her career Christie was quite happy to provide her readers with clues, confident in the knowledge that, in the words of her great contemporary R. Austin Freeman, ‘the reader would mislead himself’. How many readers will properly interpret the clue of the calendar in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, or the velvet stole in Death on the Nile, or the love letters in Peril at End House? Or who will correctly appreciate the significance of the wax flowers in After the Funeral, or Major Palgrave’s glass eye in A Caribbean Mystery, or the telephone call in Lord Edgware Dies, or the beer bottle in Five Little Pigs?
While not in the same class of ‘surprise solution’ as Murder on the Orient Express, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd or Crooked House, the solution to The Mysterious Affair at Styles still manages to surprise. This is due to the use of one of Christie’s most effective ploys: the double-bluff. It is the first example in her work of this powerful weapon in the detective-story writer’s armoury. Here the most obvious solution, despite an initial appearance of impossibility, transpires to be the correct one after all. In An Autobiography she explains that ‘The whole point of a good detective story was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. Though really, of course, he had done it.’ She returned throughout her career to this type of solution; and particularly when the explanation revolves around a murderous alliance: The Murder at the Vicarage, Evil under the Sun, Death on the Nile. Lethal partnerships aside, Lord Edgware Dies and The Hollow also feature this device. And she can take the bluff one step further, in Ordeal by Innocence and, devastatingly, in Witness for the Prosecution.
In The Mysterious Affair at Styles we are satisfied that Alfred Inglethorp is both too obvious and too dislikeable to be the murderer; and, on a more mundane level, he was absent from the house on the night of his wife’s death. So we discount him. As a further strengthening of the double-bluff, part of his plan depends on being suspected, arrested, tried and acquitted, thus ensuring his perpetual freedom. Unless carefully handled this solution runs the risk of producing an anticlimax. Here it is skilfully avoided by uncovering the presence of an unexpected conspirator in the person of hearty Evelyn Howard, who, throughout the novel, has denounced her employer’s husband (her unsuspected lover) as a fortune hunter – as indeed he is.
Productivity
Although no one, least of all Christie herself, knew it at the time, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was to be the first in a substantial corpus of books that were to issue from her typewriter over the next half century. She was equally successful in the novel and the short story form and alone among her contemporaries she also conquered the theatre. She created two famous detectives, a feat not duplicated by other crime writers. During the height of her powers publication could hardly keep pace with creation – 1934 saw the publication of no fewer than four crime titles and a Mary Westmacott, the name under which she wrote six non-crime novels published between 1930 and 1956. And this remarkable output is also a factor in her continuing success. It is possible to read a different Christie title every month for almost seven years; at which stage one can start all over again. And it is possible to watch a different Agatha Christie dramatisation every month for two years. Very few writers, in any field, have equalled this record.
And so Christie’s work continues to transcend every barrier of geography, culture, race, religion, age and sex; she is read as avidly in Bermuda as in Balham, she is read by grandparents and grandchildren, she is read on e-book and in graphic novel format in this twenty-first century as eagerly as in the green Penguins and The Strand magazine of the last. Why? Because no other crime writer did it so well, so often or for so long; no one else has ever matched her combination of readability, plotting, fairness and productivity.
And no one ever will.
Like a conjuror, he whipped from a drawer in the desk two shabby exercise books.
The Clocks, Chapter 28
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd • Sad Cypress
Although mentioned by both of her biographers, Janet Morgan and Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie’s Notebooks remain a closely protected, and largely unknown, treasure. After the death of her mother, Rosalind Hicks ensured their safety in Greenway House and, with the exception of Torquay Museum, they have never been publicly displayed. But Christie does briefly mention them in An Autobiography:
Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book. So far so good – but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that had struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I had kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled, it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot – do it yourself – girl and not really sister – August – with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.
A closer examination of some of these remarks will give a clearer idea of what she meant. Using Christie’s own words as a guide, we can begin to see the part these Notebooks played in her creative process.
… idea in an exercise book …
Considered as the notes, drafts and outlines for the greatest body of detective fiction ever written (and in many cases, unwritten) these Notebooks are unique and priceless literary artefacts. Viewed as physical objects they are somewhat less impressive. They are before me as I write these words and, at a passing glance, look like the piles of exercise books gathered by teachers at the end of class in schools the world over. Because most of them are just that – exercise books. Red and blue and green and grey exercise books, coverless copybooks ruled with wide-spaced blue lines, small black pocket-sized notebooks: The Minerva, The Marvel, The Kingsway, The Victoria, The Lion Brand, The Challenge, The Mayfair exercise books, ranging in price from The Kingsway (Notebook 72) for 2d to The Marvel (Notebook 28) for a shilling (5p); Notebook 5 represented particularly good value at 4 for 7½d (3p). Inside covers often have ‘useful’ information: a map of the UK, capitals of the world, decimal conversion rates (obviously bought just before or after the introduction of decimal coinage in February 1971). There are covers illustrated by the New York skyline (Notebook 23) or a Mexican volcano (Notebook 18).
Some of them are more worthy recipients of their contents: hard-backed multi-paged notebooks with marbled covers or spiral binding with embossed covers; some are even grandly inscribed on the cover ‘Manuscript’. Notebook 7 is described inside the back cover as ‘spongeable PVC cover from WHS’, and Notebook 71 is a ‘Cahier’ with ‘Agatha Miller 31 Mai 1907’ written on the cover and containing French homework from her time in Paris as a young woman. Notebook