← Old School with Shilo Brooks
Old School with Shilo Brooks
Agatha Christie and the Kidnapping That Inspired Her Greatest Mystery
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- [00:00]
A
This is old school and here we have an appreciation for old school, quality, craftsmanship, how things used to be made. Today's sponsor is doing exactly that. Vare, that's V A E R was founded in Los Angeles with a mission to revive American watchmaking, and they've actually pulled it off. VARE is now the largest independent watch assembler in the US building watches across California, Arizona, Rhode island and Alabama with leather straps made in Illinois and Florida. I absolutely love the watch these guys sent me. It's beautifully made and it feels substantial on my hand. It genuinely lives up to the reputation they've built. Ver has over 10,000 5 star reviews and once you wear one, you're going to understand why I get compliments on it all the time. If you're tired of disposable products and want something rugged, timeless and thoughtfully made, check them out. Go to Vere watches.com that's V A E R watches.com and support American craftsmanship. Hey y'.
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B
All.
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A
Today I'm sitting down with journalist Joe Nocera. In Joe's latest podcast series, he dives into the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr. One of the most infamous crimes in American history. Today I'm talking to Joe about that story through a surprising lens. Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express Agatha Christie is the best selling novelist of all time and Murder on the Orient Express is one of her most famous and subversive works. Published in 1934, It Takes the classic locked room mystery and turns it on its head, delivering a thought provoking and surprising ending. This is old school. Hey y'. All, Shiloh. Here listeners will know that I believe reading good books makes us better men. Likewise, having civilized debates and good faith discussions can make for a better democracy. That's why I want to recommend the chart topping podcast, you Might Be Right. Hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, it's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public affairs at the University of Tennessee. In fact, the show's named after Senator Howard Baker's principal to always remember the other fellow Might Be Right. At a time where mainstream news reverts to shouting matches and most political commentary generates more heat than light, you Might Be Right is a great place for even keel conversations about tough topics. And if you need a place to start, check out their recent episode on whether there's too much money in politics. As we approach the midterms, this is a timely discussion featuring Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessing and former Chair of the Federal Election Commission, Brad Smith. It's substantive, civil, and exactly the kind of debate worth having right now. So follow you might be right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell them I sent you. Joe Nocera, welcome to Old School.
- [02:58]
B
Thank you so much for having me, Shiloh.
- [03:01]
A
I'm delighted to have you. I want to talk about several things today. I want to talk about Agatha Christie, I want to talk about this extraordinary novel, Murder on the Orient Express, and I want to talk about Charles Lindbergh and some work you're doing on a new podcast for Charles Lindbergh and his connection to Agatha Christie. But before we get to all that, let me ask you the question. You know, she's the best selling novelist of all time. As I understand it, only Shakespeare and the Bible have outsold Agatha Christie. I read online that she sold in all languages somewhere between 2 and 4 billion books, which is extraordinary. Stephen King, for people who don't know, Stephen King, sold a lot of books. Stephen King, according to the Internet, has sold about 320 million books. So this is how much Agatha Christie dwarfs even the great Stephen King. I want to ask you this with Agatha Christie to begin. Why are readers so drawn to her?
- [03:54]
B
Well, first of all, don't forget, unlike Stephen King, she's been doing this, she started doing this in the late 20s, early 30s, number one. So she's got a long track record.
- [04:05]
A
Yeah.
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B
Second of all, there's something, it's like a puzzle, an Agatha Christie mystery. And you pick it up and you get to know the characters and they're usually pretty well drawn. And then you start to wonder a who did it? Cause there's always, you know, three, four, five, six suspects. And then you start to wonder how is her famous detective, Hercule Poirot, going to solve the crime with what he likes to call his little brain cells. You know, he doesn't use guns, he doesn't fight, he just out thinks everybody. So I think there's just a lot of appeal in that approach. And you know, one of her favorite tactics is the, what they call all the suspects in a room kind of thing. You know, 10 suspects in a room. And there's Poirot. And you see that in the movies now. You know, you see that with the old Knives series, the Last of Shiloh, the Stephen Sondheim movie. It's a very common technique. So people, you know, people are used to approaching a mystery in that fashion.
- [05:24]
A
Do you remember the first time you picked up Agatha Christie? I ask you that. Because I can imagine somebody finding this, realizing that there are 66 novels and thinking they've stumbled upon a treasure trove that can sustain really, a life of reading. 66 is a lot. Do you remember the first time that you ever read an Agatha Christie novel? Where were you?
- [05:41]
B
I read a few. I read a few as a young. As a kid. I read a few as a kid. And I want to add something else. My son, who's now 15. The first book he ever sat down and devoured without being forced to read it by a teacher or a class was the Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I believe is one of Christie's two or three finest books. So I read some as a kid, but then I stopped reading for a very, very long time, and I became a journalist. And so as a journalist, I was primarily reading nonfiction. And then I wound up doing a podcast about Agatha Christie about five years ago, and it was like, oh, my God, why didn't I keep doing this? What is wrong with me? And I probably read. I probably ripped off 10 books. You know, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
- [06:44]
A
Yeah.
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B
And in different eras. And you could watch her evolution, both as a writer and as a thinker. If you. If you. I mean, her. If you track her career, you know, she's. You're tracking from the end of World War I through World War II and beyond. She has a couple of novels, post World War II novels where she talks about rationing and about life and life in Great Britain after the war and how tough it is. And even though it's enveloped in a mystery, you're still getting insight into what that world was like.
- [07:20]
A
When you say that, you. You kind of reeled off 10 straight novels of hers. I'm curious. I mean, it's almost like her writing has an addictive quality. I mean, if you're reading 10 in a row, and I think, you know, like I said, she's got 66, and people plow through these, and then they reread them. What is it about her? What's about her writing that is like, I'm gonna read 10 of these things in one go? Is it. What is it? That. That's kind of the addictive quality.
- [07:45]
B
Her books move if, you know, they never slow down. You're always going from the. From one thing to the next to the next. The writing isn't. You know, she's not. She's not Faulkner, she's not Hemingway, she's not Fitzgerald. It doesn't matter. She grabs you by the throat and drags you across the page. And her prose, even though on a sentence by sentence basis, it's pretty ordinary, it has a very propulsive quality that causes you to just. I want to see what happens next. I want to see what Poirot does next. I want to see what this character does next. It has that kind of quality.
- [08:35]
A
As I understand it, she was a pretty interesting person. Like, she was an Egyptologist. She was something of an adventurer. I wonder if you might just give us a little bit of a sense of who she was.
- [08:47]
B
The weird thing about Agatha Christie is that if you ask her who she was or how she described herself, she describes herself as a wife and a homemaker and a mother, even though. And she also says quite openly that she would always try to sneak the reading, the writing in. You know, she didn't have an office. She didn't go to any place to write. She would sit on the kitchen table for a couple hours before dinner. She was an adventurer. She actually surfed. And her second husband was a archeologist. They'd have a. She brought all this tents and all sorts of things where she would work in the tent while he was digging, and then they'd be together for dinner. And as she got wealthy, she loved to buy homes. She was one of these people who bought and sold homes all the time. She was a voracious collector of everything you can imagine. When I was working on the podcast, my producer and I went to what had been her vacation home for most of her life, her weekend home, and it's owned by Great Britain now. And they had a lot of her ceramics dolls I can't even describe. And then they told me, oh, this is just a fraction of the stuff. Most of it we have hidden away. We have boxes in the basement. It just blew my mind.
- [10:29]
A
Now, I understand you can, like, visit her house, is that right? You can go see her home today. Have you been there?
- [10:35]
B
You have to make an appointment. But, yes, they have tour guides. Absolutely. And they take you through it.
- [10:42]
A
So if I understand correctly, she went missing, and they brought, in, wait for it, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the great Sherlock Holmes mysteries, to help try and find her. What's the story here?
- [10:56]
B
Well, first of all, he failed. So let's say that he tried to use a psychic. He was a spiritualist at that point in his life, and he was going to use the spirits to find her. He failed. Her marriage was eroding, and her life was kind of in disarray, and she was upset. She went out in her Car one night and she drove it to a river, an embankment, and left it there and disappeared. And at first people thought that she had died. And they dredging the river, they were dredging the water for her and they couldn't find her. In fact, she had somehow gotten to a spa, pretty well known spa. And she had bought all new clothes and she went to dinner every night and she was dancing and she was, you know, meeting people and she was using the name of her husband's lover.
- [12:10]
A
Wow.
- [12:11]
B
She was kind of leaving clues. And she was gone for like two weeks. And it was a big thing in the newspapers. You know, where is Agatha Christie? She had written one or two novels, one of which was. Had gotten quite a bit of publicity. So it was. She was a public figure at that point. So there was a fair amount of publicity about it. And one of the men in the orchestra, every night there was an orchestra, every night there was dancing. One of the men in orchestra, because her picture was in the paper every day, recognized her and called the police. And the police came with Archie, her husband that she would soon be divorced from. And this is what the world was like back then. Archie came in and said to the police, let us have dinner together, please. The cops just waited outside while she went in and she and her soon to be ex had a dinner at the hotel and then they all went home. The press in the aftermath, a lot of them accused her of doing this as a stunt to promote book sales. My own belief, having looked into her life, was that it was very unlike her to do something like that. And I really think it had more to do. I think she had a nervous breakdown, as they used to call it Then.
- [13:36]
A
How does Arthur Conan Doyle come into the story?
- [13:39]
B
Oh, well, they were trying all these different ways to find her and people were volunteering. I know how to find her do this. I can find her, do this. And Arthur Conan Doyle said, you know, I have connections to the spiritual world, to the psychic world, and I will try and use my psychic powers to find her.
- [14:00]
A
Amazing.
- [14:04]
B
His career, I think it's fair to say, was this was the tail end of his career slash life. So,
- [14:13]
A
you know, we've talked about the kind of characteristic of her works. I understand that she's not like Agatha Christie novels. They're not gory like they're not, you know, like people think of mystery sometimes I think murder mystery. That's not the case. You mentioned your own child had read this. They're more like riddles rather than, you know, if you watch TV today, There's a commercial. Every other commercial is a horror movie where there's, like, blood flowing from under the door crack. I mean, you know, it's just like this whole voyeuristic gore experience. Her novels are not. Not that way. So I wonder if you might kind of give an account of the elegance of the way she puts a story together.
- [14:52]
B
Well, before I do that, let me. Let me explain. In World War I, she worked in a. She worked. She was a pharmacy. Pharmacy, nurse. Nurse for the Army. And back then, poison was a very common thing to put in medicines, tiny little bits of poison. She learned all about poisons, and it said that something like two thirds of her novels are built around poison, and that's the murder weapon. So that's pretty bloodless. Now, in the Murder of the Orient Express, the victim dies from knife wounds, but again, there's no mention of blood in the book. Yeah. And even in the movie, the famous 1974 movie with Albert Finney and Sean Connery and many, many other big, big names, you know, when you see the body, you don't see any blood. So she, as a general rule, you know, would build her. They'd find somebody dead in the fifth or sixth chapter most of the time, and they'd first have to figure out what that person died of. You know, was it poison? Was it something else? And if it was poison, what kind of poison? And what did that say? You know, what's it? And Poirot, of course, is a genius at this and so on and so forth. She didn't like guns. She didn't like violence. She liked the idea that somebody can use their brains to solve a complicated, difficult mystery. And that had an enormous amount of appeal. Think about it. After World War I, nobody wanted to talk about blood and violence in Great Britain and probably the rest of the world. And so here comes this woman who has these totally engaging, fun mysteries that even though there are murders involved, they're super comfortable to read, and they don't. There's no moment in any Agatha Christie book when you're actually scared.
- [17:16]
A
So let's take a specific example. Murder on the Orient Express, 1934. As I understand it, this was published. Give us a basic sense of the plot of this novel. This is probably one of her most popular. I know, as you said, it's been made into films. Couple different times. It's been made into film, television series.
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B
Once in the 70s and once more recently.
- [17:37]
A
Yeah, with Johnny Depp.
- [17:38]
B
And it's probably her best known book, maybe because of the films. I'M not sure, but what's the plot? Okay, so let me. Wait, Shiloh. I have to say one thing first. The rule when you're talking about an Agatha Christie book, which I'm going to break, is that you should never give away whodunit.
- [18:02]
A
Yeah, right, right.
- [18:04]
B
People get mad at you if you do that. But in this particular case, I don't think it's possible to tell the story without giving it away because it's such a clever construct. The book is based on the Lindbergh kidnapping. There's a kidnapping of a three year old girl named Deborah Armstrong. Debbie. No, excuse me, Daisy Armstrong. And the kidnapper is a gangster, an American gangster, and he changes his name to Ratchet, and he's basically gotten away with it. But there are a. So he gets on the Orient Express and there are 12 other people in the same section of the train. And they're all different. A countess, an American car salesman, the porter. Two people who appear to be lovers, a servant. Everybody's different. Very, very different. And they seem to come from different places. They don't seem to have any connection to each other. And Ratchet, if I'm saying his name wrong, I'm going to kill myself. Is murdered in the middle of the night with 12 knife stabbed 12 different times. It has to be one of the 12 people in that section of the car because the. The train hit a snowbank and it's stuck and no one can get out. So nobody could have killed him and then left the train. That wasn't possible. So it's the classic Poirot mystery. He interviews everybody, one after another. He takes the case. He agrees to take the case from the guy who owns the train, the Orient Express. And he interviews each of these 12 people and he starts to add things up piece by piece, piece by piece. And they're lying to him like crazy. But he's figuring out through his cleverness that so and so who is, you know, has a French accent, is actually an American and so on, and he starts to realize that all these people have a connection to the Armstrong family, all 12 of them. So one was the sister of Mr. Armstrong and another was the servant. They're all connected to Armstrong and they all have a reason to kill him. And he figures out that they conspired to be on the train together so they could murder him together. And the 12 stab wounds is one from each one of them. Now, here's another interesting thing. So I hope you don't get too many nasty letters saying, how could you do this. You know, Shiloh, you know, there's a play called the Mousetrap in London. Do you know about this?
- [21:31]
A
I've heard of this play. Yeah. Go ahead.
- [21:33]
B
It's been on for 40 some odd years. And at the end of the play, the actors come out and they say, you know, please, please don't tell anybody how it ends, because you're gonna want your friends to come, and someday your children are gonna come, and you want them to be surprised, just as you were surprised. It's kind of lovely. The Mousetrap has been on for 73 years, and I did a whole podcast about Agatha Christie. I still don't know what the ending is. They never. People just don't divulge it. So I fear that I've gotten you into some trouble here, and I apologize.
- [22:15]
A
That's okay. If you have mail to send, Joe Nocera is where you can send those letters to Joe if they're angry about this.
- [22:26]
B
Join the many, many Free Press readers who thank Joe Nocera is not their favorite writer.
- [22:34]
A
So with the Orient Express, though. Hang on, I wanna ask you a question. So you talked about this ending with each of the people stabs one time, and you get the 12 stab wounds. But isn't there some ambiguity here? Because wasn't one of the theories also that, like, a guy got on and off the train and did it?
- [22:51]
B
Well, sure, at first, yes, at first. And then Poirot says, no, that couldn't possibly have happened. And then he comes up with a whole other theory, which kind of escapes me at the. But he comes up with another theory, and he says, this is one way it could have happened. He said, but I don't think that's what happened. I think this is what happened. Then he starts to lay out how everybody is connected to Armstrong. Here's the interesting thing, Shiloh, the thing that knocked me out, really. So they have to figure out, you got 12 guilty parties.
- [23:24]
A
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- [23:25]
B
What happens when they stop in the next place and the cops come to get the body? How are they going to deal with this? And Agatha Christie decides that Poirot to have Poirot say no, basically say, he did a heinous thing. He kidnapped a little girl, he killed her. Several other people died as a result of this for various complicated reasons, and therefore, he got away. And now he's gotten his just desserts. So we'll just, you know, we'll tell the cops that whoever did it, you know, ran away. So basically, he said, he lets everybody off the hook. There's another there's another mystery. I'm not gonna say the name of this because people will really kill me if I do that. But there's another mystery where it ends with Poirot telling the murderer, you know, basically, you need to commit suicide, and I won't say anything if you commit suicide. So she had an interesting approach to
- [24:34]
A
the justice system on this ending, though. This is pretty fascinating to me, the problem you just raised, which is you've got 12 murders, and since we've already gone, we've already spoiled it, we're just going to get into it. You've got 12 murderers, and the question that you just raised is, first of all, how to hold them to account, because justice seems to demand that you would hold them to account for a crime. But then the second aspect of this is that justice is further problematized because the person that they murdered was himself a criminal. And so you mentioned that he got his just dessert from the 12 people. And so I wonder if Agatha Christie isn't doing something really interesting here, which is exploring the problematic character of what we hope for and expect from justice. In other words, somehow, in some ways, either the law doesn't satisfy us with respect to what it says justice is, and we want more from justice than the law can give us. And other times, we're willing to overlook the law to get that justice. In other words, it seems like there's something deeper here than just a fun puzzle mystery. It's a deep reflection on what human beings want from justice and what justice demands from us.
- [25:55]
B
I agree with that. And I want to add, I think this was particularly powerful or exacerbated because it's connected to Lindbergh. What you have to remember is that at the point at which she wrote, at the point in which this book was published, they had not arrested or captured or found the person who would eventually be executed for the Lindbergh kidnapping. He was still out there on the loose. In fact, there was a widespread belief that gangsters had done it, and sure enough, her bad guy is a gangster. And in the US especially. But in other parts of the English speaking world, there was a thirst for revenge, for vengeance, for justice, for retribution, because the 20 month old child of the most famous man in America, most famous man in the world, had been kidnapped and killed. And that was considered just beyond the pale. And so I think Agatha kind of tapped into that sentiment with her ending.
- [27:16]
A
So can you kind of go through the details of the Lindbergh case and then map those on murder in the Orient Express? So I can see how that case inspired this novel, and then we can talk about that case and mysteries in general.
- [27:30]
B
In March of 1932, somebody climbed up a ladder. Supposedly. There's a lot of people who believe it was done differently, but let's just take the party line here. Somebody climbed up a ladder, crawled into the baby's bedroom, and the house was in the middle of nowhere, grabbed the baby, went down the ladder and took off, and then sent a series of ransom notes that eventually netted whoever the kidnapper was, $50,000. And a few months later, six weeks later, the baby was found dead in the woods. In the Lindbergh case, I should also add one of the servants for Ann Lindbergh's father and mother, and the Lindberghs lived with them during the week, wound up committing suicide because she was interrogated four times, and the fourth time she's, I just can't take this anymore. She had some cyanide on her bureau and she just took it and died instantly. In the Agatha Christie case, Daisy Armstrong is like 2 or 3 years old. Kidnapped, murdered. One of the nursemaids kills herself, just as happened in the Lindbergh case. They did initially believe that the mob was involved, so much so that Lindbergh authorized certain mobsters, gave him the ransom note and authorized certain mobsters to try and find, trying to kidnap her to get his child back. It was still, when Agatha wrote the book, it took two years before they arrested the alleged kidnapper, Bruno Hauptman, in the Bronx. And so at the point at which Agatha wrote the book, there was still some. That person had not been found. And so she was hypothesizing as to who might have done it. In the 1974 movie where Albert Fitty plays Poirot, the movie starts with just headline after headline after headline of newspapers about Daisy Armstrong's kidnapping and death. And that's another parallel. The Lindbergh kidnapping. There had never been anything in America as publicized as this, with the exception of the war itself. Radio was just coming into his own. A place like New York had 12 newspapers. Hopewell, New Jersey, where the kidnapping took place, was hour, hour and a half drive from New York City. So reporters were swarmed all over the place. They hounded the Lindberghs, and every day was a front page story with some hypothesis or another. Lindbergh hated the press. Hated the press. He just felt like after he had made his famous flight when he was 25 years old, he just felt like the press never left him alone. Agatha, after she got through her Time in that hotel, in that spa, also came to hate the press. Not with the intensity of Lindbergh, but she really didn't want anything to do with the reporters. So it made a certain sense that she would kind of jump on the Lindbergh case and cast it in one of her books.
- [31:22]
A
And didn't she not think that the case was properly solved?
- [31:25]
B
Agatha always thought one person couldn't have done this. As it happens, after finishing this podcast, that's what I think, too. I think it's completely implausible that somebody could have climbed up a ladder by themselves, had known where the boy's room was, would have known that that was the only window that was broken that they could climb into, climb into it without getting any mud on the floor, come out with the baby, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
- [31:55]
A
So in the one case on the murder in the Orient Express, you have, as we just discussed a moment ago, a resolution which is not fully satisfying and which problematizes what we want from justice. In other words, we seem to want orderliness from justice. A clean resolution. And what's beautiful, in a way, about what Christy does is she tempts us to say vigilante justice in the case of the murder on the Oregon Express is worth it. Like, yeah, they took it into their own hands. And these 12 people, maybe they committed a crime, too, but that guy was a total. A hole. And so I'm willing to look the other way. And so that's crazy, right? Because we're willing to let injustice pass for the sake of some deeper longing for justice. And the same would be true in the Lindbergh case. If there's this complexity that she saw, maybe multiple people did it. Maybe it's not as clean as we hope that it would be. And so it's fascinating to me that she's experimenting with a great question that authors all the way back to Plato and Aristotle were experimenting with, which is, when a people demands or a person demands justice, what exactly is it that they want? And are they willing, in some cases, to commit injustice in a way to get their justice? And does that further expose something about what we want justice to be, that it can't somehow be the thing we want it to be, that our hopes for it are greater than what can be realized in the world when there are, as there is in Christie and with Lindbergh, all of these unknowns? And so there's a sense in which I feel like Christy transcends mere sort of mystery genre fiction, that she really is Exploring something deep here.
- [33:30]
B
Well, she transcends it often, actually. Sometimes it is pure mystery fiction, but sometimes it speaks to larger issues of the way society, way people treat each other in society. There's a lot of stuff about rich versus rich versus poor. I mean, I'm not. She doesn't. She doesn't openly tackle social issues per se, but she does so slyly, as she did in Murder on the Orient Express. When you talk about justice and what we want from justice, it's so complicated a question. You know, it's weird that Christy got her justice before Bruno Hoffman was captured, because once Houtman was captured, it was the same emotional desire for revenge as Christie displays in the Murder on the Orient Express. America did. Not America. Just the moment he was captured, America assumed he was guilty, and they wanted him executed. And the press, in particular was. They didn't even call him the alleged killer. They just called him the killer or the kidnapper. And. His trial was deeply, deeply, deeply unfair. And we spend a fair amount in our podcast talking about that. If he was tried today with the same issues, but with a better lawyer, he would have gotten off. There's no way he would have been convicted, but the society demanded his head. And as we also point out very early in the podcast, when. The night that he was executed, there were parties in Trenton. There were execution parties at a hotel. In particular, one of our sources, grandparents was at the party. And when the. In Trenton, which was not that far from where the execution took place. And when the. When the, you know, when they. Whatever they do, push the button or whatever, the lights dimmed in the hotel because it absorbs so much power. So to me, that's a parallel where life is following art instead of art following life.
- [36:17]
A
Why did people want him to die so badly? I mean, you point out there's an injustice that's been done here in the sense that this trial, as you just said, was, you know, was not fair. And so my question is, you know, is it that it was. It was a child that was said to be taken and murdered? And the virulence. You know, we're. We're almost willing to overlook anything when someone commits a crime of that depth. I mean, what was it that caused the. The hunger for this man's unfair trial and, you know, and willingness of the people to kind of overlook some of the details to get him dead.
- [36:54]
B
Think of any celebrity you've ever known or ever known of in your life. Lindbergh was bigger than whoever that person is. Lindbergh had a Godlike stature in America because he had crossed. He was the first person to cross the Atlantic. And in so doing, well, he proved that air transportation could be a real thing. But more than that, again, I mentioned earlier, radio was just coming into its own. And this was the first time that the American people could follow something happening in real time. And so he takes off, and it's being followed. The radio announcers are following it, following, following. And then he disappears for 18 hours. No one can find him. No one knows where he is. And, you know, churches, they say prayers for Lindbergh, baseball games. They stop for a minute to think about Lindbergh. And then after 18 hours, he shows up. He's close to Paris. Hundred thousand people go to the airport in Paris to be there. When he's there, he comes back. He makes 90 speeches in all 48 states, 48 at the time. The airlines hire him to help promote their business. He's just viewed as this perfect specimen. Now, later, people will find out that he's an American firster, that he's a eugenicist, that, you know, he has a. He has some. He has some skeletons in his closet. But. But not then. At that point, he was the hero of heroes. And it, yes, people were upset because it was a child, but it was particularly because it was the child of Charles Lindbergh.
- [38:57]
A
I see. So it was his celebrity combined with the fact that it was a child.
- [39:01]
B
Correct. Kidnappings were very. Not murders. Kidnappings were very common then because it was the depression. And kidnapping was an easy way to make money. And it was usually a pretty straightforward transaction. You know, you give me ransom money, you get your kid back or your aunt back or your uncle back or your father back. And that usually happened. Not always. But kidnapping wasn't even a federal crime at that point until. Until the Lindenberg kidnapping.
- [39:23]
A
I'm curious to bring it back to Agatha Christie for a moment and just ask you. You know, she. Throughout her books, draw on real cases. I mean, she. You know, this one she's clearly, like, commenting on, in a quiet way, interpreting, sending some message about what she thinks about the Lindbergh case. That's a. That's pretty bold. And I just wonder, do you see this in her other writings or in her career more broadly, that she's kind of looking out at the world and using it as inspiration?
- [39:53]
B
Well, the Murder on the Orient Express is a very easy one to see. You don't have to be a forensic detective to get it. But let me give you another example, which is a little more obscure. And if you didn't know the real story, you wouldn't know it in real life. A woman, an actress named Jean Tierney, was pregnant, and a woman came to shake her hand who had some kind of communicable disease and should not have been out of bed. And the result was that the child was born with a variety of problems and deficits. Agatha has a mystery where a wealthy woman throws a. Moves to a town and throws a big party, and in the course of it, realizes that someone at the party had once shook her hand when she was pregnant and, you know, caused her child to have. Have these same. Same problems. And it's. This one is not a Poirot, but it's her other. Her other great detective, Ms. Marple, who. Who solves her mysteries mostly, you know, sitting in her. Sitting in her house, thinking and gossiping and talking to people and adding two and two and always coming up with four. So that's another example. I wish I remembered that book well enough to articulate it better, but that's a good one.
- [41:57]
A
Since we've spoiled Murder on the Orient Express, can you recommend two or three other Agatha Christie novels for people who want to start with her?
- [42:06]
B
My personal favorite is the Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I love that book. Another one that I really, really like is and Then There were none, which 10 people are invited to an island, and they've all committed some sort of crime that they've been able to cover up. And the guy who owns the island knows this, and, you know, one by one, they're killed. So there's another, you know, Shiloh, you're really making me think about this. There's another example of Agatha sort of saying, these people did bad things, so don't feel sorry for them when they get killed.
- [42:47]
A
Right, right. Which is a kind of interpretation of justice. I want to zoom out for a moment and talk to you about the mystery genre, the whodunit genre, and really even true crime in general. When I walk into a bookstore, especially a used bookstore, and I go to a lot of used bookstores, after all, I do host Old School. One of the things that I see in there is there's two genres that are like, there are shelves and shelves and shelves of romance. Number one, they're everywhere. I mean, go into a used bookstore, they're gonna have some romance novels. Second one is mystery. It's everywhere. And there are even used bookstores and new bookstores who only sell mystery novels. I think there's, you know, that's pretty rare to this just A whole bookst is the genre. So, you know, this, this genre is really popular. And then, you know, as the streaming services have kind of crested in their popularity, true crime is something, you know, that, that all Americans love to tune into. The ratings go bonanzas when, you know, when, when, when these streaming services make true crime documentaries. I'm curious about, you know, why people love reading mystery novels. What is it in your view that makes this genre, through television and obviously through books, so popular?
- [44:07]
B
You know, it's so interesting because, you know, on the one hand, the 1930s and early 40s was known as the golden age of mystery writing. It wasn't just Agatha, there was Dorothy Sayers. There were a whole bunch of writers who were writing, you know, what are now called cozy mysteries because they don't, they keep you reading. But they're not, they're not bloody. They're not, you know, they're fun. They, they have a, an interesting central character or central detective and so on and so forth. But then you have the modern ones. I mean, Patricia Cornwell, she sold something like 150 million copies of her books. And her main character is Kay Scarpetta, who solves crimes through forensic forensics. She's a forensic scientist and that's how she solves her crimes. And people love her. And you have books like Gone Girl, which is a whole different kind of much gorier. But also, I think there's a psychological element. I think people also, people like, people like to sit on the edge of their seat and say, what's going to happen next? And I think mysteries provide that and true crime provides that in a way that few other genres do.
- [45:39]
A
What is the thing that people are getting from true crime and mystery such that even if they know how it's going to end, they will reread a mystery novel or if they don't reread it, they'll read a hundred more and they're like pulp. I mean, you walk into the bookstore and there's 50 of them that you can choose from. And so what is it that they're coming back for emotionally from that genre?
- [46:03]
B
You know, the world is chaotic, the world is troubling. The world, you know, wars and trump and this and that, and a nice cozy mystery or even a non cozy mystery. It's like, it's orderly. One thing after another. It's, it makes sense. It ends with, it resolves, you know. You know, when you listen to a piece of music, you know, a crucial, crucial part of any piece of music is that it resolves at the end that you feel emotionally and musically that it's ending the way it should end. They actually teach this to composers. It's important. The same is true in a murder mystery. It has to resolve. Life may not resolve, but a murder mystery will resolve. I also think, you know, I come home at night, I crawl into bed sometimes I watch TV for an hour. Sometimes I listen to music for an hour, sometimes I read a book for an hour. But I take one hour out of my day to not think about anything that has to do with the world. And I think a lot of people are the same way. And I think true crime is just such a perfect way to end your day. You know, I gotta get through two chapters, then I go to bed, and then I'll take that two chapters tomorrow night.
- [47:34]
A
I'm fascinated by the fact that generally decent, good, hard working people want to spend their free time not thinking about or listening to stories about, you know, that. But rather about the kind of depths of deprivation and the, you know, people who are not those people. In other words, there's this kind of voyeuristic fantasy. Maybe it's like, what if I could be such a person? Or do I have that in me? Or. Or maybe it's not that. Maybe it's a marveling at the way human beings are able to do such things as climb a ladder and take a baby out of a window. Like, what kind of person is that? You know, that sort of thing is what fascinates me about this.
- [48:12]
B
See, I think. I think you're overthinking this, my friend.
- [48:14]
A
Well, I have been known to do it.
- [48:17]
B
Hugh Laurie wrote a wonderful piece about Agatha in the. I think in the Sunday Times of London. And in that piece, Eli's a pretty smart guy. And in that piece, he said something like, what is it about murder that holds our attention that's so powerful? He said, well, if there's a robbery, all parties are still alive. If there's a burglary, all the parties are still alive. Murder is the only thing where the victim can't tell you what happened, so you have to figure it out yourself. And so he views it just. And the other thing about murder, Shiloh, is like, think about Colombo. Are you too young for Colombo?
- [49:11]
A
No, I know Colombo, okay?
- [49:15]
B
Every week on Colombo, somebody's killed. You don't think, oh, that's so horrible. This person got murdered. Oh, that's so ugly. Oh, that. It's like, how's Colombo gonna solve it? That's what you care about? Well, I.
- [49:33]
A
Is that True, because I go back to, like, Cain and Abel. You know, it's. Murder is the crime. Like, murder is. It is the crime, right? You've. You've robbed another person of their life. And that is not like taking a pack of gum at a store. You know, it's a serious. More serious thing, capital punishment. I mean, we're gonna. We're gonna. The state will murder you for the crime that you've committed, not just imprison you. And so I do think there's something to murder itself. Of course, I admit what you're saying about the mechanics of the thing, and the person's not there. And so it's a harder crime to solve than a theft. But there's also something about taking another human being's life that I feel like is endlessly.
- [50:11]
B
See, I think you're. I think you're totally wrong about this, because to me, murder has been
- [50:19]
A
de.
- [50:20]
B
What's the right word? It's lost its potency to sh. To. It's just this. It's a plot device. That's all it is. It's a plot device. It doesn't have the power that you're ascribing to a real murder. Somebody getting shoved on the subway tracks or somebody stabbed while they're on the train, and all these horrible things that happen and where you feel that they're horrible, you know they're horrible, and you take them seriously as horrible things. But when you read Agatha Christie or watch Colombo, you don't think this murder is horrible. You just don't. You think, huh, How's Poirot gonna solve it? How's Colombo gonna solve it?
- [51:09]
A
I think there's more to it than that, because you and I have just been talking about how Agatha Christie's mysteries, the. How you're gonna solve it, are connected to a real life murder, namely the murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. Right. And so it's not. And we've been talking about true crime. She writes false crime, but people are tuning into true crime. And so I think there's. There is. It's not just a plot device. This happens in our own world. And she takes inspiration from reality. And of course, the documentary that you're doing is. Is not fiction. It's real. There's a real murder there.
- [51:41]
B
And it's a podcast, not a doc. It's a podcast. Shiloh.
- [51:44]
A
Sorry. The podcast is terrifying.
- [51:47]
B
Everybody should listen.
- [51:47]
A
Yeah, everyone listen. But you see what I'm saying here about that there is something primal, essential, more than mere entertainment about the. The Crime of murder.
- [51:59]
B
Now, you're right. In the, in the case of Daisy Armstrong and, and, you know, little Lindy, as they called the baby, I grant you that that happened pretty closely to the event, the actual event. And I don't know how people felt about it in 1934 when they bought her book. All these years later, all these years later, you don't really think of it as it's a tragedy, but you don't think of it. It doesn't have the same visceral impact on your emotional life the way it did. And I'll tell you, Let me tell you something else. So one of the things that's happened in the Lindbergh case, and we delve into this in the podcast quite a bit, is that there are lots of people today who think that Lindbergh himself was somehow involved in the kidnapping of his son. And that can only happen with the passage of time where the emotional impact of the kidnapping lessens to the degree that people can actually envision Charles Lindbergh himself being involved. Which in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, they never could. Not till the 70s, when America became a more conspiratorial country, do people start thinking like that.
- [53:22]
A
Well, I can't wait to listen to this show. No, Sarah, can you tell me, where can I listen to this? What is the name of the show? I gotta get, I gotta get into this. We gotta continue.
- [53:33]
B
The name of the show is Lindbergh Conspiracies. If you are a Free Press subscriber, you'll be able to get all episodes at once when it comes out on Tuesday 19th May. If you are not a Free Press subscriber, you can get one episode a week on Spotify, Apple and all the other various other podcast outlets.
- [53:57]
A
Well, Joe. No, Sarah, thank you for having such a wide ranging conversation with me. From Agatha Christie to Charles Lindbergh to the sin of murder. It's been a pleasure.
- [54:05]
B
It's been, it's been a total pleasure for me too.