All posts tagged Gladys

Blandings Castle and Elsewhere by P.G. Wodehouse

Presently, the cow’s audience-appeal began to wane. It was a fine cow, as cows go, but, like so many cows, it lacked sustained dramatic interest.

Lord Emsworth had one of those minds capable of accommodating but one thought at a time – if that.

It seemed to Lord Emsworth that there was a frightful amount of conversation going on. He had the sensation of having become a mere bit of flotsam upon a tossing sea of female voices.

‘Glug!’’ said Lord Emsworth—which, as any philologist will tell you, is the sound which peers of the realm make when stricken to the soul while drinking coffee.

P.G. Wodehouse wrote 10 comic short stories about Blandings Castle and its inhabitants. Six are collected in the 1934 collection ‘Blandings Castle and Elsewhere’ which I picked up in a second-hand shop. I should note that although the stories were first published in the 1920s, Wodehouse reviewed and rewrote them all for book publication in 1934. This explains why the pumpkin story, for example, although originally published in 1924, has references to President Roosevelt’s New Deal which only began to be implemented in 1933. In rewriting them, you also suspect that Wodehouse smoothed the plots and rounded the phrasing which both feel very slick and finished.

1. The Custody of the Pumpkin (1924)

It is summer at Blandings Castle. Lord Emsworth is obsessed with all aspects of his garden. For the purposes of this story he is obsessed with winning Best Pumpkin at the annual Shrewsbury Show. He’s won prizes for roses, tulips and spring onions but never for a pumpkin which is why this year he’s paying so much attention to the pumpkins and constantly bothering his bad-tempered Scottish head gardener, Angus McAllister, about them.

However Lord Emsworth’s campaign is torpedoed when he spies his useless son, (The Honourable) Freddie Threepwood kissing a strange young woman in the grounds. When he confronts him, Freddie admits that she is Niagara ‘Aggie’ Donaldson, a cousin of McAllister’s. So Lord Emsworth goes to see McAllister, ascertains that Aggie is indeed a cousin, and demands he send her away. McAllister refuses and so Lord Emsworth sacks him on the spot, promoting his deputy, Robert Barker, to become head gardener.

Only problem is Barker isn’t as good. After only a week Lord Emsworth is regretting his hasty decision and telegrams McAllister asking him to return. When McAllister huffily refuses, Lord Emsworth goes up to London to interview possible replacements. Here he is surprised to bump into useless Freddie, who he didn’t even know was in town, who amazes him by announcing that he’s just got married to Aggie this morning! (In fact Freddie is so afraid of his Dad, that he hands him a letter then legs it, rather than announce the fact to his face.)

Distraught, Lord Emsworth takes a cab to nearby Kensington Gardens. Here he is transported by the beauty of the flowerbeds, so transported that he absent-mindedly steps over the little railing and starts plucking tulips. Unfortunately the park keeper is nearby, spots him and subjects him to a lengthy harangue. This is still going on when a police constable arrives. Wodehouse’s characterisation of officers of the law is always particularly funny.

‘Wot’s all this?’
The Force had materialized in the shape of a large, solid constable.
The park-keeper seemed to understand that he had been superseded. He still spoke, but no longer like a father rebuking an erring son. His attitude now was more that of an elder brother appealing for justice against a delinquent junior. In a moving passage he stated his case.
”E Says,’ observed the constable judicially, speaking slowly and in capitals, as if addressing an untutored foreigner, ‘E Says You Was Pickin’ The Flowers.’
‘I saw ‘im. I was standin’ as close as I am to you.’
‘E Saw You,’ interpreted the constable. “E Was Standing At Your Side.’

At this tricky moment who should emerge from the gathering crowd than his former head gardener, McAllister and another man. McAllister assures the constable that Lord Emsworth is in fact an earl, at which point the constable exonerates him and focuses on moving the crowd along. The man with McAllister introduces himself as Mr Donaldson, father of the Aggie who Frederick announced he married that morning!

This Donaldson explains he is owner of Donaldson’s Dog-Biscuits and only worth, as he breezily admits, ten million dollars or so! Not only this, but he proposes to Lord Emsworth that he sends young Freddie across to the States to be employed by the firm, learn the ropes, and become a useful businessman! He’s shipping out on a liner in a few days. Lord Emsworth is staggered but delighted that his layabout son is finally off his hands and will be someone else’s problem.

The last wrinkle to be ironed out is getting McAllister back. Lord Emsworth goes over to where the grim Scotsman is admiring a border and begs and pleads, and offers to double his salary, at which the Scotsman grudgingly consents.

It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.

And cut to the Shrewsbury Agricultural Show where Lord Emsworth does, indeed, win first prize for his pumpkin, and is brusquely congratulated by his great rival Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, of Matchingham Hall.

2. Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best (1926)

Eighteen months have passed since the pumpkin adventure and Freddie went off to the States. Lord Emsworth has grown a beard and his butler, Beach, is so disgusted that he tells the housekeeper, Mrs Twemlow, that he’s ready to resign over it.

But the main point of the story is that, to Lord Emsworth’s irritation, Freddie has returned from America. He meets Lord Emsworth in London, in the Senior Conservative Club, and astonishes him by telling him his wife has left him! Freddie is a big movie fan and alongside his work at Donaldson’s Dog Biscuits he had been writing a film scenario. A famous woman movie star moved to the neighbourhood and Freddie started seeing her with the hope of getting her support. But a friend of his wife spotted them eating out and snitched on him. The wife (Aggie) knowing nothing about this (Freddie had been keeping it as a surprise) thinks the worse and came back to London, whither Freddie has followed, pleading for her to come back. She is staying at the Savoy Hotel and Freddie asks if his Dad can intervene:

‘Me? What on earth do you expect me to do?’
‘Why, go to her and plead with her. They do it in the movies. I’ve seen thousands of pictures where the white-haired old father⁠—’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Lord Emsworth,

When Lord Emsworth refuses to even phone her (Aggie) Freddie storms off.

Freddie rose with a set face. He looked like a sheep that has had bad news.

However, Lord Emsworth has a troubled night worrying if he behaved correctly and so next day goes along to Aggie’s suite of rooms at the Savoy. He decides not to announce himself at reception in case that puts her off and takes the lift to her floor. Finding the door of her rooms open, he calls then goes in but hasn’t got far before he is attacked by a tiny dog. Terrified of small does, Lord Emsworth leaps though into the bedroom where he is overheard. Next thing he knows a stocky woman has come out of the bathroom holding a pistol and accusing him of being a thief.

This is Aggie’s tough American friend, Jane Yorke, the same one who ratted Freddie out over the movie star.

About this young woman there were many points which would have found little favour in the eyes of a critic of feminine charm. She was too short, too square, and too solid. She had a much too determined chin. And her hair was of an unpleasing gingery hue. But the thing Lord Emsworth liked least about her was the pistol she was pointing at his head.

Seconds later Aggie emerges in her dressing gown. Lord Emsworth pleads his innocence but both women are sceptical. The scene descends into farce when Freddie arrives dressed up in a white fake beard. He was intending to impersonate his father and plead on his behalf but the two women immediately see through his disguise.

First of all Freddie explains to his hesitating wife what he was really doing at dinner with a film star i.e. not having an affair with her but schmoozing her for business. But Freddie has an ace up his sleeve. He pulls out a telegram from the Super-Ultra-Art Film Company, offering him a thousand dollars for the scenario!

Case closed. Aggie accepts him back and tells her divisive friend Jane to push off. Freddie takes Aggie in her arms. He gives her a detailed summary of his movie screenplay until they both realise they’d better set about reviving Lord Emsworth who is standing there completely bewildered.

The one thing he’s taken from this melodramatic chain of events is that anyone could have mistaken him for Freddie’s disguise with a great long white beard. He’s so horrified that he goes to the Savoy barbers and gets it shaved off straight away.

Cut to back at Blandings, where Lord Emsworth was gratified by the warm reception he got from Beach (not realising how relieved Beach was that Lord Emsworth had shaved off his beard). And the story ends with a comic tying up of loose ends as Lord Emsworth asks Beach to telephone the Savoy suite where his son is now happily ensconced with Aggie, to ask his son how his movie screenplay ended.

3. Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey (1927)

Two storylines collide. With only ten days until the annual Agricultural Show, Lord Emsworth’s pig-man George Wellbeloved is arrested for being drunk and disorderly on his birthday and jailed for 14 days. In his absence, Lord Emsworth’s prize pig, the Empress of Blandings, goes off her food and sickens, throwing her owner into a crisis,

This coincides with a crisis in the world of human relationships when his niece, Angela, breaks off her engagement with the eminently suitable Lord Heacham in preference for the local curate’s son and ‘hopeless ne’er-do-well’ James ‘Jimmy’ Belford. Lord Emsworth’s imperious sister, Lady Constance, roundly disapproves of him and thinks he is only after Angela’s money, which she will inherit when she turns 25 (she is currently 21).

So Lady Constance orders Lord Emsworth to catch the 2pm train to London to meet this fellow Belford and warn him that he won’t get his hands on the money for 4 long years, in the hope that he is a simple gold-digger and this will put him off.

Thus it is that next day Lord Emsworth finds himself hosting Belford to lunch at his club, the Senior Conservatives Club. He is struggling to broach the subject of the money and the marriage when Belford reveals that he has for the past two years been working very hard on ‘on a farm in Nebraska belonging to an applejack-nourished patriarch with strong views on work and a good vocabulary’ and so knows a thing or two about pigs.

Lord Emsworth sits up as Belford quickly ascertains that his pig-man has been imprisoned and speculates that the Empress of Blandings responds to the pig-man’s daily call for food. With him locked up, the pigs is missing his afternoon call. Belford goes on at some length to explain that in America pig calls vary from state to state and farm to farm. BUT he had it direct from one of America’s greatest pig farmers that there is a Master Call, none other than the ‘Pig-hoo-0-o-ey!’ which gives the story its title.

Hugely excited, Lord Emsworth thanks the young man, winds up the lunch and legs it for the 2 o’clock train back to Market Blandings. However Lord Emsworth without fail falls asleep on the westbound train and as it pulled into the station and he awoke he realised he had forgotten the pig call.

That evening his sister lets him know she considers him an utter imbecile. Not only was it unnecessary to invite Belford to his club for lunch, but he didn’t even get round to making the cardinal point that the man could not expect to get his grubby hands on Angela’s fortune for another four years, because of some ridiculous panic about a pig!

To escape her chiding, Lord Emsworth wanders out into the garden where he bumps into the fragrant Angela who is exasperated that he can remember nothing about his conversation with her beloved Belfort, instead all he goes on about is pigs. Emsworth tells her that her fiancé was kind enough to explain the importance of pig calls and that if he could only remember it, and if it helps the Empress feed again, he will do anything for her.

‘My dear,’ said Lord Emsworth earnestly, ‘if through young Belford’s instrumentality Empress of Blandings is induced to take nourishment once more, there is nothing I will refuse him—nothing.’

Angela says she’ll hold him to his promise. Then, as he’s standing there, straining to remember the forgotten pig call, a gramophone starts up in the servants quarters, and the first tune to play has the lyric ‘WHO stole my heart away? WHO?’ and with a flash Emsworth remembers – ‘Pig-hoo-0-o-ey!’

When Beach sticks his head out of the quarters to ask who’s making that noise, Lord Emsworth asks him over to practice the call too. Only the pleading of lovely Angela makes him agree but she makes then obvious suggestion that both men practice the call beside the Empress’s stye. There then follows the comic scene of the operatic trio of Emsworth, Angela and Beach all singing out the cry. The Empress stirs but doesn’t go for the huge pile of food in her trough.

Until Jimmy appears out of the gloom. He’s staying with his father at the local vicarage and thought he’d stroll over. Lord Emsworth accuses him of lying to him so Jimmy asks to hear his cry and, when he does, shakes his head. No no no, that’s not how you do it and he now tells them how:

‘It is doubtful if an amateur could ever produce real results. You need a voice that has been trained on the open prairie and that has gathered richness and strength from competing with tornadoes. You need a manly, sunburned, wind-scorched voice with a suggestion in it of the crackling of corn husks and the whisper of evening breezes in the fodder. Like this!’

And Jimmy proceeds to bellow the cry and then all four of them hear the huge pig snuffle over to her trough and start feeding. Success!

Company for Gertrude

There are, as so often, two parallel storylines.

We thought that Freddie had returned from America to England to retrieve his errant wife. Now we learn he was also sent by his employer, Mr Donaldson of Donaldson’s Dog Biscuits, to promote them here. He’s just spent an hour trying to flog them to his Aunt Georgiana, Lady Alcester, when he emerges into the street and bumps into an old Oxford pal, Beefy Bingham. He’s surprised to learn that Beefy is now a vicar but even more surprised to learn he’s desperately in love with Aunt Georgiana’s daughter, Gertrude, but the family disapprove and have packed Gertrude off to Freddie’s family seat, Blandings Castle. Freddie has a brainwave which, as usual, derives from a movie the film addict has recently seen. In it an impoverished man in love with the landowner’s daughter puts on a disguise, goes on a visit to their house and makes him indispensable and universally popular, so that they let him marry their daughter and, at the wedding, he rips off his disguise and reveals it was him all along. That’s what Beefy has to do.

Meanwhile in storyline 2, Lord Emsworth is bitterly brooding because his top pig-man, George Cyril Wellbeloved, has handed in his notice. Lord Em thought he wanted to see a different part of the country but no, turns out he’s gone to work for Lord Em’s bitter rival, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall.

George Cyril Wellbeloved had sold himself for gold, and Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, hitherto looked upon as a high-minded friend and fellow Justice of the Peace, stood revealed as that lowest of created things, a lurer-away of other people’s pig-men!

At this moment he gets a phone call from Freddie who tells him he’s sending a pal of his down to stay. Initially Lord Em is cross but Freddie adds the bright thought that his pal will be company for Gertrude and Lord Em brightens up, because this niece Gertrude has been hanging round the place looking like a wet Sunday, spreading gloom everywhere. Maybe a young chap will be just the ticket to cheer her up.

And indeed as soon as the young fellow arrives and Gertrude sees him, they both burst into peals of laughter and are thereafter inseparable, which dim Lord Emsworth thinks is wonderful. However this happy state of affairs does not last. Rupert (Beefy) is as solicitous as he can possibly be but he begins to crowd Lord Emsworth with his constant helping him in and out of chairs and up and down stairs. He’s also clumsy, and a series of trivial accidents leads up to Rupert rushing to the assistance of Lord Ems up a step-ladder which causes it to fold up and Lord Ems to have a painful fall.

Rupert thinks he then does well by going into town to buy an ointment for Lord Ems’ sore ankle and leaving it as a thoughtful gift by his bed. But he failed to notice that it’s an ointment for horses and so in the middle of the night Lord Ems awakens from a dream of being burned at the stake by Red Indians to find his ankle screaming in agony.

When he realises the cause of the searing pain he washes his ankle under the cold tap. Next morning he goes for a swim in the lake. Floating on his back in his idyllic rural surroundings, Lord Ems is prompted to burst into song. Unfortunately Rupert is also up early, hiding in the rhododendrons to meet his lady love, when he hears his lordship in apparent distress. He rushes to the lakeside, throws off his clothes, plunges in and next thing Lord Ems knows he’s being seized by strong arms.

This really is the limit! Will this young man never let him alone? Lord Ems snaps and tries to punch Rupert who realises he is dealing with a hysterical drowner and, being an experienced swimmer, promptly knocks his lordship out with one watery blow, the better to rescue him. And the poor man thought he was just having a quiet, harmless bathe. Oops.

Later on, back in bed and having recovered consciousness, Lord Ems is pondering which man he hates more, this ghastly young tough or his arch-enemy Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe. It’s at this moment that his son, Freddie, pays him a visit and comes to the point, explaining that the man he’s been hosting is his buddy Beefy Bingham, the man Aunt Georgiana sent Gertrude to Blandings to escape, and couldn’t he (Lord Ems) just do the decent thing and let them get married. Because, he goes on to explain, Beefy is a vicar and Lord Ems has many Church of England livings in his gift and so all he has to do is give Beefy a living and then he’ll have the income to support fair Gertrude.

And then he goes on to tie the two storylines together by remarking that he’s heard there’s a living just become vacant in the next village, Much Matchingham, because the vicar has been told to go to the south of France by his doctor. Much Matchingham!

Suddenly Lord Ems has a brainwave. Much Matchingham is the village next to the house of his arch-enemy, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall! If he awards the now-vacant living to the ghastly young man who’s been plaguing him… he will start plaguing Sir Gregory! What greater punishment could there be! So he tells Freddie he will indeed give Beefy the living. Everyone is happy.

The Go-getter (1931)

As usual, two intertwining storylines. In the first one Freddie is still trying to flog his father-in-law’s dog food to his Aunt Georgiana. If he can achieve this he’ll be well on his way to becoming the sort of go-getter which his American father law admires, and hands out bonuses to. In the second one, Aunt Georgiana is distracted by worries about her daughter Gertrude.

Engaged to the Rev. Rupert Bingham, Gertrude seemed to her of late to have become infatuated with Orlo Watkins, the Crooning Tenor, one of those gifted young men whom Lady Constance Keeble, the chatelaine of Blandings, was so fond of inviting down for lengthy visits in the summertime.

Aunt Georgiana had completely changed her opinion of Beefy when she learned that he was the nephew and heir of a rich shipping magnate, but now the match seems to be in danger because she spends all her time with this damn crooner.

Now, everybody knows what Crooning Tenors are. Dangerous devils. They sit at the piano and gaze into a girl’s eyes and sing in a voice that sounds like gas escaping from a pipe about Love and the Moonlight and You: and, before you know where you are, the girl has scrapped the deserving young clergyman with prospects to whom she is affianced and is off and away with a man whose only means of livelihood consist of intermittent engagements with the British Broadcasting Corporation.

Freddie goes to see Beefy at his vicarage who hands him a letter from Gertrude which appears to be dumping him or ‘giving him the bird’, or the raspberry, or ‘handing him the mitten’, as these posh chaps put it. All because of some bloody singer, or ‘yowler’, as they call him.

‘You think Gertrude’s in love with Watkins?’
‘I do. And I’ll tell you why. He’s a yowler, and girls always fall for yowlers. They have a glamour.’

Back at the Castle, Aunt Georgiana tells Freddie he needs to do something about the situation. Freddie finds Gertrude dreamily playing the piano but his arguments in favour of Beefy have no effect. He says he has a plan and later that evening, after dinner, when everyone is sitting quietly about their hobbies, he comes into the drawing room with a sack and the dog Bottles. He announces to the assembled company that he is going to demonstrate how fabulous Donaldson’s Dog Biscuits are with the example of Bottles who’s been raised on them, puppy and dog. The sack is full of rats, he’s going to release them and they can all see how effectively Bottles chases them.

However, he’s barely mentioned rats before the womenfolk start screaming and Lord Emsworth shouts for Beach who, when he arrives, is tasked with taking the sack off Freddie and disposing of it. So in terms of making a big demo of Donaldson’s Dog Biscuits, it’s a washout. But it does have one side effect which is, at the mention of rats, the crooner Watkyns had taken cover behind Gertrude like a coward. Gertrude notices this and compares him with manly Beefy who, on one occasion, fought off a bat which dive bombed them when they were on an evening walk. In other words, Beefy is a real man.

Deprived of his rats, Freddie exits to pop along to the cinema (as is his wont), but he forgets about Bottles. Bottles gets into a ferocious fight with Lady Georgiana’s Airedale. It’s a big fight but the notable thing about it is that the crooner Watkyns is even more cowardly and climbs up onto a cabinet of China. From here young Gertrude has a perfect view of his feet of clay. And this is the moment when good old Beefy enters the drawing room. Without hesitating he seizes both dogs by the scruff of the neck and pulls them apart, looking like a Greek god. ‘Rupert!’ cries Gertrude… and the engagement is back on again 🙂

Much later that night, in a comic conclusion, Lady Georgiana knocks on Freddie’s door. He is expecting to be excoriated for triggering the dog fight. but instead her ladyship is delighted that her daughter is reaffianced to the right man and (probably mistakenly) convinced that Freddie planned it all along. She enquires about the wretched dog biscuits he’s been trying to flog her for weeks and, when he starts in on his old sales pitch saying they come in either one-and-threepenny or half-crown packets, made me laugh out loud when she declares she will take two tons.

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend

As usual, two storylines. In one it’s the August Bank Holiday when a fair invades the peaceful grounds of Blandings Castle along with hordes of the peasantry from the local village, Blandings Parva. Lord Emsworth has to dress formally, with a top hat, and make a speech. He hates it. At breakfast:

He drank coffee with the air of a man who regretted that it was not hemlock.

In the other storyline, he is having a bitter disagreement with his head gardener, McAllister, about the yew path. Lord Ems wants it to remain a green and mossy path, whereas McAllister, backed up by Lady Constance, wants it turned into a gravel walk, to Lord Ems’s horror! Hence some painful encounters.

Lord Emsworth, wincing, surveyed the man unpleasantly through his pince-nez. Though not often given to theological speculation, he was wondering why Providence, if obliged to make head-gardeners, had found it necessary to make them so Scotch. In the case of Angus McAllister, why, going a step farther, have made him a human being at all? All the ingredients of a first-class mule simply thrown away.

Having stated the thesis and antithesis, Wodehouse then moves to the synthesis. This is that Lord Emsworth makes friends with a Cockney girl of 12 or 13, whose confident inspires and liberates him.

One of his chores of the day is to judge the floral displays in the cottage gardens of the little village of Blandings Parva, at his gates. Entering the last of these, he suddenly finds himself assailed by a yapping dog, one of Lord Ems’s worst fears. He is, then, hugely relieved when a dirty-looking young girl emerges from the cottage door and calls the dog to heel. He likes her already.

This is a rare incursion of a working class character of any description into a Wodehouse text, so it’s worth quoting.

She was the type of girl you see in back streets carrying a baby nearly as large as herself and still retaining sufficient energy to lead one little brother by the hand and shout recrimination at another in the distance.

Turns out she doesn’t live in the cottage, she’s a guest down from London, which explains her hard-bitten appearance and attitude. She introduces herself as Gladys, and the urchin she’s looking after as ‘Ern, ‘a rather hard-boiled specimen with freckles’. He’s holding a bouquet which he hands to Lord Ems. When Gladys announces that she pinched them from the park, and was chased by an old ‘josser’ but threw a stone at him which ‘copped hi’ on the shin – you’d have expected Lord Ems to be furious, but he realises who she hit on the leg was his nemesis, McAllister, so Lord Ems is thrilled, which leads to his wonderfully ironic thought:

What nonsense, Lord Emsworth felt, the papers talked about the Modern Girl. If this was a specimen, the Modern Girl was the highest point the sex had yet reached.

Having said goodbye, Lord Ems returns to the park and bumps into his sister, Lady Constance, who warns him against a little girl staying in the village who she had had to tell off. Lord Ems realises this is Gladys and bridles: if McAllister and Constance are against her, then she must be a good thing!

The day grinds on, reaching a peak of discomfort when he has to attend the big formal tea in a marquee. It’s blisteringly hot, his collar is sweat-soaked, the rough kids down from London are mocking the curate’s squint and when someone throws a rock cake which knocks his top hat off, he’s had enough and leaves.

Feeling like some aristocrat of the old régime sneaking away from the tumbril, Lord Emsworth edged to the exit and withdrew.

The only place he can think of hiding is a shed down by the pond but he’s barely closed the door than he hears a sniff and realises someone else is there. Turns out to be Gladys who has been sent there as a punishment by Lady Constance for stealing ‘Two buns, two jem-sengwiches, two apples and a slicer cake’. When he discovers she had pinched them in order to take them back to her brother, ‘Ern, who had been forbidden to even come to the Fair, by Lady Constance. Yet again she is being domineering and Lord Emsworth’s dander rises. So when he learns the specific fact that ‘Ern was banned because he bit Lady Constance Lord Emsworth is delighted.

Lord Emsworth breathed heavily. He had not supposed that in these degenerate days a family like this existed. The sister copped Angus McAllister on the skin with stones, the brother bit Constance in the leg… It was like listening to some grand old saga of the exploits of heroes and demigods.

This is all very funny. His dander up, Lord Emsworth insists on accompanying Gladys up to the Castle where he wakes Beach the butler from his afternoon snooze and instructs him to load Gladys up with a cornucopia of food, sandwiches and cakes, but also chicken, ham and – with comic inappropriateness – a bottle of port.

‘Nothing special, you understand,’ [Lord Emsworth] added apologetically, ‘but quite drink- able. I should like your brother’s opinion of it.’

But when she adds that her brother would like some ‘flarze’ (i.e. flowers) Lord Emsworth is initially worried about upsetting his fierce head gardener, but then has a Eureka moment. Hang on! Why is he scared of his own head gardener. He’s the earl, he’s the master here. Emboldened by Gladys’s request, Lord Emsworth accompanies her to the flower beds and gives her full permission to pick her fill.

And when McAllister spots her and comes roaring and shouting out of his shed, a terrified little Gladys slips her hand into Lord Emsworth’s and suddenly he becomes a man worthy of his ancestors. He confronts McAllister, stands up to him, defies him, says he doesn’t mind if he quits, but this poor little girl is going to pick all the flowers she wants!

On the whole McAllister likes his position here and so is cowed into silence. At which point, Lord Emsworth pushes home his advantage by emphatically insisting, once and for all, that he will not have his lovely, moss-covered yew alley turned into gravel. Over his dead body. And so McAllister, very reluctantly acquiesces, turns and departs.

At which point Lord Em’s other nemesis, his sister, arrives, crossly telling him that everyone is waiting for him to make his big speech in the marquee. But in his triumphant mood, Lord Ems insists that he will make no dashed speech. If she wants a speech given, she can give it herself!

And so, having triumphantly seen off his two arch enemies, a very happy earl walks off with Gladys, the young lady who inspired his triumphs!

Cast

Clarence, Ninth Earl of Emsworth – ‘a fluffy-minded and amiable old gentleman with a fondness for new toys’, ‘a dreamy and absent-minded man, unequal to the rough hurly-burly of life’ (NB: an Earl is generally addressed as Lord, so the Earl of Emsworth is more usually referred to as Lord Emsworth)
The Honourable (Hon.) Freddie Threepwood – 26, Lord Emsworth’s dopey second son (the younger sons of an Earl are referred to as ‘the Honourable so and so’, which Wodehouse abbreviates for comic purposes to ‘the Hon.’; this is technically correct but Wodehouse’s insistence on repeating it has a satirical effect)
Lady Constance Keeble – Emsworth’s sister, married to millionaire Tom Keeble
Angus McAllister – head-gardener – ‘a sturdy man of medium height, with eyebrows that would have fitted a bigger forehead. These, added to a red and wiry beard, gave him a formidable and uncompromising expression’
Beach – the butler, served Lord Emsworth for 18 years
Mrs Twemlow – the housekeeper
Niagara ‘Aggie’ Donaldson – cousin of McAllister’s
Mr Donaldson – her father, American, owner of Donaldson’s Dog Biscuits and a millionaire
Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe of Matchingham Hall – neighbour and rival vegetable grower
Jane Yorke – tough American woman friend of Aggie’s
George Cyril Wellbeloved – 29, Lord Emsworth’s pig man
Police Constable Evans – Market Blandings copper
Smithers – local vet
Angela Lord Emsworth’s niece – 21, ‘a pretty girl, with fair hair and blue eyes which in their softer moments probably reminded all sorts of people of twin lagoons slumbering beneath a southern sky’
James ‘Jimmy’ Belford – curate’s son
Lord Heacham – James’s rival for the hand of Angela
The Reverend Rupert ‘Beefy’ Bingham – pal of Freddie’s at Oxford
Georgiania, Lady Alcester – Lord Emsworth’s other sister and so Freddie’s aunt – ‘the owner of four Pekingese, two Poms, a Yorkshire terrier, five Sealyhams, a Borzoi and an Airedale’
Gertrude – 23, Beefy Bingham’s love interest
Orlo Watkins – the Crooning Tenor

Napoleon

I’ve noticed that Wodehouse slips references to Napoleon into all his Blandings stories. I assume it’s a subliminal way of linking them.

The Custody of the Pumpkin:

Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, of Matchingham Hall, was there, of course, but it would not have escaped the notice of a close observer that his mien lacked something of the haughty arrogance which had characterized it in other years. From time to time, as he paced the tent devoted to the exhibition of vegetables, he might have been seen to bite his lip, and his eye had something of that brooding look which Napoleon’s must have worn at Waterloo.

Lord Emsworth Acts For The Best:

As a general rule, Lord Emsworth was an early and a sound sleeper, one of the few qualities which he shared with Napoleon Bonaparte being the ability to slumber the moment his head touched the pillow.

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend:

He [McAllister] made his decision. Better to cease to be a Napoleon than be a Napoleon in exile.

The modern girl

Any unbiased judge would have said that his niece Angela, standing there in the soft, pale light, looked like some dainty spirit of the Moon. Lord Emsworth was not an unbiased judge. To him Angela merely looked like Trouble. The march of civilization has given the modern girl a vocabulary and an ability to use it which her grandmother never had. Lord Emsworth would not have minded meeting Angela’s grandmother a bit.
(Pig-hoo-0-0-O-ey!)

She reached out a clutching hand, seized his lordship’s beard in a vice-like grip, and tugged with all the force of a modern girl, trained from infancy at hockey, tennis and Swedish exercises.
(Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend)

Move fast and break things

‘Move fast and break things’ was a motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg and used in Facebook up until 2014. Young tech dudes think they’ve invented new approaches and attitudes. And yet this is really just the latest expression of the central ideology of industrial capitalism. In particular this Do It Now approach has been central to American capitalism for over a century. Which is what I thought when Lord Emsworth is hosting James Belford to lunch and is startled when the young man insists on getting straight to the point.

Diplomatic circumlocution flourished only in a more leisurely civilization, and in those energetic and forceful surroundings you learned to Talk Quick and Do It Now, and all sorts of uncomfortable things.

Plus ça change, plus American corporations proclaim the same boosterish slogans, generation after generation.

Credit

‘Blandings Castle and Elsewhere’ by P.G. Wodehouse was published in 1935 by Herbert Jenkins.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on December 12, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Short stories

Tagged Aggie, Aggie Donaldson, America, Angela, Angus McAllister, August Bank Holiday, Aunt Georgiana, ‘Ern, beach, Beefy Bingham, Blandings, Blandings Castle, Blandings Castle and Elsewhere, Blandings Parva, Bottles, British Broadcasting Corporation, cinema, Clarence, Cockney, comedy, comic novel, Constable Evans, Crooning Tenor, Donaldson's Dog-Biscuits, Empress of Blandings, Facebook, fiction, film, Freddie Threepwood, gardening, George Cyril Wellbeloved, George Wellbeloved, Georgiania, Gertrude, Gladys, Herbert Jenkins, humour, James Belford, Jane Yorke, Jimmy Belford, Kensington Gardens, Lady Alcester, Lady Constance, Lady Constance Keeble, London, Lord Emsworth, Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best, Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend, Lord Heacham, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Blandings, Matchingham Hall, movies, Mr Donaldson, Mrs Twemlow, Much Matchingham, Napoleon, Nebraska, New Deal, Niagara Donaldson, novel, Orlo Watkins, P.G. Wodehouse, pig call, Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey, pigs, President Roosevelt, Robert Barker, Rupert 'Beefy' Bingham, Rupert Bingham, Savoy Hotel, Senior Conservative Club, short stories, Shrewsbury Agricultural Show, Shrewsbury Show, Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, Smithers, Super-Ultra-Art Film Company, Swedish exercises, The Custody of the Pumpkin, The Go-getter, The Honourable Freddie Threepwood, the Modern Girl, Tom Keeble

Posted by Simon on December 12, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/12/blandings-castle-and-elsewhere-p-g-wodehouse/

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie (1948)

‘I was devoted to Daddy! He was terribly attractive and the greatest fun to live with! But I always knew he was a bad hat.’
(We are in posh world)

What was one to do, thought Adela, with someone who didn’t talk gardening or dogs – those standbyes of rural conversation.
(Country Life)

‘You don’t mean – murder -!’ Her voice was horrified.
(The innocence of dim young Rosaleen)

‘She’s quite harmless, you know.’
‘I wonder,’ said Poirot.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Is anybody – ever – quite harmless?’
(Wisdom of the wise old owl)

Poirot waved a deprecating hand and tried to look modest.
(Poirot is, essentially, a comic character)

Superintendent Spence stared. ‘Chief Inspector Japp,’ he remarked, ‘always said you
have a tortuous mind.’
(Opinion of an old favourite)

‘It’s the human interest that’s getting you?’
‘Yes,’ said Poirot. ‘It is always the human interest.’
(Poirot’s central motivation)

‘What are you doing, M. Poirot?’
‘Talking to people. That is what I do. Just talk to people.’
(The essence of Poirot’s method)

‘Taken at the Flood’ gets poor reviews as one of Christie’s weaker works and so I nearly didn’t read it but I’m glad I did for the sake of its vivid social history. The big reveal at the end is no more preposterous and far-fetched than the conclusions of most of her books.

1. Gordon Cloade

‘Taken at the Flood’ is the story of the extended Cloade family, four brothers and sisters and a few nephews, and their partners, who had all basked in the generosity of their immensely rich Uncle Gordon Cloade. As well as giving them gifts and subsidies throughout their lives, Gordon made it clear that he would leave them each handsome bequests in his will, and so they carry on leading upper-middle-class lifestyles they could ill afford if solely reliant on their own incomes.

Marriage and death

Until disaster strikes, in fact twin disasters. First, on a boat from South America old Gordon meets and falls in love with a blonde young Irish lovely named Rosaleen and all the Cloades are horrified to get telegrams from New York announcing that he has married her.

But then, he’s barely been back in England a few weeks before the house he’s in is a direct hit from a German bomb which kills all the servants. Cloade is pulled alive from the wreckage but dies on the way to hospital.

The legal situation this creates is that, regardless of a lifetime of promises to fund the Cloades, and in the absence of a new will made since his marriage (and there had barely been time to get back to London and unpack), Gordon’s entire fortune goes to his brainless young wife. She would be completely overwhelmed by all this if she didn’t have in tow her brother, the angry young Irishman, David Hunter, who plays Svengali. It is implied that David it was who guided Rosaleen towards the millionaire on the boat, and snared him into marriage.

So that’s the backstory (or one backstory). The novel opens with all the characters living in the little village of Warmsley Vale:

Dr Lionel Cloade, Gordon’s elder brother, and his wife, Katherine ‘Aunt Kathie’
lawyer Jeremy Cloade, 63, and his wife, Frances
Adela Cloade, over 60, who married a Mr Marchamont, now deceased – known as ‘Mums’ to her daughter, Lynn Marchmont, just back from serving as a Wren in the war
and Rowley Cloade, son of Gordon’s brother Maurice

With Rosaleen and David ensconced in the big smart new house Gordon had built for himself upon the hill titled Furrowbank. With Christie’s usual brisk efficiency she not only sketches in all these characters but outlines why all four of these households are in dire financial straits and are reduced to more or less begging money from Rosaleen.

While angry Irish brother David exults in these self-satisfied posh people getting their come-uppance.

Social history

And this is my point about social history: all four households have been brought low, among other things, by the collapse in value of their investments, but more by the new Labour government’s extortionate new taxes and extravagant new paperwork. The hapless older generation doesn’t fully understand where all their money has gone. They stand for the old rentier class which lived such feather-bedded lives between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s, only to see their lifestyles collapse during the war, the end of civilised living bemoaned in Evelyn Waugh’s nostalgia-fest Brideshead Revisited.

While angry, sneering, jeering David stands for the new world, the new generation of angry young men, the poor outsiders who have unexpectedly found themselves kings of the new roost and revel in the snobs’ downfall:

‘That’s just what I get a kick out of,’ said David. ‘I like seeing their smug faces eaten up with envy and malice. Don’t grudge me my fun, Rosaleen.’
She said in a low troubled voice: ‘I wish you didn’t feel like that. I don’t like it.’
‘Have some spirit, girl. We’ve been pushed around enough, you and I. The Cloades have lived soft – soft. Lived on big brother Gordon. Little fleas on a big flea. I hate their kind – I always have.’

This, it seems to me, is what the book is about. It is a long lament for the style and class of the old ways and a bitter recrimination of the new socialist government. This may explain why the plot itself feels a bit of an afterthought.

Heath and Vale

This sense of a clash between two worlds, between civilised old world and functional, charmless new world, between class and vulgarity, is embodied in the contrast between the two adjoining settlements Warmsley Heath and Warmsley Vale. As the text tells us right at the start of chapter 1, laying out the dichotomy which will underpin the narrative:

Warmsley Heath consists of a Golf Course, two Hotels, some very expensive modern villas giving on to the Golf Course, a row of what were, before the war, luxury shops, and a railway station. Emerging from the railway station, a main road roars its way to London on your left – to your right a small path across a field is signposted Footpath to Warmsley Vale.

Warmsley Vale, tucked away amongst wooded hills, is as unlike Warmsley Heath as well can be. It is in essence a microscopic old-fashioned market town now degenerated into a village. It has a main street of Georgian houses, several pubs, a few unfashionable shops and a general air of being a hundred and fifty instead of twenty-eight miles from London.

Its occupants one and all unite in despising the mushroom growth of Warmsley Heath.

There you have as pretty a little microcosm of the English class system and its petty snobberies as you could ask for.

2. Robert Underhay

And this is the second backstory I referred to: because in fact, right at the start of the novel, an old club bore tells the story of one Robert Underhay, a district commissioner (imperial official) in British Nigeria, who met and married a pretty little actress, while he was on leave in South Africa. However, once he’d taken her back to his base it turned out she hated being isolated miles from anywhere in the hot tropical jungle and, after giving it a go for a while, they decided to call it a day. Because he was a practicing Roman Catholic, Underhay arranged to go on a trip up-country and pretend to have died there i.e. get his loyal servants to return to the compound and say he’d died, thus freeing the wife of any obligations without the necessity of a divorce. (Can you feel how this whole scenario is creaking a little with plot holes and inconsistencies?) As the Major tells it:

His natives were a trustworthy lot and they came back with a good circumstantial tale and a few last words scrawled in Underhay’s writing saying they’d done all they could for him, and he was afraid he was pegging out…

Anyway, it is this young lady, recently ‘widowed’, who Gordon met and was manoeuvred into falling in love with and marrying. Yes, the current widow sitting atop a huge fortune, Mrs Rosaleen Cloade, is the very same Rosaleen who married Robert Underhay 4 or 5 years earlier before he disappeared into the jungle, presumed dead.

3. Enter Enoch Arden* the blackmailer

It takes 100 pages, the first third of this 300-page novel, to establish this, to explain the two backstories and to paint in the various characters and their fractious relationships (Lynn Marchmont resents her mother’s obeisance to Rosaleen, she is engaged to oafish Rowley the farmer, though neither of them are very excited about it etc).

And then one fine afternoon, a tall bronzed stranger gets off the train at Warmsley Heath and asks the way for Warmsley Vale (asking the puzzled young farmer, Rowley Cloade on the way).

The man was tall, with a bronzed face, a beard, and very blue eyes. He was about forty and not ill-looking in a tough and rather dare-devil style. It was not, perhaps, a wholly pleasant face.

This stranger checks into the local pub, the Stag, giving his name as ‘Enoch Arden’ and sends a note up to the posh house for the attention of David Hunter, who duly comes to meet him in his room that evening.

Here he makes the staggering revelation that Robert Underhay, rich Rosaleen Cloade’s supposedly dead husband, is still alive! Not only this, but he is fully informed of Rosaleen’s situation i.e. she married an old guy who promptly died and inherited his huge fortune, thus disappointing all his relatives who are filled with fury and frustration. If Underhay reveals that he is still alive, Rosaleen’s second marriage becomes null and void, and so does her inheritance of the fortune. At a stroke she will be penniless again, and the terms of Gordon’s old will come into force, redistributing his fortune to the four Cloade households.

Imagine how much they’d pay for this fact to come out!? So the bronzed stranger proceeds to blackmail David Hunter, asking how much he will pay for this ruinous fact not to be made public.

*Explanation of Enoch Arden

This is a reference to a long narrative poem by the English poet Alfred Tennyson. In it Enoch Arden, a sailor, is shipwrecked on a desert island and spends ten years there. Upon his return, he discovers that his wife, Annie Lee, having believed him dead, has remarried and started a new family with a man named Philip. Tragedy: Rather than reveal his return and disrupt his wife’s happiness, Enoch chooses to remain silent, dying of a broken heart.

When he had canvassed the idea of disappearing into the jungle to fake his own death, Underhay had joked that he might ‘do an Enoch Arden’ and one day return to check up on his remarried wife. Well now, no joke, this is exactly what he’s come to do!

Poirot

Remember how I mentioned that Christie has a club bore tell us a lot of the backstory, on the basis that said bore knew Underhay out in Nigeria, and then read the account of Gordon’s death in the papers and connected it with the pretty little actress he knew Underhay married… Well, as he rattles on his eyes fall disapprovingly on one of the figures sitting nearby:

Again Major Porter paused. His eyes had travelled up from the patent leather shoes – striped trousers – black coat – egg-shaped head and colossal moustaches. Foreign, of course! That explained the shoes. ‘Really,’ thought Major Porter, ‘what’s the club coming to? Can’t get away from foreigners even here.’

‘Who could that be’ we ask ourselves. Yes, Hercule Poirot and this is the twenty-third (I think) Poirot novel (there are 33 in total). That scene is followed by another one in which Poirot is paid a surprise visit at home by Mrs Katherine Cloade. She says she has been told to consult him by the figures from the beyond in her seances and ask him whether they could hire him to investigate the claims that Robert Underhay is not dead. He listens in amusement and then says no, leaving Katherine Cloade to go away disappointed.

These two scenes in the prologue are clearly designed to explain how and why Poirot comes to be involved in the case, as he has already 1) heard the backstories from the club bore and 2) been directly approached by one of the Cloade family.

Then everything goes quiet on the Poirot front, until Christie has painted in all the events summarised above and Poirot makes his reappearance on page 172, exactly halfway through the 325-page novel.

The murder

I’d nearly forgotten the murder. Yes, well first an important fact. The conversation at the Stag in Arden’s private room (room 5) when Arden explained to David Hunter that he thought Robert Underhay was still alive and tried to extort money out of him, all this was overheard by the landlady, Beatrice Lippincott, who promptly sends a message (a letter) to Rowley Cloade. When he comes that evening for a drink, she invites him into the office and describes the whole conversation.

Rowley is flabbergasted, realising that this will change the circumstances of the entire family and so walks to the lawyer, Jeremy Cloade’s house. But while waiting in the lawyer’s study for the family to finish dinner, he has second thoughts and leaves.

The following evening, Lynn is walking over the downs when David Hunter comes bursting out of nearby trees, running fast to Warmsley Heath to catch the train. With no further ado, he embraces and kisses her and tells her she belongs to him, not to that oaf Rowley, and rushes off, leaving poor Lynn bewildered.

Next morning ‘Enoch Arden’s body is discovered in his pub bedroom, his head smashed in with fire tongs. So the reader immediately suspects that David Hunter did it rather than pay Arden off, and that’s why he was running from the scene of the crime in such a hurry to catch the train. He’s the obvious suspect. Or could it have been someone else? But who? And why?

Cast

Major Porter – old India hand and club bore at the Coronation Club
young Mr Mellon – hosting Poirot at the Coronation Club
Hercule Poirot – forced to listen to the club bore’s account of Underhay and Gordon Cloade
- George – Poirot’s manservant
old Gordon Cloade – funder of the whole Cloade family, who all relied on his largesse, until he unexpectedly married a young lovely and, weeks later, was killed in the Blitz on London
Rosaleen Cloade – 26, Gordon Cloade’s widow, previously married to Robert Underhay staying at Furrowbank
David Hunter – Rosaleen’s rude and controlling brother – ‘a thin young man with dark hair and dark eyes. His face was unhappy and defiant and slightly insolent’ – Irish, in the commandos during the war – ‘tall thin bitter-looking young man’
- Old Mullard – their gardener
Dr Lionel Cloade – ‘spare and grey-haired – but he had not the lawyer’s imperturbability. His manner was brusque and impatient… his nervous irritability’
Mrs Katherine ‘Aunt Kathie’ Cloade – between 40 and 50 – into spiritualism, in debt to various clairvoyants
Jeremy Cloade – Gordon’s elder brother – senior partner in a firm of solicitors, Cloade, Brunskill and Cloade – ‘a spare grey-haired man of sixty-three, with a dry expressionless face’ – has been embezzling money
Frances Cloade – 48, ‘one of those lean greyhound women who look well in tweeds. There was a rather arrogant ravaged beauty about her face which had no make-up except a little carelessly applied lipstick’ – the only daughter of Lord Edward Trenton, who had trained his horses in the neighbourhood of Warmsley Heath
- Edna – 15-year-old servant
Antony Cloade – their son, killed on active service
Adela Marchmont née Cloade – aka Mums – over 60, never a strong woman, borne down by bills, begs £500 off Rosaleen – lives at the White House with…
Lynn Marchmont – her daughter, a far-travelled Wren during the war (Women’s Royal Naval Service, WRNS, part of the Royal Navy)
Rowley Cloade – son of deceased Maurice Cloade – ‘a big square young man with a brick-red skin, thoughtful blue eyes and very fair hair. He had a slowness that seemed more purposeful than ingrained’ – farm called Long Willows
Johnnie Vavasour – Rowley’s friend and partner on the farm, killed in the war
Beatrice Lippincott – barmaid at the Stag pub
Gladys – chambermaid at the Stag pub
Superintendent Spence – local police
Sergeant Graves – his subordinate (tactful enough not to show off his superior French accent)
Mr Pebmarsh – coroner at the inquest on Enoch Arden
Jenkins – the police surgeon

Poirot’s foreignness

Poirot’s foreignness is always emphasised.

Rowley Cloade was eyeing Poirot rather doubtfully. The flamboyant moustaches, the sartorial elegance, the white spats and the pointed patent leather shoes all filled this insular young man with distinct misgivings.

‘Do you remember old Jeremy mentioning a chap called Hercule Poirot?’
‘Hercule Poirot?’ Lynn frowned. ‘Yes, I do remember something… Well? Lynn demanded impatiently.
‘Fellow has the wrong clothes and all that. French chap – or Belgian. Queer fellow but he’s the goods all right.’

The impoverishment of the rentier class

As discussed above, the book abounds in descriptions of how the privileged rentier and professional classes of between the wars, had fallen on hard times, by the Labour government’s introduction of ruinous taxes and a jungle of forms, and the general decay in quality and standards left by the war.

Tax

Hence the surprising harping on this issue of new high taxes and how they were affecting numerous characters in the story.

Lynn realised with some dismay how their financial position had changed. The small but adequate fixed income which had kept them going comfortably before the war was now almost halved by taxation. Rates, expenses, wages had all gone up. ‘Oh, brave new world,’ thought Lynn grimly…

Dramatically, and with a trembling lip, Mrs Marchmont produced a sheaf of bills. ‘And look at all these,’ she wailed. ‘What am I to do? What on earth am I to do, Lynn? The bank manager wrote me only this morning that I’m overdrawn. I don’t see how I can be. I’ve been so careful. But it seems my investments just aren’t producing what they used to. Increased taxation, he says. And all these yellow things. War Damage Insurance or something – one has to pay them whether one wants to or not…’

ADELA: ‘I’m overdrawn at the bank, and I owe bills – repairs to the house – and the rates haven’t been paid yet. You see, everything’s halved – my income, I mean. I suppose it’s taxation…’

DAVID: ‘Rosaleen can’t touch the capital, you know. Only the income. And she pays about nineteen and six in the pound income tax.’
‘Oh, I know. Taxation‘s dreadful these days.’

ADELA: ‘Everything is so expensive nowadays. And it gets worse and worse.’

Major Porter had the first floor of a small shabby house. They were admitted by a cheerful blowsy-looking woman who took them up. It was a square room with bookshelves round it and some rather bad sporting prints. There were two rugs on the floor – good rugs with lovely dim colour but very worn. Poirot noticed that the centre of the floor was covered with a new heavy varnish whereas the varnish round the edge was old and rubbed. He realised then that there had been other better rugs until recently – rugs that were worth good money in these days. He looked up at the man standing erect by the fireplace in his well-cut shabby suit.

Poirot guessed that for Major Porter, retired Army officer, life was lived very near the bone. Taxation and increased cost of living struck hardest at the old war-horses.

KATHIE CLOADE: ‘But then, when Gordon died like that – well, you know what things are, M. Poirot, nowadays. Taxation and everything. He can’t afford to retire and it’s made him very bitter…’

Plus, after the Second World War Christie herself became the victim of aggressive tax authorities in both the UK and USA, tax problems which were to dog her for the rest of her life. So there’s personal animus, as well, behind these references.

Forms

And the new levels of post-war bureaucracy:

ROWLEY: ‘I’m only just keeping my head above water as it is. And what with not knowing what this damned Government is going to do next – hampered at every turn – snowed under with forms up to midnight trying to fill them in sometimes – it’s too much for one man.’

‘I wonder what Rowley wants?’
Jeremy said wearily:
‘Probably fallen foul of some Government regulation. No farmer understands more than a quarter of these forms they have to fill up.’

‘Come,’ she said. ‘You mustn’t keep that bucolic young man waiting too long. Go and help him to fill up form eleven hundred and ninety-nine, or whatever it is.’

General decay

Shepherd’s Court, Mayfair, was a large block of luxury service flats. Unharmed by the ravages of enemy action, they had nevertheless been unable to keep up quite their pre-war standard of ease. There was service still, although not very good service. Where there had been two uniformed porters there was now only one. The restaurant still served meals, but except for breakfast, meals were not sent up to the apartments.

‘I’ve checked up,’ said Spence. ‘The last time a woman occupied that room was three weeks ago. I know service isn’t up to much nowadays – but I still think they run a mop under the furniture once in three weeks.’

Says the fierce old lady in the Stag’s Residents Only bar, old Mrs Leadbetter:

‘Every year I come and stay in this place. My husband died here sixteen years ago. He’s buried here. I come every year for a month.’
‘A pious pilgrimage,’ said Poirot politely.
‘And every year things get worse and worse. No service! Food uneatable! Vienna steaks indeed! A steak’s either Rump or Fillet steak – not chopped-up horse!’

Everything is going to the dogs:

‘It [the lipstick] was found on the floor of No. 5. It had rolled under the chest of drawers and of course just possibly it might have been there some time. No fingerprints on it. Nowadays, of course, there isn’t the range of lipsticks there used to be – just a few standard makes.’

‘His reason for coming down,’ the Superintendent broke in, ‘was, according to him, to get certain things he’d left behind, letters and papers, a chequebook, and to see if some shirts had come back from the laundry – which, of course, they hadn’t. My word, laundry’s a problem nowadays. Four ruddy weeks since they’ve been to our place – not a clean towel left in our house, and the wife washes all my things herself now.’

After the war

And it’s not just money. There’s a mean spirit abroad after the war. At least that’s how pukka middle-class Lynn sees it.

Lynn thought suddenly, ‘But that’s what’s the matter everywhere. I’ve noticed it ever since I got home. It’s the aftermath war has left. Ill will. Ill feeling. It’s everywhere. On railways and buses and in shops and amongst workers and clerks and even agricultural labourers. And I suppose worse in mines and factories. Ill will.’

After reading a number of passages like this I began to wonder, Is this what the book is about? About the impoverishment of the rentier class and the revenge of the outsider class? Angry Irishman David Hunter gets quite a few opportunities to express his glee at the humbling of the posh Cloades:

‘Gordon Cloade died before he had time to make a will. That’s what’s called the luck of the game. We win, you and I. The others – lose.’

Self-referentiality

All Christie’s books have characters comparing the events or people to events or people in books or detective stories. There is a continual stagey self-awareness to the characters and events, a regular nudge in the ribs that all this is fiction.

‘Perhaps it’s just a feeling of unreality. In books the blackmailer gets slugged. Does he in real life? Apparently the answer is yes. But it seems unnatural.’

‘I’ve no experience, of course, of police cases. And anyway medical evidence isn’t the hard-and-fast, cast-iron business that laymen or novelists seem to think…’

Credit

‘Taken At The Flood’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1948.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1940s reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 24, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1948, Adela Cloade, Adela Marchmont, Agatha Christie, Alfred Tennyson, Annie Lee, Antony Cloade, Aunt Kathie, Beatrice Lippincott, Brideshead Revisited, British Nigeria, bureaucracy, Chief Inspector Japp, Cloade family, Collins Crime Club, Coronation Club, crime fiction, crime novel, David Hunter, detective fiction, Dr Lionel Cloade, Edna, Enoch Arden, Evelyn Waugh, Frances Cloade, Furrowbank, George, Gladys, Gordon Cloade, Hercule Poirot, income tax, Jenkins, Jeremy Cloade, Johnnie Vavasour, Katherine Cloade, Labour government, Long Willows, Lord Edward Trenton, Lynn Marchmont, Major Porter, Maurice Cloade, Mayfair, Mr Marchamont, Mr Mellon, Mr Pebmarsh, Mrs Katherine Cloade, Mrs Leadbetter, Mrs Rosaleen Cloade, murder, Nigeria, novel, Old Mullard, Poirot, rentier class, Robert Underhay, Roman Catholicism, Rosaleen, Rosaleen Cloade, Rowley Cloade, Royal Navy, Second World War, Sergeant Graves, Shepherd's Court, South Africa, Superintendent Spence, Taken at the Flood, taxes, Vienna steak, Warmsley Heath, Warmsley Vale, Women's Royal Naval Service, Wren, WRNS

Posted by Simon on September 24, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/24/taken-at-the-flood-agatha-christie/

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)

‘You’ve got a knack of turning up in the most unexpected places, M. Poirot.’
‘Isn’t Croydon aerodrome a little out of your beat, my friend?’ asked Poirot.
‘Ah, I’m after rather a big bug in the smuggling line. A bit of luck my being on the spot.’
(Inspector Japp explaining away the improbable coincidence that he is at Croydon Airport to greet the airliner on which there’s just been a murder, instead of on his normal beat in back London)

‘Rum business, this,’ he said. ‘Bit too sensational to be true. I mean, blowpipes and poisoned darts in an aeroplane—well, it insults one’s intelligence.’
(Dramatising summary from Inspector Japp)

‘The whole thing is a bit of a teaser.’
(Japp, puzzled as usual)

‘Every minute this case gets more puzzling,’ cried Fournier.
(Talking up the story’s mystery and atmosphere, Chapter 11)

‘It amazes me – the whole thing seems almost – unreal…’
(More talking up)

‘I have the feeling very strongly, Mademoiselle, that there is a figure who has not yet come into the limelight – a part as yet unplayed — There is, Mademoiselle, an unknown factor in this case. Everything
points to that…’’
(Adding depth to the mystery, Chapter 22)

Jane thought to herself with a touch of misgiving: ‘He’s French, though. You’ve got to look out with the French, they always say so.’
(Wise words, Chapter 13)

‘Ah, but, you see, an answer depends on the questions. You did not know what questions to ask.’
(Exactly what we’re learning about handing artificial intelligence – Poirot, Chapter 11)

Sensationalism dies quickly – fear is long-lived.’
(The wisdom of the old pro’, Chapter 16)

‘Mon cher, practically speaking, I know everything.’
(Poirot’s modesty)

‘If you ask me,’ said Mrs Mitchell, ‘there’s Bolshies at the back of it.’
(The comedy prole view, Chapter 19)

The setup

The regular Tuesday plane service from Le Bourget airdrome outside Paris to Croydon Airport south of London takes off with 11 passengers in First Class, and a similar number in Second Class. A few minutes before it’s due to land the steward shakes a sleeping woman who lolls forward onto her table. Marie Morisot is dead. He calls a doctor who confirms she’s dead.

Surreptitiously, Poirot has snuck up behind the stewards and the doctor, and points out that the dead woman has a red mark on her neck. Furthermore, he bends down to reveal a small dart at her feet, with a fluffy body and a thorn-like tip. Ms Morisot was murdered by a dart from a blowpipe! The American thriller writer, Clancy, is excited to see something he’s read and written about so often, in real life.

Anyway, who would want to murder Ms Morisot? And on an airplane flight? And with a blowpipe?

On landing they are met, improbably enough, by Poirot’s old friend Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard – Christie contrives an explanation about him being transferred to the anti-smuggling force to explain it – then they get down to the nitty gritty of interviewing each of the passengers, giving us readers a handy pen profile of each of them – full name, age, address, occupation and so on. Very much like the similarly stage-managed questioning of all the suspects on the Orient Express.

A few days later there’s the official inquest when the same series of witnesses are called to the stand and questions along with the local cops and doctor. Afterwards the young couple, Jane Grey and Norman Gale repair to a tea room where, after seeing off an offer by a redtop journalist to author a story about the murder, they decide to embark on the amateur investigation which feature in so many of Christie’s novels and Christie gives them a conveniently phrased excuse:

‘Murder,’ said Norman Gale, ‘doesn’t concern the victim and the guilty only. It affects the innocent too. You and I are innocent, but the shadow of murder has touched us. We don’t know how that shadow is going to affect our lives.’ (Chapter 5)

The main early revelation which opens the door, is the arrival of French Surete officers who reveal that the apparently harmless old French lady who’s been murdered is in fact a notorious loan shark to the aristocracy and professional classes. She loans these people small fortunes but her security is never a house or assets, it is knowledge about their intimate affairs. I.e. they take the loan knowing that if they don’t pay it back on time, she will leak the compromising information she has on them.

So any number of people, and possible other passengers on the plane, might have been in this position of having taken out a loan, being unable to repay it, and taking the desperate step of bumping off old Mme Morisot.

But there is a second obvious gainer from her death, her 25-year-old daughter, Anne Morisot, who is set to inherit her mother’s fortune of over £100,000.

As usual there are the customary clichés of the genre: characters telling each other that this form of murder was incredible, impossible, almost a miracle. Then, later, the conventional statement that the murderer must be a cunning devil, a fiend, a calculating fiend etc – none of which help in the detection, but all of which help to jack up the tension, deepen the atmosphere, make the whole thing a more intense reading experience.

Cast

On the flight

Seat No. 2 Madame Giselle aka Marie Morisot, ‘one of the best-known moneylenders in Paris’
No. 4 James Ryder – managing director of the Ellis Vale Cement Company
No. 5 Monsieur Armand Dupont
No. 6 Monsieur Jean Dupont – son, both ‘returned not long ago from conducting some very interesting excavations in Persia’
No. 8 Daniel Clancy – small American writer of detective stories
No. 9 Hercule Poirot –
No. 10 Doctor Bryant – a Harley Street specialist on diseases of the ear and throat (there’s always one on hand to verify the murderee is in fact dead)
No. 12 Norman Gale – dentist from Muswell Hill
No. 13 The Countess of Horbury
No. 16 Jane Grey – hairdressers assistant in a beauty salon in Bruton Street (location of Mrs Dacres’ dress shop in ‘Three Act Tragedy’), won £100 and used it to take a holiday in France
No. 17 The Honourable Venetia Kerr –
Henry Mitchell – chief steward on the airliner Prometheus
Ruth, his wife – ‘a buxom, highly complexioned woman with snapping dark eyes’
Albert Davis – second steward

Afterwards

Chief Inspector Japp – ‘an erect soldierly figure in plain clothes’
Constable Rogers – assistant to Japp
Dr James Whistler – doctor for Croydon Airport
Maître Alexandre Thibault – French lawyer for Madame Giselle
Mr Winterspoon – chief Government analyst and an authority on rare poisons
Detective-Sergeant Wilson
Monsieur Fournier of the Sûreté – ‘a tall thin man with an intelligent, melancholy face’

In Paris

Elise Grandier – the dead woman’s confidential maid, ‘a short stout woman of middle age with a florid face and small shrewd eyes’, who burned her mistress’s papers, as instructed, but kept Madam’s little black book which she hands over to Poirot
Old Georges the concierge of Morisot’s apartment – a woman came to visit her the night before the flight (and her murder) but his eyesight is failing and he didn’t notice her face
M. Gilles – Chief of the Detective Force at the Sûreté
Zeropoulos – Greek antique dealer who reported the sale of a blowpipe and darts three days before the murder, ‘a short, stout little man with beady black eyes’
Jules Perrot – clerk at the Universal Airlines office in Paris where Morisot’s plane ticket for England was bought, who turns out to have been bribed to make sure she was on the 12 noon flight
Madame Richards – Marie Morisot’s married daughter and heir

Back in England, at Horbury Chase

Stephen, Lord Horbury – another one of Christie’s dim English aristocrats: ‘Stephen Horbury was twenty-seven years of age. He had a narrow head and a long chin. He looked very much what he was—a sporting out-of-door kind of man without anything very spectacular in the way of brains. He was kind-hearted, slightly priggish, intensely loyal and invincibly obstinate’
Madeleine – Lady Horbury’s maid
ffoulkes, ffoulkes, Wilbraham and ffoulkes – the Horbury family solicitors, latest in a long line of gently mocked lawyers to the aristocracy

In London

M. Antoine – owner of the boutique where Jane Grey works, real name was Andrew Leech, whose claims to foreign nationality consisted of having had a Jewish mother
Gladys – Jane’s friend, ‘an ethereal blonde with a haughty demeanour and a faint, faraway professional voice. In private her voice was hoarse and jocular’ – she calls the boss ‘Ikey Andrew’ which isn’t very nice
Miss Ross – the nurse in Norman Gale’s dentist practice in Muswell Hill

Bookish

In previous reviews I’ve developed the idea that Christie having her characters regularly compare their situations and scenarios to the stereotypes and clichés of detective stories (or movies) serves several purposes. 1) It pre-empts criticism from critics or readers who may be tempted to complain about the corny (or preposterous) plot developments. 2) But at the same time it draws attention to the artificiality of the whole genre and nudges you away from even trying to compare anyone or anything that happens to ‘real life’, gently nudging you into the entirely fictional land of Detective Stories, where anything can happen, where anyone can disguise themselves as anyone else in order to carry out the most ludicrously complicated crimes.

Hence the succession of ‘nudges’ in this story.

‘It beats me,’ he said. ‘The crudest detective story dodge coming out trumps!’ (Japp, Chapter 3)

‘What an extraordinarily rum little beggar,’ said Gale. ‘Calls himself a detective. I don’t see how he could do much detecting. Any criminal could spot him a mile off. I don’t see how he could disguise himself.’
‘Haven’t you got a very old-fashioned idea of detectives?’ asked Jane. ‘All the false beard stuff is very out of date. Nowadays detectives just sit and think out a case psychologically.’
‘Rather less strenuous.’
‘Physically, perhaps; but of course you need a cool, clear brain.’ (Chapter 4)

‘Hullo, old boy,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a pretty near squeak of being locked up in a police cell.’
‘I fear,’ said Poirot gravely, ‘that such an occurrence might have damaged me professionally.’
‘Well,’ said Japp with a grin, ‘detectives do turn out to be criminals sometimes – in story books.’ (Chapter 6)

‘I’d like to do something,’ he said. ‘If I was a young man in a book I’d find a clue or I’d shadow somebody.’ (Chapter 14)

‘Anyway, we have heard something. Somebody – a woman – is going to be silenced, and some other woman won’t speak. Oh, dear, it sounds dreadfully like a detective story.’ (Chapter 14)

But as well as the usual arch references to the clichés and stereotypes of detective novels, this story actually features a writer of detective stories, who Japp immediately suspects and which gives him (and other characters) the opportunity to sound off about the iniquity of detective story writers.

‘Clancy let out that he bought a blowpipe. These detective-story writers… always making the police out to be fools… and getting their procedure all wrong. Why, if I were to say the things to my super that their inspectors say to superintendents I should be thrown out of the Force tomorrow on my ear. Set of ignorant scribblers! This is just the sort of damn fool murder that a scribbler of rubbish would think he could get away with.’ (Chapter 3)

‘I don’t think it’s healthy for a man to be always brooding over crime and detective stories, reading up all sorts of cases. It puts ideas into his head.’ (Chapter 7)

Or allows Clancy to make digs at the most famous detective of all:

‘Ah,’ said Mr Clancy. ‘But, you see, I have my methods, Watson. If you’ll excuse my calling you Watson. No offence intended. Interesting, by the way, how the technique of the idiot friend has hung on. Personally I myself think the Sherlock Holmes stories grossly overrated. The fallacies – the really amazing fallacies that there are in those stories –’

And generally satirise her own profession, by summarising the truly ludicrous plot Clancy is planning to elaborate from the plane murder and, when Poirot hesitantly suggests that it’s a bit melodramatic, explains that:

‘You can’t write anything too sensational,’ said Mr Clancy firmly. ‘Especially when you’re dealing with the arrow poison of the South American Indians. I know it was snake juice, really; but the principle is the same. After all, you don’t want a detective story to be like real life? Look at the things in the papers – dull as ditchwater.’

And you only have to consider the plots of some of Christie’s own novels or, for some reason the James Bond novels pop into my head, to know the truth of this generalisation.

Poirot’s method

In each Poirot novel the great Belgian repeats the key elements of his procedure: 1) to educate newcomers, 2) to please existing fans by repeating all his best moves. These are:

trust no-one – everyone is a suspect until proven innocent
every witness keeps something back, no matter how trivial, sometimes unconsciously
seek out who the crime benefits
use order and method to establish the facts
then employ ‘the little grey cells’ to come up with ‘little ideas’ i.e. draft theories, which connect the facts
accept no theory which doesn’t accommodate all the facts i.e. don’t jump to conclusions or hold onto pet theories which there is evidence disproving
finally, your theory must be congruent with psychology i.e. with the characters of the people involved

Throughout the text he iterates these principles:

Suspect everyone

‘Shall I tell you something, Mademoiselle Grandier? It is part of my business to believe nothing I am told – nothing that is, that is not proved. I do not suspect first this person and then that person. I suspect everybody. Anybody connected with a crime is regarded by me as a criminal until that person is proved innocent.’ (Chapter 10)

Order and method

‘If one approaches a problem with order and method there should be no difficulty in solving it—none whatever,’ said Poirot severely. (Chapter 18)

‘You jump about a good deal.’
‘Not really. I pursue my course logically with order and method. One must not jump wildly to a conclusion. One must eliminate.’ (Chapter 19)

‘I proceed a step at a time, with order and method…’ (Chapter 21)

‘There must be in all things order and method. One must finish with one thing before proceeding to the next.’ (Chapter 24)

Little grey cells

‘Close your eyes, my friend, instead of opening them wide. Use the eyes of the brain, not of the body. Let the little grey cells of the mind function…Let it be their task to show you what actually
happened.’ (Chapter 9)

All the facts

‘I proceed always in the simplest manner imaginable! And I never refuse to accept facts.’ (Chapter 21)

Psychology

‘Ah, M. Poirot, that is your little foible. A man like Fournier will be more to your mind. He is of the newest school – all for the psychology. That should please you.’
‘It does. It does.’ (Chapter 11)

Japp’s cockneyisms

Japp’s being a class down from the posh aristocrats or upper middle-class protagonists, is indicated by his phraseology and vocabulary.

‘I suppose that little writer chap hasn’t gone off his onion and decided to do one of his crimes in the flesh instead of on paper?’

‘Everybody’s got to be searched, whether they kick up rough or not; and every bit of truck they had with them has got to be searched too – and that’s flat.’

‘If you ask me, those two toughs are our meat…. you must admit they don’t look up to much, do they?’

‘You don’t say so,’ said Japp with a grin.

Christie does the plebs.

‘That’s all right, old cock,’ said Japp, slapping him heartily on the back. ‘You’re in on this on the ground floor.’ (Chapter 6)

‘Just as well she wasn’t on that plane,’ said Japp drily. ‘She might have been suspected of bumping off her mother to get the dibs.’ (Chapter 7)

Several times Poirot actively objects to Japp’s offensive terminology, for example when, instead of asking whether he has an idea, he crudely accuses Poirot of having a ‘maggot’ in his brain. Is it me, or does Christie make Japp noticeably coarser and cruder in this book?

‘That’s the Honourable Venetia. Well, what about her? She’s a big bug.’ (Chapter 7)

‘Yes, she’s the type of pigeon to be mixed up with Giselle.’

Japp’s role

As usual Japp is positioned as not only crude in his speech and manner (beside the dapper, restrained Poirot, ‘exquisitely dressed in the most dandiacal style’) but as intellectually crude and limited, too.

Japp always jumps to rash conclusions, takes against suspects (often on the simple basis that they’re foreigners, the long deep Farageist thread in the English character). In every novel he mocks Poirot:

Japp whispered to Norman: ‘Fancies himself, doesn’t he? Conceit’s that little man’s middle name.’ (Chapter 26)

And accuses Poirot of over-thinking things, of actively preferring to make things complicated.

Take the way he dismisses Poirot’s insistence on the subtleties of psychology:

‘It is most important in a crime to get an idea of the psychology of the murderer.’
Japp snorted slightly at the word psychology, which he disliked and mistrusted. (Chapter 7)

The net result is that when you read any opinion offered by Japp, you must immediately consider the opposite to be likely or, more accurately, you immediately suspect Christie is using him to dismiss a possibility which, later on, we will find out is in fact true.

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot did not answer, and Fournier asked curiously: ‘It gives you an idea, that?’
Poirot bowed his head assentingly. ‘It gives rise to, say, a speculation in my mind.’
With absent-minded fingers he straightened the unused inkstand that Japp’s impatient hand had set a little askew… (Chapter 7)

Poirot did not answer for a moment or two; then he took his hands from his temples, sat very upright and straightened two forks and a saltcellar which offended his sense of symmetry. (Chapter 25)

It’s actually referred to nowadays as symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Poirot’s comic English

Obviously there are hundreds of examples of this, mostly fairly humdrum. But I laughed at:

‘Let us have an end of what you call in this country the fool-tommery.’

These novels are, essentially, comedies.

1930s locutions

‘She was an – an absolute – well, I can’t say just what she was through the telephone.’ (Chapter 21)

Through the telephone?

He looked at her sharply. ‘He attracts you – eh – this young man? Il a le sex appeal?’

In a later novel, a character abbreviates this to S.A.

Poirot explains a fundamental human need

‘What a horrible, tricky sort of person you are, M. Poirot,’ said Jane, rising. ‘I shall never know why you are saying things.’
‘That is quite simple. I want to find out things.’
‘I suppose you’ve got very clever ways of finding out things?’
‘There is only one really simple way.’
‘What is that?’
‘To let people tell you.’
Jane laughed.
‘Suppose they don’t want to?’
‘Everyone likes talking about themselves.’
‘I suppose they do,’ admitted Jane.
‘That is how many a quack makes a fortune. He encourages patients to come and sit and tell him things. How they fell out of the perambulator when they were two, and how their mother ate a pear and the juice fell on her orange dress, and how when they were one and a half they pulled their father’s beard; and then he tells them that now they will not suffer from the insomnia any longer, and he takes two guineas; and they go away, having enjoyed themselves – oh, so much – and perhaps they do sleep.’
‘How ridiculous,’ said Jane.
‘No, it is not so ridiculous as you think. It is based on a fundamental need of human nature – the need to talk – to reveal oneself.’

While mocking the widely known practice of psychoanalysis, Poirot concedes its basis on a fundamental human need. Elsewhere, it is explicitly raised and mocked.

‘Ah, yes, the flute… These things interest me, you understand, psychologically.’
Mr Ryder snorted at the word psychologically. It savoured to him of what he called that tom-fool business psychoanalysis. (Chapter 18)

But he reiterates his ‘compulsion to talk’ theory right at the book’s end:

‘It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later… Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.’ (Chapter 26)

The press

Christie’s attitude to the British press may be gauged from the fact that in an earlier novel she names a national newspaper the Daily Shriek and this novel features a journalist from the Weekly Howl.

Drugs and drug addicts

I’m impressed by the ubiquity of illegal drugs in these stories: cocaine features in ‘Peril at End House’, while morphine crops up in:

The Mysterious Affair at Styles where morphine is used to delay the effects of another poison, strychnine
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? where Henry Bassington-ffrench is a drug addict
Three Act Tragedy, where Freddie Dacres with his pinpoint pupils is strongly hinted at being a dope fiend

Cocaine is here again, as Lady Horbury is revealed to be a user. Indeed at the very opening of the story we are given her internal monologue:

‘My God, what shall I do? It’s the hell of a mess – the hell of a mess. There’s only one way out that I can see. If only I had the nerve. Can I do it? Can I bluff it out? My nerves are all to pieces. That’s the coke. Why did I ever take to coke? My face looks awful, simply awful…’ (Chapter 1)

Christie’s cats

On the evidence of Christie’s novels, the word cat was widely used slang in the 1920s and ’30s for a bitchy, critical woman.

‘My face looks awful, simply awful. That cat Venetia Kerr being here makes it worse. She always looks at me as though I were dirt. Wanted Stephen herself. Well, she didn’t get him! That long face of hers gets on my nerves. It’s exactly like a horse. I hate these county women.’
(Lady Horbury’s internal monologue, Chapter 1)

Venetia thought, ‘She has the morals of a cat! I know that well enough. But she’s careful. She’s shrewd as they make ’em.’ (Chapter 12)

Stephen had been fond of her, but not fond enough to prevent him from falling desperately, wildly, madly in love with a clever calculating cat of a chorus girl…

However this meaning is interfered, like two beams of different coloured light intersecting, by the fact that Poirot, when he is on the trail, when he is excited by a breakthrough, is always described as developing green glowing eyes like a cat. Then sometimes there are just actual cats. So the two charged meanings overlap with each other, as well as the ordinary common or garden one, amusingly.

Meals

Novels very rarely indeed describe meals. They describe the events and the boring conversation, but rarely the actual dishes. So I note them when they occur. Thus Poirot in Paris suggests to Fournier they go for a ‘simple’ lunch.

‘A simple but satisfying meal, that is what I prescribe. Let us say omelette aux champignons, sole à la Normande – a cheese of Port Salut, and with it red wine.’

While in London, after interview Clancy, he takes Jane and Norman for:

Poirot ordered some consommé and a chaud-froid of chicken.

Muddle

JAPP: There you are again – unsatisfactory. The whole thing is a muddle.’
POIROT: ‘There is no such thing as muddle – obscurity, yes – but muddle can exist only in a disorderly brain.’

Wish I could have introduced Poirot to E.M. Forster whose novels are about nothing but muddle.

‘Every woman adores a fascist’ (Sylvia Plath)

Poirot laments that sweet Jane Grey was so strongly attracted by Norman Gale who turned out to be a serial killer.

‘A killer,’ said Poirot. ‘And like many killers, attractive to women.’ (Chapter 26)

The theme was aired in 1928’s ‘Murder on the Blue Train’ where young Ruth Kettering is attracted to Comte Armand de la Roche precisely because he has such a bad reputation. And in ‘Three Act Tragedy’ where the heroine’s mother, Lady Mary Gore fell for a wrong ‘un despite all her father’s warnings, and laments that:

‘There doesn’t seem to be anything that warns girls against a certain type of man. Nothing in themselves, I mean. Their parents warn them, but that’s no good – one doesn’t believe. It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a girl in being told anyone is a bad man. She thinks at once that her love will reform him.’
(Lady Mary, Chapter 14)

Her daughter, Egg, is a chip off the old block who falls in love just as inappropriately, with an older man, with Sir Charles, who turns out to be a murderer.

It’s tempting to attribute the belief that good women are attracted to bad men to Christie herself, but I’m more inclined to think it’s one of the many standard clichés and stereotypes which she placed and positioned in order to construct her preposterous stories.

Credit

‘Death in the Clouds’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1935 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1930s reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on August 4, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel, Psychoanalysis

Tagged Agatha Christie, Albert Davis, Anne Morisot, Armand Dupont, blowpipe, Bruton Street, Cat, Chief Inspector Japp, cocaine, coke, Collins Crime Club, Constable Rogers, Countess of Horbury, Croydon aerodrome, Croydon airport, Daniel Clancy, Death in the Clouds, detective novel, Detective-Sergeant Wilson, Doctor Bryant, dope fiend, Dr James Whistler, drugs, E.M. Forster, Elise Grandier, Ellis Vale Cement Company, French Surete, Gladys, Harley Street, Henry Mitchell, Hercule Poirot, Horbury Chase, Ikey Andrew, Inspector Japp, James Ryder, Jane Grey, Jean Dupont, Jules Perrot, Lady Horbury, Le Bourget airdrome, Lord Horbury, M. Antoine, M. Gilles, M. Poirot, Maître Alexandre Thibault, Madame Giselle, Madame Richards, Madeleine, Mademoiselle Grandier, Marie Morisot, Miss Ross, Mme Morisot, Monsieur Fournier, morphine, Mr Winterspoon, Muswell Hill, Norman Gale, novel, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, Old Georges, Orient Express, Paris, Persia, Poirot’s method, Port Salut, Prometheus, Psychology, Ruth Mitchell, Sherlock Holmes, sole à la Normande, Sylvia Plath, symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder, The Honourable Venetia Kerr, the Sûreté, Venetia Kerr, Zeropoulos

Posted by Simon on August 4, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/08/04/death-in-the-clouds-agatha-christie/

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie (1934)

‘It’s probably a gang. I like gangs.’
‘That’s a low taste,’ said Frankie absently. ‘A single-handed murder is much higher class.’
(Chapter 8)

‘Well, I was thinking more of illicitly imported drugs.’
‘You can’t mix up too many different sorts of crime,’ said Bobby.
(Chapter 8)

Frankie toyed for a minute or two with the idea of a homicidal bishop who offered sacrifices of clergymen’s sons, but rejected it with a sigh.
(Chapter 9)

‘I think George has broken your bed.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bobby hospitably. ‘It was never a particularly good bed.’
(Chapter 10)

‘ Oh! Bobby, the whole situation is there – I know it is. If we could just get at the reason.’
(The essence of pretty much every detective story, Chapter 32)

Christie’s freestanding novels

It’s only when you have read a certain number of Agatha Christie novels that you come to appreciate how humorous they are, and often very funny. They are, essentially, comedies. In the last few pages everything is rounded off, all the loose ends are tied up, often with a smile or a heart-warming gesture, as in the famously charitable conclusion of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’.

‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ is a detective story which doesn’t feature either Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. In other words, it’s not part of a series but a standalone novel with one-off characters. Christie wrote about 20 of these.

My experience of them is that they’re immediately more fun than the series, certainly than the Poirot novels which I’ve started to find very limited. With Poirot Christie is constrained. There will be some sitcom-style humour based on the predictable behaviour of Captain Hastings (obtuse and slow on the uptake) and Poirot (pompous and overweening). Sooner or later Poirot will tell everyone that you need ‘order and method’, that you must employ ‘the little grey cells’, that he has ‘a little idea’, and his eyes will shine with that distinctive green glow as he stumbles across a plausible theory. But the very predictability of all this militates against delightful surprises.

Whereas in these ‘independent’ stories Christie was more free to let her imagination go and what it goes towards is frolicsome comedy, as per the hugely entertaining ‘The Secret of Chimneys’ and its sequel ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’, with their casts of preposterous toffs and fearless young ladies.

‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ is of this type and, like them, introduces us to another delightfully bold and resourceful young woman – in the ‘Chimney’s novels it was Lady Elaine ‘Bundle’ Brent, here it is Lady Frances ‘Frankie’ Derwent, daughter of the very grand Earl of Marchington. And there’s a keen young chap involved, Robert ‘Bobby’ Jones, son of the local vicar, a charmingly dim young man and ‘young golfing ass’.

Obviously there’s a convoluted murder mystery plot but the main joy of the book for me was these characters, their preposterous plans and their what ho! P.G. Wodehouse-style repartee.

‘Darling, you grow a moustache.’
‘Oh! I grow a moustache, do I?’
‘Yes. How long will it take?’
‘Two or three weeks, I expect.’
‘Heavens! I’d no idea it was such a slow process. Can’t you speed it up?’ (Chapter 10)

‘Now just listen quietly, Bobby, and try and take in what I’m going to say. I know your brains are practically negligible, but you ought to be able to understand if you really concentrate.’
(Chapter 10)

‘Look here, can’t I be there? I’ll put on a beard if you like.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Frankie. ‘A beard would probably ruin everything by falling off at the wrong moment.’

‘You came down by car. Lady Frances? No accident this time?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a pity to go in too much for accidents – don’t you?’
(Chapter 27)

So to begin with, and certainly in the opening third when Bobby and Frankie are drawn together by the murder and come up with wizard wheezes and jolly pranks to investigate it, lots of the scenes, moments and dialogue have a silly P.G. Wodehouse air.

‘My dear child, do remember that Bassington-ffrench knows you. He doesn’t know me from Adam. And I’m in a frightfully strong position, because I’ve got a title. You see how useful that is. I’m not just a stray young woman gaining admission to the house for mysterious purposes. I am an earl’s daughter and therefore highly respectable.’ (Chapter 10)

Later on things get a bit more serious, and there are occasional moments of almost adult seriousness. But these don’t last long – in the last quarter of the story the whole thing collapses into the most ridiculous melodrama, high speed car drives, an emergency plane flight, with a wonderfully unexpected and pantomime conclusion, and, finally, a long letter of confession from the murderer explaining in minute detail every conceivable loose end of the plot. With the result that:

‘Everything seems to have ended very fortunately,’ said Bobby. (Chapter 35)

Plot summary

Golf

It is 3 October and we are in the Welsh seaside town of Marchbolt. Dim young Bobby Jones is playing a round of golf on the local course, part of which runs alongside the cliffs, with the local doctor. Moments after he’s sliced a ball towards the cliffs he thinks he hears a cry and, when he and the doctor go to investigate, they discover that a man has fallen partly down the cliff. Scrambling down (it’s not a vertical cliff) they discover the man is badly injured, with a broken back. The doctor volunteers to go and get help leaving Bobby with the unconscious man.

The photo and last words

Bobby searches the man and finds the photo of a pretty woman in his pocket. At which point the unconscious man suddenly opens his eyes wide and says: ‘Why didn’t they ask Evans?’ and dies. Soon afterwards another man appears on the clifftop, calls down, then scrambles down to join Bobby. He introduces himself as Roger Bassington-ffrench, claims to be walking round the area because he’s looking for a house down here.

Playing the organ

Now the thing is Bobby is on very bad terms with his father the vicar (there are some broad comic scenes between the two of them as they fail to communicate and each fulminate against the other’s generation). Anyway, Bobby had promised to play the organ at tonight’s service which starts in ten minutes, and so he asks Bassington-ffrench if it’s OK to leave him with the body while he rushes off to church. ‘I say, would you mind awfully…’ etc. Bassington-ffrench says ‘Certainly old chap.’

Newspaper account and different photo

After the service Bobby goes home with his Dad, and dinner, sleep and next morning goes off to London. Here he reads an account in the newspaper which says police used the photo of a woman found on the dead man to identify her and ascertain that she is the sister of the dead man. She is a Mrs Leo Cayman and the dead man her brother, Alex Pritchard, recently returned from Siam. He had been out of England for ten years and was just starting upon a walking tour. What staggers Bobby is that the photo reproduced in the paper bears no relation to the photo he found in the dead man’s pocket.

The inquest

Bobby returns to Marchbolt to attend the inquest and sees the Mrs Cayman who claims to be Pritchard’s sister in the flesh, and is appalled all over again, that the sweet and innocent girl of the photo has somehow morphed into the shiny, over-made-up brass he is introduced to. She and her husband (Mr Cayman) ask if Pritchard had any last words, and Bobby, discombobulated by the occasion and her appearance, forgets Pritchard’s famous last words, and say no and they go away disappointed (or relieved).

Enter Frankie

It is at the inquest that he meets up with his childhood friend Lady Frances ‘Frankie’ Derwent who, in her modern feminist way, complains that she’s bored to death staying up at Derwent Castle with her Dad and you wouldn’t have kept her away from something interesting like an inquest even if you’d paid her.

Frankie gets Bobby to tell her what happened – the cry, the photo etc – at which point he remembers the dead man’s famous last words, and vows to write to the Caymans in London to relay them.

Two odd events

Over the next few days two notable events take place. First of all, Bobby gets a letter out of the blue from a company he’s never heard of offering him a job in Buenos Aires at a grand a year. This is an apparent golden opportunity but Bobby turns it down because he has promised his old pal, ‘Badger’ Beadon – a dim young man with a stammer – to go into the second-hand car business with him.

The incident is that he goes for a picnic in the countryside and nearly dies. He drinks deep from a bottle of beer which has been injected with morphine, passes out and would have died if not discovered by a passerby who calls the police and a doctor who pumps his stomach. He still needs to be hospitalised.

The duo investigate

Frankie visits Bobby in hospital and tells him her interpretation which is that someone is trying to murder him, and they agree there’s a big fat mystery which needs investigating. First thing is to find this Roger Bassington-ffrench. Enquiries (Frankie asks her Dad who knows all about the posh families of England) reveal a family of Bassington-ffrenches living at a place called Merroway Court near the village of Staverley, in Hampshire.

The staged car crash

Rather driving over to Hampshire and introducing herself to the Bassington-ffrenches, Frankie cooks up the preposterous idea of pretending to crash her car against the wall of the Merroway Court estate, and to arrange for a friend of hers, a young doctor, George Arbuthnot, to just happen to be passing, to rescue her from the wreckage, to carry her into the Court whose owners can hardly refuse a concussed young posh woman.

And so they carry out this ridiculous plan and it works. Pretending to be in a swoon Freddie is carried into the house (by George and a passing butcher’s boy) where Mrs Bassington-ffrench gives her a spare room to rest in. A day’s rest turns into a week or more and Frankie becomes genuine friends with the wife, Sylvia Bassington-ffrench, the husband, Mr Henry Bassington-ffrench, and his handsome brother, Roger Bassington-ffrench who comes to visit.

Over dinner one evening she confirms that this is the Roger Bassington-ffrench who came across Bobby at the cliff and volunteered to stand in for him. But the thing is, there’s nothing sinister, they’re all very open and friendly, no sign of any evil conspiracy.

Introducing Alan Carstairs

In the same conversation over dinner when she raises the mystery of the body at Marchbolt, Frankie runs off to her room to get the photo from the local newspaper to show her hosts. When shown the photo of the dead man, Sylvia says that the mystery dead man looks very like Alan Carstairs, a man they know who’s often travelling abroad for long periods. She (Sylvia) hasn’t heard from him for a while, presumes he’s gone off on another of his travels. Frankie goes to bed wondering how to find out more about this Alan Carstairs.

Dope

I was a bit misleading when I said the Bassington-ffrenches appear kosher and above board. Slowly Frankie realises that there is something amiss, which is the strange behaviour of the husband, Henry. She realises that he alternates between apathetic gloom and accelerated enthusiasm, and comes to realise that the wife, Sylvia, is afflicted by this change to his previously happy personality.

Slowly Frankie is attracted to the handsome, charming, intelligent brother, Roger, and eventually he shares his theory that his brother, Henry, is a ‘dope fiend’. Roger is convinced of it and links it with the recent establishment in a nearby old house, the Grange, of a nursing home run by a Canadian, a Dr Nicholson. Is Nicolson, a medical professional with access to morphine, somehow feeding Henry’s habit? And Nicholson is Canadian but so, according to Sylvia, is Alan Carstairs. Are the two facts linked?

Dinner with Dr Nicholson

Dr Nicholson and his wife come for dinner. Nicholson is very domineering and asks inconvenient questions about Frankie’s crash. Frankie notes how his little wife, Moira, watches her husband with anxiety. Not only this but she learns that on the day Bobby was poisoned (the poisoned beer) Roger Bassington-ffrench has a solid alibi, he was at a children’s party at Staverley, but Nicholson was away, supposedly at a conference in London. And his car is a dark-blue Talbot, of a model seen near the scene of Bobby’s would-be poisoning. And, as said above, he has access to morphia. So lots of fingers point at the big, domineering Dr N.

Bobby the chauffeur

So Frankie has got as far as starting to suspect that the body on the cliff was not ‘Pritchard’ but the body of this Alan Carstairs who was snooping around the suspicious Dr Nicholson and his so-called nursing home and so was bumped off. So she writes to Bobby in London and tells him to come and collect her in a family car and dressed as a chauffeur with a fake moustache – which he does, arriving the next day impersonating Edward Hawkins, chauffeur to Lady Frances Derwent.

The Anglers’ Arms

Bobby puts up at the local inn The Anglers’ Arms, gets chatting to the landlord and barmaid who both tell him about mysterious goings-on up at ‘nursing home’ in the old Grange. They tell of a young woman who escaped, was tracked down and dragged back, screaming for help.

So Bobby goes up to the Grange for a midnight explore. He finds an unlocked door in the walls surrounding the grounds. Wandering along a path he comes across none other than the young woman depicted in the original photograph he found on Pritchard’s body! He recognises her, and identifies himself and she confirms all his worst fears by saying she fears for her life, and is terrified, but when he offers to rescue her, she shoos him away and runs back towards the house. At which point he hears other feet, men somewhere in the grounds, and does a runner.

The Grange

Next day Frankie phones him at the inn and tells him, in his guise as the chauffeur, that she wants to be driven to London. Roger half-asks to be given a lift into London and pays close attention to her response, and to Bobby when he turns up in the car – enough to make the reader suspect that he (Roger Bassington-ffrench) is onto her and her subterfuge.

Mrs Rivington

The Bassington-ffrenches had told Frankie that they met this chap Alan Carstairs when he was brought to dinner by the Rivingtons. So once arrived in London, and having pooled the results of their investigations so far, Bobby and Frankie look up Rivingtons in the phone directory and decide that Bobby should go to visit the poshest sounding ones. He will do this adopting another disguise, impersonating a solicitor from her father’s posh firm of solicitors, Messrs Spragge, Spragge, Jenkinson and Spragge.

(All these disguises, plus several more to come, and then the multiple disguises which turn out to be central to the whole plot, make the thing feel more and more like a pantomime or fairy story.)

With wild improbability the first household Bobby tries, where he is admitted by a parlour maid to see a Mrs Rivington, turns out to be exactly the right one. Yes, it was they who took Carstairs down for dinner with the Bassington-ffrenches where Carstairs asked a lot of questions about a chap in the neighbourhood, a Dr Nicholson… Aha! So things continue to focus in on Dr Nicholson and his so-called nursing home about which the locals have such a bad opinion and where Bobby met a terrified inmate!

Stop now

This summary takes us to about half way through the novel and, as with my other Christie summaries, I’m going to stop here while we’re still in the exploratory phase, while Frankie and Bobby are in the first half of their detective act and before there are any big revelations – so as not to spoil the plot for anyone planning to read it. But here’s a pretty strong clue:

‘All sorts of things happen at the Grange,’ she said. ‘Queer things. People come there to get better – and they don’t get better – they get worse.’ As she spoke, Bobby was aware of a glimpse into a strange, evil atmosphere. He felt something of the terror that had enveloped Moira Nicholson’s life for so long. (Chapter 18)

Or is it? Read the rest of this ludicrous but hugely entertaining novel to find out.

Cast

In order of appearance:

Robert ‘Bobby’ Jones – well-meaning upper-class twit of the Bertie Wooster type
Dr Thomas – who Bobby’s playing golf with when they discover the body: ‘a middle-aged man with grey hair and a red cheerful face’
The dying man – has a photo in his pocket
The stranger on the cliff – Roger Bassington-ffrench, claims he’s in the area looking for a house
The Reverend Thomas – Bobby’s disapproving father
Mrs Roberts – cook at the Vicarage
Lady Frances Derwent aka Frankie – daughter of Lord Marchington, lives up at Derwent Castle – frightfully posh and privileged: ‘Father gives me an allowance and I’ve got lots of houses to live in and clothes and maids and some hideous family jewels and a good deal of credits at shops’
Mr Leo Cayman – comes down to attend the coroner’s inquest with his wife…
Mrs Cayman – ‘her heavy make-up, her plucked eyebrows, those wide-apart eyes sunk in between folds of flesh till they looked like pig’s eyes, and her violent henna-tinted hair’
Mr Owen – estate agent from Wheeler & Owen, House and Estate Agents, with whom Bobby and Frankie check Roger Bassington-ffrench’s story that he was house hunting
Inspector Williams – local copper
Badger Beadon – dim young man with a stammer who persuades Bobby to go into the second-hand car business with him
Dr George Arbuthnot – gloomy young friend of Frankie’s who she persuades to help her with the fake crash ‘stunt’
butcher’s boy – cycling by and so helps give authenticity to the crash story
Mrs Sylvia Bassington-ffrench – mistress of Merroway Court far from Wales, near the village of Staverley in Hampshire – nervous and unhappy because of her husbands’ distraction / drug problem
Mr Henry Bassington-ffrench – ‘a big man, heavy jowled, with a kindly but rather abstracted air’; ‘now sit twitching nervously, his nerves obviously on edge, now sunk in an abstraction from which it was impossible to rouse him’; ‘With the thought of morphia suddenly the explanation of Henry Bassington-ffrench’s peculiar eyes came to her, with their pin-point pupils. Was Henry Bassington-ffrench a drug fiend?’
Tommy Bassington-ffrench – their boisterous 7-year-old son
their butler
Roger Bassington-ffrench – Henry’s handsome brother i.e. Sylvia’s brother-in-law, ‘a tall, slender young man of something over thirty with very pleasant eyes’
Dr Jasper Nicholson – head of a new nursing home set up in the old Grange, only 3 or 4 miles from the Bassington-ffrench place at Merroway Court – ‘a big man with a manner that suggested great reserves of power. His speech was slow, on the whole he said very little, but contrived somehow to make every word sound significant’
Moira Nicholson – small and attractive and absolutely terrified of her husband who she’s convinced is trying to murder her
Thomas Askew – landlord of the local pub, the Anglers’ Arms, where Bobby stays for a few nights while he’s pretending to be Frankie’s chauffeur
Mrs Edith Rivington – posh lady living in Tite Street, London who Frankie and Bobby track down and who tells them she knew Alan Carstairs the traveller, and took him down to the Bassington-ffrench place for dinner

After my summary stops

Inspector Hammond – copper in Chipping Somerton
John Savage – millionaire who (allegedly) made a will leaving his fortune to Mrs Rose Templeton then, depressed by a medical diagnosis of cancer, killed himself with an overdose
Mr Elford – lawyer who drew up John Savage’s will
Rose Chudleigh – cook at Tudor Cottage who witnessed John Savage’s will – ‘a bovine-looking woman of ample proportions, with fish-like eyes and every indication of adenoids’
Albert Mere – gardener, who also witnessed the will (now deceased)
Gladys – parlourmaid to Mrs Templeton, who discovered John Savage dead in bed

Books and films and plays

As usual in any Christie novel, there are knowing references to the genre of detective stories and to the clichés of the genre as found in books and novels.

‘I mean, it isn’t like – “Tell Gladys I always loved her”, or “The will is in the walnut bureau”, or any of the proper romantic Last Words there are in books.’ (Chapter 5)

‘Oh! but murderers are always frightfully rash. The more murders they do, the more murders they want to do.’
‘Like The Third Bloodstain,’ said Bobby, remembering one of his favourite works of fiction.
(And the premise of Christie’s entire novel, ‘Murder is Easy’ – Chapter 7)

Frightfully sweet of Frankie to bring him all these flowers, and of course they were lovely, but he wished it had occurred to her to bring him a few detective stories instead. He cast his eye over the table beside him. There was a novel of Ouida’s and a copy of ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’ and last week’s Marchbolt Weekly Times. He picked up ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’. After five minutes he put it down. To a mind nourished on ‘The Third Bloodstain’, ‘The Case of the Murdered Archduke’ and ‘The Strange Adventure of the Florentine Dagger’, ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’ lacked pep.
(Chapter 7)

Also, I wonder whether Christie wrote a novel which didn’t include at least one tip of the hat to the most famous detective of them all, Mr Holmes.

‘The thing is – what to do next,’ she said. ‘It seems to me we’ve got three angles of attack.’
‘Go on, Sherlock.’
(Chapter 8)

As I’ve mentioned, these references do several things. Far from guiltily acknowledging the novels’ indebtedness to various detective story tropes, they emphasise them, and so actively emphasise the story’s artificiality and bookishness.

‘Your hands are more loosely tied than mine. Let’s see if I can get them undone with my teeth.’ The next five minutes were spent in a struggle that did credit to Bobby’s dentist.
‘Extraordinary how easy these things sound in books,’ he panted. ‘I don’t believe I’m making the slightest impression.’
(Chapter 28)

This does at least two things: 1) It loosens the text’s relation to reality. I mean the heightening of the artificiality brings the stories closer to melodrama and panto and so makes you less likely to hold them to strict standards of verisimilitude.

2) And (I appreciate this may be another way of rephrasing point 1) they make you more prepared to believe utter tosh, preposterous coincidences, outrageous accidents and lucky breaks. They all transport you into the world of Faerie. Towards the end of the narrative, the increasingly mad, helter-skelter speed of events reminds the characters (and the reader) of some kind of mad fantasy.

‘Good,’ said Bobby. ‘Let’s take an air taxi.’
The whole proceedings were beginning to take on the fantastic character of a dream.
(Chapter 33)

Or, indeed, Hollywood.

‘It was rather fun seeing you all get worked up about Nicholson. He’s a harmless old ass, but he does look exactly like a scientific super-criminal on the films.’
(Chapter 30)

As it happens, this novel contains more references to plays and drama than any of the others I’ve read and at one point the characters reflect at length on the fact that they seem to be caught in someone else’s play.

‘Isn’t it odd?’ she said. ‘We seem, somehow, to have got in between the covers of a book. We’re in the middle of someone else’s story. It’s a frightfully queer feeling.’
‘I know what you mean,’ said Bobby. ‘There is something rather uncanny about it. I should call it a play rather than a book. It’s as though we’d walked on to the stage in the middle of the second act and we haven’t really got parts in the play at all, but we have to pretend, and what makes it so frightfully hard is that we haven’t the faintest idea what the first act was about.’
Frankie nodded eagerly.
‘I’m not even so sure it’s the second act – I think it’s more like the third. Bobby, I’m sure we’ve got to go back a long way… And we’ve got to be quick because I fancy the play is frightfully near the final curtain.’
(Chapter 20)

Actually there were another 15 chapters to go, but you get the idea. It comes as no surprise that when the baddy is revealed, he writes a long letter explaining every detail of the plot, and merrily signs himself:

‘Your affectionate enemy, the bold, bad villain of the piece…’ (Chapter 34)

If it hadn’t already, with this final flourish the novel transforms itself into pure panto. But by this stage of the novel, all those references to corny detective novels, movie clichés and stage melodramas have softened us up so much that we don’t care. And that’s at least part of their function.

Credit

‘Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1934 by the Collins Crime Club.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1930s reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on July 30, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Tagged Agatha Christie, Alan Carstairs, Albert Mere, Alex Pritchard, Badger Beadon, Bassington-ffrench, Bobby, Bobby Jones, Chipping Somerton, Collins Crime Club, Derwent Castle, detective novel, detective story, Dope, Dr George Arbuthnot, Dr Jasper Nicholson, Dr Nicholson, Dr Thomas, drug addiction, Earl of Marchington, Edith Rivington, Edward Hawkins, Frankie, Frankie Derwent, George Arbuthnot, Gladys, golf, Hampshire, Henry Bassington-ffrench, Inspector Hammond, John Savage, Lady Frances Derwent, Leo Cayman, London, Marchbolt, Marchbolt Weekly Times, Merroway Court, Moira Nicholson, morphia, Mr Elford, Mr Owen, Mrs Cayman, Mrs Roberts, Mrs Sylvia Bassington-ffrench, Murder Mystery, Murder on the Orient Express, narrative, novel, Robert Jones, Roger Bassington-ffrench, Rose Chudleigh, Sherlock, Siam, Spragge Spragge Jenkinson and Spragge, Staverley, Sylvia, Talbot, The Anglers' Arms, The Grange, the Reverend Thomas, the Rivingtons, Thomas Askew, Tite Street, Tommy Bassington-ffrench, Tudor Cottage, Wheeler and Owen, Why Didn't They Ask Evans?

Posted by Simon on July 30, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/07/30/why-didnt-they-ask-evans-agatha-christie/

The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie (1930)

‘My dear young man, you underestimate the detective instinct of village life. In St. Mary Mead everyone knows your most intimate affairs. There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.’
(The vicar, Leonard Clement, explaining village life to Lawrence Redding, the artist, Chapter 4)

‘You must understand that I heard this on the best authority.’ In St. Mary Mead the best authority is always somebody else’s servant.
(Clement’s droll sense of humour, Chapter 25)

‘Anyway, I don’t think Mr Raymond West is so frightfully clever as he pretends to be.’
‘Very few of us are,’ I said. (Chapter 25)

Introducing Miss Marple

This is the first Agatha Christie novel to feature Miss Jane Marple, who would go on to appear in 20 short stories and 11 further novels.

Miss Marple always sees everything. Gardening is as good as a smoke screen, and the habit of observing birds through powerful glasses can always be turned to account.
(Clement, the narrator)

‘Miss Marple may be mistaken.’
‘She never is. That kind of old cat is always right.’
(Griselda on Miss M.)

‘Confound the woman, she couldn’t know more about it if she had committed the murder herself.’ (Chief Constable Melchett)

‘I’m afraid that observing human nature for as long as I have done, one gets not to expect very much from it.’
(The lady herself)

One of the pleasures of this unusually long detective novel is watching Miss Marple grow into the character of ‘Miss Marple’, as Christie gets the bit between her teeth.

Leonard Clement

‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ is a first-person narrative told by Leonard ‘Len’ Clement, the vicar of a little village, St Mary Mead, in the fictional county of Downshire (Chapter 12). Christie obviously had fun striking what you could call a hesitant, mildly disapproving, vicarly tone right from the start.

It is difficult to know quite where to begin this story, but I have fixed my choice on a certain Wednesday at luncheon at the Vicarage. (Opening sentence)

It’s this reasonable, educated but self-deprecating tone and personality which dominate and define the text.

When I got back to the Vicarage I was my usual faded, indeterminate self… (Chapter 26)

‘Faded, indeterminate’ Clement is married to Griselda, younger than him, attractive but flirtatiously playful.

Griselda is nearly twenty years younger than myself. She is most distractingly pretty and quite incapable of taking anything seriously. She is incompetent in every way, and extremely trying to live with. She treats the parish as a kind of huge joke arranged for her amusement. I have endeavoured to form her mind and failed. (Chapter 1)

Years later, Griselda remains proud of seducing the vicar in just 24 hours:

‘I’m everything you most dislike and disapprove of, and yet you couldn’t withstand me!… I make you frightfully uncomfortable and stir you up the wrong way the whole time, and yet you adore me madly.’ (Chapter 1)

Unimpressed with Clement’s staidness and devotion to duty etc, she playfully threatens him with having an affair with the young artist, Lawrence Redding, who’s come to the village and set up his studio in a shed in the vicarage’s grounds, and is painting a portrait of Griselda.

‘You don’t deserve me. You really don’t. I’ll have an affair with the artist. I will — really and truly. And then think of the scandal in the parish.’ (Chapter 1)

Living with Clement and Griselda are his 16-year-old nephew, Dennis, and their brusque and incompetent maid, Mary.

It is repeatedly stated how innocent and unworldly Clement is, so much so that I did wonder whether this was a blind and whether there would turn out to be the same kind of twist as in ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’.

‘Ah! well, sir,’ he said tolerantly, ‘you’re a clergyman. You don’t know half of what goes on.’
(Chapter 17)

‘She has been ill,’ I said mildly.
‘Ill? Fiddlesticks. You’re too unworldly, Mr Clement.’
(Chapter 25)

The murderee

In Chapter 5 Clement comes home to discover the loud and unpopular Colonel Protheroe dead in his (Clement’s) study, shot through the back of the head as he sat at his (Clement’s) writing desk writing a note. Protheroe is the lord of the manor, local magistrate, who lived up at the Old Hall with his daughter, Lettice, and second wife, Anne, and is notorious for his loud-mouthed, boorish insensitivity. So who shot him? And why?

The cast

In the first four chapters leading up to the murder, Christie introduces an impressive number of characters and gives at least five of them plausible motives for committing the murder. Part of this is done by a tea party Griselda arranges for the four village gossips (or ‘old cats’ as Miss Cram calls them), four old ladies one of whom is Miss Marple and from whom she is, to begin with, indistinguishable. Only slowly but steadily does she emerge as a kind of super-sleuth in his own right.

Here’s a complete list of characters. I’ve added M for motive to the characters with obvious motives to kill Colonel Protheroe.

Leonard Clement the vicar – the modest, disapproving narrator; ‘Nobody would suspect you of anything, darling,’ said Griselda. ‘You’re so transparently above suspicion’
Griselda – Clement’s carefree, playful young wife, who enjoys teasing Clement that she’s being wooed by Lawrence Redding the painter who’s doing her portrait
Dennis – Clement’s 16-year-old schoolboy nephew, jokey and playful
Mary Adams – their rude maid, a notoriously bad cook
Hawes – the new curate, only arrived three weeks ago (suspicious!), has High Church views and fasts on Fridays
Colonel Lucius Protheroe – grumpy local squire and JP, opponent of ritual in church (so opposed to Hawes), ‘the kind of man who enjoys making a fuss on every conceivable occasion’. He disapproves of his daughter Lettice posing for the young artist Lawrence Redding in just her bathing suit. According to Griselda both his wife and his daughter are fed up to the back teeth with him. In fact his first wife couldn’t bear him and ran off. As local magistrate he has just sentenced 3 poachers, one of whom swore vengeance.
Lettice Protheroe – ‘a pretty girl, very tall and fair and completely vague’. She casually implicates herself when she tells Clement: ‘If only I had some money I’d go away, but without it I can’t. If only father would be decent and die… if he doesn’t want me to want him to die, he shouldn’t be so horrible over money.’ Lettice, in her vague, wishy-washy way, thinks she’s in love with the artist Lawrence Redding. M
Mrs Ann Protheroe, the Colonel’s second wife and Lettice’s step-mother. Protheroe married her five years ago. Clement is astonished to enter the artist’s studio one afternoon to discover her in a passionate embrace with the artist Redding. He backs out and a few minutes later she comes to his study to apologise but explain that she’s living a life of perfect misery with Protheroe and is desperate for change. Clement comments: ‘She impressed me now as a very desperate woman, the kind of woman who would stick at nothing once her emotions were aroused. And she was desperately, wildly, madly in love with Lawrence Redding, a man several years younger than herself.’ M
Lawrence Redding – handsome 30-year-old artist visiting the village and staying in the vicarage grounds. After dinner at the Vicarage he tells Clement he is sincerely in love with Ann Protheroe, he wants to rescue her from her tyrant husband, and wishes Protheroe were dead: ‘Oh! I didn’t mean I was going to stick him in the back with a knife, though I’d offer my best thanks to anyone else who did so…’ M
Mrs Price Ridley – one of the village’s gossipy old ladies, ‘a devout and fussy member of my congregation’
- Clara, her maid, aged 19
Miss Wetherby – another old lady, ‘a mixture of vinegar and gush’
Miss Hartnell – another old lady, ‘weather-beaten and jolly and much dreaded by the poor’. ‘It is difficult with Miss Hartnell to know where narrative ends and vituperation begins.’
Miss Marple – fourth of the quartet of village ladies, but Clement realises she is sharper than the others and will, of course, go on to a career in the later books and stories. According to Clement she is ‘a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner’. According to ever-critical Griselda, ‘that terrible Miss Marple’ is ‘the worst cat in the village’. Clement admits that she spies on everyone under cover of birdwatching.
Mrs Estelle Lestrange – an outsider, recently arrived in the village, taken a house for the summer, bit mysterious, ‘a cultured woman who knew something of Church history and architecture’
- ‘She was a very tall woman. Her hair was gold with a tinge of red in it. Her eyebrows and eyelashes were dark, whether by art or by nature I could not decide. If she was, as I thought, made up, it was done very artistically. There was something Sphinxlike about her face when it was in repose and she had the most curious eyes I have ever seen — they were almost golden in shade’
- ‘She was a curious woman — a woman of very strong magnetic charm’
Estelle has some kind of dark secret which she can’t bring herself to reveal to Clement (‘No, I don’t think anyone can help me. But thank you for offering to do so’), who goes away from a visit to her rented cottage thinking: ‘This woman would stick at nothing’. And then we learn that she visited the Colonel on a mysterious errand the day before the murder. Will she turn out to have some hidden connection with Protheroe? M
Dr Stone – a well-known archæologist who has recently come to stay at the Blue Boar while he superintends the excavation of an ancient barrow situated on Colonel Protheroe’s property. A ‘bald-headed dull old man’, ‘He was a little man. His head was round and bald, his face was round and rosy, and he beamed at you through very strong glasses he is known to have had a big argument with Protheroe about something to do with his project. Does that make him a suspect? M
Dr Stone’s secretary, Miss Gladys Cram – ‘Miss Cram is a healthy young woman of twenty-five, noisy in manner, with a high colour, fine animal spirits and a mouth that always seems to have more than its full share of teeth’. The old ladies (above) disapprove of an unmarried young woman staying in the same inn (the Blue Boar) as Dr Stone, who is married but visiting without his wife. Could they be having an affair? If Stone had anything to do with Protheroe’s death, would Miss Cram protect him?
Dr Haydock – local GP, ‘a good fellow, a big, fine, strapping man with an honest, rugged face’, called by Clement as soon as the latter discovers the body in his study.
Constable Hurst – village policeman, telephoned by Dr Haydock as soon as the latter ascertains that Protheroe is dead.
Inspector Slack – ‘a dark man, restless and energetic in manner, with black eyes that snapped ceaselessly.’ ‘His manner was rude and overbearing in the extreme.’ A ‘conceited ass’ according to Dr Haydock.
Colonel Melchett – Chief Constable of the county, ‘a dapper little man with a habit of snorting suddenly and unexpectedly. He has red hair and rather keen bright blue eyes.’ Patronising: ‘There’s a lot of talk. Too many women in this part of the world.’
Archer – the poacher Protheroe sentenced to jail and who threatened him with revenge. He has been walking out with Clement’s slovenly maid, Mary. This means that she, the maid Mary, joins the list of possible suspects. M
Manning – Protheroe’s chauffeur, ‘a nice lad, not more than twenty-five or six years of age’
Dr Roberts – the coroner
Cherubim – the village chemist
Staff at Old Hall:
- Mrs Simmons – the housekeeper
- Mrs Pratt – the cook
- Rose – a main, ‘a pretty girl of twenty-five’
- Gladys – the kitchenmaid
Mrs Sadler — Hawes’s landlady

As you can see, some are Direct Suspects, having explicitly stated they want Protheroe out of the way, being: his daughter who wants his money; his wife who finds living with him unbearable; Redding who wants him out of the way so he can pursue his affair with Ann Protheroe.

Could Dr Stone be added to this list because of the alleged row he had with Protheroe? He’s not in the same category as the Direct Suspects.

Then there are the Indirect Suspects who have no known connection with Protheroe but are suspicious presences who’ve been behaving oddly, of whom Mrs Lestrange is the leading example.

Details

The reader notices how, in the first four chapters, Christie introduces and sketches an impressive number of characters. Less obvious is the way she introduces lots of circumstantial details. What happens in the novel – as in life, I imagine – is that the moment the murder is discovered, scores of tiny details which had up until that moment been just part of the forgettable stuff of everyday life, suddenly become immensely important.

For example, Protheroe had an appointment to meet the vicar at 6.15 or so but they’d delayed their appointment while chatting in the village high street. Could someone have overheard? Just before 6, Clement was called away to attend Abbott, a parishioner who was dying but when he got there he found the man well, and none of his household had made the call? So who did, presumably to get him away from the vicarage so they could commit the crime?

Similarly, the clock on the study table was knocked over, smashed and stopped at the moment of death, frozen at 6.22pm. But as Clement tries to tell the Inspector, he always keeps it set 15 minutes too fast in a bid to outwit his own tardiness. So much is made of the time and this discrepancy, that I’d bet it turns out to be a vital clue.

And at dinner the evening before, conversation had turned to the subject of guns and Redding the artist had admitted to owning a .25 Mauser pistol, a souvenir from the war. So when the police identify the bullet which killed Protheroe as coming from a Mauser .25 it seems an open and shut case. Especially as in the few minutes before he returned to the vicarage, Clement had encountered Redding just outside the building looking white as a sheet, talking and behaving oddly, then running off.

Next morning everyone discovers that later the evening of the crime, at 10pm, Redding turned himself into the police, handed over the gun and confessed that he did it. So he was charged and locked up, news which travels like wildfire through the village.

But the reader of any detective story knows this is too simple and obvious – and also too early in the story: the real motive is likely to be much more convoluted and the real killer a well-hidden secret.

Anyway, as with my other Christie reviews, I’ll stop my summary here because it’s always at this point that her detective stories metamorphose from a description of events into an increasingly complicated labyrinth of competing theories. Not only do the police have theories about whodunnit, but so do all the main characters – Miss Marple starts her involvement by telling an astonished Clement she can think of no fewer than seven suspects:

‘Quite that, I should think,’ said Miss Marple absently. ‘I expect every one of us suspects someone different.’ (Chapter 26)

And the plot is carefully constructed so that over the next 200 pages or so, a steady trickle of new clues and revelations are released, which disprove some theories, support others, or provide evidence for entirely new ones. As a disgruntled Inspector Slack says, in a phrase which could be the motto of all her books:

‘You can’t get definite proof of anything in this crime! It’s theory, theory, theory.’ (Chapter 25)

And Christie has her characters themselves comment on the depth and complexity of the thing:

‘Do you know, Clement,’ [Colonel Melchett] said suddenly, ‘I’ve a feeling that this is going to turn out a much more intricate and difficult business than any of us think. Dash it all, there’s something behind it.’ (Chapter 12)

And:

‘You know,’ I said to Griselda, ‘I don’t feel we are really at the end of this case yet.’
‘You mean not till someone has really been arrested?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean that. I mean that there are ramifications, under-currents, that we know nothing about. There are a whole lot of things to clear up before we get at the truth.’ (Chapter 22)

And:

‘To tell you the truth,’ I said, as I fetched her shawl, ‘the whole thing seems to me a bewildering maze.’ (Chapter 26)

Right up till the final revelation which overthrows the whole lot of them in a dazzling denouement.

Maps

To help the reader the text contains a map of the village and a sketch of the vicarage, just some of the fleet of details the narrative is packed with.

Map of St Mary Meads showing the main houses, with the Vicarage slap bang in the middle

And:

Interior of the vicar’s house

It is an entertainment designed to puzzle, tease and amuse the reader. Trying to summarise these convolutions and complexities would be a fool’s errand.

Miss Marple’s approach

Slowly at first, Miss Marple begins to share, in a quiet and understated way, her thoughts about the murder which, as they accumulate through the story, grow into a worldview and a methodology.

Motive and opportunity The basics of all detective work.

‘Motive and opportunity.’ (Chapter 30)

All the facts must be accounted for If anything is not accounted for by your theory, pause it.

‘I know, dear Mr Clement, that there are many ways we prefer to look at things. But one must actually take facts as they are, must one not? And it does not seem to me that the facts bear the interpretation you put upon them.’ (Chapter 6)

‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that one must provide an explanation for everything. Each thing has got to be explained away satisfactorily. If you have a theory that fits every fact — well, then, it must be the right one. But that’s extremely difficult.’ (Chapter 26)

‘One’s own belief — even so strong as to amount to knowledge — is not the same as proof. And unless one has an explanation that will fit all the facts (as I was saying to dear Mr Clement this evening) one cannot advance it with any real conviction.’ (Chapter 30)

‘I thought you were going to say something, my dear. And it is often so much better to let things develop on their own lines.’ (Chapter 6)

Suspect everyone Her spinster scepticism, or cynicism.

‘One never can be quite sure about anyone, can one? At least that’s what I’ve found.’ (Chapter 9)

‘Ah!’ said Miss Marple. ‘But I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little. What I say is, you really never know, do you?’ (Chapter 16)

‘But Mrs Clement was completely out of it,’ interrupted Melchett. ‘She returned by the 6.50 train.
‘That’s what she said,’ retorted Miss Marple. ‘One should never go by what people say.’ (Chapter 30)

Intuition

‘That is a very sound way of arriving at the truth. It’s really what people call intuition and make such a fuss about. Intuition is like reading a word without have to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. But a grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before.’ (Chapter 11)

Noticing details

They realised, you see, that I am a noticing kind of person… (Chapter 30)

I don’t know whether Miss Marple had any inkling of all this. Very probably she had. Few things are hidden from her. (Chapter 30)

‘It is,’ she said, ‘a Peculiar Thing. Another Peculiar Thing.’ (Chapter 21)

A phrase she repeats several times to describe noteworthy anomalies.

Becoming Miss Marple

On one level the entire novel is about her flexing her wings and growing into the role of ‘Miss Marple’. One by one, she overcomes the scepticism of the men, the vicar being the first to realise her qualities.

I stared at the old lady, feeling an increased respect for her mental powers. (Chapter 11)

I was silent, but I did not agree with him. I was quite sure that Anne Protheroe had had no pistol with her since Miss Marple had said so. Miss Marple is not the type of elderly lady who makes mistakes. She has got an uncanny knack of being always right. (Chapter 12)

For all her fragile appearance, Miss Marple is capable of holding her own with any policeman or Chief Constable in existence. (Chapter 9)

Now how did the woman know that I had been to visit Mrs Lestrange that afternoon? The way she always knows things is uncanny. (Chapter 16)

I have a poor sense of time myself (hence the keeping of my clock fast) and Miss Marple, I should say, has a very acute one. Her clocks keep time to the minute and she herself is rigidly punctual on every occasion. (Chapter 23)

In the art of seeing without being seen, Miss Marple had no rival… (Chapter 23)

Of all the ladies in my congregation, I consider her by far the shrewdest. Not only does she see and hear practically everything that goes on, but she draws amazingly neat and apposite deductions from the facts that come under her notice. (Chapter 26)

There is always some perfectly good and reasonable explanation for Miss Marple’s omniscience… (Chapter 26)

Others’ opinion:

REDDING: You know, old Miss Marple knows a thing or two.
CLEMENT: She is, I believe, rather unpopular on that account. (Chapter 19)

‘She has a powerful imagination and systematically thinks the worst of everyone.’
‘The typical elderly spinster, in fact,’ said Melchett, with a laugh. (Chapter 9)

And the way she deploys her Spinster Cynicism to comic effect against the pompous men.

‘I’m afraid there’s a lot of wickedness in the world. A nice honourable upright soldier like you doesn’t know about these things, Colonel Melchett.’ (Chapter 9)

Triumph

All leading to the final two chapters where Miss Marple turns out to have a sounder grasp of events, character and human psychology than all the male characters put together.

There was something fascinating in Miss Marple’s resumé of the case. She spoke with such certainty that we both felt that this way and in no other could the crime have been committed. (Chapter 30)

Reading her triumph over the pompous cops and obtuse vicar is deeply enjoyable, even thrilling. She triumphs and her character is a triumph. No wonder Christie realised she’d struck gold and would go on to develop the character at length over many years to come.

Sexism

It was a hundred years ago in a country unrecognisable from modern Britain, so you might wonder why I even bother collecting the examples of the male characters’ everyday sexism except that it’s easy and amusing. Bombastic Colonel Melchett is the chief offender:

‘There’s a lot of talk. Too many women in this part of the world.’ (Chapter 7)

‘Women never like fiddling about with firearms. Arsenic’s more in their line.’ (Chapter 12)

Then there’s rude, dismissive Inspector Slack:

‘Mrs Protheroe acted in an exactly similar fashion, remember, Slack.’
That’s different. She’s a woman, and women act in that silly way. I’m not saying she did it for a moment. She heard he was accused and she trumped up a story. I’m used to that sort of game. You wouldn’t believe the fool things I’ve known women do…’ (Chapter 11)

‘Women cause a lot of trouble,’ moralised the inspector. (Chapter 25)

Self-important Constable Hurst:

‘You can’t take any notice of what old ladies say. When they’ve seen something curious, and are waiting all eager like, why, time simply flies for them. And anyway, no lady knows anything about time.’ (Chapter 23)

Even the vicar narrator, otherwise so sympathetic to everyone:

Melchett is a wise man. He knows that when it is a question of an irate middle-aged lady, there is only one thing to be done — to listen to her. When she has said all that she wants to say, there is a chance that she will listen to you. (Chapter 23)

‘Why,” I said, ‘I remember at the time Mrs Protheroe said it wasn’t like her husband’s handwriting at all, and I took no notice.’
‘Really?’
‘I thought it one of those silly remarks women will make.’ (Chapter 27)

Miss Marple herself makes a contribution:

‘My dear Colonel Melchett, you know what young women are nowadays. Not ashamed to show exactly how the creator made them.’ (Chapter 9)

Griselda:

‘I do hate old women — they tell you about their bad legs and sometimes insist on showing them to you.’ (Chapter 17)

Two points. 1) Whenever I read this kind of thing, it reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s powerful feminist tract Three Guineas which gathers an impressive array of evidence testifying to the universality of chauvinist, sexist, patronising, patriarchal attitudes throughout British society.

2) Then again, the entire book is a tissue of clichés and stereotypes (the handsome young artist, the reactionary old colonel, the lonely wife, the alienated daughter, the otherworldly vicar, the conservative chief constable – ‘all this namby-pambyism annoys me. I’m a plain man’ – and so on) so that most of the characters very much espouse, approve and express the received ideas of the day.

a) This makes them recognisable and assimilable by the great majority of readers i.e. they’re not high-falutin’ artists and psychological experimenters like the characters in Joyce or Lawrence or Woolf.

b) At a deeper level, the detective story as a genre requires most if not all of its characters to be stereotyped and predictable in order to function: if they were all unpredictable the thing would be as chaotic and unreadable as real life actually is; but if the majority of the characters are staid, recognisable and predictable it allows the reader to assimilate them, to register them and their values and be alert to the discrepancies and oddities which characterise real clues and (might) indicate the identity of the murderer.

Summary of sexism

‘They’re not doing so badly,’ I said. ‘One of them, at all events, thinks she’s got there.’
‘Our friend, Miss Marple, eh?’
‘Our friend, Miss Marple.’
‘Women like that always think they know everything,’ said Colonel Melchett.
(Chapter 27)

Colonel Melchett’s remark contains the implicit assumption that only men are allowed to think they know everything. Except that in this case, Miss Marple does know everything. She is The Spinster’s Revenge against the everyday chauvinism of men like Colonel Melchett.

Cats

A word means how it is used. Christie is fond of using ‘cat’ to mean gossiping, bitchy woman.

‘I rather like Miss Marple,’ I said. ‘She has, at least, a sense of humour.’
‘She’s the worst cat in the village,’ said Griselda. (Chapter 1)

‘Nasty old cat,’ said Griselda, as soon as the door was closed. (Chapter 3)

CLEMENT: Miss Marple may be mistaken.
GRISELDA: She never is. That kind of old cat is always right. (Chapter 3)

MISS CRAM: A girl wants a bit of life out of office hours, and except for you, Mrs Clement, who is there in the place to talk to except a lot of old cats? (Chapter 10)

‘She’d make a very good mannequin,’ said Griselda. ‘She’s got such a lovely figure.’ There’s nothing of the cat about Griselda. (Chapter 10)

‘Serve the old cat right,’ he [Dennis] exclaimed. ‘She’s got the worst tongue in the place.’ (Chapter 14)

MISS CRAM: Just because one of these gossiping old cats has nothing better to do than look out of her window all night you go and pitch upon me. (Chapter 25)

Shot

While I’m in the business of collecting quotes to make points, I noticed how Christie strategically threads the word ‘shot’ throughout the narrative. Obviously it mostly appears in the literal sense, when referring to the shot that killed Colonel Protheroes – but on a few other occasions it’s slipped in in a metaphorical sense, a few times before the murder takes place to anticipate it and a few times afterwards, giving a slight echoing, ringing repetition, which keeps the idea and sound of the one gunshot subliminally in the reader’s mind.

Proleptic (looking forward):

A ribald rhyme concocted by Dennis shot through my head. (Chapter 2)

That last Parthian shot went home. (Chapter 2)

Analeptic (looking back):

He was pacing up and down nervously, and when I entered the room he started as though he had been shot. (Chapter 24)

Bookish

Every Christie novel I’ve read so far contains multiple ironic, knowing references to the genre the story is in, detective stories:

‘It’s so mysterious, isn’t it, her arriving like this and taking a house down here, and hardly every going outside it? Makes one think of detective stories. You know — “Who was she, the mysterious woman with the pale, beautiful face? What was her past history? Nobody knew. There was something faintly sinister about her.” I believe Dr Haydock knows something about her.’
‘You read too many detective stories, Griselda,’ I observed mildly.
(Chapter 1)

And:

‘If this were only a book,’ he [Lawrence] said gloomily, ‘the old man [Protheroe] would die — and a good riddance to everybody.’ (Chapter 4)

And:

‘I see,’ I said, ‘that you are that favourite character of fiction, the amateur detective. I don’t know that they really hold their own with the professional in real life.’ (Chapter 16)

And:

‘You’ve been reading G. K. Chesterton,’ I said, and Lawrence did not deny it. (Chapter 16)

And:

‘I wonder,’ I said. ‘I think each one of us in his secret heart fancies himself as Sherlock Homes.’ (Chapter 26)

And:

‘I have been reading a lot of American detective stories from the library lately,’ said Miss Marple, ‘hoping to find them helpful.’ (Chapter 27)

And:

‘There is, I believe, an invention called a Maxim silencer. So I gather from detective stories.’ (Chapter 30)

And:

GRISELDA: I was — well, absolutely silly about him [Redding] at one time. I don’t mean I wrote him compromising letters or anything idiotic like they do in books. But I was rather keen on him once. (Chapter 24)

And:

‘I know that in books it is always the most unlikely person. But I never find that rule applies in real life.’ (Chapter 31)

The excitable schoolboy Dennis is a special case:

At Dennis’s age a detective story is one of the best things in life, and to find a real detective story, complete with corpse, waiting on one’s own front doorstep, so to speak, is bound to send a healthy-minded boy into the seventh heaven of enjoyment. (Chapter 6)

So when a murder mystery occurs right on his doorstep, Dennis is delighted:

‘Fancy being right on the spot in a murder case,’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve always wanted to be right in the midst of one.’ (Chapter 6)

And sets off with a magnifying glass to look for clues which he helpfully gives to Inspector Slack who politely thanks him, pockets them and forgets all about them.

This chimes with the gleeful delight of the two children in ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’ who are thrilled to bits that a real-life murder has been committed at their house. This is a bit more profound than the simple comedy: it’s as if every novel contains a reminder that, although a murder is a tragedy to the victim and those closest to him or her, at even a small remove it’s an exciting relief from routine and boredom, and at one more remove, in the newspapers or other media, it’s just one more item in the news.

All these bookish references are trumped when Miss M’s nephew, Mr Raymond West, arrives on a visit and turns out to be a famous writer.

‘Raymond gets up very late — I think writers often do. He writes very clever books, I believe, though people are not really nearly so unpleasant as he makes out. Clever young men know so little of life, don’t you think?’ (Chapter 17)

The odd thing about him is how little part he plays in the story – after a few scenes and bits of dialogue he more or less disappears. Maybe an indication that Christie introduced just a few more characters, complications and red herrings than the story could actually bear. Who cares? It’s the book’s fecundity, its sense of being full to the brim and then overflowing with characters and sub-plots which makes it so enjoyable.

Butlers

I imagine many scholars will have written papers about Christie’s butlers, valets and servants, such as Poirot’s man, George or the three different butlers in ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’. They are always a comic joy.

A very correct butler opened the door, with just the right amount of gloom in his bearing.
(Chapter 8)

Last word

Last word goes to the irrepressible Miss Marple. Here she is talking to the vicar narrator:

‘I remember a saying of my Great Aunt Fanny’s. I was sixteen at the time and thought it particularly foolish.’
‘Yes?’ I inquired.
‘She used to say: “The young people think the old people are fools; but the old people know the young people are fools!”‘
(Chapter 31)

Credit

‘The Murder at the Vicarage’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in 1930.

Related reviews

1930s reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on July 18, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Posted by Simon on July 18, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/07/18/the-murder-at-the-vicarage-agatha-christie/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (84)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (780)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (64)
- French literature (52)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (42)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Gladys

Blandings Castle and Elsewhere by P.G. Wodehouse

1. The Custody of the Pumpkin (1924)

2. Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best (1926)

3. Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey (1927)

Company for Gertrude

The Go-getter (1931)

Lord Emsworth and the Girl Friend

Cast

Napoleon

The modern girl

Move fast and break things

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Taken at the Flood by Agatha Christie (1948)

1. Gordon Cloade

Marriage and death

Social history

Heath and Vale

2. Robert Underhay

3. Enter Enoch Arden* the blackmailer

*Explanation of Enoch Arden

Poirot

The murder

Cast

Poirot’s foreignness

The impoverishment of the rentier class

Tax

Forms

General decay

After the war

Self-referentiality

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)

The setup

Cast

On the flight

Afterwards

In Paris

Back in England, at Horbury Chase

In London

Bookish

Poirot’s method

Japp’s cockneyisms

Japp’s role

Poirot’s OCD

Poirot’s comic English

1930s locutions

Poirot explains a fundamental human need

The press

Drugs and drug addicts

Christie’s cats

Meals

Muddle

‘Every woman adores a fascist’ (Sylvia Plath)

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? by Agatha Christie (1934)

Christie’s freestanding novels

Plot summary

Golf

The photo and last words

Playing the organ

Newspaper account and different photo

The inquest

Enter Frankie

Two odd events

The duo investigate

The staged car crash

Introducing Alan Carstairs

Dope

Dinner with Dr Nicholson