Agatha Christie's Method for Murder

Imagine a world without Agatha Christie. Miss Lemon simply can't do it. It seems as though she, and the inimitable characters of her creation -- Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Mr. Satterthwaite, Mr. Parker Pyne, indeed, Miss Lemon -- have been around as long as movable type.

And yet, as difficult as it is to believe, 2011 marks a mere 91 years since the publication of her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) and the debut of that famously fussy Belgian detective.  The success of Agatha Christie's first novel launched a career among mystery novelists that, in terms of recognition, endurance and influence, has yet to be rivaled.

Yet Agatha Christie's style is not everyone's cup of tea. Condemned by more than one critic as 'elitist,' 'escapist,' and 'wooden,' Agatha Christie's works continue to sell -- by Miss Lemon's reckoning, more than two billion of her books have been sold so far, and the tills continue to ring apace.

Escapist? Perhaps. Characters that lack nuance? One could make a case. However, there's no denying that Dame Agatha could craft a mystery cleverly enough to keep even the sharpest of armchair sleuths second-guessing the murderer's identity.

And yet, Agatha Christie never played fast and loose with the clues. Adequate evidence is always there for the reader to solve the crime -- as long as he or she is astute enough to detect it. 

In Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, John Curran points out that one possible clue to Agatha Christie's enormous success as a mystery writer is her mastery of the double-blind -- or that fine authorial touch that makes the most obvious suspect the least likely to have committed the crime. In lesser hands, mystery novels that depend on this technique tend to fall flat.

In compiling the published Secret Notebooks, Mr. Curran had the enviable task of going through more than 70 of Agatha Christie's manuscript notebooks, tracing the threads of plot outlines, character sketches and random thoughts that, strung together, provide clues to the creative ingenuity that stood behind so many of her excellent crime stories.

As a follow up to that indispensable reference source, Mr. Curran has just published Agatha Christie's Murder in the Making, in which he draws on the textual evidence he encountered in the Christie archives to come up with a theory that attempts to explain her enduring literary appeal. (He also publishes the original ending to A Mysterious Affair at Styles, rejected by her editors at The Bodley Head.)

Miss Lemon can't wait to get her hands on a copy.

As all serious admirers of Agatha Christie know, 15 September is the anniversary of her birth in 1890. This post is part of the Agatha Christie Reading Challenge that today celebrates her 121st birthday. Please join in the felicitations.

Happy Birthday, Agatha Christie

The happy day is upon us once again: today marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Agatha Clarissa Miller, in Torquay, England. As we all know now -- but couldn't possibly have foreseen then -- she grew up to become the bestselling and perhaps most ingenious mystery writer of all time.

With the day in mind, Miss Lemon thought it apt to give a mention to the few of Dame Agatha's many publications (eighty detective novels, short-story collections and plays; eight novels under the nom de plume, Mary Westmacott; and two memoirs in all) that she most frequently ranked among her favourites.

By the order in which Sir Max lists them in Mallowan's Memoirs, they are:

1. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926). This is also one of Miss Lemon's all-time favourites. So clever is the plotting, so intricately masked is the murderer that critics cried foul when this masterwork first appeared. But no violation of the conventions of mystery has ever been proved. Sour grapes, perhaps?
2. The Pale Horse (1961). Agatha Christie prided herself on her knowledge of poisons -- an erudition she gained while working in the dispensary of Torquay Hospital during the first World War. The plot of this novel shows her pharmaceutical training to its best advantage.
3. The Moving Finger (1943). Smart characterization, snappy dialogue, and a plot that zips right along make this book the perfect illustration of all that is good about Agatha Christie. This work also employs Miss Lemon's favourite but most disturbing plot device: the anonymous letter.
4. Endless Night (1967). Set in a fictional rendering of Max and Agatha's beloved Greenway, both cite this work as one of their favourites for its strong psychological exploration and classic struggle between good and evil.

With these books in mind, Miss Lemon bids you a very happy Dame Agatha Day!

Mallowan's Memoirs

As we near the 120th anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth (15 September 1890, for those who need reminding), Miss Lemon thought, what better way to celebrate the double-diamond jubilee than with a view of the grande dame of mystery through the eyes of archaeologist and Asiatic scholar, Max Mallowan?

And what better place to get that view than from Mallowan's Memoirs: The Autobiography of Max Mallowan (1977). The book is excellent for its vivid recollections of the digs at Ur, Nineveh, and Chagar Bazar, among others; its plates and illustrations of people, excavation sites and artifacts; and of course its observations on life with Dame Agatha. He was her husband, after all.

Fourteen years younger than Agatha, Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan  (he was knighted in 1968) was a classmate of Evelyn Waugh at Lancing and went on to earn a B.A. in classics at Oxford. After graduation, he foundered a bit until being invited to join Leonard Wooley as an apprentice at Ur, an ancient city, now located partway between Baghdad and the head of the Persian Gulf.   

The odyssey at Ur is where Sir Max's absorbing tale begins. He describes the notoriously difficult nature of the Wooleys -- both of Leonard and even more so, of Katherine, who is gently portrayed in Agatha's Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). But it was Katherine's imperious nature that brought Max and Agatha together. She ordered Max to escort Agatha, who was on her second excursion to the Middle East, on a round-trip tour of Baghdad. He found the task -- and the mystery writer -- so agreeable that Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie were married on 11 September 1930.

The two -- Max no great mystery fan and Agatha no great archaeologist -- in the end made an interesting pair. And the marriage -- despite rumours of Max's affair with Barbara Parker, whom he married after Agatha's death -- was a happy one. Indeed, Mallowan's Memoirs is dedicated to Rosalind, Agatha's only child, 'with love.'

What Miss Lemon finds so intriguing about reading Mallowan's Memoirs is how his perspective aligns with that found in Agatha's varied works. In fact, they complement each other quite smartly. To have read Agatha's autobiography or Come Tell Me How You Live (1946) or any of her works set in the Middle East is to get a special sense of insight when reading Max's account.

Sir Max himself gives a charming perspective on Agatha's novels and craft, though he is careful to stop short of offering literary criticism. The critic of detective fiction, he wryly observes, 'must be either a knave or a fool,' for the elegance of the narrative lies in the arc from crime to solution. One cannot discuss mysteries intelligently, he writes, without discussing their endings.

Miss Lemon will bear that in mind.

In the meantime, she will say that this post is part of a series, the Agatha Christie Blog Tour, intended to commemorate her life and work. If you like Agatha Christie and her milieu, stop by and have a look round.

Poe: A Life Cut Short

Miss Lemon was just browsing some reviews of Poe: A Life Cut Short (2008) by Peter Ackroyd, (after the fact of reading it, as she is often wont to do) and finds she must agree with at least one critic, who acidly observes that this could be resubtitled: A Book Cut Short.

Not that Miss Lemon intends any unkindness toward Mr. Ackroyd, whose tale  The Lambs of London, for instance, held her in utter thrall. It's just that she couldn't fight the feeling of disappointment that trailed her like a ball of lead as she slogged through the pages of this lithe and airy looking biography.

The problem, it seems, is that barely any life at all is breathed into the American poet and master of the macabre.

The biography begins promisingly enough -- and with Miss Lemon's favourite, a mystery:

On the evening of 26 September 1849, Edgar Allan Poe stopped in the office of a physician in Richmond, Virginia -- John Carter -- and obtained a palliative for the fever that had beset him. Then he went across the road and had supper at a local inn. He took with him, by mistake, Dr. Carter's malacca sword cane.

From there, Poe set out for a steamboat to Baltimore. It was the last time anyone would see him or officially account for his whereabouts. That is, until six days later, when he was about to meet his death.

With so much potential, it's a pity the biography doesn't continue in this arresting and mysterious vein. But what follows seem more like scattered vignettes and snippets of Poe's disappoinments and disgraces. What Miss Lemon longed for -- but did not find -- were the portraits of Poe as a writer. What, she wanted to know, fueled Poe's creative fire? How did he work?

Indeed, the way Mr. Ackroyd tells it, it's difficult to imagine Poe ever setting pen to paper at all, occupied as he was in getting himself dismissed from West Point, engaging in inappropriate love affairs, nursing his consumptive relations, running up debts, insulting his colleagues, getting sacked from various offices, and hitting up erstwhile friends and relations for the loan of $10 or more.

Poe's 1841 story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," credited as one of the first modern detective stories, is scarcely given a passing mention. But perhaps, this being a brief biography, there simply wasn't room. Even so, Miss Lemon noticed bits of repetition in the narrative -- one of her pet peeves, to be sure, and evidence of her notion that perhaps this biographical endeavor was put together in too much haste.

But all is not lost for Mr. Ackroyd's tribute to Poe. For what it did do was send Miss Lemon back to what she views as two of the greatest contributions to American lyric poetry: "The Raven"  and the stunningly onomatopoeic "The Bells." For that, she isn't sorry.

Birthday Diversions

As if her fans don't know it already, Sept. 15 is Agatha Christie's birthday. To mark the occasion, Miss Lemon consulted her impeccably organised files and found a few fun things to do in honour of the day.

1. Test one's Agatha Christie acumen with an online quiz dreamed up by those clever book people at the Guardian.

2. Take an Agatha Christie blog tour. Please forgive Miss Lemon if she points out that she is featured on Tuesday.

3. Read any one of Agatha Christie's 80 crime novels or short story collections. Miss Lemon's personal favourite: Death Comes as the End (1945). A quirky choice, Miss Lemon realizes, but this novel's special allure is its ancient Egyptian setting, which shows that murder among polite society is no British invention.

4. Have a rock cake with Devonshire cream for tea. And if you've some raspberries on hand, pile them high. This was one of Agatha Christie's favourite treats.

Felicitations!

Felicitations, Agatha Christie

Miss Lemon begs your pardon whilst she marvels over the swift passage of time. She's not the first to observe the indifferent haste of the time-space continuum, she realizes; however the 15th of September, which will be so suddenly upon us, is Agatha's Christie's birthday. Were she alive today, she would be 119 years old.

To Miss Lemon, it seems only as if it were yesterday when she could look forward to a tantalizing new whodunit from the pen of this doyenne of mystery at the rate of at least two a year. The creative winds that filled Mrs. Christie's sails in the late '30s and 1940s still stagger:

And Then There Were None (1939)
Sad Cypress (1940)
Evil Under the Sun (1941)
N or M (1941)
The Body in the Library (1942)
Five Little Pigs (1942)
The Moving Finger (1943)
Death Comes as the End (1945)
Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946)
Taken at the Flood (1948)
Crooked House (1949)
A Murder Is Announced (1950)

Good heavens. These books came out more than sixty years ago. And they are only the highlights.

Mind you, there was a war was going on then. And when there wasn't, Agatha Christie spent a significant portion of her time helping her second husband, Max Mallowan, with a major archaeological dig at Ur.

But lest Miss Lemon set herself adrift on a sea of sentimentality and stray from the purpose of her column, she'll use the felicitous occasion of Mrs. Christie's birthday to recommend her magnum opus memoir: An Autobiography.

The book was published in 1977, the year after her death on 12 January 1976. But Agatha Christie had set to work on it in Nimrud, Iraq, on the second of April 1950. She wouldn't put the final period on it for another 15 years.

As one might expect, the scope of Mrs. Christie's memoir is wide and richly detailed. Her characteristic joie de vivre tumbles over most all of the 644 pages.

One will remark also her shyness and professionally uncharacteristic modesty. Mrs. Christie simply refused to view herself as a professional writer until well after the roaring success of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and her divorce, when she turned to her writing to support herself. Even then, she looked at her success as a writer grudgingly and with a laundry list of qualifiers.

Nevertheless, the narrative of An Autobiography belies her own assessment. She recalls vividly, for example, the creepy story of 'The Elder Sister,' that Agatha's own elder sister would tell to frighten her as a child. Madge would assume the low voice and shifting countenance of a mad sister sent away and now returned to seek revenge. Agatha would shriek with an equal mix of terror and glee. From that moment, she must have remarked that there's something intensely enjoyable about feeling afraid in the comforts of one's own drawing room.

As in so many of Mrs. Christie's mysteries, the most simply stated observations can be the most revealing.

Voyeurs and sensation-seekers, Miss Lemon fears, will be disappointed. There's no mention of Mrs. Christie's eleven-day disappearance: the 1926 mystery that led her husband Archie to be briefly suspected of Agatha's murder. But then, Miss Lemon wouldn't have mentioned it either.

Indeed, Agatha Christie writes in preface to her memoirs, "I have remembered, I suppose, what I wanted to remember." That for Miss Lemon -- and, she suspects, for most of Mrs. Christie's admirers -- is more than enough.

The Secret Notebooks of Agatha Christie

Miss Lemon is beside herself with anticipation.

On the 3rd of September, little more than a week from now, HarperCollins will publish 73 of Agatha Christie's manuscript notebooks, complete with character sketches, plot outlines and scenes from her books, several of which don't appear in the published versions.

Author John Curran came across this source material while sifting through papers that were once squirreled away at Greenway, one of Mrs. Christie's favourite seaside homes in Devon.

Although the notebooks are not in fact as 'secret' as the publicity agents at HarperCollins might lead one to believe (two of Mrs. Christie's biographers, Janet Morgan and Laura Thompson, used them in their researches), Miss Lemon feels certain they will appeal to crime fiction fans far and wide. For at the very least, these notebooks contain clues to the creative processes of one the sharpest minds in British mystery history.

Miss Lemon fears, however, that Mrs. Christie would be dismayed at the news that so excites her readers. She was a tremendously shy woman, who guarded her privacy fiercely. The journals, which are reported to be a collection of scraps, scribbles, and trial-and-error sketches, should in no way be mistaken for the coveted Christie method.

Mrs. Christie was more the sort to take long walks and compose fiction in her head. She completed the first draft of The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) while wandering the craggy reaches of Dartmoor. As she progressed in her career, Mrs. Christie mapped out murders and talked out dialogue while scarcely ever setting pen to paper.

In fact, Agatha Christie hated writing out her novels in longhand. She relied on the sage assistance of her personal secretary, Charlotte Fisher, to take shorthand. And by the 1930s and 40s, Agatha found herself 'writing' primarily by dictaphone.

Even so, this in no way lessens Miss Lemon's eagerness to lay eyes on the notebooks, for the scarcity of Mrs. Christie's autograph manuscripts only increases their fascination. There is also the possibility, however remote, that some astute reader of this volume may discover the key to one of the most puzzling enigmas of the twentieth century: the creative genius of Agatha Christie.