Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making: Stories and Secrets from Her Archive - includes an unseen Miss Marple Story

This Rule essentially outlawed murder committed for ideological reasons, specifically political motivation. Van Dine goes on to suggest that this should be confined to secret-service stories and this type of plot is indeed a feature of some of Christie’s international thriller novels – They Came to Baghdad, Destination Unknown, Passenger to Frankfurt – as well as some of the early titles – The Secret Adversary, The Secret of Chimneys – but it is not a feature of her classical detective stories. But into which category does the motive for the first murder in Three Act Tragedy fall?

The detective

The supposedly all-important figure of the detective occupied both writers: Van Dine 4 and Knox 7 are identical, although Van Dine added further embellishments in Rules 6 and 9. Some of Christie’s greatest triumphs involve these Rules; she has joyously shattered all of them.

Van Dine 4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the criminal.

Knox 7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

From the very beginning of the detective novel the unmasking of the official investigator was considered a valid ploy. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (1907) by Gaston Leroux, creator of The Phantom of the Opera, is credited by Agatha Christie herself as being one of the two detective novels that she had actually read before embarking on The Mysterious Affair at Styles and contains one of the earliest examples of the criminal investigator. In The Clocks, Poirot, talking about his magnum opus on detective fiction, is unstinting in his praise for this groundbreaking novel. Some of Christie’s most deftly plotted books featured this ploy. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas was chosen by Robert Barnard in his Agatha Christie: A Talent to Deceive (1980) as one of the three best novels of Dame Agatha’s career, and indeed it is a classic English detective story of the type considered synonymous with the Christie school of whodunit, in other words a snowbound country mansion with a group of suspects and among them a killer. While her intentions when originally plotting this novel were completely different from those realised in the book we now know (see Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks), the solution is breathtaking in its daring and simplicity. We are given numerous clues to the true identity of Simeon Lee’s killer – the good looks, the habit of stroking the jaw, the subterfuge with the piece of rubber, the insistence on the family ‘on the other side of the blanket’, the daring exchange with Pilar in the chapter ‘December 24th’. But, like the presence of a narrator, Superintendent Sugden is not really seen by the reader, just accepted. With his unmasking, an ingenious (if somewhat unlikely) plot is revealed. An early foreshadowing of this ploy can also be found in ‘The Man in the Mist’ in Partners in Crime.

The Mousetrap, in both its stage and novella versions, and its earlier incarnation as the radio play Three Blind Mice, all unmask the investigator as the villain. Sergeant Trotter arrives like a deus ex machina in Monkswell Manor and is accepted unquestioningly both by its snowbound inhabitants and by the audience. In fairness, it should be said that although we think he is a policeman, he is actually an imposter, although the overall effect is the same. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the policeman, like the village doctor, was perceived as uncorrupted and incorruptible. Nowadays, unfortunately, we know differently and modern audiences are more likely to spot this type of villain than their more innocent counterparts of an earlier age.

In Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case, Agatha Christie played her last and greatest trick of all on her readers; and they loved her all the more for it. This is the ultimate sleight of hand from the supreme prestidigitator in the crime-writing pantheon. Who but Agatha Christie would have thought of, and then carried out, this almost sacrilegious trick? After 55 years of partnership, she unmasks Poirot as the killer. Certainly the book is contrived (which detective story is not?), but only the most churlish of readers would complain after such a dazzling culmination of two careers.

Van Dine 6. The detective novel must have a detective in it.

This is a perfectly reasonable Rule. But Agatha Christie made a career out of breaking the Rules, reasonable or otherwise, and she managed to demolish this one also. The most famous and best-selling crime novel of all time, And Then There Were None, has no detective. An epilogue is set at Scotland Yard where Inspector Maine and Sir Thomas Legge, the Assistant Commissioner, discuss the mass slaughter on the island but can offer no explanation that covers all the facts. It is left to a confession (breaking yet another Rule) to pinpoint the guilty party. Death Comes as the End is another example of a detective novel with no detective. Set as it is in Ancient Egypt 4,000 years ago, the absence of a detective is not remarkable. Clues also are necessarily in short supply; the fingerprints, cigarette ash and telephone alibis beloved of writers and readers alike are notable only by their absence.

Van Dine 9. There must be but one detective.

In the sense that Poirot and Miss Marple never meet between the covers of any of her books Agatha Christie abided by this Rule. But in many novels they work in close collaboration with the official investigators. And in other titles there is an unofficial coming-together of, effectively, suspects in order to solve the crime. In Three Act Tragedy, Death in the Clouds and The A.B.C. Murders Poirot agrees to co-operate with some of those under suspicion in order to arrive at the truth. And in all three cases one of his group of collaborators is unmasked in the last chapter. Coincidentally or otherwise, these novels were all published in the same 12-month period between January 1935 and January 1936.

The murderer

The other important figure, the murderer, also exercised both rule-makers. But Christie had broken most of these Rules before either Knox or Van Dine sat down to compose them.

Knox 1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.

While adhering to the former part of this injunction, the circumvention of the latter became almost a motif throughout Agatha Christie’s writing life. As early as 1924 with The Man in the Brown Suit she neatly and unobtrusively breaks this rule. Throughout the book we are presented with passages from Sir Eustace Pedler’s diary in which he shares his thoughts with the reader, before his eventual unmasking as the villain of the piece. The most famous, or infamous, example is, of course, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This title, her first for the publisher Collins, caused a major stir on its first appearance with its revelation of the narrator as a cold-blooded killer and blackmailer. The book immediately ensured her fame and success and it is safe to assert that, even if she had never written another word, her name would still be remembered today in recognition of this stunning conjuring trick. Forty years later she replayed it but in such a different guise that most of her readers were not aware of the repetition. While a doctor in a small 1920s village narrates The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a young, working-class, charming ne’er-do-well narrates Endless Night. But it is essentially the same sleight of hand at work. (See also ‘Fairness’ above.)

More subtly, we share the thoughts of a group of characters, which includes the killer, in And Then There Were None, but without identifying which thoughts belong to which character (Chapter 11). And in The A.B.C. Murders we think we are sharing the thoughts of a serial killer when, in fact, he is the innocent dupe of the real killer. Less overtly, we are given an insight into the minds of the killer in Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero and Sparkling Cyanide.

Van Dine 10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story.

Never one to cheat her readers, this is one of the Rules that Christie did not break, or not in the way that Van Dine intended. She never unmasked the second cousin of the under-housemaid as the killer in the last chapter. But adhering to the hidden-in-plain-sight ploy, the more prominent a part a character played the more suspicious should the reader be.

Van Dine 11. A servant must not be chosen as the culprit.

This is not mere social prejudice (although there is plenty of that in the work of Van Dine himself) but a practical solution to the problem of the unmasking, in the last chapter, of a member of the domestic staff whose presence in the novel was fleeting at best. Consider how Christie overcame this stricture. Kirsten Lindstrom in Ordeal by Innocence is, strictly speaking, a domestic servant but her significance to the Argyle family can be interpreted as placing her outside this category. But it is as a servant that we meet, and continue to perceive, her. This same consideration applies to Miss Gilchrist in After the Funeral; witness the telling scene at the denouement when she bitterly recriminates the Abernethie family. Gladys, in A Pocket Full of Rye, is a clearer example of domestic servitude. Indeed, it is her status as such that makes her a necessary part of Lance’s murderous plan. It is her job to poison the breakfast marmalade while Lance is demonstrably miles away, thereby giving him an impeccable alibi. But it is also a fact that, in defence of Christie’s oft-criticised attitude to domestic servants, it is the subsequent death of Gladys that causes Miss Marple to arrive at Yewtree Lodge to avenge the death of a foolish and gullible former maid.

And the closing pages of the book, as Miss Marple reads a letter from Gladys written just before her murder, are very affecting. The same plot device, and much of the same plot, can be seen in the earlier short story ‘The Tuesday Night Club’ in The Thirteen Problems.

Van Dine 17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt in a detective novel.

This Rule was adhered to and, apart from brief forays into organised crime in The Big Four, The Secret of Chimneys and At Bertram’s Hotel, no use is made of a professional criminal in Christie’s solutions.

Van Dine 12. There must be but one culprit no matter how many murders are committed.

Murderous alliances are a feature of Christie’s fiction beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and continuing with The Murder at the Vicarage, Death on the Nile, One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, Evil under the Sun, The Body in the Library, Sparkling Cyanide and Endless Night, all of which feature murderous couples. Cat among the Pigeons and, to a lesser degree, Taken at the Flood, feature more than one killer working independently of each other; The Hollow features an unusual and morally questionable, collusion; and, of course, Murder on the Orient Express features the ultimate conspiracy.

The murder method

Christie never resorted to elaborate mechanical or scientific means to explain her ingenuity, and much of her popularity and accessibility lies in her adherence to this simplicity. Many of her last-chapter surprises can be explained in a few sentences. Once you have grasped the essential fact that the corpse identified as A is, in fact, Corpse B and vice versa everything else falls into place; when you realise that all twelve suspects conspired to murder one victim all confusion disappears; when it dawns that the name Evelyn can mean a male or a female little further explanation is necessary.

Van Dine 14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific.

Knox 4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need long scientific explanation at the end.

While Christie uses poisons as a means of killing characters more than any of her contemporaries, she uses only those that are scientifically known. But, that said, thanks to her training as a dispenser, she had more knowledge of the subject than many of her fellow writers and was familiar with unusual poisons and the more unusual properties of the common ones. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, depends for its surprise solution on knowledge of the properties of strychnine, but this is not unreasonable as the reader is fully aware of the poison used. In fact, there is a graphic description of the death of Mrs Inglethorpe and a discussion of the effects of, and the chemical formula for, strychnine. Taxine in A Pocket Full of Rye, ricin in ‘The House of Lurking Death’ from Partners in Crime, thallium in The Pale Horse and physostigmine in Crooked House are just some of the unusual poisons featuring in Christie. Fictitious drugs such as Serenite in A Caribbean Mystery, Calmo in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and Benvo in Passenger to Frankfurt also feature, but as the plot does not turn on their usage, they merely bend rather than break Knox’s Rule.

To be avoided

Some of these items are mere personal prejudice; there is no good reason why cigarettes or twins, for instance, cannot be a clue, or even a main plot device, provided that the reader has been properly prepared for them. With all of these the important point is the originality of the approach in utilising them – and this Christie had in full measure and overflowing.

Van Dine 13. Secret societies have no place in a detective story.

Many readers, including probably the author herself, would wish that The Big Four had never found its way between hard covers. Cobbled together at the lowest point in her life (after the death of her mother, the request for a divorce from her husband and her subsequent disappearance) with the help of her brother-in-law, Campbell Christie, this collection of short stories that had earlier appeared in various magazines was turned into a novel by judicious editing. The ‘secret society’ bent on world domination that it features was, mercifully, a one-off aberration on Christie’s part. The Seven Dials Mystery features an equally preposterous secret society, albeit one with a Christie twist. Throughout the novel we are told of the existence of this society and the reader assumes the worst. At the eventual and literal unmasking we discover that it is actually working for the eradication, rather than the promotion, of crime, and its membership includes Superintendent Battle. The Pale Horse, one of the best books of the 1960s, features a mysterious organisation, Murder Inc., that seems to specialise in remote killing, but a rational and horribly plausible method of murder is revealed in the closing chapters.

Knox 5. No Chinamen must figure in the story.

This comment is not as racist as it may first appear. At the time of its writing Orientals in fiction were perceived as the personification of everything undesirable and came under the general heading of ‘The Yellow Peril’. A more lengthy discussion of the subject can be found in Colin Watson’s Snobbery with Violence (1971), an investigation of the social attitudes reflected in British crime fiction of the twentieth century, but suffice it to say that the white-slave trade, torture and other ‘unspeakable acts’ were the accepted fictional norms at the time for any character of Oriental extraction. This Rule was included to raise the literary horizon above that of the average opium den. Apart from The Big Four, and the more politically correct Poirot case ‘The Lost Mine’ in 1923, no ‘Chinamen’ play a part in any of Christie’s detective novels. Unfortunately, she succumbs to stereotype in The Big Four where, as well as some cringe-inducing scenes with Oriental characters and ‘speech’, the chief villain, ‘the greatest criminal brain of all time’, is Chinese. But these stories had appeared some years earlier, pre-dating Knox.

Knox 3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.

This Rule is taken to mean that no solution may turn on the existence of a secret passage. It was designed to eliminate the possibility of an exasperated reader hurling his detective novel across the room as the detective explains how the killer gained access to his closely guarded victim through such a passage, the existence of which was unknown up to that point. Christie is not above introducing the odd secret passage almost as a challenge to the cliché, but their very introduction long before the solution is in keeping with the tenet of this Rule. The Secret of Chimneys, Three Act Tragedy and ‘The Adventure of Johnny Waverley’ all feature, but openly and not covertly, a secret room or passage. The play Spider’s Web features a sliding panel with a concealed cavity; but its use pokes gentle fun at this convention.

Knox 10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

This Rule was formalised in an effort to avoid the disclosure that Suspect A, who had a cast-iron alibi for the night of the crime, was the guilty party because his alibi was provided by a hitherto unheard-of twin brother. Tongue firmly planted in literary cheek, Christie cocks a snook at this convention in ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’ in Partners in Crime. This is her take on the alibi-breaking stories of her contemporary Freeman Wills Crofts. And look at the ingenious double-bluff of Lord Edgware Dies. The Big Four also has an episode featuring a twin – one Achille Poirot …

Van Dine 20. A list of devices, which no self-respecting detective story writer should avail himself of …

The bogus séance to force a confession

At the end of Peril at End House Poirot arranges something very like a séance in End House, but it is really a variation on his usual ‘all-the-suspects-in-the-drawing-room’ ploy – although he does manage to elicit a confession. At the other end of a story is the séance in The Sittaford Mystery, where such an event is cleverly stage-managed in order to set a plot in motion.

The unmasking of a twin or look-alike

In Partners in Crime, Christie has Tommy and Tuppence tweak this Rule in ‘The Unbreakable Alibi’.

The cipher/code-letter

In The Thirteen Problems Christie features a very clever version of the code-letter in ‘The Four Suspects’ and in the last book she wrote, Postern of Fate, Tommy and Tuppence find a hidden message that begins their final case.

The comparison of cigarette butts

‘Murder in the Mews’ features not just this idea but also the clue of the cigarette smoke, or, more accurately, the absence of cigarette smoke.