Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (73 page)

He contributed his first story to a pulp magazine, aged thirty-four, in 1923. Thereafter, lawyering by day and writing by night, he produced hundreds of such stories, many under pseudonym. His first Perry Mason story,
The Case of the Velvet Claws
appeared in 1933 and his first Bertha Cool story in 1939. He contributed more stories to
Black Mask
(over 130) than any other of that magazine’s distinguished stable of hardboiled crime writers (Hammett, Chandler, Cain, etc.). The Mason series was boosted by the
Saturday Evening Post
, which serialised them from the 1930s to the 1950s and, latterly, by the TV series, starring a lugubrious Raymond Burr as Mason, which ran from 1957 to 1966. As a plot-writer, Gardner loved unexpected twists, surprises and ambushes on the reader – typically, in a courtroom climax. The hardboiled quality in his early work gave way to an easier-going, ironic mode of narration, particularly in the aptly named ‘Cool’ stories, but he always took great professional pains with the legal accuracy of his plots.

Having established himself as a writer, Gardner set up production of his fiction on factory lines, using dictaphones and armies of secretaries. The pulp magazines which flourished between the wars had an insatiable appetite for his wares. In 1938 Gardner, now rich, took up residence at the Temecula Ranch near Riverside, some fifty miles from LA. Although he gave up active legal work in 1933, with the sale of his first full-length novel, he was a founding member of ‘The Court of Last Resort’ (now more soberly called the Case Review Committee), a legal aid organisation for the wrongly imprisoned.

Gardner was an avid sportsman and – it is reported – spoke fluent Mandarin (many of his early clients were indigent Chinese) and was a keen naturalist, particularly expert on the breeding habits of the grey whale. Although guns figure centrally in many of his stories, his own favoured weapon was the bow and arrow and he was a frequent and expert contributor to
Ye Sylvan Archer
magazine. In 1913 Gardner married Natalie Talbert, a legal secretary, and they had one daughter, Grace. However, they separated and the marriage was dissolved in 1935, although the couple were never formally divorced. When his wife died in 1968, Gardner married another of his many secretaries, Agnes Jean Bethell – the supposed original of Perry Mason’s sidekick, Della Street. Unsurprisingly, Gardner lived to win every prize for which an American crime writer is eligible, most more than once.

It is as complete and shameless a bamboozling of the reader as was ever perpetrated.
Raymond Chandler on
And Then There Were None

Agatha Miller was born in Torquay, the last of three children of an American father, Frederick, and an English mother, Clarissa (Clara). The Millers were well off and cultivated. Henry James and Rudyard Kipling were on household visiting terms. The years between five and twelve were, she recalled, ‘wonderfully happy’. Her father, who ‘never did a hand’s turn in his life’ was ‘a very agreeable man’ but feckless. He died of a heart attack when Agatha was eleven and life for the Millers thereafter was less
wonderfully
happy. A brother, ‘Monty’, went to the bad spectacularly after the war, and died, rather disgracefully, in 1929, leaving the Millers, as Agatha’s biographer puts it, a ‘matriarchy’.

Agatha had been educated among this matriarchy as ‘a little lady’: she read voraciously – but, as her manuscripts reveal, never quite mastered grammar or spelling. Later she studied music in France with a view to an eventual career as a pianist or singer. In the event neither her nerves nor her voice were strong enough. Aged twenty she spent a season in Cairo, where she ‘came out’. On her return to England she joined the country-house party circuit, absorbing the Edwardian gentility which breathes serenely over her subsequent fiction. At this period of her life she wrote poetry and had tried her hand at at least one unpublished novel. She married Archie Christie, a dashing officer in the Royal Flying Corps, at Christmas 1914 – his being the third proposal she had received. ‘I love him dreadfully’, she told her mother, who opposed the marriage. Almost immediately Lieut. Christie was posted to France and Agatha cried all night.

Christie survived the war – a sinus complaint invalided him out of active service in the air, and relegated him to a desk job. During hostilities Agatha worked at Torquay Hospital and was put in charge of the dispensary. Here she gained her formidable practical expertise about drugs and poisons. In 1916, on leave from hospital, she wrote
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
(1920), a locked-room murder story, introducing the retired Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, who, as always, solves the mysterious affair by the application of his infallible ‘grey cells’. The wax-moustached and slightly comical detective was inspired by the cluster of war refugees from Belgium currently exiled in Torquay – but Poirot would stay on. He reappears in some thirty-three novels and fifty-two short stories, until his demise in
Curtain
(1975), alongside his Dr Watson, the stolid and unimaginative Captain Hastings.

After the war the Christies moved to London. Archie got a job in the city and
made money (but not much). Agatha got pregnant, giving birth to a baby girl, Rosalind, in 1919. She was a conscientious mother but not enthusiastic about the role nor, some have suggested, sex. There were no more children. But books there were. Christie had arrived on the literary scene at a period when detective fiction was all the rage. She varied her output with
The Secret Adversary
(1922), a ‘romantic’ thriller which introduced a light vein of comedy in the form of the detective duo, Tommy and ‘Tuppence’ Beresford. But her great advance came with
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
(1926), another ‘Poirot’. The novel laid down Christie’s main formula over the subsequent decades: a mysterious murder (typically by poisoning), a claustrophobic setting (typically a country house, but sometimes a ship or a train), a shortlist of suspects all equally plausible, trails of false clues and reader deceptions, ending with a startling denouement.

As the 1920s drew on, Agatha was the main earner in the Christie household. Money, not art, was always a main concern for her – and often a murder motive in her fiction. The year 1926 was the critical one in her life: her mother died and her marriage broke down. Archie, she learned, had been unfaithful. On 6 December 1926 British newspapers carried front-page headlines about Mrs Christie’s mysterious disappearance. A car with articles of her clothing was found abandoned. A huge woman hunt was mounted. Eleven days later she was discovered in a hotel at Harrogate, registered under the name of Archie’s mistress. The unconvincing explanation given out to the world was that she had suffered an attack of ‘amnesia’.

After divorce in 1928, with her daughter now at boarding school, Christie consoled herself with travel. A trip by train to the Middle East inspired her most famous novel,
Murder on the Orient Express
(1934), and at the site of the ancient city of Ur she visited a dig in 1928 and met the archaeologist Max Mallowan. They married in 1930: he was fourteen years younger than her and a Roman Catholic. The marriage lasted forty-five years and both partners continued their careers successfully – Mallowan being knighted for his services to archaeology in 1968. Christie would, somewhat later, earn her own title, for services to popular literature. She was now producing two to three novels a year.
The Murder at the Vicarage
(1930) had introduced her other great series hero, Miss Jane Marple, the genteel spinster sleuth from St Mary Mead. In her fiction of this period Christie also introduces a mocking self-portrait, in the form of the muddle-headed writer of mysteries, Ariadne Oliver.

Christie had her greatest pre-war success with the ‘locked room times ten’ mystery,
Ten Little Niggers
(1939) –
Ten Little Indians
in the US. With the outbreak of war Christie wrote and stored away ‘last’ cases for Poirot (
Curtain
) and Miss Marple (
Sleeping Murder
): both were published shortly before her death. As she explained in her autobiography, they were written ‘in anticipation of my being killed in the
raids, which seemed to be in the highest degree likely as I was working in London’. However, she survived to write seventeen books during the war and, as before, she worked in a hospital dispensary. Her husband Max joined the Royal Air Force and spent much of the war serving in North Africa. The author’s only grandchild, Matthew, was born in 1943. After the war Christie continued to write voluminously, adapting her settings to the new age of austerity – a planet away from the Edwardian milieux of her youth. Her now global popularity was boosted by theatre dramatisations and film versions of her stories. In 1954 she had three plays of her own composition running simultaneously in London’s West End, including the interminable
The Mousetrap
(1948). Christie professed not to like any film versions of her novels, even the immensely popular Margaret Rutherford Marple series.

The novels of the last phase of Christie’s life tend to be perfunctory performances. An exception is
The Pale Horse
(1961), in which a mass poisoner uses the exotic toxin, thallium. Allegedly the mass poisoner Graham Young (who also favoured thallium) was caught because the investigating detective had read and remembered the Christie novel. Uncomfortable as such settings as ‘swinging London’ were for Miss Marple in
At Bertram’s Hotel
(1965), her readership continued to grow. She was never out of fashion. Despite long-running tax problems, Christie, ‘The Queen of Crime’, was a wealthy and honoured woman of letters. She was awarded a CBE in 1956 and was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1971. She died in 1976. Her tombstone at Cholsey in Berkshire is inscribed ‘Agatha Christie the Writer’.

‘I’ll thcream and thcream and thcream till I’m thick.’
Violet Elizabeth Bott

Richmal Lamburn was born in Lancashire, the middle child of a Church of England parson. Her three-years-younger brother Jack (in later life a man of action, and a writer of action novels) evidently inspired a bit of William Brown. Crompton’s elder sister, Gwen (nothing like Ethel Brown) was throughout their joint lifelong spinsterdom Richmal’s closest friend. The ‘Crompton’ middle name was in honour of a maternal grandfather who, for no recorded reason, swallowed a lethal dose of prussic acid when Richmal was three.

Her home life was unlike William’s cosy, bourgeois, home-counties menage – Mr Brown doing his something in the city, Mrs Brown darning socks, Robert at his dramatic society, the delectable flapper Ethel fending off beaux, the incorrigible maid breaking the crockery (‘It came to pieces in me ’and, M’um’), the gardener mysteriously busy in the potting shed – and, of course, Just William, schoolboy, Outlaw, proud owner of Jumble, and sworn rebel against all the above. Aged eleven (William’s age, for four decades), Richmal was bundled off to a ‘clergy daughters’ boarding school in Warrington. A bright pupil, she won a place to read classics at Newnham, but prudently turned it down in favour of the £60 p.a. scholarship Royal Holloway College, London, offered her. She was canny about money. On graduation, with a respectable ‘second’, she entered the teaching profession and eventually found a long-term post at Bromley High School for Girls. For the fifteen most formative years of her life she lived in wholly boyless institutions. Early 1920s England was also notably manless, thanks to the Kaiser.

Richmal wrote her first William stories for the
Home Magazine
and
Happy Mag.
(sic): they were published in volume form by the magazine magnate, George Newnes. The first book, with its hallmark illustrations by Henry Thomas, was
Just William
(1922). The last, some forty volumes on, was
William the Superman
(1968). Crompton’s naughty schoolboy bestrode the twentieth century like a ragamuffin colossus. It changed, he never did. As early as the fifth volume, Crompton called William her ‘Frankenstein’s monster’. She made fitful attempts (as had Doyle with Sherlock Holmes) to kill him, but ‘he insisted on having his own way’. William the Unkillable. Crompton wrote thirty-odd books for adults, some of which, like the early
Bildungsroman, The Innermost Room
(1923) and her collection of ghost stories,
Mist
(1929), stand up well. But no one liked them as much as William’s exploits – or reads them nowadays – as they do William.

Crompton’s life took an irreversible turn in her early thirties with polio, causing her to lose the use of her right leg, and another in her early forties, when she developed breast cancer. What sexual experiences she had – if any – are unrecorded. Her pen name, ‘Richmal’, her family name, ‘Ray’, and her tomboyish girlhood are too slight to build on. She may, like Jane Austen, have died a virgin novelist. ‘I am probably,’ she said, ‘the last surviving example of the Victorian professional aunt.’ And, by all accounts, a fond one. Thanks to William, the only man in her life, she could live in a grand house – ‘The Glebe’, in Bromley – and leave a healthy £60,000 on her death.