NB: Contains major spoilers for this novel and for Taken at the Flood (1944) and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926)
This, along with They Came to Baghdad (1951), is one of only two of Agatha Christie’s novels that I have neither read, nor seen/heard as a radio, film or TV adaptation. I’ll be honest – it’s not one of her best. It’s another of her ‘thrillers’ (not necessarily a bad thing in itself, of course). As usual there’s a whodunit element, although since this is another novel that turns, like The Secret Adversary, on the identity of a master criminal, perhaps ‘whoisit’ would be a more apposite description.
The protagonist is Anne Beddingfield, an orphaned daughter of a professor of anthropology. Anne has moved to London in search of a job, but really longs for the kind of adventures she sees enacted in the weekly serials exhibited at the local cinema. Her dreams begin to come true when she witnesses what appears to be a fatal accident at Hype Park Corner tube station. Her investigations reveal a link to the murder of a young woman on a country estate and the impending voyage of the liner Kilmorden Castle, bound for South Africa. Having secured a passage on the vessel, Anne finds herself embroiled in a sinister plot overseen by the shadowy master criminal known only as ‘the Colonel’.
In a perverse way, I do love the almost self-parodic awfulness of the prologue, whose ridiculous opening line suggests that Agatha, as well as Anne, harbours an unhealthy addiction to cheap movie serials:
Nadina, the Russian dancer who had taken Paris by storm, swayed to the sound of the applause, bowed and bowed again.
This is followed by a baffling exchange which purports to explain why fellow Russians appear to be conversing in English, but which ends up confusing the reader:
‘Compatriots though we are, we will not speak Russian I think,’ she observed.
‘Since neither of us know a word of the language, it might be as well,’ agreed her guest.
By common consent, they dropped into English, and nobody, now that the Count’s mannerisms had dropped from him, could doubt that it was his native language. He had indeed started his life as a quick-change music-hall artiste in London.
But… why do they drop from Russian into English ‘by common consent’ if neither of them can actually speak Russian? This could have been a nice little joke – but Allo Allo did it better. But then, Allo Allo is, sadly, also a much better spy thriller.
It doesn’t end there, as we are then served an awful description of the mysterious ‘Colonel’:
‘He has organized crime as another man might organize a boot factory. Without committing himself, he has planned and directed a series of stupendous coups, embracing every branch of what we might call his “profession”. Jewel robberies, forgery, espionage (the latter very profitable in war-time), sabotage, discreet assassination, there is hardly anything he has not touched. Wisest of all, he knows when to stop. The game begins to be dangerous? – he retires gracefully – with an enormous fortune!’
I know that this kind of book requires a suspension of disbelief – but this is an infodump too far. Granted I haven’t met many nefarious anarchists. For all I know they may make a habit of peppering their speech with unlikely parentheses for the benefit of anyone who happens to be writing it all down. But I somehow doubt it.
As soon as the narrative proper begins, however, things improve hugely. The story is told in the first person by Anne and Sir Eustace Pedler MP. Now, a large part of my lack of enjoyment of this novel stems from the fact that I really don’t like Anne. As I’m afraid I’ll have call to mention more than once in this post, she’s selfish, arrogant, annoying and has a disturbing attitude to relations between the sexes.
Even so, I will say in Agatha Christie’s defence that I’m fairly certain that we’re not really supposed to like her – or at least that we are meant to laugh at her ridiculousness. Certainly, she isn’t a fantasy version of Agatha herself, in the way Tuppence appears to be, for all that she’s sometimes used as a mouthpiece for Agatha’s thoughts (Christie herself having had her first taste of world travel shortly before writing the book). There’s also some very nice commentary on the way in which novels and the cinema contrast with the more prosaic routine of everyday life, as well as Christie’s trademark self-referentiality – once more, her characters seem to be very much aware of their predicament as an exciting narrative, and of the way in which this narrative seems to live up to or diverge from generic expectations. The first chapter opens, for example, with Anne telling us that her former maid-of-all-work, upon hearing of her (now past) adventures, exclaims: ‘Lor, miss, what a beyewtiful book you might make out of it all – just like the pictures!’ The last part of that sentence is also a historical indication of the way in which, at this point in popular culture, the pictures and the popular press are very much extensions of each other.
It strikes me that Anne resembles an inter-war Catherine Morland, the heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Just as Catherine expects her life to conform to the gothic novels she consumes, so Anne can’t help looking at everything in terms of how it resembles (or conspicuously fails to resemble) the plot of her favourite novels and movies:
The village possessed a lending library, full of tattered works of fiction, and I enjoyed perils and love-making at second hand, and went to sleep dreaming of stern silent Rhodesians, and of strong men who always ‘felled their opponent with a single blow’. […] There was the cinema too, with a weekly episode of ‘The Perils of Pamela’. Pamela was a magnificent young woman. Nothing daunted her. She fell out of aeroplanes, adventured in submarines, climbed skyscrapers, and crept about in the Underworld, without turning a hair. She was not really clever, The Master Criminal of the Underworld caught her each time, but as he seemed loath to knock her on the head in a simple way, and always doomed her to death in a sewer-gas-chamber or by some new and marvellous means, the hero was always able to rescue her at the beginning of the following week’s episode. I used to come out with my head in a delirious whirl – and then I would get home and find a notice from the Gas Company threatening to cut us off if the outstanding account was not paid!
I like the way the notion of ‘gas’ progresses here from the sensational to the mundane – the cinema making exciting use of a common element in daily life, which in turn encourages a disappointing reminder of the way in which daily life is far from sensational. In the cinema, gas is the weapon of a vicarious, fantastical enemy. In quotidian reality, it is a boring commodity like sugar, tea or bread.
The medium then, be it the cinema or real life, has the power to transform, for better or worse, the way everything is seen – it can make anything at all either exciting or dully ordinary. Later, when Anne’s father dies and the very unromantic middle-aged Doctor asks her to marry him, she is surprised because: ‘He was not at all like the hero of “The Perils of Pamela”, and even less like the stern and silent Rhodesian.’ She doesn’t love him and tells him so. His reply:
‘You don’t think – ?’
‘No, I don’t,’ I said firmly.
There’s a nice double meaning here. Anne certainly ‘doesn’t think’ – in more ways that one. But the question is so thoroughly conventional that it also doesn’t even need to be completed before she is able to give her answer. That is, not only does Anne ‘not think’ (in the sense of being impulsive), but she also doesn’t need to think because of the dull conformity that surrounds her.
Anne combats this dullness by viewing life as if it were the cinema. She even attempts to dress the part of the orphan, creating an ‘effect that pleased me much’:
‘Anna the Adventuress,’ I said aloud, nodding at my reflection. ‘Anna the Adventuress. Episode I, “The House in Kensington”!’
This ends the chapter and Agatha Christie (and, perhaps the older Anne who is writing the narrative in retrospect) is clearly having a laugh at her heroine’s expense when she begins the next chapter: ‘In the succeeding weeks I was a good deal bored.’ The novel’s short chapters and light tone, in their resemblance to a story paper, add to Anne’s self-delusional attitude to herself as an ‘adventuress’ – I also love the irony of the newspaper serialisation of the novel being called ‘Anne the Adventuress’ despite Christie’s protests.
Reading Agatha Christie’s books in chronological order, it already strikes me that these thrillers are all subtly different – this is very much not The Secret Adversary, whose protagonists already have some experience of exciting times. Anne is a dreamer pure and simple and her fantasies are acknowledged to be more than a little silly. She certainly isn’t Tuppence – if anything she’s more like a female equivalent of Albert, who devours cheap mass-media thrillers and expects life to follow suit. Accordingly, our respect for her is, I believe, proportionately lower.
Certainly, there are moments where she is endearing – most notably the way in which the trivialities of real life keep getting in the way of the sensational narrative she hopes to create for herself. I do love the bit where, having determined to air her suspicions about the tube station incident to the authorities, she complains:
My request took some time to understand, as I had inadvertently selected the department for lost umbrellas, but eventually I was ushered into a small room and presented to Detective Inspector Meadows.
Again, there is a sense that real life will resolutely fail to live up to our attempts to self-dramatise:
I had a half-formed plan in my head when I went to Scotland Yard. One to be carried out if my interview there was unsatisfactory (it had been profoundly unsatisfactory).
That final parenthesis is priceless.
Yet, Anne’s cavalier approach to reality as if it were a detective story (again resembling Catherine Morland’s approach to Gothic fiction in Northanger Abbey) also leads her to make irresponsible and silly decisions, based on snap judgements about people. She may be resourceful, but she also comes over as naïve and spoiled, what with her ‘theory that one always gets what one wants’ and her stubborn withholding of important evidence from the authorities:
‘I went there to do so this morning. They persisted in regarding the whole thing as having nothing to do with the Marlow affair, so I thought that in the circumstances I was justified in retaining the paper. Besides, the inspector put my back up.’
And yet, like Catherine Morland, however, she does turn out not to have been entirely wrong:
Of course! I must visit the ‘scene of the crime’. Always done by the best sleuths! And no matter how long afterwards it may be they always find something that the police have overlooked.
Sure enough, this silly prediction turns out to be exactly what happens. After all, despite the narrative’s mockery of its heroine’s quixotic attitude, Anne is still the star of a ‘beyewtiful’ thriller. Indeed, her very fallibility leads to one of the most convincing ‘working out’ of a piece of evidence in all of Christie’s books, precisely because Anne constantly gets it slightly wrong. I refer, specifically, to the way that the ‘Kilmorden Castle’ puzzle is gradually solved:
17 1 22 – I had taken that for a date, the date of departure of the Kilmorden Castle. Supposing I was wrong. When I came to think of it, would anyone, writing down a date, think it necessary to put the year as well as the month? Supposing 17 meant Cabin 17? and 1? The time – one o’clock. Then 22 must be the date, I looked up at my little almanac.
Tomorrow was the 22nd!
Yet what Anne takes for a dot between 17 and 1 is actually a flaw in the paper. So, going purely by the figures, she alters her guess as to their meaning:
‘1 71 22.’
‘You see,’ said Suzanne. ‘It’s the same, but not quite. It’s one o’clock still, and the 22nd – but it’s Cabin 71! My cabin, Anne!’
This infallibility helps the reader to swallow the more improbable coincidence of Anne being in the precise travel agency that operates the Kilmorden cruise just when she suddenly has her eureka moment as to what the name means.
As the novel progresses, the sense of its being a sort of game that has to be played out according to the rules of literary genre are again apparent (as in so many of Christie’s thrillers) and are given a clever twist here: Anne’s constant play-acting and her frequent recourse to literary and cinema thriller tropes as a way of seeing the world actually help to make her a formidable match for villains who see the world in precisely the same way. Anne Suspects Mr Chichester because he is ‘a little too much like a stage clergyman’. All the other clergymen she’s known ‘had been human – he was a glorified type’. Sir Edward remembers reading F. Marion Crawford’s classic ghost story ‘The Upper Berth’ and associates this with his secretary’s aversion to a particular cabin as an office, commenting dismissively ‘we’re not going to sleep there, so I don’t see that it matters. Ghosts don’t affect typewriters.’ The remarks, on the part of the heroine as on the part of the villain, reveal a similarly heightened consciousness of the way in which fiction informs the way reality is perceived.
Another thing that pleased me about the novel is the way in which Pagett’s mysterious visit to Italy throws it open to a queer reading. Obviously, Agatha Christie probably didn’t intend this sub-plot to be read in this way – but it’s in the spirit of queer theory that this won’t stop me from reading it in this way. Indeed, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a queer subculture that associated Italy with homoerotic pleasures impossible in Britain (the work of Thomas Mann and John Addington Symonds are notable examples) and classical and Renaissance art was often put forward as containing the ideal of male physical beauty. Pagett’s effeminate character and his obviously suspicious trip to Florence certainly contrasts with the ideal of masculinity propounded by the novel’s centre of consciousness (Anne), which is located in the muscularity and brutish strength of primitive man – a total contrast to the elegant perfection of classical and Renaissance models. Blackmail was also something that was almost automatically associated with the possibility of queerness, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act (which criminalized ‘gross indecency’ between men) often being referred to as the ‘blackmailer’s charter’ – and Pagett certainly seems like a target for blackmail.
So, with this in mind, I couldn’t help but read something very queer indeed into the suspicions that haunt Pagett’s trip:
Whenever Italy is mentioned, he goes to pieces. If I did not know how intensely respectable he is – I should suspect him of some disreputable amour…
And, again, with his apparent confession that he only consorted intimately with the kinds of people most frequently implicated in sodomy trials and blackmail cases:
‘I suppose you speak Italian?’ I resumed.
‘Not a word, unfortunately. But of course, with hall porters and – er – guides.’
Of course, this makes it all the more brilliant a red herring when Pagett’s actual secret is that he is a happily married man with a couple of kids and more on the way – and that it is with this family that he has been holidaying whilst purportedly in Italy.
Yet while it’s just about possible to read that episode as a joke about inter-war models of male sexuality, the novel’s most prominent treatment of questions of sexuality and gender is less satisfying. Anne’s worship of violent, primeval machismo is very unsettling – although, again, I’m not sure Christie is putting this forward as ‘what all women want’. In general, I think it’s supposed to fit in with Anne’s interest in prehistoric man, rather than as something we’re meant to agree with as a universal truth. Indeed, Anne’s description of Colonel Race as ‘one of those strong silent men that lady novelists and young girls always rave over’ may well be a covert way of alerting the reader to Agatha Christie’s own preferences when it comes to men. Even with this in mind, however, it’s hard to swallow passages like this one:
‘He might have killed her. He may even have followed her there with that idea in mind. But he wouldn’t take a bit of black cord and strangle her with it. If he’d done it, he would have strangled her with his bare hands.’
Suzanne gave a little shiver. Her eyes narrowed appreciatively.
‘H’m! Anne, I am beginning to see why you find this young man of yours so attractive!’
And this:
I said nothing. I laughed. And yet I knew that the danger was real. Just at that moment he hated me. But I knew that I loved the danger, loved the feeling of his hands on my throat. That I would not have exchanged that moment for any moment in my life.
Not only is this deeply unpleasant, it’s also nonsensical – what does that last sentence mean exactly?
Such passages make it really difficult to warm to Anne, yet it’s also very difficult to warm to any of the other characters. This isn’t something I always require from fiction. After all, one of my favourite novels is Wuthering Heights and that has one of the most unlikable pair of protagonists in the literature. It’s just that I kind of get the impression here that we are meant to find these characters engaging, if seriously flawed. Unfortunately, I just find most of them really irritating. Almost everyone in this novel is selfish, masochistic, or egomaniacal. Suzanne is shallow and seems only to care about her husband’s money. Sir Eustace masquerades for most of the novel as a dirty old man who takes every available opportunity to comment leerily on Anne’s ‘extremely nice legs’. This is eventually revealed to be part of the Colonel’s disguise – his failure to notice the pistol conspicuously concealed in the ankles of Anne’s tights demonstrating how little attention he actually pays to her legs. Yet, this doesn’t make Sir Eustace’s fake persona any more palatable – and it is, after all, this less charming persona with which we are stuck for most of the story. The story’s hero Rayburn, for all that he has been done wrong to, is basically a thug. And as for Anne herself – quite apart from her constant self-obsession (even above and beyond the understandable reaction of someone newly an orphan) she has a masochistic tendency that we are apparently meant to find exciting, rather than simply disturbing. At one point, she makes a crack about how everything appears vile to the psychoanalyst. Amidst such an unsavoury bunch the irony, intentional or not, is palpable.
It also strikes me that while Anne’s quixotic approach to the situations in which she finds herself are meant to be (and sometimes succeed in being) endearing, the fact that she keeps explaining how real life isn’t like the films, yet continues to treat life as if it actually were film-like just ends up making her seem a fool. Before reading the novel, I’d come across what I’d taken to be a spoiler for the story, which suggested that Anne’s narrative would be revealed as posthumous. I can’t help but feel that this would have been a more appropriate end to the story, given her ridiculously cavalier attitude to the differentiation between life and fiction.
The novel also utilises several clever plot twists, which will be better-employed in Agatha Christie’s later novels. The more sustained use of the ‘first-person-narrator-is-actually-the-villain’ trick is breathtaking in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, but seems somewhat anti-climatic here – even though I confess I didn’t guess the Colonel’s identity. The trick of the initial ‘murder’ actually turning out to be an accident is re-used as the central plot twist in Taken at the Flood (1948), where it makes all the more impact by becoming the focus of the puzzle. Here, its ingenuity is lost amidst the tiring sub-D.H. Lawrence twaddle of the romance plot.
The novel’s attitude to race is also problematic. When Anne and Suzanne arrive at Bechuanaland, Sir Eustace says cogently ‘I am rather afraid that Mrs Blair may run amok [among the native gift stalls]. There is a primitive charm about these toys that I feel will appeal to her’. Given Anne’s more major obsession with primitivism in actual human beings, this idea of Africa as a continent in which one can still encounter the primitive is not altogether unreasonable – in a more enlightened form it’s still a feature of modern anthropology. It is, in any case, entirely appropriate as an idea that Anne herself would entertain as exciting. On balance though, the way this idea escapes the confines of Anne’s own point of view to become the general implied point of view of the novel itself is another of Christie’s well-intentioned attempts at sophistication that totally backfires – thus Colonel Race’s unfortunate and patronising definition of Africa as ‘Simple, primitive, big’ simply echoes the way it (and, indeed, Rayburn) appears to Anne:
By and by the character of the country changed. Great boulders appeared, piled up into fantastic shapes. I felt suddenly that I had got into a primitive era. [note: ‘that I had’, not ‘as if I had’ – this is still a ‘primitive era’, at least here] Just for a moment Neanderthal men seemed quite as real to me as they had to Papa.
I suppose the best we can say about this is that we never actually encounter any ‘Neanderthal men’ – the Africans themselves are never described as exhibiting traces of racial degeneracy, which makes the novel immediately more palatable than most early-twentieth-century thrillers set on the African continent. Indeed, only the whites are described as degenerate and unpleasant. But then, only the whites are described at all and we are still confronted with Christie’s patronising inability to take revolutions at face value (as in The Secret Adversary). Here, this bias towards working-class unrest is also racially inflected of course, with the natives being robbed of any agency, any real grievances – the poor dears simply don’t know any better:
‘It is not the strikers themselves who are causing the trouble. There is some organization at work behind them. Arms and explosives have been poring in, and we have made a haul of certain documents which throw a good deal of light on the methods adopted to import them.’
A more troubling aspect of Anne’s interest in primitivism is the point at which it tips over from her well-informed remarks on the anthropological development of human physiology into very dubious pseudo-psychology about the atavistic origins of the relations between the sexes. Again, comparison with other Christie novels reassures me that this is either a dry run for ideas that she would come to abandon, or simply a way of creating an interesting intellectual background for her protagonist. Either way, however, it doesn’t work – if their Christie’s own views, then they’re just repugnant; but if they are Anne’s, then they hardly help us to warm to our heroine.
Anne considers that women are ‘weak’ nowadays. Although this wasn’t always the case: ‘in the beginning men and women roamed the world together, equal in strength – like lions and tigers – […] And of course, underneath, one is still the same – one feels the same, I mean – and that is why women worship physical strength in men: it’s what they once had and have lost.’ Anne is quite adamant about women worshiping physical strength: ‘You think you admire moral qualities, but when you fall in love, you revert to the primitive where the physical is all that counts. But I don’t think that’s the end; if you lived in primitive conditions it would be alright, but you don’t – and so, in the end, the other thing wins after all. It’s the things that are apparently conquered that always do win, isn’t it?’ While this exhibits a decent enough understanding of the Freudian unconscious, it presses it also lends it a dubious social application. There’s an obvious, and distasteful colonial metaphor here – Africa seems conquered, like primitivism in man; but that primitivism, though apparently conquered, will always ‘win’. Africa, again, is the location of the primitive. There’s mileage in this evocative idea as an abstraction (rather than as an actual fact), where it can be used to make a point not about ‘primitive’ but about ‘civilized’ society. But it needs more sensitive treatment than it is given here. Joseph Conrad this most definitely ain’t.
Anyway, it’s definitely physical strength that Anne worships in Rayburn: ‘I felt the strength of him as he set me down and released his clasp. A man of iron, with muscles like taut steel. And again I felt afraid, especially as he did not move aside, but stood directly in front of me, staring into my face.’ And the worship of physical strength is overtly sexualised as well, as in this racy exchange:
‘I slung you across my shoulders like a sack of coal and carried you to my boat. Quite like a primitive man of the Stone Age.’
‘But for a different reason,’ I put in.
He flushed this time, a deep burning blush. The tan of his face was suffused.
My own take on the matter is that this aspect of physical attraction (wherever men are concerned and whatever the observer’s gender) is Agatha Christie indulging a sexual fantasy, while Anne’s horrible jaunt into the pseudo-psychology of attraction is more experimental – either allied exclusively to her heroine’s character or, as I suggested, perhaps Christie’s way of trying out ideas she herself would soon abandon. At least I hope so. I’d hate to have to reconcile the following with the philosophy of one of my favourite authors:
‘My God! Anne, if you ever marry anyone else but me, I’ll wring his neck. And as for you –’
‘Yes,’ I said, pleasurably excited.
‘I shall carry you away and beat you black and blue!’
‘What a delightful husband I have chosen!’ I said satirically.
What’s disturbing here is the fact that the satire Anne intends is directed towards those women who require ‘delightful’ husbands – as opposed to those who desire domestic abuse. We know from earlier that she suspects all women of secretly desiring such abuse. Frankly, it’s not pretty.
All in all, this is a surprisingly amoral novel, in which everyone is either a potential criminal or someone who relishes brutal or criminal behaviour despite being nominally good. Hence the revelation of Pagett’s hilariously innocuous ‘secret’ comes only half a page before Sir Eustace’s own secret is revealed. So basically, the book seems to celebrate characters that have nefarious hidden depths (whether actively criminal or merely pathological), to the extent that it is somehow Pagett who is at fault, becoming more difficult to admire after his revelation of normality, whilst Sir Eustace’s revelation of amoral brutality actually comes across as charming:
Although I knew well enough the kind of man he was and must be, I could not bring myself to realize it. He had tried to kill me on more than one occasion, he had actually killed another woman, and he was responsible for endless other deeds of which I knew nothing, and yet I was quite unable to bring myself into the frame of mind for appreciating his deeds as they deserved. […] The only parallel I can think of is the case of Stevenson’s Long John Silver. He must have been much the same kind of man.
Pagett’s being in Marlow is an amazing red herring though – it totally distracts your attention from his having seen Sir Eustace there. Moreover, the mention of Long John Silver, a famously amoral figure who destabilises the easy categorisation of Stevenson’s novel as a straightforward jingoistic boy’s own adventure story, makes me think that Christie is actually attempting something similar here. But just as she’s no Conrad, she’s also no Stevenson and it just doesn’t quite work. This is a novel full of irritating self-obsessed bores , rather than loveable rogues who negotiate (or at least expose) the complicated ethical questions the thriller genre usually papers over (something which Stevenson, at his best, always achieves). Moreover, it really isn’t a pleasant read. Certainly, it fulfils occasionally the thriller’s remit of providing an exciting frisson of excitements, even sexual excitement, that isn’t legitimate in reality. The problem is that Anne’s ideas aren’t just fantasies, but a fully-formed intellectual system – one which it isn’t much fun to entertain, even hypothetically. Where Conrad and Stevenson challenge us with ethical conflicts that unsettle because they’re hard to dismiss and thus tend to destabilise our coherent moral and ethical world-view, Christie’s novel simply asks us to contemplate a pseudo-scientific model that no sane person would ever endorse – and which is thus as easily dismissable as it is unpleasant to read about.
Towards the end of the novel, there is an indication that the whole worship of ‘savage’ male brutality is only ever meant to belong to the realm of sexual fantasy. First there’s the negation of Anne’s defensive idea of female sacrifice, which suggests that her theory is actually all talk: ‘I’m not making a sacrifice at all! I wanted to come!’ Then there’s Suzanne’s sensible suggestion that her and Rayburn’s primitivism belongs exclusively to the extended fantasy of the honeymoon: ‘have your honeymoon, dear lunatics, and let it be a long one.’ But this is too little too late and, along the way, we are still asked to entertain ideas which are not challenging, but merely unpleasant and false.
Ultimately, there’s enough Christie magic – the light touch, the self-referential tone of the narrative, clever and convincing deductions and plot twists, humorous use of unreliable narrators – to ensure that this is certainly not Christie’s worst novel. In fact, there are moments of genuine excitement. My favourite of these is the chapter that ends in the revelation of what was in the film case dropped through the window of Suzanne’s compartment: ‘Pebbles? No, Anne, not pebbles! Diamonds!’ This is the kind of innocuous excitement that Christie at her best excels at – and, as Stevenson himself often argued, there’s no shame in having mastered the art of such excitement – even for a moment. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Re-Reading Agatha Christie 