Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly. Агата Кристи

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СКАЧАТЬ in amateur dramatics. I was privileged to meet many of their theatrical friends such as Flora Robson and Sybil Thorndike, and I have many happy memories of being taken to theatres in London and Paris. My mother, Constance, was a pupil of Dame Carrie Tubbs at the Guildhall School of Music, though regrettably she gave up singing when she got married. Agatha trained as a singer, but she gave it up for writing.

      With the painting of the new cover for Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly, my association with Agatha Christie as her cover artist now exceeds fifty years. I hope that I will have the opportunity to do more. My conviction about this remarkable author that has steadily grown over the many years of our association can be summed up no better than this quote from a News Chronicle reviewer which appears in John Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Making: ‘Mrs Christie is the greatest genius at inventing detective plots that has ever lived or will ever live’. I couldn’t put it better myself.

       Tom Adams

       Cornwall

       January 2014

       Preface by Mathew Prichard

      UNUSUALLY FOR Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly – the book which evolved out of this novella – was written around a specific location, in this case Greenway House on the River Dart in South Devon. Greenway was where Nima (which is what I called my grandmother) used to spend her summer holidays almost from the time she bought it in 1938 until she died in 1976. It is now 15 years since Greenway was acquired by the National Trust and subsequently opened to the public.

      Last year ITV’s series Agatha Christie’s Poirot starring David Suchet shot its final film there, Dead Man’s Folly, and so a series that had begun in 1989 with The Adventure of the Clapham Cook ended in a blaze of glory at Greenway itself. Neither Nima, nor my late mother Rosalind, who had a lot to do with setting up the TV series in the beginning, could have wished for anything better. It was as if Hercule Poirot had come home.

      As luck would have it, we were blessed with wonderful summer weather, and the last day of shooting in front of the house – a scene that was not in itself dramatically very significant – was none the less poignant as it featured David Suchet, in full Poirot regalia, mincing up Greenway’s front steps in his own inimitable way and knocking on the door. Eventually, after three repeats of the same action, we heard the time-honoured words – ‘it’s a wrap’ – and there was not a dry eye in the house, or rather on the lawn, where a large crowd had come to celebrate the ending of one of the world’s best loved TV series, and the portrayal of one of our best loved literary characters, Hercule Poirot, by one of our best loved character actors, David Suchet. If anyone had told Nima (who sadly never met David Suchet) that a series of this magnitude and popularity would be made continuously over a period of 25 years, I am sure that she would not have believed it.

      My particular affection for Dead Man’s Folly extends back to long before the filming of the TV series, though. The book was published in 1956, when I was 13, coinciding with both the time I was beginning to enjoy reading Nima’s books, and when as a schoolboy I spent my summer holidays at Greenway with my family including, of course, Nima. I cannot say that I ever remember a fête on the lawn, but I certainly remember smaller events there, as Greenway was host to an ever-growing selection of literary and theatrical friends (this was the heyday of Nima’s career as a West End playwright), with plenty of friends of my step-grandfather Max Mallowan from the world of archaeology added for good measure. Nima never based her characters entirely on real-life people, but I would be lying if I did not admit to recognising snippets of Sir George and Lady Stubbs, and particularly Mrs Folliatt, from actual people whom she knew. Nor was I surprised when I found out that Dead Man’s Folly featured hitch-hikers. We were familiar with the occasional hitch-hiker from the nearby youth hostel called Maypool.

      But I suppose Dead Man’s Folly evokes two particular memories from my childhood that I find particularly poignant: one a person, one a place. The person is Ariadne Oliver, who, although rather more boisterous than Nima would ever be, did have something of her enthusiasm, her love of apples, and a writer’s curiosity that reminds me very much of Nima herself. She appeared in seven novels, six of them with Poirot, and Zoë Wanamaker gives an excellent performance in the film. The place is the boathouse, where the poor victim is found murdered. Nima and I used to walk down to Greenway’s boathouse in the afternoon, watch the pleasure cruisers sail by (the Kiloran, Pride of Paignton, Brixham Belle and those wonderful paddle streamers, one of which I am delighted to say is still in working order). The tour guides on these boats would always refer to Greenway, usually inaccurately, as the home of Agatha Christie (rather than, strictly speaking, her holiday home), and though we could hear their voices as they sailed past, never do I remember them actually recognising her as she sat inconspicuously in the boathouse with her grandson!

      As I read the book again now, I do seem to remember reading it originally on publication as a young teenager and understanding perhaps for the first time a little more about the construction of a detective story in relation to real people and real places, because I was familiar with those in this particular book. This authenticity is of course one of the reasons why Nima’s books still seem so real and convincing today. Back then, the books based around archaeology and the Middle East were pure fiction to me, although Nima used exactly the same techniques, drawing on characteristics of real people and factual landmarks and adding a fictional dimension, just as she did with Dead Man’s Folly. I hope one day that I will be able to visit Nimrud, the Pyramids in Egypt, or some other locations which inspired Nima, so that I can see them as she did. I recently visited one specific place of inspiration in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, the setting for a Harley Quin story called ‘The Man from the Sea’ (in the book The Mysterious Mr Quin) – it is a brilliant short story, and all the better for having been there.

      As you probably know, my family gave Greenway to the National Trust in 1999 and it is open to the public for most of the year. Everyone can now visit the boathouse where the murder took place, or relax on a chair near where Hattie Stubbs sat and be polite to the hikers who are now allowed to enter the grounds. You may also find that the National Trust shop has the finest collection of Agatha Christie books in the West of England. Though Dead Man’s Folly is unusual in being so closely based on a real place, it is not the only Agatha Christie book that has echoes of Greenway. If you enjoy it, you should certainly read Five Little Pigs as well, with a murder on Greenway’s Battery!

      Finally, one of the words I have often chosen to describe Agatha Christie’s books and films is ‘welcoming’, and I do think that Robyn Brown and Gary Calland, the two General Managers the Trust has employed since 1999, and all their staff, have surpassed themselves in making Greenway as welcoming a place as Nima did when I was young. I hope that having read this book, and maybe watched the film with David Suchet, that you can visit the original location. What a treat you have in store!

       Mathew Prichard

       Monmouth

       January 2014

       Foreword

      Although it was published in November 1956, the Hercule Poirot novel Dead Man’s Folly had a complicated two-year genesis. In November 1954 Agatha Christie’s agent Hughes Massie wrote to the Diocesan Board of Finance in Exeter explaining that his client would like to see stained glass windows in the chancel of Churston Ferrers Church (Christie’s local church) and was willing to pay for them by assigning the rights of a story to a fund set up for СКАЧАТЬ