Agatha Christie Page 8
Outside the home her characters, even if they are derived from a golden world that never existed, move competently through one social upheaval after another. Wartime rationing, austerity, National Health – all formed part of Agatha Christie’s accurately observed England. So too did educational grants and youth hostels in London, West Indian hospital nurses and bus conductors, the very rich staying rich in a welfare state. Dame Agatha mentioned these things to us long before anybody else did because she had a noticing eye. Capital punishment disappeared for Christie malefactors, and young people left those bed-sitters with the ubiquitous gas ring in order to share apartments – and Agatha Christie registers the fact, then casually passes it on. The Empire dies, employment goes up and down, the youth movement is spawned and it is all there, as seen from the Aga stove. There is no pretension, no didacticism. But it is the record of an era, drawn dispassionately and effectively.
Even on the delicate ground of American characters, Christie rarely sets a foot wrong. Here her victory consists less in attracting a devoted American audience than in avoiding its alienation. Refined creative instinct, or a lot of horse sense, saved Christie from the fatal error of sending Hercule Poirot to New York, or Miss Marple to Washington, DC. (English readers must often yearn for a little reciprocity along these lines.) Indeed, Christie was generally sparing in her use of Americans. In her early years, she liked the hackneyed American millionaire as he appears in The Mystery of the Blue Train and The Big Four. Thereafter she began substituting home-grown products for American stereotypes. The amoral Hollywood actress in Thirteen at Dinner (Britain’s Lord Edgware Dies) is English. The nouveau riche vulgarian in Easy to Kill (Murder Is Easy) is a local boy. Money- grubbing Babbitts are likely to hail from the City. When a touch of the wide open space is called for, she draws on the Empire, not Texas. Bronzed heroes (and some culprits) come from Kenya or Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Naturally, when Christie’s focus shifted from the manor house to the village, great wealth became less central to her plots. Still, a sinister millionaire is always useful. When she did need one, she evinced a preference for exotic Levantines, such as Monsieur Aristides in So Many Steps to Death and old Leonides in Crooked House.
We have to cross the Channel for Americans to appear in bulk. Abroad, it seems, they dominate. In Appointment with Death the whole cast is one large American family drifting through Jordan; necessarily the plot involves Americans interacting with each other. If nothing else, this solves the knotty problem of handling a solitary foreigner conspicuous in a multitude of English. In Murder in Mesopotamia the outrageous extravagance of the plot cries aloud for aliens, although nothing short of Martians would really fill the bill. And Murder in the Calais Coach, as all the world knows by now, was based on the Lindbergh kidnapping. The book is permeated with memories of that fateful household in New Jersey, but there are relatively few American roles and the two principal women are engaged in a masquerade throughout.
One important discovery made by Agatha Christie which seems to have eluded her competitors is that you can have the American fortune and not encumber yourself with the rough diamond who made it. In a number of her books American money has flowed into English hands, thereby producing the Lord Astor effect – namely, colossal wealth coupled to an aristocratic remoteness from its source. Linnet Ridgeway, the richest girl in England; Alistair Blunt, the embodiment of British conservative tradition; even the evacuees from London’s bombing in Ordeal by Innocence – all are beneficiaries of some fabulous overseas Eldorado far from the current scene. In a real sense, the most consistent American character running through the works of Agatha Christie is the American dollar. And, if she had thought it out for years, she could not have hit upon a more fortunate stance, or one that accords equally well with the preconceptions of her readers on both sides of the Atlantic. That is how Europeans think of the United States, and that is how Americans expect them to think.
So much for the content of Christie’s work. There is one final point to be made concerning her record in the United States. All those impressive sales figures stress the insatiable demand for her books. But there is another side to the coin. In addition to mass consumption, Agatha Christie represents mass production. Her long, hard-working life has filled the shelves with title after title. Now mystery reading often presents some of the symptoms of addiction, with the hardened fanatic devouring larger and larger dosages until a book a night is required to satisfy the craving. Everyone who has ever been bitten by the bug knows the joy of unearthing a new, appealing author, followed by the bitter discovery that his entire output consists of two volumes. With Christie, there is no such brief encounter; she is with you for life. And by the time there are over forty works to a writer’s credit, rereading becomes more than a possibility, it becomes an insurance policy. Nothing makes us feel safer than an Agatha Christie we read twenty years ago.
Not that we actually need such reassurance as long as we do not use our passports. Many harsh words have been uttered about the United States in one quarter and another, but even her most intransigent detractors have never denied the efficiency of her distribution system. Give the American middleman a mass producer on one side and a mass market on the other and he will bring the two of them together, no matter what it takes. On one level that is what this country is all about. There is no nonsense about a potential purchaser searching for a bookstore. He can find his chosen author in supermarkets, discount chains, drug stores and gas stations. If he’s ready to buy, there’s always somebody ready to sell. Of course there are plenty of people to deplore this kind of merchandising. Look, they whinny, at the lowering of quality, the corruption of standards implicit in such blatant hucksterism. Look at television commercials and magazines that exist solely to puff the wares of their advertisers; look at the crudity, the juvenility, the pornography littering every paperback stand. They miss the essence of a giant distribution system. It is a neutral juggernaut making no value judgements of its own. It will seed the countryside with Walter Paters as readily as with comic books. Those faultfinders who object to the crudity of the American marketplace forget that it has swept copies of Jane Austen and Henry James, as well as Valley of the Dolls, into places they have never been seen before. Naturally any process that deals with American magnitudes is inherently better constituted to cope with a product of multiple units than with single perfect roses. Air-conditioned Cadillacs pour smoothly from the assembly line into the customers’ garages. No racing driver, however, thinks he is going to get a competition machine for the Grand Prix from his local car dealer. And anybody who feels that it is a mark of worthlessness to be amenable to popularized commerce would do well to remember how much of Charles Dickens’s success was due to the innovation of issuing novels in cheap instalments and the patrician disdain elicited by this practice at the time. Agatha Christie can be said to have created the perfect material for the American system of paperback distribution. She – and her readers – could have done a lot worse.
The American Bicentennial in itself proves all this amply and graphically. In the village of Concord, Massachusetts, where it all started, there is a low stone wall bordering the approach to the rude bridge that spans the flood. This wall now bears a plaque to the memory of the British soldiers who died at its base:
They came three thousand miles, and died,
To keep the past upon its throne;
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.
Every 19 April, on the anniversary of the battle, flowers are laid on the plaque to commemorate a gallant and vanquished foe. It is fitting, it is proper and, in view of what is going on at the other end of town, it may be premature. Down the road stands the Concord Free Public Library. At last count, its card catalogue listed seventy-three separate Christie titles, without reference to multiple copies. On the same day there were two books by Agatha Christie on the shelf. The remainder were circulating. This means that all over Concord men a
nd women were ending the day by having tea at Lyons Corner House, by taking the Underground to Paddington, by calling at the Vicarage, or by making a trunk call from the village post office. So much for the end of British influence in the colonies. Some pens, it would appear, still have victories denied to the sword.
The Message of Mayhem Parva COLIN WATSON
Many have tried to devise some sort of apparatus of prediction in the book market. They have not had much luck. The standard recipe for the best-seller is still unformulated. It seems that one essential element remains incalculable: the equivalent to the catalyst in a chemical reaction. Agatha Christie was by no means the first writer of crime fiction to be blessed by the emergence of this catalytic function in her detective; Conan Doyle, Austin Freeman, G. K. Chesterton and A. E. W. Mason, among others, all achieved fame through a created persona; but she provides a surely unique example of how a device that has failed or achieved but moderate success in one set of circumstances may work spectacularly well in another.
Mrs Marie Belloc Lowndes, sister of Hilaire Belloc, was already fifty-two years old when Agatha Christie’s novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920. If she read this first effort by the young wife of an English army officer, Mrs Lowndes must have been more than passingly interested in an extravagantly egotistic, moustachioed little character named Hercule Poirot, who, by virtue of long experience in the Brussels police, from which he had now retired, was able to get to the bottom of some odd goings-on at an English country house.
For Mrs Lowndes also was the creator of a self-opinionated, bossy, retired foreign detective: the redoubtable Hercules Popeau, late of the Paris Sûreté.
Stories by both authors, each featuring her own ex-policeman, were appearing in the same popular anthologies in the 1930s, so there would seem to have been no serious dispute concerning parentage. Indeed, as late as 1947, the year of Mrs Belloc Lowndes’s death, there was published a Christie collection of Poirot stories under the title The Labours of Hercules, despite there having appeared a Popeau tale entitled A Labour of Hercules some eleven years previously.
The fact remains that Hercule Poirot worked whereas Hercules Popeau did not. Why? The question is one for the social historian, not the moralist. Popeau had been tailored to impress the generation that preceded the 1914 war; he was a late Victorian creation and went about things in a way the late Victorian middle class would have approved. Pushing in style, he wore ‘a sardonic look on his powerful face’, was thorough, not very mysterious, and given to using words like hideous, infamous, sinister – temptress even. Every inch a foreigner, certainly, but neither comical nor endearing.
Poirot, though also a foreigner, was decidedly an eccentric, a bit of a joker. He was short and his head was noticeably egg-shaped. His eyes had the curious quality of turning green when he was excited. He was an incorrigible moustache-twirler. He carried a cane, smoked queer little cigarettes, was a fancy dresser and dyed his hair. He spoke English with laughable literalness (‘I beg that you do not disarrange yourself, monsieur’) and was always making quaint remarks about the power of thought. A Froggie, for a cert.
But of course Poirot was not a Froggie. He was a Belgian. And the distinction was more important in 1920 than it might seem today. Military propaganda had created an image of ‘gallant little Belgium’ that persisted long after the war. Within such a picture, Poirot’s five-feet-four stature, his limp, his bold moustaches, fitted perfectly. Even his fastidiousness was tolerable, whereas it would have been considered odious affectation in a Frenchman, one of those unpredictable ex-allies who were throwing their weight about in Europe just when England wanted only to put a wreath of Earl Haig’s nice poppies on the beautiful new Unknown Soldier’s Tomb at Westminster and then settle down to crosswords and detective stories. For such diversions were playing no small part in the attempt by the middle classes to get their nerve back and ignore the irrational and disconcerting things that other people, in other lands, continued so wantonly to do.
The truth is that Poirot was neither French nor Belgian. He was as English a creation as one of the new ‘Moorish’ picture palaces, or boarding-house curry, or comic yodellers. Personifying native conceptions of continentals, he was immediately familiar to readers and therefore acceptable. As a detective, he was dedicated to the righting of wrong (the trade of our national saint, no less) and to the defence of property and social order. The public was used to these vital matters being entrusted to stern, authoritative, slow but fairly realistic operators on the Inspector French model; now dawning, though, was the age of novelties, and an unconventional investigator made a nice change. Especially attractive was the man’s apparent omniscience. Every encyclopaedia salesman knows that the English stand in awe of knowledge but resent intelligence. Poirot was skilfully modelled to seem mysteriously, fascinatingly knowing, yet with a monumental cockiness that restored him to favour as ‘a bit of a card’. How could anyone fail to smile at such amiable absurdities as: ‘Ah, it was a clever plan, but he did not reckon on the cleverness of Hercule Poirot!’ or ‘But I am a good detective. I suspect. There is nobody and nothing that I do not suspect.’
In the years when Mrs Christie’s reputation was being built, there was no way in Britain of tapping massive readership overnight. In the absence of television and before the organization of the film ‘promotion’ industry, authors had little help along the road to fame other than an occasional press interview and, very rarely, a patronizing and carefully non-committal airing on the wireless. Books, even cheap editions, were between hard covers, and they were sold in bookshops or from the railway bookstalls of the W. H. Smith monopoly, which could, and did, soft-pedal the offering of any book of which it happened to disapprove on moral or political grounds. There was still no sign of the paperback tide that eventually would sweep into grocery stores and sweet shops, hotel foyers and airport lounges. The novelist’s main hope was to receive the custom of libraries, and of these the most useful to the writer of entertainment such as detective stories was the private lending or ‘chain’ library that flourished in every suburban and provincial high street. The records of one such library in a West Country town were quoted at the time as showing the issue of 6,000 books every week to its customers in a population of 43,000.
Nothing quite like the ‘chain’ library exists on that scale today, but during the inter-war years it was virtually the only source of reading matter for those who could neither afford to buy books outright nor find the kind of undemanding entertainment they wanted in the public libraries, with their emphasis on non-fiction and ‘serious’ novels.
Having discovered in 1932 that in Britain ‘book buying has not increased in proportion to literacy’, Mrs Q. D. Leavis observed ‘that the proportion of fiction to non-fiction borrowed is overwhelmingly great, that women rather than men change the books (that is, determine the family reading), and that many subscribers call daily to change their novels’. The authors she quoted as being typical purveyors to the ‘tuppenny dram-shops’, as she called the chain libraries, included Sax Rohmer, Edgar Wallace, William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim and ‘Sapper’. Perhaps she selected these on account of their special reprehensibility and decided to let Agatha Christie off with a private caution, for by that time the detective story, as distinct from the thriller, shocker, or ‘blood’, was beginning to be accorded a sort of self-conscious patronage by the intellectuals, much as the juvenile japery of P. G. Wodehouse was to become a literary ‘in thing’ a generation later. Nevertheless, even by the early 1930s the request for ‘another Christie’ was to be heard daily at the counters of the chain libraries, where seven Poirot novels were already in stock and two featuring Miss Jane Marple, the refined but shrewd resident confidante of the village of St Mary Mead.
What was there in these books that pleased the predominantly middle class but by no means exclusively middle-aged people who read and praised and recommended them to one another? Firstly, it must be said that they provided what the
average library customer understood by ‘a good read’. They were written in a sound, simple, undemanding style and were free of literary affection of the kind that had bedevilled the work of so many of the early mystery writers. Their plots, though ingenious, were not convoluted to a tiresome degree, nor did they depend upon the technical or esoteric. Avoided were all subjects offensive or controversial, but there ran unobtrusively through their pages a simplistic commentary upon human nature that somehow left the reader with the flattering impression that he had been given credit for philosophical astuteness. Thus Poirot: ‘Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on.’ Gosh, how true, the reader would echo.
To describe books designed for entertainment – detective stories, thrillers, Westerns, romances even – as ‘escapist’ may be convenient but it is not always accurate in context. Consider a typical small but flourishing suburban lending library of the late 1920s, in Lower Addiscombe Road, East Croydon. It was a clean, newly decorated, well-lit shop, as quiet in atmosphere as the monastic-styled public library in nearby Ashburton Park, but with a much more raw, exciting smell: instead of leather and waxed wood, here were thick, pulpy paper and new ink and shiny yellow covers whose pungent scent seemed redolent of the scenes so dramatically depicted upon them and featuring, singly or in combination, corpses skewered with oriental daggers, delicate ladies in straight-cut frocks suppressing gasps of horror with three fingers (reversed), and men rendered incognito by excessively slouchy hats and grasping guns like great slabs of liquorice. Many of these covers bore identifying ciphers. A scarlet circle proclaimed Edgar Wallace, the words for Excitement in dashing black script followed the name of Sydney Horler, like some confident medical prescription.