Agatha Christie – Lord Edgware Dies

According to Agatha, the first thing that happened when the starting pistol was fired was that everyone made a concerted rush forward and most of them fell flat on their faces into the river. There had been a great deal of betting on the race, and when it was over a huge feast was held at night at which most of the prizes were consumed in a very short time. It was a great day for the AAAA.

It was early in May when the expedition departed first for Baghdad, where an equitable division of the objects found was made at the Baghdad Museum, and it was then back home to England. The Director of Antiquities in Baghdad, Dr Julius Jordan, a German, was a Nazi agent who did all he could to undermine British authority in Iraq. Personally, he could not have been more charming to the Mallowans. He was an excellent pianist, played Beethoven sonatas for them, and seemed always a gentle, considerate and cultured human being. But, at tea one day in his house, someone mentioned Jews. Agatha noticed that the expression on Dr Jordan’s face changed suddenly, ‘in an extraordinary way that I had never noticed on anyone’s face before’. ‘You do not understand,’ said the Doctor. ‘Our Jews are perhaps different from yours. They are a danger. They should be exterminated. Nothing else will really do but that.’

Agatha stared at him unbelievingly. It was, she wrote later, the first time she had come across any hint of what was soon to happen in Germany. She had met her first Nazi, and she discovered later that Dr Jordan’s wife was an even more fanatical Nazi than her husband. It must have been, you cannot help thinking, a salutary experience for Agatha Christie, for the casual anti-semitic comments which disfigure most of her earlier books are not to be found in such profusion in those published after the mid-thirties. Probably, too, her outlook was broadened by her contact with the more cosmopolitan mind of Max Mallowan.

After the Mallowan arrived back in England, Max spent a busy summer writing up his account of the expedition. An exhibition of some of their finds was held at the British Museum, and Max’s book on Arpachiyah was published several months later. But on the actual day of their return to London from the Middle East, it was the novelist, not the archaeologist, whom the journalists were most concerned to interview.

The novel which Agatha Christie had written in the autumn of 1931 at Ninevah, on the table she purchased at the Mosul bazaar, was published in the spring of 1933 in Great Britain as Lord Edgware Dies and in the United States as Thirteen at Dinner, and dedicated to Dr and Mrs Campbell Thompson, the leader of the Ninevah expedition and his wife.

Poirot, who has solved murders in English villages and French seaside resorts, finds himself this time investigating a crime in the West End of London, supping at the Savoy, interviewing suspects in a mansion in Regent’s Park, and venturing no farther from the metropolis than Sir Montagu Corner’s house on the river at Chiswack, which is where the dinner party for thirteen takes place…

Agatha Christie revealed in her autobiography that the idea for Lord Edgware Dies had first come to her after she had been to a performance by the famous American entertainer, Ruth Draper. ‘I thought how clever she was and how good her impersonations were; the wonderful way she could transform herself from a nagging wife to a peasant girl kneeling in a cathedral.’ Carlotta Adams was clearly based on Ruth Draper, whom older playgoers in London will remember, for, although she first appeared in London in 1920 with her dramatic monologues at two matinées at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street (Carlotta Adams in Lord Edgware Dies ‘had given a couple of matinées which had been a wild success’15 before doing a three weeks’ season the following year), Ruth Draper continued to visit London for the following thirty-six years, giving her final performance at the St James’s Theatre (now, alas, demolished) in July 1956, the year of her death. She possessed, to an extraordinary extent, the ability to alter her appearance with the minimum of help from props or costumes, merely by thinking herself into the character she wished to impersonate…