Since we are in France, Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard is not available to act as a foil for Poirot. This function is undertaken by Giraud, a young detective from the Sûreté who is already famous and inclined to pour scorn on Poirot’s old-fashioned methods. Agatha Christie has confessed that, in writing The Murder on the Links, she was influenced less by the Sherlock Holmes stories than by Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room. She must also have been reading A. E. W. Mason’s At the Villa Rose, for certain events at the Villa Geneviève in The Murder on the Links call the 1910 mystery classic to mind.
Since their earlier adventure in Essex, Poirot and Hastings have taken furnished rooms together in London. If you did not learn from The Big Four (1927) that their address was 14 Farraway Street, you would have sworn that it was 221B Baker Street, for the ambience is distinctly Holmesian, as is their landlady, who is difficult to distinguish from Sherlock Holmes’s Mrs Hudson. Captain Hastings works as private secretary to a Member of Parliament while Poirot pursues a retirement career as private detective, and Hastings finds time to write up Poirot’s cases, just as Watson used to chronicle those of Holmes. At the end of The Murder on the Links, it seems likely that Hastings will propose marriage to the auburn-haired beauty he has met, and there is even a hint that he, or they, may emigrate to ‘a ranch across the seas’. Mrs Christie, it would seem, was already laying her plans for the removal of Hastings from Poirot’s life.
A television adaptation of The Murder on the Links, with David Suchet as Poirot, was first shown on London Weekend TV on 11 February 1996.
The Man in the Brown Suit (1924)
Back in London after their world tour, the Christies for a time found it difficult to settle down. Agatha longed for a cottage in the country, near enough to town for Archie to commute to the city, but far enough away for little Rosalind to be able to breathe air fresher than that of Earls Court. Archie took some months to find a job that suited him. Eventually, however, he was offered an excellent position with Austral Trust Ltd, a city firm run by an Australian friend, Clive Baillieu. Archie was to remain with Austral Trust Ltd for the rest of his life. Now, while they searched for their place in the country, Agatha proceeded to work on her next novel.
The egregious Belcher had suggested to her, before they went on their trip, that his house, the Mill House at Dorney, would make an excellent setting for a murder. ‘The Mystery of the Mill House,’ he had said to her one evening when the Christies were dining there. ‘Jolly good title, don’t you think?’ Agatha admitted that it had possibilities, and on their voyage to Cape Town Major Belcher continued to refer to it. ‘But mind you,’ he added, ‘if you write it you must put me in it.’ Agatha doubted if she could manage to create a character based entirely on someone she knew, but Belcher continued to pester her throughout their world tour. When he asked her, for the umpteenth time, ‘Have you begun that book yet? Am I in it?’ she replied, ‘Yes. You’re the victim.’
But Belcher did not see himself as one of life’s victims. ‘You’ve got to make me the murderer, Agatha. Do you understand?’ And Mrs Christie replied carefully, ‘I understand that you want to be the murderer.’ She had not, in fact, begun writing the book, but she did sketch out its plot while she was in South Africa, and Belcher played a leading role. ‘Give him a title,’ Archie suggested. ‘He’d like that.’ So Belcher became Sir Eustace Pedler. Agatha Christie explained later that Sir Eustace Pedler was not really meant to be Belcher,
but he used several of Belcher’s phrases, and told some of Belcher’s stories. He too was a master of the art of bluff, and behind the bluff could easily be sensed an unscrupulous and interesting character. Soon I had forgotten Belcher and had Sir Eustace Pedler himself wielding the pen. It is, I think, the only time I have tried to put a real person whom I knew well into a book, and I don’t think it succeeded. Belcher didn’t come to life, but someone called Sir Eustace Pedler did. I suddenly found that the book was becoming rather fun to write. I only hoped The Bodley Head would approve of it.8
The book was written in London and, retitled The Man in the Brown Suit since its author thought the title proposed by Belcher too similar to her earlier ones, was delivered to The Bodley Head who ‘hemmed and hawed a bit’ because it was not a proper detective story but one of those thrillers which Mrs Christie seemed to find easier to write. However, they accepted it.
Agatha Christie, author of four books, was no longer the novice who had grasped eagerly the chance to have her first novel published. As she herself put it, though she had been ignorant and foolish when she first submitted a book for publication, she had since learned a few things. She had discovered the Society of Authors and read its periodical, from which she learned that you had to be extremely careful in making contracts with publishers, ‘and especially with certain publishers’. When The Bodley Head, who still had an option on her next two books after The Man in the Brown Suit, suggested shortly before its publication that they scrap the old contract and make a new one for a further five books, Mrs Christie politely declined. She considered that they had not treated a young and inexperienced author fairly, but had taken advantage of her ignorance of publishers’ contracts and her understandable eagerness to have her first book published.
It was at this point that Agatha Christie decided she needed a literary agent and went back to the firm of Hughes Massie. Massie, who had advised her years earlier, had since died, and she was received by a young man with a slight stammer, whose name was Edmund Cork. Finding him impressive, and considerably less alarming than Hughes Massie himself had been, Mrs Christie placed her literary career, such as it was, in Cork’s hands, and left his office feeling that an enormous weight had been lifted from her shoulders. It was the beginning of a friendship which lasted for more than fifty years until her death. Edmund Cork subsequently died, but the firm still represents the Agatha Christie Literary Estate.
The Evening News offered what seemed to Agatha Christie the unbelievable sum of £500 for the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit, which she hastily accepted, deciding not to object that the newspaper intended to call the serial version ‘Anna the Adventuress’, as silly a title as she had ever heard. That she should receive such a huge amount of money, was, she thought, an extraordinary stroke of luck and, when Archie suggested she buy a car with it, Agatha invested in a grey, bottle-nosed Morris Cowley which, she revealed many years later, was the first of the two most exciting things in her life. (The second was her invitation to dine with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace many years later.)
The Man in the Brown Suit, another of the thrillers which Agatha Christie found easier and ‘more fun’ to write than her detective stories, is one of her best in that genre. The heroine, Anne Beddingfield, is a romantic young woman whose archaeologist father dies, leaving her little more than the opportunity to be free and to seek adventure. Adventure, for Anne, begins when she witnesses the apparently accidental death of a man who falls onto the electrified rails at Hyde Park Corner tube station. Finding reason to suspect that the man’s death was not accidental, Anne persuades the great newspaper magnate Lord Nasby, ‘millionaire owner of the Daily Budget’ and several other papers, to commission her to investigate the matter. (For Nasby, we are probably meant to read