The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie must have known the real worth of her Mary Westmacott novels, and must surely have been disappointed that they did not arouse more interest in the literary world. But when she was interviewed many years later, after it was known that she had written several non-mystery novels, she merely remarked with an ambiguously arrogant modesty: ‘I found with straight novels that they didn’t need much thinking out beforehand. Detective stories are much more trouble – even if you have no high ideals in writing them.’

The Sittaford Mystery Alternative title: Murder at Hazelmoor (1931)

Mr and Mrs Mallowan had bought a house in London, at 22 Cresswell Place, Earls Court, which Agatha completely redecorated, and which contained a music room on the top floor where she could both write and play the piano. They also kept up Ashfield, the house in Torquay, where Agatha loved to go during the summer holidays when Rosalind was home from school. After their honeymoon, Agatha spent the winter of 1930–31 in London while Max was at Ur, and it was not until March that she joined him at Ur for a few days and then travelled home with him.

The journey back to England was an adventurous one. Having decided to go by way of Persia (Iran), the Mallowans flew from Baghdad to Shiraz, via Teheran, in a small, single-engined plane which ‘seemed to be flying into mountain peaks the entire time’. In Shiraz, they visited a beautiful house with a number of medallion paintings on the walls, one of which was of Holborn Viaduct in London! Apparently a Shah of Victorian times, after visiting London, had sent an artist there with instructions to paint various medallions of scenes the Shah wanted to remember, and these included Holborn Viaduct. Agatha Christie used the house as the setting for a short story called ‘The House at Shiraz’, which she included in a volume, Parker Pyne Investigates (1934).

From Shiraz the Mallowans travelled by car to Isfahan, which Agatha maintained to the end of her life was the most beautiful city in the world. Its colours of rose, blue and gold, its noble Islamic buildings with their courtyards, tiles and fountains, the birds and the flowers, all entranced her. They next made a sudden decision to continue their journey home by way of Russia. Hiring a car, they made their way down to the Caspian sea where, at Rasht, they caught a Russian boat across to Baku, capital of the Soviet province of Azerbaydzhan. In Baku, an Intourist agent asked if they would like to see a performance of Faust at the local opera house. They declined, and instead ‘were forced to go and look at various building sites and half-built blocks of flats’. Their hotel was one of faded splendour, but everything in Baku ‘seemed like a Scottish Sunday’. By train, they made their way to Batum on the Black Sea, having been forbidden to break their journey at Tiflis, a town Max Mallowan very much wanted to see. A French ship took them down the Black Sea to Istanbul, where they joined Agatha’s beloved Orient Express.

Max Mallowan had arranged not to go back to Leonard Woolley and his dig at Ur, the following season, but instead to accept an invitation from Dr Campbell Thompson to join him in excavating at Ninevah. So, in late September 1931, Max travelled to Ninevah, and it was arranged that Agatha should join him there at the end of October. Her plan was to spend a few weeks writing and relaxing on the island of Rhodes, and then sail to the port of Alexandretta and hire a car to take her to Aleppo. At Aleppo she would take the train to the Turkish-Iraqi frontier, and then drive on to Mosul where she would be met by Max. But a rough Mediterranean Sea prevented the steamer from putting in at Alexandretta, so Agatha was carried on to Beirut, made her adventurous way by train up to Aleppo, and eventually arrived at Mosul three days late.

The big mound of Ninevah was a mile and a half outside Mosul, and the Mallowans shared a small house with Dr Campbell Thompson and his wife, quite close to the mound which was being excavated. The country was fascinating, with the distant Kurdish mountains to be seen in one direction, and the river Tigris with the minarets of the city of Mosul in the other. At the bazaar in Mosul, Agatha bought herself a table. This cost her £10, according to her memoirs, or £3, according to Max Mallowan’s memoirs. Both agree that, on it, she wrote a Poirot detective novel, Lord Edgware Dies. When a skeleton was dug up in a grave mound at Ninevah, it was promptly christened Lord Edgware.

The Sittaford Mystery, published in Great Britain in 1931, and in America as Murder at Hazelmoor,

(#litres_trial_promo) was written during a few weeks in 1929, and is one of those Agatha Christie crime novels in which the murderer is unmasked not by Poirot or Miss Marple or one of the author’s other ‘regulars’, but by the heroine of the novel, who is usually a courageous and determined young woman with something of the spirit of Tuppence Beresford in her.

Anne Beddingfield in The Man in the Brown Suit (1924) is the earliest of these adventurous ladies, and Katherine Grey in The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) is potentially one of them, although she does not develop her potentiality since she has Poirot on hand. In The Sittaford Mystery Emily Trefusis is engaged to be married to a young man who has been arrested for the murder of his uncle, Captain Trevelyan. Convinced of his innocence, she sets out to discover the identity of the murderer, and eventually succeeds with the help of the police Inspector in charge of the case. The police, in Christie novels, are not always Inspector Japp-like incompetents brought into the story merely to set off the brilliance of the private detective.

For the first time, Mrs Christie makes use of Dartmoor, virtually her native heath and the place where she wrote her very first crime novel. Normally, her settings are in less bleak and inhospitable parts of the English countryside, but in The Sittaford Mystery she takes advantage of the snow-bound moorland village, using it not simply for atmosphere but making it contribute to the plot as well. You cannot fail to be reminded of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, not only by the setting but also by the fact that, in both novels, a prisoner escapes from Princetown, the prison in the centre of Dartmoor.

Agatha Christie was interested in the supernatural, and indeed was to write some of her finest short stories on supernatural subjects. The Sittaford Mystery begins with a seance in which the assembled sitters are informed by the rapping of the table that Captain Trevelyan, six miles away in Exhampton, is dead. And it is discovered that Trevelyan has indeed been murdered, probably at the precise moment that the message was received in the seance six miles away. But The Sittaford Mystery is not necessarily a supernatural one. There are, in fact, two mysteries, and Mrs Christie juggles them superbly so that, until she is ready to tell us, we are never sure whether they are connected or even what one of them is. Who murdered Captain Trevelyan? And why have Mrs Willett and her daughter come to live in Sittaford? These would appear to be the mysteries, and presumably they are related.

The Sittaford Mystery is strongly plotted, and the solutions to its puzzles are not likely to be arrived at by deduction on the reader’s part. It is also one of Mrs Christie’s most entertaining crime novels, and her use of the Dartmoor background is masterly. But you cannot help thinking that, given the characters of those involved, the actual motive for the murder when it is revealed seems rather inadequate. Real life produces murders committed for motives which seem even more inadequate, but that is not the point. Usually the reader is convinced by Mrs Christie’s explanations, but on this occasion he may well consider it unlikely that this particular person would have committed that particular crime for the reason given. This reader would have liked a stronger motivation and also to have had loose ends tied up. What, for instance, is the significance of the information given in Chapter 37, that the maiden name of Martin Derring’s mother was Martha Elizabeth Rycroft? What is her connection with Mr Rycroft the ornithologist? Why does Rycroft refer to the Derrings as ‘my niece … and her husband’? There is an irrelevant and unnecessary confusion here.

Mrs Christie, the most objective of authors, who usually keeps herself in the background, intrudes at one or two points in the story: once, inadvertently, when she has Emily think to herself that a tall, blue-eyed invalid looks ‘as Tristan ought to look in the third act of Tristan und Isolde and as no Wagnerian tenor has ever looked yet’, for Emily is not the kind of girl to have been at all interested in the operas of Wagner, and the comment is clearly not hers but her author’s; on the other occasion, Mrs Christie describes a character’s voice by telling us that it ‘had that faintly complaining note in it which is about the most annoying sound a human voice can contain’. The qualifying clause is the opinion not of anyone in the novel but, again, of the author. It is possible to pick up pieces of information about Agatha Christie’s personal likes and dislikes in this way, but not often.

In one or two details, there is a similarity between The Sittaford Mystery and the long story, ‘Three Blind Mice’, of about sixteen years later, a story which was subsequently used as the basis of the play, The Mousetrap.

Several months before The Sittaford Mystery was published, the crime novelist Anthony Berkeley had written, in the preface to one of his Roger Sheringham mysteries, The Second Shot.

I am personally convinced that the days of the old crime-puzzle, pure and simple, relying entirely upon the plot and without any added attractions of character, style, or even humour, are in the hands of the auditor; and that the detective story is in the process of developing into the novel with a detective or crime interest, holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.

Berkeley would seem here to be looking ahead to Simenon, whose first Maigret stories were soon to appear, or to writers of the type of Patricia Highsmith. But, until the end of her life, Agatha Christie was able to retain and increase a huge readership with precisely the kind of novel which Berkeley thought was on the way out. She did so, of course, by the cunning and subtle injection of those qualities of character, style and humour into a form which, in the hands of some of her rivals, seemed to offer little more than the donnish delights of puzzle-solving.

The Floating Admiral COLLABORATIVE NOVEL (1931)

An oddity, published in 1931,

(#litres_trial_promo) was the crime novel, The Floating Admiral, written by ‘Certain members of the Detection Club’.

The Detection Club of London, founded in London in 1928 by Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, is a private club to which a number of leading crime writers belong. Its first President was G. K. Chesterton.

For many years, the club dinners were held in a private room at L’Escargot Bienvenu in Greek Street, Soho. Later, they moved to the more luxurious Café Royal. Agatha Christie was a member of the Detection Club, and from 1958 until her death its Co-President. She was one of fourteen members who combined to write The Floating Admiral, a murder mystery to which each of its authors contributed one chapter. The conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written were described in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Introduction:

… the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection. Except in the case of Mr Chesterton’s picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely ‘to make it more difficult’. He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and, to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.

Set in the classical murder mystery country of southern England, the events in The Floating Admiral take place in and near Whynmouth, a fictitious south coast holiday resort. The corpse of Admiral Penistone is found floating down the river Whyn, in the vicar’s boat, and the detective whose task it is to discover the killer is not Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey or Father Brown or anyone associated with an individual contributor, but Inspector Rudge of the Whynmouth police, ‘a tall, thin man with a sallow, clean-shaven face’.

The authors of The Floating Admiral, in the order of their contributions, are G. K. Chesterton, Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, G.D.H. and M. Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald A. Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. The book is a remarkably successful group effort, and the fact that the story twists and turns even more than it would have done had it been the work of a single writer merely adds to its effectiveness as a mystery. The New York Times Book Review