Agatha Christie: Inspiring Lives E-Book

Cathy Cook

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: Inspiring Lives
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 199

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This miscellany explores the fascinating and enigmatic world created by the undisputed 'Queen of Crime', Agatha Christie. Examining her place in literary history, her books and her iconic characters, including Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, this unique collection includes facts, trivia and quotes that feature in Christie's legendary stories and the subsequent film and television adaptations. The Agatha Christie Miscellany will also delve into the secrets, mysteries and tricks that made Christie the most sensational and successful mystery writer of her time. For example, how is it that she managed to keep us guessing the murderer until the very end? Looking at her life and the influences on her writing, this entertaining and informative miscellany will, above all, unravel the secrets of Agatha Christie's phenomenal success.

Leseprobe

AGATHACHRISTIE

First published 2013

This edition published 2019

The History Press

97 St. George’s Place, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Cathy Cook 2013, 2019

The right of Cathy Cook to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-0-75249-253-7

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

• CONTENTS •

Introduction: 10 Things You Might NotKnow About Agatha Christie

1Her Mysteries & How to Solve Them

2The Real Agatha Christie

3Poirot vs Marple

4Key Works

5Family and Lifeline

Bibliography

To Bobby Cook

• INTRODUCTION •

10 THINGS YOU MIGHT NOTKNOW ABOUT AGATHA CHRISTIE

‘If anyone writes about my life in the future, I’d rather they got the facts right’.

Agatha Christie – The Sunday Times 27 February 1966

1. Agatha Christie was half American. Her American father, Frederick Miller, was able to trace his descendants from an old New England family. However, he died when she was only 11.

2. Agatha Christie never went to school. She was educated at home by her mother.

3. Agatha Christie had to wait five years before her first book was accepted for publication.

4. The Orient Express was nearly the death of Agatha Christie. Shortly before writing her famous book, Murder on the Orient Express, she slipped on an icy platform and fell underneath the stationary train in Calais. A railway porter quickly pulled her off the rails just before the train started moving.

5. Agatha Christie said that she did her best thinking while lying in the bath, eating apples and drinking cups of tea. She claimed that modern baths weren’t made with authors in mind as they were too slippery, with no nice wooden ledge to rest pencils and paper on.

6. Agatha Christie worked as a nurse during the First World War, and once said that if she hadn’t been a detective story writer, she would have quite liked to have been a hospital nurse.

7. Both Agatha Christie and her second husband, Max Mallowan, lied about their ages when they were married, to minimise the fourteen-year age gap. On their marriage certificate, Agatha’s age is shown as 37 (when she was really 40), and Max is shown as 31 (when he was only 26).

8. Although a fictional character, Agatha Christie claimed to have seen the personification of Hercule Poirot twice in real life. Once while lunching in the Savoy grill room she saw Poirot just across at the next table, an exact replica in every way, and another time she saw him on a boat going to the Canary Islands. She was too shy to approach either man.

9. Married to archaeologist Max Mallowan, Agatha Christie denied ever saying, ‘An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.’ Indeed, in an interview with Sir Francis Wyndham in the London Sunday Times, she said that she would have liked to have wrung the neck of the person who ever suggested that she had said it!

10. Agatha Christie predicted ‘once I’ve been dead 10 years I’m sure nobody will ever have heard of me’. She died in 1976 …

• 1 •

HER MYSTERIES & HOW TO SOLVE THEM

THERE EXISTS A MISCELLANY of trivia about the novels of Agatha Christie, her characters and her methods of murder. With fifty-seven years’ worth of novels to choose from, this section will guide you through some of the more bizarre and interesting. It also includes advice on the rooms to stay out of if you ever find yourself in the middle of an Agatha Christie murder mystery!

• THE STRANGEST CHARACTER TO APPEAR IN AN AGATHA CHRISTIE NOVEL •

In the early 1940s, during the Second World War, Agatha Christie wrote the two final novels for her most famous detectives, Hercule Poirot (Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case) and Miss Marple (Sleeping Murder), just in case she did not survive the wartime bombing raids.

However, in Sleeping Murder, which was published posthumously in 1976, there appears a character which also appeared in her 1968 Tommy and Tuppence novel, By the Pricking of My Thumbs.

She was unnamed in Sleeping Murder, but was a white-haired ‘charming-looking old lady, who came into the room holding a glass of milk.’ The old lady, who lived in a sanatorium and rest home in Norfolk, asked, ‘Is it your poor child, my dear?’ Then she said, ‘Half past ten – that’s the time. It’s always at half past ten. Most remarkable.’ And she concludes, ‘Behind the fireplace. But don’t say I told you.’

In By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Tuppence meets an old lady with white hair who was holding a glass of milk in her hand. The old lady was called Mrs Julia Lancaster and lived in a nursing home. She asks, ‘Excuse me, was it your poor child?’ ‘That’s where it is, you know. Behind the fireplace’, and, ‘Always the same time of day ... Ten past eleven. Yes, it’s always the same time every morning’.

In both novels, the mystery of the old lady, the child, the fireplace and the time remains unsolved. Yet it is undoubtedly the same character, appearing in two stories that were written with twenty years between them. Who was she and why does she appear? We will never know.

• THE CHARACTER WITH THE BIGGEST COINCIDENCE •

Agatha’s second husband Max tells of a letter that they received from Mary Ann Zerkowski, the headmistress of a school in Pennsylvania, USA in 1970. She wrote that she had just finished reading Agatha’s novel Passenger to Frankfurt, and was astonished to find herself playing the part of an undercover agent!

Mary Ann Zerkowski was really thrilled to be cast in the role, but was curious as to how Agatha had christened the spy with her name. She wrote that the book had created quite a sensation in her home town, and she was receiving many telephone calls and letters from friends addressing her as Countess Zerkowski.

Agatha wrote back that the name Zerkowski had been picked by pure chance, probably from the birth, death or marriage column in a newspaper, or from a telephone directory. However, she ended by congratulating the lady on having become a countess!

• CHARACTERS BASED ON REAL-LIFE PEOPLE •

In an interview with Lord Snowdon in the last years of her life, Agatha Christie said that she had become tired of being repeatedly asked if she took her characters from real life. She was adamant throughout her career that she invented them; that she had to, otherwise they didn’t become real for her. She needed them to do what she wanted them to do, be what she wanted them to be, and think what she wanted them to think – so becoming alive for her.

In writing her first novel, Agatha Christie looked around for inspiration for her characters. She initially started to base her murderer on an acquaintance who lived nearby, but even though she considered it at some length, she could not see the man in question ever murdering anyone. Agatha, therefore, decided once and for all not to use real people as inspiration; she would create her characters for herself. She started looking out for people in trams, trains and restaurants which she could use as her starting point, and this worked well.

Agatha Christie tried again later on in her writing career to incorporate a close friend, Major Belcher, into one of her stories. They had gone on a round-the-world trip together in 1922 and, on their return, Belcher had badgered her to make him the murderer in the book she was writing, The Man in the Brown Suit. She found this incredibly difficult, and it was only when she gave the character a completely different name that the character really started to develop, even though he did use some of Belcher’s phrases and anecdotes.

There is little doubt however that certain people she met influenced her development of certain characters. The masterful wife of an eminent archaeologist that Max Mallowan and Agatha worked with on a dig in Ur, Katharine Woolley, featured prominently in the character of Mrs Louise Leidner in Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). Max commented that Agatha became quite apprehensive that she had maybe gone a bit too close to the bone in her description of the tyrannical woman. However, Katharine Woolley appeared not to have recognised certain characteristic traits which might have been taken as descriptive of her. She saw no comparison and therefore was not offended. Agatha had however learnt her lesson and did not mirror people she had met quite so closely in future. In Murder in Mesopotamia, Max also featured as a minor character, David Emmott, who was a thoroughly decent chap!

Agatha Christie gave some insight into her choice of character names when she discussed it with the author Ernest Dudley. She explained how certain names conjured certain images of people in her mind. So for example, she saw a character called Raymond as a very blond man, whereas Dudley saw Raymond as slimish, dark and almost foreign looking.

In 1956, a French millionaire M. Nicoletis threatened legal proceedings against Agatha Christie. He claimed that her character Mrs Nicoletis, the owner of a student hostel in Hickory Dickory Dock, was based on his mother who had also owned a hostel where Agatha and her mother had once stayed. Agatha responded to her agent saying that she had invented the name Nicoletis, and it was terrible to invent a character which turns out to be so true to life.

Agatha often gave her characters unusual names that would take a bit of getting used to for the reader, so that in time the character became firmly entrenched in the reader’s mind.

• WHEN IT ALL GOES WRONG •

In Death in the Clouds (1935), set on an aeroplane, the murder was committed using a lethal dose of snake venom on the end of a thorn, which was shot from a South American Indian blowpipe. However, many expert fans wrote in to complain that such blowpipes were far too long to hide in an aeroplane seat. With self-deprecating humility, in Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), Agatha allowed her character Ariadne Oliver to narrate, with chagrin, the error of using the inappropriate blow pipe in one of her own detective stories.

INCONSISTENCIES IN HER STORIES

Colonel Arthur Bantry, the owner of Gossington Hall in St Mary Mead appeared first in The Body in the Library (1942). By the time of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (1962), Colonel Bantry had died and his wife had sold Gossington Hall. However, he returns from the dead, alive and well, in Miss Marple’s final case, Sleeping Murder (1976).

Miss Marple’s nephew, Raymond West, is married to a lady who is introduced as Joyce in The Thirteen Problems (1932), but is called Joan in ‘The Regatta Mystery’ (1939).

Hercule Poirot moves from Kings Abbott after The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) to live in Whitehaven Mansions in London, where he is residing at the time of The ABC Murders (1936). However, the name of the apartment block changes to Whitehouse Mansions in Cat Among the Pigeons (1959) and is referred to as Whitefriars Mansions in Elephants Can Remember (1972).

Florin Court, Charterhouse Square, London, was used by the producers of the Poirot TV series as the location of Poirot’s apartment – he lived at Apartment 56B.

In the novel Postern of Fate (1973), Tommy and Tuppence Beresford’s daughter Deborah has twins early in the story, but towards the end she arrives at her parents’ house with her three children aged 15, 11 and 7 – no twins.

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie commented on the mistake she made by creating the character of Hercule Poirot as already being in his 60s in the first book. Already retired and elderly when he first appears, he has to be about 120 years old by the time of his last appearance in Curtain (1975).

LIVE PERFORMANCE DISASTER 1

Agatha Christie described the first television broadcast of one of her books as something close to a farce. It was a black and white production of And Then There Were None in 1949, broadcast from the Alexandra Palace studios. At the time, productions could not be pre-recorded, so the programme went out live at 8.30 p.m. Early on in the production there was a huge crash to be heard off camera, shortly followed by the sound boom swinging into view over the actors’ heads. After an uncertain start, the next half an hour was faultless, apart from one actor speaking his words into the wrong camera.

However, things then went downhill again with out of focus shots and a view of the camera crew wheeling equipment to a different part of the set. The thing that upset Agatha Christie most, making her ‘livid’, was that one of the actors, having been stabbed to death, got up and strolled away with his hands in his pockets, quite unaware that he was still in view.

LIVE PERFORMANCE DISASTER 2

One of Agatha Christie’s plays, Verdict, was booed on its first night in 1956 because the assistant stage manager dropped the curtain down on the final scene about forty seconds too soon. This prevented the surprise re-entrance of a key character and two vital lines of dialogue, and so completely changed the ending of the play. Not realising that they had missed the ending, the audience and critics were very disappointed, saying the last scene ‘rang false and fell flat’. The next night, with the right ending, the company took six curtain calls.

MGM’S MISS MARPLE FILMS

In an interview for The Sunday Times in February 1966, Agatha Christie explained that she had always steered clear of films as she felt that they would cause her too many heartaches. Indeed, she had become so weary of stage adaptations of her books that did not stay true to the novels, that she had started to adapt them herself, rather than relying on others.

In 1960, in an attempt to extend her reading public, Agatha had agreed to sell the rights to MGM, with the provisional intention that MGM would use them as the basis of a television series. However, a sudden demand in America for British comedy films meant that they were made into movies starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. Agatha describes the whole experience as ‘too awful’, with poor climaxes, since you could tell exactly where the story was going. She said that she got immeasurable pleasure when they were not successful.

However, fans of Margaret Rutherford were delighted, and flocked to cinemas around the world. Reviewers were, on the whole, in favour of the films, and a whole new generation of fans started to read Agatha Christie books. Without doubt Margaret Rutherford was the first actress to create a lasting impression as Miss Marple with the general public, although Rutherford never really wanted to take the role. Initially concerned about violence and murder, it took the film’s director to convince her that she should play the part. It was also suggested that there would be a part for her real-life husband, the actor Stringer Davis, as Miss Marple’s trusted assistant, the village librarian.

Four stories were brought to the screen starring Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, even though only one of the films was based on a Miss Marple book, with two books originally starring Hercule Poirot. MGM wrote their own script for the last film, Murder Ahoy, which was not actually based on any of Agatha’s books. When Christie learned of the plan to produce a wholly invented plot, she objected most strongly. In 1964 she wrote to MGM saying that she could not see how they could expect her ‘to feel anything but deep resentment at your high-handed action’, and felt it highly ‘questionable that you have the right to act as you have done’. To have her characters incorporated into someone else’s film was ‘monstrous and highly unethical’. MGM ignored her objections, and carried on anyway. On its release, Agatha Christie described it as one of the silliest things she had ever seen, saying that she was delighted to note that it got some very bad reviews.

Browns Hotel, London, is alleged to be the inspiration for Bertram’s Hotel, the setting for the Miss Marple novel At Bertram’s Hotel (1965).

Rather unfortunately, one reviewer remarked that Margaret Rutherford was outfitted in a ‘regular tarpaulin of a sweater’, which created the effect of a ‘warmly bundled English bulldog’. The reviewer was no doubt unaware that Rutherford wore her own clothes for the part of Miss Marple.

• REAL-LIFE CRIMES AND THEWORK OF AGATHA CHRISTIE •

CASE 1 – SOLVED THANKS TO AGATHA CHRISTIE

1975, London – Agatha Christie’s detective story The Pale Horse provided a vital clue and saved a 19-month-old girl from dying of a condition that had baffled London doctors. According to the British Journal of Hospital Medicine, a trainee Canadian nurse in her 20s, Marsha Maitland, was off duty reading The Pale Horse. In it, one of the victims is poisoned with thallium and the nurse noticed that the symptoms closely resembled those of the baby. Thallium was rare in Britain, even though it had once been used to treat children for ringworm before its danger was realised. However, in the Middle East it was used as a household poison to kill rats and other vermin.

The 19-month-old girl had been brought to England from her home in Qatar in the Middle East, suffering from a mystery disease. Harley Street’s specialists had been unable to diagnose her illness. She had shown all the same symptoms of the murder victims in the Christie thriller, but it was the girl’s hair falling out that prompted Maitland to talk to the doctors. By this stage, the doctors felt that any suggestion was welcome. They approached Scotland Yard for help in testing for thallium poisoning and the police suggested they talk to a life-sentence prisoner called Graham Young, the Bovingdon Poisoner. He knew about thallium as he had kept detailed notes on the effects that it had as he poisoned his pet rabbits, his family and some of his co-workers.

However, the doctors didn’t need to consult Young because their initial tests confirmed Nurse Maitland’s suspicions – the child’s body contained ten times the safe dose of the poison. The girl had ingested the poison over a long period as it was being used to kill cockroaches and rodents near her home. After three weeks of treatment, the baby left hospital, returning four months later for a check-up when she showed ‘remarkable’ improvement.

CASE 2 – MURDER INSPIRED BY AGATHA CHRISTIE

1977, Creances, France – Roland Roussell admitted to using a poison that he had read about in Agatha Christie’s short story, ‘The Tuesday Club Murder’, to poison a bottle of red wine. Police found the book in Roussell’s apartment in France, with the relevant passage on poisons underlined – the murderer uses atropine, a medicine to treat eye aliments, to kill his victim.

Roussell put atropine into a bottle of Cotes du Rhone wine during the summer, with the intention of killing a female friend of the family whom he believed was responsible for his mother’s death. Roussell gave the bottle of wine to his uncle as a gift because the woman was a frequent visitor to his uncle’s home, and she drank while his aunt and uncle abstained except during holidays.

However, his uncle saved the bottle of wine for the Christmas Eve dinner, and died within minutes of drinking the wine. His wife went into a coma and was rushed to hospital, and food poisoning was suspected. It wasn’t until a few days later, when the village carpenter and the uncle’s son-in-law each drank a glass of the wine that had been left on the dining table and lapsed into comas, that the link was made.

CASE 3 – PRISON WARDENS DISTRACTED BY AGATHA CHRISTIE

March 1959, Wormwood Scrubs prison, London – On Sunday, 15 March 1959, the West End cast of the Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap arrived at London’s notorious Wormwood Scrubs prison to give a special performance for the inmates. Three hundred prisoners watched the performance … while two escaped. John Brian Meyers and David Dilwyn Gooding were reported missing. Both were serving three-year sentences – Meyers for shop breaking and Gooding for housebreaking.

CASE 4 – SERIAL KILLER ‘INSPIRED’ BY AGATHA CHRISTIE

May 2009, Qazvin, Iran – Mahin Qadiri, a 32-year-old woman, and Iran’s first female serial killer, claimed that she was inspired by the novels of Agatha Christie. She told police that she drew tips on how to conceal her crimes from Christie’s books, which had been translated into the language of Farsi.

Between February 2008 and May 2009, Mahin offered five elderly women a lift after prayers, then served them fruit juice laced with sedatives before strangling them and stealing their cash and jewellery.

CASE 5 – REAL-LIFE CRIME THAT INSPIRED AGATHA CHRISTIETO WRITEMURDERON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

The Lindbergh Baby – The motive behind the murder in Murder on the Orient Express (1934), which focuses on the kidnapping of a child, Daisy Armstrong, who was murdered after the ransom had been paid. Agatha Christie was inspired by a real-life kidnapping two years earlier.

In 1932 the 18-month-old son of famous American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped from his bedroom. A ransom note was left demanding $50,000 for his safe return. The ransom money was handed over a cemetery wall, as agreed, but the murdered baby was then found about 4 miles from where he had been taken. The US Congress rushed legislation to make kidnapping a federal crime.

The serial numbers on the banknotes were circulated to all banks in New York. However, it wasn’t until two years later that one of the banknotes turned up at a petrol station, and luckily the attendant had written the man’s car number plate in the margin because he had been acting suspiciously.

The evidence against German carpenter Bruno Richard Hauptmann was overwhelming: over $13,000 of the ransom money was found hidden in a can in his garage, handwriting experts suggested the writer of the ransom note was German, wood used to make the crude ladder employed in the kidnapping matched wood used as flooring in his attic, and the telephone number of the person who made the ransom-drop was found written on the door frame in the house.

CASE 6 – REAL-LIFE CRIME THAT INSPIRED AGATHA CHRISTIE TO WRITETHE MOUSETRAP

When Agatha Christie was asked by the BBC to write a radio play to commemorate Queen Mary’s 80th birthday, she was inspired by a real-life crime that had horrified the nation. Dennis O’Neill was a 12-year-old boy, who with his younger brother, had been placed with foster parents at a remote farm in Minsterley, Shropshire. The two children were starved and abused by their foster parents, Reginald and Esther Gough, and the death of Dennis O’Neill led to a reform of foster caring in the UK, in particular the vetting of foster parents and regular visits to check on the foster children.

Agatha had kept a newspaper article of the case from the Sunday Mirror, and had written on the top that this had been her inspiration for The Mousetrap. A classic whodunit with an unexpected twist, The Mousetrap has been playing continuously in the West End since 1952.

• AGATHA CHRISTIE’S WORLD RECORDS •

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