I find it prudent to suspect everyone ... just a little
Agatha Christie was an expert on the law and on poisons. But her grasp of human nature was matchless
What a wicked lady agatha Christie could have been, had she chosen to commit crimes instead of only writing about them.
When asked about her method, she said: ‘You start with the wish to deceive and then work backwards.’
John Goddard, in this forensic examination of Christie’s complex puzzles and tightly constructed, dovetailing plots, frankly stands amazed at her devilish ingenuity — and he relishes, as do I, the arresting opening lines such as ‘You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?’, which have (thus far) hooked more than two billion readers.
there have been many studies of the Queen of Crime, who died in 1976 — full-scale biographies, accounts of her world travels and archaeological digs, editions of her notebooks, picture books featuring her big house in Devon, cookery books and a scholarly investigation of her days as a dispensing chemist and nurse.
however, Goddard — a former partner in a firm of City solicitors called Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer — looks at Christie’s work from the viewpoint of a lawyer. he spots how key information in the tales is extracted from the Matrimonial Causes acts of 1857 and 1923, particularly in connection with insanity as grounds for divorce.
The Legitimacy act of 1926 has a bearing on Christie’s many plots about lost or unwanted children and those born out of wedlock, and how this ties in with the laws of inheritance, intestacy, and the Wills act of 1837.
Christie knew the difference between the Poisons and Pharmacy act of 1908 and the Pharmacy and Poisons act of 1933 and thus on what the average killer could lay his (or her) hands.
She therefore created stories revolving around the effect of bromide on a solution containing strychnine, what happens when you inhale prussic acid, the effect of phosphorus on the liver (it mimics liver disease) and how a quick injection of apomorphine can function as an emetic.
Christie often made use of the double jeopardy loophole — only closed in 2003 with the Criminal Justice act — whereby once a person had been acquitted, they can never be tried again for the same offence.
‘It is not enough to be arrested,’ as Poirot points out — there has to be a full jury trial, as in the Witness For the Prosecution.
In addition to the innumerable short stories, Christie published 66 crime novels, beginning in 1920 with the Mysterious affair at Styles. this is where we first meet Poirot, this ‘queer little foreigner’, a World War I Belgian refugee and ‘fusspot for whom specks of dust are more painful than bullet wounds’.
Obsessed with neatness and symmetry, he wears button boots and sports an absurd moustache, though not as absurd as Kenneth Branagh’s in the latest film.
‘I am probably the greatest detective in the world,’ says Poirot, modestly.
though he claims to be an exacting intellectual — ‘It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think’ — Poirot’s little grey cells always need a bit of help. he examines stains, looks
under mats, finds charred fragments of paper and spots the importance of candle grease, cigarette cases, discarded kimonos, brooches or a thornless rose. We, the readers, are, says Goddard, ‘skilfully deceived as to their significance’.
Whoever saw the importance of the repaired Dictaphone in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, or the fish paste sandwiches in Sad Cypress?
As awkward in company as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot nevertheless always interviews lots of suspects, ‘sometimes in a pleasantly disarming manner, sometimes threateningly’.
David Suchet was always good at the curdled courtesy, followed by a sudden snarl of rage. Poirot’s general belief is that ‘there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation’, an aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde.
The more Goddard looks into Christie’s work, the more psychological — indeed, subjective and impressionistic — is the approach.
‘When I know what the murderer is like, I shall be able to find out who he is,’ says Poirot in The ABC Murders, sounding more like a novelist than a cerebral policeman.
The tale is to be dramatised at Christmas with John Malkovich.
As a lawyer, Goddard can see how clues support, but do not actually always prove, the solutions given.
These often rely on intelligent supposition — that is to say, sheer guesswork — as in Murder On The Orient Express, where ‘one cannot complain of having no clues in this case. There are clues here in abundance’. There are also five plausible versions of events, until it is revealed they all did it.
The bustling, busy approach is the particular realm of Miss Marple, the heroine of 12 complete novels.
Far from being a sweet, harmless little old lady, of course, Miss Marple has an instinct for recognising wrongdoing and she mistrusts each and every person she encounters — who do, in fairness, all seem to be gossips, liars, adulterers, cheats, frauds, bastards, stranglers and poisoners.
‘I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little,’ she says, understandably. St Mary Mead is rampant with bodies in libraries, on the golf links, in vicarages and under rhododendrons.
GODDARD points out that Christie makes her venues — cosy studies, drawing-rooms, train compartments, paddle-steamers — take on ‘a tense or sinister atmosphere’. She was particularly keen on placing horror in settings of picturesque Thirties luxury, such as the railway carriages belonging to the Calais to Nice ‘Blue Train’, which went via Paris and Lyon.
The Middle East turns up a lot, an area Christie had explored with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan. She made extensive use of the Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island in Bigbury-onSea, Devon — it became the Jolly Roger Hotel on Smugglers’ Island.
Instead of explaining Christie away with his analytic exercises and legalistic assessments, Goddard’s book serves to deepen and enrich her success and mystery.
We are shown how Christie can formulate characters we dislike, but who may be innocent, and characters whose side we take — yet who are then unmasked as villains. Christie always saw through the perils of charm.
As a connoisseur of evil and ego, she is as great an author as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark or Jean Rhys.
Agatha Christie’s Golden Age brilliantly shows how she wove particular tales around the universal themes of greed, lust, hate, redemption and atonement.
That said, Goddard does, however, with Christie in the dock, catch her out once. In Lord Edgware Dies, a character arrives home in Piccadilly at 8.30, changes for dinner and gets to Chiswick at 8.45.
Even though there was little road traffic in the Thirties, this is simply not possible, is it, Miss Christie?