Agatha christie, p.7
Agatha Christie, page 7
Looked at from that angle, it is easy to solve. Of the four victims in the towns of Andover, Bexhill, Churston, and Doncaster, only one is rich, and sure enough, the heir to his fortune is the killer. The murder has been hidden in an apparently mad pattern. This idea has been linked to G.K. Chesterton’s war-conscious short story, “The Sign of the Broken Sword,” in which a dead body is hidden on a battlefield where it will not be noticed (Edwards, “Plotting” 189). However, the idea of hiding a motivated murder amid several unmotivated ones seems to be new. As usual for Poirot in the mid–1930s, he solves the case but has only circumstantial evidence, so he invents some—in this case, as in Death in the Clouds, a fingerprint—to trap the murderer into a confession.
Christie was tiring (again) of Captain Hastings by 1936, excluding him from as many Poirot novels as those in which he appeared. The narrative, moving between the first and third person, illustrates a frustration with writing in his limited voice. She would only include him in two more novels, one of which would not be published until 1975. However, his sportsman’s banter is in full swing here, as he clashes with Poirot over what is and is not playing the game. Poirot has the last word on this when he tells the murderer that the crime was “not an English crime at all—not above-board—not sporting” (ABC 248, emphasis in original). Perhaps he has outgrown his need for Hastings now. Nonetheless, the novel ends, echoing that of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, with Poirot telling Hastings: “we went hunting once more, did we not? Vive le sport” (252).
When The ABC Murders was serialized in the Daily Express in 1935, it ran alongside a column of “Readers’ Guesses,” with some demonstrating an extraordinary level of familiarity with the ABC railway guide. In 1936, Collins published the book in the United Kingdom, and Dodd, Mead published it in the United States. It has proven a novel that has influenced several murder plots on page and screen. Notable examples, both of which work characters reading The ABC Murders into their plots, include Elizabeth Linington’s Greenmask! (1964) and Peter Swanson’s Rules for Perfect Murders (2020).
The book has also inspired two video games; two graphic novels; three radio plays; one movie; and five television adaptations in English, French, and Japanese.
Characters: Anderson, Colonel; Ascher, Alice, and Franz; Ball, Mr.; Barnard, Elizabeth (“Betty”); Barnard, Megan; Barnard, Mr. and Mrs.; Capstick, Nurse; Clarke, Franklin; Clarke, Lady Charlotte; Clarke, Sir Carmichael; Crome, Inspector; Cust, Alexander Bonaparte; Deveril; Downes, Roger; Drower, Mary; Earlsfield, George; Fowler, Edie and Mrs.; Fraser, Donald (“Don”); Grey, Thora; Hartigan, Tom; Hastings, Captain Arthur; Higley, Milly; Jameson, Inspector; Japp, Chief Inspector James; Jerome, Colonel; Kelsey, Inspector; Kerr, Dr.; Leadbetter, Mr.; Marbury family; Partridge, James; Poirot, Hercule; Rice, Inspector; Roe, Miss; Sir Lionel; Thompson, Dr.
See also: Agasa Kurisutī no Meitantei Powaro to Māpuru; Agatha Christie’s Poirot; BBC Television Adaptations since 2015; CBS Radio Adaptations; Games; Hercule Poirot (BBC radio series); Meitantei Akafuji Takashi; MGM Films; Les Petits Meurtres d’Agatha Christie; True Crime
The ABC Murders (television adaptation). See BBC Television Adaptations since 2015
ABC Satsujin-jiken. See Meitantei Akafuji Takashi
Abdul
Christie created four Abduls, all of whom are presented in subordinate relationships to White men. In The Sittaford Mystery (1931), Abdul is in service to Captain Wyatt. In Appointment with Death (1938), Abdul is an unflatteringly-drawn servant who discovers Mrs. Boynton’s body. In “The Horses of Diomedes” (1940), Abdul is the servant of an Indian Army officer, General Grant—although the general, and presumably the servant, turn out to be bogus. In They Came to Baghdad (1951), Abdul is a friend of Henry Carmichael, a fictionalized Lawrence of Arabia. As Christie saw more of Western Asia and became more worldly, she became more comfortable presenting characters from other cultures as individuals, as the fourth Abdul shows.
Abdullah
In Murder in Mesopotamia, Abdullah is a servant boy who washes pots on the dig. In They Came to Baghdad, Abdullah works in the Foreign Office with Mr. Dakin.
Abenteuer GmbH, Die (Adventures Inc.; film)
Die Abenteuer GmbH (Adventures Inc.), the second Christie screen adaptation, was a German silent film based on The Secret Adversary. Humorlessly faithful to the plot, the one-hour film makes some small adjustments such as Europeanizing the characters so American Jane Finn becomes Jannette Finné, and Brits Tommy and Tuppence become Pierre and Lucienne, and changing the sinking of the Lusitania to the sinking of a fictional ship, the Herculine. The biggest departure from the novel is the ending, which closes with the capture of the villain rather than the central characters declaring their love. The film is difficult but not impossible to view today, mirroring its relatively limited impact outside of Germany at the time it was made. It caused no stir upon its release in early 1929 but received good reviews.
With a screenplay by Jane Bess and directed by Fred Sauer, the film starred Eve Gray as Lucienne (based on Tuppence Cowley) and Carlo Aldini as Pierre (i.e., Tommy Beresford) with Elfriede Borodin as Janette (i.e., Jane Finn), and Hilda Bayley as Rita.
See also: The Passing of Mr. Quinn (film and novel); The Secret Adversary (novel)
Abercrombie Forgery Case
Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot occasionally refers to unchronicled past cases. However, this is much rarer with Poirot than with Holmes. Conan Doyle would often write out an idea he had mentioned (for example, “The Adventure of the Second Cucumber”), but Christie did not do this. “The Abercrombie Forgery Case,” mentioned in The Mysterious Affair at Styles and “A Letter to My Publisher,” occurred in 1904 in Brussels and is the case that features the meeting of Poirot and Inspector James Japp. Although it is a matter of time, to date no subsequent author has tried to re-create the case as a narrative.
See also: “A Letter to My Publisher”; The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Abernethie, Helen
In After the Funeral, Helen Abernethie’s keen observation puts her in danger. She is the widow of Leo Abernethie and sister to the late Richard Abernethie.
Abernethie, Maude, and Timothy
A younger brother to the late Richard Abernethie in After the Funeral, Timothy is a middle-aged hypochondriac. Maude is his extremely loyal wife, who indulges his constant, and entirely self-perpetuated, ill-health.
Abernethie, Richard
Richard Abernethie is a wealthy elderly man, the oldest of six siblings, whose funeral marks the beginning of the action in After the Funeral. Although he died of natural causes, much of the investigation centers on a belief that he was murdered. Richard’s son, Mortimer Abernethie, died of polio six months before Richard’s death.
Absent in the Spring
The third novel under Christie’s Mary Westmacott pseudonym, Absent in the Spring is almost entirely composed of its protagonist’s inner thoughts. This was the last Westmacott novel published by Collins (in 1944) and the last one before the author’s true identity became public knowledge. It was published in the United States by Farrar & Rinehart in the same year. Written over three days without food or sleep, and Christie considered it her “proudest joy”: “it was written with integrity, with sincerity, and it was written as I wanted to write it” (AA 500). The idea had been “building up” for six or seven years (499) and after the writing of this, which Christie considered “an imperative,” nothing about the manuscript had to be changed for publication (500). It is not an innovative novel—the central character begins by assessing her reflection in the mirror, a tired device by 1945—but it is an accomplished work of modernist introspection.
The “strait-laced” Joan Scudamore (AIS 603) is returning to England after visiting her daughter in Iraq. After meeting Blanche Haggard, a hedonistic friend from her school days, she congratulates herself on her own superiority as a wife and mother: Blanche looks her age, has married multiple times, and gossips freely, including about an affair Joan’s daughter is rumored to have had. Readers begin to suspect that Joan is not as in control of her life as she thinks, when she brushes these comments off and recalls how happy her husband Rodney was to see her off on the original journal.
The train is delayed by flooding, and Joan is forced to stay at a rest house in Tell Abu Hamid. As boredom sets in, she starts thinking about her life, and thoughts of the vivacious, happy Blanche set in. She realizes that her daughter Barbara Wray was not in fact happy to see her in Iraq and that Barbara has been desperately unhappy, even suicidal, lacking a support network as her marriage fell apart, because Joan refuses to talk about unpleasant things. She realizes that Rodney is being stifled by her. Recalling how she felt when bullied by a self-righteous and censorious schoolmistress, she realizes that she is not an asset to her family, but an obstruction. When she returns home, Joan vows to her husband to change. She is grateful that she is no longer alone. While welcoming her back, Rodney thinks: “You are alone, and you always will be. But, please God, you’ll never know it” (755).
As Merja Makinen points out in one of the few scholarly readings of the Mary Westmacott books, when Joan judges other women for superficial things, it reflects poorly on her: the other women “are shown to be failures neither as mothers nor as wives but depicted as vibrant and generous. It is Joan who is presented as ‘blood-less’ and ‘a prig’” (Investigating 106). Makinen concludes that “[t]he novel gradually and unerringly unpacks the emptiness of a ‘circumscribed’ domesticity lived to fit social conventions” (107).
Critically, the book has been praised; it is probably the best-known of the Westmacott texts. However, it has not been studied in any particular depth, partly because it is rarely consulted except by nonfiction writers, and these tend to box it into a life-writing category as well. Osborne calls it “an emotional autobiography” (203). Gillian Gill and Laura Thompson have similarly mined it for autobiographical details.
However, there are stirrings of critical interest in the text beyond attempts to read it as a memoir, which are certainly easier with the two first Westmacott novels. Makinen has called it “an astonishingly accomplished modernist masterpiece of a woman’s self-delusion of happy respectability” and, instead of encouraging life-writing readings, has urged further scholarship into the presentation of key themes such as “sheltered childhoods that damage an adults’ ability to cope with vicissitude, the damage inflicted by possessive love, and the inability to know how life can transform others, linked to the inalienable difficulties of knowing oneself” (“Hidden”).
For a novel generally considered “a tour de force” (Osborne 203), and compared by author Dorothy B. Hughes to the enormously successful Brief Encounter (qtd. in Osborne 204), dramatizations have been a surprisingly long time coming. The book was adapted into a 45-minute radio play, as part of a short series of lesser-known Christies, in 2020. Starring Harriet Walter and directed by Catherine Bailey, it was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 31 August 2020.
Characters: Averil; Callaway, Michael; Gargill, Rupert; Gilby, Miss; Haggard, Blanche; Hohenbach Salm, Princess Sasha; Randolph, Myrna; Reid, Major; Scudamore, Joan; Scudamore, Rodney; Scudamore, Tony; Sherston, Captain Charles, and Leslie; Wray, Barbara, and William
See also: An Autobiography; BBC Radio Adaptations; Westmacott, Mary
“Accident” (story; alternative titles: “Test for Murder”; “The Uncrossed Path”)
Almost an inversion of “Philomel Cottage,” “Accident” features Inspector Evans, a retired C.I.D. man, who realizes that the new wife of an absent-minded chemistry professor once got away with murder. When Evans recognizes Margaret Merrowdene as Margaret Andrews, whose first husband died of arsenical poisoning, he worries for George Merrowdene. He arranges a meeting with Margaret to confront her. However, it emerges that she has poisoned his tea—she was plotting to kill him, not her husband, all along.
This story may have its roots in the many sensational narratives on convicted murderer Florence Maybrick. Either way, it is a vivid sketch. It was first published in the Sunday Dispatch in 1929 and has appeared in the United Kingdom in The Listerdale Mystery (1934) and in the United States in The Witness for the Prosecution (1948). In 1939, it was dramatized by Margery Vosper as a one-act play, Tea for Three, which has been performed occasionally by repertory companies.
Characters: Anthony, Mr.; Evans, Inspector; Haydock, Captain; Merrowdene, George; Merrowdene, Margaret; Zara
See also: The Listerdale Mystery (story collection); “Philomel Cottage”; Tea for Three; Witness for the Prosecution (story collection)
Ackroyd, Flora
In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Flora Ackroyd is the victim’s petite, beautiful niece who takes on a kind of wallflower role but is revealed to have hidden depths of passion and desperation: she is engaged to Ralph Paton but in love with Major Blunt and steals £40 from her dead uncle’s drawer.
Ackroyd, Roger
Roger Ackroyd is the victim in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the first of Christie’s victims to be a self-made millionaire as opposed to a hereditary one. Although he is a sympathetic character and better treated by Christie than the ridiculous Lord Whitfield in Murder Is Easy, he is nonetheless mocked as trying too hard: he is “more impossibly like a country squire than any country squire could really be” (7). In the stage adaptation, Alibi, he was turned into a baronet.
“The Actress” (alternative title: “A Trap for the Unwary”)
In this breezy short story, Jake Levitt decides to blackmail an actress, whom he recognizes as an old acquaintance with a new identity. However, the actress, Olga Stormer, ropes in her understudy to stage a murder scene and scare Levitt off. Disguised as maid, she congratulates herself on being a true actress. This is a neat vignette, which includes a typically dramatic murder set-up and plays on the idea, long-running in Christie’s works, that full attention is never paid to the servants. It also celebrates female agency and, surprisingly for an early Christie story, judges the man harshly while celebrating the resourcefulness of a woman, despite her unsavory past. It was first published in The Novel Magazine in 1923 and, in 1990, was included in a commemorative booklet to mark Christie’s centenary. In 1997, it was collected in While the Light Lasts in the United Kingdom and The Harlequin Tea Set in the United States.
Characters: Danahan, Syd (Danny); Levitt, Jake; Ryan, Margaret; Stormer, Olga; Taylor, Nancy
See also: Evil under the Sun (novel); The Harlequin Tea Set (story collection); Theatricality; While the Light Lasts (story collection)
Adams, Carlotta
Carlotta Adams is a character in Lord Edgware Dies, inspired by—but not based on—the American actor and impressionist Ruth Draper (1884–1956), whom Christie greatly admired. It is never in question that Carlotta impersonated Lady Edgware on the night of the murder, but when and why she did so is initially unclear. One of Christie’s most likable victims, she opens the novel with a performance, setting the scene for a highly theatrical novel. By the end, she has emerged as more real than many of the people she imitates—Lady Edgware, for example, is a highly artificial person who exists as no more than the sum of her affectations. Christie had previously developed a character inspired by Ruth Draper: Aspasia Glen in “The Dead Harlequin.”
Adams, Tom (1926–2019)
Originally from Providence, Rhode Island, Tom Adams provided the most distinctive and best-known illustrations for Christie’s fiction. The grandson of Thomas Adams, the urban planner and adviser to Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt, he came from a Scottish family and was raised in Britain. He studied at Cambridge University and served in the Royal Navy before training as an artist at the Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmith’s College, London before beginning a career in the 1950s.
Adams’s first success as an illustrator came with a cover for John Fowles’ The Collector, and a productive working relationship led to covers for further Fowles titles. These much-admired covers in turn led to a “trial” with Fontana, the paperback imprint of Collins, to design a cover for A Murder Is Announced. The result was a success, and Adams was commissioned to produce paintings for almost all the Christie fictional works for Fontana. Others in the series mimicked Adams’s style, and the paintings were reused in several editions with slightly altered designs, as well as in international publications—not always matched with the same title. In a separate commission for Pocket Books in the United States, he created larger paintings, detailing a scene from each text.
The oil paintings are detailed, combining realism with symbolism or surrealism, and each serves two purposes: as an arresting work of art in its own right and as a clue to the mystery or, in some cases, what happens in the story. For example, a thornless rose features on a lost-love-themed design for Sad Cypress, both an element of the overall evocation and a clue: the murderer in that book claims to prick her finger on a rose, which is thornless. Fowles described Adams’s strength as the presentation of “obliquity that … constitutes a lure” and a strategic combination, as in Christie, “of the banal and the exotic” (8). However, like Christie, Adams tended to shy away from analysis of his work. When Christie scholar John Curran suggested that a snake on the cover of Ordeal by Innocence symbolized the centrality of the family home, Viper’s Point, in the novel, Adams responded: “There is no more significance in the snake than the obvious one—this cover is essentially ‘innocence versus evil’” (Adams and Curran 116).
