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Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making

Stories and Secrets from her Archive

John Curran

Dedication

For

Mathew, Lucy and Mahler,

without whom …

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

1 Rule of Three

2 The First Decade 1920–1929

Unused Ideas – One

3 Favourite Stories and ‘The Man Who Knew’

4 The Second Decade 1930–1939

Unused Ideas – Two

5 ‘How I Created Hercule Poirot’

6 The Third Decade 1940–1949

Unused Ideas – Three

7 Miss Marple and ‘The Case of the Caretaker’s Wife’

8 The Fourth Decade 1950–1959

Unused Ideas – Four

9 Agatha Christie and Poison

10 The Fifth Decade 1960–1969

Unused Ideas – Five

11 The Dark Lady …

12 The Sixth Decade 1970–1976

Unused Ideas – Six

13 Agatha Christie’s Booklists

Appendix 1: Agatha Christie Chronology

Appendix 2: Alphabetical List of Agatha Christie Titles

Index of Titles

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

From Notebook 4 a tantalising glimpse of a project, never realised, from the 1960s. See Unused Ideas Three.

PREFACE

Victoria Station, March 1931

Although she is by now an experienced traveller, the sights, sounds and even smells of the great railway station never fail to excite her. This is the start of her journey and she takes a moment to savour the sense of anticipation that bustling railway stations have always engendered in her – harassed and luggage-laden passengers hurrying along platforms, imperious-looking porters issuing instructions and shouting to invisible colleagues, the great trains snorting and bellowing clouds of smoke. She walks purposefully along the continental platform and hails a porter. As soon as she is installed in her seat she has an opportunity to observe, at her leisure, her fellow passengers. She can’t help speculating about the life of these strangers with whom she is to share a few hours in close proximity. This covert observation has, by now, become almost an occupational hazard and provided she is left to her own devising it’s all potential material. Now let’s see …

The moth-eaten looking man sitting opposite … studying his railway timetable and jotting down the details as he turns the pages could be … an office worker planning his holiday? a Civil Servant checking a business trip? a salesman plotting his sales route? His only luggage is a smallish case … probably for his samples … too small for encyclopaedias … brushes, perhaps, or … pens or … hosiery?

And that very handsome young man opposite … reading … what, exactly? It’s not a book … or a magazine … it seems to be typed pages, loosely bound, printed on only one side of the page and laid out very specifically. And he is studying it intensely and underlining sections of it … a business report? A manuscript perhaps and he’s correcting it? No … the corrections seem too regular. Ah, I’ve got it – it’s a script and he’s marking his lines … he’s an actor and that makes sense … matinee-idol good looks.

The older, haughty-looking woman in the far corner … seems to be waiting for someone, as evidenced both by her exasperated demeanour and by the continual checking of her wristwatch and her scanning of the platform for … her husband? No … no wedding ring … a friend, maybe … a travelling companion?

A harassed-looking older woman, struggling with a fox terrier on a lead and carrying a suitcase, a handbag, an umbrella and an assortment of magazines, hurries along the platform. In response to an imperious gesture she clambers into the carriage, managing to drop the magazines as she does so. Any lingering doubt as to her status is removed by the recriminations which follow.

Yes, definitely a companion … almost certainly a paid companion … nobody else would accept that sort of abuse.

At last, to the accompaniment of final shouts and whistles, the train glides out of the station and passengers settle down for the journey. As London begins to disappear her thoughts turn to the reunion ahead of her in a few days. Although married six months ago she has not seen her husband for almost four of those months. And despite a constant flow of letters in both directions she is anxious that, when they finally meet again, there should be no awkwardness. She knows that the best remedy for worry is work and she can easily and unobtrusively do some here where she sits.

And goodness knows, there is no shortage of potential material; just look around this carriage … and I want to get down that idea about Ruth Draper … very clever performance … complete transformation in a few seconds … must take lots of practice and endless rehearsals … which also reminds me …

Reaching into her bag, she produces a small, black-covered notebook. She opens it, idly noting that Rosalind has already tried to appropriate it by the simple expedient of writing her name and address on the inside cover – ‘Rosalind Christie, Ashfield, Torquay, Devon’. A further search produces a fountain pen. Unscrewing the top of the pen, she opens the notebook, flattens the pages and begins to read what she has already written.

Ideas 1931

Book

Poirot and a crime

a closed circle – one of them did it – he knows which – but now …

Could Why Didn’t they ask Evans fit in?

Hmm … can’t really remember much about this ‘closed circle’ … and ‘Poirot and a crime’ is not much help … probably full of ideas at the beginning of the year. Evans, Evans … that rings a bell although I don’t think I settled on any particular idea … although haven’t I got an Evans in Sittaford?… Let’s see …

She turns the page and continues reading, noting the underlined qualification at the beginning.

Tentative

Old lady (or man) sends for P – in a state of coma when he arrives

Last words – Poirot is left to find out

Evans (maid)

Also Evans (gardener)

and Evans – a baker or butcher or tradesman …

Oh, yes, of course … the last words of someone who is dying and they make no sense … not even to me at the moment, I must admit … but distinct possibilities here … infinite ones, in fact. I could have a lot of fun with this. Should it be another case for Miss M? … it sounds village-y, and Miss M would know about maids and gardeners and tradesmen. Although I haven’t given Poirot an airing since … let’s see … Blue Train, I think … and that was at least three years ago. Yes, that was his last case … of course End House will remedy that next … what did Edmund tell me … next February I think … Anyway, didn’t I have a blood-covered butcher in one of those Big Four episodes … and a baker seems an unlikely possibility … a gardener, perhaps. But would it carry a book or should I use it as just an element of a plot … or a short story maybe … although it would look great as a title: ‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’

She leaves ‘Evans’ for a moment, looks up and stares absent-mindedly at the passing countryside. Outside snow is still lying on many of the fields, a fleeting reminder of the snowbound setting of yet-to-be-published The Sittaford Mystery. She returns to her notebook and turns the page.

Yes, here we are … I knew I jotted down a note somewhere … this one I do remember …

Idea for book

Murder utterly motiveless

Because dead man and murderer

Unacquainted –

Reason – a rehearsal

I’m sure this is really original but it needs careful treatment. Let’s leave that for the moment … not sure where to go from there … tricky set-up but I think the idea is promising … worth thinking about it carefully …

She looks speculatively again at the final word of the note and then glances across at the good-looking man opposite, still ostensibly studying his script.

My good-looking friend is examining his reflection in the window … he knows the young girl opposite is watching him … seems to enjoy it … used to people watching him … matinee-idol good looks … matinee … actor … rehearsal. How about an actor for the murder-as-rehearsal idea? Seems to make sense … but victim or murderer? Mmm … possibilities here although I’m not sure of carrying off a theatre milieu. Maybe just an actor and his social circle …

She turns another page and looks reminiscently at what she has previously written.

Man stabbed in room – everyone there – behind screen – gagged first.

Man induced to hide in other man’s rooms (his wife coming there) has tea first (drugged)

Hmmm, yes, that one we all wrote … was it last year?… the body found behind the screen when the blood flowed out from beneath it … lots of people in the room. Blood on the Screen or Under the Screen or something … Trouble with those combined efforts … you have to remember that someone else is going to take over after you so you can’t do everything, or even anything, you want … Dorothy always wants it all very structured and organised … I can’t really work under those circumstances and I think I can do something else with that same basic idea …

Man hides in chest – (but bores hole to see through) has previously had a dinner with friend …

Must finish this off … Edmund is sure The Strand will take it … which would be nice … and I have most of it sketched here … just a matter of writing it up. But I want to get Ruth Draper down on paper.

She flicks through a few pages until she finds a blank one, unscrews the top of her pen, writes and firmly underlines:

Book

Man Killed – says Jane Wilkinson (actress) beautiful amoral – ‘Only way is for me to kill him’

Carlotta Adams – her imitations – (including Jane) ‘Would do anything for money’

Crime discovered – either victim says it was Jane – or man servant saw her – or girl secretary saw her

However, Jane has alibi – quite unbreakable – dinner

Carlotta Adams also dies – before Poirot can see her – a simple poison

Right, that’s my basic situation. Now I wonder if I could work in the ‘Evans’ dying words idea, if the victim says Jane’s name … and I could call one of the servants Evans … must be careful about Poirot not getting to see Carlotta before she dies … now, some more detail …

An actress Jane W comes to see Poirot – engaged to Duke of Merton

Martin Squire – pleasant hearty young fellow – an admirer of Miss Wilkinson’s – he is seen next evening having supper with Carlotta

Lord Mountcarlin

Other man (Duke? Millionaire?)

Bryan Martin actor in films with her

Lord Mountcarlin’s nephew Ronnie West (debonair Peter Wimseyish)

Miss Carroll Margaret Carroll middle-aged woman A Miss Clifford

Not convinced about some of those names but I can remedy that later … ‘Evans’ is still a possibility but I’m not sure in which capacity … and I need some more suspects … what about the old reliable, the butler? or maybe a maid of Carlotta’s? And I think I’d better have Japp, especially if I set it in London … which is the most likely possibility if I have theatres and actors and actresses and rehearsals … he could be the official investigator. Rehearsals … now, I wonder … should I combine Ruth Draper and the rehearsal idea … or are they each good enough to carry a book on their own? I think they are …

Japp comes to see Poirot – threats – P says quietly ‘Who heard them?’ – J hedges? But perfect alibi – party Amersham

She pauses briefly and considers what she has written, reflecting on possible opening scenes. Turning the page she continues covering the smaller-than-usual pages in flowing, black handwriting.

Now, the actual events from the beginning …

Sequence

At theatre – CA’s performance – H’s reflections. Is JW really such a good actress? Looks round – JW – her eyes sparkling with enthusiasm. Supper at Savoy – Jane at next table – CA there also …

Enter Bryan (and CA) JW has gone into bedroom …

Next JW herself – her account – the telephone call …

With Jenny Driver – called for her – 8.30 – and took her out for evening …

Immersed mentally in the West End of night clubs and theatres and hat shops and dinner parties, she fails to notice the train slowing down until it jerks to a stop and her pen stabs the page. Glancing up briefly, she notes the approach of the ticket collector and reaches into her handbag to retrieve her ticket. Anxious to return to Jane and Carlotta and Miss Carroll, she begins a new page.

She is relieved? or disappointed. P asks if he can see Miss Carroll …

Her pen falters and she shakes it impatiently; a large splash of black ink obliterates most of the page.

Oh, what a mess … how can I mop it up?… no, I’ll just tear it out completely and start again … luckily, it’s a new page and I won’t lose the back …

‘Tickets, please.’

Distracted, she tears the page from the notebook and produces her ticket, noting idly that the official has a button missing from his uniform.

‘Thank you, Ma’am.’

Now, where was I? … Poirot was about to question Jenny … no, Miss Carroll … and he was talking to … let me check …

She unfurls the discarded, blotted page and studies it.

he is relieved

… who is?… was he not talking to … Oh, I see what’s happened … I didn’t remove it completely … there’s still some of the first word left in the notebook … makes quite a difference … now, I wonder …

She stares out the carriage window but instead of snow-covered countryside she sees Poirot, clutching a letter with a torn edge, gesticulating and explaining excitedly to Hastings, who merely looks bewildered, completely missing the vital point. She picks up her pen once more and while the idea is fresh in her mind dashes down her inspiration – an inspiration that will hang the murderer of Lord Edgware.

P looking at letter –

He had to tear it – you see?

I see nothing …

Letter … suggesting the letter was She…

INTRODUCTION

‘If one idea in particular seems attractive, and you feel you could do something with it, then you toss it around, play tricks with it, work it up, tone it down, and gradually get it into shape.’

Introduction to Passenger to Frankfurt

The 73 notebooks reposed in an unpretentious brown cardboard box at the bottom of a cupboard; notebooks in various shapes, sizes, colours and states of preservation, covered with sprawling and often illegible handwriting in pencil, fountain pen and biro; no chronology, no order, no method; but a splendid profusion of imagination.

This was my introduction to the Notebooks of Agatha Christie on a November evening in 2005 as I stood upstairs in Greenway House, her former Devon home. Downstairs Mathew Prichard, her grandson, sat in the library surrounded by the books from his grandmother’s childhood as well as numerous examples of her own literary output. At Mathew’s invitation I was spending the weekend in Greenway House, and I passed most of those few days in a small room at the top of the stairs which contained the archive of Agatha Christie’s literary life. It was a breathtaking and absorbing miscellany of signed first editions and much-read paperbacks, typescripts and manuscripts, letters and contracts, theatre programmes and film posters, audio and video tapes, film and television scripts; and 73 notebooks.

Hours after I laid eyes on the notebooks for the first time I was still immersed in the fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the plotting of the best detective novels of the century. Every Notebook contained fresh surprises – Miss Marple in Death on the Nile; Mrs Oliver in They Came to Baghdad; a different ending for Crooked House; the ‘lost’ chapter of The Mysterious Affair at Styles; an altered killer in A Murder is Announced. Scattered among these revelations were notes for projected stage adaptations and possible short story expansions, along with the outline for a novel to follow Postern of Fate, and the discovery of a new timeline for Sleeping Murder.

Appearance

The Notebooks of Agatha Christie are a unique and priceless literary heritage. But viewed solely as physical objects they resemble a pile of exercise books, similar to those gathered by teachers at the end of class in schools the world over. Red and blue and green and grey exercise books, coverless copy-books ruled with wide-spaced blue lines, small black pocket-sized notebooks: The Minerva, The Marvel, The Kingsway, The Victoria, The Lion Brand, The Challenge, The Mayfair.

Some years before her death Rosalind Hicks, Agatha Christie’s daughter, arranged that the contents of the Notebooks be listed and in this process each was allocated a number from 1 through to 73; this numbering is completely arbitrary and a lower number does not indicate an earlier year or a more important Notebook.

The number of pages used in each Notebook varies greatly – Notebook 35 has 220 pages of notes while Notebook 72 has a mere five. Notebook 63 has notes on over 150 pages but Notebook 42 uses only 20. The average lies somewhere between 100 and 120.

Contents

In a career spanning more than 55 years and two world wars, the loss of some Notebooks is inevitable, but the reassuring fact is that it seems to have happened so seldom. From the 1920s we have notes only for The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Man in the Brown Suit, The Secret of Chimneys and The Mystery of the Blue Train. For the collection Partners in Crime, there are only the sketchiest of notes and for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd there remains only an incomplete list of characters. From the prolific 1930s onwards, however, the only missing book titles are Murder on the Orient Express, Cards on the Table and, apart from a passing reference, Murder is Easy. And although there are notes on most of Christie’s stage work, including unknown, unperformed and uncompleted stage and radio plays, only two pages each are devoted to her most famous play and her greatest, Three Blind Mice (as it was before it became The Mousetrap) and Witness for the Prosecution respectively.

Not all the Notebooks are concerned with Christie’s literary output. Notebooks 11, 40 and 55 consist solely of chemical formulae, probably from her days as a student dispenser; Notebook 71 contains French homework; Notebook 73 is completely blank. Moreover, she often used them for making random personal notes, sometimes on the inside covers. There is a list of ‘furniture for 48 [Sheffield Terrace]’ in Notebook 59; Notebook 67 has reminders to ring up Collins and make a hair appointment; Notebook 68 has a list of train times from Stockport to Torquay.

In only five instances is a Notebook devoted to a single title. Notebooks 26 and 42 are entirely dedicated to Third Girl; Notebook 68 concerns only Peril at End House; Notebook 2 is A Caribbean Mystery; Notebook 46 contains nothing but extensive historical background and a rough outline for Death Comes as the End. In some cases the notes are sketchy, consisting of little more than a list of characters – for example Death on the Nile in Notebook 30. Other titles have copious notes – They Came to Baghdad has 100 pages, while Five Little Pigs and One, Two, Buckle my Shoe each have 75 pages.

Chronology

Although there are 73 Notebooks, complete (day/month/year) dates are given only on six occasions, and they are all from the last ten years of Christie’s life. In the case of incomplete dates it is sometimes possible to work out the year from the publication date of the title in question, but sometimes this is almost impossible, because …

First, use of the Notebooks was utterly random. Christie opened a Notebook (or, as she says herself, any of half a dozen contemporaneous ones), found the next blank page, even one between two already filled pages, and began to write. And to compound this unpredictability, in almost all cases she turned the Notebook over and, with admirable economy, wrote from the back also.

Second, in many cases jottings for a book may have preceded publication by many years. The earliest notes for The Unexpected Guest are headed ‘1951’ in Notebook 31, in other words seven years before its first performance; the germ of Endless Night first appears, six years before publication, on a page of Notebook 4 dated 1961.

Third, the pages following a clearly dated page cannot be assumed to have been written at the same time. For example:

page 1 of Notebook 3 reads ‘General Projects 1955’

page 9 reads ‘Nov. 5th 1965’ (there were ten books in the intervening period)

page 12 reads ‘1963’

page 21 reads ‘Nov. 6 1965 Cont.’

page 28 is headed ‘Notes on Passenger to Frankfort [sic] 1970’

page 36 reads ‘Oct. 1972’

page 72 reads ‘Book Nov. 1972’

In the space of 70 pages we have moved through 17 years and as many novels and, between pages 9 and 21, skipped back and forth between 1963 and 1965.

Finally, because many of the pages contain notes for stories that were never completed, there are no publication dates as a guideline. Deductions can sometimes be made from the notes immediately preceding and following, but as we have seen, this method is not entirely flawless.

Handwriting and transcription

Before describing the handwriting in the Notebooks, it is only fair to emphasise that these were notes and jottings and there was no reason to make an effort to maintain a certain standard, as no one but Christie herself was ever intended to read them. These were personal journals and not written for any purpose other than to clarify her thoughts. For her first ten years of productivity and at her creative peak her handwriting is almost indecipherable. Whether in fountain pen, biro or pencil, it looks, in many cases, like shorthand and it is debatable whether even she could read some sections of it. I have no doubt that the reason for this near-illegibility was that, during these hugely prolific years, her fertile brain teemed with ideas for books and stories. It was a case of getting them on to paper as fast as possible, and clarity of presentation was a secondary consideration. Although in most cases it is safe to assert that as we get older our handwriting deteriorates, in the case of Agatha Christie the opposite is the case, so that by the early 1950s and, for example, 1953’s After the Funeral in Notebook 53, the notes could be read relatively easily.

Solely in the interests of legibility, when transcribing material from the Notebooks I have removed some capital letters, brackets and dashes and in some cases have separated a paragraph of words, broken only by dashes, into separate sentences. All remaining question marks, underlinings and dashes, as well as some grammatical errors, are reproduced as they appear in the Notebooks.

If I have omitted text from within extracts I indicate this by the use of dots.

Misspellings have not been corrected but marked as [sic].

Square brackets are used for editorial clarification or remarks.

Dates of publication of works by Christie refer to the UK edition. They have been taken, for the most part, from contemporary catalogues in Collins archives. Traditionally, Crime Club titles were published on the first Monday of the month and in the few instances where actual dates were not available, I have used this guideline. In general, publication dates are included only with the first mention of each title in the Decade introductions. They are not included with later references, unless the timescale is relevant.

At the beginning of each chapter I have included a list of titles whose solutions are revealed within. It proved impossible to discuss a title intelligently, or to compare it to the Notebooks, unless I disclosed some endings. And in many cases the notes mention the vital name or plot device anyway. Christie’s creative ruthlessness in deciding her killer is a vital part of her genius and to try circumventing this with ambiguous verbal gymnastics cannot do her justice.

Since the publication of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks I have received many enquiries regarding access to the Notebooks. Although it is not possible for the public to read the Notebooks, two of them are on public display in Devon, England. One can be seen in Torquay Museum and a second in Paignton Library and Information Centre.

The quotations at the beginning of each chapter are from Agatha Christie’s Autobiography.

In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks my aim was to examine how a unique body of work, produced over a 50-year period, came into being. I analysed the creative process of the Queen of Crime and showed how the chaotic scribbles in a copybook were transformed into a body of detective fiction that set the standard for the time and, as it transpired, for all time. A brief resumé at this point will aid an understanding of later chapters.

In February 1955, on the BBC radio programme Close-Up, Agatha Christie admitted, when asked about her process of working, that ‘the disappointing truth is that I haven’t much method’. But although she had no particular method, no definite system, we discover that the apparently indiscriminate jotting and plotting in the Notebooks is her method. This randomness is how she worked, how she created, how she wrote. She thrived mentally on chaos, it stimulated her more than neat order; rigidity stifled her creative process. She used the Notebooks as a combination of sounding board and literary sketchpad where she devised and developed; selected and rejected; sharpened and polished; revisited and recycled.

One system of creation that she used, especially during the prolific years, was the listing of a series of scenes, sketching what she wanted each to include and allocating to each individual scene a number or a letter. She would subsequently reorder those letters to suit the purposes of the plot in a pre-computer version of ‘cut and paste’.

She reused plot devices throughout her career; and she recycled short stories into novellas and novels – she often speculates in the Notebooks about the expansion or adaptation of an earlier title. The Notebooks demonstrate how, even if she discarded an idea for now, she left everything there to be considered again at a later stage. And when she did that, as she wrote in her Autobiography, ‘What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me.’

Many of Christie’s best plots did not necessarily spring from a single devastating idea. She considered all possibilities when she plotted and did not confine herself to one idea, no matter how good it may have seemed. She rattled off possibilities and variations on the basic idea so that, for instance, in very few cases is the identity of the murderer settled from the start of the plotting. An example from the notes for Mrs McGinty’s Dead, as she considers the possible identity both of the killer from the past and from the present, illustrates this:

1 A. False – elderly Cranes – with daughter (girl – Evelyn) B. Real – Robin – son with mother son

2 A. False Invalid mother (or not invalid) and son B. Real – dull wife of snob A.P. (Carter) Dau[ghter]

3 A. False artistic woman with son B. Real middle-aged wife – dull couple – or flashy Carters (daughter invalid)

4 A. False widow – soon to marry rich man

5 [A] False man with dogs – stepson – different name [B] Real – invalid mother and daughter – dau[ghter] does it

Throughout the Notebooks murder methods, motives, settings and even the detective are apt to change between the early notes and the published book; names, in particular, change, sometimes radically. I try, where possible, to identify which character Christie may have had in mind when this occurs.

In Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks I examined over 25 novels, almost a dozen short stories and the genesis of all 13 of The Labours of Hercules; I also included some stage scripts and presented two ‘new’ Hercule Poirot investigations. Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making includes the rest of her novels, as well as an ‘unknown’ stage script. And, unlike Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, this new volume contains some more personal glimpses – her reading lists, her own account of the creation of Hercule Poirot, a fascinating letter to The Times. As well as a new version of a Miss Marple short story I also include, from either end of her career, the original denouement of The Mysterious Affair at Styles and her notes for a final, unwritten novel.

If any further proof were needed of the universal and timeless appeal of Agatha Christie, the appearance of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks provided it. Since its appearance I have received correspondence from Christie devotees the world over: from Australia, Russia, Croatia, Brazil, Argentina and Italy as well as the UK, the USA and Ireland; I have been interviewed for magazines, radio and TV in France, Portugal, Turkey, the USA, Iceland, Finland, Spain and Brazil as well as the UK and Ireland; I have been invited to Tokyo, Helsinki, Istanbul and New York, and to literary festivals throughout the UK and Ireland. And the book itself has been translated into 17 languages including Vietnamese and Croatian.

As a certain Belgian might say, ‘It gives one furiously to think, does it not …?’

1

Rule of Three

‘One of the pleasures in writing detective stories is that there are so many types to choose from: the light-hearted thriller … the intricate detective story … and what I can only describe as the detective story that has a kind of passion behind it …’

SOLUTIONS REVEALED

The A.B.C. Murders • After the Funeral • Appointment with Death • The Body in the Library • Curtain • Death in the Clouds • Death on the Nile • Evil under the Sun • Endless Night • Hercule Poirot’s Christmas • The Hollow • Lord Edgware Dies • The Man in the Brown Suit; • ‘The Man in the Mist’ • ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ • The Mousetrap • The Murder at the Vicarage • ‘Murder in the Mews’ • The Murder of Roger Ackroyd • Murder on the Orient Express • The Mysterious Affair at Styles • One, Two, Buckle my Shoe • Ordeal by Innocence • A Pocket Full of Rye • Sparkling Cyanide • Taken at the Flood • They Came to Baghdad • They Do It with Mirrors • Three Act Tragedy • ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ • ‘Witness for the Prosecution’

‘Surely you won’t let Agatha Christie fool you again. That would be “again” – wouldn’t it?’ Thus read the advertisement, at the back of many of her early Crime Club books, for the latest titles from the Queen of Crime. The first in the series to appear, bearing the now-famous hooded gunman logo, was Philip MacDonald’s The Noose in May 1930; Agatha Christie’s first Crime Club title, The Murder at the Vicarage, followed in October of that year. By then Collins had already published, between 1926 and 1929, five Christie titles – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Four, The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Seven Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime – in their general fiction list. As soon as The Crime Club was founded, Agatha Christie’s was an obvious name to grace the list and over the next 50 years she proved to be one of the most prolific authors – and by far the most successful – to appear under its imprint. This author/publisher relationship continued throughout her writing life, almost all of her titles appearing with the accompaniment of the hooded gunman.¹

As the back of the dustjacket on the first edition of The Murder at the Vicarage states, ‘The Crime Club has been formed so that all interested in Detective Fiction may, at NO COST TO THEMSELVES, be kept advised of the best new Detective Novels before they are published.’ By 1932 and Peril at End House, The Crime Club was boasting that ‘Over 25,000 have joined already. The list includes doctors, clergymen, lawyers, University Dons, civil servants, business men; it includes two millionaires, three world-famous statesmen, thirty-two knights, eleven peers of the realm, two princes of royal blood and one princess.’

This is the first edition title page of The Murder at the Vicarage, the first Agatha Christie title to appear under The Crime Club imprint on 13th October 1930.

And the advertisement on the first edition wrapper of The A.B.C. Murders (1936) clearly states the Club’s aims and objectives:

The object of the Crime Club is to provide that vast section of the British Public which likes a good detective story with a continual supply of first-class books by the finest writers of detective fiction. The Panel of five experts selects the good and eliminates the bad, and ensures that every book published under the Crime Club mark is a clean and intriguing example of this class of literature. Crime Club books are not mere thrillers. They are restricted to works in which there is a definite crime problem, an honest detective process, with a credible and logical solution. Members of the Crime Club receive the Crime Club News issued at intervals.

As the above statement suggests, not for nothing was the 1930s known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. In that era the creation and enjoyment of a detective story was a serious business for reader, writer and publisher. Both reader and writer took the elaborate conventions seriously. The civilised outrage that followed the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926 showed what a serious breach of the rules its solution was considered at the time. So, while in many ways observing the so-called ‘rules’, and consolidating the image of a safe, cosy and comforting type of fiction, Agatha Christie also constantly challenged those ‘rules’ and, by regularly and mischievously tweaking, bending, and breaking them, subverted the expectations of her readers and critics. She was both the mould creator and mould breaker, who delighted in effectively saying to her fans, ‘Here is the comforting read that you expect when you pick up my new book but because I respect your intelligence and my own professionalism, I intend to fool you.’

But how did she fool her readers while at the same time retaining her vice-like grip on their admiration and loyalty? In order to understand how she managed this feat it is necessary to take a closer look at ‘The Rules’.

THE RULES OF DETECTIVE FICTION – POE, KNOX, VAN DINE

Edgar Allan Poe: inventor of the detective story

In April 1841 the American periodical Graham’s Magazine published Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and introduced a new literary form – the detective story. Together with four more of Poe’s stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ established the unwritten ground-rules that distinguish detective fiction from other forms of crime writing – the thriller, the suspense story, the adventure story. Among the many motifs introduced by Poe in these stories were:

The brilliant amateur detective

The less-than-brilliant narrator-friend

The wrongly suspected person

The sealed room

The unexpected solution

The ‘armchair detective’ and the application of pure reasoning

The interpretation of a code

The trail of false clues laid by the murderer

The unmasking of the least likely suspect

Psychological deduction

The most obvious solution

All of Poe’s pioneering initiatives were exploited by subsequent generations of crime writers and although many of those writers introduced variations on and combinations of them, no other writer ever established so many influential concepts. Christie, as we shall see, exploited them to the full.

The first, and most important, of the Poe stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, incorporated the first five ideas above. The murder of a mother and daughter in a room locked from the inside is investigated by Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, who, by logical deduction, arrives at a most unexpected solution, thereby proving the innocence of an arrested man; the story is narrated by his unnamed associate.

Although Poe is not one of the writers she mentions in her Autobiography as being an influence, Agatha Christie took his template of a murder and its investigation when she began to write The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 75 years later.

The brilliant amateur detective

If we take ‘amateur’ to mean someone outside the official police force, then Hercule Poirot is the pre-eminent example. With the creation of Miss Marple, Christie remains the only writer to create two famous detective figures. Although not as well known, the characters Tommy and Tuppence, Parker Pyne, Mr Satterthwaite and Mr Quin also come into this category.

The less-than-brilliant narrator-friend

Poirot’s early chronicler, Captain Arthur Hastings, appeared in nine novels (if we include the 1927 episodic novel The Big Four) and 26 short stories. After Dumb Witness in 1937, Christie dispensed with his services, though she allowed him a nostalgic swan song in Curtain, published in 1975. But she also experimented with other narrators, often with dramatic results – The Man in the Brown Suit, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Endless Night. The decision to send Hastings to Argentina may have had less to do with his mental ability than with the restrictions he imposed on his creator: his narration meant that only events at which he was present could be recounted. Signs of this growing unease can be seen in the use of third-person narrative at the beginning of Dumb Witness and the interspersing of third-person scenes throughout The A.B.C. Murders, published the year before Hastings’ banishment. Miss Marple has no permanent Hastings-like companion.

The wrongly suspected person

This is the basis of some of Christie’s finest titles, among them the novels Five Little Pigs, Sad Cypress, Mrs McGinty’s Dead and Ordeal by Innocence, and the short story ‘Witness for the Prosecution’. The wrongly suspected may be still on trial as in Sad Cypress or already convicted as in Mrs McGinty’s Dead. In more extreme cases – Five Little Pigs, Ordeal by Innocence – they have already paid the ultimate price, although in each case ill-health, rather than the hangman, is the cause of death. And being Agatha Christie, she also played a variation on this theme in ‘Witness for the Prosecution’ when the vindicated suspect is shown to be the guilty party after all.

The sealed room

The fascination with this ploy lies in the seeming impossibility of the crime. Not only has the detective – and the reader – to work out ‘Who’ but also ‘How’. The crime may be committed in a room with all the doors and windows locked from the inside, making the murderer’s escape seemingly impossible; or in a room that is under constant observation; or the corpse may be discovered in a garden of unmarked snow or on a beach of unmarked sand. Although this was not a favourite Christie ploy she experimented with it on a few occasions, but in each case – Murder in Mesopotamia, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’, ‘The Dream’ – the sealed-room element was merely an aspect of the story and not its main focus.

The unexpected solution

Throughout her career this was the perennial province of Agatha Christie and the novels Murder on the Orient Express, Endless Night and And Then There Were None, as well as the short story ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, are the more dramatic examples. But mere unexpectedness is not sufficient; it must be fairly clued and prepared. The unmasking of, for example, the under-housemaid’s wheelchair-bound cousin from Australia, of whom the reader has never heard, may be unexpected but it is hardly fair. The unexpected murderer is dealt with below.

The ‘armchair detective’ and the application of pure reasoning

In 1842, Poe’s story ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’ was an example both of ‘faction’, the fictionalisation of a true event, and of ‘armchair detection’, an exercise in pure reasoning. Although set in Paris, the story is actually an account, complete with newspaper reports, of the murder, in New York some years earlier, of Mary Cecilia Rogers. In this story Dupin seeks to arrive at a solution based on close examination of newspaper reports of the relevant facts, without visiting the scene of the crime. The clearest equivalent in Christie is The Thirteen Problems, the Marple collection in which a group of people meets regularly to solve a series of mysteries including murder, robbery, forgery and smuggling. Miss Marple also solves the murders in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side basing her solution on the observations of others, and visiting the scene of the crime only at the conclusion of the book; she undertakes a similar challenge in 4.50 from Paddington when Lucy Eyelesbarrow acts as her eyes and ears. Poirot solves ‘The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge’, in Poirot Investigates, without leaving his sick-bed; and in The Clocks, making what amounts to a cameo appearance, he bases his deductions on the reports of Colin Lamb. For the novels of Christie’s most prolific and ingenious period (roughly 1930 to 1950), the application of pure reasoning applies. From the mid 1950s onwards there was a loosening of the form – Destination Unknown, Cat among the Pigeons, The Pale Horse, Endless Night – and she wrote fewer formal detective stories. But as late as 1964 and A Caribbean Mystery she was still defying her readers to interpret a daring and blatant clue.

The interpretation of a code

Poe’s ‘The Gold Bug’, not a Dupin story, appeared in 1843, and could be considered the least important of his contributions to the detective genre. It involves the solution to a cipher in an effort to find a treasure. A variation on this can be found in the Christie short stories ‘The Case of the Missing Will’ and ‘Strange Jest’, both of which involve the interpretation of a deceased person’s last cryptic wishes. Although the code concept was only a minor part of Christie’s output it is the subject of the short story ‘The Four Suspects’ in The Thirteen Problems. On a more elaborate canvas, the interpretation of a code could be seen as the basis of The A.B.C. Murders; and it is the starting-point of Christie’s final novel, Postern of Fate.

The Trail of false clues laid by the murderer

‘Thou Art the Man’, published in 1844, is not as well known as the other Poe stories but it includes at least two influential concepts, the trail of false clues and the unmasking of the most unlikely suspect. Although a minor theme in many Christie novels, the idea of a murderer leaving a trail of false clues is a major plot device in The A.B.C. Murders and Murder is Easy; and in Towards Zero it is taken to new heights of triple-bluff ingenuity.

The unmasking of the least likely suspect

Like its counterpart above, the unexpected solution, this was a career-long theme for Christie and appears at its most stunning in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, Crooked House and Curtain. The double-bluff, a regular feature of Christie’s output from her first novel onwards, also comes into this category.

Psychological deduction

Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’ pioneered the ideas of psychological deduction and the ‘obvious’ solution. In this type of story, the deductions depend as much on knowledge of the human heart as on interpretation of the physical clues. In Poe’s story Dupin’s psychological interpretation of the suspect allows him to deduce the whereabouts of the missing letter of the title. The Foreword to Christie’s Cards on the Table explains that the deductions in that book will be entirely psychological due to the lack of physical clues apart from the bridge scorecards. And Appointment with Death, set in distant Petra, sees Poirot dependent almost entirely on the psychological approach. Five Little Pigs and The Hollow each have similar emotional and psychological content, although both novels also involve physical clues.

The most obvious solution

Poe’s employment of the ‘obvious solution’ of hiding in plain sight (using a letter-rack as the hiding place of a letter) is adopted, though not as a solution, by Christie in ‘The Nemean Lion’, the first of The Labours of Hercules. The solutions to, for example, The Murder at the Vicarage, Death on the Nile, Evil under the Sun and The Hollow, among others, all unmask the most obvious culprits even though it seems that they have been cleared early in the story and have been dismissed by both detective and reader. In her Autobiography, Christie writes: ‘The whole point of a good detective story is that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. Though really, of course, he had done it.’

So, Christie’s output adhered to most of the conditions of Poe’s initial model, while simultaneously expanding and experimenting with them. Although Poe created the template for later writers of detective fiction to follow, early in the twentieth century two practitioners formalised the ‘rules’ for the construction of successful detective fiction. But these formalisations, by S.S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox, writing almost simultaneously on opposite sides of the Atlantic, merely acted as a challenge to Agatha Christie’s ingenuity.

S.S. Van Dine’s ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’

Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939) was an American literary figure and art critic who, between 1929 and 1939, wrote a dozen detective novels under the pen name S.S. Van Dine. Featuring his detective creation Philo Vance, they were phenomenally successful and popular at the time but are almost completely – and deservedly, many would add – forgotten nowadays. Vance is an intensely irritating creation, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of seemingly every subject under the sun and with a correspondingly condescending manner of communication. In The American Magazine for September 1928 Wright published his ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’. Christie knew of S.S. Van Dine; some of his novels can still be seen on the shelves of Greenway House and she mentioned him in Notebook 41 (see Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks), although it is doubtful if she was aware of his Rules until long after they were written. Van Dine’s Rules are as follows:

1 The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.

2 No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played by the criminal on the detective.

3 There must be no love interest.

4 The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit.

5 The culprit must be determined by logical deduction – not by accident, coincidence or unmotivated confession.

6 The detective novel must have a detective in it.

7 There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel.

8 The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means.

9 There must be but one detective.

10 The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story.

11 A servant must not be chosen as the culprit.

12 There must be but one culprit no matter how many murders are committed.

13 Secret societies have no place in a detective story.

14 The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific.

15 The truth of the problem must be at all times apparent provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.

16 A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, and no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.

17 A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt in a detective novel.

18 A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.

19 The motives for all the crimes in detective stories should be personal.

20 A list of devices, which no self-respecting detective story writer should avail himself of including, among others:

The bogus séance to force a confession

The unmasking of a twin or look-alike

The cipher/code-letter

The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops

The comparison of cigarette butts.

Ronald Knox’s Detective Story Decalogue

Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was a priest and classical scholar who wrote six detective novels between 1925 and 1937. He created the insurance investigator detective Miles Bredon, and considered the detective story such a serious game between writer and reader that in some of his novels he provided page references to his clues. When he edited a collection of short stories, The Best Detective Stories of 1928, his Introduction included a ‘Detective Story Decalogue’. These distilled the essence of a detective story, as distinct from the thriller, into ten cogent sentences:

1 The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

2 All supernatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.

3 Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

4 No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need long scientific explanation at the end.

5 No Chinamen must figure in the story.

6 No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right.

7 The detective must not himself commit the crime.

8 The detective must not light on any clues that are not instantly disclosed to the reader.

9 The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts that pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

10 Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

But as will be seen from a survey of Christie’s output, many of the Rules laid down by both Knox and Van Dine were ingeniously ignored and often gleefully broken by the Queen of Crime. Her infringement was, in most cases, instinctive rather than premeditated; and her skill was such that she managed to do so while still remaining faithful to the basic tenets of detective fiction.

Agatha Christie’s Rule of Three

In order to examine these Rules, and Christie’s approach to them, I have grouped together Rules common to both lists and have divided them into categories:

Fairness

The crime

The detective

The murderer

The murder method

To be avoided

Fairness

Both lists are very concerned with Fairness to the reader in the provision of information necessary to the solution, and with good reason; this is the essence of detective fiction and the element that distinguishes it from other branches of crime writing. Van Dine 1 and Knox 8 are, essentially, the same rule while Van Dine 2, 5, 15 and Knox 9 elaborate this concept.

Van Dine 1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery.

Knox 8. The detective must not light on any clues that are not instantly disclosed to the reader.

Christie did not break these essentially identical rules, mainly because she did not need to. She was quite happy to provide the clue, firm in the knowledge that, in the words of her great contemporary R. Austin Freeman, ‘the reader would mislead himself’. After all, how many readers will properly interpret the clue of the torn letter in Lord Edgware Dies, or the bottle of nail polish in Death on the Nile, or the ‘shepherd, not the shepherdess’ in A Murder is Announced? Or who will correctly appreciate the significance of the smashed bottle in Evil under the Sun, or the initialled handkerchief in Murder on the Orient Express, or the smell of turpentine in After the Funeral?

Knox 9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts that pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.

Hastings has been dubbed ‘the stupidest of Watsons’ and there are times when we wonder how Poirot endured his intellectual company. And, of course, Agatha Christie herself tired of him and banished him to Argentina in 1937 after Dumb Witness, although he was to return for Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, written during the Second World War but not published until 1975. It can be argued that the intelligence of the Watson character has to be below average because it is necessary for the Great Detective to explain his deductions to the reader through the Watson character. If the Watson were as clever as the detective there would be no need for an explanation at all. If Poirot were to look at the scene of the crime and announce, ‘We must look for a left-handed female from Scotland with red hair and a limp,’ and Hastings were to reply, ‘Yes, I see what you mean,’ the reader would feel, justifiably, more than a little exasperated. And, of course, this Rule overlaps with Knox 1 (see below) in the case of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd because Dr Sheppard in that famous case was acting as Poirot’s Watson.

Van Dine 2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played by the criminal on the detective.

This Rule seems to negate the whole purpose of a good detective novel. Surely the challenge is the struggle between reader and writer. In essence, the writer says: ‘I present you with a challenge to spot the culprit before I am ready to reveal him/her. To make it easier for you, I will give you hints and clues along the way but I still defy you to anticipate my solution. However, I give you fair warning that I will use every trick in my writer’s repertoire to fool you but I still promise to abide by the fair play rule.’ As Dorothy L. Sayers said in the aftermath of the Roger Ackroyd controversy, ‘It is the reader’s business to suspect everybody.’

Into this category come Christie’s greatest conjuring tricks, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night. In both these novels the reader is fooled into accepting the bona fides of a character who is taken for granted but not ‘seen’ in the same way that all the other protagonists are. The narrator is a ‘given’ whose presence and veracity the reader accepts unquestioningly. And, indeed, the narrator’s veracity in each case is above reproach. They do not actually lie at any stage. There are certainly some ambiguous statements and judicious omissions but their significance is obvious only on a re-reading, when the secret is known. In Chapter 27 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Dr Sheppard himself states:

I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following? ‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door-handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.’ All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after that first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?

All true; but not one reader in a thousand will stop to examine the details, especially not in the more innocent era of the 1920s, when the local doctor had a status just below that of the Creator.

Michael Rogers, in Endless Night, is also scrupulously fair in his account of his life. He tells us the truth but, as with Dr Sheppard, not the whole truth. But if we re-read Chapter 6, which recounts a telling conversation with his mother about ‘his plan’, what a new significance it all takes on when we know the truth. The ‘plan’, and even ‘the girl’, are no longer what we had originally supposed. This novel has much in common with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Death on the Nile, as well as with The Man in the Brown Suit and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In the first two titles, two lovers collude, as in Endless Night, in the murder of an inconvenient wife, stage a dramatic quarrel and have seemingly foolproof alibis; The Mysterious Affair at Styles also features a poisoning which happens in the absence of the conspirators. In the latter two titles, the narrator (a diarist in The Man in the Brown Suit) is exposed as the villain.

Van Dine 5. The culprit must be determined by logical deduction – not by accident, coincidence or unmotivated confession.

An example of confession (albeit not unmotivated) as a solution in Christie’s output is And Then There Were None. Here the entire explanation is given in the form of a confession. In this most ingenious novel, Agatha Christie set herself an almost insoluble problem – how to kill off the entire ten characters of the book and yet have an explanation at the end. The only solution would seem to be the one that she actually adopted – a confession. Confessions do feature in other novels, for example Lord Edgware Dies, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and Crooked House, but only as confirmation of what has already been revealed, while Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case contains one of the most shocking confessions in literary history …

Van Dine 15. The truth of the problem must be at all times apparent – provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.

Although tautological, this is intended as an elaboration of the earlier Rules regarding fairness to the reader. One of the clearest examples of this in the Christie output is Lord Edgware Dies where a very audacious plot is, in retrospect, glaringly obvious with all the clues staring the reader in the face. Other blindingly evident clues include the final words – ‘Evil Eye … Eye … Eye …’ – of Chapter 23 of A Caribbean Mystery; or the description of Lewis Serrocold emerging from the study in Chapter 7 of They Do It with Mirrors; or the thoughts of Ruth Lessing in Chapter 2 of Sparkling Cyanide after her meeting with Victor; or, most controversially of all, Dr Sheppard’s leave-taking of Roger Ackroyd in Chapter 4 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Knox 6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right.

There are, unfortunately, a few examples in Christie’s oeuvre of ‘deductions’ not based on any tangible evidence. It must be conceded that they can only be accounted for by intuition. How, for example, does Miss Marple alight on Dr Quimper in 4.50 from Paddington? And only the ‘Divine Revelation’ forbidden by The Detection Club Oath can explain how Poirot knows that Lady Westholme from Appointment with Death spent time in prison in her early life.

The crime

The crime itself did not feature strongly in the Rules, although Christie enjoyed the challenge of Van Dine 18 below.

Van Dine 7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel.

The first detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1878), concerns a robbery rather than a murder, but a mysterious death is the sine qua non of most detective novels. Although she broke this Rule often in her short story output, Christie never short-changed her readers in novel form, generously providing a multitude of corpses in And Then There Were None, Death Comes as the End and Endless Night.