Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (13 page)

Chapter 3
Favourite Stories and ‘The Man Who Knew’

‘Looking back over the past, I become increasingly sure of one thing. My tastes have remained fundamentally the same.’

What were Agatha Christie’s own personal favourites among the many stories she wrote? In February 1972, in reply to a Japanese fan, she listed, with brief comments, her favourite books. But she makes an important point when she writes that her list of favourites would ‘vary from time to time, as every now and then I re-read an early book . . . and then I alter my opinion, sometimes thinking that it is much better than I thought it was – or nor as good as I had thought’. Although the choices are numbered it is not clear if they are in order of preference; she adds brief comments and reiterates her earlier point when she heads the list:

At the moment my own list would possibly be:

And Then There Were None
– ‘a difficult technique which was a challenge . . .’

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
– ‘a general favourite . . .’

A Murder is Announced
– ‘all the characters interesting . . .’

Murder on the Orient Express
– ‘. . . it was a new idea for a plot.’

The Thirteen Problems
– ‘a good series of short stories.’

Towards Zero
– ‘. . . interesting idea of people from different places coming towards a murder instead of starting with the murder and working from that.’

Endless Night
– ‘my own favourite at present.’

Crooked House
– ‘. . . a study of a certain family interesting to explore.’

Ordeal by Innocence
– ‘an idea I had for some time before starting to work upon it.’

The Moving Finger
– ‘re-read lately and enjoyed reading it again, very much.’

The list does not contain any great surprises and most fans would probably also select most of the same titles, perhaps replacing
The Thirteen Problems
and
The Moving Finger
with
The Labours of Hercules
and
The A.B.C. Murders
respectively. Despite, or perhaps because of, Christie’s lifelong association with Hercule Poirot, there are only two of his cases included, while Miss Marple is represented by three. Each decade of her writing career is represented and no less than five of the list are non-series titles.

A further insight, this time into some of her favourite short stories, came two years later. In March 1974 negotiations began between Collins and the author on the thorny subject of that year’s ‘Christie for Christmas’. ‘Thorny’ because the previous year’s
Postern of Fate
had been a disappointment and, at the request of Christie’s daughter Rosalind, the publisher was not pressing for a new book. The compromise was to be a collection of previously published short stories. Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins mooted the idea of a collection of Poirot short stories but, in a letter (‘Dear Billy’), his creator felt that a book of stories entirely devoted to Hercule Poirot would be ‘terribly monotonous’ and ‘no fun at all’. She hoped to persuade him that the collection ‘could also include what you might describe as Agatha Christie’s own favourites among her own early stories’. To this end she sent him a list described as ‘my own favourite stories written soon after
The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
some before that’.

Before looking at this list it is important to remember that Dame Agatha was now in her eighty-fourth year, in failing health and a pale shadow of the creative genius of earlier years. She had not written a pure whodunit since
A Caribbean Mystery
in 1964 and the novels of recent years were all journeys into the past (both her own and her characters’), lacking the ingenious plots and coherent writing of her prime. If she had compiled a similar list even ten years earlier is it entirely possible that it would have been significantly different. Even the description of ‘early stories’ was, as we shall see, misleading.

Christie’s 1974 list reads as follows:

The Red Signal

The Lamp

The Gypsy

The Mystery of the Blue Jar

The Case of Sir Andrew Carmichael

The Call of Wings

The Last Séance

S.O.S.

In a Glass Darkly

The Dressmaker’s Doll

Sanctuary

Swan Song

The Love Detectives

Death by Drowning

Also included are two full-length novels,
Dumb Witness
and
Death Comes as the End
, although she acknowledges that the former is too long for inclusion. Perhaps significantly, in both these titles, like her recent publications, there are strong elements of ‘murder in retrospect’;
Death Comes as the End
deals with murder in ancient Egypt and
Dumb Witness
finds Poirot investigating a death that occurred some months before the book begins. On her list the titles are numbered but there is no indication that the order is significant. I have regrouped them for ease of discussion.

The first eight titles are all from the 1933 UK-only collection
The Hound of Death
. As Christie suspected, many of them had been published prior to this in various magazines, the earliest (so far traced) as far back as June 1924 when ‘The Red Signal’ appeared in
The
Grand
. The supernatural is the common theme linking these stories, with only ‘The Mystery of the Blue Jar’, published in
The Grand
the following month, offering a rational explanation. This type of story was on Christie’s mind as, later in the accompanying letter, she explains that she was planning a ‘semi-ghost story’, adding poignantly, ‘when I am really quite myself again.’ Some of these titles are particularly effective – ‘The Lamp’ has a chilling last line and ‘The Red Signal’, despite its supernatural overtones, shows Christie at her tricky best. ‘The Last Séance’ (March 1927) is a very dark and, unusually for Christie, gruesome story, which also exists in a full-length play version among her papers; while ‘The Call of Wings’ is one of the earliest stories she wrote, described in her
Autobiography
as ‘not bad’.

Of the remaining six titles, ‘In a Glass Darkly’ (December 1934) and ‘The Dressmaker’s Doll’ (December 1958) are also concerned with supernatural events. The former is a very short story involving precognition while the latter is a late story that Christie felt that she ‘had to write’ while plotting
Ordeal by Innocence
.
She passed it to her agent in mid-December 1957 and it was published the following year; in a note she describes it as a ‘very favourite’ story. ‘Sanctuary’ is also a late story, written in January 1954 and published in October of that year, for the Fund for the Restoration of Westminster Abbey. Appropriately it features a dying man found on the chancel steps while the sun pours in through the stained-glass window, this picture carrying echoes of similar scenes in the Mr Quin stories. Its setting is Chipping Cleghorn, featured four years earlier in
A Murder is Announced
, and Rev. Harmon and his delightful wife, Bunch, are the main protagonists alongside Miss Marple.

‘Swan Song’, published in
The Grand
in September 1926, is a surprising inclusion and appears probably due to Christie’s lifelong love of music; despite its country house setting of an opera production, it is a lacklustre revenge story with neither a whodunit nor supernatural element. ‘The Love Detectives’, published in December of the same year, foreshadows the plot of
The Murder at the Vicarage
and features Mr Satterthwaite, usually the partner of Mr Quin but here making a solo appearance.

The final story, ‘Death by Drowning’, is the last of
The Thirteen Problems
, although its inclusion jars with the rest of the stories in that collection. Unlike the first 12 problems, ‘Death by Drowning’, first published in November 1931, the year before its book appearance, does not follow the pattern of a group of armchair detectives solving a crime that has hitherto baffled the police. Miss Marple solves this case without her fellow-detectives and makes one of her very rare forays into working-class territory in a story involving a woman who keeps lodgers and takes in washing. As an untypical Miss Marple story, it is another unpredictable inclusion.

Overall, the list is, like much of her fiction, very unexpected. Though the absence of Poirot can be explained by the fact that this list is an effort to persuade Billy Collins to experiment with characters other than the little Belgian, there is, for instance, only one Mr Quin story, although she describes them in her
Autobiography
as ‘her favourite’; and there are only two cases for Miss Marple, neither of which shows her at her best. Why, moreover, no ‘Accident’, no ‘Witness for the Prosecution’, no ‘Philomel Cottage’? And only three (‘Sanctuary’, ‘The Love Detectives’, ‘Death by Drowning’) can be described as Christie whodunits, albeit not very typical examples. The over-reliance on the supernatural is surprising, although this had been a feature of Christie’s fiction from her early days –
The Mysterious Mr Quin
,
The Hound of Death
– and is a plot feature, although usually in the red herring category, of such novels as
The Sittaford Mystery
,
Peril at End House
,
Dumb Witness
,
The Pale Horse
and
Sleeping Murder.

In the event, the proposed book never came to fruition and, despite Christie’s reservations,
Poirot’s Early Cases
was published in November 1974.

Pre-dating both theses lists, in her
Autobiography
Christie names yet another selection of ‘favourites’. Here she describes
Crooked House
and
Ordeal by Innocence
as ‘the two [books] that satisfy me best’, and goes on to state that ‘on re-reading them the other day, I find that another one I am really pleased with is
The Moving Finger
’. A
Sunday Times
interview with literary critic Francis Wyndham in February 1966 confirms these three titles as favourites, although the interview may have been contemporaneous with the completion of her
Autobiography
in October 1965 where the mention of the three titles comes in the closing pages. In the specially written Introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of
Crooked House
she wrote: ‘This book is one of my own special favourites. I saved it up for years, thinking about, working it out, saying to myself “One day when I’ve plenty of time, and really want to enjoy myself – I’ll begin it.”’

Whatever her favourites, there seems little doubt about her least favourite title. Not only was
The Mystery of the Blue Train
difficult to compose (See Chapter 2) but in her
Autobiography
she writes ‘Each time I read it again, I think it commonplace, full of clichés, with an uninteresting plot.’ In the Japanese fan letter referred to above, she calls it ‘conventionally written . . . [it] does not seem to me to be a very original plot.’ She is even more disparaging in the Wyndham interview when she says, ‘Easily the worst book I ever wrote was
The Mystery of the Blue Train
. I hate it.’

THE RED SIGNAL/THE MAN WHO KNEW

In view of the inclusion of ‘The Red Signal’ on the 1974 list above, it is appropriate that ‘The Man Who Knew’, a very short short story from the Christie Archive, should appear here in print for the first time; and it is interesting to compare and contrast it with its later incarnation as ‘The Red Signal’.

‘The Man Who Knew’ is very short, less than 2,000 words, and the typescript is undated. The only guidance we have for a possible date of composition is the reference in the first paragraph to No Man’s Land, suggesting that the First World War is over. In all probability, its composition pre-dates the publication of
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
; and this makes its very existence surprising. Very few short story manuscripts or typescripts, even from later in Christie’s career, have survived, so one from the very start of her writing life is remarkable.

The only handwritten amendments are insignificant ones (‘minute service flat’ is changed to ‘little service flat’), but some minor errors of spelling and punctuation have here been corrected.

The Man Who Knew

Something was wrong . . .

Derek Lawson, halting on the threshold of his flat, peering into the darkness, knew it instinctively. In France, amongst the perils of No Man’s Land, he had learned to trust this strange sense that warned him of danger. There was danger now – close to him . . .

Rallying, he told himself the thing was impossible. Withdrawing his latchkey from the door, he switched on the electric light. The hall of the flat, prosaic and commonplace, confronted him. Nothing. What should there be? And still, he knew, insistently and undeniably, that something was wrong . . .

Methodically and systematically, he searched the flat. It was just possible that some intruder was concealed there. Yet all the time he knew that the matter was graver than a mere attempted burglary. The menace was to
him
, not to his property. At last he desisted, convinced that he was alone in the flat.

‘Nerves,’ he said aloud. ‘That’s what it is. Nerves!’

By sheer force of will, he strove to drive the obsession of imminent peril from him. And then his eyes fell on the theatre programme that he still held, carelessly clasped in his hand. On the margin of it were three words, scrawled in pencil.

‘Don’t go home.’

For a moment, he was lost in astonishment – as though the writing partook of the supernatural. Then he pulled himself together. His instinct had been right – there
was
something. Again he searched the little service flat, but this time his eyes, alert and observant, sought carefully some detail, some faint deviation from the normal, which should give him the clue to the affair. And at last he found it. One of the bureau drawers was not shut to, something hanging out prevented it closing, and he remembered, with perfect clearness, closing the drawer himself earlier in the evening. There had been nothing hanging out then.