Agatha Christie - Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

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London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2014

Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly © Mathew Prichard 2013

Foreword from Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks © John Curran 2009

AGATHA CHRISTIE® and POIROT® are registered trade marks of Agatha Christie Limited in the UK and/or elsewhere. All rights reserved.

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A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007546398

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007546404

Version: 2017-04-11

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page AGATHA CHRISTIE Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly

Copyright

Introduction by Tom Adams

Preface by Mathew Prichard

Foreword

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

‘Agatha Christie and The Greenshore Folly’ by John Curran

About the Author

Also by Agatha Christie

About the Publisher

MORE THAN half a century ago – 1962 to be precise – my impressively-named and enthusiastic agent, Virgil Pomfret, took me to meet the art director of Fontana Paperbacks, Patsy Cohen. On her desk was a copy of The Collector , John Fowles’ first published novel. It had been commissioned by Tony Colwell, art director at Jonathan Cape, and was my first serious attempt at trompe l’oeil painting for jacket art. It was a good time to be producing art for book covers. Good art was notably lacking in this field, particularly for paperbacks. In fact, the general standard was pretty dire, and the time was ripe for raising the bar. Up to then I had enjoyed doing serious paintings for hardback jackets, which included John Fowles’ The Magus , Patrick White’s Vivisector and David Storey’s Saville . Paperback covers were more often than not the poor second class products of publishers’ lists (with exceptions such as the original typographical Penguin covers), but virtually no serious attempt had been made to commission good art for paperbacks. However with the enthusiastic encouragement of Mark Collins, Virgil Pomfret and Patsy Cohen, I think we succeeded in doing just that.

From 1962 onwards, my relationship with Agatha Christie developed and prospered as I produced more than a hundred cover paintings for her books over twenty-five years. To begin with I simply enjoyed doing a good job. There were inevitably some failures and I know that I didn’t always please Agatha or her family. I am frequently asked if I met Agatha. I’m afraid the answer is no. Arrangements were made for various meetings; I did meet Rosalind Hicks, her daughter, Edmund Cork, her agent, and other members of her entourage, but Agatha’s legendary reticence and occasional illness prevented her from accepting invitations for us to meet. In retrospect I think it was just as well; it might have been embarrassing for both of us to discuss the likes and dislikes of various cover images. Nevertheless, for me it is a niggling regret. More recently, since my exhibition of Agatha Christie cover paintings at Torquay Museum in 2012, I have on several occasions met Mathew Prichard, a devoted and eloquent advocate of his grandmother’s achievements. Mathew and his wife Lucy have been a tower of strength and gratifyingly appreciative of my work. They helped and encouraged me in my recent endeavours on Agatha’s behalf, in particular while working on the cover painting for Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly , and they arranged with the National Trust to make Greenway House and garden available for my research. Once, after a delightful lunch with Mathew and Lucy at Ferry Cottage, and with my wife, the children’s writer Georgie Adams, we were taken on a memorable boat trip on the River Dart.

I was delighted when David Brawn, Publisher of Agatha Christie at HarperCollins, asked me to do this special cover painting for a so-far unpublished story. It is a shorter version of the excellent Dead Man’s Folly and a great excuse for me to revisit Greenway. Agatha’s second husband Max Mallowan described Greenway as ‘this little paradise’, and it was for Agatha ‘the loveliest place in the world’. And it is. The handsome, foursquare, no-nonsense Georgian house is in many ways an embodiment of its famous literary owner. But it is the garden that is the true paradise. In my painting I have tried, within the constrictions of being true to the story, to embody its extraordinary beauty and magic. It is without doubt one of the iconic places of the West Country – that West Country with its rain-soaked and occasionally sun-soaked landscape, haunted moors and secret bosky woodlands, fringed by sea and rocky shores.

Greenway has a flamboyant garden, almost tropical in places and bordered by the Dart, and is now owned by the National Trust. For Agatha it provided a safe retreat from an often intrusive outside world, a world she was fascinated by and acutely observed, but into which she had no wish to be integrated.

This great detective story writer, this skilled puzzle and plot maker, was the inspiration for my work on her books. My painting for this story is a tribute to her house and garden but, nevertheless, it had to fulfil its function as an illustration. I know that Agatha instinctively disliked visual depictions of actual incidents, scenes and human figures, and in particular insisted that Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple must not be shown on the covers. Though Collins tended to adhere to these rules, her American publishers demanded more literal imagery, as demonstrated by the US version of Dead Man’s Folly , reproduced on the endpapers of this book. I have largely obeyed this sensible injunction but it is right to break rules sometimes as I have for the cover of The Greenshore Folly, in which there is some pure illustration, for instance: the house, the boathouse, the ferry bell and Battery; the magnolia (one of Agatha’s favourite flowers), the face of Lady Stubbs, the fallen oak and folly; even a slightly fantasised portrait of Agatha herself in a cherished garden nook. And there is a suggestion of a convivial crowd on the front lawn. All this is woven into what I hope is a pictorial tribute to Greenway.