2 sons of old man—good boy (in Bank) Artist—or scene designer or producer
Cedric—a Robert Graves—rolling stone, uninhibited—(eventually to marry Lucy Eylesbarrow)
Sir Harold Crackenthorpe—busy man—director of Crackenthorpe Ltd. Well to do—not really? On rocks?
Bryan? R.A.F. Wing Command D? At a loose end
Alph[red] Dark slender—the crooked one—black market in war—Ministry of Supply
The ‘Robert Graves’ reference is to Christie’s real-life friend and neighbour, the author of I, Claudius among others. Graves was a critical fan and the dedicatee of Towards Zero. This reference also clarifies the question left unanswered at the end of the novel—which of the men will Lucy eventually marry?
There were seemingly minor points to consider but ones that impacted on the plot—how to ensure the necessary darkness for the commission of the crime and how to account for the presence in the house of two young boys. The question of possible dates is considered in two Notebooks:
Points to settle
Date of journey possibly Jan 9th or thereabouts Points to take in—holidays (boys) New Year (Cedric) Time of getting dark (train)
Dates
Holidays? April—Stobart-West and Malcolm there
So murder end of February? Say—24th 26th
The eventual decision to place the murder just before, and the investigation just after, Christmas answered all the concerns—the early darkness, as well as the presence of the two young boys and Cedric.
But the biggest problem about Four-Fifty from Paddington is the identity of the corpse. It is a problem for Miss Marple, the police, the reader and, I suspect, for Agatha Christie herself. We do not know for certain until the novel’s closing pages whose murder is actually under investigation. And it must be admitted that it makes what would otherwise have been a Grade A Christie novel, something of a disappointment. It also raises the question of how, divine intervention aside, Miss Marple can possibly know the story behind the murder. The original reader at Collins, who reported on the manuscript, admitted that ‘unless I am being very stupid I cannot see how anyone could have known that murderer’s motive’. He was not ‘being very stupid’ as it is not possible to deduce the identity of the killer, or the motive, although, in retrospect, both are perfectly acceptable. The following note shows that Christie had two ideas about the possible identity of the corpse—Anna the dancer or Martine—and, reluctant to abandon either, eventually used aspects of both:
Is dead woman Anna the dancer or not?
Is Anne = Mrs Q—or is Anna red herring arranged by Q
Is woman killed because she is Martine and has a son or because she is Q’s wife and he plans to marry
But the devotion of even the most ardent Christie fan is severely tested when Martine is finally identified.
7
Elephants Can Remember:
Murder in Retrospect
But now, she realised, she had got to remember. She had got to think back into the past…To remember carefully every slight unimportant seeming incident.
Sparkling Cyanide, Chapter 1 SOLUTIONS REVEALED Mrs McGinty’s Dead • Ordeal by Innocence • ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ • Sleeping Murder • Sparkling Cyanide
Some of Agatha Christie’s strongest titles feature murder in the past—the investigation of a case where the detective is dependent on the memories of those involved, where the trail has grown cold and clues have disappeared, and where the uncovering of the truth often awakens a sleeping murderer. She first experimented with this in Dumb Witness, where Poirot investigates a two-month-old death; six years later her greatest triumph finds Poirot examining a 16-yearold case in Five Little Pigs (see Chapter 4); in two other cases, Mrs McGinty’s Dead and Ordeal by Innocence, the verdict is already handed down and of her last six novels, five of them feature this type of plot. Also in this category we find her historical detective story, Death Comes as the End, a daring if not wholly successful experiment from mid-career.
Dumb Witness 5 July 1937 Emily Arundell writes to Hercule Poirot on 17 April but he does not receive the letter until 28 June. And by then she is dead. Poirot goes to Market Basing to investigate her death, where the case involves spiritualism, a brooch, a dog’s ball—and another death.
Most of the notes for Dumb Witness, roughly 25 pages, are contained in Notebook 30 along with notes for Death on the Nile and the newly discovered short story ‘The Incident of the Dog’s Ball’; the relationship between the novel and its earlier incarnation as the short story (albeit with a vital difference) is considered in detail in the Appendix. Dumb Witness was published at the end of 1936 in the US as a Saturday Evening Post serial with the title Poirot Loses a Client, and as Mystery at Littlegreen House in a UK serialisation beginning in February 1937. In connection with the US serialisation, a surviving letter dated June 1936 from Edmund Cork to Christie thanks her for the revised version sent to the Saturday Evening Post magazine (who paid $16,000 for it, $2,000 more than Cards on the Table). Cork considered it a ‘tremendous improvement’ and suggested ‘using it for Collins also’. This most probably refers to the first four chapters, in which the ‘little English village’ setting is told in the third person —the rest of the book, in contrast, being narrated by Hastings. In retrospect, the information that they were added at a later stage makes perfect sense.
Dumb Witness is the archetypal Christie village mystery—a mysterious death in a well-to-do household, a collection of impecunious relatives, the village doctor and solicitor, and the arrival of Poirot whose questioning sets village tongues wagging. Once again the red herring of spiritualism is dragged across the investigation. As far back as ‘The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb’ in 1923 Christie murderers used this ploy to cover their tracks. And as late as 1961 and The Pale Horse, with a more sinister version of Dumb Witness’s Tripp sisters, spiritualism is a major plot device.
Unusually, we know from internal evidence—the ending of Chapter 7—the exact timeline of the novel; Emily Arundell died on 1 May 1936 and Poirot’s investigation began on 28 June, although for most of that investigation there is nothing to show that murder has been committed. Reader prejudice is toyed with, and yet again subverted, with the introduction of suspicious foreigner, Dr Tanios. Four previous killers are mentioned—Death in the Clouds, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and The Mystery of the Blue Train—and there is an oblique reference to Murder on the Orient Express in Chapter 25. The description of Market Basing in Chapter 6 corresponds to that of Wallingford where Christie had, some years earlier, bought Winterbrook House.
