Lockdown and murder – the perfect combination
Agatha Christie’s biographer Laura Thompson explains why the Queen of Crime often placed her characters in claustrophobic settings
Looking for literary solace in these strange times, you can go one of two ways: either a book about an activity – travel, a wild party – that conjures up the world as it used to be. Or, perhaps more perversely consoling, a book that reflects the present situation, in which characters are confined, alone or possibly both, and having a worse time of it than you.
Taking the second option, I recently reread a little-known novel published in 1944, whose theme is self-isolation. Absent in the Spring tells the story of pleasant, attractive, slightly smug Joan Scudamore, who is travelling home to England from a visit to her daughter in Baghdad. When her train fails to arrive, she is stranded in the desert. She has a place to stay, but she is the sole guest. Soon she has no ink in her pen and – worst of all – has finished the available reading matter.
With nothing to sustain her but memories, she is forced to recognise truths that she had previously failed to acknowledge – most painfully, her husband’s love for another woman – and to see herself with a piercing clarity that ordinary life occludes.
This spare and unsparing novel is by Mary Westmacott, the pseudonym of Agatha Christie, who was fascinated by self-isolation. “One of my pet theories… is that everybody should spend one month a year in the middle of a desert...” says a character in a later Westmacott, “you’d have, at last, a fairly good chance to make acquaintance with yourself.” Christie had undergone something similar herself, in December 1926. She “disappeared” for 11 days – in fact spent at a hotel in Harrogate, where she registered under the surname of her first husband’s girlfriend – in what was a desperate twisted attempt to save her marriage. During that time, she had little to do except think (there is, indeed, something close to home in Joan Scudamore’s realisation that she had been blind to the truth about her straying husband). Agony though this must have been, it also had a hard-won value. And certainly Christie – who would have taken little interest in Netflix or Zoom – would have regarded our present predicament as an opportunity, as well as a trial.
In fact, she wrote Absent in the Spring during a rare period of total solitude, when living alone in London, on brief leave from her war work as a hospital dispenser. It was completed in just a few days. By that extraordinary reckoning, she could have written several books since this country was placed in lockdown in late March, although her detective fiction did take a slightly more feasible six weeks or so. And some of those novels – including a couple of the most famous – also constitute a reflection upon the current situation.
Lockdown is a familiar detective fiction trope. The hugely successful novels of contemporary crime writer Lucy Foley are based upon precisely that premise. In The Hunting Party, her characters are marooned by a snowstorm, in The Guest List they are trapped on an island. No surprise, therefore, that Foley is frequently compared with Christie, as – although the books themselves are entirely different – these mise-en-scènes mirror those in Christie’s two most successful novels: Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None.
In Orient Express, the train gets stuck because of bad weather. This is essentially a device that allows the suspects to be “imprisoned” until the case is solved; as well as heightening tension, the lockdown serves a practical authorial purpose. In that sense the train is no different from any other constrained space, for instance the boat in Death on the Nile, or the archaeological dig in Murder in Mesopotamia, where the unnatural conditions suddenly cause a female character to snap and scream: “I won’t stay here, I tell you! I won’t stay here a day longer” (one knows the feeling).
Then there is, of course, the classic “country house” setting, used perhaps to finest effect in Crooked House, a brilliant book in which claustrophobic family relationships become intertwined with the shadowy grip of terror. In fact confinement to the home is more metaphysical than actual in Christie’s novels, although her play
The Mousetrap is set in a remote house where the characters are trapped by snow: somewhat ironically, it is a lockdown drama that only a real-life lockdown has managed to remove from the West End stage.
And Then There Were None, however, reaches into slightly different territory. It is about the worst lockdown imaginable, in which 10 people are invited to an island and murdered one by one. The suspects/victims are mocked by the luxury of the house in which they are staying, with its mod cons and well-stocked drinks cabinets. “Somehow, that was the most frightening thing of all…”
But the book is also about social isolation, which in its most extreme form – as with Covid-19 – is impelled by the fear that other people are lethal. Detective novels are by definition about suspicion, about the dangers inherent in those who appear to be “just like us”. Almost always, however, there is a refuge of sorts, a sense that something or somebody will free the innocent from their time in hell.
Not in And Then There Were None.
There is no detective, no outsider, nothing in which the characters and readers can place their trust. All are victims, so whence the deus ex machina? It is an expressionist nightmare, a plot whose facile nursery rhyme origins make it all the more gleamingly sinister. When – on a couple of occasions – one of the characters seeks to make an ally of another, their motive is entirely deviant: in this book, credulousness is a capital crime.
The only place of safety is within the characters’ large, comfortable bedrooms, where they are forced – like Joan Scudamore – to remember
Christie would have seen our current crisis as both a trial and an opportunity
and reflect. Yet for them, isolation is even more difficult than for most of us, given the nature of their memories. The people on the island are murderers. They have never been found out, and with varying degrees of success they have lived with their feelings of guilt. When they are alone, however, feeling the encroachment of a doom that they half-believe themselves to deserve, the past can no longer be avoided.
This, for instance, is the young woman who has allowed a child to drown, and now hides from her own death in the sanctuary of her room:
“And she thought suddenly: ‘Of course! I can stay here! Stay here locked in! Food doesn’t matter! I can stay here – safely – till help comes…’
“Stay here. Yes, but could she stay here? Hour after hour – with no one to speak to, with nothing to do but think…”
What catches up with these characters, therefore, is not just the lockdown, but their inability to wait it out in isolation. This might be viewed as a message to us all. A better one, perhaps, is Westmacott’s exhortation to seek the value in solitude; although the final chapter of Absent in the Spring – shot through with typical Christiean realism about human nature – accepts that this is a great deal easier said than done.
Agatha Christie: An English Mystery by Laura Thompson is published by Headline