UK Features
Sex, Drugs and Agatha Christie: Reading the Swinging Sixties
A while ago we noticed something. We have both loved all of Agatha Christie’s works for a long time, but there are some books in her oeuvre and years of her life that just don’t get as much attention in certain quarters as we felt they should do.
So, we set out to shine a light on a set of very special stories, plays and films right through the Swinging Sixties. Or, the Swinging Christies, you might say - which is the name of our podcast.
This was the decade of astonishing books like Endless Night and The Pale Horse, the years in which Christie hit the big screen in a big way, and the decade of Cold War tensions, the Summer of Love, The Beatles and much more. In other words, the world immeasurably changed around Christie and she wrote through it all.
Still need convincing that Christie was plugged into the Swinging Sixties? Here are some of the discoveries we have made in our journey so far…
Sex
In June 1967, up to 100,000 young people showed out in San Francisco in a display of peace and free love, heralding what came to be known as the Summer of Love. And just a few months later, in the latest Agatha Christie novel, contemporary readers were greeted with passages such as this:
I didn’t know at that time anything about love. All I knew about was sex. That was all anybody of my generation seemed to know about.
Endless Night is a stunning psychological novel - probably our favourite Christie of the decade. It churns with forbidden desires and insatiable youth. In other words, it fits very squarely within the zeitgeist.
That same summer, the Sexual Offences Act was passed by the British Parliament, which meant the partial discrimination of homosexuality in the UK. But here again Endless Night proves just how topical it was - as many readers (us included) have detected homosexual undertones to the relationship between main character Mike and the architect Santonix…
We explored this and much more in episode one of our podcast.
Drugs
We knew going into the project that Agatha Christie worked in a dispensary through both World Wars, and had a good working knowledge of poisons, which she utilised to great effect in many of her plots…
We also knew that in the later books, for the first time, Christie started creating poisons to function within her plots - a move which some readers over the years have called out for not ‘playing fair’, or as a sign that Christie’s powers were fading.
On closer inspection, this is clearly not the case… Without spoiling too much, it’s fair to say the drug Christie invents for A Caribbean Mystery - Serenite - is actually not central to the solving of the mystery, and neither is Calmo in The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.
There’s also Benvo, the fictional drug in Passenger to Frankfurt, which is fascinating: imagine a world so torn apart that serious consideration by powerful people is given to a mass weapon which claims to make people… good?
It came into the heads of scientists that one can change not only men’s principal reactions and feeling, but also mental characteristics. You can change a man’s character. [...] He may be in a state of homicidal fury, he may be pathologically violent, and yet, by the influence of Project Benvo, he turns into something, or rather someone, quite different. He becomes–there is only one word for it– [...] benevolent.
We explored this and much more about drugs in the Sixties in episode six of our podcast.
Rock 'n' Roll
In the 1960s music was indelibly linked with youth culture. Such was the appeal of pop stars that singer Fabian was cast in the 1965 film version of And Then There Were None, for example. Christie even collaborated on an unproduced youth-oriented musical version of Hickory Dickory Dock called Death Beat.
While new music wasn’t always to Christie’s taste, in the podcast we explored how its impact fascinated the author; at one point Ariadne Oliver despairs that young people only seem to recognise pop stars and DJs. Christie was once asked what Miss Marple and Poirot would think about The Beatles - Miss Marple would "beg them to study voice production before it was too late", while Poirot would congratulate them on their success while shuddering at their untidiness.
In our Rock ‘n’ Roll episode, Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson, told us about the time he introduced The Beatles’ music to his grandmother. She was suitably impressed by the strains of Let It Be, and went on to enjoy the music of Paul McCartney.
Fashion
Like music, fashion of the 1960s was seen as a youth-oriented affair, and we particularly enjoyed Christie’s pithy asides about the appearance of young people in the decade. The clothes worn by young women attract some particularly amusing descriptions. In The Pale Horse, one young woman has sacrificed comfort for fashion, with unfortunate results: her "yellow wool pullover, a black skirt and black woollen stockings," are too much for the warm restaurant, and "perspiration poured down her face all through the meal" – the price you pay for latest trends, it seems.
Christie was a great observer of these modern trends, and understood that part of the attraction for fashion was to show off the body in a desirable way. In one interview towards the end of the decade she may have complained that mini-dresses "look so cold in winter", but a further concern related to their allure rather than comfort, as she felt they were "very unsexy, like gym tunics".
Men’s fashions tend to fare better in Christie’s 1960s works, which we noticed often featured long-haired and tight-trousered young men. Young men, she says, looked rather good when "strutting along in their finery, like Vandyk portraits with their curled hair and their velvets and silks" – like a peacock, in fact – a comparison that is a crucial clue in Third Girl, probably her most ‘swinging’ novel, and one that we return to repeatedly throughout the podcast.
Horror
Horror in the 1960s mostly swerved away from traditional gothic imagery of haunted castles and the like, and instead focused on horrors in the recognisable ‘real world’. At the cinema, the likes of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) asked how much you could trust your seemingly respectable neighbours, and Christie asked similar questions of her readers. More than once this decade Christie had some of the most respectable parts of society responsible for heinous crimes – although to say more would be to stray into spoiler territory…
Early in the 1960s Christie toyed with the mixing of old-fashioned horror and modern concerns, as The Pale Horse mixes ‘witches’ of a Shakespearean kind with modern concerns about brainwashing and murder by remote control.
“Tell me, Mark, do you think it is possible to kill someone by remote control?” “What do you mean by remote control? Press a button and set off a radioactive death ray?” “No, no, not science fiction. I suppose,” she paused doubtfully, “I really mean black magic.”
She continued to play with different types of horror to brilliant effect, including the claustrophobia of her lesser-known one-act play The Rats (part of The Rule of Three) and the suspense of Endless Night. The more overtly horrific events of Hallowe’en Party are particularly memorable, including the shocking murder of a girl drowned in a bucket while apple bobbing during the titular celebration. Even in her later works, Christie never loses her power to shock.
Armageddon
In 1962, Agatha Christie is deep into writing her next novel, a thriller about a mysterious death on an ordinary crescent. And then the unthinkable happens: the world ends.
Well, almost. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 - a stand-off between the Soviet Union and the United States about nuclear missiles on the island of Cuba - is widely seen as the closest the Cold War came to breaking point. So much so that the Doomsday Clock was then set at just 7 minutes to midnight.
Meanwhile, Christie is writing a book she calls… The Clocks. And more than that, but we realised on re-read that the whole book ticks like a clock itself. Typewriter keys tap, shoes clack, there’s talk of chit-chat, gates shutting, wristwatches counting and ultimately… the solution clicking in the brains of our investigative duo Colin Lamb and Hercule Poirot. Read it again looking out for these neat little touches from the talented stylist that is Agatha Christie.
“Let us not discuss the Bomb,” said Hercule Poirot. “If it has to be, it has to be, but let us not discuss it.”
Furthermore, John Curran reveals in his excellent book Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks that Christie was originally toying with making explicit the idea that the whole crescent is, from above, a clockface. We loved this discovery - it is as if Christie is updating her classic propensity for providing floor plans of country houses, to help us readers solve the crimes.
We have loved our deep dive into Christie’s 1960s works, and will be carrying on with a number of bonus episodes dropping in the near future. Do join us on our rad journey through time with the Queen of Crime!
About the Authors
Dr Mark Aldridge is an Associate Professor of Screen Histories who researches and writes about Agatha Christie. His books include Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World and Agatha Christie’s Marple: Expert on Wickedness. He has been hosting and producing The Swinging Christies with Gray Robert Brown since January 2024. You can find him @drmarkaldridge on X and Instagram, and at markaldridge.info.
Gray Robert Brown is a writer, podcaster and speaker. As a playwright, he has appeared on shortlists for the Papatango Prize and the Traverse Theatre Breakthrough scheme. He wrote a story for the Ladybird Stories for Pride audio collection for children. Gray has been fascinated by Agatha Christie since childhood and grew up a mere eight miles from her former home in Wallingford. You can find him at @classic_graham on X and at his website.
