The Rest Is History - 185. Agatha Christie

Episode Date: May 16, 2022

Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist in history. Coinciding neatly with the 'Wagatha Christie' trial taking place between Coleen Rooney and Rebekah Vardy in the UK, Tom and Dominic look at Christie as a mirror held up to the 20th century, discuss what we can learn about Christianity and the concept of 'evil' from her work, and debate the value of Tom's Poirot impression. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Jack Davenport & Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Bonjour, mes amis. Welcome to The Rest. It is history. I, Hercule Poirot, have invited you here into the library to answer for you a mystery

very profound. The fire, it is roaring in the grate. The butler, he is serving the sherry. Very profound. And what is it I wish to reveal? Why, a mystery very strange. How is it that one English writer has sold more than two billion copies of her novels? What does it say about her laughing times? What does it say about us that we still read and watch adaptations of her novels, even now almost fifty years after her death? I talk, of course, of Madame Agatha Christie, and to explain her, it requires the application of the little grasselles, the process of the

thought logique. But, of course, I would not be Hercule Poirot if i did not have a sidekick a bone-headed anglo-saxon dominic sandbrook that was of course agatha christie's great fictional creation david suchet so tom this is tell me if i'm true to the spirit of that this is the point at which i launch myself at you sink my fingers into your neck and shout, you damned interfering foreigner! Or something like that. No, I was thinking of you more as kind of Captain Hastings. Well, clearly you do, yeah. And your dapper suit.

I think of myself as the murderer. Well, of course, these are exactly the kind of tricks Agatha Christie loves to play. That's right. So what we should say right at the beginning, Tom, because we are are talking about the i think we can reasonably say certainly commercial terms the single most successful british writer probably the single most successful writer of any country in the 20th century um but amazingly there will be some people who haven't read her books but maybe want to so we should probably say at the beginning that there's a spoiler alert yeah we will be giving away i imagine a lot of the um a lot of the culprits and the denouements

and so on yeah um but yeah it's unapologetically unapologetically it's a great subject this tom because we did sherlock combs before we did james bond and i think agatha christie i mean it's extraordinary that she outsold both conan doyle andle and Ian Fleming by a colossal margin. You know, it's one of these things people try to calculate the number of books sold, but we're talking about hundreds of millions in different languages. And you did it in your splendid kind of – I assume that's a Belgian accent. Yes, it is. Yes. But she's very popular in France, incredibly popular in France. They have their own separate adaptations and French literary critics, as we will probably discuss, have written glowing tributes to her.

So it makes sense to take her seriously. I checked in the Bodleian and apparently she is the most translated individual author of all time. I can well believe that. So more than Shakespeare or? Well, easier to translate than Shakespeare, I would imagine. And more accessible, and probably very good if you're learning, also, if you're learning English. Right. So that's a question which I'm sure we'll come to, is that popularity reflective of the global cultural power that Britain had in the 20th century? That's a good question.

I'm sure we'll come to that. I would also say that Agatha Christie is, I mean, it's a classic Sandbrook subject. So a hugely popular, hugely popular figure who tends to be looked down on by the sneery metropolitan elites that you, Dominic, stand firm against. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm glad you say that because some years ago, I mean, about two listeners may remember this. I did a series on the BBC called, which they ended up calling Let Us Entertain You. This was after I'd persuaded them not to call it

Dominic Sandbrook's Pleasure Island, which was their original title. That, I mean, imagine being trapped by a storm on Dominic Sandbrook's Pleasure Island. A terrifying prospect. With a homicidal maniac on the loose. A terrible, talking to you about stanley baldwin um yeah so yeah so they didn't call it that and it was basically about british

culture in the 20th century the british imagination and its export overseas and um i wrote a tie-in book and and for that called uh the great british dream factory which i'm holding up now as i talk to you dominic no one can see it no i know It's nice that you're holding it up for me to see. I'm conjuring up an image using the power of words. And I kicked off the discussion of Agatha Christie in that by listing some of the things that people have said about her. So the American critic Edmund Wilson, for example, said her prose is of a mawkishness and banality, which seems to me almost literally impossible to read.

Bernard Levin said her books are unreadable rubbish, not one of them worth the time of an intelligent adult ruth rendall who obviously was later on a kind of rival of agatha christie or successor and rival said when i read an agatha christie i don't feel as though i have a piece of fiction worthy of the name in front of me and basically people have always looked down on agatha christie and sneered at her and sort of guardian columnists okay i was waiting for you to take use the phrase guardian columnists. Of course. And there it is. So everyone playing Dominic Sandbrook, bingo.

Bingo, yeah. Because if you search on the Guardian website and their comment pages, there are tons of attacks on Agatha Christie saying it's nostalgic, it's snobbish, it's this, that, and the other. All of which actually at the time in the books, it's not. It's not nostalgic because it's set very much in the here and now. And it's not snobbish because she doesn't look down on, as it were, the lower orders.

So as I say, the dream, Dominic Sandbrook subject. And you're brilliant at this. You're absolutely brilliant at this, at picking up on hugely popular figures who are looked down upon and certainly persuading me as you did in um uh the great british dream factory uh and and persuaded me that we should do this subject does that mean tom that one day we can do a podcast about katherine cookson i'm not sure about that i'm not sure about that no because i don't think she's i don't think i i agree that agatha christie her fame and her popularity yeah is in, you know, these are historically intriguing details that are worthy of study. I also think that in and of herself, her relationship to her work is very interesting.

Well, she's a good, the 20th century, Tom, she's a great window into the 20th century. I was only reading earlier today an essay by john lanchester you must be a big admirer i mean he's a brilliant critic john lanchester and he says in that um one of christie's subjects is the 20th century and actually you can trace it through her books from the mysterious affair of styles which was first published in 1920 in america to the last books which are not as good really published in the 1970s but you can track the social and cultural changes through the fiction. And they're very subtle, but they're there.

And it's a really interesting way to think about British culture in the 20th century. Well, if top critics who write for the London Review of Books agree with you, then we're absolutely onto a winner here. We are, we are. We're pleasing the highbrows and the lowbrows. So I think that, I mean, I agree let's let's look at agatha christie as a mirror held up to the 20th century but probably um it would be best to look at uh the life of agatha christie herself because i think there are clues there oh you're gonna i hope you're

gonna keep slipping into this because that will make that will not be irritating at all for the audience okay i think that there are clues in her upbringing and and the two two i think two particularly seismic events in her life that seem to have um do i have to ask first is uh her um her relationship to her parents so she's born 1890 yeah in uh torquay yeah the english rivera the english rivera famous for its brilliant hotels um and actually hotels along the devon coast are quite a theme of her fiction they are um but her parents are, so her father is American and her mother is British. Yes. Born in Dublin.

Yes. From Ireland. Exactly. But, but yeah, she's very, it's a very kind of genteel upbringing. So I think they have, you know, conservatories and a tennis court and. Yes. And libraries and things. Yeah.

All this sort of stuff. Yeah. So the upper middle class, I suppose you'd say they are. But when her when um agatha is and she's agatha miller when she is 11 her father dies and they are left financially embarrassed basically so there is yes there's a kind of i mean it's not it's not like they become poverty stricken but it's it's uncomfortable for someone used to upper middle class life that they have to start economizing and all these kind of things. And that clearly leaves in her mind the memory of how important money is, of how significant social gradations are, all these kind of things that will feed into her fiction. I think that's very astute, Tom.

Do you think the little grey cells there? I think the little grey cells have been absolutely vindicated because i think um she absolutely is aware of the instability and it might seem an odd thing to say about upper middle class life but of course so many people are sort of trying to keep up appearances as it were yeah and playing playing the parts expected of them which is a big theme of agatha christie's. And if you think, as you say, what are we, when she's 11, 1901. So Edwardian England, you know, keeping up appearances, putting on, you know, this is the era of the Kaiser having the wrong deck shoes, very much a favorite theme of the rest of history.

And I think that underpins so much, that the social anxiety of the upper middle classes in the 20th century is a, is a key part of the, of the sort of world of her fiction, but also that sense that everything can go away, can, can melt and dissolve. Yeah,

absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and when I, when you mentioned that you originally wanted to call your series, Dominic Island's Pleasure Island, which is,

that's a detail I'll never forget. You know, they also wanted to call it some. No, what? They wanted to call it, at one point, they wanted to call it, I'm not kidding. They really wanted to call it For Your Pleasure. It's like a Durex advert. That's exactly what I said.

I said, that's written on machines in the gentleman's toilets. I mean, you cannot call it that. Okay, but when you mentioned, I said, imagine being trapped on that island with a homicidal maniac on the loose. Of course, they're never homicidal maniacs. She's not actually that kind of writer. They are always people. I mean, that's the whole thing, isn't it? of her critics have done because the killers as you say are not you know there's no fear of the lower orders in the books the fear comes from within from within the sort of the middle class isn't it and actually you're completely right tom that people are often motivated by by secrets by a kind of grinding

gnawing anxiety about losing about being exposed or something like that and my money and my money is by by far the single biggest motivation but um of killers and agatha christie's books but the second would be sexual desire yeah jealousy or uh people being spurned or whatever and that of course um is the second uh terrible experience that agatha christie goes through and i say agatha christie rather than agatha miller because um she marries a guy called archibald that's right christie archie christie who's very dashing isn't he so she meets him at a ball um outside torquay in i think 1912 checking my notes from the bodleian. Very good. He proposes in 1913. And of course, in 1914, the war breaks out and he is in the Air Force.

He's in the Royal Flying Corps. Exactly. He's a real pioneer. But also, that's a very dashing thing to be in the Great War. I mean, she's done... A moustache, I assume. I imagine him with a moustache. I imagine him as a sort of...

Yeah, well, he becomes quite a sort of rakish figure in the kind of Christie imagination, obviously, mythology because of his behaviour in the 1920s. But he must have been a tremendous catch. So Agatha had been a very shy and always was incredibly shy kind of bookish. She didn't go to school. She was kind of self-taught. She sort of reads all these books in her father's library.

She goes to parties and things. Somebody says to her at one point or says to her mother, your daughter is a beautiful dancer, but she doesn't know how to talk. But obviously Archie Christie is a great catch. So they're married. She works as a volunteer nurse in the First World War, which I think is massively important. Where she learns about poisons.

She learns about poisons. But also she poisons but also she's she's clearing up you know cleaning up service and stuff covered in blood i mean she talks at one point she gave an interview one of the only interviews she ever gave was the imperial war museum and um she talked in that about um picking up basically bits of people and you know putting them into the furnace but that kind of i mean that kind of gore is not a feature of the novels is it no and it wouldn't they wouldn't be successful if it if it was actually yeah i think it's the you're the the death is always there is no hannibal lecter there's no definitely not but yeah so then she she writes i mean we can come back to the fiction a second but and she her first book mysterious affair at styles 1920 in america and then

published 1921 in Britain. And that introduces Poirot. Poirot. And we can come back to Poirot, I think, as well as a refugee character. But then, so she writes a series of books in the 1920s. I think there's so much actually to be said about why the 20s, why is it that Agatha Christie is successful at this point in time? What is?

Do you want to do that now or do you want to get on to the sex? Okay, let's get on to the sex and then we'll come back to that. Tom Holland, I know how his mind works. So she's quite a successful writer. She's had a great hit with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which is arguably the single greatest detective novel of all time. She's 36 years old. And she and Archie, he's a stockbroker,

and they live in Sunningdale in Berkshire, real kind of home county stockbroker belt. And real kind of everything that you would expect on a Sunday evening ITV crime drama. Yeah, absolutely. Home counties, stockbroker and seething sexual jealousy. Yes. Well, this is what you clearly wanted to get onto, Tom. So they've kind of grown apart. He spends all his time playing golf in the city. And he basically, they have a row, and he's just said to her, I'm actually, I've fallen in love with my golfing partner,

who's called Nancy Neal. Now, a fantastic fact, Tom, is that one of our listeners is related to Nancy Neal. Oh, really? Because he sent me a message when he found out. He's called John Browning. He's a member of the Restless History Club, which you too can join at restlesshistorypod.com.

So he gave us a brilliant opportunity for advertising our club. But also he says Nancy Neal was the other woman and she was my maternal grandmother's cousin. They were both the daughters of railway officials. And their father was a senior railway officer who took charge of Queen Victoria's railway travel from London to Carlisle when she went to Balmoral. I remember my grandmother saying that her cousin's husband had previously been married to Agatha Christie, but she never mentioned the scandal. Probably not surprisingly. So anyway, yes.

So Nancy Neill is the other woman. And Agatha, on the night of the 3rd of December 1926, she goes upstairs to kiss their seven-year-old daughter goodnight. And then she comes back downstairs and she gets in the car, which is, I think, a Morris. And then she disappears. Amazing. And the car is found abandoned.

Yeah, by sort of gravel pit or something. I can't remember. Or clay pit or something of that kind. And ten days go by and it's this colossal media sensation. So people send the newspapers. Of course, it's the heyday of the kind of popular press, of the sort of the Harmsworth press empire and so on. So they all get involved. They hire Dorothy L. Sayers, a rival, to visit her house looking for clues.

Psychics they get, don't they? So Arthur Conan Doyle, I mean, he consults a medium. Yeah, but I mean, Arthur Conan Doyle at this stage in his life consults a medium to tell him what pair of trousers to put on. So I mean, yeah, massive press sensation. A lot of people say it's a stunt or that she's dead or Archie has murdered her or, you know, who knows. And then 10 days later, famously, she turns up in the Swan Hydro Hotel in Harrogate under an assumed name.

And she's basically spent the last 10 days playing bridge and dancing and doing all this stuff with the other guests. But the weird thing, Tom, as you may know, is the assumed name she takes on is mrs neil yeah in other words she names herself after the other woman and people have never worked out really whether it was um designed to embarrass so what do you think because there are many theories on this aren't there and they're never conclusively conclusively answered it's really hard to say some kind of breakdown i guess a breakdown coupled with possibly an attempt to you know maybe she's hoping that her husband will come and kind of rescue her and come to his senses or something um or maybe it's something she embarked on and then once she'd

embarked on it you know in the sort of moment of madness yeah then she was stuck with it she couldn't kind of after two days say she just thought god i'm gonna have to brazen this out and carry on doing this for weeks i don't know it's impossible i mean she never talked about the degree to which she writes about these kind of dramas and then she finds herself kind of trapped in one the love triangle which is so well in a theme okay so so here is my here's my theory on this so in preparation for this i read two of her her greatest works uh murder on the nile death on the nile tom sorry death on the nile and um evil under the sun evil under the sun yeah and they're both written i think kind of 39 41 something like that i mean yes so around the beginning of the second world war and massive spoiler alerts if you haven't read them or seen them and you would like to just

blank this bit out but basically the plot of both of them revolve around a couple yeah the husband or the the fiance or the male partner seems to run off with a much more glamorous wealthier sexually attractive woman yeah who then dies who gets murdered yes and it turns out that all along the male partner has has actually stayed faithful to his original female partner and both of them have have teamed up together to commit the murder it's a trick to kill the the other the woman that you think is the the other woman who's stolen him yeah and actually all along it's it's the other woman who ends up dead i mean that's kind of very very interesting it seems to me applying my little gray cells uh back but also of course uh you know they are murderers so there's a certain degree of kind of wish fulfillment there but also a feeling of guilt perhaps that you are engaging in the wish fulfillment am i being am i being too psychologically

tom i actually once again i um now we're recording this on a day where somebody on twitter said whenever i'm i i say you're being very generous tom or something like that it means i think you're talking absolute rubbish but actually i think you're you're dead right i hadn't thought of that before but i think it's so the portrait of the killers in both those books death and then art it's a it's very kind of double-edged isn't it because the um it is wishful film but at the same time there is a dread of the of the character of the sort of raffish yeah you know sexually attractive male the um in in evil under the sun the the the woman who um turns out to be complicit in the murder but is presented in a kind of very positive light um but she she

doesn't tan she doesn't go that's right she's bookish um so she's a bit of a self-portrait you think a bit except of course that hanks christ Christie is also famous as a surfer, isn't she? A surfer? Yeah. Did I hear that correctly? Yeah. Like a surfer as in? As in the Beach Boys.

As in Big Sur or something in California? Yeah, there's a famous photo of her clutching a surfboard. Is there? I've never seen this. Wow. You're the top historian of Agatha Christie. You must have seen it. No, well, I'm clearly not. Well, maybe I the top historian of Agatha Christie. You must have seen it. No, well, I'm clearly not.

Well, maybe I'm imagining that. I'll go and check that. I think she did. But I think the idea of the kind of the bookish, almost mousy, white-skinned, uncharismatic, poor kind of church mouse who then turns out to be, you know, to have kept her man and to be a murderer i don't know i just wonder if perhaps there's a certain degree that's nice

but also that takes us back to the climates of the 20s when the book started because the sort of small scale nature of them i think is really important to their success and that's those sort of characters so poirot himself himself is kind of like that, Tom, in the sense that, of course, he's larger than life in lots of ways. But I always think with Poirot... Do you want to just describe him for people who may not have read any novels? So Poirot is, what is he, five foot four or something? He's very round.

He has a head like an egg. He is a Belgian refugee. To make him a Belgian refugee is so daring in 1920. Today, when you watch the David Suchets, he seems a nostalgic, backward-looking figure. But it's the equivalent of making him a Syrian refugee or a Ukrainian refugee today. He's a very contemporary figure.

He lives in a brand-new flat. His flat is often described of, you know, it's described as all geometrically arranged. Which they get very, very well in the Souchet. They do, perfectly. They're perfectly. Everything has to be just so. He's utterly unheroic.

He's physically unprepossessing. He's frightened of kind of paddling, let alone of swimming. I remember there was a brilliant thing where he had to, in the David S was a brilliant thing where he had to, in the David Suchet one, where he had to cross a stile. And you could see him, the look of horror on David Suchet's face. And then he kind of waddles off down the side of the field.

He's always worried about getting his kind of patent leather shoes dirty in his spats. But in 1920, all of that is really bracing because the detectives that you're used to are sherlock holmes and the and his imitators sherlock holmes and his rivals so they're all sort of quite tall beaky men in kind of massive tweed coats who are always kind of herring after hounds on moors down se sewers. Yeah, or like they want a blue for pugilism at Cambridge or something. And Poirot is absolutely not from that cloth. So I always think he is a detective for an age, a post-First World War age,

that is nervous about kind of masculine heroics and about violence and about the gallant hero and all those kinds of things but he's also an outsider he's an outsider absolutely and this is why one of the really interesting interestingly foolish things that people say about agatha christie is so foolish they say well she's xenophobic but actually a time and again in christie's books people say that damn foreigner what is he a Frenchman or something? And they either make him look like fools or they're the murderer

or they're exposed as a sort of oafish reactionary. Christie is very clever in her portrayal of Englishness. There's a sort of edge to it. And I think that's one of the reasons, incidentally, why he's so popular in France. Poirot is a character, but also Christie is a novelist. Because it paints, in many ways, quite an unflattering picture of British self-satisfaction, complacency, introversion,

all those kinds of things. Well, it's a very interesting example of this. And it wasn't about xenophobiaophobia but it was about sexism yeah watching um evil under the sun yesterday so i read the novel and then watched the adaptation of it by andy horowitz very good and i was watching it with um katie my daughter and the portrayal of the the murdery the the kind of glamorous other woman who ends up um being murdered and lots of people say, oh, she's an evil figure. You know, she's destroying the marriage. She's a man eater.

She's going to get murdered. She's going to deserve all she gets. And Katie said, oh, no, I'm not sure about that. I don't think you should be. Were you in danger of being cancelled in your own household, Tom? Well, she was picking up on something that was, you know, it was sexist. It was a sexist approach. And because it was Agatha Christie and because it was set up on something that was, you know, it was sexist. It was a sexist approach. And because it was Agatha Christie and because it was set up when it was, it was entirely, you know, you could imagine, yes, this is the attitude that you, the viewer or the reader are meant to have.

But of course, this turns out to be sand thrown in your eyes, dust thrown in your eyes, because actually it turns out that, you know, Poirot says she is a victim. She's always been a victim. She hasn't been a man eater. She's been ripped off, you know, predatory men have stolen all her money. And it turns, you know, you are, she deceives you. And she, she kind of panders to people's prejudices. I think that's absolutely right. Kind of turns them on the head. And she does that with, with, with kind of British chauvinism as well. She does it again and again. And I think that's one of the really interesting things that people often say about Christie. Well, her books are full of stereotypes, kind of vicars, doctors, you know, as you say, man-eating women, all these kinds of things.

But so often she'll feed you the stereotype. But that's a trick. And she's playing actually with your expectations. She knows that you are carrying so much baggage. And then she sort of pulls the rug out from under you. And I think what's really also interesting in the context of she's writing Between the Wars, in a period of great social change, and then, of course, some of her best books in the 1940s, amid the sort of turmoil of the Second World War, and then the Labour government in Britain, the sort of the Attlee government, all the time, these people are conscious that the sort of turmoil of the Second World War, and then the Labour government in Britain, the sort of the Attlee government.

All the time, these people are conscious that the sort of plates are shifting under their feet and you don't really know who anybody is. You know, new people are moving in, the old guard have lost power, all of this kind of thing. And they talk again and again. You know, I don't know,

those people who bought the house down the road, they say they were in, you know, the East, but I don't you know that sort of thing and then it turns out there's all kinds of secrets and sort of assumed identities and kind of love children and all this kind of stuff yeah and some behaving badly to parents and and so on yeah young tension between the generations yeah i think i think we should take a break at this point uh and i think that when we come back, we should look perhaps at ancient history and Christianity. Oh, Tom, that's absolutely scandalous behavior. Yes. All right. We'll see you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The

Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com That's therestisentertainment.com Hello, welcome back. We are looking at Agatha Christie as a mirror held up to the 20th century. But I promised that we would look at two intriguing themes, ancient history and Christianity.

Dominic, I mean, I'm not exaggerating, am I? And they are both significant. Well, ancient history, because of course she married an archaeologist. So after the Archie thing all blew up, she then married the archaeologist Max Malowan. And people were very unkind because she was, I think, 14 years his senior. Yes, a Macron-esque relationship. Well, I was going to say, by Macron standards, I mean, they're practically born in the same month. And people used to say, oh, well, you know, Max is interested in old relics and archaeologists are only interested in the older you are and stuff. But actually, they had a very seems to be a very contented marriage.

And she would accompany him on these incredible groundbreaking mid-century archaeological digs. And kind of she met him. She was out in Iraq with Leonard Woolley, who that's right. Excavated Earth. I mean, he's very, very high. And she she'd always been interested in that because because when she left school, her mother was ill. And this, you know, as with Lord Carnarvon going to Egypt, you go to Egypt if you are, you know,

you're a bit seedy, a bit under the weather, go and spend the winter months in Luxor or Cairo. And so she goes with her mother to Cairo when she's about 18. And I think it has obviously a kind of huge impact on her so I'm sure that that that is kind of an aspect of why she she falls for Max Malouan who um I I cited in Persian Fire he wrote a very good article on Cyrus the Great this is a brilliant opportunity for you to advertise your book of Persian Fire yeah thank you um and also she she

wrote um she wrote a play about akhenaten friend of the show which is terrible oh no it's terrible so basically basically it's um it's it's a kind of standard agatha christie murder novel transplanted to the 18th dynasty so you've got horam heb who is the the general under akhenaten um who is described as being a pukasarb. So he's like the colonel who's a bore about Simla and Puna and all that. And his wife, Mutnojmet, she undulates her body menacingly. Oh, no. It's one of the stage descriptions.

I'd happily see that. And she's very snooty about Queen Tea, who holds on to her old-fashioned fashions of dress. So is this an adaptation? Because Chrissie wrote one of her whodunnits, Death Comes as the End, I think it was, was set in ancient Egypt. Is this an adaptation of that?

No, it's different. It's literally about Tutankhamen and all that. So she dabbled twice in ancient Egypt. Yeah. But, of that? No, it's different. Oh, right. It's literally about Tutankhamen and all that. So she dabbled twice in ancient Egypt. Yeah. But of course, some of her books are set,

so Murder in Mesopotamia is set on an archaeological dig and there's supposedly a portrait in that of Leonard Woolley's wife, who clearly was not highly regarded by the other archaeologists.

And Death on the Nile, there's a murder attempt at the great statues of Ramses II at Abu Simnel. That's right. And actually, I mean, one of the interesting things about Christian is that her books basically take place in two different kinds of places.

They take place in rural England, in rural, in sort of St. Mary Mead or Chipping Claycorn and these sort of invented… Or islands. Yeah, or islands. Off Cornwall. Yeah, islands of Devon and sort of stuff. But also they take place in what you might call, I suppose, it's the decaying mid-century British

imperial periphery. They don't tend to be in British colonies, but they're places that are kind of maybe informal colonies. Egypt or Mesopotamia. Egypt, exactly. Or people travelling back, i.e. murder on the Orient Express. The Stamboul train kind of thing.

And that obviously adds to their appeal the exoticism so the ancient history i think i mean that gives her another string to her bow that none of her competitors have dorothy el sayers and uh marjorie ellingham so on who are so rooted in the sort of the cut glass i mean they've got all detectives lord peter whimsy and people like that who, I think, very badly because they're so firmly rooted in the world of the sort of interwar British high society in that world. But then, Tom, you want to talk about Christianity. Now, lots of people will be wondering how you're going to get Christianity in,

but I think I know how you're going to do it. It's important, isn't it, within the moral world of the detective novel? Yeah. Christie writes, both with Poirot and with Miss Marple, that there is good and evil, that there is right or wrong, that there are absolute moral standards. And that in a sense, that framework of morality is the kind of philosophical equivalent to the island on which everyone is stuck or the manor house that's been cut off by the fog. The pleasure island. The pleasure island, exactly. So it's not as though kind of Nietzschean superheroes are going to be part of the plot who deride conventional standards of morality and think there is nothing wrong with killing, say.

You know, there is no, I said there was no Hannibal Lecter. It's precisely the fact that there is no Hannibal Lecter. There is no i said there was no hannibal lecter it's precisely the fact that there is no hannibal lecter there is no serial killer there is never anyone i think i i i probably haven't read enough agatha christie's to be absolutely firm about this but by and large the murderers accept the moral frameworks the moral standards yeah and these moral standards are christian because agatha christie was actually quite a devout Christian. Well, she is a devout Christian. She's a quiet Christian. She's not kind of tub-thumping.

But I think it is significant and important to explain the style of detective fiction that she does. So there is an argument, Tom, that detective fiction comes into being in the mid-Victorian period. And you could make an argument, I suppose, that detective fiction comes into being. It obviously expresses all kinds of anxieties about an urban, mobile society where crime can strike at any moment and you don't know who's done it because you don't know. You feel discombobulated by the modern world. I suppose you could argue the detective is a substitute for the judgment of God, the sort of divine authority.

I mean, Poirot, Miss Marble. Poirot is often like that, isn't he? They absolutely, they have a kind of knowledge that nobody else does. They kind of, an omniscience almost. I mean, there's often a moment

in a Poirot book, quite early on, where Poirot will say to Hastings, I know who did it. I merely need to talk to four different people and wait for three other crimes before I can assemble people in the library. But I know, all you need to know is three things, the drop of wax, the timetable, and the fact that he placed a bet on so-and-so to win the 330th entry. And that's all you need to

know. And you know, there's a godlike figure um and interestingly christy so she believes in the death penalty miss marple in 450 at paddington which is 1957 so there's a moratorium for the death penalty in the 1950s and miss marple says of the killer i'm really very very sorry they've abolished capital punishment because i think anyone i think ought to hang it is the villain um christia herself says in her autobiography um people who kill are evil um even if they might deserve pity you cannot spare them any more than you could spare the man who staggers out from a plague-stricken village in the middle ages to mix with innocent and healthy children in a nearby village not wearing

his mask um yeah yeah and actually, the fascinating thing, I think, about Christie and her Christianity and the World Wars and the era of the World Wars in which she's writing is that so often there are conversations in her books about evil. So in Evil Under the Sun, I mean, the title, you know, evil is foregrounded. But, Tom, there's that brilliant moment that you must surely have enjoyed where there's the vicar at the beginning.

I know we have a lot of vicars who listen to this podcast, the Reverend Tim Vasby-Burney, the Reverend Marcus Walker, and so on. There's the vicar who's kind of absolutely obsessed with evil, isn't there? Yes, but his obsession with evil is one of the things that might make him a suspect. Yeah, because people think he's a maniac. Well, he's a maniac, isn't he? Monsieur Poirot, evil is real. It is a fact. I believe in evil like I believe in good. It exists. It's powerful. It walks the earth.

He stopped. His breath was coming fast. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and looked suddenly apologetic. I'm sorry I got carried away, he said. Tom, that's just like, that's what I'm like when I'm listening to you. Well, I don't know. I think that's a little harsh because he is going on about kind of painted Jezebels and he's accusing the murderee

in Evil Under the Sun of being evil. And of course he turns out not to be evil. That's the whole twist. So he's part of that kind of, the dust thrown in the eyes. But Poirot does not deny that there is evil. No. He agrees that there is evil and Poirot and

Marple both say again and again there is such a thing as evil um but what's really interesting so in this sort of pressure island series one of the conceits of it was that we were going to be tracing back um everything to Dickens and uh actually it turned out Dickens was Agatha Christie's favorite writer and Dickens of course portrays evil favourite writer. And Dickens, of course, portrays evil as well. And also Dickens is one of the great progenitors of detective. Yeah, Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. Inspector Bucket in Bleak House. But in Dickens, evil is always expressed kind of physically.

So you're a dwarf. Yes, you writhe. You've got a hunchback or whatever. Rather like in Shakespeare or something. But in Agatha Christie, the whole point about evil is that some of the really evil people are otherwise absolutely well-adjusted, sensible, normal characters. It's not like Ian Fleming, where they've all got three hands or they're too hairy or something, the criminal masterminds.

And actually, that's the fascinating thing, I think, because in 20th century culture generally, I think especially in mid-century when Christie was writing, it's full of stuff about the evil that lurks within us. You know, all the kind of Lord of the Flies kind of stuff, or indeed Gollum in The Lord of the Rings. And so Christie, again and again, characters say, so there's a book called Appointment with Death, and there's a French psychologist called Dr. Girard, and he says, there are such strange things buried down in the unconscious, a lust for power, a lust for cruelty, a savage desire to tear and rend. We shut the door on them and we deny them conscious life, but sometimes they are too strong. And that kind of, well, yes, I mean, admittedly, a lot of people will be distracted by the quite superb accident.

But... Well, that's the kind of stuff you would expect from a French psychologist. But she believes it and Poirot believes it. Well, and Miss Marple believes it. Because actually, Miss Marple is one of the kind of the bleakest fictional creations of the 20th century. Charlie, that's a big claim. She suspects that everywhere she looks, there is evil. And she always turns out to be right.

And what she sees is the evil. I know this is an absolute laugh, but people will say this is a terrible misuse of the phrase, but she sees the banality of evil. So she looks at the goings on in a village and she says, I can see the hatred, the jealousy, the resentment, the greed that festers in even the most ordinary household. So actually, when you read those, especially, I mean, I read them when I was a teenager, absolutely adored them because I wanted to know who did it. But now reading them later and thinking about people reading these books, because the Miss Marple books tend to, the best ones are written basically 1940s, thinking about people reading them at the same time, the moving finger or something.

They're reading them at the same time that they're reading the newspapers about these dreadful horrors going on during the Second World War and its aftermath. It's really, there is a bleakness there, I think. Yes, but there is also a kind of um compassion that i think also goes back to the christianity perhaps so i was pocket full of rye have you read that yeah um the killer was peter davison in the bbc adaptation in the 1980s

which i was a doctor who fan i found very very disappointing yeah yeah so so in that that's a miss marple the so the plot seems to revolve around the um you know four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie and all that kind of thing and among the the king is in his counting house counting out his money queen is in the what was it parlor making bread and honey the maid was hanging out the washing that's right yes the maid gets killed the maid's called gladys i think isn't she it's always called gladys as in uh why didn't they ask evans um and and in the adaptation i saw she has a kind of clothes peg is that the one with peter davidson yeah kind of clothes stuck on her nose and she's kind of humiliated and it's awful and the whole plot revolves basically around Miss Marple's determination that this maid, who it turns out has been very, very badly emotionally abused.

Yeah, that's right. By the killer. She's a foundling. She's been working for Miss Marple and she's gone off to the big house and basically she gets completely fooled and... She's groomed, isn't she? She's groomed. She's groomed. And that, for Miss Marple, is the true evil. Not just that she's been murdered, but that she's been groomed and abused. Because that kind of contradicts the Christy is a snob.

No, definitely not a snob. I mean, that's, you know, that's... Well, you can see the debt to Dickens there. Because that's exactly the kind of thing that would have infuriated Dickens as well. Yeah, that's nice, actually. Yes. I mean, Christie, it's interesting, isn't it, that people have this attitude to Christie in Britain,

uniquely, I think, of stamping on Christie, because they don't have it abroad. I mean, I was reading some of the French critics. Right, so that's great. Okay, so we've done Christie the Christian. Now let's do Christie the post-structuralist. Yeah, well, Christie the modernist. So, I mean, there are arguments by, I mean mean i know some british listeners will be at this point

you know either have switched off or just be apoplectic with disbelief but you know people like roland barth jacques barzun uh the novelist michelle i can't i don't know how to pronounce his name actually um huayla beck is it i've never read michelle well back i mean they're massive christy fans and what they see in Christie, the French critics, they say she's a, as you say, Tom,

she is a, a master of form of pure kind of. She really, really is. I wrote an essay about her. Did you? So we talk about the great critics of our time and you've, you've included yourself in that number.

I wrote a structuralist essay on her. Did you? Because certain, certain of the, of the novels have the plotting the structure has a kind of a stark purity that no one will ever better wow there's a big that's so massive spoilers coming up yeah the whole thing with the genre a genre of is that there are rules. Yeah. And you can either go with the rules or you can break them. So whether it's a vampire novel or a Wild West novel or a detective novel, there have to be rules. Actually, Tom, that's true of a history book, right? I mean, readers have complete expectations when we write our books of the way we're going to structure it. You know, we're not going to suddenly enter the story at some point in this like a sort of martin amos character or something yeah so with the

detective novel you can push it to certain levels beyond which it will fragment and and and break up and the murder of roger ackroyd which you mentioned as and has i think been repeatedly voted the greatest detective novel of all time. The twist in that, and again, massive spoiler alert, is that it is the narrator who is the murderer. And once you've done that, no one else can ever do that. It's been done. And Murder on the Orient Express, it turns out to be everybody. Again, once you've done that, nobody can ever do that.

The Mousetrap, the longest running play of all time, it turns out to be the detective. And I think her best-selling novel, Then There Were None, which was very awkwardly titled in its original iteration, got renamed. That then turned out to be awkward. And then there were none. But there's, again, a kind of stark purity to that,

that there are 10 people trapped on an island and one by one they all die and there is a solution to it yeah but having to present the solution almost kind of it it destroys the formal beauty of the structure of that plot well not least because actually that that so it's not just that that's formally beautiful but it's also the sort of ideology as it were um reinforces what we were saying earlier. She basically takes a cross section of society and puts them on this, traps them on this pleasure island. And they all die. No, it's not just they all die.

It's that they're all killers. They're all sinners. I mean, that's the great. Well, all except one. That's the revelation. Which then turns out to be. But that's the kind of revelation though, isn't it? That they all appear to be, you know, there is the kind of the evil lurks within and the

secrets and they've all killed often for quite banal reasons, greed, jealousy, anger, whatever. You know, they're not serial killers. They're not maniacs. They're not dictators. They're, they are ordinary people whose, whose very human flaws have just taken them a little bit step too far. And I think that's what makes that. I mean, that book is an incredibly bleak book.

It is, but it's also the, it's also the book that seems to be certainly the novels that I've read. That seems to be most about what it's like to write a detective novel. It turns out the one of the 10 was actually innocent all along and has structured the whole thing to kill people off to in a way create a mystery that people will want to solve that will attract attention and in that sense that character seems to me the closest to Agatha Christie herself yes that's a nice way of putting it that because some of the some of the books are very self-conscious

aren't they but that's part of the ethos, that people are always playing parts. And I suppose you can say in some ways the detective is the narrator. But, I mean, in Roger Ackroyd, obviously the murderer is the narrator. The murderer has created them. I mean, you are in the murderer's mind. He has created the whole kind of mise-en-scene. And Roger Ackroyd is so fascinating because it's the 1920s. Absolutely nobody in Roger Ackroyd is who they say they are so they've all

got secrets there's the you know the country squire actually turns out to be a entrepreneur who's a self-made man or something like that i can't remember all the details and praro is one of them praro is there people think he's there growing cucumbers or something and he turns out to be this detective um but it doesn't really take praro to solve it does it because it's the um the narrator you know the rater has left you and this is the brilliance of christianity the linguistic brilliance there is just a kind of ellipsis or something or there's a gap between two sentences and there's no way when you're reading that because you're so attentive to language there's no way that you would notice that when you're reading it um but

obviously once you've got to the end and you've you've realized how perfectly it all fits together um then you can go back and read it i think with enormous pleasure actually to work out yeah how she how she tricked because she doesn't because yes because she does obey the rules yeah he's not lying no no no not at all not at all everything he says is true so i think the interesting thing is so the roger roger Ackroyd is now almost 100 years old and people are still producing Agatha Christie adaptations in a way they aren't with, let's say, Dorothy Elsayers. There's no series of Lord Peter Whimsey stories.

And the only way of doing that would be to just do them straight. So people wearing spats and sort of Jesus and Worcester style. What is it, do you think, Tom, about Agatha Christie that, you know, there's just been a Why Didn't They Ask Evans adaptation written by Hugh Laurie. There's obviously the Kenneth Branagh films. There are French TV series running all the time. What is it that's meant that she survived the 20th century into the 21st? I think it's the beauty of the plotting. And I think it's the understated moral starkness and coherence that frames that plot. And I think it's a combination of those two.

I think the moral climate is really interesting because we don't normally talk about evil now. And most, I would guess, most contemporary 21st century detective novels uh very much rely on kind of social explanations for evil don't they do you think i mean yeah or psychological ones yeah so serial killers it's all you know science of the lam the the key to depravity and evil lies in well it wouldn't even be evil is it i mean it's it's it's either illness or it's society it's it's wrongs that have been done to people when they were young or yeah yeah that kind of stuff or if you're rd lang illness is caused by society so um so so i think that to a degree the kind of the charge of of agatha christie appeals to nostalgia to that extent is true i think nostalgia for a lost moral order a kind of yes a moral order in which everyone accepts

certain moral fundamentals she's morally unsparing in her disapproval of lies, greed. Adultery. Yeah, infidelity. Exactly. All those in a way that is unfashionable, but it's maybe people crave that, I suppose. I also think it's because you can do them without the period trappings in a weird way because she's such a spare writer compared with her contemporaries.

You don't need to kind of immerse yourself in Stanley Baldwin's Britain. Yes, also, I mean, the Second World War is such a kind of firebreak in British social history. And the world of the Attlee government is obviously profoundly different to the world of anyone for tennis. Yeah. Before that. I mean, it's quite tough for her target class. You know, the upper middle classes, the middle classes.

They have it quite tough in austerity britain yeah obviously not as tough as everyone else well they think they do yeah they think they do but but that's she she makes she works again with that very cleverly and subtly so unlike pg woodhouse where nothing changes nothing changes you know the world of blanding's castle or the dronesrones Club carries on as though there hasn't been a war and there hasn't been a Labour government. With Christie, it does.

And so also to that extent, her novels are kind of interesting as a... I think absolutely. So I think if you take a book like A Murderer's Announced, so that's published in 1950. And that I think is one of the best, because it's so subtly done,

is one of the best books about reading about middle-class discontent with the Attlee government after the Second World War. So, you know, everybody is, they all are sort of a bit scratchy, kind of complaining that they have, you know, it's a world of ration books and identity cards. And you don't really know who anybody is anymore. There are, you know, taxes are so high. New people have moved into the village and they say they did stuff in the war, but you just don't really know who anybody is anymore. There are, you know, taxes are so high. New people have moved into the village and they say they did stuff in the war, but you just don't really know.

People beginning to come back from the empire at this point. So this is just a sort of sense of anxiety and unease. And of this sort of, you get this impression, brilliantly done. I think it's also there actually, another book that was written decades later. Sarah Waters wrote a book called the little stranger a ghost story which i think also captures the sort of the sense of these kind

of tweedy people that their britain has been lost um in this new world of the welfare state and so on and it's not done to be kind of really outspoken and vociferous about it but they're unhappy because their world has has changed and christy captures that and she weaves that into the murder plot in a way that's really clever i think i mean i think in the 60s she's like but what is it bertram's hotel a bertram's hotel and sort of some of the sort of this one there's hickory dickory dock i think it is which is set in um a hostel for young people. And they're listening to transistors. And the music is sort of 15 years out of date or something.

And there's Marple and Dolly Birds. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't quite work. But I think certainly between the 1920s and the end of the 1950s, the books are a brilliant mirror. Because they're so subtle. They don't bang you over the head with it, but she traces in a way that very few other writers of that time did so successfully, the sort of social and cultural changes of mid-century Britain. Well, so there you go. I think that we've justified having Agatha Christie on a history podcast.

Do you know, Tom, some of the most exhilarating reading experiences in my life have been with Agatha Christie's. And I'm not talking about recently, but when I was sort of 12 or something, I really would skip meals because Poirot was, you know, in your dulcet tones, just as I imagined it, was telling people to assemble in the library, you know, tell the suspects. And I just would think I would rather do – there's nowhere I'd rather be than reading this right now and finding out who the murderer was. Well, Dominic, I summoned the listeners to the drawing room, to the library, and I feel that now we have revealed the answer. What was the answer? Christianity.

And ancient history. Amazing, amazing revelation. Amazing that you found the answer you knew you wanted to find. Who would have guessed? And on that incredible note, we've arrived at the solution to the mystery. We hope you have enjoyed it. And we will see you back soon for the solution to another mystery. I thought you had planned this incredibly subtle and elegant ending,

but you just sort of gave a very generic, you know, thank you for listening. Goodbye. That's part of my amazing kind of trickery. You were expecting something that you didn't get. Yeah. Well, I was expecting something I didn't get. And that was the ultimate.

You fell into my postmodern trap. So on that bombshell, goodbye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That have just launched our Members Club.

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