Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Agatha Christie’s Golden Age

REVIEW

WHAT a fiendish and villainous person Agathe Christie could have been, had she chosen to commit crimes instead of only writing about them.

When asked about her approach and methodology, she said: “You start with the wish to deceive and then work backwards.”

John Goddard, the author of this forensic examination of Christie’s complex puzzles and tightly constructed dovetailed plots, stands amazed at her satanic ingenuity. He relishes, as many readers will have done , the arresting opening lines such as “You do see, don’t you, that she’s got to be killed?”, which have (to date) hooked more than two billion readers.

There have been many studies of the Queen of Crime, who died in 1976 – full-scale biographies, accounts of her world travels and archaeological excavations, editions of her notebooks, picture books featuring her big house in Devon, cookery books and even a scholarly investigation of her days as a dispensing pharmacist and nurse.

Goddard, though – a former partner in a firm of City solicitors called Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer – looks at Christie’s work from the viewpoint of a lawyer. He spots how key information in the tales is extracted from the Matrimonial Causes Acts of 1857 and 1923, particularly in connection with insanity as grounds for divorce.

 

THE Legitimacy Act of 1926 has a bearing on Christie’s many plots about lost or unwanted children and those born out of wedlock, and how this ties in with the laws of inheritance, intestacy, and the Wills Act of 1837.

Christie knew the difference between the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1908 and the Poisons and Pharmacy Act of 1933 and thus on what the average killer could lay his (or her) hands.

She therefore created stories revolving around the effect of bromide on a solution containing strychnine, what happens when you inhale prussic acid, the effect of phosphorus on the liver (it mimics liver disease) and how a quick injection of apomorphine can function as an emetic.

Christie often made use of the double jeopardy loophole – only closed in 2003 with the Criminal Justice Act – whereby once a person had been acquitted, they can never be tried again for the same offence.

As Hercule Poirot points out, “It’s not enough to be arrested.” There has to be a full jury trial, as in The Witness For The Prosecution.

In addition to the innumerable short stories, Christie published an impressive 66 crime novels, beginning in 1920 with The Mysterious Affair At Styles. This is where we first encounter Poirot, this “queer little foreigner”, a World War I Belgian refugee and “fusspot for whom specks of dust are more painful than bullet wounds”.

Obsessed with neatness and symmetry, he wears button boots and sports an absurd moustache, though not as farfetched as Kenneth Branagh’s in the latest film.

“I am probably the greatest detective in the world,” says Poirot, modestly.

Whilst he claims to be an exacting intellectual – “It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think” – Poirot’s little grey cells do, however, always need a bit of help. He examines stains, looks under mats, finds charred fragments of paper and spots the importance of candle grease, cigarette cases, discarded kimonos, brooches or a thornless rose. We, the readers, are, says Goddard, “skilfully deceived as to their significance”.

Whoever saw the importance of the repaired Dictaphone in The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, or the fish paste sandwiches in Sad Cypress?

As awkward in company as Sherlock Holmes, Poirot nevertheless always interviews several suspects, “sometimes in a pleasantly disarming manner, sometimes threatening”.

David Suchet was always good at the curdled courtesy, followed by a sudden snarl of rage. Poirot’s general belief is that “there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation”, an aphorism worthy of Oscar Wilde.

The more Goddard probes Christie’s work, the more psychological – indeed, subjective and impressionistic – is the approach.

“When I know what the murderer is like, I shall be able to find out who he is,” says Poirot in the ABC Murders, sounding more like a novelist than a cerebral policeman.

As a legal practitioner, Goddard can see how clues support, but do not actually always prove, the solutions given.

These often rely on intelligent supposition – that is to say, sheer guesswork – as in Murder On The Orient Express, where “one cannot complain of having no clues in this case. There are clues here in abundance.” There are also five plausible versions of events, until it is revealed they all did it.

The bustling, busy approach is the particular realm of Miss Marple, the heroine of 12 complete novels.

Far from being a sweet, harmless little old lady, Miss Marple has an instinct for recognising wrongdoing and she mistrusts each and every person she encounters – who do, in fairness, all seem to be gossips, liars, adulterers, cheats, frauds, bastards, stranglers and poisoners.

“I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little,” she says, understandably. St Mary Mead is rampant with bodies in libraries, on the golf links, in vicarages and under rhododendrons.

 

GODDARD points out that Christie makes her venues – cosy and comfortable studies, resplendent drawing-rooms, train compartments, paddle-steamers – take on “a tense or sinister atmosphere”. She was particularly keen on placing horror in settings of picturesque Thirties luxury, such as the railway carriages belonging to the Calais to Nice “Blue Train”, which went via Paris and Lyon.

The Middle Est turns up a lot, too. This is an area and region Christie had explored with her husband, Sir Max Mallowan. She made extensive use of the Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island in Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon – it became the Jolly Roger Hotel on Smugglers’ Island.

Instead of explaining Christie away with his analytic exercises and legalistic assessments, Goddard’s superb take should serve to deepen and enrich her success and mystery.

We are shown how Christie can formulate characters we dislike, but who may be wholly innocent, and characters whose side we take – yet who are then unmasked as villains. Christie always saw through the perils of charm.

As a connoisseur of evil and ego, Agathe Christie is as great an author as Graham Greene, Muriel Spark or Jean Rhys.

Christie’s Golden Age brilliantly shows how she wove particular tales around the universal themes of greed, lust, hate, redemption and atonement.

That said, Goddard the lawyer does, however, catch her out just once in the dock. In Lord Edgware Dies, a character arrives home in Piccadilly at 8.30, changes for dinner and gets to Chiswick at 8.45.

This is simply not possible, is it, Miss Christie?

– Agatha Christie’s Golden Age by John Goddard is published by Stylish Eye for £18.99

Standard
Britain, First World War, History, Society

Great War Centenary: Respect the decision of our forebears

WW1 AND ITS CENTENARY

THE First World War was the primal disaster of modern times. Debate rages over whether to mark its centenary next month as a victory or as a catastrophe that should have been avoided.

The war began four decades of violence, hatred and cruelty that the peoples of 1914 could not have foreseen in their darkest nightmares. Across Europe, nine million soldiers died. In Britain, one in three men aged 19 to 22 in 1914 were killed. The cost could have paid for thousands of hospitals and schools, and a university for every city.

The argument that Britain should have kept out of the war seems, therefore, insurmountable. Most people in July 1914 assumed it would: the prime minister, HH Asquith, thought there was “no reason why we should be anything more than spectators”. The Cabinet, Parliament and public opinion agreed, and the government tried hard to defuse the crisis.

So, what changed?

Germany launched a surprise invasion of Luxembourg, France and Belgium. The social reformer, Beatrice Webb, decided that “even staunch Liberals agree that we had to stand by Belgium”. They thought Britain had to resist a direct threat to its security and uphold international law and order against “militarism”. Wrote the diarist Ada Reece: “We must fight, but all are agreed that it will be more terrible than any previous war [and] the ultimate consequences… none can foresee.”

Given that she was right about the consequences, should they still have kept out? Three arguments are produced to say yes. First, that it was not our fight. Secondly, that the war was futile. Thirdly, that without British intervention, Germany would have won quickly, and Europe would soon have acquiesced in its domination – a lesser evil than the horrors to come.

All these arguments are founded on very optimistic guesses. More pessimistic scenarios are at least as plausible. As early as September 1914, the German government decided that Belgium would become a “vassal state”, with its ports “at our military disposal” to directly threaten Britain. To ensure “security for the German Reich in West and East for all imaginable time”, Germany planned to annex large parts of northern France, impose a crippling financial indemnity, make France “economically dependent on Germany” and exclude British commerce. Neutral Holland would become “dependent”. Vast territories would be taken from Russia to “thrust [it] back as far as possible” – precisely what happened in 1917.

Had Germany won, democracy and liberal government would have faced a bleak feature. Authoritarian regimes would have been in the driving seat. French democracy might well have collapsed, as it did in 1940. What German soldiers and governors actually did is telling – more than 6,000 civilians in Belgium and France were massacred in the first weeks of the war by invading troops, occupied territories were subjected to military rule, and they subsequently suffered semi-starvation, mass forced labour and systematic economic devastation.

In short, Britain faced a prospect in 1914 not so different from that in 1939. It could have survived, even as a cowed and impoverished satellite state, and it is possible to consider that this would have been a lesser evil than the brutal carnage of the trenches. But in 1914, government and people decided otherwise. For one thing, they feared being forced into a future war without allies against a German-dominated coalition. They were probably right to fear what a victorious Germany might do, but they underestimated – like everyone else – the cost of preventing it. Nevertheless, most of them always believed it was worth the sacrifice.

We can choose to disagree with our forebears, but theirs was not a senseless decision – they had no safe option. If tomorrow the Russian army marched through Poland, and we were faced with the prospect of hostile aircraft based just across the Channel, would we react any differently? Let us hope we never face such a choice as the people of 1914 did. Their determination gave democracy and freedom a chance, even though it took a second war to complete the victory.

Standard
Arts, Books, Britain, Government, History, NATO, Society

The Labour Party, Soviet intelligence and the Cold War

BRITAIN: LABOUR & THE COLD WAR

THE postwar government of Clement Atlee was instrumental in the founding and formation of NATO, which binds together the defence of North America and Europe. Attlee’s successors as leader of the Labour Party have not all been as staunch as he was in the national interest. Amid the Cold War tensions of the early 1980s, for example, Labour’s candidate as a potential prime minister was a man who had willingly taken money from the Kremlin. Michael Foot, a hero of the Labour left who served as party leader from 1980 to 1983, was paid the equivalent of £37,000 in today’s money from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence agency, while he was a backbencher in the 1960s.

A new book, The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Mcintyre, recounts the remarkable public service of Oleg Gordievsky, a senior KGB officer who was a double agent for MI6. Gordievsky was recalled from the Soviet embassy in London when his cover was blown in 1985. In peril, and with the help of western intelligence, he escaped the Soviet Union. Macintyre’s book details evidence that Gordievsky gave to his British spymasters. It includes the revelation that Foot was paid as being a KGB contact.

The information has topicality as well as historical significance. Every British government since Attlee’s has treated the transatlantic alliance as the bedrock of defence policy. The current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, claimed in 2014 that NATO had been “set up to promote a Cold War with the Soviet Union”. This is nonsense. NATO was created in 1949 as an alliance of free nations to deter Soviet expansionism and aggression.

Communism collapsed a generation ago having turned the former Soviet Union and its satellite states into lands of penury and oppression. And the current regime in the Kremlin likewise threatens western interests, alters internationally recognised borders by force and pursues lethal violence against its critics at home and abroad. In the nerve agent attack in Salisbury on Sergei and Yulia Skripal, which has left one British woman dead and three people seriously injured, the prime suspects were recently disclosed as officers of Russian military intelligence (the GRU).

Any government faced with an attack on British soil ought to be able to count on bipartisan support. Yet, affecting a façade of continued open-mindedness, Mr Corbyn at every stage cast doubt on Russian culpability for the crime, despite the circumstantial evidence that was overwhelming. It also emerged earlier this month that two Russian agents were expelled from the Netherlands this year for spying on a laboratory where samples of the poison used on the Skripals were being tested.

Michael Foot was on the left of the party and advocated an irresponsible policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament by Britain. Paradoxically, however, he has never been widely regarded as being sympathetic to communist autocracy. He denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. When a British newspaper published Gordievsky’s claims in 1995 that the KGB held a file on him, Foot successfully sued for libel and was awarded substantial damages.

Inconsistencies do, however, remain. Whilst is known that Foot served as a confidential contact for the KGB, had Labour won the general election of 1983, Gordievsky would have been faced with the bewildering task of serving a prime minister who he knew to have taken money from Soviet intelligence. There is also the point of Gordievsky’s testimony which shows that Jack Jones, leader of the transport workers’ union in the 1970s, was regarded by the KGB as a disciplined agent, whom the spy agency had paid until 1968.

In explaining why he had not shared information about Britain’s nuclear deterrent with any but a few trusted cabinet colleagues, Atlee said bluntly: “I thought that some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind.” His judgment of senior Labour figures was acute and accurate, and resonates today.

Standard