‘Those who come to expect subtlety as well as sensation in Mrs Christie’s writing will be disappointed,’ said the Daily Mail of The Big Four, and this seems to have been the general opinion. Nevertheless, this hastily assembled ‘novel’ managed to sell more than 8,500 copies of its first edition. There can be little doubt that the publicity surrounding its author’s disappearance a couple of months earlier was largely responsible for the increased sales.
The Mystery of the Blue Train POIROT (1928)
In February, 1928, Agatha Christie took her daughter Rosalind for a holiday to the Canary Islands, and while they were there she managed to finish another novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train. She did not enjoy writing it, and persevered only because of the contractual obligation to her publisher and the need to continue to earn money. She had worked out what she referred to as a conventional plot, based on one of her short stories, ‘The Plymouth Express’; but, although she had planned the general direction of the story, both the scene and the characters resolutely refused to come alive for her. She plodded on, recalling later that this was the moment when she ceased to be an amateur and became a professional writer.
If one differentiates between amateur and professional (writer, actor, musician) on the basis that the professional can do it even when he does not feel like it, while the amateur cannot even when he does, then undoubtedly Mrs Christie was now justified in admitting herself to the professional ranks, for although she did not much like what she was writing and did not think she was writing particularly well (in fact, she later referred to The Mystery of the Blue Train as easily the worst book she ever wrote), she nevertheless finished it and sent it off to Collins. It immediately sold a healthy 7,000 copies, which pleased her, although she could not feel proud of her achievement.
Mrs Christie was granted a divorce from her husband in April, 1928, on the grounds of his adultery not with Nancy Neele but with an unknown woman in a London hotel room. This particular act of adultery was purely formal, if it took place at all: in those days, when both parties to a marriage wanted a quick divorce the only course open to them was for one of them to stage-manage an act of infidelity and to arrange for circumstantial evidence to be provided by ‘witnesses’. (As soon as the divorce became absolute, Christie married Nancy Neele. They remained married until Nancy died of cancer in 1958. Archibald Christie died in 1962.)
After the divorce, Agatha Christie wished to discontinue using her former husband’s name, and suggested to her publishers that she should write her novels under a male pseudonym. However, she was persuaded that her public had become used to her as Agatha Christie and that it would be unwise for her to change her name. So she remained Agatha Christie to her readers, for the rest of her life.
Though it is far from being one of her more brilliant efforts, and is distinctly inferior to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Mystery of the Blue Train does not deserve the scorn which its author liked to pour upon it. It is, at least, an improvement upon its immediate predecessor, The Big Tour, although, like The Big Four, it uneasily combines domestic murder with international crime. In solving the former, Poirot manages also to put a stop to the latter. One marvels at Agatha Christie’s objectivity as a writer. There is little trace in The Mystery of the Blue Train either of the emotional turmoil which its author had recently undergone or of the reluctance with which she claims to have written it.
The daughter of an American millionaire is found strangled in her compartment on the famous Paris-Nice train bleu when it pulls into Nice, and a fabulous ruby, the ‘Heart of Fire’, which her father had recently given her, is discovered to have been stolen. The plot is an expansion of a short story, ‘The Plymouth Express’ in which the theft and murder take place on a less glamorous train, the 12.14 from Paddington, and are very swiftly solved by Poirot. ‘The Plymouth Express’ did not appear in a volume of Agatha Christie stories until 1951 when it was included with eight other stories in The Under Dog, published in the United States. This volume was not published in Great Britain, and it was not until 1974 that British readers found ‘The Plymouth Express’ collected in a volume entitled Poirot’s Early Cases (called Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases in the United States).
In its expansion into a full-length novel, Mrs Christie’s story acquired subplots and a great many more characters. Anyone reading the novel who remembered the story would be able to identify one of the criminals but would still be left with a mystery to solve. Though the novel reveals traces of having been hastily written, its characters are entertaining and not unbelievable, and an atmosphere of the French Riviera in the twenties is still conveyed by its pages today, perhaps even more clearly than when the novel was first published. And scattered among the clumsy syntax and the phrases of bad French are a number of tart Christiean aperçus. Hastings is absent from the story, presumably on his ranch in the Argentine, and Poirot is a retired gentleman of leisure, travelling with an English valet, George, whom he must have acquired recently. It is only because he happens to be travelling to the south of France on the Blue Train on which the murder is committed that Poirot is drawn into the case.
The Mystery of the Blue Train is the first Poirot novel to be written in the third person. With no Captain Hastings or Dr Sheppard to make ironic little jests at his expense, and thus keep his overweening vanity in check, Poirot tends occasionally to act like a caricature of himself. But he is more like the Poirot Mrs Christie’s readers had come to regard with affection than the cardboard figure of The Big Four, though at one point he indulges in an uncharacteristically Wildean epigram, taking to his bed because the expected has happened and ‘when the expected happens it always causes me emotion’.
Parts of The Mystery of the Blue Train are set in the English village of St Mary Mead, which we will later come to know as the home of Miss Marple, a Christie detective we have yet to encounter. A minor character in the present novel is Miss Viner, an elderly inhabitant of the village who, with her curiosity and her sharp powers of observation, is quite as definitely an adumbration of Miss Marple as Caroline Sheppard was in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
There are one or two inconsistencies in the plot. Why, for instance, does Poirot say of Derek Kettering that he ‘was in a tight corner, a very tight corner, threatened with ruin,’ when Kettering has, in fact, been offered £100,000 in return for allowing his wife to divorce him? Agatha Christie told an interviewer in 1966 that The Mystery of the Blue Train ‘was easily the worst book I ever wrote … I hate it’. And her final verdict, in her autobiography, was that it was commonplace, full of clichés, and that its plot was uninteresting. ‘Many people, I am sorry to say, like it,’ she added. And so they should. Third-rate Christie is, perhaps, to be sneezed at, but not second-rate Christie.
The Seven Dials Mystery (1929)
The difficulties which Agatha Christie had experienced in writing during the period of nervous exhaustion which led to her disappearance, and even later, while she was recovering, seemed to evaporate as soon as she and Archie Christie were divorced. She continued to write stories for publication in magazines, especially when she needed ready cash for repairs to Ashfield, her childhood home, or for some other unexpected expense. A story brought in about £60, and took a week to write. At the same time, she found that ideas for novels were coming quite easily to her. Having especially enjoyed writing The Secret of Chimneys five years earlier, she decided to employ some of the characters and the setting of Chimneys in a new light-hearted thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery, for she continued to find that thrillers required less ‘plotting and planning’ than murder mysteries.
The Seven Dials of the title can be taken to mean either the district of Seven Dials in the West End of London, or the dials of seven alarm clocks (Mrs Christie favours the older spelling, ‘alarum’) which are discovered ranged along the mantelpiece in the room at Chimneys in which a young man is found dead in his bed. The action takes place partly at Chimneys, the country seat of Lord Caterham, and partly in various other places, among them the sinister Seven Dials Club, in Seven Dials, which ‘used to be a shimmy sort of district round about Tottenham Court Road way’. Seven Dials is actually a block or two southeast of the bottom of Tottenham Court Road, and not noticeably