Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 15)

On Friday 10 December, Dorothy L. Sayers (whose father had jumped to ‘a scandalous explanation’ of the puzzle) wrote about the case for the Daily News. She assessed the possible scenarios: loss of memory, foul play, suicide, and voluntary disappearance, but her article was apparently written without personal knowledge of Christie’s character. Her speculations highlighted the questions about the case, but yielded no answers.

Was Agatha conducting a form of ‘mental reprisal’ against someone who had hurt her? Edgar Wallace advanced this theory in the Daily Mail, guessing that she was taking revenge on Archie for his adultery. A year or so later, Wallace wrote a story inspired by the case, ‘The Sunningdale Murder’. The Daily Mail also featured Max Pemberton, author of several bestselling Victorian thrillers, fearing the worst. He thought Agatha was dead.

Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a former Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey, although he had resigned after developing a passionate belief in spiritualism. He had investigated real-life crimes, such as the Edalji and Oscar Slater cases, with much success. The Surrey police supplied him with one of Agatha’s gloves, which he took to a medium and psychometrist named Horace Leaf. Leaf’s considered opinion was that ‘trouble’ was connected to the glove. If this insight was of limited value, Leaf did say that Agatha was still alive. Conan Doyle informed Archie of this breakthrough, and announced that the case was ‘an excellent example of the uses of psychometry as an aid to the detective’.

The police appealed for public help in searching the Surrey Downs, and ‘the Great Sunday Hunt’ took place on 12 December. About two thousand civilians took part, wrapped up warm against the cold. It was like a massive outdoor pre-Christmas party. Ice creams and hot drinks were sold from vans to refresh the spectators. Sayers could not resist joining in the excitement, and persuaded John Gilroy, her artist friend from Benson’s, to drive her to the Silent Pool. The outcome for her was even more of an anticlimax than her foray to France to investigate the Nurse Daniels mystery. During a brief look around, Sayers failed to spot any tell-tale clues that the police had missed, and was left to pronounce, with all the authority she could muster, ‘No, she isn’t here.’ Yet if she failed to contribute to the detective effort, at least her day out amounted to useful research. Aspects of her visit featured in Unnatural Death, in which two women go missing from a car left abandoned on the south coast.

As darkness fell, the hunt was called off. A flare was lit to help searchers who had lost their bearings find their way home. Weary and deflated, Kenward told journalists that he did not believe Agatha Christie’s disappearance was a gimmick designed to sell her books.

What he did not know was that the answer lay more than two hundred miles north. A banjo player and a fellow bandsman performing at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, the North Yorkshire spa town, were keeping a close eye on a woman guest. They concluded she was the missing novelist, and their detective work proved superior to anyone else’s. Within forty-eight hours, the whole world learned that Agatha Christie had been discovered, safe and well.

After travelling by train to Harrogate, Christie had taken a first-floor room at five guineas a week and bought herself some new clothes, including a glamorous pink georgette evening dress. She followed the reports about her disappearance in the Press, and played bridge – and billiards – in the public rooms. At night she danced in the Winter Garden Ballroom to the music of the Happy Hydro Boys. Otherwise she relaxed by having massages, solving crossword puzzles and borrowing books from the W.H. Smith’s lending library. Her favourite reading comprised thrillers rejoicing in titles such as The Double Thumb and The Phantom Train. She had assumed the identity of a Mrs Teresa Neele, recently returned to Britain from Cape Town. Her chosen surname was that of her husband’s mistress.

Today Agatha Christie remains, almost half a century after her death, a household name. More than that, she has become a global brand. Big business. Two billion (or is it four billion? – estimates vary, and at such a stratospheric level, it scarcely seems to matter) copies of her books have been sold, and she has been translated more often than any other author. About two hundred film and television versions of her work have been screened, and the stories have been adapted into video games, graphic novels and Japanese anime. She was the most performed female British playwright of the twentieth century, and The Mousetrap is the longest-running stage play of all time, with more than 25,000 performances in London alone. The sixtieth anniversary of its first performance was celebrated by sixty specially licensed performances worldwide. Her home overlooking the River Dart is in the care of the National Trust and a popular tourist destination, while her native Torquay boasts an Agatha Christie Mile, along which visitors can retrace her steps.

A statue featuring a bust of Christie stands in Covent Garden, the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul has an Agatha Christie room, and her face smiles from a billboard welcoming tourists to Gran Canaria. On the 120th anniversary of her birth, cooks around the world baked a Delicious Death cake from a recipe by Jane Asher. The book with the thickest spine in the world has been created from the complete Miss Marple stories. In Harrogate, a plaque in the Old Swan Hotel (formerly the Hydropathic Hydro) commemorates her disappearance, the reason for which continues to provoke debate. Agatha Christie is, in short, an icon whose name is synonymous with detective fiction and mystery.

The enduring nature and astonishing scale of her fame would have amazed, and possibly appalled her. Not only was she genuinely modest, she was fanatical about preserving her privacy. She had always been shy, but the media frenzy that surrounded her disappearance left her with a lifelong detestation of the Press.

At first sight, Christie seems as genteel as her books are supposed to be. With Christie, however, nothing was quite as it seemed. In person, she combined a straightforward outlook on life with hidden depths, just as her simple and accessible writing style contrasted with her devious plots. Her father was American, and from childhood she spent long periods abroad, gaining a breadth of understanding and experience of the world that helps to explain why her work has enjoyed unceasing popularity when so much more sophisticated fiction has vanished from sight.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890, the third child of Frederick and Clara Miller. Frederick had inherited enough money from the family business not to need to work, and not long after Agatha’s elder sister Margaret (known as Madge) was born, the family settled in Torquay. Frederick was good-natured but lazy, and his failure to keep a close eye on the family fortune proved financially calamitous. To economize, he let the Torquay house, and took his family to France for over six months. Agatha enjoyed such an idyllic summer in Pau that she never went back there, unwilling to diminish the magical memories of that first foreign adventure. Her novels are stereotypically associated with settings in country houses and seemingly Home Counties villages for which detective novelist Colin Watson coined the generic term ‘Mayhem Parva’. In fact, a high proportion of her stories are set overseas. This reflects her love of travel, but above all her core belief that, in its fundamentals, human nature is much the same everywhere.

Madge was regarded as ‘the clever one’ in the family, and attended boarding school, but one of Clara’s unorthodox ideas was to school Agatha at home. Frederick Miller’s health deteriorated along with the family finances, and he died in 1901. Money was short, but Madge had married James Watt, who came from a wealthy Mancunian family, and Agatha often stayed with them at Abney Hall in Cheshire. She loved Abney, and fictitious versions of it appeared in After the Funeral and ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’. After a brief and unsatisfactory spell at a Torquay school, attending two days a week, she completed her education at three pensions in France.

She lived in her imagination, and loved writing stories and poems. Her instinct was to watch and listen to others rather than take centre stage herself. A keen eavesdropper, she gathered plot ideas from stray phrases in overheard conversations between strangers. She was as curious about other people as she was reluctant to reveal her own thoughts. Her innate modesty meant she felt under no compulsion to talk too much, and so she never gave herself away.

She wrote a novel set in Cairo, where she and her mother had taken a three-month holiday, but a literary agent, Hughes Massie, turned Snow upon the Desert down. Undaunted, she continued to write, as well as taking singing lessons, while receiving plenty of overtures from young men attracted by her serene manner and quiet good looks. Tall, slim and pale-haired, she rejected several marriage proposals before becoming engaged to Reggie Lucy, a major in the Gunners. Yet she broke with Reggie after meeting a dashing young airman.