The London Blitz Murders (24 page)

At the incessant urging of Stephen Glanville, Agatha indeed wrote an ancient-Egyptian mystery,
Death Comes at the End
, published in 1945; also, she dedicated the next Poirot,
Five Little Pigs
(1943), to her persistent friend. Glanville, after a distinguished career concluding with his position as Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, died at age fifty-six, the premature death greatly grieving the Mallowans.

Agatha modeled the country home setting of
The Hollow
(1946) after that of actor Larry Sullivan and his wife Danae’s estate at Haselmere, Surrey, dedicating the novel to them with apologies.

With her husband home and the war winding down, Agatha left her position in the dispensary at University College Hospital. She and Sir Bernard Spilsbury remained friendly, but drifted apart.

In November 1945, she was sad to learn that another tragedy had befallen Sir Bernard, who had never really gotten over the death of his son Peter: another son, Alan, had fallen ill with galloping consumption, and soon died. She and Max attended the funeral, and later had a pleasant lunch with Bernard, but despite a superficial air of normality, the great man had clearly failed.

Spilsbury soon suffered several minor strokes, but Agatha understood he was continuing to work with his usual dedication, testifying in trials, conducting postmortems, endlessly filling little file cards with data and theories. On December 17, 1947, as fastidiously dressed as ever, Sir Bernard Spilsbury turned on the gas in the little laboratory down the hall from the dispensary where Agatha had worked.

Inspector Greeno suffered no such melancholy. After thirty-eight years on the job, he retired from Scotland Yard in 1960. As head of the Yard’s number one district—covering the West End and Soho—he’d long been the “Guv’nor” to coppers and crooks alike.

The
Daily Express
said of Greeno’s retirement, “His record of successful murder investigation, including the notorious Blackout Ripper case, bears comparison with any police force in the world. One thing is certain: the underworld will be celebrating tonight.”

Agatha Christie Mallowan lived a long and happy and productive later life, with Max Mallowan at her side. Her play
The Mousetrap
outdid
Ten Little Indians
and became a West End institution.

Shortly before her death in 1976, Agatha allowed the publication of the Poirot novel she’d written during the Blitz, to best-selling results, the death of the Belgian sleuth rating a front-page obituary in the
New York Times
. Her Miss Marple novel, salted away at the same time, published shortly after the author’s passing, was similarly a best-seller.

While Agatha Christie is immortal, Gordon Cummins and his crimes have, like Mrs. Mallowan’s Gunman, gone the way of all nightmares—an unpleasantness forgotten upon waking.

APPLAUSE IN THE DARK

A
UTHOR’S
N
OTE:
THE READER IS
advised not to peruse this bibliographic essay prior to finishing the novel.

The previous novels in what has been called by others my “disaster” series have featured real-life crime-fiction writers as detectives in fact-based mysteries, often in settings and situations where they had actually been—i.e., Jacques Futrelle on the
Titanic
and Edgar Rice Burroughs at Pearl Harbor during the attack. Agatha Christie, of course, did live through the London Blitz. The description of her daily life—her work in a hospital dispensary, her writing projects and habits, etc.—has a strictly factual basis.

Agatha Christie was adept at sleight of hand, and the trick this book attempts is to present a true-crime story in the guise of a traditional mystery. How well I’ve succeeded is up to the reader, but the challenge of it was the sort of writing problem Mrs. Mallowan might well have relished.

That the real-life murders in question were vicious sex crimes of course contrasts with the cozy image of Agatha Christie (not entirely deserved in my view); but, among other things attempted in these pages, it was my wish to reflect upon reality versus fantasy, and the role of mystery and crime fiction
in a brutal world. At the same time, I hoped not to dishonor Agatha’s memory by handling the subject matter in a manner she might have found in poor taste.

The series of murders by the so-called Blackout Ripper did occur, in the time frame indicated, and the basic facts of the case are honored here, as much as conflicting source material and the passage of time allow. I chose to keep the crimes of Gordon Cummins in their proper time frame, and—despite the title of this book—not at the height of the Blitz in 1940. This is, however, a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken, including the shifting of certain events to form a better-flowing narrative.

While my involvement of Agatha Christie in the Blackout Ripper murder investigation is fanciful, the creator of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple did indeed work side by side with the famous pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, at University College Hospital during this period. The discovery that these two giants of the world of crime—a celebrated writer of mystery fiction and the British father of forensics—knew each other within an intimate work environment, at a time when both of these lonely older people were separated from their spouses, gave impetus to this narrative.

I intend this novel as a valentine to Agatha Christie, whose work—and life—I much admire. As a writer who has been identified throughout my career with the hard-boiled school of crime fiction, this choice of protagonist may seem bizarre to some of my regular readers. Suffice to say I do not view Christie as a “cozy” writer, but a tough-minded storyteller whose world-view is harder-edged than most
noir
authors, and whose primary detectives—Poirot and Miss Marple—are, beneath their deceiving surfaces, as relentless and even vengeful as Mike Hammer or my own Nate Heller.

Christie has in common with two hard-boiled writers I much admire—Mickey Spillane and Erle Stanley Gardner—huge success and scant respect. These enormously popular and influential writers are dismissed as simplistic storytellers, with even their admirers often praising them in a left-handed, patronizing fashion. I hope, in these pages, that I have given some small sense of the serious, gifted writer this woman was.

Many have considered Christie an enigmatic figure, and it is my hope that the character study in these pages has done her justice and in some measure brought her alive.

Books on Christie’s life and work are often inconsistent where dates are concerned; even Agatha and her husband Max Mallowan are themselves inconsistent, in their respective autobiographies, about when exactly Max left London to serve in North Africa. Even so, I have taken certain liberties here that go beyond the inconsistencies of my sources.

The prime example of this artistic license is my moving up in time the writing and production of the unfortunately named
Ten Little Niggers
, so that it would coincide with the Blackout Ripper murders; the material here relating to the problems that Agatha had with that tasteless title, and the title changes that ensued, is accurate. The St. James Theatre did suffer bomb damage (in 1943) and the production was indeed forced to move.

Most of the characters in this novel are real people, and the others are fictional characters with real-life counterparts. All of these characterizations, however fact-based they may be, must be viewed as fictionalized; and the characterizations range from those of Agatha, Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Edward Greeno—about whom book-length works have been written—to minor players who appear only in passing in reference material.

Gordon Cummins’s wife was indeed a secretary to a theatrical producer; I have given her the name “Janet,” and she must be viewed as a largely fictional character. Producer and director Bertram Morris and Irene Helier are fictional, with real-life counterparts. My portrayals of Francis L. Sullivan (who did portray Poirot on stage, twice) and Stephen Glanville (a distinguished colleague of Max Mallowan’s) draw largely on Agatha’s own autobiography and the official Christie biography by Janet Morgan.

The victims of the Blackout Ripper appear here under their real names. According to several sources, Margaret Lowe’s teenaged daughter did prompt the discovery of her mother’s body; however, the name “Mary Jane” is invented, though the backstory has a factual basis. The two women who escaped the Ripper’s clutches are given their real names.

My longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, spent many hours digging out material and working with me to explore the possibilities of interweaving Agatha Christie’s Blitz-era experiences with the Blackout Ripper case. While I myself uncovered the Cummins case in seeking an appropriate crime for Agatha’s involvement, it was George who discovered the Christie/Spilsbury connection, which proved so crucial to this effort. Among the material George turned up was the article “London Strangler” by Clyde Black,
Detective World
, July 1952, perhaps the single best treatment of the case, despite the obscurity of the source.

Agatha Christie’s
An Autobiography
(1977) is a massive, detailed but wonderful work, and much more revealing about its author than many would have it. The autobiographical works
Come Tell Me How You Live
(1946), bylined Agatha Christie Mallowan, and
Mallowan’s Memoirs
(1977), by Max Mallowan,
were also consulted. Particularly useful was the aforementioned, first-rate authorized biography,
Agatha Christie
(1984) by Janet Morgan.

I am partial to two books that discuss both Christie’s life and her works:
Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries
(1990) by Gillian Gill; and
The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie
(2001) by Charles Osborne, who has adapted several of Christie’s plays into novel form.

Surprisingly, one of the best Christie overviews is disguised as a picture book:
The World of Agatha Christie
(1999) by Martin Fido (whose Blackout Ripper article, coincidentally—mentioned below—first attracted me to the Cummins case). Another work vital to this novel was
The Getaway Guide to Agatha Christie’s England
(1999) by Judith Hurdle.

Many of Christie’s works were referred to, notably her
The Mousetrap and Other Plays
(1978), which includes
Ten Little Indians
. Various other books on Christie were delved into:
Agatha Christie A to Z
(1996), Dawn B. Sova, Ph.D.;
Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime
(1977), edited by H.R.F. Keating;
Murder She Wrote: A Study of Agatha Christie’s Detective Fiction
(1982), Patricia D. Maida and Nicholas B. Spornick;
The Mysterious World of Agatha Christie
(1975), Jeffrey Feinman; and
The New Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Agatha Christie
(1992), edited by Dick Riley and Pam McAllister. Robert Barnard’s
A Talent to Deceive: An Appreciation of Agatha Christie
(1979, 1980), while interesting, is typical of the supposedly pro-Christie critics who underestimate her abilities.

Book-length works on the principal detectives in the case proved particularly fruitful:
The Scalpel of Scotland Yard: The Life of Sir Bernard Spilsbury
(1952), Douglas G. Browne and E. V. Tullett;
War on the Underworld
(1960), Ex-Detective Chief
Superintendent Edward Greeno, M.B.E. (who appears to be the inspiration for John Thaw’s “Regan” character on the popular 1970s UK television series
The Sweeney
); and
Cherrill of the Yard
(1954), Fred Cherrill. All of these have chapters devoted to the Blackout Ripper. The most detailed, ironically, is in the autobiography of Cherrill, the fingerprint expert whose presence in this novel is largely peripheral.

This novel is the first book-length work on the Blackout Ripper murder spree, which is largely unknown in the United States, allowing me the conceit of presenting a true-crime case in mystery format. Hardcore true-crime buffs in the UK may recognize this case, as it has been frequently written up in British true-crime anthologies and overviews.

Among the UK publications of that type that were consulted are
The Chronicle of Crime
(1993), Martin Fido; Volumes Eight and Seventeen of
Crimes and Punishment: A Pictorial Encyclopedia of Aberrant Behavior
(1974), edited by Jackson Morley; and
The Detectives: Crime and Detection in Fact and Fiction
(1978), Frank Smyth and Myles Ludwig. A British weekly publication,
Murder Casebook: Investigations in the Ultimate Crime
, Issue 72 (1991), “Blackout Killers,” was particularly helpful (another George Hagenauer find).

Where the Blitz era in London is concerned, I leaned heavily on one book—
London at War
(1995) by Phillip Ziegler—and I offer my sincere thanks to the author. Other helpful books on the Blitz era include
The Home-front: The British and the Second World War
(1976), Arthur Marwick;
Keep Smiling Through: The Home Front 1939–45
(1975), Susan Briggs;
The London Blitz
(1980), David Johnson; and the delightful picture book
The Wartime Scrapbook: From Blitz to Victory 1939–1945
(1995), compiled by Robert Opie.