Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations (7 page)

With a warrant out for his arrest, Crippen tried to avoid detection by travelling under the name of ‘Roberts’. He also shaved off his moustache and removed his glasses, while Ethel dressed as a boy during the transatlantic voyage. The ruse failed to fool the ship’s captain who, observing the amorous behaviour of the couple, utilised the newly installed Marconi wireless system to radio an urgent message to London: ‘Have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers’. Alerted to the whereabouts of the runaways, Scotland Yard’s Inspector Walter Dew boarded a faster White Star liner and boarded the
Montrose
from the St Lawrence River in the guise of a river pilot before arresting the fugitives in July 1910. Despite protesting his innocence, Crippen was tried at the Old Bailey and hanged for murder at Pentonville Prison in November 1910, while his mistress was tried separately and acquitted on charges of being an accessory after the fact.

Dr Crippen is also mentioned in
Three Act Tragedy
(1935), along with a reference to ‘a man in the barrel’. This alluded to the real-life case of the defrocked rector of Stiffkey, the Revd Harold Davidson, who was prosecuted for trying to starve himself to death on Blackpool’s ‘Golden Mile’ in 1935. Acquitted of intentionally attempting to commit suicide and awarded costs for false imprisonment, Davidson, a former professional entertainer, had been making a protest by exhibiting himself standing in a barrel and threatening to ‘fast until death’ unless the Church authorities reinstated him. He had been defrocked three years earlier when investigations discovered that he spent six days of the week in London and only visited his parish on Sundays. In the capital, the married vicar pursued girls with the religious fervour of an evangelist, although his motives were seemingly driven by sexual gratification. A Church Court heard evidence of how he had pestered teashop waitresses and lavished gifts on prostitutes. The defendant claimed that he was guilty of no more than indiscretion in his redemptive approaches to fallen women. Improbably, he explained that he tried to help the ladies he had befriended by paying for their lodgings and had taken one girl, described as ‘feeble-minded’, to Paris to give her an opportunity to ‘get her a situation and pick up the language’. After a prolonged hearing lasting for several months, some charges were dropped, but Davidson was found guilty on five counts of immoral conduct and removed from the Church position he had held for twenty-six years.

Taking up the life of a showman to air his grievances about his treatment by the Church, his bizarre career came to a tragic end at the age of sixty-two while appearing at Skegness Amusement Park in July 1937. Taking his inspiration from the Bible story of Daniel, Davidson was engaged to address the public from a cage containing a ‘docile’ lion and a lioness, which were normally fed and cared for by the amusement park owner’s eight-year-old daughter. However at Davidson’s first, and last, appearance, he was making a speech to an audience of 100 people when he stepped backwards and accidentally tripped over the lioness, causing Freddie the lion to protect his mate by springing up to maul the intruder. The victim was hospitalised and lapsed into a coma before passing away two days later. At the inquest, sixteen-yearold attendant Irene Summner was praised by the coroner for her bravery. Describing the accident she said:

When Mr Davidson tried to get out of the way Freddie reared up on his haunches to get him with his front paws. I got into the cage and tried to beat the lion off, but it dragged Mr Davidson to a corner near the other locked gate and we could not move him until Freddie dropped him.

Ordeal by Innocence
… was inspired by a number of real-life heroes.

The Agatha Christie Collection No. 39,
Ordeal by Innocence

In
Ordeal by Innocence
(1958), geophysicist Dr Arthur Calgary returns from an Antarctic expedition too late to prevent a miscarriage of justice. It transpires that he is the only man who could have verified an alibi and saved the life of a man who died from pneumonia in prison after being wrongfully jailed for the murder of his adoptive mother.

Agatha Christie’s fictional polar explorer was inspired by two courageous men with Devon connections – Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott. In August 1907, shortly before Agatha’s seventeenth birthday, the supply ship
Terra Nova
steamed into Torquay on its last port of call before setting off on the first leg of an expedition to attempt to reach the South Pole. The leader, Lieutenant Ernest Shackleton RN (1874-1922), stayed behind in the resort for a further three months at his brother’s home, The Knoll, before travelling on a liner to join his ship in New Zealand. The party returned to Torquay two years later having narrowly failed to reach their goal by less than 100 miles. The consolation was a knighthood, conferred by King George V on Ernest Shackleton. Bad weather and low rations had forced Shackleton to turn back within sight of his objective, but in view of the tragedy that was soon to befall a fellow polar explorer, he made a suitably ‘chilling’ remark: ‘better a live donkey than a dead lion’.

Devonport-born naval captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) bettered Shackleton’s achievement during an ill-fated journey to the South Pole completed in 1912. After successfully reaching his destination, he was disappointed to discover that Roald Amundsen and his party had become the first men to reach the pole only one month earlier. The Norwegian had switched his attention to the South Pole when American Robert Peary became the first man to reach the North Pole in 1909. Dejected and faced with severe storms and blizzards on the way back, Scott and his four companions perished from hunger and exposure only eleven miles from the safety of a food and fuel depot. Scott was the last member of the party to die and patriotically wrote in his diary: ‘Had we lived I should have had a tale to tell of the hardiest endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale…’

When Amundsen and Scott conquered the South Pole, Shackleton decided to attempt the first crossing of the Antarctic, a daunting 2,000 mile trip from the Weddell to the Ross Sea. The expedition, involving twenty-eight men, became a spectacular failure when their ship
Endurance
became trapped and crushed by ice. Hopelessly marooned, Shackleton ordered his men onto the ice and after four months drifting on their ‘iceberg’ they landed at Elephant Island in April 1916. Shackleton then realised that their only hope of survival was to reach the whaling stations on South Georgia Island, 800 miles away. In one of the greatest small boat journeys ever made, he and five companions completed the crossing in seventeen days. To summon help from the whaling stations on the far side of the island, Shackleton and two of his men climbed the unsurveyed Alladyce Range in ten days and commandeered a Chilean steamer to rescue the three remaining members of the party on Elephant Island, finding them ‘All safe. All well!’

Feted for his heroics in South America, Shackleton travelled to San Francisco before sailing to New Zealand, where a ship was provided to relieve the party stranded in the Ross Sea. Led by the indefatigable Shackleton, the rescuers arrived in January 1917 and discovered that all but three of the twenty-three men had survived the year-long ordeal. In a subsequent book,
South
, about the doomed venture that took place in the midst of the First World War, Shackleton dedicated it: ‘To my comrades who fell in the white warfare of the south and on the red fields of France and Flanders’.

While embarking on his fourth polar expedition to explore ‘all the oceanic and sub-Antarctic islands’ in 1922, the intrepid Shackleton died from a heart attack on board his ship
Quest
at Grytviken, South Georgia Island, where he lies buried. The last words written in his diary shortly before his sudden death read: ‘In the darkening twilight, I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay’.

Agatha Christie wrote a short mystery story, ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’ (1960) and, if ever a true-life adventure involving this festive treat occurred, it was in 1902 when Scott and Shackleton were jointly making their first attempt to reach the South Pole (an expedition obliquely referred to in the short-story collection
The Thirteen Problems
(1932), when a polar explorer writes an important letter before perishing during the plot of ‘The Idol House of Astarte’). On Christmas Day, Shackleton conjured up a surprise to raise the morale of his fellow polar explorer, who recorded the joyous occasion:

I had observed Shackleton ferreting about in his bundle, out of which he presently produced a spare sock. Stored away in that sock was a small round object about the size of a cricket ball, which when brought to light, proved to be a notable plum pudding. Another dive into his lucky bag and out came a crumpled piece of artificial holly. Heated in the cocoa, our plum pudding was soon steaming hot, and stood on the cooker-lid crowned with its decoration. Our Christmas Day had proved a delightful break in an otherwise uninterrupted spell of semi-starvation. Some days elapsed before its pleasing effects wore off.

Billie Carleton had a certain frail beauty of that perishable, moth-like substance that does not last long in the wear and tear of this rough-and-ready world.

Evening News

A collection of Agatha Christie short stories, which originally appeared in magazines between 1923 to 1926, was published as
The Underdog and Other Stories
(1951) and included ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, in which Hercule Poirot and Captain Hastings investigate a well-publicised society mystery where a young woman has been found dead of a cocaine overdose. With the addition of another death on the same night, where the drug victim’s aristocratic fiancé is found stabbed to death, the mystery is based on the first great sex and drugs scandal of the twentieth century, in which the promising show-business career of actress, dancer and singer Billie Carleton came to a tragic end. A member of a fast-living set, the beautiful actress died from an overdose of cocaine. She was found dead in bed after an all-night party following the Victory Ball at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the end of the First World War in November 1918. Her Chinese drug suppliers became the target of hysterical press coverage about the growing threat of a ‘yellow peril’ in the Limehouse area of London. The case inspired several books, plays and films, notably Noël Coward’s
The Vortex
, D.W. Griffiths’s
Broken Blossoms
, based on a story by Thomas Burke, and Sax Rohmer’s incredibly successful novels, adapted into over thirty films, about an evil empire in Limehouse controlled by ‘Dr Fu Manchu – the yellow peril incarnate in one man’.

Billie Carleton (1886-1918) was given leading roles in musical plays and revues produced by the top impresarios of the day, André Charlot and Charles B. Cochran, before she developed a serious drug habit that impeded her progress to becoming a star. During the run of
Watch Your Step
in 1914, Cochran was told that Carleton was being ‘influenced by some undesirable people and was going to opium parties’.

The actress enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle, backed by three men in her life: ‘Sugar daddy’ John Marsh, twenty years her senior, whose wealth provided a permanent flat in Saville Row, Knightsbridge; physician Frederick Stuart, who managed her finances; and Bond Street costumier Reggie de Veulle, the man responsible for introducing her to drugs.

Arriving at the Victory Ball escorted by Dr Stuart, Carleton wore a daringly provocative dress made of transparent black georgette commissioned from de Veulle, who had asked heroin addict and actor Lionel Belcher to pass a silver box containing cocaine to the actress. Next day, Carleton’s maid could not wake her mistress and called Dr Stuart, who administered an injection of strychnine and brandy in a vain attempt to revive the patient from the effects of ‘cocaine poisoning’.

Lurid details of the late actress’s lifestyle disclosed how Carleton and de Veulle held ‘opium parties’ and ‘disgusting orgies’ during which Ada Ping You, the Scottish wife of a Limehouse drug dealer, Lau Ping You, would arrive to cook the intoxicating concoction. The normally staid
Times
reported these activities in a headline article ‘An Opium Circle. Chinaman’s Wife Sent to Prison. High Priestess of Unholy Rites’:

After dinner the party… provided themselves with cushions and pillows, placed these on the floor, and sat themselves in a circle. The men divested themselves of their clothing and got into pyjamas, and the women into chiffon dresses… Miss Carleton arrived later at the flat from the theatre, and she, after disrobing, took her place in this circle of degenerates.

The trial of the drug dealers at the centre of the scandal resulted in Ada Ping You being sentenced to five months hard labour, although her husband escaped with just a £10 fine. In court it emerged that the married Reggie de Veulle had previously been involved in a homosexual blackmail case. However, contrary to the judge’s direction, the jury acquitted him of the manslaughter of Billie Carleton. He admitted, however, to supplying the victim with cocaine and was sentenced to eight months imprisonment.

In ‘The Affair at the Victory Ball’, Agatha Christie’s murderous drug peddlers are an English couple, a scenario that happily avoids the xenophobic approach to the true-life case employed by other authors; an unfortunate reflection of contemporary press coverage, typified by the
Evening News
. The fear of the evil influence of foreign men on the behaviour of innocent women drove them to issue a dire warning about the spectre of the opium den and the white slave trade, stating that it was the ‘duty of every Englishman and Englishwoman to know the truth about the degradation of young white girls’, published under the banner headline: ‘White Girls Hypnotised by Yellow Men’.