While the Light Lasts - Agatha Christie [64]
‘My dear girl, you mustn’t be nervy. After all, you can’t escape from the smell of tobacco. You’ll meet it everywhere.’
‘Yes, everywhere!’ She smiled a slow, twisted smile, and murmured some words that he did not catch, words that she had chosen for the original obituary notice of Tim Nugent’s death. ‘While the light lasts I shall remember, and in the darkness I shall not forget.’
Her eyes widened as they followed the ascending spiral of smoke, and she repeated in a low, monotonous voice: ‘Everywhere, everywhere.’
Afterword
‘While the Light Lasts’ was first published in the Novel Magazine in April 1924. To those familiar with the works of Sir Alfred Lord Tennyson, Arden’s true identity will not have come as a surprise.
Tennyson was among Christie’s favourite poets, together with Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and his Enoch Arden also inspired the Poirot novel Taken at the Flood (1948). The plot of ‘While the Light Lasts’ was later used to greater effect as part of Giant’s Bread (1930), the first of her six novels written under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. Although of less interest to many than her detective fiction, the Westmacott novels are generally considered to provide a commentary of sorts on some of the events of Christie’s own life, a sort of parallel autobiography. In any event, they gave Christie an important means of escape from the world of the detective story, much to the chagrin of her publishers who were understandably less than keen on anything that distracted her from the business of writing detective stories. The most interesting of the six is the aptly titled Unfinished Portrait (1934), which Christie’s second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, described as being ‘a blend of real people and events with imagination…more nearly than anywhere else a portrait of Agatha.’
Her own favourite was the third Westmacott novel, Absent in the Spring (1944), which she described in her autobiography as, ‘the one book that has satisfied me completely…I wrote that book in three days flat.’ She commented, ‘It was written with integrity, with sincerity, it was written as I meant to write it, and that is the proudest joy an author can have.’
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
The Mousetrap and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in the history of London’s West End, plus three other Christie thrillers.
The Mousetrap
A homicidal maniac terrorizes a group of snowbound guests to the refrain of ‘Three Blind Mice’…
And Then There Were None
Ten guilty people, brought together on an island in mysterious circumstances, await their sentence…
Appointment With Death
The suffocating heat of an exotic Middle-Eastern setting provides a backdrop for murder…
The Hollow
A set of friends convene at a country home where their convoluted relationships mean that any one of them could be a murderer…
Christie’s plays are as compulsive as her novels. Their colourful characters and ingenious plots provide yet more evidence of her mastery of the detective thriller.
ISBN: 0 00 649618 0
ALSO BY AGATHA CHRISTIE
Witness for the Prosecution and Selected Plays
The first-ever publication in book form of Witness for the Prosecution, Christie’s highly successful stage thriller which won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play, plus three of her classic mysteries.
Witness for the Prosecution
A stunning courtroom drama in which a scheming wife testifies against her husband in a shocking murder trial…
Towards Zero
A psychopathic murderer homes in on unsuspecting victims in a seaside house, perched high on a cliff…
Go Back For Murder
When the young feity Carla, orphaned at the tender age of five, discovers 16 years later that her mother was imprisoned for murdering her father, she determines to prove her dead mother’s innocence…
Verdict
Passion, murder and love are the deadly ingredients which combine to make this one of Christie’s more unusual thrillers, which she described as ‘the best play I have written with the exception