The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A biographical companion to the works of Agatha Christie. Charles Osborne

six miles away. But The Sittaford Mystery is not necessarily a supernatural one. There are, in fact, two mysteries, and Mrs Christie juggles them superbly so that, until she is ready to tell us, we are never sure whether they are connected or even what one of them is. Who murdered Captain Trevelyan? And why have Mrs Willett and her daughter come to live in Sittaford? These would appear to be the mysteries, and presumably they are related.

      The Sittaford Mystery is strongly plotted, and the solutions to its puzzles are not likely to be arrived at by deduction on the reader’s part. It is also one of Mrs Christie’s most entertaining crime novels, and her use of the Dartmoor background is masterly. But you cannot help thinking that, given the characters of those involved, the actual motive for the murder when it is revealed seems rather inadequate. Real life produces murders committed for motives which seem even more inadequate, but that is not the point. Usually the reader is convinced by Mrs Christie’s explanations, but on this occasion he may well consider it unlikely that this particular person would have committed that particular crime for the reason given. This reader would have liked a stronger motivation and also to have had loose ends tied up. What, for instance, is the significance of the information given in Chapter 37, that the maiden name of Martin Derring’s mother was Martha Elizabeth Rycroft? What is her connection with Mr Rycroft the ornithologist? Why does Rycroft refer to the Derrings as ‘my niece … and her husband’? There is an irrelevant and unnecessary confusion here.

      Mrs Christie, the most objective of authors, who usually keeps herself in the background, intrudes at one or two points in the story: once, inadvertently, when she has Emily think to herself that a tall, blue-eyed invalid looks ‘as Tristan ought to look in the third act of Tristan und Isolde and as no Wagnerian tenor has ever looked yet’, for Emily is not the kind of girl to have been at all interested in the operas of Wagner, and the comment is clearly not hers but her author’s; on the other occasion, Mrs Christie describes a character’s voice by telling us that it ‘had that faintly complaining note in it which is about the most annoying sound a human voice can contain’. The qualifying clause is the opinion not of anyone in the novel but, again, of the author. It is possible to pick up pieces of information about Agatha Christie’s personal likes and dislikes in this way, but not often.

      In one or two details, there is a similarity between The Sittaford Mystery and the long story, ‘Three Blind Mice’, of about sixteen years later, a story which was subsequently used as the basis of the play, The Mousetrap.

      Several months before The Sittaford Mystery was published, the crime novelist Anthony Berkeley had written, in the preface to one of his Roger Sheringham mysteries, The Second Shot.

      I am personally convinced that the days of the old crime-puzzle, pure and simple, relying entirely upon the plot and without any added attractions of character, style, or even humour, are in the hands of the auditor; and that the detective story is in the process of developing into the novel with a detective or crime interest, holding its readers less by mathematical than by psychological ties.

      Berkeley would seem here to be looking ahead to Simenon, whose first Maigret stories were soon to appear, or to writers of the type of Patricia Highsmith. But, until the end of her life, Agatha Christie was able to retain and increase a huge readership with precisely the kind of novel which Berkeley thought was on the way out. She did so, of course, by the cunning and subtle injection of those qualities of character, style and humour into a form which, in the hands of some of her rivals, seemed to offer little more than the donnish delights of puzzle-solving.

      The Floating Admiral COLLABORATIVE NOVEL (1931)

      An oddity, published in 1931,¹¹ was the crime novel, The Floating Admiral, written by ‘Certain members of the Detection Club’.

      The Detection Club of London, founded in London in 1928 by Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, is a private club to which a number of leading crime writers belong. Its first President was G. K. Chesterton.

      For many years, the club dinners were held in a private room at L’Escargot Bienvenu in Greek Street, Soho. Later, they moved to the more luxurious Café Royal. Agatha Christie was a member of the Detection Club, and from 1958 until her death its Co-President. She was one of fourteen members who combined to write The Floating Admiral, a murder mystery to which each of its authors contributed one chapter. The conditions under which The Floating Admiral was written were described in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Introduction:

      … the problem was made to approach as closely as possible to a problem of real detection. Except in the case of Mr Chesterton’s picturesque Prologue, which was written last, each contributor tackled the mystery presented to him in the preceding chapters without having the slightest idea what solution or solutions the previous authors had in mind. Two rules only were imposed. Each writer must construct his instalment with a definite solution in view – that is, he must not introduce new complications merely ‘to make it more difficult’. He must be ready, if called upon, to explain his own clues coherently and plausibly; and, to make sure that he was playing fair in this respect, each writer was bound to deliver, together with the manuscript of his own chapter, his own proposed solution of the mystery. These solutions are printed at the end of the book for the benefit of the curious reader.

      Set in the classical murder mystery country of southern England, the events in The Floating Admiral take place in and near Whynmouth, a fictitious south coast holiday resort. The corpse of Admiral Penistone is found floating down the river Whyn, in the vicar’s boat, and the detective whose task it is to discover the killer is not Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey or Father Brown or anyone associated with an individual contributor, but Inspector Rudge of the Whynmouth police, ‘a tall, thin man with a sallow, clean-shaven face’.

      The authors of The Floating Admiral, in the order of their contributions, are G. K. Chesterton, Canon Victor L. Whitechurch, G.D.H. and M. Cole, Henry Wade, Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Milward Kennedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald A. Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, Edgar Jepson, Clemence Dane and Anthony Berkeley. The book is a remarkably successful group effort, and the fact that the story twists and turns even more than it would have done had it been the work of a single writer merely adds to its effectiveness as a mystery. The New York Times Book Review