Poirot (1959)
On 15 March 1959, the cast ofThe Mousetrap gave a performance of the play at Wormwood Scrubs prison in London. The set and furniture did not have to be transported to the prison as these were provided, the prisoners having constructed the decor from designs supplied by Peter Saunders. An audience of three hundred prisoners, all men serving long sentences, enjoyed the play and applauded warmly at the end. Or rather, two hundred and ninety-eight of them applauded, for two had taken the opportunity to escape during Act II.
During the year, UNESCO released the information that the Bible had been translated into one hundred and seventy-one languages, Agatha Christie into one hundred and three, and Shakespeare into ninety.
The statistics concerning numbers of copies of volumes sold revealed the Bible and Shakespeare to be ahead of Agatha Christie, who came third with something like 400,000,000 copies.
Mrs Christie may have been translated into only one hundred and three languages by 1959. Forty years later the number is higher (and the sales figures are considerably higher!) but she was not necessarily admired uncritically in all of them. Under the heading, 'A Slight Case of Poison, Agatha', the London Daily Express published this story by its Moscow correspondent on 20 May 1981: Crime writers in general came under heavy fire at the Soviet Writers' Congress today. And, in particular Agatha Christie who 'reflects the poisoned air which exists in bourgeois society'.
Seventy-year-old Kornel Chukovsky, a translator, said of her: 'She has talent-but what a waste. If she had written six or seven books in her life instead of seventy they might have been good. As it is, she has become a virtuoso in extermination.
'She makes no attempt to build up pity for her victims-for the child who died because of licking a poisoned postage stamp. She only creates admiration for the murderer's technique. Human interest is excluded from her work. She concentrates on only how to conceal crime, on plot and intrigue, on the intellectual ability of the murderers and the technical excellence of their crimes.
'The extent of inhumanity of the crime writer is frightful. There is a mass psychosis for crime stories.
They have poisoned people's brains to such an extent that they cannot absorb normal literary food.
People have become incapable of reading books in which there are no ingenious murders.
'Agatha Christie's great stunt is to throw suspicion on everyone. Readers are not allowed to believe in noble virtues like honesty, sincerity, and friendship, in unselfish motives or feelings. She fosters feelings of suspicion, fear, hate, and disbelief in the goodness of people.'
One would like to think that, if her press cutting service landed this news item on the author's desk, sheread it with a smile, and murmured, 'Look who's talking!'
The 1959 Christie, a new Poirot mystery calledCat Among the Pigeons , is one of the best of the later novels. Agatha Christie is not a writer whose work can be neatly divided into the usual three periods of promise, maturity or achievement, and decline; nevertheless her creative output did alter throughout the years. The thrillers became less light-hearted, while the structure of the mysteries loosened up somewhat, and occasionally to a perilous degree. The plotting of some of the Poirot and Miss Marple novels which Agatha Christie wrote in the last fifteen years of her life is more than a trifle lax. When this happens, there is usually a compensation in the form of especially convincing characterization.Cat Among the Pigeons , however, is quite strongly plotted, and its characters, even its minor characters, are more than usually vivid.
The novel is set, for the most part, in a girls' school in England, which has led some critics to compare it to a murder mystery published in 1946 by one of Mrs Christie's rivals: Josphine Tey'sMiss Pym Disposes , in which certain events in a girls' physical education college lead to a death. The school background apart, however, there is little similarity between the two novels. Agatha Christie's school, Meadow-bank, is said to have been based on her daughter Rosalind's school, Caledonia. The school and its staff are certainly described very convincingly, and the crotchety illiberality of outlook which occasionally creeps into the pages of late Christie is completely absent. In fact, the liberal commonsense of the headmistress and founder of the school, Miss Bulstrode, is presented in such a way as to suggest it has the author's wholehearted approval.
The skill with which the summer term at Meadowbank is combined with a revolution in Ramat, a small but rich Arab state in the Middle East, is masterly. Hercule Poirot is required to discover who is busily murdering the staff of the school, and it is not long before a plethora of motives is revealed. Elements of the domestic mystery and the thriller are combined, and two characters whom we shall later meet in the thrillers are first encountered inCat Among the Pigeons : Colonel Pikeaway, who seems to be in charge of intelligence, and is given to remarking 'We know all about things here, that's what we're for' (he will say it again inPassenger to Frankfurt and, as a old man in retirement, inPostern of Fate ): and the enigmatic financier, Mr Robinson, 'Fat and well-dressed, with a yellow face, melancholy dark eyes, a broad forehead, and a generous mouth that displayed rather over-large very white teeth'. Mr Robinson will make an appearance inPostern of Fate and a Miss Marple adventure,At Bertram's Hotel .
For some years, Hercule Poirot has lived in an apartment in Whitehaven Mansions, London, W1. We learn inCat Among the Pigeons that the number of his apartment is 228, but the block of flats is now called Whitehouse Mansions. Mrs Christie's carelessness again? Or simply a misprint in certain editions?
Or has Poirot moved without telling even his creator?
At one point in the narrative a schoolgirl mentions one of the characters fromMrs McGinty's Dead , and Poirot reminisces: this time without giving away the solution of the earlier novel. The reader enjoys such harmless and cosy links between novels, but not when vital information is carelessly and unnecessarily revealed.
Julia, the schoolgirl, is taken to a performance ofFaust at Covent Garden. If Mrs Christie had been in the habit of researching in the interests of accuracy, she would have discovered that Gounod's opera had not been staged at Covent Garden since 1938. Julia was taken either to Sadler's Wells Theatre, or the Welsh National Opera, or the old Carl Rosa Company on tour. Or, of course, to Paris! About Charles Osborne This essay was adapted from Charles Osborne'sThe Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie: A Biographical Companion to the Works of Agatha Christie (1982, rev. 1999). Mr. Osborne was born in Brisbane in 1927. He is known internationally as an authority on opera, and has written a number of books on musical and literary subjects, among themThe Complete Operas of Verdi (1969);Wagner and His World (1977); andW.H. Auden: The Life of a Poet (1980). An addict of crime fiction and the world's leading authority on Agatha Christie, Charles Osborne adapted the Christie playsBlack Coffee (Poirot);Spider's Web ; andThe Unexpected Guest into novels. He lives in London.
About Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in English and another billion in 100 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time and in any language, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. Mrs Christie is the author of eighty crime novels and short story collections, nineteen plays, and six novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.
Agatha Christie's first novel,The Mysterious Affair at Styles , was written towards the end of World War I (during which she served in the Voluntary Aid Detachments). In it she created Hercule Poirot, the little Belgian investigator who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. After having been rejected by a number of houses,The Mysterious Affair at Styles was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.
In 1926, now averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece.The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by William Collins and marked the beginning of an author-publisher relationship that lasted for fifty years and produced over seventy books.The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie's works to be dramatised-asAlibi -and to have a successful run in London's West End.The Mousetrap , her most famous play, opened in 1952 and runs to this day at St Martin's Theatre in the West End; it is the longest-running play in history.
Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. She died in 1976, since when a number of her books have been published: the bestselling novelSleeping Murder appeared in 1976, followed byAn Autobiography and the short story collectionsMiss Marple's Final Cases ;Problem at Pollensa Bay ; andWhile the Light Lasts . In 1998,Black Coffee was the first of her plays to be novelised by Charles Osborne, Mrs Christie's biographer.
The Agatha Christie Collection
Christie Crime Classics The Man in the Brown Suit The Secret of Chimneys The Seven Dials Mystery The Mysterious Mr Quin The Sittaford Mystery The Hound of Death The Listerdale Mystery Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
Parker Pyne Investigates Murder Is Easy And Then There Were None Towards Zero Death Comes as the End Sparkling Cyanide Crooked House They Came to Baghdad Destination Unknown Spider's Web *
The Unexpected Guest *
Ordeal by Innocence The Pale Horse Endless Night Passenger To Frankfurt Problem at Pollensa Bay While the Light Lasts Hercule Poirot Investigates The Mysterious Affair at Styles The Murder on the Links Poirot Investigates The Murder of Roger Ackroyd The Big Four The Mystery of the Blue Train Black Coffee *
Peril at End House Lord Edgware Dies Murder on the Orient Express Three-Act Tragedy Death in the Clouds The ABC Murders Murder in Mesopotamia Cards on the Table Murder in the Mews Dumb Witness Death on the Nile Appointment with Death Hercule Poirot's Christmas Sad Cypress One, Two, Buckle My Shoe Evil Under the Sun Five Little Pigs The Hollow The Labours of Hercules Taken at the Flood Mrs McGinty's Dead After the Funeral Hickory Dickory Dock Dead Man's Folly Cat Among the Pigeons The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding The Clocks Third Girl Hallowe'en Party Elephants Can Remember Poirot's Early Cases Curtain: Poirot's Last Case Miss Marple Mysteries The Murder at the Vicarage The Thirteen Problems The Body in the Library The Moving Finger A Murder Is Announced They Do It with Mirrors A Pocket Full of Rye 4.50 from Paddington The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side A Caribbean Mystery At Bertram's Hotel Nemesis Sleeping Murder Miss Marple's Final Cases Tommy & Tuppence The Secret Adversary Partners in Crime N or M?
By the Pricking of My Thumbs Postern of Fate Published as Mary Westmacott Giant's Bread Unfinished Portrait Absent in the Spring The Rose and the Yew Tree A Daughter's a Daughter