Agatha Christie: A Biography

Yours faithfully, The OMNISCIENT ONE.

Character of Miss A. M. C. Miller

A kindly and affectionate disposition; fond of animals except worms and cockchafers; fond of human beings except husbands (on principle). Normally lazy but can develop and maintain great energy. Sound in limb and eye, wind not good up hill. Full of intelligence and artistic taste. Unconventional and inquisitive.

Face good especially hair; figure good and skin still excellent. Can wheedle well. Wild but if once captured would make a loving and affectionate wife.

Archie was again mentioned in despatches in January 1917 and the following month promoted to Depot Commander and Lieutenant Colonel. To Agatha’s delight he was also awarded – she never knew why – the Order of St Stanislaus Third Class, with swords, a medal so pretty that she always longed to wear it as a brooch. Altogether 1917 was more bearable for Agatha, although the War seemed never-ending. Archie had three periods of leave and in between she worked for the Apothecaries’ examination. She had no trouble in passing two out of the three parts, chemistry and materia medica (the composition of medicines, doses and so on). The practical part, however, reduced her to the same ham-handed state she had displayed when asked to play the piano in public at Miss Dryden’s, but at her second attempt she passed, largely, she believed, because, rather than rolling pills or making suppositories, she had only to mix medicine and wait for the appropriate reactions to occur.

It was during this practical training that Agatha encountered a person of memorably strange demeanour, the more creepy because he was so ordinary. This was one of the principal pharmacists of Torquay, to whom she had been sent for coaching. Having demonstrated the making of some sort of suppositories and shown Agatha how to turn them out of the mould, he left her to box them, telling her to prepare labels stating that the dose contained a drug in the proportion of one part to a hundred. Agatha, however, was certain that the pharmacist had miscalculated, his actual mixture being ten times as strong. Sure enough, the decimal point in his calculations was in the wrong place. Agatha knew how easily such errors could be made. (She had once awoken at three o’clock in the morning with the vague recollection of putting a carbolic-contaminated lid on a pot of ointment and had immediately got up and gone to the dispensary to check.) She had been horrified by the casual manner in which an experienced pharmacist mixed this and that with the utmost confidence, compared with the prudence of the amateurs in her dispensary. This time she knew the pharmacist had been dangerously careless. Agatha’s reaction is interesting. She did not think it wise to point out the mistake; this man was not, she thought, the sort of person who would admit to having made an error, especially to a student. She deliberately tripped, upset the tray on which the suppositories were cooling and firmly trod on them, apologising profusely. That episode was only part of the story. Its sequel came on another occasion, when, trying to impress her, the pharmacist took from his pocket a lump of stuff and asked her whether she knew what it was: ‘It’s curare,’ he said. ‘Know about curare? Interesting stuff, very interesting. Taken by the mouth, it does you no harm at all; enters the bloodstream, it paralyses and kills you … do you know why I keep it in my pocket?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’ It seemed to her an extremely foolish thing to do. ‘Well, you know,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘it makes me feel powerful.’ The pharmacist was to reappear in Agatha’s life: as Mr Zachariah Osborne, in The Pale Horse.

The Red Cross record card showed that during the war Agatha worked a total of 3,400 hours, unpaid from October 1914 to December 1916 and, thereafter, as a dispenser, at an annual rate of £16 until the end of her service in September 1918. Her unofficial record was a sixty-page hand-made volume, illustrated with coloured drawings, bound in card and tied with pink and gold ribbon, which she and Eileen Morris devised between them. The contents of What We Did in the Great War included an opera, The Young Students, by ‘AMC’, complete with score, an ‘Agony Column’, ‘Hints on Etiquette’ (‘Sister: “never omit to say ‘Doctor’ at least once after every third word …”’), and a parody, ‘The Chemist and The Pharmacists,’ by ‘AC’, after Lewis Carroll:

… The centrifugalizing force

Was whirling fast on high,

No leucocytes were there, because

No leucocytes were nigh;

But many epithelial cells

Were passed up high and dry.

The Chemist and the Pharmacist

Were writing their reports,

They wept like anything to see

Such quantities of noughts –

(Correct to seven places too!)

Percentages of sorts.…

Archie’s preoccupations were more serious; one of the letters he sent in 1917 gives some indication of his duties:

My darling Angel

All is activity for the moment. I was glued to a telephone till 11pm last night and my temper is not so sweet today in consequence. I sentenced a man to 28 days of what the Daily Mirror used to call ‘crucifixion’ i.e. being tied to a tree and undergoing other punishments and fatigues because he refused to work, went absent without leave and pretended to be sick when he was not.…

At the beginning of December Archie was mentioned in despatches for the fourth time. On New Year’s Day 1918 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and became a Companion of St Michael and St George. There was one more leave, in June, and then, to Agatha’s joy, in September he was posted home, as a Colonel, to the Air Ministry. She left the hospital at once, joined him at an hotel and began to look round for a furnished flat.

Archie was just twenty-nine and Agatha twenty-eight. They had both grown used to tiredness, pain and grief, seen suffering and death, and were in different ways more mature. But for most of those crucial four years they had been apart and, while they had learnt how to sustain each other in difficult and precarious times, they were used to meeting and parting rather than being together for weeks at a stretch. The beginning of Agatha’s married life – for when she left Ashfield she felt it had really begun – was not what she would have envisaged five or six years before. The country was still at war, and they and their microscopic flat at 5 Northwick Terrace, in St John’s Wood, were looked after not by a maid but by Archie’s batman, Bartlett. Archie worked long hours at the Air Ministry and Agatha, missing the hospital and her friends, filled in her days with a course of shorthand, where she struggled, and book-keeping, which she enjoyed and did well. It was as she left the secretarial school that she saw one of the most curious sights she had ever seen:

Everywhere there were women dancing in the street … laughing, shouting, shuffling, leaping even, in a sort of wild orgy of pleasure, an almost brutal enjoyment. It was frightening. One felt perhaps that if there had been any Germans around the women would have torn them to pieces. Some of them I suppose were drunk, but all of them looked it. They reeled, they lurched, shouted.… I got home to find Archie was home from his Air Ministry. ‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, in his usual calm and unemotional fashion.

It was November 11th and the Armistice had been declared. The Great War was over.

7 ‘… menace and murder and sudden death …’ (#ulink_a2ba563c-81cb-5dad-904a-e25de2b55eac)

It was in the middle of the War that Agatha had first tried her hand at a detective story. In retrospect an important moment, it did not seem significant at the time. For one thing, writing crime fiction was far from being her main preoccupation. The War, Archie’s survival, her mother’s and grandmother’s failing health, the difficulty of keeping up Ashfield and the demands of the dispensary were such serious matters that, by comparison, writing a book was no more than a trivial pastime. Writing was in any case neither a new nor a surprising hobby for Agatha. Clara and Madge had written stories; so had she. For a long time she had been interested in the mysterious and sinister, as she showed in one of her earliest poems, ‘Down in the Wood’, of which the second verse ran:

Bare brown branches against a mad moon

(And Something that stirs in the wood),

Leaves that rustle and rise from the dead,

Branches that beckon and leer in the light

(And Something that walks in the wood).

Skirling and whistling, the leaves are alive!

Driven by Death in a devilish dance!

Shrieking and swaying of terrified trees,

A wind that goes sobbing and shivering by …

And Fear – naked Fear passes out of the wood!

The dispensary, moreover, encouraged thoughts of murder and malpractice, inspiring the poem ‘In a Dispensary’, published in 1924 in The Road of Dreams, (but not reprinted). The potions on its shelves were enough to cause a shiver:

From the Borgias’ time to the present day,

their power has been proved and tried!

Monkshood blue, called Aconite,

and the deadly Cyanide!

Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain

and courage and vigour new!

Here is menace and murder and sudden death

in these phials of green and blue!

There was more than the contents of the dispensary – and the unnerving habits of the local pharmacist – to incline Agatha to write a murder story. The Victorian and Edwardian press had always relished a mystery and every opportunity was taken to place before the reading public the details of sensational murder trials, with ingenious solutions propounded by special correspondents and lofty summings-up from moralising editors. These were the items Auntie-Grannie liked Agatha to read to her. Agatha herself may not have enjoyed these reports but she was certainly fascinated by problems and puzzles, by aberrant behaviour and the reasons why people departed from normal routine. Perhaps, too, she liked to learn how people kept their secrets hidden, for she herself was secretive. As a child she had been teased about her frosty proclamation, ‘I don’t care for parting with information,’ when asked why she had not reported that a parlourmaid had been seen tasting soup from the tureen before her parents came into dinner. It was the sort of phrase Agatha must have heard from some adult and, although she admitted it was pompous, she was proud of the fact that it stuck. Unlike Madge, who could and would make a good story of anything, Agatha resembled Frederick, who, when asked what he had done with his day, would say ‘Oh, nothing.’ She kept her own counsel and occupied herself with private fantasies. She was interested in techniques and stratagems for keeping secrets safe, in musical patterns and mathematical codes, her aptitude enhanced by practice with puzzle-books, riddles and, eventually, theoretical studies in elementary physics and chemistry.

In her childhood there was plenty of fuel for those who were entertained by mysteries and paradoxes, for the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw the publication of an increasing number of ever more ingenious detective stories. As a child Agatha read Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s two detective stories, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. With Madge, she had enjoyed Conan Doyle’s early Sherlock Holmes stories, and, at the age of eight, she was fascinated by Madge’s reading aloud of Anna Katharine Green’s detective story, The Leavenworth Case. In 1908, as we have seen, she had been particularly caught by The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a long, melodramatic tale of the attempted murder, by what appeared to be a fiendish supernatural agency, of a beautiful young woman sleeping in a sealed chamber, a heroine who, it emerged, was hiding some dreadful secret. The Mystery of the Yellow Room had a particularly attractive hero, the journalist Joseph Rouletabille, a young man of persistently mysterious origins, whose pursuit of the murderer was the more enthusiastic because he was competing with a disdainful and sinister professional detective, Frederic Larsan, ‘the great Fred’.

It was while they were discussing one of these detective stories that Madge had challenged Agatha to write one herself. This suggestion was at the back of Agatha’s mind when dispensary work began to become monotonous and she decided to try, adopting what was to become her standard practice: beginning by deciding upon the crime and settling on a procedure which made it particularly hard to detect. What she sought was a plot that was simultaneously commonplace and surprising: ‘I could, of course, have a very unusual kind of murder for a very unusual motive, but that did not appeal to me artistically.’ She wanted a riddle: ‘The whole point was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. But really of course he had.’ She next settled on the characters, discovering the difficulty of basing fictional characters on people she knew and breaking the creative log-jam only after seeing some striking people in a tram. It was not so much that they were odd-looking; rather, as with the three people in the Gezirah Hotel who had been the models in Snow Upon the Desert, that their relationship and their behaviour made Agatha begin to speculate.