Ordeal by Innocence

☆☆☆

Reasons for the Poirot Score

Although there are clues almost any of the main suspects could have been the murderer. The whodunnit plot devices have been used to better effect in other Christie writings. The centre of interest in this novel is the ways in which relationships are damaged when a person is an innocent suspect for murder. This is a rare Christie in which it is not the plot but the characters and their relationships that are of principal interest. The score is slightly higher than is justified by the whodunnit plot alone, reflecting the interest of this unusual focus.

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Trivia

Dedication: Billy Collins

To Billy Collins with affection and gratitude

Christie’s initial contract with The Bodley Head, a London publisher, was for five novels. In 1924 Edmund Cork, her agent, thought that once that contract was fulfilled he would be able to get her a better contract. Bodley Head were willing to improve the terms. It was William Collins, however, a Glasgow publisher founded in 1819 (and by the 1950s Britain’s biggest publishing house) that had the foresight to offer the best contract. Christie remained with Collins the rest of her life. William Collins was swallowed whole by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1989 and merged to form HarperCollins. The first book of Christie’s that Collins published, in 1926, was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the novel that set Christie on the road to stardom, and that in 2013 was voted by the Crime Writers’ Association the best crime novel ever written. 

Christie was soon angry with her new publisher. On one of the printings the note on the book’s cover gave away the murderer. The chairman, Sir Godfrey Collins, sent his nephew, William, known as Billy, who had recently joined the family business, to apologise to Christie in person. Christie was unimpressed that Sir Godfrey did not come himself but Billy was charming and he and Christie hit it off from the start. From then on it was Billy with whom Christie dealt. In 1969 he became Chairman of Collins and was knighted – Sir William Collins. Lovers of natural history will be forever grateful to Billy Collins who was one of the creators of Collins’ wonderful series of books – The New Naturalists – which began in 1945 and has over 150 titles. It includes amongst its ‘monographs’ The Herring Gull’s World by Nobel prizewinning ethologist, Niko Tinbergen.

Over the years Christie had a few run-ins with Billy Collins usually over the cover designs. About one proposed design she wrote: ‘It suggests Poirot going naked to the bath!!!’. In 1939 Christie learned that an item in Collins’ Crime Club News was going to give away the whole of the plot for the novel now known as And then there were none. Christie was furious. Collins apologised and gave Christie copies of several books including advance copies. On another occasion (probably about The Body in the Library) she wrote: ‘No I don’t like the blurb at all! I think a blurb ought to be aimed at arousing attention, rather than just recapitulating the opening events of the book. I enclose a suggestion of my own as being more provocative!’

Billy Collins mollified Christie with presents, such as books (both for her and for her local primary school at Galmpton), hardy rhododendrons, tickets to Wimbledon, and, on one occasion, tennis balls when they were difficult to come by after World War II. For Christmas 1949 Collins gave a pheasant that, Christie wrote, ‘melted in the mouth – quite unlike my butcher’s tough productions’. In the early 1950s Christie’s paperback sales were rapidly increasing and she was Collins’ best selling author. Billy so valued her that in 1953 he bought her a new car. He suggested that a Jaguar would be fun but she chose the Humber Imperial: ‘Really lashings of room,’ she wrote,  ‘and with the continual transport of Max’s books, flowers and vegetables that I bring up from Wallingford, and being able to get seven or eight people down to the beach or for picnics in summer, I think room is the thing …  pure fun is less important to me now than comfort and space. You’ve no idea the amount of things archaeologists take about with them!’ I remember seeing Harold MacMillan when Prime Minister in the 1950s in his massive Humber Pullman which had a screen between the rear compartment and the chauffeur. The Imperial was the Pullman without the screen, for owner-drivers like Christie. During a particularly complex saga over repair work on her car Billy Collins wrote to a colleague: ‘I know these arrangements are difficult, but Agatha Christie is a very exceptional author’.