Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (33 page)

Chapter 9
Agatha Christie and Poison

‘Since I was surrounded by poisons, perhaps it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method I selected.’

From her experience as a hospital dispenser in both world wars, Agatha Christie had a professional knowledge of medicines and poisons. Starting with her first book, she used poison as a murder method more often than any of her contemporaries. The use of strychnine in
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
is a vital element of the murder plot; in fact the success of the conspirators depends on it. She uses not just the usual poisons – arsenic (
Murder is Easy
), morphine (
Hickory Dickory Dock
), cyanide (
Sparkling Cyanide
), but also the more esoteric – nicotine (
Three Act Tragedy
), thallium (
The Pale Horse
), taxine (
A Pocket Full of Rye
).

Notebooks 52 and 53 both include notes on the properties of a number of poisons. The former Notebook, dating from the early 1960s, contains notes for
The Mirror Crack’d
from Side to Side
and
The Clocks
; the latter, from ten years earlier, has notes for
After the Funeral
and
A Pocket Full of Rye
, both published in 1953. Despite the fact that she had been dispatching her victims with poison for over 30 years, these notes show that Christie still researched new and ingenious methods of literary murder.

The notes are telegrammatic in style but most of the detail is scientifically accurate; I imagine that she was taking notes from a textbook. I have had to omit a few words whose illegibility defeated me and I include brief comments on some of the entries. The first list is from Notebook 53:

Notes on Poison

Taxine from leaves and berries of yew tree – salts soluble in water

Symptoms

Suddenly taken ill – fainting – face pale – pulse almost imperceptible – pupils contracted – eleptiform
[resembling epilepsy]
convulsions – stertorous breathing – slowing of respiration. Died within hour of illness, 2 hours after taking leaves. In another case died in eleptiform fit.

Possible sequence – quick pulse – fainting – collapse – nausea, vomiting; convulsions, slow respiration, death sudden and unexpected – death due to rigid paralysis of respiration and suffocation.

Taxine is used in
A Pocket Full of Rye
, the notes for which are contained in the same Notebook, and the details of Rex Fortescue’s death follow this outline.

Arsenic

Acute form similar in action to cholera; in district where cholera epidemic – no suspicion. Diarrhoea absent sometimes and death from shock

Rare form – nervous form – no diarrhoea or vomiting – narcotism – delirious – acute mania even eleptiform convulsions

Rare cases – symptoms delayed for 9 hours – fell suddenly and expired.

Murder is Easy
features the use of arsenic and, in the 1950s, Alfred Crackenthorpe succumbs to arsenic poisoning in
4.50 from Paddington
.

Ouabain

Arrow poison – of extract of root of ouabai tree
[found in Africa]

Tasteless, odourless, sol
[uble]
boiling water – almost insol
[uble]
in cold. V
[ery]
poisonous if injected – (Diabetes?)

Colchicine

Colchicine (meadow saffron) – Colchicine wine (sherry) or schnapps or madeira – leaves consumed with salad – less than a 1 gr. fatal. Mrs. Soames killed by Margaret
[should be Catherine]
Wilson 1862). Burning pain in throat and tummy

Death 2nd day to 5th

Although colchicine was not adopted as a murder method by Christie, the true-life Wilson case is mentioned in Chapter 12 of Anthony Berkeley’s
The Wychford Poisoning Case
(1926).

Digitalis

Symptoms appear not less than 3 hours after. Red coal fire appears to be blue – sometimes blindness.

Digitoxin is the poison used to despatch Mrs Boynton in
Appointment with Death
.

Helleborus

From root of Christmas Rose, Helleborus Niger and other hellebores. Death under 8 hours – root boiled in wine? Heart poison – symptoms as digitalis

Oleandrin from oleander leaves

Saponin

40 grams subcutaneously – lethargy – weakness of heart – extracted from bread or flour. Sol
[uble]
in water – frothy – in lemonade? Sherbet? Etc.

As can be seen, even as she jotted the above notes Christie was thinking of a plot involving a frothy drink to camouflage the poison, although she never used it in a story.

Santonin (for worms?!) Max dose . . . 6 gr.

Tetanic convulsions and death – 15 to 48 hours; everything looks yellow (sometimes violet). ‘Woman in yellow dress?’

Daphne Mezereum

Burning taste in mouth – sudden narcosis – convulsion – dev
[eloped from]
fresh leaves? Berries?

Water hemlock

In flower in August – root like parsnip – stalk like celery. Semi-comatose – legs dragged

Coniine, another name for hemlock, is the poison stolen from Meredith Blake’s laboratory and used the following day to kill Amyas Crale in
Five Little Pigs
.

Hyoscyamine

1 gr. fatal – quiets excitement – muscular motion enfeebled – flushed face – pupils dilate. Distinction from atropine as latter causes delirium and excitement

The following list is from Notebook 52. In the 15 years between use of this Notebook and the end of her career, Christie used poison as a murder method in a further seven novels, and mood-altering drugs are a major plot feature of
Third Girl
:

Poisons Possibilities for book

Pentanol (Amyl Alcohol) C
3
H
11
OH [should be C
5
H
11
OH]

Ethylene Glycol CH
2
OH
[formula should be twice this (CH
2
OH)
2
= C
2
H
6
O
2
]

Colourless sweet taste – substitute for glycerine – freeze – preserving substance – 100 grams drunk in “Schnapps” was fatal

Diethylene alcohol

Solvent for paints – Sol. of sulphanilamide in diluted diglycol caused 100 cases poisoning in America

Look up veronal, phanodorm, curral, somnifen, noctal, phenocton
[more probably phenytoin]
, nirvanol (phenyelhydantoin) – (barbiturate derivatives)

Look up pyrazolone derivatives – in partic[ular] pyramidon (sol. 1 in 2 alcohol central paralysis) cardiazol – coramine etc.

Strophanthin (Heart tonic)

Strophanthin is used and identified in ‘The Case of the Caretaker’ and ‘Triangle at Rhodes’ as well as
Verdict
.

Nitrobenzene

1 gm. fatal

Tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate

Paraffin-like, colourless, odourless tasteless – insol. in water – used as adulteration of ginger extract – produces similar sensation to alcohol. In 1929 20,000 died of ginger paralysis – ten weeks before symptoms developed – ending with paralysis of arms and legs – (taken as liquid paraffin).

This adaptation of a patent medicine, popular during Prohibition because of its ‘alcohol’ effect, was later shown to have an adverse effect on some nerve cells in the spinal cord. The paralysis Christie notes was not fatal, although in many cases it was permanent.

Sodium fluosilicate

Sometimes mistaken for baking powder or sod
[ium]
bic
[arbonate]
– suicidal agent

E.605 plant protection agent – freely sold to public – epidemic of suicides in Germany

Neurotoxin affects regulation of parasympathetic system. Death through cardiac and respiratory paralysis after agonising pain and convulsions – a few minutes or up to half an hour. Christa Lehman poisoned a number of people

Christa Lehman was convicted in September 1955 in Germany of the murder of two members of her own family and a neighbour, using E605. Incongruously, it is thought that the publicity surrounding the case caused the ‘epidemic of suicides’, as the chemical, now banned, was then freely available.

Kava-kava

Narcotic pepper – peaceful joyous sensation – drowsiness

In her
Autobiography
Agatha Christie writes: ‘Dispensing was interesting for a time, but became monotonous – I should never have cared to do it as a permanent job.’ Fortunately for the world of detective fiction it did not become a permanent job; but the knowledge gained in that Torquay dispensary not only stood her in good stead in her future career but also inspired the poem ‘In a Dispensary’, published in the 1924 edition of her poetry collection,
Road of Dreams
. In one prophetic verse she writes:

From the Borgias’ time to the present day, their power has been proved and tried!

Monkshood blue, called Aconite and the deadly Cyanide!

Here is sleep and solace and and soothing of pain – courage and vigour anew!

Here is menace and murder and sudden death! – in these phials of green and blue!

Chapter 10
The Fifth Decade 1960–1969

‘After all, to be able to continue writing at the age of 75 is very fortunate.’

SOLUTIONS REVEALED

After the Funeral • The Clocks • Endless Night • Lord Edgware Dies • Third Girl • Three Act Tragedy • ‘
‘Witness for the Prosecution’

As she entered her fifth decade of crime writing Agatha Christie continued experimenting with her chosen genre. The decade began inauspiciously with a collection of short stories, the title story of which, ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, was a reworking of a 1923 Poirot case, ‘A Christmas Adventure’; but the elaboration, unlike similar earlier experiments, added only words. ‘The Mystery of the Spanish Chest’, in the same collection, was a far more imaginative expansion of the earlier ‘The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest’. In fact, at one point the collection was to be called
The Mystery of the Spanish Chest and other stories.

Of the ten titles she produced in the 1960s only two are pure whodunits, the last examples of the genre that she was to write.
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
(1962) and
A Caribbean Mystery
(1964), both Miss Marple novels, employ clever variations on a plot device she had used before, that of a character seeing something surprising, shocking or frightening over someone’s shoulder. The other Marple novel of the 1960s was
At Bertram’s Hotel
(1965), a nostalgic journey into the past for the elderly Marple and Christie, with a not wholly believable variation on yet another earlier plot device. Though all three Poirot novels of this decade are disappointing – the Christie magic is missing from the development of each one – the fundamental plot ideas are as inventive as ever: in
The Clocks
(1963), a stranger’s body found in a room full of incorrect clocks; in
Third Girl
(1966), a girl who thinks she ‘may’ have committed a murder; and in
Hallowe’en Party
(1969), a child is drowned while bobbing for apples. The best novels of this decade were, ironically, the two non-series titles,
The Pale Horse
(1961) and
Endless Night
(1967). Both of them were innovative, experimental and sinister – black magic murder to order in the former and a wholly original reworking of the Ackroyd trick in the latter – each showing an aspect of the Queen of Crime not heretofore seen.

Some old friends make welcome reappearances. Mrs Oliver has a solo run in
The Pale Horse
, which affords us a glimpse into the creative process of a mystery writer and, perhaps, into that of her creator; and appears with her old friend Poirot in both
Third Girl
and
Hallowe’en Party.
Tommy and Tuppence solve their penultimate case in
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
(1968). Age has not withered their spirit of adventure and the case they investigate, the disappearance of an elderly lady from a retirement home, is dark and sinister.

The elderly Christie is reflected in many of the books of this decade. Poirot’s appearance in
The Clocks
is almost a cameo as he emulates an armchair detective and reflects on his magnum opus, a study of detective fiction; and in
Third Girl
he does unconvincing battle with the London of the Swinging Sixties. Miss Marple has aged since her previous appearance and agrees to a live-in companion in
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
. Tommy and Tuppence are middle-aged grandparents and most of the characters in
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
are similarly elderly. And this book, as well as
Hallowe’en Party
and
At Bertram’s Hotel
, is a journey into the past.

While
The Mousetrap
continued its inexorable success story with another new record in 1962 (the longest running play in London), Christie’s only new play of this decade was another experiment.
Rule of Three
(1962) consists of three one-act plays, each totally different in style and content. Two years earlier saw a dramatisation of
Five Little Pigs
as
Go Back for Murder
, but both offerings received a cool critical reception.

In the cinema the four Margaret Rutherford Marple films were released – or should that be ‘escaped’? – much to Christie’s horror; only one,
Murder She Said
, was based on an authentic Marple novel,
4.50 from Paddington
. Of the other three, two were based on Poirot novels and one was a completely original script; and in all of them Miss Marple is unrecognisable, literally and metaphorically, as the elderly denizen of St Mary Mead. As a direct result, the 1964 Marple novel,
A Caribbean Mystery
, carried on its title page the reclamation ‘Featuring the original character as created by Agatha Christie.’ The following year, 1965, found
Ten Little Indians
transposed from an island off the coast of Devon to an Austrian ski resort (but filmed in Dublin!), but with the innovation of The Whodunit Break – a ticking clock-face reprised the suspects and murders for one minute to help the audience decide on the villain.
The Alphabet Murders
appeared in 1966, bearing almost no similarity to its inspiration,
The A.B.C. Murders
, to the extent of including a cameo appearance from Miss Marple. (All five films came from the same production company.) A more faithful adaptation was the 1960 screen version of
Spider’s Web
, from the play of the same name. Also in the world of cinema, Christie worked on an adaptation of the Dickens novel
Bleak House
, but although she produced a script (‘I quite realise that a third or more of the present script will have to go’) in May 1962 the film was never made. And Hercule Poirot debuted on US television in
The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim
in 1962.

In 1965 Christie published
Star over Bethlehem
, a miscellany of Christmas poetry and short tales, and in October of that year she finished work on her
Autobiography
. This was a project she had worked at, on and off, for the previous 15 years and although the book would not be published until after her death she enjoyed reviewing her life; it fell to her daughter, Rosalind, to edit the vast amount of material to produce the 1977 book. As we know from the recent release of recordings of the ‘writing’ of her
Autobiography
, Agatha Christie used a Dictaphone for many years. It is difficult to say with any certainty when this practice began, but in a radio interview as early as 1955 she said, ‘I type my own drafts on an ancient faithful machine I’ve owned for years. And I find a Dictaphone useful for short stories or for re-casting an act of a play, but not for the more complicated business of working out a novel.’ The implication is that she was practised in the use of the machine; and, of course, as far back as 1926, her most infamous title,
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, featured that piece of equipment as a plot device.

The photograph showing Agatha Christie with the Dicta-phone dates from the late 1950s. The resultant tapes, or to use the more accurate term, Dictabelts, still exist for many of the titles from the succeeding decades. By that stage, no doubt, the elderly Christie found it physically easier to sit in her chair and ‘speak’ her novels into a machine and then correct a draft typed by her secretary. The less detailed notes for the last half-dozen novels can be seen as reflecting this procedure. The exhaustive plot experimentation and variations-on-a-theme of the Notebooks of yesteryear are replaced by plot highlights which she considered sufficient for this method of writing. This procedure meant that the later novels were both more verbose in narration and less tight in construction than the earlier, more compactly written books; to echo her own words, the Dictaphone was not suitable ‘for the complicated business’ of constructing a detective novel.

Agatha Christie, photographed in Winterbrook House in the 1950s, using a Dictaphone.

In 1967 she co-operated with the first book to be written about her work, G.C. Ramsey’s
Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery
. Although a slight book viewed from today’s standpoint, it was the first to impose order on the chaos of title changes, both transatlantic and domestic, and variations in short-story collections; thus it was as welcome to Christie’s agent and publisher as it was to her fans. And it remains the only book about Christie which received her personal cooperation. In 1961 she received a doctorate from Exeter University, where today an archive of her papers is held. That was also the year in which Christie was declared by UNESCO to be the world’s best-selling writer.

The Clocks

7 November 1963

A roomful of clocks showing the wrong time, a blind woman, a dead man and a hysterical girl – when Colin Lamb explains the story to his friend, Hercule Poirot decides that the situation is so bizarre that the explanation must be simple. Developments prove otherwise.

Appearing between two very typical Miss Marple whodunits – preceded by
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
and followed by
A Caribbean Mystery
–
The Clocks
was the first Poirot novel since
Cat among the Pigeons
in 1959. Poirot appears in only three chapters and acts, literally, as an armchair detective, with Colin Lamb bringing him the information to enable them both to arrive at a conclusion.

The Clocks
is an uneasy mix of spy story and domestic murder mystery with little in the way of clues to help the reader distinguish between the two. There are, as usual, clever ideas – the telephone call and the broken shoe, the adoption of a ready-made plot, the conversion of secrets to Braille – but the overall explanation is a disappointment. If the spy angle had been dropped and the inheritance plot elaborated the result would have been a tighter book. And, as she has done in many previous titles, Christie introduces an unsuspected and unnecessary relationship in the closing chapters.

A fascinating interlude with Poirot occurs in Chapter 14 when we read of his forthcoming study of detective fiction. He mentions several milestones of the genre:
The Leavenworth Case
,
The Adventures of Arsene Lupin
,
The Mystery of the Yellow Room
,
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. He goes on to discuss a number of authors, some of whom, although fictional, are identifiable – Cyril Quain with his attention to detail and unbreakable alibis is Freeman Wills Crofts; Louisa O’Malley with her milieu of brownstone mansion in New York is Elizabeth Daly. Florence Elks is more difficult to identify but is perhaps Margaret Millar, a writer Christie admired, as she stated in an interview in 1974. A Canadian who set most of her novels in the USA, Millar has order, method and wit, although not the abundance of drink to which Poirot refers. Two other writers are mentioned but both are firmly fictional – Garry Gregson, who is an important element in the plot of
The Clocks
, and, of course, Mrs Oliver.

The other area for speculation is the parentage of Colin Lamb. When they meet, Poirot asks after Colin’s father and wonders why he is not using the family name. In G.C. Ramsay’s
Mistress of Mystery
(1967) Christie is quoted as confirming that Colin is Superintendent Battle’s son.

In Notebook 4, on a page dated 1961, an alphabetical list of plot ideas includes the inspirations for
The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side
and
A Caribbean Mystery
; on that list idea F is a brief outline of
The Clocks
. And a year later the tentative title appears on a listing of future books.

F. The Clock – as beginning – typist – dead body – blind old lady

1962

Notes for 3 books

Y. The Clocks (?)

Z. Carribean
[sic]
Mystery

X. Gypsy’s Acre

But in fact the plot for
The Clocks
goes back a lot further than that. In late 1949 Agatha Christie set a competition for which she wrote the opening of a short story that competitors were asked to complete. It concerned a typist, Nancy, arriving at a house and letting herself in to the front room. There she finds a collection of clocks, a dead man and a blind woman. Twelve years later Christie herself resurrected the story and set about expanding it. The main difference between the two is that the clocks in the short story all show different, and wrong, times whereas the clocks of the novel all show the same, but equally wrong, time. Unsurprisingly the character names are also different, as is the street address; but the similarities are striking – the description of the clocks is identical and the ‘Rosemary’ clock is specifically mentioned; the telephone call making the appointment is a mystery and the blind woman, it transpires, is Nancy’s mother. Overall the explanation of the presence of the clocks is more convincing in the prize-winning solution than in the novel.