In his 1950 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler gripes: “[t]he average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average–or only slightly above average–detective story does.”
Among the “average” detective writers he calls out is Agatha Christie. He’s partly right–her murders are often unrealistic (Really? They were all the killer?) and she shamelessly recycles story elements. But publish she did: Christie, a literary hustler of the highest order, is the best-selling novelist of all time.
Christie wrote her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1916 and published it four years later. (She was 30 when she published her first book. Take heart, recent MFA grads.) Hercule Poirot, the detective in Styles, went on to appear in half of Christie’s 66 detective novels and 52 of her short stories.
With Poirot, Christie hit the center of a Venn diagram of elements sure to appeal to the British public. First, with his quick “little grey cells,” French bon mots and scrupulously correct appearance, Poirot followed in the steps of the eccentric, brilliant and very popular Sherlock Holmes. Second, he was Belgian: Britain had welcomed more than 250,000 Belgian refugees from the first World War. Thanks to the idea that Belgian resistance to their German occupiers had bought Britain and France some time, public sentiment about the refugees was largely positive, if patronizing (“plucky” comes up a lot.) Last, as a genteel fish-out-of-water, Poirot could make little comments on English society that would amuse without offending (What unpredictable weather! What bumbling men!) Poirot was a leading character in the golden age of detective fiction and the public ate him up.
While Christie was a natural at matching her creative output to her readers’ desires, she didn’t take as easily to the business side of writing. Her first contract, with publisher The Bodley Head, promised an even split on serialization fees, but no royalties until more than 2,000 copies of The Mysterious Affair at Styles had sold; after that initial 2,000, she would get a 10 percent royalty on net sales (after sales costs and wholesale discounts). Plus, she was on the hook for five more books under similar conditions.
Just less than 2,000 of the initial printing of Styles sold and Christie earned only £25 (roughly $1,000 today) from serialization. For comparison, I’ll just leave this here. So how did she go from £25 for an entire book to eventually owning eight homes around the world? She learned how to play the publishing game.
By 1923, Christie had wised up to the fact that The Bodley Head had taken advantage of her, and got herself an agent, Edmund Cork. In 1924, he moved her to another U.K. publisher, William Collins & Sons (eventually to become HarperCollins.) Christie duly fulfilled her contract with The Bodley Head with some thrillers, detective stories and an anthology of previously serialized short stories, using those books to try out new characters and diversify her oeuvre. Once out of her original contract, she did much better with William Collins. Her first book there, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, sold 5,000 copies in its first printing in the summer of 1926. Ackroyd is considered by many to be the best work of her entire career.
However, 1926 wasn’t all glorious ascendancy. Early that year, her beloved mother died. That fall, her husband Archie, a handsome, golf-obsessed, former pilot (COME ON, REALLY), asked for a divorce so he could marry his mistress, Nancy Neele. So our friend Agatha did what any self-respecting mystery writer would do: she encountered an alien wasp, kissed her daughter goodbye and disappeared, abandoning her car next to a lake with the hood up and the lights on. For 11 days, the country searched for her. Arthur Conan Doyle even did his part by taking one of Christie’s gloves to a medium. Thanks, Art!
Christie was eventually found in a hotel under the name Mrs. Teresa Neele (!), where she was seen “dancing the Charleston, playing bridge, doing crosswords and reading the newspapers” (!!). The media denounced the episode as a scam to sell books, to spite Archie or even frame him for her murder, but Christie claimed a nervous breakdown and amnesia (!!!). They’re all so fantastic; I can’t decide which explanation I prefer.
Through it all, Christie’s book sales kept increasing, and she expanded into writing radio and stage plays. She did well in the U.K., but it was the cash from American publications and serializations in magazines like Colliers and Cosmopolitan that helped her accumulate real estate; at the time, the top U.K. income tax rate was 90%, but foreign income was exempt from taxation. Since Christie’s prose was straightforward, her work was quick and cheap to translate, so other foreign royalties started rolling in, too.
But by the 1950s, U.K. tax laws would catch up with her, and Christie toned down her output to roughly one book a year. She was unwilling to write essentially for free, and she wanted to avoid “enlarg[ing] the finances of the Inland Revenue who would spend it mostly on idiotic things.” (O, to be a writer who is making too much money from writing too often.)
Today, Christie’s books still sell four million copies annually, earning millions for Agatha Christie Limited, a company partially owned by her grandson Mathew Pritchard and his children. The majority stakeholder since 1998, however, is a media company called Chorion Limited, which also owns entities like Paddington Bear, Peter Rabbit and the Very Hungry Caterpillar series. Oh, and twist ending: all the works of some guy named Raymond Chandler.
So what can we, as modern writers looking to improve our literary hustle, learn from the life and works of Dame Agatha Christie?
Approach writing as a trade, not an art.
Christie had a knack for writing popular work and now her great-grandchildren are very, very rich. In her autobiography, Christie explains that the only criticism she would offer to another writer would be to issue a warning if:
…[t]he would-be writer has not taken any account of the market for his wares. It is no good writing a novel of 30,000 words—that is not a length which is easily publishable at present. ‘Oh,’ replies the author, ‘but this book has got to be that length.’ Well, that is probably all right if you’re a genius but you are more likely to be a tradesman… If you like to write for yourself only, that is a different matter—you can make it any length, and write it in any way you wish; but then you will probably have to be content with the pleasure alone of having written it.
Write regularly, on everything, even–especially–if it’s just notes.
Collins advertised “a Christie for Christmas” every year and Christie obliged. She was an efficient writer, reusing elements often–her elderly amateur detective Miss Marple’s fictional village of St. Mary Mead has to be up there with Jessica Fletcher’s Cabot Cove for an astounding per capita murder rate–and plotting out stories thoroughly before beginning to write. Christie would keep notes for a single novel across dozens of notebooks, shopping lists, her daughter’s school papers—anything she could write on. With a proper Excel file, she probably could have churned out a book a month (hello, James Patterson).
Read contracts and agreements carefully.
Here’s Christie on her first contract: “Having given up hope for some years now of having anything published…the idea of having a book come out in print went straight to my head. I would have signed anything … I didn’t even notice that there was a clause binding me to offer him my next five novels.” Beware poison pills.
Do lots of things in lots of places.
In both world wars, Christie worked in a hospital dispensary, cultivating a working knowledge of poisons, which would obviously come in handy for her. She also traveled extensively, especially with her second husband, who was essentially the British Indiana Jones. The best way to invest in your long-term creative ability is to have a good range of experiences. Say yes to things.
Get skilled help.
After her bad experience with her first contract, Christie relied on her agent for nearly everything professionally, getting, as she called it, “first-class advice as to what to do, and, even more important, what not to do.” Even if you aren’t going the traditional publishing route, there are groups like Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts who will help you with things like contracts and intellectual property questions; freelance editors can be found through organizationss like the Editorial Freelancers Association. Know when to call in your Poirot.
Works Referenced:
Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (Goodreads | Amazon)
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Indiebound | Amazon)
Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Indiebound | Amazon)
Rebecca Brinson’s Hustle and Prose will be appearing in The Toast monthly. Next up: Laura Ingalls Wilder.
Tags: agatha christie, hustle and prose, ladies doing it for themselves, rebecca brinson, there is a doctor who reference, those plucky belgians
At last, an excuse to learn more about poison. “IT’S FOR RESEARCH, SHOPKEEP”
Now, how would you describe this? Difficult to trace? Near-odorless? Pungent in taste?
I got some very funny looks when I bought this. It’s good, though. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Deadly-Doses-Writers-Pois…
I have had this exact same thought and it explains many books on my shelves.
It is so rare and so refreshing to read a Defence of Agents on the internet, and in the context of Agatha Christie? The best. Thanks for this.
You know what Agatha Christie is shouting from her grave? “Hey Raymond Chandler, SUCK IT!”
But Raymond Chandler is a God Among Miserable Alcoholic Lunatics With Beautiful Prose!
A surprisingly large category.
No! There’s no one quite like Chandler! There are lines from his books that I can read again and again with wonder. Gotta admit I’m glad he wasn’t MY husband, tho.
Thankyouthankyouthankyou. I love Agatha Christie.
Fun fact that I had to cut from the final piece for length: Agatha wrote her final Poirot and Marple novels (Curtain and Sleeping Murder, respectively) during the Blitz and had them locked away in a bank vault in case she didn’t survive. They were published in 1975 (Curtain) and 1976 (Sleeping Murder). Girlfriend had her bases covered.
Agatha! My mom’s a mystery fan and I’ve started reading a few here and there when I want something easy and comforting (well, you know what I mean–formulaic). I just read Five Little Pigs the other day, and while it certainly is no Roger Ackroyd, it was still entertaining!
Also, I’m -highly- looking forward to more entries of this series.
Hurrah! Who else might you (you figwiggin and you full Toastada commentariat) be interested in hearing about?
I want to hear about the Brontes. And Emily Dickenson. And George Eliot. I know pretty much everything there is to know about Dorothy Parker, but I will read it all again anyway.
Yes, all great ideas! Thank you.
I learned from some ITV documentary earlier this year that the Brontes lived downhill from cemetery runoff and NO WONDER YOU KEPT DYING, y’all.
And Mallory, Nicole, maybe you can make a subdomain where we can talk only about Dorothy Parker, all day, every day, forever and ever amen? afterfourimundermyhost.the-toast.net?
Ray Bradbury
Oh gosh. From the hustle angle? This might not be what you’re looking for, but Ann M. Martin!
My mom got me started on Christie too- when I was wee I’d just walk over to my parents’ book shelf and grab whatever struck me. It was often a Christie novel. I still pick them up on occasion, mostly used- they make excellent plane reads.
They were my favorite books when I was 12 and was positive I wanted to be a detective. Now I just want to go to an english country house and be there when a murder is committed so I can shout “I got this!” and proceed to solve the murder (and by showing my pluckiness, the owner of said manor will fall in love with me & I get to live there happily ever after).
Agatha Christie was my first “sneaking out of my approved young person reading zone” endeavor! I found two leather-bound Christie collections, bound sets of 4-5 stories each, on a shelf in the Fancy Decorative Living Room We Weren’t Supposed To Be In At All (why have these rooms? A question for another day), and I snatched them up and ran upstairs, thinking I was being devious. Mom saw me do it, but she figured Christie was hardly the worst thing I could have grabbed from that shelf and let me have them (I still have them, 20+ years later).
Gosh, I am really excited about this series.
This was awesome, thank you!
And if you like mysteries but have never checked out Josephine Tey, do. I’m rereading my favorite, Miss Pym Disposes, right now.
Ach, Miss Pym Disposes is brilliant but I can hardly stand to read it because of all the shit that goes down…and maybe because I identify a little too much with Mary.
I used to LOVE Agatha Christie. Burned through pretty much everything in the local library, until one of the books had the hero and heroine comparing their likes and dislikes (they liked kittens and gloves, or some shit, I don’t remember) but on of the things they both disliked was “n—–s” and it was NOT written with dashes but the full word, and I kind of lost taste for her after that. I’m quite sure all the more subtle pervasive racism had gone over my head (I think I was like 14 by that point?) but that was just a little too shocking and bald for me.
Some of it is pretty appalling. I mean, it’s all appalling, but some of it is so horribly blatant. I have real real trouble with Miss Marple because I find her to be the worst – and that in those ones Christie doesn’t edit the meta commentary as much either. I mean, that Miss Marple is pretty racist and sexist and all that, but also that Christie’s voice is much more judgemental in those ones, I find.
This was so wonderful – thank you! I just loaded up a cart full of used books based on the recommendations in this thread. While their formulaic nature definitely gets to me after a book or two in a row, I am a sucker for whodunit mysteries when I just want to read something frivolous and light.
I CANNOT wait for the L.I. Wilder piece: Rose Wilder, ghostwriting, and libertarianism! Well done–this was great.
I would thumbs up this 100000000000000000000 times
The Toast is killing me. The Secret Garden, passive aggressive fights and Agatha Christie in a SINGLE DAY? I read every single Hercule Poirot volume in the main branch of the San Francisco public library last year, there are only about 5 left for me to complete. Only one Poirot mystery remains unsolved: how he can enjoy glasses of pure creme de menthe. Get rid of your liqueurs, seriously, they are disgusting.
I think the creme de menthe was just to emphasize Poirot’s un-Englishness, just like his preference for tisanes over good solid English tea. Or, you know, China or India tea.
Enjoy the last 5 books! I’m jealous that you’re reading them for the first time.
“she was seen “dancing the Charleston, playing bridge, doing crosswords and reading the newspapers” ”
I sincerely hope that was all at once.
EXCELLENT point. Hahaha
It's true, but as sophiahelix says, it goes some way to addressing issues that are still pretty relevant, to do with marriage, scholarship, work etc. For me the problematic elements are class-based, actually.
The class issues are one of the feminist elements that bug me, to start with. And I… think it addresses some issues that are still relevant. But I also think it is setting up an either/or that can only be solved by the answer "Marry Peter Wimsey." Not "look Miss Hillyard in the face and tell her to get over it and then tell Miss Chilperic not to give up her career when she marries." The only other married woman with a career is the archaeologist at the Gaudy, and she married an exceptional man. I feel like the book is about women's relationships with other women, in a lot of ways, not really about women and men and careers v families. It bothers me that the women come up wanting along with many men, and one or two dudes get it well enough to resolve Harriett's problem.
Bleh.
But I love them! I love the novels, I love the issues they explore, I love Harriett Vane, and so, it's not like I don't re-read Gaudy Night every year or so without pleasure, because I totally do!
Exactly. Me, too. ^^^
I never knew much about her, but I love her now.
Clouds of Witness is also very enjoyable, especially since it involves Lord Peter's brother and sister. And is one of the few mysteries of its kind, as far as I know. But I won't give any more away…
Busman's Honeymoon is one of the few books I've ever thrown across the room when I was finished, and it put me off Sayers for a number of years. I haven't re-read it, but I've re-read all the others so maybe I'll give it another shot.
Ach, Miss Pym Disposes is brilliant but I can hardly stand to read it because of all the shit that goes down…and maybe because I identify a little too much with Mary.
I think the creme de menthe was just to emphasize Poirot's un-Englishness, just like his preference for tisanes over good solid English tea. Or, you know, China or India tea.
Enjoy the last 5 books! I'm jealous that you're reading them for the first time.
The religious fellow in the ad for Whodunit looks disarmingly like Ken Jennings of Jeopardy! fame.