It seemed to be the middle of the night when I was awakened by Lawrence Cavendish. He had a candle in his hand, and the agitation of his face told me at once that something was seriously wrong.
Agatha Christie. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
Ever wonder where writers get their ideas? Especially crime/murder mystery writers?
There’s plenty of material out there in real life – hence the plethora of real-crime books, podcasts and series that are so popular now. That’s a sad commentary on either our unhappy society or on the ability of the internet to spread such news instantaneously and far and wide.
Personally I love the murder mysteries that came out the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, i.e. written mainly in the 1920s and 30s. Authors Margery Allingham (sleuth Albert Campion), Agatha Christie (main sleuths Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple), Dorothy L. Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey), and Ngaio Marsh (British CID detective Roderick Alleyn) were considered the “Queens of Crime’. They produced classic “whodunits”, stylish mysteries where the settings were an essential part of the stories, and the tales followed a fairly established set of ‘rules’ systematized by Ronald Knox, a British Catholic priest, theologian and radio broadcaster who produced quite a few religious and philosophical books as well as dabbling in detective fiction.
Allowing the reader get more out of the reading experience by trying to solve the mystery before the fictional detective reveals it, he stipulated that such novels must:
- Mention the criminal early in the story, but he/she can’t be a character whose thoughts are revealed to the reader. (Makes sense – if the writer did reveal the killer’s thoughts, it would have to be very skillfully done to not give everything away.)
- Not include supernatural or preternatural agencies in the crime. (A popular addition these days, but the reader has to know that something unusual is going on.)
- Not include more than one secret room or passage. (Aww…)
- Not have previously undiscovered poisons, or any appliance that would need a long scientific explanation to understand it. (Being fair to the reader’s problem-solving ability.)
- Not contain any “Chinaman” characters. (A reference to the ridiculously stereotyped Asian characters that were in common use in detective fiction of the time.)
- Not have the detective solve the mystery by accident, nor feature some inexplicable “intuition” that proves to be right. (Totally unfair to the reader to throw that curve in.)
- Not have the detective be the killer. (Creative novelists have challenged that rule quite effectively since then.)
- Allow the detective to declare any clues discovered along the way. (Another fairness rule.)
- Make the detective’s sidekick share with the reader any thoughts he/she has AND be just slightly less smart than the average reader. (I suppose that might explain the dumb-ass version of Dr. Watson in some Sherlock Holmes movies.)
- Not use twins unless the reader has been prepared for them. (I take that to mean that, if one of them is the murderer, their existence doesn’t appear out of the clear blue sky.)
Lavish country houses owned by someone wealthy who likely didn’t survive the first couple of chapters were popular settings for a lot of these novels, often by bringing all the suspects together during a weekend house party. The board game Clue was built around just such a locale
My favourite Golden Age author was Dorothy Sayers, with her aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, who was charmingly disarming and able to conceal his sharp intelligence behind a silly man-about-town facade. He had bad shell-shock from serving in World War I, and was helped out of it by his comrade Bunter, who then served as his butler and sometime sidekick. What I liked about Wimsey was his lack of pretentiousness and the fascinating portrayal of 1930s Britain, teetering once more on the brink of another war.
However, you can’t argue with the success of Agatha Christie – 66 books, 14 short stories, and the longest-running play in history, The Mousetrap (performed in the West End of London since 1952; if you visit the city, you should go see it).
Christie made her debut on the detective-novel scene in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a classic locked-room mystery that was apparently based on a real crime in a popular hill station (cooler air retreat in the hills) in Northern India called Mussoorie.
In September 1911, a woman named Frances Garnett Orme, visiting with a friend of hers, Eva Mount Mountstephens, was found dead in her room at the Savoy, a very popular luxury at the time. She’d been poisoned with prussic acid – a poison derived from cyanide. Eva Mountstephens was accused of murdering her.
The case made global headlines because of the “peculiarity of the circumstances surrounding it. The room in which Orme’s body was found was locked from the inside. Mountstephens was a spiritualist from the city of Lucknow who’d taught Orme crystal-gazing and other occult practices, and had predicted Orme’s death six months previously. She’d also expressed concern about Orme marrying a physician she was engaged to and leaving all her wealth to him.
These were the arguments offered by the prosecution in Mountstephens’ trial. They accused her of administering poison to Orme to benefit from her will, which left her a substantial sum of money, three necklaces and other jewellery.
But the defense pointed out that Mountstephens had left to return to Lucknow before Orme had died, and that there was no proof that she’d either bought or administered the poison to her friend. They characterized her as a “most devoted companion” to Orme. They claimed that Frances Orme killed herself because of the “unceasing grief” she experienced after her fiancé died.
However, although a bottle of sleeping pills, and two other bottles – labelled arsenic and prussic acid – were found in Orme’s room, at the chemist’s where the drugs would have been bought and signed for (a legal requirement), the signature for the prussic acid didn’t match the one on Orme’s letters.
But poisoning cases were common in India in the 19th c. The sale of toxic substances, particularly arsenic, was unregulated, and eventually the number of arsenic poisonings led to the creation of the Indian Poisons Act in 1904 to provide necessary regulation.
Interestingly, Eva applied for probate of her friend’s will, but the Garnett-Orme family in England sent out Frances’ brother to contest it. The judge denied Eva’s application on grounds of ‘fraud and undue influence in connection with spiritualism and crystal gazing’.
British newspapers carried accounts of the sensational trial with headlines like ‘Mussoorie murder trial’, ‘hotel mystery’ and the ‘crystal gazing trial’. In the end, though, Eva Mountstephens was acquitted due to lack of evidence. The Allahabad High Court eventually declared the case as homicide done by person(s) unknown and closed the it.
The presiding judge remarked that the “true circumstances of Ms Orme’s death would probably never be known”. He was right; the case was never solved, along with another murder – that of the doctor who performed the autopsy. He was found dead a few months later from strychnine poisoning! That news resulted in people not visiting the hotel for several months afterward. I think I might have stayed away too.
How did Frances Orme’s death morph into Agatha Christie’s first novel. Well, apparently word of the case reached Rudyard Kipling, who was living in India. Kipling passed it to his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, suggesting that perhaps the already immensely famous detective Sherlock Holmes could solve the case in another SH novel. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t want to touch the case for possible litigation issues, and is believed to have passed the story along to Agatha Christie instead.
That version has been somewhat disputed. Christie had a friend, and neighbour, Eden Philpotts, who was born in India, was friends with Conan Doyle, and helped her with her early writing. It seems likely that he passed the details of the case, and the impetus for the debut novel, to Agatha.
In Christie’s book, the poison of choice was strychnine, which was used both to poison mice, and also as a tonic diluted with other ingredients, to induce sleep. (Now there’s a terrifying thought.) Agatha’s murder victim, Emily Inglethorp, suffered from insomnia. Strychnine’s presence in a household wouldn’t have been considered suspicious in the 1920s.
Christie worked as a nurse during WWI at the Torquay War Hospital, and learned a great deal about chemicals. She was able to use that to great advantage in crafting her first published murder mystery. Strychnine was well-known at the time due to its use by serial killer Dr Thomas Neill Cream, who used it to kill a number of women in both Britain and Canada. He was finally caught and executed in 1892. Allegedly, his final words were, “I am Jack the…” (The timeline would have worked.)
It was in this novel that Christie introduced one of the most famous sleuths ever created, Hercule Poirot.
Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound. Yet this quaint dandified little man who, I was sorry to see, now limped badly, had been in his time one of the most celebrated members of the Belgian police. As a detective, his flair had been extraordinary, and he had achieved triumphs by unravelling some of the most baffling cases of the day.
Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles
The novel was published to a fair amount of acclaim. The New York Times Book Review (December 26, 1920), wrote “Though this may be the first published book of Miss Agatha Christie, she betrays the cunning of an old hand… You must wait for the last-but-one chapter in the book for the last link in the chain of evidence that enabled Mr. Poirot to unravel the whole complicated plot and lay the guilt where it really belonged. And you may safely make a wager with yourself that until you have heard M. Poirot’s final word on the mysterious affair at Styles, you will be kept guessing at its solution and will most certainly never lay down this most entertaining book.”
The Times Literary Supplement (February 3, 1921) printed: “The only fault this story has is that it is almost too ingenious…It is said to be the author’s first book, and the result of a bet about the possibility of writing a detective story in which the reader would not be able to spot the criminal. Every reader must admit that the bet was won.”
While some people may consider Christie’s style more in the nature of what’s now referred to as “cosy” mysteries, her stories do make great reads with a cup of tea, embodying what’s become everyone’s vision of classic vintage British ambience. The long-running television Poirot series, with David Suchet as the fastidious detective, was enormously popular, and quite a few movies have been made of the stories. Christie’s enduring legacy speaks for itself.
The ghost of Lady Frances Garnett-Orme apparently haunts the now run-down hotel’s lobby, corridors and roof. Guests have reported hearing things like random toilet flushes and doors opening mysteriously. People who claim to have seen her describe her as a “serene, calm” woman dressed in white, looking lost while wandering around – perhaps trying to close her own case. Given the spirituality involved, the locked room, and other mysteries, maybe a modern writer will be inspired to come up with a version steeped in the supernatural – wouldn’t that be fun!