Inconsistencies in later Agatha Christie mysteries

Griselda

Gosh, if one is looking for factual inconsistencies, look no further than the very late work Elephants Can Remember. The couple at the crux of the mystery are a General and Lady Ravenscroft. We are told that he is aged 65, and she is 35, and surprisingly, no particular comment is made by the perceptive Mrs Oliver on the disparity in their ages. At one point, they are spoken of as having retired: what, her too, at that age?A crime in the distant past, as it is always called, is 12 years before, and yet, at one point Mrs Oliver says 15 or 20 years before. That would have made Lady Ravenscroft, at the outside date, the same age that her daughter was at the time of a tragedy! Eg, zero, one or two years when she gave birth to Celia. Nobody can really remember anything clearly, which is odd, after only 12 years, and that whole repetition thing that you get in Postern of Fate, is going on, this time about people saying they knew something about someone but couldn't think who told them, and it being like cousins twice removed - two tellers removed. Better still this woman, Mrs Burton-Cox, (who is always, with none of the originality that you'd get really with different people saying it, called 'odious') BIG SPOILER ALERT, doesn't want her son to marry because she wants to control his money, and even, it is stated, to inherit from him. Why would she inherit from her own son? In the normal order of nature, she would pre-decease her offspring. Yet, on the back of my Collins Crime club first edition, the Financial Times is quoted as saying the author is 'On top of her form', and the Daily Mirror write of a 'triumphant return' . There are truly chilling moments, but I feel this is a book for the social history connoisseur, and the sentimentalist only. Marvellous references to fully grown children being fond of their parents in an ordinary sort of way, not passionately. Also references to kids at boarding school spending holidays too with non-family members who were paid to take in kids. What different times those were. However, let us truly say that even the greatest ever novelist must be permitted to write rather less enthrallinh texts in her later years. It is an interesting study to make of these the last works as less powerful as they are, they focus the reader's mind on the technical approaches the author used in order to craft her mysteries. The dialogue sometimes sounds like notes written to remind herself of how the story will be unravelled, and not like real people speaking at all.

Griselda

One character says words to the effect, "Oh no, she was a lot older than 35, she was 36, I think"

Griselda

Has anyone else noticed that in the later novels, such as Elephants.... And Third Girl, Agatha Christie has a thing about wigs. She thinks people all look the same under them. In earlier works, she is certain that most people never look properly at servants. This is an interesting insight into the mind of the author that she kind of thinks of people as being easy to de-humanise, on one level: well to de-personalise, anyway. There is a kind of detachment with which she is able to see things unsentimentally, and to see the truth. Characters are often ready to vocalise the fact that they did not have deep feelings for the deceased, and wouldn't have minded them being dead. But perhaps this is done creatively only for dramatic effect. Certainly, AC is a great moralist, who upholds the power of good over evil, and she champions justice and righteousness as much as any other author.

Tommy_A_Jones

Some people do give up work at an early age and if General Ravenscroft had had a Good amount of money she might well have "Retired" young also Terminology was different in those days, even now when we say we will retire to our bed we don't mean we will stay there until the Grim Reaper comes, she might have just decided not to work anymore.

Griselda

True enough. It isn't a great book, though, and very repetitive. Do you rate it ?

Anubis

I think it was just anno domini creeping up on Dame Agatha. She would have written that book in her 80s (?), and likely not as sharp on catching the errors as in her younger years. Maybe there was a typo and 35 should be 53 or 36 should be 63. I think one problem in adapting the novels for the screen would be dealing with these slips. As Tommy has said in earlier posts, other people reading the book before it went to press should no doubt have caught these things, but it's quite possible that since she was an author of such stature the publisher might just have accepted the manuscript as it came in. 

taliavishay-arbel

First of all, about retiring - married women of the Ravencroft's class didn't work outside the home. When AC talks about them retiring, what is understood is that he stopped working and they lived on his pension and/or private income, and they moved to a place where they could live comfortably on that income. "To retire" at this period is not just "To recieve a pension" but also "To move away from the center", as in "To retire to the country".

As for the "mistakes" - I also noticed a lot of them, but thought they were deliberate - part of the central thesis of the book, that people remember things from long ago but quite often remember them wrong, but by putting together all the stories and comparing them, the truth might be achieved. (I seem to also remember some variation in the stories, about which sister was the unstable one)

As for the "dehumanization" by wig or of servants - yes, that seems to be a recurring theme. in "Three act Tragedy a well-known actor manages to impersonate the butler, without his close friends noticing; in one of the later Miss Marple stories, "Miss Marple tells a story", someone doesn't notice that the maid who entered the room and the maid who came out wasn't the same maid; and most dramatically, in "Evil under the sun" poirot compares young women tanning on the beach (this was before everybody became cautious of too much sun) to bodies in the morgue! and indeed, SPOILER the whole plot of that book revolves around the fact that bodies of young tanned women are indistinguishable. A similar plot also in MM's "A Christmas Tragedy" in "The Tuesday Club Murders" (A.K.A. The Thirteen Problems). 

Griselda

True enough about retiring, Tali, only interesting that when looking for problems between the couple which could have led to the tragedy, no one mentions having to put yourself out to grass and a quieter life when you are only 36, good looking, and fond of younger men - if rumour be believed. Odd that the son, after being talked of, isn't a feature, so can't be a red herring suspect. All other suspects arrive too late and too little, but as Anubis wisely says, age does creep up on even the greatest.

taliavishay-arbel

I think it was mentioned that she had some ill health (physical), and then someone confuses things and thinks she had mental problems (attributing her sister's problems to her by mistake. I saw the rumors of being fond of younger men as one of the post-mortem theories that people make up, but maybe I was wrong.

Anubis

I've probably mentioned this elsewhere (my memory is not all that), but I think this story was based on the "Luard" case of 1908 (?), in which a wife was shot. The husband, a general, could not possibly have done it, but the real culprit was never found. In profound grief over his wife's death, he committed suicide shortly afterward, and the mystery was never solved.

Griselda

Thanks for this information, Anubis. The connection makes it very interesting. I can see how Agatha Christie would have thought about it, and of what was going through the head of the General after the death. The psychology of the characters involved in this story becomes clearer to me.

Griselda

Oddly, Tali, with reference to switches of identity, I find SPOILER ALERT, Dead Man's Folly convincing in the respect that the owner of the estate could come back under a disgusted identity. I buy into the post-war confusion of who would have been lost in action, and I accept that servants or long-established local families would often have known things but not wanted to rock the boat because the 'squire' set came from a different social world which wasn't really part of their 'business', and they might get work or favours from the gentry, so would not have messed things up for them. I have found more of interest and quality in this mystery on subsequent readings, especially viewing Mrs Folliat's conflict between loyalty to what is right, and love of the old order and keeping the estate as the focus of the village. Was the house based on Agatha Christie's own place in Devon?