When Agatha Christie (1890-1976) was a child she had a recurring nightmare in
which pleasant occasions %26ndash; family tea-times, parties, picnics %26ndash; were
disrupted by a scary apparition with no hands, a ghastly stare and
formidable powers of disguise. %26ldquo;It might be Mummy or Daddy or Nannie,%26rdquo; she
recalled, %26ldquo;someone you were just talking to. You looked up into Mummy%26rsquo;s face
. . . and then you saw the light steely-blue eyes %26ndash; and from the sleeve of
Mummy%26rsquo;s dress %26ndash; oh, horror! %26ndash; that horrible stump.%26rdquo; Merging cosiness and
menace, it%26rsquo;s a dream that eerily prefigures the 66 crime novels and 13 short
story collections that made her a global literary phenomenon (over a billion
copies sold in English, another billion in translation).
Comfortable stability was her ideal. Throughout later life, Laura Thompson%26rsquo;s
biography stresses, she retained wistful memories of her serene upbringing
in the late-Victorian and Edwardian Torquay of villas set among rose gardens
and impeccable lawns, retinues of servants, seven-course dinner parties,
tennis matches, fancy-dress balls, dance cards, picture hats and sedate
flirtations over the clack of croquet mallets. In keeping with this idyll,
on Christmas Eve 1914, she married Archie Christie, a dashing young officer
in the Royal Flying Corps.
When the first world war took him to France, she became a volunteer nurse. The
hospital%26rsquo;s dispensary %26ndash; whose supervisor kept a lump of curare in his pocket
because it gave him %26ldquo;a sense of power%26rdquo; %26ndash; was the perfect crucible for her
imagination. Poisons fascinated her. More than 80 characters fall prey to
them in her pages. The coloured bottles in which the dispensary%26rsquo;s drugs were
stored stirred her into poetry (%26ldquo;From the Borgias%26rsquo; time to the present day,
their power has been proved and tried! / Monkshood blue, called Aconite, and
the deadly Cyanide! / . . . Here is menace and murder and sudden death! %26ndash; in
these phials of green and blue!%26rdquo;). A lethal cocktail of potassium bromide
and strychnine dispatches the murder victim in her 1920 debut whodunit, The
Mysterious Affair at Styles (which she was pleased to find favourably
reviewed in the Pharmaceutical Journal). In that novel, Christie put her
distinctive stamp on things in the bamboozling flair she brought to the
plotting. Just how audaciously she could subvert readers%26rsquo; expectations was
displayed by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926.
After her marriage to Archie collapsed, that same year, with his revelation
that he loved another woman, she channelled her energies into a succession
of peerlessly inventive murder mysteries that exhibit the ill-advisability
of taking anything, or anyone, for granted. Compulsively orderly, her
detective Hercule Poirot reaches the truth by noting things that are
jarringly out of place. Miss Marple, the spinster sleuth introduced as his
counterpart (he solves crimes by deductive logic, she by processes of
association), inhabits a village, St Mary Mead, of tranquil-seeming
gentility. That it is also rife with slaughter epitomises Christie%26rsquo;s
imagination. Her titles like to juxtapose the deadly with the decorous: The
Murder at the Vicarage, The Body in the Library. Borrowings from nursery
rhymes (A Pocketful of Rye, Hickory Dickory Dock) similarly counterpoint the
innocent and sinister. They also highlight her love of pattern: One, Two,
Buckle My Shoe, Three Blind Mice, Five Little Pigs, Ten Little Niggers
(later regulated into And Then There Were None).
The title of one of her most dazzlingly ingenious books, Cards on the Table
(1936), reminds you that what you are enjoying is basically a game: no
emotional or psychological perturbations, no raw carnage. Her books aren%26rsquo;t
stomach-turners but brain-teasers. When begged to write %26ldquo;a good violent
murder with lots of blood%26rdquo;, she responded with Hercule Poirot%26rsquo;s Christmas
(1938), in which a cantankerous patriarch is found with his throat slit amid
a pool of gore. Typically, this isn%26rsquo;t what it seems, and the plot depends
not on bloodshed but blood-lines: ancestry, parentage. To achieve her aim of
outwitting the reader, she drew on an unsurpassed repertoire of
beguilements. In her books, the killer may be the narrator, the apparently
intended victim, the investigating policeman, or every one of the suspects.
Thompson notes how her sometimes sniffed-at use of stereotyped characters
suits her wily purposes perfectly, since the mind%26rsquo;s eye tends to slide over
them. Likewise, her simple prose ensures that nothing impedes engagement
with her intricate plots.
Showing the effort behind the intricacy, extracts from Christie%26rsquo;s notebooks
are illuminatingly reproduced here. Thompson also enlighteningly
demonstrates how the books published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott
broach personal concerns: her pain at the loss of her first husband, her
attachment to her mother, her semi-detached relationship with her daughter,
and her second marriage to the archeologist Max Mallowan (%26ldquo;I adore corpses
and stiffs,%26rdquo; she reassured him when he worried that his professional
immersion in human remains might put her off).
Most engrossing of all is Thompson%26rsquo;s account of the notorious episode in
late-1926 in which she left her car overhanging a quarry in
suspicious-looking circumstances and vanished for 11 days amid press
hysteria, drainings of ponds and mass searches of the North Downs, before
being found in a Harrogate hotel allegedly suffering from memory loss. Her
angry impulse to discomfit her errant husband, the subsequent ignoring of a
letter she had sent saying she was going to Yorkshire and a fixated
policeman%26rsquo;s obdurate determination to prove Archie had killed her combined
to cause the brouhaha, Thompson convincingly argues.
Bizarrely, this eminently sensible explanation is prefaced by the breathy
declaration that, %26ldquo;Her 11 days in the wilderness were a myth, a poem. They
exist in a different sphere from that of theories and solutions.%26rdquo; Thompson
is dismayingly prone to sugary effusions of this kind (Agatha %26ldquo;wandered
through the sunlit gardens and dark forests of her imagination%26rdquo;, had
%26ldquo;sensations that stretched her very soul to its limits%26rdquo; etc). But it%26rsquo;s worth
struggling through the saccharine. Christie%26rsquo;s work, which once attracted
admirers ranging from TS Eliot to PG Wodehouse, Clement Attlee to Robert
Graves, tends to be underestimated nowadays. So it%26rsquo;s good to be reminded of
her enduring achievement: those shoals of red herring, mounds of curiously
killed corpses, heaps of clues and fragile alibis that, in the hands of this
mistress of misdirection, have given so much pleasure to so many millions of
readers.
The labours of Hercules
Christie sometimes jokingly complained that she was tired of her dapper
Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and his preening self-satisfaction with his
little grey cells and his luxuriant waxed moustache. But she always
protected her character%26rsquo;s image. She took her publisher to task over a cover
illustration because it made him look too tall, and she regularly criticised
actors who played him in films. Charles Laughton was %26lsquo;entirely unlike him%26rsquo;,
she declared. Albert Finney, in Murder on the Orient Express, left, she
found convincing, though his moustache wasn%26rsquo;t splendid enough for her. MGM%26rsquo;s
proposed version of The ABC Murders was shelved when she objected to the
script in which Poirot %26mdash; to be played by the American comedian Zero Mostel
as a moustachioed lecher (%26lsquo;I%26rsquo;ll certainly give him an eye for the girls!%26rsquo;) %26mdash;
has a bedroom scene.
AGATHA CHRISTIE: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson
Headline %26pound;20 pp534
Buy the book here
at the offer price of %26pound;18 (inc p%26amp;p)
Related Articles
No user responded in this post
Leave A Reply
Please Note: Comment moderation maybe active so there is no need to resubmit your comments