Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

by Agatha Christie

outside the station a handsome looking motor-bus labelled Orient Palace Hotel, A grand person in

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that you really have a noble face.’ This so astonished me that I woke up a little more. It was a way I should never have thought of describing myself–certainly nobody else had ever done so. A noble face–had I? It seemed unlikely. Then a thought occurred to me. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘that is because I have rather a Roman nose.’ Yes, I thought, a Roman nose. That would give me a slightly noble profile. I was not quite sure that I liked the idea. It was the kind of thing that was difficult to live up to. I am many things: good-tempered, exuberant, scatty, forgetful, shy, affectionate, completely lacking in self-confidence, moderately unselfish; but noble–no, I can’t see myself as noble. However, I relapsed into sleep, rearranging my Roman nose to look its best–full-face, rather than profile.

Certainly, when you begin to write, you are usually in the throes of admiration for some writer, and, whether you will or no, you cannot help copying their style. Often it is not a style that suits you, and so you write badly. But as time goes on you are less influenced by admiration. You still admire certain writers, you may even wish you could write like them, but you know quite well that you can’t. Presumably, you have learnt literary humility. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can’t, and it would never occur to me to attempt to copy them. I have learnt that I am me, that I can do the things that, as one might put it, me can do, but I cannot do the things that me would like to do. As the Bible say, ‘Who by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature?’

I was never good at games; I am not and never shall be a good conversationalist; I am so easily suggestible that I have to get away by myself before I know what I really think or need to do. I can’t draw; I can’t paint; I can’t model or do any kind of sculpture; I can’t hurry without getting rattled; I can’t say what I mean easily-I can write it better. I can stand fast on a matter of principle, but not on anything else. Although I know tomorrow is Tuesday, if somebody tells me more than four times that tomorrow is Wednesday, after the fourth time I shall accept that it is Wednesday, and act accordingly. What can I do? Well, I can write. I could be a reasonable musician, but not a professional one. I am a good accompanist to singers. I can improvise things when in difficulties–this has been a most useful accomplishment; the things I can do with hairpins and safety pins when in domestic difficulties would surprise you. It was I who fashioned bread into a sticky pill, stuck it on a hairpin, attached the hairpin with sealing wax on the end of a window pole, and managed to pick up my mother’s false teeth from where they had fallen on to the conservatory roof! I successfully chloroformed a hedgehog that was entangled in the tennis net and so managed to release it. I can claim to be useful about the house. And so on and so forth. And now for what I like and don’t like. I don’t like crowds, being jammed up against people, loud voices, noise, protracted talking, parties, and espec...

I think I admire loyalty almost more than any other virtue. Loyalty and courage are two of the finest things there are. Any kind of courage, physical or moral, arouses my utmost admiration. It is one of the most important virtues to bring to life. If you can bear to live at all, you can bear to live with courage. It is a must.

Several of our acting friends can throw a temperament as well as anyone. When Charles Laughton was playing Hercule Poirot in Alibi, and sipping ice-cream sodas with me during a break in rehearsal, he explained his method. ‘It’s a good thing to pretend to have a temperament, even if you haven’t. I find it very helpful. People will say, “Don’t let’s do anything to annoy him. You know how he throws temperaments.”’ ‘It’s tiring sometimes,’ he added, ‘especially if you don’t happen to want to. But it pays. It pays every time.’ II

My literary activities at this period seem curiously vague in my memory. I don’t think, even then, that I considered myself a bona fide author. I wrote things–yes–books and stories. They were published, and I was beginning to accustom myself to the fact that I could count upon them as a definite source of income. But never, when I was filling in a form and came to the line asking for Occupation, would it have occurred to me to fill it in with anything but the time-honoured ‘Married woman’. I was a married woman, that was my status, and that was my occupation. As a sideline, I wrote books. I never approached my writing by dubbing it with the grand name of ‘career’. I would have thought it ridiculous.

Thriller plays are usually much alike in plot–all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang a la Moriarty–provided first by the Germans, the ‘Huns’ of the first war; then the Communists, who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.

I think at that moment, in St. Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born, and with her Miss Hartnell, Miss Wetherby, and Colonel and Mrs Bantry–they were all there lined up below the border-line of consciousness, ready to come to life and step out on to the stage.

Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmother’s Ealing cronies–old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with her–though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.

Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventy–which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he could have grown old with me.

Some time later I wrote another six Miss Marple stories, and the twelve, with an extra story, were published in England under the title of The Thirteen Problems, and in America as The Tuesday Club Murders.

Plots come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hat-shop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, ‘Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.’ Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book. So far so good–but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that had struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books, to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plot–do it yourself-Girl and not really sister–August–with a kind of sketch of a plot. What it’s all about I can’t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.

No one could have dreamt then that there would come a time when crime books would be read for their love of violence, the taking of sadistic pleasure in brutality for its own sake. One would have thought that the community would rise up in horror against such things; but now cruelty seems almost everyday bread and butter. I wonder still how it can be so, when one considers that the vast majority of people one knows, girls and boys as well as the older folk, are extraordinarily kind and helpful: they will do things to help older people; they are willing and anxious to be of service. The minority of what I call ‘the haters’ is quite small, but, like all minorities, it makes itself felt far more than the majority does.

I would say myself, from the ordinary observation of life, that where there is no humility the people perish.

Is there a cure for wickedness? What one can do with a killer? Not imprisonment for life–that surely is far more cruel than the cup of hemlock in ancient Greece. The best answer we ever found, I suspect, was transportation. A vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings, where man could live in simpler surroundings. Let us face the thought that what we regard as defects were once qualities. Without ruthlessness, without cruelty, without a complete lack of mercy, perhaps man would not have continued to exist; he would have been wiped out quite soon. The evil man nowadays may be the successful man of the past. He was necessary then, but he is not necessary and is a danger now.

This seems to have taken me a long way from detective stories, but explains, perhaps, why I have got more interest in my victims than my criminals. The more passionately alive the victim, the more glorious indignation I have on his behalf, and am full of a delighted triumph when I have delivered a near-victim out of the valley of the shadow of death.

One does feel proud to belong to the human race when one sees the wonderful things human beings have fashioned with their hands. They have been creators–they must share a little the holiness of the Creator, who made the world and all that was in it, and saw that it was good. But he left more to be made. He left the things to be fashioned by men’s hands. He left them to fashion them, to follow in his footsteps because they were made in his image, to see what they made, and see that it was good.

I wanted somewhere where I would not be disturbed. There would not be a telephone in the room. I was going to have a grand piano; large, firm table; a comfortable sofa or divan; a hard upright chair for typing; and one armchair to recline in, and there was to be nothing else. I bought myself a Steinway grand, and I enjoyed ‘my room’ enormously. Nobody was allowed to use the Hoover on that floor while I was in the house, and short of the house being on fire, I was not to be approached. For once, I had a place of my own, and I continued to enjoy it for the five or six years until the house was bombed in the war. I don’t know why I never had anything of the kind again. I suppose I got used to using the dining-room table or the corner of the washstand once more.

It had been exciting, to begin with, to be writing books–partly because, as I did not feel I was a real author, it was each time astonishing that I should be able to write books that were actually published. Now I wrote books as a matter of course. It was my business to do so. People would not only publish them–they would urge me to get on with writing them. But the eternal longing to do something that is not my proper job, was sure to unsettle me; in fact it would be a dull life if it didn’t.

There is always, of course, that terrible three weeks, or a month, which you have to get through when you are trying to get started on a book. There is no agony like it. You sit in a room, biting pencils, looking at a typewriter, walking about, or casting yourself down on a sofa, feeling you want to cry your head off.

You forget every time what you felt before when it comes again. Such misery and despair, such inability to do anything that will be in the least creative. And yet it seems that this particular phase of misery has got to be lived through. It is rather like putting the ferrets in to bring out what you want at the end of the rabbit burrow. Until there has been a lot of subterranean disturbance, until you have spent long hours of utter boredom–you can never feel normal. You can’t think of what you want to write, and if you pick up a book you find you are not reading it properly. If you try to do a crossword your mind isn’t on the clues; you are possessed by a feeling of paralyzed hopelessness.

I never found any difficulty in writing during the war, as some people did; I suppose because I cut myself off into a different compartment of my mind. I could live in the book amongst the people I was writing about, and mutter their conversations and see them striding about the room I had invented for them.

It is an odd feeling to have a book growing inside you, for perhaps six or seven years knowing that one day you will write it, knowing that it is building up, all the time, to what it already is. Yes, it is there already–it just has to come more clearly out of the mist. All the people are there, ready, waiting in the wings, ready to come on to the stage when their cues are called–and then, suddenly, one gets a clear and sudden command: Now!

Why should one give up any hope until one is dead? It reminds me of the story that my American godmother used to tell me years and years ago about two frogs who fell into a pail of milk. One said: ‘Ooh, I’m drowning, I’m drowning!’ The other frog said, ‘I‘m not going to drown.’ ‘How can you stop drowning?’ asked the other frog. ‘Why, I’m going to hustle around, and hustle around, and hustle around like mad,’ said the second frog. Next morning the first frog had given up and drowned, and the second frog, having hustled around all night, was sitting there in the pail, right on top of a pat of butter.

Towards the beginning of the war, Graham Greene had written to me and asked if I would like to do propaganda work. I did not think I was the kind of writer who would be any good at propaganda, because I lacked the single-mindedness to see only one side of the case. Nothing could be more ineffectual than a lukewarm propagandist. You want to be able to say ‘X is black as night’ and feel it. I didn’t think I could ever be like that.

I cannot see why people are always so embarrassed by having to discuss anything to do with death. Dear Edmund Cork, my agent, always used to look most upset when I raised the question of ‘Yes, but supposing I should die?’ But really the question of death is so important nowadays, that one has to discuss it. As far as I could make out from what lawyers and tax people told me about death duties–very little of which I ever understood–my demise was going to be an unparalleled disaster for all my relations, and their only hope was to keep me alive as long as possible!

Another occasion I remember with great pride, but I must admit with suffering all the same, is the tenth anniversary of The Mousetrap. There was a party for it–there had to be a party for it, and what is more I had to go to the party. I did not mind going to small theatrical parties just for the cast, or something of that kind; one was among friends then, and, although nervous, I could get through it. But this was a grand, a super-party at the Savoy. It had everything that is most awful about parties: masses of people, television, lights, photographers, reporters, speeches, this, that and the other–nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was. Still, I saw that it had to be got through. I would have not exactly to make a speech, but to say a few words–a thing I had never done before. I cannot make speeches, I never make speeches, and I won’t make speeches, and it is a very good thing that I don’t make speeches because I should be so bad at them.

It is particularly silly because ordinary social occasions do not make me shy. I do not enjoy big parties, but I can go to them, and whatever I feel is not really shyness. I suppose, actually, the feeling is–I don’t know whether every author feels it, but I think quite a lot do–that I am pretending to be something I am not, because, even nowadays, I do not quite feel as though I am an author. I still have that overlag of feeling that I am pretending to be an author.

Anyway, like a coward, I accepted the rebuff, turned tail and wandered miserably round the corridors of the Savoy, trying to get up my courage to go back and say–in effect, like Margot Asquith–‘I’m Me!’ I was, fortunately, rescued by dear Verity Hudson, Peter Saunders’ general manager. She laughed–she couldn’t help laughing–and Peter Saunders laughed a great deal. Anyway, I was brought in, subjected to cutting tapes, kissing actresses, grinning from ear to ear, simpering, and having to suffer the insult to my vanity that occurs when I press my cheek against that of some young and good-looking actress and know that we shall appear in the news the next day–she looking beautiful and confident in her role, and I looking frankly awful. Ah well, good for one’s vanity, I suppose!

On the whole I have had sense enough not to do things in public, except when it has been absolutely necessary, or would hurt people’s feelings badly if I didn’t. When you don’t do a thing well it is so much more sensible not to attempt it, and I don’t really see any reason why writers should–it’s not part of their stock-in-trade. There are many careers where personalities and public relations matter–for instance if you are an actor, or a public figure. An author’s business is simply to write. Writers are diffident creatures–they need encouragement.

Nothing could be further apart than our work. I am a lowbrow and he a highbrow, yet we complement each other, I think, and have both helped each other. Often he has asked me for my judgment on certain points, and whilst I shall always remain an amateur I do know quite a lot about his special branch of archaeology–indeed, many years ago, when I was once saying sadly to Max it was a pity I couldn’t have taken up archaeology when I was a girl, so as to be more knowledgeable on the subject, he said, ‘Don’t you realise that at this moment you know more about pre-historic pottery than almost any woman in England.’

One should be proud of leaving life like that–with dignity and resolution. It is, of course, all very well to write these grand words. What will really happen is that I shall probably live to be ninety-three, drive everyone mad by being unable to hear what they say to me, complain bitterly of the latest scientific hearing aids, ask innumerable questions, immediately forget the answers and ask the same questions again. I shall quarrel violently with some patient nurse-attendant and accuse her of poisoning me, or walk out of the latest establishment for genteel old ladies, causing endless trouble to my suffering family. And when I finally succumb to bronchitis, a murmur will go around of ‘One can’t help feeling that it really is a merciful relief.