1960s clothes: Third Girl by Agatha Christie

Third Girl by Agatha Christie

published 1966

 

Another Christie to catch up on. I am doing a lot of re-reading as I prepare my talk at the forthcoming

International Agatha Christie Festival 

which takes place in Torquay Sept 8-17th. My talk is on Thursday 14th 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)

As I've said before, I’ll be talking about clothes in Christie – her own interest, clothes detection, and 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.

Third Girl is the epitome of the flat-sharing era. I have read it several times, and that fact definitely demonstrates what Dr Johnson (who was talking about second marriages) described as ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. The first time I came to it I was quite excited by the idea of a book dealing with life for young people in 1960s London, it was an appealing thought. Third Girl is a great title and a great concept – it refers to young women sharing a flat, and takes in the rootlessness of the life, and also the idea that the third girl is a bit amorphous, isn’t a friend of the others, has the worst room. Sometimes an idea like that could really work with AC. And actually, the bones of this book are amazing, the disappointing thing is how much it was squandered (a similar disappointment, The Clocks, for instance, is  just a nothing-y book, you don’t feel it was wasted)

The Third Girl, Norma, is wandering around trying to confess to crimes. She gets involved with Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver (Poirot’s Agatha-esque crime writing friend). There are young arty types, there is a visit to a Bohemian studio. Norma’s father is a standard businessman with a second wife/stepmother, there is another home in the country. Her great-uncle has a foreign au pair to look after him. (That particular plotline is extremely unconvincing and not really worked out). But it is a muddle, and there are long repetitive conversations that achieve nothing and consist of people not really remembering correctly at first, but its not being relevant or important. There are wild and unnecessary coincidences. There is an impersonation that beggars belief (even for Christie) but - this may seem like a contradiction - it is so cleverly done that you have to allow it.

I just kept thinking she would have made a much better book of it some years before, because there are a few good ideas and moments…

Third girl is unusual in featuring men’s clothes in a way not related only to sensible tweeds.

‘It might have been someone in fancy dress … a representative of the youth of today. He wore a black coat, an elaborate velvet waistcoat, skintight pants, and rich curls of chestnut hair hung down on his neck. He looked exotic and rather beautiful, and it needed a few moment to be certain of his sex.’

This is David, whom Mrs Oliver always refers to as the peacock.

Norma’s appearance is a standard young woman from the Christie books of this era – compare with this from The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, 1960

 ‘Sarah has got in with what they call the coffee-bar set. She won’t go to dances or come out properly or be a deb or anything of that kind. Instead she has two rather unpleasant rooms in Chelsea down by the river and wears these funny clothes that they like to wear, and black stockings or bright green ones. Very thick stockings. (So prickly, I always think!) And she goes about without washing or combing her hair.’

… and in the 1961 Pale Horse (which is on the blog,  but we were more interested in the mysterious Box at that time) the annoying Mark dislikes women who are dirty and ‘much too warmly dressed’: a yellow wool pullover, a black skirt and black woollen stockings.’

Here, Norma starts out in black high leather boots, white open-work stockings, a skimpy skirt and a long sloppy pullover.

We can safely take it that Christie doesn’t approve of this. She is more sympathetic to the men’s clothes in fact – Poirot says David resembles a Vandyke portrait.

The  young woman went to Meadowfield School – in Christie’s Cat Among the Pigeons the girls’ school was Meadowbank. You would never be sure with Christie, she also mentions her all-purpose Ruritanian/ Balkan state which in this case is Hertzogovinia, but has appeared under other names in her books down the years.

‘Art school Boho’ of the 1960s is an illo from a book by Sam Knee called The Bag I’m In, but I think the drawing might actually be Florence Bamberger - I would love to credit them further and more clearly, and also buy the book, but it is hard to track down. He is on Instagram.

The woman in the photograph is Britt Eckland.