u/TapirTrouble

Dating from the 1880s (several years before Agatha was born) -- if the set was bought new around the time of publication, I guess the original owner would have been Margaret Miller, sister of Mary Ann West. Mary Ann was the mother of Agatha and Madge's mother Clara. It's a bit complicated because Mary Ann was widowed and having difficulties, so Margaret basically adopted her niece Clara and raised her. So she was foster-mom to Clara.
https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/Margaret_Miller

At the same time, Margaret was the second wife of Nathaniel Miller, and stepmom to his son Frederick. When Frederick decided to marry Clara, Margaret became step-grandma to their kids, through Frederick -- while being maternal great-aunt and adoptive grandma through Clara. (Mary Ann West was still in the picture, as "Grannie B", with the B standing for her married name Boehmer.)

Margaret was called "Auntie-Granny" in Agatha's autobiography. Some of Agatha's biographers suggest that she was a major inspiration for Miss Marple.

Someone posted the family tree, showing Margaret's ties to the rest of the extended family.
https://www.reddit.com/r/agathachristie/comments/xjbjtj/it_is_widely_believed_thanks_to_agatha_herself/

(the other relationships don't show up in some of the other family trees online)
https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Miller-20109

Margaret's signed her name in one of the books. I imagine she gave the books to Madge, who may have taken them up north when she got married. In any case, they eventually ended up with Agatha and were stored at Greenway, as the listing describes.

I suspect that they were auctioned off some time after the property was donated to the National Trust, after Agatha's daughter Rosalind died. People went through all the stuff, kept the personal papers and the most historically-relevant items, and the rest of the things were sold off. (Storage space was limited -- Agatha herself described what a burden it is, to have a bunch of stuff lying around that isn't really important. She had to go through all her family's things at their home in Torquay and clear out rooms.)

So if anyone likes historical books -- in French -- and is interested in things that Christie had at her holiday home ... I've included the "Buy It Now" link.
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/374326010025

I noticed that RFK Jr. has been posting past family photos fairly often, on his social media. (This was from Instagram, a week ago.)

There's a photo with very similar composition in his memoirs (American Values), almost the same angle with the same trees and fence, also showing Atlas but with Ethel riding. Photo credit there is Jacques Lowe so I assume he took this one too.

Bobby Jr. notes that Atlas was his older sister Kathleen's horse -- she'd have been about 16 then. She is currently the eldest of the Kennedys (born July 4, 1951).

https://www.instagram.com/robertfkennedyjr/p/DZdKIG1x_x8/

I came across this analysis a few years ago but was having trouble getting the graphics in legible form. Someone went through Christie's novels and looked at killers, murder methods, motives, etc. There aren't any specific books mentioned, but I'm going to put spoiler flairs up just in case, since even knowing the general patterns might be a giveaway.
I was surprised that the feeling I had, that a lot of her murderers were >!in health care or entertainment!<, only held for some periods in her career. And even then, they weren't the majority.

The author concluded:
>!"In Agatha Christie’s novels, murder and financial fraud are often intertwined. The murderers are more likely to be men, are partial to poison, and frequently commit the crime as part of a scam such as winning an inheritance."!<
(I guess that's why Bloomberg's financial journalists decided to publish it)

Quick summary:
https://indieresearch.net/2020/08/16/perfect-crime/

Original link with all the graphics:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-02/who-did-what-in-every-agatha-christie-murder-mystery-novel

See if this works for getting around the wall
https://archive.ph/miy7T

I've noticed several questions posted recently about locating particular Christie editions and found this website which has a selection of covers from first editions until present, for English and some translated titles too. It's not bad -- they've been trying to provide info on the artists, like Tom Adams, but there are some gaps (understandable because many editions don't have artist credit). I noticed that there are some covers they don't have up yet (I'm sure that the Pocket Books silhouettes from the 1980s included more titles), but aside from that they have a LOT of designs.

It's a fun way to pass some time, and find out the publisher and approximate date for ones you might have seen in the past. Or check out other titles for editions when you already own a few of them. Interesting to see how the designs have changed over the decades.

Main website is here, and you can scroll down to click on individual titles for more information.
https://www.deliciousdeath.com

More details here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Passage_in_the_Senate

Besides RFK (correction: his brother Edward) being in there on the Yea side, another name to note:
"The most dramatic moment during the cloture vote came when Senator Clair Engle (D-CA) was wheeled into the chamber. Suffering from terminal brain cancer, unable to speak, he pointed to his left eye, signifying his affirmative "Aye" vote when his name was called. He died seven weeks later."

Earlier that day:
"Senator Robert Byrd ended his filibuster in opposition to the bill on the morning of June 10, 1964, after 14 hours and 13 minutes. Up to then, the measure had occupied the Senate for 60 working days, including six Saturdays. The day before, Humphrey, the bill's manager, concluded that he had the 67 votes required at that time to end the debate and the filibuster. With six wavering senators providing a four-vote victory margin, the final tally stood at 71 to 29. Never before in its entire history had the Senate been able to muster enough votes to defeat a filibuster on a civil rights bill, and only once in the 37 years since 1927 had it agreed to cloture for any measure."

The full headline:
"Every Major Actor to Play Hercule Poirot Before New BBC Reboot, Ranked"
https://www.tvinsider.com/gallery/agatha-christie-hercule-poirot-actors-ranked/#2

I was inspired to write something up, because u/Chemical-Sea-6997 was curious on a thread several months ago, about real people who may have inspired Christie’s characters. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/agathachristie/comments/1p2x2n1/comment/nq6fgu9

It was uncommon for Christie to talk about specific things that appeared in her writing. She didn’t give a lot of interviews, in any case. That seems odd compared to now, when authors are all over radio/TV/social media, touting their books. But I guess writers could get by without book tours and doing a ton of publicity back then — the increasing amount of self-promotion they’re forced to do seems to be a late 20th C thing. (I’ve heard that celebrity author Jacqueline Suzann (Valley of the Dolls etc.) may have started that, after Christie’s time.)

Regarding people Christie actually knew: she mentions a couple of situations in her autobiography, which didn’t come out until after her death. 

Sir Eustace Pedler — The Man in the Brown Suit 

According to Agatha's memoirs, Sir Eustace was based on Ernest Belcher, one of Archie’s friends. He had been a teacher at Archie’s school. Belcher was a couple of decades older than they were, and I wondered if he was independently wealthy — but it looks like his dad worked at the post office. He taught in England and also in South Africa and New Zealand. During WWI he had a government job, and after that he was appointed to work on the British Empire Exhibition. Belcher organized a publicity tour in 1922 that would go to British colonies around the world, to promote the exhibition. He talked Archie into going with him and bringing Agatha. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Belcher

Pretty soon Agatha realized that Belcher wasn’t the person they thought he was. He was a big talker but terrible at organizing, and he had a habit of yelling at people and trying to shift the blame when things went wrong. She found out that he was prone to exaggeration, and was over-confident in his own abilities. I also wonder about the effectiveness of the whole project, because they completely missed India, a major British colony. And even though the US wasn't part of the Empire, there were lots of British expats living there (Agatha's own father and her brother were born in the States) and it was close enough that it seems like a big omission, not to do some publicity in that market. Especially since they would be touring parts of Canada and heading home via New York anyway. Reading Agatha’s account, the whole thing sounds kind of haphazard.

Agatha was exasperated by Belcher, but ended up following his suggestion that she use his home as a location for one of her books. 

https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mill_House,_Clewer

https://windsorlocalhistorygroup.org/agatha-christie-at-clewer-mill-house/

She put him in the story, which was eventually named The Man in the Brown Suit, overriding his suggestion of The Mystery of the Mill House. She said in her memoirs that it was “the only time I have tried to put a real person whom I knew well into a book” (p. 321). The “Sir” part was suggested by Archie — that Belcher wouldn’t mind as much about having his flaws described in public, if his character had a title. 

Belcher could be very charming. Agatha mentions that several times. I wonder what was going on with him … where did he get his money? He could afford to live in a fairly large country house, with a couple of servants (admittedly this wasn’t as unusual a century ago — when she was a new mom in the 1920s, Christie had a nanny but couldn’t imagine getting a car). 

Belcher was single when Christie met him, and got married (after the grand tour) to a much younger woman he met on the trip.He strikes me as being a bit of a con artist — a skilled self-promoter who talked himself into various jobs. In her memoirs, Christie notes that he’d send her out to buy stuff for him, but never paid her back.

Morgan’s biography of Christie suggests that he may also have inspired Major Palgrave in A Caribbean Mystery.

Christie’s grandson Mathew commented that Belcher was the only person close to her who ended up becoming a character. Certainly he’s recognizable —but several other characters show at least a few traits, even if they’ve been blended with other people, or altered to suit the plot.

>!Zachariah Osborne!< — The Pale Horse

Christie said he was based on “Mr. P”, >!who really did have a pharmacy in Torquay. He was one of the people who trained Christie for dispensary work in WWI. She describes him as having a “cherubic” appearance, small and rotund with a pink face, but she was wary of him because he sexually harassed her and other female employees. (From Christie’s description, the incidents would have been seen as inappropriate even back then, the sort of thing that “polite company” would have disapproved of, and probably called out or at least interrupted if they saw such behaviour.)!<

>!“His memory remained with me so long that it was still there waiting when I first conceived the idea of writing my book The Pale Horse--and that must have been, I suppose, nearly fifty years later.””!<

>!<

>!Christie goes so far as to say Mr. P was dangerous — not necessarily because of how he acted towards women, but  he was making mistakes with prescriptions. He was so arrogant that he reacted badly to being corrected, especially by someone he saw as inferior. Christie may have felt that he was influential enough to prevent her from being certified as a dispenser. She wasn’t the kind of person to pick a fight in public with a man (unlike her colleague Dorothy L. Sayers who reportedly argued with people at the BBC), but she was more subtle about it. Christie figured out a way to destroy medication that he’d mixed in error, and which might have made a patient very ill — even though it made her look incompetent.!<

I have no idea whether the bit of biographical detail that Christie inserts -- >!that Osborne had wanted to become an actor, but his father discouraged him and thought he should go into the family business instead -- also applies to Mr. P. Or if she heard directors or other actors talking about a person they disliked, maybe while she was working on theatre productions, and decided to remember this for future use. Whichever the case, I thought it was brilliant. Not only does this explain the way the main scheme is devised, but it's so revealing about Osborne's personality. It turns out that it's not a stereotypical "dad crushing son's dreams" situation -- the elder Osborne probably knew what kind of person Zachariah was, and that he didn't have the temperament to be a performer. The other characters in the book note that he was too arrogant to accept guidance or criticism, and he was probably difficult to work with. And Osborne has always resented his rejection, and in his mind he's getting revenge on other theatre people, proving to them that he *can* play a role and convince his audience (or rather, victim) that he's that character. !<

>!A weird little detail — Christie said that Mr. P showed her a solid dark nugget he had in his pocket, which he claimed was curare, a poison derived from plants in South America. (Indigenous people use it on their arrows, to paralyze prey.) Unprompted, he told her that he carried it around because it made him feel “powerful”.!<

I think that she mentioned Mr. P because if he was middle-aged during WWI, he and most of the people (family, friends, and clients) who remembered him would have been dead by the time she wrote her autobiography in the 1960s. I don’t know if his real first or last name started with “P”, but there’s a chance he could be identified now from business records, ads in the local papers, city directories, etc. That would be an interesting project for a historian someday. 

Louise Leidner — Murder in Mesopotamia

Katharine Woolley (an archaeologist Christie worked with), is believed to have inspired Louise. She was a talented and charismatic person, but could also be rather difficult. I’ve wondered whether Woolley noticed any parallels between her and the character. Even if she didn’t, my own experience doing field work suggests that the other people on the dig probably did!

I was interested to find out that Woolley wrote a novel, Adventure Calls, not long after Murder in Mesopotamia came out. It sounds a bit like one of Christie’s “young woman goes on a travel adventure” books. (It’s long out of print, but apparently can be bought on Abebooks as a print-on-demand reprint.)

https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/murder-in-mesopotamia/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Woolley

Also — Woolley being a skilled sculptor reminds me of The Hollow — I wonder if some of Henrietta Savernake’s character is based on her?

True crime cases:

Christie often referred to actual situations by name, like Crippen and Lizzie Borden. I think Poirot even mentions having a theory about what happened in the Borden case, though he doesn’t go into it. 

She also had several books that parallel cases which would have been widely known to her readers back then — like the kidnapping/murder mentioned in >!Murder on the Orient Express!< (The Lindbergh case) and what happened to >!Marina Gregg in The Mirror Crack’d !<(Gene Tierney and her daughter Daria). 

>!<

Spoiler for >!a particular Christie play:!<

>!<

Real people who weren’t involved in crime:

Ruth Draper — she was a talented character actor, who impressed Christie with her ability to do impressions. She could appear to be different people without the aid of make-up or special effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Draper

This situation appears multiple times in Christie’s work, where someone is a master of disguise and can even fool family and close friends. 

(For example: >!After the Funeral, Lord Edgware Dies, Murder in Mesopotamia, Third Girl, Mystery of the Blue Train, The Secret Adversary, The Big Four — and short stories like The Dead Harlequin)!<

It’s an in-joke among fans that if a character >!is an actor, professional or amateur, you have to suspect them! !<Sometimes it gets pretty farfetched, but Draper (and also Christie’s own sister Madge, who did local theatre productions in her youth) are likely responsible for raising that possibility in Christie’s mind. 

Characters possibly influenced by Christie’s family and friends:

I think Christie mentioned once that she didn’t really like to put people she already knew into her books. Instead, she might notice someone on the train or walking by on a street, and start imagining characteristics that would work in a particular story. This makes sense to me, because when I’m writing, it’s actually harder to bend a story around somebody you know, than to make up things that the plot requires. So she might have just worked in some traits from people she was already familiar with, when she was developing a brand-new character.

The Morgan biography notes that Mrs. Boynton, in Appointment With Death, was inspired by a domineering woman Christie encountered while on a Nile cruise. And when she was visiting the Caribbean, she noticed an elderly man in a wheelchair. So it may not be a coincidence that Miss Marple, also on an island holiday, met Jason Rafiel.

Reading Christie’s memoirs, sometimes she mentions a real person who seems to have some similarities to characters I’ve already read about. Like her brother Monty and his escapades in Africa — I can't help thinking of people from The Sittaford Mystery or And Then There Were None. Anytime there’s a military guy who served overseas, and went a bit feral — doing things that would shock or frighten people back home. The Morgan biography of Christie mentions that her sister Madge also wrote Monty into one of her plays. 

Other Christie characters

The woman who’s socially out of place — she’s from an upper-middle or lower-upper class, then marries a very rich man (or rather, an entrepreneur who becomes very rich). She’s overwhelmed by the different kind of life she’s now leading. Lady Coote, in The Seven Dials Mystery, is living in an enormous mansion with dozens of servants. She’s bewildered and a bit lonely, and misses the times when she and her ambitious entrepreneur husband had a cottage-size place, that she decorated and looked after on her own. The servants know that she’s out of her depth. 

Compare this with Agatha’s sister Madge, who married into the aristocratic Watt family. At one point their estate was short-staffed, and Madge swept and mopped the massive house by herself. 

(I definitely got a similar vibe from the Marie Claire piece by Elon Musk’s first wife Justine, describing how much things changed, after they began as a young couple with housemates. There's a rather revealing video on YouTube, showing 1990s Elon proudly getting an expensive McLaren car delivered, while Justine is standing there looking bemused. He used to commute between LA and the Bay Area in that thing -- I'm imagining it stuck in traffic.)

The kindly European governess or nanny — the governess in Elephants Can Remember reminds me a lot of this woman described in Christie’s memoirs

https://agathachristie.fandom.com/wiki/Marie_Sigé

Nosy older ladies — Miss Marple of course, but when she was a young woman, Christie would often visit her “Auntie Grannie” in Ealing (she’s actually recorded as being there on the weekend when the 1911 census was carried out) and met her elderly cronies. 

https://www.aroundealing.com/history/1849/

https://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/featuredarticles/2012/agatha-christie-queen-of-crime-51/

Worsley’s biography of Christie (p. 69) mentions that the matriarch Mrs. Inglethorp, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is a bit like Auntie Grannie and even Christie’s own mother Clara. 

If anyone else has any thoughts about real people who became Christie characters, please feel free to post!

It's the time of year, at least in the northern hemisphere, when a lot of people start thinking of getting out their swimming outfits -- in pools or on beaches, supervised or not.

Even if people think I'm being a bit silly, dragging water safety into an Agatha Christie post, I don't mind that if it helps even one person avoid this kind of a situation. This is what almost happened to Agatha, in her own words. It's one of the scariest things of hers that I've read.

This is from p. 149 of her memoirs. It probably happened sometime between 1905 and 1907, given that she went swimming with her nephew Jack (born 1903) and he was still very small -- he wasn't really good at swimming on his own yet. So he would hang onto her back. She was in her teens, strong and an experienced swimmer, and knew that particular beach very well since it was in Torquay where she'd grown up.

"On this particular morning we started off as usual, but it was a curious kind of sea -- a sort of mixed swell and chop -- and, with the additional weight on my shoulders, I found it almost impossible to keep my mouth and nose above water. I was swimming, but I couldn't get any breath into myself. The tide was not far out, so that the raft was quite close, but I was making little progress, and was only able to get a breath every third stroke."

"Suddenly I realized that I could not make it. At any moment now I was going to choke. "Jack," I gasped, "get off and swim to the raft. You're nearer that than the shoe."
"Why?", said Jack. "I don't want to."

"Please -- do --" I bubbled. My head went under. Fortunately, though Jack clung to me at first he got shaken off and was able therefore to proceed under his own steam. We were quite near the raft by then, and he reached it with no difficulty. By that time I was past noticing what anyone was doing. The only feeling in my mind was a great sense of indignation. I had always been told that when you were drowning the whole of your past life came before you, and I had also been told that you heard beautiful music when you were dying. There was no beautiful music, and I couldn't think about anything in my past life: in fact I could think of nothing at all but how I was going to get some breath into my lungs. Everything went black and -- and -- and the next thing I knew was violent bruises and pains as I was flung roughly into a boat."

She had been rescued by the elderly man who looked after the bathing machines. He'd noticed that she was in trouble, and rowed out quickly in a boat to grab her before she went under. He must have seen something like this happening before, or had been trained in what to look for, because even today this isn't always obvious. In movies and TV, often they show someone struggling and even shouting for help. But the really dangerous situation is when they're quiet. It's possible for someone to be drowning and even people who are near them in the water might not realize this. Jack was so young that he didn't know. Luckily he didn't throw a tantrum, and was able to swim to the safety of the raft on his own.

More info on what to watch for:
https://gcaptain.com/drowning/

https://www.surfertoday.com/surfing/signs-of-drowning

https://www.wikihow.health/Recognize-That-Someone-Is-Drowning

Like the old guy said later: "Once you goes down you can't shout -- water's comin' in."
We don't know his name, but if it hadn't been for him -- there wouldn't be any Poirot or Miss Marple, no Mysterious Affair at Styles or any other books. Not because of a murder, but an accident of the type that claims not just thousands, but probably hundreds of thousands of lives each year around the world.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drowning

You can see a small echo of this experience in one of the flashback scenes in And Then There Were None -- a young woman swims out after a small boy, only the circumstances and outcome are quite different.

Also -- one of my co-workers lost a family member because of a rip current several years ago. If you're out swimming at a river or large lake, look around for this (especially if the beach doesn't have a lifeguard). They used to be called "rip tides" or "undertows".
https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/ocean/rip-currents

I hope everyone reading this has a fun and safe summer !

Does anyone have family stories about relatives who met or saw Robert F. Kennedy?

My friend Cliff grew up in Buffalo NY and became an astronomy/physicist who used to work on the Hubble Space Telescope. Earlier this week he told me that once he saw Bobby Kennedy. He managed to narrow it down to August, when he was 14, so it must have happened in 1964 when he was on school break.
Cliff said he and one of his teenaged friends were in Chautauqua, probably attending an educational event there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua%2C_New_York

They saw a familiar-looking man walking across the lawn ahead of them. Chautauqua is some way from Buffalo (especially for teens who aren't old enough to drive yet), and not the usual summer hangout for a Kennedy either, so it took them awhile to recognize he was RFK.

I suspect that he might have been there for a different event. I don't know if it would have been election-related. According to Wikipedia, RFK announced he was going to run for the Senate on August 25th, so he might not have been a candidate yet, at that time.

Anyway, Cliff's friend happened to have a football with him, and he handed it to Cliff, saying "the Kennedys like playing football -- quick, toss it to him!"
Cliff's better at math than football, but he did his best. He was horribly embarrassed when the ball fell way short of RFK. He didn't laugh, but smiled and waved at the boys, and continued walking.

When Cliff told me this story, I realized that the youngest people who'd have had memories of meeting Bobby Kennedy are now probably 60 or older. Cliff's going to be 76 next month. I could tell it was a special moment for him, even though he still struggles with footballs. Ironically he had a job later at the stadium, helping with the recording equipment when reporters were interviewing the Buffalo Bills players. He remembers setting up microphones for OJ Simpson (!) and some of the other guys.