Being a man of many aunts, he was fairly certain that the nice old lady in the corner did not propose to travel in silence to London. He was right.
(The basically comic tone of ‘Murder is Easy’ (and the theme of aunts) established early, on page 3)

Bridget said, ‘You think this man is definitely mad?’
‘Oh, I should say so. A lunatic all right, but a cunning one.’
(The standard claim, made in all her novels, that the killer is a maniac)

‘You don’t think that a murderer can be as sane as you or I?’
‘Not this kind of a murderer. As I see it, this murderer must be crazy.’
(Ditto, Chapter 10)

‘He doesn’t actually think he’s God yet, but he soon will.’
‘Mad?’
‘Oh, unquestionably, I should say.’
(Ditto, Chapter 19)

‘He’s mad, then?’
‘He’s mad, all right, but he’s a cunning devil. You’ll have to go warily.’
(Ditto)

He glanced back down the length of the High Street, and he was assailed by a strong feeling of unreality. He said to himself, ‘These things don’t happen.’
(In every novel, one or more characters comment that the whole situation seems unreal)

Rose said ruefully, ‘That’s the worst of a place like this. Everybody knows everything about everybody else.’
(Village life)

Luke said, with significance, ‘No one human being knows the full truth about another human being. Not even one’s nearest and dearest.’
(What passes for wisdom in books like these, but can also be seen as the kind of tropes and truisms which grease the machinery of the narrative, a fortune cookie motto to distract the mind for a moment while the plot rattles on)

After a long sequence of novels featuring her famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, ‘Murder is Easy’ is an independent or free-standing novel i.e. it features none of her established characters (neither Poirot nor Miss Marple, Captain Hastings, Inspector Japp etc). Instead it introduces completely new characters undertaking a one-off murder mystery investigation.

Setup

Luke Fitzwilliam is a retired colonial policeman, just returned to England from Malaya (his precise beat is said to have been ‘the Mayang Straits’):

Honourably retired on a pension, with some small private means of his own, a gentleman of leisure, come home to England.

By accident Luke ends up on a slow, stopping train to London, in a compartment with a chatty old lady, Miss Fullerton. She tells him that she is on her way to Scotland Yard because there has been a series of mysterious deaths in the little town she comes from, Wychwood under Ashe, which she suspects have all been murders! She reels off a list:

• Harry Carter – landlord of the Seven Stars, ‘A drunken ruffian… One of these socialistic, abusive brutes’, drunk and fell in the river
• Mrs Rose – the laundress
• little Tommy Pierce – ‘a nasty little boy’, fell from a high ledge while cleaning the windows of the old hall, which is now the library
• Amy Gibbs – housemaid with Lord Eastacre and then Miss Waynflete, ‘one of the most inefficient housemaids I have ever known’, died by swallowing hat paint instead of cough mixture

Now Miss Fullerton has a presentiment that the town’s old doctor, Dr Humbleby, will be next so that’s why she’s on her way to Scotland Yard, does he (Luke) think it will be open? He (Luke) assures her that it will be open and that, of course, they’ll listen to her, and politely bids her goodbye and good luck at Waterloo, then travels on to stay with his old pal in London, Jimmy Lorrimer.

It’s at Jimmy’s that he reads a small news item in The Times announcing the accidental death of a Mrs Lavinia Fullerton, who was run over by a car in Whitehall, which didn’t stop. He is upset at the thought of this sweet little old lady dying so randomly. But then, a few days, later, Luke (a keen reader of newspapers) comes across another obituary, for a Dr Humbleby of Wychwood under Ashe, and this makes him sit up and think.

He discusses the whole thing with Jimmy, who thinks it sounds like a jolly interesting adventure. Luke settles on a plan of going to Wychwood under Ashe to have a dig around and see if the old lady was onto anything. He is, after all, a policeman and has the technique for interviewing people, making notes, and developing theories.

What he doesn’t have is an excuse or a contact. Jimmy comes up with both. As to cover, he suggests that Luke pretends to be researching a book on folklore and customs, with a particular focus on death and its rituals. As to contact, turns out that (very conveniently) Jimmy has a cousin, Bridget Conway, a native of Wychwood under Ashe, who works as secretary to the local grandee, Lord Easterfield.

So Luke takes the next train to Wychwood while Jimmy sends a message to Bridget to expect him. Let the investigation begin!

The title

Luke said slowly, ‘Just something I remembered my old lady saying to me. I’d said to her that it was a bit thick to do a lot of murders and get away with it, and she answered that I was wrong – that it was very easy to kill.’ He stopped, and then said slowly, ‘I wonder if that’s true. Jimmy? I wonder if it is -‘
‘What?’
‘- easy to kill.’

The mysterious deaths

All the deaths Miss Fullerton mentioned have perfectly reasonable explanations. None of them were regarded as suspicious by the police. So this is another case where the protagonist not only has to catch a murderer, but has to start one step before that, and prove that a, or several murders have taken place at all. Here’s the list and Luke’s suspected real causes of death.

• Amy Gibbs – Poisoned
• Tommy Pierce – Pushed out of window
• Harry Carter – Shoved off footbridge (drunk? drugged?)
• Doctor Humbleby – Blood poisoning
• Miss Fullerton – Run down by car

At Ashe Manor

So Luke arrives at Wychwood, makes his way to Ashe House (home of Lord Eastwood) and meets Bridget Conway. Far from being a dim gold-digger, she is in fact young (28), attractive and – like so many of Christie’s young women – clever and quick-witted.

He had thought of her – if he had thought of her at all – as a little blond secretary person, astute enough to have captured a rich man’s fancy. Instead she had force, brains, a cool clear intelligence… He thought: ‘She’s not an easy person to deceive.’ (Chapter 4)

Whereas pompous Lord Easterfield is taken in by Luke’s cover story of researching a book about folklore, Bridget doesn’t believe it for a second. By page 60 (Chapter 6) she’s confronted Luke about it, he’s admitted his true purpose (to discover whether old Miss Fullerton’s claim of murders is true and, if so, who the murderer is) and they agree to work together.

Christie’s sleuths always work in pairs, or need sidekicks. Poirot famously needed the rather dim Captain Hastings to bounce ideas off, a dynamic which of course allows Christie to share theories about the murderer with her readers, thus augmenting the narrative with entertaining complications, theories and counter-theories.

Exactly the same happens in these ‘freestanding novels’, whoever begins to suspect a murder or conspiracy always ends up being paired off with an accomplice / sidekick / partner, a basic device which allows them to discuss and interpret their latest at length which is, one of the great pleasures of these novels, watching the characters themselves trying to work out the mystery. It’s particularly enjoyable in the books which feature her fearless, feisty young heroine, Lady Elaine ‘Bundle’ Brent (‘The Secret of Chimneys’ and ‘The Seven Dials Mystery’).

I haven’t mentioned yet that one of the first things Luke discovers after he’s arrived is that the doctor Miss Fullerton told him would be next on the kill list, Dr Humbleby, has indeed died in the interim between Miss Fullerton predicting it and Luke’s arrival. As with all the other deaths, there’s a perfectly natural explanation for it (sepsis deriving from a scratch).

This really hardens Luke’s conviction that foul play is afoot, and so it is that handsome young Luke (a man’s man, burnished by responsibility and experience in the colonies) teams up with free-spirited beautiful young Bridget.

‘It’s dangerous for both of us. I know that. But we’re in it, Luke – we’re in it together!’

Do I hear wedding bells in the offing? The previous couple of Christie novels ended with a flurry of engagements and weddings – will this one, too?

Anyway, in the classic style, Luke sets off to interview as many of the townspeople as he can, ostensibly using his cover of novelist researching local folklore although, to this reader, lots of his questioning very obviously went way beyond that subject and focused very much on the characters of the dead people. But none of the people he talks to seem to notice so why should we care.

Cast

• Luke Fitzwilliam – retired colonial policeman, just returned to England from Malaya, ‘honourably retired on a pension, with some small private means of his own, a gentleman of leisure, come home to England’
• Miss Fullerton – old lady Luke meets on the train to London who tells him a murderer is loose in the little English town of Wychwood under Ashe
• Jimmy Lorrimer – Luke’s friend who he stays with in London
• Bridget Conway – Jimmy’s cousin who lives in Wychwood under Ashe, secretary to Lord Easterfield – ‘Tall, slender, a long delicate face with slightly hollow cheekbones, ironic black brows, black eyes and hair. She was like a delicate etching, he thought – poignant and beautiful’ – ‘she had force, brains, a cool clear intelligence’
• Lord Easterfield – ‘owns those nasty little weekly papers… a nasty little man’ – self-made newspaper tycoon who’s returned to his native town (Wychwood under Ashe) – ‘a small man with a semi-bald head. His face was round and ingenuous, with a pouting mouth and boiled gooseberry eyes. He was dressed in careless-looking country clothes. They were unkind to his figure, which ran mostly to stomach’
• Mrs Anstruther – Bridget’s aunt, ‘a middle-aged woman with a rather foolish mouth’, keen gardener
• Mr Abbot – the solicitor, ‘a big florid man, dressed in tweeds, with a hearty manner and a jovial effusiveness’
• young Doctor Geoffrey Thomas – Doctor Humbleby’s partner – ‘thick fair hair. He was a young man whose appearance was deceptive’
• Mr Wake – the rector, ‘an old dear and a bit of an antiquary’ – ‘a small stooping old man with very mild blue eyes and an absent-minded but courteous air’
• Giles the sexton
• Mrs Pierce – mother of the boy Tommy, keeps a tobacco and paper shop in High Street
• Rose Humbleby – ‘a very pretty girl’, ‘a remarkably pretty girl, with brown hair curling round her ears and rather timid-looking dark blue eyes’ – fancied by Dr Thomas
• Miss Waynflete – ‘completely the country spinster. Her thin form was neatly dressed in a tweed coat and skirt, and she wore a grey silk blouse with a cairngorm brooch. Her hat, a conscientious felt, sat squarely upon her well-shaped head. Her face was pleasant and her eyes, through their pince-nez, decidedly intelligent’
• Jim Harvey – mechanic at the local garage, who Amy Gibb was engaged to
• Reed – village constable
• Mr Ellsworthy – keeps the antique shop – ‘a thin young man dressed in russet brown. He had a long pale face and long black hair’ – according to Bridget, said to dabble in black magic, talk that he held some queer ceremony in the Witches’ Meadow – for a lot of the novel, he is the prime suspect
• Major Horton and his bulldogs – ‘a small man with a stiff moustache and protuberant eyes’, the most hen-pecked man in the land until a year ago his wife died
• Mr Jones – the bank manager, ‘tall, dark, plump face’
• Hetty Jones – daughter of the bank manager, ‘a giggling young woman’
• Miss Church – Amy Gibbs’ aunt, ‘an unpleasant woman; her sharp nose, shifty eyes and her voluble tongue all alike filled Luke with nausea’
• Miss Lucy Carter – Carter the landlord’s beautiful daughter, ‘The fine-looking girl behind the counter, with her black hair and red cheeks’
• Rivers – the chauffeur, sacked by Lord Easterfield when he discovers he’s been taking the car out for his own use (and a bit tipsy into the bargain)
• Sir William Ossington – aka Billy Bones, senior London police commissioner
• Superintendent Battle – of Scotland Yard, turns up for the last 20 pages – ‘a solid comfortable-looking man with a broad red face and a large handsome moustache’

Magic…

Obviously Miss Fullerton is right, somebody did bump off all these characters, and Luke and Bridget eventually discover who i.e. it’s very much like any other murder mystery.

What’s much more interesting is the book’s deployment of magic. If ‘Appointment with Death’ at moments verged on the genre of psychological horror, this novel very deliberately invokes an atmosphere of magic and the uncanny.

For example, it turns out that the long ridge (Ashe Ridge) which lours over Wychwood, was once the site of Witches’ Sabbaths. Quite quickly Luke becomes aware of an atmosphere of unease and the uncanny in the small town. And much is made of the fact that Bridget doesn’t wear a hat (a fact so notable for the late 1930s that Christie repeatedly comments on it) and so lets her long raven black hair stream in the winds which are always popping up for the purpose. In other words, right from the start, Bridget herself has a distinctly witchy aspect.

He became suddenly conscious of the overlying menace of Ashe Ridge. There was a sudden sharp gust of wind, blowing back the leaves of the trees, and at that moment a girl came round the corner of the castellated mansion. Her black hair was blown up off her head by the sudden gust, and Luke was reminded of a picture he had once seen – Nevinson’s Witch. The long, pale, delicate face, the black hair flying up to the stars. He could see this girl on a broomstick flying up to the moon. (Chapter 3)

Christie’s protagonists are often afflicted by a general sense of the unreality of the situation, and this afflicts Luke, too.

Luke frowned at the opposite bank unseeingly. Once again the dreamlike quality of his mission obsessed him. How much was fact, how much imagination?

He glanced back down the length of the High Street, and he was assailed by a strong feeling of unreality. He said to himself, ‘These things don’t happen.’ (Chapter 9)

But it’s more than that, it’s an active atmosphere of strangeness and enchantment.

It was as though he had stepped out of normal everyday life into that queer half world of enchantment, the consciousness of which had enveloped him ever since he came to Wychwood… (Chapter 10)

This mood or tone or atmosphere is increasingly emphasised and gives the novel an additional, very enjoyable dimension.

Slowly she raised her face from her hands. Her face troubled him. She looked as though she were returning from some far-off world, as though she had difficulty in adjusting herself to the world of now and here. (Chapter 10)

It was a minute or two before she answered – as though she still had not quite come back from that far-off world that had held her. Luke felt that his words had to travel a long way before they reached her. (Chapter 10)

They looked like two figures out of a dream. One felt that their feet made no sound as they sprang cat-like from tuft to tuft. He saw her black hair stream out behind her, blown by the wind. Again that queer magic of hers held him. ‘Bewitched, that’s what I am – bewitched,’ he said to himself. (Chapter 9)

And, at moments, a real sense of menace.

Then he lifted his eyes to the long frowning line of Ashe Ridge, and at once the unreality passed. Ashe Ridge was real; it knew strange things – witchcraft and cruelty and forgotten blood lusts and evil rites. (Chapter 9)

And:

The sun had come out while he was talking to Rose Humbleby. Now it had gone in again. The sky was dull and menacing, and wind came in sudden erratic little puffs. It was as though he had stepped out of normal everyday life into that queer half world of enchantment, the consciousness of which had enveloped him ever since he came to Wychwood. He turned a corner and came out on the flat ledge of green grass that had been pointed out to him from below, and which went, he knew, by the name of Witches’ Meadow. It was here, so tradition had it, that the witches had held revelry on Walpurgis Night and Halloween. (Chapter 10)

While at other times the language of magic, witchcraft and spells is deployed rather more light-heartedly in the context of falling in love. Here’s Luke embarrassedly explaining to Bridget that he’s fallen in love with her:

‘I came down here to do a job of work and you came round the corner of that house and – how can I say it? – put a spell on me! That’s what it feels like. You mentioned fairy stories just now. I’m caught up in a fairy story! You’ve bewitched me.’ (Chapter 12)

… or madness

Well before the end, though, the theme of magic and witches and whatnot fades into the background and is eclipsed by the increasingly shrill emphasis on madness, the madness of – first of all, Lord Easterfield who Luke comes to imagine is the murderer – and then of the actual murderer, who really is revealed to be completely insane. Often the insanity thing is just a trope in Christie’s novels: here it is literally true.

And is emphasised in the book’s increasingly hysterical last 40 pages or so, when the protagonist, Luke, running through a succession of possible suspects, slangily wonders whether he’s going mad or not.

Oh, I’m mad. I must be mad. Easterfield’s the criminal. He must be.

My point is that the colourful theme of magic and the occult is only a kind of temporary flavour, colours the first half of the book, maybe, but fades away as the final passages give way to the same kind of focus on madness and a desperate race against time to prevent the final murder, as so many of the others.

In the same way that other ‘themes’ – such as the Riviera or the Orient Express or a Nile steamship or an archaeological dig in Iraq – provide an initial colour and exoticism but don’t really soak the story, aren’t really intrinsic to it. The plots of all those novels could be moved to different locations. The colour is just that, a little local flavour thrown over the same basic scaffold, and which is increasingly discarded and then disappears as the logic of the plot unfolds.

Bookishness

‘There was no suspicion of what they call in books ‘foul play’, at the inquest?’ (Chapter 6)

‘Because of the melodramatic atmosphere in which I’m living at present. It makes me see things out of all proportion. If I lose sight of you for an hour or two, I naturally assume that the next thing will be to find your gory corpse in a ditch. It would be, in a play or a book.’ (Chapter 10)

‘Oh, no, I’m not a plain-clothes dick.’ He added, with a slightly humorous inflection, ‘I’m afraid I’m that well-known character in fiction, the private investigator.’ (Chapter 13)

I feel a lawyer is definitely a suspicious person. Possibly prejudice. His personality, florid, genial, etc., would be definitely suspicious in a book – always suspect bluff genial men. Objection: This is not a book but real life. (Chapter 7)

No, it’s a character in a book insisting that they’re not a character in a book, while the reader smiles, knowing that they are a character in a book.

And there’s the obligatory Sherlock Holmes reference which occurs in nearly every Christie novel, in this instance a joke between Luke and Bridget:

‘Oh, you admit it then.’
‘Obvious, my dear Watson.’
(Chapter 12)

Complexes

From her first novel in 1920, Christie had used the language of psychology and, intermittently, of psychoanalysis, as handy labels to describe her murderers. Nowhere is any of it gone into in great detail, it’s more as if her characters parrot the catchphrases publicised by the popular press and magazines. ‘Complex’ is a handy catch-all idea, the notion that this or that person suffers from this or that complex. Easily written, sounds sophisticated, doesn’t really explain anything.

Luke stood looking after her. A sudden wave of solicitude swept over him. He felt a longing to shield and protect this girl. From what? Asking himself the question, he shook his head with a momentary impatience at himself. It was true that Rose Humbleby had recently lost her father, but she had a mother, and she was engaged to be married, to a decidedly attractive young man who was fully adequate to anything in the protection line. Then why should he, Luke Fitzwilliam, be assailed by this protection complex? (Chapter 10)

But don’t you realize that Gordon Easterfield has a very exalted opinion of himself?’
Bridget said, ‘He pretends to be very wonderful and very important. That’s just inferiority complex, poor lamb!’ (Chapter 21)

Magazine level.

The abilities of aunts

Towards the end Luke goes to see young Dr Thomas and gives his theory that the murderer is Ellsworthy the curiosity shop owner. Thomas is sceptical. Unexpectedly, their exchange turns into praise of the acuteness of aunts:

Thomas replied good-humouredly. ‘Give me a few proofs, my dear fellow. That’s all I ask. Not just a long melodramatic rigmarole based on what an old lady fancied she saw.’
‘What old ladies fancy they see is very often right. My Aunt Mildred was positively uncanny! Have you got any aunts yourself, Thomas?’
‘Well – er – no.’
‘A mistake!’ said Luke. ‘Every man should have aunts. They illustrate the triumph of guesswork over logic. It is reserved for aunts to know that Mr. A is a rogue because he looks like a dishonest butler they once had. Other people say, reasonably enough, that a respectable man like Mr A couldn’t be a crook. The old ladies are right every time.’ (Chapter 18)

In fact quite a few aunts feature in the cast list and in conversation. The novel has an aunt complex.

She reminded Luke slightly of one of his aunts, his Aunt Mildred, who had courageously allowed him to keep a grass snake when he was ten years old. Aunt Mildred had been decidedly a good aunt as aunts go. (Chapter 1)

The younger generation

‘I’ve always been respectable and I don’t hold with carryings on! But with what girls are nowadays, it’s no use speaking to them. They go their own way. And often they live to regret it.’ (Working class Miss Church, Chapter 14)

The older generation has always felt this, hasn’t it? I.e. it’s pure cliché. Significant, maybe, that it’s put into the mouth of an uneducated character, as if this is a tired cliché which has percolated down through papers and magazines to people of Miss Church’s class, where it has gathered like water in a puddle, an utterly exhausted, contentless notion.

Pussy

Four times Christie has her character describe old ladies as ‘pussies’. New to me.

Luke grinned. ‘No fear. No, it’s rather queer. Old pussy I travelled up with in the train yesterday got run over.’ (Chapter 2)

Said Luke, ‘They said she was a nice old pussy, but talked a lot…’ (Chapter 3)

Bridget smiled faintly. ‘Oh, no; not in the sense you mean. I mean we haven’t said anything right out. I don’t really know how far the old pussy has gone in her own mind…’ (Chapter 6)

She thought: ‘I’m a match for her anyway. My muscles are pretty tough; she’s a skinny frail old pussy…’ (Chapter 22)

And Major Horton refers to Honoria Waynflete and Lavinia Fullerton as ‘the old tabbies’ (Chapter 11). Obviously closely allied to the use of ‘cat’ meaning gossipy old so-and-so which I’ve come across elsewhere in her works and throughout Noel Coward.

Film language

Luke said, ‘Seriously, Miss Waynflete, do you really think that I am in any danger? Do you think, in film parlance, that Lord Easterfield is really out to get me?’ (Chapter 22)

Credit

‘Murder is Easy’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in June 1939.

Related links

• Murder is Easy online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1930s reviews