A Very British Murder (28 page)

Poirot can read other people exceptionally well, and Christie’s own autobiography discusses the training in psychology and courtesy that she had received from her family as a well-brought-up
Edwardian girl. She knew ‘back to front’ the rules of flirtation, the inadvisability of ever showing an open preference for a man, but the satisfaction of knowing that oneself was preferred. Like Poirot, Christie seems an arch-assimilator of the rules of society. But also like him, she was an observer, not a follower. Quietly scrutinizing the social scene of her family, friends and middle-class contemporaries, she purified it down to its essence and transformed it into words.

One of Christie’s ladylike tricks was to minimize or disguise the amount of time she put into her work. During summers at Greenway, her house in Devon, her grandson Mathew never saw her writing: ‘she could manage to write a book almost without one noticing’. That’s partly because it was a holiday home, and there she took a break, but even her publishers were astonished by her productivity.

Christie described getting ideas for plots from newspaper accounts of crime, but also from everyday experiences such as looking into a hat-shop window. Her own first book,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
(1920), an affair of poisoning, reprocessed Christie’s own experience in the pharmacy:

‘What a lot of bottles!’ I exclaimed, as my eye travelled round the small room. ‘Do you really know what’s in them all?’

‘Say something original,’ groaned Cynthia. ‘Every single person who comes up here says that. We are really thinking of bestowing a prize on the first individual who does not say: “What a lot of bottles!” And I know the next thing you’re going to say is: “How many people have you poisoned?”’

Of course, although Cynthia distracts us from them, these bottles hold the clue to the crime. According to P. D. James, Christie’s clues are ‘brilliantly designed to confuse. The butler goes over to peer closely at a calendar. She has planted in our mind the suspicion that a crucial clue relates to dates and times, but the clue is, in fact, that the butler is short-sighted.’

And yet, despite all this, something about Agatha Christie’s success still seems odd. Just why has she been translated into more languages than Shakespeare? Barry Forshaw, editor of
British Crime Writing: An Encyclopaedia
(2008) ascribes her continued saleability to the lowest common denominator: ‘There is no single author … who manages to translate so well into so many different languages. She keeps the language fairly straightforward and simple but the plots are constructed incredibly well, like a finely-tuned machine.’

Christie, though, tells us her own views on the secret of her success, on one of the Dictaphone recordings that I listened to in the company of her grandson, in the drawing room at Greenway. ‘I was eminently a writer for entertainment,’ she says. She did not set out to be ‘serious’ or ‘worthwhile’, and, in this aim, her work falls firmly into the grand British tradition of art inspired by crime.

‘What would those women say to her, to Harriet Vane, who had taken her First in English and gone to London to write mystery fiction, to live with a man who was not married to her?’

Dorothy L. Sayers of her character Harriet Vane (or perhaps herself) in
Gaudy Night
(1935)

AT FIRST SIGHT,
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) looks indomitable: full of certainty, self-confidence and strong opinions. A born newspaper columnist, she seemed to hold trenchant views on nearly every subject under the sun. But above all, her passion was for clarity of language and thought. She concluded her (often damning) reviews of other crime writers for the
Sunday Times
with a section of her column called ‘The Week’s Worst English’, and described the abuse of grammar as ‘treason’.

Ngaio Marsh described Sayers as ‘robust, round and rubicund’, a cross ‘between a guardsman and a female don with a jolly face (garnished with pince-nez), short grey curls, & a gruff voice’. Sayers
herself claimed that her life was ‘far too humdrum to be worth writing about’. And yet this was far from true, and smacks of deflection. She was a woman far more complex than her projected public image as a busy, even bossy, figure, organizing a club for her fellow fiction writers and directing the future of the Church of England.

Given the circumstances in which she was born, Sayers played her hand boldly and bravely. From today’s vantage point, her life seems crowded and rich with friends and incidents and projects, and yet at the same time painfully lacking in love. She used her gregariousness, and her pen, to create substitutes for the husband and children she would dearly love to have had. It seems impertinent to feel sorry for someone so impressive in so many ways, and yet she left enough of a record of her inner thoughts to show that in some ways she would have liked a life that was more conventional.

Physically, Sayers had strong features and a heavy body; mentally, she was combative and steely. And life did nothing to soften her edges. Her father was in the Church, and she was brought up in the bracing atmosphere of a vicarage. In 1893, when his only child was born, Henry Sayers was a chaplain at Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, but the family soon moved to the small village of Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Huntingdonshire. It sounds like a made-up place from a detective novel, and indeed Dorothy L. Sayers would turn it into one, in
The Nine Tailors
(1934), many peoples’ favourite among her novels, with its plot revolving around the intricacies and eccentricities of bell-ringing and bell-ringers.

After rather a lonely Fenland childhood, Dorothy found fun and friends at Somerville College, Oxford. Here she made lifelong connections – ‘The Mutual Admiration Society’ – sang in the
Bach choir, flirted with unsuitable men and was truly happy. The nostalgic tone of
Gaudy Night
(1935), her finest novel, set in an Oxford college, suggests that this was the only period of her life of which this could be said.

Dorothy L. Sayers during her time at Somerville College, Oxford, where she arrived in 1912.

Sayers earned herself the equivalent of a first-class degree, but it was not until 1920, five years later, that women were allowed to become full members of the university. The precariousness of the position of the women of Somerville College, tolerated rather than welcomed by their male peers, is another theme of
Gaudy Night
. A note from Sayers’ tutor warns her against being ‘smart’: it was not a quality then required or even desired in a female.

Her first works in print were poetry produced in the few years following her degree. Lacking the strength to tear herself away from the scenes of her undergraduate bliss, she found a job with the publisher Blackwells, and published some rather terrible verses about her favourite town:

Oxford! Suffer it once again that another should do thee wrong

I also, I above all, should set thee into song.

Her career as a junior editor was short-lived – her boss called her ‘a race-horse harnessed to a cart’ – and Sayers knew that she wanted to write for a living. She moved to London in search of work. This was a low period, during which she often feared that she would have to give up and find permanent paid employment as a teacher. She was genuinely hard up and short of money for food.

At the eleventh hour, in terms of her finances, Sayers found a job she seemed born to do, and it involved writing of a sort. She became a copywriter at Benson’s, an advertising agency in Holborn. Living in a Bloomsbury flat and walking to work in the busy office, Dorothy’s life became almost a 1920s version of
Mad Men
. She felt at home among the male copywriters, who valued her sharp brain and gift for words. The noisy, competitive, jokey atmosphere of the advertising agency would be lovingly recreated, years later, in
Murder Must Advertise
(1933). Its plot is preposterous, but what every reader remembers is its vivid picture of office life between the wars. At Benson’s, Sayers created memorable campaigns such as ‘The Mustard Club’ and a celebrated jingle for Guinness involving a toucan:

Finally, in her thirtieth year, she sold the detective novel upon which she had been working in her spare time.
Whose Body?
(1923) introduced Lord Peter Wimsey, the man who would lead Sayers out of her wilderness years and into financial security, and a career as a full-time novelist.

An illustration accompanying Lord Peter Wimsey’s first appearance in a magazine story of july 1925

Lord Peter Wimsey saw Sayers through these difficult times. He was a financial – and, one suspects, an emotional – support to her. For a start, she took great pleasure in spending his money. ‘After all, it cost me nothing,’ she later explained,

and at that time I was particularly hard up … when I was dissatisfied with my single unfurnished room, I took a luxurious flat for him in Piccadilly. When my cheap rug got a hole in it, I ordered an Aubusson carpet. When I had no money to pay my bus fare, I presented him with a Daimler double-six, upholstered in a style of sober magnificence, and when I felt dull I let him drive it.

The ease and luxury and implausible grandness of Lord Peter’s life certainly contributes to the divided response he provokes. Many people find him ridiculous: too suave, too aristocratic, expert in too many fields (incunabula, cricket, international relations), sentimental and embarrassing when he has scruples (as he always does at the end of the story) about sending the murderer to the gallows.

At the same time, though, he has a gift for speaking the truth to everybody, peer and charlady alike. He never spares himself in pursuit of a criminal, and he has an attractive understanding of the lot and toils of the women of his age. Sayers has Wimsey bankroll an agency, for example, that specializes in sending ‘surplus’ women out to useful work. Run by Miss Climpson (a spinster herself, of course), the employment agency gives its women workers money and purpose, and provides Wimsey with all the adjutants he might need for his cases. Miss Climpson, rather like Miss Marple, is a particularly
capable secret agent: in
Strong Poison
(1930) she insinuates herself into cafés and households – in her unthreatening way – to pick up vital information. She’s even capable of pretending to be a medium, and of tricking a nurse into thinking that the spirits of the dead require her to reveal the hiding place of a vital missing will.

The sympathetic side of Wimsey emerges only slowly as he opens himself up to his mother, and to his faithful ‘man’ Bunter, his former batman from the trenches. He eventually reveals himself to be suffering from survivors’ guilt and what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder from his experiences in the First World War. Beneath the suave exterior, he is a deeply damaged person.

Despite that, one feels that Sayers would have been better off sticking to Lord Peter. In real life, however, she became entangled with John Cournos, a Russian Jew working in London as a journalist. He liked interviewing literary figures, and Sayers described him as the kind of man ‘who spells Art with a capital A’. It was not an easy relationship. ‘It’s such a lonely dreary job having a lover,’ she wrote: ‘One has to rely on him for companionship, because one’s entirely cut off from one’s friends … it’s so dirty to be always telling lies, one just drops seeing them. One can’t be open about it, because it would end by getting round to one’s family somehow.’