Max Collins: The London Blitz Murders

She never told Max about the Ripper affair, and their friend Stephen Glanville discreetly never mentioned it, either.

Sir Bernard, who was himself struggling with an on-again-off-again autobiography, said to her toward the end of the affair, “This will make an interesting tidbit for your autobiography.”

“I believe I’ll leave this bit out,” she told him, and she did.

She felt foolish about how she’d endangered herself, going to Cummins’s flat, and preferred Max not know of it; and she had resolved any misgivings she’d had about the inappropriateness of her fiction in the postwar world. Good and evil were a reality, and fiction that dealt with that subject, however escapist in intent, would always have a place.

One good thing had come of the episode, however: she never again had the Gunman dream.

Perhaps, at long last, her subconscious had banished the nightmare, out of her acceptance of one of the primary themes of her own work: that behind innocent eyes, evil often lurked. The thought wasn’t a frightening one, once you’d adapted it to your thinking.

At least not so frightening as to cause nightmares.

At the incessant urging of Stephen Glanville, Agatha indeed wrote an ancient-Egyptian mystery, Death Comes at the End , published in 1945; also, she dedicated the next Poirot, Five Little Pigs (1943), to her persistent friend. Glanville, after a distinguished career concluding with his position as Herbert Thompson Professor of Egyptology at Cambridge, died at age fifty-six, the premature death greatly grieving the Mallowans.

Agatha modeled the country home setting of The Hollow (1946) after that of actor Larry Sullivan and his wife Danae’s estate at Haselmere, Surrey, dedicating the novel to them with apologies.

With her husband home and the war winding down, Agatha left her position in the dispensary at University College Hospital. She and Sir Bernard Spilsbury remained friendly, but drifted apart.

In November 1945, she was sad to learn that another tragedy had befallen Sir Bernard, who had never really gotten over the death of his son Peter: another son, Alan, had fallen ill with galloping consumption, and soon died. She and Max attended the funeral, and later had a pleasant lunch with Bernard, but despite a superficial air of normality, the great man had clearly failed.

Spilsbury soon suffered several minor strokes, but Agatha understood he was continuing to work with his usual dedication, testifying in trials, conducting postmortems, endlessly filling little file cards with data and theories. On December 17, 1947, as fastidiously dressed as ever, Sir Bernard Spilsbury turned on the gas in the little laboratory down the hall from the dispensary where Agatha had worked.

Inspector Greeno suffered no such melancholy. After thirty-eight years on the job, he retired from Scotland Yard in 1960. As head of the Yard’s number one district-covering the West End and Soho-he’d long been the “Guv’nor” to coppers and crooks alike.

The Daily Express said of Greeno’s retirement, “His record of successful murder investigation, including the notorious Blackout Ripper case, bears comparison with any police force in the world. One thing is certain: the underworld will be celebrating tonight.”

Agatha Christie Mallowan lived a long and happy and productive later life, with Max Mallowan at her side. Her play The Mousetrap outdid Ten Little Indians and became a West End institution.

Shortly before her death in 1976, Agatha allowed the publication of the Poirot novel she’d written during the Blitz, to best-selling results, the death of the Belgian sleuth rating a front-page obituary in the New York Times . Her Miss Marple novel, salted away at the same time, published shortly after the author’s passing, was similarly a best-seller.

While Agatha Christie is immortal, Gordon Cummins and his crimes have, like Mrs. Mallowan’s Gunman, gone the way of all nightmares-an unpleasantness forgotten upon waking.