Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations (3 page)

However, people in her hometown were far from convinced by her plea of innocence. Lizzie was ostracised by the community but continued to live in Fall River until her death in 1927. Her body was then laid to rest alongside the graves of her murdered parents. One of the most famous unsolved crimes in America, a theory has been advanced that Lizzie Borden could have wielded the axe while having an epileptic fit from which she emerged with no memory of the atrocity. Agatha Christie mentioned the crime on other occasions: the Borden case is recalled by characters in
And Then There Were None
(1939) and
Sleeping Murder
(1976), and a famous contemporary nursery rhyme is quoted in
After the Funeral
(1953):’Lizzie Borden with an axe gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one’.

Another real-life case that developed ‘after the funeral’ was the case of Sarah Anne Hearn, whose alleged method of poisoning was alluded to in
Sad Cypress
(1940). The middle-aged widow lived at Lewannick, Cornwall, where she cared for her invalid sister Lydia Everard until her death in 1930. Sarah’s immediate neighbours were a kindly farmer and his wife, William and Annie Thomas, who showed concern for the bereaved woman living on her own and went out of their way to be helpful and friendly. In October 1930, the Thomas’s offered to take Sarah on an afternoon drive to Bude and she made some salmon paste sandwiches that were consumed by all three people during the outing. On the way home Annie Thomas became ill and was later admitted to Plymouth Hospital, where she died two weeks later. When a post-mortem revealed arsenic in the dead woman’s body, pointed remarks were made at the funeral by the victim’s brother, who was convinced that there was poison in the sandwiches prepared by Sarah Hearn.

In response to these comments, the accused woman disappeared and there were concerns for her safety when items of her clothing were found on a cliff top at Looe. A letter posted to William Thomas suggested that she had committed suicide: ‘Goodbye… I cannot forget that awful man and the things he said. I am innocent, innocent. But she is dead and it was my lunch she ate… When I am dead they will be sure I am guilty and you at least will be clear’. Far from being dead, however, Mrs Hearn had carefully planned her flight and journeyed from Looe to Torquay, where she obtained a job as a housekeeper using the assumed name of ‘Annie Faithful’. Meanwhile, an inquest found that Annie Thomas had been poisoned by arsenic and an exhumation of Sarah Hearn’s recently deceased sister also revealed levels of the poison in her body.

Alerted to her presence in Torquay by her suspicious employer, the police arrested Sarah Hearn, who stood trial for murder at Bodmin Assizes in June 1931. The prisoner impressed the jury by taking the witness stand and calmly denying that she had poisoned anyone. Furthermore, her defence counsel contended that arsenic found in Cornish soil had penetrated the coffins of the dead women and Sarah Hearn walked free, acquitted of double murder.

You know my methods in such cases, Watson: I put myself in the man’s place, and having first gauged the man’s intelligence, I try to imagine how I should proceed under the same circumstances.

Sherlock Holmes (
The Adventures of the Musgrave Ritual
, 1893)

Agatha Christie always felt a keen sense of rivalry with the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author she revered and succeeded as the world’s most popular crime writer, for he had set a high standard by which all authors must be judged.

Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, grew up in the city and studied medicine before moving to Plymouth for a short time in 1882. He briefly joined the practice of Dr George Budd, but resigned after observing the eccentric practices of his employer, who on one occasion insisted that he and Doyle throw plates of food at each other to cure a patient of lockjaw by making the sufferer laugh!

Setting up his own practice in Portsmouth, Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1887. The following year he applied a combination of his own medical knowledge and the cool logic of his fictional detective to a shocking real-life case in Whitechapel. In a letter published in
The Times
, Doyle suggested that Jack the Ripper might be a man disguised as a midwife who was able to commit the murders and walk through the district in a bloodstained apron without attracting undue suspicion. Doyle himself has been named as a possible suspect in the hunt for the perpetrator of the East End atrocities, possessing the necessary medical and criminological skills to fit the profile of Jack the Ripper. The novelist has also been implicated in the alleged poisoning of two well-known personalities. The first case occurred shortly after Doyle returned from medical service in the Boer War, for which he was awarded a knighthood in 1902. Tired of the effect that crime fiction was having on his ambition to become an historical novelist, Doyle had killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 before bowing to public pressure to revive the detective hero in his best-known case,
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, written while he was staying on Dartmoor at the Duchy Hotel, Princetown, in 1901. In the book’s dedication, the author faithfully acknowledged that, ‘This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details’.

Journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who later became editor of
Vanity Fair
, lived on the edge of the moor at Ipplepen and regaled Doyle with local legends of spectral demon hounds. The coachman who drove the pair around the district was the man whose name inspired the title, Harry Baskerville, who later claimed that Robinson had not received the credit he deserved for co-writing the story with Doyle. In 2003, author Rodger Garrick-Steele went further and presented a theory that Robinson was the sole author of the book and had been murdered at the insistence of Doyle, who was having an affair with his wife Gladys, whom he persuaded to administer lethal doses of laudanum to her husband. The symptoms of laudanum poisoning are similar to typhoid, which was the official cause of death when Robinson passed away aged thirty-six in 1907. Doyle, however, curiously contended that his friend, who had dabbled in Egyptology, was a victim of selective poisoning through the same so-called ‘Mummy’s Curse’ that killed Tutankhamun-discoverer Lord Carnavon.

Doyle had a child-like belief in the occult, believed in the existence of fairies and was a champion of spiritualism – an issue he hotly debated in correspondence with Harry Houdini. The legendary escapologist fervently denounced false mediums until his death from peritonitis on Halloween 1926, although his great-nephew George Hardeen contended in
The Secret Life of Houdini
(2007) that no autopsy was carried out on the American showman to determine the cause of death. Furthermore, he contends that it was an act of deliberate poisoning by a group called the Spiritualists, led by Doyle, who wrote to a fellow devotee in 1924 that Houdini ‘would get his just deserts very exactly meted out… I think there is a general payday coming soon’.

When Agatha Christie’s car was found abandoned in mysterious circumstances following the shock of the breakdown of her first marriage in 1926, Doyle took an active part in the search to find out what had become of her. This was not by utilising the deductive powers of his fictional detective, but by obtaining the services of spiritualist Horace Leaf. After handing the medium a glove belonging to the missing writer, Sir Arthur later recalled:

He never saw it until I laid it on the table at the moment of consultation, and there was nothing to connect either it or me with the Christie case... He at once got the name Agatha: ‘There is trouble connected with this article. The person who owns it is half-dazed and half-purposeful. She is not dead as many think. She is alive. You will hear of her next Wednesday’.

Indeed, the world did learn of Agatha’s whereabouts that day when newspapers broke the news that she had been found suffering from amnesia staying at a luxury hotel in Harrogate.

When Arthur Conan Doyle gave a lecture on ‘Death and the Hereafter’ at Torquay in September 1920, newly published author Agatha Christie was in the audience and rose at the end to propose a vote of thanks to the distinguished speaker. A year after Doyle’s own death, she based the story of
The Sittaford Mystery
(1931) on Dartmoor where, in a twist reminiscent of the classic
The Hound of the Baskervilles
, a villainous convict makes his escape across the misty landscape in a supernatural mystery, where the plot concerns the murder of a man whose death was foretold to the hour by the spirits at a séance. Dartmoor was also the place where Agatha chose to complete her first success,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
(1920), whilst staying at the Moorland Hotel, Haytor.

One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.

Oscar Wilde (
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, 1891)

Agatha Christie completed her first published novel,
The Mysterious Affair at Styles
, in 1916 but, astonishingly, the creation of Hercule Poirot, who used his ‘little grey cells’ to solve crimes, did not immediately find favour with publishers. Having been rejected by various publishing houses, the budding author had become a mother and virtually given up all hope of becoming a writer when, two years after submitting her manuscript, she was surprised to receive an offer from The Bodley Head. The managing director, John Lane, explained that he was taking a risk with an unknown writer but believed the work showed some promise and the relieved author naïvely signed a disadvantageous publishing contract which she would later regret.

During the 1920s the company relied heavily on sales from out-of-copyright works, and amusingly revealed that they had received enquiries from the Inland Revenue about the earnings of ‘Mr W. Shakespeare’ and ‘Mr O. Kyam’. Before the signing of Agatha Christie, The Bodley Head’s most famous discovery had been literary genius Oscar Wilde, whose spectacular fall from grace can be partially attributed to an incriminating letter he wrote in the birthplace of Christie, who was two years old when Wilde stayed in Torquay from November 1892 until March 1893. Wilde leased the villa Babbacombe Cliff from the owner, Lady Mount-Temple, a distant cousin and confidante of Oscar’s wife Constance. Writing to Lady Mount-Temple whilst she was wintering abroad, Wilde commented, ‘I find the peace and beauty here so good for troubled nerves, and so suggestive for new work’.

During his stay, Oscar completed the play
A Woman of
No Importance
and supervised rehearsals of the first amateur production of
Lady Windermere’s
Fan
, directed by the Mayoress Mrs Splatt, which opened in January 1893 at Torquay’s Theatre Royal. He also granted an interview to local history author and solicitor Percy Almy that appeared in the magazine
The Theatre
. Almy observed that Wilde had ‘an engaging charm’ which would win him many disciples and interestingly, in view of the scandal that was about to engulf him, recorded the great man’s thoughts on criminals: ‘Never attempt to reform a man, men never repent’.

Early in February, Constance left to join friends in Florence. Immediately, Oscar was joined by his close friend Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, accompanied by his tutor, who wrote of Wilde whilst staying in Babbacombe: ‘I think him perfectly delightful with the firmest conviction that his morals are detestable’. Two years later, the relationship between Wilde and Bosie was to incite the boy’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, into denouncing Wilde as a ‘sodomite’. Oscar responded by bringing an ill-advised libel case against Queensbury in April 1895. Produced in evidence was a damning letter written at Babbacombe Cliff, where Wilde had responded to a poem that Douglas had sent him:

My boy, Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days.