Tag Archives: Agatha Christie Challenge

The Agatha Christie Challenge – The Secret Adversary (1922)

Posted on by

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 Tommy and Tuppence, who form The Young Adventurers Ltd, and through a combination of hard work and good luck prevent the evil Mr Brown from capturing secret documents that could cause a world war. Don’t worry if you haven’t read the book yet, its big secret is the identity of Mr Brown and I’m hardly likely to tell you that now, am I?

So, greetings to Mr Thomas Beresford and Miss Prudence Cowley, who, as Tommy and Tuppence, are full of daring and spirit, consider everything a jolly jape and a wizard wheeze, were bred to enjoy the finest things in life but are down on their uppers and haven’t a bean to scrape together, old bean. But with Agatha Christie’s appreciation of post-war youngsters getting their act together and plundering their dressing-up box of resourcefulness, T&T are bound to succeed right from the start.

Having chosen an old man as detective in her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie went for a completely different tack with this her second. Whilst Poirot is well into his seventies, T&T are described as having “united ages” which “would certainly not have totalled forty-five”. They’d both survived the First World War; Tommy, heroically injured in both France and Mesopotamia, “stuck in Egypt till the Armistice happened”, finally demobbed and job-hunting ever since; and Tuppence, a VAD nurse and a driver in London, a fine example of an upper middle class gel doing her bit. They’re frightfully good at the smart and swanky small talk of the era, and have a very playful relationship, which Christie conveys with a great sense of fun and animation in their conversations. Like John Cavendish in Styles, Tommy describes his late mother as “the mater”, and they both come from good, if impoverished, stock, with Tuppence’s father being an Archdeacon – although Tommy has a rich, but distanced, uncle. It’s clear that Christie really loves her new characters – and she writes about them so enthusiastically that we fall in love with them too.

In her autobiography, Christie reveals the trigger for writing this book. “Two people were talking at a table nearby, discussing somebody called Jane Fish. It struck me as a most entertaining name. I went away with the name in my mind. Jane Fish. That, I thought, would make a good beginning to a story – a name overheard at a tea-shop – an unusual name, so that whoever heard it remembered it. A name like Jane Fish – or perhaps Jane Finn would be even better. I settled for Jane Finn – and started writing straight away.” Inspired by the notion that overhearing one name can set a chain of events going that could overthrow civilisation as we know it, Christie embarks on a sequence of outrageously far-fetched coincidences necessary to set up the story. Let’s consider them.

Coincidence #1, that Jane Finn, a name plucked out of the obscure recesses of Tuppence’s brain, is the name of the girl who was given the secret paperwork.
Coincidence #2, that Tuppence knew intimately the pensionnat in Paris where Whittington wants to send her (Madame Colombier’s in the Avenue de Neuilly).
Coincidence #3, that Tommy knows “Mr Carter” from his days in the Intelligence Corps in France.
Coincidence #4, that of all the Jane Finns in the world, both Carter and Hersheimmer – in reply to Tommy’s vague newspaper advertisement – are thinking of the same Jane Finn as T&T and Mr Brown. I know that it’s almost 100 years ago, but, as an indication, I did a little research and there are currently 28 Jane Finns on Facebook alone.

Now that IS a coincidence. Perhaps the plotline didn’t seem quite so fanciful back in 1922. By associating it, on the very first page, with the real-life story of the sinking of the Lusitania, just seven years before the book was published, and still vivid in many readers’ minds, maybe Christie gave it a sense of reality that it lacks today.

Something The Secret Adversary has in plentiful common with The Mysterious Affair at Styles is detail. In that first novel, the detail was in the plethora of clues that dripped from each page so that you could barely read a paragraph without having to go back and check up on all the new information you had amassed before progressing further. In Adversary, it’s all about adventure and activity. No pausing for reflection here, no time to consider what Poirot’s little grey cells might make of the situation; it’s all out action and hurtling from scrape to scrape. Christie’s dedication tells you precisely what she wants the reader to get out of this book: “To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure”. That feels a bit patronising to me; but as we know from the present day, our war veterans can, like Tommy, frequently find it difficult to find suitable employment, and for most people in the early 1920s, money was very tight, and I guess they didn’t have that much excitement in their lives. So Christie let her imagination run riot and came up with this fantasy of a crime novel, where our heroes hide behind curtains, pretend to be domestic servants, scour cliff-edges for hidden documents and play up against Bolsheviks and other foreign agitators, all in the cause of tracking down the elusive Jane Finn and uncovering the true identity of Mr Brown.

And all this is set in the context of the growing relationship between Tommy and Tuppence, which Christie amusingly and rather tenderly allows to blossom under their very noses without them quite realising it. As the days pass and Tuppence hasn’t heard from Tommy (the last we read was that he had a sudden blow on the head), she gently realises how much she misses him. It starts off with her not enjoying the adventure so much without him: “for the first time, Tuppence felt doubtful of success. While they had been together she had never questioned it for a minute. Although she was accustomed to take the lead, and to pride herself on her quick-wittedness, in reality she had relied upon Tommy more than she realized at the time. There was something so eminently sober and clear-headed about him, his common sense and soundness of vision were so unvarying, that without him Tuppence felt much like a rudderless ship.”

Yet she makes excuses for how she feels. “”Little fool,” she would apostrophize herself, “don’t snivel. Of course you’re fond of him. You’ve known him all your life. But there’s no need to be sentimental about it.”” Thirty pages later, she still hasn’t heard from him: “Her eyes fell on a small snapshot of Tommy that stood on her dressing-table in a shabby frame. For a moment she struggled for self-control, and then abandoning all presence, she held it to her lips and burst into a fit of sobbing. “Oh, Tommy, Tommy,” she cried, “I do love you so—and I may never see you again….” At the end of five minutes Tuppence sat up, blew her nose, and pushed back her hair. “That’s that,” she observed sternly. “Let’s look facts in the face. I seem to have fallen in love—with an idiot of a boy who probably doesn’t care two straws about me.””

Meanwhile, how was Tommy faring? Circumstances require that he and Julius work together a lot, and when he discovers that Julius has proposed to Tuppence, Tommy has to undergo a lot of self-examination. “Tuppence and Julius! Well, why not? Had she not lamented the fact that she knew no rich men? Had she not openly avowed her intention of marrying for money if she ever had the chance? Her meeting with the young American millionaire had given her the chance—and it was unlikely she would be slow to avail herself of it. She was out for money. She had always said so. Why blame her because she had been true to her creed? Nevertheless, Tommy did blame her. He was filled with a passionate and utterly illogical resentment. It was all very well to SAY things like that—but a REAL girl would never marry for money. Tuppence was utterly cold-blooded and selfish, and he would be delighted if he never saw her again! And it was a rotten world!”

But when it looks as though the gang have murdered Tuppence, Tommy is on high alert with distress. “”Well, I’m darned!” said Julius. “Little Tuppence. She sure was the pluckiest little girl——” But suddenly something seemed to crack in Tommy’s brain. He rose to his feet. “Oh, get out! You don’t really care, damn you! You asked her to marry you in your rotten cold-blooded way, but I LOVED her. I’d have given the soul out of my body to save her from harm. I’d have stood by without a word and let her marry you, because you could have given her the sort of time she ought to have had, and I was only a poor devil without a penny to bless himself with. But it wouldn’t have been because I didn’t care!” “See here,” began Julius temperately. “Oh, go to the devil! I can’t stand your coming here and talking about ‘little Tuppence.’ Go and look after your cousin. Tuppence is my girl! I’ve always loved her, from the time we played together as kids. We grew up and it was just the same. I shall never forget when I was in hospital, and she came in in that ridiculous cap and apron! It was like a miracle to see the girl I loved turn up in a nurse’s kit——”” And so on. I think it’s fair to say, it’s love.

As usual when reading an early Christie, I found myself checking back to the dictionary and other online references to understand some of her words that have fallen out of general use. Tommy and Tuppence first bump into each at Dover Street tube station – where is that? I can reveal that it became Green Park station in 1933. Tuppence is wearing “a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair”. I’m sure if you’re into fashion you understand that, but I’d never heard of a toque before – it’s a small hat without a projecting brim. On another occasion, Tommy interrupts her silent chain of thought, much to her annoyance, to which Tommy retorts “Shades of Pelmanism!” The Pelman in question was one Christopher Louis Pelman, founder of the Pelman Institute for the Scientific Development of Mind, Memory and Personality in London, in 1899. Pelmanism was his system of memory training, which also involved a game where you had to memorise the positions of matching pairs of cards, face-down on a table. Largely a distant memory itself nowadays, Pelmanism had some distinguished followers, including Rider Haggard, Robert Baden-Powell and Jerome K Jerome. “There may be trouble with the A.S.E.” says the German voice that Tommy hears from his hiding place when trying to track down Mr Brown. Five points to you if you know that the A.S.E. was the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, one of the “New Model” trade unions that developed in the 19th century, and whose name actually changed to the Amalgamated Engineering Union before the book had been published – Christie hadn’t kept up to date with the times there, score one against her.

Then there are a few nice phrases that we don’t see much today. When Tuppence decides to visit Sir James with Julius, this was to be her plan: “She would meet Julius, persuade him to her point of view, and they would beard the lion in his den.” How’s that? I’ve never heard that phrase before. The OED defines it as to “attack someone on his or her own ground or subject”, but by all accounts it goes back to the Book of Samuel and the story of David, a shepherd who pursued a lion that had stolen one of his sheep. David bravely seized the lion “by his beard” and killed him. So how come I’ve never come across that one before? And when Tommy and Julius discover a package of blank paper, Tommy suspects the use of sympathetic ink – say again? But apparently that was just another name for Invisible ink – I wonder why they used the word sympathetic? When Tommy writes to Mr Carter he says “something’s turned up that has given me a jar”. Given him a what? I think – but I’m not entirely certain – this is an 18th century usage meaning “given me a shock”. Fascinating use of language! But one phrase I did recognise – and I haven’t heard in years – comes when Julius tells Tommy “I must be going to Colney Hatch”. The Dowager Mrs Chrisparkle would also use that phrase. Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum opened in 1851, and the phrase became widely used as an alternative to “I must be going mad”.

I did a little interesting extrapolation of financial values at the time. Tuppence would be the first to accept that she’s very keen on money, so I thought it would be interesting to find out how much she’s working for. We don’t quite know how much blackmail money Whittington paid Tuppence when she visits him at the offices of Esthonia Glassware, but he was willing to pay £100 for her to spend three months doing nothing in Paris. £100 in 1922 is roughly the equivalent of £4000 today, so if he paid her that much money, no wonder T&T were eating in the most expensive restaurants to celebrate. Bizarrely, Carter’s suggested salary for their detective work was just £300 a year, to both Tommy and Tuppence, which equates to just £12000 each today, just about minimum wage level. It may not have been much, but at least there was equal pay for women, which would have been highly unlikely in 1922.

So here’s my regular at-a-glance summary for The Secret Adversary:

Publication Details: 1922. My copy is a Pan paperback, published in 1970.

How many pages until the first death: 105. That might feel quite a long wait, but solving a murder seems somehow less important in this book that tracking down Jane Finn and uncovering the identity of Mr Brown.

Funny lines out of context:
“The movies—of course! Your American word for the cinema.” This was relatively new technology – stupid people could be confused.

“Wonder what she’s been up to. Dogging Rita most likely.” Good Lord, that’s a surprise.

“Feeling more tongue-tied than ever, Tommy ejaculated “Oh!” again.” Not sure if that’s what he said or if it was a sound effect.

Any number of lines describing Julius and his gun:
“”I rather wish that fellow would come along,” said Julius. He patted his pocket. “Little William here is just aching for exercise!””

“Tommy kept a respectful silence. He was impressed by little William.”

“”And I tell you,” retorted Julius, “that Little Willie here is just hopping mad to go off!” The Russian wilted visibly. “You wouldn’t dare——” “Oh, yes, I would, son!””

“Little Willie and I will come behind.”

Memorable characters:
Tommy and Tuppence themselves are pretty memorable, and as this book introduces them it contains a fair amount of description and idly just watching them do stuff. Apart from them, the two major characters of Julius and Sir James are nicely realised – and poles apart – with Julius a very “in-your-face” rich American and Sir James a more dignified and aloof Brit.

Christie the Poison expert:
The first death comes as a result of administering chloral, or as the doctor first thought, an accidental overdose. It was actually chloral that formed the “knock-out” element of a traditional Mickey Finn. It’s not currently licensed for use, but it can be used as a sedative. You wouldn’t describe it as a poison though.

However, the second death is simply described as someone collapsing, “whilst an odour of bitter almonds filled the air.” That’d be cyanide poisoning.

Class/social issues of the time:
Christie goes into great detail about potential political subterfuge with the fallout over the secret papers, with much speculation about the Labour movement and how it would react. At the time of writing, Britain hadn’t yet experienced a Labour government, and the fear and distaste of these Bolshevik ruffians is palpable in Christie’s writing. There is a lot of concern about the behaviour of the trade unions, which Tommy turns into a joke when he doesn’t want to start work early in the morning: “My union, Tuppence, my union! It does not permit me to work before 11 a.m.” Some things don’t change, though – there is huge disapproval of socialists with money: “Put on a thick coat, that’s right. Fur lined? And you a Socialist!”
The secret document that T&T are trying to keep from Mr Brown could be used to bring down (and worse) the government. Mr Carter’s politics are clear. ““As a party cry for Labour it would be irresistible, and a Labour Government at this juncture would, in my opinion, be a grave disability for British trade, but that is a mere nothing to the REAL danger… Bolshevist gold is pouring into this country for the specific purpose of procuring a Revolution….”

Before Mr Brown is thwarted there is fear: “the 29th was the much-talked-of “Labour Day,” about which all sorts of rumours were running riot. Newspapers were getting agitated. Sensational hints of a Labour coup d’état were freely reported. The Government said nothing. It knew and was prepared. There were rumours of dissension among the Labour leaders. They were not of one mind. The more far-seeing among them realized that what they proposed might well be a death-blow to the England that at heart they loved. They shrank from the starvation and misery a general strike would entail, and were willing to meet the Government half-way. But behind them were subtle, insistent forces at work, urging the memories of old wrongs, deprecating the weakness of half-and-half measures, fomenting misunderstandings.” Once Mr Brown is defeated, “to most people the 29th, the much-heralded “Labour Day,” had passed much as any other day. Speeches were made in the Park and Trafalgar Square. Straggling processions, singing the Red Flag, wandered through the streets in a more or less aimless manner. Newspapers which had hinted at a general strike, and the inauguration of a reign of terror, were forced to hide their diminished heads. The bolder and more astute among them sought to prove that peace had been effected by following their counsels.”

Political extremists infiltrate the parties – when Carter asks Tommy to try to recognise some of the people in Mr Brown’s gang, we can see Christie’s distrust of anything other than True Blue. “You say two faces were familiar to you? One’s a Labour man, you think? Just look through these photos, and see if you can spot him.” A minute later, Tommy held one up. Mr. Carter exhibited some surprise. “Ah, Westway! Shouldn’t have thought it. Poses as being moderate. As for the other fellow, I think I can give a good guess.” He handed another photograph to Tommy, and smiled at the other’s exclamation. “I’m right, then. Who is he? Irishman. Prominent Unionist M.P. All a blind, of course. We’ve suspected it—but couldn’t get any proof.”

On a more mundane level, the class difference between, on the one hand, Tommy and Tuppence, and their soon to be long-term associate Albert, is clearly shown in their use of language. T&T are full of the swanky small talk, whereas Albert-speak is littered with “Lord!” and “Lumme!” and “Mark my words” and “Blest if I’d have known you! That rig-out’s top-hole.” Where T&T’s fantasies run to Lobster a l’américaine, Chicken Newberg, Sole Colbert or Sole á la Jeanette, Albert’s are firmly rooted in the shlock detective B-movies of the day. Some of the dramatic tension and humour of the story are created when people are engaged in activities outside their class – such as Tuppence in domestic service, or Julius shimmying up a tree.

There’s also an observation on what Christie might have termed the criminal class: “The man who came up the staircase with a furtive, soft-footed tread was quite unknown to Tommy. He was obviously of the very dregs of society. The low beetling brows, and the criminal jaw, the bestiality of the whole countenance were new to the young man, though he was a type that Scotland Yard would have recognized at a glance.” I expect his eyes were too close together too.

And we have the usual distrust of foreigners found in a Christie novel, but here with added terrorist/intrigue/post-war flavour, and Tommy is the chief recidivist:

When Tommy first receives Julius P Hersheimmer’s card, he asks “Do I smell a Boche?” When he observes “Number 14” in Mr Brown’s gang, he says “If that isn’t a Hun, I’m a Dutchman!” And during his “bluffing” altercation with Boris, after the latter, in pure schoolboy war comic language says “speak, you swine of an Englishman,” Tommy replies “that’s the worst of you foreigners. You can’t keep calm”.

Classic denouement: Fairly protracted and elongated, covering the best part of thirteen pages, and in three distinct phases – the truth about the identity of Jane Finn, the last minute heaping of suspicion onto an innocent person, and finally the revelation of the truth. It’s definitely an exciting read. The diary confessional element to the denouement gives it an additional dimension – it was a device Christie used again in (if I remember rightly) Crooked House.

Happy ending? Very. The blossoming romance of Tommy and Tuppence results in a ham-fisted proposal, and another couple also get engaged. Not only that, but there is much rejoicing in the fact that Mr Brown’s plot has been foiled, as this means there will be continued peace and not war – and you can’t get a much happier ending than that. Oh, and Tommy gets back in touch with his rich uncle who proves himself to be a nice old geezer, who with one wave of his financial magic wand, puts all T&T’s money troubles to rest: “In future I propose to make you an allowance—and you can look upon Chalmers Park as your home.”

Did the story ring true? There’s an enormous amount of coincidence, and T&T survive by the skin of their teeth. The fact that Mr Brown is revealed to be a man of extreme intelligence, overweening self-confidence but with the Achilles’ heel of insisting on writing a diary so that he can enjoy seeing his brilliance in writing, is, I think, highly believable.

Overall satisfaction rating: 7/10. I miss the traditional “murder mystery/whodunit” aspect in this book, and, like its predecessor, I find it a little over-frantic. But there’s much to enjoy and the characterisations of Tommy and Tuppence themselves make it worth reading alone.

Thanks for reading this summary of The Secret Adversary, and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment – but don’t tell the world who Mr Brown is! Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge we move from 1922 to 1923, with the second appearance of Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings in The Murder on the Links. I read this when I was a very young man and can’t remember much about it, so I am looking forward to revisiting it. I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, why not read it too? 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 Affair at Styles (1920)

Posted on by

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 introduced to Hercule Poirot, who solves the murder of a wealthy re-married widow by strychnine poisoning, wading through an inordinate number of clues and red herrings before finally coming to the truth. If you haven’t read the book yet, I promise I won’t tell you whodunit!

So we say Bonjour to M. Hercule Poirot, detective extraordinaire, with a number of silly francophone phrases like “Nom d’un nom d’un nom!” When he goes off on a rant, you almost expect him to break into a Morecambe and Wise-like “Sacré Beaujolais et Bon Appetit!” He is accompanied as ever by his faithful Hastings, who plods alongside his master like a keen but rather stupid bloodhound, sniffing out his beloved clues. And of course it is Hastings who narrates the story, as he (nearly) always does.

The book was written in 1916, but not published until 1920 (1921 in the UK). As such, it reveals a picture of privileged life in an Essex country manor during World War One, with a well-to-do family doing what they can for the war effort: saving scrap paper, working for the Voluntary Aid Detachment, milking cows, and so on. It also explains how Poirot and Hastings dovetail into their Christie-land relationship. Poirot was one of the refugees who had taken residence in the village of Styles St Mary “by the charity of that good Mrs Inglethorp” (soon to be the late Mrs Inglethorp). Captain Arthur Hastings was “invalided home from the Front; and after spending some months in a rather depressing Convalescent Home” chanced upon his boyhood friend John Cavendish, and thus came to stay with him at Styles, his mother’s home (that’s the aforementioned Mrs Inglethorp).

Hastings remembers Poirot at the height of his professional prowess: “a very famous detective…a marvellous little fellow…a funny little man, a great dandy, but wonderfully clever”. Inspector Japp is brought in to investigate the crime on behalf of the police and he instantly recognises Poirot as the detective with whom he worked in 1904, solving “the Abercrombie forgery case”. So depending on whether you take this book to date from 1916 or 1920, you’re looking at a period of 12-16 years earlier when Poirot was active in the Belgian police force; it’s hard to extrapolate Poirot’s age with any accuracy, and in her autobiography Christie regrets having made him so old at the beginning of her writing career! But Hastings does provide us with the classic description of Poirot’s appearance: “He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.” Maybe it is not a coincidence that the OED defines “eggheaded” as “(a) having an egg-shaped head; (b) colloq intellectual, highbrow” and that its usage dates from the early 20th century, around the time this book was published.

Poirot and Hastings are best buddies but they do sometimes have a prickly relationship. Hastings admits at one stage that he is “nursing a grudge against [my] friend’s high-handedness”. Here follows a typical conversation between them when the relationship is strained: “After lunch Poirot begged me to accompany him home. I consented rather stiffly. “You are annoyed, is it not so?” he asked anxiously, as we walked through the park. “Not at all,” I said coldly. “That is well. That lifts a great load from my mind.” This was not quite what I had intended. I had hoped that he would have observed the stiffness of my manner.” On another occasion, Hastings is trying to hurry Poirot along to interview a witness but the latter has slowed down to admire the symmetry of the flower beds: “”Yes, but this affair is more important.” “And how do you know that these fine begonias are not of equal importance?” I shrugged my shoulders. There was really no arguing with him if he chose to take that line.” Poirot always teases Hastings on affairs of the heart; in The ABC Murders he jokes with him about his fondness for pretty girls with auburn hair, and in The Mysterious Affair at Styles Hastings is instantly captivated a girl who has “great loose waves of…auburn hair”, to whom he proposes marriage on the spur of the moment, and who of course turns him down with “don’t be silly…you know you don’t want to!” Hastings reflects on the unsuccessful proposal with typical understatement: “Thinking over the interview, it struck me as being profoundly unsatisfactory.”

This being the fourth of Christie’s novels that I have re-read as part of the Agatha Christie Challenge, but the earliest to have been written, I am struck by the difference in writing style from the other three books. The Mysterious Affair at Styles stands out in two aspects. The first is that it contains an overwhelming number of clues and red herrings. Christie wrote the book in response to a bet from her friend Madge, “that the author, who had previously never written a book, could not compose a detective novel in which the reader would not be able to “spot” the murderer, although having access to the same clues as the detective” (from the dust jacket of the First Edition). It probably required the high level of facts and evidence within the book in order to satisfy the terms of the bet, but to the reader it’s almost overkill. To get the best out of this book you have to read it slowly and carefully, with frequent pauses for thought, consideration and reflection. If you read it like a throwaway paperback, everything in it just becomes a blur.

The second outstanding aspect is its style. Hastings’ narrative is very clinical, factual, almost journalistic (in a good sense) in its reporting, going into forensic detail about Poirot’s investigation and the clues he uncovers. In comparison with the later works, it feels formal and stilted. Where in other books, plot developments occur through conversation and observation, in this book you often get the feeling you are reading a witness statement: “I had arrived at Styles on the 5th of July. I come now to the events of the 16th and 17th of that month. For the convenience of the reader I will recapitulate the incidents of those days in as exact a manner as possible.” Simply waiting to meet Cynthia at the dispensary has a military police feel about it: “we were detained under suspicion by the hospital porter”. A major segment of the plot development takes place in a courtroom and several pages read more like court reports and transcripts than a novel. Whilst this provides good suspense – courtroom scenes are always exciting – the reader does miss out on the sense of a personal narrative. But then again, no doubt it helped Christie win her bet. The book also gives the reader direct access to some of the evidence – with floorplans of both Styles House and Mrs Inglethorp’s bedroom, and facsimile representations of jottings on the back of an envelope, a letter written by Mrs Inglethorp, and the writing on a torn scrap of paper. It encourages the reader to play a more active role in solving the crime, rather than just sitting back and letting Poirot do all the work for us. No lazy read, this.

It’s fascinating how language changes over a relatively short period of time. Given that this book was written 99 years ago, as I was reading it I noticed a few words and references that completely bewildered me. Do any of these five phrases mean anything to you?

1 – As suggested earlier, the character of Cynthia is first seen wearing a VAD uniform. The Voluntary Aid Detachment was a unit that provided field nursing services, mainly in hospitals in the UK, the majority of volunteers being women and girls. Christie herself was a VAD nurse, as was Tuppence Beresford, who we’ll be meeting in the next book in the Agatha Christie Challenge. It’s probably to my great shame that I’d never heard of this fine bunch of people.

2 – We all know the saying that someone’s walked over my grave but I’ve never heard “as if a goose were walking over my grave,” as Mrs Inglethorp remarks. I’ve read that the derivation of that comes from a back-formation of goose bumps or goose pimples, but I also wonder if there might be a connection with the more common phrase “a ghost walking over one’s grave”.

3 – Poirot says if Inglethorp is guilty he will hang him “as high as Haman”. Never heard that before. It refers to a Bible story in the Book of Esther, where Haman builds a really high gallows so that when he hangs his enemy it becomes a major spectacle – however, he gets hanged instead. Book of Esther, Chapter seven if you want to look it up.

4 – Miss Howard refers to the detectives swarming about the house as “a lot of Paul Prys”. Paul Pry was a comical busybody and nosey parker in a play of the same name that first appeared in 1825, and continued to be popular until the 1870s.

5 – When Poirot exclaims to himself “triple pig!” I have no idea what he’s on about, unless it’s a variation on something like “cochon d’un cochon d’un cochon”. Really the man talks very strangely sometimes.

So here’s my at-a-glance summary for The Mysterious Affair at Styles:

Publication Details: 1920. My copy is an American print, Bantam paperback, published in 1970. I bought it from a second hand stall on a summer holiday in Sorrento, if I remember rightly, in 1978.

How many pages until the first death: 25. Just the one death.

Funny lines out of context: Not very many. In fact the most insightful line is a serious observation from Poirot: “one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort”.
“Mr. Wells was a pleasant man of middle-age, with keen eyes, and the typical lawyer’s mouth.”
“As I walked away, I met an aged rustic, who leered at me cunningly.” One of Shakespeare’s rude mechanicals perhaps?
“He tried several [keys], twisting and turning them with a practiced hand, and finally uttering an ejaculation of satisfaction.”
“”Silly ass!” I ejaculated.”

Memorable characters:
Mary Cavendish is quite a complex character, standing up for herself and being emotionally forthright. Evelyn Howard is described as having “a deep voice, almost manly in its stentorian tones, and had a large sensible square body” – possibly a forerunner of The Mousetrap’s Miss Casewell?

Christie the Poison expert:
Poison runs through this book like the River Thames. The murderer’s choice is strychnine, but not only is it administered to kill the victim, it’s also distilled, bought at a shop, found in other medicines and is kept in the dispensary.

Lawrence uses it to accuse Bauerstein: “poisons are his hobby, so of course he sees them everywhere”.

But Lawrence too is suspected of dabbling in the poison: “I suppose I must have taken up the bottle”…”Did you abstract any of the contents of the bottle?”… “I once studied to be a doctor. Such things naturally interest me”…”So poisons “naturally interest” you, do they?”

There’s technical talk: “Strychnine has an unusually bitter taste. It can be detected in a solution of 1 in 70,000, and can only be disguised by some strongly flavoured substance.”

There’s comparison talk: “I dare say he soaked fly paper, as I told you at the beginning.” “That is arsenic – not strychnine”, said Poirot mildly. “What does that matter? Arsenic would put poor Emily out of the way just as well as strychnine”.

Even Poirot gets fed up with it: “one thing does strike me. No doubt it has struck you too…that there is altogether too much strychnine about this case.”

Class/social issues of the time:
The Styles household is a very upper class affair; a household where a grown man refers to his mother as “the mater”; a household where married couples still have separate bedrooms.

This is how Hastings describes the manner in which the household goes about the business of mourning: “Under the circumstances, we were naturally not a cheerful party. The reaction after a shock is always trying, and I think we were all suffering from it. Decorum and good breeding naturally enjoined that our demeanour should be much as usual, yet I could not help wondering if this self-control were really a matter of great difficulty. There were no red eyes, no signs of secretly indulged grief. I felt that I was right in my opinion that Dorcas was the person most affected by the personal side of the tragedy. I pass over Alfred Inglethorp, who acted the bereaved widower in a manner that I felt to be disgusting in its hypocrisy.”

When Poirot and Hastings are considering the behaviour of Mary Cavendish, arguing with her mother-in-law, Poirot notes “it was an astonishing thing for a woman of her breeding to do.”

There’s also an argument with her husband, where Mary reveals her independence, but which also reveals the way a woman was meant to behave in those days: “”Am I to understand that you will continue to see Bauerstein against my express wishes?” “If I choose.” “You defy me?” “No, but I deny your right to criticize my actions. Have you no friends of whom I should disapprove?” John fell back a pace. The colour ebbed slowly from his face. “What do you mean?” he said, in an unsteady voice. “You see!” said Mary quietly. “You do see, don’t you, that you have no right to dictate to me as to the choice of my friends?” John glanced at her pleadingly, a stricken look on his face. “No right? Have I no right, Mary?” he said unsteadily. He stretched out his hands. “Mary——” For a moment, I thought she wavered. A softer expression came over her face, then suddenly she turned almost fiercely away. “None!”

There is the usual mistrust of foreigners found in Christie books. Dorcas the maid, who is seen as a stalwart of traditional values says as an aside: “I don’t hold with foreigners as a rule”. Hastings takes an instant dislike to the foreign-surnamed Dr Bauerstein: “The sinister face of Dr. Bauerstein recurred to me unpleasantly. A vague suspicion of everyone and everything filled my mind. Just for a moment I had a premonition of approaching evil.” He hates spending time with him: “My evening was utterly and entirely spoilt by the presence of Dr. Bauerstein.” John Cavendish also uses racial language to criticise Bauerstein: “I’ve had enough of the fellow hanging about. He’s a Polish Jew, anyway.” An exchange between Poirot and Hastings on Bauerstein includes the lines: “A very clever man—a Jew, of course.” “The blackguard!” I cried indignantly.”

And whilst on the subject of language that’s considered offensive today but was run-of-the-mill then, Dorcas says that in one of their dressing-up games evenings (they sound simply hilarious – not) there was some difficulty removing stage make-up: “Burnt corks they use mostly—though ’tis messy getting it off again. Miss Cynthia was a n***** once, and, oh, the trouble she had.””

It’s also an interesting to note that in 1916 a perfectly respectable reason for buying over-the-counter strychnine was to poison a dog. Can you imagine someone saying that in a shop today?!

Classic denouement: About as classic as it gets, basically covering the final two chapters (twenty pages) with Poirot holding a little réunion in the salon, and revealing the name of the murderer in a flurry of panache with the final two words of the penultimate chapter. Every red herring is sorted out, every clue is dismissed or validated.

Happy ending? Certainly! Two happy couples in fact.

Did the story ring true? I find it slightly hard to believe the instance of one character impersonating another, but apart from that all the jigsaw puzzle pieces fit nicely together.

Overall satisfaction rating: Perhaps a surprisingly low 5/10. It’s a clever book, and a challenging book, but I think it’s one of the least satisfying to read as a piece of detective escapism. And that’s primarily what you want from a Christie.

So that’s my little summary of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know what you think. Please just add a comment – but don’t give the whodunit game away! Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge, and continuing in chronological order, it’s the first appearance of Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary. There have been recent TV and stage adaptations so you might be sick of it, but give the book a try, my memory is that it’s an entertaining and quite exciting read. I’m looking forward to finding out if I’m right, and I’ll blog my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. Thanks for reading, and 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 ABC Murders (1936)

Posted on by

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 Hercule Poirot is challenged by a serial murderer to solve apparently random killings in an alphabetical sequence, the only clue being that an ABC railway guide is always found near the body. And, like before, don’t worry, you can read this without finding out whodunit!

If you’ve read my earlier Agatha Christie blogs, gentle reader, you will be aware that this was the third Christie I read as a kid and the first of those to feature Hercule Poirot. I don’t think at that time I’d seen any film or TV adaptation of a Poirot book so had absolutely no preconceptions as to how he’d look or behave. What you quickly pick up reading the book is his vanity regarding his hair colour and his moustaches (always moustaches with Poirot, never just one moustache) – his love of symmetry, symptomatic of clarity of thought I suspect, and the fact that he is fully aware of all his idiosyncrasies: “I am like the prima donna!” he says in Chapter One. Re-reading The ABC Murders I was struck by the difference of approach of Christie’s two major sleuths. Miss Marple (as seen in A Pocket Full of Rye and At Bertram’s Hotel) is very quiet. She listens, she considers, she assembles thoughts in her mind but rarely thinks out loud. By the time she comes out with some devastatingly accurate dissection of a crime, it’s already fully formed and reasoned in her brain.

Poirot, on the other hand, thinks out loud all the time. He hardly does anything silently. He experiments with his suspects by splashing out wayward accusations to see how they react. He exercises his famous little grey cells in open banter with his friend and narrator, Captain Hastings, whom he teases for the latter’s partiality to a pretty girl with auburn hair. Poirot can’t resist the occasional portentous pronouncement. Chapter One ends: “You are in error, my friend. You do not understand my meaning. A robbery would be a relief since it would dispossess my mind of the fear of something else.” “Of what?” “Murder”, said Hercule Poirot.” And whereas you feel Miss Marple offers her sleuthing advice out of an altruistic sense of justice, Poirot and Hastings are in it for the challenge, almost for the craic. “If you could order a crime as one orders a dinner” asks Poirot, “what would you choose?” “Let’s review the menu” replies Hastings. “Robbery? Forgery? No, I think not. Rather too vegetarian. It must be murder, red-blooded murder, with trimmings, of course.” The last line of the book reads: “So, Hastings – we went hunting once more, did we not? Vive le sport”. It’s no coincidence that Poirot’s main gripe with the murderer appears to be that the crimes committed were “not sporting”.

In 1936 Christie was absolutely at the top of her game. She was 46 years old, this was her 18th full length novel and the 11th to feature Poirot. This is a highly inventive story, with the apparent identity of its murderer seemingly obvious right from the start (you suspect that this could be like Christie’s version of a Columbo TV film, knowing the identity of the murderer and then working back to see how Columbo solved the crime) but it’s only at the end that you realise that both the apparent murderer and the reader have both been led up the garden path. Structurally too, it’s inventive, with its two different narrators – not just Hastings, but also several chapters entitled “(Not from Capt Hastings’ personal narrative)”. There’s a vast amount of smoke and mirrors, much obfuscation from the criminal mind, committing murders for no reason than to obscure the truth, and it’s written with a great sense of pace and excitement, as you wonder just how far down the alphabet you’re going to get before Poirot works it all out.

Class issues play a major part in this book, with Hastings proving himself to be a complete snob – I’m not sure Hastings comes out of this book as all that decent a chap, actually. There’s much condescension about cheapness and commonness (of things and people) and a huge amount of xenophobia too. There are also many references to Christie’s favourite blanket theme that murderers are mad, with one of the suspects confessing that they had dreamed that they had committed the crimes. The Assistant Commissioner has no qualms about confronting the issue of mental incapacity: “In my day if a man was mad he was mad and we didn’t look about for scientific terms to soften it down”.

It’s definitely a book of its time in other ways – in that there are a number of words and phrases that are frankly meaningless today. One of the witnesses at the murder in Andover is a platelayer – a term that I have managed to go my entire life without having come across – that is, a person employed in laying, repairing and renewing plates on a tramway or railway (according to my OED). Dr. Thompson, who provides psychological insight into the criminal mind, is described as an alienist, a term that I am sure was already on its way out by the time this book was published (my OED suggests mid-19th century for that one). Miss Merrion of the Ginger Cat café is described as wearing “various fichus”, of which the OED says “a triangular piece of muslin, lace or the like, worn by women around the neck and shoulders, and formerly also over the head (mid-18th century). I guess she is an old-fashioned sort of character. Betty Barnard’s parents are proud of their snuggery – I’d heard of a snug but never a snuggery – it’s largely the same thing. Paranoia was referred to as paranoea – an early 18th century spelling; and who on earth today uses the word dugout to describe (OED again) “a person of outdated appearance or ideas, specifically a retired officer recalled to service” (19th century slang). I can’t believe that the young me sat reading this around 1970 with my dictionary by my side. I must have been thoroughly confused.

As far as matching the murderer’s personality with the murders is concerned, Mrs Christie does give us some genuinely good clues along the way, almost bending over backwards to show how someone with a penchant for doing A, would be the kind of person to commit these crimes. “We are confronted here by an unknown personage” says Poirot. “He is in the dark and seeks to remain in the dark. But in the very nature of things he cannot help throwing light upon himself”. Mrs Christie hides the culprit in plain sight, yet I’m pretty sure that for the most part the identity of the murderer comes as a surprise. I can’t remember if I guessed it when I was young – I don’t think I did. This time round, I had already remembered who the murderer was before I started reading, so it’s hard for me to judge.

Just as Chief Inspector Davy in At Bertram’s Hotel was partial to an old song from the musicals, Poirot gives us another musical quotation: “some of the time I love a blonde who comes from Eden by way of Sweden”. It’s from the song “Some Sort of Somebody” from Kern and Janis’ 1915 musical Very Good Eddie, not something that most people would have at the forefront of their minds nowadays. But not only does Mrs Christie make reference to such popular songs, she even refers to her own books. When Poirot and Hastings are discussing what makes the perfect crime, Poirot outlines a case where four people sit down to play bridge, and by the end of the evening the man by the fire is found dead – precisely the scenario for Cards on The Table, which would be published a few months later. Even further into the future, Japp teases Poirot that he will end up investigating his own death – have you read Curtain yet? No matter, that comes later on in the oeuvre!

So here’s my at-a-glance summary for The ABC Murders:

Publication Details: 1936. My copy is a third impression of the Fontana publication, from October 1967.

How many pages until the first death: 11. And they keep on coming at regular intervals.

Funny lines out of context:
A conversation between Poirot and Hastings where Poirot describes how choosy he is now over which crimes to investigate: “For Hercule Poirot nowadays, only the cream of crime.” “Has there been much cream about?”
“Is there anything – queer going on, sir?” “Yes my child. There is – something queer going on”.
“I hastily presented the strawberries to a small boy who seemed highly astonished and faintly suspicious. Poirot added the lettuce, thus setting the seal on the child’s bewilderment.”
“A man in drink can be like a ravening wolf.”
“In those hot dog days even his moustaches drooped”.
Hundreds of stories from imaginative people who had “seen a man looking very queer and rolling his eyes”.

Memorable characters: Well, not every book is lucky enough to have its own Alexander Bonaparte Cust. Not only is it a name to conjure with, but his odd presence cropping up throughout the book as the obvious murderer makes him stand out. It’s the juxtaposition between his grandiose name and his insignificant character that makes him interesting. Whilst Mrs Christie is happy to brandish the word “madman” around liberally throughout the book, Cust really does appear to be mad at times; although his final breakdown is said to be due to an epileptic fit.

Christie the Poison expert: No poison here. It’s all bumpings-off and knifings.

Class/social issues of the time:
Hastings thinks that everything about Mrs Ascher is beneath him. “The murder of an old woman who kept a little tobacco shop seemed, somehow, sordid and uninteresting”. He is further dismissive of the case: “This sordid murder of an old woman in a back street shop was so like the usual type of crime reported in the newspapers that it failed to strike a significant note.” When Poirot intimates that “she must have been beautiful once”, Hastings’ reaction is: “Really? I murmured incredulously”. Of her neighbours, Hastings observes: “There were a certain number of small shops interspersed between private houses of the poorer class. I judged that ordinarily there would be a fair number of people passing up and down – mostly people of the poorer classes”. He is dismissive of her possessions: “A couple of old worn blankets on the bed – a little stock of well-darned underwear in a drawer – cookery recipes in another – a paper-backed novel entitled The Green Oasis – a pair of new stockings – pathetic in their cheap shininess – a couple of china ornaments – a Dresden shepherd much broken, and a blue and yellow spotted dog – a black raincoat and a woolly jumper hanging on pegs – such were the worldly possessions of the late Alice Ascher.”

Despite Hastings’ pomposity about the Aschers, they themselves have their own class and social mores issues. Mr. Ascher was a bully and a cad in his treatment of his wife, frequently threatening violence. But could divorce have been an option? ““Your aunt never thought of freeing herself by legal means from this persecution?” “Well you see, he was her husband, sir, and you couldn’t get away from that.” The girl spoke simply but with finality.”

Christie was quick to equate cheapness with class and/or quality issues. Of the photograph of Betty: “Her hair had evidently recently been permed, it stood out from her head in a mass of rather frizzy curls. The smile was arch and artificial. It was certainly not a face that you could call beautiful, but it had an obvious and cheap prettiness”. But Betty too had issues: “Is she likely to have confided in any one? The girl at the café, for instance?” “I don’t think that’s likely. Betty couldn’t bear the Higley girl. She thought her common.”

And there’s a massive wave of distrust of foreigners. Riddell’s response to Poirot’s questioning: “Told it to the blarsted police, I ‘ave, and now I’ve got to spit it all out again to a couple of blarsted foreigners”. When Poirot asks Inspector Crome whether Betty was a pretty girl he mistakes his motivation for asking. “As to that I’ve no information,” said Inspector Crome with a hint of withdrawal. His manner said: “Really – these foreigners! All the same!” Even Poirot himself seems to understand the distrust. When thinking out loud about why ABC is committing these crimes, he wonders: “Is his motive direct personal hatred of me, of Hercule Poirot? Does he challenge me in public because I have (unknown to myself) vanquished him somewhere in the course of my career? Or is his animosity impersonal – directed against a foreigner?” When Cust is overhearing the to-ings and fro-ings of the public in Princess Gardens, Torquay, someone suggests “awful…do you think it was anything to do with the Chinese? Wasn’t the waitress in a Chinese café…” One of the traits Poirot sees in the person he accuses of being the murderer is “the partiality for England that had showed itself very faintly in the jeer at foreigners”. And indeed Poirot does get branded the rather splendid insult: “you unutterable little jackanapes of a foreigner!”

Two other observations about the class/social issues in this book; when Lily and Tom are discussing the policing of the case, he remarks that Inspector Crome is “a bit quiet and ladida – not my idea of a detective”. “That’s Lord Trenchard’s new kind” said Lily, with respect. “Some of them are ever so grand.” Trenchard had been the Metropolitan Police Commissioner from 1931 to 1935, and amongst his reforms had been greater education and training for police officers.

And we get to find out about Poirot’s opinion of foxhunting in a conversation between him and Hastings. “It is very terrible that, Hastings.” He was silent a minute. “You hunt the fox here?” “I don’t. I’ve never been able to afford to hunt. And I don’t think there’s much hunting in this part of the world.” “I meant in England generally. A strange sport. The waiting at the covert side – then they sound the tally-ho, do they not? – and the run begins – across the country – over the hedges and ditches – and the fox he runs – and sometimes he doubles back – but the dogs – “ “Hounds!” “- hounds are on his trail, and at last they catch him and he dies – quickly and horribly.” “I suppose it does sound cruel, but really – “ “The fox enjoys it? Do not say les bêtises, my friend.” Possibly Christie sets this up as a strong example of just how much a foreigner Poirot is, by not sharing in the simple harmless English pastime of foxhunting. (I’m being ironic here). Interesting Hastings only doesn’t hunt because he can’t afford it. You sense otherwise he’d throw himself into it with ruthless abandon.

Classic denouement: Absolutely! A really exciting read. All the suspects are gathered together, and Poirot makes a long and intentionally misleading speech so that we suspect a number of people of doing the deed. When the truth is revealed, the accused lashes out and attempts suicide but Poirot foils it. We even discover that Poirot tells a couple of porkies just to get the accused to confess. Great stuff.

Happy ending? Yes! The much-wronged Mr Cust has an improved social status, income and finally starts to enjoy life. And romance blossoms between two of the other suspects.

Did the story ring true? Although it’s highly far-fetched it really does ring true. You could easily imagine how someone with a lot of chutzpah and a deeply flawed personality could set up a similar crime.

Overall satisfaction rating: 10/10 – can’t see any reason to award it fewer points. A classic!

I hope you enjoyed this little rundown of The ABC Murders, and if you’ve read it too, I’d love to know your thoughts about it. Please just add a comment – but don’t give the whodunit game away please! From now on in the Agatha Christie Challenge, we’re going back to the books in chronological order. So the next on the list is Christie’s first Hercule Poirot book – and indeed her first book of all – The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Please feel free to catch up on that one, and I’ll be blogging my thoughts about it in a few weeks’ time. Thanks for reading, and 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 – At Bertram’s Hotel (1965)

Posted on by

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 Miss Marple assists the police in solving the assault of a forgetful cleric, discovering the mastermind of a sequence of high value robberies and identifying the true identity of the murderer of a hotel employee, all in a seemingly respectable and old-fashioned London hotel. And, like before, don’t worry, I won’t spill the beans about whodunit!

At Bertram’s Hotel was the second Christie I read as a kid, and I think the main reason I chose it from the bookshop was because I liked the cover illustration! The elegantly made-up ladies’ hand, concealing an expensive looking chocolate and holding a bullet as though it was a cigarette probably came across to the young Master Chrisparkle as being somewhere on the sexy/sophisticated scale. It makes a great contrast with the blurry, eerie night-time illustration of the hotel in the background, with just the lone commissionaire outside – almost as though he was going to do battle with the sophisticated lady. Not an inaccurate interpretation of events, as it happens.

The main character in this book is really the hotel itself. Mrs Christie spends a lot of time coming back to how it’s a building of innate taste and class, providing good service to an older clientele, and recreating an Edwardian feel during what was actually the Swinging Sixties. The general unlikeliness of such an establishment spills over into a realisation that the hotel is, indeed, not all that it seems. Yes, in part it’s a real hotel, a solid building with a good reputation, with real guests and real staff; but it’s also a façade for other activities performed by dubious characters and criminals; and the two are seamlessly intertwined. Nothing is as it seems to be: “the china, if not actually Rockingham and Davenport, looked like it”. A stark contrast throughout between Edifice and Artifice.

Both of Christie’s main amateur detectives are elderly, but their actual ages are not stated. Poirot (we haven’t met him yet, soon will though! in his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) is described as retired from the Belgian police force after many years of devoted service; and he has developed a limp. So he’s obviously of some age then. Miss Marple first appeared in The Murder in the Vicarage (1930), and she was in her late-sixties from the very beginning. So what age would she be in 1965? Well, not knocking 100, that’s for sure. Neither character has a real-time age-progression throughout their Christie-careers, but Miss Marple has definitely got a little older by the time this novel came around. The fortnight at Bertram’s was a holiday treat given to her by her nephew and his wife. When explaining why she chose this quaint old London hotel and not a more snazzy location, she says “I stayed there once – when I was fourteen”. When she’s later reflecting on the changes of the years, Mrs Christie tells us “it was fifty – no, nearer sixty years since she had stayed here”. I take that to indicate somewhere between 56 and 59 years; so add that to 14, and I can conclusively prove that, in 1965, Miss Marple was aged somewhere between 70 and 73 years old!

But, hovering around my mid-50s as I am, I really object to Mrs Christie declaring people to be elderly when they’re really only a little bit older than I am. Canon Pennyfather, who is a doddery, forgetful old buffoon is 63. That seems to be her favourite age to choose when she wants to impress on you how past it they are – Helen MacKenzie in A Pocket Full of Rye was the same. Interestingly, Mrs Christie herself had attained the age of 75 in 1965, and she certainly wasn’t past it. There’s another character in At Bertram’s Hotel who’s marked as elderly beyond his years – Mr Bollard of the jeweller’s shop patronised by Elvira. He is described as “the senior partner of the firm, an elderly man of sixty-odd”. Even worse, the character of Egerton, one of Elvira’s trustees with his hands on her purse strings, is 52 years old and describes himself as “well advanced in years”. I’m finding it hard to get my head around this.

Moving on! There is a lovely air of nostalgia littered throughout this book and personally I think it’s got more than its fair share of elegant turns of phrase for a Christie novel – let’s face it, she’s not known for her literary quality. In that reverie where Miss Marple works out that it’s nearly sixty years since she’s stayed at Bertram’s, she reflects on the then and now with rather charming, delicate observations. “The out of date returns as the picturesque”, she says of the hotel, which today would be a good description of anything that we would now refer to as “retro”. The opening description of the hotel includes the fact that: “there were two magnificent coal fires; beside them big brass coal scuttles shone in the way they used to shine when Edwardian housemaids polished them, and they were filled with exactly the right sized lumps of coal”. That’s a typically nostalgic look back at how life seemed to be more pleasant in the “good old days”, whereas of course by 1965 the whole heating issue was dealt with by modern radiators, creating a much more efficient way of keeping warm. High standards of modern cleanliness too are seen as having a negative connotation: “A connecting door led to a bathroom which was modern but which had a tiled wallpaper of roses and so avoided any suggestion of over-frigid hygiene”.

Elsewhere Miss Marple reminisces about how wonderful it was to shop at the Army and Navy Stores, how you used to be able to get proper glass cloths, how you left an address for your purchases to be delivered to, and how sad it was to see that a splendid old house now has four front-door bells (so it must have been converted into four flats). Egerton’s offices are located “in one of those imposing and dignified squares which have as yet not felt the wind of change”. Even Chief-Inspector Davy seems to have his head filled of old nonsense: “Why must they call me Mary when my name’s Miss Gibbs” he muses, taking a line from a long gone musical comedy; followed by the slightly misquoted “tell me, gentle stranger, are there any more at home like you? A few, kind sir, and nicer girls you never knew”, from the 1899 musical Floradora.

I find this book hugely enjoyable because of its constant aside observations, its Dickensian minor characters and its gentle approach to the crimes involved. I would normally prefer something much punchier, but I guess this one is the exception that proves the rule. There’s very little in the way of cold-blooded evil; and that’s perfectly in keeping with the nature of the criminal minds at work. Well-structured and thoughtfully characterised, this is classy Agatha Christie country.

So, gentle reader, here’s the at-a-glance summary for At Bertram’s Hotel:

Publication Details: 1965. My copy is a third impression from April 1969.

How many pages until the first death: The only murder takes place on page 140. Sounds like a long time to kill, but you’re not hanging around, kicking your heels waiting for something to happen – there’s a strong sense of intrigue right from the very start.

Funny lines out of context: thin pickings in this book, on the whole. But here are some nice lines –
“There were people who would have smiled in gentle derision at this pronouncement on the part of an old-fashioned old lady who could hardly be expected to be an authority on nymphomania”.
“Where can we go and talk? That is to say without falling over some old pussy every second”.
“Mrs McCrae, Canon Pennyfather’s housekeeper, had ordered a Dover sole for the evening of his return. The advantages attached to a good Dover sole were manifold. It need not be introduced to the grill or frying pan until the Canon was safely in the house. I could be kept until the next day if necessary. Canon Pennyfather was fond of Dover sole; and, if a telephone call or telegram arrived saying that the Canon would after all be elsewhere on this particular evening, Mrs McCrae was fond of a good Dover sole herself.”
“Inspector Campbell drew his papers towards him and gave Father the ascertainable facts in so far as they had been ascertained. “Doesn’t sound as if he’d gone off with a choirboy””.
“So then we hit upon getting Dr Stokes to come and have a look at you. We still call him Dr Stokes although he’s been struck off. A very nice man he is, embittered a bit, of course, by being struck off. It was only his kind heart really, helping a lot of girls who were no better than they should be.”

Memorable characters: The central character of Bess Sedgwick is very fully written, a glamorous, flawed, sensuous woman, full of daring and attitude. “Bess Sedgwick stubbed out her cigarette in her saucer, lifted a doughnut and took an immense bite. Rich red real strawberry jam gushed out over her chin. Bess threw back her head and laughed, one of the loudest and gayest sounds to have been heard in the lounge of Bertram’s Hotel for some time”. That’s a very visual and realistic description of someone who really lives life to the full.
She doesn’t feature a lot but I also feel the receptionist Miss Gorringe is a very believable character. “She knew every one of the clientele and, like Royalty, never forgot a face. She looked frumpy but respectable. Frizzled yellowish hair (old-fashioned tongs, it suggested), black silk dress, a high bosom on which reposed a large gold locket and a cameo brooch.”

Christie the Poison expert: Nope. It’s all handguns in this one.

Class/social issues of the time: Linked to the nostalgia theme.
The smoking room is reserved for gentlemen only.
A conversation between Mr Humfries, the hotel manager, and Colonel Luscombe, a guest: “We endeavour to give people anything they ask for”. “Including seed cake and muffins, yes I see. To each according to his need – I see…. Quite Marxian”.
Miss Marple gratefully remembers how her mother steered her away from an unsuitable liaison with a young man, and reflects on the relationships between mothers and daughters nowadays: “These poor young things. Some of them had mothers, but never mothers who seemed to be any good – mothers who were quite incapable of protecting their daughters from silly affairs, illegitimate babies, and early and unfortunate marriages. It was all very sad.”
A socially awkward situation: “He remembered he hadn’t paid for it. He attempted to do so; but Henry raised a deprecating hand. “Oh no sir. I was given to understand that your tea was on the house. Mr Humfries’ orders. “Henry moved away. Father was left uncertain whether he ought to have offered Henry a tip or not. It was galling to think that Henry knew the answer to that social problem much better than he did!”
There’s a wonderful display of snobbery by Miss Gorringe towards Chief-Insp Davy, when she assumes he is just a mere sergeant; she is much more responsive towards the more junior (but better dressed) Inspector Campbell.

Classic denouement: Well certainly an exciting one. In the space of a few pages, suspicion alights from one person to another to another. There’s a big showdown between Davy and the alleged murderer, who, instead of putting up their hands with an “it’s a fair cop, guv”, actually tries to escape and run away. The truth of whodunit is only revealed in the final three pages; where the murderer fails a test of decent character which makes Davy only more resolved to seek justice.

Happy ending? Not discernibly. There aren’t many people to come out of the whole sorry affair unscathed.

Did the story ring true? For the most part it’s a complete flight of fantasy. Eccentric, unlikely and rather weird. However, the characters are largely believable and many of the more interesting conversations have a definitely realistic feel.

Overall satisfaction rating: 8/10

So, have you read At Bertram’s Hotel? What are your thoughts about it? Please let me know – but don’t give the whodunit game away please! Next up in the Agatha Christie Challenge is the first Hercule Poirot book I read – The ABC Murders. If you fancy catching up with that one, I’ll be blogging my thoughts about it in a two weeks’ or so time. Thanks for reading, and 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

Posted on by

So what’s the Agatha Christie challenge all about, I hear you ask? Let me explain, gentle reader. As a child I was a reasonably avid reader. Not as avid as some, but avider than others. My favourite author was Enid Blyton. Not so much the Famous Five or Secret Seven, I preferred what I referred to rather pompously as her “stand-alone novels”, like The Six Bad Boys or The Put-em-Rights. Of the “series” type books I liked the “Secret” ones – like the Secret Island, or the Secret Mountain. And I really loved The Five Find-Outers and Dog. It was my first exposure to detective fiction in print, and I found the genre instantly irresistible.

Sadly, a time comes when you grow out of Enid Blyton. Every so often I would re-read the Five Find-Outers books to get that whodunit thrill. But I needed more. Then one day, I was off school, sick. I used to get terrible ear infections as a child, that would inevitably end up with my being prescribed double the adult strength dose of penicillin tablets (as a result my teeth are very striated). By the end of the week’s treatment, the penicillin would make me very moody and miserable. But to get some exercise, I used to accompany the Dowager Mrs Chrisparkle on her daily trudge up the High Street in Wendover to do her grocery shopping. In the middle of all the shops was the newly opened library – a rather palatial place for its time. We popped in, with the intention of me finding something to while away my miserable time with sore ears. And that’s where I discovered Agatha Christie.

My only exposure to Mrs Christie at that stage had been the Miss Marple films starring Margaret Rutherford. The Dowager loved them, and I caught her enthusiasm for them. The infectious theme tune, the outrageously over-the-top characterisation, and marvellous dénouement moments with lines like “I’ll have you know I was Ladies’ National Fencing Champion of 1931!” as the redoubtable old girl parry-riposted to save her life from the duelling murderer. But – as I was to discover – those films bore scant resemblance to any of the books, and Miss Rutherford’s interpretation of Miss Marple is, whilst totally brilliant, a complete fabrication of Mrs Christie’s original.

Back to the library. They only had one Christie in stock – A Pocket Full of Rye. Hardback, grimy with previous perusers’ thumbprints, I selected it, took it home, and read it all in one day. I’m not sure quite how much of it I understood – I was only about 11, I think. But I got the drift, and I understood whodunit, although maybe not quite whydunit. But I was instantly hooked. Next time I went to the big bright shining metropolis of Aylesbury, I visited W H Smith and bought the two Christie paperbacks that looked most intriguing – At Bertram’s Hotel, and The ABC Murders. After they were read, I thought I’d tackle the book that was (allegedly) her masterpiece – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I went to a village fete and the bookstall there had three hardback Christies (sadly none with their dust jackets) – The Clocks, Crooked House, and They Came to Baghdad. Then I thought I ought to read her first book – The Mysterious Affair at Styles. And after that, I thought I’d just read whatever books came my way. I think I was in my early twenties when I’d finally read each and every one of them.

Since then, I’ve had a regular ten-year treat. Every ten years or so, I decide to re-read all, or the majority of, her books. I did so in 1990; I did in 2001; but I realise I haven’t done so since. So I am well behind on this decade’s Christie Challenge. So I’m embarking on all the books again, and, if you can bear it, gentle reader, I’ll share my thoughts and feelings about each one as I go. As usual, I’ll re-read them in the order I originally read them. Thus I’m currently halfway through Pocket Full of Rye, and I must say, enjoying every minute! So please watch this space for some Christie blogs over the next few weeks/months/years. I’d be very happy to hear your comments about the books too, as we go. Looking forward to it!