Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (37 page)

Chapter 11
The Dark Lady . . .

‘Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having being made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage.’

Agatha Christie was a lifelong fan of William Shakespeare. Some of her titles –
Sad Cypress
,
Taken at the Flood
,
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
– come from his plays.
Macbeth
, with its Three Witches, provides some of the background to
The Pale Horse
; in Chapter 4 Mark Easterbrook and his friends discuss the play after attending a performance and in the village of Much Deeping, Thyrza, Sybil and Bella have a reputation locally as three ‘witches’. Iago, from
Othello
, is a psychologically important plot device in
Curtain
; a quotation from
Macbeth
– ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him’ – follows the discovery of Simeon Lee’s body in
Hercule Poirot’s Christmas
; and
Appointment with Death
closes with a quotation from
Cymbeline –
‘Fear no more the heat of the Sun.’ Her letters, written to Max Mallowan during the Second World War, include detailed discussions, instigated by nights at the theatre, about
Othello
and
Hamlet.

In
The Times
of 29 January 1973, the historian and Shakespeare scholar A.L. Rowse claimed that he had positively identified the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Emilia Lanier née Bassano, daughter of a court musician and a former mistress of the Lord Chamberlain. Although disputed since, this theory received much publicity. In Notebook 7, in the middle of the notes for
Postern of Fate
, Christie drafted her response to this discovery:

A page of Christie’s handwritten draft of the ‘Dark Lady’ letter.

Letter to Times – Jan 26

I have read with great interest (your) the article written by Dr. A. L. Rowse on his discovery of the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady of the Sonnets. She has always had a peculiar fascination for me particularly in connection with Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra
. I have no pretensions to be in any way a historian but I am one of those who can claim to belong to those for whom Shakespeare wrote. I have gone to plays from an early age and am a great believer that that is the way one should approach Shakespeare. He wrote to entertain and he wrote for playgoers – I took my daughter and her friends to Stratford when she was twelve years old and later my grandson – at about the same age – and nephews. One young schoolboy gave an immediate criticism after
wards
seeing
Macbeth
– ‘I never would have believed
that
that was Shakespeare; it was wonderful, all about gangsters – so exciting, so real.’ Shakespeare was clearly associated in his mind with a school lesson of extreme boredom, but the real thing thrilled him. After
Julius Caesar
[he said]
‘What a wonderful speech Marc Antony made and what a clever man.’ Take children to see Shakespeare on a stage and
reading
Shakespeare will be enjoyed all through their life.

What I also particularly enjoy is to see different productions of the same play. A character such as Iago can lend himself to different renderings. But Cleopatra has always been to me a most interesting problem. Is Antony and Cleopatra a great love story? I don’t think so. Shakespeare in his sonnets shows clearly two opposite emotions; one an overwhelming sexual bondage to a woman who clearly enjoyed torturing him, the other was an equally passionate hatred. She was to him a personification of Evil. His description of her physical attributes, ‘hair cut like wire’, was all he could do to express his rancour, in those early times. But he did not forget. I think that, as writers do, he pondered and planned a play to be written some day – a study of an evil woman, a woman who would be a gorgeous courtesan and who would bring about the ruin of a man who loved her.

Is not that the real story of
Antony and Cleopatra
: Did Cleopatra kill herself with her serpent for love of Antony?
Did she not,
having tried to approach and capture Octavius so as to retain her power and her kingdom was she not tired of Antony? Anxious to become the mistress of the next powerful leader, Augustus not Antony, and he rebuffed her. And so, could it be that she would be taken in chains to Rome? That, never [and] so, charmian and the fatal asp. Oh, how I have longed to see a production of
Antony and Cleopatra
where a great actress shall play the Evil Destroyer and, Antony, the great warrior, the adoring lover is defeated

Dr. Rowse has shown in his article that Emilia Bassano (1597) was deserted by one of her lovers as an ‘incuba’, an evil spirit, and became the mistress of an elderly Lord Chamberlain, 1st Lord Hunsdon, who had control of the Burbage Players and so abandoned the gifted playwright for a rich and power-wielding admirer. Unlike Octavian he did not rebuff her. He was probably not a good actor, though one feels that that is really what he wanted to be. How odd it is that a first disappointment in his ambition forced him to a second choice, the writing of plays and so gave to England a great poet and a great genius. His Dark Lady the incuba, played her part in his career. Who but she taught him suffering and all the different aspects of jealousy, the green-eyed monster.

The edited version of Christie’s letter as it appeared in
The Times
on February 3rd 1973.

Although the Notebook is clearly dated ‘Jan. 26’, the article to which Christie refers was not published until three days later on 29 January. It is entirely possible that, because of her friendship with A.L. Rowse, she was aware of the forthcoming publication but it is more likely that she just wrote the wrong date. These notes were, presumably, tidied up when they were typed as the printed version is slightly different. The letter was published in
The Times
on 3 February 1973 as from ‘Agatha Mallowan, Winterbrook House, Wallingford’, with three further responses three days later. One took Dame Agatha to task for accepting ‘interesting conjectures as irrefutable proof’ and reminding her that Hercule Poirot would not have made the same mistake. Another challenges her portrayal of Cleopatra as a ‘cheap femme fatale’.

In his book
Memories of Men and Women
(1980), Rowse has an affectionate chapter on his friendship with Agatha and Max, a friendship which began through Max’s election as a Research Fellow in All Souls, Oxford, Rowse’s own college. Recalling that she wrote him a ‘warm and encouraging letter’ about his Shakespeare discoveries as being ‘from the mistress of low-brow detection to the master of high-brow detection’, he mentions her support with this letter to
The Times
and her subsequent attendance at his lecture on the subject at the Royal Society of Literature.

Chapter 12
The Sixth Decade 1970–1976

‘Thank God for my good life, and all the love that has been given to me.’

SOLUTIONS REVEALED

Nemesis

In 1970 Agatha Christie celebrated her eightieth birthday; with the employment of a little selective arithmetic, it was also the year of her eightieth book. Extensive press coverage, both at home and abroad, greeted the publication on her birthday – 15 September – of
Passenger to Frankfurt
.

On the first day of the following year Agatha Christie became Dame Agatha, to the delight of her global audience. As she worked in Notebook 28 on that year’s book,
Nemesis
, she wrote ‘D.B.E.’ (Dame Commander of the British Empire) at the top of the page. A book more impressive in its emotional power than in its plotting,
Nemesis
is, like its 1972 successor
Elephants Can Remember
, a journey into the past where ‘old sins cast long shadows’. And the last novel she wrote,
Postern of Fate
(1973), is a similar nostalgic journey and the poorest book of her career (with the possible exception of the curiosity that is
Passenger to Frankfurt
); one which, in retrospect, should never have been published. To counterbalance these disappointments, 1974 saw the publication of
Poirot’s Early Cases
, a collection of short stories from the prime of the little Belgian and his creator, not previously published in the UK. (See Chapter 3, ‘Agatha Christie’s Favourites’.)

Coinciding with these reminders of the vintage Poirot, one of his most challenging cases,
Murder on the Orient Express
, was filmed faithfully and extravagantly by Sidney Lumet, working with an all-star cast. A massive critical and popular success worldwide, it became the most successful British film ever and created a huge upsurge of interest in the now frail Agatha Christie. Her last public appearance was at the Royal Premiere in London, where she insisted on remaining standing to meet the Queen. Her publishers knew that a new book would be unable to satisfy the appetite of the vastly increased Christie audience created by the success of the film. So Sir William Collins convinced Dame Agatha to release
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
, one of her most ingenious constructions, written when she was at the height of her powers. Another global success followed its appearance in October 1975, heralded by a
New York Times
front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot.

On 12 January 1976, three months after her immortal creation, Dame Agatha Christie died at her Wallingford home. International media mourned the passing of, quite simply, ‘the writer who has given more enjoyment to more people than anyone else’ (
Daily Telegraph
); the perennial
Mousetrap
dimmed its lights and newspapers printed pages on ‘the woman the world hardly knows’. She was buried at Cholsey, near her Oxfordshire home, and a memorial service was held in May at St Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
Sleeping Murder
, another novel from Christie’s Golden Age, and the ‘final novel in a series that has delighted the world’ (to quote the blurb) was published in October and presented Miss Marple’s last book-length investigation. Dame Agatha’s
Autobiography
followed in 1977 and
Miss Marple’s Final Cases
, a collection of previously uncollected short stories, in 1979.

Apart from the unparalleled success of
Murder on the Orient Express
, the much-underrated screen version of
Endless Night
had appeared in 1972. Despite Dame Agatha’s objection to a love scene at the close of the film, this adaptation remains a faithful treatment of the last great novel that Christie wrote. The previous year the last Christie play,
Fiddlers Five
(reduced to
Fiddlers Three
in a subsequent version in 1972), was staged, but its lack of critical and popular success ruled out a West End production. In 1973 Collins published
Akhnaton
, her historical play, written in 1937 but never performed; and her poetry collection, called simply
Poems
, was also issued in 1973.

The final six years of Agatha Christie’s life saw some of her greatest successes – her damehood, the universal successes, in two separate spheres, of
Murder on the Orient Express
and
Curtain
– but also the publication of some of her weakest titles. But by then it didn’t matter. Such was the esteem and affection in which she was held by her worldwide audience that
anything
written by Agatha Christie was avidly bought by a multitude of her fans, many of whom had had a lifelong relationship with her.

Passenger to Frankfurt

15 September 1970

Diverted by fog to Frankfurt Airport, Sir Stafford Nye agrees to the fantastic suggestion of a fellow passenger. On his return to England he realises that he has become involved in something of international importance – but what? A further assignation leaves him little wiser. What is Benvo? And who is Siegfried?

Published on her eightieth birthday, this was claimed to be Agatha Christie’s eightieth book and, despite the dismay with which the manuscript was greeted by both her family and her publishers, it went straight into the best-seller lists and remained there for over six months. The publicity attendant on the ‘coincidence’ of her birthday and her latest production certainly helped, but
Passenger to Frankfurt
remains the most extraordinary book she ever wrote. Described, wisely, on the title page as ‘An Extravaganza’ – the description went some way towards mitigating the disappointment felt by both publishers and devotees – and showing little evidence of the ingenuity with which her name is still associated, this tale of international terrorism and engineered anarchy is difficult to write about honestly. Most fans, myself included, consider it an aberration and, but for the fact that it is an ‘Agatha Christie’, would never have read it the first time, let alone re-read it over the 40 years since its first appearance. Like other weaker novels from the same era, it begins with a compelling, if somewhat implausible, situation, but it degenerates into total unbelievability long before the end. Only in the closing pages of Chapter 23, with the unmasking of a completely unexpected, albeit incredible, villainess is there a very faint trace of the Christie magic.

The idea of stage-managed anarchy brought about by promoting student protest and civil unrest is not new in the Christie output. It reaches back as far as the mysterious Mr Brown in
The Secret Adversary
and also makes an appearance, 30 years later, in
They Came to Baghdad
. While both these examples demand some suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader,
Passenger to Frankfurt
demands a higher and longer suspension. The other echo from earlier works, and one that can be appreciated only now, after the publication of the alternate version of ‘The Capture of Cerberus’ (see
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks
), is the subterfuge about a fake/real Hitler character and the method of concealment. This element of the plot is identical in both the short story and the novel, written 30 years apart.

The other surprise about this novel, apart from the unlikeliness of the plot, is the fact that throughout her life Christie evinced little interest in politics. And yet the entire thrust of the novel is political, with politicians and diplomats meeting regularly and, it must be said, implausibly in attempts to maintain political stability. Such scenes are dotted throughout the book; although, despite these meetings and endless conversations, nothing happens. Most of the conversations, whether private or political, meander aimlessly and unconvincingly and swathes of the book could be removed without making any notable difference.

The character of Matilda Cleckheaton is, in many ways, a Marple doppelganger – elderly, observant, worldly-wise and devious. But her stratagem for dealing with ‘Big Charlotte’ is in the highest degree unlikely and unconvincing.

Passenger to Frankfurt
was written in the year of publication and Notebook 24 has three dates, ‘1970’, ‘February 1970’ and ‘16th February 1970’, on pages 12, 14 and 17 respectively. Christie realised that the year of her eightieth birthday would inevitably involve publicity and that the 1970 ‘Christie for Christmas’ would have to be finished earlier than usual for a September publication. Some selective arithmetic had to be done to arrive at the significant figure of 80 titles. Only by counting the American collections –
The Regatta Mystery
(1939),
Three Blind Mice
(1950),
The Underdog
(1951) and
Double Sin
(1961) – all of which contained stories not then published in Britain, as well as the Mary Westmacott titles, could this all-important figure be arrived at.

In an interview conducted shortly after the publication of the book Christie denied that any of the characters were based on real-life politicians and that her inspiration for writing the book was her reading of the daily newspapers. She cited especially reports of rebellious youth and the fact that youth can be more easily influenced than older people. She was at pains to emphasise that, personally, she was ‘not in the least interested in politics’ and that the novel was apolitical in the sense that anarchy could originate from either the Right or the Left. Much of this is echoed in the Introduction to the novel where she also discusses her ideas and where and how she got them. ‘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.’ It is a sad irony that, of all her novels,
Passenger to Frankfurt
is one where the ingenious ideas that proliferated in other novels are notable only by their absence.

The opening gambit of the airport swap is one that, nowadays, would be practically impossible; in the less terrorist-conscious days of the late 1960s, when the book was plotted, it was just about feasible. But this feasibility does not extend to believability: is it remotely likely that anyone would agree to hand over their passport to a total stranger and then take a drink with the assurance of that stranger that the drug that it admittedly contained was harmless? This ploy is considered in six Notebooks with the earliest, in the first extract below, dating back to around 1963. As usual, details of names and airport locations were to change, but the basic situation remains the same:

Possibilities of Airport story (A)

After opening in central European airport (Frankfurt) (Venice) – diversion of plane – substitution of girl for Sir D

Starts at European airport – woman, tall, sees a medium man wearing a distinctive cloak and hood. Asks him to help her – Sir Robert Old – she takes his place – he takes knock-out drops. Later woman contacts him in London. Thriller

D. Book

Starting at airport – substituting – Robin West – international thinker type

B. Missing passenger

B. Passenger to Frankfort
[sic]

Missing passenger – airport – Renata – Sir Neil Sanderson

B. Passenger to Frankfurt

Sir Rufus Hammersley – his cloak – med
[ium]
height – sharp jutting feminine chin.

In Notebook 23 the first sketch above – ‘Possibilities of Airport story’ – continues at ‘A.’ below. But the scenario considered after the postcard and ‘near escape’ idea goes in a completely different direction from the one adopted in the novel. The ‘Girl murdered’ idea is rather similar to that of Luke Fitzwilliam’s reading of the death of Miss Pinkerton following their meeting on the train in
Murder is Easy
. These notes appear on a page directly preceding the plotting of 1964’s
A Caribbean Mystery
and this timeline is confirmed by the date of the proposed postcard, November 1963.

A. Advertisement?

Postcard? Frankfort 7-11-63 Could meet you at Waterloo Bridge Friday 14th 6 p.m.

B. Sir D. is called upon by a rather sinister gentleman – questioned about incident at Frankfort – D. is alert – non-committal. Shortly after, a ‘near escape’ – gas? car steering trouble? electric fault? Then a visit from the ‘other side’ apparently friends of girl

Or

Girl murdered – her picture in paper – he is sure it is the girl at the airport – it starts him investigating – he goes to the inquest.

Notebook 28A contains the plot-line that Christie actually adopted and the following short paragraph, listed as Idea B, neatly encapsulates it. Although the calculation about the age of the supposed son would seem to place the writing of this note in 1969, Idea C on the following page is part of the plot of
Endless Night
(1967) and is followed a few pages later by extensive notes for
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
(1968). Unusually, here also is the exact title, spelling apart, of the projected book:

Passenger to Frankfort
[sic]

Missing passenger – airport – Renata – Sir Neil Sanderson

London Neil at War Office or M.14. His obstinacy aroused – puts advertisement in. Frankfort Airport Nov. 20th Please communicate – passenger to London etc. Answer – Hungerford Bridge 7.30pm

What is it all about? She passes him ticket for concert Festival Hall. Hitler idea – concealed in a lunatic asylum – one of many who think they are Napoleon or Hitler or Mussolini. One of them was smuggled out – H. took his place – Hitler – H. Bormann – branded him on sole of foot – a swastika – the son born 1945 now 24 – in Argentine? U.S.A.? Rudi Schornhorn – the young Siegfried

The following extract from Notebook 49 dates from the mid 1960s. Idea A on the same list became
Third Girl
and Ideas C and D never went further than the four-line sketches on the page of this Notebook. This outline tallies closely with the finished novel although there is no mention of the ticket and passport swap.