by Paul F. Newman
[First published in The New Writer July 2007]
‘The Agatha Christie Code’ was the title of a television programme not long ago suggesting that Agatha Christie’s novels were subtly coded. Specific words and phrases planted at intervals in the text supposedly lured readers on by raising serotonin and endorphin levels in the brain, triggering the areas of pleasurable response. Like chain-smoking or having a fix it made it hard to put her books down and when one novel was finished we were compelled to pick up another. Cunningly achieved by the use of simple words or phrases repeated many times in the space of a few paragraphs, it unconsciously seeded key concepts in our minds.
That this was artificially contrived by Christie is surely pure nonsense. If anything it tended to prove that once she had worked out her plots the words flowed rapidly from mind to paper without her stopping to change them. When we learned that a computer had been involved in this scientific ground-breaking research, remnants of credibility began to fade. We were informed that the phrases “can you keep an eye on this” “more or less” “a day or two” and “something like that” cropped up an inordinate number of times in her novels, and the words “life” “living” “live” and “death” had actually appeared several times in a few close paragraphs. Such was the evidence for her being one of the biggest selling writers in English.
Agatha Christie’s simplistic style was necessary for her stories as the reader had to become quickly acquainted with an array of suspects and form snapshot impressions of them. But the truth of her record-breaking status as the most widely published author of all time and in any language is more than partly because she lived and kept writing for many years longer than anyone else. That is not to demean her immense talent as the populariser of an entire fictional genre, nor her genius in individual works such as And Then There Were None, which we will examine below.
Almost all of Agatha Christie’s novels have been republished in recent years, most never having been out of print, and a range of Christie anthologies now load the market with both favoured and unfamiliar fare. Love Detectives is an example of the latter and features ‘The Complete Satterthwaite and Quin’, forgotten names from an era long ago. They present one of her earliest, strangest and personal favourite of intermittent heroes: Mr Harley Quin (Harlequin). Not altogether human, he is described as both a friend of lovers and an advocate for the dead. Along with his earthly partner the quietly observant Mr Satterthwaite (yet another of her Virgo caricatures), Mr Quin occurred only rarely in Christie’s fiction, mainly in magazine stories during the 1920s.
The theme sounds perhaps like a forerunner of Randall & Hopkirk (deceased), though it is more in the vein of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. Priestley’s play came out a good twenty years after Agatha Christie’s but the same elements are there: the nocturnal visitor who raps on the door, introduces himself to the gathered household and brings out secrets that solve the crime. This all-knowing stranger and the importance of allowing him in evokes ancient legends of wandering immortals who occasionally intervened in human affairs. Mrs Christie and Mr Priestley may or may not have been aware they were recasting old myths but Christie’s is definitely based on the Harlequin figure better known in the 1920s and 30s than today.
Harley Quin does not appear in any of Agatha Christie’s most celebrated novels: The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The ABC Murders, Death on the Nile, And Then There Were None… But this early brush of the supernatural may lay disguised behind her more down-to-earth super-brains like Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. One could even suggest that Satterthwaite and Quin are a double act that she fused together in her other individual heroes. Almost all her creations are fastidious figures, enjoying praise for a job well done but uncomfortable when thrust into too bright a spotlight – like the author herself. But they had the knack of being in the right place at the right time as if drawing a murder towards them and ensuring that justice was not bungled or evaded.
“Mr Quin, I consider, is an epicure’s taste”, wrote Mrs Christie in a rare Author’s Foreword probably dating from 1930, and it is not stretching credulity to imagine him as the archetypal presence that personally stood behind her, providing strength and certainty. Her mother, she tells us, had a set of dell’arte figurines on her mantelpiece and as a child Agatha wove fantasies around them investing them with power and purpose. Harlequin’s Song was the title of one of her first published poems. Much later when making her name as a crime novelist Harlequin “invisible except when he chose” materialised again, this time as a tall refined stranger who indirectly resolved misunderstandings and injustice by leading others to arrive at the truth. All her heroes did this in some fashion though she usually preferred to paint them as fussy cerebrally-gifted old virgins in contrast to the rather dashing Mr Quin.
One of the main differences between the stories of Satterthwaite and Quin and those of Poirot, Marple, Pyne and the rest is the time factor. The stock Agatha Christie whodunit has a body in a library, a house full of suspects and a sleuth who solves the lot before the body’s cold and supper is served. The Harley Quin stories are different as they set to rights misunderstandings dating from a long while before, thus preventing further tragedies in the present. They may unearth a deception left uncovered for years or a suicide whose meaning has not yet come to light. And it is this underlying idea of people getting away with something in the past and now being brought to justice that leads into her remarkable novel And Then There Were None. ‘Remarkable’ because even the author thought she had set herself an impossible task creating a murder mystery in which every suspect dies. And remarkable because every single character in the plot has a skeleton in the cupboard.
In other words with no Hercule Poirot, no Miss Marple, and no Mr Quin, which dell’arte figurine now occupied her mental mantle-shelf?
In truth there were ten of them. And they were all black.
And Then There Were None was originally published in the UK as Ten Little Niggers in 1939, later renamed Ten Little Indians and sometimes Ten Little Soldier Boys, until settling on the title it had always held in the United States describing the last line of the sinister children’s poem: And Then There Were None.
Although it’s obvious why the racially unacceptable title was changed, modern prefaces or editorial notes rarely tell us when these alterations took place and so we are left with the impression that we’re still reading the author’s original 1939 text, which we are not. It is an important issue because it’s not just the title that is involved here. Central to this famous story is the old nursery rhyme The Ten Little Niggers (or Ten Little Indians) each one of whom dies in turn so that in the end ‘there were none’. In the novel china models of the ten figures occupy a prominent place in the mysterious island sanctuary to which ten guests have been invited, each model enigmatically disappearing after a real murder has taken place. In its current wording for the 21st century the Indians have been changed to “Soldier Boys”, the models are soldiers, the nursery rhyme hanging in each bedroom begins “Ten little Soldier Boys”, and the island itself is called Soldier Island.
If this hadn’t been one of Christie’s best stories (and there is no question that it is) the political incorrectness would probably have led to it being dropped from anthologies and general reissue years ago. But it is not the story that is politically incorrect, it is the nursery rhyme, and the author didn’t invent that, it was once as familiar as Ring a-Ring a-Roses or Jack and Jill. And we wonder what other subtleties have been lost with the changes of wording. The name of the rocky island off the Devon coast is mentioned many times in the opening pages, overly so, as if the stage is being set up for something, and Soldier Island just does not inspire the same sense of mystery and darkness.
Odd remarks by the house guests seem to play on the name, but make little sense in their present form. At one point two of the women guests are in conversation touching obliquely on African natives, “Emily Brent said sharply: ‘Black or white, they are our brothers.’ Vera thought: ‘Our black brothers – our black brothers. Oh I’m going to laugh. I’m hysterical. I’m not myself’.”
This weird outburst by Vera can only refer to the fact that the china figures disappearing one by one were ornaments of little black boys, and Vera’s pent-up fear of the situation has been triggered by that association in an otherwise unrelated conversation. With the rest of the text changed to ‘soldier boys’ and the models being soldiers rather than this disquieting set of Victorian exotica, her hysteria over black brothers has absolutely no meaning. (There are no black people in the story).
The ending of the story is different to all the filmed versions that followed and it is debatable which is the better. Hollywood required the lovers to survive; Agatha Christie had them all killed off so that “then there were none”.
But it was Christie herself who gave the alternative ending of the surviving couple when she adapted her novel for the stage a couple of years after its first publication, and all subsequent film versions followed the play rather than the book. Her reason was not simply to attain a happy ending. She needed a remaining character to voice an explanation to the puzzle, to work out for the audience ‘who done it’. Because this adventure did not involve any outside clever-dick detective there could be no summing-up scene in which everything was explained. Suspects and victims were all dead and an alternative narrative device had to be found. Not entirely satisfactory in the book is a conversation between two police detectives trying to piece together what has happened when the ten bodies are found. This leads to a last chapter, which is better, written as the contents of a note found in a bottle floating at sea, penned or typed by the house guest who was guilty of the murders. It’s a bit long-winded for a note in a bottle, but has to be fairly detailed to explain the murderer’s motives and methods and to tie up all the loose ends. Apart from the slight awkwardness of this plot device you can still not put the book down from beginning to end. With or without ‘The Agatha Christie Code’, it is a masterpiece.
If there was an omniscient figure hiding behind the mask of this plot it was one of dark nemesis. We can not rule out the associations that the deadly nursery rhyme set up in Agatha Christie’s mind causing her to turn that benevolent angel Mr Quin into a hidden character of total retribution and annihilation. It is an unseen host who invites the guests to his island in the story, but who ultimately never appears. At least that is how it seems. The sinister set-up and its backstage string pulling is one of the most complicated plots Christie ever devised. Although it was not her favourite novel she remained proud of it as an achievement and, as the last figurine smashed, she dispatched the avenging angel too. After this Mr Quin in the form of his benign detective heroes was able to comfortably return, and the Motley could resume as habitually as before.
SEE ALSO:
Paul F. Newman’s article on THE FAMOUS FIVE
Peter Viney’s review of the 1965 film TEN LITTLE INDIANS