My very dear Eustace Trubshawe?
‘I’m sorry, Miss … Miss …?’
She rose to her feet. That tricorne hat! Those pince-nez! That garish two-piece suit! Evadne Mount, as I lived and breathed!
I was speechless. By that I mean, I had no speech prepared. Even if it hadn’t been she who posed the question, I doubt I could have offered a satisfactory response to it, since until that very instant I hadn’t realised I’d actually done what she’d accused me of doing. Yet the instant her accusations were aired, I knew them to be true. (Mortified as I was, however, I remained rational enough not to try mentally passing the buck, blaming my editor, my proof-reader, anybody but myself, for not having picked up on my self-plagiarism. Since I had failed to catch it, why should I have expected them to?) Mumbling some triteness about Homer nodding, I let a puzzled Jochen call the whole event to a decidedly anti-climactic close.
And now I must beg the reader’s indulgence with an unavoidable digression.
If by chance you’ve read those two Agatha Christie parodies-cum-celebrations-cum-critiques of mine which are alluded to above, you will recall that the first is set in the nineteen-thirties and the second a decade later, just after the Second World War. Also that, aided and abetted by her loyal, long-suffering partner-in-detection, ex-Chief-Inspector Eustace Trubshawe, the same amateur sleuth, Evadne Mount, author of innumerable bestselling mystery novels and the bastard offspring of Christie herself and her own fictional alter ego, the whodunit-writing, apple-munching Ariadne Oliver, presides over both. You will also recall that, just as Hercule Poirot never (or almost never) aged from his first to his last recorded case, from The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, to Curtain, published in 1975, so neither Evadne nor Eustace, meeting up in the Ritz tearoom in the opening chapter of A Mysterious Affair of Style, looks a day older to the other than when they had joined forces to solve the Roger Murgatroyd case a decade earlier. That, of course, was a conscious ploy on my part. I had fun with the cliché and I hoped the reader would too.
Considering, then, what I’ve just written, it would be perfectly understandable if the same reader, re-encountering Evadne Mount in this memoir, were to shrug off as more postmodern high jinks, as yet another playful subversion of the genre’s conventions, the apparent implication that the woman must now be pushing a hundred-and twenty. No need! The Evadne Mount I stared at across a crammed lecture hall in the Meiringen Kunsthalle was just a month or two short of her sixty-sixth birthday.
How come? The story started three years ago at the West London home of the writer and publisher Carmen Callil. We were lounging in the garden before dinner, we being Marina Warner, essayist and polymath; Jules and Pat, i.e. the novelist Julian Barnes and his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh; actor and man-about-town Peter Eyre; and, of course, irrepressible Carmen herself. Somebody – it was Marina, I think – had just asked me whether I had any current project and I replied that I rather fancied writing a parody of vintage Agatha Christie, a novel in black-and-white, as it were, like one of those feebly directed but sparklingly scripted and gloriously well-acted prewar British films which are for me one of the definitions of sheer, uncomplicated bliss, but that I hadn’t yet hit upon the iconographical trappings, both gestural and sartorial, of my cardboard cutout of a sleuth. Spearing one of her own cocktail sausages, Carmen said:
‘You know, darling, I may just be able to help you there.’
‘Oh. How so?’
‘Well … as it turns out, I’m personally acquainted with a parody, a living parody, of Agatha Christie.’
‘What do you mean, Carmen?’
‘I mean my friend Evadne Mount.’
‘Evadne Mount?’ I said, savouring the two strangely pleasurable words on my tongue. ‘I do like the name, but I can’t say it rings any bells for me.’
‘I didn’t think it would,’ she replied. ‘She doesn’t write the kind of books someone like you would ever condescend to read. Except,’ she spoke again after a short pause, ‘if you really are planning to do a Christie sort of thingie …’
‘Do stop teasing, Carmen,’ I said impatiently. ‘Why do you think she might interest me? It could be important.’
First asking around if anybody’s glass needed topping up, but everybody was fine, then commanding me to follow her back into the kitchen, where she had to oversee the roast, she told me about her friend.
Their first encounter had been at the literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, to which they had both been invited to debate the topic ‘Feminism or Femininity?’. In spite of the fact that Evadne’s novels – or Evie’s, as I now feel more comfortable referring to her – were not really Carmen’s thing, they had taken an instant liking to one another and had begun to meet regularly for high tea at one of the posher Piccadilly tearooms. As for those novels, it seems that they were all conscious retreads of the cosy whodunits of the Golden Age of English crime fiction, Agatha Christie’s in particular, and had been mildly successful – she did have her following – if rather less so in recent years. In fact, said Carmen, Evie’s current anxiety was that, as a single lady without close family connections or any sort of private income, if and when she finally slipped off the mid-list (by which I mean those authors whose books sell just enough copies to persuade their publishers to keep on bringing them out until one fine day they decide not to), she would probably, and sooner rather than later, end up as a homeless bag lady.
I was as baffled as I was intrigued.
‘But what are these novels?’ I asked. ‘I read whodunits. Why have I never heard of hers?’
‘Oh, darling, you have me there. It’s been so awfully long since I read any of them myself. There was one, I remember, called The Hour of 12. No, no, The Stroke of 12. And another two which had kind of a gastronomic theme, The Proof of the Pudding and The Timing of the Stew. Quite good fun. Except that they weren’t really topnotch and it all became hugely embarrassing when Evie began badgering me to publish one of her books as a Virago Modern Classic.’
‘Not one of her whodunits?’
‘Good Lord, no. Even she knew better than to push her luck that far. No, it was an early effort that she’d had published privately and let go out of print, a bit Lesbian, The Urinal of Futility, can you imagine, all very simpatico in its way but just too terrible as prose. I mean to say, I know that at Virago we sometimes had to stretch the definition of classic – all in the good cause – but even so, there are limits.’
She started hunting for a spatula which, it turned out, she’d been using as her cookbook’s bookmark.
‘Well, anyway, as I was saying, it was awkward having to refuse her, in fact it became quite unpleasant, our being friends and everything, but I was a publisher, after all, and her work just wasn’t up to snuff.’
‘And yet you still think I ought to read her?’
‘No, no, darling, you’ve completely misunderstood. I think you ought to meet her.’
‘Meet her? Why?’
‘You’ll see.’
‘Okay, but when?’