‘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.

Related links

• The Hollow online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews