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.
APPLAUSE IN THE DARK
AUTHOR’S NOTE: THE READER IS advised not to peruse this bibliographic essay prior to finishing the novel.
The previous novels in what has been called by others my “disaster” series have featured real-life crime-fiction writers as detectives in fact-based mysteries, often in settings and situations where they had actually been—i.e., Jacques Futrelle on the Titanic and Edgar Rice Burroughs at Pearl Harbor during the attack. Agatha Christie, of course, did live through the London Blitz. The description of her daily life—her work in a hospital dispensary, her writing projects and habits, etc.—has a strictly factual basis.
Agatha Christie was adept at sleight of hand, and the trick this book attempts is to present a true-crime story in the guise of a traditional mystery. How well I’ve succeeded is up to the reader, but the challenge of it was the sort of writing problem Mrs. Mallowan might well have relished.
That the real-life murders in question were vicious sex crimes of course contrasts with the cozy image of Agatha Christie (not entirely deserved in my view); but, among other things attempted in these pages, it was my wish to reflect upon reality versus fantasy, and the role of mystery and crime fiction in a brutal world. At the same time, I hoped not to dishonor Agatha’s memory by handling the subject matter in a manner she might have found in poor taste.
The series of murders by the so-called Blackout Ripper did occur, in the time frame indicated, and the basic facts of the case are honored here, as much as conflicting source material and the passage of time allow. I chose to keep the crimes of Gordon Cummins in their proper time frame, and—despite the title of this book—not at the height of the Blitz in 1940. This is, however, a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken, including the shifting of certain events to form a better-flowing narrative.
While my involvement of Agatha Christie in the Blackout Ripper murder investigation is fanciful, the creator of Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple did indeed work side by side with the famous pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, at University College Hospital during this period. The discovery that these two giants of the world of crime—a celebrated writer of mystery fiction and the British father of forensics—knew each other within an intimate work environment, at a time when both of these lonely older people were separated from their spouses, gave impetus to this narrative.
I intend this novel as a valentine to