“The Lamp” - A Ghost Story by Agatha Christie

Hercule Poirot? Yes. Miss Jane Marple? Yes. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford? Yes. General mystery stories? Yes. 

Ghost stories? No. Except the answer is really yes.

 

I’ve read a lot of novels and stories by Agatha Christie. The novels wither her trademark and famous detectives. Her thrillers. Her general mysteries without a trademark detective. But I didn’t know she also wrote ghost stories.

 

The Lamp is a ghost story by Agatha Christie.

 

It’s not long, only about 13 pages. It was first published in 1933 in a collection called The Hound of Death. The book was available only in one way – by collecting coupons from the magazine “The Passing Show.” And there it sat, until 1971, when it was published in the United States in a collection called The Golden Ball and Other Stories. In 2013, it was published as a standalone ebook by William Morrow Paperbacks.

 

I was expecting a mystery. Instead, I got a ghost.

 

Agatha Christie in the 1930s

The story is not set in any particular time. It could be anytime between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. The only real clue is that the family is attended by servants, including maids, so that might push it back toward the ninetheenth.

 

A woman is looking for a house for herself, her young son, and her father. She finds one she really likes, but she questions the estate agent closely about why the house has been empty for 19 years. He finally admits that there is a story about a ghost, a boy who was left with servants while his father traveled to London. Unfortunately, the father died there, and it’s said that the little boy wanders through the place, crying.

 

The woman does not believe in ghosts. She buys the house, and the family moves in. And all seems to go well until her son and her father begin to hear noises. And see things. Things will not end the way she expects. For that matter, things will not end like the reader expects.

 

The title comes from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The woman’s elderly father quotes this passage:

 

What Lamp has Destiny to guide

Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?

“A Blind Understanding,” Heaven replied.

 

The story seems odd for a work by Agatha Christie. It also seems a little creepy. You’re not going to see Hercule Poirot using his little gray cells or Miss Marple knitting away listening quietly. Instead, you get the innocent if discerning understanding of childhood and the wisdom of age and how those in between can easily miss what’s really going on.

 

Yes, it’s an Agatha Christie ghost story.

 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

“Vivien’s Song,” poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Three Poems for Robinson Jeffers – Lucas Smith at The Sprawl of Quality.

 

Two Moccasins Tied Together – poem by Emily Patterson at Every Day Poems.

 

Fire in July – poem by Rosa Gilbert at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

"The Haunted Hotel" by Wilkie Collins

British author Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) is best known for his two mystery novels The Moonstone and The Woman in White. He’s also known as a friend of Charles Dickens; the two met in 1850, and Dickens not only published several of Collins’s stories in his magazines, he also collaborated with Collins on both fiction and drama projects. 

In 1878, Collins published a strange story (which may be redundant; most of his stories were strange) entitled The Haunted Hotel: A Tale of Modern Venice. The novel is set in England, Ireland, and Italy, and it certainly has the stamp of Collins, being a mystery with supernatural or ghostly overtones.

 

An English aristocrat, Lord Montbarry, has surprised his family and friends by breaking off his engagement with a cousin, Agnes Lockwood, to marry a foreign countess. The new Lady Montbarry is completely unacceptable to the family; she and her brother, a supposed baron, seem more like goldiggers. When they learn that the lord’s wealth is all tied to entailed holdings (which means they can’t own and sell anything; the property remains with whomever holds the title), they induce the lord to take out a life insurance policy.

 

While on their extended honeymoon, the newlyweds rent a palace in Venice. The bride’s brother joins them. And it is not long before the lord succumbs to what is diagnosed as bronchitis. An investigation is launched by the insurance company, but all seems aboveboard.

 

Wilkie Collins

Except, of course, it’s not. The widow is becoming haunted by what has happened; the story beings with her consulting a renowned physician in London, trying to determine f she’s going mad. She has become convinced that the jilted fiancée, who by all accounts is a young woman of sterling reputation, will be the instrument of the widow’s own death. 

 

Collins mixes mystery and a ghost story together. He adds the deceased lord’s missing manservant, and a mysterious payment made to the manservant’s wife, swirling the plot into an even more mysterious direction. We know what likely happened – Lord Montbarry was likely murdered. But we don’t know what happened, and how the perpetrators managed to pull it off.

 

The Haunted Hotel is a classic Wilkie Collins novel, with a mix of mystery, murder, and the supernatural. Originally published in 1878, it has the charmingly formal language of the Victorian age coupled with a tale of the supernatural. The ghosts of those who die before their time don’t rest easy. 

"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

Many consider The Turn of the Screw by Henry James to be one of the best, if not the best, ghost stories. The novella was first serialized by Collier’s Magazine in 1898; reading it today is to read a classic gothic horror story. James, apparently, needed money, and he deliberately wrote a story he was confident would sell. It did. And it did more than sell. 

The Turn of the Screw influenced Joseph Conrad when he wrote The Heart of Darkness. Numerous movies based on the story have been made. It inspired Benjamin Britten to write an opera. And the story has been told and remade over and over again by many authors, including Joyce Carol Oates. 

 

The novella is a kind of story-within-a-story. A group of people celebrating Christmas Eve in an old house are talking about ghost stories. One, a man known only to the reader by his first name, Douglas, says that he has a manuscript given to him some 20 years previously by a woman when she died. The others convince Douglas to send to his home to get it, and it arrives the next evening. 

 

Douglas begins to read the story which begins straightforwardly enough. A young woman is engaged to be a governess to a niece and nephew left in the charge of their uncle, their parents having died in India. The boy is usually at school; his sister lives at the uncle’s country home, called The Bly. The man sets one unusual requirement: the new governess is not to contact him about the children, for any reason whatsoever. She travels to the home, which is quite large, old, and rebuilt and added onto many times.

 

Henry James

The first problem is that a letter arrives from the boy’s school; he’s being “sent down,” or expelled. The cause isn’t specified. After meeting the boy, the governess can’t imagine what might have happened, and she decides to ignore it, for the time being. The second problem is that she begins to see a man around the house, looking in a window from outside or near the house itself. When she describes the man to the cook, the cook is shocked. It is the description of a particularly nasty valet who once worked there. The problem is that the man is dead. Not too long after, a second person is spotted, that of a woman, the former governess, who also had died. And what the governess comes to realize is that the two apparitions want the children.

 

Or do they? Could it be a case of the governess having an overactive imagination? Is she possibly suffering from a mental illness? 

 

James (1843-1916) is considered as having been one of the best novelists writing in English His works include The Ambassadors, Portrait of a Lady, Wings of the Dove, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians, and Washington Square, and he published numerous short stories, novellas, plays, biographies, and criticism. Critics point to James as the transition between the Realist School and Modernism.

 

The word most frequently used in describing The Turn of the Screw is “ambiguity.” A major reason the story leaves so many readers unsettled is that it never really answers the question of ghosts versus madness. But that is its genius; it is a horror story regardless of which interpretation is accepted.