‘Surely you won’t let Agatha Christie fool you again. That would be “again” – wouldn’t it?’ Thus read the advertisement, at the back of many of her early Crime Club books, for the latest titles from the Queen of Crime. The first in the series to appear, bearing the now-famous hooded gunman logo, was Philip MacDonald’s The Noose in May 1930; Agatha Christie’s first Crime Club title, The Murder at the Vicarage, followed in October of that year. By then Collins had already published, between 1926 and 1929, five Christie titles – The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Four, The Mystery of the Blue Train, The Seven Dials Mystery and Partners in Crime – in their general fiction list. As soon as The Crime Club was founded, Agatha Christie’s was an obvious name to grace the list and over the next 50 years she proved to be one of the most prolific authors – and by far the most successful – to appear under its imprint. This author/publisher relationship continued throughout her writing life, almost all of her titles appearing with the accompaniment of the hooded gunman.1
As the back of the dustjacket on the first edition of The Murder at the Vicarage states, ‘The Crime Club has been formed so that all interested in Detective Fiction may, at NO COST TO THEMSELVES, be kept advised of the best new Detective Novels before they are published.’ By 1932 and Peril at End House, The Crime Club was boasting that ‘Over 25,000 have joined already. The list includes doctors, clergymen, lawyers, University Dons, civil servants, business men; it includes two millionaires, three world-famous statesmen, thirty-two knights, eleven peers of the realm, two princes of royal blood and one princess.’
This is the first edition title page of The Murder at the Vicarage, the first Agatha Christie title to appear under The Crime Club imprint on 13th October 1930.
And the advertisement on the first edition wrapper of The A.B.C. Murders (1936) clearly states the Club’s aims and objectives:
The object of the Crime Club is to provide that vast section of the British Public which likes a good detective story with a continual supply of first-class books by the finest writers of detective fiction. The Panel of five experts selects the good and eliminates the bad, and ensures that every book published under the Crime Club mark is a clean and intriguing example of this class of literature. Crime Club books are not mere thrillers. They are restricted to works in which there is a definite crime problem, an honest detective process, with a credible and logical solution. Members of the Crime Club receive the Crime Club News issued at intervals.
As the above statement suggests, not for nothing was the 1930s known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. In that era the creation and enjoyment of a detective story was a serious business for reader, writer and publisher. Both reader and writer took the elaborate conventions seriously. The civilised outrage that followed the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926 showed what a serious breach of the rules its solution was considered at the time. So, while in many ways observing the so-called ‘rules’, and consolidating the image of a safe, cosy and comforting type of fiction, Agatha Christie also constantly challenged those ‘rules’ and, by regularly and mischievously tweaking, bending, and breaking them, subverted the expectations of her readers and critics. She was both the mould creator and mould breaker, who delighted in effectively saying to her fans, ‘Here is the comforting read that you expect when you pick up my new book but because I respect your intelligence and my own professionalism, I intend to fool you.’
But how did she fool her readers while at the same time retaining her vice-like grip on their admiration and loyalty? In order to understand how she managed this feat it is necessary to take a closer look at ‘The Rules’.
THE RULES OF DETECTIVE FICTION – POE, KNOX, VAN DINE
Edgar Allan Poe: inventor of the detective story
In April 1841 the American periodical Graham’s Magazine published Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and introduced a new literary form – the detective story. Together with four more of Poe’s stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ established the unwritten ground-rules that distinguish detective fiction from other forms of crime writing – the thriller, the suspense story, the adventure story. Among the many motifs introduced by Poe in these stories were:
All of Poe’s pioneering initiatives were exploited by subsequent generations of crime writers and although many of those writers introduced variations on and combinations of them, no other writer ever established so many influential concepts. Christie, as we shall see, exploited them to the full.
The first, and most important, of the Poe stories, ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, incorporated the first five ideas above. The murder of a mother and daughter in a room locked from the inside is investigated by Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, who, by logical deduction, arrives at a most unexpected solution, thereby proving the innocence of an arrested man; the story is narrated by his unnamed associate.
Although Poe is not one of the writers she mentions in her Autobiography as being an influence, Agatha Christie took his template of a murder and its investigation when she began to write The Mysterious Affair at Styles, 75 years later.
The brilliant amateur detective
If we take ‘amateur’ to mean someone outside the official police force, then Hercule Poirot is the pre-eminent example. With the creation of Miss Marple, Christie remains the only writer to create two famous detective figures. Although not as well known, the characters Tommy and Tuppence, Parker Pyne, Mr Satterthwaite and Mr Quin also come into this category.
The less-than-brilliant narrator-friend
Poirot’s early chronicler, Captain Arthur Hastings, appeared in nine novels (if we include the 1927 episodic novel The Big Four) and 26 short stories. After Dumb Witness in 1937, Christie dispensed with his services, though she allowed him a nostalgic swan song in Curtain, published in 1975. But she also experimented with other narrators, often with dramatic results – The Man in the Brown Suit, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Endless Night. The decision to send Hastings to Argentina may have had less to do