Category Archives: Literature

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Floating Admiral (1931)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which the members of the Detection Club each write a chapter on how Inspector Rudge investigates the case of the death of Admiral Penistone, found floating on a boat with the vicar’s hat. The book is relevant to our challenge, gentle reader, as one of the chapters was written by Agatha Christie. As usual, you can safely read this blog post and not discover whodunit!

More of an exercise in cleverness than a real attempt to write a proper detective book, members of the Detection Club each wrote a chapter with the following rules (and I am indebted to the introduction by Miss Dorothy L Sayers for this explanation): “Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely “to make it more difficult.” He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery.” Chapters I to XII were written first, then bizarrely the prologue and the introduction. The result is a patchwork quilt of styles and content; the overall effect is one of unbalance but strangely intriguing.

G. K. Chesterton’s prologue, “The Three Pipe Dreams”, briefly provides the reader with three rather ethereal scenarios, that serve merely to give us the presence of a valiant sea captain who has passed out under the influence of drink and drugs. It brought to my mind those Princess Puffer scenes in Dickens’ Mystery of Edwin Drood. As Simon Brett points out in the foreword to the edition I’m reading: “the prologue […] seems to bear no relation to anything in the ensuing novel.” No real reason to linger here.

Chapter I – Corpse Ahoy! was written by Canon Victor L Whitechurch, a clergyman who wrote detective stories featuring his creation Thorpe Hazell, described on Wikipedia as “a vegetarian railway detective, whom the author intended to be as far from Sherlock Holmes as possible”. He wrote 26 detective novels, the first published in 1903, and died only two years after the publication of The Floating Admiral. This opening chapter introduces us to the character of Neddy Ware, ex-sailor, well-known fisherman; not local, only having lived in the area for ten years; and discoverer of the body of the late Admiral Penistone, clad in evening clothes, his white shirt front stained with blood, floating away in a boat with only Mr Mount (the vicar)’s clerical hat for company. Inspector Rudge is called in to investigate and quickly meets two hearty young lads – the vicar’s sons – who take him to see Mr Mount where Inspector Rudge drops the bombshell that his hat has been found near the dead body: “Your boat was drifting with the tide up-stream. And in her was the dead body of your opposite neighbour, Admiral Penistone – murdered, Mr Mount.” You can almost feel the shock.

Chapter II – Breaking The News was written by husband and wife team G D H Cole and M Cole, writers of 35 books of detective fiction between 1923 and 1948. The change of writing style is immediate and very noticeable. Whereas Whitechurch had been quite stately and elegant in his writing, the Coles were quite slovenly by comparison, adopting a much more conversational style and concentrating more on detail, less on the bigger picture. In particular, Mr Mount’s voice changes from Whitechurch’s rather formal and thoughtful tones to the Coles’ garrulous and wandering ones. The change really does not help the narrative thread at all, as you can’t believe it’s the same person talking. It’s more successful when we meet the Admiral’s niece, Elma Fitzgerald, because her character can be completely created anew. But the main feeling you get from this chapter is one of bluster and hurry, exhaustion and talking just a bit too much.

Chapter III – Bright Thoughts on Tides, was written by Henry Wade. He wrote twenty crime novels, but moreover, under his real name of Sir Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, 6th Baronet, was awarded the DSO and Croix de Guerre for his bravery in World War One and was also High Sherriff of Buckinghamshire. He died in 1969 and I have a tiny memory of him presenting programmes on BBC Radio Oxford when I were a lad! Whilst remaining largely conversational in format, Sir Henry’s natural authority absolutely shines through his words and again makes a stark contrast to the Coles’ more humdrum contribution. I like the way Inspector Rudge coaxes information out of people in this chapter – not only suspects and witnesses but also his police colleagues. Sir Henry must have had excellent coaching skills to tease further thoughts and explanations out of people. Regarding plot development, the chapter concentrates on the activities of Fitzgerald’s maid and how the tides might explain at what time and where from the boat carrying the dead body set sail.

Chapter IV – Mainly Conversation, by Agatha Christie (and therefore my main reason for blogging this book!) Christie decides to continue the conversation that had brought the previous chapter to a conclusion. After sending Appleton back to the vicarage to ask a very sensible question about coats, Rudge asks Hempstead for advice on where to get the best gossip – and Mrs Davis certainly fulfils that role. It would appear that Christie is still in Miss Marple mode! Peter and Alec the Mount boys reappear and pester Rudge for a job in the investigation – it’s a very Christie trait for people other than the police to do the investigating – and he sets them off to look for the murder weapon. And trust Christie to be the first writer to pen anything remotely xenophobic in the story. “One of those nasty murdering Eyetalian stilettos. Wops they call them in New York – the Eyetalians I mean…” As you would expect, Christie fills in a lot of detail and raises a few issues that are bound to turn out to be red herrings; and drives the story on with the big piece of information that the Admiral was in the Lord Marshall pub just a few hours before he was found murdered.

Chapter V – Inspector Rudge Begins to Form a Theory, a rather long-winded chapter title for the contribution by John Rhode, the pen name of Cecil John Charles Street, and a Major in the First World War. Under that nom de plume he wrote no fewer than 72 novels featuring his detective Dr Priestley, 6 other John Rhode books, 63 detective novels written under the name Miles Burton, 4 as Cecil Waye and approximately another ten in various other guises. Talk about prolific, he makes Christie look like an amateur! However, long-winded seems to be the tone of the chapter, with Rudge having conversations with the porter behind the hotel desk, and going back out to seek more information from Neddy Ware about tides; and although he gathers quite a lot of information, I found it quite a boring chapter. Maybe the next one will liven things up again?

Chapter VI – Inspector Rudge Thinks Better of It by Milward Kennedy. According to Simon Brett, he specialised in police procedurals, and wrote 20 books between 1928 and 1952. A new writer and a new method for Inspector Rudge – sitting and thinking. Then there are more questions – primarily of Emery and the vicar’s sons (one of whom uses the N word in a simple statement that strongly defines the era in which it was written) – and also discussions between the police officers trying to fill in the blanks of the case. We do get an important new piece of information though – why Miss Fitzgerald departed so rapidly.

Chapter VII – Shocks for the Inspector by Dorothy L Sayers. I was looking forward to this chapter because I have long enjoyed Miss Sayers’ detective stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and one day I must get around to re-reading them too. The chapter’s initial conversation between Rudge and Peter Mount instantly makes you realise what a much more elegant writer we are dealing with here; and also how much more interested in the religious aspects of the vicar she is than any of the previous writers. Of the many little extras that this chapters gives us in the way of understanding the case, is the first mention of the Admiral in Hong Kong back in 1911 – which ties us in with the rather woolly prologue. And the chapter ends with a definite bang (as opposed to a whimper) with the dramatic return of Elma and Holland.

Chapter VIII – Thirty-nine Articles of Doubt, written by Ronald Knox, more known for his religious and non-fiction books than his detective novels, which featured his sleuth Miles Bredon. It doesn’t take long, as you start reading this relatively long chapter, what a very different style Knox had. This is very formal, almost turgid writing. As a contrast with Sayers’ delightfully elegant style this was like wading through treacle. The thirty-nine articles of the chapter heading are the questions that Rudge poses to himself in his night-time memorandum; and by the time he’s written them all out, Knox concludes the chapter, leaving any potential for solution to the next writer! I did enjoy his contemplations about why the body was found in the boat – that for me was the most thought-provoking of his Articles. But, well thought out as they may be, the thirty-nine Articles look like someone saying, I’ve read it very carefully so far and showing off with their ideas. It doesn’t have much of a literary style, and kind of stands out like the proverbial sore thumb.

Chapter IX – The Visitor in the Night, by Freeman Wills Crofts. Crofts was most famous for his Inspector French novels – the detective semi-parodied in the story The Unbreakable Alibi in Christie’s Partners in Crime. He wrote 33 detective novels between 1920 and 1957. This chapter follows Rudge as he investigates the mysterious lady who arrives in town late at night. It’s quite nicely written on the whole, and I won’t say any more!

Chapter X – The Bathroom Basin by Edgar Jepson. This was towards the end of his life, having written forty books all in all, between 1885 and 1938. This brief chapter starts with the surprising news that one of the police officers is related to someone in the book – but I don’t think it will turn out to be relevant to the case. The prime purpose for this chapter is simply to prove that someone has shaved their beard off. When, we have a rough idea; why, there are some possibilities and who, that’s to be discovered shortly.

Chapter XI – At the Vicarage, by Clemence Dane. The writer of over thirty plays and sixteen novels, her writing career started in 1917 with Regiment of Women, a somewhat controversial novel that included lesbian relationships in a school setting. This little chapter is charmingly and amusingly written, with a deft turn of phrase that makes me think I would like to read some of her books. Not a lot actually happens during the course of this chapter, apart from at the very end, when the plot development takes a huge turn for the better; getting a kick up the backside that it really needed to keep the reader’s interest alive.

Chapter XII – Clearing up the Mess, by Anthony Berkeley, one of the founders of the Detection Club, creator of detective Roger Sheringham, writer under many pen names, including Francis Iles’ whose Before The Fact (1932) would be adapted to become Hitchcock’s classic film, Suspicion. Thus, as the chapter title suggests, it is left to Anthony Berkeley to make some head or tail of the previous eleven chapters. And he does a pretty good job! Finally, the book gathers some suspense as Rudge, with Chief Constable Twyfitt, tie up the Hong Kong background and at one stage I thought it was going to turn into a kind of Murder on the Orient Express, with everyone being implicated in the crime. Although it’s one long chapter, it’s split into separate sections, with plenty of opportunities for some excellent cliffhangers. And there’s no doubt that the revelation of whodunit is a humdinger.

But it doesn’t end there. If you remember, Dorothy L Sayers said in her introduction: “each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery.” So we now get to read all the contributors’ own solutions to the story. Two, Whitechurch and the Coles, don’t bother – so I hope they got kicked out of the Detection Club. Some provided very peremptory solutions, almost a five-minute rushed job. Sayers provides a hugely intricate and detailed solution. Between them, the eleven contributors (we ignore Berkeley who provided the denouement for the book) lay the crime at any of five people in the story; only two accurately identified the murderer, Rhode and Sayers.

And that concludes this little look at The Floating Admiral. It was an interesting book to read on the whole, although more for the exercise than any real literary thrills. If you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge we’re going back to her “proper novels” and her 1931 whodunit, The Sittaford Mystery. As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

Review – The Girl With All The Gifts, Everyman Cinema Barnet, 2nd October 2016

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Time: the future, but maybe not that far ahead. Place: England; London, Birmingham and places in between. Life: Distinctly not as we know it. A fungal infection beyond the scope of Daktacort has zombified the populace, turning the average man on the street into a Hungry. Indeed, that average man on the street remains exactly where he was at the time he was infected – on the street; and one of the most chilling images of this brilliant film is the sight of them all, swaying gently in the breeze in an abandoned shopping centre like the most bizarre crop choice a deranged urban farmer could ever have envisaged. They are the decayed product of a decayed environment, where a dilapidated M&S Simply Food outlet becomes a backdrop for death and disease rather than for promoting its aspirational groceries. Hungries just stand and sway, inanimate; they do nothing, unless something fleshy comes within their orbit, in which case their senses start to activate and their taste buds start to salivate; and then they go hell for leather for whatever it is that has aroused their desire. Teeth jammering for food like human machetes, it’s not long till that living creature is but a husk.

Only one thing can save the dribs and drabs of humanity that have survived the infection, and who inhabit a military camp/prison school/research laboratory somewhere in the Home Counties, and that’s the possibility of a vaccine, being perfected by Dr Caldwell. And what organic tissue might be the source of this vaccine? The brains of the Hungry children, who have no idea they are not just regular kids; they just wait for the enjoyable 9 till 5 lessons of the lovely Miss Justineau, and accept their regimented and isolated 5 till 9 as part of ordinary life. And there’s one particularly intelligent, polite and loving kid – Melanie. She lives to please Miss Justineau – just as you would if she was your teacher. Melanie’s compliant and obedient with the soldiers; she respects and assists Dr Caldwell wherever she can; but she also recognises the moment when the balance of power swings in her favour.

OK, I think this is the moment when I step out of review mode and into personal persona. I first met the writer of both the screenplay and the original book, Mike Carey, in December 1977 when we were both hapless teenagers attempting to convince Oxford University during their rigorous interview process, that we were worth a punt, if you’ll pardon the expression. Come October 1978, on arrival for the first term to read for a BA in English Language and Literature, we both discovered that we’d pulled sufficient wool over their eyes to get an offer. Within days of meeting again we became the bestest of best friends, and that’s been a friendship that has endured at full blast to this very day. There’s also a side issue that for the last two days of shooting the film, I was an extra; a blink and you’ll miss me extra, but an extra nonetheless. I may be seen fleeing or munching on dead soldiers in one of the outside scenes at the Beacon camp; and I’m definitely in the trailer! Two long days of endlessly running at USAF Upper Heyford in the summer of 2015; it was sheer agony at the time but now I look back on it with a certain nostalgia. So you may think, gentle reader, that this review cannot possibly be impartial. In response to that I say: if I’d hated the film I would have been in a very tricky situation. But fortunately, both Mrs Chrisparkle and I thought it was just totes amazeballs, and I will be as honest as I always am!

Back into review mode: so this is a zombie film in excelsis. It’s not a genre with which I am particularly au fait; but I know for a fact that these zombies have a class and a style way above those normally found in zombiedom. In his Felix Castor novels, Mike’s own self-confessed favourite character is his zombie with the most unthreatening name ever – Nicky, the red-wine loving, jazz record collecting, but nevertheless putrifying inhabitant of a disused cinema in Walthamstow. One could never accuse Mike of creating a run-of-the-mill zombie. In The Girl with all the Gifts he has devised a complete landscape of these terrifying creations and director Colm McCarthy has done an incredible job in bringing his vision to life, if that’s not an oxymoron. Whether they’re delicately poised in a shopping precinct, with our heroes carefully treading lightly around so as not to disturb them; or whether they’re gnashing viciously at the perimeter fence, rest assured the Hungries won’t leave your mind for a goodly while. And given Mike’s lightness of touch, the film contains just the right number of unexpectedly funny lines, reflecting the irony and sheer ridiculousness of the situation. For example, it takes a full five seconds for Melanie’s response to Justineau’s suggestion that she might like a cat, to sink in.

As a perfect counterpoint to the Hungries, you have the pure, human emotion of the relationships between Melanie and all the adults in her sphere (which is ironic, seeing as Melanie isn’t really human.) Revel in that beautiful simplicity of her thoughts and her motives; her child-like sentence structures; and the innocence with which she repeats the barrack-room terminology of the soldiers. Her presence and her trust soften the hard exteriors of the people around her, such as when you see her sharing stories in friendly chat with Private Gallagher, where before he was merely her military custodian. Somewhere in the emotional spectrum between Melanie and the Hungries is Dr Caldwell, with her emotionless and clinical need to pursue her vaccine research with no care for whom she hurts; but also with that degree of altruism that motivates her – the chance that the world may survive is down to her. Caldwell becomes a character that turns out to be far more complex than one originally imagined on reading the book.

Which takes us nicely on to the performances, and let’s start with Glenn Close as Caldwell, because she really did make you think twice about whether or not she is just a scalpel-happy savage or the potential saviour of the world. Just like with all the film’s stars, director Colm McCarthy has coaxed a superb performance out of Glenn Close. Her Caldwell is tough, no-nonsense, wily, but surprisingly vulnerable; prepared to endanger herself in the cause of science, willing to side-step the rules if it means she can get closer to her personal goals. She treads a beautiful balance between modern hero and medieval torturer and it makes thrillingly uncomfortable viewing.

Paddy Considine puts all his natural authority to great effect as the hard-nosed Sergeant Parks, running the camp with ruthless efficiency, eliminating a wounded comrade with just one shot. His gradual softening towards Melanie is beautifully depicted, as he starts to trust her – or as she starts to manipulate him, your choice. His final scene with its quiet, emotional dignity turned the otherwise cool, calm and collected Mrs C into a blubbering wreck. Fisayo Akinade is a very believable Private Gallagher, all bluster when directly under the influence of his military bosses but revealing a decent level of humanity when Parks hears Melanie refer to him as Kieran – his briefly embarrassed look is a moment to treasure. Annamaria Marinca has a brief but very impactful role as Dr Selkirk, Caldwell’s even-less-friendly assistant. That’s one helluva scary scene.

As Miss Justineau, there’s a wonderful performance from Gemma Arterton, who’s quickly become one of the country’s most talented actors. From the start she’s brimming with emotion, making that really important contrast with the rigorous discipline of the camp. Justineau is much fonder of Melanie than she should ever have allowed herself to become; Miss Arterton soon makes it clear that Melanie is her character’s Achilles heel, and it’s Miss Justineau’s sentimentality (or innate decency?) that sets the ball rolling for the sequence of uncontrollable events that lead to the final conclusion of the story. It’s a superb, very moving performance, and if she doesn’t get nominated for a best actress at the BAFTAs I’ll eat my Ophiocordyceps unilateralis.

Which leads us to the stunning debut performance by Sennia Nanua as Melanie, the Girl herself. The very last person to be auditioned for the role, the creative team have made a great discovery with this young lady. A totally secure, supremely confident performance, full of emotion, a stunning ability to portray both vulnerability and power, and, when it comes to it, a deadly comic delivery!

It’s a thoroughly fantastic film, and I’m not just saying that because it’s written by my mate. The combination of unsettlingly recognisable locations in a post-apocalyptic era, tense and suspenseful story-telling through both script and direction, and a cast that excel themselves in every role, makes this one of the most intelligently exciting films for an age. I couldn’t recommend it more!

 

If you’d like to read more about Mike Carey the writer, may I respectfully direct you to an interview we did earlier this year about his current book, Fellside; and to another interview a while back as the author of The Dead Sea Deception – under the pseudonym of Adam Blake.

 

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Murder at the Vicarage (1930)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we are first introduced to Miss Jane Marple, busybody spinster of St Mary Mead, and close neighbour of the Reverend Leonard Clement, in whose study a murder takes place that brings scandal and unwelcome attention to the sleepy village. As you would expect, Miss Marple keeps her eyes and ears open and finally presents the police and the vicar with the only solution that satisfies every single loose end in the case. If you haven’t read the book yet, don’t worry, I promise not to give the game away as to whodunit!

The book is dedicated “to Rosalind”, her daughter, who would have been eleven years old at the time. Reviews of the book were mixed, with the New York Times Book Review getting rather bored with the network of old ladies in the village: “the local sisterhood of spinsters is introduced with much gossip and click-clack. A bit of this goes a long way and the average reader is apt to grow weary of it all, particularly of the amiable Miss Marple, who is sleuth-in-chief of the affair”. They also described the denouement and solution as “a distinct anti-climax”. Personally, I think that’s a bit harsh. Admittedly, Christie does take plenty of opportunities to get as close to the workings of Miss Marple’s brain as we need to; and the final solution is both a huge surprise and not a huge surprise, depending on your point of view. But the way in which Christie plays with the reader’s expectations is very enjoyable to revisit, and the resolution makes perfect sense in retrospect.

Jane Marple is not the only person to be introduced in this book, as the Vicar, Leonard Clement, and his wife Griselda, will re-appear in two later Christie books, The Body in the Library and 4:50 from Paddington. The rather wretched Inspector Slack will also reappear in the first of these books. Although this was Miss Marple’s first appearance in book form, Christie had already written some short stories featuring her that had appeared a few years previously in the Royal and Story-Teller Magazines. These would appear in 1932 in the book The Thirteen Problems – which I will be re-reading and writing about in the near future!

So what are our first impressions of Miss Jane Marple? The first adjective in the book to describe her (by Griselda counting off her tea party guests) is “terrible”. She goes on to say: “she’s the worst cat in the village […] and she always knows every single thing that happens – and draws the worst inferences from it.” Miss Marple herself would largely agree with this; in her first conversation with the vicar she tells him: “you are so unworldly. I’m afraid that observing human nature for as long as I have done, one gets not to expect very much from it. I dare say the idle tittle-tattle is very wrong and unkind, but it is so often true, isn’t it?” She’s also not above gently teasing the Chief Constable: “I’m afraid there’s a lot of wickedness in the world. A nice honourable upright soldier like you doesn’t know about these things, Colonel Melchett.”

But it’s later on in the book, when Miss Marple is very close to having solved the crime, that she really identifies her own personality and raison d’être. “Living alone, as I do, in a rather out-of-the-way part of the world, one has to have a hobby […] my hobby is – and always has been – Human Nature. So varied, and so very fascinating. And, of course, in a small village, with nothing to distract one, one has such ample opportunity for becoming what I might call proficient in one’s study. One begins to class people, quite definitely, just as though they were birds or flowers, group so-and-so, genus this, species that. Sometimes, of course, one makes mistakes, but less and less as time goes on. And then, too, one tests oneself […] It is so fascinating, you know, to apply one’s judgement and find that one is right […] That, I am afraid, is what has made me a little conceited […] but I have always wondered whether, if some day a really big mystery came along, I should be able to do the same thing. I mean – just solve it correctly. Logically, it ought to be exactly the same thing. After all, a tiny working model of a torpedo is just the same as a real torpedo […] the only way is to compare people with other people you have known or come across. You’d be surprised if you knew how very few distinct types there are in all.”

Breaking tradition with her two previous novels, The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Seven Dials Mystery, Christie returns to the structure of having a narrator. And personally, I think she really feels at home with this method. Here the narrator is the Reverend Clement, a rather witty and urbane man, with the occasional delectable turn of phrase. Right from the start, his narrative style has an eye for self-deprecation and an ear for the ludicrous. Phrases such as “My wife’s name is Griselda – a highly suitable name for a parson’s wife. But there the suitability ends. She is not in the least meek” instantly give you an insight into how he does not take himself too seriously; he knows what is required from his position and he tries to achieve it, but also knows full well that he frequently fails and will look ridiculous as a result. A fine example of his failing positively is his inability to explain to Inspector Slack about the significance of the clock time. He does his best to get the appalling man’s attention, but when he is constantly thwarted in this attempt, he starts to enjoy withholding information. “Griselda said I ought to make another effort to tell Inspector Slack about it, but on that point I was feeling what I can only describe as “mulish”.”

There are many great one-liners in this book that I would normally reserve for the “Funny lines out of context” section below, but in this book they serve the double purpose of colouring the personality of the good reverend. Here are some of his highlights:

“Unblushingly, I suggested a glass of old port. I have some very fine old vintage port. Eleven o’clock in the morning is not the usual time for drinking port, but I did not think that mattered with Inspector Slack. It was, of course, cruel abuse of the vintage port, but one must not be squeamish about such things.”

“”It must be a very interesting hobby,” I said. “You know something of it, perhaps?” I was obliged to confess that I knew next to nothing. Dr Stone was not the kind of man whom a confession of ignorance daunts. The result was exactly the same as though I had said that the excavation of barrows was my only relaxation.”

“On the sofa beside Griselda, conversing animatedly, sat Miss Gladys Cram. Her legs, which were encased in particularly shiny pink stockings, were crossed, and I had every opportunity of observing that she wore pink striped silk knickers.”

His wife Griselda is equally liable to be a loose cannon, as she never holds back on her opinions, and consistently proves her husband’s belief that she is most unsuitable for her role in the village. “…It’s Mary’s blancmange that is so frightfully depressing. It’s like something out of a mortuary.” “”What they need,” said Griselda, [of the village’s busybodying spinsters] “is a little immorality in their lives. Then they wouldn’t be so busy looking for it in other people’s.”” Colonel Melchett, too, holds little time for what Christie would describe as these old pussies: “there’s a lot of talk. Too many women in this part of the world.” It’s interesting that many of the ancillary characters in this book are depicted in quite a negative fashion. Inspector Slack, as previously mentioned, is a boor and a bully. The Clements’ cook, Mary, has no style or grace in her food preparation or presentation, and comes across like one of Noel Coward’s doltish and stupid maids. Miss Marple’s talented nephew Raymond West is presented like some bighead with firmly held self-centred views that no one likes. I am sure that characterisation of him changes over the years – I’ll watch out for it.

As usual, there are a few unusual references and words in a Christie book that made me run for the dictionary and online research tools. Here are a few words and abbreviations that got me foxed. “He wants to go over all the Church accounts – in case of defalcations – that was the word he used. Defalcations! Does he suspect me of embezzling the Church funds?” Well yes it sounds like it. Originally meaning simply to take something away from something, by the mid-19th century it specifically meant misappropriation of money. But this must have been one of its last examples of popular usage. In the same exchange, Griselda retorts: “I wish you’d embezzle the SPG funds. I hate missionaries – I always have.” The SPG (now the USPG) was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, first incorporated under Royal Charter in 1701. As the title suggests, missionary work was/is its key raison d’être. Still in the same conversation, the good reverend announces “I must finish preparing my talk for the C. E. M. S. today.” This was the Church of England’s Men’s Society; founded in 1899, the society closed in 1985.

Part of the village gossip involves the mysterious Mrs Lestrange. “I should imagine Mrs Lestrange to be a déclassée” affirms Clement. Late 19th century – someone who is reduced or degraded in social class or status. It means the same in French too. Who knew? In a letter revealed towards the end of the book, the writer wishes to discuss with Mr Clement “the recent peculations”. Peculations? Does he mean speculations and has misspelled it? No. It’s a mid-17th century term for embezzlement of public money.

I’m a little confused over the reference early on in the book to Canon Shirley’s Reality. Canon Shirley appears to have been Fred Shirley, Headmaster of Worksop College at the time and then later of King’s School Canterbury from 1935 to 1962. But I’ve no idea what his Reality is… Do you know? Griselda teases her husband about getting inspiration for a sermon from a Detective Novel – The Stain on the Stairs. It didn’t exist – it was an invention of Christie’s; but it is curious to note that it is also one of the books that were written by the fictional novelist and detective Jessica Fletcher in the TV series Murder She Wrote! There’s a reference to someone taking the cheap Thursday train; that had already been mentioned previously in The Mystery of the Blue Train. They did off-peak differently in those days.

Miss Marple notices Dr Stone and Miss Cram walking down the lane because at the time she was observing a golden crested wren. If you were wondering what that is, today we call them Goldcrests. Similarly, the Firecrest was also known as the fire crested wren in those days. And I noticed that when Clement was telling Redding that as a local celebrity, everyone would know what kind of tooth powder he used. Wikipedia tells me that toothpaste was commonly available in the UK from 1909 – so maybe Clement is being a bit behind-the-times.

There are just a couple of financial references that it might be helpful to look at from today’s viewpoint; the £1 note that Mrs Price Ridley placed in the offertory bag is now worth a good £45, so she was being very generous. And the tazza that Mr Clement said sold for over £1000 – well you can work it out for yourself – today is worth over £45k.

Now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for The Murder at the Vicarage:

Publication Details: 1930. I used to have a Fontana paperback with a rather elegant old telephone on the cover illustration but it was one of the books stolen from me when I was a teenager. So my current copy is the much less glamorous Harper paperback, 9th printing, published in 2002, priced £6.99. It’s an unimaginative drawing of a graveyard and I also don’t like the paper quality or font size either – I must be getting hard to please in my old age.

How many pages until the first death: 59. But given the large size of the font and the spacing, I expect in other editions it appears to happen earlier than that! For comparison – the final page is Page 380.

Funny lines out of context: I’ve already named a few where I was considering what jovial types the Clements are, but here’s a couple more:

“…we must, of course, have a meat meal tonight. Gentlemen require such a lot of meat, do they not?”

“The – what one used to call the factors at school – are the same. There’s money, and the mutual attraction people of an – er – opposite sex – and there’s queerness of course – so many people are a little queer, aren’t they?”

Memorable characters:
Ignoring Miss Marple – she’s a given – I really like the character of Len Clement; for a vicar he’s totally unstuffy, humorous and very very human. Griselda too, as a loose cannon, is plenty of fun. And I have a rather soft spot for Miss Cram; she’s not as proper as she ought to be, and I rather like that in a girl.

Christie the Poison expert:
Not too much poison in this book. It’s not the method of murder; but there is some side allusion to arsenic – Inspector Slack thinks that would be Mrs Protheroe’s preferred mode de meurtre; and there’s also some picric acid at play – which I’d never heard of, unsurprisingly perhaps, because it’s rather out of fashion.

Class/social issues of the time:
Sexism, xenophobia, class… where should I begin?! Let’s start with sexism.

That first tea party hosted by Griselda, with Misses Marple, Wetherby and the redoubtable Mrs Price Ridley present. Goodness me! They’re talking about women being employed (scandalous!) in jobs (mercy!) working with men (pure filth!) “”No nice girl would do it” […] “Do what?” I inquired. “Be a secretary to an unmarried man,” said Miss Wetherby in a horrified tone. “Oh! My dear,” said Miss Marple. “I think married ones are the worst […]” “Married men living apart from their wives are, of course, notorious,” said Miss Wetherby […] “But surely,” I said, “in these days a girl can take a post in just the same way as a man does.” “To come away to the country? And stay at the same hotel?” said Mrs Price Ridley in a severe voice. Miss Wetherby murmured to Miss Marple in a low voice: “And all the bedrooms on the same floor…”” There’s also a shock in the village that Lawrence Redding’s portrait of Anne Protheroe depicts her in her bathing dress – a delightful level of prudery there.

That was an example of women disapproving of women working. Inspector Slack also has his own views on women, and they don’t leave much space for doubt: “She’s a woman, and women act in that silly way. I’m not saying she did it for a moment. She heard he was accused and she trumped up a story. I’m used to that sort of game. You wouldn’t believe the fool things I’ve known women do. But Redding’s different. He’s got his head screwed on all right.”

There are plenty of opportunities for Christie to deal with her favourite class issues too. Griselda (who else?) is happy to talk about Miss Cram behind her back. “Not such a bad sort, really, […] terribly common, of course…” Archer, too, is the recipient of a lot of class-based dismissiveness. This from Inspector Slack: “It appears he was with a couple of pals all the afternoon. Not, as I say, that that counts much. Men like Archer and his pals would swear to anything. There’s no believing a word they say. We know that. But the public doesn’t, and the jury’s taken from the public, more’s the pity.” Not only does that betray the way Slack looks down at Archer, it also shows his similar condescension towards the general public. Miss Hartnell, too, reveals her deep-seated class distrust. “”The lower classes don’t know who are their best friends,” said Miss Hartnell. “I always say a word in season when I’m visiting. Not that I’m ever thanked for it.”” Miss Marple is not above making assumptions about “men like Archer” when she describes him as “primed with drink”.

There’s actually not quite as much xenophobia in this book as in others, but this exchange between Colonel Melchett and Lawrence Redding stood out when I read it: “”We want to ask you a few questions – here, on the spot,” he said. Lawrence sneered slightly. “Isn’t that a French idea? Reconstruction of the crime?” “My dear boy,” said Colonel Melchett, “don’t take that tone with us.”

But there are some other more fascinating insights into English life in 1930. For example, funerals obviously took place much more quickly than they do today. I would guess the average time for a funeral to take place nowadays is about two weeks after the death. I can imagine the 1930s set being aghast at this delay. “I want a short interview with Mrs Protheroe.” “What about?” “The funeral arrangments.” “Oh!” Inspector Slack was slightly taken aback. “The inquest’s tomorrow, Saturday.” “Just so. The funeral will probably be arranged for Tuesday.” And cigarettes were expected to be set out on a table so that guests could help themselves, like they were cheezy wotsits or some other tasty nibbles. Planning for her nephew Raymond’s visit, Miss Marple reflects: “He brings his own pipe and tobacco, I am glad to say. Glad because it saves me from knowing which kind of cigarettes are right to buy.” Today this would seem completely bizarre! It’s also an age of some innocence – no one locks their houses; it just wasn’t deemed necessary. And Dr Haydock is obviously something of a forward-thinker: “We think with horror now of the days when we burned witches. I believe the day will come when we will shudder to think that we ever hanged criminals.”

Classic denouement: Not quite. Miss Marple drops her bombshell as to who the guilty party is and there’s still three more full chapters for everyone to get over the shock and surprise; plus they also lay a trap to catch the blighter. But there’s no grand pointing finger moment where a detective cries out “j’accuse!”

Happy ending? Yes – although this time it’s not Christie’s usual sub-Shakespearean reality of the two young lovers getting married. This time they’re already married but another “happy event” is foreseen.

Did the story ring true? Absolutely. Everything in this story is well within the bounds of one’s own imagination; there are no silly secret organisations, doppelgangers or ridiculous coincidences. Just plain human motivation with a twist of ingenuity.

Overall satisfaction rating: 8/10. It’s a very enjoyable read. If I could I’d probably give it a 7.5 because the ending could be just a little more riveting. But I was feeling generous.

Thanks for reading my blog of The Murder in the Vicarage and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is something very different. Christie’s next book was her first writing as Mary Westmacott – the romance “Giant’s Bread” – but I’m not particularly interested in her romance writings, I’m much more up for the detectives! However, in 1931 she contributed to The Floating Admiral, a book where twelve of the greatest crime novelists of the age each wrote one chapter. This sounds intriguing, so I’m going to give it a try! As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Mysterious Mr Quin (1930)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we meet Mr Harley Quin, enigmatic representative of the Commedia dell’Arte, who drifts in and out of Mr Satterthwaite’s life, as a catalyst for solving crimes and saving lives, the responsibility for which he hands over to Mr Satterthwaite, giving the old man a final purpose in life. It’s all highly mysterious and unusual; once more structured (like Partners in Crime) as a sequence of short stories that build up to an episodically narrated novel. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the book, I promise I won’t reveal any of its important secrets! Actually, as I was reading it I came to the conclusion that I hadn’t properly read it myself before. I had read a couple of the stories in another compilation (13 For Luck, which I may eventually get round to blogging), but this was my first proper exposure to The Mysterious Mr Quin per se. On the whole, it was an agreeable exposure, although with the occasional nadir along the way.

Again, like Partners in Crime, the stories first appeared in magazine format, either in The Grand magazine, The Story-Teller, or in Britannia and Eve magazine; all first appearing between 1924 and 1929. Christie really did spend those formative years trying out a number of different detectives; naturally, she’s largely known for Poirot and Marple but there are several other minor characters in her oeuvre too worth a re-read. Let’s take the stories in order and see how successfully they fill out into a “proper book”.

The Coming of Mr Quin

So what do we know of Mr Satterthwaite? We know what we read in the blurb – and it seems likely that we are meant to read this before we actually start reading the book. “Mr Satterthwaite is a dried-up elderly little man who has never known romance or adventure himself. He is a looker-on at life. But he feels an increasing desire to play a part in the drama of other people – especially as he is drawn to mysteries of unsolved crime. And here he has a helper – the mysterious Mr Quin – the man who appears from nowhere – who “comes and goes” like the invisible Harlequin of old. Who is Mr Quin? No one knows, but he is one who “speaks for the dead who cannot speak for themselves”, and he is also a friend of lovers. Prompted by his mystic influence, Mr Satterthwaite plays a real part in life at last, and unravels mysteries that seem incapable of solution.”

My two instant reactions to this are: a) Mr Satterthwaite is apparently 62 years old – in my book that does not make him elderly. However, I do accept that times have changed – in 1924 the average life expectancy for a male was 56; and b) if Mr Satterthwaite has always sat on the edge of life and never actually done anything, how come he is permanently in the company of interesting people? Surely they would have found him a very boring little man and never have invited him to their house parties? It’s a question that’s never really addressed.

I digress. The first tale sets us in one of those aforementioned house parties, where a gathering for New Year’s Eve becomes all reflective as they try to work out why their friend Derek Capel, who previously owned the house where they are all meeting, committed suicide ten years ago. Enter Mr Quin, in a blustery gale; “to Mr Satterthwaite, watching, he appeared by some curious effect of the stained glass about the door, to be dressed in every colour of the rainbow” – thereby establishing his motley, Harlequin-like, credentials. He says he is seeking refuge from the weather whilst his chauffeur is mending his car – just like the arrival of Mr Paravicini in The Mousetrap, if I remember rightly – and he leads the conversation into memories of that fateful night when Capel died. Theories are propounded, motives are examined; and a second suicide is, as a result, prevented. Mr Quin leaves as promptly as he arrives, and Mr Satterthwaite feels like he has finally achieved something.

Capel had said that he was “in the running for the Benedick stakes”. I’d not heard this phrase before – but a Benedick is a newly-married man, especially when he has long been a bachelor – no doubt, taken from the character in Much Ado About Nothing.

Both arsenic and strychnine get a mention, as they inevitably do with a Christie that was penned in or around 1924. She was fascinated by the stuff!

“The masculine side of Mr Satterthwaite spoke there, but the feminine side (for Mr Satterthwaite had a large share of femininity) was equally interested in another question.” Is Christie trying to tell us something indirectly about Mr Satterthwaite’s sexuality? I guess we’d better carry on reading to find out.

An enjoyable start to the book, and I found both Satterthwaite and Quin an interesting couple with whom to get acquainted. The writing at the end of the story became more suggestive and opaque and less “obvious” than usual. You may, or may not, think this is a good thing. Personally, it left me a little cold. Let’s see what happens with the next story.

The Shadow on the Glass

The next tale sets Mr Satterthwaite in another house party situation, observing a number of more glamorous women and go-getting men from his rather downtrodden station in life. There are a few passages where Christie quite subtly emphasises differences between Satterthwaite and the rest – like how he has to run (out of breath because he’s probably too portly) to keep up with the Big Game Hunter Major Porter, and how he is almost speechless with honour when Porter calls on him in desperation to do something to protect Mrs Staverton. You very much get the feel of a developing character and I rather enjoyed this story about intrigues within marriages set against a backdrop of a ghostly apparition on a window pane. And once again Mr Quin arrives, with a suggestion of surreal colour, asks some pertinent questions and reveals the secret to the mystery in a rather opaque manner.

It’s an interesting reminder of how revered Big Game Hunters were in those days. It was a sign of bravery, of virility; there are endless biographies of bloodthirsty colonels shooting anything that moved in the jungle which the general public a hundred years ago simply lapped up. Today they are people that society generally despises; come across a photograph of an American dentist with a dead jungle animal on Facebook and the likelihood is someone will be questioning the size of his manhood rather than dishing out plaudits. How times change.

The big game hunter reminds Lady Cynthia of a song that includes the lyrics “great big bears and tigers”. If you were curious to know their origin, the song in question is called “Come along with me” and is from a much forgotten old show entitled “The Orchid”, with words by Adrian Ross and music by Ivan Caryll, produced in 1903. Satterthwaite comes up with an odd line: “mine not to reason why, mine but to swiftly fly”. Not only is this a split infinitive (tut, tut) but it’s nothing like what I learned at the Dowager Mrs Chrisparkle’s knee: “ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die”. So which is it? The true quotation is: “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die” and it’s from Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade. So where is Satterthwaite’s “mine but to swiftly fly” from? I haven’t a clue.

I like the fact that Satterthwaite is planning to go to Carlsbad for his liver. Today we know it as Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, renowned for its spa and healing waters. I also liked how Christie unified this story with the opening tale by mentioning the Eveshams again – they played a more major role in that story, but here they are again, staying in that unlucky room shortly before they got divorced. You sense a whole parallel world moving along at the same time, which gives it a greater sense of being an episodic novel rather than just a collection of separate short stories. It would be rare for the Christie of this era not to give a disparaging mention to left wing subversives, and she doesn’t disappoint: “”Has it ever struck you, “ he said, “that civilisation’s damned dangerous?” “Dangerous?” Such a revolutionary remark shocked Mr Satterthwaite to the core.”

An entertaining story that drives the book forward at a satisfying pace. Will we get tired of Mr Quin just coming in to scenarios like this, or will we need him to become more of a rounded and regular character? Time will tell…

At the “Bells and Motley”

The “Bells and Motley” is the pub in the village of Kirtlington Mallet, where Mr Satterthwaite’s car breaks down again with a third puncture – that is unbelievably unlucky – and where he seeks refreshment only to discover that Mr Quin is already there waiting for him. Well, it is the “Bells and Motley” – where else would a harlequin go for a pint?

This is an introverted little tale where the two characters just talk over a cause célèbre that happened a few months previously – the mysterious disappearance (and presumed death) of one Richard Harwell, a brash and jovial huntsman of whom nobody knew much, and the suspects – his young wife, his gardener and his groom (horses, not marriage). As usual Mr Quin presses the right buttons in Satterthwaite’s imagination to solve the crime (if crime there be) from the comfort of the snug. It’s actually quite a clever little whodunit, that probably wouldn’t work in any other way except as a tale retold by third persons.

And we’re still learning more about Mr Satterthwaite; he is an epicure with his own cordon bleu chef (that explains his portly out-of-breath running in the previous story) and he isn’t very gracious with his chauffeur: “”you seem to think you can arrange everything, Masters,” said Mr Satterthwaite snappily.” I’m not sure he’s that nice a chap on the whole. Snappy at servants; easy to flatter if you’re an important person; but not having actually done much with his life.

Some references and facts to consider: the village of Kirtlington Mallet is unsurprisingly a creation of Christie, although there is of course both a Kirtlington and a Shepton Mallet. Ashley Grange – the Harwell’s home – was to be sold for £60,000 to Cyrus G Bradburn – given this was originally written in 1925, that converts to an equivalent sum of £2.5 million today. Nice. “Happy’s the wooing that’s not long doing” says Mr Satterthwaite, describing the brevity of Harwell’s engagement to Miss le Couteau. I thought that might be a quotation but apparently it’s an old proverb – not one that I’d heard of before – dating from the 16th century.

It’s quite amusing from the perspective of reading this book in the 21st century that Quin wants Satterthwaite to imagine they are in the year 2025, trying to solve a case that took place a hundred years previously. We very nearly are.

The Sign in the Sky

After the previous story, this is another in a very similar vein – Mr Satterthwaite has been observing a trial, and then later bumps into Mr Quin sitting at his favourite table in the Arlecchino restaurant in Soho – one again continuing the Harlequin theme. One wonders at this stage how many oblique ways Christie can refer to the Commedia dell’arte character. However, whereas the previous story knits up nicely and convincingly, this one is full of holes, IMHO. For example: how do we know the trains always run on time? Supposing another member of the household had a wristwatch? Sorry, Agatha, I expect better from you.

What she does achieve is to continue to fill out our understanding of Satterthwaite – now we know that he enjoys watching trials, and that femininity alluded to in the first story also gets further, dare we say, outing… “your sympathies were with the accused? Is that what you were going to say?” “I suppose it was. Martin Wylde is a nice-looking young fellow – one can hardly believe it of him.” “I’ve known a good many young men, and these emotional scenes upset them very much – especially the dark, nervous type like Martin Wylde.” And once again, we see how promptly Satterthwaite responds to Quin’s flattery: “…if anyone can show me that, it will be Mr Satterthwaite,” he murmured. Mr Satterthwaite gripped the table with both hands. He was uplifted, carried out of himself. For the moment, he was an artist pure and simple – an artist whose medium was words.”

Deering Vale, is, of course, imaginary; Banff in Canada is, of course, real. That’s quite a flight of fancy that Satterthwaite takes on a whim – getting a crossing to Canada, then going all the way over to the Rockies for a couple of days and then coming back. He’d have to have done it rapido in order to be back in time to save Wylde’s life. Both Wylde and Quin have considerable power over Satterthwaite in this tale. Actually the whole conversation where the Canadian link is mentioned, then dropped, then picked up again, and Satterthwaite goes quiet because he just knows deep inside he’ll have to go there, is all done with a very amusing lightness of touch. So my verdict on this one is: well written in all respects except the machinations of the plot.

The Soul of the Croupier

The next story is my favourite so far in the whole book. Satterthwaite finds himself (as you do) with the Riviera set in Monte Carlo, observing the goings on between an American lad (you can kind of imagine him being of the Gatsby set, at least in appearance) and the Countess Czarnova, the height of aristocracy (at least as far as the American is concerned). Add an American girl who is jealous of the guy’s infatuation with the (much) older Countess, a croupier who pays out the wrong winner, and – yes you guessed it – the appearance of Mr Quin, subtly glowing with motley colours, encouraging Satterthwaite to enter life’s drama rather than merely observing it on the sidelines. It was during this story that I started to get the feeling that Quin was actually part of Satterthwaite’s psyche, rather than an individual in his own right. It’s as though he represents a part of Satterthwaite that was hitherto missing – an element of soul, conscience, imagination, spirit… The two are definitely becoming one, because Quin appears already to know all of Satterthwaite’s own feelings and emotions.

Talking of which, we get even closer to what Christie refers to as Satterthwaite’s feminine side. It goes without saying that he would already have known Franklin Rudge, the American boy, being young and good looking. Satterthwaite’s ability to see through the Countess, for who she really is, is attributed by Christie to the fact that he “knew far more of feminine secrets than it is good for any man to know”. When Elizabeth Martin, the American girl, asks Satterthwaite why Rudge is so infatuated with the Countess, he replies “she’s got a very charming manner, I believe” – not “she’s got a very charming manner” which is what he would have said if he personally found her attractive. And the Countess can see right through Satterthwaite too: “”You are interested in that nice American boy, Mr Satterthwaite, are you not?” Her voice was low with a caressing note in it. “He’s a nice young fellow,” said Mr Satterthwaite, non-committally.” Satterthwaite’s observations about the young people holidaying in Monaco also make clear what we had previously suspected anyway, that the man’s an utter snob.

The Monte Carlo setting allows us to see Christie moralising again. Just as she was very anti-divorce in Partners in Crime, here she is very anti-gambling. Satterthwaite thinks of gamblers as “doomed souls who could not keep away”. The story requires that the Countess loses at the casino: “again and again she staked, only to see her stake swept away. She bore her losses well […] she staked en plein once or twice, put the maximum on red, won a little on the middle dozen and then lost it again, finally she backed manque six times and lost every time.” The story also allows her to give vent to her general mistrust of foreigners and slight antisemitic viewpoint. She describes some of the Countess’ former dalliances as being with “friends […] of Hebraic extraction, sallow men with hooked noses”; when Elizabeth and Franklin are talking at the end, he says “these foreigners – they beat the band! I don’t understand them. What’s it all mean, anyhow? […] Gee, it’s good to look at anything so hundred per cent American as you […] these foreigners are so odd.” There’s also a reference to Prohibition, which reminds us of Julius in The Secret Adversary.

Some other references: Radzynski is certainly an authentic surname although more Polish than Hungarian; there definitely was a King of Bosnia although the kingdom hasn’t existed since 1463. Although it sounds really credible, alas there isn’t a Sargon Springs anywhere in the US, it’s another of Christie’s inventions. And I’d never heard of a “Hedges and Highways” Party! The reference is in the Bible, Luke 14:23: “And the lord said unto the servant, go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” This is following the refusal of three invitees to attend supper because they had other jobs on hand, so the servant went out and brought all the poor and lame in for supper… and there was still room.

Oh, and that 50,000 French Franc note? Probably worth about £40,000 today, unless I’ve got my conversions wrong.

The Man From The Sea

Another very notable story next, one with a very different atmosphere from any that have gone before; here there is no crime to solve as such, but suicides to prevent – two of them in fact. Satterthwaite is feeling very mortal in this tale – he reflects with some sadness on the passing of the years; he even witnesses a dog being killed by a car and takes it as evidence that happy life is fleeting and can be snuffed out in an instant. There’s also a further element of supernatural – over and above the regular reappearance of Mr Quin in a shimmer of motley – with an air of reincarnation at the end of the story that I found rather spooky.

Although this is the sixth story in the book, it was, in fact, the last to be written and originally published – first appearing in October 1929 in Britannia and Eve magazine. This in part may account for the discrepancy with Satterthwaite’s age – it clearly states that he is 69 years old. Yet in The Coming of Mr Quin, four years previous, he is 62. What happened to those missing three years! No wonder Satterthwaite feels old if he thinks he’s 69 when in fact he’s only 66. Satterthwaite’s femininity continues to be explored in the book – the mysterious Spanish lady explains that she can say anything to him because “you are half a woman. You know what we feel – what we think – the queer, queer things we do.” Christie also adds a nice aside which you could file under her “distrust of foreigners” heading, when the Spanish lady invites Satterthwaite to take tea with her. “She added reassuringly. “It is perfectly good tea and will be made with boiling water.”” Even today some of those European chappies just don’t know how to make a proper cuppa.

And it’s always entertaining to see Christie use one of her favourite words that has undergone a certain semantic change since the book was written: “While he was resolving things in his mind, the other spoke, realising somewhat belatedly that his single ejaculation so far might be open to criticism.”

A strange story, successful on the whole I think, although it made me feel uncomfortable rather than rewarded.

The Voice in the Dark

Satterthwaite is called on by an old aristocratic friend to investigate the apparent “voices” that her daughter is hearing – as Satterthwaite is bound to know occultists and mediums, he is the obvious person to help. But what at first might have been thought to be some supernatural nonsense – including a very credible séance scene – turns out to be murder in the old-fashioned way.

From the rigorous story of the croupier and the dreamy tale of the Spanish lady, this next story is a bit of a damp squib. It sets up as a good tale; although it doesn’t take a sleuth to guess what “give back what is not yours” refers to; and it leaves many loose ends untied, including exactly how did that séance work and whether there is some missing evidence about the chocolates. I get the feeling that Christie rattled off this one in a hurry. There is also the unfortunate continuity issue, with Satterthwaite recollecting that he and Quin last met in Corsica (in The World’s End, see below) which was the previous story in the order in which they were written but is four stories ahead in this book – that rather kills the sense of the volume developing as a satisfying whole.

In some respects this is classic Christie. There is an allusion to her favourite thing of all, poison, with the chocolates that are sent to Lady Stranleigh. She gets to dig in some further disapproval of divorce and everything that goes with it – Lady S’s interminable paperwork with lawyers and undesired reuniting with “Rudolf” is a nice case in point. There’s the fabulous, brief, characterisation of Lady S’s new beau – Bimbo (yes, that’s his name) and his delightful reply to the question: “what has the tennis been like?” (Answer: “septic”.)

Was there ever a ship called the Uralia? I don’t think so. I looked it up on the internet and found this cryptic definition, about which I have got, I freely admit, gentle reader, not a clue. But perhaps the most relevant aspect of the entire story is the little snapshot into Satterthwaite’s youth that suggests that perhaps he isn’t gay after all!

Not one of Christie’s best short stories.

The Face of Helen

Quite entertaining, rather sad, and, in the details, incredibly far-fetched, this story sees Satterthwaite in his box at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden looking down on a most beautiful girl, and then encountering her again with her boyfriend (not that Satterthwaite would ever say the word) and another admirer; there’s a Christie equivalent of a fight in the pub car park, followed by Satterthwaite interceding to help the girl – Gillian West – and then continuing to help her when the other admirer is jilted for the real boyfriend. Quin plays a somewhat lesser role in this story – almost significant by his absence when Satterthwaite hopes to meet him at the Arlecchino.

Christie continues to fill in the gaps of Satterthwaite’s younger days – he likes to visit the bluebells at Kew Gardens because it reminds him of a time when he was going to propose to a young lady there who sideswiped him by telling him all about the man she really loved; cue Satterthwaite subtly going into confidant mode and abandoning his true feelings. It also occurs to me how incredibly rich Satterthwaite must be. All this cavorting around Europe, staying in the best places, and now we realise he pitches up twice a week in his private box at Covent Garden, entertaining Countesses. That’s some level of independent wealth there.

A few things come to mind – the desire to go for coffee or lemonade during the interval at Covent Garden as opposed to the champagne and Pinot that it would be today, for example. I wonder when tastes changed? Probably with availability. Magical performer Yoaschbim is considered to be the second Caruso – the first, Enrico, died in 1921. I was shocked that Satterthwaite doesn’t like Cavalleria Rusticana as it’s the most delightful of operas – but not at all surprised that Quin favours Pagliacci – as the Harlequin character is the lover. Interestingly, one of Caruso’s most celebrated roles was as Pierrot. And forgive my smutty mind from finding this line amusing: “he was a gregarious little gentleman, and he liked filling his box with the elite of the great world…”

An interesting juxtaposition with The Man From The Sea, where Satterthwaite prevents two suicides; in this story he fails to prevent one.

The Dead Harlequin

An engrossing story this one, with some enjoyable characterisations – I thought Frank Bristow was a very realistic creation – and a good blend of whodunit and the supernatural. Satterthwaite is taken with a painting at an exhibition entitled The Dead Harlequin, a) because the Harlequin reminds him of Harley Quin and b) because he recognises the setting as The Terrace Room at Charnley, a house he knew and the site of an apparent suicide by the young Lord Charnley. Satterthwaite invites Bristow, the painter, to his house for dinner, also inviting Colonel Monkton, who was present when Charnley’s body was discovered. Two people seek to buy the painting off Satterthwaite and Mr Quin turns up in a spookily unexpected way – and of course disappears similarly at the end of the story.

Of course, there are no Harchester Galleries, and an internet search on Frank Bristow reveals a pigeon-fancier, so as usual this is all down to Christie’s fertile imagination. There’s no such house as Charnley, although priests’ holes are certainly real – in fact the old inn in which I was brought up as a youngster (built 1535) had one – frustratingly plastered over so we couldn’t get access to it. There’s a nice moment of Christie tongue-in-cheek where Bristow describes the circumstances of the death of Lord Charnley as “not a best seller mystery, is it?” And the Bokhara rug apparently was valued at £2000. That’s some expensive rug, as at today’s prices that would be the equivalent of almost £90,000. A lot of money for an item whose main purpose was to hide bloodstains.

Exciting and suspenseful, this is definitely one of Mr Satterthwaite’s best moments!

The Bird with the Broken Wing

This is another quite enjoyable and engrossing story but it also requires a number of leaps of faith. Satterthwaite decides to change his plans when a game of “table turning” provides him with a message – apparently from Mr Quin – that he should stay with Madge Keeley as originally invited. He attends her house party where he meets a number of people, one of whom is murdered overnight. The police are called, but Satterthwaite is able to use his little grey cells, if I may use the phrase, to solve the crime without having to discuss it with Quin first.

This is the only story in the collection that does not seem to have appeared in magazine format prior to publication; as a result, we have no way of dating it other than “1930 or before”. Satterthwaite meets and works with Inspector Winkfield, who says “it won’t be the first murder mystery you’ve helped us with. I remember the case of Mrs Strangeways”. Whilst Inspector Winkfield had previously appeared in “The Shadow on the Glass”, there is no other mention in the other stories of Mrs Strangeways; does that suggest maybe a lost or unpublished story?

This tale brings out some of Satterthwaite’s less attractive traits – he’s very snobbish and rather bitchy here, patronising people who sing songs about “my baby”, being very judgmental when he thinks Mrs Graham has been smoking, and being highly sniffy about one of the guests: “her name seemed to be Doris, and she was the type of young woman Mr Satterthwaite most disliked. She had, he considered, no artistic justification for existence. “ As for Quin, he wins the prize for most ethereal character ever in this story, somehow communicating his concerns about Madge through a Ouija-type game; then later appearing to Satterthwaite on a train, who closes his eyes to imagine something and then opens them to find he has gone. He really takes on a dream identity in this book. But that Ouija game… assuming it’s balderdash, how was it that “the spirit” knew to bash out Quin’s name and then start describing Madge’s address? Even if you believe in ghosts, Quin wasn’t (apparently) dead! Talk about loose ends!

Of Mabelle, Christie writes: “she might have been one of those creatures who are only half-human – one of the Hidden People from the Hollow Hills.” Today that’s a pretty obscure reference, but I can only assume it is from the programme notes written to accompany the first performance (1910) of Arnold Bax’s symphonic poem “In The Faery Hills”. In it he describes how he had sought “to suggest the revelries of the ‘Hidden People’ in the inmost deeps and hollow hills of Ireland.”

The World’s End

Eleventh story in and I got the feeling of some barrel-scraping going on here. A rather long-winded and pointless tale that eventually gets started, after an inordinate amount of scene-setting, where yet another young person who might be tempted into suicide is averted from the act, this time by a third party who reveals the secret of an Indian Box. To be fair, there are a couple of interesting characters – the Duchess of Leith is well described and fleshed out, and Naomi Carlton Smith, the young attitudinal artist, makes a very good contrast with Satterthwaite’s comfortable and respectable world. There are some enjoyable exchanges between the two on the subject of art – the Duchess knows what she likes and she likes what she knows. But on the whole I found this immensely tedious and artificial.

A couple of references and explanations – the Duchess says Satterthwaite can sit on the dickey, which isn’t an insult; the dickey was an extra foldaway seat hidden in the luggage compartment of some older cars. No wonder Satterthwaite doesn’t sound too chuffed at the prospect. The story takes place in Corsica (for no particular reason that I could identify) and the final scene takes place at a Casse-Croûte which is like a lunch/sandwich bar. Unusually for Christie, she places this story at a specific location – Coti Chiaveeri, or as it is known today, Coti-Chiavari, a tiny Corsican village on the south west coast of the island.

This is the story that originally came before The Voice in the Dark – creating the continuity issue explained earlier. Considering the stories leading up to this one – this is definitely something of a disappointment.

Harlequin’s Lane

And so we come to the final tale, where Satterthwaite is staying at yet another house party but this time with people he doesn’t really associate with; the address of the property is Harlequin’s Lane, which Mr Quin (for, surprise, he is there too) says belongs to him. An extra-marital affair and a concealed identity figure in another rather sad story that has an unhappy ending.

But more than anything, you get a feeling that Satterthwaite and Quin are somehow two parts of the same whole, a symbiotic relationship where Satterthwaite gains insight and the ability to participate in the world through Quin’s influence, and where Quin gains a physical presence that otherwise he might not have. This final story seems extremely spooky and supernatural – Mrs Denham more or less tells Satterthwaite that they both know Quin is a fantasy.

There’s an excellent description of how Satterthwaite feels dead and worn out in comparison with life going on around him: “He felt suddenly rather old and out of things, a little dried-up wizened old fogey of a man. Each side of him were the hedges, very green and alive.”

As an end to the book it’s a rather misty conclusion; hard to pin down, definitely leaving the gate open for more (although there wasn’t much more to come) – perhaps ending more with a whimper than a bang, but that’s probably in keeping with the rest of the book. Satterthwaite and Quin get under your skin; it’s a fictional relationship that stays with you long after you read the final page.

All that remains is for me to give this an overall satisfaction rating of 7/10. It’s very enjoyable, but the short story format doesn’t work as well for me as the “proper novel”. And there’s a supernatural element and a number of untied loose ends that don’t really work. But the characterisation is fascinating! And just to keep you fully informed, my edition illustrated at the top of the page is Fontana Paperback, priced 3/6, first edition in this format (1965), with a striking cover by an unnamed artist.

With the next book in the Agatha Christie Challenge, our beloved writer returns to the novel format; not only that, it’s the debut of one little old lady by the name of Miss Marple. The book is Murder at the Vicarage, and if you’d like to read it too, I’ll blog about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meanwhile, happy sleuthing and keep on Christie-ing!

 

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – Partners in Crime (1929)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we meet again Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, now six years into their happy ever after marriage – him relaxed, her bored – until their old friend Mr Carter installs them in Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives Detective Agency, where they solve a number of varied crimes whilst keeping a watch out for anything to do with the number 16… Feel free to read this blog even if you haven’t read the book – I shan’t give any of the games away! This is a slightly odd book, as it purports to be a series of separate short stories, but they follow on chronologically to make one novel, just with individual tales told episodically. I’ve split the stories up individually to look at – but in fact, you could just as easily take the whole book as one amorphous blob.

As in the earlier collection of short stories, Poirot Investigates, there’s very little time for niceties as our gallant heroes get on with solving sixteen crimes with effortless ease. The stories had all been originally published between 1923 and 1928, principally in The Sketch magazine, which is where the Poirot Investigates stories also first saw the light of day. The twist – if you can call it that – with this selection is that Tommy and Tuppence solve each of the cases in the style of popular fictional detectives of the day – a kind of art recreating art/pop will eat itself situation. I can imagine that, at the time, it would have added to the fun of the book to note the parallels between Christie’s stories and the fictional detectives to whom she pays tribute. 87 years later, however, when very few people know these other detectives, the in-jokes and the references are largely lost and today the structure is sadly a bit of a bore. As I said earler, I’m going to take them one by one and look at each one separately, pointing out any of Christie’s usual themes and idiosyncrasies – and don’t worry, I won’t reveal the intricacies of whodunit!

A Fairy in the Flat/A Pot of Tea

The first two chapters of the book serve as an introduction and the first case for Blunt’s Brilliant Detectives. This is a very gentle, lightweight introduction indeed, as Tuppence can solve the case of where is the missing Jeanette without getting up from her desk. There’s not a lot for me to comment on really; Albert, their young lad friend who ended up being their assistant in The Secret Adversary, is still on the scene, doing his best to be of service. In this introduction he is said to be recreating the style of a Long Island butler – and I wasn’t quite sure what the reference was. I don’t think it’s anything more than the fact that Long Island was (is?) rather prosperous and posh and that everything would have been done with style and elegance. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby was written around the same time.

The eponymous fairy refers to the scandal at the time about the Cottingley fairies, which so interested Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – that’s why Tuppence suggests writing to him.

When I wrote my blog about The Secret Adversary, I tried to ascertain if Christie gave us any clues as to the ages of our two heroes. T&T were described as having “united ages” which “would certainly not have totalled forty-five”. That book was written in 1922; and although Partners in Crime wasn’t published in book form until 1929, this short story was first published (with the title Publicity) in The Sketch on 24th September 1924. So when Tommy describes his staff (Tuppence and Albert) as neither of them being over 25 years old, he’s being consistent!

It’s clear that the vast majority of cases that a private detective would have been asked to undertake would be to gain evidence in divorce cases. Tommy and Tuppence make much of the fact that that would be boring. They obviously disapprove, not only because it’s unadventurous work, but also because they find it distasteful. Tuppence comes across as surprisingly ill-tempered when she talks of divorce as the growing “divorce evil”. I expect she is referring to The Matrimonial Causes Act 1923, which put men and women on an equal footing for the first time, enabling either spouse to petition the court for a divorce on the basis of their spouse’s adultery. For a successful case, you had to prove the deed, hence the popularity of the private detective.

Apparently the basis for this first story is Malcolm Sage, Detective, by Herbert Jenkins; a jolly, but essentially flimsy, start to the book.

The Affair of the Pink Pearl

The next story concerns the apparent theft of a pink pearl from a well-to-do American lady at a house party. There are plenty of enjoyable red herrings and some wonderfully Christie-esque suspects including a socialist (gasp) and a kleptomaniac member of the aristocracy (double gasp). But of course, not everything is as it seems.

It’s in this story, first published in the Sketch on 1st October 1924, that Tommy and Tuppence start to echo the detective fiction heroes in earnest. Tommy decides he will be Dr Thorndyke, the creation of British detective writer R Austin Freeman. We can consider him an early forensic science detective – a Quincy for the 1920s – and he always had his lab technician, Nathaniel Polton, in tow. I would say that the character is rather out of favour at the moment. However, in an almost “note to self”, Christie calls on Tommy to encourage Tuppence to use her little grey cells – of course Poirot’s catchphrase – and you can just imagine her rather self-conscious delight at doing so.

There are a few references to check out: the scene of the crime is The Laurels, Edgeworth Road, Wimbledon. There is an Edgeworth Road, but it’s nearer to the Oval cricket ground as opposed to Wimbledon. Lady Laura Barton is said to be the daughter of the late Earl of Carrowway – again this appears to be genealogy of pure Christie imagination. Tommy bluffs his way past Colonel Kingston Bruce with a reference to the case of Rex v Bailey, which the Colonel swallows hook, line and sinker. But is this a famous case? Doubtless there will have been Rex v Bailey cases but I don’t think Tommy was that knowledgeable about them.

There are also a couple of delightful lines and a very interesting example of linguistic semantic change: “I must explain […] that the pendant consisted of two small diamond wings and a big pink pearl depending from them.” What a charming old use of “depending” – that must have been pretty archaic even then. The Colonel doesn’t hold back from his description of Mr Rennie: “A most pestilential fellow – an arrant socialist. Good looking, of course, and with a certain specious power of argument, but a man, I don’t mind telling you, whom I wouldn’t trust a yard. A dangerous sort of fellow.” And there’s the lovely overheard quote: “you know perfectly well, Mother […] that she did bring home a teaspoon in her muff.” I sincerely hope the muff in question was a small cylindrical fur cover in which one rests one’s hands for warmth.

An amusing, interesting and nicely written case, with a surprise and sudden ending.

The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger

After the smartness of the previous story, this is a rather bumbling, uninteresting and obvious story of espionage. It’s the first appearance of one of the blue Russian letters that Carter had told them to expect, which provides much of the purpose and motive for the story. It was first published in the Strand Magazine on 22nd October 1924, showing a deviation in the order of stories from their original magazine publication to their appearance in Partners in Crime. The two stories that follow in the book originally preceded Sinister Stranger in the magazine.

The detective writer to which this story pays homage is Valentine Williams, creator of the young British Officer Desmond Okewood; his book The Man with the Clubfoot is clearly on Tuppence’s mind after Dr Bower has left them. “”Well, Tuppence, old girl, what do you think of it?” “I’ll tell you in one word,” said Tuppence. “Clubfoot!” “What?” “I said Clubfoot! My study of the classics has not been in vain. Tommy, this thing’s a plant. Obscure alkaloids indeed – I never heard a weaker story.””

Just a couple of references to check out: Dr. Bower’s practice is at The Larches, Hangman’s Lane, Hampstead Heath. Hangman’s Lanes are quite common in the UK, but none in Hampstead I’m afraid. This address is contradicted and the new suggestion is 16 Westerham Road, Finsbury Park. Again no luck tracing that, but there is a Westerham Road in Walthamstow.

You don’t often get references to vitriol nowadays. Vitriol today is when someone spouts a lot of angry stuff because things haven’t gone their way. Christie’s vitriol was the real deal – Sulphuric Acid. Yes good old H₂SO₄ was heading Tommy’s way if he didn’t think quick. (He did.)

There’s a little of the contemporary anti-Germanic feel; Dr Bower is revealed as Dr Bauer – the same slip of the typewriter appears in The Seven Dials Mystery – and one of the baddies in the story cries out “Gott! What cowards are these English”. Not very subtle really.

A very bland little tale. Suffice to say, that as I read it, I solved it before Tommy did.

Finessing the King/The Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper

An enjoyable little story but not one that really makes you sit up and take notice. Tuppence is bored and wants to go dancing and has seen an advertisement in the newspaper that will justify their appearance at the Three Arts Ball. It then becomes one of those stories where everyone is masked and in fancy dress, so that it’s hard to work out who killed who, and why. Nevertheless, our magnificent duo, with an eye to Isabel Ostrander’s detective Tommy McCarty and his sidekick, Denis Riordan, a fireman, work it out. That’s why Tuppence humiliates Tommy into wearing a fireman’s outfit for the ball.

Not much to discuss here. The cover illustration of my copy of the book (Fontana, 3rd impression, 1971) by Tom Adams depicts the Queen of Hearts with a dagger through her heart, thus representing this story in a manner that gives it more excitement and style than perhaps it merits! The Three Arts Ball certainly existed as an annual event, held more often than not at a swanky London venue.

From a language point of view, we get a rare chance to see in full the “red herring” allusion that we all know and love. “”Aren’t you clever?” said Tuppence. “Especially at drawing red herrings across the track.”” The original idea was that by drawing red herrings across the track you create a false scent to be followed. I’d never come across the full allusion before.

Having agreed in the opening part of the book that neither Tommy nor Tuppence can still be over 25, Tuppence accuses Tommy of being 32 in this book. Whether that was a Christie error, an annoyed suggestion by Tuppence that he’s acting like an old man, or whether he really is 32, I guess we’ll never know.

The Case of the Missing Lady

This little story sees Tommy pretending to be Sherlock Holmes, including excruciating playing on the violin and preposterous guesswork about their client’s background – which all turns out to be true. Soon our heroes are trying to hunt for his inamorata, the missing Lady Hermione. And I shall say no more about the plot because there isn’t really anything else I can say that wouldn’t give the game away. Suffice to say, again it’s mere confection in comparison with some other Christie short stories.

The story has echoes of Conan Doyle’s Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax, but reading it won’t really prepare you for this story. It does, however, have one classic line: “Fat women and fat dogs are an abomination unto the Lord – and unfortunately they so often go together.” For other references: The Honourable Hermione is said to be the daughter of Lord Lanchester – who doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else other than in a 2012 Mills and Boon romance by Linda Sole. Lady Susan Clonway lives in Pont Street, which does exist – a fashionable address near Harrods. And there is the town of Maldon. Two of them apparently; one in Surrey, and one in Sussex. The one in Surrey is really Malden; the one is Sussex doesn’t exist. However, there is one in Essex to which she doesn’t refer.

Blindman’s Buff

And so it goes on; another short story where Tommy is playing at being a fictional detective, this time the Blind Problemist Thornley Colton, the invention of writer Clinton H Stagg who died in 1916 aged just 27. Much of the early part of the story is taken up with Tommy’s learning how to “play blind” which today comes over as being rather unpleasant trivialising of a serious disability. The story doesn’t stand successfully by itself, you would have to have read the entire volume so far to appreciate the references and motivations of the characters – and actually, I found this story immensely tedious, ridiculously fanciful and borderline sick (in the old fashioned sense).

Just a couple of references – a character declares himself to be the Duke of Blairgowrie, a picturesque market town in Perthshire; but of course in real life there is no such dukedom. Tommy and the Duke get into “a smart landaulette”. I’ve never heard of that term before. Of course we all know and love the Royal State Landaus used for pomp and ceremony occasions – so one can guess what a landaulette is. In fact, it’s more like a convertible limousine of the era. Very smart!

Not a story to dwell on, in my humble opinion.

The Man in the Mist

Finally, a much more substantial short story, with a proper build up, a proper crime and a lovely piece of light dawning as Tommy tries to solve it. This story is told in the style of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories – at least, Tommy is dressed like Father Brown for most of the time, and so adopted the good Father for this story.

This gave rise to some anti-Catholic rhetoric from Mrs Honeycott: “To begin with, you’ll excuse me if I say I don’t hold with the Roman Catholic religion. Never did I think to see a Roman Catholic priest in my house. But if Gilda’s gone over to the Scarlet Woman, it’s only what’s to be expected in a life like hers…” The rather stern Mrs H also diatribes against divorce – “Divorce is sinful” she avows, much like Tuppence’s distaste for the subject in the early pages of the book. She also equates theatre with wickedness, so she’s a pretty outdated old stick.

Other interesting observations of the times come from the fact that it’s obviously a good old pea-souper that obscures Morgan’s Avenue in the quaint village of Adlington – we don’t get those anymore. We also don’t get prejudice against people writing “pacifist poems”, even if it does make the hairs on Tuppence’s militaristic back stand on end. It’s also a world where use of the words “Hell” and “Damn” are seen as worthy of apologising to strangers for. How times change.

Adlington Hall really exists! The village of Adlington is near Macclesfield, Cheshire and was certainly in existence at the time Christie wrote the book. However, it’s hardly a short hop back to London, which is what the book implies. It doesn’t boast a Morgan’s Avenue, although there is a Morgan Avenue not too far away in Warrington.

A much more entertaining and rewarding tale than the majority of others so far.

The Crackler

This story, in the style of Edgar Wallace, isn’t bad, although it’s not exactly riveting either. Our tempestuous twosome are on the hunt for the source of counterfeit currency, and, as usual, Tommy gets lured into a trap but is saved by the bell.

It’s named The Crackler because that’s the name Tommy makes up to describe someone who makes nice fresh, crackly, counterfeit notes. He’s 100% sure the word will end up in the dictionary as a result of his brave sleuthing. He’s wrong – it hasn’t. Tuppence is still confused by “busies” and “noses”. Busies is still certainly a slang term for the police; never actually heard anyone use the word “noses” in this context though – but my OED confirms it’s a late 18th century term for a spy or an informer. Ryder refers to cash as “oof”, which I’d certainly never heard before – and that’s a 19th century word derived from two Yiddish words meaning “cash on the table” – i.e. gambling money.

“Marguerite Laidlaw […] was a charming creature, with the slenderness of a wood nymph and the face of Greuze picture.” Who? That would be Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725 – 1805), a French painter of portraits, genre scenes, and history painting. Pardon my ignorance.

One of those silly, out-of-context lines that only Christie can write, that sounded perfectly ok back in the day but now takes on a new meaning: “Major Laidlaw is pretty well known […] Men in the know look queer when he’s mentioned.”

The Sunningdale Mystery

Among the better tales in this book. Tommy takes on the mantle of Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, with Tuppence as journalist Polly Burton. I’ve only read one “Old Man in the Corner” story, and Polly didn’t appear in it, so I can’t vouch for Christie’s veracity. This is a tale of a man found stabbed with a hatpin (if ever there was a classic Christie weapon, there’s one) on the links at Sunningdale Golf Club.

It’s unusual for Christie to set a story so firmly in a real location. Sunningdale is, of course, a proper golf club and a pretty swish one to boot. The Christies were actually living in the village at the time, and Archie was a member of the club, so it’s written with a certain insider knowledge. There’s even reference to a footpath that leaves the course and comes out on the road to Windlesham. I reckon you could pinpoint that location with dead accuracy.

Other interesting references to note are that the story takes place in an ABC shop. What’s one of those, I hear you ask? They were a chain of tea shops, first launched in the 1860s, and that died out in the 1950s. The ABC of the title referred to the Aerated Bread Company. Catchy! I’m no golfer, and I didn’t recognise the verb to foozle, as in “not only did he foozle his drive badly…” The OED tells me it was a late 19th century term to make a bad job of something (especially in golf). It’s also rather sweet to think that there was a time when you could get cheap tickets to London on a Wednesday, just because it was a Wednesday. Such innocent times.

Tommy and Tuppence manage to solve the crime without having to get up from their tea and buns.

The House of Lurking Death

And here comes another pretty good whodunit short story, with a decent crime, a decent motive and a decent (albeit rapid) denouement. Here Tommy envisages himself as A E W Mason’s detective Inspector Hanaud, considered by many to be an influence on Christie in the creation of Hercule Poirot – although apart from them both being francophones, I’m not yet convinced of too much similarity. Tommy’s last words to Tuppence at the end of this story are a direct quote from Mason’s first Hanaud novel, At the Villa Rose. I have to say those first few pages, where Tommy is practising his French style, make pretty cringily embarrassing reading. In a complete aside, Hanaud’s offsider, Ricardo, was played by Austin Trevor in Mr Trevor’s film debut in 1930; and he also went on to be the first ever Poirot on screen – in Alibi, a 1931 film based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I met Mr Trevor when I was 8 years old, as I collected autographs at the stage door of the Lyric Theatre in London, where he was appearing in the play Oh Clarence! I remember him being a charming old gentleman.

Poison in chocolates, how delicious. If you’ve read any of my other Christie blogs, you’ll know that I look for evidence of “Christie the Poisons Expert” in every book, because, deep down, she loves it. This story has plenty of poison. There’s (allegedly) arsenic in the chocolates that made everyone sick at Thurnly House before Lois Hargreaves comes to call on T&T. Later there is a suggestion of ptomaine poisoning in the figs – I’d never heard of ptomaine, and that’s because it’s now recognised not as a poison per se but as part of the general field of food poisoning. However, the real culprit in this story is ricin, the product of the castor oil plant, much favoured by the old KGB. Let’s not go there.

Thurnly. Does it exist? No. An invention of Christie’s. However, I did enjoy the little diatribe against those damn lefties again, ascribing the sending out of poisoned chocolates as “socialist agitation”. I suppose the most in-depth references in this story are those Hell and Brimstone quotations from the Bible that Hannah the maid keeps quoting. The first one is from Psalm 140, verse 10, but Hannah misquotes it slightly; the others are variously from the Psalms and the Gospel of St John.

The Unbreakable Alibi

Blunt’s Detectives are challenged to prove which of two contradictory alibis is false – how can one person be in London but also in Torquay at the same time? This is a jauntily written, entertaining little tale, but terribly easy to guess the solution that Tommy and Tuppence seem to take ages discovering. And of course, the reader is right, so the mini-denouement becomes a bit of a damp squib.

Tommy takes the guise of Inspector French from the novels of Freeman Wills Crofts, of whom I know nothing, so I can’t tell if it’s well done or not! Apparently French was good at sorting out alibis, hence Tommy’s choice. There is some nice talk of astral travel which is a concept I haven’t come across for decades – I convinced myself that I had done it one night when I was a child. I probably didn’t.

Other than that there are a few references to check out – the Bon Temps Restaurant in London (there isn’t one at the moment, at any rate) ; The Duke’s Theatre (there’s the Duke of York’s but that’s all) ; The Castle Hotel in Torquay (there’s a Castle pub, but I doubt it’s the same) ; and Clarges Street London – that certainly exists, but I don’t think there’s a Number 180.

Montague Jones refers to his mother as “The Mater”, just as John Cavendish does in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and our own Tommy does in The Secret Adversary. All peas from the same pod, I think.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect about this story is that it was written four years after the others, in 1928.

The Clergyman’s Daughter/The Red House

And this story was the first to be written, published in the Strand magazine in December 1923, only a short while after the publication of The Secret Adversary. In it, Tommy decides to take on the mantle of detective Roger Sheringham from the novels of Anthony Berkeley. Again, I’ve not read his works, so I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the homage.

The story is a relatively lightweight affair about a house that is up for sale, and the reason why people are desperate to buy it is because of buried treasure. The grand total of treasure is £25,200, which in 1923 was the equivalent of a majestic £10.6m. The Clergyman’s daughter who will take ownership of the tidy sum will be doing relatively well.

The story has a cryptogram to solve, which Tommy and Tuppence manage through a combination of hard work and good luck, about as opaque as those old clues on Ted Rogers’ 3-2-1 in the 1980s.

The town of Stourton in the Marsh doesn’t exist, of course, but it certainly makes you think of Moreton in the Marsh.

Apart from that, nothing much more to say about this story. It’s about now that I started to get really bored with this book. If you’re still with me, gentle reader, well done you, I’m not sure how you’re hanging on.

The Ambassador’s Boots

The penultimate tale in the book is a rather unsatisfactory account of two kit bags being swapped and Tommy allowing himself to be lured (yet again) into the hands of danger, where he will be rescued by Tuppence and the Police. These stories get more and more fanciful as the book progresses. It seems to me that there are loose ends in this story that aren’t properly tied up; it’s as though the story finishes too early.

Tommy here is emulating H. C. Bailey’s sleuth Reggie Fortune, someone else who appears to have gone permanently out of fashion. Perhaps more interesting is the allusion to a Sherlock Holmes story where it was pertinent how far the parsley had sunk into the butter. That’s The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, published in 1904.

In what would today be seen to be a rather unpleasant racial sideswipe, Tommy refers to the Spanish looking chap that bursts into the office as a dago. Remembering that this story was originally written in 1924, that precedes by one year the word’s more thorough usage in The Secret of Chimneys. I’ll watch to see if Christie continues to use it in further books.

The bag swap took place on board the SS Nomadic. You can still visit her at Belfast’s dockyards. You won’t, however, find Cyclamen Ltd at Bond Street.

The Man who was Number 16

And finally, we come to the last story that wraps up the book – and not a moment too soon, in my opinion! Christie comes full circle in this story by cocking a snoop at her own The Big Four and the dearly beloved Hercule Poirot. Christie must have revised her original short story somewhat to include the Big Four reference as the short story appeared in the Sketch in December 1924 (it was actually the last story she wrote for The Sketch) and The Big Four was published in 1927. Interesting that she chooses to refer a book that she herself considered to be well below standard.

For the most part this is an exciting end to the book, with some nice touches of “classic” espionage – Tommy has to say “I myself was in Berlin on the 13th of last month” to prove that he’s on the same side as the special agent – and there’s a suspenseful race against time as Tommy and Carter try to rescue Tuppence from the clutches of the Russian Spy. It’s all very camp and cloak and dagger; at one point, Carter reassures Tommy that Tuppence will be alright in the hotel room with the spy: “one of my men’s inside – behind the sofa”. Albert encourages Tommy to engage his little grey cells in a Poirot-like structured and neat examination of the facts in order to solve the case. Which of course he does.

And there is a happy ending – predictably nauseous though it may be!

The only thing that remains is for me to give this an overall satisfaction rating of 6/10. It started well, but I got bored. Still, it’s a clever concept and if you’re a big Tommy and Tuppence fan, you’ll positively wallow in the bright young things’ way of living life and being daring. Contemporary T&T fans would have to wait another twelve years before Christie brought them back, in N or M?

So there we are at the end of this rather exhaustive look back at what originally looked deceptively straightforward! Thanks for sticking with me, if you did. The next book stays with the short story format and it’s our first meeting with the enigmatic Harley Quin in The Mysterious Mr Quin. If you’d like to read it too, I’ll blog about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meanwhile, happy sleuthing and keep on Christie-ing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we pay a return visit to the grand country mansion of Chimneys and get re-acquainted with “Bundle” Brent, that typical Christie bold adventuress who, with her friends, helps to expose the activities of the secret “Seven Dials” society, uncover the identity of its head, the mysterious No. 7, and in so doing discovers a murderer. As usual, you can read at ease, I promise I won’t reveal those secret identities if you haven’t read it yet!

In her autobiography, Christie described this book as one of her “light-hearted thriller types”, saying it was easy to write as it didn’t require too much plotting or planning. I have to say, I think it shows; as I found re-reading this book much more of a bind than a pleasure. I found it really hard work, leaving it to one side for days and days with no interest in picking it back up. It’s not a question of the characters, I just found the plot immensely tedious. Interestingly, it wasn’t particularly well received critically at the time; in particular, the New York Times Book Review was very damning: “She has held out information which the reader should have had, and, not content with scattering false clues with a lavish hand, she has carefully avoided leaving any clues pointing to the real criminal. Worst of all, the solution itself is utterly preposterous. This book is far below the standard set by Agatha Christie’s earlier stories.”

The book is described as a sequel to The Secret of Chimneys and re-introduces us to our heroine Bundle, her slightly eccentric father Lord Caterham, our trusty police officer Superintendent Battle, Under-Secretary for State for Foreign Affairs George Lomax and his assistant Bill, and the ever-reliable butler Tredwell. The good superintendent will come back to solve three more mysteries before his time is out; the other characters never return to Christie-land. The tone of the book is once more that of jolly trendy young things making the most of their 1920s opportunities, dancing to the wireless, driving recklessly, getting their man to buy them guns, that sort of thing. Christie does reflect that world extremely convincingly and you can just see in your mind’s eye those rather vacuous characters having the time of their lives, with authority figures like Battle trying to keep them on the straight and narrow with affectionate indulgence. There’s not a lot of character development for the six “return” characters; you don’t learn much more about them than what you would have gathered in The Secret of Chimneys. However, for me, where this book falls down is its general lack of plot. I’m not surprised that I couldn’t remember much about it before re-reading it – there isn’t that much to remember.

It’s also very unevenly written. There are a few genuinely exciting, page-turning scenes which completely grip your imagination and you really enjoy the ride – for example the sequence where Jimmy, Bill, Bundle and Loraine split up and the narrative follows each of them in turn; then they all come back together again in the library, having experienced gunshots, police presence, creaking floorboards and door handles silently turning. But there are some other sequences that, when you look back you realise do have relevance to the crime and its solution, but are extraordinarily boring to read: an example of that is the interminable conversations with Lord Caterham (who really is very dull in this book) and Bundle about left-handed golf-playing. Nevertheless, the proof of the pudding, etc, tells its own story. There are some good red herrings littered everywhere, and I suspected two different people of being the murderer at different stages of the book and I was wrong on both counts – and the revelation of the identity of the murderer – and indeed of No 7 – is a very good surprise indeed. It just feels like it takes ages to get there!

Like her previous book, The Mystery of the Blue Train, there is no narrator to guide us through the investigations, but Christie’s own voice comes through occasionally with some slightly wry asides about the way the story is unfolding: “Now it may be said at once that in the foregoing conversation each one of the three participants had, as it were, held something in reserve. That “Nobody tells everything” is a very true motto. It may be questioned, for instance, if Loraine Wade was perfectly sincere in the account of the motives which had led her to seek out Jimmy Thesiger. In the same way, Jimmy Thesiger himself had various ideas and plans connected with the forthcoming party at George Lomax’s which he had no intention of revealing to – say, Bundle. And Bundle herself had a fully-fledged plan which she proposed to put into immediate execution and which she had said nothing whatever about.“ There is also a scene where two people are locked away in a room and it is revealed that they have fallen in love. Christie deals with that situation very nicely: “There is no need to describe in detail the conversation of the next ten minutes. It consisted mainly of repetitions.”

When one of the clocks goes missing, at the scene of the first crime, was anyone else expecting them to continue going missing, in the style of And Then There Were None? This book precedes the latter by ten years, but you often catch Christie trying ideas out that she re-uses to greater effect later in her career. This, however, wasn’t one of them.

There are a few locations in this book, and, unusually for Christie, they are quite specifically identified. The title itself gives rise to the Seven Dials area of London, described, amusingly, as a “rather slummy district of London”. Perhaps this is one of the best examples of how an area can be smartened up over the years. This is how the Seven Dials website describes the location: “the intriguing network of seven atmospheric streets that link Covent Garden to Soho. Always buzzy, packed with independent boutiques, international fashion labels, heritage brands, beauty salons, men’s grooming specialists, traditional pubs, cool cocktail bars, cafés, restaurants, theatres and smart hotels; historic Seven Dials is modern London’s most original shopping and lifestyle destination.” How times have changed. Christie’s Seven Dials club is located at 14 Hunstanton Street; however, I’m sorry to say, there’s no such street. There is however a genuine Seven Dials Club, based at 42 Earlham Street. Jimmy Thesiger lives at 103 Jermyn Street – a very fine and respectable address indeed. And there really is a 103! It’s the London home of that fine shirtmaker T. M. Lewin. However, when Christie wrote the book, I think Lewin’s were based at 18 Jermyn Street. Sir Oswald and Lady Coote move to “the Duke of Alton’s place, Letherbury”. No such title, I’m afraid, although there was a Marquis of Alton in the late 17th century (the Alton in question being the Staffordshire village now best known for Alton Towers). Letherbury itself appears to be a complete invention of Christie’s.

There are always a few unusual references and words in a Christie book that make me think twice and delve into their meanings – and this book is no exception. On the very first page, Christie introduces us to Lady Coote. “An artist looking for a model for “Rachel mourning for her children” would have hailed Lady Coote a delight.” Rachel? Mourning for her children? I guessed this was a Bible story of which I was unaware but I had to go check. Of course – married to Jacob. Jeremiah 31:15 is your friend.

““Father,” said Bundle […], “I’m going up to town in the Hispano. I can’t stand the monotony down here any longer.”” I wasn’t sure what a Hispano was, so I checked. The Hispano-Suiza company was a Spanish manufacturer of luxury cars, founded in 1904, defunct in 1968. At the time of this book, the company was enjoying a good position in the luxury car market. Once the Spanish Civil War kicked in, the company was forced to be part of the war effort, and after 1950 worked almost exclusively in the aerospace industry.

I thought it was fascinating that at the time of writing this book, Christie called alarm clocks “alarum clocks”. I reckon this must have been a pretty archaic use of the term even in the 1920s. When Bundle first visits the Seven Dials Club she asks Alfred for a gimlet. “You must have a gimlet – perhaps you’ve got an auger as well”. I’ve never been into DIY much, but, in case you didn’t know, a gimlet is one of those little tools that looks like a screwdriver but has a screw-type ending rather than the angular flat edge ending. An auger is a bigger version. In one of Christie’s duller passages, Lady Coote reminisces about some old wallpaper she admired. “Satin stripes, you know, not moiré”. I’ve never heard of moiré – but it’s when you superimpose a line pattern on top of another. How clever of Lady Coote.

Unusually for Christie, this isn’t a book where large sums of money are being mentioned, either in the form of the value of expensive jewellery, or property or blackmail sums. I always like to translate money values into what they’re worth today to get a better understanding of the amounts involved. But there are only a couple of instances, both involving Alfred. Bundle offers him £10 to scarper from the Seven Dials Club and avoid getting involved with the police; which happens to be exactly one tenth of the sum he was offered by Mosgorovsky (£100) in order to leave Chimneys and work at the Seven Dials. That tenner today is worth £444 – that’s some generosity in Bundle’s purse, for sure. And £4440 isn’t a bad sum for a footman to be poached to another employer. No wonder he did it.

I think it’s now time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for The Seven Dials Mystery:

Publication Details: 1929. My copy is a Fontana paperback, 4th impression published in September 1967, priced 3/6. The atmospheric cover picture is by an uncredited artist and depicts a gloved hand wielding a pistol in a most menacing manner, with somewhat ethereal alarm clocks serving as the background. And yes, the artist did get the most important detail about the gloved hand right!

How many pages until the first death: 15. That’s just about perfect. No hanging around, and it keeps you locked into the story – at least for a while.

Funny lines out of context: I liked these extracts for their pithiness and ability to amuse:

“She had reckoned without the predominant trait of a good head gardener, which is to oppose any and every suggestion made to him.”

(Lady Coote playing bridge) “She was very fond of her husband, but she had no intention of allowing him to cheat her out of ten shillings.” (That’s £20 today!)

“Mrs Howell […] was full of pitying ejaculations”.

”I went to Harrods and bought a pistol.”

Memorable characters:
Jimmy Thesiger is quite a lovable rogue in many respects, with his constantly cheeky repartee with authority figures; he was probably seen as quite a fascinating young cove in those days. The characterisation of Lady Coote starts well, but then she fades.

Christie the Poison expert:
The first victim dies from an overdose of chloral, just as in The Secret Adversary. Please feel free to read more about chloral in that blog post!

Class/social issues of the time:

What kind of life is valued in this book? For all that she’s a go-ahead, go-getting girl, Bundle is very much a traditionalist and, although she rails at boredom, what she really wants is the old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud world of her father, where tradition beats plumbing. “”That’s a fine place of yours, Chimneys, “ remarked the great man. “I’m glad you liked it”, said Bundle meekly. “Wants new plumbing,” said Sir Oswald. “Bring it up to date, you know.” He ruminated for a minute or two. “I’m taking the Duke of Alton’s place. Three years. Just while I’m looking round for a place of my own. Your father couldn’t sell if he wanted to, I suppose?” Bundle felt her breath taken away. She had a nightmare vision of England with innumerable Cootes in innumerable counterparts of Chimneys – all, be it understood, with an entirely new system of plumbing installed.”

Aside from that, Christie’s is, as we have seen in previous books, a sexist world; and there’s plenty of evidence of that in this book. There are endless references to discussions between Jimmy and Bill to the effect that “the girls have done their bit” and are to stay behind whilst the men do the risky business. Interestingly though, Bundle and Loraine show no signs of wishing to obey by staying in and washing their hair whilst the men have adventures. Bill Eversleigh reports that George Lomax “doesn’t really believe in women standing for Parliament”; and in her brief appearance in the book, Bundle’s Aunt Marcia gives her appraisal of Mrs Macatta: “A most estimable woman with a brilliant brain. I may say that as a general rule I do not hold with women standing for Parliament. They can make their influence felt in a more womanly fashion.”

It’s also a xenophobic, if not racist world, as the following insights bear out. Here’s some antisemitism: Bill is telling Bundle about the beautiful actress Babe St Maur…: “”I wonder how she got that name?” said Bundle sarcastically. Bill replied literally. “She got it out of Who’s Who. Opened it and jabbed her finger down on a page without looking. Pretty nifty, eh? Her real name’s Goldschmidt or Abrameier – something quite impossible.” “Oh, quite”, agreed Bundle.” And here’s some anti German sentiment: Bundle tries to find out about John, the new footman, from Tredwell the butler. “”What’s his name, Tredwell?” “Bower, my lady”. […] Apparently he was the perfect servant, well trained, with an expressionless face. He had, perhaps, a more soldierly bearing than most footmen and there was something a little odd about the shape of the back of his head. […] “Tredell, how is the name Bower spelt?” “B-A-U-E-R, my lady”. “That’s not an English name.” “I believe he is of Swiss extraction, my lady.” “Oh! That’s all, Tredwell, thank you.” Swiss extraction? No. German! That martial carriage, that flat back of the head. And he had come to Chimneys a fortnight before Gerry Wade’s death.” I guess we must accept that we are in 1929 and tensions are building.

As usual, the class system is very much at large in Christie’s world. Pompous politician George feels it is incumbent on him and his ilk to preserve England’s traditions – the traditional view of life that Bundle has a soft spot for, as shown earlier: “In these days of changed and unsettled conditions […] when family life is at a premium – all the old standards falling! It becomes our class to set an example to show that we, at least, are unaffected by modern conditions. They call us the Die Hards – I am proud of the term […] There are things that should die hard – dignity, beauty, modesty, the sanctity of family life, filial respect – who dies if these shall live?” At the other end of the scale, when Bill considers if Bundle has a future in politics he sees it in terms of having to “kiss dirty babies in Bermondsey”. I expect the Mayfair babies aren’t dirty.

Classic denouement: No. It’s quite brief and it takes place in retrospect, with the guilty party already having been arrested, so you never get to see their reaction to the long arm of the law and if they try to wriggle out of it, which is a little disappointing. Nevertheless, the identity of the murderer is only one of number of good surprises, so that’s a mitigating factor.

Happy ending? Yes! Two of the major younger characters find love and you just know they’re going to settle down to a happy ever after.

Did the story ring true? If you believe that the criminal mastermind behind this case could genuinely carry off all the subterfuge and misleading behaviour that it would require, then there’s no reason not to believe the whole thing. There is, however, a lot of coincidence, perhaps most significantly the fact that Bundle was driving past at the very moment that the second victim is discovered.

Overall satisfaction rating: 5/10. It’s not all bad by any means – with some exciting passages, a good surprise ending and some enjoyable characterisation. It’s just a bit boring. Interesting that Christie never sought to revisit Chimneys for any future books.

Thanks for reading my blog of The Seven Dials Mystery and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge we are still in 1929, but going back to the short story genre as we catch up with Tommy and Tuppence as private investigators in Partners in Crime. If I remember rightly, this is a very entertaining read! As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we meet Katherine Grey, the recent recipient of a fine inheritance, who seeks a change from her modest life in St Mary Mead by taking the Blue Train to stay with well-to-do cousins in France; but en route becomes entangled with a plot to steal rubies and murder an heiress. Fortunately, M. Hercule Poirot is also travelling on the train and is called in by the deceased’s father to identify who killed his daughter. And, lo and behold, with a little assistance from Miss Grey, he does! Don’t worry, if you haven’t read the book yet you can read this blog post and still not find out whodunit.

According to her autobiography, this is the book of which Christie was least proud. She hated writing it, she said “she could not see the scene in my mind’s eye, and the people would not come alive.” She said each time she re-read it, she found it “commonplace, full of clichés and with an uninteresting plot”. No doubt a contributory factor was the breakdown of her marriage to Archie Christie, and her famous ten-day disappearance which had recently taken place. She needed to write to pay the bills, so from that point of view the book was a great success, as it sold just as well as any of her other books. That’s why it stood out in Christie’s mind as not only her worst book, but also the book that marked her transition from amateur to professional. If she could write on demand, without particularly caring about her characters or her plot, then surely she could think of herself as a professional writer, able to tackle any task that her career (or bank manager) required of her.

The plot was taken from one of Christie’s own short stories that had been written in 1923 under the title The Plymouth Express, but was not to be actually published in the UK until the appearance of Poirot’s Early Cases, in 1974; so it will be some time before I read and write about that one! Katherine Grey is a one-off character, but her home village of St Mary Mead would of course become very significant as the home of Miss Marple – who had yet to appear in Christie’s works. There are several other links to other Christie books. This is the first appearance of Mr Goby, the private detective who specialises in having people followed; he works for Mr Van Aldin in this book but will provide Poirot with direct detailed information on suspects in After the Funeral and Third Girl. Once again we meet Mr Aarons, who gave Poirot valuable advice regarding showbiz performers in The Murder on the Links and The Big Four; and this is also the first appearance of Poirot’s manservant George, to whom he constantly refers as Georges, although he’s definitely a George.

The conductor on board the Blue Train is named Pierre Michel; that is also the name of the train conductor in Murder on the Orient Express, Christie’s 1934 classic. Sadly, I don’t think they’re the same people. Poirot makes no sign of recognition when he interviews Michel on the Orient Express – and with Poirot’s brain he would have certainly remembered him. In the latter book Michel is said to have worked for the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits for fifteen years; the real Train Bleu was also part of that same company. Coincidence? Or did Christie think all train conductors were called Pierre Michel? After all, it seems that she thought all French houses were called the Villa Marguerite. That’s where Lady Tamplin lives in this book, and it was also the name of the residence of the Daubreuils in The Murder on the Links.

So is Christie still developing the character of Poirot, or is he now the finished article? More than ever, Poirot is as vain, pompous and big-headed as can be. Poirot’s simple answer to Derek Kettering’s question “who are you?” is “My name is Hercule Poirot […] and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.” Katherine and Lenox can’t keep a straight face at Poirot’s outrageously high self-esteem: “You have seen the gentle, the calm Hercule Poirot; but there is another Hercule Poirot. I go now to bully, to threaten, to strike terror into the hearts of those who listen to me.” And he’s not wrong. His interrogation of Hipolyte and Marie, the Comte’s servants, is a shouting, bullying, fist-waving, table thumping affair that lacks all the usual style and finesse that we have come to expect from him. “You tell your lies and you think nobody knows. But there are two people who know. Yes – two people. One is le bon Dieu […] and the other is Hercule Poirot.” In previous books, regular police inspectors have questioned Poirot’s sanity, tapping their foreheads, implying the old boy’s losing his marbles, whilst of course he has not. In this book he is able to answer that question directly. ““Are you mad, Monsieur Poirot?” It was Van Aldin who spoke. “No,” said Poirot, “I am not mad. I am eccentric, perhaps – at least certain people say so; but regards my profession, I am very much, as one says, ‘all there’.””

There’s no Captain Hastings in this book for Poirot to bounce ideas off; instead Katherine Grey serves that purpose, but only on a couple of occasions. Apart from her, Poirot has only M. Caux of the Sûreté (they met once, long ago) as a helpful investigative partner. No Hastings also means no narrator as such; this might have been a contributory factor in why Christie found the book such a bind to write. Katherine is a kind and thoughtful character; independent, generous and human; but Christie doesn’t really give enough of her for us really to attach ourselves to her. Maybe if she’d written this book at a more confident and experienced time in her career, she’d have turned out to be a much more rewarding character. As it is, she is identified by Miss Viner as: “there you are, as sensible as ever you were, with a pair of good Balbriggan stockings on and your sensible shoes” – good quality stockings having been manufactured in Balbriggan, in the old County Dublin, at that time. So, a redoubtable stalwart, but not much more.

There aren’t many locations specified in this book, but one that may require a little explanation is Down Street tube, which is where Van Aldin alights when he goes to visit his daughter Ruth. It was located between Green Park station and Hyde Park Corner station and was closed in 1932. The Isles d’Or, which the Comte de la Roche suggests is a good spot for a liaison with Ruth, do indeed exist; they are a secluded group of four islands off the coast of France by Hyères, comprising of national park and nudist beach. But don’t believe the Comte was suggesting that kind of hanky-panky; the naturist colony there was started in 1931, three years after the book was published. The Negresco, where Derek Kettering chooses to lunch, is a swish and swanky hotel in Nice, that opened in 1913 and is still going strong.

Some other references that propelled me into research mode: Has there ever been an opera based on Peer Gynt? It’s a relevant question, as Mirelle discusses Claud Ambrose’s opera of Ibsen’s play because she is dancing the role of Anitra. Well, Claud Ambrose is a figment of Christie’s imagination, but yes, there have been two operatic Peer Gynts. The first, back in 1938, written by German composer Werner Egk; the second, very recently (2014) by Juri Reinvere. Of course, both were written after The Mystery of the Blue Train. Talking of which, when the train arrives at Lyons, Christie describes the “long plaintive hiss of the Westinghouse brake”. I’m no engineer, so I had to look this up. But even today, modern trains rely upon a fail-safe air brake system that is based upon a design patented by George Westinghouse on March 5, 1868. So he’s had a long-lasting influence.

Lady Tamplin says of Katherine, “her clothes are all right. That grey thing is the same model that Gladys Cooper wore in Palm Trees in Egypt. Gladys Cooper was, of course, a renowned stage and screen actress but she never appeared in a film entitled “Palm Trees in Egypt” – nor do I think anyone else ever did. In the same conversation, Lady Tamplin resumes: “She has been a companion, I tell you. Companions don’t play tennis – or golf. They might possibly play golf-croquet, but I have always understood that they wind wool and wash dogs most of the day.” So Lady T doesn’t have much respect for the position of Companion. But what is this “golf-croquet”? I’ve heard of golf, I’ve heard of croquet, but never come across this hybrid. Actually it is a form of croquet where, as soon as someone has driven their ball through a hoop, all other players then play for the next hoop. Sounds a bit faster than regular croquet.

Major Knighton reveals that he was staying at a house in Yorkshire when Lady Clanravon’s jewels were stolen. He suggested calling in Poirot to solve it, but they didn’t, and the jewels were never recovered. I can confirm that there is/was no such person as Lady Clanravon (a Christie invention) and the case of the Clanravon jewels doesn’t appear to be part of Christie’s back catalogue of short stories. Crippen, of course, is a different kettle of fish. Here’s the relevant passage: “”The personality of a criminal, Georges, is an interesting matter. Many murderers are men of great personal charm.” “I’ve always heard, sir, that Dr. Crippen was a pleasant-spoken gentleman. And yet he cut up his wife like so much mincemeat.” “Your instances are always apt, Georges.”” Dr Crippen murdered his wife and dismembered her, for which he was hanged in 1910. It’s one of those cases that, for some reason, lingers on in society’s consciousness.

As this is a book where inheritance, divorce settlements and valuable jewellery all play a significant part, there are many instances of financial values being quoted but their value was very different in 1928 from their value today. Van Aldin values the jewels he gives Ruth to be between four and five hundred thousand dollars – today’s equivalent of between £3.6m and £4.5m. So we’re talking big biccies here. But actually, these are small potatoes compared with the two million dollars that Kettering told Mirelle that his wife had received from her father when she got married. That’s the equivalent of over £18m – a triple rollover on the lottery. By contrast, the £500 a year that Katherine was expecting from her inheritance works out at £22,000 in today’s money. Then there’s the £100,000 Van Aldin offers Kettering if he doesn’t contest Ruth’s divorce. That’s £4.4m today. And finally there’s the £2m that Kettering inherits from Ruth – a tidy £8.8m today. He’s a lucky lad.

It’s now time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for The Mystery of the Blue Train:

Publication Details: 1928. My copy is a Fontana paperback, 23rd impression published in March 1974, priced 30p. The intriguing cover picture is by an uncredited artist and depicts a cigarette case, some strands of red auburn hair, some bloodstaining on a brass stick, all against the backdrop of Ruth Kettering’s passport. Smart!

How many pages until the first death: 64. It’s the only death too. The story does take its time to get going.

Funny lines out of context: Unusually, I couldn’t really identify any. I did, however, enjoy these individual pieces of writing:
““Mrs Samuel Harfield presents her compliments to Miss Katherine Grey and wishes to point out that under the circumstances Miss Grey may not be aware –“ Mrs Harfield, having written so far fluently, came to a dead stop, held up by what has proved an insuperable difficulty to many other people – namely the difficulty of expressing oneself fluently in the third person.””

“”Ellen does a steak with grilled tomatoes pretty fairly,” said Miss Viner. “She doesn’t do it well but she does it better than anything else.””

Memorable characters:
One of the problems with this book as that the characters are not at all memorable. They’re primarily irritating, like Mirelle with that silly accent, or underemphasised like our heroine Katherine.

Christie the Poison expert:
Not in this book. The victim is killed by strangulation.

Class/social issues of the time:

Just as The Big Four offered us a rather uneducated view of mental health, this book takes a somewhat facile glance at suicide: “He fetched Zia’s cloak, and together they strolled out into the gardens. ”This is where the suicides take place,” said Zia. Poirot shrugged his shoulders. “So it is said, Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air. It is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money – or because the heart aches. L’amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?” This doesn’t show much appreciation of what we think of as mental illness today.

Miss Viner’s letter to Katherine is full of the minutiae of everyday living in St Mary Mead and gives a very vivid insight into her life, and the things that occupy her mind. “Everything goes on much the same here. There was great trouble about the new curate, who is scandalously high. In my view, he is neither more nor less than a Roman […] I have had a lot of trouble with maids lately. That girl Annie was no good – skirts up to her knees and wouldn’t wear sensible woollen stockings. Not one of them can bear being spoken to […] Dr Harris persuaded me to go and see a London specialist – a waste of three guineas and a railway fare, as I told him; but by waiting until Wednesday I managed to get a cheap return […] Is it cancer or is it not? And then, of course, he had to say it was. They say a year with care, and not too much pain, though I’m sure I can bear pain as well as any Christian woman.” So, here we have: divisions within the church, problems with servants, high cost of medical and railway services, and the fact that a diagnosis of cancer meant inevitable pain and death. It’s interesting to remember how professional fees were almost always given as guineas rather than pounds – that three guineas is the equivalent of £140 today. Pretty reasonable price in those days, by comparison! Miss Viner’s problem with maids is a classic example of Christie’s observations on the class system. In a later encounter: “”Tell Ellen she is not to have holes in her stockings when she waits at lunch.” “Is her name Ellen or Helen, Miss Viner? I thought –“ Miss Viner closed her eyes. “I can sound my h’s, dear, as well as anyone, but Helen is not a suitable name for a servant. I don’t know what the mothers in the lower classes are coming to nowadays.”

Captain Hastings, not known for his modern man approach to life, would have been in full agreement with Van Aldin’s view that all women are basically stupid: “There is one thing no man can do, and that is to get a woman to listen to reason. Somehow or other, they don’t seem to have any kind of sense. Talk of woman’s instinct – why, it is well known all the world over that a woman is the surest mark for any rascally swindler. Not one in ten of them knows a scoundrel when she meets one; they can be preyed on by any good-looking fellow with a soft side to his tongue.”

And, of course, there are the usual digs at foreigners. Jewel expert Papopolous (in itself something of a parody of a Greek surname) is described as a “wily Greek”. Chubby Evans has no time for the French, although Christie chides him for his view: “Mr. Chubby Evans listened with a very imperfect comprehension, his French being of a limited order. “So like the French,” murmured Mr Evans. He was one of those staunch patriotic Britons who, having made a portion of a foreign country their own, strongly resent the original inhabitants of it. “Always up to some silly dodge or other.”” There is also this slightly uncomfortable exchange between Poirot and Papopolous: “”Seventeen years is a long time,” said Poirot thoughtfully, “but I believe that I am right in saying, Monsieur, that your race does not forget.” “A Greek?” murmured Papopolous, with an ironical smile. “It was not as a Greek I meant,” said Poirot. There was a silence, and then the old man drew himself up proudly. “You are right, M. Poirot,” he said quietly. “I am a Jew. And, as you say, our race does not forget.””

Classic denouement: No, quite the contrary. There’s no grand assembly of all the suspects in a classy drawing room. It’s just a meeting between Poirot and two people. In fact, you only realise you’re in the denouement stage just before Poirot reveals the identity of the murderer. I had a sense of being a bit short-changed.

Happy ending? Not especially. Katherine is back at home, alone; Lenox is at home, alone. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of character progression, nor the faint tinkling of wedding bells that so often characterises a Christie climax.

Did the story ring true? At a push, it’s not too fanciful. There are a few coincidences, of course, like the fact that Poirot is in situ to start the investigation and that both Kettering and Knighton are friends of the Tamplins, but then, it wouldn’t be a Christie without some coincidences.

Overall satisfaction rating: 4/10. Considering it’s called The Mystery of the Blue Train, it takes a long time before the Blue Train gets mentioned. So you always have this nagging feeling that all the preamble is just that – not part of the mystery. So whereas in other Christies those important pages before a crime is committed can be seen as enticing, clue-giving, and motive-suggesting, in this book it just feels like it’s taking a long time to get started. And, as I suggested above, the characters just go nowhere at the end. Definitely a book that ends with a whimper rather than a bang. One further slight disappointment – even though I couldn’t remember the story from my earlier readings, I still quite easily managed to guess the murderer – so no big surprise for me at the end.

Thanks for reading my blog of The Mystery of the Blue Train and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge we move forward to 1929, and it’s back to that wacky gang at Chimneys with The Seven Dials Mystery. I can’t remember anything about this book, so I’ll be reading it as though it were brand new. As always, I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Big Four (1927)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which Captain Hastings returns to England to be reunited with his old pal Hercule Poirot, and together they uncover the identities and crimes of an international group of four evil megalomaniacs aiming for world domination, and eventually put a stop to their wicked ways. Normally I make a promise not to spoil the surprise for you so that you can read this blog post before reading the book. I’m not sure that’s possible in this case. There will be spoilers!

Let’s start by saying that, although this book unquestionably has a lot of fun, in many ways it’s absolutely bonkers and total balderdash. Clearly inspired by the fiendish Dr Fu-Manchu, whose earliest incarnations in print were during the First World War, this is a book that takes as its central tenet the fact that there is a group of four evil criminals, so rich and powerful that the world quakes in their path, plotting their devilish crimes against humanity from a quarry in the Italian Tyrol, like some James Bond/Austin Powers villain. The Fu-Manchu character is Li Chang Yen, known to only a few specialist orientophiles, who masterminds the group’s activities. We know this from the seventh page of the book, so I’m not giving away too many secrets here. The identities of two other members of the Big Four fall into place with relative ease, and it’s only The Destroyer, who flits in and out of the activity with almost farcical regularity, whose identity is concealed until relatively late in the day. But it’s not a whodunit – you’re not faced with a bunch of suspects and one of them is No 4 – so you might ask, where is the suspense, the tension, the thriller, the mystery? Good question.

Part of the problem is its structure, and the story of how it came to be written. Originally, it was a series of 12 short stories that had been published in The Sketch magazine three years earlier in 1924; so Captain Hastings’ return from South America happened much more quickly than it might appear if you only read this as a new book in 1927. It was a time of domestic strife for Agatha Christie. Her marriage to Archie was breaking down; she needed an income, but lacked the creative muse. Her brother in law, Campbell Christie, suggested revising the short stories into a novel; and apparently he assisted her with linking them together.

However, the episodic nature of the original sequence of short stories remains very apparent when reading The Big Four. It lacks a flowing narrative; it “stop-starts” constantly, picking up and dropping characters like someone struggling with an overfull shopping bag. There’s a point in the story where Poirot is discussing the sinister group with the non-believing French Prime Minister, Desjardeaux (oh yes, Poirot moves in exalted circles in this book). Poirot tries to convince him that the threat is real, and in Hastings’ narrative, the noble captain writes: “for answer, Poirot set forth ten salient points. I have been asked not to give them to the public even now, and so I refrain from doing so, but they included the extraordinary disasters to submarines which occurred in a certain month and also a series of aeroplane accidents and forced landings.” To my mind that’s amongst Christie’s laziest writing. She’s simply making an excuse not to spend an afternoon inventing those events. Perhaps it’s no surprise that in later years, Christie herself described The Big Four to her agent as “that rotten book”. Despite its not being a traditional whodunit, and its not being a very good book, it still sold very well – as it was published a few weeks after Christie’s famous disappearance and re-appearance, which to this day remains probably her biggest mystery. As with Poirot Investigates, Christie did not write a dedication. Presumably there weren’t enough people around in her life at the time worth dedicating it to. Alternatively, maybe she didn’t want to saddle one of her friends or relatives with the dubious honour of having this book dedicated to them.

So what extra does this book tell us about our detective heroes? Poirot is still living in London (unlike in the previous The Murder of Roger Ackroyd where he had retired to King’s Abbot to grow vegetable marrows). He’s attracted to his next case – which would take him off to Rio de Janeiro – purely for the money, which is most unlike him. He normally prefers something to tax the little grey cells rather than something that will result in his paying tax. He is still as egotistical as ever, though: “I think he came to see Hercule Poirot, and to have speech with the adversary whom alone he must fear”. In another exchange: “”And his mistake?” I asked, although I suspected the answer. “Mon ami, he overlooked the little grey cells of Hercule Poirot.” Poirot has his virtues, but modesty is not one of them.”” Despite his incredible track record, Poirot’s contemporaries still like to make out that he’s losing his marbles. To Poirot’s cryptic comment about seeing “not with the eyes of the body, perhaps, but with the eyes of the mind”, Inspector Meadows “touched his forehead with a significant grin at me. I was utterly bewildered, but I had faith in Poirot”.

As for Hastings, he’s still a wry narrator, with a penchant for girls with auburn hair – Abe Ryland’s stenographer Miss Martin takes his fancy for that very reason. But he’s also still a terrible misogynist: “it had always seemed to me extraordinary that a woman should go so far in the scientific world. I should have thought a purely masculine brain was needed for such work.” When infiltrating Ryland’s domestic staff, he notes: “I had, or course, carefully scrutinised all the members of the household. One or two of the servants had been newly engaged, one of the footmen, I think, and some of the housemaids. The butler, the housekeeper, and the chef were the duke’s own staff, who had consented to remain on in the establishment. The housemaids I dismissed as unimportant.” And we are reintroduced to Inspector Japp, whose first appearance in the book is described as “jaunty and dapper” – so there’s a portmanteau name if ever there was one.

One relic of the book’s origin as a sequence of short stories is that it is littered with different locations. We start off at Poirot’s residence; in The Murder on the Links, this is just an unidentified London flat, but in The Big Four we know it to be 14 Farraway Street; a road that, according to Bing Maps, doesn’t exist anywhere in the world! Mayerling, the man who turns up unannounced, is said to have escaped from Hanwell asylum. This definitely existed – and indeed, still does to an extent, as part of the original buildings are now used by the West London Mental Health (NHS) Trust. The story moves to the village of Hoppaton in Dartmoor, the home of Jonathan Whalley. Christie describes it as 9 miles from Moretonhampstead. There is no such village – but in the village of Pyworthy, near Holsworthy, I discovered an old area called Hoppatown; there’s a farm, and one or two other buildings. I expect this was Christie’s inspiration. Other locations like Market Hanford, and Hatton Chase are purely fictional. When the story ends up in the Italian Tyrol, it takes us to Karersee or the Lago di Carezza, which certainly does exist, as you can see in the lovely picture at the top of this paragraph.

One interesting side-effect of this mammoth task that Poirot set himself is that – I think – the detection, once it has started, is the longest to come to fruition of all Poirot’s cases. It certainly is of the books I have looked at so far. It is a morning in July when Hastings reaches the White Cliffs of Dover at the end of his long sea voyage. It’s mid-January when Hastings gets the telegram to announce that his wife has been kidnapped. Poirot and Hastings meet the Home Secretary and the French Premier at the end of March, and it’s June before the final showdown in the Italian Tyrol. Often you get the feeling that Christie’s books take place over a relatively short period. Well, here’s one exception to that rule.

There are also a number of people who drift in and out of the book, and also several who are referred to, but we don’t meet. Some are people from Poirot’s past. He and Hastings refer to Inspector Giraud of the Sûreté in disapprobatory tones; you might remember their encounter in The Murder on the Links. Countess Rossakoff is clearly an old adversary, for whom Poirot and Hastings have a sneaking regard. Hastings remembers that the Countess masterminded a “particularly smart jewel robbery”. But if you had only read each of Christie’s novels, and none of her magazine publications, reading The Big Four in 1927, you wouldn’t have a clue as to who Countess Rossakoff was. They had indeed come up against the Countess a few years earlier, in the story The Double Clue, which was published in the Sketch magazine in 1923. However, it did not appear in book form in the UK until 1974, as part of the volume Poirot’s Early Cases. So I’m afraid it’s going to be a good while before we get round to reading that one. Pierre Combeau appears to be an old friend of Poirot’s who plays a tiny but crucial role in the story – but he is not referred to in any other books – so this smacks of being another rather limp device of Christie’s in this book.

Mme Olivier has colleagues who sound like they could have been genuinely real people, like Professor Borgoneau; I think they’re completely fictitious. There are also chess champions, whom one could believe really existed – Rubinstein, Lasker and Capablanca. And yes they did! Akiba Rubinstein was a Polish chess Grandmaster at the beginning of the 20th century. Emanuel Lasker was a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher, who was World Chess Champion for 27 years (from 1894 to 1921). José Raul Capablanca was a Cuban chess player, who was World Chess Champion from 1921 to 1927. By combining real and fictional characters in this way, this must have brought the story to life for its first readers in a way we might find hard to appreciate today.

As usual there are some references that might benefit from a little research. In The Murder on the Links, one of the characters is described by a doctor as suffering from brain fever. A few years on, and medical research and knowledge increases at a fast rate in the 1920s just as it does today, and in The Big Four, Hastings suggests another character might be suffering from the same condition. Dr Ridgway retorts: “Brain fever! No such thing as brain fever. An invention of novelists!” In an attempt not to look quite so stupid, Hastings then suggests aphasia, which is a term I hadn’t heard before – but it’s a well-known condition which refers to a combination of a speech and language disorder caused by damage to the brain. Hastings refers to Poirot wanting to send “constant marconigrams”. That wasn’t a term I’d heard before, but it will come as no surprise that it was a telegraphic message sent by Marconi Radio. The term fell out of popular use around 1931.

Hastings chooses not to leave the flat in case the man from the asylum returns, much to Poirot’s scorn. “”Mon ami”, he said, “if you wish you may wait in to put salt on the little bird’s tail, but for me I do not waste my time so.” That reminded me that there was an old song by the Mamas and the Papas when I was a kid called “No salt on her tail”. I didn’t know what it meant then, and up till today I still didn’t! Well apparently, if you put salt on a bird’s tail, it cannot fly away. So now you know. When investigating the disappearance of Halliday in Paris, Japp concludes: “either it’s Apache work, and that’s the end of it – or else it’s voluntary disappearance”. Apache work? Native Americans? No. In the early 20th century Apache was also a term for violent street ruffians in Paris, according to my OED.

Japp again: “it’s too bad of you, M. Poirot. First time I’ve ever known you take a toss.” Take a what? Taking a toss was literally meant to mean being thrown from a horse; so figuratively it means to fail or to suffer a major setback. New to me. And Poirot also refers to chess “tourneys”; it’s just an informal term for a tournament. Poirot observes to Hastings that there could be a number of ways in which the Big Four could “get at them”, to which Hastings replies, “an infernal machine of some kind?” I don’t know about you, but I have definitely come across the phrase “infernal machine” before without really knowing what is meant by it. At that time, it had a specific meaning of an apparatus designed to cause an explosion.

Let’s now consider my usual at-a-glance summary, for The Big Four:

Publication Details: 1927. My copy is a Pan paperback, published in 1980, priced 90p. The cover picture is by an uncredited artist and depicts a Fu-Manchu type figurine. Not that imaginative.

How many pages until the first death: 9. It’s worth noting the incredibly large number of deaths in this book. Some took place before the narrative of the story started, but were still caused, directly or indirectly, by the Big Four. I’m not sure you could give a definite number of murders all in all, but it’s at least thirteen, not including the fate of the big four themselves.

Funny lines out of context: There are two, one right at the beginning, and one right at the end.

“Our conversation was incoherent and inconsequent. Ejaculations, eager questions, incomplete answers, messages from my wife, explanations as to my journey, were all jumbled up together.”

Poirot: “No, I shall retire. Possibly I shall grow vegetable marrows! I might even marry and arrange myself!” He laughed heartily at the idea, but with a touch of embarrassment. I hope…small men always admire big, flamboyant women.”

Memorable characters: Bizarrely, Li Chang Yen is probably the most memorable character – and we never get to meet him! Number 4 is memorable, for the fact that he is the master deceiver and actor – we meet him many times during the course of the book, and he is a most unusual character. The structure of the book means that we don’t get that close to the majority of the characters – but I do have a soft spot for Flossie.

Christie the Poison expert: With so many deaths it’s only to be expected that at least some of them are brought about by poison. Mayerling was killed by being forced to smell Prussic Acid, or Hydrogen Cyanide, to give it its proper name. When Poirot confronts Number 3 he threatens to use curare on her unless she does what he demands. Curare is that rather romantic (if you can use the word in this context) poison, allegedly favoured by the rural tribes of Central and South America for dipping their darts into and murdering their foes at 50 paces. The Yellow Jasmine that kills Gerald Paynter is a source of strychnine-related alkaloids – interestingly that the all wise Poirot didn’t realise the association between the two, but of course Christie did – and there are traces of antimony in Mr Templeton’s soup. So if you haven’t already read the book, I’ve really spoiled it for you now.

Class/social issues of the time:

Even though we know that the representative from the Hanwell asylum was fake, his rough and ready attitude to his “patient” gives us a very insightful look into how mental health was treated in those days: “I’ve got reason to believe you’ve got one of my birds here. Escaped last night, he did…. ‘Armless enough. Persecution mania very acute. Full of secret societies from China that had got him shut up. They’re all the same…. If he was sane, what would he be doing in a lunatic asylum? They all say they’re sane, you know.”

Li Chang Yen is greatly feared and disliked because of the wickedness of the way he treats his enemies and also performs so-called social experiments: “experiments on coolies in which the most revolting disregard for human life and suffering had been shown”. Today we would associate that kind of activity with the Nazis – interesting that this predates the Nazi experiments by at least ten years. Similarly, Number 3’s apparent discovery of how to liberate atomic energy and use it to her advantage comes eighteen years before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

There’s a rather charming sequence when Inspector Meadows becomes rather prim when discussing the scene of the crime with Mr Ingles. “The other man had stepped in the bloodstains, and I traced his bloody footprints – I beg your pardon, sir.” This may be a hark back to Eliza Doolittle’s famed use of the adjective in Shaw’s Pygmalion from 1914. But certainly in the earlier part of the 20th century it was considered a very strong swear word. So Meadows feels he must apologise even when he is using it in its “proper” sense.

From the comfort of our domesticated 21st century homes comes a stark reminder of how far we’ve developed over the last hundred years or so. Poirot deduces that the butcher delivery to Granite Bungalow had happened that morning and not on an earlier day because “I found in the larder a leg of mutton, still frozen. It was Monday, so the meat must have been delivered that morning for if on Saturday, in this hot weather, it would not have remained frozen over Sunday.” Not only did people not have domestic freezers in those days, it was also assumed there’d be no deliveries on a Sunday!

In another just lightly touched upon conversation, we remember another aspect of life in 1927. “Captain Kent was a tall, lean American, with a singularly impassive face which looked as though it had been carved out of wood. “Pleased to meet you, gentlemen,” he murmured, as he shook hands jerkily. Poirot threw an extra log on the fire, and brought forward more easy chairs. I brought out glasses and the whisky and soda. The captain took a deep draught, and expressed appreciation. “Legislation in your country is still sound,” he observed.” American prohibition was in place from 1920 to 1933.

As you would expect, especially with a book that concerns itself with foreign enemies from the far corners of the globe, there are plenty of opportunities for those little xenophobic/ anti-foreigner references that Christie found hard to resist. Paynter’s Chinese servant is suspected of being his murderer, primarily because he is Chinese. “I’d bet on the Chink” says Japp, “…but it’s the motive that beats me. Some heathen revenge or other, I suppose.” Ah Ling’s appearance and speech patterns are precisely what you would expect: “The Chinaman was sent for and appeared, shuffling along, with his eyes cast down, and his pigtail swinging…. “Ah Ling,” said Poirot, “are you sorry your master is dead?” “I welly sorry. He good master.” “You know who kill him?” “I not know. I tell pleeceman if I know.” Poirot’s housekeeper Mrs Pearson announces to Hastings: “a note for you, Captain – brought by a heathen Chinaman.” Hastings commits one of the cardinal sins of racism; when he is reminded that he has met Ingles’ Chinese servant before, he remarks: “Then I had seen him before! Not that I had ever succeeded in being able to distinguish one Chinaman from another.”

It’s not only the Chinese who are in for this treatment. When they are investigating the death of chess champion Gilmour Wilson, Hastings interjects with “You suspect Dr. Savaronoff of putting him out of the way?…” “Hardly that,” said Japp dryly. “I don’t think even a Russian would murder another man in order not to be beaten at chess.” And Hastings also puts the boot in on another group of foreigners: “Extraordinary-looking Slavs were constantly calling to see him, and though vouchsafed no explanation as to these mysterious activities, I realised that he was building some new defence or weapon of opposition with the help of these somewhat repulsive-looking foreigners.” Captain Hastings would never have been suited to the Diplomatic Corps.

Classic denouement: No. It isn’t a whodunit as such, so there’s no real denouement. The identity of Numbers 2, 3 and 4 drift in during the course of the book, so there’s no grand unveiling of their names; the equivalent of the denouement is Poirot and Hastings tracking Numbers 2, 3 and 4 to their lair in Italy, which has a rather unsubtle (but useful) climax.

Happy ending? Yes, in that the world lives to survive another day, our heroes remain unscathed, and Mrs Hastings was never in danger. However, so many of the characters fall by the wayside (mainly through being murdered) that there’s not a great feeling of celebration at the end. Countess Rossakoff is reunited with her child who was left in an orphanage, so her future’s bright.

Did the story ring true? Absolute tosh! No way. It’s pure fantasy from start to finish. Even within the book’s own rules, it’s absolutely impossible that the Big Four would have been deceived into thinking that Poirot was dead. But the coincidences and double-crossings are outrageous, and the ability of Number 4 to appear and reappear in constant disguises without detection is beyond a joke. And as for the appearance of Achille Poirot…!

Overall satisfaction rating: 5/10. It’s entertaining, but nonsense.

Thanks for reading my blog of The Big Four and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment in the space below. Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge we move forward to 1928, and another Hercule Poirot book, The Mystery of the Blue Train. I remember enjoying this a great deal when I was young, but I can’t remember whodunit, or what it was they might have done! So I’m looking forward to rediscovering it. I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!

The Real Chrisparkle meets M. R. Carey!

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I recently had the pleasure to talk to celebrated author M R Carey about his newest novel, Fellside, that was published today. Hope you enjoy our chat!

RealChrisSparkle: Greetings gentle reader! And welcome back M R Carey to the pages of The Real Chrisparkle blog! I say “welcome back” because this isn’t the first time you have graced us with your presence, is it?

MRC: Thanks for having me! No it isn’t the first time I’ve been here. It’s the first time I’ve been here under my own name though.

RCS: So it was you pretending to be Adam Blake! I knew it all along. Well thanks for taking some time from your busy schedule to talk bookish things. Since your appearance as Adam, your career has continued to blossom with the very successful Girl With All The Gifts. You must be dumbstruck at how well it has done?

MRC: Yeah, very much so. I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop, in some ways. I’ve been writing for thirty years or so now, and doing it for a living for about half that time. The reception that The Girl With All the Gifts got wasn’t like anything in my previous experience. It’s not just about the sales figures, either. It’s the fact that I was able to write the movie screenplay, and the fact that the movie got made. That one story has completely changed my life, in all kinds of ways.

RCS: It’s amazing how just one book can turn things around! And you mention the movie, I’ve read that it’s going to open on 9th September, is that the official date?

MRC: Yeah, Warner’s confirmed that a few weeks ago. Very exciting! It’s actually somewhat earlier than I was expecting. The unofficial word was “some time in September or October” but with the rider that October was more likely. Now suddenly there’s an actual date and it’s only five months away. It’s hard to believe. There’s a part of me that still finds this whole sequence of events implausible enough to be a prolonged hallucination that I’m having while I’m slumped on the floor of a bar somewhere.

RCS: I guess if the barman jogs you awake with the words “come on mate, haven’t you got a premiere to go to?” you’ll know it’s true! But what’s really at the top of your agenda today is the fact that your latest book, Fellside, is just out. Would you like to tell us a bit of what it’s about? Don’t give away any surprises!

MRC: It’s a ghost story set in a women’s prison. The protagonist, Jessica Moulson, is a drug addict who accidentally kills a child. She’s high at the time, and trying to escape from an abusive relationship by burning down her flat with her violent boyfriend in it. The boyfriend gets away clean, but the young boy who lives in the flat above gets caught in the blaze and dies.

Jess is tried for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in Fellside, a privately owned “titan” prison on the Yorkshire moors. But she judges herself a lot more harshly than that. She feels that she doesn’t deserve to live after what she has done. So she decides to commit suicide.

But killing yourself in prison isn’t easy, especially if you’ve been put on suicide watch. Jess chooses to go on hunger strike, because the prison authorities can’t intervene to stop that process.

But when she’s about to die she has a vision of the ghost of the boy she killed. He saves her from dying, by means that seem to be supernatural and inexplicable. It seems that he has plans for her, and that she might have a chance to earn herself some kind of redemption if she can figure out what the ghost wants her to do and do it.

But there’s a complicating factor. Jess comes to the attention of the woman who runs all the rackets in Fellside – Harriet Grace. And Grace has plans for her too.

RCS: I was lucky enough to obtain an early copy and have read it cover to cover, and – most unlike me – I really was unable to put it down. It’s such an exciting read – in fact, probably one of the most exciting books I have ever read. Did it take you long to write?

MRC: It took a lot longer than GIRL. About eighteen months, but of course I was working on other projects for some of that time. I went through five drafts, effectively trying out different versions of Jess’s character and voice until I hit on the one that seemed best. It was hard. She’s a very difficult character to sympathise with, but in the end the story fails if you don’t. So it was important to present her strongly from the outset and to find an effective way of staging the reveals that make us revise our judgement of her as the story goes on.

RCS: I can appreciate that – and the way that the character develops through the story is definitely one of the driving factors that makes you want to keep reading. What came first in the creative process – was it wanting to write a book set in a prison, or wanting to write about someone accused of murder? Or some other aspect of the book?

MRC: I think there were two things that were in my head when I set out. One of them was the setting. I really like enclosed settings in which some of the normal rules of social interaction are suspended. The army base in GIRL was one, and obviously Fellside Prison is another.

The other strand that was in there right from the start was addiction. I wanted to write a story about an addict fighting against her own cravings, fighting to find herself and redefine herself. I’ve had my own (mostly trivial) brushes with addiction, but I’ve also known many addicts. Some of the people who have been most important in my life have either fought against addiction and won or been destroyed by it. So I’ve thought for a long time that it was a theme I should visit and try to explore.

RCS: That’s fascinating and the exploration of addiction is something that frequently recurs in the book – and it pulls no punches where it comes to the harm it can cause. As far as the enclosed setting is concerned, I don’t think you’ve ever been to prison but I do know you used to work in a school – do you think prison and schools are similar in some ways?

MRC: There are obviously some strong similarities. Two groups sharing the space, one of whom is empowered while the other is mostly powerless – at least in terms of defining the rules of engagement. Prison is a total environment, though. You’re there all the time and there’s no getting away from it. So a relationship that sours or a situation that the institution sees as problematic can spill over into every aspect of your life. There’s no refuge. No way – or almost no way – to assert your own definition of yourself against the institution’s definition of you.

Another huge similarity, though, is that both schools and prisons offer roles, and behaviour sets that go with the roles. By enacting the role you can find yourself absorbing it, accepting it. You carry out the behaviours you think are expected of you, vaguely reassured by the fact that it’s the role, not your real nature, that’s in play. But of course we are what we do. You converge with the role. You become that aspect of yourself more and more. Or at least that’s the danger.

That’s another reason that enclosed and constrained settings fascinate me. I think they create pressures on our sense of self, and it’s interesting to see how people respond to that.

RCS: Certainly the traditional roles of, say, prisoner and prison officer are questioned in your book. Sometimes it’s not necessarily the person with the institutional authority who’s in the driving seat. I’m not sure Harriet Grace would ever have been the kind of person who meekly did what she was told!

MRC: No, that’s true. And partly that’s a case of the individual will, of course. But partly, too, it’s a side effect of how total institutions work. You could say that Grace chooses a role out of the many that are waiting there to be selected. There’s a point where one of the other characters, Shannon McBride, tells us about Grace’s early life, and how she escaped from being bullied by becoming a bully. She doesn’t change or question the paradigm, she just moves. It’s a confidence trick. Look, I can’t be a victim because you can plainly see that I have victims of my own…

I think this is something we see at a lot of different points in the book. People either getting trapped in a definition of themselves or rebelling and renegotiating it. The biggest contrast to Grace is probably Salazar, who allows himself to be trapped by one bad decision – and by fear – into playing a role that he absolutely hates.

RCS: Yes I admit I felt rather sorry for Salazar, even though he’s his own worst enemy – but that’s part of the human condition – frequently we are! I guessed from the start things wouldn’t turn out well for him, although I couldn’t predict what actually happened! And on that note, can I ask you about the plotting? The story twists and turns like a twisty-turny thing. Did you always know where it was going, or did the characters surprise you by taking you in different paths from what you expected?

MRC: I did what I always do, which is to start out with a very detailed plan but then to jump ship when a better idea came along! I think it’s probably like this for most writers. A novel is a semi-organic thing, like a cyborg. Some parts of it are built to high tolerances out of factory-hardened steel. Other bits are made of spit and sawdust. But the great thing about having a plan to start with is that it allows you to do precisely that – to deviate and experiment.

I think I had a strong sense of the journey each character would have to make, so I knew – in general terms – where they would end up. The big reveals, likewise, were fixed from the start. But some things just happened because they happened, which is part of what makes writing so exhilarating. Shannon wasn’t even mentioned in the plan, but at a certain point I pushed her into this role as Fellside’s storyteller and it seemed to work really well. So she ended up being very important. She’s the one who lets us see inside Grace’s head. She’s also the custodian of Jess’s story, although she changes it many times as her perceptions of Jess change.

RCS: That’s fascinating, I saw Shannon as rather like “Rumour” in an old pre-Shakespearean tragedy. I sense you’re rather fond of Shannon, she developed very nicely through the book! Are there any other characters of whom you are especially fond or proud that they turned out like they did? I liked the solicitor’s assistant Levine, falling for his client – albeit a rather imaginary version of his client. He’s wannabe noble but full of human failings. Are there any characters who you’d want to go for a drink with?

MRC: I liked all of them, including the really dysfunctional and scary ones! I’m very fond of Salazar. He was a challenge to write because he’s so passive and weak-willed for most of the story, facilitating what the more brutal and unprincipled characters do by not standing against them. But underneath that he has a very powerful desire to do the right thing, and we follow his progress from this position of abject surrender to a very brave decision that is still, somehow, a falling down rather than a standing up.

And I enjoyed writing both Patience DiMarta and Andrea Corcoran – people who are quietly doing their best in this hideous and messed up environment.

In terms of going out for a few pints… you know, I’d probably go for the other lawyer, Brian Pritchard. He’s a bit of a grandstander, but he’s shrewd and in his own understated way an idealist. I suspect he’d be good company.

RCS: He probably earns well too, so I’m sure he’d be generous when it was his round! As in GIRL, at the heart of the book you have a strong female character with an almost unbreakable bond with a child. Is this something we should examine psychologically about yourself? Would you like to get on my couch and tell me about your childhood?

MRC: Oh man, would I not like that!

My childhood was frankly weird. There was a fair amount of deprivation – we were very poor – and there was a fair amount of what I can only call crazy shit. My brother Dave said to me once that the scariest thing about our childhood was the sense that nobody was really in control, and I absolutely agree.

But it was a very loving family. Precarious, almost falling apart, perpetually in crisis, but loving all the same. And I think those contradictions ricochet around in everything I write. Families can save us or destroy us. Can save us AND destroy us. Parents build us up and break us down. They make it possible for us to be what we are, and yet they set the limits too.

I think what I really keep picking at is the extent to which we make our own identities, and the extent to which our relationships with other people can help us or hinder us in that process. Nothing is as fulfilling or as important as love, and parental love is important at the point in our lives where we’re still learning who we are. But it’s almost inevitable that at some point you’ll have to fight against the way your parents see you. The definition of yourself that they want to give you. Otherwise you’ll find yourself becoming some edited and foreshortened form of yourself.

RCS: Thank you for your honesty sir! I completely agree that there comes that point when you have to fight your parents’ definition of who you are and take your own course in life, which is almost certainly not the same course that they had planned for you! Jess’s bond with Alex is, at first, very domineering, making those assumptions about who he really is, and what will be best for him, just in the same way you suggested your parents did for you and certainly mine did for me. Jess is certainly guilty of projecting her own fears, fantasies and desires onto Alex, moulding him into something she wants him to be, but that he basically isn’t. This also happens to Lizzie Earnshaw who’s been made into a big bad bitch but is actually as nice as pie deep down. It all goes back to what you said earlier about defining your roles and your character.

MRC: Yeah, absolutely – and sometimes that’s a very hard thing to do. Every relationship changes you. Everything you do often enough and consistently enough changes you. There’s no clear dividing line between you and the world, there’s just a permeable membrane. The trick is to maintain enough awareness of those processes to have some control over them.

RCS: There’s a very stark contrast between the gritty realism of life in the prison with the supernatural friendship between Jess and Alex. It must have been very difficult to find the right way to express their relationship, when there’s not much in the way of “reality” taking place! How did you go about finding that voice?

MRC: It was the toughest balancing act in the whole process of writing the book, and I think part of the answer is that I cheated. Once I’ve created the two worlds – Fellside, in all its grim solidity, and the dream world which is about as solid as a memory of smelling candy floss – I immediately start to interweave them. As soon as you have that moment when Jess feels Alex’s hand in hers as she’s standing on the walkway outside her cell, you have a kind of palimpsest. She’s always got a foot in both camps, and everything – arguably – is simultaneously real and not real. Or at least everything has consequences in the other world. Jess and Alex’s dream journeys raise echoes in the minds of the Goodall inmates, and the realities of life in Fellside shape and inform the things that they encounter in the dream world.

There are other forms of cheating going on too, of course, that I can’t discuss without major spoilers. But it seemed crucial to me that we should both believe and invest in the relationship between Jess and Alex in all of its stages. They help each other to survive, in real and measurable ways. That’s the core of the story. And it doesn’t stop being real (or at least I hope it doesn’t) when we realise that they’ve been fundamentally mistaken about each other.

RCS: No, absolutely, the two characters are completely interdependent and that bond is completely real, right through to the very end – which we’d better not discuss as that would really ruin it for anyone who hasn’t read it! In amongst all the greed, power, corruption, injustice, and revenge, it strikes me as being a very moral tale. The baddies certainly get their come-uppance, which feels very satisfactory for the reader. And there’s definitely a religious nuance going on there too. Is it fair to say the name of Grace was chosen with a certain degree of irony?

MRC: Yeah, very much so. My original working title for the novel was State Of Grace. It’s a story about redemption, and about how far redemption is possible. And of course in that narrative Grace has some of the attributes of Mephistopheles, pulling Jess away from her goals and from her attempt to keep faith with Alex.

But I don’t know that I’d call it a moral tale. Good people get hurt and ruined too. I remember reading Kenneth Muir’s introduction to the Arden King Lear back when I was a student. Sorry, I’m not comparing myself with Shakespeare, here, I’m just borrowing an argument. Muir pointed out that by the end of the play the villains have been destroyed but they’ve taken almost all the decent characters with them. It’s as though the universe has been through some huge convulsion to purge itself of something terrible – but the violence of that purging hits everybody, leaves them all dead or walking wounded.

Having said that, there is certainly a sense of a better order starting to emerge at Fellside at the close of the book. It doesn’t just go back to the status quo.

RCS: There’s definitely a better order at the end of the book – Fortinbras has come on board and taken things under control! I see why you don’t feel it’s moral, and for sure some of the decent characters don’t survive unscathed. But they were sacrificed so that the future would be brighter. Something was certainly rotten in the state of Fellside – sorry for Hamleting up your Lear allusion! So what’s next on the cards for you, now that Fellside is out. Reclining on a chaise-longue and being fed grapes?

MRC: That would be nice! Actually I’ve never been busier in my life. I’m finishing up the next novel, Bedlam Bridge, which I’ve got to deliver in April, and at the same time I’m working on a lot of screenwriting projects which I’m trying to juggle so that I don’t lose momentum on any of them. One of them is a movie version of Fellside, which I’m hoping to get off the ground with the same production company that did The Girl with All the Gifts, and with Colm as director again.

I still write comics, too. I’ve just finished volume one of Highest House, the epic fantasy I’m writing for French publisher Glenat. Which means I should now be planning volume two…

RCS: …and I’m guessing you aren’t yet?! Wow you certainly are busy. A movie version of Fellside would be great, I can already imagine some perfect casting for the roles! And if Bedlam Bridge needs to be ready this month I’d better let you get on! Thanks very much for your time Mike, congratulations on a brilliant book, and best of luck for all your future endeavours!

MRC: Thanks to you too, RCS. It’s been a real pleasure talking.

Later edit: Bedlam Bridge, which Mike talks about here as being his next up and coming novel was of course retitled The Boy on the Bridge, the much admired prequel to The Girl with All the Gifts.

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)

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STOP PRESS: The Agatha Christie Challenge is now available as a book in two revised volumes – details at the end of this blog post!

In which we become reacquainted with Christie’s most renowned detective, Hercule Poirot, and witness him solve the murder of Roger Ackroyd, as narrated by Dr Sheppard, in the absence of Poirot’s usual narrator, Captain Hastings. And, despite the enormous difficulty in doing so, I’ve written this blog post so that you can still read it without finding out whodunit!

It’s been a fascinating nostalgia trip to re-read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It makes me feel a little deprived of one of life’s most exciting surprises, as, just before I read this as a lad, a “friend” told me who the murderer was. I still think that was one of the rottenest things to do to anyone. I read it of course, but there was no sense of mystery for me. Many critics and observers cite this book as Christie’s masterpiece. In 2013, the British Crime Writers’ Association voted it the best crime novel ever. Because I’ve always known whodunit, I find it hard to imagine reading it without knowing. Whenever I read it, I always feel that the identity of the murderer is, in fact, pretty obvious. But that’s the baggage I bring with me from my childhood, and I guess I must be mistaken, or else the book wouldn’t be held in the great esteem that it enjoys.

Christie dedicated the book to “To Punkie, who likes an orthodox detective story, murder, inquest, and suspicion falling on every one in turn!” Punkie was the family nickname for Christie’s big sister Margaret, and in fact it was Margaret who originally inspired Agatha to write The Mysterious Affair at Styles. However, it was her brother-in-law, James Watts, to whom she had dedicated The Secret of Chimneys, who actually gave her the inspiration for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Coincidentally, Lord Mountbatten, too, had written to Christie in 1924 suggesting a similar storyline and structure, although she was so overworked at the time that she forgot to reply.

So welcome back, Hercule Poirot, we’ve missed you. We last saw you dealing with all those short story cases in Poirot Investigates, two years previously; for a full length novel we had to go back three years for The Murder on the Links. Christie has now bundled Hastings off with his lady love to make a new life for himself in The Argentine, as it used to be called. We now have an image of Poirot, missing his old pal, having moved from his London digs that they shared, now retired to the village of King’s Abbot, where he devotes his life to growing vegetable marrows. Honestly; is there anything more unlikely? Poirot, who thrives on the psychology of people’s brains, whom we last saw avidly reading the gossip and celebrity magazines, whose life has been a celebration and a triumph of the power of the little grey cells – settling down to a village where he spends the day grubbing about in the earth growing vegetables? Christie has always pointed out how fastidious he is; can you imagine Poirot accumulating garden dirt under his fingernails? No. It’s never going to happen. So either it’s a complete lie – which I’m not sure is right as I believe Poirot’s apparent affection for marrows recurs later in Christie’s oeuvre – or it’s a complete miscalculation of his personality. Whatever, as soon as crime rears its ugly head in King’s Abbot, Poirot doesn’t give another moment’s thought to his prize crop.

Of course there is no such place in the United Kingdom as King’s Abbot; but, with Christie based in the south-west, maybe the name was inspired by a mixture of Newton Abbot and Kingsbridge. There’s no Cranchester either, not that it matters. What’s more important to the story is that Poirot needs a replacement for Hastings, and one turns up just perfectly in the shape of Dr Shepperd, who takes on the mantle of being Poirot’s scribe. He even draws us a couple of plans of room layouts to help our understanding, just like Hastings used to do. Poirot takes him under his wing and into his confidence with surprising alacrity, and for most of the book, Shepperd seems to just follow him around, occasionally revealing how impressed he is with the old man’s powers of deduction, but primarily there in order to feed Poirot with local insights and backgrounds about the characters. Like Hastings, Shepperd isn’t a particularly nice man, I don’t think; he has a rather unpleasant view on suicide: “women, in my experience, if they once reach the determination to commit suicide, usually wish to reveal the state of mind that led to the fatal action. They covet the limelight”. He does though, have a rather cynical sense of humour too: “lots of women buy their clothes in Paris, and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands”. He doesn’t hold back at describing the worst aspects of a character he doesn’t like; of Ackroyd’s butler Parker, he says “what a fat, smug, oily face the man had, and surely there was something decidedly shifty in his eye”.

He also doesn’t hesitate to pick Poirot up on his poor use of English – not something many people would dare to do, I suggest. “Is there anything else that I can tell you?” inquired Mr Hammond. “I thank you, no,” said Poirot, rising. “All my excuses for having deranged you.” “Not at all, not at all”. “The word derange,” I remarked, when we were outside again, “is applicable to mental disorder only”. “Ah!” cried Poirot, “never will my English be quite perfect. A curious language. I should then have said disarranged, n’est-ce pas?” “Disturbed is the word you had in mind”. “I thank you, my friend. The word exact, you are zealous for it.” I must say I was personally very pleased with that exchange, because Poirot’s misuse of the word had really annoyed my own sense of language. Interestingly, it’s only Caroline who criticises Shepperd in the book: “take James here – weak as water, if I weren’t about to look after him”. Christie was later to observe that the rather meddlesome Caroline was her favourite character in the book, and that elements of her were like a prototype for Miss Marple, who would be hitting the shelves in a few years’ time.

But where the book becomes delightfully surreal and rewarding, is when Shepperd confesses to Poirot that, just like Hastings, although he wouldn’t have known it, he has been writing up the case every night. It’s when you realise that the book you are reading is actually the account that Shepperd is talking about – even to the detail that he has just finished the twentieth chapter, and you look back and realise that yes, that is the part of the story that Shepperd has written up so far, that you feel like you are almost part of a book within the book. You feel that, by reading thus far, you are probably the first person ever to have read those words – because, in real time, it clearly hasn’t been published yet. This gives a strong sense of involvement and immediacy. From then on you really imagine Shepperd at his late-night desk, catching up on the day’s events and getting them down on paper. In a way, the book takes on the extra dimension of being a creative piece of work that examines its own creative process, which I always find very stimulating. Near the end it really turns itself on its head when Shepperd actually starts to critique himself; really most inventive writing that’s a delight to read. And there’s a certain symmetry to his narrative which leaves you with a sense of balanced satisfaction at the end too.

Certainly the book as a whole is a gripping read. There are several moments of exquisite tension and suspense, plenty of detailed plotting for the amateur sleuth reading it to lose themselves in, bags of clues, likely suspects, unlikely suspects, and even a highly suspicious brand new character brought in with only about sixty pages before the end. Shepperd is a great narrator, the domestic staff who at first appear rather nameless and insignificant, unexpectedly grow in importance as the story develops; and Poirot is on fine form as he quickly eclipses the rather dull and underwritten police officers, expounding what may appear at first to be general theories but which are in fact targeted examinations of particular suspects. As usual, he has to run the gauntlet of the police accusing him of senility: “Then a grin overspread [Raglan’s] weaselly countenance and he tapped his forehead gently. “Bit gone here,” he said. “I’ve thought so for some time. Poor old chap, so that’s why he had to give up and come down here. In the family, very likely. He’s got a nephew who’s quite off his crumpet”. Not the most enlightened times when it comes to mental health, were they?

If you’ve read any of my previous Agatha Christie Challenge blogs, gentle reader, you’ll know I like to convert any financial values mentioned to what they would be worth today, just to give you a greater insight into the comparative size of the sums we’re talking about. There’s only one real instance of it in this book – the sum of £20,000. This is the amount of money that Miss Flora Ackroyd says her Uncle Roger has left her in his will. That sum is worth about £850,000 today – no wonder she feels like all her Christmasses have come at once.

As usual there are a few references and idiomatic use of language that might merit a little further investigation. I fully recognised the first one: in the fifth paragraph of the first chapter, the irrepressibly snooping Caroline is given the motto of the mongoose family: “Go and Find Out”. That is a reference to Rudyard Kipling’s Rikki Tikki Tavi, the perpetually curious and nosey companion of young Teddy. One of the most enjoyable short stories I know – if you’ve never met Rikki Tikki Tavi, you really should read his victorious tale.

After that my confidence with Christie’s references gets weaker. “I don’t know what Mrs Cecil Ackroyd thought of the Ferrars affair when it came on the tapis”. On the what? That’s French for carpet, isn’t it? Well yes it is, but apparently “on the tapis” is an obsolete phrase meaning “under consideration”. Yes, I don’t understand why it should mean that either. Flora and Blunt are looking in the water and think they can see a gold brooch. “Perhaps it’s a crown,” suggested Flora. “Like the one Melisande saw in the water.” “Melisande,” said Blunt reflectively – “she’s in an opera isn’t she?” Yes, she is, by Debussy, but originally she was in the play “Pelléas and Mélisande” by Maurice Maeterlinck, first performed in 1893. All sorts of misfortunes befall Melisande, but none of them really bear any resemblance to what happens in the book – so it’s a bit of a classical garden path moment. In what would now feel quite a trendy observation, Poirot is quick to recognise the tools of the drug addict and remarks that the goose quill found in the summer house must lead to the presence of “snow”. That’s cocaine of course, sometimes (I believe) snow refers to particularly fine powdered cocaine – and cocaine was a very aspirational drug back in the 1920s. “I’ve been every kind of fool,” said Blunt abruptly. “Rum conversation we’ve been having. Like one of those Danish plays”. Well, your guess is as good as mine there. He can’t be thinking Ibsen – he’s Norwegian. Strindberg? – he’s Swedish. All the big Danish names at the time wrote novels or poetry. Weird. I don’t suppose he’s thinking of Hamlet?

And now it’s time for my usual at-a-glance summary, for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd:

Publication Details: 1926. My copy is a Fontana paperback, published in July 1979, twentieth impression, priced 25p. The cover painting is by Tom Adams, and, on the whole, I think it’s fairly lousy.

How many pages until the first death: 34; unless you count the death of Mrs Ferrars, which gets reported in the very first line of the book. However, it’s not really the death of Mrs Ferrars that we’re investigating, although it is relevant to the murder of Roger Ackroyd. And of course, because of the title, the reader spends the first 34 pages fully aware that Ackroyd is going to croak at some point.

Funny lines out of context:
I don’t know whether Christie had turned a corner with the seriousness of this book – generally speaking there are far fewer little moments of humour here than in most of her other stories. As a result there’s not many funny lines to be enjoyed. The only one that stood out for me was when Charles Kent was infuriated by Poirot and called him a “little foreign cock duck”. What a bitch.

Memorable characters:
I’m not sure that many of the characters are that well delineated to make them memorable as such. Caroline Shepperd is amusingly nosey, but her brother doesn’t give too much of his personality away in his narrative. Parker the butler is creepy in a slightly eerie way.

Christie the Poison expert:
Although Roger Ackroyd is killed by an antique silver dagger (this is a very posh murder), poisons do still play an active role. Mrs Ferrars was suspected of poisoning her husband, and she herself commits suicide by taking an overdose of veronal. Veronal, of itself, was not a poison – in fact it was the first commercially available barbiturate, sold as a sleeping aid from 1903 until the 1950s. Taking about four times the recommended dose though was enough to kill you.

It is Ackroyd’s housekeeper Miss Russell who corners Shepperd on the subject of poisons. “[She] asked me if it was true that there were certain poisons so rare as to baffle detection. “Ah!” I said, “You’ve been reading detective stories… The essence of a detective story…is to have a rare poison – if possible something from South America, that nobody has ever heard of – something that one obscure tribe of savages use to poison their arrows with. Death is instantaneous and Western science is powerless to detect it. Is that the kind of thing you mean?” “Yes. Is there really such a thing?” I shook my head regretfully. “I’m afraid there isn’t. There’s curare, of course.” I told her a good deal about curare but she seemed to have lost interest once more. She asked me if I had any in my poison cupboard, and when I replied in the negative I fancy I fell in her estimation.”

Class/social issues of the time:

There’s a nice dig at vegetarianism, which had really hit public awareness about ten to fifteen years earlier. Shepperd (or, I suppose, Christie) gives us an amusing description of the time when he invites Poirot to join his sister Caroline and him for lunch but Cook has only prepared two chops. In order to avoid a scene, Caroline pretends to be vegetarian. “She descanted ecstatically on the delights of nut cutlets (which I am quite sure she has never tasted) and ate a Welsh rarebit with gusto and frequent cutting remarks as to the dangers of ‘flesh’ foods”. Later we discover that Poirot wasn’t fooled for one moment.

There’s the usual anti-foreigner invective every so often from Christie, not only with Kent’s rather absurd little insult I mentioned earlier, but also from Mrs Ackroyd, in her annoyance at what she sees as Poirot’s interference. “Why should this little upstart of a foreigner make a fuss? A most ridiculous-looking creature he is too – just like a comic Frenchman in a revue.” I think if I were Poirot I’d be much more insulted than he tends to be.

Classic denouement: Yes and no. Poirot sets up the big meeting with all the suspects present but leaves it with a cliffhanger, so that all the suspects (bar the murderer) leave the room before the truth is revealed. As a result, there’s no big shock in front of a room full of people, as it were, although the final surprise is still extremely exciting and suspenseful.

Happy ending? Not especially. Justice isn’t entirely seen to be done. The murderer escapes trial, although he does not get off scot-free. A number of people will feel very unhappy in the weeks, months and years after the book ends. Additionally, a theft of money appears not to be followed up and the thief doesn’t seem to carry the can at all. It’s all a rather dark story from that perspective.

Did the story ring true? Yes! For me everything fits very believably into place, and although it’s a bold and ambitious crime, Christie fairly presents us with all the clues. In addition, this book seems to rely on chance coincidence much less than some of her others.

Overall satisfaction rating: 10/10. Who am I to disagree with the British Crime Writers’ Association?

Thanks for reading my blog of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment – but don’t tell us whodunit! Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge we move forward to 1927, and another Hercule Poirot mystery, The Big Four. I can’t remember a thing about it, so I’m looking forward to rediscovering it. I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, please read it too then we can compare notes! Happy sleuthing!

If you enjoy my Agatha Christie Challenge, did you know it is now available as a book? In two revised volumes, it contains all my observations about Christie’s books and short stories, and also includes all her plays! The perfect birthday or Christmas gift, you can buy it from Amazon – the links are here and here!