LITMIR.BIZ

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had still left him grave and serious. He had been obliged to grow up too fast. Like a schoolboy, he demanded the smooth, sweet viscosity of golden syrup to comfort his nervous stomach and, with a sudden infusion of sugar, refuel his slender, exhausted frame.

      Not that Agatha overlooked this. She understood Archie and was later to describe in her books the sort of difficulty that men of his age and temperament found when they returned to everyday life after an heroic war. In many ways – as that unexpected pregnancy shows – she was able to settle down more quickly to changed conditions and a new pace. After a fortnight with the newly born Rosalind at Ashfield, she returned to London to secure the services of a nurse and a maid of all work, and to find furnished accommodation in which they could live while she looked for an unfurnished flat they could decorate and arrange themselves. With much expenditure of time, energy and emotion, all this was accomplished.

      Archie had left the Air Force at the end of the War, determined to go into the City to make some money. It was not too difficult to find an opening, since City firms, whose usual recruits had gone from school to the battlefield, there to be wiped out in swathes, were naturally anxious to offer posts to brave and enthusiastic young officers. This did not mean, however, that Archie earned a large salary; his first job brought him £500 a year, which, with his gratuity and savings giving another £100 a year, and Agatha’s £100 annual income from her grandfather’s trust, was just enough. Rent and the price of food had risen enormously compared with costs before the War but to employ a nurse and cook/housemaid was not considered a luxury. Owning a motor car, however, would have been an immense extravagance.

      Nonetheless, Agatha was perfectly happy. By a stroke of luck, she heard of an unfurnished flat, No. 96, in the same building – Addison Mansions – as the furnished one, No. 25, in which they were perching, and its ordering and decoration gave her a great deal of pleasure. She always enjoyed acquiring and embellishing houses; this time she and Archie papered and tiled the bathroom in scarlet and white, with the help of a painter and decorator. With a friend from the Air Force and his sister, they painted the walls of the sitting-room shiny pale pink and, to the professional decorator’s eventual grudging approval, covered the ceiling with black glossy paper decorated with hawthorn blossoms. Rosalind’s nursery was washed with pale yellow paint, with an animal frieze around the top of the wall. The curtains were made elsewhere but Agatha bravely assembled loose covers for the furniture, though, she remembered, she ‘did not attempt to do any piping’. She kept careful records of the furnishing and decorating expenses, some of which were assigned to her and some to Archie’s account. Archie, for instance, bought Rosalind’s frieze and a bed from Maples, Agatha a mattress and a mincing machine. The installation of a telephone (£4) was put down to Archie and purple quilts to a general housekeeping account. There was no piano, another reason why Ashfield remained important.

      1919 was a good year for Agatha. She had found and was furnishing a pretty flat, she enjoyed her interesting and equably tempered daughter, delighted in her husband and got on well with her servants. She was young and attractive and her family’s health was good; she was not greatly worried about bills. Her spirits became even more buoyant with the next welcome surprise: just before she and Archie moved into the new flat, John Lane asked her to come to discuss the typescript of The Mysterious Affair at Styles which had been sent to The Bodley Head two years before. It was a moment of great significance in Agatha’s life and her recollection of it is like a scene on the stage or in a picture. Indeed, she describes John Lane, ‘a small man with a white beard’, sitting behind a desk in a room full of pictures, looking Elizabethan, as if he should have been a portrait himself, with a ruff around his neck. Her memory has framed that encounter between the young amateur author and the shrewd professional publisher. At the time Agatha was delighted with the outcome. John Lane liked her book, though he suggested various minor alterations and a major change in the ending. He would publish it, and would give her a ten per cent royalty on any English sales over two thousand copies and on American sales exceeding one thousand copies, together with half of anything the book earned from serial or dramatic rights. The Bodley Head was to have an option, at only a slightly increased rate of royalty, on her next five books. In later years, when Agatha knew her work was popular and her name valuable, she would feel that John Lane had taken advantage of her inexperience – as indeed he had.

      The relationship between writer and publisher is studded with traps but at this first meeting, matters were relatively simple. John Lane drove a hard bargain with an untried author, who was overjoyed at the thought of her book’s being published and who had not contemplated this as a way of earning money. She agreed to alter the last chapter, changing it from a court scene to a conversation in the library between Poirot and Hastings, his amanuensis and well-meaning but blundering colleague, and she modestly celebrated her success with Archie. The serial rights of The Mysterious Affair at Styles were sold to the Weekly Times for £50, of which Agatha received half, and the volume was published in America in 1920 and in England, at seven and sixpence, in 1921. Agatha dedicated it to Clara.

      Soon after Rosalind’s birth in 1919, Auntie-Grannie had died at the age of ninety-two, of heart failure after an attack of bronchitis. With her death went part of the income salvaged from the wreck of H. B. Chaflin, and Ashfield accordingly became even more difficult for Agatha, Clara and Madge to keep up. Archie first proposed that Ashfield be sold, to enable Clara to live more economically and conveniently, but, when Agatha vigorously protested that the idea was unthinkable, he suggested that she should write another book. Although she did not believe she would earn much money this way, she did draw some encouragement from Archie’s remarks, which seemed to indicate that (like Dermot in Unfinished Portrait) he did not wholly disapprove of his wife’s literary efforts.

      Agatha next produced a thriller. Its catalyst was a discussion overheard in an ABC teashop, in which the name ‘Jane Fish’ struck Agatha as particularly odd and interesting. Jane Finn, as she became, is an elusive figure, who has been entrusted in the middle of the War with the delivery of certain important documents, which various individuals and factions are attempting to obtain. The hero and heroine of the novel are a pair of ‘young adventurers’ (one of the titles Agatha originally tried), unemployed after leaving the Forces, ingenious, affectionate, unsophisticated and irrepressible and, particularly in the case of the girl, arch to the point of being irritating. The novel is especially interesting, however, not so much because it introduces Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, but for the first appearance of two important themes that were to figure in much of Agatha’s work: the search for the mysterious possessor of some valuable secret or special knowledge – who may be a courier, a conspirator, the perpetrator of a crime, and who is as likely to be a woman as a man – and the identification of some powerful figure, able to buy unlimited information and arms, to travel anywhere and influence anyone, bent on domination. Sometimes, as in the story of the pursuit of Jane Finn by the ‘man behind the Bolshevists’, the two characters are opposed; in other books they are one and the same. The person who seeks to dominate is, without exception, evil at worst or of deplorable character at best; the possessor of secrets, on the other hand, may be either a sinister presence, an innocent pawn, or, as in the case where it is a detective with insight and experience, a force for good.

      John Lane accepted The Secret Adversary, as Agatha eventually called her second novel, for publication in 1922. It earned her £50, although what proportion of this came from the sale of serial rights and what from an advance on royalties is unclear from the ambiguous sentence in her draft Autobiography. More encouraging than cheques from John Lane and the Weekly Times was the praise she received from Bruce Ingram, editor of the Sketch, who commissioned her to write a series of Poirot stories for his paper. She began to compose these in 1921, together with another full-length detective novel, Murder on the Links, which was based on her recollection of a complicated case of murder that had happened in France not long before and on a number of French detective stories she had been reading. At this point, however, there were two interruptions.

      The first was the prospect of the return to England of Agatha’s brother Monty, who had been living in a precarious, harum-scarum way in various parts of the Empire. After Frederick’s death in 1901 he had come home on leave and had then gone back to his Regiment in India, where, having come of age and into his inheritance under Nathaniel’s will, he proceeded to enjoy his legacy. It

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