I admire Christie’s restless experimentalism, each new novel playing with the format of detective story or crime novel. This one rotates around a murder, of course, but in a clever way which manages to feel just original enough to be entertaining. Certainly her characters are stock types and stereotypes but it’s this, along with the simplicity of her psychology, with her nostalgically posh upper-middle-class characters, and the immense readability of her artfully simple prose, which makes her so addictive. It’s certainly not the plots – even the ones which start out plausibly enough, end in a welter of improbabilities and absurdity, and then the incongruously happy endings (generally at least one couple involved in all the mayhem get engaged or actually marry).

The death of Rosemary Barton

The idea is that the pretty socialite Rosemary Marle married the much older and boring George Barton. A year into her marriage, she died suddenly at her own birthday party, a dinner held at the posh Luxembourg hotel. She went blue in the face and fell forward onto the table, frothing at the mouth. The cops and the coroner said it was suicide by poison brought on by depression after a bout of flu. But since the title of the book is ‘Sparkling Cyanide’ and it’s an Agatha Christie novel, the reader doesn’t believe this for a second.

Indeed it comes as no surprise to learn that, about a year later, Rosemary’s widower, George Barton, receives several anonymous letters claiming Rosemary didn’t commit suicide, she was murdered! Well, who’d have thought it!

George wanders about looking distraught for months but then breaks down and shows these anonymous letters to Rosemary’s younger, unmarried sister, Iris, who went to live with Rosemary and George in their big posh London house after the Marle sisters’ mother (Viola) died a few years earlier. There she joins a household which includes George’s efficient secretary, Ruth Lessing, and a chaperon brought in for her, Aunt Lucilla, each of these characters enjoyably fleshed out, as are the key figures from Rosemary’s past, namely a likely lad, young Anthony Browne, who liked hanging round with her, and an up-and-coming politician, Stephen Farraday, with his posh wife, Lady Alexandra.

Now at the ill-fated birthday dinner there were seven people at the table and George and Iris realise with horror that, if the letters are correct and Rosemary was murdered, then one of the guests must have murdered Rosemary. (Why? why couldn’t the poison have been administered before the meal, or slipped into her drink by a waiter working for someone else entirely? Don’t ask inconvenient questions.)

No, the pleasure doesn’t come from the supposed puzzle at the heart of this murder mystery but from the speed and skill with which Christie summons up her characteristically large cast, and quickly, skilfully paints in all the characters, their murky backstories and their convoluted relations with each other.

Thus part 1 of the book is ‘cleverly’ divided into six sections or chapters, each one devoted to one of the key players and their thoughts and memories of Rosemary. One by one we learn that each of them had powerful motives for murdering pretty, empty-headed Rosemary. This is, of course, par for the course, part of the convention, an absolutely standard aspect of this kind of novel, in which everyone is carefully provided with an elaborate set of motives for wanting to bump off the murdered person and the challenge for the reader who can be bothered is to try and figure out whodunnit before everything is revealed in the last ten pages.

The suspects

1. Her sister, Iris Marle, claims to have loved Rosemary, though the age difference (six years) meant they led very different lives. Only casually does the fact slip out that, when Rosemary died, Iris inherited her sizeable fortune (itself a legacy from an ‘Uncle Paul’ who left it to their mother). The first question the police ask is, Who stands to benefit from a murder, and in this case it is definitely Iris.

2. George Barton’s secretary, Ruth Lessing, hated Rosemary because she was so casually glamorous and successful and didn’t give a damn about her (Ruth):

In that moment Ruth Lessing knew that she hated Rosemary Barton. Hated her for being rich and beautiful and careless and brainless. (p.46)

3. Playboy Anthony Browne threatened Rosemary when she reveals she knows that this is not his real name, that he’s really called Tony Morelli and spent some time in prison. The conversation in which she playfully reveals this turns nasty and he threatens her not to tell anyone.

His voice grew stern. ‘Look here, Rosemary, this is dangerous. You don’t want your lovely face carved up, do you? There are people who don’t stick at a little thing like ruining a girl’s beauty. And there’s such a thing as being bumped off. It doesn’t only happen in books and films. It happens in real life, too.’
‘Are you threatening me, Tony?’
‘Warning you.’ (p.52)

4. We then discover that up-and-coming politician Stephen Farraday had a passionate affair with Rosemary but eventually tired of her and then began to think of her as a liability, panicking that she will reveal the affair to their respective spouses and ruin his career.

‘It’s a pity,’ he thought grimly, ‘that we don’t live in the days of the Borgias…’ A glass of poisoned champagne was about the only thing that would keep Rosemary quiet. Yes, he had actually thought that. Cyanide of potassium in her champagne glass… (p.76)

Pretty damning, eh?

5. Farraday naively thinks he hid the affair from his wife, posh Lady Alexandra Hayle, third daughter of the rich, famous and influential Earl of Kidderminster, but she knew all about it from day one, knew her husband was sleeping with Rosemary, and hated her for it:

She hated Rosemary Barton. If thoughts could kill, she would have killed her. But thoughts do not kill – Thoughts are not enough… (p.82)

6. Lastly, Rosemary’s husband, boring reliable George Barton, he too came to realise she was having an affair and was incandescent with rage:

He’d like to choke the life out of her! He’d like to murder the fellow in cold blood… (p.86)

So there you have it. The first 90 or so pages consist of a chapter apiece to each of these characters, sketching out all too clearly why each of the six had compelling motives to do the deed. The remaining 170 pages, divided into two more distinct parts, take us on an entertaining journey as we delve deeper and deeper into the suspects’ backstories, plus scenes in which they meet and talk among themselves, eyeing each other like dogs sniffing each other’s bottoms.

Enter Colonel Race

Obviously there are scores of minor events which shed new light on this or that person’s suspectability or are designed to thicken the plot – events such as George deciding he wants to buy a property in the country (Little Priors) which just happens to border on the Farradays’ lovely country estate. Or Anthony Brown telling Iris he loves her and wants to marry her.

But the really big thing that happens in part two is the advent of Colonel Race. Race is one of Christie’s recurring characters, a tall, pukka British Secret Service agent who travels the world tracking down international criminals. We learn that he once controlled Britain’s Counter-Espionage Department (p.155), and he cuts an impressive figure.

• Race was over sixty, a tall, erect, military figure, with sunburnt face, closely cropped iron-grey hair, and shrewd dark eyes. (p.116)
• a tall soldierly man with a lined bronze face and iron-grey hair… (p.235)

This is the fourth and final Christie novel Race appears in, the previous ones being: ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’ (1924) and two Poirot novels, Cards on the Table (1936) and Death on the Nile (1937) in both of which he is a key helper and collaborator with the Belgian detective.

All Souls’ Day

In this book, Race knew Rosemary and was invited to attend the fateful birthday dinner but was called away on business at the last minute so wasn’t present. But when, a year later, the distressed widower George Barton decides to restage the fateful dinner at the same restaurant, the Luxembourg, he invites Race to join them. (Conveniently for the story it turns out that Race and Barton have known each other for years.)

Barton explains to Race that he has some cockamamie plan to re-enact the fateful dinner and lure the murderer out into the open. Race strongly advises against it, in fact tells Barton to go to the police who are the professionals, Barton obstinately persists with his scheme, so Race refuses to attend. In fact, later on we discover that Race does go to the re-enactment, but doesn’t tell anyone and sits at a distant table so as not to be spotted.

George dresses up the re-enactment as a party to celebrate Iris’s 18th birthday, but re-enactment it will (eerily) be. But, in the event, things do not at all turn out as George expected, and part two ends with a genuinely surprising bombshell.

The final third of the novel follows Inspector Kemp of Scotland Yard and Colonel Race as they do the usual murder mystery thing of interviewing all the suspects, turning up all manner of red herrings, building cases against all the suspects in turn, before there is a final flurry of panicky activity and the baddie is revealed. As with all my other Christie reviews, I’ll stop my summary there so as not to give away the plot but will just say that the mystery turns out to be relatively straightforward, certainly not as ludicrously contrived as the outcome of Towards Zero which is one of the most preposterous things I’ve ever read.

Cast

• Rosemary Barton née Marle – committed suicide nearly a year ago, in November, on the night of her birthday, apparently because an unknown lover, nicknamed Leopard, had jilted her – Stephen falls for ‘Her lovely laughing face, the rich chestnut of her hair, her swaying voluptuous figure’ – Colonel Race thought her ‘a singularly lovely nit-wit’
• Iris Marle – her younger sister, 6 years younger – ‘very straight and slim, with her pale face and black hair and grey eyes. Iris with much less than Rosemary’s beauty and with all the character that Rosemary would never have’ – in Anthony’s eyes: ‘rich chestnut hair, laughing blue eyes and a red passionate mouth…’
• George Barton – the boring worthy older man who Rosemary married, ‘fifteen years older than herself, kindly, pleasant, but definitely dull’, in Stephen’s view ‘ the kind of husband who was born to be betrayed’
  • Mrs Pound – their cook, according to Lucilla Drake although ‘slightly deaf, was an excellent woman. Her pastry sometimes a little heavy and a tendency to over-pepper the soup’
  • Betty Archdale – parlour-maid
• Ruth Lessing – 29 – George’s capable secretary – ‘Ruth was an institution – practically one of the family. Good looking in a severe black-and-white kind of way, she was the essence of efficiency combined with tact’ – ‘the neat shining dark head, the smart tailor-mades and the crisp shirts, the small pearls in her well-shaped ears, the pale discreetly powdered face and the faint restrained rose shade of her lipstick’ – ‘She was a good-looking girl, he [Colonel Race] decided, with her sleek dark head and her firm mouth and chin’
• Paul Bennett – Uncle Paul, in love with their mother, Viola Marle, who, nonetheless, married another man – Paul stood godfather to Rosemary; when he died, left her his fortune, she being aged only 13
• Hector Marle – Rosemary and Iris’s father, died when Iris was five
• Viola Marle – Rosemary and Iris’s mother, died when Iris was 17 – ‘always been a somewhat remote mother, preoccupied mainly with her own health, relegating her children to nurses, governesses, schools, but invariably charming to them in those brief moments when she came across them’ – and she went to live with Rosemary and George at their house in Elvaston Square
• Aunt Lucilla Drake – Iris’s father’s sister, Mrs Drake, who was in impoverished circumstances owing to the financial claims of a son, Victor (the black sheep of the Marle family) – so she comes to live with George and chaperones young Iris in society – ‘an amiable elderly sheep with little will of her own’, latest in a long line of Christie’s gabby garrulous women
• Victor Drake – black sheep and ne’er-do-well son of Aunt Lucilla – ‘He had a lean brown face and there was a suggestion about him of a Toreador – romantic conception! He was attractive to women and knew it!’
• Stephen Farraday – a stiff pompous young man in politics, a possible future Prime Minister
• Lady Alexandra ‘Sandra’ Farraday – ‘a very reserved woman. Looks cold as ice. But they say she’s crazy about Farraday’
• Lord William Kidderminster – her suave, diplomatic, influential father
• Lady Victoria Kidderminster – Sandra’s ‘arrogant’ mother
• Anthony Browne – dark good-looking, devoted to Rosemary, travels a lot – Rosemary finds out (from Victor Drake) that he was in prison and his real name is Tony Morelli
• Alexander Ogilvie – Barton’s agent in Buenos Aires, ‘a sober, hard-headed Scotsman’
• Charles – head waiter at the Luxembourg
• Giuseppe Bolsano – waiter at the Luxembourg
• Mr Goldstein – owner of the Luxembourg
• Mary Rees-Talbot – old friend of Colonel Race’s from India who hires a parlour-maid fired by George Barton – ‘a lively near-brunette of forty-nine’
• Miss Chloe West – ‘about twenty-five, tall, brown-haired and very pretty’ – actress who George Barton paid to impersonate Rosemary at the reunion dinner, but someone else rang up and cancelled her at the last minute – but who?

The cops

• Chief Inspector Kemp – ‘slightly reminiscent of that grand old veteran, Battle, in type. Indeed, since he had worked under Battle for many years, he had perhaps unconsciously copied a good many of the older man’s mannerisms. He bore about him the same suggestion of being carved all in one piece – but whereas Battle had suggested some wood such as teak or oak. Chief Inspector Kemp suggested a somewhat more showy wood – mahogany, say, or good old-fashioned rose-wood’
• Sergeant Pollock

Types and stereotypes

Christie always dealt in stereotypes and clichés, manipulating the ones she inherited in the genre and inventing some new ones. But one of the reasons for her books’ success is you feel as if you half-know the characters as they’re introduced and this is because so many of them are, indeed, stock types. For the lolz I searched this novel for the keyword ‘type’ and was surprised to see how many times the characters themselves dismiss each other as ‘types’

‘He [Victor Drake, a wrong ‘un] started by forging a cheque at Oxford – they got that hushed up and since then he’s been shipped about the world – never making good anywhere.’ Ruth listened without much interest. She was familiar with the type. They grew oranges, started chicken farms, went as jackaroos to Australian stations, got jobs with meat-freezing concerns in New Zealand.

Of Victor, again, here’s George discussing him with Ruth:

‘I see you understand.’
‘It’s not an uncommon case,’ she said indifferently.
‘No, plenty of that type about.’

And after Ruth has seen Victor off on a boat to South America, she reports back to George on his brashness:

‘Cheek!’ said George. He asked curiously, ‘What did you think of him, Ruth?’
Her voice was deliberately colourless as she replied: ‘Oh – much as I expected. A weak type.’

Of Stephen Farraday:

He was small for his age, quiet, with a tendency to stammer. Namby-pamby his father called him. A well-behaved child, little trouble in the house. His father would have preferred a more rumbunctious type.

Here is Stephen’s early life in politics:

The Labour Party did not satisfy Stephen. He found it less open to new ideas, more hidebound by tradition than its great and powerful rival. The Conservatives, on the other hand, were on the look-out for promising young talent. They approved of Stephen Farraday – he was just the type they wanted.

When he falls in love with Rosemary, it hits Stephen like a bolt from the blue:

He had always assumed that he was not a passionate type of man. One or two ephemeral affairs, a mild flirtation – that, so far as he knew, was all that ‘love’ meant to him.

At the end of their affair, Stephen’s wife sees how distressed he is and guesses that Rosemary wants him to run away with her:

Rosemary wanted him to go away with her… He was making up his mind to take the step – to break with everything he cared about most. Folly! Madness! He was the type of man with whom his work would always come first – a very English type.

Later, when Colonel Race meets up again with George he reflects on their different temperaments:

He was thinking at this moment that he had really no idea what ‘young George’ was like. On the brief occasions when they had met in later years, they had found little in common. Race was an out-door man, essentially of the Empire-builder type – most of his life had been spent abroad. George was emphatically the city gentleman. Their interests were dissimilar…

As George tells him about Rosemary, Race reflects:

‘Rosemary,’ said George Barton, ‘loved life.’ Race nodded. He had only met George’s wife once. He had thought her a singularly lovely nit-wit – but certainly not a melancholic type.

So the characters themselves think in terms of ‘types’ of human being and personality in a way which is specially possible in a novel. I don’t think we do this much in the real world, do we? When you meet a new person or get to know someone, do you reflect that they’re a this, that or the other type of personality? Do you dismiss people as one of those types? Maybe other people do, but I don’t think I do. But then I find people puzzling and often unreadable, so I may not be very representative.

I was going to suggest that the quickness and efficiency with which fictional characters can assess and sum each other up is one of the appeals of fiction; in books, everything is simpler. People are easy to read. Even if characters wildly misinterpret someone else, in novels like this, everything eventually comes out at the end, and in a sense everyone is understood. Whereas, in my own life, I know there are people, most people, who I’m going to go the grave not really understanding or ever having a handle on.

Fiction simplifies life. This may be its biggest attraction.

N.B. There are even more results when you search for the word ‘sort’ used in the same sense:

• ‘Sort of woman who might resent his having a friendship with another woman’
• She saw her partner, a blushing immature young man whose collar seemed too big for him, peering about for her. The sort of partner, she thought scornfully, that debs have to put up with.
• The sort of girl who would expect you to tell her every morning at the breakfast table that you loved her passionately!
• Thank goodness she wasn’t the sort of woman who asked questions about a man’s correspondence.

Or kind:

• You’re the kind of girl who ends up by marrying the boss.
• It would be the kind of scandal that he would not be able to live down, even though public opinion was broader-minded than it used to be.
• George had been the kind of husband who was born to be betrayed.
• He loved her, and he was the kind of man who was humble about his own powers of holding a wife’s interest.

Or other ways of making points about types and sorts of people:

• ‘Rosemary laughed at Sandra. Said she was one of those stuffed political women like a rocking horse.’
• ‘It was a wonder her husband hadn’t got wise to things. One of those foolish unsuspecting chaps – years older than she was…’
• Race nodded. He had met Lady Alexandra Farraday several times. One of those quiet women of unassailable position whom it seems fantastic to associate with sensational publicity.

Maybe one of the many reassuring, comfortable things about Christie’s stories is the way they flatter the reader into thinking that we, too, have the worldly wisdom and savoir faire to airily define all these different types; it flatters us into thinking that we, too, are oh-so-familiar with this sort of girl and that sort of chap, we’re all men of the world here etc. It’s pleasant to be so worldly wise and experienced assumed to know this kind of thing. Who wouldn’t be flattered?

In addition, I suppose all this talk of types bleeds into Christie’s fondness for generalisations, for having her characters make sweeping generalisations – most often about the opposite sex (‘men this’, ‘women that’) sometimes about foreigners (especially notable in the Poirot novels) and on other subjects, too.

I suppose these are all manifestations of the world of conventions and clichés and conformist thinking which Christie’s novels radiate, deeply conservative, describing an essentially timeless upper middle-class world.

Fallings off

Christie’s early novels were deliberately comic. The Poirot and Marple novels from the 1930s contain many comic touches and Hercule Poirot himself is essentially a comic creation.

Maybe it was the war which affected her but the novels from the end of the 1930s and the 1940s feel dried out. They are as structurally innovative, clever, entertaining as ever but they completely lack the sparkle and humour of her earlier works.

The high good humour of the earlier novels helped to mask the ridiculousness of the plots. Without the permanent smile at the corner of Poirot’s mouth or the comedy of the 1920s stories, the absurdity of the plots becomes more obvious.

It’s a funny combination of good and bad because the novel before this one, ‘Towards Zero’, had moments of something resembling psychological depths, in its depiction of the tortured love triangle between Nevile Strange, the first wife he divorced and his bitterly jealous second wife. Some of the exchanges between these couples have a real poignancy. But then the denouement, the revelation of who did the murder and how and why is one of the most preposterously ludicrous things I’ve ever read – and Christie goes on to outdo herself by having the divorced wife suddenly, after just one or two meetings, fall head over heels in love with the complete stranger who helped save her life, and the novel ends with a ridiculous Mills and Boon declaration of mutual adoration and the promise to get married. Hard to credit that the author of the earlier, almost believable moments, made the free choice to end her novel with such a farrago.

So these novels from the 1940s maybe, at moments, betray a bit more psychological depth than previously – but the almost total removal of the high good humour of hear earlier novels somehow makes her prone to more melodrama and/or bodice-ripping, breast-heaving passion. Makes the stories feel cheap and silly.

Bookishness

As you know I have rather doggedly copied out all the references characters make in Christie novels to appearing in a detective novel, how the situation they find themselves in seems to come right out of a book, and so on.

Colonel Race was not good at small talk and might indeed have posed as the model of a strong silent man so beloved by an earlier generation of novelists. (p.117)

Race leant forward. His voice was suddenly sharp. ‘I don’t like it, George. These melodramatic ideas out of books don’t work. Go to the police…’ (p.129)

‘What about cyanide? Was there any container found?’
Yes. A small white paper packet under the table. Traces of cyanide crystals inside. No fingerprints on it. In a detective story, of course, it would be some special kind of paper or folded in some special way. I’d like to give these detective story writers a course of routine work. They’d soon learn how most things are untraceable and nobody ever notices anything anywhere! (p.157)

Or films:

They spoke in spasmodic jerks, for the taxi-driver was taking their directions literally and was hurtling round corners and cutting through traffic with immense enthusiasm. Turning with a final spurt into Elvaston Square, he drew up with a terrific jerk in front of the house. Elvaston Square had never looked more peaceful. Anthony, with an effort regaining his usual cool manner, murmured: ‘Quite like the movies.’

But films or books, characters are aware of the type of story they’re appearing in:

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s have it.’
‘I don’t think I want to tell you, Anthony.’
‘Now then, funny, don’t be like the heroines of third-rate thrillers who start in the very first chapter by having something they can’t possibly tell for no real reason except to gum up the hero and make the book spin itself out for another fifty thousand words.’
She gave a faint pale smile.

Christie writes first-rate thrillers. But she’s very conscious that she’s swimming in the same waters as the third-rate writers, using many of the same tropes and tricks, one of which is to include in the text characters referring to the fact that they feel like they’re in a third-rate thriller.

Sandra Farraday laughed as she said: ‘You’re something to do with armaments, aren’t you, Mr Browne? An armament king is always the villain of the piece nowadays.’ (p.143)

At some level, Christie’s characters know they’re appearing in a panto.

Credit

‘Sparkling Cyanide’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in December 1945. Page references are to the HarperCollins 2017 paperback edition.

Related links

• Sparkling Cyanide (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews