Endless Night (novel)

The title comes from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence:

Every night and every morn,

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night,

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

The story begins with Michael telling us about his time as a chauffeur and how he met the architect Rudolph Santonix. He plans to one day have a house built by Santonix. Michael is walking along a village road near the Gipsy's Acre property one day when he meets Ellie, a wealthy heiress who wants to escape from her world of snobby friends, begging relatives, and restrictive financial advisors. As it turns out Ellie had purchased Gipsy's Acre before they met, they decide to marry and build a house at Gipsy's Acre acre with Santonix. The newlywed couple decides to go around the village meeting its residents but is threatened by an old gypsy woman, Ms. Lee, who warns them and instructs them to leave because of a curse.

Ellie sustains an injury and invites her companion, Greta Andersen, over to stay with them. Ellie begins to worry about Mike and Greta, as they get into heated arguments. While at lunch with Major Philpot, Mike begins to worry about the fact that Ellie has not yet joined them after going out horse riding. The next day, they find Ellie dead and having sustained no apparent injuries, the local police determine that Ellie died of shock, likely induced when she encountered Ms. Lee. Ellie also had a heart condition. Michael travels to America to attend Ellie’s funeral with her family and collect the inheritance. While there he hears that Ms. Lee has been found dead in a quarry, and Claudia Hardcastle (one of Ellie’s friends from the village) has also died whilst out riding. After Ellie's funeral, Mike goes to visit Santonix on his deathbed. Right before Santonix dies, he screams, “You should have gone the other way!” Feeling disturbed by this, Mike returns to the UK on a sea voyage to give him time to reflect.

When he returns to the village Mike reveals how he and Greta had met much earlier when in Germany, they had fallen in love and devised a plan to take Ellie’s money. They killed her with cyanide put inside her allergy pills that took a while to dissolve, and paid Ms. Lee to frighten Ellie and raise suspicion of the shock theory. To eliminate her as a witness, they pushed Ms. Lee into a quarry. Claudia Hardcastle was unintentionally poisoned after finding and taking some of Ellie's pills. It's assumed that Santonix had guessed Michael’s intents and was trying to warn him of the rage fits he (Mike) had. He and Greta celebrate what they have done, but Michael starts to lapse and sees Ellie everywhere he looks. When they realise Ellie's relatives may have suspicions about them, Mike has another fit and strangles Greta. Shortly afterwards, the police and the local doctor arrive; their suspicions were aroused by Claudia Hardcastle's death. Mike reminisces about all of the bad things he has done, such as drowning his childhood friend to steal his watch. He asks for a pen and paper to write down his story, and the novel ends.

The following details of the characters are based on the original novel. Backstories, backgrounds, and names vary with differing international adaptations, based on censorship, cultural norms, etc.

• Fenella Rogers (née Guteman): Often called Ellie, she is a sweet heiress with a head for business.
• Michael Rogers: A 'rolling stone', who shifts from job to job. Michael hides dark secrets behind his nonchalant facade.
• Greta Andersen: Ellie's Scandinavian, blonde companion with a penchant for arranging and micromanagement.
• Claudia Hardcastle: A young woman in the village who shares Ellie's passion for horse-riding.
• Cora Van Stuyvesant: Ellie's stepmother, several times divorced, and a thoroughly unpleasant woman of roughly forty years of age who married Ellie's father for money.
• Andrew Lippincott: Ellie's guardian and trustee, a Bostonian with hardly a trace of an accent, who resents Greta's 'influence' over Ellie.
• Esther Lee: The village gypsy, who enjoys frightening people, especially when money is involved.
• Stanford Lloyd: Claudia Hardcastle's former husband and one of Ellie's trustees.
• Frank Barton: The husband of Ellie's aunt, a man who borrows but doesn't return.
• Rudolf Santonix: A perfectionist architect who 'looks through you' and 'sees right through the other side'. A personal friend of Michael's from the latter's time as a cab driver.
• Major Phillpot: The village 'god' who becomes a good friend of Michael.
• Mrs. Rogers: as his mother, one of the few people who know Michael well. She worked hard to get her son a proper education since her husband was a poor role model and an alcoholic.

The novel was published in 1967. Christie later said she normally wrote her books in three to four months but wrote Endless Night six weeks.[5] The novel – which recycles plots and characters Christie had used in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Death on the Nile – is dedicated "To Nora Prichard from whom I first heard the legend of Gipsy's Acre." Nora Prichard was the paternal grandmother of Mathew, Christie's only grandson. Gipsy's Acre was a field located on a Welsh moorland. The Times Literary Supplement of 16 November 1967 said, "It really is bold of Agatha Christie to write in the persona of a working-class boy who marries a poor little rich girl, but in a pleasantly gothic story of gypsy warnings she brings it all off, together with a nicely melodramatic final twist."[6]

The Guardian carried a laudatory review in its issue of 10 November 1967 by Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley Cox) who said, "The old maestrina of the crime-novel (or whatever is the female of 'maestro') pulls yet another out of her inexhaustible bag with Endless Night, quite different in tone from her usual work. It is impossible to say much about the story without giving away vital secrets: sufficient to warn the reader that if he should think this is a romance he couldn't be more mistaken, and the crashing, not to say horrific suspense at the end is perhaps the most devastating that this surpriseful author has ever brought off."[7]

Maurice Richardson in The Observer of 5 November 1967 began, "She changes her style again and makes a determined and quite suspenseful attempt to be with it." He finished, "I shan't give away who murders whom, but the suspense is kept up all the way and Miss Christie's new demi-tough, streamlined style really does come off. She'll be wearing black leather pants next, if she isn't already."[8] The poet and novelist Stevie Smith chose the novel as one of her Books of the Year in the same newspaper's issue of 10 December 1967 when she said, "I mostly read Agatha Christie this year (and every year). I wish I could write more about what she does for one in the way of lifting the weight, and so on."[9]

Robert Barnard: "The best of the late Christies, the plot a combination of patterns used in Ackroyd and Nile (note similarities in treatment of heiress/heroine's American lawyers in Nile and here, suggesting she had been rereading). The murder occurs very late, and thus the central section seems desultory, even novelettish (poor little rich girl, gypsy's curse, etc.). But all is justified by the conclusion. A splendid late flowering."[10]

• 1967, Collins Crime Club (London), 30 October 1967, Hardcover, 224 pp
• 1968, Dodd Mead and Company (New York), 1968, Hardcover, 248 pp
• 1969, Pocket Books (New York), Paperback, 181 pp
• 1970, Fontana Books (Imprint of HarperCollins), Paperback, 192 pp
• 1972, Ulverscroft Large-print Edition, Hardcover, 342 pp, ISBN 0-85456-115-3
• 2011, HarperCollins; Facsimile edition, Hardcover: 224 pages, ISBN 978-0-00-739570-5

In the US, the novel was first serialised in two parts in The Saturday Evening Post from 24 February (Volume 241, Number 4) to 9 March 1968 (Volume 241, Number 5) with illustrations by Tom Adams.

• Endless Night at the official Agatha Christie website
• Endless Night (1972) on IMDb