The Man in the Brown Suit

The Man in the Brown Suit is a mystery novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the UK by The Bodley Head on 22 August 1924 and in the US by Dodd, Mead and Company later in the same year. The character Colonel Race is introduced in this novel.

Anne Beddingfeld is on her own and ready for adventures when one comes her way. She sees a man die in a tube station and picks up a piece of paper dropped nearby. The message on the paper leads her to South Africa as she fits more pieces of the puzzle together about the death she witnessed. There is a murder in England the next day, and the murderer attempts to kill her on the ship en route to Cape Town.

The setting for the early chapters is London. Later chapters are set in Cape Town, Bulawayo, and on a fictional island in the Zambezi. The plot involves an agent provocateur who wants to retire, and has eliminated his former agents.

Reviews were mixed at publication, as some hoped for another book featuring Hercule Poirot,

Characters

Anne Beddingfeld: orphaned daughter of Professor Beddingfeld, famous archaeologist.
Anita Grünberg: alias Nadina, beautiful woman, murdered in The Mill House.
John Harold Eardsley: son of Sir Laurence Eardsley, the South African mining magnate who died a month before Anne is aboard the ship, alias Harry Lucas, alias Harry Rayburn.
Harry Lucas: friend of John Eardsley, killed in the Great War.
Colonel Race: a distant cousin of Sir Laurence Eardsley who works for the British government as a spy or a detective. He has a reputation as lion hunter in Africa and as a wealthy man.
Suzanne, the Hon. Mrs Clarence Blair: a society lady who befriends Anne Beddingfeld.
Sir Eustace Pedler: a wealthy Member of Parliament and a businessman.
Guy Pagett: Sir Eustace Pedler's secretary.
Arthur Minks: alias the Reverend Edward Chichester, alias the mysterious Hostess on the "Kilmorden", alias Miss Pettigrew, alias Count Sergius Paulovitch, and an agent of "The Colonel".
Mr Flemming: solicitor, and his wife: Anne's hosts after her father's death.
L B Carton: Anita Grünberg's husband, a diamond sorter for De Beers in South Africa. He died at Hyde Park Tube Station.
Inspector Meadows: Scotland Yard detective who dismisses Anne's evidence about the murder in The Mill House as unimportant.
Lord Nasby: owner of the Daily Budget and Anne's employer.
The red-bearded Dutchman: an agent of "The Colonel".
Mrs Caroline James: wife of the gardener at The Mill House, who gives the keys to potential renters.
The Colonel: criminal mastermind and murderer whose identity is concealed for most of the story.

Literary significance and reception

The Times Literary Supplement reviewed the novel in its issue of 25 September 1924. The review appreciated the "thriller-cum-adventure" style of the book and concluded, "The author sets so many questions to the reader in her story, questions which will almost certainly be answered wrongly, that no one is likely to nod over it, and even the most experienced reader of romances will fail to steer an unerring course and reach the harbour of solution through the quicksands and shoals of blood, diamonds, secret service, impersonation, kidnapping, and violence with which the mystery is guarded."

The unnamed reviewer in The Observer (7 September 1924) wrote: "Miss Christie has done one bold and one regrettable thing in this book. She has dispensed with Hercule Poirot, her own particular Sherlock Holmes, to whose presence and bonhomie and infallibility the success of her previous books has been mainly due." After comparing Poirot with Harry Rayburn, the reviewer continued by saying that the book, "will be something of a disappointment to those who remember The Mysterious Affair at Styles. It is an excellent and ingenious complexity, in its way, but it might have been written by quite a number of the busy climbers who now throng this particular slope of Parnassus. One almost suspects that Miss Christie contemplates exchanging the mantle of Conan Doyle for that of Miss Dell; a hazardous manoeuvre, for the two authoresses are very different in tastes and sympathies." The reviewer went on to say that, "The plan of the book is rather confused. There is a prologue which does not link itself up with the rest of the story for quite a long time; and the idea of giving alternate passages from the diaries of the heroine and of Sir Eustace Pedler is not altogether justified by the glimpses it gives of that entertaining but disreputable character. One of the points on which some readers will have doubts is as to the plausibility of the villain: assuredly he is a novel type in that role. The book, like all Miss Christie's work, is written with spirit and humour."

Robert Barnard said about this novel that it was "Written during and about a trip to Southern Africa, this opens attractively with the heroine and her archeologist father (Agatha's interest in the subject was obviously pre-Max), and has some pleasant interludes with the diary of the baddie. But it degenerates into the usual stuff of her thrillers, and the plot would probably not bear close examination, if anyone were to take the trouble."

Some additional blurbs regarding the book, and used by The Bodley Head for advertising subsequent print runs, are as follows:

:*"A capital tale – mystery piled on mystery, incident on incident." – Referee.

:*"Agatha Christie has written a most entertaining story, excellently conceived and executed." – Morning Post.

Dining with the Christies before the trip, Belcher had suggested setting a mystery novel in his home, the Mill House at Dorney and naming the book The Mystery of the Mill House; and had insisted on being in it as well. He is the inspiration for the central character Sir Eustace Pedler, having been given a title at Archie's suggestion. In Agatha Christie: The Grand Tour, Christie writes that for all his shortcomings, she and Archie "did not keep to our vow of never speaking to Belcher again...To our enormous surprise, we found that we actually liked Belcher, that we enjoyed his company."

Adaptations

Television

US adaptation

The Man in the Brown Suit aired in the US on 4 January 1989, adapted by Alan Shayne Productions, in association with Warner Brothers Television. It is set in a later era than the 1920s, and many details are changed as a result: the setting, for instance, is Cairo. At least one review found the story lacking, feeling that those adaptations of Christie's novels shown on PBS in the United States fared better than this one, which aired on CBS.

Adaptor: Carla Jean Wagner<br/>

Director: Alan Grint

Main Cast:

Stephanie Zimbalist – Anne Beddingfeld
Rue McClanahan – Suzy Blair
Tony Randall – Rev Edward Chichester
Edward Woodward – Sir Eustace Pedler
Ken Howard – Gordon Race
Nickolas Grace – Guy Underhill
Simon Dutton – Harry Lucas
María Casal – Anita
Federico Luciano – Leo Carton
Rose McVeigh – Valerie

French adaptation

The novel was adapted as a 2017 episode of the French television series Les Petits Meurtres d'Agatha Christie.

Graphic novel

The Man in the Brown Suit was released by HarperCollins as a graphic novel adaptation on 16 July 2007, and, on 3 December 2007 was adapted by Hughot and illustrated by Bairi (). This was translated from the edition first published in France by Emmanuel Proust éditions in 2005 under the title of L'Homme au complet marron.

Publication history

The first UK edition retailed at seven shillings and sixpence (7/6) and the US edition at $2.00.

In her 1977 Autobiography Christie refers to it as Anna the Adventuress. The change from her preferred title was not of her choosing and the newspaper's choice was one that she considered to be "as silly a title as I have ever heard". She raised no objections, however, as the Evening News were paying her £500 (£ in current terms) for the serial rights which she and her family considered an enormous sum. At the suggestion of her first husband Archie, Christie used the money to purchase a grey, bottle-nosed Morris Cowley. She later stated that acquiring her own car ranked with dining at Buckingham Palace as one of the two most exciting incidents in her life.