Agatha christie, p.48
Agatha Christie, page 48
The Innocent. See Ordeal by Innocence (novel)
“An Interview with Agatha Christie” (1966 interview)
An interview granted to Paul Carson to promote the 1965 movie Ten Little Indians, then opening in American cinemas, this was published in the Gastonia Gazette in North Carolina on 1 May 1966. In it, Christie reflects on the inadequacy of “low life brawls, naked passion,” and “sensational” stories: “She won’t read them, won’t write them,” Carson explains (42). “For her the mystery is the thing”—and the mystery belongs “in a polite leisured class setting.” Christie reflects on her early, unpublished work, describing her efforts as “stories of unrelieved gloom” and praises Eden Phillpotts for mentoring her (42).
Asked if she would “stop writing if she could,” Christie reiterates a common theme in early interviews: the idea that she writes purely for money: “Yes, of course, I would if I won the pools and could pay off all my back income tax. No one ever enjoyed writing. Far too much of an effort of concentration. In the evening you feel dead” (42). The interview was published with a now-famous photograph of Christie by Angus McBean, strangely altered to give the impression that she is smiling.
See also: And Then There Were None, Screen Adaptations of; Phillpotts, Eden
“An Interview with Agatha Christie” (1970 interview)
Christie’s final years were spent at Winterbrook House, her home with Max Mallowan in Cholsey, Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Although she famously resisted interviews, she granted one in 1970 to a local schoolboy who knocked on her door and asked to interview her for his school magazine. Questions covered her influences (Sherlock Holmes), the difference between Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot (the difference between “common-sense” and police training), and the routine of writing (“I prefer writing during the morning”). In September 2015, the interview was displayed at the Wallingford Museum as part of that town’s first annual Christie celebration.
See also: “‘Queen of Crime’ Is a Gentlewoman”; Winterbrook House
Introduction to Hercule Poirot (radio series introduction)
Introduction to Hercule Poirot was a prerecorded introduction by Christie to the 1945 Mutual radio series Hercule Poirot in the United States. Efforts were made to switch to Christie live, but these failed, so the recording was played. In the brief introduction, Christie implies that Poirot is a real person and suggests that a career on the radio would appeal to his vanity.
See also: Hercule Poirot (Mutual radio series)
Introduction to The Mousetrap Man (book introduction)
However theatrical impresario Peter Saunders wished to be remembered, it became clear in his lifetime that he would always be best-known as the first producer of Christie’s runaway stage success The Mousetrap. For this reason, the title of Saunders’s wide-ranging 1972 memoir is, with both wry humor and an eye to sales, The Mousetrap Man, and Christie wrote the introduction. Saunders’s memoir is much kinder to Christie than director Hubert Gregg’s also-cynically-titled Agatha Christie and All That Mousetrap (1980), written after her death.
Christie’s contribution is brief and mostly concerns a condensed history of her own theatrical writing. Contradicting her autobiography and the findings of archivists, which contradict both, she states that her first play “must have been Black Coffee in about 1927” (Christie, Introduction, Mousetrap Man 7). She goes on to relate a story that also appears in her autobiography, about turning up to an evening in her honor at the Savoy, only to be turned away by staff and being too shy to contradict them (8). Finally, she commends Saunders for his “kindness to me over my shy fits,” his “consoling” manner, his belief in the Mousetrap (it is well known that Saunders spearheaded several publicity initiatives to keep the production going), and his luck (9).
See also: Black Coffee; The Mousetrap; Saunders, Sir Peter
“Investigation by Telegram.” See “The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge”
“The Invisible Enemy.” See “The Lernean Hydra”
“An Island” (poem). See Poems
“The Island” (story). See Star Over Bethlehem (story/poetry collection)
“Islot of Brittany.” See Poems
Itoshino Cendrillon. See Meitantei Akafuji Takashi
“I’ve Forgotten You” (song; see “Yellow Iris” [story])
“Jack Fell Down” (Keating). See Continuation Fiction
Jackson, Arthur
Arthur Jackson is Jason Rafiel’s attendant and effective guard dog in A Caribbean Mystery. He is “a man of extreme muscular development heightened by his training. His not to reason why, his but to do” (242).
Jackson, Fred
Fred Jackson is a fishmonger in St. Mary Mead, known for chatting up the maids, in The Murder at the Vicarage and A Pocket Full of Rye.
Jameson, Inspector
Inspector Jameson is an eager-to-please but fundamentally unintelligent policeman who appears in “Murder in the Mews” and The ABC Murders.
“Jane in Search of a Job” (story)
A perky short story, “Jane in Search of a Job” was published in the Grand Magazine in August 1924. It may have its origins in rumors widely spread at the time about Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, believed to have survived the assassination of her family in 1918 and to be living as an ordinary woman.
The 26-year-old Jane Cleveland, who is running short on money, answers an advertisement in a newspaper looking for a young woman who matches her description for unspecified work. Applying for the job, she learns that she is to stand in as a double for the Grand Duchess Pauline, the sole survivor of the imperial family of Ostrava, which was killed in a communist revolution. The grand duchess tells Jane, who looks strikingly like her, that an attempt may be made on her life, so she needs a lookalike to divert them. Traveling with a stern elderly princess, Jane is held up at gunpoint, imprisoned, and drugged.
Later, she learns that a jewel robbery has occurred nearby, perpetrated by a woman matching her description and wearing her regular clothes. She realizes that there was no Grand Duchess Pauline but that she was tricked by a gang of thieves. Jane is cleared of suspicion by Detective-Inspector Farrell and falls in love with a young man she met on the journey. “Jane in Search of a Job” appears in the U.K. collection The Listerdale Mystery (1934) and the U.S. collection The Golden Ball (1971). It was filmed as part of The Agatha Christie Hour, broadcast on ITV on 9 November 1982.
Characters: Anchester, Countess of; Cleveland, Jane; Farrell, Detective Inspector; Kranin, Colonel; Pauline of Ostrava, Grand Duchess; Poporensky, Princess Anna Michaelovna; Streptitch, Count Feodor Alexandrovitch
See also: The Agatha Christie Hour; “The Girl in the Train”; The Golden Ball (story collection); The Listerdale Mystery (story collection)
Janet
Janet is an elderly maid in After the Funeral who forms a friendship with Marjorie, the young cook. She may have been trained by Miss Marple, who mentions a former maid, Janet, in The Body in the Library and Nemesis. Another Janet without a surname is an imperfect maid to Mrs. Carmichael in “The Case of the Perfect Maid.” There is another Janet, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford’s granddaughter, who is mentioned in Postern of Fate.
Japp, (Chief) Inspector James
Inspector Japp is to Hercule Poirot what Inspector Lestrade is to Sherlock Holmes. A Scotland Yard man who inevitably requires Poirot’s help and takes the credit for himself, this character is nonetheless more sympathetic to the detective than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation and is more like a friend than a grudging colleague. Introduced in the first novel, Japp makes clear that his relationship with Poirot goes back to 1904 and the Abercrombie forgery case.
Japp appears in the following Poirot texts: The ABC Murders; “The Adventure of the Cheap Flat”; “The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman”; “The Affair at the Victory Ball”; The Big Four; Black Coffee; “The Capture of Cerberus” (1947); Death in the Clouds; “The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim”; “The Flock of Geryon”; “The Girdle of Hippolyta”; “The Kidnapped Prime Minister”; Lord Edgware Dies; “The Market Basing Mystery”; “Murder in the Mews”; The Mysterious Affair at Styles; “The Mystery of Hunter’s Lodge”; “The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest”; One, Two, Buckle My Shoe; Peril at End House; “The Plymouth Express”; The Secret Adversary; and “The Veiled Lady.”
He is one of the few characters to appear in both the Poirot universe and that of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, as he makes an additional cameo in The Secret Adversary. His last appearance is in the 1947 version of “The Capture of Cerberus,” and this postdates his previous last appearance by some seven years. Christie dispensed with him, then, around the same time she dispensed with Captain Hastings, indicating a desire to move away from the Holmes context completely around the time of World War II, and the end of crime fiction’s Golden Age.
Jarimat fi Aldhdhakira (A Crime in Memory)
Jarimat fi Aldhdhakira (A Crime in Memory) is a 1992 Syrian miniseries based on Sleeping Murder, which was broadcast in Dubai in 1993. The adaptation is composed of 20 episodes and replaces Miss Marple with a doctor.
See also: Sleeping Murder
Jarrow, Dorothea (“Dolly”)
Dorothea Jarrow is the twin sister to Margaret Ravenscroft, whom she impersonates after killing Margaret in Elephants Can Remember. All she needs for the deception is a series of wigs, but living as her sister proves more difficult.
“Jealousy Is the Devil.” See “The Shadow on the Glass”
Jefferson, Adelaide, and Frank
In The Body in the Library, Adelaide is the widow of Frank Jefferson, and, via another marriage, mother to Peter Carmody. By the end of the novel, she has agreed to marry again, this time to Hugo McLean. Frank is a deceased son of Conway Jefferson.
Jefferson, Conway, and Margaret
Rich, elderly, and wheelchair-bound, Conway Jefferson is an old friend of Colonel and Dolly Bantry in The Body in the Library. Bereaved after the loss of his wife Margaret and two children in a plane crash, which also left him without legs, he had taken an interest in the young, gold-digging Ruby Keene, causing family tensions.
Jennson, Miss
Miss Jennson is an angular, bespectacled woman in Destination Unknown; Andy Peters suspects that, because she is easily overlooked, she may well hold a great deal of secret knowledge and fascist ideals may fester in her unchecked.
“Jenny by the Sky.” See Star Over Bethlehem (story/poetry collection)
“The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan” (story; alternative titles: “The Curious Disappearance of the Opalsen Pearls”; “The Jewel Robbery at the ‘Grand Metropolitan’”; “The Theft of the Opalsen Pearls”)
Although charges that Christie failed to play fair with her readers rarely stand up, she sometimes set up deliberately simple, self-contained fair-play puzzles. “The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan,” first published in The Sketch in 1923, is an example. In this case of a robbery at a high-end hotel, there are two possible suspects—a ladies’ maid and a chambermaid—and one of them did it. The story was collected in Poirot Investigates in 1924. It was the basis for the play Road to Memory (1932) by W.E. Fuller. It has been dramatized for television twice: as episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1993) and Agasa Kurisutī no Meitantei Powaro to Māpuru (2004).
Characters: Celestine; Hastings, Captain Arthur; Opalsen, Ed; Opalsen, Mrs.; Poirot, Hercule
See also: Agasa Kurisutī no Meitantei Powaro to Māpuru; Agatha Christie’s Poirot; Poirot Investigates; Road to Memory (play)
John
St. John is the highly debated author of Revelation, the final book of the Christian Bible. In “The Island,” he is shown to be living on an island with the Virgin Mary. When Jesus takes Mary away to make her Queen of Heaven, John begins to write.
Johnson, Anne
Anne Johnson is Dr. Eric Leidner’s devoted assistant in Murder in Mesopotamia. A traditional woman whom Amy Leatheran compares to a matron, she strongly resents Mrs. Leidner’s presence on the dig and is secretly in love with Eric. It is unclear whether this character, who dies one of the cruelest deaths in the canon, is based on a real person as each Leidner is.
Johnson, Colonel
Colonel Johnson is a chief constable who works with Hercule Poirot in Three Act Tragedy and Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. He hails from either Yorkshire (in 3AT) or “Middleshire,” a fictional county vaguely representing the midlands (HPC).
Johnson, Elspeth
Elspeth Johnson is matron at Meadowbank School, who cares more about the school than about people, in Cat Among the Pigeons.
Johnson, Victoria
The second victim in A Caribbean Mystery, Victoria Johnson is an innocent local woman with a common-law marriage and children who works at the hotel. She is killed for what she saw or did not see. The character represents Christie’s efforts at awareness of other cultures, living peacefully and disrupted by British tourism. She also represents an inversion of narratives about the dangers for Britons traveling abroad.
Johnston, Elizabeth
A law student in Hickory Hickory Dock, Elizabeth Johnston is from Jamaica and is “particularly well balanced and competent” (23). Other students call her “Black Bess.”
Jones, Gladys. See Gladys
Jones, Robert (“Bobby”)
The joke about this character in Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is that he shares a name with a world-famous golfer but is terrible at golf. With Lady Frances “Frankie” Derwent, he is one of Christie’s last Bright Young Thing adventurers. The son of a vicar, Bobby is thrown into an upper-middle class world at the same time as he is thrown into a murder mystery.
Jones, Vavasour
In Crooked House, Vavasour Jones is the author of a melodrama for the stage, “The Woman Disposes,” which is generally “cribbed from Arsenic and Old Lace” (180). The character’s name is a joke, combining the exotic/elaborate and the prosaic, and the idea of the play is a satire on reductive entertainment masquerading as shocking and new.
Jones, Victoria
Victoria Jones is the highly down-to-earth protagonist of They Came to Baghdad. She is unrepentantly greedy and a happy fantasist who lies unblushingly and convincingly. After being fired as a typist for impersonating her boss, she stumbles into an adventure traveling around the world to pursue a shadowy political organization. She also sees romantic potential in the young Edward Goring before unmasking him as a criminal.
Judy
Judy is a fictional portrait of Rosalind Hicks as a girl, with the same nickname (“Teddy”), in the Mary Westmacott novel Unfinished Portrait.
Kait
The wife of Sobek in Death Comes as the End, Kait appears utterly devoted to her children and is a quiet, even-tempered wife. However, toward the end of the novel, she reveals a hidden rage at the limited opportunities available for women, which could be turning her into a monster.
Kameni
Renisenb is supposed to marry Kameni in Death Comes as the End, Kameni is a scribe, younger and more handsome than Hori. His is not a distinctive personality.
Keene, Julia
Julia Keene’s real name is Julia Garfield in Butter in a Lordly Dish. She is the widow of a man hanged for murder, and her obsession with the late Henry Garfield has led her to commit multiple homicides with increasing violence.
Keene, Ruby
A victim in The Body in the Library, Ruby Keene is a 17-year-old dancer, with bleach-blonde hair and a tacky dress. She is known as a gold digger, whom the rich, bereaved Conway Jefferson wished to adopt. In this highly artificial and self-aware novel, Keene is not only misidentified (the body identified as hers belongs to another girl, Pamela Reeves, and Ruby’s corpse is identified as Pamela’s) but also goes by two names: Keene is a stage name, and her real name is Rosey Legge. The name is significant, however: in real life, a teenager called Ruby Keen was strangled in a tawdry, sensational case that made headlines in 1939. Therefore, the character is supremely, metafictionally, artificial.
Kelsey, Detective Inspector
Detective Inspector Kelsey is the investigating officer from Scotland Yard in Cat Among the Pigeons. He has worked with Poirot before as a sergeant in an unspecified case. There had already been an Inspector Kelsey, working with Poirot in The ABC Murders, but that character was xenophobic, and this one is extremely friendly.
Kendal, Molly
The young, friendly wife of Tim Kendal and co-owner of the Golden Palm Hotel in A Caribbean Mystery, Molly Kendal believes she is going mad. She is experiencing anxiety, blackouts, and memory loss, and at one point finds blood on her hands. However, her husband, apparently a reformed rogue, is deliberately drugging her so he can have her declared insane and gain control of her money. At the end of the novel, Molly decides to continue running the hotel, with help from the wealthy Jason Rafiel’s extensive network.
Kendal, Tim
Married to Molly Kendal, Tim Kendal co-owns the Golden Palm Hotel with her in A Caribbean Mystery. An extremely likable and accommodating man in his thirties, he has a secret history as a blackguard, disapproved by Molly’s family; he married her under a different name to gain their consent. In fact, his past is darker than even Molly knew: he killed his first wife. The second marriage was likely for money alone, as Tim is behind a dual plot to kill Major Palgrave (who recognized him from a photograph of the old murder case) and several others, as well as to have Molly declared insane.
Kennedy, Dr. James
Half-brother to Helen Spenlove Kennedy in Sleeping Murder, James Kennedy is an amiable, middle-aged doctor who turns out to be insane, possessive, and perverted. His control over his half-sister has extended to murdering her and framing her husband for the crime because he did not want to lose her. Unmasking him as a kind of gothic monster, Miss Marple compares him to the incestuous Barrett (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s father) in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
