Agatha Christie’s Taste in Crime Fiction Transcript

Caroline: Since you're listening to this podcast, I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that you know, and probably love, the work of Agatha Christie. I think there are very few people who don't — she created beloved detective characters, wove clever, surprising plots, and published regularly and consistently over many decades. I think if I was going to write a recipe for "most successful crime writer of all time", those things would all be on the ingredient list.

So far, so obvious. Christie's writing is largely well-trodden territory today. But what is less well-explored is her reading. She devoted a lot of time to writing crime fiction, but what did she like to read? Did she stay within her own genre, or range beyond it? And what might we learn about her from looking at the books she held in high esteem?

Join me, won't you, as I explore Agatha Christie's taste in crime fiction.

Music

Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

Music

As is so often the case with any consideration of twentieth century crime fiction, Sherlock Holmes is where we must begin. And I think there is a fair case to be made that that is where Agatha Christie began too, in her reading of crime fiction. In her autobiography she explains that it was her sister Madge who, was eleven years older, who introduced her to the sleuth of 221B Baker Street, via the 1892 story "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle". Although the chronology nor indeed the contents of the autobiography is not always entirely to be trusted, Christie includes this recollection about Madge and Conan Doyle in a section about this married sister's visit home to Torquay just after her son was born, which was at the end of the summer in 1903. Agatha would have been thirteen, which in my view is just the age to start reading the adventures of Holmes and Watson. She records that aside from "The Blue Carbuncle", it was "The Red-Headed League" and "The Five Orange Pips", which also appeared in 1892's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, that she liked best. More experienced Sherlockians might have theories about what unites these three stories, but to me it seems as if these are all tales with an origin point in the mundane and domestic — the loss of a Christmas goose, a strange job advertisement, a peculiar letter. And we know, of course, what good use Agatha herself was going to put such innocuous elements in her own fiction.

The Sherlock Holmes were no passing teenage interest for Agatha Christie, either. They were still in the forefront of her mind over a decade later, when she was writing the book that became The Mysterious Affair at Styles — as a response to Madge's teasing, as it happens. This novel marks the first appearance of Hercule Poirot and so great was Christie's identification of the Holmes character with the overall notion of "detective", that she was having to go to some effort to make her own sleuth anything other than a carbon copy of Conan Doyle's creation. Reflecting later in her autobiography, she said that Sherlock Holmes was, to her, "the one and only – I should never be able to emulate him". Poirot was thus formed as a kind of negative image, with every attribute making him as unlike this perfect idol as possible. Thus, he is short and round where Holmes is long and lean, and comic-looking rather than imposing. Both characters do share a very high opinion of their own intellectual abilities, though, and seek out the companionship of a less-observant friend-slash-chronicler — Holmes, of course, has Watson, while Poirot has Hastings, who is the first person writer and narrator of The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

Christie's love and reverence for the work of Conan Doyle was such that her first few years as a writer saw her sticking very much to his shadow. She says herself that, three books in, she was "still writing in the Sherlock Holmes tradition – eccentric detective, stooge assistant, with a Lestrade-type Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Japp". But the connections run much deeper even than just her early work, as past Shedunnit guest Jamie Bernthal highlighted in a talk at the Agatha Christie festival a few years ago. Her 1923 Poirot short story "The Lemesurier Inheritance" is very clearly a fresh take on the plot of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and in her Dartmoor-set novel The Sittaford Mystery, Christie makes numerous references, including one by name, to Arthur Conan Doyle, who had died the year before the book was published.

Music

In an essay penned in 1945 at the request of the wartime Ministry of Information, Agatha Christie gave us several broad clues to her taste in detectives and detection. Perhaps because this piece, titled "Detective Writers In England", was destined for publication in a Russian magazine and was therefore unlikely to be read by her fellow Detection Club members, Christie allowed herself to be blunt and specific in her critique of their work, which is wonderful for us now trying to divine her taste in reading material. She is quite negative about the work of Dorothy L. Sayers, stating her strong preference for three earlier novels published in the 1920s — Whose Body?, Unnatural Death and The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club — because they have quote "greater simplicity and more 'punch' to them". Sayers' later work was ruined by her attempt to introduce romance and a greater scope to the detective novel, Christie said, and she felt that "Lord Peter remains an example of a good man spoilt". Ouch.

She was positive as well as negative, though. H.C. Bailey's Mr Fortune comes in for high praise, not least because, unlike Lord Peter Wimsey, he is "always the same" and marriage leaves "his incisive character untouched". As I found out for myself last year when we read Mr Fortune, Please on a Green Penguin Book Club episode, the cases that Reggie Fortune, a surgeon who occasionally advises the Home Office, works on are not always the most original or exciting. But as Christie says, it is "Mr Fortune's handling of them wherein lies the fascination". She praises Bailey for both describing his detective as a man of great morals and then managing to show him to be such in a plausible manner — "a supreme literary feat", to her mind. As unimpressed as she was by the Wimsey stories of the 1930s, Christie was very much approving of the Mr Fortune books, especially those that are told as a selection of long short stories, rather than full-length novels. She concludes: "Reggie Fortune is for Justice — merciless and inexorable justice. His pity and indignation are aroused by the victims — in execution he is as ruthless as his own knife." This was certainly the aspect of the Mr Fortune stories that most stood out to me when I read them for the first time. For a golden age detective, he has an unusual preoccupation with securing justice for the genuinely oppressed, which makes for an interesting contrast with all of those drawing room and country house based amateur sleuths elsewhere in the fiction of the time. Police corruption, the neglect of children, and prejudice against outsiders are all recurring themes in his cases. Although Christie didn't make such issues a similarly prominent element of her own fiction, I think the way Hercule Poirot ponders his own role in the dispensation of justice in books like Murder on the Orient Express is her way of incorporating a little of what made Mr Fortune so good.

Other writers in this essay come in for commendation for some characteristic or other. Margery Allingham is noted as "one of the foremost writers of detective fiction" for her ability to create characters and evoke atmosphere, while John Dickson Carr's clever plots earn him the title of "master magician". Michael Innes and Anthony Berkeley are witty, while R. Austin Freeman's science is excellent, Freeman Wills Crofts is very good at alibis, and Gladys Mitchell's use of psychology is clever. Nobody else comes in for such whole-hearted praise as H.C. Bailey and Mr Fortune, though. I think it's safe to say she was a fan.

Music

Because of Christie's fame and renown in crime fiction, even half a century since her death, it is not at all unusual to see her name evoked on the covers of other novels. I've been disappointed too many times in books that are proclaimed on the front as being written by "the new Agatha Christie!!!" to pay much attention to this anymore, but there is one such blurb that has long caught my attention. Elizabeth Daly, who published her first crime novel in 1940 at the age of 62, is often described as "Agatha Christie's favourite American mystery writer". What an endorsement! I had to know more.

As far as I have been able to determine, the source of this quote is the entry on Daly in the St. James Guide To Crime & Mystery Writers. Contributor Charles Shibuk mentions Christie's affection for Daly's work, but does not elaborate on when, where or to whom she actually said this — he doesn't claim it was something he had heard personally, that's for sure. Still, he does go on to give his theory as to why Elizabeth Daly's novels would appeal to Christie:

"It isn't too difficult to explain this phenomenon because Daly has transposed most of the apparatus of the cozy British Golden Age detective story, as written by Christie, to a New York setting in the 1940s. Here are crime problems among the well-to-do classes who spend most of their time observing the social conventions in a closed circle that is isolated from much of the reality of World War II, crime, and the struggle for existence among the lower classes."

Christie liked Elizabeth Daly, he is suggesting, because she was following in Christie's footsteps pretty closely. Daly was a new author to me when I started researching this episode, so I decided to read her for myself to see if I found the similarities compelling too, and my answer is: not really. I started at the beginning, with her 1940 novel Unexpected Night, which I enjoyed a lot. It's set at an upscale resort on the coast of Maine, where Henry Gamadge, a rare books expert, is having a holiday. There, he encounters a young man in very poor health who is due to inherit a big fortune on his twenty-first birthday, surrounded by his apparently very solicitous family. When said young man is found dead on the cliffs in the early hours of his birthday, Gamadge becomes part of the investigation into whether there has been foul play. His bibliographic knowledge becomes relevant, as does the company of a ramshackle summer theatre nearby.

I think any commonalities between Daly's work and that of Christie can be put down to the conventions of the genre in which they were both operating. Both were writing, by this time, character-driven crime fiction that aimed to surprise the reader with its solution, unveiled by a detective who recurred across many books. So were Ngaio Marsh, Michael Innes, E.C.R. Lorac and many others. I liked Daly's prose, although I think Christie wrote better dialogue. The original features of Unexpected Night to me were the detective, who in this first book is a personable and compassionate rare books specialist with no previous detecting experience, and the setting in rural Maine. Neither of those said "Christie" to me at all. I think Christie liked Daly because she was executing a good version of the form, and because her books were set in a different world to Christie's own. Albeit one to which Agatha had some family connections, because her paternal grandfather Nathaniel Miller was an American who had climbed the economic ladder from salesman to partner in the dry good business Claflin, Mellon & Company that at one time had a huge store on Church Street in Lower Manhattan.

Moira Redmond, my guest for the green penguin book club episode about The Missing Moneylender, pointed out on her blog last year that Christie may well have inserted a pseudonymous tribute to Elizabeth Daly into her 1963 novel The Clocks. This book contains a slightly odd scene where a melancholy and bored Poirot is going through some detective novels, vainly searching for a crime problem upon which he can exercise his huge brain. Some of the books are real and ones that we know Christie read and even admired: The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux, for instance, and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Others are her own invention, such as the work of a character she created as a version of herself, Ariadne Oliver. Then Poirot gets to a book by someone called "Louisa O'Malley", and says:

"What a model of fine scholarly writing is hers, yet what excitement, what mounting apprehension she arouses in her reader. Those brownstone mansions in New York. Enfin, what is a brownstone mansion—I have never known? Those exclusive apartments, and soulful snobberies, and underneath, deep unsuspected seams of crime run their uncharted course. It could happen so, and it does happen so. She is very good, this Louisa O’Malley, she is very good indeed."

Moira posits, and I agree, that this is a veiled tribute to Elizabeth Daly, who by this time had published sixteen Henry Gamadge novels with considerable success, and who regularly set her plots in the homes and social circles of New York's wealthier citizens. A fun little in joke between two authors who had formed their own two-person mutual admiration society.

After the break: the writer Agatha Christie admired most.

Ad music

In 1961, Agatha Christie served as a judge for a competition run by the Collins Crime Club that sought to reward a "Don's Detective Novel" — in other words, only university academics could enter. The year that she served on the panel, the prize was given to David McDonald Devine, writing as D.M. Devine, for his novel My Brother's Killer. Unfortunately, Devine was then disqualified from the competition because he was found to be an administrator at the University of St Andrews, rather than an academic, but the publicity the competition gave him still launched his writing career, and he went on to publish thirteen novels in total with Collins in the 1960s and 1970s. The reprint of this book that is available now still proudly bears the endorsement "judged best detective novel by Agatha Christie", as an indicator of how powerful her taste still is.

My Brother's Killer is not a golden age detective novel, since it was published over twenty years after that period officially ended, but it does have certain classic characteristics that are married to more modern plot points. The first-person narrator is a solicitor called Simon who is summoned to his small town office late in the evening by his brother, his legal partner, only to discover on arrival that he has been shot dead in his office. When a former flame of Simon's is arrested for the crime, he takes on the role of amateur sleuth to clear her name, discovering all sorts of unpleasant things about his brother on his way to solving the crime. There are some elements in this book that reminded me of the writing that John Le Carré was doing in the early 1960s, in books like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. To me, Christie's preference for this novel is a reflection of how neat and well-conceived its plot is, which we know from her notebooks is something she always strived to achieve in her own work. Given that she was incorporating some darker and more contemporary themes in her own books through the 1960s, with titles like The Pale Horse and Endless Night, it makes sense to me that My Brother's Killer would have appealed to her. When Martin Edwards wrote about this book on his blog in 2012, he mentioned seeing at least one of Devine's books on the shelves at Greenway, Christie's home in Devon, so it would seem that she continued to be a fan of Devine beyond this first novel, too.

Music

Agatha Christie didn't just read crime fiction, of course. The surviving evidence we have from her bookshelves, her autobiographical writing, her notebooks and indeed her own fiction shows her to be someone who read broadly and with great curiosity. Thus I want to touch on her relationship to three writers who are not generally considered crime writers, but who nonetheless have relevance to the formation of Christie's taste: Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and Muriel Spark. Greene I have little to say about other than Christie routinely named him, alongside one or both of these others, when asked for her favourite writers. I do also wonder whether his hit novel of 1932, Stamboul Train, might have inspired Murder on the Orient Express, which came out two years later.

Then we come to Muriel Spark, the acclaimed Scottish writer who is probably best known today for her 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Spark is someone who, like Christie, played with genre and expectation in her fiction. Her 1959 novel Memento Mori is structured like a poison pen whodunnit, as a group of older people are plagued by anonymous phone calls saying "Remember you must die". Except in Spark's hands this plot becomes paranoid and twisted; it is not a person making the calls but death itself, we are lead to believe. She described her 1970 novel The Driver's Seat as a "whydunnit" and an early chapter tells the reader that a major character will later die, in a move that is reminiscent of a book of Christie's like A Murder is Announced or even The ABC Murders. I recently listened to talk by Gray Robert Brown for Romancing the Gothic in which he said that Christie admired Spark's style while Spark was influenced by Christie's plots, and that exchange between them corresponds with what I have read so far.

It was Elizabeth Bowen's relationship to Christie, though, that I ended up finding the most compelling of these three writers. Bowen was a Dublin-born novelist who spent time on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group in London and published her first novel in 1923. Although she and Christie were almost the same age and entering the world of publishing at the same time in the early 1920s, I can't find any evidence that their paths crossed at this time.

In 1939, Bowen inherited Bowen's Court, an Anglo-Irish "big house" in County Cork that had been in her family since the eighteenth century. During World War Two, she worked for the British Ministry of Information, providing intelligence about activity in neutral Ireland, one of many aspects of her biography that has complicated her reputation and place in the Irish literary canon. She was something of a genre shape-shifter, never quite claimed by the modernists or the populists, producing something that reads alternately like literary fiction, espionage thriller and mystery fiction. The writer Sarah Stewart Taylor has argued that Elizabeth Bowen's work laid the foundation for today's highly successful Irish domestic noir, and I can certainly see this. Her focus on crumbling country houses feels very detective fiction in general to me.

Bowen was a great reader of detective fiction, especially American noir, but she was also keen on Christie. The two writers did finally meet in 1962 at a dinner party and correspondence survives between them. In one letter, Christie thanked Bowen for sending a copy of her new book — thought to have been 1949's The Heat of the Day — and says "I shall be able to read it many times and enjoy it each time". She also makes comparisons to two of Bowen's other novels, Death of the Heart and The House in Paris from the 1930s, indicating that she was well-versed in Bowen's back catalogue.

I had not read any Elizabeth Bowen prior to preparing for this episode, but I found myself completely hooked by The Heat of the Day, although it did take me about fifty pages to adjust to Bowen's highly detailed, interior style. Set in wartime London, it concerns a love triangle that becomes an espionage triangle. The extreme specificity of its scenes and the well-calibrated pacing of the book did remind me of the best detective fiction, but it was the strong emotional currents, especially for the female characters, that made me think of Agatha Christie the most. Or should I say, Mary Westmacott, because I think it was the part of Christie that wrote those six genre-bending, emotional novels that was most in tune with the work of Elizabeth Bowen.

I think the last word here should go to Agatha Christie herself, who seems to have maintained a very healthy balance between admiration and inspiration when it comes to her favourite writers.

“If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can't, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them," she write in her autobiography. "I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do.”

I think she is selling herself a little short here, given the wide variety of things she did do with her writing, to great success. I wonder what she would say if she knew that, so many decades after her death, even her taste in crime fiction is shaping the genre at which she excelled.

Music

This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

If you'd like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.

You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/agathachristiestasteincrimefiction. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.