Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 16)

Lieutenant Archie Christie was the son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service, and Christie later said she fell for him because she found him unpredictable and fascinating. When war broke out, she realized he was likely to be killed. Three days before Christmas, he suddenly obtained leave from duty and they decided to marry. The wedding took place on Christmas Eve 1914, and Archie returned to France on Boxing Day. Life at this time was heady, exhilarating, and impulsive. It was also frighteningly insecure. Agatha’s brother Monty, a feckless charmer, was badly wounded while serving with the King’s African Rifles, and although he survived, he suffered psychological damage. To Clara’s distress, he liked to take up his revolver and shoot at people passing the family home in Torquay – a hobby Christie gave to a character, decades later, in her play The Unexpected Guest.

Archie was decorated for bravery and promoted to the rank of colonel before being invalided out of the Royal Flying Corps. At one point the couple did not see each other for almost two years. Agatha became a V.A.D. (Volunteer Aid Detachment) nurse, later transferring to the dispensary. A rather sinister pharmacist who told her he enjoyed the power afforded by dealing with poisons stuck in her mind, and nearly fifty years later, provided her with a key character in The Pale Horse. She blew up a Cona coffee maker whilst attempting the Marsh test to detect the presence of arsenic, but acquired an extensive knowledge of poisons, which she soon put to use – in fiction.

Madge shared Agatha’s enthusiasm for detectives such as Sherlock Holmes and his French rivals Arsène Lupin and Joseph Rouletabille, and challenged her to write a whodunit. Having encountered a few Belgian war refugees, Christie decided that her detective would be Belgian too. She created someone who was vain but brilliant: Hercule Poirot. His foreign nationality was a clever stroke, and so was his conceit: British people were often suspicious of foreigners, and distrustful of cleverness. Christie poked fun at her fellow countrymen’s insularity, while making it plausible that suspects who concocted ingenious murder schemes made the catastrophic mistake of underestimating this seemingly ridiculous figure, with his broken English, extravagant moustache and insistence on using ‘the little grey cells’ of the brain. Christie’s prime literary influence was Conan Doyle, and she equipped Poirot with an amiable if rather obtuse Watson in Captain Arthur Hastings.

Christie finished The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1918, and the following year she gave birth to Rosalind. After a series of rejections from publishers, John Lane offered a less-than-generous contract which gave him an option over her next five books. She made the revisions he asked for, and her ingenious country house mystery finally appeared in the US in 1920 and in Britain the following year. Next came The Secret Adversary, a light and breezy thriller which introduced a young couple who went on to marry and to feature in four subsequent books, the last published more than half a century after the first. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford represent wish fulfilment on Christie’s part. She imagined herself as the lovely, sharp-witted Tuppence, while the courageous and eternally reliable Tommy was an idealized portrait of the man she thought she had married.

In January 1922, Christie and Archie took the extraordinary step of leaving their young daughter for almost a year so that they could take part in a ‘Mission to the Dominions’. This was an international publicity exercise meant to pave the way for the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. The grand tour was the brainchild of Major Belcher, a friend of Archie’s with a genius for self-promotion, the highlight of whose war service was a spell as Controller of the Supplies of Potatoes. Belcher offered Archie, who had worked in the City since the war, the job of financial adviser to the mission, and Agatha’s travel expenses were covered, with a month’s holiday in Honolulu thrown in. Archie’s employers were unwilling to keep his job open for him, but he was bored with civilian life, and Agatha loved to travel. She said in her autobiography: ‘We had never been people who played safe.’

Although Madge and her mother agreed to look after Rosalind, Madge felt Agatha should have stayed in England, but Clara Miller was supportive, arguing that a wife’s priority was to be with her husband. Agatha fell in love with South Africa, and the experience provided material not only for her next book, but also for creating the make-believe life of Mrs Teresa Neele. On board ship, she often played bridge, and sometimes quoits, once defeating the captain. In Waikiki, the couple were among the first British people to master the art of stand-up surfing. An added pleasure for Agatha was the chance to show off her figure in an emerald green wool bathing dress.

The tour was long and often gruelling, but although Belcher proved a cantankerous and selfish companion, who sent Agatha out to buy socks or on other errands, and then forget to reimburse her, she had no regrets. On their return, however, Rosalind treated them as strangers. Perhaps her mother’s long absence during her childhood accounted for some of the complexities in the relationship between mother and daughter that persisted for the rest of Christie’s life.

Christie’s naïveté is illustrated by the fact that she did not realize that the money she earned from writing was subject to income tax, and this was the start of a long and unhappy relationship with the Revenue. She needed a literary agent, and although Hughes Massie had died, she was taken on by his youthful successor whose trustworthiness made him someone she relied on for the rest of her life. This was Edmund Cork, who later escorted Ngaio Marsh to Bentley’s installation as President of the Detection Club.

Poirot had returned in The Murder on the Links, whose plot was influenced by a recent murder in France, and she tried to supplement her finances by entering newspaper competitions. The Daily Sketch serialized The Mystery of Norman’s Court, by John Chancellor, a crime writer who enjoyed a brief vogue but is now forgotten. The first prize for the solution to Chancellor’s puzzle was an eye-watering £1,300, illustrating the lengths newspapers were willing to go to in order to attract readers. Christie did not win, but was one of twelve people who shared in the runners-up prize of £800.

At this time, she did not have the loathing of publicity stunts that developed later. She even took part in a mock trial to promote a mystery play, In the Next Room, a dramatization of a locked room mystery by Burton E. Stevenson. Christie was one of four writers on a jury presided over by G. K. Chesterton. The accused was found not guilty, and Chesterton announced that in any case he would have ‘refused to convict a Frenchman for the humane and understandable act of murdering an American millionaire’.

Poirot’s popularity prompted her to feature him in a string of sub-Sherlockian short stories, but The Man in the Brown Suit broke fresh ground. It is almost unique among early Golden Age novels in being narrated (mostly) by a woman. Anne Bedingfeld, the heroine, was an idealized self-portrait of an independently minded young woman with a taste for adventure. After arriving in South Africa, Anne goes surfing at Muizenberg, as Christie had done, and finds the sport equally exhilarating. By the end of the book, she has also found love, and is happily married, with a child.

At Belcher’s request, a character based upon him played a prominent part. Much of the story is presented through extracts from two diaries, and the surprise solution paved the way for an even more daring and skilful means of confounding the reader’s expectations in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Christie took care to ensure that this breakthrough novel did not appear until after she had completed her contractual obligation to John Lane with a collection of the Poirot tales and a third light-hearted thriller, The Secret of Chimneys.

The events of 1926 changed everything. The year began pleasantly, with a holiday in Corsica, and winning the prize (under husband Archie’s name) for solving Berkeley’s serial, The Wintringham Mystery. In June, the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd catapulted her into the front rank of crime novelists. The book remains a landmark title of classic detective fiction. The story is told not by Captain Hastings but by Dr Sheppard, who lives with his busybody sister Caroline in the sleepy village of King’s Abbot, and their new neighbour is Poirot, who has retired to grow vegetable marrows.

The arrival of a fictional detective in a tranquil location invariably presages an outbreak of homicide, and when the little Belgian starts to investigate, Dr Sheppard acts as a surrogate Hastings. Christie enjoyed writing about the doctor’s sister, Caroline Sheppard, someone who is intensely inquisitive, ‘knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home’. More fully developed than most of Christie’s puppets, Caroline was the prototype for Jane Marple. The village setting and dazzling plot combine to make this the definitive Christie novel.