Agatha Christie Read online

  From this experience he envisages a music of the future: ‘I want to know every instrument there is. What it can do, what are its limitations, what are its possibilities. And the notes, too. There are notes they don’t use – notes they ought to use.’

  Incoherent at first, Vernon’s ideas about music grow clearer. In a striking passage, the author says: ‘He drew an experimental finger round the edge of his finger bowl. Jo shuddered and clapped both hands to her ears. The sound increased in volume. Vernon smiled dreamily and ecstatically.

  ‘One ought to be able to catch that and harness it. I wonder how it could be done. It’s a lovely round sound, isn’t it? Like a circle.’

  The answer to Vernon’s rhetorical question is: tape. Sounds of glasses (‘Let’s have the Venetian and the Waterford together,’ he says a bit farther on) and of tins and automobiles were – several decades later – to be harnessed on tape, manipulated, and turned into musique concrete.

  Vernon thinks of four-dimensional music, but in fact, he begins at once by writing an opera. His mind works in dramatic terms: ‘Suddenly he saw the whole thing in music – the high tower and the princess’s cascade of golden hair, and the eerie haunting tune of the prince’s pipe which called the princess out of the tower… He heard the music of the tower – the round globular music of the princess’s jewels…’

  The tower makes one think again of Pelléas, though there is also a hint of Delius. And the question springs naturally to mind: is Vernon based on a real composer? A musical friend and fellow-Agathian has suggested Arthur Bliss, not only because his dates are right (1891-1975) but also because he wrote the music for H. G. Wells’s films of the future. Prokofiev – of the Pas d’acier – is also a possibility. Personally, I was reminded at times of Scriabin, of that artist’s compulsion to go beyond the restrictions and confines of traditional music expression. Today one might think of still more advanced inventors: Xenakis, Cage. The fact is that, on the basis of her voice studies and her piano lessons, Mary Westmacott created an extraordinary, anti-conventional, but not unrealistic composer. And the study of the singer, who deliberately forces her small voice into a dangerous repertory (Wagner, Strauss’s Elektra, and Vernon’s own first opera) is equally compelling.

  Several operas are discussed in the book, besides Vernon’s. And one, the imaginary Radmaager’s Peer Gynt, affords an unusual Westmacott–Christie cross-reference, because in The Mystery of the Blue Train a new opera is mentioned: Peer Gynt. But this time the composer’s name is Claud Ambrose.

  Giant’s Bread opens with a prologue, which is actually a postlude to the novel’s action. The brief chapter describes the opening night of ‘London’s new National Opera House’ with The Giant. It is an extremely daring work, and one section of the orchestra is called ‘The Glass’ (‘in the new modern phrase’). It deeply impresses Carl Bowerman, ‘the most distinguished of English musical critics’ (is he Ernest Newman?). But the audience reaction is mixed. As the author says of it: ‘ “Why can’t they open a British opera house with a decent British composer? [Vernon has assumed a foreign pseudonym.] All this Russian tomfoolery!” Thus a peppery colonel.’

  One wonders: is the peppery colonel our old friend Major Blunt, now promoted? And further: is Miss Marple perhaps in the audience? If so, she probably dislikes the opera, which reminds her, no doubt, of something that happened to the vicar…

  Miss Marple – A Portrait CHRISTIANNA BRAND

  Agatha Christie once described to me her own particular method of getting down to work. She mulled over a book in her mind till it was ready, she said – well, we all do that – and she would then repair to a very bad hotel. In a bad hotel, there was nothing to do but to write, and plenty of time to do it in. The beds were so uncomfortable that you had no inclination to retire early or to get up late, the armchairs so unyielding that you wasted not a minute in idle relaxation. The meals were so bad that there was no temptation to linger over them, and any guests who would put up with such conditions must of necessity be so stupid that you couldn’t possibly make friends and spend precious moments in desultory chat. So the book would be done in a matter of weeks and you could pack up the few dull clothes which were all you need bother to take with you, and go off triumphantly home.

  I never heard of anyone else to whom she confided this ploy, nor have I ever heard that in fact it was the way she worked. So either she was making it up or I am. For myself, I do most positively swear that I distinctly recall the conversation; however, nil nisi bonum – I daresay it’s me that’s wrong.

  True or false, there was one fellow guest upon whom – whatever the surroundings – Mrs Christie would certainly have fallen with cries of joy. Miss Marple inclined to the comforts of Brown’s – I mean Bertram’s – Hotel, or to the exotic pleasures of tropical islands, all laid on by kind nephew, Raymond West. But there may have been occasions when even Raymond’s judgement faltered and he landed his dear Aunt Jane in some less propitious holiday setting, such as the bad hotel. She will certainly never have disillusioned him. He was, after all, so very generous and good and Miss Marple was adept at pulling the wool over eyes less sharply suspicious than her own.

  Mrs Christie may well for a moment have mistaken the guest for her own grandmother, whom Miss Marple strongly resembled: a tall, thin old lady with soft white curling hair, a pink and white face and an expression of the utmost gentleness in her china blue eyes – somewhat unfairly belying, I have often thought, the extreme cynicism of her outlook on human nature. This had been formed presumably in the pre-natal condition, for she sprang fully armed with it into life, at the age of seventy-four; continuing almost as closely enwombed for the rest of her days in the small village of St Mary Mead – a sink of petty iniquity if ever there was one – until at an age which we cannot but ungallantly assess as well over the hundred mark, her career came to a close. With the death of her creator – even at eighty-five untimely – Hercule Poirot has also died. But in the final book tucked up her posthumous sleeve, Mrs Christie has left Miss Marple to simply fade softly away. Perhaps she could not bear to kill off her own grandmother.

  Miss Marple will have been knitting when Mrs Christie came upon her in the bad hotel. The uncomfortable chairs, I dare say, won’t have been troubling her; she would sit very upright, ‘having been trained on a backboard in her youth and taught not to loll’ – and never for a moment would her hands have been idle. ‘Something fleecy’ would have been forming on her knitting needles – what in the world she can have done with all she produced, one simply can’t imagine: she had a tendency, certainly, to embark upon small matinee coats before even the prospective parents themselves suspected the approach of the Little Stranger, but her acquaintances naturally tended to be beyond child-bearing age. (One does hope, rather anxiously, that all that excessive fleeciness wasn’t something of a threat to infant lungs; what with Miss Marple’s own hair which was known to be fleecy in itself and all those fleecy shawls she wore, never mind the fleeciness of the inevitable knitting, the very air about her must have been full of flying particles of nasally irritating fluff.)

  At any rate, she knitted. No sunshine was too radiantly brilliant, no sea too sparkling blue, no lamplight too softly beaming – for Miss Marple to whip out her knitting bag and start off, clickety-click. Even an evening party seems not to have been sacred and if the knitting came to an end, there was always the crochet hook handy and off she went again. Her outlay in wool must have eaten up every penny saved up by her ladylike economies. Thank goodness nephew Raymond, that well-to-do literary young man, not to say precious young prig, was always there to pay for the sunshine holidays! No doubt many a fleecy pullover rewarded him – never to be surreptitiously disposed of, ‘consciously debonair’ though we know him to have been; for Aunt Jane would obviously have expected to see her offerings sported upon the manly chest and would by no means have been deceived by fibs about dishonest servants or the depredations of the rapacious moth. ‘Now that reminds me so much of dear
Jane Helier,’ she would have said, with those bursts of italics, which in her conversation made up for a considerable lack of other punctuation:

  ‘… the film star you know, dear boy, such a pretty young woman but not very clever, these theatrical people so often are not and I understand that in the film world, they are hardly required to be, some person called the director or producer, I’m not sure which, does it all for them… But where was I? (Just a moment, dear, while I count this row, I fear I may have dropped a stitch…) Yes, I was saying that poor dear Jane was given such a dreadful garment, a woollen jumper I think it would be called nowadays though I never quite understand why, and some admirer, some fan, as Jane would say, had knitted it for her but of course in her position it was impossible to wear such a thing and she gave it away to a jumble sale, but the Vicar’s wife, perhaps not very honestly, dear, considering her situation, but then again they are so very badly paid even nowadays, Vicars, I mean, not their wives who of course are not paid at all which does seem wrong when you think of all that is expected of them… Well, as I was saying, on this occasion she thought it a fair enough exchange, I dare say, to give her her due, if she kept the garment for herself and put in a worn jumper of her own. And then of course the next time the poor donor went to Evensong, well, there was the Vicar’s wife in the very garment she had so laboriously knitted for her idol. As I say, poor dear Jane is not very clever, or she wouldn’t have given the thing to a local charity…’

  And she would have fixed dear Raymond with that deceptively gentle blue eye. ‘But then, of course, I fear that you are not a churchgoer, my dear boy?’ she would have said with the just acceptable admixture of reproach and regret – not to mention suspicion – as she glanced at the smooth, decidedly machine-made article just visible beneath his hastily buttoned-up jacket. ‘You would have been exposed to no such unfortunate impulses.’

  Did Mrs Christie, as the years went by, fall a little out of love with M. Poirot? Is it possible, as some have claimed, that in fact she never loved him at all? She created Miss Marple, at any rate, as his very antithesis. Where Poirot is all shine and show-off, Miss Marple is the very pink of modest self-deprecation: how totally sincerely we may sometimes wonder for she certainly has a quiet confidence in her own powers, robustly bolstered up, should it ever fail her, by the adulation of her somewhat unremarkable friends. She and M. Poirot share, it is true, a tendency, sometimes bordering on the criminal, to play their cards very close indeed to their chests, repressing the solution to some progressively monstrous sequence of crimes, till the moment arrives when they may sun themselves in triumphant unravellings. In this, however, they are hardly alone among the literary detective fraternity. It has been done, but it cannot be often that a reader had been kept enthralled throughout a couple of hundred pages, by the slow unmasking of a multiple murderer whose identity, motive and method have been outlined in Chapter One. Of Miss Marple it must in honour be said that she is a great deal more scrupulous in this matter than the gentleman of the little grey cells. The reader may be kept in the dark, but accredited investigators are forewarned in a note scribbled on a scrap of paper and quietly pressed into the official palm: the name written therein, having been withheld from the rest of the characters, only out of a laudable anxiety that damaging accusations be not broadcast until their truth has been absolutely proven. Such broad hints as, ‘I am reminded so much of Mrs Smith’s little housemaid at home in St Mary Mead, who never could distinguish between mushrooms and toadstools,’ may be trusted to pass completely over their heads. It must be confessed that most of Miss Marple’s friends are less than liberally equipped with any share of the little grey cells.

  Nor has the lady herself great pretensions in that quarter, as she would be the first to acknowledge. A strong appetite for village gossip of a paralysingly boring nature, an aptitude for total recall of the information so gleaned and an almost paranoid mistrust of her fellow men and especially of her fellow women – these are her stock in trade. And it is by comparison with very small events that she tumbles to immense conclusions: put a droplet of water under a microscope, so runs her message, and you will find there a teeming life, even though the water comes only from a village pond. Nor is the source to be despised. ‘Talking scandal,’ she admits, going a little pink, ‘ – well, it’s done a good deal. And people are very down on it – especially clever young people…’ (The clever young person in the back of Miss Marple’s mind is in fact kind, but highly critical not to say often censorious, nephew Raymond West.) ‘But what I say is that none of these young people ever stop to think. They really don’t examine the facts. Surely the whole crux of the matter is this: How often is tittle tattle, as you call it, true! And I think if, as I say, they really examined the facts they would find it was true nine times out of ten! That’s really just what makes people so annoyed about it!’

  ‘The inspired guess,’ suggests one of her listeners.

  ‘No, not that, not that at all! It’s really a matter of practice and experience… What I’m trying to say – very badly, I know – is this: What my nephew – ’ (I told you!) ‘ – calls “superfluous women” have a lot of time on their hands, and their chief interest is people. And so, you see, they get to be what one might call experts. Now, young people nowadays – they talk very freely about things that weren’t mentioned in my young days, but on the other hand their minds are terribly innocent. They believe in everyone and everything. And if one tries to warn them, ever so gently, they tell one that one has a Victorian mind – and that, they say, is like a sink.’

  Yet after all, suggests another listener – falling all too understandably into Miss Marple’s habit of emphasis – what is wrong with a sink?

  ‘Exactly. It’s the most necessary thing in any house…’

  Not content with the scum from other people’s sinks, Miss Marple is vigilant to equip her own and to this end does not disdain to spend a good deal of time at open windows – wrapped in a sufficiency of the fleecy shawls, we may be sure – with a pair of binoculars glued to her china blue eyes: all ready, should she be disturbed, to have had a charm of goldfinches in her sights just a moment ago. To observe the butcher’s boy pedalling by with his load in a basket fixed to his handle-bars, is to be reminded most aptly at some future date, of the fact that nowadays they use only those horrid wooden skewers, so difficult to get back once one has removed them from the joint, so that if a poor old woman is found dead, transfixed through the heart with a steel one, the recent movements of any old-fashioned purveyor of meat should be enquired into urgently. On so frail a thread has many a malefactor hanged by the neck in the earlier days of Miss Marple’s activities, and who shall say that the sequence of events is not always logical and – allowing for a somewhat large margin of alternative interpretation – quite likely to be correct. True, most of us cherish a skewer or two on the dear old original pattern for poking down choked drains – back to the sink again! – and would be as likely suspects if this were all, as the traditional butcher, but it is never safe to underrate Agatha Christie. Subtly led to put all our faith in the coincidence of the metal skewer and old-world charcuterie, we shall find that, after all, the skewer was just one which the aged eccentric was accustomed to use in a high wind to secure her hat, and had merely come in handy in a case of unpremeditated murder, and that, all the time, it was recollection of the butcher boy’s basket that had alerted Miss Marple to the fact that the old lady’s was missing. If the old lady carried no basket then she could not have been going out shopping as everyone had assumed and must therefore have been lured out on some other pretext by her murderer – too much to hope that it was the situation of the boy’s basket that had led to Miss Marple’s flash of intuition regarding a villain with handle-bar moustaches. But one way or another – on to the eventual unmasking…

  Everything, in other words, reminds Miss Marple of some small occurrence in St Mary Mead which may subsequently be matched against events in the world outside. It is usuall
y accepted, however, that these deductions play a greater part in her detective work than in fact they do. The connection between the butcher boy’s basket and arrival at the solution to the mystery is, after all, tenuous in the extreme, but it is a good enough comparison with Miss Marple’s accustomed processes of thought – though not an actual example. Mrs Christie’s sleight of hand is seldom less than miraculous, her deductive procedure impeccable, but of Miss Marple and her methods, Dr Johnson might well have observed that it was not so much that the thing was well done as that it had been done at all – (and by a lady aged anywhere between seventy-four and a hundred and one.)

  In several of the longer novels, she deserts St Mary Mead almost entirely. No erring errand boy, no unseemly seamstress leaps unbidden to her mind. Instead she leans – a little more heavily than in matters of such huge importance many of us would perhaps dare to do – upon the sort of sixth sense that reads truth or falsehood in people’s eyes (though exceedingly well able to dissemble it in her own) – sees guilt in the set of their mouths, recognizes worlds of meaning in their manner or deportment. She goes even further. So important a person as ‘a Confidential Adviser to the Home Office’ places a quite extraordinary reliance upon the suggestion that she has ‘a very fine sense of evil’. Miss Marple does not disclaim. It’s true, she agrees, that on several occasions she has ‘recognised that there was evil in the neighbourhood, the surroundings, that the environment of someone who was evil was near me, connected with what was happening’. She has ‘a kind of emotional reaction or susceptibility to – well, I can only call it atmosphere… It’s rather, you know, like being with a very keen sense of smell. You can smell a leak of gas when other people can’t do so. You can distinguish one perfume from another very easily’. (With St Mary Mead, it will be observed, Miss Marple’s italics are also left behind, and even something of her grammatical accuracy too.) ‘I had an aunt once who said she could smell when people told a lie. She said there was quite a distinctive odour came to her. Their noses twitched, she said, and then the smell came.’ Sherlock Holmes might have suggested that this phenomenon would be likely to occur in the reverse order, but then he was aridly free of the sort of atmospheric pressures which came increasingly to govern Miss Marple’s otherwise rather matter-of-fact outlook – though at least as liberal in his deductions from the mud splash on the outside of the left boot or the missing button indicative of the missing wife, as ever Miss Marple would have dared to be. And it must be said at once that she by no means relied exclusively upon otherworldly powers of insight but, having let her sensitive nose point the way, stood aside and allowed her creator to back it all up with some good, thumping, red-blooded clues. Where Jane Marple went, Agatha Christie was never far behind. Together they make an absolutely unbeatable pair.