Ever Wonder What Inspires Writers Like Agatha Christie?

When Agatha Christie ‘Ripped from the Headlines’
by Chris_Chan

(WARNING: SPOILERS FOR VARIOUS CHRISTIE NOVELS FOLLOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.)

The Law & Order television franchise is famous for “ripping from the headlines,” that is to say, taking real-life crimes and other news stories and then fictionalizing them and incorporating them into the plots of episodes. Although Law & Order is probably the most famous example of this practice, many other crime shows borrow actual events. In another prominent instance, the television show The Fugitive is thought to be based on the true case of Dr. Samuel Sheppard (no relation to the character from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd!), who was convicted of murdering his wife but insisted that a man with distinctive features really did it. Roy Huggins, the creator of the show, denied borrowing the premise, despite the many parallels.

Agatha Christie had a creative and original mind, but on occasion she dipped into real-life events for her books. Many little details came from life.

It should be noted that she insisted that most of her characters were not based on anyone real, although she admitted that the killers in The Man in the Brown Suit and The Pale Horse were based on acquaintances of hers.  In the former case, the individual in question begged to be inserted into one of her books, then took umbrage at being the victim and insisted on being made the murderer, since “the murderer is always the most interesting character!”  Some fictional locations are based on real places.  The fictional mysterious island of And Then There Were None and the vacation getaway in Evil Under the Sun are thought to be based on Burgh Island.  The titular Bertram’s Hotel is commonly believed to be based on Brown’s Hotel, an establishment Christie often frequented in London.  These are just a handful of instances where little details had a foundation in fact.

Though the bulk of Christie’s plots were original, a handful of true crimes, carefully restructured, found their way into murders solved by Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.  Importantly, Christie tended to only borrow the basic facts of the case, altering details as needed, and almost never utilizing the real-life solution.  Indeed, as this essay will illustrate, many unsolved true crimes were given neat solutions by Christie.

THE TRIALS OF MADELINE SMITH, ADELAIDE BARTLETT, AND FLORENCE MAYBRICK

THE HEADLINES : During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, murder cases with female defendants were relatively rare.  A few famous poisoning cases found their way into the popular imagination.  Madeline Smith was an attractive young woman who had a clandestine affair with Pierre L’Angelier.  Smith’s feelings cooled, and her parents, who knew nothing of L’Angelier, arranged a marriage with a respectable man.  Smith decided to accede to her parents’ wishes, but L’Angelier, furious at being rejected, blackmailed Smith with the love letters she wrote to him, claiming he’d ruin her reputation if she refused to marry him.  Smith bought arsenic from a pharmacy, ostensibly for the use of a cosmetic concoction for clear skin.  L’Angelier later died, and an autopsy proved arsenic poisoning.  Smith was tried for the crime in a well-publicized trial in 1857, but a “not proven” verdict set her free.  Controversy rages as to whether Smith was indeed guilty or not.

In 1886, the Adelaide Bartlett case, commonly referred to as the Pimlico murder, set the popular imagination on fire.  Adelaide was charged with pouring a lethal dose of chloroform down her husband’s throat.  Chloroform is an abrasive chemical, and the police could never convincingly explain how so much of the toxic substance was introduced into his system.  Adelaide was suspected of being in love with her minister, the Reverend George Dyson.  Dyson was initially also charged as a co-conspirator in the death of Thomas Edwin Bartlett, but the case was dismissed and eventually Dyson became a prosecution witness in his alleged paramour’s trial.  Due to excellent defense counsel and conflicting forensic evidence, Adelaide was acquitted.  To this day, no one is certain as to how the poisoning of Thomas Edwin Bartlett occurred and who was responsible.

Florence Maybrick was charged with her husband’s murder in 1889.  Her spouse, James Maybrick, was an abusive philanderer who used drugs.  Florence, popular in society, was seen buying a large quantity of fly-papers.  Fly-papers are strips of material treated with substances in order to attract flies and other pests.  The bugs then become trapped to the very sticky paper, and slowly die from absorbing poison in the paper.  During the late nineteenth-century, arsenic was the preferred poison for use in fly-papers.  The arsenic can be extracted from the papers by soaking the papers in water, and then boiling and evaporating the water, leaving an appreciable quantity of powdered arsenic.  After James Maybrick died, Florence was convicted of feeding him arsenic and sentenced to life in prison.  Potentially exonerating but ultimately inconclusive evidence emerged, and after fourteen years Florence was freed, but her life was ruined.  She was prevented from contacting her five children, and eventually scraped out a living back in the United States, having moved to England earlier to marry her British husband.  She died in a tiny, dirty apartment surrounded by cats, declaring her innocence to the end.

THE NOVEL : Although the parallels are a little vague, Sad Cypress appears to borrow certain aspects of the aformentioned murder trials, especially in the characterization and treatment of the female defendant.  In Sad Cypress, Elinor Carlisle, a beautiful young woman is accused of poisoning her aunt and romantic rival. The real points of similarity lie in the trial scenes and charactertization of the defendant.  Smith, Bartlett, and Maybrick became the archtypical cases of enigmatic women on trial for murder, generating sharply drawn opinions on her culpability.  The trials of Caroline Crale in Five Little Pigs and Lisa Koletzky in the play Verdict, both attractive women accused of poison murders, similarly mirror the public images of Smith, Bartlett, and Maybrick in the popular press.  Interestingly, Carlisle, Crale, and Koletzky are all unquestionably not guilty!

Dorothy L. Sayers’ Strong Poison traces the Smith case much more closely, copying some of the details almost exactly.  Sayers’s alter ego Harriet Vane steps into Smith’s role, accused of putting arsenic in her ex-lover’s coffee, but in this book the defendant is incontrovertibly innocent.

THE BRAVO CASE

THE HEADLINES : The Bravo case is one of the most infamous unsolved murder cases of all time.  In 1876, Charles Bravo died at his house The Priory, outside of London.  The cause of death was antimony poisoning (similar to arsenic).  Charles Bravo had a turbulent, often violent, and generally unhappy relationship with his wife, Florence.  Florence’s past scandalized Victorian society.  She’d had a turbulent first marriage that was sundered by separation and ended by her husband’s death, probably from alcohol abuse.  Florence had an affair with the prominent (and married) Dr. James Gully during her separation.  Gully impregnated her and then aborted the baby.  Emotionally devastated by the rocky relationship and abortion, Florence married Charles Bravo soon after her husband’s death in an attempt to regain a measure of social respectability.  Bravo resented his wife’s determination to hold on to most of her inherited wealth instead of signing it all over to him.  The marriage grew steadily tempestuous, until Charles Bravo took ill and died in agony over the course of a few days.

Florence was immediately suspected of poisoning her husband, but Dr. Gully, Florence’s companion and housekeeper Mrs. Cox, and George Griffiths, a stable worker recently fired by Bravo, were also suspects.  There was no evidence to prove whodunit, and the film dramatizations and written accounts of the case point accusing figures at all of the suspects.  Some believe that Bravo took the poison himself, but Florence and Mrs. Cox are the most commonly scrutinized suspects.  When Agatha Christie was asked about the case, she declared that she believed the most likely culprit was Dr. Gully.

To this day, no one knows for sure who did it- there are holes and unanswered questions in all of the prominent attempts to solve the crime.  The failure to catch the killer ruined the lives of all the suspects.  Florence took to drinking and died soon afterwards, Dr. Gully’s career was ruined, and Mrs. Cox and Griffiths never escaped the shadow of suspicion.

THE NOVEL : A couple of Christie’s books mirror the Bravo case.  In The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the dying agonies of Mrs. Inglethorpe, poisoned with strychnine, mirror Bravo’s horrible final hours.  Furthermore, the death of Amyas Crale, poisoned with coniine in Five Little Pigs, has numerous points of similarity.  A put-upon wife is suspected of feeding her emotionally abusive husband a toxic substance, and as in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, the setting is a large house.  Neither of these books copies the case with any degree of exactitude, but the influence of the case may be theorized.

The idea of innocent suspects’ lives forever being tainted by the shadow of suspicion is a common theme in Christie’s books.  The short stories “The Four Suspects” and “The Lernean Hydra,” and the novels Appointment With Death, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, and Ordeal by Innocence all emphasize what a horrible experience it is to be an innocent suspect, and how vital it is for the truth to be known.  In the Geraldine McEwan television adaptation of Ordeal by Innocence (Miss Marple does not appear in the book but was inserted into the film), Miss Marple actually reflects upon the fallout of the Bravo case on the innocent.

Christie was not the only author to borrow the Bravo case.  Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison utilizes aspects of this murder as well as the Madeline Smith case.  The character of the boorish Philip Boyes and his painful death by arsenic, are often thought to be drawn from Bravo.  The victims have similar personalities and five-letter names beginning with “B.”

JACK THE RIPPER

THE HEADLINES : 1888 was a bad time to be a prostitute in the Whitechapel district of London.  A brutal slasher attacked several streetwalkers over the course of a horrifying autumn.  The exact number of victims is hotly debated.  Some “Ripperologists” set the figure as low as three or four, most believe that a serial killer slaughtered five women, but some pundits say the total could be as high as twelve or even more.

As these bloody crimes captured the public opinion, a number of letters purported from the killer were delivered to Scotland Yard, major newspapers, and some prominent individuals.  One letter, filled with grammatical and spelling errors, claimed to be from the killer and was signed, “Jack the Ripper.”  No one knows for sure if the letter is genuine or a fake, but the nickname stuck.  Another letter, known as the “‘From Hell’ Letter” due to those words being scrawled at the top of the page, came with a grisly surprise- half a kidney, allegedly from one of the victims.  The author of the letter claimed to have fried and ate the other half.  Hundreds of other letters were sent out, although most of them are almost certainly forgeries.  Some Ripperologists believe that all of the letters are fraudulent.

Jack the Ripper was never caught, and controversy rages as to who did it and why.

THE NOVEL: In The A.B.C. Murders, a serial killer sends letters to Poirot, announcing his crimes in advance and daring Poirot to stop him.  The few Jack the Ripper letters that may be genuine tend to refer to past crimes rather than announce future ones.  The A.B.C. victims are not prostitutes, and the murder locations are more varied.  About the only aspect of the Ripper case that Christie borrows is the conceit that the killer may have written letters to a detective.  The Ripper crimes are referred on several occasions in the book.  Unlike Jack the Ripper, the A.B.C. murderer is caught and presumably convicted.  There is no hint of cannibalism in the A.B.C. case.  Christie is not the only author to use this plot device; the conceit of a serial killer contacting the police is used frequently in crime fiction.

THE MURDER OF GEORGE HARRY STORRS

THE HEADLINES : George Harry Storrs was a wealthy business magnate.  In 1909, Storrs was attacked in his country home and was fatally stabbed.  Storrs was not liked much by those around him, even his relatives and wife.  The only person who might have cared for him was Maria Hohl, a young woman who may have become his mistress and may have become pregnant by him, and did definitely die of drowning, possibly a suicide.

Soon after Hohl drowned, Storrs started to receive letters warning him that his life was in danger.  Storrs took steps by engaging a capable friend to help protect him, and installing an alarm bell in his house.  A “dry run” of bell ringing infuriated the police, and when Storrs was genuinely attacked, the authorities refused to respond to the summons for help.  A local man, Cornelius Howard, was charged with the crime, but there was no solid evidence against him and he was found not guilty.  A second trial followed, this time for Mark Wilde, an individual with a reputation for violent behavior, but this case similarly led to an acquittal.

THE NOVEL : The death of Paul Renauld in The Murder on the Links has several points of similarity to the Storrs case.  In both cases, a man announces that he is about to be murdered and is later fatally stabbed.  Both victims face the consequences of a shady past.  And in both cases, someone is charged with the crime, exonerated at trial, and then a different person is arrested but soon released.  There, the similarities end- Christie had too much ingenuity to rip from the headlines too closely.

Another case of a man receiving threatening letters and then dying of stab wounds is in Murder on the Orient Express, although the parallels are substantially more oblique.

THE CRIPPEN CASE

THE HEADLINES : Dr. Hawley Crippen was a purveyor of medicines, living in England, married to a flamboyant woman with dreams of success on the stage.  In 1910, Mrs. Crippen vanished, and Dr. Crippen told his acquaintances that she had left him.  Later, he amended his story to state that she had died abroad.  Dr. Crippen’s girlfriend, Ethel LeNeve, soon began cohabitating with him, provoking much gossip.  The police began investigating, and Dr. Crippen and LeNeve attempted to flee across the Atlantic.  While the pair was at sea (LeNeve was disguised as a boy!), the police scrutinized the Crippen home, and found the partial remains of a dead body in the basement, which had been poisoned with scopolamine, dismembered, and buried.  A quick telegram led to the pair’s arrest and extradition.  Crippen was convicted and hanged for his wife’s murder, but LeNeve was found not guilty.  The case became imbedded in the popular imagination.  In recent years, some controversial testing has raised doubts as to whether or not the body in the basement was that of Mrs. Crippen (although many commentators are convinced that the new evidence is not trustworthy), and scholars of the case have begun to engage in a renewed debate over the guilt of Dr. Crippen.

THE NOVEL : The case is referred to in the Christie short story “Tape-Measure Murder”. A boy calls out to a husband suspected of his wife’s murder, “Yah, who’s a Crippen?”  The case is also a major subplot in Mrs. McGinty’s Dead.  Decades before the events of the book, a young woman named Eva Kane had an affair with a married man.  The wife of Kane’s lover was later found buried in her basement, having first been poisoned with a vegetable alkaloid, then dismembered.  The husband was convicted of the crime, but Kane was not.  Years later, Kane and her child are major factors behind the death of Mrs. McGinty.  By crafting the character of Eva Kane, Christie is drawing upon long-held speculation that Ethel LeNeve was involved in the death of her lover’s wife, perhaps even the instigator of the crime.  In Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, Poirot has to deal with the possibility that a now-elderly Eva Kane, her grown child, or the adult children of Kane’s convicted boyfriend are involved in the title character’s murder.

THE THOMPSON/BYWATERS AFFAIR

THE HEADLINES : In 1922, Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were tried for the stabbing death of Thompson’s husband Percy.  The Thompsons had allegedly been assaulted outside their home one night.  Edith received only minor injuries, but Percy was killed.  Edith implicated Bywaters, but when her love letters were found amongst Bywaters’s possessions, Edith was arrested, too.  Bywaters confessed to his own culpability, but insisted that his paramour was completely innocent, despite her frequent declarations that she wished her husband was dead.  The jury thought that Bywaters was just being chivalrous, and both defendants were convicted and hanged.

THE NOVEL : The Thompson/Bywaters affair occurred in the year before The Murder on the Links was published, so given the fame of the case, it seems probable that the Beroldy case in the book was impacted by the Thompson/Bywaters media circus.  In the book, a wealthy Frenchman named Beroldy was murdered years before the events of the book, and his wife and her lover were implicated.  Madame Beroldy was loosely bound and gagged in a presumed burglary, but evidence mounted against her and her boyfriend.  The lover, Georges Conneau, confessed to the fatal stabbing but fled the country.  Madame Beroldy was tried alone, but her impassioned testimony in defense of herself led to an acquittal.  Years later, this past crime leads to a new murder mystery.  Christie altered the location from England to France, and changed the outcome of the trial, but otherwise the similarities are evident.

THE CROYDON POISONINGS, A.K.A. THE BIRDHURST MURDERS

THE HEADLINES : In 1928 and 1929, a family was torn apart by the deaths of three members of the family.  The Sidney and Duff families grieved the deaths of Edmund Duff, Vera Sidney, and finally the family matriarch Violet Sidney.  Vera was Violet’s daughter, and Edmund was married to Violet’s elder daughter Grace.  Edmund’s death was originally attributed to sunstroke due to failure to wear a hat while fishing, but after the two women died with similar symptoms, the corpses were exhumed and arsenic was found in all three bodies.  The motive may have been money, after Violet’s death the surviving members of the family received a modest inheritance.  The prime suspect was Grace Duff, who was implicated but never tried for the crimes, although other members of the family remain potential suspects.

THE NOVEL : Although it would be a bit of a stretch to say that Christie was deliberately borrowing from the Croydon crimes specifically when she wrote her novels, a couple of her mysteries involve wealthy families substantially reduced by poisonings.  In 4:50 From Paddington, the entire family is made ill by arsenic poisoning, and one family member dies from arsenic.  A second family member is killed with aconite tablets.  In A Pocket Full of Rye, the family patriarch is murdered with taxine, and his trophy wife’s tea is lethally spiked with cyanide.  In both of these cases a strangulation is thrown into the mix. Crooked House also sees a rich family rocked by deaths from eserine eyedrops and heart medication.  Unlike the Croydon poisonings, Christie makes sure that these murders are solved, although in one novel the “official” solution” is not the truth, but justice is done outside the letter of the law.

THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING CASE

THE HEADLINES : There are many contenders for the “trial of the twentieth century.”  One of them is the prosecution of Bruno Hauptmann for the Lindbergh kidnapping case.  In 1932, Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the baby son of the famous aviator, was taken from his crib in the middle of the night at the Lindbergh’s New Jersey home.  A media whirlwind ensued, but after a couple of months of fruitless attempts to locate and rescue Charles Lindbergh, Jr., the child’s corpse was finally discovered.  The police made little headway in the case for a while, although some heavy suspicion fell on the household staff.  Violet Sharp, a maid in the Lindbergh household, was repeatedly questioned by police on suspicion of complicity.  Eventually, Sharp committed suicide by poisoning herself.  Later, the police concluded that she was not involved.  After a couple of years and a media circus, the German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann was linked to the crime; and was subsequently tried, convicted, and executed for kidnapping and murder.  Hauptmann contended his innocence to the end and to this day many commentators believe him to be wrongfully convicted and executed (due to anti-immigrant prejudice and a desire to give closure to a national hero), although others are convinced that justice was done.

THE NOVEL : Christie lifted this case for Murder on the Orient Express when she crafted the subplot of the Armstrong kidnapping case.  In Murder on the Orient Express, the little victim is a girl, Daisy Armstrong.  After her corpse is found, her pregnant mother dies due to complications from a miscarriage. The devastated father shoots himself, and an innocent servant under suspicion commits suicide by defenestration.  Christie found it necessary to add the additional deaths to heighten the tragedy and for important plot purposes.  In real life, Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh survived (although the heartbreak naturally took an emotional toll on them) and had five more healthy children.  In Murder on the Orient Express, there is no doubt about the guilt of the kidnapper, who escapes conventional justice by using bribery to receive a not guilty verdict.

THE PERSONAL TRAGEDIES OF GENE TIERNEY

THE HEADLINES : Gene Tierney was an Oscar-nominated American actress with a successful career and a troubled personal life.  In the 1950’s, Tierney had well-publicized battles with mental illness.  Her personal problems are often thought to be stem in part from the health problems of her daughter Daria, who in 1943 was born premature, mentally challenged, and afflicted with numerous other ailments.  The doctors attributed Daria’s poor condition to Tierney contracting rubella (German measles) in the middle of her pregnancy.  Much later, a fan came up to Tierney at a gathering and told her that years earlier she had come to one of Tierney’s performances despite being ill with German measles, and got an autograph and a kiss from her.  The fan said that she hoped that she hadn’t got Tierney sick.  Stunned to come face-to-face with the person who was inadvertently responsible for destroying her daughter’s health, Tierney froze with a stunned expression and then wandered off, later commenting that the experience had inured her to the adulation of fans.

THE NOVEL : Christie used this as the catalyst for the events of The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.  The character of Marina Gregg has some superficial similarities with Tierney, being an actress with an earlier marriage that ended in divorce, and a mentally retarded child due to rubella contracted during pregnancy.  In real life, however, Tierney had another healthy child, unlike Gregg, whose inability to bear more children contributed to her own mental breakdown.  Gregg adopted children before her ill-fated pregnancy, and then abandoned them before giving birth to focus on her biological baby.  Tierney had not adopted anyone, Christie added this to provide more potential suspects in the grown-up jettisoned adoptees.  The character of Heather Badcock turns out to be responsible for Tierney’s personal tragedy in precisely the same manner as the anonymous real-life fan, although this individual was not murdered at the party where she revealed her unwittingly destructive actions.

SCIENTISTS WHO DEFECTED DURING THE COLD WAR

THE HEADLINES : The Cold War was an interesting time to be a scientist.  Both sides wanted to achieve and maintain an advantage in all kinds of scientific endeavors, and notable scientists whose political beliefs didn’t coincide with those of the regimes of their home countries sometimes were willing to move halfway across the world in order to work for a more sympathetic government.  The Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo defected to the Soviet Union in 1950, and the Russian engineer Victor Kravchenko fled to the United States in 1944, to cite two notable examples.  Defection often did not bring success.  These scientists were often viewed as traitors in their home country, and many defectors to the Soviet Union were under constant scrutiny by the authorities, and treated with contempt by their peers.

THE NOVEL : Themes of defection and the battle over intellectuals were common in Cold War fiction.  Alfred Hitchcock’s movieTorn Curtain is one of the most prominent examples of such a plot being used for entertainment purposes.  Christie uses this as a central plot point in Destination Unknown, although the character Thomas Betterton, a defecting scientist, is not clearly based on any one person, and the Soviet Union is not involved- a private organization turns out to be behind the mass exportation of brilliant minds.

CONCLUSION

While real-life case influenced Christie’s work, Christie’s books have also affected actual murder cases.  The Pale Horsehas been credited with saving at least three lives due to its vivid descriptions of thallium poisoning, which causes slow deaths that resemble natural demises, albeit with one constant symptom: hair loss.  A serial killer who murdered his family and some of his co-workers with thallium in what was termed the “Bovington Bug” case was caught thanks to an official who read Christie.  A sick baby and an ill husband were also saved from death due to people who had read The Pale Horse.

In May 2009, the Iranian police announced the capture of a woman they dubbed “the Agatha Christie Serial Killer,” Iran’s first female multiple murderer.  The woman, known as Mahin, targeted mainly older women, drugged them with tainted juice, and then robbed and murdered them.  The moniker comes from the fact that Mahin attempted to avoid detecting by varying the means of murder by copying crimes out of Agatha Christie novels!

There may very well be other cases of “ripping from the headlines” that are not mentioned in this essay.  Some obscure cases, crimes, and individuals may conceivably have found their way onto Christie’s pages after a little reworking.  It must be stressed that in no way is this article meant to imply that Christie had to turn to genuine events in order to fill her books.  Her capacity for originality can be reflected in a comical scene early in Cards on the Table, where Dr. Roberts jovially remarks that Mrs. Ariadne Oliver (Christie’s alter ego) might be able to wrangle some “good copy” out of the murder of Mr. Shaitana, and quips that a simple stabbing might go over with readers better than her usual diet of untraceable poisons.  The moment Dr. Roberts leaves the room, a furious Mrs. Oliver vents, “Copy!  Copy indeed!  People are so unintelligent.  I could invent a better murder any day than anything real.  I’m never at a loss for a plot.  And the people who read my books like untraceable poisons!”

• Posted 11 May 2010 at 11:52a.m. GMT