Tuesday Night Bloggers: Death Wears a Mask

A new month and a new theme. We are coming up to Hallowe'en (which I tend to ignore as my house is protected by my black cat who sits on the window sill and glares at all potential trick-or-treaters) so it was decided to deal with murder in costume. As before Kate Jackson is collecting all the contributions on her blog. They are very well worth reading.

Several people wrote about Agatha Christie in the first week. It is, in fact, almost impossible to produce a clutch of blogs about classic detective stories (let us not get into an argument as to what is and what is not Golden Age) without mentioning that lady and her output. Despite the fact that it is fashionable to dismiss her work (a trend that, I am sorry to say, the Baroness James strongly contributed to) the truth is that it was often of the first order on many more levels than just clever plots, Several aspects of crime and detective fiction were pioneered by her.

My colleagues among the Tuesday Night Bloggers  covered a number of Christie's novels and short stories in which people wear masks in the sense of masquerading as someone else. Off the top of my head I can refer to A Murder Is Announced (in which only about two members of a household are what they say they are), After The Funeral (in which we see the same person in two guises without realizing it) and One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (about which I cannot say anything without giving away the plot). There are others but I want to look at a slight adventure, one of the Beresfords' about whom I have written before here and here.

One of their adventures in Partners in Crime, which spreads over two stories, Finessing the King and The Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper, deals with murder committed by a masked man with the victim also being masked. The crime is committed in a private room of a rather shady cafe, called The Ace of Spades, to which the Beresfords go at midnight, having attended (in Tommy's case reluctantly) The Three Arts Ball. They hear a cry and sinister laughter in the room next to theirs and go in to find a dying lady dressed as the Queen of Hearts, who manages to whisper that Bingo did it. Nothing is exactly straightforward and Tuppence manages to work out the truth because she remembers something Tommy had told her about differences in newsprint from day to day in what must be their favourite newspaper, The Daily Leader. That and the killer's sinister laughter.

Masquerading as another person or wearing a mask to hide the real personality is a frequent Christie device. In this story, the mask is physical - the killer assumes another's outfit in order to confuse both victim and police.

Like most of the stories in Partners in Crime this is clever but skight. As so often with Christie's work, it gives a delightful picture of life in London of a particular period, in this case, the mid-twenties - the fancy dress balls and the caffs one can go to for bacon and eggs or Welsh rabbit [that is the original spelling, by the way] afterwards; the ladies and gentlemen who manage to live on private income, which causes criminal problems and the ease with which one can acquire just the right fancy dress costume.

This is a McCarty Incog. story with Tuppence managing to get the right clothes for them to wear at the ball, pointing out that it is time they studied and imitated some American detective methods. (Their original plan or, rather, Tuppence's original plan is to work out what a particular personal ad means as a kind of practice as business is none too brisk. Actually, business for Blunt's Brilliant Detectives is never too brisk, which is surprising in the light of their success.) Tuppence is McCarty the former cop who usually solves the problem because of some simple comment by his friend Dennis Riordan, the fireman. That is what happens here.

The 1983 - 1984 TV series with Francesca Annis, James Warwick and Reece Dinsdale, a more successful version than the 2015 one abandoned several aspects of the original. There was no question of Soviet espionage, which made some of the introductory comments by Inspector Marriott (Mr Carter, the Chief, was dropped completely) somewhat incomprehensible and it was clearly decided that the audiences will not manage to understand the references to classic detective stories. No mention of McCarty and Riordan and Tuppence's costume is a rather poor version of somebody's idea of Sherlock Holmes while Tommy swelters away as Dr Watson. To be fair, none of the other detectives are mentioned either, which makes the Beresfords' lunch at the ABC Corner House (The Sunningdale Mystery) also incomprehensible. One can hear a subtext but there is no explanation.

I can't help feeling that is rather a pity. In the first place, one or two of the references would be comprehensible and, secondly, even if they are not, the idea of imitating great fictional detectives is a highly amusing one. You never know, some viewers might try to find out more.

Tuesday Night Bloggers: Children as witnesses to crime

Yes, dear readers, we are back. The Tuesday Night Bloggers had a month off and are back with the creepy theme of Children in Crime. That could be anything: children as detectives (and this may be a good time to re-read some Enid Blyton and Malcolm Saville), children as victims (tends to be very grim), children as criminals (from Fagin's gang to The Bad Seed) and children as witnesses. I am being a little lazy and turning to the obvious source, Agatha Christie.

Famously, Christie was no respecter of persons. Anybody could be a victim and anybody could be a criminal though she was writing at a time when some decencies were kept by most writers. I am a great fan of Patricia Wentworth's Miss Silver books but one knows for certain that the young and not so young couples are going to turn out to be innocent. Not so with Christie. Nothing of the kind can be assumed. That nice young man who sits opposite you on a train or an aeroplane? I wouldn't trust him any further than I could throw him. The delightful young lady who appears to be victimized by nasty bullies? Make sure you do not stand between her and a fortune.

There is no protection for children in any way. Most readers can remember the child victims of Hallowe'en Night (1969) but what of the boy who cleans windows in Murder is Easy (1939) and the very ordinary girl guide in Body in the Library (1942)? All disposable. One particularly grim but excellent novel has a child of about twelve as the murderer and I am not stupid enough to tell you which one it is.


In this posting I intend to look at one of Christie's books in which children are witnesses to a series of crimes, which take place in Meadowbank, a very select and highly regarded girls' school, Cat Among The Pigeons.

The slightly chaotic plot starts in Meadowbank school, moves to Ramat, a fictional Middle Eastern country where a routine coup is taking place, the prince is being flown out with his personal pilot and British tourists are being shepherded out by harassed embassy officials and returns to Meadowbank with few necessary interruptions. The start is the first day of term with new girls arriving, being assigned to rooms and unpacked with their parents handled firmly if tactfully. The headmistress, Miss Bulstrode, temporarily distracted by the unexpected appearance by the dipsomaniac Lady Veronica Carlton-Sandways (Christie had a good ear for names and no respect for the aristocracy) misses something the very sensible Mrs Upjohn says, something that she will much regret missing.

Missing and not noticing things is one of the novel's themes: Miss Bulstrode misses Mrs Upjohn's story, Adam Goodman the gardener at the school (who is neither Adam Goodman nor a gardener but a Special Branch agent sent by our old friend Colonel Pikeaway) does not notice Princess Shaista's knees thus causing Poirot annoyance and Jennifer Sutcliffe manages not to notice anything while believing anything anybody tells her at any time. One cannot help wondering what possessed Miss Bulstrode to give such a dimwitted child one of the school's much sought after places.

On the other hand there is Julia Upjohn, daughter of the woman whose story Miss Bulstrode misses at the beginning, who has, as her mother says, quite a good brain. She notices things and, more to the point, she puts two and two together, getting four, which puts her ahead of the police and Special Branch. It is something of a truism in numerous detective stories that children have sharper eyes and ears and often notice things that adults miss. Not in this novel: Jennifer is positively deaf and blind while Julia works out things because she has extra information purely because of her friendship with Jennifer. No adult could have worked it out where the jewels (not a secret, as it happens) might have been.

When she does find them she very sensibly takes them to Poirot, knowing about him from Maureen Summerhayes of Mrs McGinty Is Dead, who happens to be her mother's friend. She explains to George, Poirot's servant that she has come to talk about some murders and a robbery and adds to Poirot himself that there is also the kidnapping but she does not think that is her business. Naturally, Poirot is fascinated but he had already read a certain amount of what has been going on at Meadowbank in the newspapers, which have been carefully refolded.

The kidnapping is that of Princess Shaista and the trick is the same Christie had used in The Girdle of Hyppolita, one of The Labours of Hercules. In that story Miss Pope, the headmistress of what is little more than a finishing school, is treated with amused irony; Miss Bulstrode is taken far more seriously as is her school. The differentiation is quite interesting as Christie herself did not attend a school at all and is usually seen as someone who held somewhat old-fashioned views about women's education and careers. As ever, she manages to confound the various assumptions made by critics about her.

In fact, headmistresses apart from Miss Pope are seen as highly intelligent and knowledgeable. Poirot asks the advice of Miss Emlyn in Hallowe'en Party and it is absolutely sound. She knows exactly who can and who cannot be trusted. More than that she is the only person who understands the significance of one particular detail about the party and urges the witness to tell Poirot who also works out from that who the killer must have been. None of the children, one may add, have noticed anything. So much for their sharp eyes. Miss Emlyn is also an old friend of Miss Bulstode who has, by the time of of Hallowe'en Party retired (she is on the verge of it in Cat Among The Pigeons) but the Meadowbank has gone on, changed but also with its traditions.

Poirot also consults Miss Battersby, the former Principal of Meadowfield school and present tutor of mathematics, in The Third Girl. Again, he receives a no-nonsense, accurate assessment of the girl Norma Restarick and her family. Altogether, headmistresses are a good thing in Agatha Christie's novel.

Cat Among The Pigeons ends with a different child, the boy Allen, son of the late Prince Ali Yusuf, whose life is about to change drastically as his mother inherits the jewels that had been put aside for her. Julia Upjohn acquires one emerald, green for mystery. It is no more than she deserves.

Tuesday Night Blog Murders: Archaeologists in Christie's stories

Various things have been happening, one of which is that I am on jury service this week, which is not nearly as exciting as one might think when watching old Perry Mason episodes. In fact, it is very boring with a good deal of time spent just hanging around and not being able to get wi-fi. That accounts for the fact that I have not written anything about the progress of the EU Referendum Bill but before I go on to the far more intriguing subject of Agatha Christie and archaeologists I ought to remind my readers that the Committee stage of the Bill in the House of Lords will begin tomorrow (October 28) and is scheduled to last three days with the Report stage lasting two days.

And now: back to Dame Agatha Christie Mallowan whose 125th birthday we have been celebrating by this series of blogs. First of all, let me remind everyone that the originator of this idea is Curt Evans whose blog, The Passing Tramp is indispensable to anyone who is interested in the genre. Here is his latest contribution, on the subject of Tom Adams's brilliant book covers. In all honesty, I feel that his work in collecting and posting all the links to the various Tuesday Night blogs should be acknowledged, so here they are: the first, introductory, posting; week two with a delightful picture of afternoon tea; week three and week four. This is week five and the last of the Christie blogging as a group. Another member, Noah Stewart, has suggested that we should move on to other well known Golden Age Detective writers and the first of them will be Ellery Queen. I have not yet made up my mind whether to participate because, though I have read a good many of the novels and short stories, I have little to say that even I can consider to be interesting. The plan is to go on to Ngaio Marsh about whom I have a good deal to say and then Rex Stout who created one of my favourite characters in detective fiction: Archie Goodwin.

As every school child knows, Agatha Christie's second husband was the noted archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan, with whom she went to Syria and Iraq when he was excavating. there and where she helped by washing and classifying the finds. I recall hearing a lecture at the British Museum about Christie and archaeology. Apparently, she is highly thought of in that field. One of my co-bloggers in the group, Moira Redmond, wrote last week about Christie and digs, quoting her delightful account of her times in the Middle East, Come, Tell Me How You Live.

In it and in They Came To Baghdad, which takes place partially on an archaeological dig, Christie describes the way people's lives and even personalities can be discovered and understood through archaeological finds, which makes it a subject of particular interest to detective fiction writers: the two processes have much in common.

There have been a number of archaeologists who are also detectives: Glyn Daniel's Professor Sir Richard Cherrington (written at first under the pseudonym, Dilwyn Rees) is an obvious example. Then there was Tamara Hoyland, the heroine of Jessica Mann's early series as well as her erstwhile teacher, Professor Thea Crawford. Ellis Peters's George Felse series as well as a number of the stand-alone novels revolve round archaeological sites with archaeologists either solving the mystery or contributing to the solution. Elizabeth Peters and Elly Griffiths's heroines (and heroes) are archaeologists and Kate Ellis's novels tend to have a double strand of modern crime and archaeological study that interweave with DI Wesley Peterson as the amateur archaeologist and professional police officer and his friend Neil Watson the opposite. These are just the examples I could think of immediately.

Christie did not have a single archaeologist as an investigator though a few try their hands at it, particularly in Murder In Mesopotamia, the one novel that takes place almost entirely on a dig and the only book that is narrated by a woman. It also has possibly the most preposterous solution of any Christie detective story, which is rather a pity as so much about it is so very good and entertaining.

How can one categorize the archaeologists? Let us try to employ those little grey cells. There are the phony ones - the crooks who masquerade as an archaeologist in order to steal various artefacts or, in one case, silver from the local mansion. There is Dr Stone in Murder at the Vicarage and Father Lavigny in Murder in Mesopotamia. They both usurp the personality of a well-known practitioner in order to carry out their nefarious projects. Both manage to escape but will, almost certainly, be found in the near future and imprisoned for fraud and theft.

Then there are the criminal archaeologists. The best known of these [name withheld] is the murderer in Mesopotamia. A less well known one is Dr Carter who crops up in one of the Parker Pyne short stories, The Pearl of Price. He tries to steal an expensive pearl earring in order to finance his next expedition. Not only he fails as Parker Pyne works out what has happened but the earring is a fake so criminal success would not have given him what he wanted.

Another criminal, a far more evil one, is Dr Ames in The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb, an early Poirot short story. The collection in which it appeared, Poirot Investigates, was published in 1924 and Hastings is in all the stories. Strictly speaking Dr Ames is a medical man, who accompanies the exhibition but he is most definitely evil.



So we come to the archaeologist heroes. In two books (though it sometimes feels as if there were many more of them) the heroine forms an attachment to a charming young man who turns out to be a very bad person, indeed.

In They Came to Baghdad, he is seen as "Lucifer", the beautiful fallen angel, the man who wants to create world-wide chaos in order to take over eventually. Or something like that. This is one of those books whose parts are considerably better than the whole. The heroine, Victoria Jones, who is rather feisty one has to admit, is rescued from the emotional morass by an archaeologist. She ends the adventure by re-joining the dig and intending to work there, having become quite interested in the subject as well as in the man who explains it all to her.


The other novel in which the heroine, also quite an admirable young lady, is saved from her infatuation with a charming rotter, in this case a serial killer, by a young archaeologist whose expedition she will be accompanying as an assistant, largely though Poirot's intervention is Death in the Clouds, illustrated here.

Poor Archie Christie, clearly the man on whom those charming villains are based, was really no worse and no less sensitive than many men of his class and generation. He was certainly not a criminal. But he paid heavily for his misdemeanours in his wife's novels.

Tuesday Night Blog Murders: What did the Beresfords read?

We know quite a lot about the Beresfords' taste in reading. As late as Postern in Fate when they inexplicably decide to move to the country on Tommy's supposedly final retirement from the Service (do they ever retire?) that many of the books they take with them are adventure stories from their adolescence or even later. It is Tuppence's entirely understandable desire to re-read some of her old friends that launches them on the adventure. In the much earlier and much more readable Partners in Crime, Tommy explains that he sees no problems about running a detective agency, which is, in any case, just a front for the real work and that is the catching of Soviet spies, because they have both read every single detective story that had come out in recent years. Later on, in The Ambassador's Boots, which Tuppence starts by wanting to be Roger Sheringham, Tommy is seen in the austere office, "improving his mind by reading the latest sensational thriller". Indeed, a number of the writers and characters they invoke in the various adventures are not really detectives but heroes of shockers.

According to John Curran, Agatha Christie seems to have read an enormous number of detective stories and shockers as well as serious literature. Unfortunately, she had not started making extensive notes of plans when she wrote Partners in Crime so we do not know what her real opinion was of the writers to whom she referred in the stories though there is a great deal of affection for the various characters, even Hercule Poirot, whose "little grey cells" are mentioned throughout the book almost as often as "Watson" is told that he sees but does not observe.

The last adventure, at the end of which Tuppence announces that she has something far more exciting to do in future, as she is expecting a baby, is The Man Who Was No. 16, a hilariously funny destruction of The Big Four, probably Christie's worst book (even allowing for Postern of Fate and Passenger to Frankfurt), written as a kind of Bulldog Drummond-type shocker soon after her notorious disappearance and reappearance. She never liked the book. (It should be noted that Christie's opinion about her own books was usually accurate - the ones she liked best were very good and the ones she disliked were rather poor.)

So what about the Beresfords' reading matter? They were obviously fans of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and kept up with his career. In the introductory chapter, A Fairy in the Flat, Tommy tries to cheer up the seriously and understandably bored Tuppence with the idea that one of the little people might be in their flat and he might have taken a photograph of it. Just to make sure that the reference is not lost, Tuppence wonders whether they should write to Conan Doyle about it. Fortunately, the Chief turns up with his proposition that they should run Blunt's Brilliant Detectives, solve whatever cases come their way and, incidentally, catch an important spy as well as his minions. When they take over the office and "solve" the first case, which involves a bit of cheating on Tuppence's part, they decide to study the classics and, indeed, model themselves on them.

In his The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie Charles Osborne lists all the authors and characters mentioned in the adventures and points out that most of them are "now" completely unknown. The book came out in 2000 and it seems a little cavalier of Mr Osborne to dismiss characters such as Dr Thorndyke, Inspector Hanaud, Roger Sheringham, Reggie Fortune, Inspector French and the Old Man in the Corner as being unknown: there had by then been a number of reprints of stories and many of them had appeared on TV.

We must assume that Charles Osborne was not dismissing Sherlock Holmes or Father Brown as being at all unknown. The Man in the Mist, the "Father Brown" adventure is the only one that is a serious copy of the original works. It is dark in external descriptions and deals with dark matters of the soul. It relies on one of Chesterton's most famous solutions and the murderer is completely unexpected. (The idea was used again by Christie in a later novel.)

As against that, the references to Sherlock Holmes are all entertaining. The first time Tommy tries to use a Holmesian technique he comes a cropper and the "Holmes" adventure is a farcical parody of The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax. At the end of it Tommy announces "with dignity":

I believe, Watson, that there is a very good concert at the Queen's Hall to-morrow. We shall be in plenty of time for it. And you will oblige me by not placing this case upon your records. It has absolutely no distinctive features. 

Not all the adventures mention "respectable" detective stories; the Beresfords quite clearly loved reading shockers as well and must have worked their way through the entire works of Edgar Wallace and Sapper as well as Conan Doyle and Chesterton. Curiously enough, given the background of espionage, there is no reference to John Buchan.

Some of the authors have, indeed, fallen into oblivion. Wallace remains well known and some of his works are periodically reprinted or dramatized for TV. I recall watching an excellent series of The Mind of J. G. Reeder though it was only when I read the book that I realized how much of the violence had been toned down. While some of Wallace's works are unlikely to see the light of day because of their racism and anti-Semitism, the thrillers about "busies" and "noses" against villains like the "Crackler" have been occasionally reprinted and may yet be again. At any rate, Wallace has not disappeared down the memory hole completely and a memorial to him can still be seen in Ludgate Circus though Fleet Street has not been the home of British journalism for many years.

The three writers whom the Beresfords seem to have read avidly but who really are unknown today except to a few cognoscenti are Valentine Williams (also here), the creator, among others, of the Okewood brothers and of the villainous German spy master, Dr Grundt alias the Clubfoot, Clinton H. Stagg, creator of Thornley Colton, the blind Problemist and, most undeservedly, Isabel Ostrander (a more complete list of her works is here), creator, again among many others, of McCarty Incog, that is Timothy McCarty, retired New York cop and his friend Dennis Riordan, still a fireman in the New York Fire Service.

It is not easy to get books by those writers but, luckily for me, London Library has some by Isabel Ostrander and Valentine Williams. I chose Clubfoot The Avenger of the Okewood series. Published in 1924 it would have been the one read by Tommy and Tuppence, who pride themselves on keeping up with detective stories and shockers, not long before the time they took over Blunt's Brilliant Detectives.



Clubfoot, for those who have not come across these books, is the man who had been in charge of the Kaiser's personal secret service before and during the First World War and has been looking for employment ever since. He is a gigantic man, described over and over again, as looking like an ape with bristling hair and eyebrows, a ferocious sneer and a huge clubfoot, which means he is always leaning on a stick. Oddly, the stick is just that, not a gun or a telescope or anything else of that kind. Dr Grundt (his real name) is a German patriot but unlike Erskine Childers and, to some extent, John Buchan, Valentine Williams did not think very highly of that, being on that subject at one with Sapper and Dornford Yates.

Clubfoot is usually very successful and his trail is littered with bodies of people who have somehow upset him or prevented him from carrying out his work, though the stories are not nearly as nasty as Sapper's. Tommy Beresford recognizes that: in The Adventure of the Sinister Stranger he tells said stranger when talk turns to vitriol and other suchlike methods of persuasion that he and Tuppence had made an error in diagnosis as the adventure is not a Clubfoot but a Bulldog Drummond one with the stranger being "the inimitable Carl Peters". The only two people who can and do best Grundt are the Okewood brothers, Desmond and Francis, both, at this stage, retired from the Secret Service but recalled because of the reappearance of Clubfoot in England. The man is out to avenge his past failures and systematically kills everyone who has seriously inconvenienced him, to use Professor Moriarty's term. Eventually, he intends to do away with the Okewoods and the Chief, which must not be allowed to happen.

The stories are well written and quite exciting though one begins to see the pattern fairly early on. However, there is a problem and that is the ability of Desmond Okewood, supposedly the best agent the British Secret Service has ever had. In the Beresford adventure Tuppence warns Tommy when the latter shows signs of not passing on information to Carter and playing a lone hand: whenever Desmond disobeys orders and plays a lone hand he gets into trouble and his brother Francis has to rush to his rescue.

As a matter of fact, that happens even when Desmond does not disobey orders. The man is plain stupid. He cannot walk past a trap without falling into it. He has to be rescued by Francis (who is not that bright himself as he does not think of checking out whether a sudden and inconvenient summons from the Chief is genuine), by the Chief and by a substantial number of police officers. In the last adventure, which allegedly ends with Clubfoot's retirement for good, the situation is saved by a young woman colleague of his, whose attitude amuses him until she turns out to be smarter than he. She it is who realizes that there is something wrong with the pilot, who then decides to take charge of the jewels and hides them and she it is who trounces verbally Clubfoot, using "a little knowledge, a little intuition, a little bluff". To be fair to Okewood and the Chief, they acknowledge her ability and her career in the Service is about to be discussed. But will she be allowed to rise above Major Desmond Okewood or his brother Francis?

There is some discussion as to who was the first blind detective in print, a debate that is made more difficult to resolve by the fact that many of the early stories in every case appeared in various journals and periodicals, which have since disappeared in the physical sense. The best known of all the early blind detectives is Max Carrados, created by Ernest Bramah (here is a fuller but rather facetious piece on Bramah and a better one here and a bibliography here). Carrados stories appeared in magazines in 1913 and the first collection came out in 1914. Isabel Ostrander (of whom more below) created a blind detective, Damon Gaunt, in the novel At One-Thirty, published in 1915 but there might have been stories in magazines before that. Stagg's Thornley Colton seems to have appeared in short stories in People's Ideal Fiction Magazine in 1913 but was not collected in a book till 1915. For some reason the Beresfords preferred the Colton stories to the Carrados ones.

Thornley Colton is a man whom everyone notices as the first paragraph of the First Problem, called The Keyboard of Silence, explains:

"Not often did mere man attract attention in the famous dining-room of the " Regal," but men and women alike, who were seated near the East Arch- way, raised their eyes to stare at the man who stood in the doorway, calmly surveying them. The smoke-glass, tortoise-shell library spectacles, which made of his eyes two great circles of dull brown, brought out the whiteness of the face strikingly. The nose, with its delicately sensitive nostrils, was thin and straight ; the lips, now curved in a smile, somehow gave one the impression that, released by the mind, they would suddenly spring back to their accustomed thin, straight line. For a smile seemed out of place on that pale, masterful face, with its lean, cleft chin. The snow-white hair of silky fineness that curled away from the part to show the pink scalp underneath contrasted sharply with the sober black of the faultless dinner-coat that fell in just the proper folds from the broad shoulders and deep chest."

His assistant is black haired and apple cheeked Sydney Thames, whom Colton had picked up on the banks of the eponymous river, a mere bundle of baby clothes and brought up. Thames worships Colton and spends several minutes in every "problem" agonizing over the fact that his idol seems to have made a mistake. Actually, he is wrong every time. When Tommy Beresford pretends to be blind in Blindman's Buff and is accosted by potential clients who turn out to be not quite what they seem, he refers to Tuppence (usually known as Miss Robinson, for reasons that are never explained) as Miss Ganges who had been found on the banks of the Indian river, a mere bundle of baby clothes. The little joke would have appealed to Clinton H. Stagg's readers. One of Sydney Thames's most difficult tasks is to gauge how many steps his master must take in which direction, when he should turn and when he should avoid someone or something. When Tuppence tries to emulate him she fails miserably. It is just as well that Tommy's blindfold is not quite what it seems either.

The other member of Colton's household is the Shrimp of the Fee, a boy with a hoarse voice and a broken nose who was the only thing Colton and Thames got out of a particularly complicated murder case. Astonishingly, they do not have a housekeeper.

The Problemist is not only a man who, having been blind since birth, not only managed to train all his other senses to a superlative level and trained his mind to understand things problems practically as soon as they are presented to him, he is also someone who can read people's moods and characters from their pulse, the famous Keyboard of Silence, that he touches while shaking hands. Again, the Beresfords have some fun with it:

"Give me your hand," said Tommy. He held it, one finger feeling for the pulse. "Ah! The Keyboard of Silence. This woman has not got heart disease."

One cannot help suspecting that of all the writers referred to in the Beresfords' adventures Clinton H. Stagg is the one Christie thought least of.

That leaves Isabel Ostrander and McCarty Incog together with his best friend Dennis Riordan. Ostrander was a prolific writer, popular on both sides of the Atlantic, though some of her books were not published in Britain till after her death. Altogether there were five McCarty and Riordan books with one actually called McCarty Incog, published in Britain in 1925, possibly the last one the Beresfords had read before their adventures. The first, The Clue in the Air, came out in 1917 in the US and 1920 in Britain.

Timothy McCarty a former cop who had been a roundsman, resigned before he could be made sergeant as he inherited money and property from his uncle. His friend, Dennis Riordan, with whom he had grown up as their parents seem to have gone to New York from the old country at the same time, has not inherited anything and has stayed in the fire department. Time hangs heavy on McCarty's or Mac's hands so when a criminal problem comes his way he becomes involved together with his buddy who is simpler and stupider than he is but who usually makes an innocent comment or two that clarify the issues in Mac's brain and lead him to the right solution. Poirot was to maintain that Hastings did the same to him and in Finessing the King and The Gentleman Dressed in Newspaper (two parts of the same adventure) Tuppence, as McCarty, solves the problem because of some idle comments of Tommy's.

Ostrander's crimes tend to be domestic, not a given in American novels of that period as these often dealt with crooks in business and politics, and the criminal, in the ones I have read, tends to be a sympathetic figure. The victim, on the other hand is not necessarily so. When Tommy tries to see the same pattern in the adventure he is disabused by Inspector Marriott. The crime was committed for money though, as in the Ostrander novels, the criminal commits suicide rather than surrender.

Partners in Crime ends with the Poirot story; published in 1929 it came a year before Murder at the Vicarage. Tuppence would have enjoyed being Miss Marple. Yes, of course, they would have read it. As soon as it came out.

Tuesday Night Blog Murders: The Beresfords - discuss

The first thing to discuss or, at least, to admit is that it is now Wednesday but I do hope I shall be forgiven by my co-bloggers (to whom I really should link) for not being able to write this piece before.

So, the Beresfords, Thomas and Prudence, otherwise known as Tommy and Tuppence, except in the French film of By The Pricking of My Thumb, (Mon petit doigt m'a dit) in which they are Colonel Bélisaire Beresford and Mme Prudence Beresford. The film is excellent, incidentally, and one of the best film versions of a Christie novel I have ever seen.

People tend to sigh when Tommy and Tuppence are mentioned, which is a little unfair as not every book about them is poor even if the latest TV dramatization was by all accounts. But then, as I have pointed out before, transposing Christie stories to another decade is never a good idea.

Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Cowley appear first in The Secret Adversary, published in 1922. They have both been demobbed and are looking for work and in Tuppence's case a way of not having to go back to the parental home after four years of exciting life away from it. They decide to form The Young Adventurers Ltd and, by a strange coincidence, they overhear a conversation that leads them to a spectacular adventure in which they save Britain, the US and the life of a girl who has been guarding some papers ever since the sinking of the Lusitania. In the process they fall in love, decide to get married and Tommy acquires a job in the Secret Service. More importantly, they learn not to trust anyone because the most respectable and highly regarded member of the Establishment can turn out to be a traitor.

The Secret Adversary was the first Christie book to be filmed, in Germany, though the action has been transposed to France. It was called Die Abenteurer G.m.b.H and is highly entertaining. It was quite a revelation to me to discover that there are amusing German silent films, having assumed in the past that they were all heavy symbolic tragedies.

Just for fun, here is a trailer:



Tommy and Tuppence's next appearance was in the real Partners in Crime, a series of adventures that make gentle fun of well known (and not so well known) fictional detectives. Some readers find them far too flimsy, as they are, but others, and I am one of them, find them amusing and even manage to see some interesting Christie themes in them. I shall return to this, the main subject of my posting in a minute.

In The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie Charles Osborne points out that "it is as well ,,, that Thomas Beresford and Prudence Cowley, known to their friends as Tommy and Tuppence [and even, as Charles Osborne does not mention, Mrs Tommy], are only in their twenties in 1922, for this enabled their creator to allow them to age naturally. In their final adventure in 1974 they are presented as an elderly married couple with three grandchildren."

That is undoubtedly true but there are problems with the Beresfords' ages as there usually are with various characters in Christie's novels. That 1974 adventure, The Postern of Fate, is seriously bad. By this time Christie's phenomenal ability to create plots had weakened considerably and her equally phenomenal inability to keep track of dates and time spans became overwhelming.

Impossible time spans crop up throughout Chistie's work and I do not mean the ages of Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. That, as the author admitted, was inevitable if one starts with characters who are already elderly. But there are other problems. In Appointment with Death there is an epilogue in which Poirot meets the surviving members of the Boynton family five years after the events of the novel. The amount those people are supposed to have achieved in those five years is physically impossible.

The same is true for the Beresfords. We must assume that they marry some time in 1920 or 1921 at the latest. In Partners in Crime they have been married for six years, which puts the action in 1926 or 1927 yet in the first adventure, A Pot of Tea, Tuppence is described as being under 25, a complete impossibility, given her life and career up to that point. In another story Tommy is described as being 32 which is at least possible if unlikely. Albert, a lift boy in The Secret Adversary has become a 15 year old servant and office boy in the second book, which suggests that he must have worked in that hotel at the age of 8 or 9, an unlikely state of affairs after the First World War.

Even more unsettling is the story of the Beresfords' children. Partners in Crime ends with Tuppence joyously proclaiming that she is expecting a baby and in the third book, the spy thriller N or M?, we find out that she had twins, Derek and Deborah. These could not have been born any earlier than late 1927 yet in 1940 they are, respectively, in the RAF and some (fairly) secret work in one of the Intelligence outfits. Indeed, one of Deborah's boyfriends plays an important part in the plot. We know the novel takes place soon after Dunkirk. Was the RAF really putting boys of 12 or 13 into those planes? Makes the reference to the Few even more poignant.

What of Tommy's career? He joins the Service in 1920 (let us say) and is still there six years later when he is given six months' leave in order to run Blunt's Brilliant Detectives and to crack an important spy case. Yet by 1940 (N or M?) he seems unable to find any useful employment in the war effort. Nobody in the Secret Service had the slightest difficulty in finding employment in 1940. When Mr Carter (the Chief) decides to send Tommy to a seaside resort to investigate a nest of spies and find out who is sending out information, he mentions that they are not going to know who he is as he is unconnected with any organization. Does this mean that at some point between the two books Tommy had "left" the Service in order to do deep undercover work? This must be the explanation as by the third book, published in 1968, (By The Pricking Of My Thumbs) he is back in the Service and is high enough to be sent off to some hush-hush conference, thus making it possible for Tuppence to go off on her own adventure.

One interesting aspect of N or M is the way that book fits in with the strange preoccupation at the time with espionage networks with books and films abounding. I wrote about it some time ago on EUReferendum, my erstwhile blogging home.

Recently I re-read one Agatha Christie's war-time novels, N or M?. It is not highly regarded by the aficionados, being a Tommy and Tuppence tale but it is, as it happens, better than the last two in that series, By the pricking of my thumb and Postern of Fate. Those are really terrible, though the first of them was turned into an enchanting film by the French Pascal Thomas. Once one gets over the problem of Tommy Beresford being Colonel Bélisaire Beresford, one is in for a rare treat. But I digress.

N or M? is about German spies and fifth columnists and takes place in 1940, during some of the darkest days of the war. There is a fascinating conversation between Tommy and Tuppence about a third of the way through. Tommy has been reading the news and hearing the terrible stories of bad management, inadequate equipment and complete lack of military coherence brought back by the soldiers who had been evacuated from Dunkirk.

Could it really be incompetence, he muses, or are there traitors among the highest echelons of the military command, the intelligence service and those who take political decisions. Without any hesitation Tuppence replies that it has to be treason. Clearly, she does not bother to think the implications of that statement either. Tommy agrees and the work they are engaged on becomes even more urgent.

Suddenly it all fell into place in my own mind. Of course, they were obsessed with fifth columnists. The alternative was to accept the fact that Britain, its security services, its military, its police, its politics were led by people who were incompetent, self-satisfied idiots. Alas, much of that was true. The best description of it is in another and far better novel or, rather, a trilogy of novels: Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour. Curmudgeonly, depressive and a great novelist, Waugh had no problems about accepting unpalatable truths.

And so we arrive at another conundrum: how am I going to fit all that I wanted to say about Partners in Crime into this posting? The answer is that I cannot do so and shall have to do all that next Tuesday (this time on the right day). Until then .....

Tuesday Night Blog Murders: Christie and servants

Have I really not blogged since last Tuesday? It felt as if I had been working but clearly not on this blog. Memo to self: finish all those blogs you have started.

In the meantime, I return to Agatha Christie and the Tuesday Night Blog Murders. In my previous posting I explained the basis of this series so I need not repeat myself. I know Christie did occasionally but she usually managed to have an extra twist to make the repetition not exactly that. See, for example, Sleeping Murder and Nemesis. Spot the difference in the two almost identical plots.

Today I wish to discuss the treatment of servants in Christie's books. Firstly, it is worth noting that of all the Golden Age Detective writers Christie was probably the most acute observer of social changes. Her books are of the period in which they are set and all attempts to move them to a different decade (because the clothes are prettier or the scenery more easily cobbled together) have been a failure. It is not possible to imagine the circumstances of The Body in the Library, published in 1942 but clearly of the thirties in the post-war period as the BBC TV series with the superb Joan Hickson tried to do if a little half-heartedly. The Bantrys could not have afforded the staff they had in the late forties and Christie would not have written that.

The early novels and short stories have a good many servants. Large houses have large staff, smaller households have usually two servants, a cook and a maid, bachelors' establishments have men servants. Even the vicarage where the murder is committed has a servant of quite unsurpassable incompetence. In The Moving Finger, also published in 1942 but also of the thirties, a very ordinary country solicitor has a cook and a maid as well as a part-time gardener and a nanny for his young sons. Again the BBC tried to shift the action to the post-war period and again it seemed unlikely: a man like Richard Symmington would not have had that big a staff in the later forties but neither could the series dispense with any of them, as they were all essential to the plot.

Christie knew that the world had changed with the Second World War, that taxes hit middle class people (about whom she wrote mostly) very hard, that the government interfered in people's lives almost constantly (as mentioned in, among others, Mrs McGinty Is Dead) and there were no more servants for most people. The staff of maids and cooks turns into foreign refugees (A Murder Is Announced), ubiquitous daily chars (Mrs McGinty Is Dead, The Pale Horse and others) or dubious au pairs (Third Girl). Griselda Clements who appears briefly in The 4.50 From Paddington would have long ago had to learn to cook and manage with a daily woman coming in to help and bringing gossip twice a week.

In the same novel we get a wonderful character (to make up for the flimsy plot) of Lucy Eyelessbarrow, a Cambridge graduate in mathematics, who decides to make money as an all purpose domestic worker. Her understanding of economics is clearly superior to many an academic economist: she sees a gap in the market and decides to fill it. As a consequence she can get any fee she names and controls her working conditions beyond the dream of any trade unionist. (And here is a really stupid cover, according to which Lucy must have been practising golf in a very tight skirt.)

When Cedric Crackenthorpe tells his sister Emma to tell Miss Marple who is walking up the drive that she is out, Emma wants to know whether she is to go down and tell her that herself or ask Lucy (who has told them that Miss Marple was her aunt) to do so. Cedric laughs ruefully and admits that he was thinking of the old days when a house like that would have had staff. In the decades after the war even a rich Hollywood star could not give a party without employing temporary help from the new "Development" that has grown up beside St Mary Mead. (The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side)

A few of the old servants survive as in After The Funeral but they are usually kept on at some expense to the family an out of loyalty.

Poirot is, obviously, an exception in that he manages to keep on his invaluable man servant George and the equally invaluable secretary Miss Lemon who, astonishingly, has a sister in Hickory Dickory Dock. The sister runs a hostel for young people and foreign students (a post-war touch) where all sorts of strange things happen.

Secondly, there is Christie's treatment of servants as characters and she is much maligned by critics who do not seem to know her work as much as they should.

There is no question that Christie wrote about the class she knew best: the professional middle class. Her characters, are doctors, lawyers, clergymen, writers, some businessmen though she is not enamoured of the big ones (A Pocket Full Of Rye), writers and other suchlike individuals. Interestingly, given that Christie was not precisely a feminist, she has a professional woman doctor in the 1938 Appointment With Death. There is the odd appearance of members of the aristocracy but they are rarely attractive (the Bantrys are landed gentry not aristocracy) and she has the English middle class suspicion of anyone who makes too much money. At the other end of the scale, she does not venture much into the working class milieu, though Mrs McGinty Is Dead comes close with its description of the victim's life as a charwoman and her lodger, who is possibly the least attractive innocent to be accused and found guilty of murder. There is an interesting detail in the novel that shows Christie's understanding of a class she rarely wrote about: Poirot is launched on the investigation by the fact that not long before her death Mrs McGinty had bought a bottle of ink. Why should she have done that? Perhaps, her niece suggests, she had to write something to the government, a well known complaint in those years (and more recently). Mrs McGinty, unlike Poirot and people of his class, would not have had ink as a matter of course in her house. Is this a sign of Christie's supercilious attitude or of an ability to understand how other people lived? My view is that it is the latter. (But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?)

There are scattered references to servants that make us of the more sensitive age cringe. In The Incident Of The Dog's Ball that later became, with a completely different murderer, Dumb Witness, Hastings says about a housekeeper: "She entered with the gusto of her class into a description of her [late mistress] illness and death." It was, for some reason, a given in the Golden Age that servants adored talking about illness and death though why that should be so is never explained.

A number of Christie's plots hinge on that well-known fact that "nobody notices a servant". This extends to air stewards (Death In The Clouds), butlers (Three Act Tragedy), companions (After The Funeral) and governesses (The Secret of Chimneys) as well as others. Of course, the point is that in the Poirot novels he does realize the connection (as do others like the playwright, Miss Wills in The Three Act Tragedy and Helen in After The Funeral). In other words, people might dismiss servants as being of no importance but that fact is used by Christie for her own purposes as is the general English disdain for foreigners that allows people dismiss Poirot as a mountebank. They do not find out how wrong they are until it is too late.

The most delightful usage of "nobody looks at a companion" is in The Nemean Lion, the first of The Labours of Hercules in which Miss Amy Carnaby, a companion to the horrible Lady Hoggin, organizes a highly ingenious criminal conspiracy to extract money in order to help elderly single ladies who are falling on very hard times. She uses her pekingese dog, Augustus, pretends to be stupider than she is and assumes, correctly, that nobody ever looks at a companion.

In a later story Poirot tells Miss Carnaby that he remembers her as one of the most successful criminals of his career. 

And so we come to Miss Marple, whose attitude to servants is very different. She knows very well how useful conversation with maids in hotels can be if one is trying to unravel a mystery (A Murder Is Announced and At Bertram's Hotel), she knows how girls who are likely to go into service react in various situations (Body In The Library), she trains young girls out of an orphanage to be good servants when there are openings for servants in good houses and she does not lose touch with them when they leave. It is the news that one of her former maids had been murdered that brings her like an avenging fury to Yewtree Lodge in A Pocket Full Of Rye. 

Her ability to understand servant girls and the situations they might find themselves in as well as her compassion is demonstrated first in the very first short story she appears in, The Tuesday Night Club. In another short story The Case Of The Perfect Maid she is motivated partly, as she explains to the hapless Inspector Slack, by her indignation: 

I'm not going to have one of our village girl's character for honesty taken away like that! Gladys Holmes is as honest as the day and everybody's going to know it!

Clearly, not someone who does not notice or care about servants.

Miss Marple, too, has difficulties after the war. At first she manages to find young girls whom she can train but times change. Once she hires Lucy Eyelessbarrow (Raymond West helps again) whom she then recalls when she needs someone to do the investigating but Lucy has other plans and, anyway, Miss Marple could not afford her rates. The much referred to Faithful Florence runs her own life now and the companion (hired by the invaluable Raymond West) in The Mirror Crack'd is intolerable. Solution is provided by young Cherry Baker, the cleaner, who lives with her husband in a smart new but not very soundproof house in the "Development". She suggests that the two of them move into some spare rooms in an outhouse (not previously mentioned). Cherry can look after Miss Marple and will even learn to sweep the stairs with a pan and brush (a sacrifice about which Miss Marple is very doubtful) while Jim can act as a sort of a handyman in his spare time (when he is not laying out toy railways or listening to classical music). That the arrangement suits everyone is proved by Cherry's reappearance as a well established person in Miss Marple's home at the end of Nemesis.

Tuesday Night Blog Murders: The Mystery of Raymond West

This was Curt Evans's idea. He is really Curtis J. Evans (not the theologian, at least I don't think so), author of a number of books about writers of the Golden Age of Detective Stories, Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery, Clues and Corpses: the detective fiction and mystery criticism of Todd Downing,  The Spectrum of English Murder and editor of Mysteries Unlocked: essays in honor of Douglas G. Greene to which I proudly contributed. He also runs one of the most interesting blogs dedicated to detective and mystery literature. (In parenthesis let me note that, though there are many wonderful blogs on that theme, I do intend to set up one of my own very soon.)

Why don't we or, at least, some of us, suggested Curt, write a series of blogs about Agatha Christie (this being her 125th anniversary year) on Tuesdays and call it the Tuesday Night Blogs (some of us cannot resist adding the word "Murders" to it). Any Christie afficionado will recognize the reference. The Tuesday Night Club, a short story published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927 saw the first appearance of Miss Jane Marple and signalled a tentative new departure for Agatha Christie.

Six people assemble in Miss Marple's drawing room: the hostess, her nephew, the modernist writer and poet Raymond West, the elderly local clergyman Dr Pender, the local solicitor Mr Petherick, Sir Henry Clithering, the retired Commissioner of Scotland Yard and the artist Joyce Lemprière who is also, we must assume, of the more modernist persuasion. As a result of a rather pretentious comment by Raymond West they decide to tell stories of unsolved crimes and try to come up with solutions. In fact, a certain amount of cheating goes on because the solution is known to several of the people who tell the tales but at first the crimes do appear to by rather mysterious. At first, Miss Marple is allowed to be part of the "club" on sufferance - a spinster who has lived all her life in a village, what would she know about real life or crime? Her comments about life and crime being just as real in a village as anywhere else are dismissed kindly but condescendingly, particularly by her nephew.

It is not much of a spoiler even to people who have not read these delightful stories to say that with everyone, including Sir Henry and, especially, Raymond West baffled, Miss Marple (as illustrated above) solves every single problem by using her knowledge of human nature. By the end of the series nobody can argue that village life is boring or uneventful. As Raymond West says "The cosmopolitan world seems a mild and peaceful place compared with St Mary Mead." Unfortunately, he later forgets this revelation or so it seems. The other thing we find out is that at the end of the sixth story Raymond proposes to Joyce just as Miss Marple had always known he would.

The stories were published monthly till May 1928 and a second series about Miss Marple solving crimes in a circle of dinner guests that brought back Sir Henry Clithering and introduced Arthur and Dolly Bantry, was published in The Storyteller between December 1929 and May 1930. Those six tales seem to be told in one sitting after dinner at the Bantrys while the Club was supposed to have met every Tuesday for six weeks.

The twelve stories were collected in book form in 1932 when a thirteenth one was added, Death by Drowning, in which Miss Marple solves a crime as soon as it happens, ahead of the police but we do not really see how she does it. By then, however, she had appeared in Murder at the Vicarage, published in October 1930 and a much loved (even by her creator) new detective had come into existence.

There are several questions one can ask about the Tuesday Club mysteries. Do those people really meet every Tuesday evening for six weeks at Miss Marple's small house? Can her circumstances really allow her that kind of hospitality or is it discreetly supplemented by gifts from, say, Fortnum and Mason by Raymond West or Sir Henry Clithering? Does Raymond West stay with her all those six weeks? Where do Joyce Lemprière and Sir Henry stay? If the latter with the Bantrys as he does the following year, why are they never invited? Does Dr Pender retire soon afterwards and a younger vicar, Leonard Clements, in whose study Colones Protheroe is shot, succeed him? Can someone as naive and incompetent as Sir Henry Clithering really become Commissioner of Scotland Yard?

The biggest mystery of all surrounds Raymond West. Let us see what we know of him. He is a terrifyingly intellectual and high-brow novelist and poet whose books are all about very unpleasant people doing rather strange things. He marries the artist Joyce Lemprière who, for some reason, becomes Joan in Sleeping Murder and At Bertram's Hotel. In the latter she is described by Miss Marple as Joan West, the artist. We know that Miss Marple is not given to senile forgetfulness so there must be a reason for this strange change in names but we never find out what. Did Raymond West marry two women artists, divorcing one? Would Miss Marple not refer to it in some roundabout fashion? Whose are the two (at least) sons mentioned in 4.50 from Paddington? It is, of course, possible that Joyce Lemprière works in two different genres and prefers to use one name in painting and another one in, say, book illustrations.

Raymond West appears in Murder at the Vicarage, when he comes to stay with his aunt, obviously unmarried, and pronounces on the stagnant life of the village only to be corrected gently by her: stagnant ponds, she explains, are full of life. He and his wife appear in Sleeping Murder, when Gwenda Reed stays with them at the same time as Miss Marple does and screams with terror during a production of The Duchess of Malfi. Her husband Giles is, apparently, some kind of a cousin of theirs,  which would make him Miss Marple's relative as well though she, surprisingly, pays little attention to that. On the other hand, Raymond clearly knows nothing about some other niece of Miss Marple's called Mabel about whom she tells her Tuesday night story.

In Sleeping Murder Raymond West refers to his aunt as "the original Victorian dug-out" and makes his usual condescending remarks about her knowing so little of life and spending her whole life in a village. His wife reminds him that St Mary Mead did have a rather exciting murder and Miss Marple had done rather well over that. Well yes, admits the nephew, she is good at puzzles. In other words, the Wests do know about Miss Marple's various adventures though they go on pretending that she has a very dull life.

Even their younger son, David, who works for British Rail (something of a rebel, by the sound of it) makes silly jokes about parochial scandals when his great-aunt asks him about trains that leave Paddington at a certain time.

We know that Raymond West is very fond of his aunt and often suggests treats like the latest incomprehensible Russian play as well as sending her his books. She gently refuses the treats or most of them and pretends to read his books. He suspects that she does nothing of the kind and assumes that is because her eyes are not as good as they once were. That, as it happens, is completely untrue. She remains a very sharp-eyed lady with nothing much wrong with her physically apart from rheumatism and the occasional cold that can go into bronchitis.

On a more practical basis the Wests help with money, either regularly after the Second World War when people on small set income become rather impoverished, as we know from They Do It With Mirrors or through gifts and treats such as a trip to the Caribbean after a bad bout of illness or a week at Bertram's Hotel. Both, as we know, turn into criminal investigations at which Miss Marple excels. Given that the Wests also inhabit a big house in Chelsea and have a reasonably high life style, one has to wonder where the money is coming from.

Miss Marple refers to her nephew in various other novels and stories, proudly telling everyone how successful he is and even quoting his joke about her having a mind like a Victorian sink, which would indicate that he realizes something about her activities. In fact, he and "Joan" discuss this in At Bertram's Hotel when they decide to treat her because she never leaves the village (which is patently untrue). Of course, there was her Caribbean trip and it is rather a pity, says "Joan" that she became mixed up with that murder to which Raymond replies that it is the sort of thing that tends to happen to her. Or, in other words, he knows quite well what sort of a life his aunt leads in between gardening and attending amateur performances of plays at St Mary Mead.

He makes another interesting comment in At Bertram's Hotel; his last book did very well so he is happy to pay for a treat for his aunt. Why exactly does he feel the need to spend his hard-earned money on his aunt every time and how well did that book do? The truth is that no matter how successful Raymond West's modernistic, miserable and undoubtedly boring books might be they cannot pay for his life style and all those treats for his aunt as well as the more substantial help in the years after the war, not even if his wife's income from her paintings are added to the household budget.

On the other hand, let us look at some dates. At Bertram's Hotel was published in 1965 so the events described in it must have happened in 1964, the year in which A Caribbean Mystery, Aunt Jane's murder investigation on her holiday, was published. That was immensely successful. All Miss Marple's adventures were. Could there be a connection between those two events?

One assumes that Raymond West must have done his bit during World War II and being a writer he would have been recruited into the Ministry of Information where he was told to produce literature for the masses that kept them happy. Clearly his own novels would do nothing of the kind so he reverted to something he had done some years before and wrote up one of his aunt's investigations in Gossington Hall (the Bantrys' home), St Mary Mead and the nearby seaside resort Danemouth and published in 1942. In 1930 he had come to an agreement with another author (or maybe several) and published Murder at the Vicarage under the nom de plume Agatha Christie. In 1942 he revived that and put that name to The Body in the Library. Actually, he nearly came a cropper on that as another well known writer, Ariadne Oliver, had already written a novel under that name but the publishers sorted the matter out with some help from the Ministry of Information, who were anxious to see Raymond West's book in print.

Thereafter, it all became a good deal easier. At present it is not clear what Raymond West's relationship was with the other Agatha Christie or, for that matter, Ariadne Oliver but it is surely obvious that he made his money by writing up his aunt's various investigations while pretending, ever less credibly, to dismiss her as a Victorian relic who knows nothing about life. He is unlikely to have fooled her. Being an honourable man, Raymond West felt that he must repay his debt through various gifts, treats and, when necessary, outright financial assistance. Miss Marple accepted it all (though not the Russian plays and the West novels) with a gentle smile. No doubt, when she inherited a large sum of money from Mr Rafiel at the end of Nemesis she, too, repaid by planning a few very special treats for the whole family.

Does this explain the strange name change of Raymond's wife? I think it does. If Joyce Lemprière was known as a modernist artist she would not want the critics and buyers to think that she also did illustrations to detective stories. What better way to get round that problem but to use her second Christian name, Joan, and her married name West?