Backwards and Forwards with Agatha Christie

Several books on sailing. A couple about English Springer Spaniels. Some James Herriot novels from that time in the 1970s when everyone read about vets, and some collections of Thirlwell cartoons. The bookshelf has not changed since my dad died just as 2014 blinked itself free of a new year’s hangover. In truth I don’t think the bookshelf had changed much in the preceding decades. Certainly the small collection of Agatha Christie paperbacks that I read in my youth are still there, the Tom Adams cover illustrations so very evocative of time and place.

Having said that, I have to admit that I am still not entirely certain when I would have bought and read them, (my) memory being such a fickle thing. Oddly, I see now they are almost exclusively later Christies, and hence hardly her finest work. ‘Postern Of Fate’. ‘The Clocks’. ‘Elephants Can Remember’. There is a 1978 edition of ‘Death On The Nile’ with Peter Ustinov cut out and pasted in front of the Sphinx and ’NOW A SPECTACULAR NEW FILM’ in the bottom corner. On the back cover a grid of stills from the film shows the likes of Mia Farrow, David Niven, Lois Chiles, George Kennedy and Maggie Smith. Glancing at these images now, two key things occur to me. The first is that Jane Birkin looks fabulous (of course she does) and the second is that I wonder if this was the first Agatha Christie book that I bought. If so though, when, and why? I’m sure the two answers must to connected, but my cursory sleuthing does not help much. I’m almost certain I would not have seen the film at the cinema on its release, and the television premiere was not until Christmas Day, 1982, when it was the BBC’s Big Christmas Film. It started at 8.15pm, immediately after ‘The Two Ronnies Christmas Show’ (special guest David Essex!) so I feel much more secure (or do I?) in saying I would have watched it then. Was it then my first exposure to Christie and Poirot? It is certainly possible, yet this would have made me an angsty 16 year old, with barely a year of schooling still ahead of me. By Christmas 1982 I had already been to the Glasgow School of Art twice (once for an open day, once to a night time fashion show) and had my head blown, metaphorically speaking, by the weirdness and wildness I’d glimpsed there. Even in my cloistered bedroom existence then I’m certain that by 1982 surely Poirot and Christie would have felt tame and oddly childish. Wouldn’t they? This train of thought is certainly backed by the printing dates in almost all the other Christie’s in my childhood bedroom. These are are all 1978 or 1979, which rather suggests that the film tie-in might actually have been picked up at the time of printing rather than as a result of finally seeing it on television. More than this, I wonder if by this point, hovering close to my 16th birthday, I was not already tiring of Christie and preparing to reinvent myself as some miserable existential Art Student for whom books by the likes of Agatha Christie were so much frippery. Perhaps by the time 8.15pm on Christmas Day 1982 came around I was already ensconced in my bedroom with a smuggled-in bottle of red and Camus under the covers.

As if.

Why though would I have picked up any of Agatha Christie’s books at all? As with Enid Blyton, the answer is long since lost to me. Perhaps it was simply an extension of that childhood affection for mystery and adventure, multiplied by the small-town economic necessity of only seeing Big Names and bestsellers in the book store. Looking again at those Tom Adams’ covers, however, I do wonder whether it was this which prompted me to pick them up in the first place. Wildly imaginative and mildly hallucinatory, they are perhaps an homage to a 1960s/70s interest in progressive ideas that is nicely in contrast to the somewhat more conservative worlds inhabited by Christie’s words. Not that I would have any concept of such things at the time, just as I would have been wholly ignorant of notable New York musician/artist Lou Reed, who was certainly a fan. Whilst he might have been more inspired by Adams’ illustrations for a series of 1970s reissues of Raymond Chandler’s Noir novels (it is, after all, a long way from St Mary Mead to Manhattan, although it is amusing to think of Joan Hickson as Jane Marple replacing Mo Tucker to recite lines about the “Apelike and tactile bassoon” in ‘The Murder Mystery’ on the eponymous Velvet Underground LP of 1969) he certainly commissioned the illustrator for the cover of his 1972 debut solo album. A long way too from Warhol and his Pop Art bananas. Then again, perhaps not, for Adams’ works often look like hand painted collages; meticulous watercolour studies of Dada assemblages with visual references abounding.

Whether I was drawn to Adams’ illustrations or not, however, the reality is likely to be that I was reading and enjoying Christie in my mid teens, and there is something quite comforting in that thought now. Did I read more Christie in books borrowed from the library? Unsurprisingly, I do not remember, but I think it unlikely. Certainly when I started conscientiously reading the Poirot series in order back in 2012 there was little, if anything, that seemed even vaguely familiar. So no, I hardly think that I would have been as splendidly immersed in Christie as, say, detective fiction historian Curtis Evans, who admits to have been devouring Poirot when he was 12, or my friend Clare who similarly had read all of Christie’s works (encouraged, I believe, by a librarian parent) by the time she became a teenager. Another friend with whom I share almost identical interests in music and detective fiction tells me that, like Evans, he had read Christie when he was 11, led there perhaps inevitably from Sherlock Holmes. Chapeau to them all, even if they do make me feel ashamed of my ill-informed eleven year old self. Then again, don’t we all feel something similar about our young selves when we begin to glance into the barrel of our sixties?

Chapeau also to Lucy Worsley, whose BBC show and accompanying book (or was it the other way round?) in 2023 were both highly entertaining and informative. In all of her work Worsley pulls off the tremendous trick of being both remarkably clever and enormously accessible, which is not unlike Christie herself of course (or Agatha as Worsley says repeatedly in her book/show as if she is on chummy first name terms, which I’m sure would be the case had they been contemporaries) and no doubt explains something of their continued success.

That point about Christie’s work being both remarkably clever and enormously accessible is, I think, critical to understanding her appeal. Like Enid Blyton, Christie appears to have almost sub-consciously understood what appeals to the audience and then delivered it in truck loads. Both authors’ almost supernatural abilities to channel the elements necessary for success is uncanny. It is easy to throw such a notion in the air, of course, but whilst I do believe there is more than a little magic involved in the process of such successful writing, what should also never be overlooked is the sheer amount of time put in at the coalface, as it were. Endless hours spent tapping it out. Tap tap tap, typewriter keys reverberating in solitary confinement. Putting in the hard miles. No shortcuts. Though having the magic on your side helps soften the pain, perhaps.

Critically speaking, one will certainly find more people willing to take up the defence for Christie than for Enid Blyton (Nicholas Royle and his tremendous ‘David Bowie, Enid Bolton and the sun machine’ book notwithstanding), but she remains too often a sniffy shorthand reference for being intellectually substandard. For example, in a review of the 2024 film ‘Wicked Little Letters’, Claire Armitstead in The Guardian suggests that the screenplay “blows a raspberry at the Agatha Christie tradition of cosy crime stories”. Now I’m not going to haul Armistead over the coals for this line, and nor have I seen the film in question, but nevertheless I do think it a somewhat lazy observation, a slightly tired and jaded repetition of a widely accepted notion that is not really supported by the evidence of Christie’s writing. Indeed, to my mind there is actually very little, if any, ‘Golden Age’ detective fiction that is ‘cosy’. ‘Cosy’ feels to me instead a style that is a more modern reinterpretation of Golden Age detective fiction, one inevitably additionally influenced by other media, notably television, film and the entire Nostalgia Industry. Where I do agree with Armitstead though is in the pejorative use of the word, for ‘cosy crime’ to me is certainly something best avoided. I know the style has innumerable supporters and I am very happy about the pleasures they get from the books, but whilst I have tried some of the self-proclaimed ‘cosy’ books/authors of the contemporary era I find them (with only the rarest of exceptions) unutterably dull. Can you see my eyes rolling and my head lolling off to sleep?

Christie does use the word, of course, notably early in ‘Murder Is Easy’ when she describes a certain Miss Pinkerton as being “very cosy and English”. Of course it’s not Christie who says this at all, it is her character Luke Fitzwilliam, a somewhat vapid young chap who is certainly one of the more easily forgettable of Christie’s amateur sleuths. Now ‘Murder is Easy’ is one of Christie’s standalone pieces, but whilst Christie had written only one Miss Marple novel when it was published, one rather thinks that Jane was on her mind. The books is filled with old ladies about whom, as with Miss Pinkerton, there is “something very cosy and English” but that also “are as sharp as nails in some ways”. One can’t help but wonder if the book might have begun life as a prototype Marple before Christie decided that the (spoiler alert!) serial killer theme leant more towards the blood thirsty realm of the thriller than the more subtle disquiet of the Jane Marple universe. Indeed, the book does rather get lost in its latter stages, falling a little too much into the rampaging action of the thriller genre for my tastes, but it is all carried off exuberantly well regardless. And this is the crux of the thing with Christie, and with ‘Murder is Easy’ in particular. For whilst it is too easy to think of Christie books as being ‘cosy’, so too is it to play up the darkness that underpins the (multiple) crimes committed in their pages. Christie (like many Golden Age crime writers) is more complex than that, but crucially, only slightly more so. It is the combination of those contrasting flavours and the injection of the intangible Entertainment ingredient that make them so enjoyable. As Christie says herself in ‘Murder Is Easy’: “Gossip and malice and scandal – all so delicious if one takes them in the right spirit!” Quite the cocktail.

Perhaps more interestingly Christie uses the word ‘cosy’ in a late Poirot novel (1963’s ‘The Clocks’). As much as such a thing is possible in a Poirot mystery, it’s a throwaway line at the end of a chapter. Someone has found a dead body and is recovering from the shock with a nice cup of tea. “It all sounds very cosy”suggests Colin Lamb, one of the book’s narrators, and it is. Of course it is. It’s Agatha Christie poking fun at herself. On your 34th Poirot novel you’d do the same, wouldn’t you?

‘The Clocks’ is not, I think, regarded as one of the better Poirot novels but I admit I find it enormously entertaining and interesting. It reads now like an author throwing caution to the wind, a writer being a little lackadaisical but still reassuringly having their wits about them. ‘The Clocks’ feels like Christie playing with the form, teasing the expectations. So it’s a Poirot mystery where Poirot (now getting on a bit in years) barely appears, and apart from making a flourish with the solution at the end, is mostly there to put some kind of proof to the eternal Poirot insistence that it is in the exercising of “the little grey cells” where mysteries are solved, not in the running around looking for clues. Poirot and Christie leave this to the aforementioned Colin Lamb and Detective Inspector Hardcastle who, for relatively minor Christie characters, are pleasantly sketched. The mystery at the core of the novel, Poirot suggests as soon as he is appraised of the facts, is so apparently complicated that it must, in truth, be very simple. Naturally he is proved to be right, but not before the author takes us on something of a rollercoaster ride of investigation.

The other, perhaps more important (and certainly more amusing) role that Poirot plays in the ‘The Clocks’ is to provide us with an exposition on detective fiction itself, thereby positioning the novel as an enjoyably post-modern meta-fictional work. Well, perhaps that is over-stating the case, but whatever.

Now I told myself that I would not pepper this piece with lengthy quotations, yet the sequence in which Poirot waxes lyrically about detective fiction is so marvellously done that it rather demands it. Poirot/Christie kicks off with Anna K. Green’s 1878 novel ‘The Leavenworth Case’, a copy of which he hands to Lamb, who comments that it is “going back quite a long time… my father mentioned that he read it as a boy. I believe I once read it myself. It must seem rather old-fashioned now.” Poirot though insists that “It is admirable… One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama.” Lamb has a point, for ‘The Leavenworth Case’ is a mite ‘old-fashioned’. Unusually for a 19th Century novel, however, it does not leave me cold and indeed is certainly worth, ahem, investigating. Christie/Poirot too, though, is quite right about its “deliberate melodrama” and its “period atmosphere.” Of course the writer is making the same point about her own work, looking backwards and forwards through time. She acknowledges the criticism. Celebrates it even.

Poirot continues to Maurice Leblanc’s ‘Adventures of Arsene Lupin’ of which he enthuses: “How fantastic, how unreal. And yet what vitality there is in them, what vigour, what life! They are preposterous, but they have panache. There is humour, too.” Here too Poirot/Christie makes a fine point, for the stories of Leblanc are great fun and there is certainly something of Lupin in, say, Leslie Charteris’ character of Simon Templar, aka The Saint. It’s interesting that when Christie was writing ‘The Clocks’ Simon Templar himself was being resuscitated by Roger Moore in a TV show for Beat Boom Britain. The slippage of time backwards and forwards, repeating.

The next piece of classic detective fiction on Poirot’s (or is it Christie’s?) agenda is Gaston Leroux’s novel of 1907 ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’. “Ah, that is really a classic!” gushes Christie (or is it Poirot?) “I approve of it from start to finish. Such a logical approach!… Definitely a masterpiece, and, I gather, almost forgotten nowadays.” The novel is certainly another excellent point of reference, but I wonder how accurate it is to suggest that, in 1963 it should be “almost forgotten.” Certainly by 1981 it was anything but, being rated as the third best locked room mystery by a poll carried out amongst mystery writers and reviewers. Since then it appears to have been seldom out of print. Perhaps Poirot/Christie helped to revive interest?

Then, of course, there is Arthur Conan Doyle, about whom Hercules Christie opines that the “tales of Sherlock Holmes are in reality far-fetched, full of fallacies and most artificially contrived.” This is an opinion that I’m in wholehearted agreement with, the Holmes stories and novels never quite connecting with me beyond the thrill of rollicking adventures. Nothing wrong with that of course, but I did come to Holmes and Conan Doyle later in life, and anyway, the short story form has never really done much for me. However, before one can nod too much in agreement, Agatha Poirot continues with a qualification to the opinion, stating that “the art of the writing—ah, that is entirely different. The pleasure of the language, the creation above all of that magnificent character, Dr Watson. Ah, that was indeed a triumph.”

The reference to Watson is, naturally, an excuse for Christie (and one gets the sense it really is Christie and not Poirot, even though the words are voiced by the little Belgian) to bring up her own Watsonesque construct. The use of the estimable Hastings as the narrative voice for many of the earlier Poirots is unquestionably in homage to Conan Doyle and one rather gets the feeling from this particular scene in ‘The Clocks’ that Christie is expressing regret at leaving him behind, as it were, having banished the poor chap to the depths of Argentina. Perhaps too it is a sneaky preview of Hastings’ return in the final Poirot novel ‘Curtain’, written some twenty years previously and locked in a vault awaiting final publication. After ‘The Clocks’ there would ultimately be another decade and a bit (and three further novels) to wait, but perhaps Christie was getting antsy, or maybe just looking in the eyes of fate and wondering how much longer there would be before…

Interestingly too there is a nod in the ‘The Clocks’ to the first novel (1934’s ‘‘Unfinished Portrait’) that Christie published under her pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Now I cannot in all honesty recommend ‘Unfinished Portrait’ for it feels laboured and tediously self-indulgent to my mind, although admittedly, as a piece of semi-autobiographical writing it does provide some insights into Christie’s life. Lucy Worsley perceptively makes something of this in her book/show but is generally more positive than I can bring myself to be. Instead, I enjoy rather more the fleeting piece of self-reference in ‘The Clocks’, where our friend Mr Lamb happens to stumble upon a young girl observing the world (and, crucially, The Scene Of The Crime’) through opera glasses from an upper flat window. The young girl is confined to the flat in a plaster cast, so it is all very ‘Rear Window’, but there is much in what the character says and thinks that recollects the young Christie/Westmacott of ‘Unfinished Portrait’. Whilst the whole scene is, like much of the entire novel, preposterous (did no-one think of safeguarding measures in 1963?!) it is, I think, intentionally so. Detective fiction is by definition preposterous after all. Hasn’t Poirot already made that clear to us in his little exposition? Perhaps then my suggestion that ‘The Clocks’ is a piece of meta-fiction about the process of making fiction is not so wide of the mark? I shall let the academics argue that out in private whilst I settle back with a sherry.

Let’s go back to that Poirot exposition for moment though, because he’s not finished. With bright eyes he suggests that we “take the works of John Dickson Carr or Carter Dickson, as he calls himself sometimes”. Me, I call the American author John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr and if I were Lamb I should answer with the riposte of “let’s not.” Except… except I cannot quite escape from mentioning John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr, if only to point out what I think is one of the more interesting aspects of Christie’s work. It’s all to do with cleverness, or assumed cleverness, or imagined cleverness, or no cleverness at all. To puzzle or not to puzzle, that might be the question.

Personally I don’t think I have ever particularly bothered about the puzzle for the puzzle’s sake in any piece of mystery or detective fiction and I strongly believe that Agatha Christie would side with me on this one. For whilst it is inescapable that the puzzle aspect of her mysteries is one of the most enduring facets of the work, it never seems to overpower everything else. Indeed, the puzzle can often just be the arresting hook on which to hang everything else, which are conversations and observations and a strong narrative drive. Let’s Get On With The Story indeed.

The solutions to the puzzles of the crimes in Christie’s books do sometimes feel tortuously convoluted, yet, as Poirot pointedly makes clear in ‘The Clocks’ they are also often fiendishly simple because the motivations behind the crimes are such. I don’t think one ever comes away from a Christie novel feeling that the author has been insufferably clever. Her characters, arguably, sometimes, and Poirot, yes, certainly and almost all the time. This is one of his defining characteristics after all and I suspect one of the reasons that Christie grew to despise him. Jane Marple? Heaven forbid. Which is probably why Marple is Christie’s greatest character and perhaps the one most like herself. She is disarmingly, self-deprecatingly, charmingly yet incisively clever.

The same also feels true of, say, Dorothy L Sayers. Her Lord Peter Wimsey character can sometimes come across as insufferably smug yet, despite often spending an interminable amount of time unpacking the finer details of train timetables, Sayers herself never comes across as intellectually aloof. John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr on the other hand most assuredly does, as do several other male authors I could name but won’t partly because I don’t want to fall into the trap of negativity but mostly because my memory fails me and I can’t think of any names off the top of my head.

John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr novels are always preposterous but only occasionally pleasurably so. More often, as with every book I have had the misfortune to read featuring the appallingly insufferable Dr Gideon Fell, they are simply interminably dull expositions of the novelist’s thought processes barely disguised as Fell unravelling the puzzle to find the solution. Some people, I know, just live for this kind of thing and that is fair enough. To me, though, the Gideon Fell mysteries read like John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr showing off what he considers to be his astounding cleverness, and what an irritatingly masculine cleverness it is. As dull as reading/hearing people’s drug or dream stories.

Perhaps all of this is about the subtle difference between character and writer, fiction and autobiography. Or is it that just what I want to believe? Subjectivity playing tricks on objective logic. Then again, photographer Richard Avedon has suggested that his portraits are more about him than they are the people he photographs, whilst Mary Ellen Mark has said that “every photograph is the photographer’s opinion about something”. In other words, the art is about the artist even when it appears to be objective. So is the difference between Christie and John Dickson Carter Dickson Carr ‘just’ to do with the manner in which each does/does not blur the distinction between self and character? Any number of academic treatises no doubt exist to prove and disprove this. Meanwhile, thank you for indulging the meagre meanders of my mind.

Is there more to be said on Christie? Assuredly yes. For example there might be the absurdity of 21st Century film producers ‘reimagining’ her stories with themes, characters and narrative arcs that are nowhere to be found in the original texts. I don’t by default object to this notion, incidentally. Weaving past and future together into the fleeting moment is what artists do, after all, Christie included. That said, it does amuse me to think of someone coming to the original novel of, say, ‘Murder Is Easy’ after seeing the 2023 BBC adaptation and being surprised to find few of that production’s themes in evidence in the text. Similarly, anyone reading the Poirot novel ‘Hallowe’en Party’ on which Kenneth Branagh’s ‘A Haunting In Venice’ film is allegedly based will struggle to find anything remotely similar. Vastly superior, certainly (and it is a ‘lesser Poirot’), but with only the flimsiest of connections.

There could be something to be said too about the sense of place and landscape in Christie’s work. Poirot in Egypt, for example, or Miss Marple in the Caribbean, but mostly something about perception of English landscapes. Cities and villages. The darkness lurking in the shadows, of course, but also their lightness and charm, their cool sophistication and rustic warmth. Perhaps I will revisit these ideas at a later date. For now, though, I’m putting my Christie’s back on the shelf. They might now physically sit there next to Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but in a corner of my mind they are back in a teenage bedroom, rubbing jackets with James Herriott, Thirlwell and books about Springer Spaniels.