Thoughts on things...

4. Agatha Christie and her true crime inspiration

At the end of last year I was doing an event about Agatha Christie, and the moment came for ‘questions’. Am I the only writer who dreads this moment? Surely not. The faint shuffling embarrassment when it seems as though nobody actually wants to ask anything. The anticipatory alarm, when a hand is raised, that the question might be antagonistic/ nonsensical - or indeed both, as with the woman in Edinburgh who demanded that I explain why Agatha Christie disliked blondes. I actually stopped doing events for my Lord Lucan book - which is not wholly sympathetic to Lucan’s wife - after receiving an enraged diatribe on how I should ‘educate’ myself about the lives of married women in the 1970s; I snapped back that I knew about them from my mother, thanks so much; then had to spend the rest of the evening trying to atone - unsuccessfully - for having dropped the authorial pretence that all questions/ comments are valued (we really only like the positive stuff).

There is, incidentally, a truly hilarious ‘questions section’ scene in the 1983 film The Ploughman’s Lunch (written by Ian McEwan, hence the verisimilitude): a poetry reading culminates with the author being asked what is the poet’s role in society today, at which his cynical, non-poet friends blow the whole thing apart by bursting into uncontrollable laughter.

Anyway. My real anxiety, with ‘questions’, is that an area of ignorance will be exposed. As with lawyers, authors want to be asked something to which they already know the answer; even though a good question - and some are very good indeed - can open up a new aspect of one’s knowledge, and make an answer more nuanced and thoughtful. But not knowing, not being authoritative, even just for one moment, can nullify the entire previous 55 minutes: there is a sense of wavering dissatisfaction within the audience, as if they fear that they have been listening to the equivalent of a fraudulent medium.

Even though it might simply be that one’s concentration fails.

As happened to me, at the Agatha event at the end of last year (my excuse is that I was ‘coming down with something’, although really there is no excuse). I was asked an interesting question - were any of her books inspired by real-life murders? - and the waffle that ensued from my lips would have absorbed a pint of maple syrup. Only afterwards, when a very nice audience member (nice not least because he could have said this in front of everybody) came up to me and said, what about Murder on the Orient Express, did I remember how my answer might have begun, and what it should have been.

Here it is now.

Orient Express was published in 1934, two years after the highly-publicized case in which the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. To be accurate, the inspiration for Orient Express was - in the very first instance - an interminable journey that Agatha took on the train in 1931. But her plot, and the powerful moral conundrum that underpins her solution, proceeds from a circumstance near-identical to the Lindbergh case: a child, in this case a girl, is seized from a rich American family and killed despite a ransom being paid.

Not that Agatha ever acknowledged the connection, to the best of my knowledge - she was very cool and enigmatic about her work.