15

Agatha Christie and the

Magic of Murder

In writing about Somerset Maugham, whose short stories

cover a range of experience, I noted that he did not aim
simply at thrilling or entertaining us. That idea, somewhat
dismissive of work that concentrated on just one element,
has stuck with me, I think, from the time I read David Cecil
on the early Victorian novelists, whom he compared with
modern writers who had only a single aim in their fictions.
Thus, as I have noted earlier, he talked of Aldous Huxley
as being concerned with ideas, while Virginia Woolf wove a
tapestry of words. The third major writer he mentioned was
John Galsworthy, whom I believe he saw as documenting
social change. But then, he mentioned two other writers who
were widely popular in the thirties, one who made us fear
and the other who made us laugh.
The latter was P. G. Wodehouse, the former Agatha Christie,
who was widely touted in my youth as the writer who had
sold more volumes than any others, save only the collective
authorship of the Bible. This was doubtless publisher’s
hype and was the counterpart of the pervasive suggestion –
never directly stated, as I recall, but implied continuously in
celebrations of other crime writers – that Agatha Christie was
simple and superficial, her plots basic and her characters
stereotypes.
I did not think of disagreeing in those days, and I am not
sure I could argue a case now for great depth and complexity
in her work. But, it has provided enormous satisfaction
over the years, and in the process, she covered a range of
characters and milieus that provide various perspectives on
England and the English.

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 Agatha Christie and the Magic of Murder 69

In the thirties, she certainly spent much time and effort

on English country houses, and I suspect she will be
remembered most fondly for those. But she expanded her
scope to cover high politics and spies during the First and
Second World Wars, ancient Egypt and contemporary Nile
cruises, international intrigue and deep lesbian passions,
girls’ public schools and even, towards the end of her career,
the pop culture of London in the sixties.
She had a range of detectives, most famously, of course,
the Belgian professional Hercule Poirot (whom I saw as a
role model when I was trying to find out what Rama Mani
and Angela Bogdan were up to – when you have eliminated
the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must
be the truth), the fluffy English spinster Miss Marple, the
husband and wife team of Timothy and Tuppence, the
rotund Parker Pyne and retiring Mr Satterthwaite, who is
helped to understand life by the mysterious Mr Quin. They
are all memorable characters and, while most of them stay
the same through their long careers, the manner in which
the couple manage to triumph over evil when old and frail
is particularly rewarding. So too, I should note, is Poirot’s
last case, Curtain, in which he returns to Styles, the country
house that was the scene of his first triumph, now a nursing
home for the old. It is also quite startling in its resolution,
when Poirot shows how to deal with a serial killer of a sort
that cannot be pinned down for the deaths he precipitates.
Agatha Christie had a strange life, with an unhappy marriage
that led to her fleeing from home, as depicted movingly in a
recent film. However, her second marriage proved eminently
successful. It was to the archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan,
and she accompanied him on his digs in the Middle East,
which provided her with much inspiration, for works such
as Murder in Mesopotamia and They Came to Baghdad, as
well as Death on the Nile, made into a marvelous film with
Peter Ustinov and Angela Lansbury (daughter, I think, of
the leader of the Labour Party during the thirties, which
explained, someone said, why the Labour Party did not come

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 70 Twentieth Century Classics

into power during that period). I was moved last year, to find,
when visiting Syria, that the hotel they used in Aleppo still
survives, still celebrates her, and seems much as it must
have been three quarters of a century ago.
Playing the part of Poirot is not easy and, though Ustinov
did well, he did not quite capture what seemed to me the
quicksilver impression Poirot leaves. Miss Marple, however,
though seemingly a more settled and definite figure, has
been brought to life successfully on screen in different ways
by a number of actresses. First, there was the heavy definite
Margaret Rutherford, but there have been several since of
differing build, including the elegant Geraldine McEwan,
who played the very different Jane Austen in Sri Lanka (and
I think Angela Lansbury herself, abandoning the drunken
writer she portrayed so splendidly in Death on the Nile).
Miss Marple too has a memorable refrain about life, that
one should never forget how wicked human nature can be,
a lesson she has learnt by observing life in a quiet country
village.
Ultimately, I should note, though the range is impressive,
perhaps the most memorable of Agatha Christie’s works are
those set in those English villages that now seem so remote,
and in particular the country houses of the aristocracy and the
squirearchy. I remember being particularly delighted by The
Secret of Chimneys, perhaps because of the preposterously
grand setting for political skullduggery, but I also enjoyed
the more simply set Murder at the Vicarage, with its very
subtle plot and the deep passion that is completely beyond
the ken of the innocent vicar who tells the tale.
Agatha Christie knew well how to use narrative voices, as in
perhaps her most famous work, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,
but also through Poirot’s sidekick Captain Hastings, with all
the strengths as well as the weaknesses of an Englishman
of good breeding. His final incarnation in Curtain, when he
almost falls prey to the murderer Poirot cannot unmask, is
a marvelous tribute to a relationship sustained over half a

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 Agatha Christie and the Magic of Murder 71

century, taking in on the way marriage to one of the few

survivors of Cards on the Table.
That was typical of Agatha Christie’s sense of the bizarre,
involving murder during what was the lately fashionable
game of bridge. She delighted in absurd plots based on
nursery rhymes, and party games that went wrong. In short,
she had a splendid sense of humour and, if one cannot
claim very great insights into human experience in her work,
I think Cecil was perhaps unfair in not registering that her
thrills involved an entertaining glimpse too into the elasticity
of the human mind. And while I would not agree with Milan
Kundera who described her once as ‘the greatest magician
of all time’, he explains that ‘she knew how to turn murder
into amusement .… from the crematorium of Agatha’s novels
the smoke is forever rising into the sky, and only a very
naïve person could maintain that it is the smoke of tragedy’.
Reading that, and remembering too how she turned the
smoke from a railway train into a question mark from the
Almighty as well as a simple clue to when and by whom a
murder was committed, one has to recognize a certain level
of expansive genius.

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