The Golden Age of Murder. Martin Edwards
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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.
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.’
Christie, Sayers and Berkeley were conservative in outlook, and their success has caused a peculiar amnesia to afflict critical discussion of the Golden Age. Detective novelists with radical views have become the men – and women – who never were. Even the distinguished historian of the genre Julian Symons, who should have known better, thought it ‘safe to say that almost all of the British writers of the Twenties and Thirties … were unquestionably right-wing.’ In fact, the Liberal Party and centre-left were well represented among Golden Age authors, while others joined the Communist Party or flirted with it. One led the Jarrow Crusade, another married one of Stalin’s senior lieutenants, yet another was killed fighting for the Republican cause in Spain. Some mocked Nazis and Fascists in their detective novels long before it was fashionable to do so. Others wrote mysteries which debated the merits of assassinating dictators.
Douglas and Margaret Cole were the leading lights of the Left among Golden Age detective novelists. Their personal lives seem, at first glance, more straightforward than the emotionally turbulent experiences of Sayers, Berkeley and Christie. Yet the Coles’ apparently happy marriage was more complicated than it seemed.
Douglas Cole was already a pillar of the Labour Research Department, when Margaret Postgate joined after a spell teaching classics at Hammersmith’s prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School. Margaret was a dynamic young woman, with ‘a mop of short thick black wavy hair in which is set swarthy complexion, sharp nose and chin and most brilliantly defiant eyes’. Instantly smitten by Douglas, she wrote the name ‘Mrs G. D. H. Cole’ on a piece of paper to see how it looked before hastily crumpling it up.
Her brother Raymond described Douglas as ‘slender, fairly tall and quite handsome; his eyes were set in a curiously straight line and he could look at you in an oddly hypnotic manner.’ This expression reminded Raymond of a snake, while Raymond’s son Oliver gave Douglas a curious immortality by taking him as the model for the character of Professor Yaffle in the children’s television series Bagpuss. Yaffle was a woodpecker carved from wood, a brilliant academic with a grumpy demeanour, who at times of inactivity served as a bookend.
Margaret debated political theory with Douglas, and secretly wrote ‘a bad poem or two about him’, but was dismayed to find the Department ‘as nearly as possible sexless – it did not fornicate – hardly even“neck”.’ One wet winter night, she spent the evening in Douglas’ flat in Battersea, discussing a propaganda pamphlet. When he offered her the loan of an umbrella for her walk back to Fulham, rather than a bed for the night, she felt aggrieved. Although he did not seem to reciprocate the physical desire she felt for him, she put this down to the all-consuming nature of his dedication to socialism.
After a year or so, it dawned on him that Margaret’s interest in his company was not solely due to her love of politics, and he took her out to the theatre and a concert. When he invited her for a country walk, it turned into ‘a pretty fast march’ along the Thames towpath. He brought along dates and biscuits for them to eat, but forgot about anything to drink. The walk passed mostly in silence. Margaret’s throat was dry with thirst, and she could not think of anything to say. Douglas did not help her out.
Undeterred, a couple of months later, she accepted another invitation for a walk. They went down to Hampden Woods on a fine day in May. ‘Some kind of tension seemed to develop,’ she recalled, and they sat down on a log in the midst of the young beech trees. No-one else was around, apart from an ‘indignant pigeon’ which flew out of the log. With something less than the panache of a born Casanova, Douglas stretched an