‘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.

Related links

• Towards Zero online (PDF)
• Agatha Christie website

Related reviews

• Agatha Christie reviews
• 1940s reviews