II
My literary activities at this period seem curiously vague in my memory. I dona€?t think, even then, that I considered myself a bona fide author. I wrote thingsa€“yesa€“books and stories. They were published, and I was beginning to accustom myself to the fact that I could count upon them as a definite source of income. But never, when I was filling in a form and came to the line asking for Occupation, would it have occurred to me to fill it in with anything but the time-honoured a€?Married womana€?. I was a married woman, that was my status, and that was my occupation. As a sideline, I wrote books. I never approached my writing by dubbing it with the grand name of a€?careera€?. I would have thought it ridiculous.
My mother-in-law could not understand this. a€?You write so well, Agatha dear, and because you write so well, surely you ought to write somethinga€“wella€“more serious?a€Something a€?worth whilea€was what she meant. I found it difficult to explain to her, and indeed did not really try, that my writing was for entertainment.
I wanted to be a good detective story writer, yes, and indeed by this time I was conceited enough to think that I was a good detective story writer. Some of my books satisfied and pleased me. They never pleased me entirely, of course, because I dona€?t suppose that is what one ever achieves. Nothing turns out quite in the way you thought it would when you are sketching out notes for the first chapter, or walking about muttering to yourself and seeing a story unroll.
My dear mother-in-law would, I think, have liked me to write a biography of some world-famous figure. I cannot think of anything I should be worse at doing. Anyway, I remained sufficiently modest to say occasionally, without thinking, a€?Yes, but then of course I am not really an author.a€This was usually corrected by Rosalind, who would say: a€?But you are an author, mother. You are quite definitely an author by this time.a€?
Poor Max had one serious penalty laid on him by marriage. He had, as far as I could find out, never read a novel. Katharine Woolley had forced The Murder of Roger Ackroyd upon him, but he had got out of reading it. Somebody had discussed the denouement in front of him, and after that, he said, a€?What on earth is the good of reading a book when you know the end of it?a€Now, however, as my husband, he started manfully on the task.
By that time I had written ten books at least, and he started slowly to catch up with them. Since a really erudite book on archaeology or on classical subjects was Maxa€?s idea of light reading, it was funny to see what heavy weather he made of reading light fiction. However, he stuck to it, and I am proud to say appeared to enjoy his self-imposed task in the end.
The funny thing is that I have little memory of the books I wrote just after my marriage. I suppose I was enjoying myself so much in ordinary living that writing was a task which I performed in spells and bursts. I never had a definite place which was my room or where I retired specially to write. This has caused much trouble for me in the ensuing years, since whenever I had to receive an interviewer their first wish would always be to take a photograph of me at my work. a€?Show me where you write your books.a€?
a€?Oh, anywhere.a€?
a€?But surely you have a place where you always work?a€?
But I hadna€?t. All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter. I had begun now to write straight on to the typewriter, though I still used to do the beginning chapters and occasionally others in long-hand and then type them out. A marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place to write; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.
My family usually noticed a time of approaching activity by saying, a€?Look, Missus is broody again.a€Carlo and Mary always called me Missus, supposedly in Peter the doga€?s language, and Rosalind, too, more often called me Missus than Mummy or Mother. Anyway, they all recognised the signs when I was broody, looked at me hopefully, and urged me to shut myself up in a room somewhere and get busy.
Many friends have said to me, a€?I never know when you write your books, because Ia€?ve never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.a€I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone: they depart for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same. I felt slightly embarrassed if I was going to write. Once I could get away, however, shut the door and get people not to interrupt me, then I was able to go full speed ahead, completely lost in what I was doing.
Actually my output seems to have been rather good in the years 1929 to 1932: besides full-length books I had published two collections of short stories. One consisted of Mr Quin stories. These are my favourite. I wrote one, not very often, at intervals perhaps of three or four months, sometimes longer still. Magazines appeared to like them, and I liked them myself, but I refused all offers to do a series for any periodical. I didna€?t want to do a series of Mr Quin: I only wanted to do one when I felt like it. He was a kind of carry-over for me from my early poems in the Harlequin and Columbine series.
Mr Quin was a figure who just entered into a storya€“a catalyst, no morea€“his mere presence affected human beings. There would be some little fact, some apparently irrelevant phrase, to point him out for what he was: a man shown in a harlequin-coloured light that fell on him through a glass window; a sudden appearance or disappearance. Always he stood for the same things: he was a friend of lovers, and connected with death. Little Mr Satterthwaite, who was, as you might say, Mr Quina€?s emissary, also became a favourite character of mine.
I had also published a book of short stories called Partners in Crime.
Each story here was written in the manner of some particular detective of the time. Some of them by now I cannot even recognise. I remember Thornley Colton, the blind detectivea€“Austin Freeman, of course; Freeman Wills Croft with his wonderful timetables; and inevitably Sherlock Holmes. It is interesting in a way to see who of the twelve detective story writers that I chose are still well knowna€“some are household names, others have more or less perished in oblivion. They all seemed to me at the time to write well and entertainingly in their different fashions. Partners in Crime featured in it my two young sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence, who had been the principal characters in my second book, The Secret Adversary. It was fun to get back to them for a change. Murder at the Vicarage was published in 1930, but I cannot remember where, when or how I wrote it, why I came to write it, or even what suggested to me that I should select a new charactera€“Miss Marplea€“to act as the sleuth in the story. Certainly at the time I had no intention of continuing her for the rest of my life. I did not know that she was to become a rival to Hercule Poirot.
People never stop writing to me nowadays to suggest that Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot should meeta€“but why should theyI am sure they would not enjoy it at all. Hercule Poirot, the complete egoist, would not like being taught his business by an elderly spinster lady. He was a professional sleuth, he would not be at home at all in Miss Marplea€?s world. No, they are both stars, and they are stars in their own right. I shall not let them meet unless I feel a sudden and unexpected urge to do so.
I think it is possible that Miss Marple arose from the pleasure I had taken in portraying Dr Shepparda€?s sister in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She had been my favourite character in the booka€“an acidulated spinster, full of curiosity, knowing everything, hearing everything: the complete detective service in the home. When the book was adapted as a play, one of the things that saddened me most was Carolinea€?s removal. Instead, the doctor was provided with another sistera€“a much younger onea€“a pretty girl who could supply Poirot with romantic interest.
I had no idea when the idea was first suggested what terrible suffering you go through with plays, owing to the alterations made in them. I had already written a detective play of my own, I cana€?t remember exactly when. It was not approved of by Hughes Massie; in fact they suggested it would be better to forget it entirely, so I didna€?t press on with it. I had called it Black Coffee. It was a conventional spy thriller, and although full of cliches, it was not, I think, at all bad. Then, in due course, it came into its own. A friend of mine from Sunningdale days, Mr Burman, who was connected with the Royalty Theatre, suggested to me that it might perhaps be produced.
It always seems strange to me that whoever plays Poirot is always an outsize man. Charles Laughton had plenty of avoirdupois, and Francis Sullivan was broad, thick, and about 6a€?2a€tall. He played Poirot in Black Coffee. I think the first production was at the Everyman in Hampstead, and the part of Lucia was played by Joyce Bland, whom I always thought a very good actress.
Black Coffee ran for a mere four or five months when it finally came to the West End, but it was revived twenty-odd years later, with minor alterations and it did quite well in repertory.
Thriller plays are usually much alike in plota€“all that alters is the Enemy. There is an international gang a la Moriartya€“provided first by the Germans, the a€?Hunsa€of the first war; then the Communists, who in turn were succeeded by the Fascists. We have the Russians, we have the Chinese, we go back to the international gang again, and the Master Criminal wanting world supremacy is always with us.
Alibi, the first play to be produced from one of my booksa€“The Murder of Roger Ackroyda€“was adapted by Michael Morton. He was a practised hand at adapting plays. I much disliked his first suggestion, which was to take about twenty years off Poirota€?s age, call him Beau Poirot and have lots of girls in love with him. I was by this time so stuck with Poirot that I realised I was going to have him with me for life. I strongly objected to having his personality completely changed. In the end, with Gerald Du Maurier, who was producing, backing me up, we settled on removing that excellent character Caroline, the doctora€?s sister, and replacing her with a young and attractive girl. As I have said, I resented the removal of Caroline a good deal: I liked the part she played in village life: and I liked the idea of village life reflected through the life of the doctor and his masterful sister.
I think at that moment, in St. Mary Mead, though I did not yet know it, Miss Marple was born, and with her Miss Hartnell, Miss Wetherby, and Colonel and Mrs Bantrya€“they were all there lined up below the border-line of consciousness, ready to come to life and step out on to the stage.
Reading Murder at the Vicarage now, I am not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters, and too many sub-plots. But at any rate the main plot is sound. The village is as real to me as it could bea€“and indeed there are several villages remarkably like it, even in these days. Little maids from orphanages, and well-trained servants on their way to higher things have faded away, but the daily women who have come to succeed them, are just as real and humana€“though not, I must say, nearly as skilled as their predecessors.
Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival. I wrote a series of six short stories for a magazine, and chose six people whom I thought might meet once a week in a small village and describe some unsolved crime. I started with Miss Jane Marple, the sort of old lady who would have been rather like some of my grandmothera€?s Ealing croniesa€“old ladies whom I have met in so many villages where I have gone to stay as a girl. Miss Marple was not in any way a picture of my grandmother; she was far more fussy and spinsterish than my grandmother ever was. But one thing she did have in common with hera€“though a cheerful person, she always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.
a€?I shouldna€?t be surprised if so-and-so isna€?t going on,a€my grandmother used to say, nodding her head darkly, and although she had no grounds for these assertions, so-and-so was exactly what was going on. a€?A downy fellow, thata€“I dona€?t trust him,a€Grannie would remark, and when later a polite young bank-clerk was found to have embezzled some money, she was not at all surprised, but merely nodded her head.
a€?Yes,a€she said, a€?Ia€?ve known one or two like him.a€?
Nobody would ever have wheedled my grandmother out of her savings or put up a proposition to her which she would swallow gullibly. She would have fixed him with a shrewd eye and have remarked later: a€?I know his kind. I knew what he was after. I think Ia€?ll just ask a few friends to tea and mention that a young man like that is going around.a€?
Granniea€?s prophecies were much dreaded. My brother and sister had had a tame squirrel as a pet in the house for about a year, when Grannie, after picking it up with a broken paw in the garden one day, had said sapiently: a€?Mark my words! That squirrel will be off up the chimney one of these days!a€It went up the chimney five days later.
Then there was the case of the jar on a shelf over the drawing-room door. a€?I shouldna€?t keep that there, if I were you, Clara,a€said Grannie. a€?One of these days someone will slam the door, or the wind will slam it, and down it will come.a€?
a€?But dear Auntie-Grannie, it has been there for ten months.a€a€?That may be,a€said my grandmother.
A few days later we had a thunderstorm, the door banged, and the jar fell down. Perhaps it was second sight. Anyway, I endowed my Miss Marple with something of Granniea€?s powers of prophecy. There was no unkindness in Miss Marple, she just did not trust people. Though she expected the worst, she often accepted people kindly in spite of what they were.
Miss Marple was born at the age of sixty-five to seventya€“which, as with Poirot, proved most unfortunate, because she was going to have to last a long time in my life. If I had had any second sight, I would have provided myself with a precocious schoolboy as my first detective; then he could have grown old with me.
I gave Miss Marple five colleagues for the series of six stories. First was her nephew; a modern novelist who dealt in strong meat in his books, incest, sex, and sordid descriptions of bedrooms and lavatory equipmenta€“the stark side of life was what Raymond West saw. His dear, pretty, old, fluffy Aunt Jane he treated with an indulgent kindness as one who knew nothing of the world. Secondly I produced a young woman who was a modern painter, and was just getting on very special terms with Raymond West. Then there were Mr Pettigrew, a local solicitor, dry, shrewd, elderly; the local doctora€“a useful person to know of cases which would make a suitable story for an eveninga€?s problem; and a clergyman.
The problem told by Miss Marple herself bore the somewhat ridiculous title of The Thumb Mark of St. Peter, and referred to a haddock. Some time later I wrote another six Miss Marple stories, and the twelve, with an extra story, were published in England under the title of The Thirteen Problems, and in America as The Tuesday Club Murders.
Peril at End House was another of my books which left so little impression on my mind that I cannot even remember writing it. Possibly I had already thought out the plot some time previously, since this has always been a habit of mine, and often confuses me as to when a book was written or published. Plots come to me at such odd moments: when I am walking along a street, or examining a hat-shop with particular interest, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head, and I think, a€?Now that would be a neat way of covering up the crime so that nobody would see the point.a€Of course, all the practical details are still to be worked out, and the people have to creep slowly into my consciousness, but I jot down my splendid idea in an exercise book.
So far so gooda€“but what I invariably do is lose the exercise book. I usually have about half a dozen on hand, and I used to make notes in them of ideas that had struck me, or about some poison or drug, or a clever little bit of swindling that I had read about in the paper. Of course, if I kept all these things neatly sorted and filed and labelled it would save me a lot of trouble. However, it is a pleasure sometimes, when looking vaguely through a pile of old note-books, to find something scribbled down, as: Possible plota€“do it yourself-Girl and not really sistera€“Augusta€“with a kind of sketch of a plot. What ita€?s all about I cana€?t remember now; but it often stimulates me, if not to write that identical plot, at least to write something else.
Then there are the plots that tease my mind, that I like to think about and play with, knowing that one day I am going to write them. Roger Ackroyd played about in my mind for a long time before I could get the details fixed. I had another idea that came to me after going to a performance by Ruth Draper. I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were; the wonderful way she could transform herself from a nagging wife to a peasant girl kneeling in a cathedral. Thinking about her led me to the book Lord Edgware Dies.
When I began writing detective stories I was not in any mood to criticise them or to think seriously about crime. The detective story was the story of the chase; it was also very much a story with a moral; in fact it was the old Everyman Morality Tale, the hunting down of Evil and the triumph of Good. At that time, the time of the 1914 war, the doer of evil was not a hero: the enemy was wicked, the hero was good: it was as crude and as simple as that. We had not then begun to wallow in psychology. I was, like everyone else who wrote books or read them, against the criminal and for the innocent victim.
There was one exception in the popular hero Raffles, a sporting cricketer and successful cracksman, with his rabbit-like associate Bunny. I think I always felt slightly shocked by Raffles, and in looking back now I feel much more shocked than I did then, though it was certainly in the tradition of the pasta€“he was the Robin Hood type. But Raffles was a light-hearted exception. No one could have dreamt then that there would come a time when crime books would be read for their love of violence, the taking of sadistic pleasure in brutality for its own sake. One would have thought that the community would rise up in horror against such things; but now cruelty seems almost everyday bread and butter. I wonder still how it can be so, when one considers that the vast majority of people one knows, girls and boys as well as the older folk, are extraordinarily kind and helpful: they will do things to help older people; they are willing and anxious to be of service. The minority of what I call a€?the hatersa€is quite small, but, like all minorities, it makes itself felt far more than the majority does.
As a result of writing crime books one gets interested in the study of criminology. I am particularly interested in reading books by those who have been in contact with criminals, especially those who have tried to benefit them or to find ways of what one would have called in the old days a€?reforminga€thema€“for which I imagine one uses far more grand terms nowadays! There seems no doubt that there are those, like Richard III as Shakespeare shows him, who do indeed say: a€?Evil be thou my Good.a€They have chosen Evil, I think, much as Miltona€?s Satan did: he wanted to be great, he wanted power, he wanted to be as high as God. He had no love in him, so he had no humility. I would say myself, from the ordinary observation of life, that where there is no humility the people perish.
One of the pleasures of writing detective stories is that there are so many types to choose from: the light-hearted thriller, which is particularly pleasant to do; the intricate detective story with an involved plot which is technically interesting and requires a great deal of work, but is always rewarding; and then what I can only describe as the detective story that has a kind of passion behind ita€“that passion being to help save innocence. Because it is innocence that matters, not guilt.
I can suspend judgment on those who killa€“but I think they are evil for the community; they bring in nothing except hate, and take from it all they can. I am willing to believe that they are made that way, that they are born with a disability, for which, perhaps, one should pity them; but even then, I think, not spare thema€“because 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. The innocent must be protected; they must be able to live at peace and charity with their neighbours.
It frightens me that nobody seems to care about the innocent. When you read about a murder case, nobody seems to be horrified by the picture, say, of a fragile old woman in a small cigarette shop, turning away to get a packet of cigarettes for a young thug, and being attacked and battered to death. No one seems to care about her terror and her pain, and the final merciful unconsciousness. Nobody seems to go through the agony of the victima€“they are only full of pity for the young killer, because of his youth.
Why should they not execute himWe have taken the lives of wolves, in this country; we didna€?t try to teach the wolf to lie down with the lamba€“I doubt really if we could have. We hunted down the wild boar in the mountains before he came down and killed the children by the brook. Those were our enemiesa€“and we destroyed them.
What can we do to those who are tainted with the germs of ruthlessness and hatred, for whom other peoplea€?s lives go for nothingThey are often the ones with good homes, good opportunities, good teaching, yet they turn out to be, in plain English, wicked. Is there a cure for wickednessWhat one can do with a killerNot imprisonment for lifea€“that surely is far more cruel than the cup of hemlock in ancient Greece. The best answer we ever found, I suspect, was transportation. A vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings, where man could live in simpler surroundings.
Let us face the thought that what we regard as defects were once qualities. Without ruthlessness, without cruelty, without a complete lack of mercy, perhaps man would not have continued to exist; he would have been wiped out quite soon. The evil man nowadays may be the successful man of the past. He was necessary then, but he is not necessary and is a danger now.
The only hope, it seems to me, would be to sentence such a creature to compulsory service for the benefit of the community in general. You might allow your criminal the choice between the cup of hemlock and offering himself for experimental research, for instance. There are many fields of research especially in medicine and healing, where a human subject is vitally necessarya€“animals will not do. At present, it seems to me, the scientist himself, a devoted researcher, risks his own life, but there could be human guinea-pigs, who accepted a certain period of experiment in lieu of death, and who, if they survived it, would then have redeemed themselves, and could go forth free men, with the mark of Cain removed from their foreheads.
This might make no difference to their lives; they might only say, a€?Well, I had good lucka€“anywaya€“I got away with it.a€Yet the fact of society owing them thanks might make some faint difference. One should never hope too much, but one can always hope a little. They would at least have had a chance to do a worthwhile act, and to escape the retribution they had earneda€“it would be up to them to start again. Mightna€?t they start a little differentlyMight they not even feel a certain pride in themselves?
If not, one can only say, God pity them. Not in this life, perhaps, but in the next, they may move a€?on the upward waya€?. But the important thing is still the innocent; those who live sincerely and fearlessly in the present age, who demand that they should be protected and saved from harm. They are the ones that matter.
Perhaps Wickedness may find its physical curea€“they can sew up our hearts, deep-freeze usa€“some day they may rearrange our genes, alter our cells. Think of the number of cretins there used to be, dependent for intellect on the sudden discovery of what thyroid glands, deficient or in excess, could do to you.
This seems to have taken me a long way from detective stories, but explains, perhaps, why I have got more interest in my victims than my criminals. The more passionately alive the victim, the more glorious indignation I have on his behalf, and am full of a delighted triumph when I have delivered a near-victim out of the valley of the shadow of death.
Returning from the valley of the shadow of death, I have decided not to tidy up this book too much. For one thing I am elderly. Nothing is more wearying than going over things you have written and trying to arrange them in proper sequence or turn them the other way round. I am perhaps talking to myselfa€“a thing one is apt to do when one is a writer. One walks along the street, passing all the shops one meant to go into, or all the offices one ought to have visited, talking to oneself harda€“not too loud, I hopea€“and rolling onea€?s eyes expressively, and then one suddenly sees people looking at one and drawing slightly aside, clearly thinking one is mad.
Oh well, I suppose it is just the same as when I was four years old talking to the kittens. I am still talking to the kittens, in fact.