Agatha Christie Read online

  Are The A.B.C. Murders (1935) and And Then There Were None (1939) as good as Roger Ackroyd? Not quite, because the trick played on the reader is deliberately artificial rather than fitting naturally into the story. In the later books the Christie cleverness again leaves us gasping, but second and third readings show that the plot has been built around the device used, with total disregard for our belief in the story itself. Who can believe that those ten guilty people would in fact have accepted that mysterious invitation to stay on the small island in And Then There Were None? Who can believe in a murderer so reckless, and in a gull so stupid, as the characters in The A.B.C. Murders? Yet the books remain triumphs of ingenuity, and it is worth trying to see just how the tricks are done.

  The A.B.C. Murders are apparently motiveless, or at least their motive seems to be purely alphabetical. Ascher is killed at Andover, Barnard at Bexhill and Clarke at Churston. A copy of an A.B.C. Railway Guide is placed beside the body, and each crime is announced beforehand in a taunting letter to Poirot. ‘We’re up against a homicidal maniac,’ says one of the police investigators, but although Poirot agrees at the time, we know that this cannot be the case. There must be a logical answer.

  That is the reader’s assumption, and of course he is right. The problem is, then, how to maintain his interest through a series of crimes which in their details (I am trying not to give away too much) are for the most part irrelevant to the plot. This is managed by shifts of viewpoint from Hastings’s first person narration to a third person view of the actions of a man named Alexander Bonaparte Cust, or A.B.C. Who is A.B.C.? He is always on the scene of the crime, and it seems that he must be the murderer. The presence of A.B.C. links what would otherwise appear disparate crimes in which we might lose interest. And another problem confronted the author, that of bringing together suspects involved in separate crimes and living in different parts of England. This too is managed with unobtrusive skill. The book is a masterwork of carefully concealed artifice.

  And so is And Then There Were None. The way in which characters and plot are introduced has been described. At an early stage, then, we see what is going to happen. Some of these people are going to be killed, there will be a police investigation, and the person responsible will be discovered. But as death after death occurs, and no investigator appears, it is slowly borne in on us that the nursery rhyme ends with the line: ‘And then there were none.’ When only two people remain, one must be the murderer. It doesn’t, however, work out like that. The book’s last sentences embody the nature of the puzzle: ‘When the sea goes down, there will come from the mainland boats and men. And they will find ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Indian Island.’ Poirot does not appear in this book. How could he, when it is a problem that remains unsolved?

  4

  What are Agatha Christie’s chances of survival as a writer who will be read a century from now? To a certain extent this depends upon the kind of society we live in. Although some of her books are published in the Soviet Union, it is unlikely that she would be much read in a Communist-ruled world. But if we approach the question in literary rather than social terms, will she be read in the year 2100, and if so, why?

  To answer yes, as I would do, is not to say that she was a great or even a good writer, but rather to say that although the detective story is ephemeral literature, the puzzle which it embodies has a permanent appeal. Perhaps W. H. Auden was right in identifying the ideal detective story reader as one possessed by a sense of guilt, and in suggesting that detective stories should not be considered as art but as a kind of magic. Certainly its association with myth, and its links with the classical riddle, are strong. Few crime stories nowadays are detective novels – they belong, to vary what Auden said a little, to the real and not to an ideal world – and it is plausible to consider Dame Agatha Christie as the last notable figure of her kind. If her work survives it will be because she was the supreme mistress of a magical skill that is a permanent, although often secret, concern of humanity: the construction and the solution of puzzles.

  The Mistress of Simplicity A conversation with H. R. F. Keating

  EDMUND CRISPIN

  KEATING: Agatha Christie is generally regarded as a superb plotter, but was her actual writing on the same level?

  CRISPIN: I think not, no. She wrote dialogue very well – a lot of her books are dialogue almost entirely, with relatively little action – but I wouldn’t say she was a particularly good stylist.

  KEATING: No. So what was, if you like, unique about her work? Obviously it was enormously successful. What do you think is the key to that success?

  CRISPIN: Oh, simplicity, I think, ultimately. Her plots, though in themselves often highly sophisticated, are rarely, if ever, sophisticated in their actual presentation: basic English words, relatively short sentences, relatively short paragraphs, minimal punctuation – these were her usual building-blocks. Incidentally, her simplicity helps her books to translate well, as does her lack of interest in police procedure, which naturally differs from country to country. In short, she is in some ways an ingenuous writer, so that she can be read happily not merely by Professors of Logic taking the train from Oxford to London but equally happily by children under the desk at school.

  KEATING: Yes, but there have been other writers who have kept things fairly simple and certainly haven’t been as successful artistically.

  CRISPIN: Yes, that is so.

  KEATING: What about, for instance, Erle Stanley Gardner, who was very successful and kept things even more simple?

  CRISPIN: Though it’s arguable that he overdid it, except perhaps in the A. A. Fair novels. The Perry Mason stories became not simple so much as simplistic, with constant repetition from page to page and from book to book of such clichés as ‘The telephone rang. Della Street picked up the instrument.’ Given character, plot and background, one feels that almost any of Gardner’s secretaries could have written the book.

  KEATING: Whereas Agatha Christie managed to avoid this sort of thing.

  CRISPIN: Exactly. She had enough variety in her prose style to colour and alter the stereotyped form Erle Stanley Gardner used.

  KEATING: And when you say variety, that’s variety within books and variety from book to book?

  CRISPIN: Yes, certainly, except that as regards single books the pace is rather even. Apart from that, there’s variety within each book as well as between one book and another – much more variety than people realized when they bought a ‘Christie for Christmas’ on the vague assumption that it was all going to be the same mixture as before.

  KEATING: Can you give an instance of the variety that she…?

  CRISPIN: Yes, certainly. The Hollow, for example – a story that hasn’t a particularly good plot – is much more elaborately written than, say, Death in the Clouds.

  KEATING: Or as Americans would say, Murder After Hours is much more elaborate than Death in the Air. But her artistic success varied from book to book?

  CRISPIN: Certainly it did, as with any other author. Though beyond a certain point people bought her anyway, because she was Agatha Christie and you just did buy the latest Agatha Christie. A sort of snowball effect.

  KEATING: Is that quite fair? All over the world people bought, borrowed, begged or stole her books. Surely that can’t have been entirely due to a snowball effect?

  CRISPIN: No, you’re right, of course. What they wanted from her, and what she could almost always provide, was ‘escapism’, a release, however temporary, from the anxieties of real life. The novelist E. M. Forster was once asked why he didn’t face reality – to which he replied, ‘How can I face reality when it’s all round me?’ And that’s sound enough, you know. Most people, I fancy, have had the experience of seeming to be bedevilled from all directions at once.

  KEATING: Would you say in fact that Agatha Christie made you face a tiny slice of reality in one direction?

  CRISPIN: Yes. When one thinks of her, one thinks inevitably of English country life, rather
than of English metropolitan life, and in particular of small villages and parsonages and possibly the Squire’s large mansion, but not of factory towns, or coal mines, or any sort of commercialism.

  KEATING: And yet she appealed to people who’d no idea of what an English village was like. Why do you think that was?

  CRISPIN: Well, to a lesser extent because we are not, after all, the only nation to whom the exotic appeals. But to a much greater extent because the Christie characters were in many ways universal – so that an Icelander, for example, had no difficulty in recognizing his particular equivalent of Miss Marple in his Icelandic neighbour.

  KEATING: Yes, I’m sure that there are Miss Marples all over the world. But not Poirots?

  CRISPIN: Poirot – as opposed to Miss Marple – was a special case: an almost completely artificial conglomeration of trivial mannerisms. His creator, I might add, became very bored with him at quite an early stage in his career – whereas for Miss Marple she retained a certain affection to the last.

  KEATING: So you’d say that she picked on the universal in human character – on the things we have in common rather than on the ways in which we differ – and that this was the aspect of us she brought to the fore?

  CRISPIN: Yes. In several of her books she maintained that humanity was much the same all over the world; that its motives are the same whether you are Swedish, Hottentot or Chilean. Action, Agatha Christie either implies or specifically states, will provoke approximately the same reaction regardless of colour, creed or nationality.

  KEATING: Now, you said earlier that her dialogue was good.

  CRISPIN: Yes, I think it is. It runs very smoothly.

  KEATING: And is it just a matter of smoothness? She had a good ear, presumably, for the way people speak in her circle.

  CRISPIN: Yes, in her circle. But scarcely outside that circle. I can’t remember her showing any command of dialect, for example, such as Gladys Mitchell excels at.

  KEATING: You compare her with Gladys Mitchell. How does she compare with some of the other crime writers, for instance, with Ngaio Marsh?

  CRISPIN: Well, Ngaio Marsh, I think, is a better stylist; but she can be very much duller, particularly in the middle of her books, with her detective Alleyn interviewing one suspect after another and getting nothing very relevant out of any of them. This can go on for a hundred pages or more and seems to me, personally, to be faulty construction, a fault almost completely absent from Agatha Christie.

  KEATING: And she avoided this by being very aware of what her reader would want?

  CRISPIN: True, but I think it was a sort of natural rather than an acquired craftsmanship. I think it would have bored her to have interview after interview after interview, à la Marsh.

  KEATING: You mean that she had a temperamental instinct to write, rather than to write for either commercial or fashionable reasons?

  CRISPIN: I think that’s certainly true. And what interested her was not crime as such, but crime as… I suppose we have to call it intrigue. She did, as you know, write under the name of Mary Westmacott several straightforward romantic novels. But without her plot, her crime, to hang her story on, she seems to me to have been more or less lost.

  KEATING: So it works out that she had an intense interest in her plot, and this kept her very strictly to her story.

  CRISPIN: Yes. It kept her from irrelevance.

  KEATING: In addition to which, it kept her from putting in things which other crime authors nowadays have made very familiar indeed.

  CRISPIN: Yes. Things like detailed descriptions of sex and of violence. Even humour. She wasn’t a humourless woman and there are occasional funny bits, such as the Mah Jongg game in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. But even that she would have regarded as something of a distraction from the real business of the story, which was to enunciate a puzzle and solve it.

  KEATING: So for this reason she left out sex and violence. Are there any other important omissions?

  CRISPIN: Surprisingly many. Any serious discussion of politics or religion, for example, and also I think she was very seldom directly topical. Comfortable by the fire in the evening, you scarcely ever feel, as with so much crime fiction nowadays, that you’re reading the morning papers with their settled gloom, their alarmist politics and so forth, yet a second time.

  KEATING: Yes – although she did keep up to date in her settings. There’s the lack of servants in the later books, in contrast for instance to their simply unstressed omnipresence in such a book as the last Miss Marple story, Sleeping Murder, which of course was written many years before she died. And in her eightieth book, Passenger to Frankfurt, there’s even a passing reference to Marcuse.

  CRISPIN: Oh, yes. She kept up with the times in so far as the smaller details of life were concerned. But I was thinking of larger things, the international issues and so forth. But domestic details are another matter. For one thing, she was interested in young people – and indeed the children in her books are often much more sharply individualized than the adults. But as far as the real-life ones were concerned, she shared in, and was mildly amused by, their special interests.

  KEATING: Was this because of her large family of young relatives?

  CRISPIN: Yes, it was rather a ramifying family. I never worked out who was who, but there was certainly a considerable number of them about the place. Not to mention dogs. Dogs and young people, they surrounded her. When I went to lunch, there would quite likely be sixteen people at table and a lot of them young people in whom she kept an interest. Like well brought-up children, they treated her with politeness but not with any special awe. She usually sat at the centre of the table, but they didn’t show her any special deference just because she was Agatha Christie.

  KEATING: To get back to things she left out, we haven’t talked about her descriptive writing.

  CRISPIN: Well, there was very little of that. As I was saying earlier, there wasn’t much which wasn’t dialogue. And also I think that, although she must have observed her surroundings, she very seldom uses an exotic setting in a documentary or detailed or convincing way. Someone would say ‘Allah el Allah’ or something, but that was just about as far as it would go. And she’d be aware that Jews don’t eat pork and so forth. But I can’t remember a description of any place, outside Britain, except possibly Petra. I think there was an extended description of Petra, the ‘rose-red city – half as old as Time!’

  KEATING: Could we find from that pile of books at your elbow some quite random examples of her customary method of describing principal settings for a book?

  CRISPIN: Yes, of course. From After the Funeral (Funerals Are Fatal in America), 1953: ‘Enderby Hall was a vast Victorian house built in the Gothic style.’ And from Dead Man’s Folly, 1956: ‘They went on, down a steep hill through woods, then through big iron gates, and along a drive, winding up finally in front of a big white Georgian house looking out over a river.’ Then in Sleeping Murder, 1976: ‘Anstell Manor had a bleak aspect. It was a white house, set against a background of bleak hills. A winding drive led up through a dense shrubbery.’ Quite adequate, but neither detailed nor atmospherically convincing.

  KEATING: And what about her descriptions of people?

  CRISPIN: She describes people very little. One has only the vaguest idea of what they look like.

  KEATING: In Sleeping Murder, which I’ve just been reading, Miss Marple is described as being tall. Had you remembered her as tall?

  CRISPIN: No, I hadn’t. I’d always thought of her as a little thing, knitting away busily or busy with the secateurs in the garden. So that came as quite a surprise.

  KEATING: And could we find some examples of her descriptions of people, of main characters?

  CRISPIN: In Cards on the Table, 1936, she wrote: ‘Poirot had not previously met Colonel Race, but he knew something about him. A dark, handsome, deeply bronzed man of fifty, he was usually to be found in some outpost of empire – especially if there was trouble brewing.’ And then in Curtain: Poi
rot’s Last Case, 1975: ‘A frail elderly lady, with an abundance of curly white hair, pink cheeks, and a pair of cold pale blue eyes.’ The last four words admittedly come as a mild shock, but the rest, I’m afraid, is little better than cliché.

  KEATING: So, finally, is there one word which you might apply to explain the secret of the effect she had on readers?

  CRISPIN: In saying ‘one’, Harry, I’m afraid you’re being a bit over-optimistic. But I’ll make it as short as I can. I think that a prime factor in Agatha Christie’s success was tension created by cunning plot construction. Secondly, the plot was expressed as uncomplicatedly, and in as simple a prose, as was possible. Finally, one finds a curious satisfaction in what the Americans would call the ‘de-sanitizing’ of unpleasantness. In a Christie, you know, for example, that the corpse is not a real corpse, but merely the pretext for a puzzle. You know that the policeman is not a real policeman, but a good-natured dullard introduced on to the scene to emphasize the much greater intelligence of Poirot or Miss Marple. You know that there will be no loving description of the details of physical violence. You know (or up to a few years ago, used to know) that, although the murderer is going to be hanged, you will be kept well at a distance from this displeasing event. You know that although people may fall in love you will not be regaled with the physical details of what they do in bed. You know, relaxing with a Christie, that for an hour or two you can forget the authentic nastiness of life and submerge yourself in a world where, no matter how many murders may take place, you are essentially in never-never land. To paraphrase Forster, with reality all round you, you can close your eyes to it for a little while. And to do this, I believe, is psychologically healthy. It gives one a breathing space, a respite, a rest. When reality has once again to be coped with, we cope with it all the better for the break.