This is a fun romantic thriller, more in the mould of Tommy and Tuppence than Hercule Poirot. It is the closest Christie gets to a passionate ‘Mills and Boon’ bodice ripper.
On the down side, there are no decent clues for the reader to solve the mystery of who is ‘The Colonel’ – the criminal mastermind? The solution is arbitrary. It could have been any of the five main characters. It is also confusing that there are two Colonels: the criminal mastermind; and Colonel Race, from the British Secret Service.
On the positive side, there is much historic detail about 1920s passenger liners, surfing and South Africa, that makes this an enjoyable and interesting read, based on Agatha Christie’s own voyage to Cape Town in 1922.
‘To E.A.B. In memory of a journey, some lion stories and a request that I should someday write the ‘Mystery of Mill House’
Major E. A. Belcher had been a schoolmaster at Clifton where he had taught, and liked, Agatha Christie’s husband, Archie Christie, who had been Head Boy. After World War I, Major Belcher was appointed as Assistant General Manager for the Empire Exhibition held in 1924 as a showcase for the products of the Empire. The idea, like that of the Great Exhibition of 1851, was to rekindle morale in all things British. It was a government effort to boost exports in the Great Depression. An Empire Tour, lasting 9-10 months, of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Southern Africa was planned in order to drum up interest in participating in the exhibition.
Archie Christie, trying to get on in the City of London, was restless and bored after the excitement of having been one of the first war pilots. Major Belcher recruited Archie as Financial Adviser for the Empire Exhibition for the sum of £1000, plus a one-month holiday in Honolulu at the end. Mrs Agatha Christie could come too, but it would be impossible to take their toddler, Rosalind. So Major Belcher was the reason the Christies got an all-paid round-the-world tour in 1922: a dream come true. In writing The Man in the Brown Suit Christie drew heavily on this time in South Africa. This is the first Christie novel to be set outside Europe, and in an exotic location.
Kilmorden Castle
Anne Beddingfeld sails from England to Southern Africa on a fictional passenger liner called the Kilmorden Castle.
Agatha Christie and her husband Archie set sail for South Africa on the Kildonan Castle on 20th January 1922. Agatha Christie’s sister, Madge, and their mother, Clara, took turns supervising the Christies’ nanny for their two year old daughter, Rosalind, for almost a year.
The Kildonan Castle (which operated from 1899 to 1931) was a passenger liner owned by The Union-Castle Line which ran passenger and cargo ships between Europe and Africa. Most of their ships had the word “Castle” as part of the name. The lavender-hulled liners with red funnels topped in black, ran weekly from Southampton, on the South coast of England, to Cape Town in South Africa, leaving every Thursday at 4pm. At the same time, a Union-Castle Royal Mail Ship would leave Cape Town bound for Southampton.
The combined line was bought by Royal Mail Line in 1911, but continued to operate as Union-Castle. Many of the line’s vessels were requisitioned as troop or hospital ships in the First World War. Mines or German U-boats sank eight of their ships. When the Christies sailed in her, the Kildonan Castle had only recently been back in service after the Great War.
Agatha Christie was seasick all the way to Madeira: an experience she shared with Anne Beddingfeld. Hercule Poirot also suffers from sea sickness.
Agatha Christie’s round-the-world voyage
The Christies landed in Cape Town on the 6th February 1922. Christie adored the sunshine and the exciting new experience of ‘bathing with planks’ (surfing), an activity at which she became proficient in Cape Town. Anne Beddingfeld in this novel says:
‘Surfing looks perfectly easy. It isn’t. …You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.’
She remarks on the ‘most lovely flowers’. She described Durban’s Tropical gardens as ‘really beautiful- just like Torquay’.
Christie was marooned in Pretoria for 5days by ‘a young revolution’: this experience inspired the revolution and the train journey in The Man in the Brown Suit. After Africa the Christies visited Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Canada, the Rockies and finally New York. They returned to the UK in December: an exciting and intrepid round-the-world tour, giving her a vast experience on which to draw for future novels, as well as a love of travel, sunshine and surfing. Several of Christie’s early novels are set in South Africa, but, oddly, none are set in Australia, New Zealand, Canada or America, although ‘colonial’ characters crop up in many books.
In Agatha Christie’s journey around South Africa she bought many carved animals that she sent home for her little daughter, Rosalind. In The Man in the Brown Suit Anne Beddingfeld and Mrs Blair buy locally carved wooden animals, which they expect others to carry as they move around. Indeed, Sir Eustace Pedler carries a big giraffe, to which he greatly objects. He never realises that the giraffe’s hollow insides are the secret and safe hiding place for the missing diamonds – which form a sub-plot in the novel.
Cannibalism in East Africa
The Reverend Chichester mentions cannibal Congo Tribes.
Sidney Langford Hinde, a former captain of the Congo Free State Force, wrote, in “The Fall of the Congo Arabs” (Methuen, 1897)
‘Nearly all the tribes in the Congo Basin either are or have been cannibals; and among some of them the practice is on the increase. Races who until lately do not seem to have been cannibals, though situated in a country surrounded by cannibal races, have, from increased intercourse with their neighbours, learned to eat human flesh. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that they prefer human flesh to any other.’
The Zambezi (also spelt Zambeze and Zambesi)
The fourth-longest river in Africa. Its source is in Zambia. It flows through eastern Angola, along the eastern border of Namibia and the northern border of Botswana, then along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe to Mozambique, where it crosses that country to empty into the Indian Ocean.
The Zambezi is most famous for the Victoria Falls, where Anne almost falls to her death.
Christie’s character observes African natives in “Manchester blankets of gaudy hue”. Presumably when Christie was in Southern Africa she found the locals wrapped in blankets with bright, bold patterns, and was amused to find they were made in Manchester. When I worked in Umtata in South Africa, in 1980, I was about to buy some lovely bright local blankets to bring home, when I saw the label ‘Earlys of Witney’ on them. Witney is in Oxfordshire only a few miles from where I lived.
Cubism and Jazz
‘The sea looked …like a cubist picture’
A hat is described as a ‘cubist’s dream of a jazz carrot’
‘Marvellous garments of futuristic design hung on pegs’ in Nadina’s dressing room in Paris.
Cubism and Jazz were new and wild in the early 1920s. This was the time when Diaghilev’s ‘Ballet Russe’ was touring Europe and the Americas. In The Man in the Brown Suit Nadina is pretending to be a Russian Ballet dancer. In 1917, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) designed sets and costumes in the Cubist style for three Diaghilev ballets, all with choreography by Léonide Massine: Parade (1917, music by Erik Satie); El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) (1919, music by Manuel de Falla); and Pulcinella (1920, music by Igor Stravinsky). In 1924 Diaghilev presented a new ballet in Paris, Le Train Bleu, which inspired the title for Christie’s novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, published in 1928.
Clearly Christie was excited by Cubism herself. There are many references to the visual arts in Christie novels, but very few to classical music. Agatha Christie herself was extremely musical, playing piano and singing. As a young girl she had wanted to be a professional classical musician, and spent a year studying music in Paris, but was too shy to perform in front of strangers and so gave up that ambition and became a writer.
Psychoanalysis
‘There is such a thing as unconscious self-revelation’ says Colonel Race.
‘She put it down to a ‘fear complex’. ‘Suzanne goes in rather for psychoanalysis.’
Freud’s theories of the unconscious, and psychoanalysis, had enormous impact on the arts in the first decades of the twentieth century. Many of Christie’s characters remark upon it. Hercule Poirot often talks of the importance of psychology in solving a crime although what he means by this, and how significant it is, changes as he, and Christie’s writing, develops. In After the Funeral (1953) Poirot says that it is a profound belief of his that if you can induce a person to talk for long enough, on any subject whatever, sooner or later they will give themselves away. In Appointment with Death (1938) Poirot appears to respect the French psychoanalytic psychiatrist, Dr Gerard. Colonel Carbury, in the same novel, one of Christie’s no-nonsense British military types, has, however, no time for the airy-fairy business of psychoanalysis or psychiatry.
‘Passion for a charwoman at the age of four makes you insist you’re the Archbishop of Canterbury when your’re thirty-eight. Can’t see why and never have, but these chaps explain it very convincingly.’
Romance
This book is one of the steamiest thrillers, and virtually turns into romantic fiction. This was before Christie made a break between her whodunnits and crime thrillers, and the so called romantic novels written under the nom de plume of Mary Westmacott. It is noticeable in the rest of Christie’s crime fiction that although high passions may be in the plot, as the cause or effect of the crime, the passionate feelings of characters are not described in the way they are in The Man in the Brown Suit.
‘Just seeing him has turned my whole life upside-down. I love him. I want him. I’ll walk over Africa barefoot till I find him. I’d work for him, slave for him, steal for him, even beg or borrow for him!’
The response to this passionate outpouring is ‘you’re very un-English, gipsy girl’. Well brought up English gentlewomen did not say such things in the 1920s. It was shocking indeed. There is also this philosophy expressed:
‘There is really nothing a woman enjoys so much as doing things she doesn’t like for the sake of someone she does like. And the more self-willed she is, the more she likes it.’
“Successful husbands make their wives do just what they want, and then make a frightful fuss of them for doing it. Women like to be mastered, but they hate not having their sacrifices appreciated. Men don’t really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. “
‘You’re so young Anne, and so beautiful- with the kind of beauty that sends men mad.’
Perhaps it was writing this book that made Christie realise that she should not mix business with pleasure and in future stick to calm, glacial detectives, and under separate covers explore the passions, and more commonly the pain, of lovers. This book also expressed the touching, naïve belief that if you are really in love nothing else of a material nature matters. Mrs Miller had grave concerns when her daughter, Agatha, became engaged to Archie Christie during the War. At the time, Agatha was engaged to a wealthier man, and Archie made her break off her previous engagement in his favour. Mrs Miller had the natural concern of a Victorian mother that they were both so poor it would be a very long engagement, without prospects. Perhaps this book was Christie’s vindication to her relatives of listening to her heart, not her head. Just like the impulsive Anne Beddingfeld who rushes off to Africa against the kindly advice of her olders and betters.
‘The sea looked …like a cubist picture’
Cubism and Jazz were new and wild in the early 1920s. This was the time when Diaghilev’s ‘Ballet Russe’ was touring Europe and the Americas. In The Man in the Brown Suit Nadina is pretending to be a Russian Ballet dancer. In 1917, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) designed sets and costumes in the Cubist style for three Diaghilev ballets, all with choreography by Léonide Massine: Parade (1917, music by Erik Satie); El sombrero de tres picos (The Three-Cornered Hat) (1919, music by Manuel de Falla); and Pulcinella (1920, music by Igor Stravinsky). In 1924 Diaghilev presented a new ballet in Paris, Le Train Bleu, which inspired the title for Christie’s novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, published in 1928.
