Agatha Christie

by H. R. F. Keating

  After the George Pollock version of And Then There Were None, there was another pause to the 1972 Endless Night. Written and directed by Sidney Gilliat, the film echoes the work he did with Frank Launder in the forties, such as Alistair Sim and Trevor Howard in Green for Danger or Howard in I See a Dark Stranger. Some of the more firmly entrenched British technicians were backed by a score from Bernard Herrmann, whom the producers obviously hoped would give the film the Hitchcock sound and emphasize the overtones of Psycho they were striving for.

  Hayley Mills is the rich girl who marries Hywel Bennett and from the moment Britt Ekland appears as the old friend whom the groom can’t abide, the outcome is obvious. Per Oscarson, the remarkable Swedish actor, was doing a few English language films at this stage (Dandy in Aspic dates from this period), and as the architect friend who tries to ward off the disaster he makes a considerable impression, though his character is devalued by the grotesque house which he is supposed to have created for the couple. George Sanders, in one of his last performances, also suffers from an incomprehensible characterization further weakened by poor post-synchronization.

  The attempts to update the style with a little tame sex and some non-time-sequence editing make less impression than Harry Waxman’s vivid colour photography and the Herrmann score. Appealing Hayley Mills’s career had wilted with the declining British film industry and the attempt to turn her long-running partner Bennett into a new ‘menace’ star was no more successful than those with John Hodiak.

  This brings us to 1974 and Murder on the Orient Express. The most ambitious British film of its day, its enormous success was a considerable embarrassment to EMI, then talking of cutting back their commitment to the unprofitable British film industry. One of the author’s most celebrated and unfathomable mysteries, this Poirot adventure had long defied adaptation. Censorship alone would have frustrated any accurate rendition until the seventies. As we have seen, from the 1940s onwards, Agatha Christie adaptations have attempted to update their material with humour. Paul Dehn’s screenplay offered the material perfectly straight, and director Sidney Lumet used this to fashion what may well be the peak achievement of the seventies nostalgia craze. Lumet saw the film as another great train melodrama in the tradition of The Lady Vanishes and Shanghai Express and certainly its set-piece is the arrival at the steam-wreathed railway station of the dazzling cast and the rhythmically edited departure of the train, headed by its massive valve-geared locomotive.

  Lumet had made it a policy to alternate safer commercial subjects like The Anderson Tapes with more challenging material such as The Offence, both with Sean Connery. Sometimes his safe films failed and occasionally his difficult ones were very successful, but not having had a hit since Serpico, he badly needed one to ensure the high output which made him one of the last of the great American film-makers. This production was played safe with a big budget, lavish production, alternating lush period studio work with authentic snowscape locations and, particularly, filling all the parts with superb and famous players.

  Probably the film’s greatest joy is watching these enormous talents competing with one another. Albert Finney is buried in make-up and enjoyably coasts as Poirot, but Richard Widmark is suitably abrasive as the victim. Michael York and Jacqueline Bisset manage not to be obliterated in the thankless parts of the young married aristocrats and they are surrounded by the superb gallery of gargoyles made up of Lumet regulars, Martin Balsam as the railway official, Anthony Perkins doing Norman Bates yet again, and particularly Sean Connery, the director’s regular star who manages to draw attention away from even this prestigious company. Lauren Bacall as the American matron plays opposite Widmark, with the superb and so often wasted Wendy Hiller as the countess, Rachel Roberts as her maid, Vanessa Redgrave as the lady with the husband, the deliriously anti-type casting of Ingrid Bergman as the lumpen nurse and upstaging them all because the audience is kept waiting for his big moment which he discreetly withholds – John Gielgud as the Jeeves character. Jean-Pierre Cassel is suitably inconspicuous and the featured players also would have drawn comment in any other production – Colin Blakely, George Coulouris and Denis Quilley.

  Richard Williams’s titles (one of his few non-comic ventures like Charge of the Light Brigade) set up the kidnapping and murder of the child of the rich family in impeccable period detail and soon Poirot finds himself on the Orient Express with this bizarre cross-section of humanity, all of whom appear to have some connection with this earlier event. There follows the murder and their isolation in the snowbound train. I personally value the film more for its little touches – Vanessa Redgrave’s coquettish wink or Widmark brusquely pushing aside the delicate flower arrangement – than for the suspense of the approaching snow-plough which will free the train, and by consequence, the murderer. While it is a delight to watch, the film yet again sinks under the sheer weight of words, with Finney/Poirot’s final double unravelling of the mystery totally uninvolving – even with its flashback visualization. There was talk of a new Poirot series from this stable but Finney, one of the most serious and most wasted of British actors, proved reluctant to spend more of his career padded and brilliantined. He still remembered the waste of his charming film as director, Charlie Bubbles, and tended to concentrate on the theatre which can regrettably be neither preserved nor widely seen.

  Murder on the Orient Express showed in a spectacular fashion that the Agatha Christie magic could be made to work on film, and that attempts to dilute or update it showed little understanding of its nature. However impatient we may become with silly-ass lounge lizards, murders at the vicarage and blundering police inspectors unable to detect the exotic poison in the coffee, Agatha Christie’s craftmanship will still find a public who delight in matching their imagination with one of her precisely engineered plots. Many more serious writers cannot claim a body of film work that contains titles as impressive as the 1945 And Then There Were None, Witness for the Prosecution and Murder on the Orient Express.

  Music and Mystery WILLIAM WEAVER

  In general, the arts do not come off well in the novels of Agatha Christie. Her painters, for example, are few and usually unpleasant or feckless. The best of the lot, from an artistic point of view, was no doubt Amyas Crale, posthumous protagonist of Five Little Pigs (America’s Murder in Retrospect). Several reputable observers – including Hercule Poirot himself – testify to the power of Crale’s work, but as a human being, he was far from admirable, bearing, in his unlikeable aspects, a strong resemblance to Augustus John. There are painters, too, in After the Funeral (Funerals Are Fatal), daubers and incompetent. Only the sculptor Henrietta Savernake, in The Hollow (Murder after Hours), has both talent and a certain spiky charm, along with a deep, if reticent, humanity. But she, too, can be ruthless when it comes to her art.

  Literature fares a bit better. There are several untalented and unsuccessful writers around (one in The Crooked House, for example), but in compensation there is Miss Marple’s clever nephew Raymond West, whose novels – odd as his aunt finds them – allow him to live on an elegant scale and be generous not only to Aunt Jane (giving her a Caribbean holiday) but also to others in need, like the young heroine of the final Marple book. And, of course, there is the delightful Mrs Ariadne Oliver, Mrs Christie’s wry self-caricature, warm and engaging as a person and obviously a success with her Frankenstein-monster, the Finnish detective.

  The theatre gave Mrs Christie a number of characters, but again, few are sympathetic, and at least one – Charles Cartwright in Three Act Tragedy (Murder in Three Acts) – is doubly guilty, of bigamy and murder. Actors make natural suspects, if not natural criminals, and many a Christie figure in the past engaged in amateur theatricals or was perhaps a bit too brilliant in the OUDS. In the early The Man in the Brown Suit there is a wicked prima ballerina, and there is a reference to the Russian ballet in The Mystery of the Blue Train, while in the short story ‘The Arcadian Deer’ (one of The Labours of Hercules) the great Katrina’s love for a garag
e mechanic is reminiscent of the real-life story of Karsavina, who married a racing driver. In any case, we seldom see dancers dancing, nor do we hear their music.

  We know, from her rare interviews, that Agatha Christie liked music. As a young girl, she studied voice in Paris, and she had ambitions of becoming a concert pianist. But in the books of Agatha Christie music occupies a strange, ambivalent position.

  Superficially, it seems absent. But under the surface, it is there. Chiefly music takes the form of nursery rhymes. Seven books have quotations from such rhymes for their titles, and the American Christie scholar G. C. Ramsey gives the tunes (some apparently sung to him by the author herself) in an appendix to his Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery. But nursery rhymes or old songs crop up also elsewhere, and in significant ways. In the very first Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Russian folk songs are mentioned. Kirsten, the Scandinavian murderess, in Ordeal by Innocence, has a song she sings, a wistful tune that recurs like a leitmotif and explains much about her character. Poirot shows interest in music. In Cards on the Table he ‘hums a tune’, but in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (The Patriotic Murders) he actually sings and, in doing so, finds the key to the puzzle: ‘I had my first glimmer of the truth. I was in church at the time, and singing a verse of a psalm. It spoke of a snare laid with cords…’ Again in The A.B.C. Murders Poirot sings a World War I song (having previously, in the same book, compared himself to a prima donna). Poirot evinces a taste for opera in Lord Edgware Dies (Thirteen at Dinner), in which he actually puts a rose between his lips and explains to the bewildered Hastings: ‘I had a fancy to pretend I was Carmen.’ Hastings, incidentally, seems virtually unmusical, but he does reveal (in The Big Four) that he has at least heard of Handel’s Largo. Untypically, Hastings marries an artist – or rather, an artiste, the acrobat Cinderella – but after marrying her and settling in South America, he makes suspiciously frequent trips to Europe. Perhaps Cinderella turned nasty when taken away from her art.

  In They Do It With Mirrors (Murder With Mirrors) Miss Marple speaks of having been to the opera. Was this a taste acquired during her education in Italy (mentioned in the same book)? Perhaps her Italian school was like Miss Pope’s establishment in ‘The Girdle of Hyppolita’ (another story in The Labours of Hercules), as described by its headmistress: ‘We specialize here, M. Poirot, in Art and Music. The girls are taken to the Opera… The very best masters come here to instruct them in music, singing, and painting.’ Miss Marple keeps a critical eye on the music situation in St Mary Mead, where the position of organist is clearly not an enviable one. In one of her Thirteen Problems (1932), Miss Marple remarks of an older man: ‘Gentlemen of that age are sometimes very peculiar where young girls are concerned. Our last organist – but there, I mustn’t talk scandal.’ The village obviously had bad luck with its organists, since in 4.50 From Paddington (What Mrs McGillicuddy Saw!), twenty-five years later, Miss Marple reports a ‘general distrust of the new organist’.

  Operas crop up here and there, sometimes in unexpected situations. The stolid Major Blunt, in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in a rather Marple-like way, finds an opera situation to compare to an event in his current life: ‘Remember the Johnny who sold his soul to the devil? In return for being made young again? There’s an opera about it.’ The novel appeared in 1926, and it is interesting to speculate as to which production of Faust the major attended. Given his age, it could have been during the Hammerstein season at Covent Garden 1911–12, or more likely, during the 1919 Beecham summer season, with the Belgian tenor Fernand Ansseau as Faust and Melba as Marguerite.

  A few pages after his reference to Faust, Major Blunt shows even more astonishing operatic knowledge. A piece of jewellery has been thrown into a pond, and clever Flora says: ‘Perhaps it’s a crown… like the one Melisande saw in the water.’

  ‘Melisande… she’s in an opera, isn’t she?’

  And Blunt explains his knowledge: ‘People take me sometimes…’ He adds a philistine comment, unfortunately fairly typical of Christie characters: ‘Funny idea of pleasure.’

  In Faust perhaps. But in Pelléas? We can guess, in any event, that the major attended one of the Pelléas performances conducted just after the war by Percy Pitt, with Edvina, Royer, Maguenat, and Huberdeau. These were in 1920. Or, in 1924, he could have heard a more modest production by the BNOC at His Majesty’s. His friends made a strange choice for their non-operatic guest.

  Faust appears elsewhere. In Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) the schoolgirls have been ‘taken to Covent Garden to hear Faust last week’. Here we have the sort of blunder one might expect from Ariadne Oliver, but not from Agatha Christie. Faust was, in fact, not played at Covent Garden after the war until the 1970s. The girls must have been taken to Sadler’s Wells. Opera is mentioned earlier in the same novel, when a letter is written saying: ‘Dear Baron von Eisenger. We can certainly arrange for Hedwig to go to the Opera on the occasion of Hellstern’s taking the roll [sic] of Isolda —’

  This opera is mentioned again in The Sittaford Mystery (Murder at Hazlemoor), but only in passing: ‘He looked, Emily thought, as Tristan ought to look in the third act of Tristan and Isolde and as no Wagnerian tenor has ever looked yet.’

  Such references to music are characteristic: casual, nonchalant, not embedded in the story. On other occasions, the author uses musical terms in a similar fashion. In Dead Man’s Folly, the butler rings the gong in ‘a most artistic performance, crescendo, forte, diminuendo, rallentando…’ In The Moving Finger, the barely convalescent narrator is warned, musically if inaccurately, by his doctor: ‘You’ve got to take life slowly and easily, the tempo is marked Legato.’

  But in a few novels, music plays a more important role. The murder weapon in They Do It With Mirrors is concealed in the piano stool, where less frequently played pieces are kept. First Inspector Curry examines the music out on the instrument itself, and is expectedly amazed: ‘Hindemith? Who’s he? Never heard of him. Shostakovitch! What names these people have!’ Then he looks into the stool.

  ‘Here’s the old-fashioned stuff. Handel’s Largo, Czerny’s Exercises, “I know a lovely garden” – Vicar’s wife used to sing that when I was a boy—’

  The automatic is lying on Chopin’s Preludes. One wonders, parenthetically, how the pianist managed to play Hindemith and Shostakovitch if he neglected his Czerny so badly.

  In Hercule Poirot’s Christmas music plays a significant role: two alibis are based on it. David, the vague and unsatisfactory son of the family, who ‘always got on father’s nerves… with his music’, plays the piano after dinner. The ‘Dead March’ (does the author mean the march from Handel’s Saul or the third movement of the Chopin Second Piano Sonata?). The point of his playing is that it seems to cover the time during which his father is murdered (and nobody else in the house could play either Handel or Chopin). During that same time, two lovers of less austere music, in another part of the house, are dancing to a gramophone. Since the gramophone, too, is heard constantly, they obviously do not have time – in that pre-LP age – to rush upstairs and do the deed.

  In one of her novels, Agatha Christie speaks of ‘variations on a well-known theme’. This might be a description of the body of her own work. Whether her characters – victims, suspects or villains – like music or not is immaterial; she obviously enjoyed its formality as something akin to her own. And even in her constant use of nursery rhymes and old songs there is a hint at her work’s general quality, for it has – in the original sense – a ‘popular’ tone. No doubt, most of her characters are rich or well-to-do (and the poor ones always have at least one maid), but still these novels are the finest ‘people’s’ literature in a way that works of Soviet or People’s Republic orthodox hacks can never achieve.

  As a postscript to these observations on music in Agatha Christie, which make no claim to completeness by the way, one must mention a novel she wrote in her other, more romantic, less formal persona, Mary Westmacott. This is Giant’s Bread, and
– poles away from the Christie canon – the entire story revolves around artists, the most important being a singer (who loses her voice) and a composer (who loses the singer).

  This is a remarkable book. Written in 1930, it comes some time after other ‘composer’ novels like Henry Handel Richardson’s Maurice Guest and Romain Rolland’s mammoth Jean-Christophe, which may well have influenced it. Music, in Giant’s Bread, is not a form of entertainment, not a source of pleasure, not even an artistic discipline: it is a kind of possession, or rather obsession, which seizes its foreordained victim and forces him to follow it.

  Vernon, the composer of the story, ‘gets music’ the way some people get religion. Dragged against his will to a concert (the time is some years before World War I), he is bowled over. Admittedly, it is a special sort of concert, as he describes it: ‘There were nine orchestras… all massed. Sound can be glorious if you get enough of it. I don’t mean just loudness – it shows more when it’s soft. But there must be enough. I don’t know what they played – nothing, I think, that was real…’