Agatha Christie: Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets From Her Notebooks (39 page)

Old friends make reappearances: Mrs Oliver plays a large part and Superintendent Spence reminisces in Chapter 5 about
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
,
Hallowe’en Party
and
Five Little Pigs
, all stories where Poirot investigates past crimes, the first two also in the company of Mrs Oliver. In Chapter 10 Miss Lemon, Poirot’s secretary, appears briefly. Mr Goby, described in Chapter 16 as ‘a purveyor of information’, first appeared in
The Mystery of the Blue Train
, and also conducted enquiries on behalf of Poirot in
After the Funeral
and
Third Girl
.

There can be little doubt that it is Agatha Christie herself rather than Ariadne Oliver who muses throughout the first chapter on the difficulties of eating with false teeth, the horror of giving speeches, the difficulties of dinner-party companions and the unwarranted effusiveness of fans. And the passage in the same chapter in which Albertina remonstrates with Mrs Oliver about her diffidence is echoed in Christie’s
Autobiography
when she describes how the wife of the British ambassador to Vienna had encouraged her to abandon her natural shyness and declare to reporters, ‘It is wonderful what I have done. I am the best detective story writer in the world. Yes, I am proud of the fact . . . I am very clever indeed.’

There are fewer than 20 pages of notes, scattered over four Notebooks, for
Elephants Can Remember
. Notebook 5 contains six pages of notes but only the first few lines are relevant to the finished novel. In strong legible writing at the top of the first page of Notebook 5 we read:

Elephants Remember – Jan. 1972

Despite its incongruity in a crime novel it would seem that the title, or a slight variant of it, was settled from the beginning. The elephant motif recurs throughout the book – often in defiance of logic, for example the reference in the first chapter to Mrs Burton-Cox’s teeth.

In the following extract Mrs Gorringe is the forerunner of Mrs Burton-Cox and, although their discussion about hereditary violence is not used, the last idea, a godchild and her fiancé, is. Details from this extract – Mrs Oliver’s birthday and the ‘bull in the field’ memory – tally exactly with Chapter 1.

Mrs. Oliver – Poirot

Does a problem come to P? or Mrs. O? Lunch for literary women – Mrs. Oliver – Mrs. Gorringe

Mrs G. ‘Do you think that if a child had grown up she might have been a murderer- murderess?’

Boys pull fly’s legs off but they don’t do it when they grow up – just boyish fun. Are you very interested in these things?

Not really – it’s just because of one particular thing – a god child I’ve got – she’s got a boyfriend – she wants to marry him. (Interruption – Speeches) They go and sit and look at the Serpentine.

All so long ago – everyone would have forgotten. People don’t forget things that happen when they were children – Mrs. O remembers cows a bull in a field – a birthday and something to do with an éclair. It’s like elephants – elephants never forget

After a brief detour to consider an alternative and to remind herself to re-read an early Poirot short story with a very similar plot, Christie outlines the opening of
Elephants Can Remember
in Notebook 6, almost exactly as it appears in the published novel:

Idea A

Husband and wife – she says her husband is poisoning her – (wants to believe it) attracted to a young man who pretends he is in love with her – actually is also courting niece tells wife he is pretending this to deceive husband. Really, he and niece are in on it. Re-read ‘Cornish Mystery.’

Idea B

Mrs. O goes to literary lunch – bossy female buttonholes her. I believe Celia Ravenscroft is your god-daughter? My son wants to marry her. Can you tell me if her mother killed her father or was it
[her]
father killed
[her]
mother. Celebrated case – you must remember – both bodies on cliff – both shot.

Mrs. O goes to Poirot or does she get Celia to come and see her. Modern – violent – intellectual girl – says definitely of course mother shot him – gives reason – story of what lay behind it. Mrs. O gets interested. Talks to Poirot

A few pages later we find a mixture of ideas, some of which found their way into the finished book. These notes are somewhat confused and confusing – references to the wife/sister are not always clear – but the underlying plot of two sisters, one husband and lifelong jealousy ending in murder and impersonation eventually emerged. There is an echo of the Christie of old in the listing of alternatives, although most of them are variations on a theme.

Further ideas

Is it actually Col. R has shot himself – wife is
not
his wife – a sister in law – elder sister of wife – has been in nursing home or mental Home for killing children – unfit to plead

Or Col. R’s sister or his first wife – a tragedy in India – she is paroled from mental home. Dressed in wife’s clothes and wig. Wife pretends to be sister – identifies body.

Sisters one is mental – kills children – unfit to plead – in Broadmoor

or

Colonel’s sister – devoted to him – jealous of his wife. Paroled – comes to house – kills brother – wife shoots her – dresses her in wig and clothes – stages it all – identifies wife’s body –

or

India Col. has wife/sister? – mental kills child – Ayah accused – poisons herself. But was it the ayah? Could it have been sister in law or the mother?
[Chapter 7]

Story about Mrs. Ravenscroft sister in India – nervous breakdown – killed a child – hushed up taken back to England – nursing home.

Story – Wife and mother killed child

Story – Sister of Col – or Mrs. R – said to be accident. Goes now to England in private mental home – released – lives with a qualified mental nurse – nurse dies – sister in law marries.

There is a reference to one of the ideas Christie regularly toyed with, that of the twins (see
Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks
); this motif does come into play in the novel, although not exactly as Christie here speculated. And the second reference below, from Notebook 6, is a plot very similar to the Marple short story ‘The Case of the Perfect Maid’; apart from the idea of twins, it has little to do with
Elephants Can Remember.

Twin idea – 2 girls born same day – one girl tells her they are identical – nobody knows them apart

Lalage and Lorna identical twins – born same day but really not identical – look quite different – come from Australia or New Zealand. Lalage plays part of
both s
isters – 3rd person in house is Stephanie (really Lorna). Play part of maid or one time au pair girl – foreign accent etc. actually looks like her Aunt (mother’s sister Francesca)

One of the ideas noted by Christie, however, appears in Chapter 6 as a red herring:

Colonel R – is doing reminiscences of his days in India – girl secretary comes – takes dictation from him and does typing. Suggestion that there
was
something between them

Despite showing a glimpse in the final chapter of the Christie of yesteryear,
Elephants Can Remember
remains a disappointment. Like the books published on either side of it, there are too many rambling conversations that give the reader little solid information but merely repeat what we have already been told. The central idea has possibilities and there is certainly material for a long short story. It could have been a disappointing swan song for Poirot – but the Queen of Crime had reserved a dazzling final performance,
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
, for the little Belgian.

Postern of Fate

29 October 1973

While shelving books in her new home Tuppence Beresford finds a hidden message concerning the mysterious death of a previous inhabitant. With the help of Tommy she investigates a mystery from the distant past, unaware that new danger is very much in the present.

Postern of Fate
was the last book Agatha Christie wrote and the initial notes are clearly dated November 1972, almost exactly a year before publication. It is arguable that her agent and publisher should never have asked for another book after the previous year’s
Elephants Can Remember
. Although H.R.F. Keating reviewed
Postern of Fate
charitably in
The Times
with the ambiguous phrase ‘She stills skims like a bird’, there is no doubt that it is the weakest book Christie ever wrote. The most interesting passages are those where we get a glimpse of the private Agatha Christie. Old Isaac’s reminiscences in Book II, Chapter 2 (‘Introduction to Mathilde, Truelove and KK’) echo Christie’s own memories of her childhood as described in Part I of her
Autobiography
. Many of the books mentioned by Tommy and Tuppence in the early chapters of the book –
The Cuckoo Clock
,
Four Winds Farm
,
The Prisoner of Zenda
,
Under the Red Robe
– are still to be found on the shelves of Greenway House, her Devon home. The description of The Laurels bears more than a passing resemblance to Ashfield, her beloved childhood home, even down to the monkey puzzle tree in the garden; and the first UK edition has on the jacket a photo of Bingo, Christie’s own family dog and the inspiration for the novel’s Hannibal. And when Tuppence complains about the effects of old age or the vagaries of workmen (‘They came, they showed efficiency, they made optimistic remarks, they went away to fetch something. They never came back’), we can be certain that this is the elderly Christie speaking.

Interesting though these insights are – and they were to be superseded within a few years by publication of her
Autobiography
– they do not make a detective novel and there can be no argument that
Postern of Fate
is even a pale imitation of the form at which, for half a century, she excelled. The novel’s intriguing opening premise, the coded message in the book, clearly shows that advancing age did not prevent Christie having ideas; what was missing was the ability to develop them as she would have even a decade earlier. All of the final half-dozen novels, from
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
onwards, begin with a fascinating idea – the disappearance of an elderly lady from her retirement home, the drowning of a child while bobbing for apples, the supposed double suicide of an elderly couple – but none of them is explored with anything approaching the ingenuity of Christie’s yesteryear. As recently as two years earlier,
Nemesis
begins with a situation very similar to that of
Postern of Fate
– a message from the dead that demands an investigation. But the decline in those two years is all too evident and dramatic; the plot of
Nemesis
is coherent and reasonable and the action of the story moves forward throughout. All of these elements, sadly, are absent from
Postern of Fate
.

Not surprisingly this decline is mirrored in the two Notebooks, 3 and 7, which contain the plotting notes. There are fewer than 25 pages of notes and they vary between scattered jottings and complete paragraphs. Many of the notes are reminders to amend sections already written and there is none of the plethora of ideas normally associated with the Notebooks. Note that the page numbers below do not refer to the published version but, in all probability, to the proofs.

Continue next from P.120

March 9th
[1973]

P.135 Letter or money in leather wallet

P.56 Name of village or market town? Must be mentioned in first chapter?

P.75 about M.R. Car accident? Change to illness

The book was completed by May 1973 and the editor at Collins wrote diplomatically in mid-June to say that he ‘enjoyed your latest novel very much’, remarking especially on the splendid character of Hannibal the dog and the wise comments on old age. He also mooted the idea of changing the title, despite the presence of the quotation, to
Postern of Death
, a suggestion that obviously was not well received. Further correspondence and phone calls were needed to rectify ‘certain discrepancies’ – whether references to the war refer to the First or Second World War, exactly who killed Isaac, and the splitting of some long chapters into shorter ones. With all of this clarification it is surprising that no one spotted the impossible chronology of the Beresfords’ children. In
N or M?
Deborah, their daughter, is involved in war work; in Book III Chapter 16 of
Postern of Fate
, set 30 years later, she is described as ‘nearly 40’.

Some old friends reappear – the mysterious Colonel Pikeaway and Mr Robinson – and there are numerous references to the Beresfords’ earlier cases. They reminisce as far back as
The Secret Adversary
in 1922, their exploits as
Partners in Crime
in 1929 and their war-time spy adventure in
N or M?
. Oddly, although they remind each other frequently about these, neither of them mentions their most recent adventure
By the Pricking of my Thumbs
, a mere five years earlier. The murder method in
Postern of Fate
, foxglove leaves as poison, has echoes of the early short story ‘The Herb of Death’ from
The Thirteen Problems
. And note the reference, in Book II, Chapter 2, to the idea of taking pot-shots at departing visitors; this was the unsociable habit both of Richard Warwick, the victim in
The Unexpected Guest
, and Christie’s brother Monty when he settled in Devon on his return from Africa.

For even the most devoted reader of Christie
Postern of Fate
is a challenge. Despite its intriguing premise – ‘Mary Jordan did not die naturally. It was one of us. I think I know which’ – the book never explores this enigma in any organised way. The investigation, such as it is, consists mainly of pointless and long-winded conversations, endless reminiscences and far too many inconsequential characters. What little plot there is would have benefited from the excision of at least 100 pages, but it is doubtful if even this ruthless exercise would make any overall difference. Yet the book went into the best-seller charts within weeks of publication – and stayed there. But there can be no doubt that at this stage fans automatically bought each new title just because it
was
the new ‘Christie for Christmas’.