‘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 links

• Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1930s reviews