1924: The Man in the Brown Suit

Publisher: The Bodley Head (1924) (UK); Dodd, Mead & Co., 1924 (US)

Series: Colonel Race

Category: Novel

Cross refs:

Warning: Spoilers!

With The Man in the Brown Suit, Christie returns to the thriller genre. She presents us with another plucky heroine, this time in the form of Anne Beddingfeld. Beddingfeld is one of Christie’s strong women, ready to weaponise her beauty and intellect, rather than subordinate herself to her patriarchal ‘protectors’. Young and ready for adventure, her narrative highlights the disconnect at the time between societal expectations of women and women’s own abilities and desires for independence. This is captured, with some humour, in the exchange between Beddingfeld and the solicitor Mr Flemming early on in the book:

He was benignant, kind and fatherly – and without the least doubt he regarded me as a perfect fool of a girl left adrift to face an unkind world. From the first I felt that it was quite useless to try to convince him of the contrary.

This theme of female independence surfaces again in a later exchange between Beddingfeld and Suzanne Blair:

How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female say, in the tone of one clinching an argument, ‘Edgar says——’ And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool. Suzanne, by reason of her married state, was yearning to lean upon some man or other.

Written in the interwar period, when the Agatha and her husband, Archie Christie (1889–1962), were short of money, and women were less welcome in the workplace than they had been during the war years, some of Beddingfeld’s frustrations and negotiations around the patriarchy may have echoed Christie’s own.

Set for the most part in South Africa, Christie began The Man in the Brown Suit, at least in concept, while she was herself in that country. She observed that ‘there was some kind of revolutionary crisis on while we were there, and I noted down a few useful facts’.[1] This was, in fact, the Rand Rebellion, which began on 28 December 1921 as a strike by white mine workers, later becoming an open, violent and racially charged rebellion against the state. In a letter home from South Africa Christie wrote:

At Germiston a wire was handed in from the Trade Commissioner … saying Jo’burg was unsafe … All the Hotels had shut down that afternoon with their waiters etc. on strike … They were throwing hand grenades in the street … Today they have proclaimed Martial law in Jo’burg.[2]

The rebellion simmered in the background of The Man in the Brown Suit, and later emerged as an opportunity for the mastermind criminal the ‘Colonel’ to supply ‘certain explosives and arms … to foment feeling generally, and to incriminate certain people up to the hilt’.

On a lighter note, the description Beddingfeld gives of her foray into surfing is undoubtedly based on Christie’s own experience of beginning to learn to surf while in South Africa.

Surfing looks perfectly easy. It isn’t. I say no more. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to return on the first possible opportunity and have another go. I would not be beaten. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board, and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.

On a later trip to Hawaii, Christie went on to perfect the art, becoming one of the first European women to stand on a surfboard. Beddingfeld’s seasickness also echoed the awful seasickness Christie suffered, although, unlike her story’s heroine, Christie never quite gained her sea legs.

The story was originally going to be called Mystery in the Mill House, or Murder in the Mill House, named after the home of a friend of the Christies, Colonel Earnest Albert Belcher (1871–1949), who had been responsible for taking the Christies on the 1922 world tour, which encompassed the aforementioned trips to South Africa and Hawaii, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and North America, and which inspired this novel. The trip was ostensibly part of Belcher’s, and Archie Christie’s, role to promote the British Empire Exhibition (1924–5) and Agatha Christie was happy to come along for the ride, encouraged by her mother who warned her that if she was away from her husband for too long he would feel he had ‘a right to forget her’ (fig. 1).[3]

As well as wanting his home referenced, Belcher also asked to feature as a character in the book. Accordingly, Christie offered him the role of the victim. This was, perhaps unsurprisingly, met with objections and instead he – or at least a version of him – became Sir Eustance Pedler, the mastermind criminal in The Man in the Brown Suit.

Belcher’s real-life secretary, Mr Bates, also made it into the novel as Pedler’s secretary, Mr Pagett. Christie described Bates as having ‘the appearance of a villain … and an altogether sinister aspect’, which is echoed in Pagett’s appearance as having the ‘face of a fourteenth-century poisoner – the sort of man the Borgias got to do their odd jobs for them’.[4] Though, while Pagett shared Bates’s appearance, the dynamic between Pagett and Pedler was the reverse of that of Bates and Belcher. While Pedler complained of Pagett always making him work, Christie observed that Bates was ‘unceasingly bullied’ and ‘made to work at any hour of the day or night Belcher felt like it’.[5]

Belcher himself was quite a character. His relationship with the Christies soured during their travels, and Christie described him as ‘rude, overbearing, bullying, inconsiderate, and mean’.[6] However, on returning to the UK, and without the strain of being travelling companions, their friendship was restored, the Christies recanting on their vow to never speak to Belcher again. In fact, Christie wrote, ‘to our enormous surprise, we found that we actually liked Belcher, that we enjoyed his company’.[7] And this story is dedicated to him:

To E.A.B. In memory of a journey, some Lion stories and a request that I should some day write the Mystery of the Mill House.

Likewise, in The Man in The Brown Suit, Anne Beddingfeld also declares a surprising fondness for Sir Eustace: ‘Never, to this day, have I been able to rid myself of a sneaking fondness for Sir Eustace. I dare say it’s reprehensible, but there it is.’

The Mill House itself also made an appearance, though not in the title, and with a relocation to Marlow rather than Windsor, where Belcher’s home was actually located.

The Man in the Brown Suit definitely feels more like a Tommy and Tuppence mystery than a Poirot. There are moments of absurd action followed by little consequence – such as when Pagett seemingly attempts to push Anne overboard on their journey to South Africa, but Anne never questions him over this, and everyone continues as if nothing has occurred.

In this novel we are also introduced to Colonel Race, a quiet, brooding, secret service agent, who we are at times directed to mistrust, but who eventually comes good as one of the chivalric heroes of the piece. Race actually proposes to Anne at one juncture (the second of three proposals she receives within the book – is it even an Agatha Christie story without a hasty, misjudged proposal?). While Anne goes off into the sunset at the end of the novel, Colonel Race is left to brood further until he finds himself in a future story alongside Hercule Poirot.     

The novel was first serialised as Anne the Adventurous in the London Evening News, running in some 50 instalments from 29 November 1923 to 28 January 1924, and was published later in 1924 by The Bodley Head in the UK and Dodd, Mead & Co. in the US.

[1] Christie 2011, p. 311.

[2] Michael Green, ‘The Surfing Detective: Collingwood, Christie, and the 1922 Rand Mine Rebellion or, “we are off to Rhodesia on Tuesday”’, English Academy Review 10, 1 (1993), pp. 66–82, https://doi.org/10.1080/10131759385310091 [accessed 26 March 2025].

[3] Christie 2011, p. 288.

[4] Christie 2011, pp. 289–9.

[5] Christie 2011, p. 290.

[6] Christie 2011, p. 297.

[7] Christie 2011, p. 306.