Free Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations by Mike Holgate

in bloody water, the naked body of her father in an unused room and the noise of butchering sounds in the night. The week after her father’s disappearance, when using the outside privy, she clearly remembered seeing his face floating in the water. After consulting a psychiatrist about these disturbing visions, she was advised to make a report to the police. They took the matter seriously and dug up the site of the old privy, where human remains were duly found.
    Annie’s mother, Winnie Cameron, had reported her husband missing and in due course obtained a divorce on grounds of desertion. When the gruesome discovery was made thirty-five years later, she shot herself, leaving a note confessing to the murder.

17
THE SINKING OF THE LUSITANIA
The Secret Adversary
    The torpedoing of the Lusitania was a premeditated crime… This could only be done by vampires in human form.
    Western Morning News
    Agatha Christie introduced courting ‘partners in crime’ Tommy Beresford and Tuppence Crowley in The Secret Adversary (1922). The novel is not a murder mystery but a thriller, cleverly mixing fact with fiction. Set after the end of the First World War, the childhood friends meet up and, seeking excitement and gainful employment, they form a business called ‘Young Adventurers’. After placing a newspaper advertisement offering to do anything and go anywhere, they are recruited by the Secret Service and become embroiled in the murky world of espionage, seeking the whereabouts of a young woman, Jane Finn, who, as she queued for a lifeboat, was handed highly sensitive wartime documents by an intelligence agent about to go down on a ship attacked by a U-boat, including a treaty that could still embarrass the government in peacetime. Tommy and Tuppence begin their investigation by tracking down surviving passengers to learn what they can of Jane Finn’s fate in what was a true-life international incident, the sinking of the SS Lusitania .
    In May 1915, the Cunard liner Lusitania set sail on her last voyage, with 1,257 passengers and 702 crew aboard. Travelling from New York to Liverpool, she was sunk by a U-boat eight miles off the coast of Ireland with the loss of 1,198 lives. Too late, a lookout on the bow sounded the alarm through a megaphone, ‘Torpedoes coming on the starboard side!’ The torpedo struck the Lusitania under the bridge and triggered a second explosion of a deadly cargo onboard the ship. A shocked survivor recalled, ‘It sounded like a million-ton hammer hitting a steam boiler a hundred feet high’.
    The barbarism of an attack on an unarmed and unescorted passenger ship without warning brought widespread condemnation, summed up by the following comment in the press: ‘Fifteen hundred non-combatants murdered in cold-blood… has produced a feeling of horror and abhorrence which cannot, and should not, be confined to impotent fury’. However, it was not generally known at the time that apart from passengers, the liner was also carrying munitions, arguably making it a legitimate military target. Only a week earlier, the German embassy had warned US citizens of the dangers of travelling on a published list of vessels that included the Lusitania . When news of the loss broke in England, rioters took to the streets and attacked shops with German-sounding names in cities across the country, including London, Manchester and Liverpool. Mobs then targeted other minority groups, including Jewish and Chinese communities, forcing the government to send in troops to restore order and the introduction of a policy to intern ‘enemy aliens’ for the duration of the war.
    Although outraged, there was no comparable violent reaction in the USA, despite the fact that 128 US citizens had drowned in the atrocity. A year later Woodrow Wilson was elected President on a peace platform, naïvely asserting that ‘there is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right’.