Returning to Mr Quin Transcript

Caroline: Here are a few things that all crime fiction lovers know to be true. Detective stories work best when they are firmly focused on reality, giving the supernatural a wide berth. A classic whodunnit needs a clear, unambiguous ending: the good end happily and the bad, unhappily. And Agatha Christie's best characters are the ones, like Poirot and Marple, that she developed over many cases in many books.

But what if these things aren't actually true at all? What if there's an often-overlooked Agatha Christie character who shows that the exact opposite can be the case?

That's why, today, we're returning to Mr Quin.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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The response to my episode about the most underrated Agatha Christie novels was wonderful. Many listeners got in touch to share their own selections, some of which overlapped with mine and some didn't. But one thing kept coming up over and over again: what about Mr Quin? Not a novel, per se, but isn't he Agatha Christie's most underrated character? Since I hadn't read The Mysterious Mr Quin in at least twenty years and could remember very little about him, I felt immediately inclined to agree. Even I, a semi-professional Christie fan, had overlooked him completely.

What I found as I flew through the slim canon of Mr Quin — there are only fourteen stories, twelve of which were collected together in one volume in 1930 — startled me. I am so used to thinking of Agatha Christie as the supreme plotter of puzzle mysteries that I sometimes forget she was very good at other kinds of writing too. She was a playwright as well, of course, but her best-known work in that arena is also centred around whodunnits. The Mysterious Mr Quin, though... It is really something else. Should these stories be described as suspense? As thrillers? As magical realism? I'm not sure. Christie scholar John Curran describes them as "crime fantasy", and that's a fairly convincing genre descriptor.

The further through the stories I got, the more compelled I became by Mr Harley Quin. Not just by the character himself, although he is slippery and shadowy, but by why Christie felt the need to bring him into being and then return to him through her turbulent 1920s. Consider this my investigation, then, into this most elusive of her creations.

The origins of Mr Quin go all the way back to Christie's childhood. On the mantelpiece at Ashfield, the Millers' family home in Torquay, was a set of Dresden china figures that represented the traditional characters from the early form of professional theatre in sixteenth century Italy, the commedia dell’arte. This theatrical tradition was focused on a set of stock characters or archetypes who were then slotted into different stories and productions. There are quite a few that developed over a couple of centuries, but there is a core group of six, arranged in three couples: Harlequin and Columbine, Pierrot and Pierette, Punchinello and Punchinella. As can be the way with familiar objects you see a lot as a child, these figurines made quite an impact on imaginative little Agatha Miller. She wrote poems about them, some of which she later set to music. She had some success with them: she later recalled that one of the poems, titled "Harlequin's Song", might very well be her first paid writing work, as she was paid a guinea by Poetry Review for it.

Many years later, during the 1920s, her interest in the Harlequin resurfaced. The market for magazine stories was very good at this time, and Christie took full advantage — writing and serialising as much as she could, as her literary profile improved through the decade. One magazine that she had a highly productive relationship with throughout the 1920s and 1930s was The Grand Magazine, an early British pulp title. They had taken the serialisation of The Murder on the Links in late 1922, early 1923, and continued to return to her for short stories until the Second World War. One of these, in 1924, was the first Mr Quin to be published: the first one in the eventual collection, "The Coming of Mr Quin", although the magazine gave it the lesser title of "The Passing of Mr Quinn". Incidentally, another short story from 1923, "The Affair at the Victory Ball", also makes use of the six primary commedia dell’arte characters as fancy dress costumes for a society set's ultimately tragic visit to a Victory Ball.

"The Coming of Mr Quin" contains all of the strands that Christie would go on to weave through the rest of the Quin canon. A group of friends is assembled at a house party on New Year's Eve, an icy, windy night. Among those present is Mr Satterthwaite, who we are told is "a little bent, dried-up man with a peering face oddly elflike, and an intense and inordinate interest in other people's lives." The conversation turns to a tragedy that occurred in the house ten years before, when the previous owner shot himself despite there being no prior indication that he was considering such a course of action. Then comes a knock on the door and there stands a stranger who is having car trouble; can he come in and wait in the warm while the problem is being fixed? Of course he can. Christie describes this meeting from Satterthwaite's point of view, and for a moment the light shining through the stained glass panel above the door hits the stranger and he seems to be "dressed in every colour of the rainbow". He introduces himself as Mr Harley Quin and joins the gathering, skilfully steering the conversation into an inquiry that ultimately reveals the true explanation for the decade-old suicide. At one point, Mr Satterthwaite has the sensation that they are all puppets being manipulated by a master puppeteer, Mr Quin, or perhaps actors on a stage with a commanding director. And then, once the truth has been uncovered, Mr Quin melts away into the night with no further explanation, once again looking briefly multi-coloured as he does so. All of these points — the presence of Mr Satterthwaite, the relationship between Mr Quin and colour, his habit of flitting in and out like a puckish sprite, and the revelation about a past trauma that he elicits — are ones that Christie would turn to again and again.

Known as "Arlecchino" in Italian, the Harlequin is traditionally a servant figure in the commedia dell’arte, often playing romantic roles with a trickster angle to them. His multi-coloured costume and fluid physicality are also important facets of the character. Christie brings all of this into her Mr Harley Quin, peppering in references to the original Harlequin. The Italian restaurant in Soho that both Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite frequent in the story "The Sign in the Sky" is called "Arlecchino". Another story, "At the Bells and Motley", takes place mostly at a pub of that name, "motley" being another word for the Harlequin's varicoloured costume. The traditional Harlequin garb also includes a black mask, and Mr Quin is frequently described as being "a thin dark man". There are regular references to cues and lines and other theatrical jargon for actors, hinting both at the Harlequin's origins on the stage and the way in which Mr Quin subtly directs people towards his intended outcome. The stained glass imagery for Mr Quin recurs, and seems to have been a motif Christie liked generally — it also shows up in her 1954 Miss Marple short story "Sanctuary". Incidentally, the connection between stained glass and Christie's fiction doesn't stop there. In the 1950s, she wrote and donated the rights of the short story "Greenshaw's Folly" to the parish church in Churston Ferrers in Devon, so that a new stained glass window could be paid for.

Christie continued to write and publish Mr Quin stories through the 1920s, initially in The Grand Magazine and then a set of six in 1927 for The Story-Teller. In a foreword to a later edition of the collection, she revealed that the dozen stories were not written to be a series, coming to her separately at "rare intervals". There is, however, a very satisfying continuity to them. Mr Quin and Mr Satterthwaite meet in the first story and we see their familiarity with each other grow with each subsequent encounter. Mr Satterthwaite ages, too, and acquires something like a philosophy about fixing the problems of others.

Mr Quin, though, only becomes more remote and unknowable as the stories go by. That first story, "The Coming of Mr Quin", is more conventional, more what you might expect from Christie. It has the country house setting, where the group of friends are chewing over a cold case. Mr Quin is on the page for a fair amount of the action, physically present in the room as the key connections are made. In his subsequent adventures, he makes much briefer appearances, sometimes staying only for a quick conversation with Mr Satterthwaite before disappearing again. Later, just getting a glimpse of Mr Quin starts to tip Satterthwaite off that there is some problem to be unravelled in the vicinity. Quin works through Satterthwaite, insisting that he does nothing himself other than offer a chance to look at old events from a new perspective. Any action that might result is Satterthwaite's alone, he insists. He is merely the catalyst, that's all. Although the reader might think they know better.

The Mr Quin stories become weirder and more supernatural as they go on, then. Mr Quin flits between the pages, an omniscient presence about which we are allowed to know nothing. I tend to think of the ghostly elements arriving in Christie's crime fiction towards the latter half of her career, in books like The Pale Horse and Hallowe'en Party from the 1960s, whereas earlier on she was dedicated to mysteries and thrillers. Returning to The Mysterious Mr Quin made me confront that the interest in the weird was always there, bubbling under the surface. Indeed, in that foreword, she suggests that poetry and ghost stories were her first literary projects, preceding her turn to crime fiction with The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

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If Mr Quin is the shadow, then Mr Satterthwaite is the light. He's the one we can see more closely and perceive in more detail. Mr Quin chooses him to work through, so perhaps there are clues to our harlequin to be found there.

Mr Satterthwaite is one of life's observers. He is addicted to the drama of human life: he loves to watch the way the people around him interact without welcoming any of that emotional business into his own life. All of his time watching others has made him perceptive and empathetic, too; he is often shown as having flashes of insight when first encountering someone that turn out to be eerily accurate. Over time, we come to trust him, both as a reader of people and as a fundamentally moral individual. He has moments of self-doubt and defaults towards inaction in a way that could read as cowardly in certain situations, but he is never not aware of the right thing to do.

Many of the Mr Quin stories take place in the traditional milieu of golden age detective fiction, the upper echelons of English society. Country houses, theatres, galleries, casinos in the south of France — these are the places you will find Mr Satterthwaite and, by extension therefore, Mr Quin. In fact, we are told definitively that Mr Satterthwaite has a set rota of locations he moves through as the year progresses, the Riviera in January, London in May and June, Le Touquet in July and August, shooting parties in the English countryside in the autumn, then back to London to end the year. It's also stated explicitly that Mr Satterthwaite is a snob who likes the company of the best people, even if they are shabby looking and irritatingly parsimonious like the Duchess of Leith in "The World's End". I love the detail that he has published a book titled Homes of My Friends, which comprises his photography of his rich friends' fancy houses. So modest and yet so boastful! He moves in the best circles, always on the edge of them, knowing everybody but close with nobody. He loves music, and collects art and is admired for his taste in that realm, but seemingly has no interest in creating it himself.

There are certain things about Mr Satterthwaite that remind me of Hercule Poirot, actually. The snobbishness, absolutely, and the adherence to routine. They both share a romantic sensibility under the surface, too — in "The Face of Helen" we learn that Mr Satterthwaite once had a young lady that he took to Kew Gardens in order to propose to her, only for her to get in first with her confession of undying love for another and an expression of best friendship for Mr Satterthwaite. I think Christie includes this as a possible origin point for his detachment. He tried having strong emotions first hand as a young man and it didn't work out for him, so he allowed himself to drift further and further from the possibility as he aged. Both Poirot and Satterthwaite share a disregard for gender norms, interestingly. Poirot, of course, we know, values excellent personal grooming, natty tailoring, fine accessories and shiny patent leather shoes, and will allow no untidy Englishman to convince him that these preferences are unmanly in any way. We don't get quite such a clear depiction of Satterthwaite's sartorial partialities, but we are told at one point that he "knew far more of feminine secrets than it is good for any man to know" and that he understood exactly how much expertise and effort had gone in to a particularly well made up lady's macquillage. I think there's something about the older, fussy type of man that reads as slightly feminine in the era that Christie is writing, and which makes both of these characters outsiders, just as prone to being underestimated as Miss Marple. Poirot and Satterthwaite do meet, actually, in the crossover novel Three Act Tragedy from 1935 — one of my underrated Christies, as it happens — and it's quite entertaining to see. From a nerdy continuity perspective, it's nice to have it confirmed that they do exist in the same universe and might bump into each other between cases.

In her autobiography, Christie called the Mr Quin stories "her favourite". They were, she said in that foreword, "an epicure’s taste", meaning that they appealed to the most discerning of her readers (I hope all the listeners who named them as underrated feel validated by this). She also said that she refused offers to turn Mr Quin into a proper series, or to write more about him to order, preferring instead to put him on paper only when she felt moved to do so. The character was even sufficiently popular that a silent film, now lost, titled The Passing of Mr Quin was made in 1928. Christie didn't like it. With this character, she was writing for herself, rather than for anyone else. In his memoir, Christie's second husband Max Mallowan aptly described the Mr Quin stories as "a natural product of Agatha’s peculiar imagination".

Christie named three of the Quin stories as her favourites, and we will come to those in just a moment. First, though, I want to touch on my favourite, which is "The Dead Harlequin". This is a story about a painting Mr Satterthwaite buys from an up and coming artist, which depicts a harlequin two ways. The character is dead on the floor of an elegant hallway, and also alive, looking down at his own corpse from outside the window. The interest for Satterthwaite is obvious, but he also ends up recognising the real-life version of the hallway that the artist has painted, which in turn leads to the solving of a mystery. There's a nice little connection hidden in this one, because in Christie's early notes for this story, found in her notebooks and seen by early biographer Janet Morgan, Christie named the house where the harlequin's death took place as "Marple", not "Charnley" as it became for the final version. This story was first published in March 1929, and likely written around the same time the Christie was working on the first Marple stories, which would eventually be collected in The Thirteen Problems in the early 1930s. That isn't why this story is my favourite, though. I like it because it's one of the least explicable Mr Quin tales. Yes, Mr Satterthwaite does unravel the truth of the death, but nobody can explain why the artist happened to paint that character, in that way. Mr Quin is at his least real in this story, more of a ghost haunting the narrative than a person. It reminds me of a Dorothy L. Sayers short story, "The Unsolved Puzzle of the Man with No Face", which also revolves around a painting with uncanny elements. I'm not sure either author would be flattered by this comparison, by the way, because I think they were trying to do very different things with these stories, but I do mean it in the most complimentary sense.

Christie's favourite Quin stories were "World’s End", "The Man from the Sea", and "Harlequin’s Lane". I think she shared my preference for the more other-worldly version of her creation, because these are all tales where Mr Quin appears briefly and strangely, and where Mr Satterthwaite is most acutely conscious that there is a realm beyond his comfortable human existence that he can sense but not fully perceive. They are eerie and unsettling and barely crime-related at all. "The Man from the Sea" even shares a pivotal scene and theme with one of the Mary Westmacott novels, Unfinished Portrait — a possible suicide is averted by the mere presence of a stranger. It's bleak and stark and uncompromising on the subject, harking back to Christie's own emotional turmoil after the breakdown of her first marriage.

Is Mr Quin real, or even a person? Is he just a loose embodiment of what Mr Satterthwaite calls "catalysis", a kind of accelerant for the discovery of truth? I wondered this the entire time I was revisiting this character. The evidence is inconclusive. In the first story in The Mysterious Mr Quin, he is a man with a car and a servant, who spends time with characters who are not Satterthwaite and passes to them as a totally plausible human. Later, in "The Bird with the Broken Wing", he communicates with Satterthwaite through a oujia board, something only the spirits of the dead are supposed to be able to do. On the rare occasions when others see him, they wonder if he is a shade or a memory of a harlequin. In the final story, "Harlequin’s Lane", he feels like a fever dream someone had and tried to recall later.

Mr Quin may not be real, but the effect he has is. I think that's what Christie wanted for the character. And she cared deeply about him, for all that he is rarely mentioned among her greatest hits now. The Mysterious Mr Quin bears a rare dedication — doubly unusual, because her short story collections don't often have one, and because the book honours a fictional character. "To Harlequin the Invisible", it says. A book about Mr Quin, dedicated to Mr Quin. The strangest, most uncanny, least knowable of all Christie's characters. And one who absolutely rewards a closer look.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and narrated by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find out more about the books mentioned in this episode by looking in the description or visiting shedunnitshow.com/returningtomrquin. I also publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to hear me speaking at greater length about Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie, come along to my event at the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay on Saturday 19th September at 3pm. Tickets are available from the festival website, iacf-uk.org.

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

Thanks for listening.