by Jared Cade
Over the course of the next twenty-four pages Laura Thompson becomes so caught up in her fantasy that further discrepancies creep into her account. She gives her readers to understand that Agatha dreamed up the plots and words from her 1928 short story ‘Harlequin’s Lane’ and her 1954 book Destination Unknown by the side of the chalk pit before she abandoned her car; that she conceived the plots of her novels, Death on the Nile (1937), Sad Cypress (1940) and Five Little Pigs (1943) and the short story ‘The Edge’ (1927) while she was in Harrogate. She even claims that Agatha wrote chunks of these stories in her mind and later recalled every line she had composed in her head when it came time to commit them to paper prior to their UK publication. In fact, what Laura Thompson has done is take quotes from these stories and incorporate them into her account of what Agatha did in Harrogate.
When ‘The Edge’ was published in Pearson’s Magazine in February 1927 an editorial note stated it was ‘a story that was written just before this author’s recent illness and mysterious disappearance’, which negates Laura Thompson’s suggestion that the story was conceived and written by Agatha while she was in Harrogate.
The biographer states that Agatha took room five on the first floor of the Harrogate Hydro, but this is factually incorrect. Agatha’s handwritten entry as Mrs Neele in the hotel register shows her room was 105. According to the chambermaid Rosie Asher, during Agatha’s visit room 105 was not situated on the first floor but on the third floor because the numbering of the rooms conformed at that time to continental standards: ‘They had a funny system in those days. The best rooms were at the front of the hotel with a nice view. They were all numbered one and the rooms in the back, near the kitchen, were numbered two and three.’
Many readers will have assumed that Laura Thompson had accurate knowledge of Agatha’s time in Harrogate since the blurb for the biography states that it was ‘written with unique access to her diaries, letters and family’. But this is not so. After reviewing the Christie family papers, Janet Morgan stated: ‘Gaps remain in the story. No one knows why Agatha fled from Styles late on the night of December 3rd . . . We simply do not know what Agatha planned to do, if indeed she had any plans at all.’ By writing a romantic fictionalized account of the disappearance Laura Thompson avoids the main issues and trivializes what remains a serious subject for many of the crime-writer’s staunch fans.
Laura Thompson also claims it was wrong of me to allege that Agatha called her secretary Carlotta. But Agatha dedicated The Mystery of the Blue Train ‘To the two distinguished members of the O.F.D. Carlotta and Peter.’ While some paperback versions have since dropped the dedication to her secretary and dog it can be found in both the first hardback English editions and 2007 facsimile editions of the novel released by Harper-Collins.
Moreover, Edith Butler has stated unequivocally that Agatha had called her secretary Carlotta. The reason she is so sure of this is because her father, Inspector Sidney Butler, discussed the case with her and her mother over the breakfast table at the time of the disappearance. Edith Butler also recalls seeing Archie, dressed in plus-fours, arriving at Ascot Police Station to report his wife’s disappearance to her father and clearly being very unhappy at having to do so.
Laura Thompson employs faulty logic to refute the Gardners’ version of events pertaining to the night of the disappearance. The police established that Agatha left Styles at 9.45 p.m. Laura Thompson envisages it would have taken her between ‘thirty and forty minutes’ to drive from Styles to Newlands Corner and concludes she would have reached there at ‘ten-thirty’. But if Agatha had taken thirty minutes’ driving time she would have reached Newlands Corner by 10.15; or if she had taken forty minutes driving time her arrival would have been at 10.25, not 10.30. The biographer argues it would have taken Agatha ‘no more than five minutes’ to push the car off the plateau of Newlands Corner before walking to West Clandon Railway Station. On the basis of these timings, she argues that Agatha would not have arrived there in time to catch the 10.52 train up to London.
The distance between Styles, Sunningdale, and Newlands Corner is 14.7 miles and not ‘just under twenty miles’ as maintained by Laura Thompson. During the 1920s the makers of the model of Agatha’s Morris Cowley car advertised it could average 45 m.p.h., but according to Philip Garnons-Williams, the author of Morris Cars, 1913–1930, it was capable of comfortably attaining higher speeds of 55 m.p.h. A Morris Cowley driven at a steady 50 m.p.h. would have taken twenty minutes to reach Newlands Corner and would have arrived there at 10.05 p.m.
Contrary to Laura Thompson’s hypothesis, Agatha’s car rolled off the edge of the plateau within seconds because she had left the gears in neutral and released the handbrake – no sensible person would have spent five minutes pushing the car off the plateau with the handbrake on. The distance from Newlands Corner to West Clandon Railway Station is 2.3 miles. This would have given Agatha plenty of time, forty-seven minutes to be precise, in which to walk down the sloping road, which flattened out at the bottom of the hill, to West Clandon Station and catch the 10.52 train.
The average speed of a normal, healthy person walking at a reasonable steady pace is about four miles an hour or fifteen minutes per mile; it would take about thirty-five minutes to complete the walk, bringing the time to 10.40 pm, with twelve minutes to spare before the train arrived. Laura Thompson’s theory does not take into account that if, for any reason, Agatha’s car journey had taken longer than she had predicted she could have turned round at Newlands Corner and driven back part of the way she had come, then abandoned the vehicle and walked the remaining mile or so to West Clandon Station, thus ensuring she caught her train on time. All this is, of course, purely speculative since it is clear from Nan’s conversation with Graham Gardner that she believed Agatha might have got a lift part of the way to the station.
After I restaged Agatha’s journey one night in 1996 by getting Philip Garnons-Williams to drive me in his vintage Morris Cowley from Styles to Newlands Corner, then walking to West Clandon Station, it became apparent that the main reason she left her fur coat on the back seat of her car is because it would have been too hot for walking in – just as Superintendent Goddard had guessed after she was found alive.
It is Laura Thompson’s contention that Agatha was wearing shoes with high heels and would have found it difficult to walk along ‘unfamiliar roads’ in the dark to the station. But the composite photograph of Agatha on the missing person’s poster issued by the Berkshire police shows her in sensible walking shoes. Agatha was familiar with the location of West Clandon Station because it was on the same stretch of road between Sunningdale and Newlands Corner that she had travelled along on the many occasions when she had driven to mother-in-law’s house at Dorking.
Laura Thompson goes on to say that even if one accepts Agatha arrived at the station in time to catch the 10.52 train, why didn’t she leave home earlier in the night – perhaps around nine o’clock – to make things easier on herself? Agatha could have left sooner, of course, but she wanted to give Archie every opportunity to come home. When he didn’t she was determined to teach her philandering husband a lesson he would never forget. It would have made no sense for Agatha to abandon her car by the Silent Pool, which is a quarter of a mile away from Newlands Corner, down the steeply embanked A25 Dorking Road, as this would have made her walk to the station a longer one, although Laura Thompson obliquely suggests to the contrary. Also the narrow lane leading to the Silent Pool might have proved difficult to find in the dark compared to the wide open space of Newlands Corner. Moreover, the Silent Pool is surrounded by a thick belt of trees, and the vehicle might have gone unnoticed for several days.
Laura Thompson also contends that in early 1927 Agatha went to an unnamed psychiatrist in Harley Street ‘in order to maintain the fiction that she had lost her memory and needed to regain it’. Agatha was, in fact, in the Canary Islands completing The Mystery of the Blue Train.
Critical of anyone whose opinions or theories d
o not coincide with her own, Laura Thompson does not hesitate to airbrush Agatha’s image when it suits her. On 23 April 1947 Officer Fris, a survivor of the German concentration camp at Buchenwald during the Second World War, wrote to Agatha via her literary agent explaining how he became the author of a three-act play based on her splendid thriller Ten Little Niggers after it was smuggled into his camp from the other side of the barbed wire. The prisoners’ performance of the play was a great success thanks to the cunning plotting of her novel. He asked Agatha’s permission to stage his play for a forthcoming reunion of the Dutch prisoners of war on 20 May 1947.
Laura Thompson states that Agatha gave her permission for the play to be performed since it ‘was clearly a very special request’. But this is incorrect. Agatha’s agent Edmund Cork instead dealt with the matter on her behalf, and permission was refused. In a letter dated 2 May 1947 Edmund Cork advised Officer Fris that rights had been granted that would preclude any professional performance of Ten Little Niggers in Holland based on his dramatic version of Mrs Christie’s play and that no exception could be taken to the planned performance on 20 May.
According to Anthony Martin, director of the centenary celebrations, throughout her career, Agatha’s literary advisers were of the opinion that if they granted free favours where her copyrighted material was concerned others might seek to take financial advantage of her work without first acquiring permission to use it and paying the appropriate fees. It might seem harsh in the case of Officer Fris, but it was an entirely consistent line from their point of view.
Laura Thompson’s attempt to diminish the importance of Nan and Judith in Agatha’s life is strange. Quite early on in her biography she states that Nan ‘remained close’ to Agatha ‘all her life’ and that ‘Judith, too, was close to both Agatha and Rosalind.’ However, the biographer later contradicts herself when she alleges, ‘although Agatha wrote to Judith “I shall miss her very much” after Nan’s death in 1959, there is no sense that she was an intimate friend’. This, of course, is absurd.
At no time did Laura Thompson approach the Gardners or anyone else connected with my own book for assistance in her research. The fact that Agatha always gave Nan signed copies of her Mary Westmacott books, years before her pseudonym was publicly exposed, as well as copies of all her detective novels, is irrefutable proof of their long and enduring friendship for those outside their family circle.
During my research many reliable sources stated that Nan and Judith were great friends of Agatha’s all her life, including Rosalind herself during my visit to Greenway in 1994, Anthony Martin, Humphrey Watts’s daughter Dame Felicity Peake and his granddaughter Jane Davies, as well as Mathew Prichard, who confided as much to me over lunch at his home in Wales in 1995. Moreover, Janet Morgan acknowledged in her biography that the relationship Agatha described in A Daughter’s a Daughter had nothing to do with herself and Rosalind, but to those who knew them ‘there were touches of Agatha’s old friend from Abney, Nan, and her daughter Judith’.
Other aspects of Laura Thompson’s book betray a degree of censorship, such as Max Mallowan’s relationship with his mistress Barbara Parker. Laura Thompson takes the view that Agatha’s and Max’s marriage was unblemished by adultery. Even so, she admits that one friend of the couple came close to admitting to the affair and said of those who deny it: ‘What people say may be the truth in their eyes. Which may have involved a certain amount of turning a blind eye.’
In a bid to persuade her readers that the Mallowans’ marriage was happy and monogamous until Agatha died in 1976 Laura Thompson quotes from the letter Max wrote to Agatha forty years earlier, some two days prior to their sixth wedding anniversary. This is one in which Max said he thought that sometimes, but not very often, two people find real love together as they had, and then it was something that lay deep and intangible, not to be shaken by the wind. The document was found after Agatha died in a secret drawer of a little desk at Greenway. Laura Thompson intimates that this is proof that Max was a faithful husband throughout the couple’s marriage, but of course the letter is dated 9 September 1936 and Max’s liaison with Barbara did not start until the early 1950s. While the affair might have been considered explosive back then, it seems oddly quaint and unnecessary to continue hushing it up.
Encouraged by the Christie family, Laura Thompson’s biography also takes a somewhat naïve view of the crime writer’s financial affairs and, in particular, Agatha’s testamentary dispositions, claiming ‘the fact that she left only £1,000,600 was in fact no mystery at all. Everything else had been taken from her.’ However, after Agatha’s battles with the Inland Revenue had been resolved in the 1960s she was a very rich woman. The reason she left just over £1 million in her will is because the bulk of her fortune had been disposed of in elaborate tax avoidance schemes in the form of family trusts.
Anthony Martin has stated, after consultation with the literary agent Brian Stone, that Rosalind’s wealth from her mother’s writings was estimated in 1990 to be in excess of £600 million. Greenway was evaluated at £6 million, and around this time she bought Lower Greenway Farm, which consisted of 270 acres. The Christie family have always been secretive about their financial affairs, so Laura Thompson’s wholly unrealistic appraisal of Agatha’s legacy is hardly surprising.
A source close to Agatha’s grandson Mathew Prichard alleges that he was greatly offended by Laura Thompson’s claim that his step-grandfather Max Mallowan ‘found it easier and more congenial to fall in love for the first time with a man’ called Esme Howard prior to becoming Agatha’s second husband.
Laura Thompson alleges that the affair between Max and Esme Howard was not consummated, although, in the absence of proof, her opinions amount to speculation. Mathew Prichard and Laura Thompson allegedly had a crisis meeting in which he asked her to make certain alterations to her manuscript, but she declined, and he is said to have retaliated by refusing to grant her permission to publish in her book any precious photographs of his grandmother from the Christie family’s private albums. Its original title The Fully Authorized Biography of Agatha Christie was changed before publication to the more prosaic Agatha Christie: An English Mystery. All the photographs of Agatha that appear between the covers of Laura Thompson’s biography are well-known publicity shots from press agencies which are readily available upon the payment of reproduction fees.
Despite disagreeing with Mathew Prichard over certain aspects of her biography, Laura Thompson has never acknowledged the fact in public or fully explained the reasons why. Instead she gave thanks to Mathew Prichard for his ‘infinitely generous support’ and ‘permission’ to reproduce the photograph of Agatha on the dust jacket. In fact the photograph in question is a well-known publicity shot; it first appeared on the back covers of the English first editions of Death in the Clouds and The ABC Murders during the 1930s. Since then Laura Thompson’s and Mathew Prichard’s professional association in public has been one of guarded neutrality.
In order to promote Laura Thompson’s biography, which was commissioned as damage control in the wake of my book Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, Agatha Christie Ltd’s publicity machine went into overdrive, citing her as a lifelong addict of crime fiction and, in particular, of Agatha Christie’s work. Laura Thompson was a guest speaker at the Dorothy L. Sayers annual convention in 2008. She confessed to having no knowledge of detective fiction before she began work on her biography and to knowing precious little about Agatha Christie before this. When a member of the audience made an unflattering remark about Mathew Prichard, instead of defending him she maintained a diplomatic silence and, in the words of someone present, ‘it was not hard to see that she agreed’. Asked about relations with the Christie family, Laura Thompson replied that ‘like all things’ this came down to ‘big money’ and the family were doing their best ‘to cash in on the Christie legacy’.
If Rosalind Hicks had lived to see the publication of Agatha Christie: An English Mystery she would have perceived Lau
ra Thompson as a loose cannon, since her main reason for commissioning the biography in the first place was to reinforce the amnesia explanation of the disappearance. Given her fondness for Max, Rosalind would also have been furious at Laura Thompson’s claim that he had had an unconsummated homosexual love affair and would doubtlessly have refused to give the biographer permission to reproduce any precious photographs of her mother from the Christie family albums. In short, Rosalind would have hated Laura Thompson’s biography.
Epilogue
A Realm of Her Own
The publicity that arose from the disappearance shook Agatha until her dying day and, although her continued friendship with Nan helped to sustain her in its aftermath, Agatha always regretted having staged it with her help. Moreover she never got over the loss of Archie. Walter Savage Landor’s lines perhaps most poignantly encapsulate her lifelong heartbreak: ‘While the light lasts I shall not forget, and in the darkness I shall remember.’
After Agatha’s death, her writing case was opened and found to contain her wedding ring from Archie, together with letters from him, some mementoes and a cutting of Psalm 55, verses 12, 13 and 14:
For it is not an open enemy, that hath done me this dishonour: for then I could have borne it.
Neither was it mine adversary, that did magnify himself against me: for then peradventure I would have hid myself from him.
But it was even thou, my companion: my guide, and mine own familiar friend.
Love was the most important thing in Agatha’s life: she had been raised to ‘await her fate’ and for her the true symbol of success in life was being a married woman. It is indicative that when she booked into the Harrogate Hydro she accorded herself the title of a married woman. How important this status was to her was reinforced when she created her fictional counterpart Mrs Ariadne Oliver, since there was never any mention in the books of Mr Oliver or what had become of him. Marriage, for better and for worse, was essential to Agatha’s existence, for, as she once told Max, she was like ‘a dog that needs to be taken for walks’. Moreover, as a result of the humiliating public scrutiny she endured in 1926, the extraordinary fame that later came her way never went to her head.
