Tag: Agatha Christie

Crime Fiction Alphabet – A is for …

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

… Agatha Christie

For the first of this year’s Crime Fiction Alphabet hosted by Kerrie I’ve chosen a double A – Agatha Christie – An Autobiography.

I finished reading it at the end of December. I can’t remember exactly when I began reading it. I think it was the end of May because in a Sunday Salon post then I wrote that I was thinking about starting it. I read short sections of it most days since I started it and felt quite sad when I came to the end. It was like having a daily chat with Agatha.

 

It took her fifteen years to write it. She stopped in 1965 when she was 75 because she thought that it was the ‘right moment to stop’. It seems right that a book that took her so long to write should take me a long time to read. As well as being a record of her life as she remembered it and wanted to relate it, it’s also full of  her thoughts on life and writing. I’ve written about her Autobiography in a few posts as I was reading it:

It struck me as I was reading her Autobiography that  it’s not very easy to work out the dates of many of the events she described. It follows on chronologically but is so interspersed with her thoughts and reflections that I forgot the date, or she hadn’t mentioned it. She wrote about her childhood, teenage years, friends and family, and her marriage to Archibald Christie; but although she wrote about their divorce she didn’t write about her disappearance in 1926. She wrote about her travels around the world, the two world wars, her interest and involvement with archaeology and her marriage to Max Mallowan.

Towards the end of the book she wrote that she had decided not to tidy up her Autobiography too much:

Nothing is more wearying than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way around. I am perhaps talking to myself – a thing one is apt to do when one is a writer. (page 455)

What she remembered most were things that were most vivid and it was places that remained most clearly in her memory. She never had a good memory for people, apart from her own dear friends:

A sudden thrill of pleasure comes into my mind – a tree, a hill, a white house tucked away somewhere by a canal, the shape of a hill. Sometimes I have to think for a moment to remember where and when. Then the picture comes clearly, and I know. (page 416)

She wrote quite a lot about her writing methods, writing criticism, hearing your own voice, economy in wording, writing detective stories, adapting plays and writing them herself, the right length for a detective story (50,000 words), writing two novels at once, writing books set in historical periods and the joy of creation. The one book that satisfied her completely is not one of her detective books but one she wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott – Absent in Spring – and she wrote it in three days flat (pages 516 -7).

She ended the book with these words:

A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner’.

What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’ (page 551)

Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret8 Comments

Curtain was first published in 1975, but it was written in the 1940s during the Second World War. Agatha Christie had written it with the intention that it be published after her death, but in 1975 her publishers persuaded her to release it so that it could appear in time for the Christmas season – a ‘Christie for Christmas’.

In this book Poirot and Hastings have come full circle, returning to Styles, the scene of their first case. Poirot is now an old man (just how old is not revealed  – I think if you go by the chronology of the novels he must have been about 120, but there is no need to be too precise), and close to death.  Hastings is the narrator of this mystery. He is saddened by the devastation age has had on Poirot:

My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheeled chair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feeling by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot’s hair came out of a bottle. but now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse the children!

Only his eyes were the same as ever, shrewd and twinkling, and now – yes, undoubtedly – softened with emotion. (pages 12-13)

Curtain is in many ways a sad book. Sad because this is Poirot’s last case and he dies, with  X, the murderer, apparently having got away with his crimes. Sad, too because Hastings is in a nostalgic and morbid frame of mind, mourning the death of his wife and wishing himself back into happier times. It doesn’t help him that one of his children, Judith, a secretive child now aged 21, is also staying at Styles, the assistant to Dr Franklin who is engaged in research work connected with tropical disease. She resents her father’s interference in her life and is scornful of what she considers his sentimental and old fashioned ideas. Sad too, because of the setting. Styles, once a well-kept country house has been sold  and is now being run as a guest house, the drive badly kept and overgrown with weeds and the house iself badly needing a coat of paint.

But is also an interesting puzzle. Poirot knows the identity of X, a murderer who is present at Styles but will not tell Hastings, because Hastings would not be able to conceal his knowledge – his face would give him away. Poirot is convinced that X will kill again, but he doesn’t know who the victim will be. He asks Hastings to be his eyes and ears whilst he is confined to his wheelchair. He also gives Hastings newspaper cuttings of five murder cases, all of which were committed by different people. X apparently had no motive for killing any of the victims, but he/she was connected with all of them.

Hastings is intrigued and suspects all the people staying at Styles in turn. The first mishap occurs when Colonel Luttrell, the owner of Styles, accidently shoots his wife, but she is only wounded and recovers. Then Barbara, Dr Franklin’s wife, who suffers from her nerves and is looked after by Nurse Craven is found dead, poisoned by one of the toxic substances her husband is researching. Finally Stephen Norton, another guest is found dead in his locked bedroom with a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. It looks like suicide, but there is something about the scene that reminds Hastings of an earlier death.

When Poirot, himself dies, the mystery is unsolved, but there is a twist in the ending, which I didn’t see coming, making this one of my favourite Agatha Christie books. It is also a theatrical and dramatic ending to the book and to Poirot, himself.

Agatha Christie on Individuality

Published on by Margaret9 Comments

This morning I was reading more of Agatha Christie’s Autobiography. It feels as though I’m listening to her as she recalls her life and in this morning’s chapter she was talking about individuality and writing. She said that even though you admire certain writers and may wish to write like them, you know you can’t:

If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things, that as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do. As the Bible says, ‘Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’ (page 422)

So it’s no good me wanting  to write like she did!

She went on to list the things she couldn’t do:

  • she was never good at games
  • she was not a conversationalist
  • she couldn’t draw or paint
  • she couldn’t model or do any kind of sculpture
  • she couldn’t hurry without getting rattled
  • she couldn’t say what she meant easily – she could write it better

and then the things she could do:

  • she could write
  • she could be a reasonable musician, but not a professional one
  • she could improvise when in difficulties

and things she didn’t like:

  • crowds
  • being jammed up against people
  • loud voices
  • noise
  • protracted talking
  • parties, especially cocktail parties
  • cigarette smoke and smoking generally
  • any kind of drink except in cooking
  • marmalade
  • oysters
  • lukewarm food
  • grey skies
  • the feet of birds, or the feel of birds altogether
  • and most of all – the taste and smell of hot milk

finally, things she did like:

  • sunshine
  • apples
  • almost any kind of music
  • railway trains
  • numerical puzzles and anything to do with numbers
  • going to the sea
  • bathing and swimming
  • silence
  • sleeping
  • dreaming
  • eating
  • the smell of coffee
  • lilies of the valley
  • most dogs
  • going to the theatre

Apart from a few exceptions we like and dislike most of the same things – I do like a glass of wine for example, I’m useless at numerical puzzles, can’t do sudoku (I bet she’d have liked that), I’m not fond of swimming, and I like cats as well as dogs.

Agatha Christie on Poirot

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

These are some of Agatha Christie’s thoughts on creating Hercule Poirot, taken from her Autobiography.

She had decided to write a detective story whilst working in a hospital dispensary during World War 1. Surrounded by poisons it seemed natural that death by poisoning would be the method. She then decided who should be poisoned, who would be the poisoner, when, where and how. And then who should be the detective? She was steeped in the Sherlock Holmes tradition but decided she had to invent a detective of her own and he had to have a friend as a ‘kind of butt or stooge’. He had to be unique, a character that hadn’t been used before. She considered a schoolboy, or a scientist, but when she remembered the Belgian refugees who were living in a colony in Tor that is who she settled on.

She decided her detective should be a Belgian – a refugee and a retired police officer and only later realised what a mistake she had made:

What a mistake I made there. The result is that my fictional detective must be well over a hundred by now.

Anyway, I settled on a Belgian detective. I allowed him to grow slowly into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that he would have a certain knowledge of crime. He would be meticulous, very tidy, I thought to myself, as I cleared away a good many untidy odds and ends in my own bedroom. A tidy little man, I could see him as a tidy little man, always arranging things, liking things in pairs, liking things square instead of round. And he should be very brainy – he should have little grey cells of the mind – that was a good phrase: I must remember that – yes he would have the little grey cells. (page 263 -4)

And then he had to have a name, rather a grand name. She wondered about calling her little man Hercules but his last name was more difficult. She didn’t know how the name Poirot came to her – whether it just came into her head or whether she saw it in a newspaper or written down somewhere, but it didn’t go with Hercules; eventually she decided that it should be Hercule – Hercule Poirot. So, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was conceived and eventually published. She was jubilant – her book was going to appear in print. She didn’t know that this was the start of her long  writing career and that

Hercule Poirot, my Belgian invention, was hanging round my neck, firmly attached there like the old man of the sea. (page 285)

Because  Poirot had been quite a success in The Mysterious Affair at Styles she was encouraged to use him again and then she realised that she was tied to both Poirot and his Watson: Captain Hastings.

I quite enjoyed Captain Hastings. He was a stereotyped creation, but he and Poirot represented my idea of  a detective team. I was still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition, eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp – and now I added a ‘human foxhound’, Inspector Giraud, of the French police. Giraud despises Poirot as being old and passé.

Now I saw what a terrible mistake I had made in starting with Hercule Poirot so old – I ought to have abandoned him after the first three or four books, and begun with someone much younger. (page 290)

Poirot, whatever Agatha Christie thought of him is one of her most famous characters, vying in popularity with Miss Marple. Each time I read on of the 33 novels he appears in or see him portrayed by David Suchet (who is Poirot for me) I think he is my favourite. But then I’m equally as fond of Miss Marple (Joan Hickson fitted the part to perfection) and she too is my favourite. I can’t pick one over the other – they are both outstanding creations.

A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie: Book Review

Published on by Margaret11 Comments

In Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery, published in 1964  Miss Marple is on holiday, arranged for her by her nephew Raymond West after her doctor had prescribed sunshine. Whilst staying at the Golden Palm Hotel on the fictitious island of  St Honoré, she is listening to Major Palgrave droning on about his life, reliving days when he’d been happy. He was about to show her a photo of a murderer when he stares over her shoulder and sees someone, stops his story and hastily returns the photo to his wallet. Then hours later he is found dead. Miss Marple suspects he didn’t just die in his sleep and investigates his death, involving old Mr Rafiel, a man who looked on the point of death himself, and who delighted in contradicting anything anyone else said.

She also wants to find out about the murderer the Major had mentioned. The question she needs answered was who was it the Major saw that disturbed him so much. Once again it is her knowledge of human nature, gleaned from living in peaceful St Mary Mead that leads her to uncover the truth. She considers the other guests at the hotel in turn, and not sure whether the murderer was a man or a woman everyone is a suspect, from the elderly Canon Prescott and his sister, a thin severe-looking woman to the hotel owners, a young couple, Molly and Tim Kendal. There are plenty of misleading false trails and hidden relationships to discover before the murderer is revealed.

This is not my favourite Agatha Christie but it’s still an entertaining book, which I enjoyed. I didn’t guess who the murderer was until quite near the end, but that is not a bad point. I liked the descriptions of the island and Miss Marple’s thoughts and observations on human nature. At the beginning Raymond mistakenly thinks his Aunt Jane has her head buried in the sand, living in an idyllic rural life when it is real life that matters. Jane silently disagrees:

People like Raymond were so ignorant. In the course of her duties in a country parish, Jane Marple had acquired quite a comprehensive knowledge of the facts of rural life. She had no urge to talk about them, far less to write about them – but she knew them. Plenty of sex, natural and unnatural. Rape, incest, perversion of all kinds. (Some kinds, indeed, that even the clever young men from Oxford who wrote books didn’t seem to have heard about. (page 9)

Agatha Christie on …

Published on by Margaret4 Comments

I’ve been reading Agatha Christie’s Autobiography for a while now – just a chapter or so each day. Instead of writing about the details of her life I thought I’d do a few posts now and then on things she drops into the narrative. Ideas she had, thoughts on various things, books she liked and so on.

Today, I’ve chosen to focus on her joy in being alive and happiness.

She’s writing about the time in her life when she was thirteen or fourteen:

Always when I woke up, I had the feeling which I am sure must be natural to all of us, a joy in being alive. I don’t say you feel it consciously – you don’t – but there you are, you are alive, and you open your eyes, and here is another day; another step as it were, on your journey to an unknown place. That very exciting journey which is your life. Not that it is necessarily going to be exciting as a life, but it will be exciting to you because it is your life. That is one of the great secrets of existence, enjoying the gift of life that has been given to you.(page 133)

She goes on to say that not every day will be enjoyable, for example if you remember you’re going to the dentist. However, she thinks it does depend upon your temperament – whether you’re a happy person or melancholic:

Naturally happy people can be unhappy and melancholic people enjoy themselves. But if I were taking a gift to a child at a christening that is what I would choose: a naturally happy frame of mind. (page 133)

I like that.