Agatha Christie's Gun Man Transcript

Caroline: At the heart of every good golden age mystery is the closed circle — that limited group of suspects from which the detective will, eventually, pick out the murderer. This isn't a form of crime writing that generally concerns itself with faceless strangers or unknown assailants. Part of the contract between author and reader requires that the culprit be there, hiding in plain sight, ideally right from the beginning of the story.

Disguise and dissimilation is vital to making this work. For the killer to hide successfully among a small group of otherwise innocent people for most of a book, they have to put on a pretty good act. Good enough to fool their nearest and dearest, and to keep any investigators from realising the truth.

We read murder mysteries for entertainment, for escapism, for light relief, but this underlying mechanism is quite horrifying when you get thinking about it. One moment, the person sat next to you is your loved one, someone you know better than anyone else. The next, a completely different person is looking out at you through those familiar eyes — and that person has committed a terrible crime.

The best crime writers confront this tension over and over again, between the familiar and the alien, the intimate and the distant, good and evil. And one of them in particular had been dreaming about this terrifying switch since she was a small child. Which is why, today, we're going to meet Agatha Christie's Gun Man.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Agatha Christie was a very imaginative child. She tells us so in her Autobiography, devoting almost the entire first half of the work to memories of her upbringing in Torquay and the loving household that surrounded her. She was also a fairly solitary child, her siblings both being much older than her — her sister Madge by eleven years, and her brother Monty by ten. She was largely educated at home and spent most of her time with her parents and the servants who took care of her, a procession of nurses, nannies and maids.

It was a happy childhood. As well as in her autobiography, we can see hints of it in her first two novels published under the Mary Westmacott pseudonym, Giant's Bread from 1930 and Unfinished Portrait from 1934. Here, Christie gave aspects of her own experience to her central characters, Vernon and Celia, both of whom spend their early years roaming freely in beautiful houses and gardens, at liberty to enjoy the games and characters that they make up to keep them company.

These idyllic accounts are not without their moments of horror, though. Celia, for instance, is deeply upset by an incident where an adult pins a still-alive butterfly to her hat, with part of her dismay coming from the fact that she feels she has to pretend to be grateful for this attention from an elder. This incident also has a counterpart version in Christie's autobiography. Vernon, tellingly for his later story in Giant's Bread, finds his mother's behaviour and way of speaking overwhelming and dreads his encounters with her. These are lucky children, but their lives are by no means without distress.

The same was true for Christie herself. In her autobiography, she tells us of a recurring dream she had from an early age — or perhaps nightmare would be a more appropriate designation. It was sufficiently bad that she would wake up screaming, and her nurse would have to inform her mother. The dream concerned a figure Christie called "the Gun Man". He seems to have been an invention all of her own, rather than a character lifted from a book or play she knew as a child. He was a figure from history, perhaps the early nineteenth century, with his grey-blue French military uniform, powdered hair and tricorn hat. His weapon was a musket, which is why she knew him as the "Gun Man", even though he did not shoot in the dream. No: just his presence alone induced terror.

The Gun Man dream always started with a cheerful occasion, like a picnic or a tea party, attended by Christie's friends and loved ones. Gradually, a sense of wrongness would creep in. Even though everybody present seemed to be someone she knew, this perception was not to be trusted. Then she would realise that one of them was actually the Gun Man, who had been sitting, unnoticed, at the tea table or on the picnic blanket the whole time. It was at this point that she would wake up screaming.

That's the version of the dream we get in her autobiography. It's easy to understand why this was sufficiently distressing that Christie still remembered it and wanted to write about it decades later. Figures in dreams, whether they be invented characters, remembered people, or amalgams of the two, are already hard to pin down. They morph and change, or look one way while actually being another. Adding the threat and menace of the Gun Man to this effect would certainly tip a dream into a nightmare. Even though, interestingly, Christie doesn't actually say what the Gun Man ever did, if anything. He doesn't shoot anyone, or even speak to her. Just his presence there, where she did not expect him to be, is horrifying enough.

This wasn't the only time Christie wrote about the Gun Man. He seems to have been there in the back of her mind long after she left childhood behind. In Unfinished Portrait, which was written in the early 1930s after Christie's turbulent divorce and subsequent remarriage, she gives her protagonist Celia a slightly different version of him. The Gun Man's uniform is blue and red, instead of just blue, and in this retelling he has no hands. He no longer just appears among the guests at whatever pleasant festivity she is dreaming about. He is one of the guests. The dream version of Celia looks up at her mother, or her father or nanny, and catches sight of unfamiliar "light steely-blue eyes" in a familiar, beloved face. Where she expects to see her mother's hands emerging from her sleeves, there are now only stumps. But in every other way, this is still her mother. The Gun Man is a parasite that can inhabit a person without replacing them. He is the terrifying unknown that lurks within someone you thought you knew better than anyone else.

There's a related phenomenon in Christie's non-crime short story "The House of Dreams", first published in 1926 but in fact a reworking of an early piece of fiction she wrote at the age of 18. A young city clerk named John Seagrove has recurring dreams of a beautiful, joyful house. At the same time, he meets a beautiful young woman, Allegra Kerr, who insists that she will never marry but refuses to tell him why. Gradually, John's dreams shift and he becomes aware of a Thing, with a capital T, that inhabits the dream-house — something vile and corrupt that squats malevolently in the idealised house of his mind. Although it doesn't have a corporeal form, it's the same idea as the Gun Man. Evil, intruding, in disguise, upon all that is familiar and good.

Unfinished Portrait is actually the first time Christie named the Gun Man in print, and I think it's a more significant version than the rendition in her autobiography. Christie's autobiography is a very important document about her life, but it has to be understood in its proper context. She began work on it in the early fifties while in Nimrud, Iraq, for an archaeological dig with her second husband, Max Mallowan. She continued amassing material for fifteen years, concluding at Winterbrook, the couple's home in Wallingford in 1965, when she was 75 years old. Or at least that was the impression given by her foreword and epilogue when the book was published in 1977, almost two years after her death. In fact, as subsequent biographers have revealed, much of what Christie wrote about herself during this period took the form of diary entries and autobiographical fragments that she initially thought she might use for short, subject-specific recollections in the mould of her 1946 volume Come, Tell Me How You Live, which is about her travels in the Middle East with Max.

She became more serious about the prospect of a unified, linear account of her life in the early 1960s, when requests from other writers wanting to produce an Agatha Christie biography began to show up on a regular basis. This is when she evolved the chronological structure of the autobiographical and began to dictate more material to fit it. She wanted her own version of her life that would stand against, and ideally overshadow, anything that anyone else might produce. The resulting text was edited extensively after her death — her first authorised biographer, Janet Morgan, writes that there was a "great deal of cutting and correction" done by an editor at Collins, as well as by Christie's daughter and son-in-law, Rosalind and Anthony Hicks. Although the Autobiography might read like a straightforward account of a life, told from childhood to old age, it's worth knowing that that isn't how it was originally conceived or mostly, written. It's a deft work of assembly, a lot of disparate memories recalled decades later, slotted together into a convincing whole. Rather like the vessels and other artefacts that Christie helped to piece back together during Max's digs.

Another reason why Unfinished Portrait is a more interesting source to me on the Gun Man is because Christie makes explicit connections between the dream and other crucial events in her protagonist's life. Although Celia isn't exactly a one to one stand in for Christie herself, Celia's courtship and ultimately unsuccessful marriage to Dermot bears a very striking resemblance to Agatha's own first marriage to Archie Christie. Dermot, like Archie, pursues Celia avidly at first, only later to find her frustratingly clingy. Ultimately, he asks for a divorce so he can marry someone else. Even in the version of events in the Autobiography, written at least twenty years later while Christie trying her best not to show anyone in an especially bad light, the parallels with the novel are striking. So when in Unfinished Portrait Celia has the sudden realisation that the Dermot who is asking her for a divorce is the Gun Man, it's easy to imagine that this is the same revelation Christie had herself. The months leading up to Archie's request had been impossibly hard, with the death of Christie's mother and the requirement that she clear decades-worth of family clutter out her childhood home to ready it for sale, all while still parenting her young daughter. Christie had no inkling that her husband was going to arrive at Ashfield and tell her that he had fallen in love with another woman. To her, in that moment, he was a cruel and terrifying stranger inhabiting Archie's body, even if he wasn't wearing a uniform or wielding a musket.

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Agatha Christie never publicly speculated about why she was visited by the Gun Man dream so early on in her life. Looked at from one angle, such unwarranted distress is surprising, since by her own account she had such a happy childhood. In our post psychological, therapy-filled era, we associate such things with trauma. I think there is a way in which it fits, though. Sometimes, the biggest thing that a happy person has to worry about is the loss of said happiness. And that's what the Gun Man represents: the mistaken belief that everything is wonderful, when actually, it isn't.

Christie's crime fiction is full of psychological insights and brilliant twists. But there are a few titles in particular in which she allowed herself free rein to explore the true horror that the Gun Man represented. These books tend to deal with personal betrayal, the breaking of trust, impersonation and the desperation to conceal bad behaviour from loved ones. Sometimes, Christie built an entire story around this: murder not for financial or status gain, but to preserve a fragile situation or relationship beyond its natural lifespan. What if the picnic could carry on, after we realise that the Gun Man is present? But of course, it can't.

When I think about this, I'm drawn particularly to a trio of novels that Christie published within a five year period in the 1930s: Peril at End House in 1932, Three Act Tragedy in 1935 and Murder in Mesopotamia in 1936. Superficially, these books are very different — they aren't set in the same type of place, nor do they cover similar crimes. Murder in Mesopotamia, especially, is an outlier in Christie's bibliography, being both one of novels she produced about her archaeological experiences in the Middle East, and one of her rare true locked room mysteries. Poirot is present as detective in all three, it is true, but even he isn't a constant. Hastings is with him as "Watson" in Peril at End House, but absent elsewhere, for instance.

What unites all three of these books is that ultimately, the person behind the murder has been hiding behind a different, benevolent, likeable face. In each case, Christie puts a good deal of effort into establishing this character as "safe", as someone whom Poirot and other seemingly trustworthy characters can reliably communicate with. They're a good friend, a potential love interest, a safe harbour in an emotional storm. Until suddenly, they aren't: the Gun Man's eyes look out of their face and the whole sequence of events has to be looked at in a new way in light of their true nature. These books are all the more disturbing because of the planning and connivance their crimes require. These imposters, these people who have so successfully fooled everyone into believing in their goodness, are not accidental murderers, haphazardly covering up crimes after the fact. No: these are cold-blooded, calculated killers, with covert schemes that have been running weeks, months, even years. Once unmasked, they are irredeemable. The fact that Christie handles these psychological arcs alongside the more practical details of crime and detection makes these stories all the more impressive to me. Murder in Mesopotamia would probably still be a clever and readable murder mystery without the addition of a Gun Man-style character element. Plenty of writers in the 1930s were writing intricate puzzle mysteries without that additional gut punch. Given that we know Christie was still thinking about the Gun Man as she was writing Unfinished Portrait for 1934, his bleed into her crime fiction from this era too feels like more than a coincidence.

Three decades later, when she was in her seventies and of a more nostalgic turn of mind, we see hints of the Gun Man again. Third Girl from 1966 is a novel entirely about the unreliability of memory and how difficult it is to know who someone truly, truly is. The writing style and the means of concealment have changed to keep up with the times — this is by no stretch of the imagination a golden age murder mystery — but the psychological dynamics are very similar. At Bertram's Hotel, a Miss Marple novel from this same period touches on similar themes, albeit without such an intense focus on character. In that book, it is a whole hotel rather than an individual that presents the welcoming face, only to be revealed later on as something much more sinister. The Gun Man then becomes intertwined with Christie's thoughts about ageing, as she moves into novels from the early 1970s like Elephants Can Remember and Postern of Fate, both of which are about the reliability of memory and whether you can ever trust your perception of someone.

After Agatha Christie's death in 1976, her estate published Sleeping Murder, the "final" Miss Marple novel that she had written in the early 1940s. Although he is never named, this is perhaps the book where we feel the Gun Man's presence most acutely. He is the Thing in the House of Dreams, haunting the home that newlywed New Zealander Gwenda Reed has chosen in which to start her new life in England. Strange coincidences abound: what seems safe is in sinister. We know Christie primarily as a crime writer, but I think in a different life she would have made a marvellous writer or perhaps director of horror. This book is full of visual and psychological jumpscares, where what should be comforting turns out to be the very opposite.

For all the Christie experimented with her Gun Man nightmare in her crime fiction, the reader can always claim the safety that is inherent in the murder mystery form. Devastating though their unmasking may be to the rest of the circle, the criminal has been caught. They will face justice. They will not be able to cause harm again. But that isn't always how it works in real life, is it? Those who hide in plain sight, hurting others, don't always get caught.

As we've already seen, Christie's writing as Mary Westmacott is where some of her most potent and devastating psychological insights about the Gun Man reside. Absent in the Spring from 1944 is by far the best Westmacott novel, precisely because it takes all of the horror from Christie's dream, of seeing a stranger's eyes in a loved one's face, and turns it inward. It follows a middle-aged English woman, Joan Scudamore, as she endures a frustrating days-long travel delay while she makes the journey back home from visiting her married daughter in the Middle East. Joan is a self-satisfied sort of woman at the start of the book, secure in her comfortable marriage, her easy relationships with her grown-up children, and her warm friendships with her neighbours. She isn't prone to self-reflection, at all. Then she has to spend three days at a remote desert rest stop, alone, with nothing to do and nobody at all to talk to. Finally, she has to get to know herself. And it turns out, she is the Gun Man that others flee from.

Three times over the course of the book, Joan looks in a mirror and analyses what she sees. The first time, she is all smug satisfaction at her own appearance, congratulating herself on having worn well compared to an old schoolfriend. The second time, she is seeking reassurance. She feels different, not like herself, because the inner revelation of her true character has already begun. But she still looks the same, so she is able to stave off the uncomfortable truth for a little longer. The last time, she looks and sees the difference in herself. She is different, and so she looks different. Her true nature within is finally visible without, as well.

Despite the name that Christie gave him as a child, the Gun Man was never about a killing shot or blow. He might have had a musket in her nightmares, but there's no sense that he fired it or that Christie feared that he would. His mere presence was enough to terrify. It is the intrusion, the unwanted appearance, that makes him such a figure of fear. That's what lingered for decades, and that's what she returned to again and again in her fiction. And it's also why we're still reading and thinking about Christie's work. Sometimes the trappings of golden age detective fiction can seem dated or antiquated, a century on. Locked rooms, deadly poisons, blunt instruments — these are familiar to us now, even cosy, not deadly. But the fear that Christie manipulated so expertly? That scares me anew every time I turn the page.

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

There are links to all the books and stories I referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/agathachristiesgunman. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to stay in touch with the podcast between episodes, sign up for the weekly Shedunnit newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. It's the best way to get more murder mystery reading recommendations and know what's coming up on the podcast before anyone else.

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

Thanks for listening.