In her childhood there was plenty of fuel for those who were entertained by mysteries and paradoxes, for the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw the publication of an increasing number of ever more ingenious detective stories. As a child Agatha read Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s two detective stories, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. With Madge, she had enjoyed Conan Doyle’s early Sherlock Holmes stories, and, at the age of eight, she was fascinated by Madge’s reading aloud of Anna Katharine Green’s detective story, The Leavenworth Case. In 1908, as we have seen, she had been particularly caught by The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a long, melodramatic tale of the attempted murder, by what appeared to be a fiendish supernatural agency, of a beautiful young woman sleeping in a sealed chamber, a heroine who, it emerged, was hiding some dreadful secret. The Mystery of the Yellow Room had a particularly attractive hero, the journalist Joseph Rouletabille, a young man of persistently mysterious origins, whose pursuit of the murderer was the more enthusiastic because he was competing with a disdainful and sinister professional detective, Frederic Larsan, ‘the great Fred’.
It was while they were discussing one of these detective stories that Madge had challenged Agatha to write one herself. This suggestion was at the back of Agatha’s mind when dispensary work began to become monotonous and she decided to try, adopting what was to become her standard practice: beginning by deciding upon the crime and settling on a procedure which made it particularly hard to detect. What she sought was a plot that was simultaneously commonplace and surprising: ‘I could, of course, have a very unusual kind of murder for a very unusual motive, but that did not appeal to me artistically.’ She wanted a riddle: ‘The whole point 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. But really of course he had.’ She next settled on the characters, discovering the difficulty of basing fictional characters on people she knew and breaking the creative log-jam only after seeing some striking people in a tram. It was not so much that they were odd-looking; rather, as with the three people in the Gezirah Hotel who had been the models in Snow Upon the Desert, that their relationship and their behaviour made Agatha begin to speculate.
Next came the question of the detective. She wanted someone like Rouletabille, a detective of a type which had not been used before. She eventually decided that he should be a Belgian refugee; as she recalled in a memorable sentence of her autobiography, Torquay was full of Belgian refugees, bewildered and suspicious, who wanted to be left alone, ‘to save some money, to dig their garden and manure it in their own particular and intimate way’. The detective was to be clever, meticulous, with an impressive name and some knowledge of crime and criminals. Agatha made Hercule Poirot a retired Belgian police officer. Like Larsan, he was in his way an artist, with a high opinion of himself. There have been a number of theories as to Poirot’s origins in Agatha’s imagination. Some have pointed to Hercules Popeau, a former member of the Sûreté in Paris, who had been created well before the War by Mrs Marie Belloc Lowndes, or to Hercule Flambeau, G. K. Chesterton’s criminal-turned-detective. Others have drawn attention to the fictional Eugène Valmont, formerly ‘chief detective of the government of France’, a character of overweening vanity and tolerant, good-natured contempt for the English people and, particularly, the English police. Valmont was the creation of Robert Barr, who published his stories in 1904 and 1905. Another critic, François Rivière, has connected Agatha’s interest in food and cooking with the fact that Poirot’s name is almost the same as the French word for a leek. Towards the end of her life Agatha was asked what she thought of some of these theories. She had only a vague memory of Eugène Valmont and certainly did not recall anything that might have directly influenced her creation. In fact, Poirot was very much her own invention; he was not a Frenchman because she had spent enough time in France for its citizens to be familiar to her, and she wanted something exotic. Belgians, at the time of Poirot’s first manifestation, were the object both of respect (‘gallant little Belgium’, overrun by Germany) and of some condescension, being thought to be neither as intellectual as the French nor as commercially astute as the Dutch. Poirot was clever, and equipped with a pompous character, ridiculous affectations, a luxuriant moustache and a curious egg-shaped head – in contrast to Rouletabille’s bullet-shaped one. His creator could admire him without having to be so deferential that she felt unable to manipulate him. It does not matter whether certain of Poirot’s features were derived, a fragment here, a morsel there, from other works that had contributed to the rich mulch in Agatha’s subconscious; in his extravagance of personality he was sufficiently plausible to stand and survive by himself.
Agatha worked on and off at her story, writing it out in longhand and, as each chapter was done, typing it on Madge’s old machine. She was distracted by it but, at the half-way point, became tired and cross at wrestling with the exposition of her plot. Clara then suggested that she should take it away to finish during her fortnight’s holiday, so The Mysterious Affair at Styles was largely completed at the Moorland Hotel at Haytor on Dartmoor. Agatha wrote all morning, walking over the moor to think out the next part of the book in the afternoon. Then she dined, slept for twelve hours, and set to work again the following morning. With a dozen of these concentrated bursts the back of her work was broken; she brought the draft home, tinkered with it – adding ‘love interest’ on the model of popular detective novels – and sent it away to be professionally typed. It went first to Hodder and Stoughton, came back, went elsewhere, was returned, was sent to Methuen, came back once more, and, last, was despatched to John Lane at The Bodley Head, where it appeared to sink without trace.
Agatha quickly forgot about it. Archie came to work at the Air Ministry in London, her real married life began, the War ended, and she found herself expecting a baby. Though astonished at the discovery, she was thrilled. ‘My ideas of having a baby had been that they were things that were practically automatic. After each of Archie’s leaves I had been deeply disappointed to find that no signs of a baby appeared. This time I had not even expected it.’ She consulted a sensible doctor in Torquay, unhappily named Dr Stabb (his colleagues were Dr Carver and Dr Quick), and, although she suffered nine months of morning sickness, on August 5th the baby was born with little trouble. Agatha’s daughter was called Rosalind Margaret Clarissa; she was born at Ashfield.
Agatha was still deeply attached to Ashfield. It was near the sea, it had trees, many of the belongings she had grown up with were there, and at its centre was Clara. Few of Agatha’s friends were in London and she and Archie were not sufficiently well off to entertain very much or to amuse themselves with more than an occasional supper in town or visit to a dance hall. In Torquay, however, things were easier. Ashfield was large and, though some of Agatha’s contemporaries, now married, lived rather grandly, there were still enough cheerful young people to enjoy a picnic on the moors or an impromptu party. On one occasion, for instance, Agatha gave a ‘Poodle Party’ at Ashfield, which all the guests attended dressed as dogs; a concession was made in Clara’s case and she was allowed to come as a butterfly. Agatha wore a headdress of astrakhan and Archie’s dinner jacket. She had cut a hole in the trousers and inserted the spring from a Captive Pencil (the sort held by a spring so that it would bend for use but bounce back when released), having substituted a pom-pom for the pencil itself.
What did Archie make of these proceedings? As his letters show, he had been a gay and light-hearted young man, and he was to amuse his daughter and later her school-friends with jokes, games and wonderful presents. But he also succumbed easily to anxiety. Agatha spoke of his unemotional manner but to some extent that may have been a mask. Archie could be edgy, his sinus gave him trouble and his digestion was delicate: there were many evenings, Agatha wrote, when he came home from a taxing day at the Air Ministry unable to eat, until, after some hours groaning on the bed, he would suddenly say, to Agatha’s constant amazement, that he felt like trying something with treacle or golden syrup. Archie had fought courageously in the War – the repeated acts of bravery that had brought him his medals and so many mentions in despatches also suggest quick reactions and finely tuned sensitivity to the needs of the moment – and it had been a long, depressing, noisy, filthy campaign, whose effects