Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations Read online

  Doyle had a child-like belief in the occult, believed in the existence of fairies and was a champion of spiritualism – an issue he hotly debated in correspondence with Harry Houdini. The legendary escapologist fervently denounced false mediums until his death from peritonitis on Halloween 1926, although his great-nephew George Hardeen contended in The Secret Life of Houdini (2007) that no autopsy was carried out on the American showman to determine the cause of death. Furthermore, he contends that it was an act of deliberate poisoning by a group called the Spiritualists, led by Doyle, who wrote to a fellow devotee in 1924 that Houdini ‘would get his just deserts very exactly meted out… I think there is a general payday coming soon’.

  When Agatha Christie’s car was found abandoned in mysterious circumstances following the shock of the breakdown of her first marriage in 1926, Doyle took an active part in the search to find out what had become of her. This was not by utilising the deductive powers of his fictional detective, but by obtaining the services of spiritualist Horace Leaf. After handing the medium a glove belonging to the missing writer, Sir Arthur later recalled:

  He never saw it until I laid it on the table at the moment of consultation, and there was nothing to connect either it or me with the Christie case... He at once got the name Agatha: ‘There is trouble connected with this article. The person who owns it is half-dazed and half-purposeful. She is not dead as many think. She is alive. You will hear of her next Wednesday’.

  Indeed, the world did learn of Agatha’s whereabouts that day when newspapers broke the news that she had been found suffering from amnesia staying at a luxury hotel in Harrogate.

  When Arthur Conan Doyle gave a lecture on ‘Death and the Hereafter’ at Torquay in September 1920, newly published author Agatha Christie was in the audience and rose at the end to propose a vote of thanks to the distinguished speaker. A year after Doyle’s own death, she based the story of The Sittaford Mystery (1931) on Dartmoor where, in a twist reminiscent of the classic The Hound of the Baskervilles, a villainous convict makes his escape across the misty landscape in a supernatural mystery, where the plot concerns the murder of a man whose death was foretold to the hour by the spirits at a séance. Dartmoor was also the place where Agatha chose to complete her first success, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), whilst staying at the Moorland Hotel, Haytor.

  6

  OSCAR WILDE

  A Woman of No Importance

  One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

  Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891)

  Agatha Christie completed her first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1916 but, astonishingly, the creation of Hercule Poirot, who used his ‘little grey cells’ to solve crimes, did not immediately find favour with publishers. Having been rejected by various publishing houses, the budding author had become a mother and virtually given up all hope of becoming a writer when, two years after submitting her manuscript, she was surprised to receive an offer from The Bodley Head. The managing director, John Lane, explained that he was taking a risk with an unknown writer but believed the work showed some promise and the relieved author naïvely signed a disadvantageous publishing contract which she would later regret.

  During the 1920s the company relied heavily on sales from out-of-copyright works, and amusingly revealed that they had received enquiries from the Inland Revenue about the earnings of ‘Mr W. Shakespeare’ and ‘Mr O. Kyam’. Before the signing of Agatha Christie, The Bodley Head’s most famous discovery had been literary genius Oscar Wilde, whose spectacular fall from grace can be partially attributed to an incriminating letter he wrote in the birthplace of Christie, who was two years old when Wilde stayed in Torquay from November 1892 until March 1893. Wilde leased the villa Babbacombe Cliff from the owner, Lady Mount-Temple, a distant cousin and confidante of Oscar’s wife Constance. Writing to Lady Mount-Temple whilst she was wintering abroad, Wilde commented, ‘I find the peace and beauty here so good for troubled nerves, and so suggestive for new work’.

  During his stay, Oscar completed the play A Woman of No Importance and supervised rehearsals of the first amateur production of Lady Windermere’s Fan, directed by the Mayoress Mrs Splatt, which opened in January 1893 at Torquay’s Theatre Royal. He also granted an interview to local history author and solicitor Percy Almy that appeared in the magazine The Theatre. Almy observed that Wilde had ‘an engaging charm’ which would win him many disciples and interestingly, in view of the scandal that was about to engulf him, recorded the great man’s thoughts on criminals: ‘Never attempt to reform a man, men never repent’.

  Early in February, Constance left to join friends in Florence. Immediately, Oscar was joined by his close friend Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, accompanied by his tutor, who wrote of Wilde whilst staying in Babbacombe: ‘I think him perfectly delightful with the firmest conviction that his morals are detestable’. Two years later, the relationship between Wilde and Bosie was to incite the boy’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, into denouncing Wilde as a ‘sodomite’. Oscar responded by bringing an ill-advised libel case against Queensbury in April 1895. Produced in evidence was a damning letter written at Babbacombe Cliff, where Wilde had responded to a poem that Douglas had sent him:

  My boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.

  The plaintiff’s case collapsed and he immediately found himself facing criminal charges on twenty-five acts of gross indecency, allegedly committed with a number of youths.

  During the first of the two trials that were necessary to decide Oscar’s fate as the jury failed to agree a verdict, Constance sought refuge from the press at Babbacombe Cliff with Lady Mount-Temple. Whilst there, she wrote a letter seeking guidance from a fortune teller, Mrs Robinson: ‘What is to become of my husband who has so betrayed me and deceived me and ruined the lives of my darling boys?’ The lady had already given the answer two years earlier at a party after the London opening of A Woman of No Importance. Wilde was noticeably distressed when told that his right palm revealed that he would ‘send himself into exile’. Indeed, after serving two years hard labour in Reading Gaol, Wilde fled to France, where in his own words he was soon ‘dying beyond my means’. Loyal friends bore the cost of his funeral and one of then complained with unintended Wildean wit: ‘Dying in Paris is really a very difficult and expensive luxury for a foreigner!’

  The sordid revelations of the trials of Oscar Wilde resulted in The Bodley Head’s most successful author becoming persona non grata and his works were withdrawn for many years after sales plummeted. The publishing company were to suffer another catastrophic loss when they allowed Agatha Christie to slip through their fingers by offering unfavourable terms. When The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, the author received only £25 – a half share of serialisation rights that had been sold to a weekly magazine. No royalties were forthcoming until 2,000 copies of the book had been sold, a target not reached with the first edition. Furthermore, the publisher had a clause inserted in the contract giving them the option on the writer’s next five novels at only fractionally better terms. Treating a new author like ‘a woman of no importance’ was to cost the publishing company dear as, unsurprisingly, Agatha quickly realised her worth and transferred her allegiance to William Collins & Sons. The first offering to her new publisher was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), an ingenious ‘whodunnit’ that was to become a sensation and substantially increase Agatha Christie’s standing in the literary world.

  7

  AGATHA CHRISTIE

  The Mysterious Affair at Styles

  Loss of memory cases are… rare, but occasionally genuine.

  Hercule Poirot (The Disappearance of Mr Dagenham, 1924)

  In the year that she achieved her greatest litera
ry success to date with the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie found herself at the centre of a mystery as baffling as any of her complex works of fiction when she disappeared for eleven days in December 1926.

  The case unfolded when Agatha drove off late at night, leaving her wedding ring behind at the marital home, Styles, in Sunningdale, Berkshire. The following morning her car was found abandoned with the headlights switched on near the edge of a quarry at Newlands Corner, a beauty spot on the Surrey Downs. Thousands of volunteers searched the area in vain for a corpse, before hopes for the author’s safety were raised when her brother-in-law Campbell Christie received a postcard from Agatha, saying that she was travelling to an unspecified spa town in Yorkshire. It had been posted shortly after her car had been discovered. When enquiries in the White Rose County drew a blank, the police in Torquay became involved when they visited the author’s birthplace, Ashfield. The house was found to be deserted following the recent death of Agatha’s mother, a traumatic event that had left her bereaved daughter feeling depressed. However, the press began to suspect that the whole thing was a publicity stunt when Archie revealed that his wife had often said she could disappear at will and no one would be able to find her. He impeded the investigation further by failing to reveal that the couple had argued on the day of Agatha’s departure after he told her that he loved someone else and wanted a divorce. The police only learned of the couple’s domestic problems when they interviewed the household servants. The guilt-ridden husband with something to hide instantly became a murder suspect and a week later the pressure was clearly getting to him when he spoke to the Daily News: ‘I cannot account for her disappearance save that her nerves have completely gone, and that she went away for no real purpose whatever… I have been badgered and pestered like a criminal, and all I want is to be left alone’.

  Before Agatha was eventually tracked down to a luxury hotel in Harrogate – apparently suffering from amnesia and using the name Mrs Neele – Archie suggested three possible explanations for his wife’s disappearance: voluntary, loss of memory and suicide, informing the press:

  I am inclined to believe the first, although, of course, it may be loss of memory as a result of her highly nervous state. I do not believe this is a case of suicide. She has never threatened suicide, but if she did contemplate that, I am sure her mind would turn to poison. I do not mean that she has ever discussed the question of taking poison, but that she used poison very largely in her stories.

  However, in February 1928, Agatha gave an interview to the Daily Mail and admitted that dark thoughts of suicide had indeed played a part in her disappearance:

  In my mind was the vague idea of ending everything… I went to Newlands Corner. I turned the car off the road down the hill… I left the [steering] wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. I was flung against the steering wheel, and my head hit something.

  Up to this moment I was Mrs Christie… After the accident in the car, however, I lost my memory. I believe I wandered about London and I then remember arriving at the hotel in Harrogate. I was still muddy and showing signs of the accident… I had a bruise on my chest and my head was bruised… At Harrogate I read every day about Mrs Christie’s disappearance, and came to the conclusion that she was dead. I regarded her as having acted stupidly. I was greatly struck by my resemblance to her and pointed it out to other people in the hotel. It never occurred to me that I might be her, as I was quite satisfied in my mind as to who I was. I thought I was a widow, and that I had had a son who had died, for I had in my bag a photograph of my little girl when very young with the name ‘Teddy’ upon it. I even tried to obtain a book by this Mrs Christie to read.

  When I was brought back to my life as Mrs Christie again, many of my worries and anxieties returned, and although I am now quite well and cheerful and have lost my old morbid tendencies completely I have not quite the utter happiness of Mrs Neele.

  Agatha’s happiness was to be fully restored when she married archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, for there was to be no reconciliation when the Christies were reunited in Harrogate. The couple separated, then, when the divorced was finalised in 1928, Archie Christie immediately wed his mistress; none other than Nancy Neele, whose surname had been adopted by her troubled love rival during the author’s desperate flight to escape from the reality of her marriage crisis.

  8

  DAME GRACIE FIELDS

  A Murder is Announced

  Miss Marple is a very popular with Agatha Christie’s readers all over the Britain and America and it is a rather daunting task to try and play on television.

  Gracie Fields (US TV guide, 1956)

  Romance blossomed between Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan as they journeyed home from an archaeological dig at Ur, near Baghdad, travelling on the ‘Orient Express’ in 1930. When they arrived back in England, Max surprised Agatha by asking her to marry him. A whirlwind courtship resulted in the couple’s betrothal occurring only six months after their first meeting - but only once the forty-year-old bride had come to terms with the age difference with her twenty-six-year-old suitor, a situation perhaps resolved by the old music hall joke, ‘An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her’.

  The world’s most famous train journey would later inspire the novel dedicated to Max Mallowan, Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and the same mode of travel was naturally chosen to transport Agatha and Max on the first stage of their honeymoon to Venice. Following a tour of Greece, the newlyweds parted in Athens; Max rejoined the dig at Ur, while Agatha returned to London suffering from a violent bout of stomach poisoning. Her journey home confined to her bed on the ‘Orient Express’ became a nightmare, but did not compare with a tragedy on the train that later brought an end to the second marriage of Gracie Fields, the first actress to portray Miss Marple on television.

  In 1938, the Mallowans took the decision to sell Ashfield and move to the tranquillity of Greenway on the River Dart. Agatha was dismayed by the urbanisation of her hometown, which had experienced a population explosion as cheap travel made holidays available to the working classes. People fell in love with the resort and permanently left the industrial towns of the North to make their home in Torquay. One of the firms that pioneered coach travel from Lancashire to Devon was Yelloway, which grew from a Rochdale haulage firm launched by brothers Robert and Ernest Holt. At weekends in the early 1900s, the company would convert their lorries into charabancs and run trips to places of interest, including the ever-popular resort of Blackpool, before an unexpected opportunity arose to transport holidaymakers to Torbay. In 1911, a holiday was organised by a local printing firm for their annual staff holiday during regatta week in Torquay. Their journey was normally made by train, but a rail workers’ strike necessitated the hire of a charabanc instead. Among the twenty-six people and one dog who made the inaugural 300-mile road journey from Rochdale to Torquay was singing sensation Gracie Fields (1898-1979), whose father Fred Stansfield maintained the vehicles for Holt Bros. The thirteen-year-old entertainer had already taken the first step on the ladder to fame by joining a girl’s troupe until the vulnerable young girl was sexually assaulted and hospitalised for six weeks, suffering from a nervous breakdown that threatened her future in show business. Fortunately, the seaside holiday proved just the tonic and quickly restored her brash confidence as she kept up the passengers’ spirits by leading the singing during the tortuous two-day journey. When the weary holidaymakers finally reached their destination, Gracie entered a talent competition on Paignton seafront and scooped the first prize of a purse, 10s and a pair of roller skates.

  After continuing to tour with juvenile troupes, Gracie was made into a major national star by comedian Archie Pitts, who became her first husband. Her diverse repertoire included opera, ballads, hymns and comic songs. During the 1930s, she established herself as a leading film star in roles that recreated her own ‘r
ags to riches’ rise from mill girl to celebrity. Her screen debut in Sally in our Alley (1931) also provided her with the show-stopping song forever associated with her, ‘Sally’. Her huge success led to offers from Hollywood and, following her divorce from Archie Pitt, she married her film director Monty Banks in 1940. During wartime, the couple came in for undeserved criticism for residing in America, a decision forced on them as Banks was born in Italy and faced detention as an ‘enemy alien’ in Britain. Gracie re-established herself in the nation’s affections after the war and as one of England’s best-known actresses across the Atlantic, she was chosen to introduce Miss Marple to the small screen. In a series of plays shown on The Goodyear Television Playhouse, the story chosen for adaptation was Agatha Christie’s fiftieth novel, A Murder is Announced (1950), which was broadcast live from New York on 30 December 1956. Billed as: ‘An edge-of-theseat murder mystery featuring the Queen of Crime’s famous lady sleuth’, the production was not recorded for future showings and failed to impress the television critic of the New York Times: ‘The mystery of the Goodyear Playhouse last night was not whodunnit – but rather why? Why, for example, did… Gracie Fields ever get involved in such an inferior melodrama? It was murder from beginning to end’.

  Gracie Fields was fully aware of the historic significance of her one-off performance and in a television guide revealed her thoughts on the characterisation she had adopted to play the role of Miss Marple: ‘I have always imagined her as a rather quiet lady with a quick turn of mind and a nose for murder’.