Well, hello and welcome to The Swinging Christies, the Christie Time podcast about Agatha Christie in the swinging 60s.

What's that puddle?

I'm watching a puddle.

I'm Mark Aldridge and Agatha Christie, historian and writer, including of my latest book.

I have Christie's Marple, expert on wickedness.

I should write a new one.

So I've got a new intro.

Yes, and I'm great.

Robert Brown.

You'd think we'd be better at these.

By now it's raining.

It's.

Raining a lot.

I'm I'm working.

I'm a writer and an Agatha Christie fan.

And today we are in Belfast, we are.

It's a beautiful city.

It's a beautiful city.

I'm really excited to be here.

I've never been before.

It's only my second time.

How exciting.

But on both counts, however.

Yeah.

It is absolutely piddling it down.

I've I got chained to a really lovely guy on the on the flight.

One of those things where you you sort of bump in someone in the airport or getting on the plane and then ended up sitting next to him on the plane and then bumped into him at the other end as well.

And he's from Belfast and, and lives in London now.

And he apologised for the rain and then as he was about to walk away when of course, it's boiling in London.

And I was like, yeah, thanks, mate, but no, it's amazing to be here today.

We're going to be recording a very special episode about Agatha Christie and Ireland and the 1960s.

There's a lot to cover, a lot to delve into.

Yes, because I'm here for the Belfast Book Festival.

Where are we?

Speaking with Jan Carson, who's also carved out some time for us.

Jan, brilliant writer who's going to talk to us about, well, her love of Agatha Christie, but also they're going to chat about how Ireland figures in swinging Christie's texts in particular.

Yeah.

And we're, I mean, in many ways this is about righting a wrong because as you may know, the troubles began in the late 1960s, sort of 68 or 69, depending on which historian you you talk to.

And yet we've never quite got round to covering this topic properly before, but mainly because we we didn't either of us feel qualified to do it justice.

I think it's fair to say, given that it's such a complex and sensitive topic.

But we've had some time to do the legwork, yes, we've done the research and we've got Jan to talk to and shed some insight.

So yes, very excited to do so.

Yeah.

Shall we?

March a little quicker so we can dry off a bit quick quicker.

Let's do that.

Yeah, let's get in the dry, all right.

So we're now drying off the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast with our very special guest Jan Carson, who's a writer.

Many things based in Belfast.

Most important thing though, Agatha Christie fan?

Absolutely.

So that's how I ended up going to Belfast in the 1st place because last year we spoke at this Belfast Book Festival and you've invited me back this year as well.

But a great conversation and a good quiz.

A slightly mad quiz Mark, To be very honest, there's a lot of cheating and a lot of craziness going on at the.

Hold on you, you didn't warn me about this because this is my first.

Time this year, there's no.

Quiz No, there's no budget for a a Poirot shaped vegetable marrow as a prize.

Oh.

No, if only I'd known, I would have brought one of mine.

Yeah, we would have funded that ourselves.

I don't.

I don't know what you mean.

So we had lots of people who had never read an Agatha Christie but came along because they were on like we had Americans who on an not an exchange year, but a year out of university and coming to Belfast for a year.

I just took a punt on it and I think that is lovely.

Like, I mean, you know, yourself, like Agatha Christie draws people together from all sorts of different backgrounds.

So we had everything from like a 12 year old to 80 year olds at the back.

Yeah, it was really good.

Anyway, Jan, we could talk forever about that, but tell us about your Christie journey to begin with.

So you're a fan.

Where does it start?

Is there anything you particularly love about Agatha Christie?

You know, just give us an idea.

OK, so I grew up in a town about an hour north of here called Ballymena in a very strange kind of household.

My whole extended family are extremely conservative Presbyterians.

So I was raised under kind of Ian Paisley in the 80s in Ballymena.

I like to say not a lot of crack.

So the arts was really frowned upon.

We didn't go to the cinema in our house.

There was no dancing.

There was a lot of kind of control over what you watched and what you read.

But my daddy was a massive, massive crime fiction fan, so it was okay to watch Morse and Poirot and all sorts of different programmes.

And my parents also really encouraged me to read.

So like a lot of people, I first came across Christie in the library.

By the time I was 8, I had read everything in the kids section and a lovely librarian said come here, I'm going to introduce you to somebody you need to know.

And it was Agatha.

And my first Christie was Death in the Clouds.

Interesting.

Yeah.

And I guess for me, it was really a fundamental experience for a couple of reasons.

1 And I have loved recently listening to the author.

Elizabeth Day has talked about a very similar experience if she lived in Derry during the Troubles.

And Christie for her was a form of escapism.

You know, there's something about being part of or being kind of party to a lot of out of control violence.

When you come across someone like Agatha Christie where things are ordered and there are, you know, there's justice done by the end of it, that feels really comforting.

And I had that exact same feeling reading Christie in 1988 in Ballymena Library.

And I think the other thing for me is I could honestly point to that as the moment when I thought I want to do this.

I probably couldn't have articulated I want to be a writer, but I would have said I want to learn how you use words to take people out of their situation, to make them feel something, even if that is abstract fear.

But it just felt like a really formative experience for me as a writer, and I haven't stopped reading her since.

Yeah, and you did it, you.

And just like Chrissy, you, you've written novels, you've written short stories.

Yeah, not a murder mystery thing.

Oh yeah.

So I've had a go at writing crime fiction three times and all it did was make me realise how incredibly talented she is because it's so difficult.

So difficult.

I know.

I get the same questions.

Why?

Why don't you write?

You know, you know, Christie say, well, you know all the secrets.

Why don't you write a piece of crime fiction?

It's like, because she's really good, yeah.

Not.

So although I I may retract that if I change my mind for 10 years.

Yeah, yeah.

That's that.

When the money dries up.

I will say like I my ordinary fiction plotting device is to just start writing and let the story unfold.

And I attempted to do that with the crime fiction and I got to a point where I had a decapitated head and a fruit basket passing as a pineapple.

I don't know why I got there, and I didn't know how to get out of it.

This is why you plot furiously and crime fiction.

It's really fascinating and refreshing to you make that link between and like you said, Elizabeth Day has as well, that link between what has gone on here in in the last 100 years or so and the escapism of Agatha Christie.

Because I feel like we talk about that a lot, but exclusively in terms of people trying to escape the Second World War and specifically in that the the lens of English and British people saying that about the Second World War.

But obviously she's been read through other periods of conflict as well.

I mean, even in a really basic level, I remember as a child saying to my father, I think it was, oh, I'd really love to be a detective.

And because I love the kind of the order and the kind of working through plot and solving things, and my dad really quickly saying, well, that doesn't mean the same thing here as it means in other places because nobody really wanted to be a police officer, you know?

So even that split between what crime looks like in Agatha Christie and what crime looked like in 1980s and 1990s Northern Ireland, it's very different.

It was chaotic.

It was, you know, you could be caught up in something for no fault of your own.

Yeah.

Whereas when I open her books, I think usually it's the bad guys who get their comeuppances.

And yeah, there's a reason why people are being murdered in terrible ways.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Well, Speaking of the Dame herself, the Queen of Crime herself, we thought we'd first of all just look at just take a sort of broader look at Ireland and and Irish matters Irish characters in the works back of the Christie and one of the first things I thought when we were first researching and planning this episode planning to chat to you.

Jan was I seem to recall, and you'll be able to correct me Mark Doctor Mark Aldridge when Sophie Hannah who writes those continuation Poirot novels.

Great thriller writer in her own right and and writes those Poirot and catch full novels set closed casket in Ireland.

I'm sure she said in interviews that part of the impetus for doing that was because Christie seldom did or or never had.

Yes, she did.

And.

You then got this fact checked with her.

I did, yes, I did, Sophie says.

Yes, it's because Chrissie's never written a novel that was based in in Ireland.

But also she found a house with a floor plan that I loved and Clonicilty was where it happened to be.

Is that right?

Clonicilty.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a good part here.

Shouldn't.

I thank you so so yeah, so Christie, as far as I can remember and then I've checked is the only time that she sets a mystery in Ireland is one of the short stories in Labours of Hercules and it's.

Not a terribly good.

No, it's a convent and it's, it's, you know, so it's the Apples of Hesperides where Poirot does visit an Irish convent, but other than that.

I do feel that there's a bit in Bertram's hotel.

At Bertram's Hotel is a Miss Marple novel set in a London hotel which is not quite what it seems from 1965.

Where you think she's going to go to Ireland and then maybe the travel budget ran out and she didn't go.

But there is a hint of that isn't the end.

There's a really weird thing about her pawning the drawer, isn't there?

Did Christie ever come to Ireland?

I looked up and yes, there are bits about it, I know.

I remember the thing about Rosalind going to Ireland at one point in particular to do some research or something.

But yes, I believe she did.

Hello Mark here.

Shortly after recording this episode I did go and check about Agatha Christie and indeed Rosalind in Ireland.

So I also double checked with the family archive And well, Rosalind went to Northern Ireland in late 1940 with Hubert who was her first husband who who was sadly killed in the war.

And Agatha and Max both went shortly after Agatha's 70th birthday for a little holiday.

And in October 1960, Agatha wrote to Eden Court Talk, her agent, to say that she'd enjoyed the mole, Marinair.

So mussels and the Dublin Bay prawns, hot and cold, simply super, and said that Ireland was glorious.

So there you go.

She was there during our swinging period, which is nice to know.

But when we when we were researching this episode, you went, of course, Agatha Christie's mother.

It was born in Belfast, so we had a little chat about this earlier and we were sort of talking about what we might discuss.

But yeah, so she didn't spend long in in Belfast because she ended up being sort of adopted out and, and it was, it was very long, slightly sad story.

I don't know.

Does Belfast embrace the fact that Agatha Christie's mum was born here?

I don't think people know because I remember reading the autobiography and going out.

I've never been told that that's really interesting.

But there is a long tradition of people who are from this part of the world and have kind of papered over their roots.

And sometimes that's because of the the problematic, like kind of history here and the politics and things.

And sometimes it's just because they get associated with somewhere that's more glamorous.

So the big one is CS Lewis, who's from East Belfast originally.

But it's so associated with Oxford and the estate really like that association.

So there's not as many people maybe know that he's from, he's one of ours as I should, yeah.

We did do a Halloween special where one of the things that we refer to was how sound, and I'm apologising now for that if it's not pronouncing that well, very much predated the modern American idea of Halloween, for example.

So there is a line that you can draw between Irish traditions, but also Scottish as well that that seemed to pop up often, of course, in America and then gets fed back via this sort of loop back to to Agatha Christie.

So even if it's not always explicit, there is of course, you know, culture and heritage and history That.

Yeah, that, that.

And of course, the Irish diaspora went all over the world and took some of those practises with them and then they morphed into, you know, traditions like Halloween that we have now.

Yeah, which is super interesting just to to see how that's played out.

I worked on a a big research project last year called Bad Bridget.

It's out of the history department at Queens here, and we looked at Irish women who migrated from here to the US in Canada and became incarcerated.

So these were all of the felons that kind of moved from here to the US and end up as pickpockets and even a couple of serial killers.

But at at one point in the US, like almost half the population of the presents, presents were from Ireland originally.

Really.

So we we did take crime all over the world.

So did Agatha Christie, mind you.

That's true.

It's 10 years.

Like that.

So let's go.

With that, amazing.

OK, so we thought we'd specifically look at some references to Ireland and Irish characters in what we like to call our swinging texts.

So we broadened the definition of the 60s slightly to income a little bit before and a little bit after.

And we're gonna sort of ping through some more minor ones before going on to the the big two really in this topic, which as we've already talked about Jan at Bertrams Hotel and Passengers Frankfurt.

But just in, in terms of like little mentions.

And I thought it'd be interesting to get your take on these.

So there's the adventure of the Christmas pudding.

The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding and A Selection of Entrees is a collection of early short stories, including the titular The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding or the Theft of the Royal Ruby, rewritten for publication in 1960.

And I think you spotted Mark that there's just a very sort of throwaway reference to Island being named alongside Scotland and the quote the Argentine as somewhere to elope to.

And interestingly, this is not a reference in Christmas Adventure, which is what Christmas Putting was based on the original short story from the 20s.

I did some digging and I couldn't seem to find that there's any particular.

Bizarre to me.

Last night we had a wonderful event about Edna O'Brien here.

Yes.

And O'Brien really kicked out against, like, some of the restrictive views of the Catholic Church in terms of female sexuality and freedom And that, you know, she eloped to the Isle of Man and the priest came after her to drag her back.

Stop it.

Yeah.

They chartered a plane, and her father and the priest came over to the Isle of Man to try and drag her back.

So I wouldn't automatically say Ireland is.

Yeah, it could be.

I mean, we movement this in our America episodes recently, but how often?

And this just happens in all writing where a place which is othered, a place which is not their own, your own will be invoked in a mention.

She does it with America a few times, just as a kind of byword for something different and and I.

Mean there is an association in Ireland with this kind of wild romanticism.

So things like the the very true quiet man, Yeah.

I mean, that's a lot of people's idea around that era of what Irishness is.

These are, you know, women with wild hair and like, very attractive men.

And unfortunately, that's not the case to be honest.

What?

That's the sole reason I'm here.

I don't know what you mean.

Interestingly though, it did strike me after I wrote this note down that of course, between Christmas adventure and Christmas pudding, Christy did elope with her second husband to Scotland.

Yes, that's very true.

You would have looked to Gretna Grain.

Yeah, kind of.

Yeah, although she went to Edinburgh and it wasn't, it wasn't anything to do with the legalities.

It was more, I think it was mainly because she was so burned by being tailed by the press in 1926 around her disappearance that she and Max Malawan, who she was marrying, kind of put a finger on a map a bit almost at random.

And when you know, the press won't find us there because there's no motivation behind picking that in particular.

Oh yeah.

If only he put his finger on the on the map in Argentina and then in the Pale Horse.

The Pale Horse is a stand alone novel that explores mysterious goings on and unexplained deaths at a countryside in from 1961.

Another type of mention I feel that is fairly common is this idea, and I'm sure you could speak to this, the the feeling that there's something kind of spiritual or quote unquote mystical about being kind of Celtic broadly.

So one of the witches in the pale horse is talking about her sort of heritage and she says my great great aunt or one or two more greats was burned as a witch, I believe in Ireland.

Those were the days.

And then somebody else replies, I always thought you were Scottish.

And she says on my father's side, hence the second sight Irish on my mother's and then it goes on.

So I'm sensing that this is a common series of I.

Mean in lots of different levels.

You have like such a rich tradition of kind of myths and storytelling and a lot of those kind of Celtic myths feature things like banshees and witches and leprechauns and all sorts of like creepy mystical things.

There were also witch trials in Ireland.

There were some in the North, and there were lots of death of supposed witches as well.

So that is woven into the history here.

And then you're also coming off the back of, you know, the period when Yeats was writing in the South.

He was very into his mysticism and reinvoking this kind of Celtic revival.

So, you know, that's probably in the back of Christ.

He said, you know, Yeats, his poetry was really wide, wildly read.

So all of that is possibly in the mix there.

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

In preparation for this episode, I was reading an incredible book called Inventing Ireland by Declan Kerbert.

It it was absolutely fascinating, but it it immediately made me think of per horse.

The main first of the argument is about the figurative construction of quote UN quote Ireland, suggesting that Ireland has long existed, particularly pre independence as quote a foil to set off English virtues and as a fantasy land in which to meet fairies and monsters.

And it is it is that that really distils that point.

I think about the kind of mysticism and the fantasism that that's what you'd find here.

Yeah, I mean, it's something that I come up a lot against in my own works.

I'm a magical realist.

And if you go back two or three generations, there was a real sense of people being au fait with the supernatural here.

Partially because Catholicism hadn't lost its grip yet, but also because people actually believed in things like banshees and spirits and and so.

There was this a sense of like the work of someone like Bram Stoker.

People would have easily have believed in Dracula as a real entity.

Yeah.

No, it's not so much.

So when you're writing magical realism with ghosts and things, folks will automatically say what does that represent?

What does it symbolise?

Not what could actually be an attempt at writing something real.

Yeah.

And and you can mark that to about about the beginning of the Troubles is when that sense of the literature and art that's coming out of Ireland starts to become more and more realist into one.

And I always wonder if it's because, you know, difficult violent times, people thought they need to approach that in a very rational, sensible way of writing.

But it, you know, there's very, very little non realist writing coming out of here now, which wouldn't have been the case when when Christie was writing.

Yeah, yeah.

The the history of magical realism, it's usually associated with places that have a colonial past.

And so a kind of straight realist heteronormative fiction is usually associated with the kind of coloniser.

And anything that you're writing that bucks that kind of trend is an act of kind of independence and rebellion.

You know, something like the the pale horse.

There are logical solutions for all of this.

Suppose it's supernatural stuff.

Yes, of course, but.

The supernatural element, it really makes you wake up as a reader and pay attention, and it shocks you into a kind of attention there that you might not have otherwise.

Yeah.

And Then There Were None And Then There Were None is a film adaptation of the titular story about a group of guests picked off 1 by 1 by a mysterious killer.

This one's from 1965.

It was filmed in Rush, County Dublin, although it's obviously not supposed to be set in County Dublin.

It's supposed to be set in the sort of snowy Alps.

Yeah, 'cause when I first read that, I was like, what did they pump all that fake snow in?

Like what?

Do you mean I was like, we don't really have mountains that would require a cable car to get to them.

So I I watched it on Saturday night and.

That's real commitment.

I know.

Yeah, you've done.

Your homework and you read Bertrams and Passenger.

Very grateful.

And it it's a beautiful example of what we would call a, a big house here.

Mm hmm.

So the big houses were often kind of the thumbprint of colonialism.

They were built by the the the Lords that came over and settled here.

And the interior of that house is classic big house, right down to the kind of big fireplaces and the it's a blocky house as well, so.

Is that why?

Because I think I read that it it fell into disrepair and it was demolished in the late 70s.

So is that do you think?

Some of them have been preserved and repurposed as different things, but you'll find one in almost every kind of town.

Yeah.

They're usually quite square and blocky and quite English.

And it was usually where the, the, the English person lived.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess that helps to explain again why they would pick it, because perhaps a slight mix of architectural ideas that wasn't too completely traditionally.

But yeah, and they're coming at making the film from, you know, an English lens.

So they're, they're sort of immediately attuned to then picking architecture that sort of makes sense to to them.

And Endless Night Endless Night is a stand alone psychological thriller in which young couple Michael and Ellie are menaced by unusual happenings from 1967.

Ireland's just mentioned is one of the many places that Mike has worked in.

So I, I guess that's the sense that people could again, slightly escape to Ireland because he is somebody who is running from things at times as well that he could just come and the sense is that maybe do quite casual work or work of questionable legality as well, I think as as some of his background.

Yeah.

Is that an early?

Is that designed to be an early indicator that he's untrustworthy?

That there's?

We're skirting around the big topic.

Where we'll we'll save that one maybe for.

Yeah, yeah, maybe there's something not not so good going on there.

Well, on a on a more positive note, I did find what I think, I hope is, is a positive depiction of an Irish character in By the Pricking of My thumbs.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs sees Tommy and Tuppence return to investigate a mystery at a nursing home from 1968, which is Nurse O'Keefe.

She's the sort of primary caregiver to Tommy's aunt Ada, who's in the nursing home and it's visiting her that is kind of the instigator for the whole plot.

She's not a major character by any means.

And and so obviously there's limits to this.

But later you're not explicitly told that she's Irish until later on in the story, although I went back and wrote her dialogue today and I think it is Christie attempting to write in the vernacular.

So the way we meet Nurse O'Keefe is that we're, we're told that she, we were explicitly told that she's very sympathetic and was very kind and to Aunt Aida and very fond of her, that they had a really good relationship to the extent that Tommy gives Nurse O'Keefe the first stall of Aunt Aiders.

And there's some talk about how toppance is too small for it, whereas the nurse is very tall and therefore it would look great on her.

And it's not quite wrapped up.

But there's some indication that Nurse O'Keefe is not part of, is not part of, but conscious of the conspiracy that's going on in the nursing home.

That's Sunny Ridge.

And that's why she sort of leaves that job quite suddenly, even though she was very fond of the work and the people.

And maybe this stood out as quite a positive depiction of an Irish character because they're a few and far between.

They're positive depictions, but they're also tropes.

So, you know, Irish people are often the servant, the carers even.

I know it's outside your period, but in Taking up the flood, it's a servant girl who's the Irish person.

Yeah.

And, and then sometimes, and this is not just limited to Christie, but across the board, Irish women are all often seen and just in a solely domestic role.

So they're carers and they're people who cook and provide food and they're motherly and the men are often the drunken criminal layabouts.

Sure.

So it can be quite lazy stereotyping, but she's by no means the worst.

Writer.

Who does it?

There's a there's another form of stereotype in the same book as well, I think, which is when Tubbins is talking of about funerals and she says, and I'm quoting, I mean, the Irish enjoy Awake, don't they?

They have a lot of keening and wailing first, and then plenty of drink and a sort of mad whoopee.

We would call it a hilly.

Yeah.

I mean, that's pretty spot on, to be honest.

Not so much the the wakes that I was raised with, the Presbyterian ones are a little bit more demure, sure.

But yeah, an an Irish wake, you would tend to laugh as much as you'd cry.

And yeah, so I think that's pretty spot on there.

OK.

So in the terms of the the sort of the bigger examples, a key title for us in this conversation is going to be at Bertram's Hotel.

Yes, so if I'll I'll just remind people about Mickey in particular and then I'd really love to hear your thoughts, Jan.

So Mickey Gorman is the doorman who we discovered that many years ago best Cedric married in Ireland.

Now Mickey is described as and this is these are Christie's words, a drinker, a fighter.

He's into gambling on horses and he's of course also looking to bribe or extort money from Best because of the secret of their marriage.

So perhaps not a great stereotype.

Then there's even the sense, I think, that he might have seduced Bess because even though Bess was 20 or 21, so it was an adult.

But he's certainly overbearing.

He's got control.

Miss Marple doesn't like him because he keeps trying to get her taxis and she wants to get the bus, which is such a sort of a mansplaining, overbearing sort of thing.

So what?

What are your thoughts about this sort of character being in a 1965?

It doesn't surprise me at all.

It doesn't surprise me.

I mean, we're in the era of no blacks, no Irish, no dogs.

And the Irish in, you know, how they were portrayed in literature, they're often, you know, it's shorthand to say it's an Irish man for someone who's a criminal, a drunk, a deviant, a wife beater, all of those things.

Yeah.

I think there's something in Christie's head as well, because Mickey Gorman is extremely similar, almost identical to the Irish man and taken at the flood because she also makes a big deal of that.

Mickey had good war service, that he was a good man in the war and that so that there is this idea of him as being, there's an honourable side to him as well and he's a charmer.

She talks about that.

You know, when Bess meets him at the start, she was totally charmed by him.

So she's holding those two stereotypes of Irish identity.

The, you know, you can be a man of character and then also a drunk and a deviant and a layabite.

So there's a a degree of nuance and complexity there, but not a lot.

And I'd like to say that that stereotype has kind of gone out of fashion, but it, it still often rears its head.

And you know, I've, I've encountered lots of people assuming that you'll be a big drinker just because you're from here or some of those other stereotypes and we just sort of have to laugh and get on with it.

So still very much present.

In Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And I guess we call them microaggressions now, wouldn't we?

That sort of thing in, yeah, in everyday conversation.

I know you sort of said this on the phone the other day and I I said from our perspective as English gays that there's, you know, it's like, you know, us that people were assuming that we're promiscuous or.

I I will say, I'll flip it over and say we are allowed to laugh at ourselves.

But it it as with anything, it depends on, Yeah, because if you're if it's you yourself, then you're reclaiming it, you're owning it, but you're also not punching down.

I think that's the the problem isn't it is have many hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of oppression.

Yeah, yeah.

Can't then sort of pivot and still not even pivot.

Just carry on in joke form.

I'll also say that a lot of her Irish characters, and I think Mickey is a pretty good example of one of them, they don't have any kind of clout for themselves.

It feels like they're victims of circumstances, yes.

They're not particularly nice people, but they're also caught up sometimes in things that happen to them.

And yeah, and.

And that feels like a comment on what happened to, you know, Ireland as a country as well.

You know, we've gone into very, very deep, heavy subjects here, but there there is a a very English reading to Agatha Christie that is sometimes a little bit hard to stomach whenever you are, you know, from a space like Ireland that has such a heavy colonial history.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

And her kind of exoticization of something like Ireland is a good place to elope to or Ireland is a place where deviants and criminals come to.

That feels like a quite a colonial gaze.

Oh.

Absolutely, Yeah.

Yeah, it's something that Alison Light, the Christie scholar, writes really beautifully about, not specifically in terms of Ireland, but that distillation of of an England as a kind of very specific, I think because years of primarily English scholarship and readership and attention on Agatha Christie means that.

And we're guilty of this too, obviously.

We're 2 English people sat here.

Mark and I are having this conversation as well.

You're then oblivious to or not attuned to you don't have that that lens.

So.

So we've been writing and talking about Christie in a certain way, without with that key perspective missing.

But I I think we exoticize back as well.

So for me as a child Raiden, Miss Marble and Saint Mary Maid.

Saint Mary maid isn't like any villages here.

The villages in Northern Ireland are tend to be segregated into like 1 is Protestant.

2 miles down the road there's a Catholic neighbourhood.

It felt very beautiful, pristine, of a different era.

So we're guilty of doing the exoticisation backwards as well?

Sometimes, yeah.

And that's some of the reason that I like to raid her, because it was that escapism into this is a world I'm not aware of.

Yeah, I I mentioned this on the phone to you the other day Jan, and I think you just sort of laughed in response.

There is another Mickey who's also Irish straight after at Bertrams Hotel in 3rd Girls.

3rd Girl is a Poirot novel set in swinging London about a young woman who thinks she may have committed a murder from 1966.

Also the novel that directly follows it.

Also, you know.

That, Mick is the term for a Catholic.

I did not know that slag for ohh really.

Okay so yeah, so there's another.

I just assumed that was.

I don't think even like Christy might have known that, but if you say someones a Mick here that's it's a slightly derogate return for.

Interesting.

Yeah, okay, well there's another layer there again.

Again in a service job.

He's a Porter in the block where the titular girls live of their girl.

And yeah, so we hear about him from Mr Goby, who's one of our investigative figures, and he says one of the porters is a gossipy type.

Buy him a drink or two and you'll be surprised at the things he'll tell you who drinks and who drugs, who keeps his cash behind the cistern and goes on.

So yeah, again, that that drinking stereotype raising its head, I suppose.

But also, I mean, there's a nugget of something she's not seeing as nice, but I think is kind of a trait of Irish people.

And that's the talking.

Yeah.

Like Irish people are storytellers.

They're talkers.

They're conversational, and I think that nearly all of the Christy characters here, Irish, so I can think of, they're all big talkers.

Yeah.

So that that is a true kind of trope of here.

Yeah.

And knowing what's what in a community, in this sense, yeah, in the block.

The nice way to say it is being informed and the not so nice is being nosy.

Is gossipy, which is the word she uses.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Finally, in Bertram's hotel, the sort of pivotal criminal case in the book revolves around what Chrissy calls the Irish Mail train, and many people agree that this is a a a Christie version of the Royal Mail Train Robbery from Glasgow.

I wonder if if there's a swapping out of Glasgow, Scotland and Ireland that she's doing there that betrays a sort of everything's, you know, Celtic it.

Just all merges into one.

Kind of, yeah.

Which is maybe borne out by the Scotland Argentine Island.

How does the train get across the sea?

That's a very good question.

Every time I read that book I think there's no mention of the ferry.

And this is definitely before the Channel Tunnel, so.

Yeah, yeah.

I wonder as well if it's just something that's lodged in the back of her mind from reading those newspaper reports a year prior to writing Bertrams, because Great Train Robbery is 63 and this is 60 were published in 65.

But there was someone who was referred to as the oldsterman who was involved in the Great Train Robbery, who was sort of the linchpin who gave them the kind of crucial information, the inside man, as it were.

So she's got that little nugget of detail filed.

Maybe, yeah.

Quite like her, yeah.

And I just wanted to mention, just because I only noticed it when doing the research for this episode, but there is actually a continuity reference back to the Irish train incident in By the Breaking of My Thumbs.

So which And at this point in her career, the continuity references are sometimes inconsistent and a bit patchy.

So the fact that that's consistent and it's made three years later, I thought was quite interesting.

Hello, Grey here.

It's two months later and I've swapped out damp Belfast for damp Hackney.

It just occurred to me when I was editing this, but we skipped out quite a vital Irish depiction, Irish character in our 60s rundown.

And that is Father Gorman.

In The Pale Horse.

There is another Gorman, another reused name.

So he's not explicitly called Irish, but I mean, he's he's leaving a Presbyterian Church when we first meet him.

The implication is, is very clear.

It's perhaps slightly cliche that he is an avuncular Roman Catholic priest, although admittedly she does avoid some of the more problematic cliches around that.

And he's a victim, which is a shame.

It is an occupational hazard in Christie.

But it is, it's a really memorable kind of very noir, film noir sort of passage.

The moment that he is killed and the fact that he writes down the names of the victims and then he's struck down and he has the presence of mind to obscure in his shoe the names, the all important names, which which means that the murderer does not get hold of them, but the police do.

So very clever, clever Father Gorman, so worth noting.

But yes, Father Gorman, how could we forget?

Anyway, back to the episode.

So most historians agree that the Troubles begin in October 1968 after a civil rights protest in Derry.

So you're obviously a writer based in Belfast.

This is a big question, but to what extent do the events or the Troubles still influence your work now?

I mean, is it something that is always present or is it something that you try to steer away from sometimes?

I'd just be really interested to know.

So I'm always super interested in the fact that, like, my childhood is entirely enduring, you know, what's thought to be the conflict period in Northern Ireland.

So I was born in 1980 and became an adult in 1998.

Eight when the Good Friday Agreement was signed.

So I do have that kind of first hand memory of army men on the street and the the kind of presence of violence and threat all around you being searched every time you went into a shop and things like that.

But I've also had the benefit of seeing a country slowly recovering and taking its first steps and a kind of, and I say the term loosely post conflict community.

And I can't right without that colour in my work.

I'm entirely shaped by that narrative.

I think what I find particularly interesting is to think about where the conflict is placed in your work, whether it's front and central and you're writing explicitly about it or whether it's more in the background or where.

And I know we're going to talk about passengers for Frankfurt in a second.

Whether you come at it slant, can you use metaphor, imagery, other narratives that are beginning to unpick the big themes?

So our big themes here would be things like the the legacy of trauma and the kind of conflicted ideas of identity, the history of violence.

I think all of those are in that novel, but they're not explicitly about Ulster, Northern Ireland to Ireland, whatever you want, what you want to put it under the label of.

Yeah, you mentioned Passenger to Frankfurt.

Passenger to Frankfurt is a stand alone espionage thriller about Sir Stafford Nye's hunt for answers from 1970.

It's it's interesting that we we just did our America miniseries and one of the things we were speaking about during that is that there's an argument to make that Christie was inspired by what was going on in Vietnam or inspired as perhaps the wrong word, but prompted by what she read of the conflict in Vietnam when she was writing that novel.

What what was going on in Vietnam shares with the troubles is that I've seen historians refer to both as some of the first really, as you say, traumatic conflicts that were televised, that were, you know, images of which were were beamed all over the world.

And, and people felt like they were very, you know, people had quite a visceral reaction to what was going on and, and for the first time could really see it and get that information quite quickly.

And and this is not this is not just kind of us imposing a reading on it because it actually comes from from Christie herself.

So in last year, when we visited the archives, the Agatha family archives, we found some answers to questions that Agatha had been asked by her Italian publisher.

That's.

Correct, yes.

So trying to do some publicity, I think for passenger to Frankfurt.

That's it.

And and they'd asked her what had inspired the book and she said at the present moment, quoting now at the present moment.

The things taking place in Ulster are the main expression of this.

And it's also quoted in the Chris biography by Laura Thompson.

You Jan, reread Passenger to Frankfurt for this episode, didn't you?

What how did you find that?

And and can you see?

Yeah, so I, I found it really interesting because you told me you 2 point at me towards passenger to Frankfurt as a book that dealt with Ireland.

And I was like, I'm not sure there's any Ireland in there.

And then I, I reread it and I was like, and you know, the more I read some of the, the academic writing that you sent across around the text and I can see that she's possibly doing something that I do.

Similarly, in terms of these are difficult things to address head on, especially when you're close to them.

And, you know, living in England, that's, you know, it's the closest country across from Ireland.

You know, whether she acknowledges it very much or not, she has a, a blood tie to this place.

She has a mother who's from Belfast.

Sometimes it's easier to write kind of elusively about the difficult thing, to put in a kind of hypothetical situation.

Or for me, I use metaphor and images when I want to talk explicitly about the kind of really difficult stuff about being from here.

Of course, it might make it easier for her to write about a complete, completely fabricated situation, but we read it as almost a parable about Northern Ireland situation here.

Yeah.

Well, she famously subtitles passenger to Frank for an extravaganza and and there is this sense that it's both incredibly grounded in several world conflicts.

As I said, the the contemporaneous whilst also being a sort of flight of fancy of a of a world entirely in chaos.

So yeah, I think that's kind of borne out by by what you just said.

I think there's a, a slight tone to it that I find quite difficult in that almost a kind of like judgy thing about or if, you know, if everyone could just get along and, you know, all of these young people stirred up by violence.

And that seems quite naive to me because there were real problems and roots at the heart of the conflict.

But it, you know, a tablet or a drug that would make everyone happy and get along together, it's not going to fix the problems with identity and colonialism.

And yeah, there's an awful history we have here.

Yeah.

And similarly with some of the other conflicts that she mentioned, Yes.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's interesting you should say that because one of the points I wanted to, to make today was there was a, an exhibition about the troubles in the Imperial War Museum in London a couple of years ago.

And some of the press around that there was, I think the curator was, was challenged on this actually, people had said, and I have a degree of sympathy with this view.

Even neutral has a point of view, right.

So it's almost that thing of it comes across a little as oh, sort of, oh, just bang your heads together kind of thing like both are at fault.

And it that neglect and what what Christie's doing in passenger to Frankfurt is creating this sense of tumult and confusion, which sort of by definition flattens blame almost in a way that is actually quite problematic because it isn't addressing, as you say, the root causes and the very real concerns.

I will say, and, and this is probably as candid as I, I, I'll be in this interview, I have a degree of sympathy with Christie because the, the perspective that I was brought up in would have been very similar to hers.

You know, I went to a Protestant girls grammar school.

The schools in Northern Ireland are still right now today, 91% segregated.

So are, and that extends to what's taught in curriculums and language and all sorts of things.

But because of that, I didn't get taught any Irish history.

So it's only as an adult I have learned the complexities of what was done to the nationalist population here and some of the horrors.

And so when I was a child, I would have just thought, you know, why don't can't everybody get along?

Like.

And I didn't fully understand the hurt and the trauma and just the incredible injustice that had been wrought here.

Yeah.

So when I read something like Passenger to Frankfurt I I can see a bit of myself in it as well.

The same is true of so many people.

We we were observing earlier, Mark and I that, you know, we, we don't get taught any of this.

We, we never were.

And certainly even even today, I don't think really, I think a lot frankly of my generation, a lot of the the kind of waking up to anything to do with with the troubles was Derry girls, frankly was watching Derry girls.

And maybe Anna Burns and.

Maybe Melman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is incredible.

And Anna Burns is a big Agatha Christie fan.

She is, and she's here tonight, you said.

I'm very excited to meet her.

Yeah.

I was also gonna say, like, it intrigues me that you've said there was an exhibit to the troubles in London.

Was that?

Yeah, because we do not have a Museum of the Troubles here in the North.

And they're the biggest reason for that is that there is no agreement as to what would go into this museum because there's not one version of the narrative.

It's a shifting kind of kaleidoscopic, perspective based narrative.

And that makes it very hard for someone like Agatha Christie who's looking in from the outside to, you know, write it properly or accurately.

Because even those of us who live here have to employ all sorts of different techniques when we come to to talk about what happened here and what's continuing to happen here.

Yeah, yeah, that reminds me I I don't know if you've listened to it.

I recommended to you amazing BBC Radio foil series that's on sounds called 68 OK, which is just snippets of based around this the civil rights protests in the outbreak of violence in in October 68 and just hears from different, you know, people from all sides of the conflict and is caught up in it in very different ways, different ages when it happened.

It's so fascinating.

But like you say, you need projects like that and as conversations with as much nuances as you're bringing to us now.

So thank.

You and I'd I'd also recommend.

So a lot of folks ask for one book to read on the troubles and it's very difficult because most of them are written either from one perspective with bias or an attempt at kind of objectivity, which doesn't really work.

Yeah.

So I'd recommend a really brilliant book called Dirty Linen by Martyn Doyle.

And it just this takes this tiny parish that he grew up in and it tells the story of everyone who died in the troubles from from all the communities.

And you get a real snapshot of this is a a small area.

And this is how deeply it impacted and also how people were connected.

Not just divide it by difference, but the relationships.

You know, someone who delivered somebody's milk might have been a Catholic, and they delivered milk to a Protestant who also got murdered.

So you see how this is a, a close community that had a, a forced kind of division put upon it.

And so it's a really beautiful, very moving book.

Yeah, We'll put the title of that book on our website, on our resources page along with everything else we've mentioned.

Just one final thing from passengers to Frankfurt, you mentioned the Project Benvo utopia.

That's kind of or, or dystopia slash utopia, that is, that's kind of invoked by Christie in that book.

And I did notice that the the way that that is envisioned by the villains in that book is aligned with the way that people used to talk of violence, specifically this phrase, the country of the young.

I don't know, I'd never heard of this before.

Is this a sort of?

I've never heard that.

Before, So I see.

I think this is what she's referring to.

So the passages, people are talking of peace and beauty and the wonderful world that is the world of the young, which is to be theirs when they've destroyed enough of the old world.

The original country of the young was West of the Irish Sea, wasn't it?

A very simple place, a different country of the young from what we're planning now.

Is that turn and oak?

So there's this a myth, an Irish myth about a mythical place of eternal youth.

Oh, OK, yes, well, quite possibly, she goes on.

It was silver sands and sunshine and singing in the waves.

Yeah, and no one, it's kind of like no one grows old when they go there.

Oh, OK.

So I think she's a veiled reference to that.

Right.

OK, good.

This is why we have Jannah, yeah.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for talking to us.

Is there any way that people can follow you on social media?

Have you got a website or anything?

Yeah, I've got my website itsjustjancarson.co.uk.

Amazing.

And people should definitely follow you on Instagram because you post pictures of your stunning accessories, more of which you're sporting currently.

A fine red set currently, yes.

And you're at Jan Carson's Stories, is it?

Yeah, that Jan Carson stories.

Fantastic.

Well, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us today, Joanne.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Actually, this is a good 60s reference.

The other Dan Carson, was a very famous 1960s stripper.

Oh my goodness.

Stop it.

Yeah so about 5 or 6 years ago I got this e-mail from a Dutch academic and he was like hi, I am Dutch academic researching The Beatles and the swinging 60s.

Are you famous stripper of same name?

Stop it.

Starts to research and she's the stripper who strips in magical mystery to her.

Oh my goodness.

Wow.

And she strips to a song called Death Cab for Cutie, which is where Death Cab for Cutie took their band name.

Before.

No way.

And her name is John Carson.

Well, there's something in this, if you haven't already written it, I feel.

Like this?

Yeah.

But I think she had quite a sword at life.

She moved to states to try and make it in like normal cinema and end up like dying of a drug overdose or something.

But I've got her is my name's like, and the other one is a woman who writes self published books about how angels leave messages on her answering machine with prophetic messages from the world.

So they're 2 pretty good.

Yes, yes, yes.

Have you got like?

I was just about to say, before we met her, well before, before I was properly cognizant of Mark's work, which was long before we met her.

I did used to think that he was, that he wrote crime novels under the name MJ Arledge because I can't breathe.

But basically, you know that thing where your, your, your brain just reads the first letter and then it sort of sizes up the word.

I just kind of went, oh, you know, MJ Aldridge and Mark Aldridge, he writes about Christian in the day and he does crime to us.

But we we joked about this on the podcast before.

And then I think I looked him up and we did follow him and he followed us back, but he's never got in touch.

So we're not sure if he listens.

MJ, if you're listening, get in touch.

We'll do an episode.

That in a locksmith I think of mine.

And next episode, well, you'll just have to stay tuned.

You'll have to stay subscribed.

Got lots of plans, more coming soon but yes top secret as of yet.

Please do rate and review us positively ideally.

And please also make sure you subscribe if you haven't already.

There are actually surprising numbers of listens that come from people that haven't.

Subscribed I think.

People assume that they have subscribed and they just never clicked the button.

So yes, go and check you've clicked the button on your pod culture of choice so that you get notifications every time and your episode drops.

And please do get in touch.

You'll find us on Instagram at Christy underscore time.

Our blue sky is christytime dot B sky dot social.

You can e-mail us at christytimeprod@gmail.com, our websiteschristytime.com, and you can find greyonline@greyrobertbrown.wicsite.com/grey Robert Brown.

I'm also on Insta at Doctor Mark Aldridge and on Blue Sky at markaldridge.info, which is also my website.

And of course, if you so wish, you'd be very welcome to track down any of my books about Agatha Christie.

The important thing is, so keep swinging.

Keep swinging.

Thanks for listening Bertrologizers and frankfoligizers The Swinging Christie's is a Christian project by Doctor Mark Aldridge and Grey Robert Brown.

This episode was recorded on a very damp 9th of June 2025.

June.

It should be nicer than this.

Our artwork was designed by Bartlett's studio and our music is by Dar Golan.

Oh, and while we're here, as I remember, in the middle of a rain stall, Fred Connolly wrote Brendan Connolly, who some of you with a long, long memories may remember was one of the people inspired the title, Should we say So, you and Christine when I spoke about this project.

The origin.

Story.

Yeah.

And I promised him a copy of my marble book.

Nice.

And signed.

Very happy to do.

Wasn't out of the time.

And then you bumped him and then then he disappeared from like, Twitter.

I was just so right too.

Sounds like a.

Christian, it does.

It does.

So if you're still listening, Frederick, Brendan, drop us a line and I'll make sure I get that across to you.

It just crossed my mind the other day.

Yeah, I'll say, oh, I, I, I can't find him.

So you know me always to clear up a mystery as soon as I can.

Exactly.

Well, yeah, hopefully mystery solves soon.