Puzzles in Agatha Christie, Part Two

Continuing yesterday’s theme of issues that have puzzled me in Agatha Christie novels:

3. Did Mrs Varley poison her first husband? (Dumb Witness, 1937)

The redoubtable Emily Arundell dominates Dumb Witness, in part because of a narrative structure that, as far as I recall, Christie does not use in any other novel: though Miss Arundell’s death is the subject of the first sentence, the novel then flashes back to a fortnight before her death, and the victim is allowed to live again for the first four chapters.

We learn a little about Emily’s life in the novel: one of five children, four of them girls; the daughter of an irascible general who played his part in suppressing the Indian Mutiny and never ceased to talk about it, who drank brandy secretly, so that his daughters had to sneak the bottles out of the house in the dead of night and bury them, who was the archetypal domestic tyrant of late Victorian melodrama; the last surviving member of her family, despite being the “delicate one.” When she dies in 1936 (according to the epitaph in the novel), she is well over seventy: born, then, in the mid-Victorian era, she had a mid-Victorian life.

But Emily Arundell is not really the subject of this puzzle: that is about her only brother, Thomas.

We learn less about Thomas than we do about Emily, but what we do learn is intriguing. Thomas stays at home, being coddled and rather bullied by his sisters and certainly bullied by his father. He is meek and quiet, not an adventurous type.

And then he falls in love with Mrs Varley, on trial for murdering her first husband, cuts all the available clippings and photographs from the newspapers, and, when she is acquitted, tracks her down in London, proposes successfully, moves to the Channel Islands after a breach with his father, fathers two children, and outlives his wife by three years.

It’s tempting to say that this is not such a mid-Victorian life, but it’s certainly the stuff of which melodrama is made and perhaps nothing is quite so Victorian as a poisoning cause célèbre.

But did Mrs Varley murder her first husband? Some of the novel’s characters don’t care: they point out that she certainly didn’t poison her second husband, and that that’s the main thing.

But the plot does turn, in part, on a certain moral weakness in her offspring: son Charles is thoroughly without a conscience, and his sister Theresa is nearly as selfish and cold-blooded.

Theresa’s fiancé, Dr Donaldson, certainly seems to believe her mother was a murderess: he refers to Theresa as having not only an unfortunate upbringing, but also a bad heredity. Surely having a mother who was the unfortunate victim of circumstance (which is one way of reading her experience if she were innocent) does not make for bad heredity?

Then again, the fastidious Dr Donaldson may not be talking about her mother’s family. The bad heredity and the moral weakness could come from the father’s side: from roaring, drinking, boasting General Arundell.

That would be a subversive reading, since—secret brandy drinker though he was—General Arundell belongs to that class of good, upright “service people” who are so ostentatiously the backbone of the type of society with which Christie deals.

So perhaps it’s more plausible to suggest that Thomas Arundell might have had a closer shave than he realised.

(As a corollary to this puzzle, I’ve been wondering recently about the similarities between the back story of the Arundell family and the circumstances of the Bronte family: the houseful of women, the absence of a mother, the slightly odd father, the brother who breaks out in an unexpected way. I’m convinced this is entirely coincidental, but it does intrigue me, since Christie has a tendency to draw heavily on the late-Victorian lifestyle into which she was born and that her mother and—to a greater extent—grandmother perpetuated. A Bronte connection seems not outside the realms of possibility.)