Agatha Christie Festival, & Peril at End House

Peril at End House by Agatha Christie

published 1932

 

 

 

I’m delighted to say I am giving  a talk at the forthcoming

International Agatha Christie Festival 

 which takes place in Torquay Sept 8-17^th. My talk is on Thursday 14^th at 5pm, do please come and see me! 

This is a link to my event:

International Agatha Christie Festival | Mysterious Affairs with Style (iacf-uk.org)

You will not be surprised to hear that I’ll be talking about clothes in Christie – her own interest, the sociological fascination of her books taking us from flappers in short skirts in the 1920s to trouser-wearing girls sharing flats in the 1960s, and of course the key question of clothes detection.

Peril at End House features a Golden Age classic trope – someone borrows a distinctive shawl and shortly afterwards dies. This (featuring different items of clothing) is a great favourite in, for example, Patricia Wentworth’s Miss SilverWorld, but in fact Christie is sparing with this particular ploy. I decided to re-read it to check my facts, noting that I have never blogged on it. (I have never tried to be completist on blogging with Agatha, although she is the most-featured author here, and I have in my time read everything – now I am filling in gaps when I think of them. There may be more relating to this upcoming talk…) It did feature in a Guardian article I wrote about non-anachronisms  - items that seem unlikely for the date: I said ‘Captain Hastings takes pride in English achievements, while the Belgian Poirot pointedly says that this must console him "for the defeats at Wimbledon" – quite a surprise for those of us who assumed only the British won then, and that complaining about the lack of success (and being taken aback by an actual victory) was a recent development.’

Peril has never been one of my favourites, but it stood up well, I enjoyed it. It’s a clever if unlikely plot, with a genuine sense of evil, and End House itself was more real than many Christie settings. She never bothers with irrelevant description, and there isn’t much here, but it was very easy to picture End House and get a feel for the atmosphere. (Who remembers any of her other fictional houses – Fernly Park anyone? See below…*)

The setting is a Devon seaside town, St Loo, which could easily be a standin for Torquay, home to Agatha and the festival. At the house there is the fancy hotel next door, the terrace outside, the overgrown trees, flowers and shrubs, the slope down to the sea.... the evening of the firework display was particularly well done and real. And Nick Buckley – the owner, a young woman who is in need of Poirot’s help – is an excellent character.

There are bright young things going out at night:

There was dancing that evening at the hotel. Nick Buckley dined there with her friends and waved a gay greeting to us. She was dressed that evening in floating scarlet chiffon that dragged on the floor. Out of it rose her white neck and shoulders and her small impudent dark head.

At a later party:

Frederica Rice drifted into the room wearing a gown of Madonna blue…Nick was wearing a black frock and round her was wrapped a marvellous old Chinese shawl of vivid lacquer red.

 

 

Captain Hastings, who is narrating, comments on Nick’s manners in an interesting couple of sentences:

Nick, I noticed, made a good hostess. She sank her modernisms and made everyone welcome in an old-fashioned way.

The incident of the shawl is worth quoting at length. This is Nick, talking about Maggie, who is very much the poor relation: a dull sensible girl who has come to visit from her vicarage life in Yorkshire.

‘We came in to fetch her coat – it was rather cold watching the fireworks. I flung off the shawl on the sofa here. Then I went upstairs and put on the coat I’m wearing now – a light nutria one. I also got a wrap for my friend Mrs Rice out of her room. There it is on the floor by the window. Then Maggie called out that she couldn’t find her coat… I said it must have been left in the car – it was a tweed coat she was looking for, she hasn’t got an evening furry one, and I said I’d bring her down something of mine. But she said it didn’t matter, she’d take my shawl…’

Given that Agatha doesn’t do detail, there’s something affecting about Maggie who only has her sensible tweed coat, doesn’t have an evening wrap, and has to look after herself, and takes the moment to put on the shawl.

A book full of interest, and unexpectedly better than I remembered.

·   *    Christie and the relative unimportance of houses – in this book Poirot remembers a past case at ‘Fernly Park’. That rang no bells at all, and I had to look it up. I was astonished to find it is the setting of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of her best-known books and one I would consider myself to know very well. Even then, it didn’t sound familiar. Perhaps I should be sacked from writing about her.

There are many pictures of shawls around – there were some Victorian artists who kept them in their studios, and you can see them popping up in different pictures – but (I have  noticed before) it is surprisingly hard to find one to fit a particular description. This is just the Red Shawl, a picture by George Lambert from the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I will take this opportunity to mention that he has been featured on the blog before - back in the very early days, when no-one was reading, I was more than delighted with a picture of his to illustrate Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and still think it is one of my best matches: 

The woman in scarlet is Orpen’s portrait of Madame Errazuriz. The group of revellers is from the NYPL.