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

Lord Mountbatten’s claim to be responsible for having given Agatha Christie the idea for Roger Ackroyd should probably be taken with a pinch of salt. It is true that, at Christmas in 1969, he received from the author a copy of the book, inscribed: ‘To Lord Mountbatten in grateful remembrance of a letter he wrote to me forty-five years ago which contained the suggestion which I subsequently used in a book called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Here once more is my thanks.’ However, this was in response to a letter from Mountbatten reminding her that he had written to her forty-five years earlier.

Whether Agatha Christie thought Roger Ackroyd her best book is uncertain, but she usually mentioned it as among her three or four favourites.

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, dedicated not to Lord Mountbatten but ‘to PUNKIE,

(#litres_trial_promo) who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on every one in turn!’, Agatha Christie returned to the classical domestic crime novel for the first time since Murder on the Links three years earlier, and at the same time reintroduced Hercule Poirot who, apart from the short stories in Poirot Investigates, had also been missing for three years.

The story, narrated not by Poirot’s usual associate, Hastings, but by the local doctor whose name is Sheppard, begins with the death of someone other than Roger Ackroyd. Mrs Ferrars, a wealthy widow, has been found dead in her bed, and Dr Sheppard has been sent for. He suspects suicide, but sees no point in saying so publicly. The following evening Roger Ackroyd, a wealthy widower whom village gossip had prophesied would marry Mrs Ferrars, is murdered in the study of his house.

We are soon introduced to Dr Sheppard’s sister Caroline, who keeps house for him, and to the Sheppards’ neighbour, a recent arrival in the village of King’s Abbot. He is a foreign gentleman with ‘an egg-shaped head, partially covered with suspiciously black hair, two immense moustaches, and a pair of watchful eyes’. He has retired from whatever his profession may have been, grows vegetable marrows, and is thought to be called Porrott.

Porrott, of course, is simply the King’s Abbot pronunciation of Poirot, and soon the retired detective has introduced himself to Dr Sheppard, has admitted how bored he is with his vegetable marrows, and how much he misses his friend (‘who for many years never left my side’) who is now living in the Argentine. When Poirot is asked to investigate the murder of Roger Ackroyd, he allows Dr Sheppard to take the place of his old friend Hastings as assistant and part-confidant; and also as Boswell to Poirot’s Johnson, for it is Sheppard who writes up the case and is the chronicler of Poirot’s eventual success.

It is not a success which comes easily to Poirot, for the suspects are many and varied. Most of them were staying in Ackroyd’s house when he was murdered. Major Blunt, a big-game hunter, is an old friend, and appears to have a romantic interest in Ackroyd’s niece, Flora. Flora and her mother, who is Ackroyd’s widowed sister-in-law, are poor relations living on a rich man’s charity. Geoffrey Raymond, the dead man’s secretary, Ursula Bourne, a somewhat unusual parlourmaid, and Ralph Paton, Ackroyd’s adopted son who is burdened with gambling debts, all come under suspicion.

Poirot is assisted not only by Dr Sheppard but by the doctor’s sister Caroline, a middle-aged spinster who seems to know everything that goes on in the village. Many years later, in discussing the character of Miss Marple, an unconventional solver of puzzles whom she was to introduce in Murder at the Vicarage, Agatha Christie said she thought it possible that Miss Marple ‘arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Sheppard’s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the book – an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home.’

It is not simply because of its startling dénouement that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd has remained one of Agatha Christie’s most popular novels. The story is believable, the characters convincing, and Mrs Christie’s ear for dialogue is accurate. That she can occasionally be clumsy ought not to obscure the fact that, on form, she writes speech which sounds natural, whether it issues from the mouth of a peeress or a parlourmaid. Even more impressive is her ability to enter into the thought processes of her male characters. Dr Sheppard, the narrator of Roger Ackroyd, is a fully rounded and perfectly convincing character, and his loving, exasperated relationship with his sister Caroline, an amusing and acutely observed character, is beautifully conveyed. Another important ingredient in the success of the novel is the background of English village life which Mrs Christie provides. It is never obtrusive but it is there, and it is important.

From The Murder of Roger Ackroyd onwards, Agatha Christie’s readers knew what to expect, or rather knew that they would never know what to expect. And it is this quality of unexpectedness which makes Mrs Christie unique among crime writers. Dorothy L. Sayers writes more elegantly but also, at times, more ploddingly. Her stories do not move quickly. Ngaio Marsh is in the Christie tradition but can get bogged down in endless interviews with suspects. Patricia Wentworth is pastiche Christie and her villains can usually be guessed. After the trick Christie played on her public in Roger Ackroyd (though some of those who remembered The Man in the Brown Suit ought perhaps not to have been taken in), clearly there were no holds barred. It is this realization that no one, absolutely no one, is exempt from suspicion in an Agatha Christie novel that makes reading the finest ones such a delight. Here she will kill off all the characters, there she will make virtually everyone the murderer, somewhere else the crime will be committed by – no, surely not by him? But how could she possibly justify that? Well, she does.

Her puzzles endure to delight and surprise readers towards the end of the twentieth century just as much as they did in the twenties because they are not mechanical but concerned with human character. The locked-room mysteries beloved of John Dickson Carr are of no great interest to Agatha Christie, nor are the fiendish devices, the evaporating ice darts or any of the other paraphernalia used by some of the earlier crime writers. Her tricks are sometimes verbal, sometimes visual. If you listen carefully and watch her all the time, you may catch Mrs Christie, but it is highly unlikely that you will. The solution which she has somehow persuaded you quite early in the narrative is not the correct one very frequently is – but not invariably.

Mrs Christie is at her best throughout The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. The occasional Christie carelessness is there, as when she tells us that Ackroyd is nearly fifty years of age, and a paragraph or two later it becomes clear that he could not have been older than forty-three. And Poirot’s years in England have caused his command of French to deteriorate. He says ‘Je ne pense pas’ when he clearly means ‘Je crois que non’, and in any case is perfectly capable of saying ‘I think not’ in English. But these are minor quibbles. In Dr Sheppard and his sister Mrs Christie has created a pair of highly engaging characters, and her description of Caroline Sheppard, tempted to gossip, but wavering for a second or two ‘much as a roulette ball might coyly hover between two numbers’, is especially felicitous.

You can usually expect a little music in her books and, at least in the early Christies, a little anti-semitism. Both are to be found in Roger Ackroyd. Oddly, it is the unmusical Major Blunt who provides the two references to opera when he talks of ‘the johnny who sold his soul to the devil’, adding that ‘there’s an opera about it’, and later reveals his knowledge that Mélisande is someone in an opera. Agatha Christie probably saw both Faust and Pelléas et Mélisande during her period at finishing school in Paris, but you would not have expected Major Blunt to know Debussy’s opera though he might just have been aware of the more popular Faust of Gounod. Blunt, incidentally, is a name Mrs Christie seems to have been fond of using. Three more Blunts, one of them an Admiral, will turn up in later works.

The mandatory anti-semitic reference occurs when one of the characters receives demands from debt collectors (Scotch [sic] gentlemen named McPherson and MacDonald), and Dr Sheppard comments: ‘They are usually Scotch gentlemen, but I suspect a Semitic strain in their ancestry.’

Two years after its publication, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was adapted for the stage by Michael Morton. Mrs Christie much disliked Morton’s first suggestion which was to take about twenty years off Poirot’s age, call him Beau Poirot, and have lots of girls in love with him. With the support of Gerald Du Maurier who produced the play, she persuaded the adaptor not to change the character and personality of Poirot, but agreed to allow Caroline Sheppard to be turned into a young and attractive girl, in order to supply Poirot with romantic interest. Mrs Christie’s agreement was reluctant. She resented the removal of the spinster Caroline, for she liked the role played by this character in the life of the village, and she liked the idea of that village life being reflected through Dr Sheppard and his sister. In the play, Poirot confesses to Dr Sheppard that he loves Caryl, as she is now called and, although at the end the great detective announces his intention to leave ‘for my own country’, the final moments suggest that he may, one day, come back for Caryl:

POIROT (taking both her hands and kissing them): Un

de ces jours …

CARYL: What do you mean?

POIROT: Perhaps one day …

(Caryl goes out slowly. Poirot turns back to table, takes rose out of specimen glass which is on table, kisses it, and puts it in his button-hole, looking off towards the garden where Caryl has gone out.) The curtain falls.

The play, which was called Alibi, opened on 15 May 1928, at the Prince of Wales Theatre in the West End of London, with the twenty-nine-year-old Charles Laughton as Hercule Poirot, J. H. Roberts as Dr Sheppard, Basil Loder as Major Blunt, Henry Daniell (who went to Hollywood the following year to play suave villains in countless American films) as Parker, the butler, Lady Tree as Mrs Ackroyd, Jane Welsh as her daughter Flora, Cyril Nash as Ralph Paton, Henry Forbes Robertson as Geoffrey Raymond, Iris Noel as Ursula Bourne, and Gillian Lind as Caryl Sheppard. The Sketch said that Laughton ‘admirably impersonated’ Poirot, and Mrs Christie thought he was a good actor but ‘entirely unlike Hercule Poirot’. The play was a commercial success, running for 250 performances in London before being taken up elsewhere and eventually by amateur dramatic societies with whom it is still highly popular.

In 1931, the play became a film, still with the title of Alibi. Produced by Julius Hagen, who had already made an Agatha Christie movie in 1928 and directed by Leslie Hiscott, Alibi was filmed at the Twickenham studios near London, with Austin Trevor, who was even less like Hercule Poirot than Laughton had been, and who made no attempt at a characterization, but played the role ‘straight’. Others in the cast were Franklin Dyall, Elizabeth Allan, Clare Greet and Milton Rosmer. (Max Mallowan in his autobiography, Mallowan’s Memoirs, wrongly identifies the actor who played Poirot in this film as Francis Sullivan, who played Poirot twice on the stage, but who was not in either the film or the stage version of Alibi.)

Retitled The Fatal Alibi, the play was staged in New York on 28 February 1932, with Charles Laughton directing and also playing Poirot. It closed after twenty-four performances.

The first of Agatha Christie’s books to be produced in Great Britain by Collins and in America by Dodd, Mead & Co who had bought John Lane and Co, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in the spring of 1926. Seven months later, on Friday, 3 December, Mrs Christie disappeared in mysterious circumstances worthy of one of her crime novels.

The year 1926 had been far from a happy one for Agatha Christie. It began well enough with a brief holiday in Corsica with her sister, during which she worked on The Mystery of the Blue Train, but shortly after the sisters arrived home they learned that their mother was ill and some months later Agatha found herself also having to cope with the realization that her marriage to Archie Christie had badly deteriorated. For some time Colonel Christie had seemed to be more interested in golf than in his wife, and now Agatha discovered that she had a more serious rival for her husband’s affections, a young woman called Nancy Neele who lived at Godalming in Surrey and who was also an acquaintance of hers. Archie confessed that he was in love with Miss Neele and wanted to marry her. He asked Agatha to divorce him.

On the morning of Friday, 3 December 1926, after a quarrel with his wife, Colonel Christie packed his bags and left home to spend the weekend with Miss Neele in Godalming. That evening, leaving her daughter Rosalind asleep in the house, Mrs Christie drove off in her car. She left two letters, one addressed to Archie, and one requesting her secretary to cancel her appointments as she was going to Yorkshire. According to the daughter of the then Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey, she posted a letter to the Deputy Chief Constable, in which she said she feared for her life, and appealed for his help. Her car was found next morning by George Best, a fifteen-year-old gypsy lad. It had been abandoned on the embankment at the side of the road at a popular ‘beauty spot’ called Newlands Corner, near a lake known as the Silent Pool. The bodywork of the car was covered in frost, and the lights were still on. Inside the car the police found a fur coat, and a small case which had burst open and which contained three dresses, two pairs of shoes and an expired driving licence in the name of Mrs Agatha Christie.

For the next few days the newspapers were full of stories about the well-known mystery writer’s disappearance, with huge banner headlines announcing new so-called developments, interviews with and comments by several people, and speculation by many more. Suicide was not ruled out, nor was murder.

On 7 December, the Daily News offered ‘£100 reward to the first person furnishing us with information leading to the whereabouts, if alive, of Mrs Christie’. The Deputy Chief Constable of Surrey said, in the best tradition of the detective novel: ‘I have handled many important cases during my career, but this is the most baffling mystery ever set me for solution.’ Also in the best tradition of crime fiction, suspicion centred for a time upon the husband of the missing woman.

By the following weekend, hundreds of policemen and thousands of members of the general public had joined in the search for Agatha Christie. The Silent Pool was dredged with special machinery, light aircraft scoured the countryside from above, and packs of airedales and bloodhounds went over the ground more closely. Police from four counties, Surrey, Essex, Berkshire and Kent, were brought in. As in an Agatha Christie murder mystery, a number of clues were found, only to be discarded as red herrings: a local chemist said that Mrs Christie had often discussed with him methods of committing suicide; a woman claimed that she had seen someone, whom she identified from photographs as Mrs Christie, wandering about, dazed; and two other people remembered that a woman answering to her description, her clothes covered in frost, had asked them the way to Petersfield, a town in Hampshire. The police guarded Colonel Christie’s house, monitored his phone calls, and followed him to his office. Christie told a city colleague, ‘They think I’ve murdered my wife.’ The weekend after her disappearance, in answer to an appeal from the police fifteen thousand volunteers searched the Downs. On the Saturday afternoon, three thousand of their cars were parked on Merrow Downs, and they set off in groups of thirty with a police officer in charge of each group. The Daily Mail played its part by publishing an article by the famous thriller writer, Edgar Wallace, in which he expounded his theory of Mrs Christie’s disappearance. He did not suspect foul play, but considered it

a typical case of ‘mental reprisal’ on somebody who has hurt her. To put it vulgarly her first intention seems to have been to ‘spite’ an unknown person who would be distressed by her disappearance.

That she did not contemplate suicide seems evident from the fact that she deliberately created an atmosphere of suicide by abandonment of her car.

Loss of memory, that is to say mental confusion, might easily have followed but a person so afflicted could not possibly escape notice … If Agatha Christie is not dead of shock and exposure within a limited radius of the place where her car was found, she must be alive and in full possession of her faculties, probably in London. It is impossible to lose your memory and find your way to a determined destination.

Edgar Wallace’s theory was perfectly tenable, and indeed in its essentials was correct. It was certainly quite proper for him to have suggested it, but perhaps unwise of the chief suspect, Colonel Christie, to put forward the same idea to the Daily News: ‘My wife said to me, some time ago, that she could disappear at will and would defy anyone to find her. This shows that the possibility of engineering her disappearance was running through her mind.’

During the week in which Agatha Christie remained missing, the banjo player in the band at the Hydropathic Hotel at Harrogate, in those days an elegant spa resort in Yorkshire, informed the Harrogate police of his suspicion that the Mrs Neele who had been staying at the hotel since the previous Saturday was, in fact, Mrs Christie. The police stationed a detective in the hotel for two days to keep an eye on Mrs Neele, and the manager of the hotel (which is now called the Old Swan Hotel) made a statement to the police about Mrs Neele:

She arrived by taxi on Saturday morning with only a small suitcase and asked for a bedroom on en pension terms and was given a good room on the first floor with hot and cold water.

I did not see her myself but I believe that the price quoted to her was seven guineas a week. She accepted this without hesitation. Indeed, from the first day she has been here she seems to have as much money as she wants. From the first her life in the Hydro has been exactly similar to that of our other guests. She takes her meals in the dining-room and only once or twice has had breakfast in bed. She is a very agreeable guest.

When the story that a Mrs Neele at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate might well be Agatha Christie was leaked to the press, several newspapers sent reporters to Harrogate, and the Daily Mail sent a special train with a team of reporters and photographers. It was, however, a Daily News reporter, the twenty-year-old Ritchie Calder (the late Baron Ritchie-Calder) who walked up to Mrs Neele in the lounge of the hotel and addressed her as Mrs Christie. ‘Mrs Neele’ admitted to him that she was Mrs Christie, but, when asked how she had got to Harrogate, said she did not know as she was suffering from amnesia. She then left Calder abruptly, went up to her room and stayed there for the remainder of the afternoon.

On Tuesday, 14 December, the London Evening Standard published the news that Agatha Christie had been found. The Daily News sent Mrs Christie a telegram, which they also published: ‘In view widespread criticism your disappearance strongly urge desirability authentic explanation from yourself to thousands of public who joined in costly search and cannot understand your loss of memory theory.’

No ‘authentic explanation’ was ever vouchsafed by Agatha Christie. She had registered at the Hydro Hotel as Mrs Teresa Neele, and had let it be known to fellow guests

(#litres_trial_promo) that she was a visitor from Cape Town. On the evening of the day she arrived, Saturday, 4 December, there was a dance at the hotel, and when the band played ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, Mrs Neele got up and danced the Charleston. She spent her week at Harrogate shopping (‘she was constantly buying new clothes,’ Miss Corbett, the hotel pianist, told the police), taking tea in a local tea shop, and going on long walks. In the evening she played billiards at the Hydro, and on more than one occasion was prevailed upon to sing in her small but sweet soprano, accompanying herself at the piano. Once in the middle of a sentimental song, she faltered and seemed close to tears, but this was attributed to the fact that ‘Mrs Neele’ was recovering from the loss of a child in South Africa. During the week she posted an announcement to The Times, which appeared in the newspaper’s personal column on Saturday, 11 December: ‘Friends and relatives of Teresa Neele, late of South Africa, please communicate – Write Box R 702, The Times, EC4’.

When he accosted her at the hotel, the young journalist Ritchie Calder thought that ‘amnesia’, which Mrs Christie flung glibly at him, ‘was much too clinical a word for someone supposedly surprised into conversation, and if, as her doctor later suggested, she had an “identity crisis”, well, by golly, there was no “Teresa Neele” lurking in the self-possessed woman I met.’

Archie Christie arrived in Harrogate at 6.45 p.m. on Tuesday, 14 December, and identified his wife as she walked through the lounge of the hotel wearing an orchid pink dinner gown. She appeared unembarrassed as he walked up to her, merely turning to a group of fellow guests and saying, ‘Fancy, my brother has just arrived’. One of the guests who watched the reunion said later that the Christies then sat down in front of the fire in the lounge, but several chairs apart from each other as though they had been quarrelling. They stayed overnight, not in Mrs Neele’s room but in a suite. Colonel Christie made an announcement to the press:

There is no question about the identity. It is my wife. She has suffered from the most complete loss of memory and I do not think she knows who she is. She does not know me and she does not know where she is. I am hoping that the rest and quiet will restore her. I am hoping to take her to London tomorrow to see a doctor and specialists.

Two doctors, a neurologist and a general practitioner, issued a statement to the effect that Mrs Christie was ‘suffering from an unquestionable loss of memory and that for her future welfare she should be spared all anxiety and excitement.’ In other words, ask no questions.

The press accused Mrs Christie of having planned her disappearance merely to obtain publicity. That was a nonsensical accusation, for she was not only a shy woman who avoided publicity as much as possible, she was also in no need of it. But she was certainly not the victim of amnesia. The week before her disappearance, Agatha Christie had lost a diamond ring at Harrods. She wrote to the Knightsbridge department store from Harrogate, describing the ring and asking that, if it were found, it be sent to Mrs Teresa Neele at the Hydro Hotel. Harrods did, in fact, return Mrs Christie’s ring to Mrs Neele.

In 1980, in a magazine called The Bookseller, a very elderly journalist claimed to remember that, in 1926, on the morning after Mrs Christie disappeared, her publisher Sir Godfrey Collins had told him not to talk to anyone about it, as Mrs Christie was in Harrogate, resting.

The strongest likelihood is that a very unhappy Mrs Archibald Christie had come close to nervous collapse, and that it was in a condition of considerable mental turmoil that she, nonetheless deliberately, staged her disappearance in such a way as to cause the maximum distress to the man whom she loved and who had caused her such anguish. She probably hoped that he would think she had killed herself and would suffer remorse. She may even have hoped that he would be suspected of having murdered her. Perhaps she thought her disappearance would bring Archie to a realization of how much he needed her. Normal, warm-hearted and affectionate a creature though she was, Mrs Christie was not necessarily more so than many another who had been driven by extreme mental anguish to commit actions which seem wildly out of character. Far from disappearing in order to court publicity, she was so distraught at the collapse of her marriage that she was driven to a course of extremely neurotic behaviour despite her fear of publicity. And, her most successful novel having been published seven months earlier and sold extremely well, she had no need of publicity.

In her autobiography, written in old age, Agatha Christie made no direct reference to these exciting events of 1926, contenting herself merely with the observation that after illness came sorrow, despair and heartbreak, and that there was no need to dwell on it. Further clues to the mystery of her behaviour in December 1926 are inextricably embedded in the crypto-autobiographical novel, Unfinished Portrait, which she wrote a few years later.

2 The Vintage Years (#u4c11d2da-02de-5fc8-b25c-1419931e92cc)