Free Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations by Mike Holgate Page B

friends became concerned as he had attempted suicide in the past. He wrote to Nancy:
    I am so tired that it feels like heaven drawing near: only there are people who whisper that heaven will bore me. When they tell me that I almost wish I were dead for I have done everything in life except rest, and if rest is to prove no refuge, then what is left?
    Lady Astor tried to cheer Lawrence with the promise of a forthcoming government post and invited him to her country house in Buckinghamshire: ‘I believe... you will be asked to help reorganise the Defence Forces. If you will come to Cliveden, the last Saturday in May... you will never regret it’.
    Britain needed men of Lawrence’s calibre in preparing to counter the growing threat posed by Germany. On the 13 May Lawrence received a letter from the award-winning author of Tarka the Otter , Henry Williamson, based in Georgeham, North Devon, proposing a meeting at Cloud’s Hill to discuss the possibility of Lawrence holding talks with Adolf Hitler to try and secure a lasting peace in Europe. Williamson was a member of Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and fervent admirer of the Fuhrer’s achievements. His collected novels, The Flax of Dream , contained the following dedication: ‘I salute the great man across the Rhine whose life symbol is a happy child’.
    Lawrence agreed to receive Williamson and rode to the Post Office to send a telegram with the following directions: ‘Lunch Tuesday will find cottage one mile north of Bovington Camp SHAW’.
    On his way back home he swerved his motorcycle to avoid two errand boys on bicycles, crashed and flew over the handlebars, receiving severe head injuries. Lawrence was taken to Bovington Military Hospital but never recovered consciousness and died six days later. The ghost of Lawrence wearing flowing, long Arab robes was soon spotted riding a motorbike by Cloud’s Hill. Chillingly, a year before his death, Lawrence had prophesised his demise in a letter to motorbike manufacturer George Brough: ‘It looks as though I might yet break my neck on a Brough Superior’.
    Agatha Christie’s fictional hero, Fakir Carmichael, is killed while trying to relay plans to his supervisor about a secret weapon; likewise, following Lawrence’s death, rumours circulated that he had been murdered by foreign agents. Conversely, another story circulated that his death had been faked by the Secret Service to allow him to undertake espionage in the Middle East. Supporters of this theory believe he died in Morocco in 1968. In keeping with similar tales about heroic figures, including Francis Drake, Horatio Nelson and Lord Kitchener, there is also a legend that Lawrence has merely withdrawn into an Arthurian limbo from which he will emerge to save an imperilled nation.

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EDEN PHILLPOTTS
Peril at End House
    Eden Phillpotts was an odd-looking man, with a face more like a faun’s than an ordinary human being’s.
    Agatha Christie ( An Autobiography , 1977)
    In Peril at End House (1932), Poirot and Hastings go to the aid of a young woman in danger at an eerie mansion, End House, whilst holidaying at the Majestic Hotel, St Loo. The properties are recognisable as Rock End and the Imperial Hotel in Torquay and Agatha Christie dedicated the mystery novel to one of the town’s most famous former residents, prolific author Eden Phillpotts, in gratitude ‘for his friendship and the encouragement he gave me many years ago’.
    Born in India, the son of an Army officer who died while he was an infant, Eden Phillpotts (1862-1960) was raised and educated in Plymouth, then for ten years worked for an insurance company in London before he successfully turned to writing for a living after failing in his ambition to become an actor. For half a century Phillpotts produced an average of four major works a year, covering novels, poems, plays, short stories and even detective stories, using the pseudonym Harrington Hext. However, he is best remembered as the