1920 (39 page)

He was not, however, the story's hero. That distinction belongs to Hercule Poirot, a private investigator from Belgium who would go on to achieve a distinction in the real world that only he, of all the fictional characters ever created, would be able to claim.

He was a charming fellow in his way. Undoubtedly he gave off a whiff of snootiness, an air of superiority—but wasn't he entitled? Nobody could detect the way Poirot detected, and no one was as ingeniously clever in assembling the suspects in a single room of a British mansion in the final chapter of a book and, after a series of false hints about the killer's identity to raise the level of suspense, actually revealing it.

In narrating the first of Poirot's adventures in 1920, Captain Hastings, upon his initial meeting with the unlikely-looking crime-solver, was impressed that, despite the fact of his being but five feet, four inches tall, “his extravagance of personality … was sufficiently plausible to stand and survive by himself.” Christie biographer Janet Morgan continues with her description of Poirot by relating that he “was clever, and equipped with a pompous character, a luxuriant moustache, and a curious egg-shaped head.”

But how was Christie to find the peace she needed to concentrate on her first of Poirot's adventures? She decided, after a time, to write at least part of her novel in a hotel room in a section of England that was “desolate, tranquil, and utterly unique in the nearly spiritual serenity that transcends the vast moorland.” Nonetheless, the creative drive demanded by Poirot's investigative methods would tax her physically as much as it did artistically. According to biographer Richard Hack, the ambience “was dreary, yes, and outside, the damp cold weather no doubt furthered that impression as Agatha settled into a daily routine of rising early and writing in longhand for several hours in the morning, until her fingers ached and cramped around her pencil, and the lunch bell finally pealed the call for the dining room.”

Christie's fingers did not completely un-cramp for the rest of the day; she was finished writing until tomorrow.

And when she was finished writing her book in its entirety, she did what all unknown authors did in those days before agents—she submitted it, unsolicited, through the mail to a publishing house, hoping that someone
who worked there would pluck her envelope from the stacks and stacks of other unsolicited manuscripts and read it. In this case, that is exactly what happened, and it did so, to Christie's ineffable joy and immediate success, at one of England's leading publishers, the Bodley Head.

Stunned when an editor contacted her and told her he had actually read
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, even more stunned when he asked for a meeting, and stunned yet further after the meeting when he told her the book would be published and then offered her a contract, Christie virtually took flight from his office and “wanted to hug someone, or scream, or do something so wonderfully silly that everyone on the street would stop and stare in her direction.”

Hercule Poirot's career was about to begin.

Christie could not, or would not, ever satisfactorily explain the origin of either her hero's name or his Belgian nationality. But his brilliant deductions at Styles made him, virtually overnight, the most famous crime-solver on the planet. Only he, it seems, could have discovered the identity of the murderer of the grande dame of Styles, Emily Cavendish Inglethorp, who was elderly, near death, and had a great deal of money to dispense when her demise finally came.

This first of Christie's books, in Captain Hastings's voice, began as follows:

The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somehow subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumours which still persist.

However inadvertently, Christie was being coy. She
wanted
the rumors to persist, rumors not only about the possible perpetrator of Dame Inglethorp's slaying, but of the murders by the score she would set to paper in the years ahead, eventually putting aside her pencil and, with fingers straightened, making use of a typewriter.

And, to this very day, the rumors have indeed persisted.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie was born in 1890, her parents wealthy but their daughter uninterested in other little girls of her age and similar circumstances. Although she would later describe her childhood as a happy one, Christie preferred to spend her time alone, with her pets, and often with her imaginary friends. One of them was Sue de Verte, and little Agatha was perhaps describing herself as much as her fantasy playmate when she wrote that Sue was “curiously colourless, not only in appearance … but also in character.”

As she grew older, Agatha turned to books for companionship, and they may have been her truest friends of all in childhood. She began with the works of Maria Louisa Molesworth, who was simply Mrs. Molesworth on her dust jackets and who produced such British childhood classics as
Carrots, The Cuckoo Clock
, and
Tell Me A Story
. Eventually Agatha moved up to the sophisticated, sometimes nonsensical verse of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and in time, too inspired by her reading to resist, she began to write her own works. She began with short stories that were not published, then novels that were not published. But she was becoming a determined young lady and would not be dissuaded by early disappointment.

It is the story of many an author. Years of failure—or, to consider them less depressingly and in some cases more realistically, years of learning her craft—and then finally a breakthrough.

At this point, however, Christie's real-life story, like her fiction, takes an unforeseen twist.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
becomes an immediate best seller. So does every other book she writes, all of them mysteries, more of them than the number of years remaining in her life. It is reported by her estate that the books of the woman who would eventually become Dame Agatha, a total of sixty-six novels and fifteen short-story collections, rank behind only the Bible and the plays of Shakespeare in sales. She is, thus, with four
billion
of her volumes in print, the most widely read novelist of all time.

And as if that weren't enough, she also succeeded beyond any playwright's dreams on the stage, where her work
The Mousetrap
has for many years been the longest-running play in history. It opened in London's West
End in 1952 and, as of this writing, after more than sixty years, has yet to close. On November 18, 2012, it celebrated its 25,000th performance. It has gone far beyond the status of mere theatrical drama to being one of England's principal tourist attractions, ranking with Big Ben, the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace.

Even Christie, in her autobiography, admitted her puzzlement at the success of
The Mousetrap
. “Apart from replying with the obvious answer, ‘Luck!'—because it is luck, ninety per cent. luck at least,” Christie wrote, “I should say … it is well constructed. The thing unfolds so that you want to know what happens next, and you can't quite see where the next few minutes will lead you.”

At the beginning of the play, with the stage still in darkness, a young woman is murdered. After the killer is finally identified, the person's identity a surprise to almost all, the curtain falls and the audience is asked not to discuss the play's ending with family members, friends, or associates at work, who might thus have the experience of
The Mousetrap
spoiled for them. The assumption is that, eventually, everyone in London, whether resident or tourist, will get around to seeing it. So far, almost everyone has.

Curiously, the world's longest-running play has never had much success in this country. Hundreds of productions have been mounted, but almost all of them in community and regional theatres, and they have been limited by the theatres' schedules to a run of a few weeks, a month at the most. No attempts at a major New York production have been made for decades, and none has ever had more than a tiny fraction of the success of the original.

Still, that original, now an institution, is the great marvel of live drama—certainly in modern times. And Christie's continuing book sales are the great marvel of the publishing world. She is far from being the world's most honored author, often criticized for an inability to create three-dimensional characters, her works accused of being puzzles more than true literary creations. Nonetheless, whatever her shortcomings, Agatha Christie is without question the queen of engaging quantity.

AH, IF ONLY HE COULD
have offered his services to the Bureau of Investigation in the United States after the Wall Street bombing. …

On August 6, 1975, the
New York Times
ran one of its rare front-page obituaries. It reported the death of Hercule Poirot. But it was a strange kind of passing, and there was far too much to say about it for a single page. The notice of decease continued at greater length on page sixteen.

An article about the death of a man of Poirot's eminence is always accompanied by a picture. However, since no photograph of the decedent could ever be taken, the
Times
article was accompanied by a painting done some fifty years earlier, when Poirot was at the peak of his powers, not to mention the peak of his dandified, even haughty, presence. It looked just like him.

Since his was a death that saddened hundreds of millions of readers the world over, the obituary of this man deserves to be quoted at some length.

Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective who became internationally famous, has died in England. His age was unknown.

Mr. Poirot achieved fame as a private investigator after he retired as a member of the Belgian police force in 1904. His career, as chronicled in the novels of Dame Agatha Christie, his creator, was one of the most illustrious in fiction.

At the end of his life, he was arthritic, and had a bad heart. He was in a wheelchair often, and was carried from his bedroom to the public lounge at Styles Court, a nursing home in Essex, wearing a wig and false mustaches to mask the signs of age that offended his vanity. In his active days, he was always impeccably dressed.

Mr. Poirot, who was just 5 feet 4 inches tall, went to England from Belgium during World War I as a refugee. He settled in a little town not far from Styles, then an elaborate country estate, where he took on his first private case. …

The news of his death was confirmed by Dodd, Mead, Dame Agatha's [American] publishers, who will put out “Curtain,” the novel that chronicles his final days, on Oct. 15.

The Poirot of the final volume is only a shadow of the well-turned out, agile investigator who, with a charming but immense ego and fractured English, solved uncounted
mysteries in the 37 full-length novels and collections of short stories in which he appeared.

Dame Agatha reports in “Curtain” that he managed, in one final gesture, to perform one more act of cerebration that saved an innocent bystander from disaster. “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it,” to quote Shakespeare, whom Poirot frequently misquoted.

It was the first and only obituary of a fictional character that the
New York Times
has ever published.

CHRISTIE WAS THE MAGNIFICENT EXCEPTION
of 1920, a traditionalist who succeeded in a radical age of literature, which consisted of verse as well as prose. T. S. Eliot, who had shaken the world of poetry a few years earlier with
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
, and would startle it again in two years with the modernist classic
The Waste Land
, published his first volume of collected works in 1920, including
Prufrock
. It was the poem's first great showcase. Described as “a drama of literary anguish,”
Prufrock
's language was dense and some of its references oddly chosen, but one did not have to understand every word in the epic to feel the aching depression of the title character's life, a life in which there was no love, no music, no hope. Going further, Eliot biographer Craig Raine offers a withering description of Mr. Prufrock, calling him “a thin-skinned sensitive, a dithering compass of cowardice and crippling lack of self-esteem. Prufrock fails to live, fails to declare himself—and is therefore culpable by romantic lights. He does not seize the day.” It is, rather, the days that seize him, and do with him what they will.

Eliot, an Englishman who moved to St. Louis as a young man, was another of the year's prominent figures who looked as if he belonged on
Main Street
, although in a position superior to that of Harding—perhaps bank president, perhaps president of the Gopher Prairie Chamber of Commerce, despite appearing a bit reserved for a hale-fellow-well-met crowd. Eliot wore three-piece suits, parted his hair in a wide, straight line and flattened it to his scalp, both of which actions appeared to have been taken ruthlessly. He was a private man. His smile was slight and
benign, his mind always appearing to be on something other than the photograph. The frames of his glasses, which he wore in only a few of his pictures, were perfectly round.

Eventually, moving back across the ocean and settling as far as comfort would allow from Gopher Prairie, Eliot became a citizen of Great Britain, as staid in his choice of homeland as he was in his appearance. But devoted to it. When the United States announced it was entering the Great War with little more than a year remaining, Eliot wrote from London to his mother in St. Louis with undisguised bitterness. “You [Americans] will be having all the excitement and bustle of war with none of the horrors and despairs.”

For Agatha Christie, the Great War was seldom more than a fact turned up in the background of a suspect by Poirot or her other great detective, the village busybody Miss Jane Marple. It usually meant nothing more than that the individual in question knew how to shoot a gun, or that he might still have walked with a slight limp.