won’t start up Max again’; a remark that Rowse, not an expert in heterosexual relationships, took deadly seriously. ‘I wonder if that wasn’t an element in the failure with the dashing, perhaps demanding, army officer?’ he wrote. In fact Agatha found Archie deeply attractive throughout their marriage; the waning of sexual desire was on the other side

  52 AC to MM, 23/10/1931

  53 Anthony Hicks, in conversation with the author

  54 From the poem ‘A Choice’

  War

  1 In Memories of Men and Women

  2 From The Hollow

  3 Letter from MM to AC, 8/11/1930

  4 Letter from AC to MM, 24/12/1944

  5 The Diaries of A. L. Rowse, edited by Richard Ollard (Allen Lane, 2003)

  6 AC to MM, 27/10/1942

  7 Underneath the floor of the boathouse there is a dark and silent plunge pool

  8 Max was knighted in June 1968 for services to archaeology; Agatha was made a Dame in the 1971 New Year’s Honours List. The painter Oscar Kokoschka, who had done a superb portrait of Agatha for her eightieth birthday (as rugged and vital as an Amyas Crale), wrote to congratulate her and warned: ‘I hope you are not forced to kneel down . . . Do not get a cold in a too light gala dress, please!’

  9 The BSA was founded in 1932 as a memorial to Gertrude Bell, with the aim of promoting and supporting ‘research relating to the archaeology of Iraq and surrounding countries’. A fellow archaeologist said that Agatha contributed heavily to a fund within the School. ‘I’m sure not how much she actually put in . . .’

  10 From the address given by Seton Lloyd at Max’s memorial service, held at St James’s, Piccadilly, 29/11/1978

  11 In conversation with the author, 2006

  12 Shown by the British Museum in its 2001 exhibition ‘Agatha Christie and Archaeology’

  13 AC to MM, ‘Whit Sunday’ 1944

  14 In Come, Tell Me How You Live, Agatha Christie Mallowan (Collins, 1946)

  15 ‘She will have to be changed into an American, preferably with what we call a “Cape Cod” background’, wrote Ober to Cork about this proposed series. Unsurprisingly, Agatha did not agree to it; although later the actress Helen Hayes did create a perfectly acceptable Miss Marple of this type

  16 Of which Edmund Cork wrote to Agatha: ‘I’m afraid I don’t like this book quite as much as some of the others’; her casual repl
y was ‘I agree with you about it – not one of my best’

  17 In this book Poirot is asked to investigate a murder that took place sixteen years previously; that is to say, in 1926. This has been viewed as significant, but in fact the book was written in 1941, and its events correspond only loosely with those of Agatha’s own life

  18 Letter from MM to Rosalind, 3/7/1940

  19 One of Max’s arguments was that his wife had written an anti-Nazi book; that is to say, N or M?

  20 At the end of 1943 Max had been promoted to colonel, Archie Christie’s rank. Perhaps with this dimly in mind Max wrote: ‘You never thought that Mr Puper would one day for a time become a Colonel did you?’

  21 MM to AC, 26/4/1943

  22 This famous block, which was awarded second prize for Ugliest Building in Horizon magazine, had also been home to Nicholas Montserrat and Henry Moore; later members of the Isobar included Barbara Hepworth. It was sold in 1968 for £7,000 to the New Statesman

  23 AC to MM, 27/10/1942

  24 ‘How is James?’ Max wrote in 1945. ‘Has he succumbed to the Fishers and how are they, not married and if not why not?’ Max did not especially like Carlo and Mary, whom he perhaps associated with Agatha’s former life. The answer to his question was that ‘Char did have someone during the war’, according to her niece, although for whatever reason this did not lead to marriage; Mary Fisher’s fiancé was killed

  25 In an undated letter to Jeremy Pritchard, son of the original owner, who was collecting reminiscences from residents. A cousin of the family was Beryl, later married to die Mallowans’ friend Robert Graves; possibly this is what directed Agatha to Lawn Road in the first place

  26 AC to MM, 31/8/1942

  27 MM to AC, 10/12/1942

  28 Perceived by Max as the model for Mrs Dane Calthrop, the vicar’s wife in The Moving Finger

  29 The character is used in Appointment with Death, when a parallel is drawn between Ophelia and the mentally unstable Ginevra Boynton

  30 AC to MM, 23/8/1942

  31 AC to MM, 29/11/1942

  32 Musings on the play also appeared in a much earlier book, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? ‘“You know, I’ve always thought”, said Frankie, suddenly digressing wildly from the matter in hand, “that Lady Macbeth incited Macbeth to do all those murders simply and solely because she was so frightfully bored with life – and incidentally with Macbeth”’

  33 AC to MM, 27/10/1942

  34 MM to AC, 27/6/1943

  35 AC to MM, 4/7/1944

  36 AC to MM, 14/4/1943

  37 MM to AC, 12/1/1943

  38 ‘. . . The Assyrian craftsman’s savage hands deline The tortures of the dying and record The suffering cries that echo through the ages’ are the last lines of a sonnet written by the twenty-three-year-old Max

  39 MM to AC, 22/12/1943

  40 A.P. was Rosalind’s nickname – ‘Auntie Punkie’ – later adopted by Agatha and Max

  41 AC to MM, 1/7/1944

  42 AC to MM, 26/8/1943

  43 AC to MM, 27/3/1943

  44 MM to AC, 13/8/1943

  45 Stephen Glanville to AC, 9/4/1943

  46 Stephen Glanville to AC, 11/7/1943

  47 Stephen Glanville to AC, 18/11/1943

  48 AC to MM, 17/11/1943

  49 AC to MM, 9/1/1944

  50 AC to MM, 2/8/1944

  51 AC to MM, 19/5/1944

  52 The words of Dr Glyn Daniel, who also knew Max and Agatha. In his autobiography he recalls asking Max what he had made of Tom Driberg, his contemporary at Lancing: ‘Seemed all right to me, but I had no idea then of his specialised proclivities’

  53 Rosalind to AC, 7/2/1931

  54 AC to Rosalind, sent from the British Museum Foundation in Syria, no date

  55 These cards, with the cartoon ‘Bonzo’ dog on the front, feature as a clue in N or M?

  56 Rosalind to AC, 27/1/1936

  57 Rosalind to AC, 24/4/1936

  58 Rosalind to Charlotte Fisher, no date

  59 Rosalind to AC, 16/5/1936

  60 Agatha wrote to Rosalind that she had said to another mother ‘“I think we will be at Mrs Lambert Simnel’s lunch at Claridges” and she said “Of course!” So we are all liars together!’

  61 AC to Rosalind, 30/1/1937

  62 AC to MM, 8/8/1943

  63 AC to MM, 20/9/1943

  64 MM to Rosalind, 7/12/1941

  65 MM to Rosalind, no date

  66 MM to Rosalind, 17/6/1943

  67 MM to Rosalind, 15/10/1943

  68 AC to MM, 30/9/1943

  69 AC to MM, 12/10/1943

  70 Dr Harold Davis was chief pharmacist at UCH and later published an article on Agatha’s time there. Few people knew who she was, he wrote. ‘She was a wonderful, cheerful and industrious colleague’

  71 MM to AC, 5/3/1944

  72 This name reappeared in At Bertram’s Hotel

  73 AC to MM, 25/5/1944

  74 MM to AC, 16/1/1944

  75 For example by John Mallowan, in conversation with the author

  76 MM to AC, 27/9/1942

  77 Edmund Cork to Harold Ober, 19/12/1940

  78 The official rate of exchange was four dollars and three cents to the pound

  79 Cork to Ober, 3/1/1941

  80 Ibid

  81 AC to MM, 11/9/1944

  82 AC to MM, 13/10/1944

  83 AC to MM, 2/11/1944

  84 AC to MM, 16/12/1944

  85 Agatha did something very unusual in this adaptation: she changed the solution. It made sense in dramatic terms but the original ending is better, being far less ‘obviously’ satisfying. The ending of Ten Little Niggers was also changed, in order to leave two people on stage rather than a mass of corpses, but the actual solution remained the same. A new version, produced in 2006, restored the original death count and much of the original book dialogue; nevertheless it managed to be atrociously bad, proving that a knowing and selfconscious ‘authenticity’ is not the way to keep Christie alive

  86 This play found it hard to get a London theatre. The reviews for Appointment with Death (which nonetheless did good business) ‘left a prejudice against Christie plays’, as Cork rather tactlessly told Agatha. Also the Ministry of Labour objected to the presence of a maid in the play

  87 From The Thirteen Problems

  88 So irritated was Agatha by William Collins’s attitude that she asked Cork to place The Rose and the Yew Tree elsewhere; Heinemann stated that ‘Billy is crackers’ and snapped up the book for publication

  89 Clement Attlee himself spoke charmingly of Agatha: ‘Fifty books! Many of them have beguiled and made agreeable my leisure’

  English Murder

  1 A 1965 film was made starring Shirley Eaton, Dennis Price and the pop star Fabian; a 1974 version starred Oliver Reed and, as the judge, Richard Attenborough, a friend of Agatha who had starred with his wife Sheila Sim in the first cast of The Mousetrap. A more eccentric piece of casting had Charles Aznavour in the role of first victim

  2 Campbell Christie also wrote the scripts to the films Jassy and (adapted from the play that he wrote with his wife) Carrington VC. In June 1963 his Times obituary reported that he had been ‘found dead in the gas-filled kitchen of his home at West Byfleet, Sussex’. The obituary said ‘Christie in social life could pack a punch, and he packed it in wit’

  3 She had been expecting around £5,000. ‘I am rather looking forward to breaking this to Rosalind,’ Cork wrote to Agatha, when the news of the deal came through

  4 ‘I would be ecstatic to be working on a Christie again,’ Wilder later wrote to Agatha. ‘How about a great big $8 million all-conclusive mystery to end all mysteries? Got anything up your sleeve?’

  5 She moved out of Lawn Road in 1947 and for a short time used Cresswell Place before letting it (a tenant named ‘Mr Portner’ was intensely troublesome in the early 1950s). Campden Street had been sold and, thanks to the bombs, Sheffield Terrace was no more

  6 This brilliant title, taken from the ‘
play within a play’ in Hamlet, was the idea of Agatha’s son-in-law Anthony Hicks

  7 From Hallowe’en Party

  8 Sunday Express, 20/11/1935

  9 From Mrs McGinty’s Dead

  10 These exquisite toy dogs were bred by Rosalind and eventually taken up as Agatha’s favoured breed. The graves of her two, Treacle and Bingo, are in the garden at Winterbrook. In A Murder is Announced she has a character say of them ‘such graceful little things. I do like a dog with legs . . .’

  11 Agatha became very friendly with Allen Lane, nephew of her first publisher, John Lane, and he and his wife Lettice spent frequent weekends with the Mallowans. The Lanes also visited the site at Nimrud that Max excavated after the war; by way of thanks to Agatha for her early support of Penguin Books, Allen made a financial contribution to the dig

  12 The Close Up was broadcast on the Light Programme, 13/2/1955

  13 In conversation with the author, 2004

  14 ‘Candidly, we don’t feel that the Mary Westmacott is up to standard’, wrote the American publishers Rinehart when turning down A Daughter’s a Daughter, of The Burden Rinehart wrote that ‘when Agatha Christie becomes Mary Westmacott she is not at all successful at characterisation’. This despite the fact that Rinehart had snapped up the earlier Westmacotts

  15 To Gillian Franks in 1970

  16 Or Remembered Death, as it was originally called; the title was considered inappropriate so soon after the war, but retained for the US edition

  17 These were used in, respectively, ‘The Thumb Mark of St Peter’ (a short story in The Thirteen Problems); The Pale Horse; and Ordeal by Innocence

  18 Agatha wanted this because she had received several letters from readers about the plot of Sad Cypress, saying that in law an illegitimate child would not be the automatic heir of a sole parent who died intestate. In fact this was the law according to the 1926 Act. Another letter about Sad Cypress came from a reader who objected that when Nurse Hopkins poisoned Mary Gerrard with the tea, she had no means of knowing that Elinor would not also drink it. This was a very good point; the excellent 2003 ITV adaptation of the book inserted a line for Elinor to say that she never drank tea

  19 Bigbury-on-Sea is linked across the water to Burgh Island in South Devon, still home to a smart Art Deco hotel (built 1932) at which Agatha stayed, and where she set Evil Under the Sun and And Then There Were None