Novel for every year of life

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32450, 10 November 1970, Page 7

Novel for every year of life

(By GILLIAN FRANKS) LONDON. Agatha Christie, the queen of crime fiction, celebrated her eightieth birthday recently on the same day her eightieth novel, “Passenger to Frankfurt,” went on sale in the bookshops. Her recipe for success^ —“I suppose it’s just like making sauce. Sometimes you get all the ingredients just right and you have success,” she days. Certainly she has broken a few records on her Way. She has engineered at least a thousand murders, she once sold a record 5 million paperbacks in a year, and her play, “The Mousetrap,” is still going strong at London’s Ambassadors Theatre after 18 years the world’s longest-running stage drama. Incredibly, she is the last person in the world you would normally associate with producing stories of mayhem and murder. As one of her critics and most fervent admirers once said, “She gives you the impression of being native to Belgravia, and brought up on a good golf course.” How did it all begin? She chuckles. “When I was a young woman, I did nothing, absolutely nothing. No I mean it People are always going on about my vitafity, now I leave them all tired. “I never went to school. At our house in Torquay I spent all my childhood playing

■ with a hoop in the garden. > It’s wonderful how a life like ■ that preserves you for the ■ future. Of course, a lot of 1 the time I was fearfully bored. And there’s nothing ! like boredom for stimulating 1 ideas.” ! It was during the First ! World War that Agatha ' Christie first thought seri- ’ ously about detective stories. r At this time she was working in a hospital dispensary. ; “I remember when I was off duty chatting to my sister 'about detective stories. We both agred it must be easy to write them. Mark you, we had only ever read two— Sherlock Holmes and something called ‘Mystery Of The Yellow Room.’ “It wasn’t long before a plot was beginning to form. Then I had a holiday. My mother, a strong-minded woman, packed me off to a hotel—on Dartmoor, I think. She said briskly: ‘lf you’re going to write that book you had better get on with it’ “I wrote the book and forgot about it. I had a young man at the time and that was , far more interesting. It was {Just as well because the I book kept coming back. It rwas called ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles,’ and it I wasn’t published in the end I until 1920.”

Since then, she has managed a minimum of a book a year. "When I get an idea 1 do a rough outline of it in one month. Then, perhaps, I take another three to finish it. Never more, otherwise, I and it get stale.” Has she ever tried to analyse her own success? “Basically, I’ve never tried to do what’s beyond me,” she says. “I know that spy stories are fashionable nowadays, but I’ve never tried to write one and I never will. Neither is the private eye novel really me. “My formula is to pose a puzzle, pure and simple. Then I round up a limited number of suspects, among whom we find the murderer —a three-card trick in which you pick the knave.” If there is anything she likes as much as writing, it is listening to people. . “I listen to my cleaning woman talking, and to her relatives,” she says. ‘T've always loved shops and buses and cafes. And I keep my ears open. That’s the secret.” As long as Agatha Christie is alive,. Hercule Poirot and her other creation Miss Marples ("based on my grandmother who lived to be 92”) will still be cropping up every year. That is a promise which the world’s best-selling

thriller writer means to maintain. “And,” she says, "there’ll be more when I’m gone.” Agatha Christie has reserved, for posthumous publication, a Poirot and a Miss Marples book. Features International.