What’s not to love about a cozy mystery?

 There’s something about a world in chaos that makes me long for order. Something about irrationality and cruelty that makes me long for good sense and kindness. Skip the politics, please, and just give me a sweet cozy mystery.

 Any fictional mystery can satisfy our human longing for order. For the hope that justice, even mercy, can prevail. But in a world where technology reigns, the thought that our unaided human observation, our common sense, and innate knowledge of our own hearts and those of our fellows have value can especially find its solace in the mystery variety called “cozy.”

 

Full disclosure: although I’m still wedded to mystery’s evil twin, the thriller, I’ve found relief in curling up with, and attempting to write, this kinder, gentler version. Yes, characters will be put in danger. Some of them will die. But in cozies, danger and death are life’s anomalies.

 

It never occurred to me that any reader could not understand what constituted a “cozy” until multiple critique partners professed their bewilderment.

 

One demanded to know how a mystery’s protagonist could be a middle-class wife and mother, who loved her family and her job in a service industry but just happened to stumble into a murder. Wasn’t the main character of a mystery supposed to be a loner, a hardboiled, embittered detective dogged by multiple failed relationships and, most usually, with a drinking problem? Did it even need to be mentioned that this detective would be male?

 

In vain I pleaded the case of armies of bakers, knitting club members, bookstore owners, even psychics, who populate cozy mysteries. All of them amateurs at detection. All of them, I realized with a start, women.

 

Where did they all come from?

 

Enter the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie, and one of her most beloved characters, Miss Marple. You’ve perhaps heard of Miss Marple – or Aunt Jane, as she was known to her loving multitude of nephews, nieces, and godchildren?

 

Christie herself would probably have been bewildered to be called a genius (although she has been) but it’s hard to deny that some almost divine inspiration must have struck her imagination when she invented Miss Marple. Like Christie’s other, perhaps slightly better-known character, Hercule Poirot, Miss Jane Marple was born elderly. Also, like Poirot, Miss Marple, although uncannily knowledgeable about the physical desires of others, possessed not an atom of sex appeal. And yet, though the elderly eccentric male detective left few, if any, literary offspring, the virginal Miss Marple has become the mother of thousands.

 

Image: Ivan Elmar Cayahan, Pixabay

Before her debut in six short stories in 1928 that became the nucleus of the book-length collection, The Thirteen Problems (published in the United States as The Tuesday Club Murders), there were no major independent female crime solvers. Not even in that early 20th century's golden age of detective fiction, or from other women writers, such as Dorothy Sayers. Women characters were usually dismissed either as victims or vamps. Even such canny and courageous women sleuths as Sayers' Harriet Vane or Erle Stanley Gardner's Della Street were mere adjuncts of male detectives.

 

Miss Marple made her first novel-length appearance two years later in Murder at the Vicarage. In the words of Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo’s The Agatha Christie Companion: The Complete Guide to Agatha Christie’s Life & Work, Jane Marple brought the queen of crime “a new audience – the woman reader – the housewife and mother, the schoolmistress, the middle-class matron of English society.”

 

Still, except for some short story appearances, Miss Marple dropped from sight (possibly counting the stitches on her interminable knitting needles) for more than a decade, before making a fresh appearance in The Body in the Library. Perhaps, Sanders and Lovallo suggest, she was overshadowed by the popularity of Poirot, a character Christie grew to resent so much she wrote his death in Curtain, during the World War II blitz of London but not published until a year before Christie’s own death in 1976.

 

Since then, “cozies” have multiplied and prospered, according to the “rules” formulated by their progenitor, Jane Marple. Protagonists are chiefly women, amateurs operating with minimal technical advantages, and in a physical or social milieu of limited size. Friends, family, and even lovers are musts – no loners here. They may have access to law enforcement contacts but are not themselves professionals in these fields.

 

They differ from Miss Marple generally in being younger. (The ages of both major Christie characters, Marple and Poirot, were problematic. No doubt she never expected either of them to be with her for decades!) They also generally work for a living, often juggling both career and family. And they very often have pets.

 

But they have never lost their ancestress’s dedication to goodness, common sense, and a sharp set of eyes and ears. Long live Aunt Jane’s legacy!

When there’s no time to read: four brief reviews

The fallout from the illness and death of my sister in Mexico which I mentioned in a December 2018 post, still dogs me, cutting into both writing and reading time. After making a downward adjustment to my annual self-imposed reading challenge at Goodreads, here’s what I found myself reading this January: one “serious” novel for a reading group, one audiobook biography, one book of semi-popular science, and a cozy mystery I found among my late sister’s books while sorting them for donation to the San Miguel de Allende biblioteca.

Snippets only posted here – and despite readers’ kindness in asking me to review their books, I must still decline. My schedule is only getting tighter as more issues about my sister’s estate crop up.

***

First up: When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro. While searching for a compatible reading group years ago, I came across one in Dallas that specializes in reading books by non-U.S. authors and non-U.S. cultures. The reading choices of its members tend to be more high-brow than those I would pick if left to my own devices, which is not a bad thing. As it happens, I’m a fan of historical fiction (preferably of the non-bodice ripping kind) and Ishiguro’s depiction of the inter-war British colony in Shanghai and the Sino-Japanese war of 1937-1945 is a masterpiece of historical research. 

Beginning with the mysterious disappearance of a British couple in Shanghai, Ishiguro follows the career of their young son, Christopher Banks, ripped from his life in China and friendship with the young Japanese boy next door in the insulated international colony to the care of an elderly aunt in England.

Always the odd one out in school and society (perhaps like Ishiguro himself, a Japanese national brought up in England), Christopher becomes a professional consulting detective, joining the likes of Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Whimsey, and a myriad of other heroes from the golden age of English detective fiction. But despite his fame in England, Christopher’s guiding ambition is to return to China and solve the mystery of his parents’ disappearance. 

I found When We Were Orphans plodding in its early stages and disliked what seemed to me to be Ishiguro’s tendency to use his protagonist as a mere way to display the history. However, the story’s intensity increased with Christopher’s return decades later to Shanghai, where he learns that things are not – and never were – the way he remembered them from childhood. Ishiguro’s depiction of Christopher’s journey through a city and its people on the verge of collapse is almost hallucinatory in its horror and strangeness. Grade: 4/5.

***

Next: Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and his Last Muse, by Andrea di Robilant. I listened to this on an audio CD, a favorite method of whiling away the tedium of long drives – in this case, to and from the airport from which I travelled to my sister’s former home in Mexico. The book traces approximately the last decade of Hemingway’s life, and his emotional – although possibly Platonic – love affair with young Adriana Ivancich. When they first met in 1948, following Hemingway’s off-the-cuff decision to return to scenes of his World War I service in Italy, he was nearing fifty (and married to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh). Adriana was only 18, and barely out of convent school. 

image: pixabay

Hemingway was also almost a has-been to American audiences. He had not published a book since For Whom the Bell Tolls, nearly a decade previously, and by the late 1940’s a new post-war generation of writers were rising to the top of the best-seller lists. Was it really his infatuation with a woman young enough to be his daughter (and who he sometimes addressed as Daughter) that prompted a rebirth of his writing juices – culminating in his late-period masterpiece, The Old Man and the Sea (as well as such lesser but still memorable works as Across the River and Into the Trees, Islands in the Stream, and parts of A Moveable Feast)? 

In the #metoo era, Hemingway’s relationship with Adriana looks creepily like the sexual “grooming” of abusers, although in her memoir published after his death, Adriana insisted they got beyond kissing and cuddling. And perhaps my experience with my sister’s descent into alcohol-fuel rages and mental collapse colored my nightmarish impression of Hemingway’s final, booze-soaked years. 

Still, Autumn in Venice is a memorable account of the last bloom of a literary icon, as well as life with the jet-set of post-World War II Italian aristocracy. A bonus – the Italian author’s great-uncle was one Hemingway’s drinking pals of the era! Grade: 4/5.

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Next: I, Mammal: The Story of What Makes Us Mammals, by Liam Drew. This book by British writer (and former neurobiologist) Liam Drew caught my eye when a local branch of the Dallas Public Library featured it on its new books shelf. The evolution of the mammalian scrotum and placenta? How about the evolution of the mammary glands, the organs which have given their name to the vertebrate class to which Drew, I and presumably you readers belong?

If this sounds like heavyweight reading, it’s not. I originally planned to major in biology in college (before quickly changing to journalism!) but even a high school course in the science should be enough to carry the average reader through Drew’s discussions. 

Even those who sometimes feel their minds being stretched by the subject matter – not a bad thing – will find themselves hooked on the charm of Drew’s writing, with personal illustrations throughout of the organs that nurtured his daughters through fetal and early childhood development.

And after all, why shouldn’t gonads share the “sex appeal” that more common discussions of brains usually usurp in evolutionary discussion? Try dropping a hint or three into your next cocktail party conversation and watch what happens. Although, by the way, how did mammals and birds – that other warm-blooded (oops – endothermic) vertebrate class with which we mammals share the planet – find different ways to develop their brainy intellects? Grade: 5/5.

Adventure classics – A joy to live those days between wars

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

***

It was spring 1944 as Agatha Christie (in a rare use of the name of her second husband, Max Mallowan ) wrote the epilogue to Come, Tell Me How You Live, the memoir of her time as an archaeologist’s wife in the Middle East. She began it before World War II, laid it aside for years, and at last took it up again, writing, “. . . it seems to me that it is good to remember that there were such days and such places, and that at this very minute my little hill of marigolds is in bloom, and old men with white beards trudging behind their donkeys may not even know there is a war.”

So after years of war (with more than another year still to go), she took up the writing again. She could remember with both nostalgia and humor the travails of the years she and Max spent on excavations in Syria and Iraq.

There were the plagues of mice (dealt with by “a very professional cat”); the excavation’s top-heavy lorry (christened Queen Mary) and prone to getting mud-bound when seasonal rains wash out roads; the local forms of entertainment (“there is to be a hanging,” their foreman said, “a woman…who has poisoned three husbands! Surely (you) would not like to miss that!”).

Agatha fears her refusal to attend the hanging costs her a great deal in status, as does her insistence on not having the sheep that will constitute dinner slaughtered in plain sight of their house.

And although she considers herself handy at washing excavated artifacts and developing photographs, and dealing out first aid, her writings get no respect. And no wonder. Because after a workman proud of his rare literacy writes a note on an empty cigarette packet that another man has been drowned, the unlucky packet finds its way to the supposed dead man’s home village, prompting the arrival of “a great cavalcade of mourners”, the man whose rumors of death were so greatly exaggerated attacks the literate one. Max docks the supposed dead man a day’s pay for fighting, sentences the prankster to walk the 40 kilometers to the not yet dead man’s village to explain and apologize, and docks him two days’ pay.

“And the real moral is—Max points out afterwards to his own select circle—what very dangerous things reading and writing are!” she writes ruefully.

Perhaps most of all, she remembers an old man (one of those who seemed to arrive out of nowhere as if in a fairy tale) who arrives and after a long silence, “inquires courteously if we are French. German? English?. . . ‘Is it the English this country belongs to now? I cannot remember. I know it is no longer the Turks.’

“‘No,’ we say; ‘the Turks have not been here since the war.’

“‘Ah yes, about the time you mention, many (soldiers) went to and fro over the railway. That, then was the war? We did not realize it was a war. It did not touch us here.’”

“After four years spent in London in war-time, I know what a very good life that was, and it has been a joy and refreshment to me to live those days again…not an escape to something that was, but the bringing into the hard work and sorrow of today of something imperishable that one not only had but still has!…Inshallah, I shall go there again, and the things that I love shall not have perished from this earth…”

(The illustration for today’s post is reproduced from a photograph by World War I Australian Expeditionary Force member Eric Keast Burke and published in The National Geographic Magazine April 1922.)

(Next Friday Adventure classics begins a February of animal adventures with A Dog of Flanders, by Marie Louise de la Ramee, writing as “Ouida”.)

Adventure classics – Adventures of 'le camping' in the desert

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

***

Last Friday’s post left Agatha Christie and her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan leaving Palmyra. But those lovely Roman-era ruins are far too modern for Max, whose mind, as Christie notes in her introductory poem, was attuned “to far B.C.” But before the Mallowans depart the first century CE for circa 3,000 BCE, they encounter some of those hangers-on of archaeology, tourists. Specifically, French tourists who need a ride back to their hotel after the breakdown of their taxi, and whose high-heeled ladies are unable to make the trip on foot.

While gallant Max returns to the hotel to fetch the Mallowans’ rented car, Agatha makes small talk.

“The French ladies profess a charming interest in our journeyings,” she writes in her 1946 memoir, Come, Tell Me How You Live. “‘Ah, Madame, vois faites le camping?’ I am fascinated by the phrase. Le camping! It classes our adventure definitely as a sport.”

It is a phrase she comes both to love and to rue, as the adventures come to include scourges of mice, fleas and cockroaches; the company of their Armenian driver Aristide who was rescued and adopted by an Arab tribe while escaping the World War I era genocide of his people; and encounters strange, comic or tragic.

The Mallowans’ first visits to Iraq and Syria are made in autumn to scout potential excavation sites for the following spring. Mallowan has three requirements for a dig: it needs proximity to villages where he can hire labor and to water (not to be taken for granted in a desert). And most important, it has to be of the right era. Of the hundreds of “tells” – artificial mounds indicating the places of ruined and buried cities dotting the Syrian and Iraqi deserts – he passes over any he considers too recent, i.e., within the past two millennium or so. Even sites with more ancient strata don't make the cut if their oldest layers are too deeply buried under more modern debris – the cost of excavating will simply be too high.

They are indeed camping, setting up their tents nightly, including a never-to-be forgotten night of rain and wind. "the wind rises to a gale, the rain is lashing down," Christie writes. "Aristide runs in to say he thinks the tents are coming down. We all rush out in the rain. It dawns on me that I am now going to see the seamy side of le camping.”

And then there are the people, who often appear seemingly out of nowhere like figures from a fairy tale, such as the very old man with “a long white beard and ineffable dignity…He sits down beside us. There is a long silence—that courteous silence of good manners that is so restful after Western haste.” After asking Max’s name: “‘Milwan…How light! How bright! How beautiful,’” he leaves. The Mallowans never see him again.

More tragic is the mother who comes to their camp begging for medicine to cure her son who “has not his proper senses.” The child’s mental disability is all too obvious, and Max tells her gently that there is no medicine that can help the boy. “The woman sighs—I think a tear runs down her cheek.” Then she asks Max for poison “‘for it is better that he should not live.’” This request too must be refused as gently as possible.

I suspect the fate of this mother and child especially weighed on Agatha. Much later, she would use the trope of a mentally disabled child and a mother’s revenge by poison in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side (published in the US under the shortened title, The Mirror Crack’d).

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie Mallowan’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.)

Adventure classics – Digging through dirt in a labor of love

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

***

So you think you know Agatha Christie? Just as we Christie fans can’t really know the famously private author without reading the romantic novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott (possibly the closest Christie ever came to public revelation of her inmost feelings), we also can’t know her until we read her sole comic work, Come, Tell Me How You Live. This short memoir cum travel book is the record of the years she spent with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, between sifting happily (more or less) through the sands covering the ancient cities of Iraq and Syria.

Published in 1946, it is a record of Mallowan’s archaeological digs of the 1930’s, written nostalgically during the Second World War, while Mallowan was posted to Egypt and Christie was living alone in London. It is one of only two books she published under the name “Mallowan,” and comprises a love letter of sorts to her then-absent husband.

Christie and Mallowan met at an archaeological excavation site, the ancient Sumerian city known as Ur, south of Baghdad. (The illustration for today’s post is taken from his 1930 article in National Geographic Magazine, “New Light on Ancient Ur.”) Christie at the time was divorced from her first husband, Archibald Christie. She claims in her autobiography to have been astonished when the much younger Mallowan proposed to her after a relatively short acquaintance, although given Christie’s typical reticence about her private life, the proposal may not have been entirely unexpected.

Believing that extended absences were one of the reasons for her divorce from Archibald, she seems to have been determined not to make the same mistake in her second marriage. Each year, as Mallowan left England for a new expedition, Christie traveled with him.

Personally and professionally, the digs proved fruitful for both. While he worked on (and later directed) excavations at Nineveh, and several other sites in Syria and Iraq, Agatha added archaeological backgrounds to the settings for her mystery stories, beginning with Murder in Mesopotamia, a fictionalized record of the Ur site where the two met.

Ever artful, Christie collapses several seasons of excavation into what appears in Come, Tell Me How You Live to be a single expedition.

In contrast to today’s headlines from Syria, the Syria of Christie’s record, Syria seems blissfully exotic, its worst dangers a malady known as “Gippy tummy” and a tendency to discombobulate the inner workings of fountain pens and watches.

“The desert is not kind to watches,” she writes. “After a few weeks there, one’ watch gives up steady everyday work. Time, it says, is only a mode of thought. It then takes its choice between stopping eight or nine times a day for periods of twenty minutes, or of racing indiscriminately ahead. Sometimes it alternates coyly between the two.”

Suitably prepared (on her part) with a plentiful supply of watches and on Max’s part by suitcases filled primarily with books, the pair start off, crossing the Channel by ferry and boarding the Orient Express to Istanbul (the setting for a favorite Christie mystery). From Turkey, the pair embark in a further series of trains and hired vehicles, arriving at last in Palmyra, where her description serves as an epithet to a place now synonymous with horror and ruin. “…the charm of Palmyra—its slender creamy beauty rising up fantastically in the middle of hot sand. It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream.”

Alas, its Roman-era ruins are all modern for Mallowan, who craves more ancient ruins. And so he and Christie continue their travels, deeper into the past.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.)

Adventure classics -- When the good guys are behaving badly

The Yellow Room

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

***

It’s a week after the June 6, 1944, and the news everywhere is about the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Everywhere, that is, except in the tiny Maine resort town where the rich and beautiful “summer people” expect the arrival of Medal of Honor recipient and debonair bachelor, Gregory Spencer. But when Spencer’s sister arrives to ready the family mansion, Crestview, for her brother’s return, she finds the housekeeper hospitalized after a bizarre accident and the half-burned body of a murdered young woman stashed in a linen closet.

And that’s just the start of the happenings in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s 1945 mystery, The Yellow Room.

It’s enough make Spencer’s younger sister Carol give up the whole idea of a summer vacation. Except she’s under orders from the local police not to leave, and as she turns up more details, including the overnight stay of the murdered woman in the mansion’s guest room, the one hung with yellow wallpaper.

The yellow room is a very pretty room, with pastel furniture and curtains and its own bathroom. But why did the Spencer’s resident housekeeper let the young woman stay there? And once there, why did she walk out the door to meet her murderer?

Strangest of all, the chief—make that only—suspect in the death is Greg Spencer, who, it turns out is the murdered woman’s husband, married to her secretly following a night of drunken partying. Is that why the housekeeper won’t explain her actions? Oh, no, now the housekeeper is dead too, lying cold on the floor of her hospital room despite round the clock guards.

It’s no surprise that Mary Roberts Rinehart, the creator of all this mayhem and mystery, was dubbed the American Agatha Christie, except that title couldn’t be used for more than a decade after Rinehart started publishing in 1908. Christie’s first mystery wouldn’t appear until 1920. Perhaps it’s she who should be known as Britain’s Mary Rinehart.

As Rinehart writes it, Greg Spencer isn’t the only soldier behaving strangely. What’s up with Colonel Richardson, hero of an earlier war, who insists his pilot son is still alive more than a year after his plane was shot down in the South Pacific? And why hasn’t the airman grandson of old Mr. and Mrs. Ward visited them during his recent leave? And who is the mysterious man calling himself Major Dane, and who claims to be recuperating from wounds received in action, except that there’s no record of any Major Dane in Army records?

A story about war heroes gone wrong may have seemed like a tough sell in 1945, but Rinehart’s take struck home with the millions of Americans who found their brothers, sons, husbands and sweethearts returning from war strangely changed. Post-traumatic stress disorder hadn’t found its name yet, but Major Dane could plead with Carol understand and find compassion for soldiers driven to desperation by their wartime experiences.

But do understanding and compassion mean overlooking murder? Or can the year-round residents of the little resort town avoid feeling strangely gleeful at the fall of one of the summer people who’ve lorded it over them so long? Rinehart’s village isn’t the comfortable hierarchy of Christie’s stories.

So did Greg Spencer kill his wife? Was he in Washington, D.C., receiving his medal when his wife met her death? Or wasn’t he? It’s going to take more than one post to unravel the twists of The Yellow Room.

Adventure classics -- The doctor did it. Or did he?

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

by Agatha Christie

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It’s one of the most famous of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. Certainly the most controversial, for pulling a twist many readers found unfair. At this point, I’m going to do something book reviewers should never do, reveal the ending. If you truly hate spoilers, stop reading right now, get the book and read it. Then reread it for those clues  that somebody’s not telling everything he knows.

For those of you still reading this post, the twist Christie pulled off, the one that broke a major rule of the mystery genre but had readers panting for more was this: the book is narrated by the murderer, Dr. Sheppard.

Sheppard lives with his older unmarried sister Caroline in the tiny English village of King’s Abbott, a place “rich in unmarried ladies and retired military officers,” Dr. Sheppard writes. “Our hobbies and recreations can be summed up in the one word, ‘gossip.’”  And among the gossips, the greatest is Caroline Sheppard. “The motto of the mongoose family, so Mr. Kipling tells us, is: ‘Go and find out.’ If Caroline ever adopts a crest, I should certainly suggest a mongoose rampant.”

Aside from the twist, the story is a classic of the locked room class. Village squire Roger Ackroyd believes his fiancée, Mrs. Ferrars, committed suicide to escape a blackmailer's clutches. While Ackroyd discusses the situation with his friend, Dr. Sheppard, the mail arrives, including a letter addressed in what Ackroyd recognizes as Mrs. Ferrars’ handwriting. Overcome with emotion, Ackroyd sends Sheppard away in order to read the letter privately, believing it will reveal the name of the blackmailer. Sheppard leaves Ackroyd at ten minutes till 9.  When the study door is forced open later that night, Ackroyd is dead, stabbed in the back with a silver dagger, as in this post’s illustration, via Flickr, from Tom Adams’ cover for a 1974 edition. About three-quarters of an hour after Sheppard leaves, members of Ackroyd’s household hear him speaking behind the locked door of his study, proving he was still alive at 9:30.  Or was he?  

Red herrings swim in schools through the book, baffling everyone except Hercule Poirot, lured out of retirement to investigate the case.  Poirot insists that the mechanically-talented Dr. Sheppard gave himself an alibi by leaving a Dictaphone recording of Ackroyd’s voice, which he removed when he was called to the crime scene. After confronting Sheppard privately, Poirot leaves him alone to write his ambiguously-worded confession and swallow a fatal dose of poison.

Leaving us to wonder, why? The Dictaphone Poirot pins his case on is never found. The incriminating letter has disappeared. There are neither witnesses nor physical evidence tying Sheppard to the murder. Why doesn’t he just stand pat and defy Poirot?

Pierre Bayard’s psychological reconstruction, Who Killed Roger Ackroyd, builds a case for Caroline as the murderer, the person Ackroyd is heard talking to on his final night. 
And Sheppard killed himself, Bayard says, to protect Caroline. Just as Caroline killed Ackroyd (and presumably destroyed the letter) to protect her brother from a charge of blackmail, Sheppard kills himself to protect his sister from being charged with murder.

“My greatest fear all through this has been Caroline,” Sheppard writes.

Poirot seems to have joined him in this league to protect Caroline. Poirot checks and double checks the alibis of every other person with access to Ackroyd’s house, but he never checks Caroline’s. He shares his findings with her, accepts her tidbits of gossip at face value. If he weren’t Hercule Poirot, I’d have to think he was in love with her.

The root of the dilemma probably lies in Christie’s own infatuation with Caroline. Christie would later admit that Dr. Sheppard’s devoted sister was her favorite character in the book, and the precursor of Christie’s amateur detective Miss Marple. Did she love Caroline enough to let her get away with murder?

(Next Wednesday, Adventure classics concludes an April of mysteries with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, about which Pierre Bayard also has a few things to say.)

Adventure classics -- Art of murder made personal

Murder in Mesopotamia

By Agatha Christie

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What’s a mystery writer to do when the wife of her husband’s boss tries to sabotage her marriage? For Agatha Christie, the temptation was overwhelming -- to kill the offender, in fiction if not in reality.

When young archeologist Max Mallowan joined the Iraqi archeological investigation at Ur, he soon learned the acid test of his qualifications was meeting Katharine Keeling, the future wife of his employer, Leonard Woolley.

Mallowan passed the test so well Katharine (by then Mrs. Woolley) deputized him as a tour guide when the famous mystery novelist Agatha Christie visited Ur. Katharine’s cordiality, however, dissolved at the unexpected mutual attraction between Agatha and the much-younger Max.

“I finally broke the news (of Mallowan’s proposal) to the Woolleys,” Agatha recounted in her autobiography. “They seemed pleased. . . .Only (Katherine) said firmly, ‘you mustn’t marry him for at least two years.. . . it would be fatal.’”

Of course, they married as soon as possible. And of course, the outcome was fatal -- just not to Max or the new Mrs. Mallowan.

The excavation season following Agatha and Max’s marriage was his last with the Woolleys. Given Agatha’s knowledge of poisons, it’s lucky Katharine’s notoriously poor health survived the encounter, and fascinating to speculate on what might have happened if she had succumbed to a bout of food poisoning during Agatha’s visit. Would the Queen of Crime have found herself a murder suspect?

Four years later, Agatha published Murder in Mesopotamia, whose victim was a thinly-disguised version of Katharine Woolley.

In his biography, Woolley of Ur, H.V.F. Winstone reports that another of Woolley’s assistants persuaded Agatha to give the central role of Murder in Mesopotamia to a character based on Katharine Woolley, the team leader’s wife, Louise Leidner. But only Agatha could have described the too-deserving victim’s sense of entitlement so acutely, as in the following exchange between members of the fictional excavation staff.

“‘She’s always known as Lovely Louise.’

“‘Is she so very handsome then?’ I asked.

“‘It’s taking her at her own valuation. She thinks she is!’”

Did the scent of libel hang in the air? Fortunately, according to Winstone, although everyone else on the excavation recognized the inspiration for Louise Leidner, “Katharine always believed that she was represented by a minor character named Emmott.”

In Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha refrains from any mention of Murder in Mesopotamia, speaking only graciously of Katharine, whose last words to her husband as she retired to bed November 7, 1945, were, “Leonard, I shall die this night.” And she did, apparently of natural causes.

The Mallowans called on Woolley the next day, paying their last respects to “the woman who perhaps found her only substantial reality,” Winstone writes, “as one of Agatha’s characters.”

(Next Friday -- Writers need jobs. They also need hobbies. Adventure classics takes counsel on sailing from Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Crooked Candle.)