Over the years I have had a growing conviction that Agatha Christie was without doubt pre-eminent as a writer of crime fiction. She was a weaver of spells, someone who leads us up and down the garden path, round and round in circles, only to deposit us in an unexpected place. Oh good heavens, we say. We didn’t see that coming! From the first words of advice she received from her friend, Eden Philpotts, Agatha learned that writing was a craft as well as an art and that there are methods and tricks for overcoming stylistic and technical obstacles.
Agatha’s work is a gift to the visual artist. Characters, locations, and objects provide a rich choice of subjects, but the lack of specific detail in her descriptions allows the illustrator to imagine and manipulate. As for imagination, Agatha had it in spades. According to Janet Morgan in Agatha Christie – A Biography, she was deeply affected by two books: J.W. Dunne’s Experiment With Time and The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, inspiring her to write to Max in 1930:
‘I understand very little of it but it fills me with nebulous ideas. How queer it would be if God were in the future – something we never created or imagined but who is not yet – supposing him to be not Cause but Effect … It’s fun to play with ideas – that God has made the world as it is and is pleased with it seems certainly not so. Originally man starved to death and froze to death (on top of coal in the ground) and every plague and pestilence caused by Man’s stupidity was put down to “God’s Will”. If life on this planet is an accident, quite unforeseen, and against all the principles of the solar system – how amazingly interesting – and when may it end? In some complete and marvellous Consciousness …’
Janet Morgan’s excellent biography discusses how Agatha was a prolific and ingenious fantasist. She ‘dreamt vividly, remembered and talked of her dreams, relished them – dreams of flying …’ I have the same propensity to fantasise and dream, especially dreams of flying, and I’ve always thought this is one of the many reasons I empathise so well with Agatha in her books.
However, Agatha was also a very down-to-earth person. Her own autobiography shows something of her humanity and wit:
‘I don’t like crowds, being jammed up against people, loud voices, noise, protracted talking, parties, and especially cocktail parties, cigarette smoke and smoking generally, any kind of drink except in cooking, marmalade, oysters, lukewarm food, grey skies, the feet of birds, or indeed the feel of a bird altogether. Final and fiercest dislike: the taste and smell of hot milk.
‘I like sunshine, apples, almost any kind of music, railway trains, numerical puzzles and anything to do with numbers, going to the sea, bathing and swimming, silence, sleeping, dreaming, eating, the smell of coffee, lilies of the valley, most dogs, and going to the theatre.
‘I could make much better lists, much grander-sounding, much more important, but there again it wouldn’t be me, and I suppose I must resign myself to being me.’
Agatha worked by herself: ‘The most blessed thing about being an author is that you do it in private and in your own time’. I profoundly echo these sentiments! My working conditions are a studio stacked with stuff, books everywhere and everything extremely untidy. I get the feeling that on the much smaller scale of a writer’s workspace Agatha was not that much more concerned with order and tidiness than I am. When asked on BBC’s radio programme, Close-Up, about her process of working, Agatha admitted: ‘The disappointing truth is that I haven’t much method’. And in John Curran’s comprehensively perceptive book, Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making, he points out: ‘She thrived mentally on chaos, it stimulated her more than neat order; rigidity stifled her creative process.’ This was her method and it works for me too. Out of my chaos, sketches and multiple reference notes, my finished painting emerges.
Archaeology is something else Agatha and I have in common. She was married to archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. My eldest son, Professor Jonathan Adams, is a marine archaeologist. He was Deputy Director of the excavation and raising of the Mary Rose and assembles and recreates a logical whole from an unlikely jumble of apparently unrelated bits and pieces – much as I do as an artist – and he is a fine painter. In our own ways we both share much in common with Agatha’s method of writing, and I think the processes and activities involved in archaeology are similar to the writing of detective stories: the assembly of pieces, finding facts, following clues, digging below the surface, and taking leaps of imagination …
As well as writing books, Agatha Christie was also a very accomplished playwright. My own passion for the theatre began with memories of my parents’ active life producing and acting in amateur dramatics. I was privileged to meet many of their theatrical friends such as Flora Robson and Sybil Thorndike, and I have many happy memories of being taken to theatres in London and Paris. My mother, Constance, was a pupil of Dame Carrie Tubbs at the Guildhall School of Music, though regrettably she gave up singing when she got married. Agatha trained as a singer, but she gave it up for writing.
With the painting of the new cover for Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, my association with Agatha Christie as her cover artist now exceeds fifty years. I hope that I will have the opportunity to do more. My conviction about this remarkable author that has steadily grown over the many years of our association can be summed up no better than this quote from a News Chronicle reviewer which appears in John Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making: ‘Mrs Christie is the greatest genius at inventing detective plots that has ever lived or will ever live’. I couldn’t put it better myself.
Tom Adams
Cornwall
January 2014
Preface
by Mathew Prichard
UNUSUALLY FOR Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly – the book which evolved out of this novella – was written around a specific location, in this case Greenway House on the River Dart in South Devon. Greenway was where Nima (which is what I called my grandmother) used to spend her summer holidays almost from the time she bought it in 1938 until she died in 1976. It is now 15 years since Greenway was acquired by the National Trust and subsequently opened to the public.
Last year ITV’s series Agatha Christie’s Poirot starring David Suchet shot its final film there, Dead Man’s Folly, and so a series that had begun in 1989 with The Adventure of the Clapham Cook ended in a blaze of glory at Greenway itself. Neither Nima, nor my late mother Rosalind, who had a lot to do with setting up the TV series in the beginning, could have wished for anything better. It was as if Hercule Poirot had come home.
As luck would have it, we were blessed with wonderful summer weather, and the last day of shooting in front of the house – a scene that was not in itself dramatically very significant – was none the less poignant as it featured David Suchet, in full Poirot regalia, mincing up Greenway’s front steps in his own inimitable way and knocking on the door. Eventually, after three repeats of the same action, we heard the time-honoured words – ‘it’s a wrap’ – and there was not a dry eye in the house, or rather on the lawn, where a large crowd had come to celebrate the ending of one of the world’s best loved TV series, and the portrayal of one of our best loved literary characters, Hercule Poirot, by one of our best loved character actors, David Suchet. If anyone had told Nima (who sadly never met David Suchet) that a series of this magnitude and popularity would be made continuously over a period of 25 years, I am sure that she would not have believed it.
My particular affection for Dead Man’s Folly extends back to long before the filming of the TV series, though. The book was published in 1956, when I was 13, coinciding with both the time I was beginning to enjoy reading Nima’s books, and when as a schoolboy I spent my summer holidays at Greenway with my family including, of course, Nima. I cannot say that I ever remember a fête on the lawn, but I certainly remember smaller events there, as Greenway was host to an ever-growing selection of literary and theatrical friends (this was the heyday of Nima’s career as a West End playwright), with plenty of friends of my step-grandfather Max Mallowan from the world of archaeology added for good measure. Nima never based her characters entirely on real-life people, but I would be lying if I did not admit to recognising snippets of Sir George and Lady Stubbs, and particularly Mrs Folliatt, from actual people whom she knew. Nor was I surprised when I found out that Dead Man’s Folly featured hitch-hikers. We were familiar with the occasional hitch-hiker from the nearby youth hostel called Maypool.
But I suppose Dead Man’s Folly evokes two particular memories from my childhood that I find particularly poignant: one a person, one a place. The person is Ariadne Oliver, who, although rather more boisterous than Nima would ever be, did have something of her enthusiasm, her love of apples, and a writer’s curiosity that reminds me very much of Nima herself. She appeared in seven novels, six of them with Poirot, and Zoë Wanamaker gives an excellent performance in the film. The place is the boathouse, where the poor victim is found murdered. Nima and I used to walk down to Greenway’s boathouse in the afternoon, watch the pleasure cruisers sail by (the Kiloran, Pride of Paignton, Brixham Belle and those wonderful paddle streamers, one of which I am delighted to say is still in working order). The tour guides on these boats would always refer to Greenway, usually inaccurately, as the home of Agatha Christie (rather than, strictly speaking, her holiday home), and though we could hear their voices as they sailed past, never do I remember them actually recognising her as she sat inconspicuously in the boathouse with her grandson!
