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| Christie's time as a nurse and dispenser in the First World War without doubt informed her choice of poison as the predominant murder weapon in her novels (AGATHA CHRISTIE ARCHIVE) |
After 39 years, Hercule Poirot is back in a new novel.
David Suchet as wily Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in 'Appointment with Death' Photo: BBC
Here Kate Weinberg
looks at how the First World War shaped his creator
David Suchet as wily Belgian detective Hercule Poirot in 'Appointment with Death' Photo: BBC
A writer’s life: Agatha Christie wrote most of her novels at her London home in Kensington Photo: Popperfoto/Getty Images
The elegant drawing rooms and grand country houses of Agatha Christie’s novels
might seem a world away from the mud and horror of the trenches, but they
are closer than you might think.
For Agatha Christie, both as a person and as a novelist, was forged in the
fires of the First World War.
Sophie Hannah, inset, the bestselling novelist who has picked up the baton and
is launching the first new Poirot novel in 39 years at the Agatha Christie
Festival in Torquay today, agrees.
Hercule Poirot is a fictional Belgian detective, created by Agatha Christie. Poirot
is one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing
in 33 novels, one play (Black Coffee), and more than 50 short stories
published between 1920 and 1975.
“People of that era were asking themselves how the war was possible,” she
says. “I think that while Christie’s novels provided some brilliant light
relief, she was also trying to help them understand it.
“She was trying to say this person has been driven over the edge by this thing, that person by that. This is how an individual was driven to kill.
“Just as a wrong idea can seize a person, it can also seize a group of people, which is often worse as the feelings grow and they can push responsibility to the others. It does make things like war make a bit more sense and become more explicable.”
That’s not to say that she understood the destruction.
“Christie was very much in favour of moderation and keeping your powder dry,” says Hannah. “Both she and Poirot believe that every human life is valuable and precious.”
Given Christie’s own experiences in the war, that’s not surprising. In October 1914, she became one of the 90,000 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses that enlisted to help in the war.
In a makeshift hospital in Torquay town hall, she washed and cared for seriously wounded patients, attended in the operating theatre during operations and even helped clean up after amputations. “I would wash [away] all the blood,” she later wrote, “and stick [the limb] in the furnace myself.”
Christie’s tone is British stiff-upper lip as she recounts some advice from another nurse: “Everything in life one gets used to and if you can last it out, you’ll have no trouble.” But it is striking that although she went on to become “The Queen of Crime”, there is almost no blood, and certainly no gore, in her books.
Instead she prefers the clean method of poisoning, again, no doubt, influenced by her experiences in the war. After serving as a nurse, she qualified as a dispenser, who mixes the tonics and medicines for prescription. It clearly made a mark: out of the 66 full-length detective novels she wrote, more than half feature poisoning.
But the war did much more than provide her with a cabinet of poisons for a career in crime writing. The war years also unlock the story of Christie herself, the private woman whose life became something of a mystery itself.
Just as a wrong idea can seize a person, it can also seize a group of people, which is often worse as the feelings grow and they can push responsibility to the others. It does make things like war make a bit more sense and become more explicable.” That’s not to say that she understood the destruction.
“Christie was very much in favour of moderation and keeping your powder dry,” says Hannah. “Both she and Poirot believe that every human life is valuable and precious.”
Given Christie’s own experiences in the war, that’s not surprising. In October 1914, she became one of the 90,000 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses that enlisted to help in the war.
In a makeshift hospital in Torquay town hall, she washed and cared for seriously wounded patients, attended in the operating theatre during operations and even helped clean up after amputations. “I would wash [away] all the blood,” she later wrote, “and stick [the limb] in the furnace myself.”
Christie’s tone is British stiff-upper lip as she recounts some advice from another nurse: “Everything in life one gets used to and if you can last it out, you’ll have no trouble.” But it is striking that although she went on to become “The Queen of Crime”, there is almost no blood, and certainly no gore, in her books.
Instead she prefers the clean method of poisoning, again, no doubt, influenced by her experiences in the war. After serving as a nurse, she qualified as a dispenser, who mixes the tonics and medicines for prescription. It clearly made a mark: out of the 66 full-length detective novels she wrote, more than half feature poisoning.
But the war did much more than provide her with a cabinet of poisons for a career in crime writing. The war years also unlock the story of Christie herself, the private woman whose life became something of a mystery itself.
When the war broke out in 1914, Agatha Miller was a pretty girl engaged to a young man called Archie Christie. He had just been accepted by the RAF and was going to France as a flying officer.
On Christmas Eve 1914 they were married in Archie’s parish church, in their street clothes, while Archie was on leave from the front.
In the passionate love letters Archie wrote to Christie during the war he told her, “I love you much too much – more than ever now – to take any risks. Death only means to me being separated from you.”
During the war, Archie was promoted several times, becoming a Colonel, and in 1918 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and in 1919 Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG).
But as Christie’s novels later attested, a happy ending was hard to find.
A few short years after the war, Archie revealed to her that he had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, one of their friends. It broke Christie’s heart, precipitated her mysterious 11-day disappearance, and as her daughter Rosalind remarked, “she never got over losing him”.
In fact, according to Christie’s only grandchild, Mathew Prichard, she almost never spoke of Archie again.
She was so careful to avoid the subject that Mathew grew up believing her second husband, Max Mallowan, to be his grandfather.
Prichard says: “She avoided the subject of the [First World] war altogether, because that was when my grandfather was alive.”
The centenary of the First World War has prompted a great deal of reflection on, even celebration of, the literature of the times.
But, strangely, the First World War is largely overlooked in the consideration of Christie.
Perhaps this is because her response to the severed limbs and human horror was, like so much else in her life, to disguise it: in her books, death is not violent but artful, it happens not in the trenches but in vicarages, victims are beautiful and well-dressed, corpses are rarely seen and never lingered upon.
After four years in which the world had seen murder turned into an industry, she made it into a work of art. The Telegraph
“She was trying to say this person has been driven over the edge by this thing, that person by that. This is how an individual was driven to kill.
“Just as a wrong idea can seize a person, it can also seize a group of people, which is often worse as the feelings grow and they can push responsibility to the others. It does make things like war make a bit more sense and become more explicable.”
That’s not to say that she understood the destruction.
“Christie was very much in favour of moderation and keeping your powder dry,” says Hannah. “Both she and Poirot believe that every human life is valuable and precious.”
Given Christie’s own experiences in the war, that’s not surprising. In October 1914, she became one of the 90,000 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses that enlisted to help in the war.
In a makeshift hospital in Torquay town hall, she washed and cared for seriously wounded patients, attended in the operating theatre during operations and even helped clean up after amputations. “I would wash [away] all the blood,” she later wrote, “and stick [the limb] in the furnace myself.”
Christie’s tone is British stiff-upper lip as she recounts some advice from another nurse: “Everything in life one gets used to and if you can last it out, you’ll have no trouble.” But it is striking that although she went on to become “The Queen of Crime”, there is almost no blood, and certainly no gore, in her books.
Instead she prefers the clean method of poisoning, again, no doubt, influenced by her experiences in the war. After serving as a nurse, she qualified as a dispenser, who mixes the tonics and medicines for prescription. It clearly made a mark: out of the 66 full-length detective novels she wrote, more than half feature poisoning.
But the war did much more than provide her with a cabinet of poisons for a career in crime writing. The war years also unlock the story of Christie herself, the private woman whose life became something of a mystery itself.
Just as a wrong idea can seize a person, it can also seize a group of people, which is often worse as the feelings grow and they can push responsibility to the others. It does make things like war make a bit more sense and become more explicable.” That’s not to say that she understood the destruction.
“Christie was very much in favour of moderation and keeping your powder dry,” says Hannah. “Both she and Poirot believe that every human life is valuable and precious.”
Given Christie’s own experiences in the war, that’s not surprising. In October 1914, she became one of the 90,000 Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses that enlisted to help in the war.
In a makeshift hospital in Torquay town hall, she washed and cared for seriously wounded patients, attended in the operating theatre during operations and even helped clean up after amputations. “I would wash [away] all the blood,” she later wrote, “and stick [the limb] in the furnace myself.”
Christie’s tone is British stiff-upper lip as she recounts some advice from another nurse: “Everything in life one gets used to and if you can last it out, you’ll have no trouble.” But it is striking that although she went on to become “The Queen of Crime”, there is almost no blood, and certainly no gore, in her books.
Instead she prefers the clean method of poisoning, again, no doubt, influenced by her experiences in the war. After serving as a nurse, she qualified as a dispenser, who mixes the tonics and medicines for prescription. It clearly made a mark: out of the 66 full-length detective novels she wrote, more than half feature poisoning.
But the war did much more than provide her with a cabinet of poisons for a career in crime writing. The war years also unlock the story of Christie herself, the private woman whose life became something of a mystery itself.
When the war broke out in 1914, Agatha Miller was a pretty girl engaged to a young man called Archie Christie. He had just been accepted by the RAF and was going to France as a flying officer.
On Christmas Eve 1914 they were married in Archie’s parish church, in their street clothes, while Archie was on leave from the front.
In the passionate love letters Archie wrote to Christie during the war he told her, “I love you much too much – more than ever now – to take any risks. Death only means to me being separated from you.”
During the war, Archie was promoted several times, becoming a Colonel, and in 1918 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and in 1919 Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG).
But as Christie’s novels later attested, a happy ending was hard to find.
A few short years after the war, Archie revealed to her that he had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, one of their friends. It broke Christie’s heart, precipitated her mysterious 11-day disappearance, and as her daughter Rosalind remarked, “she never got over losing him”.
In fact, according to Christie’s only grandchild, Mathew Prichard, she almost never spoke of Archie again.
She was so careful to avoid the subject that Mathew grew up believing her second husband, Max Mallowan, to be his grandfather.
Prichard says: “She avoided the subject of the [First World] war altogether, because that was when my grandfather was alive.”
The centenary of the First World War has prompted a great deal of reflection on, even celebration of, the literature of the times.
But, strangely, the First World War is largely overlooked in the consideration of Christie.
Perhaps this is because her response to the severed limbs and human horror was, like so much else in her life, to disguise it: in her books, death is not violent but artful, it happens not in the trenches but in vicarages, victims are beautiful and well-dressed, corpses are rarely seen and never lingered upon.
After four years in which the world had seen murder turned into an industry, she made it into a work of art. The Telegraph
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