Backlisted - Endless Night by Agatha Christie

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

At long last, it's our Agatha Christie show! We are joined by Caroline Crampton, writer and host of the Shedunnit podcast, and Laura Thompson, author and Christie biographer, for an investigation of Endless Night (1967), a late entry in the Queen of Crime's extensive catalogue and perhaps her last truly great novel of suspense and surprise. NB. Whilst we refrain from revealing the killer's identity (just about), there are enough clues sprinkled throughout the podcast that listeners may be advised to read the book first; you don't need to be Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple to work out whodunnit. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience at Foyles in Charing Cross Road, London, on 17th July 2024. If you would like to hear more, including some excellent contributions from members of the audience, subscribe to our Patreon at the Locklistener level or above; we will be making this part of our conversation available next weekend as a bonus podcast.  *For £100 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at http://seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everyone. Hi everybody. People often ask me how I read so much. And it's a fair question. And one of the answers is, well, I have a very good reading light, which makes a serious difference. I think I know what you're doing.

You use, if I'm not mistaken, Andy, a serious reader's lamp, the ones with daylight wavelength technology, which supposed to replicate the daylight spectrum as closely as possible. I do. I've been using one for about five years and I absolutely love it. It's amazing how much clearer the type stands out on the page and it means I can whip through my 50 pages a day without any risk of straining either my eyes or my brain.

So I just got one and actually it does, it's true. It makes me want to sit and read from an actual book and not turn the TV on, which is a double win. It's also ridiculously easy to unpack, beautifully hand-built in Great Britain. So, backlisted friends and listeners, we're going to make you an offer we hope you can't refuse. Yeah, if you order any Sirius Readers HD lamp, you'll get £100 off plus free UK delivery. You just go to siriusreaders.com forward slash backlisted and enter the code back B A C K. If you're unhappy with it,

there's a 30 day risk free trial. You can return it after 30 days for free, but trust me, you won't want to because they're great. So for that £100 off your Serious Reader lamp, go to seriousreaders.com forward slash backlisted and enter the code back. B A C K. It actually makes reading enjoyable again. Now there's a slogan we can stand by. Let's make reading enjoyable again. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us

once again in Foyles on Charing Cross Road in London, a place where bookselling has happened for 115 years. A place that started when two Edwardian brothers, having failed their civil service exams, decided to sell off their textbooks, the textbooks they no longer needed. That indeed was the start. So, Enterprising Young Chances, there'll be more of those coming on later in the show. Anyway, before that I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the place where people pledge for the books they really want to publish. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and today we are joined on stage by two guests, one new, one returning. Please welcome Caroline Crampton and Laura Thompson. Caroline Crampton is the host of She Done It, a storytelling podcast that

unravels the mysteries of golden age detective fiction. She also writes nonfiction books, most recently the tremendous A Body Made of Glass, a History of Hyperchondria, which was published by Grant earlier this year and was a Radio 4 Book of the Week. Also joining us, Laura Thompson. Laura Thompson is Agatha Christie's biographer. Among other books she has written about the Mitford sisters and the Lord Lucan case as well as two books from Bound, The Last Landlady and Au Revoir Now Darling, The Letters of Edith Thompson. This is her fourth appearance on Batlisted after joining us for episodes on Nancy Mitford, Antonia White and earlier this year, P.D. James. We are here to discuss Endless Night by Agatha Christie, the 62nd of her

66 crime novels, first published in 1967 by Collins Crime Club and in the following year by Dodd-Meadon Company in the USA. It is narrated by Michael Rogers, a rootless 22-year-old Englishman who's working as a chauffeur but who is drawn to the finer things in life. A chance meeting with the architect, Rudolf Santonix, both terminally cool and terminally ill, fuels Mike's dream of building a beautiful house. And he knows just where, Gypsy's Acre, a derelict property in Devon that looks down a wooded valley to the sea, a place with an unlucky reputation but a spectacular view. The place where he first sees Ellie. Ellie, it turns out, usefully for the plot, is not only beautiful but rich, an American heiress. The attraction is immediate and mutual. They marry in secret and Ellie buys Gypsy's Acre for Mike and they commissioned Santonyx to build the house of their dreams.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, there's Ellie's meddling American family for a start and her controlling best friend and best friend and confidant, the impossibly beautiful Swede, Greta Anderson. And then there's that gypsy curse. Don't worry, we're not going to spoil it for you yet, but there will be spoilers in this episode so flee from the room now if you do not want to at some point find out what happens in Agatha Christie's Endless Night. Okay, good.

Let's just go for now with the line used by Francis Eales in his Guardian review at the time that quote, the novel is sufficient to warn the reader that the crashing, not to say horrific, suspense at the end is perhaps the most devastating that this surpriseful author has ever brought off. Surpriseful. You could get away with that in 1967. Yeah.

This review is typical of the positive notices the book received. The book is rather different in style and tone to the murder mysteries that made her name, with its use of a young, working class narrator and no Miss Marple or Poirot on hand to untangle things. Christie herself seemed fond of the book, calling it my favourite at the time and brushing off the feet of making Mike Rogers so convincing when she herself was in her late seventies. She said, it wasn't difficult. After all, you'll hear people like him talking all the time.

That's not actually what she said, is it Caroline? She actually said something else. I think that's one version of what she said. I think she got asked this question a lot. She said in an interview just after the book was published, being Mike wasn't difficult. After all, you hear people like him talking all the time, perhaps the relatives of your cleaning woman.

In shops and buses on the streets or in cafes. people like him talking all the time, perhaps the relatives of your cleaning woman. In shops and buses on the streets or in cafes. In shops and buses. Yeah, I can't do the voice as well as Andy, but I thought that was a hilarious attempt on her path to be relatable. Well, if you are interested in the subject of Agatha Christie's attempt to swing with along with the 1960s, in which her last batch of novels were written there is a podcast a marvelous podcast series which it would be remiss of me not to plug here called the swinging Christie's not the swinging 60s the swinging Christie's and we operate in their shadow here but

we're gonna try and give you a bit of context around endless night and where that fits in the cultural scene of 1967. Five years later, the novel was adapted for the screen by Sidney Gilead with a cast including Hayley Mills, Hewlett-Bennett, and Britt Eklund. And I don't know if some of you saw the film poster that I tweeted the other day, but that features a very excellent catch line to encourage people to see the film Endless Night, which is as follows

Only three people in 100 guess the answer Will will you be one of the three? It was adapted for television in 2013 as part of the ITV Marple series with with Julia Mackenzie playing Miss Marple, who doesn't feature in the novel. Has anybody seen that version? Oh, it stank the place out. It's terrible. In 2008, HarperCollins released a graphic novel version adapted by Francois Riviere and illustrated by Franck Leclerc.

And if all this makes Endless Night sound slightly cooler than the average Agatha Christie, that might just be because it is. We'll be discussing why and many other things in more detail. So let's start with the question we ask all our guests. I'll start with you please Laura. Where were you, what were you doing when you first encountered either Endless Night or the work of Agatha Christie? Endless Night I can't remember and that's the truth because I read them all in such a big heap and other than a couple of them I can't remember when And that's the truth, because I read them all in such a big heap. And other than a couple of them, I can't remember when I first read them.

It was like a submersion. I first read her when I was about 11, I think. My parents both liked her. I picked up my mother's copy of Murder on the Links, which I think has a fair claim to being her worst book. That's a golf one, right? Yeah, golf, French. It's a Venn diagram nobody wants to see.

No, Hastings falls in love with an acrobat, enough. But I was under the spell. I was under the spell. And it was, it's a phrase I've used before, but to me they were like fairy tales for adults. That sense of resolution, which I still get a kick out of. Even reading Endless Night yesterday, I got such a thrill at the end.

It's a sort of physical, visceral thing. But also she's a sophisticate and I sort of recognized that at a very young age. So I was under the spell then and then years later got to write her biography, which was a stroke young age. So I was under the spell then and then years later got to write her biography, which was a stroke of luck. And where do you rank Endless Night then in the pantheon? High, high. Seriously, when I read it yesterday I thought, wow, this is almost one. Her grandson, Matthew Pritchard, who kind of gave me the blessing to write the biography, he thinks it is her best.

And I think it's such an outlier, but I will come to that, obviously. But I always say my favorite is Five Little Pigs and possibly The Hollow. But this one is the same. They're books that there's another novel sort of bursting to come out, I feel like her Mary West McCot novels, which I know you want to talk about, Andy. But there's a within the geometry, within that pure geometry, there's something, there's something ceiling. And I feel that very strongly about Endless Night and the way it's written.

The stark, sparse prose. Wow. Quite exciting, I found it. Yeah. Caroline, when did you first discover the work of Agatha Christie? It was when I was on holiday with my family in, I must have been 10 or 11, I think. And it was our one year without having a boat.

And we normally went on these very tedious long boat holidays because my parents are sailing obsessives. And one year we were without a boat, so we had to go to a cottage in Norfolk instead. And it had that Can I just ask sorry? When you say boating holiday, I mean your ting or ho seasons Norfolk broads your ting brief context my parents are South African and they got to this country in a boat

They built themselves and having done that they couldn't wait to get back out on the water I've written a whole book about this, if anyone cares. But yes, I had a very peculiar childhood that was mostly water based. And we were we were grounded for this one summer because we'd sold one boat and we hadn't got a new one yet. And so we were in this cottage. Everyone was very bored and fractious. And there was this shelf of books, as there often is in a holiday cottage. And one of the books was,

sometimes you find it under the title, The 13 Problems, sometimes The Tuesday Nightclub. It's the first collection of Miss Marple stories, which I actually think is quite a good introduction to Christie, they're short stories, lots of different types of cases. So it really brings you in. So that was me and Christie, age 10.

Then I went to the library. What I didn't realize is that there was a very heavy recency bias for the library. They had all of the 50s and 60s and 70s, Christie's, and much fewer of the earlier ones. But I didn't know anything about the order or the list. So I read Endless Night, I think it was my second or third Christie.

My first one from the library was Curtin with the final story. So I read them all backwards but Endless Night was in there pretty early. And where do you rank Endless Night? Definitely top five I think. It's peculiar and strange and not like anything else. And we should say how old is Christy when she writes Endless Night? Late 70s? 76 I think. Yeah. Yeah, she was born 1890.

So this was a big bestselling book when it was published in 1967, but John, I find that the numbers on Christy's sales then and now head spinning. I wonder if you could give people a snapshot of that. The usual story, the one that gets banded around, is that she sold broadly two billion copies, a billion in English and a billion in other languages. Put that in perspective. If you had a bookshelf of books, that would be, I think, six times across the Atlantic. So it's a lot of books. Or a tower that would go up, I think you can get pretty much four Mount Everest.

So it's a lot of, it's just a huge amount. She's the world's bestselling author outside Shakespeare and the Bible. So what's astonishing is that she was a best seller during her lifetime. We talked about the fact that she was the only, still I think the only woman who's had three West End shows on simultaneously at the same time.

But how's she doing now? HarperCollins are quite cagey about giving you precise figures, but I went into company's house and she formed a company called Agatha Christie Limited. We'll talk about her tax situation if you're really interested about. That's the actual bonus content this time. It is a pretty remarkable story, but she left only £106,000 in her will, famously. I think they call it tax efficiency now. But in 2022, the last published accounts, the turnover of Agatha Christie Limited was

£24.9 million, of which 15.1 was profit. So it's not only a huge... That's a big turnover for books, mostly paperbacks. And obviously, coming out of two, the fact that they have brilliantly reinvented or brilliantly they have reinvented the film franchise. The first Murder on the Orient Express, Kenneth Branagh,

as Poirot film grossed over $350 million. The second two have done about half that, but you know, $130 million is still $130 million. So they have been very clever at keeping Christie in the forefront. And I think we were talking earlier, broadly what I've heard anecdotally is the same as you Caroline, that every single Christie, whatever it is, however many times it's been published, always ends up selling 10,000 copies. A year at least, yeah. This very latest edition has done almost that. I checked it on Nielsen this morning of Endless Night has done almost 10, I think it's done seven and a half, and that's relatively recently. So she remains phenomenally successful, phenomenally widely

read, translated into over a hundred languages. There are very, very few authors that have hit that kind of... So yeah, big. If you ask me when did I first read An Amicath or Christy, I'd be very hard pressed to remember. But I've just sort of... If you have Christmas, you have Christy, right? I mean, it used to be a thing, Christie for Christmas. But if you know, we've all sort of had Poirot on in the background when we're visiting our parents, or we've had, we've what sat down, you know, and watched one of the various Murder on the Orange Expresses or one of those. Even if you haven't actively worked your way

like Caroline and Laura have, you kind of, you just absorb Christie, she's part of the, She's part of the culture. And you can't really think about this genre without at some point reading her. Why don't we hear from the lady herself? This is by way of introducing herself to listeners around the world on the World Service in the early 1970s. Here is Agatha Christy. People often ask me what made me take up writing. Many of them I fancy wonder whether to take my answer seriously, although it's a strictly truthful one.

You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I'd better qualify that by admitting I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts, but until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I'd had no lessons to speak of at all. Although I was gloriously idle, in those days children had to do a good many things for themselves. They made their own dolls furniture and they made Christmas presents to give to their friends. Nowadays they're just given money and told to buy their presents in a big store. But I found myself making up stories and acting with different parts and there's nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time

I was 16 or 17 I'd written quite a number of short stories and one long dreary novel. By the time I was 21 I'd finished the first book of mine ever to be published, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. I'd sent it to one or two publishers who didn't want it and eventually it went to John Lane. About a year later I heard it had been accepted. Well that's how it began and since that time I've written something like 55 books and half a dozen plays. I think my impression was quite kind, wasn't it? Can you imagine that poor guy who turned down Agatha Christie? So that was the actual voice of Agatha Christie.

I'm now going to read the jacket flap copy from the first edition of Endless Night, and then I'm going to ask first Laura and then Caroline to decide if they think this is a good jacket blurb and indifferent one or a bad one and whether they think Dame Agatha was involved with the writing of it. Okay? The site of the house called the Towers had once been known as Gypsy's Acre. When it was sold, Michael Rogers went to the auction, though he hadn't any money. His dream was of a new house on the old site to be built by his brilliant architect friend. It was at Gypsies Acre that Michael first

saw the girl he was to marry. The account of Michael's courting of Ellie, their growing attraction for each other, is the starting point of the drama that begins and ends at Gypsy's Acre. The story ends, two ends, in the revelation of a monstrous crime complete with all the paraphernalia that had been required to effect it. A new novel by Agatha Christie is always a momentous event in the calendar of crime novel publishing. In this doom-laden story, different in kind from the experiences of Urquell Poirot and

Miss Marple, all the author's great gifts of subtlety and interpretation are on full display. Here, from the master of crime storytelling, is something new and different, something extraordinarily exciting. Wow. Good, bad or indifferent. That is the sort of thing I do because I can't do blurbs or anything. You know when people say, well, write a little something to entice people. It would come out like that with all the clauses and horrible.

What do you think, Caroline? Would you say that gives you absolutely the opposite effect of what that book creates in the reading? Yes, it gives you absolutely no sense of the compelling narrative voice, which is its major feature. It doesn't tell you who is the person you're about to inhabit, whose mind you're about to inhabit, and gives you a lot of irrelevant details about houses and former names of fields. And it's got a deep publisher fear in it hasn't it? It hasn't got Hercule Barrow, hasn't got Miss Martha, but it's still really really good. And we're telling you this now, you can't be cross.

We're just telling you, don't be disappointed, please don't be disappointed. Stick with us readers, it's Doomladen. I don't think she can have written that. Surpriseful. This novel was reviewed in, widely of course, it was reviewed in the Times. I'm going to read you the Times review in full of Agatha Christie's Endless Night published by Collins for 18 shillings. Settle back for this. The Dwyerne of Detection writes a first-person romance

as a 22-year-old lower middle-class rolling stone. She doesn't always ring quite true. Who cares? Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.

I mean, you know, we could end the podcast there, couldn't we, if we accepted that, the truth of that. Laurie, that blurb is clumsy at best, but it does focus in on a great truth about Endless Night and about Christie, which I know you feel strongly about, which is the house, Gypsy's Acre, the house, the old house or the new house. Yes. How does that figure in the general story of Christie? That's true within all the verbiage there is they are getting somewhere to the point. To me the book is about the house really. A lot of you will have been to Greenway House where Agatha, it wasn't her only house, she had a

lot of houses, but Greenway House was sort of her summer house in Devon and it it features in to my my mind, in Endless Night and also in Halloween Party, which is a couple of years later. It's almost like living in a dream. It's a place that's too beautiful to believe that you actually possess it. And I think that's the idea that's in Agatha's head when she's writing Endless Night. This idea of wanting something so badly that even when you get it, it remains elusive and thus will lead to dissatisfaction. But she's writing

about it in a more profound way than just about the house. But the house is a symbol of that, I feel. The character of Mike and his longing, his longing always for something that he doesn't quite know what it is, and the house becomes the symbol of that. To me, that always links to Greenway, because if you go to Greenway, it is so beautiful. And it is almost like a dream. And you do almost feel it might vanish if you turn your head away. And she herself could scarcely believe

that she owns something so beautiful, even though she'd earned it. It's only a personal interpretation, but I feel that's what's at the root of Endless Night for her. And also for her characters, right? For Mike, her protagonist, wants not merely to own a house, but to create a new house, you know, be master of his domain.

Yes. He thinks that achieving what you want is going to be the same thing as fulfillment. No good will come of it. Well, not of the yes, no good. Yeah. He's a very modern character, I think. I know you can sort of say, oh, some of the phrase

even doesn't quite ring true and everything. When he says something like, my word, he looked a twerp. Or there's some, there's a few sentences, and you think, no, no, no. But generally I find it very convincing. I find his thought process is very convincing. He's a very, he's a very contemporary figure. He's an instant gratification figure.

But I think she gets inside him to a quite phenomenally convincing degree. It always amazes me how people used to say she couldn't do character. Because even though her characters are sketches they are so truthful I think and I think he is a tour de force and the ambivalence of him. The Warden of All Souls wrote her a letter saying, you know the ambivalence that you've created with this character of Mike Rogers, I read it twice just to savor it.

Also Mike fulfills the very 60s role of the jumped up pantry boy who never knew his place to coin a phrase, as we are familiar with say with Joe Lampton, the working class or Mr Sloan, Orton's Mr Sloan, the idea of the bit of rough who can work his way up through society. That's a very swinging 60s trope. Caroline, there was a part of the novel relating to Mike that you wanted to read which seems appropriate to bring in at this point. Yes, so this comes in, where are we, almost halfway through the book, and this is after Mike has married Ellie, this big American heiress, they've been married for a couple of weeks at this point, and he is talking about what he's come to realise about the difference between that kind of wealth and what he thought it would be like. And he says, I had been learning, learning a great deal in the last few weeks. I'd stepped as

a result of marriage into an entirely different world, and it wasn't the sort of world I'd imagined it to be from the outside. So far in my life, a lucky double had been my highest knowledge of affluence, a whack of money coming in and spending it as fast as I could on the biggest blowout I could find. Crude, of course. The crudeness of my class. But Ellie's world was a different world. It wasn't what I should have thought it would be. Just more and more super luxury. It wasn't bigger bathrooms and larger houses and more electric light fittings and bigger meals and faster cars. It wasn't just spending for spending's sake and showing off to everyone in sight. Instead, it was curiously simple.

The sort of simplicity that comes when you get beyond the point of splashing for splashing's sake. You don't want three yachts or four cars and you can't eat more than three meals a day, and if you buy a really top-priced picture you don't want more than perhaps one of them in a room. It's as simple as that. Whatever you have is just the best of its kind. Not so much because it is the best, but because there is no reason if you like or want a particular thing why you shouldn't have it. There is no moment when you say, I'm afraid I can't afford that one. So in a strange way it makes sometimes for a very curious simplicity that I couldn't understand it. We were considering a French Impressionist picture, a Cézanne I think it was. I had

to learn that name carefully. I always mixed it up with Cigarne, which I gather is a gypsy orchestra. And then as we walked along the streets of Venice, Ellie stopped to look at some pavement artists. On the whole, they were doing some terrible pictures for tourists, which all look the same. Portraits with great rows of shining teeth and usually blonde hair falling down their necks. And then she bought quite a tiny picture, just a picture of a

little glimpse through to a canal. The man who had painted it to praise the look of us and she bought it for six pounds by English Exchange. The funny thing was that I knew quite well that Ellie had just the same longing for that six pound picture that she had for the Suzanne. Yeah, that's great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. And Caroline, do we miss either of, you know, do we miss Poirot or Marple or Tommy and Tuppence or Ariadne Oliver? Bundle Brent? No, I don't think we do. I think we actually can say that for certain because of the ITV Marple adaptation

in which they tried to put Miss Marple into this novel. And you just see how it doesn't work. All of the scenes where Miss Marple has to randomly run into Mike and have tea with him in order to make her part of the plot. You just see how superfluous she is. And although Christie did do successful first person novels in which one of her recurring characters appeared, a good one is The Moving Finger, for instance, I think in this case, when it is so much about the first-person narrative, there's no space. It's all ego. There's no space for another

intelligence, I think, in the book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also, picking up Laura's point about houses, is there a... I mean, it is a trope, isn't it? Houses are one of the Christy almost, you know, from the mysterious affair at Stiles, the first Poirot novel onwards, the sense of trying to say, is there a kind of role, Christie is performing on behalf of the reader at the time, of saying these are desirable things. Imagine this big house with something less desirable in it. Imagine this beautiful boat with something less glamorous contained within it. It's partly functional.

In order to write the really classic murder mystery, you need what's called the closed circle of suspects. And that often means you need to physically contain them in something in such a way that it's not plausible or reasonable for a passing psychopath to have come through and committed the crime. You need it to be one of your principal cast who are confined in the thing. So that's just a kind of practical thing. But she does go out of her way to give character to those containment devices in a way that I think some of her contemporaries did not. And partly that's, as Laura said, just her personal obsession with houses.

She bought and sold houses throughout her life. She had what I think she called her plutocratic period in the 1930s where she bought about eight in two years. She really loved to what we would now call flip a house. She would have to buy it, decorate it, do it up, eventually pass it on. So I think some of that is just her own personal interest bleeding through. But then there is a kind of Etienne Arcadia ego about it, you know, I'm showing you the perfect country house. Gypsy's Acre is Mike's dream house, he dreamed it and now it's real and he can't quite believe it. And yet it's rotten to the core that you can't really, no one can be that happy, no one can have anything that perfect.

And John, we've all got an architect friend. Yeah. How do you measure Santonix, Moick's architect friend, in this? Well, I love Santonix. He's a brilliant character. Sort of that weird thing that she does, that he has that Cassandra role through the book. Can I read a little bit?

Because I think this is absolutely brilliant exchange. It comes in the middle of the book. Can I read a little bit? Because I think this is absolutely brilliant exchange. It comes in the middle of the book. We should say that this book, the murder doesn't happen until the second half of the book. I mean, you're thinking, what am I reading? This is brilliant. I'd never read Endless Night before it was chosen for the podcast.

So it's firmly number one Christie for me, I can say that. So he's talking to an extraordinary exchange with with Mike. And he's talking about they're talking about Greta, Greta, obviously, grit in the oyster all the way through the book. Those of you who have read it will know just how much of a kind of grit she is. Anyway, he says, I can't throw her out of the house, says Mike. She's Ellie's old friend, her best friend. What the hell can I do about it?

No, said Santonyx. I suppose you can't do anything, can you? He looked at me. It was a very strange glance. Santonyx was a strange man. He never knew what his words really meant. Do you know where you're going, Mike? Have you any idea?

Sometimes I don't think you know anything at all. Course I know, I said, I know what I'm doing. I know what I want to. I know what, I'm going where I wanted. Are you? I wonder. I wonder if you really know what you want yourself. I'm afraid for you with Greta.

She's stronger than you are, you know. I don't see how you make that out. It isn't a question of strength, isn't it? I think it is. She is the strong kind, the kind that always gets her way. You didn't mean to have her here. That's what you said. But she's here. And I've been watching them, she and Ellie, sitting together at home, together, chattering and settled in. What are you, Mike, the outsider? Or aren't you an outsider?

You're crazy, the things you say. What do you mean, I'm an outsider? I'm Ellie's husband, aren't I? Are you Ellie's husband? Or is Ellie your wife? You're daft, I say. What's the difference? He sighed. Suddenly his shoulders sagged as though the vigor had gone out of him.

I can't reach you, said Santanix. I can't make you hear me. I can't make you understand. Sometimes I think you do understand. Sometimes I think you don't know anything at all about yourself or anyone else. Look here, I said, I'll take so much from you, Satanics. You're a wonderful architect, but his face changed in the queer way it had. Yes, he said, I'm a good architect. This house is the best thing I've done.

I'm as near as possible, satisfied with it. You wanted a house like this, and Ellie wanted a house like this too, to live in with you. She's got it and you've got it. Send that other woman away, Mike, before it's too late. How can I upset Ellie? That woman's got you where she wants you," said Suntanix. Look here," I said, I don't like Greta.

She gets on my nerves. The other day I even had a frightful row with her, but none of it's as simple as you think." No, it won't be simple with her. "'Whoever called this place Gypsyacre said it. A curse on it may have had something,' I said angrily. "'We've got gypsies who jump out from behind trees and shake fists at us, and warn us that if we don't get out of here some awful fate will happen to us. This place that ought to be good and beautiful.'

They were queer words to say, those last ones. I said them as though it was somebody else saying them. Yes, it should be like that, said Centinix. It should be, but it can't be, can it? If there is something evil possessing it, you don't believe she. There are many queer things I believe. I know something about evil. Don't you realize? Haven't you often felt that I am partly evil myself?

Always have been. That's why I know when it's near me. Although I don't always know exactly where it is. I want the house I built purged of evil. Do you understand that? His tone was menacing. You understand that? It matters to me.

Then his whole manner changed. Come on, he said, don't let's talk a lot of nonsense. Let's come in and see Ellie. Whoa. Bravo. Bravo, sir. I think it's great writing, but also when you get to the end of the book, you go back and read that again and you can see. The only problem with Santonyx

is his name. It sounds like a health tonic. Synatogen, yeah. Yeah. Okay, so we'll see you after the break. Welcome back. Would you like to know what Stevie Smith thought of Agatha Christie? Yes, me too. She chose Endless Night as one of her books of the year in 1967, the wonderful poet Stevie Smith. This is what she does for one in the way of lifting the weight and so on. I like going to bed because then I can read an Agatha Christie. After a few months I can read it again. In order to make it a bit different I often read her in French. It is the sort of franglais that makes the general so cross.

Est-ce que vous avez bouqué les sleeping? J'ai stoppé mon car. It is so exotic. I love that. Isn't that brilliant? I wonder, Laura, your biography, your marvellous biography, which was published when in 2000 and? Seven originally, and then it came out again a couple of years ago. And how long were you working on that? Oh, quite a long while, because 2003,

I first sort of got the gig. So I met her daughter Rosalind when she was still living at Greenway. So when it was like a private house, and she sort of gave me the thumbs up and it went from there. What's amazing to me is that when I first started doing it, she was not, her reputation was not quite what it is now. To take her seriously was regarded as a bit left field actually.

It's absolutely amazing to me how her reputation and how her incredibly simple style that we're all admiring was regarded as simplistic and how people like Ruth Rendell, who my door, were very, very, very unkind about her really. And that she'd been the subject of a television program called Jacuz where she was accused of killing the detective novel. I mean, it's quite unbelievable how in a quarter of a century, a bit less even, she has become

– there's been this revisionist attitude to her. And a book like Endless Night, which might have been viewed as, yeah, it's really good, but it's very, very simple, it's so simply written and blah, blah, blah, it's just a twist. We now sort of are very aware of an awful lot of subtext. And you know that if you turn the geometry the other way, there's this wealth of stuff in there. And that that is now being sort of much better understood about her, I think. And Caroline, I mean, this is a very difficult question, but we'll try and chip away at it.

It seems to me when we talk about Agatha Christie, we get dazzled by the sales figures, the plot twists, the cultural ubiquity. What can't she do? I think it's a very interesting question. She couldn't do true complexity, shall we say. So we prize her books because of their simplicity, because of their perfect simplicity in the best ones. When she did try and write books that had A, B, C, and D storylines, I don't think she was quite so good

at braiding all of that together. And it's possibly a bit controversial to say that because the sort of thing that everyone says about Agatha Christie, or at least that they used to say, as Laura refers, her reputation is somewhat higher now, is that she was great at the plots and terrible at the prose. That used to be the way that you talked about her. And my criticism is of plot.

But there are some books where she tries too much and thus they fail. Sorry, so she tries too much and they fail in brutally saying the plot or the prose or both? I think the plot. I've never had a problem with her prose. I've actually never really understood that criticism because I think it's very good for what she's trying to do. I don't really see how it could be improved for what she's trying to do. That section that John read is a perfect example of that I think. I think there are books,

some of the later ones, Passenger to Frankfurt, They Came to Baghdad, where she was trying to do too much and therefore the plot doesn't have that perfect simple rendering that we love. And yet she must have lived and worked, John, with the knowledge that every time she published a book the world would be watching, waiting for her to stumble, perhaps for her to trip up, to catch her out. It's extraordinary that she had the mental toughness to deliver over and over again. Yeah, I honestly think, you know, if you read enough, Christy, just the sheer ingenuity of being able to come up with that number of, yeah, sure, a lot of the books have got cyanide poisoning in them, but there's still extraordinary exercises in mystery and suspense.

I mean, this book is a brilliant example of that. You're wandering three quarters of the way through where the hell it's going to go. Yes, the murder comes late doesn't it murder comes late But also she set up a whole a whole set of possibilities of faults of the there was some great red herrings You know Greta having a red cloak the gypsy woman having a red cloak. I mean I She once said that she had to only write one book a year because if she wrote one more than that, the revenue would get more of the money and they'd spend it on things that she didn't want them to spend it on, which is a brilliant line.

But I wonder, going back to sort of Laura's point is that she, I think she is, as a writer, I think, yeah, there are cliches in there, but Mike would think in cliche, you know? He's that kind of character. I sometimes think that idea, if you're looking sort of Martin Amis-like at prose, yeah, Agatha Christie probably isn't going to pass muster, but Mikes are really seriously interesting and sinister and engaging and this is not her pretending. You mentioned Martin Amis. Martin Amis, of course, Martin Amis, God bless Martin Amis, wherever he may be now, famously said of crime novels when asked if he read crime, he said, well, no, of course I don't. I'm not a baby. So no, John. You're not comparing apples with apples, but nor would a reader, so that's fine. I would like to make a very quick... We don't really have time to read from this,

which is a terrible shame, but I would like to ask Laura to just say a word about it. Agatha Christie wrote six novels under her pseudonym as Mary Westmacott, and for the first 15 years that these were published nobody knew they were by Agatha Christie, not like a certain other pseudonymous children's writer I could name, so nobody knew these were by Agatha Christie. And if we still didn't know these were by Agatha Christie, I guarantee you that we on Batlisted would be featuring one of these novels. Completely. And Becky would be seeking to find a publisher for it because they're absolutely crackers and

completely psychologically fascinating. The one I'm holding here is called Giant's Bread completely psychologically fascinating. The one I'm holding here is called Giants Bread by Mary West McCott. It's the first of these novels that Christie wrote. And it is not about an architect called Santonyxed, but a sensitive and brilliant musician called the Dea, modern musician by the standards of the 1920s and 30s. And it's about artistic obsession

and the cost paid for artistic obsession. It's really extraordinary. And I wonder, Laura, what you feel the role of these Westmacott books was for Christie. Why did she write these alongside her Poirot's and Marple's and what have you? Well, an outlet really. I mean, that, what you've got,

the one you've got there, Andy, Giant Spree, which is the first one. It's so like Endless Night in a way, because it's about the ineffable, isn't it? He's obsessed with sounds and music that have never been created before, have never been heard before. He wants to fight.

It's always this thing of trying to trap what's elusive and thinking that will bring you fulfillment and happiness, which of course is the same as Mike, even though he's an artist. But I mean, they're very autobiographical, aren't they? I mean, the unfinished portrait, 1934. If you want to read the story of Agatha's first doomed marriage to Archie Christie, you read that book, right, Caroline?

Yeah, absolutely. I think she wrote them, we would say today, as therapy. Yeah. And unbelievable. It's a lacerating book. I think, how could you write this? She is ripping at the scars of that marriage and of the death of her mother. And I mean, brave,

real, real writer. She really is a writer. And The Absent in the Spring is also a brilliant one and I think The Rose and the Utre, the one that's set after the Labour election of 1945, I think is the best book she ever wrote. But I mean, that's a bit of a left field opinion, but I think it is so, again, it's still that same idea, though, what's at the edges of your imagination that she's trying to trap all the time. That's why I love Endless Nights so much, and what John's saying about how nothing really happens. How does she keep that unidentifiable,

unnerving feeling going? Nothing's happening. Caroline what does reading Westmacott add to your reading of Christie's own novels? I think it does give you that psychological insight that Laura referenced but something else about them that really made them click for me was when I read in various of the thinking her autobiography she talks about this and is in various of the biographies, that when she was really, when a book really took hold of her,

she wrote incredibly fast, Agatha Christie. Absent in the spring, she wrote in three days. She didn't sleep for three days. And she just, the book poured out of her, she said. She wrote the first chapter, and then she wrote the last chapter immediately after because she knew what it was gonna be and she had to get it down.

Then she wrote everything in between, and then she slept for 24 hours. Endless night, she wrote the last chapter immediately after because she knew what it was gonna be and she had to get it down. Then she wrote everything in between and then she slept for 24 hours. Endless Night she wrote in six weeks. Six weeks, yeah. So it's not quite as dramatic as that, but you can see how it just pours out of her. And I think understanding that sort of psychological gripping and how she got that voice,

I think the rapidity is important. And then what also I think helped me understand that unsettling feeling in Endless Night a bit was realizing that this was the period when Christie was dictating. She wasn't writing anymore. She wasn't typing. She was dictating her novels. So she was speaking Mike into a device that was then typed. Hello, I'm Mike. I mean, is that I don't know if that's available to listen to, but wow. Like Muriel Sparks, there's a brilliant clip of Muriel Sparks saying, how do you write your novels?

She said, well, I write my title, and then I write my name, and then I turn over the page and then I write the novel. It's just, it's like, there's no, there's just no problem at all. The more episodes of Batlisted we do, the more we realise there's only actually one book. All books are the same, right? Who was here for the good soldier? Two months ago we sat here and did The Good Soldier. This is The Good Soldier again. And that was dictated. It is weird. It is odd that, I mean, yes, the unreliable narrator, but also that kind of,

what you say is so brilliant, Laura, that edge of things, trying to, there's something here that I don't understand about myself and the writing of it. It's like Mike, through the book, says, yeah, writing, I don't know, it's quite good to get it down, you know, it's quite good to get it down. And who knows what from what kind of secure mental institution he's writing, but it's powerful. Now this does kind of overlap with one of the great famous facts of Christie's life, her biography, which is her disappearance for several days. We're not going to talk about that in the main show. We're going to talk about it in the lot listed, which is available to Patreon

supporters next week. That will be available next week. We're gonna talk about that a bit. We're also gonna take questions from this lovely audience. So if you wanna hear more about how we feel about that, that's gonna be on Lock Listed, not in this main part of the show. But it would be remiss of me to continue much longer without bringing in the reason why I wanted

to come here tonight fundamentally, which is the 1972 film adaptation of Endless Nights, starring Hugh Bennett and Hayley Mills. Gypsy's Acre. A quiet place in the country. No hint of anything sinister. But sunlight and shadows can play strange tricks. That was the first time I saw Ellie. The very first time. A beautiful girl.

A summer romance. All perfectly innocent. And yet... I've got a feeling we're being followed. That's funny. That's what I thought when I came here. Get away from this place, girl. Go now before the harm's done.

Tell nobody, not even your closest friend, the terrifying secret of Endless Night. From the best-selling novel by Agatha Christie comes a film masterpiece of chilling suspense and yet, curiously, it is a love story. Is it though? Film masterpiece, John, what would you say? No, let's be honest. It's promising, isn't it? It's promising. It's promising because

it's got Hill Bennett and it's got Haley Mills and it's got a marvellous cameo by George Saunders, his last film. Andy told me the shocking news that George Saunders, he committed suicide before the film came out. Yes, he shot the film, then he shot himself, fundamentally. He committed suicide, leaving a note that he killed himself because he was bored. But it's a marvelous cameo. And it just doesn't quite work. The whole thing doesn't really hang together.

And it's also strange that you can hear Bernard Herman's score, but really strange bad moog kind of synthesizer. There's no such thing as a bad moog. Next. Right. OK. Laura, what did you make of watching the film? Yeah, a bit like John.

I felt it could have been much better. It's quite faithful to the book. It's quite faithful to the book. She didn't like it, Agatha. There's that marvelous interview with Lord Snowden where her husband, Max Malone, says, oh, I quite like the photography. I thought that was quite good.

And she says, well, I think otherwise. Just kidding. She didn't like Brit Eklund's, which I thought the whole thing about the house, the house is ridiculous in the movie. But the whole thing about the swimming pool in the house, you think, how long before we're going to see a naked Brit Epland in that pool? It's a smoking gun. It is a smoking gun. And indeed...

Check off... Yeah. So, OK, John, you didn't like it. We know that. We've established that. Laura, you're not so keen. Well, it's just that what I was waxing lyrical about, how it's all about the house and the house is like green. And instead you've got this kind of 70s mod cons swimming pool with a retractable lid. It doesn't quite measure up to the ineffable, the numinous, the edges of the imagination. Okay, strong opinions. Sydney Gilliat spinning in his grave right now. Caroline, what did you make

of seeing the film? I quite enjoyed it. I don't think it's necessarily good, but I enjoyed it. opinions. Sydney Gilliat spinning in his grave right now. Caroline, what did you make of seeing the film? I quite enjoyed it. I don't think it's necessarily good, but I enjoyed it. Yeah, it's very enjoyable. It's very enjoyable. I do think that the two screen adaptations of this book I've seen now, they've both failed at the house. And I think that's partly because Chrissie doesn't really describe it a ton in the book. She describes how it makes people feel. And at one point someone says,

oh, you know, I like the space and the light of it. So you get the idea that it's modernist or something. Corbusier, Starley. Yeah, but she doesn't ever describe it. And so therefore filmmakers are just left, I guess, trying to find a location that they can use. And in both cases, they have let us down. But I actually really enjoyed the music.

I'm with you on the synthesizer thing. I love it. The long-term listeners to Batlist will know I had the great fortune to interview Hayley Mills a few years ago, one of the stars of the film of Endless Night. And the two facts I came away with, the closest to my heart, is she still owns the incredible little red trouser suit that she wears when Hewlett-Bennett meets her at the library. Wow. And she can still get into it, which is incredible.

And the other thing that I loved, I said, so now you worked with Hewlett-Bennett several times. What was that like? And she pulled a face and she said, you know, he, you know, he was a bit of a hell raiser. And after we worked together on The Family Way, I swore I wouldn't work with him again. And I said to my agent, you get me a role in a film

with an altogether better leading man. I said, oh, and did it work? Well, no, she said, the next film I was in was Take a Girl Like You with Oliver Reid. After which she then went back to Hewlett-Bennett and made Endless Night. So if there's a lack of chemistry, that might be why. Listen, we're going to move on to a quiz in a minute. those of you who are long-term listeners may remember we Made a show on a wonderful book called how to talk about books. You haven't read by Pierre Bayard and Pierre Bayard is also the author of a book called who killed Roger Ackroyd Has anybody read that book?

Right Anybody read that book? Right. So several people have read that book. In Who Killed Roger Atcroid, Pierre Bayard proves beyond all reasonable doubts that both Poirot and Christie got it wrong. It's perhaps the most French book imaginable. Laura, have you read it? I know what happens in it. I know the happens in it. I know the gist.

She was very big with French intellectuals always. Right. I mean, it's brilliant. It's inspired. And of course, to me, what's so brilliant about it is that it does sort of go with this idea that she is seething with subtext. And that's why it's so genius. It's genius. It's absolute genius.

And Caroline, the idea of Christie, as we talk about unreliable narrators often on this podcast, but really, Christie is the queen of the unreliable narrator, right? In terms of the book that makes her reputation, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that's without giving an ass away. That exists because of play, it's a, if you will, a book about books. It's a book about books. It's a book about our

credulity as readers, the extent to which we automatically believe what we're being told by the trustworthy narrator. One of my favourite debates in discussions of Golden Age detective fiction is, is the murder of Roger Ackroyd a fair play mystery or not? Fair play mystery for those who don't know is the golden age convention whereby the reader should be able to solve the book. All the clues are put in front of you but cleverly concealed by the author in such a way that the ending is still a surprise to you but if only you'd been as smart as them you would have got it. And so the

question is, are there clues in the murder of Roger Ackroyd, which meant you could solve it? Or is it more of a psychological twist, thriller, twist at the end thing? And Christie always maintained, and Christie's defenders maintain, that the clues are clues of a mission, that you should spot what she leaves out.

And that's how it's fair. That's how it plays fair. And do you think that's correct? I think that's really fun to think about when you read it the second time. I don't know that anyone reading it the first time is going, ah, I would expect here to see this and I don't, so my suspicions are raised. I agree with Laura, I think it's very French. Well Endless Night's title is taken from Auguries of Innocence by William Blake. Every night and every morn, some to misery are born, every morn and every night, some

are born to sweet delight. I'll sing it for us Andy. Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night. So here's a little quiz. I'm going to give you the title, John, of a Agatha Christie book novel and I want you to tell me the source of the title. The Rose and the Yew Tree, mentioned by Laura as her favorite of Christie's novels and her best book, The Rose and the Yew Tree. Would you like the quote and see if you can identify it?

Go on then. The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree are of equal duration. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets. Correct! Which is also, the first line of this novel is also from Four Quartets, in my end is Is My Beginning, which how the hell did Mike get that? He said, a lot of people say that to me.

Laura, The Mirror Crapped From Side To Side. Oh, okay. Tennyson. She was a big Tennyson girl. She adored Tennyson. Yes, and it specifically is? Lady of, sorry, Lady of Shalott. Yes, the curse has come upon me cried the Lady of Shalott, the mirror cracked from side to side. For Alfred Lord Tennyson, round of applause please. Laura, thank you. APPLAUSE

Caroline, Evil Under the Sun. We're all familiar with the title. Where does it come from? I'm gonna let you all down now and say I'm not sure. Do you want to guess? Is it Shakespeare? It's not Shakespeare. I'll tell you what, I've got an idea. Where does the title Absent in the Spring come from? 1946. I'll read you the line. From you have I been absent in the spring.

I don't know this either. Shakespeare. Yes, that's right. Shakespeare. Of course it's the opening line of Sonnet 98. Evil under the sun is taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter six, verse one. There is an evil which I have seen under the sun and it is common among men. And I'll open this out to anybody. Which author did Christie derive the title

The Body in the Library from? It's a great question. Can I phone a friend? Yeah, she's sitting next to you. John Dixoncar. Great guess, but no. Caroline, Body in the Library. I was gonna say Raymond Chandler. No, good guess, no. John the Body in the Library?

I don't know, kind of American? Ellery Queen? No. Christie said she borrowed the title The Body in the Library from the work of the novelist Ariadne Oliver. Her own as a parody of a parody. of the novelist Ariadne Oliver. Her own as a parody of a parody. I see. Yeah, it's cracked. Okay, it's time for us to wind up the formal proceedings. Thanks to the Foils team and in particular, Harry McNamara and to our indefatigable producer

and queen of the merch, Nikki Burch. If you would like show notes with clips, links, and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 216 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed on this or any of our other shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're always keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blue Sky, and Poison Pen Letter and wherever else you feel compelled to write from. Papier-Meshae writing desk. You'll get not one but two extra exclusive podcasts every month. Locklisted features the three of us buffing on about and recommending books, films and

music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. For those of you who enjoyed our previous What Have You Been Reading slot, that's where you'll now find it. It's an hour of tunes, musings and superior book chat. And for those of you who are in the room right now, for one night only, shortly you get to be Locklisted, of which we thank you sincerely. But before that, please show your appreciation. A huge thank you for lifting the weight to Laura and Caroline.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening. Thank you.