With Agatha Christie’s birthday coming up on the 15 September, it seems an ideal opportunity for Christie fans to look back over their favourite books. It is also interesting to see how others have been inspired by her work, or indeed what inspired Christie herself as she plotted her murders. Here Raicho Raichev, author of The Riddle of Sphinx Island the latest instalment in the bestselling Antonia Darcy and Major Payne collection, shares his thoughts on the importance of location in Christie’s work, and how that was influenced his own work.
The book has literary origins: it was inspired by Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None. Indeed, Riddle was conceived as a kind of homage to that most ghoulishly suspenseful of thriller-cum-whodunnits – which also has the distinction of being one of the earliest detective stories featuring a serial killer.
As settings go, a minuscule island that can be traversed in twenty-five minutes, near to civilisation, yet utterly remote, is the ultimate in unsettlingly claustrophobic settings; perfect for murder – especially if it is cut off from the rest of the world by a storm. Antonia Darcy – a crime writer and amateur sleuth – sees the island’s possibilities at once and she observes, ‘The turbulence of the sea would parallel the turbulence of human emotions. Though this is a terrible cliché, it could still be effective, if properly done.’
Agatha Christie was born in Torquay and she set a number of her novels in South England. Devon seems to have been a particular favourite. Some of the names she gave to characters in her novels are recognisable as names of streets or villages – the elusive Lady Dittisham in Five Little Pigs, for example, owes her name to Dittisham, across the river from Christie’s Greenway House; Colonel Luscombe, blimpish guardian to devious Elvira Blake, in At Bertram’s Hotel, may have been inspired by Luscombe Road in Paignton. It is a known fact that Agatha made excursions to various parts of Devon, which later featured in her books. Burgh Island seems to have captured her imagination in a very special way as she made it the setting not only for one but for two of her books: And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun, which she wrote in 1941.
Burgh Island (pronounced ‘Burr’) is situated not so very far from the South Devon coast and it is linked to Bigbury-on-Sea by a wide expanse of sand, which, for twelve hours a day, is shallowly covered by sea. This allows the island to be reached by a very tall contraption with high wheels, perhaps the only sea tractor in the world. I have placed my island further away – three miles off the Devon coast – and I have made it clear that it can be negotiated by boat only. Its original name is de Coverley Island, after the family that owns it, but as it seems to resemble a ‘crouching, smiling kind of Sphinx’, it is popularly known as ‘Sphinx Island’. It looks sinister enough and so does the house that stands on it. When she sees it for the very first time Antonia is put in mind of a painting by Edward Hopper – ‘that master-blender of loneliness, nostalgia and shadowy foreboding’.
This is the eighth murder mystery featuring Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne. The husband-and-wife detective duo have been asked to travel to Sphinx Island so that they could prevent a murder, but they suspect an elaborately staged Murder Weekend, conceived by another crime writer, known to Antonia by name only, at the request of Major Payne’s aunt. Certain aspects of the Sphinx Island set-up remind them of various scenarios already used in detective stories, including Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.
Antonia and Hugh become reluctant players in the Murder Game. They believe they know exactly what to expect – but that is before a truly diabolical storm breaks out and a murder is committed for real ... As Major Payne's aunt puts it, ‘What if this is only the beginning? I am sure I am talking rot, but it’s suddenly hit me that this may be only the beginning.’
A second murder follows soon enough...
Raicho Raichev was born in Bulgaria but has lived in the UK since 1989. He read English literature at university and is the author of The Riddle of Sphinx Island.