In The Thirteen Problems Christie features a very clever version of the code-letter in ‘The Four Suspects’ and in the last book she wrote, Postern of Fate, Tommy and Tuppence find a hidden message that begins their final case.
The comparison of cigarette butts
‘Murder in the Mews’ features not just this idea but also the clue of the cigarette smoke, or, more accurately, the absence of cigarette smoke.
Knox 2. All supernatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Van Dine 8. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means.
These two Rules are, in effect, the same and are more strictly adhered to, but Christie still sails close to the wind on various occasions, especially in her short story output. The virtually unknown radio play Personal Call has a supernatural twist at the last minute just when the listener thinks that everything has been satisfactorily, and rationally, explained. Dumb Witness features the Tripp sisters, quasi-spiritualists, but apart from her collection The Hound of Death, which has a supernatural rather than a detective theme, most of Chritie’s stories are firmly rooted in the natural, albeit sometimes evil, real world. The Pale Horse makes much of black magic and murder-by-suggestion but, like ‘The Voice in the Dark’ from The Mysterious Mr Quin and its seeming ghostly presence, all is explained away in rational terms.
Van Dine 3. There must be no love interest.
Although Van Dine managed this in his own books (thereby reducing them to semi-animated Cluedo), this Rule has been ignored by most successful practitioners. It is in the highest degree unlikely that, in the course of a 250-page novel, the ‘love interest’ can be completely excised while some semblance of verisimilitude is retained. Admittedly, Van Dine may have been thinking of some of the excesses of the Romantic suspense school, when matters of the heart take precedence over matters of the intellect; or when the reader can safely spot the culprit by pairing off the suspects until only one remains. Christie, as usual, turned this rule to her advantage. In some novels we confidently expect certain characters to walk up the aisle after the book finishes but, instead, one or more of them end up walking to the scaffold. In Death in the Clouds, Jane Grey gets as big a shock as the reader when the charming Norman Gale is unmasked as a cold-blooded murderer. In Taken at the Flood, Lynn is left pining after the ruthless David Hunter and in They Came to Baghdad, Victoria is left to seek a replacement for the shy Edward. In some Christie novels the ‘love interest’ or, more accurately, the emotional element and personal interplay between the characters, is not just present but of a much higher standard than is usual in her works. For example, in Five Little Pigs, The Hollow and Nemesis it is the emotional entanglements that set the plot in motion and provide the motivation; in each case it is thwarted love that motivates the killer.
Van Dine 16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, and no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations.
This Rule merely mirrors the time in which it was written. And it must be admitted that it would be no bad matter to reintroduce it to some present-day practitioners. Many examples of current detective fiction are shamelessly overwritten and never seem to use ten words when a hundred will do. That said, character analysis and atmosphere can play an important part in the solution. In The Moving Finger, it is only when Miss Marple looks beyond the ‘atmosphere’ of fear in Lymstock that the solutions both to the explanation of the poison-pen letters and the identity of the murderer become clear. In Cards on the Table the only physical clues are the bridge scorecards and Poirot has to depend largely on the character of the bridge-players, as shown by these scorecards, to arrive at the truth. In Five Little Pigs, an investigation into the murder committed 16 years earlier has to rely almost solely on the evidence and accounts of the suspects. Character reading and analysis play an important part in this procedure. In The Hollow, it is from his study of the characters staying for the weekend at The Hollow that Poirot uncovers the truth of the crime. Apart from the gun there is nothing in the way of physical clues for him to analyse.
RULE OF THREE: SUMMARY
The Knox Decalogue is by far the more reasonable of the two sets of Rules. Written somewhat tongue-in-cheek – ‘Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’ – it is less repetitive and restrictive and shows less personal prejudice than does its American counterpart. A strict adherence to Van Dine’s Rules would have resulted in an arid, uninspired and ultimately predictable genre. It would have meant for-going (much of) the daring brilliance of Christie, the inventive logic of Ellery Queen, the audacious ingenuity of John Dickson Carr or the formidable intelligence of Dorothy L. Sayers. In later years it would have precluded the witty cunning of Edmund Crispin, the erudite originality of Michael Innes or the boundary-pushing output of Julian Symons. Van Dine’s list is repetitive and, in many instances, a reflection of his personal bias – no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations. It is somewhat ironic that while the compilers of both lists are largely forgotten nowadays, the writer who managed to break most of their carefully considered Rules remains the best-selling and most popular writer in history.
And so, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920 until Sleeping Murder in 1976, Agatha Christie produced at least one book a year and for nearly twenty of those years she produced two titles. The slogan ‘A Christie for Christmas’ was a fixture in Collins’s publishing list and in 1935 it became clear that the name of Agatha Christie was to be a perennial best seller. That year, with Three Act Tragedy, she reached the magic figure of 10,000 hardback copies sold in the first year. And this trebled over the next ten years. By the time of her fiftieth title, A Murder is Announced, she matched it with sales of 50,000; and never looked back. And all of this without the media circus that is now part and parcel of the book trade – no radio or TV interviews, no signing sessions, no question-and-answer panels and virtually no public appearances.
Although mutually advantageous, the relationship between Christie and her publisher was by no means without its rockier moments, usually about jacket design or blurb. The proposed design for The Labours of Hercules horrified her (‘Poirot going naked to the bath’), she considered that an announcement in ‘Crime Club News’ about 1939’s Ten Little Niggers – its title later amended to the more acceptable And Then There Were None – revealed too much of the plot (see Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks), and in September 1967 she sent Sir William (‘Billy’) Collins a blistering letter for not having received her so-called advance copies of Endless Night before she saw them herself on sale at the airport. And as late as 1968 she wrote her own blurb for By the Pricking of my Thumbs.
Thanks to her phenomenal sales and prodigious output, she became a personal friend of Sir William and his wife, Pierre, and conducted much of her correspondence through the years directly with him. They were regular visitors to Greenway, her Devon retreat, and Sir William was one of those who spoke at her memorial service in May 1976. A measure of the respect in which he held her can be gauged from his closing remarks, when he said that ‘the world is better because she lived in it’.
2
The First Decade 1920–1929
‘It was while I was working in the dispensary that I first conceived the idea of writing a detective story.’
SOLUTIONS REVEALED
The Mysterious Affair at Styles • The Mystery of the Blue Train
The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in the USA at the end of 1920 and in the UK on 21 January 1921. It is a classic country-house whodunit of