Since then, Blood has been my portion! Blood and Bodies! Blood spilt in the libraries, in railway trains, on golf courses; Bodies discovered in aeroplanes, on Nile steamboats, buried in bunkers or lying prone on beaches. Bodies stunned, shot, stabbed, strangled and poisoned.
They can’t, of course, be poisoned every time—but I’m happier when they are! Firearms make me acutely nervous— I know so little about them. I always try to avoid going into details. When it comes to poison I feel more on my own ground. One has at least enough knowledge to ensure that, even if death is not likely to occur under the circumstances described, no one will be able to say positively that it couldn’t! By the way, neither doctors nor pharmacists ever agree as to what is going to be lethal. One will say cheerfully: ‘Oh yes, that ought to do for her all right!’ whilst another will object: ‘Don’t think that would do her in for a minute!’ And trial and error is ruled out!
Finding suitable drugs to use in a book is not so easy as one might think. Anything really rare and recherché is usually ruled out because, being difficult of access, it narrows your field of potential suspects. So arsenic in the ever-present weed killer, and cyanide for the convenient wasp, will always retain their posts as the writers’ first favourites.
However, I have had my fun with strychnine, nicotine, morphine, phosphorous—and just a dash of N-methyl-C-C-cyclohexenylmethylmalonylurea because, after all, why not a good sounding name?
There are, too, limitations in poisons on the grounds of good taste! The reader smiles appreciatively as the victim turns purple in the face, gives a few strangled gasps and slides down dead from his chair—but he would feel somewhat disgusted to read a too realistic account of vomiting and purgation. The ‘facts of death’ have to be tactfully disguised.
Hemlock gave a dignified death to Greece’s so-called corrupters of the State. It takes a Fascist mind to think of castor oil!
The fact remains that the supreme cliché of the detective story is the drug that permits the victim to gasp out one unnecessarily cryptic sentence before expiring!
And now, whilst waiting for the next batch of out-patients to arrive, I can look round the shelves and once more choose my poison for the next book.
What would my old friend, Hercule Poirot, fancy?
AGATHA CHRISTIE
London
1941
THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES: AN INTRODUCTION
by John Curran
In An Autobiography, written towards the end of her life, Agatha Christie gives an account of the genesis of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, her first published novel written some fifty years earlier. It had its origins in a challenge from her sister Madge: ‘I bet you can’t write a good detective story.’ At the time Agatha was working in the dispensary of the local hospital and had a professional knowledge of poisons. This, coupled with the fact that Belgian refugees fleeing the First World War were arriving in her home town of Torquay on the south coast of England, provided Agatha with both her murder method and her detective’s background.
This was not her first literary effort, nor was she the first member of her family with literary aspirations. Both her mother Clara and sister Madge wrote, and Agatha had already written a ‘long dreary novel’ (her own words in a 1955 radio broadcast) and some short stories and sketches. Though the stimulus to write a detective story probably was the bet with her sister, there was obviously an innate talent within Agatha to plot and write such a successful book.
Although she began writing The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916 (the novel is set in 1917), and eventually completed it at the encouragement of her mother during a two-week seclusion in the Moorland Hotel, it was not published for another four years. Its publication was to demand consistent determination on its author’s part as more than one publisher declined the manuscript. Finally in 1919 John Lane, co-founder of The Bodley Head Ltd, asked to meet her in London with a view to publication. But even then, the struggle was far from over.
The contract that John Lane offered her for the mistakenly named The Mysterious Affair ‘of’ Styles, dated 1 January 1920, took advantage of Agatha Christie’s publishing naivety. She explains in her autobiography that she was ‘in no frame of mind to study agreements or even think about them’. Her delight at the prospect of publication, combined with the conviction that she was not going to pursue a writing career, persuaded her to sign a six-book contract. She was to get a royalty of 10 per cent only after 2,000 copies were sold in the UK, and she was obliged to produce five more titles in a clause that was to lead to much correspondence over the following years.
The readers’ reports on the Styles manuscript were promising, despite some misgivings. One gets right to the commercial considerations: ‘Despite its manifest shortcomings, Lane could very likely sell the novel … There is a certain freshness about it.’ A second report is more enthusiastic: ‘It is altogether rather well told and well written.’ And another speculates on her potential future, ‘if she goes on writing detective stories and she evidently has quite a talent for them.’
The readers were much taken with the character of Hercule Poirot—‘the exuberant personality of M. Poirot who is a very welcome variation on the “detective” of romance’; ‘a jolly little man in the person of has-been famous Belgian detective’. Although Poirot might have taken issue with the use of the description ‘has-been’, it was clear that his presence was a factor in the manuscript’s acceptance. In a report dated 7 October 1919, one very perceptive reader remarked, ‘but the account of the trial of John Cavendish makes me suspect the hand of a woman’. Because her name on the manuscript appears as A.M. Christie, another reader also refers to ‘Mr Christie’.
Despite these favourable readers’ reports, there were further delays, and after a serialization in The Weekly Times—the first time a ‘first’ novel had been chosen—beginning in February 1920, Christie wrote to Mr Willett at The Bodley Head in October wondering if her book was ‘ever coming out?’ pointing out that she had almost finished her second one. Soon thereafter she received the projected cover design, which she approved, and almost five years after she began it, Agatha Christie’s first book went on sale in the UK on 21 January 1921.
The reviews on publication were even more enthusiastic than the pre-publication reports. The Times called it ‘a brilliant story’ and the Sunday Times found it ‘very well contrived’. The Daily News considered it ‘a skilful tale and a talented first book’, while the Evening News thought it ‘a wonderful triumph’ and described Christie as ‘a distinguished addition to the list of writers in this genre’. ‘Well written, well proportioned and full of surprises’ was the verdict of The British Weekly.
As we have seen, one of the early readers’ reports mentioned the John Cavendish trial. In the original manuscript, Poirot gives his explanation of the crime from the witness box during the trial. In An Autobiography Christie describes John Lane’s verdict on her manuscript, including his opinion that this courtroom scene was not convincing and his request that she amend it. She agreed to a rewrite, and although the explanation of the crime itself remains the same, instead of giving it in the course of the judicial process, Poirot unveils the murderer in the drawing room in the kind of scene that was to be replicated in many later books.
Although the typescript of the original courtroom chapter is long gone, the significance of Agatha Christie’s handwritten notebooks to researchers had long been disregarded, almost certainly on account of the general illegibility of her handwriting. The 73 notebooks cover her entire literary life, beginning with