Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations (11 page)

Tried and sentenced to fourteen years imprisonment, Fuchs was released after serving nine years in Wormwood Scrubs and immediately travelled to East Germany, where the Soviets placed him in charge of nuclear research at Dresden – a reward for presenting them with the world’s most powerful weapon free of charge.

Eight months after the disappearance of Klaus Fuchs, another brilliant scientist, Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993), failed to return to England after going on holiday with his family. Born in Pisa, the brother of film director Gillo Pontecorvo and geneticist Guido Pontecorvo, the physicist had left Italy in the 1930s to avoid the Fascist regime’s discrimination against his Jewish faith. He lived in Paris until the Nazis entered the city in the Second World War, then worked in America until he was invited to contribute to the British atomic bomb project at Harwell in 1947. However, in August 1951, he abruptly abandoned his holiday in Rome and, accompanied by his wife and three children, boarded a plane for Stockholm without informing friends or relatives. Fears for his motives grew when a passenger on the flight revealed that five-year-old Antonio Pontecorvo had told him that the family were going to Russia. Unbeknown to the security services, Soviet agents had helped the Pontecorvos to enter the USSR from Finland. Confirmation of this outcome was not forthcoming until 1955, when Pontecorvo held a news conference in Moscow declaring that he had been granted refuge in the Soviet Union where he was involved in nuclear research for peaceful purposes and had left the West because, in his view, it was intent (like the megalomaniac in Agatha Christie’s novel) on ‘new war using atomic and nuclear weapons as means for achieving world domination’.

In Christie’s political thriller
Passenger to Frankfurt
(1970) two characters discuss the most sensational spy scandal of the post-war period when Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean escaped arrest for their treachery by seeking sanctuary in the Soviet Union. With a theatrical flourish, the partners in crime fled the country on a ferry from Southampton to France en route to Moscow in May 1951, with Maclean dressed in drag and posing as Burgess’s wife. Guy Burgess, a native of Devonport who had undergone service training at the Britannia Royal Naval College on the River Dart near Greenway, was fully conversant with the novels of Agatha Christie and playfully fooled the security services by using
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
and
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
to complete an elaborate disguise by using the alias ‘Roger Styles’.

I never really wanted to play Miss Marple. I have always hated violence of any kind and murder in particular.

Margaret Rutherford (1972)

Oscar-winner Dame Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972), the well-loved ‘spaniel-jowled’ actress of whom acid-tongued critic Kenneth Tynan once affectionately observed, ‘The unique thing about Ms Rutherford is that she can act with her chins alone’ was the niece of Sir Joshua Benn and the cousin of politician Tony Benn, but throughout her life hid a terrible secret about her family’s past. In her autobiography, completed shortly before her death, she glossed over the fate of her parents by simply commenting, ‘My father died in tragic circumstances soon after my mother, and so I became an orphan’. Behind this fabricated understatement lay the fact that she was tormented by a grisly murder, far more bloody than any she was to investigate in her later role as Agatha Christie’s fictional sleuth Miss Marple.

Ten years before Margaret’s birth her father, William Rutherford Benn, who had recently been released from an asylum where he had received lengthy treatment for mental health problems, suffered a complete psychotic breakdown and battered his clergyman father’s head to a pulp with a chamber pot before making a vain bid to end his own life by slashing his throat with a knife. After spending seven years in Broadmoor, the recovered patient was discharged into the care of his devoted wife, Florence. Changing their surname from Benn to Rutherford, the family made a new start in India soon after their only child, Margaret, was born, but when the infant was aged three her depressive mother hanged herself from a tree in the garden of their home in Madras. Returning to England, the grief-stricken husband was re-admitted permanently to Broadmoor. Young Margaret was then raised in London by a kindly aunt who thought it best to shield her from the terrible truth of family murder, madness and suicide by allowing her to believe that both parents were dead. At the age of twelve, Margaret learned the terrible truth from her aunt after the shocked young girl answered the door to a dishevelled man who delivered a message from her father purportedly sending his love. These horrifying revelations precipitated bouts of depressive illness brought on by an irrational fear that her mad father might escape and harm her.

As an adult, Margaret earned a living by teaching the piano and giving elocution lessons before turning to professional acting at the age of thirty-three. Finally realising a long-held ambition to join the Old Vic Co., she fell in love with fellow actor Stringer Davis, who cared for his ailing mother for a further fifteen years before popping the question; the devoted couple eventually married when the groom was forty-six and the bride fifty-three.

Margaret Rutherford gave several memorable stage and film performances during the 1930s before winning a special place in the hearts of cinema audiences as the bicycle-riding medium in Noel Coward’s
Blithe Spirit
in 1945. That same year, the actress made her first appearance in an Agatha Christie work in the touring company of the stage hit
Appointment with Death
. It was over fifteen years later that she accepted an offer from MGM to play Miss Marple in
Murder She Said
(1961), loosely adapted from the murder mystery
4.50 From Paddington
(1957). Fully aware of the unsympathetic treatment that her novels were to receive at the hands of the producers, a resigned Agatha Christie watched the knockabout comedy at the ABC Cinema, Torquay, and wrote to her agent: ‘Don’t think I’m upset by
Murder She Said
. I’m not. It’s more or less what I expected all along’. Agatha was shocked further when a Poirot case,
After the Funeral,
(1953) was converted into a vehicle for Miss Marple in the movie
Murder At the Gallop
(1963). The third outing caused even more consternation when another Poirot novel,
Mrs McGinty’s Dead
(1952), was converted into a horrendous title the author had conceived in the short story ‘Mr Eastwood’s Adventure’ (1934), where a thriller writer submits a story to a publisher predicting he will probably change it to ‘something rotten’ like ‘Murder Most Foul’. Despite her objections to the next production, Agatha Christie suffered her worst indignity when the scriptwriters invented a totally original storyline for the final film of the series,
Murder Ahoy!,
released in 1964.

Although the creator’s misgivings at the distortion of her characters and plots were understandable, the films proved extremely popular at the box office and were well received by reviewers. Alexander Walker in the
Evening Standard
praised the star’s performance:

Margaret Rutherford fills the spinster’s tweeds of the renowned detective Miss Marple splendidly. She is hugely enjoyable. With chin wagging like a windsock on an airfield and eyes that are deceptively guileless, she clumps her way through lines, situations and disguises that would bunker an actress of less imperial aplomb.

Rutherford recalled in her autobiography how Christie had reacted to her casting:

I didn’t know it at the time, but she was not keen on me playing Miss Marple. It was not a question of my acting, just that I didn’t look at all like her idea of the detective. She saw her as a kind of fragile, pink-and-white lady, not physically like me at all! But when we met face to face on the set of
Murder She Said
, we instantly clicked and became friends. We became admirers of each other’s work - hers is the world of the pen, and mine is of speech. Agatha even dedicated to me one of her Miss Marple books,
The Mirror Crack’d From Side to Side
.

Although there is no doubt that the author’s gracious dedication was genuine, the book itself, featuring a series of murders on a film set, seemingly reflects the author’s unflattering view of a film industry riddled with neurotics, egomaniacs, backstabbers and blackmailers.

Oh well, those days don’t seem to last when you’re living hard and fast, And life is sweet all down the line:

But when you’re counting stars looking through them prison bars, Thirty years is a long, long time.

Song chorus,
The Great Train Robbery
(1964)

The Great Train Robbery of 1963 was still fresh in the public mind when Agatha Christie wrote
At Bertram’s Hotel
(1965). The novel features Miss Marple, who is staying at a restored London hotel which, she discovers, is also the headquarters of a criminal mastermind and his gang that includes a jet-setting racing driver who handles a getaway car in the ‘Irish Mail train robbery’. This character was doubtless inspired by a real-life thief with a talent for racing, Roy James, who played a leading role in the most audacious heist of the twentieth century.

Long before his involvement in the infamous train robbery, Roy James had served periods of imprisonment for theft, often using the proceeds to fund his involvement in motorsport where he showed great promise and often lined up on the grid with the likes of future Grand Prix World Champions Jack Brabham, Denny Hulme and Jackie Stewart. While competing in Monte Carlo in 1962, he and an accomplice, Mickey Ball, also stole £144,000 worth of jewellery and on their return to England took part in a daylight robbery at Heathrow Airport, stealing a payroll protected by an armoured car. James needed all of his motoring skills to escape from the scene of the crime in one of two stolen Jaguars. While exiting through a gate in the airport’s perimeter fence, he bounced off an Austin A40 trying to block his way; then, once on the main road, he balked traffic in the middle of an intersection, allowing his mate Mickey Ball to catch up and pass through a red light. In the ensuing investigation, Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad quickly rounded up James and Ball, suspecting that they had orchestrated the daring getaway. A confession was extracted from Ball, who was jailed, but the case against James collapsed and he used his share of the spoils to purchase a top of the range racing car to enter a Formula Junior race, which he won in 1963.

The airport robbery had netted the gang £62,000, but the same ‘firm’ set its sights much higher for the next job, when leader Bruce Reynolds meticulously devised a plan to hit the Edinburgh to London night train carrying £2.6 million in used bank notes, on their way to be destroyed at the Royal Mint. On 7 August 1963, the train was duly stopped by rigging a railway signal located on an isolated stretch of track at Cheddington, near Leighton Buzzard. The cab was stormed and the driver, Jack Mills, coshed over the head for initially refusing to move the train along the track to the waiting vehicles. Once this manoeuvre had been completed by the semi-concussed driver, a human chain was formed to load 150 moneybags onto an old Army truck. On this occasion, fast driving skills were not required as Roy James sedately transported some of his accomplices the short distance to a rented farmhouse at the wheel of a Land Rover.

Like a scene from an Ealing comedy, the jubilant crooks counted their ill-gotten gains and passed the time by playing Monopoly with the stolen banknotes – carelessly leaving their fingerprints on the board. When the police located the gang’s hideout at Leatherslade Farm, they found an embarrassment of evidence and made short work of rounding up the majority of the culprits. James went into hiding but was caught early in December after failing to make his escape with a rooftop dash and a daring 30ft leap to the ground, where the police were waiting to apprehend him. Savage sentences were handed out at the trial of the train robbers with seven of them – Ronnie Biggs, Gordon Goody, Robert Welch, Thomas Wisbey, James Hussey, Charley Wilson and Roy James – receiving terms of thirty years. His dream of becoming a top racing driver finally over, James became the first train robber to be released on parole in 1975, only to discover that a friend he had entrusted with his share of the money had spent it all while he was in prison.

When
At Bertram’s Hotel
was published in 1965, the Great Train Robbery was still hot news with the recent high-profile prison escapes by Charley Wilson and Ronnie Biggs, whilst criminal mastermind Bruce Reynolds remained at large until an international manhunt came to an end in November 1968. He was also sentenced to thirty years imprisonment after being arrested in a dawn raid mounted by the Flying Squad in Torquay. For the previous two months, the career criminal had revisited the resort where he had spent childhood holidays with his parents. Accompanied by his wife, Frances, and their six-year-old son, Nicholas, they resided at a rented luxury villa with panoramic views of Torbay. Reynolds planned to move to New Zealand, but after five years on the run with periods spent in Canada and Mexico, his share of the bank loot had dwindled from £150,000 to just £5,000. Ten days before his capture, Reynolds had a slight brush with the law for parking too close to a zebra crossing. A policeman asked him to produce his driving documents at the local police station and Britain’s most wanted man calmly took his son along with him and was not recognised during the routine check. Using a false name, the robber had recently taken a driving test at nearby Newton Abbot and passed despite his nervousness when the examiner revealed that he had previously been a member of the Flying Squad. During their brief stay, the Reynolds were also members of Torquay Library, enrolling under their current alias ‘Miller’, which coincidentally was the maiden name of the town’s famous crime author, Agatha Christie!