The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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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.
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