The Moving Finger | 1943, first edition, with a remarkable late letter revisiting the novel’s “Pleasure of Idleness” as well as a mention to the IRA

An excellent first edition of The Moving Finger, accompanied by a remarkable typed letter signed by Agatha Christie nearly thirty years later, in which she returns to one of the novel’s most distinctive and personal images.

The letter, signed “Agatha Mallowan,” was written from Winterbrook House on 16 March 1972, while Christie was still suffering the effects of a fractured hip. Explaining that she had been “rather lazy with my home work of late,” she writes that her injury had encouraged her to spend more time enjoying what she calls the Chinese “Pleasure of Idleness,” describing:

“a very charming picture of an old man in a lovely tree, doing cats-cradle.”

It is an image with a direct and striking connection to The Moving Finger.

In the novel, Jerry Burton is himself recovering from an accident when he reflects upon the virtues of enforced idleness and recalls a favourite Chinese picture of an elderly man beneath a tree, occupied with cat’s cradle. The image evidently stayed with Christie for decades. She returned to it again in An Autobiography, using it as a metaphor for the leisurely and reflective process of writing her own life story.

Here, in a private letter written in old age, Christie finds herself occupying much the same position as her fictional character: physically incapacitated, temporarily removed from work and once again contemplating the pleasures of doing nothing.

The letter is also unusually revealing of Christie’s dry and distinctly unsentimental humour. Responding to an unidentified proposal sent to her by the recipient, she jokes:

“I suppose Miss Anita Chuan ought really be advised to apply for a job with the I.R.A., specially recommended by Bernadette Devlin, perhaps.”

The remark was written at an extraordinarily charged moment in modern British and Irish history, only weeks after Bloody Sunday and during the political crisis that would lead to the suspension of Stormont later that month.

A particularly evocative pairing of one of Christie’s classic Crime Club first editions with a private letter that, three decades after its publication, unexpectedly returns to one of the novel’s most memorable ideas.

The letter is one page, 5½ x 7 inches, on Winterbrook House letterhead, dated 16 March 1972 and signed “Agatha Mallowan.” Fine condition, with a small stain touching the first name of the signature.

A rare instance in which Christie’s fiction, autobiography and private life converge around the same image.