Agatha and Ariadne Transcript

Caroline: We spend a lot of time alone with our favourite writers, just them and us. With nothing but the page separating us, a close connection develops. Even though we only actually know what they have chosen to put in their work, a sense of familiarity and camaraderie often develops. We feel we know this author, even though they have no idea who we are in return.

How can an author reckon with this lopsided relationship? One way is to have fun with the persona that has grown up around them, making readers' assumptions part of the work. And this is what Agatha Christie did with her character Ariadne Oliver.

Join me, won't you, for an exploration of all of the ways in which Agatha both is and isn't Ariadne.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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The character of Ariadne Oliver first appears in a short story titled "The Case of the Discontented Soldier". It's a low key beginning — Ariadne isn't really a detective in it, and she's certainly not the protagonist. She isn't even given a first name. This is really a Parker Pyne story, another of Christie's lesser-known sleuths, a former government statistician who now in retirement describes himself as a "detective of the heart" and attempts to use his skills to help unhappy people improve their lives. Potential clients answer his enigmatic newspaper advertisement and he attempts to make them happy. In this story, Mrs Oliver is a specialist that he has called on to devise an exciting life event for a jaded ex-colonial major.

Although she only has a few lines of dialogue in the story, we do get a relatively strong first impression of her. We learn, for instance, that Parker Pyne defers to Mrs Oliver's skill in constructing a mystery plot because of her literary success. We are told that she as written "forty-six successful works of fiction, all best sellers in England and America, and freely translated into French, German, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese and Abyssinian". The plot she invents for the disaffected major works perfectly; she knows her craft, even if in another of the Parker Pyne stories, "The Case of the Rich Woman", her services are not engaged because she is deemed too "conventional" for that particular client. This is interesting in and of itself, Mrs Oliver herself having argued in "The Case of the Discontented Soldier" that is precisely her grasp of the conventional that makes her such a popular writer.

Christie wrote this story in the early 1930s, first for magazine serial in Woman's Pictorial and Cosmopolitan, then for collection in the 1934 anthology Parker Pyne Investigates. Looking back at it now, there is something uncanny about the achievements she gives to Mrs Oliver. It could easily be a prediction of what was to come for Christie herself. Although we know her as a global bestselling phenomenon now, she wasn't anything like that at the time that this story appeared. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926, of course, had been very well-received and widely read, and her 11-day disappearance that same year had resulted in a lot of distasteful publicity and notoriety. But she had nothing like the length of bibliography that Mrs Oliver has, nor the profusion of translations. She grew into that body of work and that kind of fame. Was it a coincidence that she had already attributed it to a character she would later identify as a version of herself, or was it an expression, conscious or unconscious, of her own grand literary ambitions? We can never know for sure.

Mrs Oliver next appears in Christie's 1936 novel, Cards on the Table. This is our first glimpse of her as a three-dimensional character and where many of the traits associated with her originate. Perhaps most crucially, this is where Mrs Oliver gets a first name — Ariadne. And I don't think that name was chosen at random. By giving her character the name Ariadne, Christie was leaving a broad hint about her occupation and purpose. Ariadne is a name best known from Greek mythology, where she is a Cretan princess who provides Theseus with a sword and a ball of thread so that he can find his way out of the labyrinth where her brother, the Minotaur, lives. "Ariadne" is thus associated with providing clues and following the thread of a story through to its tragic end — in some versions of the myth, Ariadne then elopes with Theseus and he later betrays and abandons her. Mrs Oliver never functions as a conventional detective, but she does have a vital role as a deus ex machina, providing the hero-detective — often, but not always, Poirot — with some important clue or insight, just as the original Ariadne gave Theseus the thread that got him out of the labyrinth. This is probably most visible in the novel Dead Man's Folly from 1956, in which Mrs Oliver constructs a murder mystery game to played at a garden fete, laying all of the clues herself. Christie seems to have enjoyed repurposing quotations from the Bible, from nursery rhymes and from Shakespeare for her book titles, so this Classical allusion is not much of a departure for her. "Hercule", after all, also appears in a short story collection titled The Labours of Hercules, in which the detective takes on cases that mimic the trials of another mythical hero.

In Cards on the Table, Mrs Oliver is one of four sleuths who have been invited to a bridge party by the rich eccentric Mr Shaitana. The other three are Hercule Poirot, whom Mrs Oliver already knows from a meeting at a literary dinner, Superintendant Battle of Scotland Yard, and Colonel Race of the secret service. All four had previously appeared separately, one way or another, in Christie's fiction. The other four guests are people, new original characters, whom their host believes have committed murder and got away with it. After dinner, while the two bridge tables are busy, Mr Shaitana is stabbed in his seat at the fireplace where he is watching the play. All there is to go on are the bridge scores, which Poirot gradually deciphers to reveal both the suspects' characters and their actions on the fateful evening. Mrs Oliver does also take an active part in the investigation, doing some interviewing of her fellow guests. But for our purposes today, the plot of this book is far less significant than what it tells us about Mrs Ariadne Oliver.

Her reputation as a major writer of detective fiction is confirmed. She is known to all the characters in this capacity, and, we are told, she is also a regular commentator in the press on matters relating to murder. We get our first proper physical description of her: she is middle aged, of "generous proportions", has "fine eyes" and large shoulders. She is somewhat untidy in her dress and hair; indeed, her hair is mentioned repeatedly, because she has the habit of experimenting with wildly different and dramatic hair styles. She is confident and gives her opinions freely, especially those that relate to the role of women in society. Mrs Oliver's belief in "women's intuition" is prominent in this book is repeatedly stated and she is prone to saying things like "Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard!" when given bad news about crime.

This is also where we get the first mention of Mrs Oliver's affinity for apples, which is to become more important as she progressed through the Christie canon, culminating in an apple-based murder in Hallowe'en Party. Mrs Oliver really likes eating apples, and eats them compulsively while driving or working through a tricky bit of plotting. Five of her novels are named in this book: The Lotus Murder, The Clue of the Candle Wax, The Body in the Library, The Death in the Drain Pipe and The Affair of the Second Goldfish. I don't know that Christie ever contemplated writing a book with the latter title, though I would have loved it if she had, but she did like one of these enough to give to one of her own novels: The Body in the Library, of course, was published in 1942, eight years after Cards on the Table appeared.

It is when Mrs Oliver talks about detective fiction that we get the broadest hints that Agatha Christie herself is speaking through the character. She quarrels with some of the guests at Mr Shaitana's party who tease her for crime fiction's repeated use of so-called untraceable poisons, insisting that her readers like that sort of thing. Her mission as a writer, she seems to be saying, is to entertain and astound, not to replicate the details of real life precisely. She builds on this later, responding to Superintendant Battle when he offers to correct her on a few points of police procedure that she doesn't care "two pins about accuracy". What really matters is "plenty of bodies" and a plot that isn't dull.

All the way through this novel, Mrs Oliver is eloquent on the fact that detective fiction doesn't work the same way as a real-life murder. She talks frequently about how badly constructed Mr Shaitana's death was and how she would write it very differently if it were in one of her books. She invents better, if more improbable, solutions for the facts of the case, too. Poirot is especially admiring of the one where Mr Shaitana invited all of his murderers and sleuths for dinner and then killed himself, just for the drama of it, but then they both agree that this is both too obvious and too neat to have happened in real life. This way, via Mrs Oliver, Christie adds a delightfully metafictional dimension to this book. She retains this as a facet of the character throughout, because even in the last Mrs Oliver novel, Elephants Can Remember from 1972, Mrs Oliver is lamenting the fact that if she had invented this crime, she would have solved it already because it would have been so much more logical. This is detective fiction about detective fiction.

My favourite moment with Mrs Oliver in Cards on the Table, though, occurs between Ariadne and Hercule. Someone asks if she ever repeats plots and Poirot quietly names two novels that are, at heart, the same story dressed up differently. Rather than being annoyed, Mrs Oliver is delighted that someone has been reading with sufficient attention to appreciate the subtlety of her craft. Christie, of course, did this constantly, turning short stories in novels and vice versa, and sometimes even reusing her most famous effects several times. In fact, in 1934, she was about to do it in one of her most famous Poirot novels, Death on the Nile. I like to think that she, like Mrs Oliver, would have been pleased rather than irritated when anyone spotted the repetition.

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After Mrs Oliver assists Poirot in bringing the murderer of Mr Shaitana to justice, we don't see her for almost twenty years. I'm not sure why Christie put her aside only to return two decades later, but that is what happened. We next encounter Ariadne in 1952's Mrs McGinty's Dead, where she pops up as an acquaintance of one household in a village where Poirot is investigating the brutal murder of a charlady named Mrs McGinty. Mrs Oliver is there because she is working on a stage adaptation of one of her novels with someone who lives in this village, reflecting Christie's own turn towards theatre work in the 1950s — The Mousetrap had its first performance the same year that this novel was published. She and Poirot reunite, a moment that has greater significance looking back on Christie's entire bibliography, because Mrs Oliver is a prominent part of what we might call Poirot's later adventures. She is present in more than half, five out of nine, of the last Poirot novels, not counting Curtain, of course, which was actually written in the early 1940s.

In Mrs McGinty's Dead we get two moments that read like Agatha using Ariadne as a mouthpiece to talk to the reader again. The first concerns Mrs Oliver's recurring detective, Sven Hjerson, who is from Finland. Making him a Finn, she has already told us in Cards on the Table, is her only regret in her writing career, because she doesn't know anything about Finland and Finnish people keep writing to her to correct her on things. In Mrs McGinty's Dead, another character asks her why she made Sven Hjerson a vegetarian, and she replies irritably that she doesn't know why she gave his such "idiotic mannerisms" and habits. Such things just happen, she says, suggesting that there is no deeper meaning as the questioner seems to hope. This is a funny moment from Christie, who has created Mrs Oliver as a character with plenty of little tags of her own — the apples, the "women's intuition", the different hairstyles — but then had her angrily explain how little such things really matter.

But I must disagree with Ariadne slash Agatha here. These little details do matter. Christie gives Mrs Oliver certain recurring motifs that the reader can anticipate and enjoy every time they appear. This isn't unique to this character by any means — Poirot has his moustaches and his "little grey cells" for the same reason. But Mrs Oliver's perennial props are especially interesting. If Poirot's serve to stress his vanity, his meticulousness, and his absurd self-confidence, some of hers have a broader thematic function. Her appearance, especially her ever-changing and absurd hair styles, demonstrates her quixotic, chaotic nature. The same goes for her striking manner of dress and decorating her home. Her strong connection with apples and her special interest in the plight of girls and young women is even more suggestive. These are both symbols from the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, associated with evil and original sin. Mrs Oliver, scatterbrained and with no patience for painstaking investigation, is a detective of human nature. She operates on instinct and is capable of seeing the absolute worst in people, even when they are successfully concealing their true nature from everyone else.

The second moment of importance in Mrs McGinty's Dead concerns a blowpipe. While looking at a display of Penguin books in the post office, which seems to include several of her own books, she muses on her past plot mistakes. I do maintain, by the way, that Ariadne Oliver is a fictionally canonical green penguin author. Anyway, she comments to the postmistress that in a book called The Cat It Was Who Died, she described a blowpipe as being a foot long when it really would have had to be about six feet for the plot to work. Christie had made a similar error in her 1935 novel Death in the Clouds and I love that she took this opportunity to say to her readers "I know, please stop writing to me about it". Mrs Oliver also references a mistake she made in another book with the water solubility of a drug, something that chemical expert Agatha Christie would never do, of course. Some people only read books in order to pick holes in them, Mrs Oliver concludes. This moment serves no wider purpose in the book, by the way, it's just something that had to be said. Petty, perhaps, but very enjoyable to hear Agatha Christie's voice peeping through like this.

Throughout the seven novels in which Mrs Oliver appears, we are encouraged to think of her primarily as a detective who operates on instinct, furnishing more quote "rational" sleuths like Poirot with material that they can then fit into the larger pattern. However, this is not a complete picture. Mrs Oliver does do some investigative legwork, such as her interviewing of suspects in Cards on the Table or the episode in 1966's Third Girl when she disguises herself and tails someone across London. Also, some of her best breakthroughs come not from her intuition, but from the fact that she is approachable and a good listener. People come to her with their problems, as Mark Easterbrook does in The Pale Horse, or Rhoda Dawes does in Cards on the Table, and almost all of the characters do in Elephants Can Remember. She may not immediately make the vital connections based on what they tell her, but the fact that she receives these confidences means that the information is there in her brain, waiting for the right moment to slot into place. Equally, she is capable of making irrational guesses or blunders, as in Mrs McGinty's Dead when a murder happens right under her nose, or in Cards on the Table when she insists from the start that she knows who the killer is, despite not having any tangible evidence to back up her assertions.

Critics disagree on how closely we can identify Agatha Christie with Ariadne Oliver. Some use the phrase "self-insertion" to describe the character, while others limit themselves to pointing out the individual correspondences, such as the mutual frustration with their Finnish/Belgian detectives. When Dead Man's Folly was serialised in John Bull magazine in 1956, its author was quoted as saying "I never take my stories from real life, but the character of Ariadne Oliver does have a strong dash of myself."

The strongest evidence for this is not in that novel, but in two others. In Cards on the Table, Mrs Oliver makes one of the very few references to Christie's disappearance in her fiction, recalling an episode from her childhood when a Welsh nurse she had taken her to Harrogate — the place where Christie was eventually found in 1926 — and forgot her, leaving her in the Yorkshire town alone. Was this a conscious reference by Christie, who otherwise preferred not to discuss the episode in public if she could avoid it, or an unconscious slip? Perhaps Harrogate was forever coupled in her mind with the idea of being lost or abandoned. Cards on the Table was published in 1936, ten years after the incident, at a time when Christie had been revisiting that period of her life extensively in her first two Mary Westmacott novels. Giant's Bread from 1930 gives the experience of amnesia and the associated trauma to a young man fighting in World War I, and Unfinished Portrait from 1934 covers many of the details from the breakdown of her first marriage to Archie Christie which precipitated her distressed trip to Harrogate.

Another, more oblique, reference pops up in Third Girl, which features an Inspector Neele — Neele being the surname of Archie Christie's second wife, for whom he left Agatha. Again, I wonder whether she was doing this deliberately. For someone who liked to keep her private life private, she was dropping unnecessary hints to it in her work. And in both instances, it is in the proximity of Mrs Oliver that this occurs.

These are the only occasions that Mrs Oliver shares something of substance with Christie, though. Everything else that they have in common is superficial. Her irritation with readers who nitpick in detective stories, her frustration at being boxed in by the traits she had given Poirot all the way back in 1920, her fondness for prioritising entertainment over precision — these are things that Christie would probably have happily talked about at a literary event or to someone she met on a train.

The scholar Françoise Grauby has argued that by always presenting Mrs Oliver with descriptions of the material elements of a writer — her typewriter, her proofs, her fantastically decorated study — Christie is hinting at personal revelation without actually providing any details about her own life or process. Famously keen to guard her own private life and personality, seen this way, Mrs Oliver is a total red herring. She is a character that makes her creator seem like she is revealing something to her audience while actually revealing nothing at all. At one point, Grauby calls Ariadne a "good hiding place" for Agatha Christie", and this seems apt.

On the few occasions when she did talk about her creative process, such as in her Autobiography, Christie talked of her ideas coming in moments of sudden inspiration, or as germinating seeds that she had previously planted. She gives us a sense of an instinctual writer, visited by her muse, rather than someone who had a detailed creative process she was keen to share with others after the fact. Mrs Oliver writes the same way: in The Pale Horse, we see her gripped by a "spasm of agony" as she works. Grauby describes it very effectively: "Just as the apple tree produces fruit, Mrs Oliver produces mystery novels." The tree doesn't tell us anything about how this happens; it just does.

What does Ariadne Oliver really tell us anything of substance about Agatha Christie? Her essential nature, her morals, her thoughts on the meaning of life? Very little. By creating a writer character who has some superficial similarities to herself, Christie in fact told us nothing at all of consequence about the two things that seem to have mattered most to her: her work and her personal relationships. And yet the presence of Mrs Oliver still makes you feel closer to her creator, like you have been let in on the joke. But as ever, it's Agatha Christie who is having the last laugh.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton.

You can find links to all the books and sources referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/agathaandariadne. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

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Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.