Small Crimes, Big Consequences

Even the most beloved authors are not necessarily remembered for the works they themselves considered their best. Famously, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his Sherlock Holmes stories begrudgingly, and was instead devoted to his historical fiction, in particular The White Company, a charming but somewhat mannered tale of knights in the Hundred Years’ War. Similarly, C. S. Lewis considered his little-known novel Till We Have Faces his best work. A retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, it’s a dark and foreboding tale, a far cry from his Narnia stories or even his popular theology.

Perhaps most surprising of all is the case of Agatha Christie, who didn’t even publish her favourite works under her own name but used that of Mary Westmacott. This pseudonym allowed her to branch out from pure crime writing to delve instead into psycho- logical character dramas. Most notable of these is Absent in the Spring (1944), which she wrote in just three days, saying of the experience: ‘It was written with integrity, with sincerity, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy an author can have.’ So what makes Absent in the Spring worthy of such pride? In it Christie presents us with a psychological portrait of her protagonist, Joan Scudamore. Prim and proper, the model of an English mid-twentieth-century housewife, Joan is travelling home from Baghdad, where she has been visiting her sick daughter. At the Turkish border she finds herself stuck, her train delayed for several days by flooding. She must wait at a shabby guest house in the middle of the desert, with no other guests, no writing materials and nothing to read. For once the ever-busy Joan, with her litany of charitable committees, servant problems and social engagements, finds herself alone with her thoughts. With her typical flair for dramatic foreshadowing, this is the scenario Christie sets up in the opening chapter. Early in her homeward journey Joan has run into her old schoolfriend Blanche Haggard. Blanche, once the most charming and popular girl in the school, has now come down in the world with a string of broken marriages and not much money. The two women are in stark contrast to one another: Joan is all propriety and conventionality, while Blanche is a paradox, both generous and capricious, a rule-breaker but a kindly one. As the two old friends struggle through small talk they inevitably land on the topic of the weather, which threatens to be bad for Joan’s journey ahead, raising the possibility that she may get stranded:

‘There are always plenty of things to think about, aren’t there?’ she said. Blanche grinned. ‘One can always think of one’s sins!’ ‘Yes, indeed.’ Joan assented politely though without amusement. Blanche eyed her keenly. ‘Only that wouldn’t give you occupation long!’ She frowned and went on abruptly: ‘You’d have to go on from them to think of your good deeds. And all the blessings of your life! Hm – I don’t know. Might be rather dull. I wonder,’ she paused, ‘if you’d nothing to think about but yourself for days and days I wonder what you’d find out about yourself –’ Joan looked sceptical and faintly amused. ‘Would one find out anything one didn’t know before?’ Blanche said slowly: ‘I think one might . . .’ She gave a sudden shiver. ‘I shouldn’t like to try it.’

Predictably, Joan finds herself in just such a situation. The noise and bustle of life fade away, and the thoughts, memories and impressions she has so long tried to suppress begin to emerge. Christie delightfully likens these unpleasant ripples in the mind to snakes and lizards darting in and out of the ground. They won’t leave Joan in peace, and she finds she must at last confront them. In describing the novel Christie said of Joan, ‘She would be, as it were, continually meeting herself, not recognizing herself, but becoming increasingly uneasy.’ This is the atmosphere Christie brilliantly creates, full of sinister and unsettling moments, all of which happen in Joan’s own anxious mind, with its familiar repetitions and obscure trains of thought. At the same time Joan starts to follow the trail of clues that Christie lays down, but instead of a criminal to be unmasked or a murderous plot to be revealed, she has only herself to discover. She is the culprit at the centre of a storm of misery which she has been inflicting on those she loves. However, Joan Scudamore is no Poirot, dedicated to truth and logic. Even epiphanies in the desert may not be enough to shake her out of her self-deception. It’s a shame that Absent in the Spring is so little remembered, for Christie was right, it is among her best works. I first experienced it as an audiobook, which I foolishly began listening to late in the evening. Hours later I was still clutching my phone, unable to stop, trying not to think how soon my morning alarm was due to go off. I’m not the only one: it’s a book I’ve pressed on a lot of people, and they’ve all raced through it. When I gave it to my flatmate, I left her one Saturday morning curled up on the sofa, reading the opening pages, and returned several hours later to find her still there, feverishly reaching the final chapter.

Not surprising perhaps. Christie’s novels are often quick reads, on the short side and dramatically paced. But there is something especially compelling about Absent in the Spring. Perhaps it has to do with the personal nature of Christie’s ‘Mary Westmacott’ novels, in which she clearly used the mask of anonymity to draw more directly on her own life and experiences. The characters in it have a weight of reality to them and this is particularly true of the women. As well as Joan herself there is the aforementioned Blanche – dissolute yet compassionate, and unflinching about her own failings; there’s Joan’s neighbour Leslie Sherston, stoic, devoted, caring nothing for respect- ability but thwarted in many ways; and finally Joan’s daughters – Barbara, flighty and vulnerable, and Averil, coolly observant but burning with an inner fire.

Absent in the Spring is a novel centred on moral complexity, occur- ring in the small interior moments of seemingly quiet lives. In it we get glimpses of Christie’s own moral code. Far from being prudish, she’s quite cavalier about the failings which even today tend to cause the most outrage. Adultery, embezzlement, abandonment of family, these sins are not presented as ultimate failings from which there can be no return. Instead Christie is deeply sensitive to the hurt and harm that can come from simply not being brave enough in our virtues. I’m reminded of some words from The Habit of Being, the collected letters of the American author Flannery O’Connor: Not that I can claim any interesting or pleasurable sins (my sense of the devil is strong) but I know all about the garden variety pride, gluttony, envy and sloth, and what is more to the point, my virtues are as timid as my vices. I think sin occasionally brings one closer to God, but not habitual sin and not this petty kind that blocks every small good. It is precisely this timidity that is so destructive in Joan. In her self-satisfaction she has failed to see that it is not intrinsically a moral victory to be respectable and middle-class. That such an easy failing could have such dire consequences makes for unsettling reading. One wonders what similar failings of our own we might be overlooking. Herein lies the trick behind so many of Christie’s mystery stories. Rather than creating one character who might believably have committed the crime, she convinces us that almost any character might have done it, given the right circumstances. Christie’s friend and fellow author G. K. Chesterton voices this through his own detective character Father Brown who says, ‘When I tried to imagine the state of mind in which such a thing would be done, I realized that I might have done it myself under certain mental conditions. And then, of course, I knew who really had done it.’ Absent in the Spring takes this train of thought one step further. Christie suggests that not only do we all carry within us the possibility of committing a murder, but in fact we might be committing such crimes on a spiritual level every day and not even noticing it: an apt lesson from the Queen of Crime.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 83 © Rachel Sherlock 2024