The biggest surprise is the inclusion in the above list of the ‘Death of Nelson’ (complete with double exclamation marks) as the subject of the all-important picture on the stairs. In the novel it is the Madonna and Child motif of the painting that causes both Marina to ‘freeze’ and Miss Marple’s theory to be vindicated. Is it possible that at this stage in the planning Christie had not decided on the reason for the look of doom? Unlikely as it might appear, this would seem to be the case, as some of the other options for the ‘frozen’ stare are listed and eventually included in the novel.
And, finally, Miss Marple explains…
Miss M says—I’ve been very stupid—medical book—shuts it
The Meeting—Miss M wants to stand on stairs—the light—‘I understand better now’
She took an overdose? Very easy to do—or perhaps someone gave it to her
To Dermot—Very simple Doom has come upon me cried was Heather—doom came on her as a direct result of what she once did—many years ago—meaning no harm but lacking consideration—thinking only of what an action meant to her. She did because she went to an Entertainment to see and meet Marina Gregg at a time when she was suffering from German measles
Endless Night 30 October 1967 Every Night and every Morn Some to Misery are born Every Morn and every Night Some are born to Sweet Delight, Some are born to Sweet Delight, Some are born to Endless Night.
Blake, ‘Auguries of Innocence’
Penniless Michael Rogers woos and marries Ellie, an enormously wealthy American heiress. They build a dream house in the country but their blissful existence is ruined by a spate of unpleasant incidents. A fatal accident follows and a monstrous plot is gradually revealed.
The Collins reader, in a report dated 23 May 1967, found Endless Night ‘prodigiously exciting to read. The atmosphere is doom-laden from the beginning and all the minor tricks and ornaments are contrived to heighten the effect.’ Phrases such as ‘dazzling sleight-of-hand’, ‘handled with great assurance’ and ‘Mrs. Christie has, as always, been very clever’ are scattered through the report.
In an interview for The Times in the month following publication Christie admitted, ‘it’s rather different from anything I’ve done before—more serious, a tragedy really. In some families one child seems born to go wrong…Usually I spend three or four months on a book but I wrote Endless Night in six weeks. If you can write fairly quickly the result can often be more spontaneous. Being Mike wasn’t difficult.’ She began drafting in America in late 1966 when she accompanied Sir Max, who was on a lecture tour.
Endless Night is Agatha Christie’s final triumph. It was the last great novel that she was to write and is the greatest achievement of her last 20 years. It is also an astonishing book to have appeared from a 75-year-old writer at the end of a long and illustrious career. It is astonishing for a few reasons: it is written by an elderly upper middle class woman in the voice of a young working class male; it recycles her most famous trick 40 years after she originated it; it is totally unlike anything else she ever wrote; and finally, it is a return to the multiple death scenarios of Ten Little Niggers and Death Comes as the End. By the end of the novel all the main protagonists are dead—Ellie, Greta, Mrs Lee, Santonix, Claudia Hardcastle; and Michael is behind bars, at best, for life.
The plot is an amalgam of at least four earlier plot ideas.
First, with a narrator—Michael Rogers—as the villain of the piece, comparisons with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd are inevitable. It should be remembered that even before this, Agatha Christie had experimented with the narrator-murderer device in 1924 in The Man in the Brown Suit. There, Sir Eustace Pedlar narrates part of the novel through extracts from his diaries, before his eventual unmasking as the villain. The ploy came to fruition in 1926 with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a village murder mystery narrated by the local doctor, who is unmasked by Poirot as a blackmailer and a murderer. Forty years later she added another twist to it with Endless Night.
While The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a whodunit, however, Endless Night is most decidedly not. For much of its length it seems to be merely a novel with menacing undertones, and only at its conclusion is it perceived as a carefully plotted crime novel. It is thus utterly unlike anything that Agatha Christie had written before and so, a repetition of the Ackroyd trick was not a possibility that anyone considered. This makes its impact all the more impressive. Nobody expected her to repeat her dazzling trick of 40 years earlier. But it should be remembered that Agatha Christie made a career out of doing what nobody expected.
Second, Endless Night’s plot set-up is identical to Death on the Nile. Two lovers collude to install a charming villain into the life of a wealthy heiress; the plan is to marry and subsequently kill her. The lovers fake a serious argument and are, to all appearances, at daggers drawn. Although the mechanics of the murder in each case are totally different, the similarities are too obvious to ignore and unlikely to be mere coincidence. In Endless Night there is also an unexpected development when Michael begins to harbour unexpected feelings for the ill-fated Ellie.
Oddly, although the Collins reader’s report when Christie first submitted Endless Night was enthusiastic—finding that ‘the difficult gimmick is fairly played’, and ‘the murder is pretty ingenious’—his fear was that the critics would maul it. This mauling would presumably result from its sheer unexpectedness. In the event he was completely wrong as it received some of the best reviews that Christie had ever received: ‘one of the best things Mrs Christie has ever done’ (Sunday Times); ‘Christie at topmost peak’ (Evening Standard); ‘Wickedly ingenious murder mystery’ (Scotsman); ‘the most devastating [surprise] that this surpriseful author has ever brought off’ (Guardian).
Third, its greatest, and most obvious, similarity is to the Marple short story ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, first published in January 1942. There we have a wealthy heiress, Louise Laxton, marrying the local ne’er-do-well and being murdered in exactly the same way as Ellie Rogers. (There are two versions of this short story—the second, unpublished version is slightly more elaborate.) In many ways, Endless Night is an expanded form of ‘The Case of the Caretaker’, but told in such a way as to make it a new story.
Fourth, The Mysterious Affair at Styles also features a collusive couple who stage a very public argument, thereby convincing listeners, and readers, that they hate each other. They, like their counterparts in Endless Night, have doctored the victim’s existing medication, allowing both of them to be absent at the time of the crime.
The earliest note below dates from 1961 and appears in a list of ideas that includes A Caribbean Mystery, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side and The Clocks:
Husband—wants to marry rich wife—get rid of her—employs someone to threaten her—grudge—he intercepts sweets—etc. saves her life several times—her death in the end comes through fear—running from a ‘ghost’—she falls
Although there are strong hints in this jotting of A Caribbean Mystery (‘saves her life several times’), the idea of marrying a rich wife and employing someone to threaten her is the basis of Endless Night.
The following year it is listed with her proposed titles for 1963 and 1964, after The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side had been delivered to Collins. There is no mention yet of the eventual title and the references to it throughout the notes are always as ‘Gypsy’s Acre’, the scene of the legend that seems, from the dedication, to have provided the germ of the book. Nor is there any indication at this early stage of the method of telling—one of the main features of the novel. Note also that ‘Gypsy’s Acre’ is listed as X—an indication, perhaps, that she intended to work on this before the other two, which are listed as Y and Z.
1962
Notes for 3 books
