Martin Edwards – The Golden Age of Murder (страница 17)

Christie’s masterstroke was to give an ingenious extra twist to Berkeley’s central idea in The Layton Court Mystery. Her spin on the ‘least likely person’ theme resembled the trick in a book written more than forty years earlier. The Shooting Party was a remarkable early novel by that least likely of crime writers, Anton Chekhov. The Swedish writer Major Samuel August Duse (it is not true that Swedish crime fiction began with Henning Mankell and Stieg Larsson) had previously used a comparable device in Dr Smirno’s Diary and The Dagmar Case. However, since Chekhov’s book was not translated into English until 1926, and Duse’s books not at all, it is unlikely that Christie was aware of them.

A minority moaned that Christie had failed to ‘play fair’. One reader wrote a letter of complaint to The Times, and the News Chronicle harrumphed that the book was a ‘tasteless and unfortunate letdown by a writer we had grown to admire.’ This was an absurdly harsh judgment, even though Christie’s telling of the story was economical with the truth. T. S. Eliot reckoned it was a ‘brilliant Maskelyne trick’, while Sayers insisted, ‘It’s the reader’s business to suspect everybody.’

Before the year was out, Christie’s comfortable existence was ripped apart. Clara died, and as Christie struggled to cope with grief and the task of sorting out her mother’s affairs in Torquay, she felt increasingly run down and lonely. She was acutely conscious that she was no longer the svelte young woman who made admirers swoon. Her delicate beauty was fading, and since Rosalind’s birth, she had put on weight. Archie stayed in London, and when he rejoined her, he broke the news that he had fallen in love with Belcher’s former secretary, Nancy Neele. At that moment, Agatha’s ‘happy, successful, confident life’ ended.

She tried to persuade Archie to stay, but he became increasingly unkind, perhaps a sign of a guilty conscience. He walked out on his family on the morning of 3 December to be with Nancy. That same evening, Agatha drove away from home, leaving Rosalind asleep in the house.

After Agatha was tracked down to Harrogate, Archie maintained in public that she had been suffering from amnesia, a claim supported by two doctors. In a forerunner of a tabloid witch-hunt, hostile journalists accused her of simply seeking publicity. She also found herself caught up in a row between two formidable bruisers from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

When the Home Office announced that the cost to Scotland Yard of the search for Christie was twelve pounds, 10 shillings, the MP and former miner William Lunn ranted about the expense of a ‘cruel hoax’. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, promptly revised the cost to nil, on the basis that it was absorbed by the general police budget. The real argument was not about Christie, but the bitter aftermath of the failed General Strike. Lunn was angry about expenditure on the moneyed classes when the poor were suffering. Joynson-Hicks was a right-wing hawk, unwilling to give his opponents an inch, and quite prepared to juggle the figures to suit his purpose.

Lunn’s condemnation was as brutal as the Press coverage. Christie was a victim, though she was too strong to wallow in victimhood, and too proud to seek help before she cracked. Her experiences left a mark on her future writing, in which the idea of the ‘ordeal by innocence’ undergone by ordinary people whose lives are disrupted by murder crops up as often as the ‘wronged man’ in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The trauma left her barely able to work. Drained of energy and enthusiasm for writing, she recuperated at Abney Hall and then took a holiday in the Canary Islands; her visit features in their tourist literature to this day. But the process of recovery was slow and tortuous. She had lost her trust in people, and had developed a loathing for crowds and for the Press. She admitted in her autobiography that she could hardly bear to go on living. Yet she, like Sayers, had a young child to whom she felt not only devotion but a sense of duty. Suicide was not an option.

With her marriage in ruins, and her confidence shattered, she struggled to earn money to look after herself and Rosalind. Inspiration had deserted her. As a stop-gap measure, she was helped by Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, to cobble some previously published short stories together to form The Big Four. The resulting thriller was lively but ludicrous, featuring not only an evil Chinese mastermind and an exotic femme fatale, but also, in a nod to Mycroft Holmes, Poirot’s smarter brother, Achille.

When Christie did force herself to produce a fresh novel, it was simply an expanded version of an earlier short story. By her standards, it was dismally dull. Even Christie admitted she hated The Mystery of the Blue Train. The book is dedicated to Carlo Fisher, one of the few people whom Christie felt she could trust. In April 1928, she was granted a divorce, and Archie promptly married Nancy Neele. Hoping to rid herself of her former husband’s name, she tried to persuade her publishers to allow her to adopt a male pseudonym, but they refused. The Agatha Christie brand was already too valuable to be sacrificed.

She tried her hand at various types of story in an attempt to recapture her joy in writing, but struggled to recapture her zest and originality. The Seven Dials Mystery, another thriller, resurrected characters from The Secret of Chimneys, while Tommy and Tuppence Beresford returned in Partners in Crime, a collection of short stories which had mostly appeared five years earlier.

The worst was not yet over, as Agatha’s brother died. She and Madge had paid for Monty to live in a house on Dartmoor; his poor health was exacerbated by a drug habit, although his personal magnetism attracted women willing to look after him. He emigrated to the south of France, and his final companion was a nurse. A stroke killed him while he was having a drink in a seafront café in Marseilles. Christie had been fond of him, but acutely aware of his failings. Attractive but weak-willed men like Monty often figure in her novels.

As Partners in Crime was published, there was at last a hint of better times to come. Anthony Berkeley introduced Christie to a new social circle, which gave her the chance to meet people with whom she had a great deal in common. Crucially, they were people whom she could trust. Her determination to stay out of the public gaze was shared by many of her new friends. They believed their books should speak for themselves. The camaraderie of their dinners helped her to patch up her self-confidence as she embarked on the long journey towards a new life.

Notes to Chapter 4

Christie had already established a reputation as a detective novelist

The principal sources for my account of Christie’s life and work, including her disappearance, are listed in the Select Bibliography. The tireless research work undertaken by both Tony Medawar and John Curran has proved especially valuable.

his French rivals Arsene Lupin and Joseph Rouletabille

Created respectively by Maurice Leblanc (1864–1941) and Gaston Leroux (1868–1927). Rouletabille first appeared in the classic ‘locked room’ novel, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, but thanks to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Leroux is now better remembered as author of The Phantom of the Opera.

she tried to supplement her finances by entering newspaper competitions

See Tony Medawar, ‘On this Day’, CADS 64, November 2012, for accounts of Christie’s prize competition entry, and the mock trials mentioned here and in chapter 6.

The Swedish writer Major Samuel August Duse … had previously used a comparable device

Duse’s work is discussed by Bo Lundin in The Swedish Crime Story (1981).

T. S. Eliot reckoned it was a ‘brilliant Maskelyne trick’

Jasper Maskelyne (1902–73) was a British stage magician, and a member of a family of stage magicians, the son of Nevil Maskelyne and a grandson of John Nevil Maskelyne. The Maskelynes’ claims to fame include not only the creation of countless tricks that fascinated Carr, but also the invention of the coin-in-the-slot toilet door, which has yet to be deployed in a locked cubicle whodunit. John Nevil invented a character dressed in a Chinese-style silk tunic, capable of playing hands of the card games whist and nap, and named Psycho. Psycho appeared to move of its own accord, but was in fact operated by concealed bellows.

5

A Bolshevik Soul in a Fabian Muzzle

A tediously repetitive complaint about Sayers and other Golden Age novelists is that their books were dominated by ‘snobbery with violence’. This is a neat phrase, but a lazy criticism. In reality, Golden Age writers suffered under snobbish attitudes (and still do) at least as often as they were guilty of them. Douglas Cole, a leading socialist intellectual, liked to tell a story from his time as an Oxford don. He remarked to a reactionary acquaintance, Colonel Farquharson, that the BBC had broadcast one of his detective stories the previous week. The Colonel replied: ‘What a pity. Had I known earlier, I could have asked the servants to listen to it.’