Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (3 page)

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: 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 . . .?’

Chapter 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.’

From Notebook 33 Christie’s own sketch of St Mary Mead for
The Murder at the Vicarage
showing most of the locations that appear in that novel.

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
.