Dumb Witness

☆☆☆

 

Explanation of the Poirot Score:

There is only one good clue, which Poirot takes an inordinately long time to think about.

Critics of this plot have objected to the murderer hammering in nails to the skirting board in the night, as the noise would have been noticed by the rest of the household – servants and guests alike. Also the murderer would have checked that the other bedroom doors are closed, rather than risk being observed. I was also surprised women wore broaches of any sort on silk dressing gowns, the sharp bit of the fastening would have scratched the wearer’s skin and made a big hole in the silk.

There is much very subjective Poirot pontification presented as though it was hard psychological evidence, when there was none.

Finally as Miss Arundell was never exhumed, and no post-mortem was performed, there is no proof of anything at all.

Dumb Witness Review plot spoilers ahead

Trivia

Dedication: To dear Peter. Most faithful of friends and dearest of companions, a dog in a thousand

Christie’s dog, Peter, died in 1938.

Christie wrote to Max Mallowan in 1930

You‘ve never been through a really bad time with nothing in the world but a dog to hold on to.

Peter was with the Christie family dog when Archie asked Agatha Christie for a divorce in 1926. Peter was Agatha Christie’s faithful companion and loving friend, through the double heart-break of her mother’s death, and Archie leaving his wife and daughter, for a younger woman. The Wallingford Museum has information that in fact it was another dog, Binkie, who actually left toys on the stairs as a trip-hazard. The most lovingly portrayed character in Dumb Witness is the dog, Bob.

The dog stood at the top of the stairs, his ball in his mouth, his tail gently wagging. Bob sank down on his haunches, nosed his ball slowly and slowly nearer the edge. As he finally bunted it over he sprang to his feet in great excitement. The ball bumped slowly down the stairs. Charles caught it and tossed it up to him. Bob caught it neatly in his mouth. The performance was repeated.

Christie always kept at dog, and often uses dog metaphors or similes for human characters who were kind or loyal. Christie dedicated this novel to Peter, and the last book she ever wrote, Postern of Fate 1973, was dedicated to her then current dog, ‘Hannibal and his master’: ‘his master’ being her second husband, Max Mallowan. So her two dog dedications can be seen as the bookends of her fifty years of writing. Peter was her woolly rock in 1926 when Christie went through her darkest time. Hannibal with her and Max, companions in peaceful old age.

Market Basing: based on Wallingford, Oxfordshire

Wallingford is first mentioned in Cards on The Table, but takes centre stage in this book, under the name of Market Basing. There is an excellent museum in Wallingford that has a room devoted to Agatha Christie with many of her original letters.

An air of old-fashioned dignity and quietude. Its one wide street and ample market square seemed to say : I was a place of importance once and to any person of sense and breeding I am still the same. I was built to endure in a day when solidarity and beauty went hand in hand.’

Christie, thanks to her financial success had bought several houses. She and her husband owned Winterbrook House, on which Littlegreen House in Dumb Witness is based, from 1934 till her death in 1976. Winterbrook House is still privately owned and not open to the public.

Winterbrook House

In Dumb Witness, Littlegreen House is up for sale for £2850 in 1936. Littlegreen House is described by Mr Gabler the estate agent in Dumb Witness ‘Period House of character: four recep., eight bed and dressing, usual offices, commodious kitchen premises, ample outbuildings, stables, etc. Main water, old-world gardens’. In several places in the book the house is described as being on the main road, but having a hedge and railings. One feels the dim girl from the Estate Agents in Dumb Witness ‘with adenoids and a lack-lustre eye’, who makes four attempts to write down a phone number and still gets it wrong, must have crossed Christie’s path, when she was trying to buy Winterbrook House. All experience is grist to a writer’s mill.

Wallingford was close enough to Oxford for Max Mallowan to be in contact with his old college, and to London for the British Museum. Max had been involved in several archaeological digs sponsored by the British Museum in Mesopotamia (see Murder in Mesopotamia trivia). Winterbrook House was large enough to have a study and library for each of them. Most importantly it was quiet enough for ‘Mrs. Mallowan’, as she was known in Wallingford, to get on with her writing uninterrupted.

The Mallowans are both buried in the Parish Church of Cholsey nearby.

Rich Victorians and their Paid-Companions:

The character of Emily Arundell is an interesting study of the type of woman Agatha Christie knew so well: her mother, Clara, was born in 1856. Emily Arundell must have been born around the same time as Clara, to be ‘well into her 70s’ in 1936 when this book was written. Miss Arundell is a very tough, no nonsense woman, the daughter of a Colonel who’d fought in the Indian Mutiny.

Sleeping draughts were for weaklings. Dr Grainger bullied and she defied – they always got a good deal of pleasure out of each other’s company!’

Clara’s father, Captain Boehmer, was also a dashing Army Captain. Agatha’s older brother, Monty volunteered in 1899 for the 3^rd Battalion Royal Welsh Regiment and went to Boer War. In 1902, Monty obtained a commission with the East Surreys and went to India. Agatha was steeped in the knowledge of Army families.

Paid companions have changed over time. In the past right up to the 1930s ladies of a certain rank and wealth had a battalion of servants and staff to look after them. In the 21^st century, only a very few extremely rich people still do. A rich Victorian spinster, like Miss Arundell, would have had a paid companion to do the menial tasks like order the beef, or put out the dog, and liaise with the rest of the servants. Rather like a modern PA to a Captain of Industry, but scaled down to a domestic level. Due to the spiralling cost of wages post Second World War and the emancipation of women, things changed. Indeed times were already changing by this book: ’women who earn their living as companions are usually fools. If they‘ve got brains they’re earning a better living some other way’. One can see this book as a social commentary on the 1930s and the demise of the paid companion. It’s a rather splendid irony that ‘mindless’ Minnie Lawson does so extraordinarily well out of this autocratic spinster’s death!

Emily Arundell

‘ looked at her companion with mingled affection and contempt. She had so many of these foolish, middle-aged women to minister to her- all much the same, kind, fussy, subservient and almost entirely mindless’. ‘Emily Arundell treated Minnie Lawson worse than a dog.’ Miss Arundell is described almost like an ancient spider sucking these hapless flies dry, and then discarding them after a year, when she is bored with them.

‘Take Bob’s collar off’, said Miss Arundell.

The slave [Miss Lawson]hastened to obey.

Miss Lawson remained downstairs performing her final duties, letting Bob out for his run, poking down the fire, putting the guard up and rolling back the hearthrug in case of fire.

 

Although Miss Arundell expects unswerving obedience from servants and dogs, she also is fierce in protecting them from other people’s thoughtlessness. She roundly tells off her slothful nephew and niece for not coming down to breakfast until so late. It puts out all the smooth running of the house:

“ I know it is the fashion not to consider servants nowadays, but that is not the case in my house”.

Clearly thoughtless bright young things coming down late to breakfast were a common problem. Compare this with the timorous Lady Coote in The Seven Dials Mystery, who is completely out of her comfort zone, having been promoted by her husband’s wealth into the higher spheres of Society. Lady Coote fails to discipline guests and servants alike. The servants treat Lady Coote with contempt, quite unlike the immediate unswerving obedience expected by Miss Arundell.

Vegetarians, British Israelites and Christian Scientists

“The Misses Tripp were vegetarians, theosophists, British Israelites, Christian Scientists, spiritualists and enthusiastic amateur photographers. She {Emily Arundell} didn’t much care for Julia and Isobel Tripp. She thought their clothes ridiculous, their vegetarian and uncooked fruit meals absurd, and their manner affected. They were women of no traditions, no roots – in fact, no breeding.”

It is interesting how attitudes have changed in the 80 years since this book was written. Vegetarianism is now accepted, and indeed thought to be the ‘healthy option’. Certainly most people in the 21^st century would not look upon uncooked fruit as ‘absurd’, but both Poirot and Hastings shudder at the thought.

British Israelites were a popular movement who thought that people in Western Europe were of direct descent from the Lost Tribes of Israel in the Bible. There was a published book showing that Queen Victoria was a direct descent of King David! Prominent members of the British Israelite movement also converted to be Christian Scientists, like the Miss Tripps.

Séances come into a number of other Christie novels: Peril at End House, The Sittaford Mystery, The Pale Horse. Miss Arundell sees the credence that some characters give these sessions as amusing. Miss Arundell’s servant says

‘I sometimes wondered if she didn’t – well have a bit of fun…pushing the table and that sort of thing. And the others all as serious as death’. The Tripps have success in ‘Automatic Writing.. Several messages from ‘Those who have Passed Over’.

At the time there were a number of highly influential people who believed in Spiritualism, like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. When the Tripps and Miss Lawson witness the green phosphorus vapour coming from Miss Arundell’s mouth they don’t think to tell the doctor who certified Miss Arundell ‘dead from natural causes’. They simply believed it was Miss Arundell’s ectoplasm leaving her body! Had they described this to Dr Grainger, he might have thought something abnormal had occurred that warranted investigation, like phosphoric vapour. Most probably even if they had described the vapour, Dr Grainger would have dismissed the description, as hysteria, in these women who are clearly viewed as odd by most of the town.

Yellow Jaundice

If a person turns yellow, with jaundice, as a GP the first thing I would do is check their liver function with a blood test, and get an ultrasound of the liver and biliary ducts to look for a mechanical obstruction. This would distinguish between a surgical obstruction such as a gall stone blocking the duct, like a golf ball stuck in too small a hole, and a medical cause of the liver not functioning: an hepatitis [either from a viral infection or a poison, usually alcohol!].

In 1936 the liver could not be visualised in terms of modern ultrasounds, CT scanning or MRI scans. Also liver function could not be monitored by blood tests. The Hepatitis A virus was only visualised by using an electron microscope in 1977.

Elderly women often had gall stones causing intermittent blocking of the biliary tract with fever, jaundice and vomiting. A family doctor in the 1930s would not know the cause of her jaundice, but only that it was not uncommon in elderly patients. Sometimes they would get better, as indeed Miss Arundell had done from a previous attack, and sometimes they would not. It is not surprising that her family doctor would have had no hesitation to write a death certificate with ‘natural causes’: jaundice.