Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade Read Free Book Online Page B

for Agatha that she contemplated taking Rosalind home with her to Ashfield or Abney Hall while Archie sorted himself out. Being sensitive to failure, he hated being unable to get a job. If Agatha attempted to take his mind off their worries by indulging in light-hearted chat she was accused of having no sense of the gravity of their situation; while if she was silent she was censored for not trying to cheer him up.
    By November 1923 Agatha had completed The Man in the Brown Suit , a fast-moving thriller, set mainly in South Africa, involving the murder of a Russian dancer, the disappearance of some jewels and a mysterious arch-criminal known only as ‘the Colonel’. The characters of Sir Eustace Pedler and his secretary Guy Pagett were based on Major Belcher and his put-upon secretary Francis Bates from the British Empire Tour.
    Agatha injected her own feelings and experiences about marriage into the character of Anne Beddingfeld, the attractive and fiercely independent heroine. She says she would not dream of marrying anyone unless she was madly in love with him and insists that sacrifices are worth it for the man one loves. She claims that the reason so many marriages are unhappy is because husbands either give way to their wives all the time or else cause resentment in their wives by being utterly selfish. She maintains that women like to be mastered but hate not to have their sacrifices appreciated, while men do not really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. She concludes that the most successful marriages occur where a man is able to get his wife to do precisely what he wants then makes an enormous fuss of her.
    As if recognizing where her own subservience had landed her, Agatha has the heroine add defiantly that when she is married she will be a devil most of the time but will occasionally surprise her husband by behaving angelically. When the hero remarks what a cat-and-dog life she will lead, she assures him that lovers always fight because they don’t understand each other and that by the time they do they aren’t in love any more. The hero asks if the reverse is true, whether people who always fight each other are lovers? The heroine is lost for a reply.
    This exchange suggests that, while Agatha had reason to feel unappreciated by Archie, she considered that discord and confusion were acceptable in a marriage because it indicated that the couple still loved each other and that the woman’s suffering was all part of the greater, nobler cause of love.
    Meanwhile, Archie’s professional difficulties had at last ended; he had found a job with a somewhat disreputable firm. While he knew that he would have to be careful not to get caught up in anything shady, he was finally able to smile again. Agatha was delighted in the change in him and was relieved to find her marriage back on a seemingly even keel.
    By now the Bodley Head had recognized Agatha’s commercial worth and suggested scrapping her old contract for a new one, also for five books but with more favourable terms. Agatha declined the offer without giving a specific reason.
    She had reason to feel confident about her decision on account of the popular reception of some Hercule Poirot stories she had written for The Sketch and the accompanying star treatment she had received. The first series had appeared between March and May 1923 and had been heralded by a portrait taken by Boorthorn that showed a poised Agatha wearing a string of pearls. She had by now cropped her long blonde hair into a stylish red-tinted bob and had been proclaimed by The Sketch’s publicist, with reference to The Mysterious Affair at Styles , as ‘Writer of the Most Brilliant Detective Novel of the Day’. In March another page of The Sketch had been devoted to photographs by Alfieri, taken at the author’s home. Finally, ‘A Family Portrait’, in which Archie was conspicuously absent from Marcus Adams’s charming studio photograph of Agatha and Rosalind, had