All posts tagged murder

Alan Furst reviews

Alan Furst (born 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. He published a few novels in the 1970s but hit paydirt in the late 1980s when he had the idea of setting his spy thrillers 50 years earlier, back in the 1930s, and in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, in the murky, threatening years leading up to the Second World War.

The first of these historical spy novels was ‘Night Soldiers’, which follows a Soviet spy across war-threatened Europe and which has given its name to the entire series, published from 1988 to the most recent one in 2019. Because of the 1930s settings, Furst has been called the ‘heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene’ who both, of course, actually wrote ominous thrillers in the 1930s. As the series progressed, Furst sometimes deploys recurring characters and settings (notably the Brasserie Heininger in Paris, which appears in all 15 novels) to bind the stories together and please fans (like me).

List of my reviews

List with plot summaries

1988 Night Soldiers An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.

1991 Dark Star The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)

1995 The Polish Officer A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.

1996 The World at Night A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)

1999 Red Gold Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)

2000 Kingdom of Shadows Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.

2003 Blood of Victory Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, gets recruited into a conspiracy to prevent the Nazis getting their hands on Romania’s oil, though it takes a while to realise who’s running the plot – Count Polanyi – and on whose behalf – Britain’s – and what it will consist of – sinking tugs carrying huge turbines at a shallow stretch of the river Danube, thus blocking it to oil traffic. (298 pages)

2004 Dark Voyage In fact numerous voyages made by the tramp steamer Noordendam and its captain Eric DeHaan, after it is co-opted to carry out covert missions for the Allied cause, covering a period from 30 April to 23 June 1941. Atmospheric and evocative, the best of the last three or four. (309 pages)

2006 The Foreign Correspondent The adventures of Carlo Weisz, an Italian exile from Mussolini living in Paris in 1938 and 1939, as Europe heads towards war. He is a journalist working for Reuters and co-editor of an anti-fascist freesheet, Liberazione, and we see him return from Civil War Spain, resume his love affair with a beautiful German countess in Nazi Berlin, and back in Paris juggle conflicting requests from the French Sûreté and British Secret Intelligence Service, while dodging threats from Mussolini’s secret police.

2008 The Spies of Warsaw The adventures of Jean Mercier, French military attaché in Warsaw between autumn 1937 and spring 1938, during which he has an affair with sexy young Anna Szarbek, helps two Russian defectors flee to France, is nearly murdered by German agents and, finally, though daring initiative, secures priceless documents indicating German plans to invade France through the Ardennes – which his criminally obtuse superiors in the French High Command choose to ignore!

2010 Spies of the Balkans The adventures of Costa Zannis, senior detective in the northern Greek port of Salonika, who is instrumental in setting up an escape route for Jews from Berlin through Eastern Europe down into Greece and then on into neutral Turkey. The story is set against the attempted Italian invasion of Greece (28 October 1940) through to the German invasion (23 April 1941).

2012 Mission to Paris The adventures of Hollywood movie star Fredrick Stahl, who travels to Paris to make a movie and becomes embroiled in increasingly sinister Nazi attempts to bully, blackmail and intimidate him into making pro-German or at least pacifist statements, and then gets caught up in actual espionage with more and more at stake.

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by Simon on April 2, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1930s, Alan Furst, Alexander de Milja, American fiction, André Szara, Anna Szarbek, Blood of Victory, British Intelligence, British Secret Service, Carlo Weisz, Civil War Spain, Communism, conspiracy, Costa Zannis, Count Janos Polanyi, Count Polanyi, Dark Star, Dark Voyage, Eastern Europe, Eric Ambler, Eric DeHaan, espionage, Europe, fascism, fiction, Fredrick Stahl, French Surete, Graham Greene, historical spy novel, Ilya Serebin, Italian invasion of Greece, Jean Casson, Jean Mercier, Kingdom of Shadows, Liberazione, Mission to Paris, murder, Mussolini, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Paris, Nazi-occupied Poland, Nicholas Morath, Night Soldiers, NKVD, Noordendam, Paris, Prague, Pravda, Red Gold, River Danube, Romania, Salonika, Siberia, Spanish Civil War, Spies of the Balkans, spy fiction, The Brasserie Heininger, The Foreign Correspondent, the Gestapo, The Polish Officer, The Resistance, The Spies of Warsaw, The World at Night, thriller, treachery, Warsaw ghetto

Posted by Simon on April 2, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/alan-furst-reviews/

Hard-boiled American fiction

Definition

Hard-boiled fiction is a gritty, unsentimental subgenre of crime fiction originating in 1920s America, often published in pulp magazines like Black Mask. It features tough, cynical private detectives navigating corrupt urban landscapes. Known for rapid-fire, slangy dialogue and graphic violence, it emphasizes realistic, raw action over intellectual puzzles.

American hard-boiled fiction was distinct from traditional British mystery stories (Golden Age authors like Agatha Christie or Dorothy L. Sayers) due to its emphasis on the moral ambiguity of the protagonist (cf the whiter-than-white Hercules Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey), its sordid urban settings (cf English country houses), and the high-risk, visceral experience of the detective (regularly getting beaten up, shot etc).

W.R. Burnett

W.R. Burnett is widely credited with inventing the modern gangster novel with his debut book, Little Caesar (1929). He revolutionized the crime genre by shifting the perspective to the criminal and focusing on the internal mechanics of underworld gangs, helping to define the hard-boiled crime fiction style.

Little Caesar by W.R. Burnett (1929) – the rise and fall of Rico, a ruthless, ambitious small-time gangster in 1920s Chicago, who rises rapidly through the criminal ranks. Initially a lieutenant in Sam Vettori’s gang, Rico takes control after a nightclub robbery goes wrong and exposes Vettori’s weakness. Backed by loyal associates like Otero, he consolidates power and becomes a major figure in the underworld. The novel’s impact comes less from deep characterisation than from its fast-paced, dialogue-driven style and its vivid, immersive portrayal of the gangster milieu.

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett is sometimes credited with creating the hard-boiled crime genre with his string of powerful novels from the early 1930s, not least The Maltese Falcon which features the iconic private eye, Sam Spade.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929) The unnamed operative of the Continental Detective Agency uncovers a web of corruption in Personville. There’s a lot of violence, shoot-outs on almost every page, plus individual murders. Strangely, the CO himself says the violent atmosphere of Personville has made him go ‘blood-simple’, becoming infatuated with murders and killing.
The Dain Curse by Dashiell Hammett (1930) The Continental Op is dragged into three episodes involving members of the Dain family: first, the French ex-con posing as Dr Leggett is murdered and his wife shot; then the daughter Gabrielle involved in murders at a weird cult; then the husband who has loved her all along is killed and, while the Op is detoxing the morphine addict, the truth of the long sorry saga is revealed.
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1930) Drastically different in feel from the previous two murder-fests and told in the third person: detective Sam Spade solves the mystery of three murders surrounding a mysterious jewel-encrusted medieval statuette, and deals with the colourful trio of crooks who are prepared to kill for it: Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Joel Cairo and Casper Gutman.
The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett (1931) The adventures of Ned Beaumont, fixer for reformed gangster Paul Madvig, as he copes with a rival gangster, a corrupt DA, a pliant newspaper editor, and various difficult dames in the run-up to an election Paul must win.
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (1934) A lighter, comic departure from Hammett’s earlier hard-boiled fiction, though still centring on a complex murder mystery: the story follows Nick Charles, a retired detective living a wealthy, idle life with his witty wife Nora. Nick is reluctantly pulled back into investigation when Dorothy Wynant, daughter of a former client, seeks help finding her missing father, an eccentric inventor.

James M. Cain

Other critics credit James M. Cain’s gritty crime novels from a little later in the 1930s, as the genre’s inventor, although he himself dismissed the idea. Discuss and debate into the wee small hours.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (1934) Short, blisteringly intense novella describing the affair of lowlife drifter Frank Chambers and Cora, wife of the roadside diner where he ends up getting a job. Sex, murder, in one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read.
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain (1936) first-person story of insurance salesman Walter Huff who gets involved with a classic femme fatale (Phyllis), leading to a sexually charged conspiracy to murder her husband for the life insurance money. A classic cynical noir revelling in greed, lust and manipulation.

Raymond Chandler

Coming at the end of this sequence of authors, Raymond Chandler defined the Los Angeles private eye aesthetic with his iconic PI, Philip Marlowe. I think reading Philip Chandler first five novels was about the purest reading pleasure I’ve ever had.

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939) Introducing private detective Philip Marlowe, who is hired by wealthy General Sternwood to investigate the blackmail of his daughter Carmen, but the case quickly expands into a complex web of crime involving pornography, gambling, and multiple murders.
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler (1940) Philip Marlowe returns to be hired by ex-convict Moose Malloy to find his missing girlfriend Velma, but the case quickly entangles him in a web of deception involving a stolen jade necklace, corrupt officials, and a series of murders, as Marlowe himself gets beaten, drugged, and misled.
The High Window by Raymond Chandler (1942) Marlowe is hired by wealthy widow Elizabeth Bright Murdock to recover a stolen rare coin, but his investigation leads into a murky world of blackmail, counterfeit schemes, and multiple murders involving her son Leslie and criminal associates, ultimately revealing both a criminal conspiracy around fake coins, and a hidden family secret.
The Lady in The Lake by Raymond Chandler (1944) Marlowe is hired by wealthy businessman Derace Kingsley to find his estranged wife Crystal, and his investigation—stretching from Los Angeles to a mountain town—uncovers a series of deceptions, murders, false identities, and police corruption.
The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler (1949) Marlowe is hired by a young woman, Orfamay Quest, to find her missing brother Orrin, but his search through post‑war Los Angeles uncovers blackmail, murder, Hollywood glamour and corruption, involving a movie star, organized crime figures and hidden motives.
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (1953) Marlowe befriends alcoholic war veteran Terry Lennox then helps him flee to Mexico after Terry is accused of murdering his wealthy wife. But this is just the start of his entanglement in a deeper conspiracy involving corruption, betrayal, and social hypocrisy.
Playback by Raymond Chandler (1958) Marlowe is hired by actress Claire Winter to find her missing husband, journalist Paul Marston, and his search uncovers a complex maze of deception, professional rivalries, and hidden motives across Hollywood and Los Angeles social circles.

Eye imagery in ‘The High Window’ and ‘The Little Sister’ by Raymond Chandler

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by Simon on March 30, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Novel

Posted by Simon on March 30, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/30/hard-boiled-american-fiction/

Death of a Ghost by Margery Allingham (1934)

‘I’ve told him that I’ll outlive him if I have to die to do it.’
(John Lafcadio, the painter and humourist)

‘I agree with Max entirely,’ she said. ‘Too many people imagine they know something about Art.’
(Donna Beatrice, the voice of the art snob)

‘I don’t like that type, though. Exhibitionists they’re called, aren’t they?’
(The early days of popular psychology)

‘Very lowerin’ to the locality,’ said Mr Pudney, adding darkly, ‘artists mean models.’
(The popular view)

Campion looked down at her. The world was reeling. This was the last development he had expected, the last eventuality for which he had been prepared.
(Allingham’s characteristically over-wrought tone)

‘I don’t know why I’ve come to you, Albert. I don’t know what I expect you to do,’ she burst out suddenly.
(Well, probably solve the case, as he usually does)

Margery Allingam’s first Albert Campion novel overflows with facetious high spirits and melodrama, it’s a ridiculously pulp adventure told in a breathless style. Jumping to this, the sixth one (once she got going she wrote them very quickly, sometimes two a year) I was struck by how wordy and pompous her style had become, so pompous that it often teeters on incoherence.

The chief deterrent to private killing, he reflected, was probably the ingrained superstitious fear of the responsibility of ending a human life, but in a man of Max’s inordinate conceit this objection could no doubt be swept away by being decided a necessity.

It makes sense, but only just, and only if the reader does a little work to help it along.

The gentle procession of ordinary life swept them all along, and it began to seem as unlikely that violence would ever again assail Lafcadio’s household as it had done on that Saturday evening when he and Belle had discussed the morrow’s reception.

‘Assail’? ‘Morrow’?

His naturally picturesque appearance was considerably exaggerated by his latest sartorial fad, consisting somewhat astonishingly of a fully coloured Victorian fancy waistcoat. This gallant vestment was without question a thing of beauty.

‘Gallant vestment’?

Five minutes later, as they sat round sipping out of the famous crackleware cups mentioned in so many books of reminiscence, the sensation of calamity which had returned to Mr Campion as he came up the staircase burst into his fullest mind.

‘Fullest mind’?

When one considered Max Fustian’s appearance it was all the more extraordinary that his personality, exotic and fantastic as it was, should never have overstepped the verge into the ridiculous.

‘Overstepped the verge’? I found collecting these dubious phrases far more interesting than the supposed plot.

Max shrugged his shoulders, a gesture almost contortionate, but having made his protest he gave way gracefully.

At the moment her pallor was almost startling, and her eyes beneath her thick brows were burning with nothing less than ferocity.

She bustled off, leaving a tang of schoolmistress in the air.

Looking at the newcomer, Mr Campion felt again a liking for this naïve, friendly spirit who regarded the world as an odd sort of party upon which he had dropped in by mistake.

Today, in a little old forgotten corner of our wonderful London, the ghost of a great artist, thought by some to be the greatest artist of our time, entertains the glass of fashion and the mould of form for the eighth time in a twelve-year programme.

‘The mould of form’?

Mrs Potter wondered if the beads of sweat had rolled down under her fringe. The chattering old gossip seemed to have become a fiend possessed of super-human insight in the power to wrest truth from its well.

‘Super-human insight in the power to wrest truth from its well’?

The scene he indicated was amusing. Donna Beatrice was talking volubly to Max Fustian. Knowing her, Mr Campion shuddered to think of the matter of her discourse.

At moments like this I think Allingham is trying to sound elegant and sophisticated to match the upper-class Bohemian setting of the story, and her sentences superficially have the structure and feel of sophistication – until you actually read what she’s written, at which point the effect vanishes.

The theory that the art of conversation has died out in modern times is either a gross misrepresentation of the facts or an Olympian criticism of quality alone. Three quarters of the gathering seemed to be talking loudly, not so much with the strain of one trying to capture an audience, but with the superb flow of the man who knows all creation is trying to hear him.

He came up to Belle, who greeted him with that delight which was half her charm.

Belle seemed loath to speak, but Donna Beatrice sailed in with an eagerness that was frankly uncharitable.

Or take this phrase which doesn’t quite make sense, is not quite grammatically accurate.

A few of the die-hard school of manners clung to their standards and talked together quietly, affecting not to have noticed this second disturbance…

Surely it should be something like ‘A few members of the die-hard school of manners…’ And what about this odd and clunky phrasing?

He was still undecided on his course of action and never remembered finding himself in a similar quandary.

And anyway, these attempts at mellifluous urbanity are only a veneer. Continually breaking through is Allingham’s more habitual tone of melodrama and hyperbole:

The little woman in the tight purple dress was staring at him, her yellow face a mask of horror.

She began to sob noisily, great gulping animal sounds which whipped the already jolted nerves of the company to the point of agony.

The Belle Darling whom Lafcadio had loved, protected, and leant upon was beaten to her knees by the deluge of horror poured down upon her.

He hurried over to Belle, who was standing in her place by the door, superbly gallant and unruffled in the nightmare crisis.

It took Max just those three seconds to get across the room and seize the girl by the arms, while the shocked silence in the room deepened into a growing perception of horror.

Campion noticed with growing concern, there was a new note in the general air of frustration and despair which was his general atmosphere: the high thin note of alarm.

Mr Campion was prepared for the worst, and her words sent a thrill of horror down his spine.

It’s this silly tone of Gothic melodrama which appeals to Allingham’s fans but puts my teeth on edge. And it’s not even convincingly written melodrama. As a writer, she seems to have only a shaky grasp of her sentence structure. She is frequently clumsy and clunky.

Looking at him posturing in the dusty sunlight, it occurred to her that it was really remarkable that he should not appear very ridiculous. She thought also that this was certainly not the case.

The moment was one of drama, and those minds which had hastily dismissed Rosa-Rosa’s outburst as a regrettable, hysterical, or drunken incident suddenly wheeled round to face the half-formed fear which had secretly assailed them all.

She went on, still leaning heavily on the doctor’s arm, while they listened to her breathlessly with that sinking of the heart and faint sense of nausea which always comes just before the worst is told.

Everything is overlit and over-wrought:

He dreaded the meeting with the family. Belle, he knew, looked to him for comfort, and in the circumstances he had very little to offer her. The cold air of calamity had permeated the whole household.

This tottering, unsteady melodramatic tone really, really makes you appreciate Agatha Christie’s brisk professional prose style all the more. Christie, too, of course, has sudden murders, shocked hostesses, stunned guests and whatnot. But she uses crisp short sentences which are so much more effective at a) drawing you in and b) painting the scene, even when she herself is being dramatic.

The noise drew nearer. It consisted of shrill cries and protests in a woman’s voice. The door at the end of the dining-car burst open. Mrs Hubbard burst in. (Murder on the Orient Express)

Less is more.

Plot summary

The plot? It is March 1930 and we are in the household of the long-dead artist John Lafcadio who, back in the 1890s, was considered the greatest artist in Britain. Now, 19 years after his death (in 1911), his house, his artist’s studio in Little Venice, and his memory are kept alive by his circle, which includes his widow (Belle Lafcadio), a former model (Donna Beatrice), his paint mixer (Fred Rennie), the art dealer and critic who’s made a career out of writing books about him (Max Fustian), his grand-daughter the tempestuous Linda (25), who’s in love with handsome Tom Dacre (37), who’s just returned from Italy with a brainless model in tow (Rosa-Rosa Rosini), and half a dozen others.

Before his death, Lafcadio had a humorous idea which was to stash away 12 completed and impressive paintings and, ten years after his death, have his widow release them, one a year, with a formal unveiling party before each one is sent to the Royal Academy Summer exhibition.

The novel opens with a couple of chapters introducing us, in Allingham’s usual wordy manner, to the dozen or so members of the Lafcadio household, and hinting at their various jealousies and resentments – all witnessed by the mysterious Albert Campion, who is an old friend of the widow’s.

But then we get onto The Murder: at the height of the very posh reception for this year’s posthumous Lafcadio painting (attended by a bishop, an ambassador and sundry other society nobs) the lights in the studio go out (because they’re on a meter) and a young man, Thomas Dacre – himself an artist and recently returned from Italy with a stunning if brainless model in tow – is stabbed to death with a pair of ornamental scissors.

Campion was outside in the corridor popping another sixpence in the electric meter. When the lights go back on he returns to an exhibition room in uproar. That is the murder. Whodunnit?

Campion’s friend from Scotland Yard, Inspector Stanislaus Oates, is called in, interviews all the guests, and quickly concludes that the Lafcadio household, with its collection of haunted old women, former models and hangers-on, is like a lunatic asylum.

It’s all so different from Agatha Christie. Christie’s novels are so pared back that they sometimes feel like engineer or architect’s designs for a novel. There is a tremendous clarity, and also repetitiveness, to the way Poirot calls in all the suspects of the murder on the Orient Express or on the Nile steamship, one by one, discovering (almost) everything about their background and character and relationship with the deceased. It’s like a diagram with certain key pieces missing which the reader is invited to fill in. And all told in a prose style which became more clipped and functionally effective as she grew into her style.

Allingham is completely different. Her plots are as confusing and clumsy as her prose style. There’s a murder and a relatively small group of suspects but the explanation of who, why and what, is extremely muddy and confused. The impulsive grand-daughter, Linda, was engaged to the murdered man and furious to discover he married his Italian model in Italy. Campion discovers that one of the old ladies in the household, Lisa, in a fit of anger had attacked the widow, Belle, with a pair of scissors leaving permanent scars. But somehow neither of these stories feel very compelling.

Campion’s involvement feels arbitrary and episodic. Poirot is called in by the cops to help. Campion seems to happen to be hanging around because he’s an old friend of the family. Is that his connection in all of his crime novels? It feels very tangential and arbitrary.

I didn’t understand why the police investigation was slowly dropped (was it because the presence of an ambassador at the reception would have embarrassed the Foreign Office?) The narrative implies that the murder enquiry is simply dropped. but surely that’s improbable.

So I wasn’t much puzzled about the crime and the so-called mystery. I was much more puzzled by Allingham’s strange, clumsy, round-the-houses, mystifying treatment of it. I found it hard to stop reading Agatha Christie novels, whereas I found it a real struggle to finish Margery Allingham’s books, they’re unsatisfying on so many levels.

There’s a second murder, Mrs Potter, the harmless long-suffering wife of failed artist Tennyson Potter. She has no value in herself but clearly saw or knows something which can identify the murderer, and so she has to go. And so Chapter 15 opens:

Mr Campion knew that Max Fustian had killed Mrs Potter as soon as he saw him that evening. He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.

‘The shoddy, untidy process’ – used to the clarity of Christie’s murder mysteries, I think it’s the scrappy untidiness of Allingham’s books which I find tiresome and frustrating.

Cast

John ‘Johnnie’ Lafcadio – deceased painter, eminent in the 1890s
Mrs Belle Lafcadio – his widow, approaching 70, kindly, intelligent, always described as ‘plump’
Donna Beatrice, real name Harriet Pickering – ‘a lady who had caused a certain amount of flutter in artistic circles in 1900’ – ‘a widow with a small income and an infinite capacity for sitting still and looking lovely’ – nowadays uses a hearing aid – into psychomancy and auras etc
Lisa Cappella – model for such famous Lafcadio paintings as Clytemnestra and the Girl at the Pool, now much reduced as an old servant
Max Fustian – art dealer, owner of the Salmon Galleries in Bond Street, and critic who’s built a career writing eight books about Lafcadio’s work – ‘He was small, dark, pale, with a blue jowl and a big nose. His eyes, which were bright and simian, peered out from cavernous sockets, so dark as to appear painted. His black hair was ungreased and cut into a conventional shock which had just sufficient length to look like a wig. He was dressed, too, with the same mixture of care and unconventionality. His double-breasted black coat was slightly loose, and his soft black tie flowed from beneath his white silk collar… He was forty, but looked younger and appreciated his good fortune’
- Isidore Levy – the astute, thickset gentleman who helped manage Max Fustian’s Bond Street business
- Mr Green – teenage boy who packs the art works
Tennyson Potter – failed artist, inventor of engraving on red sandstone which never caught on – ‘a thin red melancholy face whose wet pale eyes were set too close together above the pinched bridge of an enormous nose’ – ‘His thin red face with its enormous nose and watery eyes…’
Mrs Claire Potter – ‘a little, dowdy woman with iron-grey bobbed hair, capable hands, and an air of brisk practicalness which stamped her at once as one of those efficient handmaids-of-all-work to the arts who are capable of undertaking any little commission from the discovery of a Currier & Ives to the chaperoning of a party of society-girl students across Europe’
Lisa Capella, discovered by Lafcadio on the slopes outside Veccia one morning in 1884, had been brought by him to England, where she occupied the position of principal model until her beauty passed, when she took up the household duties for Belle, to whom she was deeply attached. Now, at the age of sixty-five, she looked much older, a withered, rather terrible old woman with a wrinkled brown face, quick, dark, angry eyes, and very white hair scraped back from her forehead. She was dressed completely in black, the dead and clinging folds which enveloped her only relieved by a gold chain and brooch’
Linda – John Lafcadio’s granddaughter, daughter of Belle’s only son, killed at Gallipoli in 1916 – ‘a strongly made, tempestuous young woman of twenty-five who bore a notable resemblance to her grandfather’ – engaged to…
Thomas Dacre – ‘a man of great ability, thirty-seven years old, unrecognized and obsessed by his own shortcomings, resembled a battered, careworn edition of the Apollo Belvedere in horn-rimmed spectacles. He was one of that vast army of young men who had had five all-important years cut out of their lives by the war, and who bitterly resented the fact without altogether realizing it. Dacre’s natural disbelief in himself had been enhanced by severe shell-shock, which had left him capable of making any sacrifice to the furtherance of his creature comforts
Rosa-Rosa Rosini – beautiful young woman Dacre has brought back from Italy to be a model – Linda is furious because she thinks he’s married her in Italy – ‘the figure of a John gipsy and the face of a fiend’ – ‘Like all natural models she moved very little and then only to drop from one attitude into another, which she held with remarkable faithfulness’ – ‘Rosa-Rosa had another of the perfect model’s peculiarities; she was unbelievably stupid. She had been trained not to think, lest her roving fancy should destroy the expression she was holding. For the best part of her life, therefore, her mind remained a complete blank’ – connected to a London crime family, the Rosinis, based around Saffron Hill
Fred Rennie – plucked as a child from a working class background by Lafcadio and taught to be his colour mixer, still lives and pursues his alchemical trade in the converted coach house
Brigadier General Sir Walter Fyvie
Bernard, bishop of Mould
Albert Campion
Sir Gordon Woodthorpe – that eminent society physician’ who attends the dead body
Inspector Stanislaus Oates – Campion’s most reliable contact at Scotland Yard – always fiddling with his moustache
Constable Bainbridge –
Downing – plain clothes policeman
Matt D’Urfey – friend of murdered Tommy – ‘loosely but strongly built, wide of shoulder and narrow of hip, with faded hair, a big characterful nose, and shy dancing blue eyes’ – does ‘pen drawings’
Sir Edgar Berwick – the politician and client of Fustian’s – ‘an oldish man, large and remarkably dignified. His skin was pink and his natural expression belligerent. At the moment he looked important and extremely wise. He also appeared to be aware of the fact’
Miss Florence Cunninghame – ‘was plump, ladylike, elderly, and quite remarkably without talent. Her tweed coat and skirt, silk blouse and pull-on hat might have belonged to any provincial schoolmistress. She had money of her own and an insatiable passion for painting water-colours’
Young Dr Fettes – ‘a quiet, square young man with bushy black hair growing low down over his forehead and the gift of looking blank without appearing foolish’
Dr Derrick – his assistant, ‘a sandy-haired young man with a blue suspicious eye’
Derek Fayre – ‘the cartoonist, whose bitter, slightly obscene drawings appeared occasionally in the more highbrow weeklies’
William Pudney – landlord of the White Lion pub in the Essex village of Heronhoe – ‘a spare, pink, youngish man with a masterpiece of an accent which betrayed at once both his ambitions in this direction and his complete lack of the ear by which to attain them’
Lady du Vallon – ‘a crisp little woman with sharp eyes and red elf-locks’
Sir Gervaise Pelley – the Cellini authority
Bee Birch – the militant painter of athletes
Joseph – ‘the pontifical head waiter’ of Savarini’s, the fashionable restaurant of the moment
Chatters – doorman of Campion’s club Chatters
Braybridge – police psychiatrist

The mysterious Mr Campion

Very few people knew much about Mr Campion. In the first place, that was not his name. The majority of his friends and acquaintances knew vaguely that he was the younger son of some personage, who had taken up the adventurous calling of an unofficial investigator and universal uncle at first as a hobby and finally as a career. His successes were numerous, but for the best reasons in the world he remained in the background and avoided publicity like the plague. (Chapter 4)

Aspects of Campion

Long thin legs. Long fingers. Pales eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.

The pale young man in the horn-rimmed spectacles remained unusually serious.

Mr Campion regarded her mildly through his enormous spectacles.

He stood for a moment looking at the cottage and then stepped forward, his lank figure casting a very small shadow in the bright cold sunlight.

His character:

Albert Campion wandered into the room looking his usual vacant, affable self.

Mr Campion had a gentle, kindly personality and was possessed of infinite patience.

Mr Campion… had the wit to make a study of men without considering himself a connoisseur of humanity…

Complicating:

In the last case they had worked on together, Mr Campion’s fantastic theory had been correct, and the inspector, who was a superstitious man in spite of his calling, had begun to regard his friend as a sort of voodoo who by his mere presence transformed the most straightforward cases into tortuous labyrinths of unexpected events.

This is exactly the same accusation made by Inspector Japp against Hercule Poirot in novel after novel. That everywhere he goes, simple cases become tortuously complicated. Christie even uses the same word.

‘It was odd, very odd, that the room should smell – as it did, perfectly fresh.’
‘So that’s what you were getting at!’ Japp sighed. ‘Always have to get at things in such a tortuous way.’ (Murder in the Mews, Chapter 10)

One sentence epitomises the transformation in Campion’s character from the high-voiced, facetious poseur of the first novel and this later one:

Campion was as earnest as he had ever been. The vacuity had vanished from his face, leaving him unexpectedly capable.

Truisms

I’ve noted in my Christie reviews how it’s part of the tradition of ‘the Novel’ to drop wise sayings and apothegms about human nature into their narratives, in the way that Bible quotes and Christian sayings comforted pre-modern generations. Both the narrator and characters can, at the drop of a hat, launch into sententious generalisations about human nature, men, women etc etc.

Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing, of all the emotions.

When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.

Miss Cunninghame went on with the dreadful eagerness of one who has broken the ice of a difficult subject.

But I came to think these kinds of wisdom generalisations perhaps have another motive, which is to flatter the reader into thinking themselves wise. ‘Yes, yes, you nod, I knew that about human nature. People this, people that, of course of course.’ Although even this aspect of the novel Allingham struggles with:

Campion was prepared for a painful experience, but even so the sight which Mr Potter presented as he sat up in the big Italian bed, propped by the glistening pillows, had in it that element of the unexpectedly shocking which is the very essence of embarrassment.

Which is the very essence of incoherence.

As the sensation died away and the atmosphere of Little Venice subsided once more into a false peace the younger man at any rate experienced the sensations of a maiden lady who sees the burglar’s boots below the curtain as the last of the neighbours troop back to their homes after the false alarm…

The drunk chapter

Credit where credit’s due, though. The second half of the novel deserves a review of its own because in it Allingham develops an interesting idea, which is then the basis for a surprisingly effective chapter / passage / scene.

This is that about half-way through the story, Campion becomes convinced that Max Fustian, the preening egotistical art dealer, is the killer. His motivation is a clever scam the reader didn’t see coming and is, unlike most Christie plots, both ingenious but also plausible.

And the sequence it leads up to is this: Campion gathers evidence from various sources strongly suggesting Fustian is responsible but, in conversation with Inspector Oates, agree there is no actual hard evidence. He will have to be caught in the act of his next murder. And with this in mind Campion drops broad hints to Fustian that he both knows he is the murderer, and understands his (very profitable) motive. In his suave smooth way, Fustian invites Campion out for the evening to discuss the matter.

First of all he asks him to join him at a book launch, where Fustian makes a big point of being loudly dressed and making loud remarks and being seen with Campion, presumably to establish what good pals they are. Then at the end of the reception invites him back to his apartment in Baker Street, and offers him a cocktail, while he gets dressed for dinner. Campion suspects the cocktail is drugged, especially after Fustian makes a big point of adding a ‘special’ cherry to it.

But it’s when Fustian then takes him on to dinner at London’s most fashionable restaurant, Savarini’s, that what I’m talking about really kicks off. Fustian gets him drunk, really drunk, howlingly drunk, by lavishing on him a rare and precious wine which must not be consumed after you’ve drunk gin, knowing that Campion downed a number of gin-based cocktails at the book launch, and back at his flat.

It’s an ingenious plan because his alibi is that he’s seen wining and dining Campion, the best of friends, as his alibi. But what makes the chapter, chapter 24, really notable, is the extended description of Campion’s drunkenness seen through his own eyes, as he blunders out of the restaurant, Fustian steer him to his club (in order for there to be plenty of witnesses to his howling drunkenness) before steering him through the West End and down into a tube station at maximum rush hour and right to the front of a packed platform, so that he is drunkenly teetering right on the edge as the Tube train comes hurtling into the station, and he feels Fustian behind him, right behind him, waiting for just the right moment to accidentally on purpose push him in front of the hurtling train.

This extended passage is really good, very effective at what it sets out to do, genuinely gripping – maybe because Allingham drops all pretence of fine writing and witty sayings, dodgy generalisations about human nature and all the rest of the affectations which mar her usual style, and just focuses on this one thing, describing a drunk’s progress through the West End in a compelling way.

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by Simon on November 5, 2025 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on November 5, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/05/death-of-a-ghost-margery-allingham/

The Crime at Black Dudley by Margery Allingham (1929)

‘How thrilling!’ she said. ‘It sounds just like a play!’
(Welcome to Posh World)

‘It means, Michael,’ he said…’ that we are up against the most dangerous and notorious criminal of modern times.’
(As usual)

‘You just ’aven’t realized, you and your lot downstairs, what you’re playing about wiv,’ he said. ‘This ’ere isn’t no Sunday School hunt-the-thimble-set-out. There’s nine of us, we’re armed, and he isn’t jokin’.’ The hand round Abbershaw’s throat tightened as the thug thrust his face close against his victim’s.
(A baddie with a baddie’s ghastly working class accent)

Abbershaw turned on him furiously, only to find a revolver pressed against his ribs.
(Ooops)

‘But how terrible!’ Meggie burst out suddenly. ‘I didn’t believe that people like this were allowed to exist. I thought we were civilized. I thought this sort of thing couldn’t happen.’
(Eternal cry of the pampered bourgeoisie on encountering reality)

This is a ludicrously over-the-top international spy melodrama. It was the first outing for Allingham’s absurdly posh and mysterious sleuth, Albert Campion, who would go on to appear in 17 further novels. This is a bad book. I wouldn’t bother reading it. I struggled to finish it.

The setting: Black Dudley is a great grey building, bare and ugly as a fortress, isolated in a thousand acres of parkland which stretch out to the Suffolk coast. It’s owned by old Colonel Gordon Coombe, now wheelchair bound and with a plate masking a horrific facial injury from the war (nearly ten years earlier). The colonel encourages his young nephew, Wyatt Petrie, to host weekend house parties there, half a dozen times a year. Wyatt is the last in a long, long line of the Petrie family who have owned the land and house for nearly a thousand years.

The narrator: Dr Abbershaw The building, and the novel, have a strong Gothic, spooky atmosphere. It’s a third-person narrative but seen very much through the eyes of one of the guests, no-longer-young Dr George Abbershaw, author of a standard book on pathology, adviser to Scotland Yard – ‘a smallish man, chubby and solemn, with a choir-boy expression and a head of ridiculous bright-red curls’. He has a shy passion for similarly red-haired Margaret ‘Meggie’ Oliphant, which blossoms through the course of the adventure, as boy-girl romances do in popcorn thrillers through to this day.

House party guests Allingham briskly introduces us to the other half dozen house-party guests, all bright young things down from London or Oxbridge, as well as to the three sinister companions of the old Colonel, being: his physician Dr White Whitby, the slimy Englishman Jesse Gideon, and the big fat foreigner with the improbably English name, Benjamin Dawlish.

Albert Campion One of the guests, a ludicrously posh chap with a receding chin and a mouthful of teeth, is introduced as Albert Campion. Allingham didn’t know it when she wrote this first novel, but Campion would go on to feature in another 18 novels and over 20 short stories and become the character she’s most associated with.

The plot

So in the early chapters we meet all the young chaps and chapesses gathered for the weekend. It leads up to a big dinner at which the young people are disconcerted by the two creepy men who never leave the side of crippled old Colonel Coombe.

The Black Dudley Dagger After dinner the young people go through to the big hall and are impressed by the arrangement of spears and whatnot on the wall which centre on a sparkling dagger. Wyatt explains that the dagger is the focus of the so-called ritual of the Black Dudley Dagger. The idea is to turn the lights out and pass the dagger on to whoever you bump into in the dark until a set period of time has passed and the lights are turned back on.

Murder As you might expect, during the ritual there is a murder. The Colonel’s companions give out that he has been taken ill with a heart attack and spirited off to his rooms. Later we discover that he was stabbed to death.

Eberhard von Faber Now the narrative embarks on a long, long series of narrative twists and turns, but the basic idea is this: so-called Benjamin Dawlish is none other than Eberhard Von Faber, the international criminal mastermind: ‘a leader of one of the most skilful criminal organizations in the world’.

Stolen During the lights out of the ritual, somebody got their hands on something which really matters to Von Faber and he announces to the amazed young guests that none of them will leave the house until it is returned to him. They shouldn’t even think about using their cars which have been drained of petrol.

Kennedy tries his luck One of the young chaps, Chris Kennedy the rugby blue, has a brainwave and takes some spirits down to the garage, fills up his tank and his car is pottering and banging away when someone in the castle shoots at it, hitting Kennedy in the arm (a conveniently non-fatal wound as in silly thrillers), puncturing a tyre and overturning it. Yes. It becomes clear that the entire staff (of nine) all work for Von Faber and most of them are armed tough guys.

Campion in the garage Now earlier, during the blackout and ritual, Dr Abbershaw had left the building to wander down to the garage and check out the cars. Here he had been disturbed by the mysterious Albert Campion, who comes over as a facetious simpleton but – is he hiding something?

The bloody dagger When they go back into the castle they discover a) that the Colonel has been whisked away and b) that Abbershaw’s girlfriend, Meggie, is in hysteria because someone handed her the dagger and then whisked it away ,but not before she’d realised it was covered in blood!

Campion fighting Later that night, the house is woken by loud noises and find Campion fighting wildly with one of the servants, he seems to be drunk.

Abbershaw finds the secret After they’ve separated the combatants and Campion has been led away, Abbershaw finds a leather case on the ground near the scrap, and takes it back to his room. We aren’t really told what it contains except for papers, instead the narrative jumps to him agonising about what to do with its contents which, on reflection, he decides to burn in the fireplace.

A discussion Abbershaw invites Meggie and her friend Anne out into the garden to discuss events and they discover that Campion had met Anne in London, informed her he was invited to the party and got a lift down in her car. In other words, nobody really knows who he is.

Disposing of the colonel’s body Next morning Abbershaw sees Dr Whitby and the chauffeur take Colonel Coombe’s body off to the nearest crematorium; before the situation had fully unfolded, they had called Dr Abbershaw in to sign the cremation certificate. They didn’t want him to see the body but he sneaked a quick look, enough to tell him death wasn’t from a heart attack but from loss of blood as per stabbing.

No-one can leave At breakfast Dawlish-Von Faber makes a stark announcement – the cars have been drained of fuel, and no-one is to leave the house until something he has lost is returned to him. As described, Chris Kennedy, the gung-ho rugby player, attempts to escape in a car powered by alcohol, but is shot and wounded.

Interrogations Von Faber announces he’s going to call each of the guests one by one into an interrogation room until he gets what he wants. It must be the documents Abbershaw found on the floor near the fight between Campion and one of the goons.

Secret passageways Maybe I had a bad week at work but I found it very hard indeed to care about any of this. Abbershaw and Meggie and Campion emerge as the central figures. The old castle is riddled with secret passages, hidden entries, concealed staircases and whatnot. When Von Faber is interrogating Meggie Abbershaw, enraged and fearful for her safety, finds a series of secret passages which allow him to burst into the room where the questioning is taking place. After which point, he turns out to be completely ineffectual and he and Meggie are bundled into a locked room, to be dealt with later.

Disappointments It feels like the story is full of moments like this, moments which ought to be climaxes and revelations, but which consistently fizzle out and disappoint.

Mrs Meade Meggie and Abbershaw discover there’s a mad old lady, Mrs Meade, in the adjacent room. She is a Christian zealot and tells them they are all doomed to burn in hell-fire etc.

Blocked They hope to escape when they’re given their food by a serving girl, but she is accompanied by one of the toughs with a revolver. After hours and hours of imprisonment, they are starting to despair when Campion suddenly stumbles into their room, having found a secret passage through the back of fireplaces (!)

Escape Campion leads them out of the locked room, and down secret passageways back to the main part of the building where the other young people are still at liberty, and they cook up a plan to ‘take’ the armed goons at the next mealtime.

The organisation Why is all this happening? Well, it’s not immediately obvious, and it comes out in dribs and drabs, but eventually we discover that Von Faber implements criminal plans drawn up in detail by someone else. I think that’s the Colonel.

Campion was a spy At some point Campion reveals to Meggie and Abbershaw that there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye because he was sent to the castle to talk to Colonel Coombes, to give him a codeword and receive a secret something from him to take back to his masters (in British intelligence?) in London.

‘This little affair, of course, was perfectly simple. I had only to join this house-party, take a packet of letters from the old gentleman, toddle back to the Savoy, and my client would be waiting for me. A hundred guineas, and all clean fun – no brain-work required.’

Campion got then lost the secret So during the blackout for the ritual, Campion did in fact have a chance to whisper the codeword in Coombes’s ear and Coombes did slip him the packet of documents and it was these documents which fell out of his pocket when he was having his inexplicable fight with a goon, and which Abbershaw found and proceeded to burn. So we never have the psychological pleasure of relief of finding out what they were plans for. This is typical of the narratives many blocks and frustrations. In fact, at one stage one of the characters comments on the air of permanent frustration which hangs over the narrative.

‘Let’s catch ’em up,’ said Martin. ‘It’s time something definite happened.’

Whodunnit? And then Coombes was murdered. But why? And by whom? Not the baddies because he was a key part of their organisation: at one point Abbershaw, hiding outside the baddies’ room, overhears that they themselves are mystified by the Colonel’s murder.

John Buchan Anyway, the plot rambles on with more twists and turns and escapes through hidden passages etc. As you can see, three things are obvious: 1) It is not a country house murder mystery at all but something much more like the adventure thrillers of John Buchan, centring as it does on a criminal mastermind at the apex of a secret criminal organisation.

2) It is bad. It is badly done. It contains all the elements of a John Buchan thriller but somehow none of them gell. The way they’re confined to the castle doesn’t really work, why don’t some of them just slip out at night and walk to freedom? Each new chapter introduces another secret passage or false door until it becomes a bit ridiculous.

3) And in the middle of this farrago we are meant to care about Abbershaw’s feelings for young Meggie, which lead up to him declaring that he’s passionately in love with her and being thrilled to discover she feels the same and they agree to get married ‘as soon as this is all over’.

Rebellion Back to the narrative, the gang of young people successfully attack and overwhelm the couple of goons who serve them dinner at dinner time (odd, strange, that all the formalities of a country house weekend still continue). There’s a lot of fol-de-rol trying to find the rest of the gang, scattered fights, our chaps knocked out in random corridors and what-not, until they finally overpower and lock up the baddies, and walk out a side entrance towards the cars. Hooray! Free at last!

But not so fast! Von Faber is waiting in a car outside and turns on the headlights, dazzling our chaps and telling them he and Gideon have the two girls in their sights: hands up or the girls get it!

Burned alive So the young people, so close to freedom, hand over their guns, the goons are released, and they are all packed into a secure sealed room upstairs. Here they are warned that Von Faber has loaded the fort with wood and kerosene and will set it on fire and burn them alive unless they reveal the whereabouts of the missing belongings, which Campion long ago explained to all the young people was a wallet full of documents and Abbershaw explained that he burned in his fireplace.

The hunt arrives There follows what is meant to be a tense countdown and maybe it was to readers in 1929. Just in the last few minutes before Gideon says they’re going to start the fire, chaps looking out the window notice the local fox hunt galloping into view. They start yelling out the window that they are being held prisoner but Von Faber is quick to take command of the situation and tell the leaders of the hunt, which has now gathered below the castle walls, that he runs a lunatic asylum and not to believe the inmates shouting for release.

Good old ‘Guffy’ Until Campion (and he does emerge as the leader in so many of the situations) recognises a posh buddy of his, old ‘Guffy’ Randall, among the hunt. He yells down to Guffy who recognises him and Von Faber’s game is up. He draws a gun and tries to threaten the hunt but there are too many of them and when he fires it and narrowly misses a hunt leader, the hunt round on him.

Von Faber’s failed escape Amid the resulting confusion he and Gideon bolt for the only car with gas in it, start it up and head down the drive. The hunt on horseback cut across the grounds and block the road but that doesn’t stop Von Faber hurtling towards them at to speed. At the last minute the horses leap out of the way but Guffy leans down and whips the driver round the face, with the result that the car careers into a ditch and overturns, badly injuring Von Faber.

The cops Cut to the local cops who have been called and interviewed everyone and recovered the bodies from the overturned car and after a few final bits of clearing up, allow everyone to leave.

Who is Campion? Abbershaw drives back to London and gives Campion a lift. Only as they reach Piccadilly does he ask the question he’s been burning to ask: who is Campion, and Campion bends over and whispers his parentage in Abbershaw’s ear, to his astonishment. As far as I can tell, Allingham never reveals Campion’s parentage; it is left a deliberately teasing secret.

Who killed Colonel Coombs? I hope this would be the end, but oh no. There are four gruelling chapters left to go. Because back in London Abbershaw invites a couple of the chaps who survived the ordeal round for drinks and to try and decide who killed Colonel Coombs? Theories are divided between Campion himself (who was implicated by the statements of mad Mrs Meades – but why would he?); Von Faber (but why was he overheard himself wondering who killed him?); or Martin Watt’s theory, that it was his physician, Dr White.

Car news The situation is transformed when Michael Prenderby walks in and announces that he has seen the very distinctive car they had all noticed in the Black Dudley garage, an innocuous seeming banger with the chassis and engine of a Rolls Royce. Prenderby noticed it at a garage when he recently took his own car in for a service.

Stake-out So a gang of our chaps head out to this garage (‘half-way down the Lea Bridge Road’). the owner, Mr Haywhistle, is surly and threatening because the car’s owner has been threatening him, but a small bribe softens him up. So the three chaps (Abbershaw, Martin Watts and Prenderby) wait in their car opposite the garage until the mystery owner arrives. And it does, indeed, turn out to the Von Faber’s physician, Dr White.

All-night chase The disguised Rolls pulls out of the garage and heads East, eventually going through Chelmsford, Colchester, off the main road and along endless country lanes. The little Riley car driven by our plucky trio of chaps keeps pace with it, just about, losing it at a few places, then catching up again. Finally it rolls to a halt as dawn is coming up over fields in the middle of nowhere, somewhere towards the Essex coast.

Dr White explains After they’ve taken a few pot shots at each other (both sides have revolvers) Dr White waves a white hankie and our chaps close with him. In the event this is yet another delay, block and red herring. After a good deal of verbiage the doctor finally claims that Coombe was murdered by one of the young chaps who is secretly a member of the Simister gang which are a gang to Von Faber’s mob. But as he pads out this explanation they all hear a big Fokker airplane circling overhead which lands in the field near them. White warns them not to come closer as the pilot has a machine gun trained on them and so, as frustrated and blocked as the reader (again) our trio watch White (and his butler) climb into the German plane and take off. On the drive back to London they are still no closer to really knowing who murdered Colonel Coombe or why.

Back in London Six weeks pass. The other survivors get on with their lives but Abbershaw only becomes more obsessed. Eventually, after doing research of his own he reluctantly drives to Wyatt Petrie’s apartment overlooking St James’s. Here he confronts Wyatt with murdering his uncle, Colonel Coomb and is surprised when he readily confesses. What surprises him is his motivation.

Joy Love Wyatt shows him the photo of a sweet and innocent 17-year-old girl and tells the surprised Abbershaw that he fell in love with her when he was 27, the only woman he’s ever cared for. He loved her despite the fact that she was stupid and ignorant and worked in the kind of bar where you have to pay money to talk to the girls.

But slowly Wyatt learned that Joy’s ignorance wasn’t accidental. She along with a cohort of girls like her had been born and bred and raised to lives of cattle-like ignorance and compliance by a criminal gang. And his researches led him to realise that at the apex of the gang was his despicable uncle. And so he planned the Perfect Crime, inviting guests he knew would have good alibis, inventing the so-called Dudley Dagger Ritual as a cover for his plan – and then stabbing his uncle in the back.

What he hadn’t anticipated at all was the coincidence of Campion having been sent on a mission to secure the secret documents from his uncle which led to the enormous hue and cry, to everyone being locked up and to the melodramatic series of events. He shows no remorse about committing murder, just about the fact that it was not the Perfect crime he had hoped to achieve.

He announces that he is going to leave the country, he is going into a religious retreat in Spain. Caught on the hop, Abbershaw finds himself shaking his hand and wishing him good luck.

End Abbershaw reels out of the apartment building not knowing whether Wyatt was justified in his behaviour or is a dangerous lunatic, completely confused about what is right or wrong. Luckily a beefy constable is waiting to tell him that his bad parking has brought him a parking ticket and this snaps Abbershaw out of his confusion. Of course there is a right and wrong, and officers of the law who define and maintain it.

‘It’s people like you,’ [the constable] explained, as Abbershaw climbed into the driving seat, ‘wot gives us officers all our work. But we’re not goin’ to have these offences, I can tell you. We’re making a clean sweep. Persons offending against the Law are not going to be tolerated.’
He paused suspiciously. The slightly dazed expression upon the face of the little red-haired man in the car had suddenly given place to a smile.
‘Splendid!’ he said, and there was unmistakable enthusiasm in his tone. ‘Really, really splendid, Officer! You don’t know how comforting that sounds. My fervent wishes for your success.’

As in so many of these golden age detective stories, it ends with comedy.

Cast

Dr George Abbershaw – author of a standard book on pathology, an expert upon external wounds and abrasions with especial regard to their causes – advises the police, respected at Scotland Yard – ‘a smallish man, chubby and solemn, with a choir-boy expression and a head of ridiculous bright-red curls which gave him a somewhat fantastic appearance. He was fastidiously tidy in his dress and there was an air of precision in everything he did or said which betrayed an amazingly orderly mind’
Wyatt Petrie – ‘the last of the Petries’ – ‘a scholar of the new type. There was a little careful disarrangement in his dress, his brown hair was not quite so sleek as his guests’, but he was obviously a cultured, fastidious man: every shadow on his face, every line and crease of his clothes indicated as much in a subtle and elusive way’ – ‘Head of a great public school, a First in Classics at Oxford, a recognized position as a minor poet, and above all a good fellow. He was a rich man’
Colonel Gordon Coombe – Wyatt’s uncle and owner of Black Dudley – ‘a little man who sat huddled in his high-backed chair as if his backbone was not strong enough to support his frame upright. His crop of faded yellow hair was now almost white, and stood up like a hedge above a narrow forehead. But by far the most striking thing about him was the flesh-coloured plate with which clever doctors had repaired a war-mutilated face’
Dr White Whitby – the Colonel’s private attendant, a grey-haired, sallow-faced man, a ‘harassed, scared-looking little man’
Margaret ‘Meggie’ Oliphant – ‘one of those modern young women who manage to be fashionable without being ordinary in any way. She was a tall, slender youngster with a clean-cut white face, which was more interesting than pretty, and dark-brown eyes, slightly almond-shaped, which turned into slits of brilliance when she laughed. Her hair was her chief beauty, copper-coloured and very sleek; she wore it cut in a severe ‘John’ bob, a straight thick fringe across her forehead’
Michael Prenderby – young, newly qualified MD – ‘a fair, slight young man, with a sense of humour entirely unexpected, to the casual observer he was an inoffensive, colourless individual, and his extraordinary spirit and strength of character were known only to his friends’
Jeanne Dacre – Prenderby’s girlfriend
Anne Edgeware – a ‘Stage-cum-Society person’
Martin Watt – a ‘black-haired beaky youngster’ who Meggie describes as ‘Just a stray young man’ – ‘he was, in point of fact, a chartered accountant in his father’s office, a pleasing youth with more brains than energy’
Chris Kennedy – gung-ho Cambridge rugger blue (a ‘blue’ denotes the highest levels of sporting success, particularly in competition against Oxford in rowing, rugby etc)
Albert Campion – ‘the fresh-faced young man with the tow-coloured hair and the foolish, pale-blue eyes behind tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles’ – in Maggie’s opinion ‘just a silly ass’ – possessor of an ‘absurd falsetto drawl’
Jesse Gideon – ‘white-haired, very small and delicately made, with long graceful hands which he used a great deal in his conversation, making gestures, swaying his long, pale fingers gracefully, easily. Under the sleek white hair which waved straight back from a high forehead his face was grey, vivacious, and peculiarly wicked’
Benjamin Dawlish – ‘a foreigner, grossly fat, and heavily jowled, and there was something absurdly familiar about him. Suddenly it dawned upon George what it was. The man was the living image of the little busts of Beethoven which are sold at music shops. There were the same heavy-lidded eyes, the same broad nose, and to cap it all the same shock of hair, worn long and brushed straight back from the amazingly high forehead’ – ‘was fat to the point of grossness, but tall with it, and powerfully built. The shock of long grey hair, brushed straight back from the forehead, hung almost to his shoulders, and the eyes, which seemed to be the only live thing in his face, were bright now and peculiarly arresting’ – cover for Eberhard von Faber – ‘He is, without exception, the most notorious, unsavoury villain this era has produced’ – ‘his ponderous form and long grey hair…’
the man-servant – ‘a big man with a chest like a prize-fighter and a heavy florid face with enormous pale-blue eyes which had in them an innately sullen expression’
Mrs Daisy May Meade – ‘a striking old woman, tall and incredibly gaunt, with a great bony frame on which her clothes hung skimpily. She had a brown puckered face in which her small eyes, black and quick as a bird’s, glowed out at the world with a religious satisfaction at the coming punishment of the wicked. She was clothed in a black dress, green with age, and a stiff white apron starched like a board, which gave her a rotundity of appearance wholly false’
Mrs Browning – Black Dudley’s housekeeper
Lizzie Tiddy – a ‘natural’, helps Mrs Browning, washes up etc
Detective-Inspector Pillow, of the County Police – ‘a sturdy, red-faced man with close-cropped yellow hair, and a slow-smiling blue eye’
Inspector Deadwood – friend of Abbershaw
Mr Haywhistle – garage owner in Shoreditch
Sir Dorrington Wynne – Abbershaw’s uncle, one-time Professor of Archaeology in the University of Oxford

Campion as satire on Lord Peter Wimsey

According to Allingham’s Wikipedia article, the protagonist she was to become most associated with, Edward Campion, was originally conceived as a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’ extraordinarily posh, upper-class twit of a wealthy private detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. Therefore he is loaded with aristocratic insouciance, and an unsinkably facetious attitude, all expressed in the poshest of upper-class slang. He never goes, he always ‘toddles’.

Then I toddled off down the passage, out of the side door, across the garden, and arrived all girlish with triumph at the garage and walked slap-bang into our Georgie…

I think we’d better toddle downstairs to see how the little ones progress

The poshness is relentlessly emphasised.

The slightly receding chin and mouth so unnecessarily full of teeth was distinctly familiar. ‘Albert Campion?’ he repeated under his breath.

The words, uttered in an inoffensively idiotic voice, made Abbershaw glance up to find Albert Campion smiling fatuously in upon him.

…the absurd young man with the horn-rimmed spectacles

Mr Campion’s personality was a difficult one to take seriously; it was not easy, for instance, to decide when he was lying and when he was not.

Abbershaw turned to where the young man with the tow-coloured hair and the unintelligent smile sat beaming at them through his glasses.

He said, with more gravity than was usual in his falsetto voice… Campion’s somewhat foolish voice and fatuous expression… the pleasant vacuous face,

He delivers one particularly memorable bit of posh slang:

‘If the man who calls himself Dawlish doesn’t get what he wants, I think we are all of us for a pretty parroty time.’

Campion and Wimsey

In one respect Campion is really notably like Wimsey, which is his habit of quoting advertising slogans, at length, as a kind of facetious nervous banter. One of the baddies jumps Abbershaw when the latter isn’t paying attention. Campion rescues him, knocks the baddie out and promptly lectures Abbershaw:

‘My dear old bird, don’t lose your Organizing Power, Directive Ability, Self-Confidence, Driving Force, Salesmanship, and Business Acumen,’ chattered Mr Campion cheerfully. ‘In other words, look on the bright side of things.’

This is also how Wimsey speaks, in an unstoppable tsunami of gibberish.

‘A very pretty tale of love and war,’ murmured Mr Campion, some of his old inanity returning. ‘ “Featuring Our Boys. Positively for One Night Only.”

‘While you’re gathering up the wreckage I’ll toddle round to find Poppa von Faber, and on my way back after the argument I’ll call in for the girls, and we’ll all make our final exit en masse. Dignity, Gentlemen, and British Boyhood’s Well-known Bravery, Coolness, and Distinction are the passwords of the hour.’

This rubbish-speak is so noticeable that Allingham has a character comment on it.

Martin looked at him wonderingly. ‘Do you always talk bilge?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Mr Campion lightly, ‘but I learnt the language reading advertisements. Come on.’

Campion and P.G. Wodehouse

Maybe it’s not specifically Wodehouse, maybe there was lots of fiction floating around mocking young, posh Bertie Wooster types, but at the climax of the novel Campion shouts out the window of the fortress at a chap who’s riding by as part of a fox hunt.

Mr Campion’s slightly falsetto voice interrupted him. He was very excited. ‘I know that voice,’ he said wildly. ‘That’s old “Guffy” Randall. Half a moment.’
On the last word he leapt up behind Martin and thrust his head in through the bars above the boy’s.
‘Guffy!’ he shouted. ‘Guffy Randall! Your own little Bertie is behind these prison bars in desperate need of succour. The old gentleman on your right is a fly bird – look out for him.’
…
Several heavy blows outside followed. Then there was the grating of bolts and the heavy door swung open.
On the threshold stood Guffy Randall, a pleasant, horsy young man with a broken nose and an engaging smile. He was backed by half a dozen or so eager and bewildered horsemen.
‘I say, Bertie,’ he said, without further introduction, ‘what’s up?’

Campion’s real name

Early on in the narrative Abbershaw realises that he’s met Campion before.

Abbershaw threw out his hand, indicating Mr Albert Campion.
‘That gentleman,’ he said, ‘is Mornington Dodd.’
Albert Campion smiled modestly. In spite of his obvious pain he was still lively.
‘In a way yes, and in a way no,’ he said, fixing his eyes on Abbershaw. ‘Mornington Dodd is one of my names. I have also been called the “Honourable Tootles Ash”, which I thought was rather neat when it occurred to me. Then there was a girl who used to call me “Cuddles” and a man at the Guards Club called me something quite different –’
‘Campion, this is not a joke.’ Abbershaw spoke sternly. ‘However many and varied your aliases have been, now isn’t the time to boast of them. We are up against something pretty serious now.’
‘My dear man, don’t I know it?’ said Mr Campion peevishly, indicating the state of his shoulders. ‘Even better than you do, I should think,’ he said dryly.
‘Now look here,’ said Abbershaw, whose animosity could not but be mollified by this extraordinary naïveté, ‘you know something about this business, Campion – that is your name, I suppose?’
‘Well – er – no,’ said the irrepressible young man. ‘But,’ he added, dropping his voice a tone, ‘my own is rather aristocratic, and I never use it in business. Campion will do quite well.’

Campion’s mother

After they’ve been released from the castle, at the end of driving Campion back up to London, Abbershaw finally gets to pop the question:

Campion held out his hand as he spoke, and Abbershaw, overcome by an impulse, shook it warmly, and the question that had been on his lips all the drive suddenly escaped him.
‘I say, Campion,’ he said, ‘who the hell are you?’
Mr Campion paused on the running-board and there was a faintly puckish expression behind his enormous glasses.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Shall I tell you? Listen – do you know who my mother is?’
‘No,’ said Abbershaw, with great curiosity.
Mr Campion leaned over the side of the car until his mouth was an inch or two from the other man’s ear, and murmured a name, a name so illustrious that Abbershaw started back and stared at him in astonishment.
‘Good God!’ he said. ‘You don’t mean that?’
‘No,’ said Mr Campion cheerfully, and went off striding jauntily down the street until, to Abbershaw’s amazement, he disappeared through the portals of one of the most famous and exclusive clubs in the world.

Campion takes over

I’ll quote the Wikipedia article:

Apparently, Allingham intended Abbershaw to be the hero/sleuth of this book and any future mysteries. He is, after all, a pathologist, and that would have led to many interesting stories. Campion got in the way and manages to become a far more memorable character, so much so that the American publishers strongly encouraged Allingham to focus on Campion.

And so that’s what happened and the rest is Allingham’s career, 18 novels and over 20 short stories about the preposterous upper-class twit with hidden depths.

Sherlock

I’ve noted how pretty much every Agatha Christie novel contains at least one reference to Sherlock Holmes, and then how surprised I was that the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers do the same. Well so does Margery Allingham. What Harold Bloom called The Anxiety of Influence.

‘One moment,’ he said, ‘let us do a spot of neat detective work. What the German gentleman with no manners has lost must be very small. “And why, my dear Sherlock?” you ask. Because, my little Watsons, when our obliging young comrade, Campion, offered them an egg wrapped up in a table napkin they thought they’d holed in one.’

Credit

‘The Crime at Black Dudley’ by Margery Allingham was first published in the UK by Jarrolds Publishing in 1929.

Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers (1927)

‘Pardon my Stevensonian manner.’

‘Begin right at the beginning, if you will, please. I have a very trivial mind. Detail delights me. Ramifications enchant me. Distance no object. No reasonable offer refused…’
(Wimsey’s rambling manner)

‘I sleuth, you know. For a hobby. Harmless outlet for natural inquisitiveness, don’t you see, which might otherwise strike inward and produce introspection an’ suicide. Very natural, healthy pursuit—not too strenuous, not too sedentary; trains and invigorates the mind.’ (Chapter 4)

‘You’re a noticing one, aren’t you?’ said Mrs Cropper. ‘Make a good waiter, you would—not meaning any offence, sir, that’s a real compliment from one who knows.’
(Chapter 10)

Plot summary

This is the third Lord Peter Wimsey novel by Dorothy L. Sayers. It is a very long, convoluted story about a will which involves understanding a complex family tree which goes back to the late eighteenth century.

It opens with Wimsey and his good friend, Detective Charles Parker, having a meal in a cheap Soho restaurant and arguing about the behaviour of a doctor in a murder case. Their argument prompts a chap dining alone at the next table to introduce himself as a doctor who has had a similar experience and Wimsey promptly asks him to tell his story.

He was physician to an elderly lady dying of cancer who’d had several operations. She was attended by a nurse who he fell in love with and he thought the old girl had months left to live. But then the woman’s great-niece dismissed the nurse, and two servants, replaced her with a new nurse and took over full-time care of her herself. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the old lady died, leaving everything to her great-niece.

The physician was, understandably, suspicious and insisted on a post-mortem and full inquest. However, both found no evidence of foul play and his conscientiousness rebounded on him as the small village community closed ranks to defend the great-niece and accuse him of meddling, throwing in the idea that he had neglected caring for the lady because of his affair with her first nurse. His clients started to drop him and eventually he was forced to sell the practice altogether which is why he finds himself unemployed in a cheap restaurant in Soho.

Wimsey is immediately grabbed by this (to be frank) boring and banal story and won’t let it go. The unnamed physician finishes his story and leaves without introducing himself or giving the names of any of the people in his tale.

So Wimsey gets in touch with a new character, a spinster lady named Miss Alexandra Katharine Climpson, to investigate, by going to Somerset House and searching for deaths which match these circumstances. (It is typical of Wimsey, and Sayers’ sense of humour, that Wimsey pranks his friend Detective Parker by inviting him to come and meet old Miss Climpson in phrases which make it seem as if he has taken a mistress and set her up in a swanky flat, which Parker believes until the door to the flat in question is opened by a sweet little old lady, and he turns to see Wimsey’s face beaming at him.

After a lot of sifting Miss C identifies the participants as follows: the old lady who died was Miss Agatha Dawson; her great-niece is Mary Whittaker; the doctor who talked to them in the restaurant is Dr Edward Carr; the nurse he fell in love with and who was then dismissed is a Miss Philliter; the two servants who were dismissed are Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed. The small town where this all took place is Leahampton in Hampshire.

Wimsey then instructs Miss C to go down to Leahampton, take a room somewhere and make enquiries among the old gossips of the town about the Agatha Dawson affair – which she promptly does, taking a room with Mrs Budge of ‘Fairview’, and attending tea parties with the vicar, Mr Tredgold and his charming wife, and meeting such village luminaries as Miss Murgatroyd, Mrs Peasgood and so on. ‘Gossip’ is the word the characters themselves use.

‘It really is terrible, living in a little town like this,’ went on Miss Findlater, ‘so full of aspidistras, you know, and small gossip. You’ve no idea what a dreadfully gossipy place Leahampton is, Miss Climpson.’ (Chapter 5)

Miss C writes back to Wimsey that there’s no sense of foul play or no more than circulates in any circle of gossipy old ladies. At the same tea party she meets Miss Whittaker and is immediately impressed:

The first impression which Miss Climpson got of Mary Whittaker was that she was totally out of place among the tea-tables of S. Onesimus. With her handsome, strongly-marked features and quiet air of authority, she was of the type that ‘does well’ in City offices. She had a pleasant and self-possessed manner, and was beautifully tailored—not mannishly, and yet with a severe fineness of outline that negatived the appeal of a beautiful figure. (Chapter 5)

Miss C discovers that clever Miss Whittaker has a fan, an acolyte, the devoted Miss Findley who is encouraging her plan to quit Leahampton and set up a chicken farm where they can both live close to the soil (!)

Despite Parker pointing out that there is no evidence of any crime being committed, Wimsey is intrigued and decides to put a ‘fishing’ advert in the press to see what happens. It reads:

Bertha and Evelyn Gotobed, formerly in the service of Miss Agatha Dawson, of ‘The Grove,’ Wellington Avenue, Leahampton, are requested to communicate with J. Murbles, solicitor, of Staple Inn, when they will hear of SOMETHING TO THEIR ADVANTAGE.’

What happens is that a few days later the dead body of Bertha Gotobed turns up in undergrowth in Epping Forest. The local cops think she died of a heart attack since there are no marks on the body, no sign of foul play. But Wimsey is galvanised. He is now convinced that someone murdered Miss Dawson and is now covering their tracks by bumping off any witnesses.

Bertha’s landlady is called in to identify the body and confirms that the other Gotobed sister, Evelyn, got married and moved to Canada with her husband.

In a tree nearby Wimsey finds a very posh ham sandwich wrapped in paper, posher than Bertha’s class, alongside a bottle of Bass beer. And in her handbag a £5 note, again much above her station. In those days you could trace notes and the cops identify this one as one of a series paid out to a Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street.

So off Wimsey and Parker go to question her, Wimsey frivolously posing under the pseudonym Mr Templeton. Mrs Forrest is rich and self-possessed and explains that she is in the process of divorcing her husband and has an active lover. Wimsey makes a fuss about fixing drinks for them (behind a fashionable screen) and takes the opportunity of secreting a glass she’s handled out the window in order to retrieve it later and get her fingerprints and see if there are any fingerprints on the beer bottle: there aren’t…

Parker is still puzzled why Wimsey cares so much about the case and Wimsey explains that he has an entire library of books about murders and murderers, but they are only about the ones we know about. What about the thousands and thousands who get away with it because no crime is even suspected? This may be one of those. He is interested in it:

‘Because I believe this is the case I have always been looking for. The case of cases. The murder without discernible means, or motive or clue.’ (Chapter 8)

The plot is long and convoluted and long before the end I was wondering why I was bothering. Suffice to say it is about the old girl’s money, about the will she left, and involves her very extended family in so convoluted a manner that the book requires an extensive and confusing family tree of the Dawson family to help you understand…

Cast

Lord Peter Wimsey
Mervyn Bunter – his faithful man servant (served under him in the Great War)
Detective-Inspector Parker of Scotland Yard – ‘He’s the one who really does the work’, a ‘restraining presence’ on Wimsey’s over-exuberant impetuosity – ‘When he worked with Wimsey on a case, it was an understood thing that anything lengthy, intricate, tedious and soul-destroying was done by Parker’
Dr Edward Carr – doctor to Miss Agatha Dawson
Agatha Dawson – old lady dying of cancer, had had several operations, was reckoned to last another 6 months or so, but her great-niece dismissed her nurse, and two carers, the Gotobed sisters, and then Miss D suddenly dies
Miss Whittaker – the niece
Miss Findlater – devoted fan of Miss Whittaker, ‘a slight, fair girl, with a rather sentimental look—plump and prettyish’ – a ‘very gushing and really silly young woman’
Nurse Philliter – original nurse and carer for Miss Dawson, fell in love with Dr Carr, became engaged, was then dismissed
Miss Katherine Climpson – ‘a thin, middle-aged woman, with a sharp, sallow face and very vivacious manner. She wore a neat, dark coat and skirt, a high-necked blouse and a long gold neck-chain with a variety of small ornaments dangling from it at intervals, and her iron-grey hair was dressed under a net, in the style fashionable in the reign of the late King Edward’
Sir Andrew Mackenzie – Chief of Scotland Yard
Mr John Murbles – solicitor and friend of Wimsey, featured in ‘Clouds of Witness’, resident at Staples Inn
Superintendent Walmsley – officer in charge of the scene of Bertha’s body
Dorcas Gulliver – landlady of the murdered Bertha Gotobed
John Ironsides – was to have married Miss Bertha, a clerk on the Southern Railway
Mrs Forrest, living in South Audley Street – classy lady one of whose five pound notes was found in Bertha’s purse, getting divorced and has a lover yet inexplicably tries to seduce Wimsey
Mrs Piggin – landlady of the Fox and Hounds in Crofton
Jim Piggin – husband and landlord
Ben Cobling – 87, Miss Clara Whittaker’s groom for forty years
Mrs Cobling – 85, ‘a delightful old lady, exactly like a dried-up pippin’
Mr Probyn – Miss Whittaker’s solicitor and managed all Miss Dawson’s business in Croftover Magna, now retired to the Villa Bianca, Fiesole
Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission
the Rev. Hallelujah Dawson – ‘an elderly West Indian of… humble and inoffensive… appearance’
Esmeralda – Cockney street urchin who protects Wimsey’s parked car for half a crown
Mr Towkington of Gray’s Inn – expert on property law – ‘a large, square man with a florid face and a harsh voice’
J. F. Trigg – solicitor in Bedford Row
Mrs Marion Mead – false name Mary Whittaker gives to the lawyer Trigg when she invites him to the empty house in Hampstead
Sir James Lubbock – scientist consulted by Wimsey in the research for his book, ‘The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, or 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death’
Sir Charles Pillington – Chief Constable of Hampshire
Mr Andrews – local photographer roped in to take photos of the body of Vera Findlater
local doctor – a ‘tutster’ who examines the body of Vera Findlater
Dr Faulkner – sent by Scotland Yard to double check the local man’s verdict, ‘a lean, grey badger of a man, business-like and keen-eyed’
Mr Stanniforth – Sacristan of the church of Saint Onesimus
Dewsby – head of the fingerprint department at Scotland Yard

Wimsey trivia

Wimsey is 37 (Chapter 15).

In the first book Wimsey very much smoked a pipe. Now he smokes stylish cigarettes, Sobranes. And cigars. Parker smokes a well-worn briar pipe.

Lord Peter paused, in the very act of ringing the bell. His jaw slackened, giving his long, narrow face a faintly foolish and hesitant look, reminiscent of the heroes of Mr P.G. Wodehouse. (Chapter 6)

Wimsey has bought a new car:

‘The new Daimler Twin-Six,’ said Lord Peter, skimming dexterously round a lorry without appearing to look at it. ‘With a racing body.’

Wimsey’s blether

In a characteristically arcane literary reference, Wimsey nicknames his new car ‘Mrs Merdle’ because it is very quiet or ‘makes no row’, and Mrs Merdle, in Charles Dickens’ novel ‘Little Dorrit’, is an arriviste i.e. newly rich, and causes a minor scandal by very noisily taking his seat in the theatre and his wife tells him to stop making a row. To be honest, this reference is so obscure I don’t really understand it…

But that may be part of the point of Wimsey’s countless fleeting cultural references, part of the point is the speed with which he drops them and races on, leaving most of his interlocutors thinking he’s mad.

‘It’s quite all right,’ he said apologetically, ‘I haven’t come to sell you soap or gramophones, or to borrow money or enroll you in the Ancient Froth-blowers or anything charitable. I really am Lord Peter Wimsey—I mean, that really is my title, don’t you know, not a Christian name like Sanger’s Circus or Earl Derr Biggers. I’ve come to ask you some questions, and I’ve no real excuse, I’m afraid, for butting in on you—do you ever read the News of the World?’
Nurse Philliter decided that she was to be asked to go to a mental case, and that the patient had come to fetch her in person. (Chapter 4)

Or else talks in elliptical telegraphese as here when he summarises his theory about Bertha Gotobed’s demise:

Said Wimsey: ‘We suggested shock, you know. Amiable gentleman met at flat of friendly lady suddenly turns funny after dinner and makes undesirable overtures. Virtuous young woman is horribly shocked. Weak heart gives way. Collapse. Exit. Agitation of amiable gentleman and friendly lady, left with corpse on their hands. Happy thought motor-car; Epping Forest; exeunt omnes, singing and washing their hands. Where’s the difficulty?’ (chapter 8)

Or just general-purpose facetiousness, as here when he rings up Dr Carr:

‘Hullo! hullo—ullo! oh, operator, shall I call thee bird or but a wandering voice?… Not at all, I had no intention of being rude, my child, that was a quotation from the poetry of Mr Wordsworth… well, ring him again… thank you, is that Dr Carr?… Lord Peter Wimsey speaking… oh, yes… yes… aha!… not a bit of it… We are about to vindicate you and lead you home, decorated with triumphal wreaths of cinnamon and senna-pods…’

Presumably this is intended to be funny and endearing but well before I was halfway through this novel I’d concluded that Wimsey really is a tiresome berk and to give up reading any more.

‘Be thou as chaste as ice and have a license as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. I am not a dangerous driver. Buck up and get your leave. The snow-white horsepower foams and frets and the blue bonnet—black in this case—is already, in a manner of speaking, over the border.’ (Chapter 11)

‘Sorrow vanquished, labour ended, Jordan passed. Buzz off, my lad. No, Charles, I will not wait while you put on a Burberry. Back and side go bare, go bare, hand and foot go cold, so belly-god send us good ale enough, whether it be new or old.’

He often sounds a bit like the Fool in King Lear i.e. so arcane and scatter-brained as to sound mad.

‘Well, well—we’ll have a spot of lunch and write a letter to Mr Probyn and another to my good friend Bishop Lambert of the Orinoco Mission to get a line on Cousin Hallelujah, Smile, smile, smile. As Ingoldsby says: ‘The breezes are blowing a race, a race! The breezes are blowing—we near the chase!’ Do ye ken John Peel? Likewise, know’st thou the land where blooms the citron-flower? Well, never mind if you don’t—you can always look forward to going there for your honeymoon.’ (Chapter 12).

Or:

‘Well now, as to the medical problem—the means. I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids). Even I am baffled. But not for long! (he cried, with a magnificent burst of self-confidence). My Honour (capital H) is concerned to track this Human Fiend (capitals) to its hidden source, and nail the whited sepulchre to the mast even though it crush me in the attempt! Loud applause. His chin sank broodingly upon his dressing-gown, and he breathed a few guttural notes into the bass saxophone which was the cherished companion of his solitary hours in the bathroom.’
Parker ostentatiously took up the book which he had laid aside on Wimsey’s entrance.
‘Tell me when you’ve finished,’ he said, caustically.

It’s almost as if he’s brain damaged.

Wimsy’s flippancy

Sayers loses no opportunity to make Wimsey frivolous and flippant. He is given to extended comic fantasias, satirically quoting poems, adverts, newspapers headlines, in youthful high spirits, while his interlocutors have to wait until he’s quite finished before they can get a word in. And the reader, also, has to wait before he gets to the point.

This can get tiresome. Take this reply to Parker who says there’s nothing to the death of this old lady, to which Wimsey is saying that, on the contrary, he suspects there is. But this is how he puts it

‘You’ve got an official mind, Charles,’ replied his friend. ‘Your official passion for evidence is gradually sapping your brilliant intellect and smothering your instincts. You’re over-civilised, that’s your trouble. Compared with you, I am a child of nature. I dwell among the untrodden ways beside the springs of Dove, a maid whom there are (I am shocked to say) few to praise, likewise very few to love, which is perhaps just as well.’ (Chapter 6)

All of which is a humorous misapplication of a famous poem by William Wordsworth, She dwelt among the untrodden ways if, humorous, that is, you find this kind of long-winded, literary byplay humorous. In the same way that the following quote is a humorous reference to Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, ‘The Raven’.

‘I wish you wouldn’t keep on saying the same thing, Charles. It bores me so. It’s like the Raven never flitting which, as the poet observes, still is sitting, still is sitting, inviting one to heave the pallid bust of Pallas at him and have done with it.’ (Chapter 14)

Bookishness

Like Agatha Christie, Sayers has her characters repeatedly make references to books, crime stories, murder mysteries and so on, thus emphasising the artificiality of the entire story.

‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’

‘Outlet,’ said Wimsey, energetically, ‘hi! taxi!… outlet—everybody needs an outlet—97A, St. George’s Square—and after all, one can’t really blame people if it’s just that they need an outlet. I mean, why be bitter? They can’t help it. I think it’s much kinder to give them an outlet than to make fun of them in books—and, after all, it isn’t really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.’ (Chapter 3)

‘That’s so. Well, there’s only one thing that could prevent that happening, and that’s—oh, lord! old son. Do you know what it works out at? The old, old story, beloved of novelists—the missing heir!’ (Chapter 11)

‘[She] gets the said minions to polish her off before she can do any mischief.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘Oh, by one of those native poisons which slay in a split second and defy the skill of the analyst. They are familiar to the meanest writer of mystery stories.’ (Chapter 11)

Or references to specific books:

At intervals the patient Bunter unpacked himself from the back seat and climbed one of these uncommunicative guides to peer at its blank surface with a torch—a process which reminded Parker of Alan Quartermain trying to trace the features of the departed Kings of the Kukuanas under their calcareous shrouds of stalactite. (Chapter 12)

Epigraphs

Of course the most bookish thing about this novel is the epigraphs. Each of the 23 chapters is prefaced by epigraphs from a deliberate and show-off range of sources, including half a dozen or more from Shakespeare, George Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Don Quixote, Samuel Butler, Tennyson, Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, as well as outliers such as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the popular novelists Gilbert Frankau and Edmund Pearson, the 17th century jurist Sir Edward Coke, the statesman Edmund Burke, 18th century playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

As you can see, this is an ostentatiously eclectic and showy selection.

Sherlock

This bookish referentiality is epitomised by repeated references to Sherlock Holmes, as if invoking his name somehow lays his ghost, whereas it tends to do the opposite and trigger comparisons of the present novel with Conan Doyle’s masterpieces, against which it mightily suffers.

‘Good gracious!’ cried Charles, ‘it’s perfectly obvious—’
‘Shut up, Sherlock,’ said his friend,

‘Anyhow, curious cases are rather a hobby of mine. In fact, I’m not just being the perfect listener. I have deceived you. I have an ulterior motive, said he, throwing off his side-whiskers and disclosing the well-known hollow jaws of Mr Sherlock Holmes.’ (Chapter 2)

‘I told you I’d be turnin’ up again before long,’ said Lord Peter, cheerfully. ‘Sherlock is my name and Holmes is my nature.’ (Chapter 4)

‘I must say that up to now that appears completely insoluble. I am baffled, Watson (said he, his hawk-like eyes gleaming angrily from under the half-closed lids).’
(Chapter 19)

Lesbians?

Delving deeper into the Dawson family, Wimsey and Parker discover that old Agatha lived for many years with Clara Whittaker, a fierce, mannish rider to hounds. Is there any hint that they were lesbians? Or was two unmarried women living together for many years taken at face value a hundred years ago?

Lord Peter and Parker looked with considerable interest at the rather grim old woman sitting so uncompromisingly upright with the reins in her hand. A dour, weather-beaten old face, but certainly handsome still, with its large nose and straight, heavy eyebrows. And beside her, smaller, plumper and more feminine, was the Agatha Dawson whose curious death had led them to this quiet country place. She had a sweet, smiling face—less dominating than that of her redoubtable friend, but full of spirit and character. Without doubt they had been a remarkable pair of old ladies. (Chapter 11)

And here’s her devoted old groom remembering her:

‘Straight as a switch, with a fine, high colour in her cheeks and shiny black hair—just like a beautiful two-year-old filly she was. And very sperrited. Wonnerful sperrited. There was a many gentlemen as would have been glad to hitch up with her, but she was never broke to harness. Like dirt, she treated ’em. Wouldn’t look at ’em, except it might be the grooms and stablehands in a matter of ’osses. And in the way of business, of course. Well, there is some creatures like that…. The Lord makes a few on ’em that way to suit ’Is own purposes, I suppose. There ain’t no arguin’ with females.’

And his wife’s view:

‘Often she used to say to me, ‘Betty,’ she said, ‘I mean to be an old maid and so does Miss Clara, and we’re going to live together and be ever so happy, without any stupid, tiresome gentlemen.’ And so it turned out, sir, as you know…’

And the Chief Constable’s:

He put his hand down behind the cushions of the car and pulled out an American magazine—that monthly collection of mystery and sensational fiction published under the name of The Black Mask.
‘Light reading for the masses,’ said Parker.
‘Brought by the gentleman in the yellow boots, perhaps,’ suggested the Chief Constable.
‘More likely by Miss Findlater,’ said Wimsey.
‘Hardly a lady’s choice,’ said Sir Charles, in a pained tone.
‘Oh, I dunno. From all I hear, Miss Whittaker was dead against sentimentality and roses round the porch, and the other poor girl copied her in everything. They might have a boyish taste in fiction.’

The female perspective

Old spinster Mrs Climpson is given a number of insights or perceptions about the female experience. Early on she has a sad piece of autobiography about the severe limitations placed on women of her generation, which reminded me of Virginia Woolf’s powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas.

‘A dear old friend of mine used to say that I should have made a very good lawyer,’ said Miss Climpson, complacently, ‘but of course, when I was young, girls didn’t have the education or the opportunities they get nowadays, Mr Parker. I should have liked a good education, but my dear father didn’t believe in it for women. Very old-fashioned, you young people would think him…

‘My dear father would be surprised to find his daughter so business-like. He always said a woman should never need to know anything about money matters, but times have changed so greatly, have they not?’ (Chapter 3)

And other miscellaneous insights from an ageing spinster’s point of view:

With her long and melancholy experience of frustrated womanhood, observed in a dreary succession of cheap boarding-houses, Miss Climpson was able to dismiss one theory which had vaguely formed itself in her mind. This was no passionate nature, cramped by association with an old woman and eager to be free to mate before youth should depart. That look she knew well—she could diagnose it with dreadful accuracy at the first glance, in the tone of a voice saying, ‘How do you do?’ (Chapter 5)

And:

Miss Findlater has evidently quite a ‘pash’ (as we used to call it at school) for Miss Whittaker, and I am afraid none of us are being flattered by such outspoken admiration. I must say, I think it rather unhealthy—you may remember Miss Clemence Dane’s very clever book on the subject?—I have seen so much of that kind of thing in my rather WOMAN-RIDDEN existence! It has such a bad effect, as a rule, upon the weaker character of the two… (Chapter 8)

And:

‘If Mary Whittaker were to marry, she would marry a rabbit.’ (Miss Climpson’s active mind quickly conjured up a picture of the rabbit—fair-haired and a little paunchy, with a habit of saying, ‘I’ll ask the wife.’ Miss Climpson wondered why Providence saw fit to create such men. For Miss Climpson, men were intended to be masterful, even though wicked or foolish. She was a spinster made and not born—a perfectly womanly woman.)

Miss Climpson had little difficulty in reconstructing one of those hateful and passionate “scenes” of slighted jealousy with which a woman-ridden life had made her only too familiar. “I do everything for you—you don’t care a bit for me—you treat me cruelly—you’re simply sick of me, that’s what it is!” And “Don’t be so ridiculous. Really, I can’t stand this. Oh, stop it, Vera! I hate being slobbered over.” Humiliating, degrading, exhausting, beastly scenes. Girls’ school, boarding-house, Bloomsbury-flat scenes. Damnable selfishness wearying of its victim. Silly schwärmerei swamping all decent self-respect. Barren quarrels ending in shame and hatred.

Miss Findlater the feminist

She talks to Miss Findlater who is a feminist:

‘If you only knew what a stupid lot they are! Anyway, I’ve no use for men!’ Miss Findlater tossed her head. ‘They haven’t got any ideas. And they always look on women as sort of pets or playthings. As if a woman like Mary wasn’t worth fifty of them! You should have heard that Markham man the other day—talking politics to Mr Tredgold, so that nobody could get a word in edgeways, and then saying, ‘I’m afraid this is a very dull subject of conversation for you, Miss Whittaker,’ in his condescending way. Mary said in that quiet way of hers, ‘Oh, I think the subject is anything but dull, Mr Markham.’ But he was so stupid, he couldn’t even grasp that and said, ‘One doesn’t expect ladies to be interested in politics, you know. But perhaps you are one of the modern young ladies who want the flapper’s vote.’ Ladies, indeed! Why are men so insufferable when they talk about ladies?’

‘I mean to be an old maid, anyhow,’ retorted Miss Findlater. ‘Mary and I have quite decided that. We’re interested in things, not in men.’

‘Men’s friendships—oh yes! I know one hears a lot about them. But half the time, I don’t believe they’re real friendships at all. Men can go off for years and forget all about their friends. And they don’t really confide in one another. Mary and I tell each other all our thoughts and feelings. Men seem just content to think each other good sorts without ever bothering about their inmost selves.”
Probably that’s why their friendships last so well,’ replied Miss Climpson. ‘They don’t make such demands on one another.’

‘I cannot help feeling that it is more natural—more proper, in a sense—for a man and woman to be all in all to one another than for two persons of the same sex. Er—after all, it is a—a fruitful affection,’ said Miss Climpson, boggling a trifle at this idea, ‘and—and all that, you know, and I am sure that when the right MAN comes along for you—’

‘Bother the right man!’ cried Miss Findlater, crossly. ‘I do hate that kind of talk. It makes one feel dreadful—like a prize cow or something. Surely, we have got beyond that point of view in these days.’

The male view

‘We talked for some time, Inspector, and I will not conceal from you that I found Miss Grant a very interesting personality. She had an almost masculine understanding. I may say I am not the sort of a man who prefers women to be brainless. No, I am rather modern in that respect. If ever I was to take a wife, Inspector, I should wish her to be an intelligent companion.’

Or our boys being more conventionally sexist:

‘When a woman is wicked and unscrupulous,’ said Parker, sententiously, ‘she is the most ruthless criminal in the world—fifty times worse than a man, because she is always so much more single-minded about it.’
‘They’re not troubled with sentimentality, that’s why,’ said Wimsey, ‘and we poor mutts of men stuff ourselves up with the idea that they’re romantic and emotional. All punk, my son. Damn that ’phone!’

Or Mrs Piggin, landlady of The Fox and Hounds in Crofton:

‘They don’t make them like that nowadays. Not but what these modern girls are good goers, many of them, and does a lot of things as would have been thought very fast in the old days,’

Newspapers

Christie mocks newspapers, giving her fictional newspapers satirical names. Mind you, so did lots of comic authors. In Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, William Boot works for the ‘The Daily Beast’. Anyway, in this story Detective Parker reads his news in the Daily Yell. Less humorous alternatives are the ‘Evening Views’ and the ‘Evening Banner’.

It girls

Never had he met a woman in whom ‘the great It’, eloquently hymned by Mrs Elinor Glyn, was so completely lacking.

Elinor Glyn was a bestselling author of popular romances which were often a trifle racy. She popularized the concept of the ‘It girl’, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture ‘

Credit

‘Unnatural Death’ by Dorothy L. Sayers was published in 1927.

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by Simon on October 31, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 101 Ways of Causing Sudden Death, 1927, Agatha Dawson, Alan Quartermain, Bass beer, Ben Cobling, Bertha Gotobed, Bishop Lambert, Burberry, Canada, Charles Parker, Conan Doyle, crime fiction, crime novel, Croftover Magna, Daimler Twin-Six, Detective Charles Parker, detective novel, Detective-Inspector Parker, Dewsby, Dorcas Gulliver, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dr Carr, Dr Edward Carr, Dr Faulkner, Earl Derr Biggers, Edgar Allen Poe, Edward Carr, Elinor Glyn, Epping Forest, Esmeralda, Evelyn Gotobed, Evelyn Waugh, Feminism, Fiesole, Gray's Inn, Hampshire, Hampstead, Ingoldsby, It Girl, J.F. Trigg, Jim Piggin, John Ironsides, John Murbles, Leahampton, lesbian, Little Dorrit, Lord Peter Wimsey, Mary Whittaker, Mervyn Bunter, Miss Agatha Dawson, Miss Alexandra Katharine Climpson, Miss Climpson, Miss Findlater, Miss Katherine Climpson, Miss Murgatroyd, Miss Philliter, Miss Whittaker, Mr Andrews, Mr Probyn, Mr Stanniforth, Mr Templeton, Mr Towkington, Mr Tredgold, Mrs Budge, Mrs Cobling, Mrs Cropper, Mrs Forrest, Mrs Marion Mead, Mrs Merdle, Mrs Peasgood, Mrs Piggin, murder, News of the World, novel, Nurse Philliter, P.G. Wodehouse, Saint Onesimus, Sanger’s Circus, Scoop, Scotland Yard, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Andrew Mackenzie, Sir Charles Pillington, Sir James Lubbock, sleuth, Sobranes, Soho, Somerset House, South Audley Street, Southern Railway, Staples Inn, Superintendent Walmsley, The Black Mask, The Daily Beast, the Daily Yell, the Fox and Hounds, The Murderer’s Vade-Mecum, the Orinoco Mission, The Raven, the Reverend Hallelujah Dawson, Three Guineas, Unnatural Death, Vera Findlater, Virginia Woolf, West Indian, William Boot

Posted by Simon on October 31, 2025

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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.

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by Simon on September 24, 2025 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on September 24, 2025

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The Hollow by Agatha Christie (1946)

‘Do any of us know what anyone else is like?’
(Edward Angkatell expressing one of the shallow truisms which litter Christie stories, helping to give them a spurious sense of depth)

‘Je suis un peu snob,’ he murmured to himself.
(Poirot commenting on his fondness for invitations from English aristocrats – but in this he surely reflects the snobbery of his creator and her fondness for upper class and aristocratic settings)

It was, he thought, an interesting pattern… Yes, that was how he saw it: a pattern. A design of intermingled emotions and the clash of personalities. A strange involved design, with dark threads of hate and desire running through it.
(Poirot ponders, p.199)

‘It’s bad enough for children to have a father who’s been murdered – but it will make it infinitely worse for them to have their mother hanged for it. Sometimes I don’t think you policemen think of these things.’
(Lady Lucy Angkatell’s amusingly eccentric take on the situation which develops, p.219)

The Hollow is a country house in Surrey belonging to the posh Angkatell family, so it is a variation on ‘the country house murder mystery’. (I say Surrey, but half way through the book we learn Christie has set it in the fictional country of ‘Wealdshire’, though God knows why she bothered as the descriptions of Gerda’s and Henrietta’s drives there both make it clear the house is located in Surrey, p.131.)

The lady of the house – eccentric, whimsical Lady Lucy Angkatell – has invited a group of friends down for a lovely autumn weekend of walks and meals and fine company. And so in a stately, leisurely way Christie introduces us to the key characters in their homes and workplaces before they pack up to travel down to the lovely country house.

They can maybe be grouped into three sets:

1. The Christows

John Christow, 39, a classy Harley Street doctor, is the central figure. He has a lucrative private practice reassuring worried but essentially healthy rich ladies. He is meant to be doing laborious research into (the fictional illness) ‘Ridgeway’s disease’, which resembles multiple sclerosis in that it involves degeneration of the cortex.

But despite all this success he is, in fact, tired and frustrated. In moments of reverie he remembers his affair with the beautiful actress Veronica Cray who got the offer of a part in Hollywood and refused to turn it down in order to remain in London with him. That was 15 years ago.

Angry and upset, on the rebound he married Veronica’s opposite, the plain, sheep-like, slow, stupid and nervous Gerda. After years of marriage and the arrival of two young children, Christow is liable to fly into towering rages at the drop of a hat and so Gerda goes in absolute terror of him. For the past year or so John has been having an affair with tall, beautiful, clever, creative sculptress, Henrietta Savernake.

Gerda is slow and stupid and she knows it. In everyday life, every single household decision she takes seems to drive her husband mad with frustration and irritation. When socialising she is cripplingly aware that she is the stupidest person in the room, always the last to get a joke, missing clever intellectual references and so on. She is crippled by an inferiority complex, which means going to stay with the oh-so-clever, well-connected, intellectually playful Angkatell family is her idea of hell.

2. Henrietta Savernake

Tall, clever, quick, independent, an impressive artist and shown to be ruthless at getting what she wants. For example, she offered to do a life bust of Gerda, which cheered the poor woman up, but next time he visits her, John realises she only offered to knock off the realistic bust because what she really wanted was to capture the pathetic posture, the kneeling, keening pitiful upwards look of a whipped dog, which Gerda embodies so well – in order to use it as the basis for a completely different, more modernist sculpture, which she titles ‘The Worshipper’.

John Christow is having an affair with her but she retains her independence and is perfectly capable of standing up to him in arguments and simply saying no.

The contrast between smooth Henrietta and hapless Gerda is epitomised by their respective ways of driving and handling a car: Gerda is all fingers and thumbs, grinding the gears and stalling in the middle of traffic lights; whereas Henrietta gets an almost sexual enjoyment from handling her sports car’s wheels and sticks with the confidence of a champion jockey riding a thoroughbred horse.

She shot away down the Mews, savouring the unfailing pleasure she always felt when setting off in the car alone. She much preferred to be alone when driving. In that way she could realize to the full the intimate personal enjoyment that driving a car brought to her. (p.61)

Henrietta is Lucy Angkatell’s cousin.

3. The Angkatells

Lady Lucy Angkatell, 60, is wispy, etiolated, eccentric, flits from one subject to another with ‘that curious elfin elusiveness of hers’ (p.76).

Her husband, Lord Henry Angkatell, was in the diplomatic service, a former high commissioner, and knows to keep in the background and say ‘yes dear’ to her various plans.

Then there’s a bit of family tree complexity. Tall bookish diffident Edward Angkatell is a distant cousin of Henry’s but somehow was the entailee of the family’s beloved house, Ainswick. In other words, Lucy was brought up at this lovely estate, Ainswick, Henry (her distant cousin) was often there, and Midge remembers visiting and playing their as a child, and they were all very happy there.

But when Lucy’s father, old Geoffrey Angkatell (a great ‘character’ in the county) passed away, his wealth went to Lucy but the terms of the entail dictated that the house and the estate could not go to a female, and so it was left to the nearest male relative, who was Edward Angkatell.

He [Edward] was of a bookish turn of mind, collected first editions and occasionally wrote rather hesitating, ironical little articles for obscure reviews. He had asked his second cousin Henrietta Savernake, three times to marry him.

And three times she turned him down. Anyway, so not having inherited Ainswick, Henry and Lucy moved into their family home, The Hollow, which is to be the setting of the story.

Then there is Midge Hardcastle, a less affluent relative of the Angkatells, who has been staying at the house for a while before the weekend commences. She is an old friend of the family and remembers visiting them as children when they all lived happily at Ainswick.

Midge is in love with Edward (‘She had loved Edward ever since she could remember…’), and who wouldn’t be:

The afternoon sun lighted up the gold of John’s hair and the blue of his eyes. So might a Viking look who had just come ashore on a conquering mission. His voice, warm and resonant, charmed the ear, and the magnetism of his whole personality took charge of the scene. who, however, only has eyes for Henrietta, who keeps politely but firmly turning down his proposals, and is happy enough having an affair with John Christow for the time being. (p.76)

And lastly, David Angkatell, a young man, up at Oxford, cocky and opinionated and left-wing, very anti-British Empire, very aggrieved on behalf of the working classes etc – ‘a tall, sulky young man with an Adam’s apple.’

Poirot

In addition, early on in the text we learn that Lady Angkatell has also invited a new neighbour, a man who’s moved into a nearby cottage, for lunch on Sunday. She refers to him in her eccentric airy way as ‘the crime man’ but when she goes on to say he has an egg-shaped head and she met him in Baghdad solving a case when her husband, Henry, was high commissioner there – we realise she must be referring to Hercule Poirot!

I’ve been reading Agatha Christie’s novels in chronological order and had noticed how we hadn’t heard of Poirot for some time. On investigation, it turns out that he ‘The Hollow’ was the first of her novels in four years to feature him, one of the longest gaps in the series of Poirot novels.

In the event Poirot doesn’t arrive on the scene until page 100 of this 300-page novel and when he does, it feels as if Christie is letting her dislike of her own creation seep through a bit. She describes how he dislikes the country, dislikes trees, dislikes the country cottage his friends have persuaded him to buy, and dislikes the way Englishmen are meant to dress for ‘a weekend in the country’. In everything he remains an urban dandy.

Incidentally, in the same conversation that Lady Lucy tells people she’s invited ‘the crime man’ to Sunday lunch, she adds the detail that he’s renting one of the cottages which adjoins their estate, while the other cottage (‘Dovecotes’) has been taken by some actress or other. This will be significant…

Shame about the murders

In these later Christie novels I’ve felt it a shame that anyone has to get murdered. In ‘Towards Zero’ I really liked the characters of old Mr Treves and haughty Lady Tressilian and was dismayed when they both got bumped off. Some of the scenes between the characters in that book had a depth and impact previously absent from her novels.

It’s no coincidence that it was in the 1940s that Christie wrote her two best ‘straight’ non-murder novels, published under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, Absent in the Spring (1944) and The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948). She wanted to escape from the straitjacket of crime fiction in order to explore character and relationships.

You feel the same here. I was enjoying the characters of angry John Christow, his pathetically abject wife Gerda, and springy confident Henrietta – it feels like another, more interesting novel could have been written if only Christie didn’t have to bend her talent and distort her characters in order to accommodate the inevitable murder. It had to happen but in some ways it feels like a let-down. ‘Here we go again’, the reader sighs…

Preparing the way for the murder

The way is prepared not only for the murder but for as many people as possible to be suspects, in her usual manner, by having numerous characters either threatening murder or describing other characters as being perfectly capable of carrying out a murder.

Thus gentle Edward Angkatell gets cross when Henrietta explains why John Christow won’t do the decent thing i.e. divorce Gerda and marry her, in effect permanently keeping Henrietta beyond his grasp, leading him to say:

‘If there were no John Christow in the world you would marry me.’
Henrietta said harshly, ‘I can’t imagine a world in which there was no John Christow! That’s what you’ve got to understand.’
‘If it’s like that, why on earth doesn’t the fellow get a divorce from his wife and then you could marry?’
‘John doesn’t want to get a divorce from his wife. And I don’t know that I should want to marry John if he did. It isn’t – it isn’t in the least like you think.’
Edward said in a thoughtful, considering way: ‘John Christow… There are too many John Christows in this world…’

Later, Lord Henry remarks of his wife Lucy:

‘She’s always been the same from a girl – only sometimes I feel it’s growing on her… I mean that she doesn’t realize that there are limits. Why, I really believe, Midge,’ he said, amused, ‘that Lucy would feel she could get away with murder!’

And the atmosphere is ramped up when, once the guests have all arrived, Lord Henry decides to give Christow a little go with his impressive gun collection. They take pot shots at target cards, the others come up and they all have a go themselves. Henrietta is a poor shot, Gerda is, predictably, worse, Midge is no good… but everyone is surprised when Lady Lucy comes marching up:

took the revolver from Midge as her husband greeted David Angkatell, reloaded it and without a word put three holes close to the centre of the target.
‘Well done, Lucy,’ exclaimed Midge. ‘I didn’t know shooting was one of your accomplishments.’
‘Lucy,’ said Sir Henry gravely, ‘always kills her man!’ (p.79)

Why do I have the feeling that this scene, and these words, will come back to haunt us…

The revenant

And then, just as the family and guests are embarking on their after-dinner games of bridge, the french windows are thrown open and who should stand there picturesquely framed against the night, but John Christow’s old flame and original love, Veronica Cray! So she is the actress who Lucy mentioned had taken the other cottage.

Anyway, her reappearance cycles very quickly through a number of stages. Astonishment, as everyone takes in her dazzling appearance, all platinum blonde hair and fox fur. Then politeness, as she says she’s popped over to ask for matches to light the fire, and Lady Angkatell recovers her manners and gets the butler to fetch not one but six packs.

Then pretend surprise, as Veronica catches sight of John Christow and affects astonishment at bumping into her old flame after all these years. Then simpering apologies as she asks the assembled guests if it’s alright to ask John to accompany her back to her cottage to see her safely home, and with that she and John exit the french windows to everyone’s astonishment.

Cut to hours later, to 3am in the morning, to find John making his way quietly through the grounds back to The Hollow. Two important things have happened. Number one, Christie hints, as strongly as she can in a book published in 1946, that the pair have had sex. One last fling.

But far more importantly, John has been exorcised. For fifteen long years he now realises he has been pining for Veronica, wondering what might have been, living a double life, not fully committing to his wife or children. Now, one night with Veronica, rather than reawakening the past, has laid the ghost. He feels cleansed and renewed. he has shaken off her haunting shadow. He will never see her again.

John is understandably tense as he approaches the house. Was that the sound of a door closing? Did someone twitch their curtain, observing his return? Was it the curtain of Henrietta’s room? And then, tiptoeing through the french windows, up the stairs and into his bedroom. Will Gerda be awake and furiously waiting for him? No, she’s fast asleep and only half wakes up as he slips into bed beside her. Phew! He’s got away with it.

Except that next morning, after a late breakfast, he is handed a note, that has been delivered by one of Veronica’s servants demanding to see him. So, dutifully enough, he walks in full daylight back to her cottage where they have a flaming row. After last night (i.e. sex) Veronica thinks John is in love with her and so now demands that he divorces his wife and comes away with him.

But John, as we’ve seen, is in the exact opposite state of mind. Having laid the ghost that haunted him, he now sees Veronica in the cold light of day, as hard and egotistical and manipulative. Once again she ridicules his work as a doctor, says anyone can be a doctor whereas hardly anybody makes it to the top of the acting procession as she intends to do. When he claims he is now committed to his wife and children, she laughs in his face.

Suddenly the penny drops and Veronica realises it’s not Gerda John wants to remain loyal to, it’s his mistress, Henrietta. With a woman’s intuition, she knows Gerda is nothing, but realises that the tall elegant woman standing at the fireplace when she made her dramatic entrance the night before, she’s the stumbling block which is preventing John’s return.

Which makes her erupt with anger:

‘You turned me down fifteen years ago… You’ve turned me down again today. I’ll make you sorry for this.’
John got up and went to the door.
‘I’m sorry, Veronica, if I’ve hurt you. You’re very lovely, my dear, and I once loved you very much. Can’t we leave it at that?’
‘Good-bye, John. We’re not leaving it at that. You’ll find that out all right. I think – I think I hate you more than I believed I could hate anyone.’

The swimming pool scene

So John leaves her seething and walks back through the woods towards The Hollow. He feels a wonderful sense of release, into a new life. he will be a new man. He will be kinder to poor Gerda in future. He will stop rowing with Henrietta. He can’t wait to tell Henrietta that rather than going off with veronica, as she probably suspects, the opposite has happened and he has at last liberated his mind from her thrall.

On his way back through the grounds John arrives at the swimming pool and suddenly has an uncanny sense of being watched. He looks around at the thick border of chestnut trees which surround it and hears a metallic click. Suddenly he is aware of danger, sees a figure (‘His eyes widened in surprise’) but has no time to move or shout when there is a shot, and he falls on the edge of the swimming pool, his blood dripping into the blue water…

Poirot arrives

Moments later, by sheer coincidence, Poirot arrives at the pool having been brought by the Angkatell’s butler with a view to arriving at the pavilion where the family often have cocktails or pre-luncheon drinks. Instead the butler and Poirot are both astonished at the scene which confronts them: there is John Christow lying on the verge of the pool, bleeding to death; over him stands his wife, Gerda, holding a revolver; and at just that moment also arrive at the pool, from different paths which converge on it through the woods, the other family members and guests, namely: Edward and Midge, Henrietta, and Lady Lucy.

Often Poirot only hears about a murder weeks or months after it has occurred. In this story he is right at the scene of the crime within moments of it having been committed.

What strikes him more than anything is how much it all looks like a scene, from a movie or stage play. In fact, comically enough, his first impression is that the entire thing has been staged for his benefit, in some obscure expression of the notorious English ‘sense of humour’. He thinks these toffs are playing a silly game of murder mystery. It’s only after a minute or two, as he bends over the dying man, that he realises, with a great shock, that this is the real thing.

The really startling aspects of the scene are that 1) it is Gerda who is standing over John’s body holding the revolver. In subsequent hours and days she will insist to everyone that she came across his body and the gun lying beside him and without thinking picked it up… But it makes her the number one suspect from the first.

2) Second thing is that, as Poirot kneels to the dying man, John Christow says one word, ‘Henrietta’, loud enough for them all to hear and then expires. Well, quite obviously, did this mean his last thoughts were of Henrietta? Or more simply, that it was Henrietta who shot him?

Suspects and motives

So: it is a classic country house and closed circle mystery – country house because of the setting, and closed circle because only a handful of suspects we have been lengthily introduced to, can have dunnit, namely:

Gerda – found holding the murder weapon, motive: jealousy that her husband had revived his old love affair with Veronica
Henrietta – same as above, she mistakenly thinks John is going to dump her and run off with the Hollywood actress
Veronica – who, as we saw, was driven to insensate rage by John’s calm rejection of her offer to run off with him, especially if I’m right in thinking they slept together
Edward Angkatell – who thought the only thing standing between him and happy marriage to Henrietta is charismatic John Christow, so has a motive for wanting him out of the way
Lady Lucy – remember how good a shot she was, and her husband saying she always kills her man? Well, earlier on she was given several scenes where she implied that it would be best for poor Henrietta and Edward if John Christow could be got out of the way; if Christow disappeared, Edward and Henrietta would marry, as they always intended to, and then they will have babies and Ainswick, the estate she really loves, will be saved for the family – if not, no marriage, no heirs, and the Angkatell line will end with ineffectual Edward
David Angkatell – more remotely, might it have been young David, the firebrand socialist who despised John Christow and his Harley Street practice pandering to spoiled fat posh women?

Whodunnit? Well the local cops are called in, in the shape of sturdy, lugubrious Inspector Grange, and the last two-thirds of the novel (the shooting occurs on page 105 of this 308-page-long book) are spent very enjoyably watching all the characters react to the murder, adjust their lives to the new matrix of relationships, while Grange goes about his work, and Poirot interviews all the suspects in his usual way, casual conversations, and much sitting on a bench in the woods pondering, pondering…

As usual I won’t carry my summary on any further, as Christie’s denouements are always tangled and convoluted, and also, not to give it away. The full text is freely available online (see link, below).

Cast

Lady Lucy Angkatell – mistress of The Hollow – 60s, eccentric, talks in non-sequiturs and ‘swift inconsequences’ – distant cousin of her husband…
Lord Henry Angkatell – husband, former diplomatic service, discreet and wise – married his distant cousin, Lucy Angkatell. they keep an impressive number of servants, several characters comment on it:
- Miss Simmons – the housemaid
- Gudgeon – the butler
- Mrs Medway – the cook
- Doris Emmott – kitchenmaid
- Mears – the gardener
- Mrs Mears – his wife
Midge Hardcastle – ‘from the North country grimness of a manufacturing town’ – works in a posh clothes shop run by a Madame Alfrege – ‘Midge pushed thick, wiry black hair back from her square forehead with a sturdy brown arm. Nothing unsubstantial or fairylike about her’ – she is in love with Edward, who’s in love with Henrietta
Edward Angkatell – very tall and thin – inherited the Ainswick estate and lives there alone, diffident, sensitive, bookish – has asked Henrietta to marry him three times and been rejected
- Tremlet the head gardener at Ainswick
David Angkatell – just down from Oxford, clever, intellectual, very left-wing and bitter against the world
Henrietta Savernake – sculptor, clever, passionate, quick – John Christow is in love with her and she’s enjoying their affair but is maybe not as committed
- Doris Saunders – her model
John Christow – posh Harley Street doctor, meant to be doing laborious research into ‘Ridgeway’s disease’, in fact is tired and frustrated; takes it out on his dog-like wife in bouts of furious rage, and is having an affair with Henrietta
- Beryl Collins, ‘Collie’ – his plain efficient secretary
- Mrs Crabtree – the patient at St Christopher’s Hospital who John is experimenting on to find a cure for Ridgeway’s Disease
Gerda Christow – his dutiful wife – stupid, slow, dim, anxious, drives John mad with frustration
- Terence – their detached, brainy 12-year-old son
- Zena – their 9-year-old daughter
- Collins – servant
- Lewis – servant
- Cook – servant
Mrs Elsie Patterson – Gerda’s sister
Hercule Poirot – has rented the country cottage, Resthaven, where he is attended by:
- Victor – his Belgian gardener
- Françoise – Victor’s wife and cook
Inspector Grange – local police – ‘a large heavily built man with a down-drooping pessimistic moustache’
Sergeant Clark – Grange explains: ‘He’s been working on the servants – the friendly touch. He’s a nice-looking chap, got a way with women’

Poirot’s method

Loads of times in earlier novels, Christie has made it abundantly clear that Poirot is not the kind of detective who gets down on his hands and knees to find cigar ash and distinctive footprints. Instead he sits back in his chair and ponders the human relationships among the suspects, the kind of person the murder victim was, and the kind of person all this implies the murderer is. In other words, he reflects on the psychology of the situation.

Poirot said, ‘That is one of Inspector Grange’s men. He seems to be looking for something.’
‘Clues, I suppose. Don’t policemen look for clues? Cigarette ash, footprints, burnt matches?’
Her voice held a kind of bitter mockery. Poirot answered seriously:
‘Yes, they look for these things – and sometimes they find them. But the real clues, Miss Savernake, in a case like this, usually lie in the personal relationships of the people concerned.’ (p.194)

Poirot murders are never simple

They are contrived, like the contrived plots of murder mystery novels.

‘It has seemed to me from the beginning that either this crime was very simple – so simple that it was difficult to believe its simplicity (and simplicity, Mademoiselle, can be strangely baffling) or else it was extremely complex – that is to say, we were contending against a mind capable of intricate and ingenious inventions, so that every time we seemed to be heading for the truth, we were actually being led on a trail that twisted away from the truth and led us to a point which ended in nothingness. This apparent futility, this continual barrenness, is not real – it is artificial, it is planned. A very subtle and ingenious mind is plotting against us the whole time – and succeeding.’ (p.260)

Poirot can’t get rid of the nagging feeling that the whole thing has been somehow staged for his benefit. But in a sense what he’s perceiving is the way the entire novel has been staged for the reader’s entertainment. There are at least two levels of stageyness, of artifice, at work.

Poirot

I assume that from the start Christie had a checklist of Poirot characteristics or qualities which had to be dropped into each story. A recurring one is his foreignness, which keeps him outside all the social circles involved in the murder, at an angle from the events and the society they occur in, from English traditions and turns of phrase, an askewness which gives him countless small advantages and, in the end, the one Big Advantage, of seeing the sequence of events in a way nobody else can. So it signifies more than just he comes from abroad.

VERONICA: ‘I didn’t know who my next door neighbour was – otherwise I should have. I just thought he was some little foreigner and I thought, you know, he might become a bore – living so near.’

He [Sergeant Clark] came in a little breathlessly. He was clearly pleased with himself, though subduing the fact under a respectful official manner. ‘Thought I’d better come and report, sir, since I knew where you’d gone.’ He hesitated, shooting a doubtful glance at Poirot, whose exotic foreign appearance did not commend itself to his sense of official reticence.

‘[I was] hoping Mrs. Medway would make a really rich Mud Pie –’
‘Mud pie?’ Inspector Grange had to break in.
‘Chocolate, you know, and eggs – and then covered with whipped cream. Just the sort of sweet a foreigner would like for lunch.’

Grange came into Resthaven to drink a cup of tea with Hercule Poirot. The tea was exactly what he had had apprehensions it might be – extremely weak and China tea at that. ‘These foreigners,’ thought Grange, ‘don’t know how to make tea – you can’t teach ’em.’ (p.263)

An outsiderness which Poirot turns to all kinds of advantage, sometimes in just being able to say what the tightly-wrapped, buttoned-up English can’t say to each other.

Poirot put his hand gently on her shoulder. He said: ‘But you are of those who can live with a sword in their hearts – who can go on and smile -‘
Henrietta looked up at him. Her lips twisted into a bitter smile. ‘That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?’
‘It is because I am a foreigner and I like to use fine words.’

Feminist

To demonstrate how Christie was using the word ‘feminist’ in 1946.

In the consulting room Inspector Grange faced the cool, belligerent glance of Beryl Collier. It was belligerent, he noted that. Well, perhaps that was only natural. Plain bit of goods, he thought. Nothing between her and the doctor, I shouldn’t think. She may have been sweet on him, though. It works that way sometimes.
But not this time, he came to the conclusion, when he leaned back in his chair a quarter of an hour later. Beryl Collier’s answers to his questions had been models of clearness. She replied promptly, and obviously had every detail of the doctor’s practice at her fingertips. He shifted his ground and began to probe gently into the relations existing between John Christow and his wife.
They had been, Beryl said, on excellent terms.
‘I suppose they quarrelled every now and then like most married couples?’ The Inspector sounded easy and confidential.
‘I do not remember any quarrels. Mrs. Christow was quite devoted to her husband – really quite slavishly so.’
There was a faint edge of contempt in her voice. Inspector Grange heard it.
Bit of a feminist, this girl, he thought. (p.170)

Self-referentiality

Right from the start Christie’s books have had characters saying that all the events, or characters, or mystery itself, all feel like they come from a murder mystery novel. One of the effects of this is to lower your sense of critical realism, and accept the fact that the whole thing is a silly entertainment, welcome you into the world of fandom. Another is, maybe, to head off and defuse criticism of its use of clichés. But maybe describing how a text reminds its characters of the clichés of crime fiction, is itself, one of the clichés of crime fiction. Maybe it was already a convention when she start in 1920, which she just continued…

‘Yes. Don’t they usually leave one standing in the hall? Or perhaps he’s watching the front door from the shrubbery outside.’
‘Why should he watch the front door?’
‘I don’t know, I’m sure. They do in books. And then somebody else is murdered in the night.’ (p.135)

‘You know, I’d never thought about murder before.’
‘Why should you? It isn’t a thing one thinks about. It’s a six-letter word in a crossword, or a pleasant entertainment between the covers of a book. But the real thing -‘ (p.236)

Oh, no, thought Midge, it can’t be true. It’s a dream I’ve been having. John Christow, murdered, shot – lying there by the pool. Blood and blue water – like the jacket of a detective story… Fantastic, unreal… The sort of thing that doesn’t happen to oneself… (p.144)

‘I was analyzing my reactions to murder.’
‘It is certainly odd,’ said Midge, ‘to be in one.’
David sighed and said:
‘Wearisome…’ That was quite the best attitude. ‘All the clichés that one thought existed only in the pages of detective fiction!’ (p.155)

‘She mightn’t know about our being able to identify the gun used from the marks on the rifling.’
‘How many people do know that, I wonder?’
‘I put the point to Sir Henry. He said he thought quite a lot of people would know – on account of all the detective stories that are written. Quoted a new one, ‘The Clue of the Dripping Fountain’, which he said John Christow himself had been reading on Saturday and which emphasized that particular point.’ (p.210)

In fact in books about murder, in detective stories, more often than not the murderers get their ideas or insights from reading other detective stories. In this sense, it’s an incredibly incestuous, self-referential genre. Thus Gerda got some of her ideas about how to behave in a detective story from reading a detective story.

‘But then I’m not really as stupid as people think! If you’re very slow and just stare, people think you don’t take things in – and sometimes, underneath, you’re laughing at them! I knew I could kill John and nobody would know because I’d read in that detective story about the police being able to tell which gun a bullet has been fired from.’

If you read the accounts of actual real-life murders, most of which relate to arguments among drug addicts and dealers, or horrible ‘domestics’, nobody gets their ideas from detective stories. The whole idea is as remote from reality as ‘Lord of the Rings’.

A moral objection

Criticism of literature for centuries, maybe for millennia (back to the Greeks and Romans) attributes literature a moral purpose. Being very literal-minded, I’ve always struggled with how reading about murder can be classed as any sort of entertainment. Surely it only works, in moral terms, if you discount the murder, if you accept from the start that it has little or no psychological meaning, is little more than a counter on a board of a game of Cluedo.

There is hardly anywhere in any of Christie’s novels, any real sense of how devastating it would be, traumatic and wrecking, to have someone you know and love, be murdered. No hint at all. Instead here, as in all the other novels, the guy is killed and everyone else accepts it pretty quickly and, by the next day at the latest, have gotten back to their chatty, gossipy lives.

‘Cheer up, Midge,’ said Henrietta. ‘You mustn’t let murder get you down. Shall we go out later and have a spot of dinner together?’ (p.242)

Same in ‘Towards Zero’ where I found the killing of nice old Mr Treves dismaying, but the horrible brutal murder of old Lady Tressilian genuinely upsetting. I couldn’t concentrate on the increasingly ludicrous revelations at the end of that book because I was transfixed by the horror of her gruesome death, and a little disgusted at a genre which brutally, horribly butchers people for our ‘pleasant entertainment’.

For all the effort that goes into lovingly supplying the plausible character profiles and the wealth of social detail, from a really grown-up psychological point of view, I find the entire genre – which treats murdering human beings as a charming game – weird, almost bizarre.

‘C’est formidable!’ Poirot murmured. ‘You are one of the best antagonists, Mademoiselle, that I have ever had.’ (p.299)

As if killing people is much like a jolly game of tennis or a pleasant round of bridge.

Antisemitism

For no reason at all Christie makes Midge’s employer at the clothes boutique ‘a Whitechapel Jewess with dyed hair and a voice like a corncrake’.

Madame Alfrege was not a very easy person to explain things to at any time.
Midge set her chin resolutely and picked up the receiver.
It was all just as unpleasant as she had imagined it would be. The raucous voice of the vitriolic little Jewess came angrily over the wires.
‘What ith that, Mith Hardcathtle? A death? A funeral? Do you not know very well I am short-handed. Do you think I am going to stand for these excutheth? Oh, yeth, you are having a good time, I darethay!’
Midge interrupted, speaking sharply and distinctly.
‘The poleeth? The poleeth, you thay?’ It was almost a scream. ‘You are mixed up with the poleeth?’
Setting her teeth, Midge continued to explain. Strange how sordid that woman at the other end made the whole thing seem. (p.148)

Why? I thought by now, after everything the Jews had lived though in Nazi Germany and the revelation of the death camps, Christie would have abandoned the anti-Jewish sentiment which crops up in so many of her novels. But no…

Credit

‘The Hollow’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in November 1946. Page references are to the HarperCollins 2017 paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 22, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Detective stories, Novel

Tagged Absent in the Spring, adultery, Ainswick, Angkatell family, Antisemitism, Baghdad, Beryl Collins, British Empire, Christie, Cluedo, Collie, Collins Crime Club, country house murder mystery, crime fiction, crime novel, David Angkatell, detective story, Doris Emmott, Doris Saunders, Dovecotes, Edward Angkatell, Feminism, Françoise, Geoffrey Angkatell, Gerda, Gerda Christow, Gudgeon, Harley Street, Henrietta, Henrietta Savernake, Hercule Poirot, Hollywood, infidelity, Inspector Grange, jealousy, Jewess, John Christow, Lady Lucy Angkatell, Lord Henry Angkatell, Madame Alfrege, Mary Westmacott, Mears, Midge, Midge Hardcastle, Miss Simmons, Mrs Crabtree, Mrs Elsie Patterson, Mrs Mears, Mrs Medway, Mud Pie, murder, Murder Mystery, narrative, novel, Poirot, Revolver, Ridgeway's disease, self-referentiality, Sergeant Clark, St Christopher's Hospital, Surrey, swimming pool, Terence Christow, The Clue of the Dripping Fountain, The Hollow, The Rose and the Yew Tree, The Worshipper, Towards Zero, Tremlet, Veronica Cray, Victor, Wealdshire, Whitechapel, Zena Christow

Posted by Simon on September 22, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/the-hollow-agatha-christie/

Sparkling Cyanide by Agatha Christie (1945)

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 reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1940s reviews

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by Simon on September 19, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1945, Agatha Christie, Alexander Ogilvie, All Souls' Day, Anthony Browne, Aunt Lucilla, Australia, Betty Archdale, Borgias, Buenos Aires, Chief Inspector Kemp, Chloe West, Collins Crime Club, Colonel Race, Conservative Party, Counter-Espionage, crime fiction, cyanide, cyanide of potassium, detective novel, Earl of Kidderminster, Elvaston Square, fiction, George Barton, Giuseppe Bolsano, Hector Marle, Inspector Kemp, Iris Marle, jackaroos, Labour Party, Lady Alexandra, Lady Alexandra Farraday, Lady Alexandra Hayle, Lady Victoria Kidderminster, Leopard, Little Priors, London, Lord William Kidderminster, love triangle, Lucilla Drake, Luxembourg hotel, Mary Rees-Talbot, Mr Goldstein, Mrs Drake, Mrs Pound, murder, Murder Mystery, narrative, New Zealand, novel, Paul Bennett, Rosemary Barton, Rosemary Marle, Ruth Lessing, Sandra Farraday, Scotland Yard, Secret Service, Sergeant Pollock, Sparkling Cyanide, Stephen Farraday, stereotypes, suicide, the Luxembourg, Tony Morelli, Towards Zero, Victor Drake, Viola Marle

Posted by Simon on September 19, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/09/19/sparkling-cyanide-agatha-christie/

Towards Zero by Agatha Christie (1944)

‘I’m an old woman,’ she said. ‘Nothing makes sense any more.’
(Lady Tressilian expressing what many of us feel)

At the end of half an hour Lady Tressilian gave a deep sigh of satisfaction. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I’ve enjoyed myself! There’s nothing like exchanging gossip and remembering old scandals.’
‘A little malice,’ agreed Mr Treves, ‘adds a certain savour to life.’
(Two oldsters having fun)

‘You’d be surprised if you knew how many of the people who have committed crimes are walking about the country free and unmolested.’
(Deep truths from Mr Treves)

Nevile said desperately: ‘It’s like some awful dream. There’s nothing I can say or do. It’s like – like being in a trap and you can’t get out.’
(The chief suspect, Nevile Strange, bewailing his lot, p.169)

‘I want to ask you something, Superintendent. Surely you don’t, you can’t still think that this – this awful crime was done by one of us? It must have been someone from outside! Some maniac!’
‘You may not be far wrong there. Miss Aldin. Maniac is a word that describes this criminal very well, if I’m not mistaken.’
(In Christie, the murderer is always described as a maniac, a lunatic, a fiend – it helps to ramp up the tension; p.193)

Introduction

I admire the way Christie continually tinkered and experimented with the genre of the murder mystery novel. ‘Towards Zero’ was something like her 34th novel and is another playful experiment with the form, interesting and quite gripping for most of its length, until it completely blows it in the laughably preposterous conclusion.

The narrative starts with an entertainingly novel premise. The Prologue introduces an after-dinner chat by a group of lawyers and posh chaps at a London club, discussing a case which has recently come to trial and reached a verdict (‘the Lamorne case’).

The oldest lawyer there, nearly-80-year-old solicitor Mr Treves, is struck by the thought that, for every incident of this type, every murder, you can delve back into the past and observe the way a whole load of random factors, actions and events, bring initially unconnected people together – often without their knowing it – to create the circumstances which are propitious for the crime.

‘I like a good detective story,’ he said. ‘But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that – years before, sometimes – with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.’

Treves develops his thought into a kind of spooky insight, second sight, almost a premonition.

He nodded his head gently: ‘All converging towards a given spot… And then, when the time comes – over the top! Zero Hour. Yes, all of them converging towards zero…’ He repeated. ‘Towards zero…’ Then gave a quick little shudder.

Well, there you have the title of the novel and its premise. Instead of starting with the murder, Christie is going to write a murder mystery which beings months, almost a year earlier, to show all the players in the murder, even the tiny walk-on actors, slowly going about their unconnected lives and slowly, steadily converging towards the moment when, by accident, unwittingly and unwillingly, they will all be suddenly linked by the crime – and then, it turns out, become key pieces in the complex investigation which solves it.

So the readerly interest comes from starting with a number of disparate characters, widely dispersed, completely unknown to each other, and watching them, over a period of some months, pursuing their own ends, all unconscious of the fate that awaits them, namely to be entwined in the events surrounding a complicated and premeditated murder.

It’s a clever idea, and it’s cleverly done, until we get to the actual murder which, we discover in the last 30 or so pages, is just part of a larger plan, which is preposterously complicated and unlikely, and then to the solution of the murder, which is just ridiculous.

For most of the narrative this is a gripping and entertaining story until it explodes in wild improbabilities and leaves you feeling embarrassed at wasting your time on such nonsense.

The text is divided into half a dozen big parts, each of which are sub-divided into sections. The first section is titled:

‘Open the Door and Here Are the People’

Presumably that’s taken from the nursery rhyme:

Here’s the church – here’s the steeple.
Open the door and here’s all the people.

As all her readers noticed, Christie based half a dozen or more of her novels on nursery rhymes. I don’t think this particular rhyme has any more resonance or significance than being a handy tag to introduce the people who are going to feature in the story.

Given the dominating idea that the incidents of the murder, the mystery, and its solution are built up to over a period of time, it’s appropriate that each little section is dated, to create a sense of suspense and anticipation. Here are the main sub-sections:

11 January: a miserable man, Angus MacWhirter, has tried to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff but his fall was broken by a tree sticking out of it, then passersby noticed and called the emergency services, which is why he is lying in bed with a broken shoulder feeling sorry for himself
14 February: an unnamed person – male or female – sits in a room scribbling on a piece of paper a plan for the perfect murder: they set the date for the coming September
8 March: Superintendent Battle, known to us for his appearances in previous Christie novels – The Secret of Chimneys (1925), The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), Cards on the Table (1936), and Murder is Easy (1939) – is introduced, fretting about his 16-year-old daughter, Sylvia, who’s gotten into trouble at her boarding school, admitting to a theft which she didn’t, in fact, commit: Battle visits the school to sort it out and take her away
19 April: Nevile Strange, champion tennis player, golfer and mountain climber, argues with his new wife Kay about how he treated his ex-wife, Audrey, who he divorced in order to marry Kay
30 April: introducing old Lady Tressilian, nearly 70 and confined to her bed, and her 36-year-old companion, Mary Aldin: Nevile was raised in her house, Gull’s Point (on a promontory overlooking the sea on the south coast, this will turn out to be important) by her and her now-dead husband, Sir Matthew; Nevile has said he plans to come and stay in September and Lady Tressilian and Mary discuss it: Nevile knows September is when Audrey comes to stay at the house, too, so it will have the effect of placing Nevile, his ex-wife and current wife under one roof
5 May: Audrey, Nevile’s ex-wife, visits Lady Tressilian and insists that Nevile and Kay coming to stay at the same time as her is fine, in fact she welcomes it
29 May: introducing Thomas Royde, a planter in distant Malaya; he was brought up in the same household as Audrey and has always loved her but, ‘a man singularly economical of words’, was too bluff and tongue-tied to ever declare it; now that Audrey’s single, he is packing to leave Malaya and return to England for the first time in 8 years, with a view to arranging a meeting with her and trying his luck again
29 May: old Treves grumbling that the seaside hotel he’s been going to for years, the Marine at Leahead, has been pulled down. Young Rufus Lord suggests he goes to the Balmoral Hotel at nearby Saltcreek, just spitting distance from nice Lady Tressilian’s
28 July: Kay and her pal from pre-marriage days, Ted Latimer, watch Nevile lose a competitive tennis match and conclude that he’s too good a loser
10 August: Lord Cornelly interviews the failed suicide, Angus MacWhirter, and gives him a job in South America

Superintendent Battle is tasked with acting on a case down on the south coast and so heads off for a hotel there. Another skein or filament in the matrix which will draw all these people together…

The next section is titled:

Rose Red and Snow White

All the guests have arrived at Gull’s Point (Nevile, Kay and Audrey) or at hotels nearby (Ted Latimer and Mr Treves) and start interacting in interesting and juicy ways. ‘Rose red and Snow White’ is Thomas Royde’s comparison of passionate red Kay and white, moth-like Audrey.

Among numerous complex interactions between the characters, Mr Treves is invited to dinner (he is an old friend of the family) and tells the story of an old case in which a child killed another with a bow and arrow. This tragic event was agreed to have been an accident, until a local man reported seeing the child practising with a bow and arrow.

Instead the child was given a new name and a fresh start in life. Mr Treves remembers the case, and the child, because they possessed a distinctive physical feature but, having freaked everyone at the dinner table out, he does not go on to disclose it.

Instead the meal ends and the menfolk, Ted Latimer and Thomas Royde walk Treves back to his hotel. Now it had been mentioned quite a few times that Treves has a heart condition and expressly wanted to be given a room on the ground floor so as not to strain his heart by walking up stairs. So he was irritated when the hotel gave him a room on the third floor but insisted they had a functioning life which he could use.

But on this particular evening, when they get to the hotel, they find the life has an Out of Order note hanging on it. Treves grumbles about this but resolves to climb up the stairs, albeit slowly.

Next day all the guests at Gull’s Point learn that he passed away that night, in his room, of heart failure. The authorities attribute it to natural causes but Thomas and Ted discover that the lift was not out of order – so someone who knew about his condition pinned the notice there with malicious intent. But who? Nevile? Kay? Audrey? Did one of them have a quick chance to hang it up?

This and other events create a web of suspicion about all the guests at Gull’s Point.

A Fine Italian Hand…

Treves’s death is upsetting for Miss Tressilian but worse is to come. That evening Nevile has a standup row with her and next morning she is found murdered in her bed, her head stove in by a heavy blunt object. By the bed is discovered a golf club whose head has a horrible mess of blood, flesh and hair attached. Looks like it was the murder weapon and, when the cops arrive and take fingerprints, it is covered with Nevile’s.

Big argument – mutual bitterness – stands to inherit Lady Tressilian’s fortune (when her solicitor reveals the terms of her will): looks like Nevile is the obvious culprit.

It’s now that Superintendent Battle is called in by the local cops who knew he was in the area, on holiday. He takes charge of the investigation and is immediately struck by a number of relevant aspects: chief among these is that the case against Nevile is too easy, as if he’s been set up as the patsy by someone else, someone playing a deeper, cunning game.

This section gets its name from a comment by Inspector Battle to Major Robert Mitchell, the county Chief Constable:

‘There’s a phrase I read somewhere that tickled my fancy. Something about a fine Italian hand. That’s what I seem to see in this business. Ostensibly it’s a blunt, brutal, straightforward crime, but it seems to me I catch glimpses of something else – of a fine Italian hand at work behind the scenes…’ (p.153)

I’ll stop my summary about here. Quite a few more circumstantial details and bits of evidence crop up, release by Christie with skill and amusement in order to draw suspicion away from the too-obvious Nevile. Battle finds himself building convincing cases against pretty much everyone else (Kay, Audrey, Latimer, even solid dependable Thomas Royde).

In addition to being very enjoyable, some of the scenes between Nevile and Kay, or Nevile and his first wife, have a bite and depth usually missing in Christie. We remember that Christie, herself, was involved in a bitter divorce and was badly hurt when her first husband had an affair and left her. You can feel real anguish in some of these scenes.

In the event, the crucial part is played by Angus MacWhirter, a man who has no direct link with any other character in the story. He’s just a random passerby pursuing his own destiny but gets involved in several key elements – the wrong suit is delivered to him by the dry cleaners and in investigation he begins to realise that it might be the crucial clue to Miss Tressilian’s murder which has been widely reported in the local papers. And he just happens to be up on the cliffs looking at where he jumped off a year previously when he encounters Audrey for the first time, who is in a similarly suicidal mood.

Saving her, talking her out of killing herself, wins him to her side, and the clue of the Wrong Suit is his entry into the complex of motives and suspects surrounding the case, unexpectedly turning him into the central figure in solving it.

I won’t say any more except to say that it’s about here, with MacWhirter’s increasing involvement, that the plot spins wildly beyond all probability or believability. Which is a shame, because some of the earlier scenes between Nevile and his hurt women had genuine depth and for a while promised to make this a worthwhile read. But the ending is one of the worst, most ridiculously melodramatic – and then soppily sentimental finales in all Christie.

Cast

One of the chief pleasures of each Agatha Christie novel is the large cast of stock characters. In each book they’re new and yet, somehow, it feels like we’ve met them all before. There’s something immensely reassuring and comforting about the stereotypical characters and the reassuringly predictable views they express.

Mr Treves – the solicitor who expresses the novel’s premise, then comes down to stay at a hotel near Lady Tressilian’s – ‘his little wise nut-cracker face’
Angus MacWhirter – tried to commit hospital; instead rescued and confined to hospital with a broken shoulder; interviewed and given a job by Lord Cornelly he visits south coast resort just across from Gull’s Point and so, unintentionally, ends up playing a key role in events
Miss Amphrey – Sylvia Battle’s headmistress of Meadway school
Nevil Strange – ‘a first-class tennis player and all-round sportsman. Though he had never reached the finals at Wimbledon, he had lasted several of the opening rounds and in the mixed doubles had twice reached the semi-finals. He was, perhaps, too much of an all-round athlete to be a champion tennis player. He was scratch at golf, a fine swimmer and had done some good climbs in the Alps. He was thirty-three, had magnificent health, good looks, plenty of money, an extremely beautiful wife whom he had recently married and, to all appearances, no cares or worries’
Kay Strange née Mortimer – his new young wife – ‘twenty-three and unusually beautiful. She had a slender but subtly voluptuous figure, dark red hair, such a perfect skin that she used only the slightest make-up to enhance it, and those dark eyes and brows which so seldom go with red hair and which are so devastating when they do’
Audrey Strange – Nevil’s first wife, of eight years, who he divorced to marry Kay – ‘She was of
medium height with very small hands and feet. Her hair was ash blonde and there was very little colour in her face. Her eyes were set wide apart and were a clear pale grey. Her features were small and regular, a straight little nose set in a small, oval, pale face. With such colouring, with a face that was pretty but not beautiful, she had nevertheless a quality about her that could not be denied nor ignored and that drew your eyes to her again and again. She was a little like a ghost, but you felt at the same time that a ghost might be possessed of more reality than a live human being… She had a singularly lovely voice; soft and clear like a small silver bell’
Edward ‘Ted’ Latimer – friend of Kay’s from her Riviera days – ‘good-looking in a gigolo kind of way’ according to Mary Aldwin – ‘twenty-five and extremely good-looking… He was dark and beautifully sunburnt and a wonderful dancer’ – ‘His dark eyes could be very eloquent, and he managed his voice with the assurance of an actor. Kay had known him since she was fifteen.
They had oiled and sunned themselves at Juan les Pins, had danced together and played tennis together. They had been not only friends but allies’
Lady Camilla Tressilian – 70, widow of Sir Matthew Tressilian – lives in a grand house – Gull’s Point – at Saltcreek, presumably in Devon – ‘had a striking-looking profile with a slender bridged nose, down which, when so inclined, she could look with telling effect. Though now over seventy and in frail health, her native vigour of mind as in no way impaired’ – snobbishly disapproves of Kay as a marriage-busting gold-digger
Mary Aldin – ‘thirty-six, but had one of those smooth ageless faces that change little with passing years. She might have been thirty or forty-five. She had a good figure, an air of breeding, and dark hair to which one lock of white across the front gave a touch of individuality’
- Barrett – Lady Tressilian’s elderly and devoted maid
- Hurstall – her the aged butler
- Mrs Spicer – the cook
- Alice Bentham – the gooseberry-eyed housemaid
- Emma Wales – housemaid
Thomas Royde – plantation owner in Malaya – brought up in a household alongside Audrey who was an orphaned cousin and he’s always loved her: had a brother Adrian, who died in a car crash – seven years since he’s seen Audrey – ‘A rather thickset figure, with a straight, solemn face and observant, thoughtful eyes. He walked a little sideways, crab-like. This, the result of being jammed in a door during an earthquake, had contributed towards his nickname of the Hermit Crab. It had left his right arm and shoulder partially helpless, which, added to an artificial stiffness of gait’
Allen Drake – Royde’s partner in Malaya
Lord Cornelly – an insignificant and rotund little man, gives a job to McWhirter
Mrs Rogers – proprietress of the Balmoral Hotel
Barnes brothers, Will and George – operate the Saltcreek ferry i.e. a rowing boat
Mrs Beddoes – guest at the hotel who provides Ted Latimer with an alibi
Mr Trelawny – Lady Tressilian’s lawyer – ‘a tall, distinguished-looking man with a keen, dark eye’

The cops

Inspector Battle – who’s already appeared in previous Christie novels – The Secret of Chimneys (1925), The Seven Dials Mystery (1929), Cards on the Table (1936), and Murder is Easy (1939) –
Mrs Battle – his wife, crying after their daughter got into trouble at school
Sylvia Battle – his 16-year-old daughter
Inspector James Leach – Battle’s nephew who he stays with in Devon
Major Robert Mitchell – the Chief Constable
Sir Edgar Cotton – Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard
Dr Lazenby – local doctor and police surgeon for the district
Detective Sergeant Jones

Generalisations

As I’ve explained in other Christie reviews, her characters are prone to expressing sweeping generalisations, generally about the opposite sex, which, on closer examination, all turn out to be meaningless. The more of them you read, the more empty and rhetorical they become. All they do is indicate the personality of the person who expresses them, as much as their clothes or their behaviour – they have no factual content.

Thus Lady Tressilian is very prone to lofty dismissive generalisations about men which suit her lofty aristocratic character:

‘When I was a girl, these things simply did not happen. Men had their affairs, naturally, but they were not allowed to break up married life.’

Or as here, criticising push young Kay Strange, who she dislikes:

‘The girl pursued him everywhere, and you know what men are!’

But it works the other way. Here’s Nevile talking to Mary:

‘What matchmakers you women always are! Can’t you let Audrey enjoy her freedom for a bit?’

Clearly this generalisation only exists to add force to what is an opinion or wish, which is that Mary would stop interfering. It exists to pad out the wish, not for any truth value.

In a different register, here is a sententious claim by old Mr Treves, delivered in characteristically orotund and long-winded style.

‘It has been my experience,’ said Mr Treves, ‘that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.’

This is meaningless, isn’t it? Empty words, but helping to give the novel a spurious sense of depth or wisdom. Just like Lady Tresillian’s:

‘Nevile, like most men, is usually anxious to avoid any kind of embarrassment or possible unpleasantness.’

Or:

Said Lady Tressilian. ‘Nevile, like all men, believes what he wants to believe!’

This bears no relationship to ‘men’, but is just an indicator of Lady Tressilian’s aloof, dismissive personality. It is the kind of disdainful attitude expected from an aristocratic old widow. In fact this kind of thing is just part of Christie’s method of working through stereotypes and stock characters.

Or take this this claim by Mary Aldin:

‘Lady Tressilian, you know, was fond of discussion. She often sounded acrimonious when she was really nothing of the kind. Also, she was inclined to be autocratic and to domineer over people – and a man doesn’t take that kind of thing as easily as a woman does.’ (p.173)

Does it mean anything to us today, or does it only have meaning in the context of the plot and the argument Nevile has when Lady Tressilian rubbishes his plan to divorce Kay?

The one place where these kinds of sweeping generalisations might have some actual meaning is when the police, who do have an actual broad range of experience and data to work on, make generalisations about what they know. As here, where the two inspectors distinguish between ‘male crimes’ and ‘female crimes’.

Leach shook his head. ‘No, not a woman. Those prints on the club were a man’s. Too big for a woman’s. Besides, this isn’t a woman’s crime.’
‘No,’ agreed Battle. ‘Quite a man’s crime. Brutal, masculine, rather athletic and slightly stupid.’
(p.140)

But even this sounds improbable. I mean, concocted to appeal to the prejudices and values of its day, to reinforce contemporary values, as all her novels do.

Bookish

Of course the entire thing is a very bookish conceit. In real life murders are mostly committed by men on their partners, a lot of random attacks, and some gangland killings. Next to no murders are the result of long-meditated and exquisitely cunning calculations like this one.

It is bookish in the sense that such a preposterous plot could only exist within the confines of an archly self-conscious murder mystery. This self-consciousness is obvious from the start when Mr Treves, after defining the premise of the book, takes a cab back to his comfy London town house, snuggles up in front of a big fire and thinks:

He sat down in front of the fire and drew his letters towards him. His mind was still dwelling on the fancy he had outlined at the Club.

‘Even now,’ thought Mr Treves to himself, ‘some drama – some murder to be – is in course of preparation. If I were writing one of these amusing stories of blood and crime, I should begin now with an elderly gentleman sitting in front of the fire opening his letters – going – unbeknownst to himself – “towards zero…”‘

1940s slang

Cat

MARY: ‘What a cat I am!’

Said Mary, ‘That’s probably plain cat! The girl is what one would call glamorous – and that probably rouses the feline instincts of middle-aged spinsters.’

‘Unless they’re very careful,’ said Kay, ‘I shall kill someone! Either Nevile or that whey-faced cat out there!’ (p.65)

He [Royde] stood and looked at the door that she had slammed so vigorously. Something of a tiger cat, the new Mrs Strange. (p.65)

KAY: ‘Now I suppose you want to go back to that whey-faced, mewling, double-crossing little cat –’ (p.126)

KAY: ‘You fell in love with me and married me and I’m not going to let you go back to that sly little cat who’s got her hooks into you again.’ (p.127)

White

White was sometimes used as an adjective meaning solid, pukka, the right stuff. I don’t think I’ve come across it anywhere else in Christie, except once, here.

Said Nevile slowly. ‘One never does know what Audrey is feeling.’ He paused and then added, ‘But Audrey is one hundred per cent thoroughbred. She’s white all through.’ (p.124)

Credit

‘Towards Zero’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in July 1944. Page references are to the 2025 HarperCollins paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 17, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Crime, Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1940s slang, 1944, A Fine Italian Hand, adultery, Agatha Christie, Alice Bentham, Allen Drake, Angus MacWhirter, Audrey Strange, Barrett, Cat, Collins Crime Club, crime, crime novel, detective novel, Detective Sergeant Jones, detective story, Devon, Dr Lazenby, Emma Wales, fiction, George Barnes, Gull's Point, heart failure, Hurstall, infidelity, Inspector Battle, Inspector James Leach, James Leach, Kay Mortimer, Kay Strange, Lady Camilla Tressilian, Lady Tressilian, Lord Cornelly, Major Robert Mitchell, Malaya, maniac, Mary Aldin, Mary Aldwin, melodrama, Miss Aldin, Miss Amphrey, Mr Trelawny, Mr Treves, Mrs Battle, Mrs Beddoes, Mrs Rogers, Mrs Spicer, murder, Murder Mystery, narrative, Nevil Strange, Nevile Strange, novel, nursery rhymes, Open the Door and Here Are the People, Rose Red and Snow White, Saltcreek, Scotland Yard, Sir Edgar Cotton, Sir Matthew, Sir Matthew Tressilian, South America, stereotypes, stock characters, Superintendent Battle, Sylvia Battle, Ted Latimer, tennis, the Balmoral Hotel, the Lamorne case, Thomas Royde, Towards Zero, Will Barnes

Posted by Simon on September 17, 2025

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The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie (1943)

Just for a moment I hated Lymstock and its narrow boundaries, and its gossiping whispering women.
(Chapter 2)

‘I hope you find the devil who writes these soon. She murdered my wife as surely as if she’d put a knife into her.’
(Mr Symmington in Chapter 3 – Criminals in Christie are always maniacs, devils or fiends, or a ‘dangerous lunatic’, Chapter 5, or ‘A crafty, determined lunatic killer’, Chapter 7)

Nash nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, it isn’t very pleasant to look upon these fellow creatures one meets as possible criminal lunatics.’
(Ditto, Chapter 6)

‘What kind of place is this for a man to come to to lie in the sun and heal his wounds? It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.’
(Jerry Burton appalled by what he is discovering)

‘But people have such evil minds. Yes, alas, such evil minds!’
(Miss Ginch)

‘It’s the first murder we’ve ever had in Lymstock. Excitement is terrific.’
(Hearty Aimée Griffith expressing the comic view which is never far away in Christie)

‘The Moving Finger’ is Agatha Christie’s third Miss Marple novel.

Synopsis

Jerry Burton

It’s a first-person narrative told by Jerry Burton. A fit young man, he was badly injured in a flying accident and, once he’d recovered, his doctor advised going somewhere very quiet for rest and recuperation. So he and his sister Joanna rented a cottage called Little Furze in the village of Lymstock, ‘a little provincial market town’. The charming old Victorian lady who owned it, Miss Emily Barton, moved into rooms in Lymstock.

Small town gossip

Having just finished reading some of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, I was struck by the similarities, not of tone, style or intent – but of setting. A provincial village with a set of stock characters, even down to the way that morning is the time for everyone to head off to the High Street, bump into each other and have a good gossip.

‘That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock.’
‘I have no doubt,’ I said, ‘that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then.’
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.

Just as in Lucia’s Riseholme where the catchphrase is ‘Any news?’ – as Inspector Nash explains about tiny little village communities:

‘Anything’s news in a place like this. You’d be surprised. If the dressmaker’s mother has got a bad corn everybody hears about it!’ (Chapter 5)

And here’s Aimée Griffith’s view:

‘Oh, I dare say you don’t hear all the gossip that goes around. I do! I know what people are saying. Mind you, I don’t for a minute think there’s anything in it – not for a minute! But you know what people are – if they can say something ill-natured, they do!’… Aimée Griffith gave her jolly laugh. ‘You’re shocked, Mr Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this – they always think the worst!’

I was struck when I came across Mr Pye using the expression ‘village Parliament’ to describe the daily morning meeting of villages in the high street to exchange gossip:

‘Not joining our village Parliament? We are all agog over the news. Murder! Real Sunday newspaper murder in our midst!’

Because it echoes Benson’s novel, Queen Lucia, in which characters refer half a dozen time to exactly the same morning meeting of villagers on their green as ‘the morning parliament’, ‘the parliament on the green’ and so on. Coincidence of not just concept but precise terminology.

Poison pen letters

As to the plot, first of all we are introduced to the middle class inhabitants of the village and some of their servants, in an enjoyably leisurely way, about 15 named characters in all. Fairly early on Jerry receives an anonymous poison pen letter claiming his sister, Joanna, is not his sister at all and that he’s living in sin with his mistress masquerading as his sister. Jerry shows it to Joanna, they have a laugh and then burn it in the fireplace.

But over the next few chapters they learn that almost everyone in the village has received one of these letters – a type-written envelope containing a message made entirely from words cut out of an old textbook and pasted into paper to make poisonous accusations, nearly all of a sexual nature.

Suicide

So far, so shedding an unexpected light on the dark underside of a small tightly-knit rural community. What drastically changes the narrative is when the querulous wife of the village’s dried-up solicitor, Mrs Symmington, commits suicide. The note she left suggests it was in response to the accusations contained in one of these letters and when the letter she’d scrunched up into a ball is examined, it claims that the second of her two children by the lawyer is not in fact his i.e. that she had an affair.

The cops

So the police, in the form of Superintendent Nash, are called in and Nash requests help from a specialist in these kinds of letters, an Inspector Graves who comes down from London specially. Suddenly all the nice characters we’ve met to date acquire a nimbus of suspicion.

Megan Hunter?

There’s a fairly big red herring or storyline which is that the Symmingtons have a step-daughter – Megan Symmington was Mrs Symmington’s daughter by her first marriage, by a Captain Hunter who was a wrong ‘un and quickly despatched leaving her holding the baby who would grow up to become Megan Symmington, 20-years-old at the time of the narrative. Megan is tall and clumsy, gauche, unhappy and angry because she knows she is simply not wanted in the Symmington household.

Jerry and Joanna feel sorry for her and so, in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, they step in and offer to look after her, leaving the Symmington household’s governess, the stunningly attractive but commonplace Elsie Holland, to concentrate on looking after the bereaved husband and their two boys.

Earlier in the story, Jerry had bumped into her in the street and they’d walked for a bit and Megan had confessed that she hates everyone, because of her profound sense of alienation and unwantedness. Could the poison pen writer be her?

Miss Barton?

Later Jerry has a slight argument with old Miss Barton who’s rented them the cottage they’re staying in. Remember how in Murder Is Easy, the killer turned out a harmless little old lady, well… Miss Barton tells Jerry that she’s never received one of these horrid letters but later on the police inspector tells Jerry this was a lie…

Miss Ginch?

And then he goes to the estate agents about his rental and discovers that Mr Symmington’s dried-up 40-year-old secretary, Miss Ginch, has quit her job with him to work at the estate agents and seems to take a gleeful delight in the mayhem being caused by the letters. So maybe she wrote them!?

Elsie Holland?

The Symmingtons employ a stunningly beautiful young woman, Elsie Holland, as a governess to their two boys, Colin and Brian.

Dr Griffiths

That nice young but harassed Dr Griffiths. At first Jerry likes him, he is a widely read and interesting young chap, but then comes to realise that he also has more access to people’s secrets than anyone else in the village. And behaves increasingly nervously as if he knows something or has done something…

The second death

So far so entertainingly puzzling and challenging as the reader shares in Jerry’s conversations with all the different characters, picking out throwaway remarks, wondering whodunnit. But the plot thickens considerably when there is a second death and this time it is no accident, this time it is murder!

A maid at Symmington’s house, Agnes Woddell, rings up her former superior and mentor, Partridge, who is housekeeper at Little Furze, in a tizzy and wanting help. Partridge can’t get out of her what the problem is and agrees to meet her but Agnes never turns up. Next day she is found brutally murdered and stuffed into the broom cupboard under the stairs. Jerry and the cops quickly conclude that she must have seen who delivered the fatal letter by hand to the Symmingtons house, which pushed Mrs Symmington over the brink into suicide – she’d come to connect someone she knew walking up the path and delivering something at the letter box (everyone else was out of the house at the time) – and that person – the Poison Pen writer must themselves have realised that Agnes knew and could identify her (everyone thinks it’s a woman), and so snuck back a week later, when the rest of the household was out, and murdered her!

At which point the atmosphere thickens and everyone becomes a suspect, quizzed by the police about their whereabouts at the time of the murder, with Jerry kept informed by the police superintendent of developments, who also asks if Jerry could keep his ear open and quiz villagers, with a view to turning up more evidence.

In other words, following the Hercule Poirot rulebook, which is to get people talking and keep them talking, until they slip up. Combined with that other Poirot technique, which is finding psychological consistency, identifying the kind of person who would write these letters and then go on to kill to protect themselves…

So life goes on in this harmless little village with a new tinge of paranoia, which verges slightly on the realm of horror:

There was a half-scared, half-avid gleam in almost everybody’s eye. Neighbour looked at neighbour… Somewhere, then, in Lymstock, walking down the High Street, shopping, passing the time of day, was a person who had cracked a defenceless girl’s skull and driven a sharp skewer home to her brain. And no one knew who that person was. As I say, the days went on in a kind of dream. I looked at everyone I met in a new light, the light of a possible murderer.

Enter Miss Marple

And it’s only here, on page 180 of this 250-page book, that Miss Marple enters, a guest invited to tea by the vicar, along with jerry, who is introduced to her for the first time… And after a few pages demonstrating her fondness for making analogies to characters in her own village, she drops out of the narrative altogether for the next 30 pages. Only 25 pages or so from the end does she reappear, after the police have arrested the person they think responsible.

And it now, in the final stretches, that Miss Marple, of course, proves everybody wrong, organising an elaborate hoax which the police stake out in order to catch the murderer red-handed.

Miss Marple dazzlingly solves the case, and the novel ends with the baddie caught and arrested, a flurry of engagements, and quite a funny joke in the last line. Very slick and enjoyable entertainment all round.

Cast

Jerry Burton – narrator, severe back injury in a flying accident and so ‘an invalid hobbling about on two sticks’
Joanna Burton – his sister, suave, independent, fond of brief love affairs, blonde
Old Miss Emily Barton – permanently pink and excited like Dresden China
- Florence Elford – Miss Barton’s faithful parlour-maid, ‘a tall, raw-boned, fierce-looking woman’
- Partridge – Miss Barton’s maid
- Beatrice – the daily help
- Old Adams – the gardener
Mr Richard Symmington the lawyer, thin and dry
- old Miss Ginch – his lady clerk – ‘forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit’ – ‘She had frizzy hair and simpered’
- Agnes Woddell – maid
- Rose – the cook, ‘a plump pudding-faced woman of forty’
Mrs Mona Symmington – his querulous bridge-playing wife; he is her second husband after she divorced the not-to-be-mentioned Captain Hunter – ‘a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health’ – ‘That anaemic middle-aged prettiness concealed, I thought, a selfish, grasping nature’
Megan Hunter – Symmington’s step-daughter – ‘a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually
twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them’
Elsie Holland – the Symmingtons’ nursery governess – stunningly beautiful
- Colin and Brian, Symmington’s two young boys
Dr Owen Griffith – the dark, melancholy doctor – ‘dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy’
Aimée Griffith – his sister who was big and hearty – runs the Girl Guides – ‘had all the positive assurance her brother lacked. She was a handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way,
with a deep voice’
the Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop – the vicar – a scholarly absent-minded elderly man, ‘s a being more remote from everyday life than anyone I have ever met. His existence was in his books and in his study’
Mrs Maud Dane Calthrop – his erratic eager-faced wife, ‘quite terrifyingly on the spot. Though she seldom gave advice and never interfered, yet she represented to the uneasy consciences of the village the Deity personified’ – ‘her startling resemblance to a greyhound’
Mr Pye of Prior’s End – rich dilettante – ‘an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of period furniture’ – gay?
- Prescott – his cook
- Mrs Prescott – his house parlour-maid
Mrs Mudge – the butcher’s wife
Jennifer Clark – barmaid at the ‘Three Crowns’
young Fred Rendell from the fish shop
Sergeant Parkins – village cop
Bert Rundle – the village constable
Mrs Cleat – the village witch – ‘Likes to show off. Goes out to gather herbs and things at the full of the moon and takes care that everybody in the place knows about it’
Colonel Appleby – ‘that awful old bore’
Miss Jane Marple – ‘That’s my expert,’ said Mrs Dane Calthrop. ‘Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known’

The police

Superintendent Nash – ‘I liked him at first sight. He was a top quality criminal investigator. Tall, with a military way, he looked tranquil and objective, besides being very simple’
Inspector Graves – an expert on anonymous letter cases, come down from London to help the local police

In London

Marcus Kent – Jerry’s doctor, who told him to go to some little place in the country to rest and recover
Mirotin – Joanna’s dressmaker – ‘Mirotin is, in the flesh, an unconventional and breezy woman of forty-five, Mary Grey’

Feminism

In most of the Christie books I’ve read to date, her feminist characters are figures of fun. Not here. Aimée Griffith is given some fiercely feminist lines that instantly reminded me of the furious denunciations on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.

‘I should have said Megan is at the age when a girl wants to enjoy herself – not to work.’
Aimée flushed and said sharply, ‘You’re like all men – you dislike the idea of women competing. It is incredible to you that women should want a career. It was incredible to my parents. I was anxious to study for a doctor. They would not hear of paying the fees. But they paid them readily for Owen. Yet I should have made a better doctor than my brother.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘It was tough on you. If one wants to do a thing–’
She went on quickly.
‘Oh, I’ve got over it now. I’ve plenty of willpower. My life is busy and active. I’m one of the happiest people in Lymstock. Plenty to do. But I go up in arms against the silly old-fashioned prejudice that woman’s place is always the home.’
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, I said. I had had no idea that Aimée Griffith could be so vehement.

Theology

Despite having created countless vicars, and dwelling on death at great length, and endlessly invoking the concept of ‘evil’, and despite Christie herself being a Church of England Christian, her books contain surprisingly little theology. That made Jerry Burton’s little outburst stick out the more. Here he is getting cross with old Miss Barton as they discuss the author of the poison pen letters and Miss Barton says maybe they were sent by Providence to punish the villagers.

‘No, no, Mr Burton, you misunderstand me. I’m not talking of the misguided creature who wrote them – someone quite abandoned that must be. I mean that they have been permitted – by Providence! To awaken us to a sense of our shortcomings.’
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘the Almighty could choose a less unsavoury weapon.’
Miss Emily murmured that God moved in a mysterious way.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I might concede you the Devil. God doesn’t really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We’re so very busy punishing ourselves.’
(Chapter 3)

Class in England

‘I shouldn’t have thought one of these bucolic women down here would have had the brains,’ I said.
Graves coughed. ‘I haven’t made myself plain, I’m afraid. Those letters were written by an educated woman.’
‘What, by a lady?’
The word slipped out involuntarily. I hadn’t used the term ‘lady’ for years. But now it came automatically to my lips, re-echoed from days long ago, and my grandmother’s faint unconsciously arrogant voice saying, ‘Of course, she isn’t a lady, dear.’
Nash understood at once. The word lady still meant something to him.
‘Not necessarily a lady,’ he said. ‘But certainly not a village woman. They’re mostly pretty illiterate down here, can’t spell, and certainly can’t express themselves with fluency.’
(Chapter 3)

The slow impoverishment of the rentier class

Late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is full of posh ladies who live off unearned income deriving from trust funds or investments in government ‘consols’. See the novels of E.M. Forster or my little philippic against the rentier class in my review of Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902).

The point is that the Great Depression dealt this whole lifestyle a blow and began the process whereby all those lucrative stocks and shares and annual incomes began to decline and the carefree, arty lifestyle along with it – plus the kicker of higher taxes. Here’s old Miss Emily’s loyal servant, Florence, complaining about it, starting with Joanna Burton saying Miss Barton put her house on the market.

‘Well, Miss Barton wanted to let the house. She put it down at the house agents.’
‘Forced to it,’ said Florence. ‘And she living so frugal and careful. But even then, the government can’t leave her alone! Has to have its pound of flesh just the same.’ [i.e. increased taxes]
I shook my head sadly.
‘Plenty of money there was in the old lady’s time,’ said Florence. ‘And then they all died off one after another, poor dears. Miss Emily nursing of them one after the other. Wore herself out she did, and always so patient and uncomplaining. But it told on her, and then to have worry about money on top of it all! Shares not bringing in what they used to, so she says, and why not, I should like to know? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Doing down a lady like her who’s got no head for figures and can’t be up to their tricks.’
‘Practically everyone has been hit that way,’ I said, but Florence remained unsoftened.
‘It’s all right for some as can look after themselves, but not for her. She needs looking after, and as long as she’s with me I’m going to see no one imposes on her or upsets her in any way. I’d do anything for Miss Emily.’

This, in a little village mode, is the same process of impoverishment of the old leisured class which Evelyn Waugh laments in Brideshead Revisited.

Mr Symmington, too, was a very clever lawyer, and had helped Miss Barton to get some money back from the Income Tax which she would never have known about.

Incidentally, neither Jerry nor his sister appear to have jobs. They just live a charmed and pleasant life, attended by servants catering to all their needs, without lifting a finger – an amount of pure leisure time we 21st century wage slaves can only dream of.

NB Christie’s lament for the loss of the old leisured life, and her resentment at the postwar Labour government and its introduction of ruinously high taxes, are all given full expression in her 1948 novel, ‘Taken at the Flood’.

Rise of the unconscious

I’ve mentioned many times how I’ve noticed a slow but steady increase in references to Freudian notions of the unconscious and the unconscious mind in Christie’s novels as the 1920s and ’30s progressed, matching the spread of Freudian ideas through the wider culture. More of the same, here:

Somewhere behind my conscious mind, a queer uneasiness was growing. It was connected in some way with the phrase that Joanna had used, ‘a week exactly’. I ought, I dare say, to have put two and two together earlier. Perhaps, unconsciously, my mind was already suspicious. Anyway, the leaven was working now. The uneasiness was growing – coming to a head.

I think that even then, there were pieces of the puzzle floating about in my mind. I believe that if I had given my mind to it, I would have solved the whole thing then and there. Otherwise why did those fragments tag along so persistently?

How much do we know at any time? Much more, or so I believe, than we know we know! But we cannot break through to that subterranean knowledge. It’s there, but we cannot reach it… I lay on my bed, tossing uneasily, and only vague bits of the puzzle came to torture me. There was a pattern, if only I could get hold of it….

Later, Jerry shares some more bucket psychiatry, of the kind you read in magazines in GP waiting rooms.

‘She’s rather ‘queer’ in some ways – a grim spinster – the sort of person who might have religious mania.’
‘This isn’t religious mania – or so you told me Graves said.’
‘Well, sex mania. They’re very closely tied up together, I understand. She’s repressed and respectable, and has been shut up here with a lot of elderly women for years.’

The central idea, which became so popular, that it’s bad to ‘repress’ strong urges because if you try, they come out in other, generally bad, ways.

Later, as it happens, Christie uses the name Freud for, I think, the first time in her oeuvre:

I closed my eyes. I considered the four people, these strangely unlikely people, in turn: Gentle, frail little Emily Barton? What points were there actually against her? A starved life? Dominated and repressed from early childhood? Too many sacrifices asked of her? Her curious horror of discussing anything ‘not quite nice’? Was that actually a sign of inner preoccupation with just these themes? Was I getting too horribly Freudian? (Chapter 6)

Gay

Homosexuality was, of course, illegal, so authors had to find coded ways to refer to gay or lesbian characters. Quite a few mannish women crop up in Christie’s novels who she may have been implying were lesbians. Fewer gay men. Is the following passage about homosexuality? Joanna and Jerry are discussing the gender of the poison pen writer.

‘They are sure it is a woman, aren’t they?’
‘You don’t think it’s a man?’ I exclaimed incredulously.
‘Not – not an ordinary man – but a certain kind of man. I’m thinking, really, of Mr Pye.’
‘So Pye is your selection?’
‘Don’t you feel yourself that he’s a possibility? He’s the sort of person who might be lonely – and unhappy – and spiteful. Everyone, you see, rather laughs at him. Can’t you see him secretly hating all the normal happy people, and taking a queer, perverse, artistic pleasure in what he was doing?’
‘Graves said a middle-aged spinster.’
‘Mr Pye,’ said Joanna, ‘is a middle-aged spinster.’
‘A misfit,’ I said slowly.
‘Very much so. He’s rich, but money doesn’t help. And I do feel he might be unbalanced. He is, really, rather a frightening little man.’
(Chapter 5)

And police inspector Nash’s view:

‘I don’t think men wrote the letters – in fact, I’m sure of it – always excepting our Mr Pye, that is to say, who’s got an abnormally female streak in his character…’

Bookish

In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems. I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.

‘She despised them, you know, for not getting married, and yet so arranged their lives that it was practically impossible for them to meet anybody. I believe Emily, or perhaps it was Agnes, did have some kind of affair with a curate. But his family wasn’t good enough and Mamma soon put a stop to that!’
‘It sounds like a novel,’ said Joanna.

Presently Nash said that he was going to interview Rose once more. I asked him, rather diffidently, if I might come too. Rather to my surprise he assented cordially.
‘I’m very glad of your co-operation, Mr Burton, if I may say so.’
‘That sounds suspicious,’ I said. ‘In books when a detective welcomes someone’s assistance, that someone is usually the murderer.’
(Chapter 5)

Slang

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S.A. That girl hasn’t. It seems such a pity.’

As in previous novels, SA stands for Sex Appeal, a phrase first used in the early 1900s but which became much more common with the spread of moving pictures in the 1920s, as well as the tremendous growth in advertising which, from that day to this, routinely relies on associating a product with youth and vitality and sexiness.

Credit

‘The Moving Finger’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943.

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by Simon on September 15, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1943, Agatha Christie, Agnes Woddell, Aimée Griffith, Beatrice, Bert Rundle, Brian Symmington, Brideshead Revisited, Caleb Dane Calthrop, Captain Hunter, Colin Symmington, Collins Crime Club, crime novel, detective novel, Dr Griffiths, Dr Owen Griffith, E.F. Benson, E.M. Forster, Elsie Holland, Evelyn Waugh, Feminism, Florence Elford, Fred Rendell, Freud, gay, Hercule Poirot, homosexuality, Inspector Graves, Inspector Nash, Jane Marple, Jennifer Clark, Jerry Burton, Joanna Burton, lesbian, Little Furze, Lymstock, Mapp and Lucia, Marcus Kent, Mary Grey, Maud Dane Calthrop, Megan Hunter, Megan Symmington, Mirotin, Miss Barton, Miss Emily Barton, Miss Ginch, Miss Marple, Mr Pye, Mr Symmington, Mrs Cleat, Mrs Craddock, Mrs Dane Calthrop, Mrs Maud Dane Calthrop, Mrs Mona Symmington, Mrs Mudge, Mrs Prescott, murder, Murder is Easy, Murder Mystery, novel, Old Adams, Partridge, Poison Pen, poison pen letters, Prescott, Prior's End, Queen Lucia, religious mania, Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop, Richard Symmington, Riseholme, Rose, SA, Sergeant Parkins, sex appeal, sex mania, Somerset Maugham, suicide, Superintendent Nash, The English class system, The Moving Finger, the unconscious, Theology, Three Guineas, village Parliament, Virginia Woolf

Posted by Simon on September 15, 2025

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