Murder By Design - Promotion UCL, People Magazine March 2005
Feature by Clare Bowerman editor: Photographs ©UCL - Vanessa outside the Cruciform building, University of London and right at Florin Court, Charterhouse Square - set location of Agatha Christie's Poirot.
Click here to vierw the magazine cover.
Vanessa Wagstaff (Slade School 1995) has turned a lifelong passion for Agatha Christie into a book.
Snapping photographs mid-air from a microlight aircraft isn't the sort of task I'd have associated with the job of a period book designer, but according to Vanessa Wagstaff (Slade School 1995) it's all in a day's work. The decidedly game artist and designer is telling me about gathering pictures for her glossy new book Agatha Christie: A Reader's Companion, which she's published against all odds - and, by the sound of it, against several of the elements.
"The book didn't have a big budget for hiring pictures, so I just thought I'd ask a local flying club to take me up and I'd get some pictures myself," says Vanessa, who sounds unperturbed by the whole experience. As an afterthought she adds: "There were safety issues, I suppose, and moving your head too much with the camera makes you pretty airsick, but it was an amazing experience."
Co-written with Stephen Poole (UCL 1983), A Reader's Companion is a survey of the celebrated whodunnit writer' life and literature that distinguishes itself through its lavish imagery - which is why, Vanessa explains, it had to look right. Targeted at Christie fans who naturally have an eye for detail, the book moves chronologically through Christie's novels and short stories. A résumé of each work is combined with the book jacket, TV drama stills, historical objects and contemporary newspaper cuttings that surrounded it, transporting the reader back into the world that Christie and her characters inhabited.
Vanessa had been a lover of Agatha Christie's work for years when she came to produce A Reader's Companion, having devoured most of her novels and even investing in some Christie first editions - an expensive hobby in recent years, which have seen many of the author's works fetch tens of thousands of pounds at auction.
However, it was Vanessa's professional interests that eventually led her back to further her interest in the novelist in book form. After studying set design at the Slade School, Vanessa initially pursued fine art, a career that proved far from lucrative: "I did approach galleries, but to be honest I was painting rather than selling paintings."
It was when she decided to pursue her interest in set design, approaching TV costume designers for work, that she realised the value of a resource she'd been building up for years: her family photograph archives. Vanessa's mother's family were upper class wit numerous aristocratic connections, and had led leisured, lavish lifestyles through the first half of the 20th century, resulting in a wealth of fashionable family friends and relatives, whose photographs Vanessa had catalogued and restored. Although initially a personal undertaking, the catalogue turned out to be a rare resource for a costume researcher: "Although you can get hold of fashion photos, I found that having a library of everyday images was considered to be a real bonus. My family albums were my way in to costume research."
Stints on four Hercule Poirot TV dramas followed, which couldn't have been much better for Vanessa, whose favourite Christie novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, not only launched Christie's career, but also introduced the mustachioed Poirot to the British public.
Published in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles shows Poirot use his 'little grey cells' for the first time to unravel the murder of old Mrs Inglethorp by poisoning, amid a host of suspicious characters including the 'absolute bounder' Alfred Ingelthorp and the mysterious Mr Bauerstein.
The novel was partly inspired by Christie's experiences during the First World War when she served as a VAD nurse (she would later serve in the UCLH dispensary during the Second World War) where the novelist gained a working knowledge of drugs and poisons which stood her in excellent stead in her subsequent writing career. Vanessa says: "The novel has all the freshness of something new. I always like the lead up to the plot in films rather than the plot itself, and that's what The Mysterious Affair at Styles does; introducing Poirot, who inspired a lifetime of plots for her work."
Vanessa's experiences on the TV adaptations of the Poirot novels reignited her passion for the design of the 1930s in general and for Christie in particular, and also gave her a seemingly inexhaustible knowledge of period details (her knowledge of Art Deco window fittings alone is jaw-dropping): "The Poirot sets were just music to my eyes, basically, and I forged very good contacts, and learned a lot about set fixtures and fittings and graphics."
A Reader's Companion was a natural extension of Vanessa's work on Poirot, bringing together her experience in two-dimensional and three-dimensional design with her love of the Christie era: "I was lucky enough to find an agent for the book who was herself passionate about Christie, because the whole intention of the book was that it should be lavish, and it's hard to get support for such an expensive proposal for a first book."
Even when Vanessa did find backing for the project, it took all her ingenuity to get all of the visuals she wanted - contemporary typefaces, book shots, cartoons and photographs - within the picture budget. Copyright on objects associated with Christie turned out to be fiercely protected and expensive to buy, so in many cases Vanessa needed to improvise. One factor that helped her out was her skill for trompe l'oeil gained by years in set design, where she learned "how to suggest a happening that hasn't occurred in fact". Many of the items pictured in A Reader's Companion - an old-fashioned telephone, a pair of chic high there is no explicit link; the portraits of girls with wavy bobs beaming outside country houses seem plucked straight out of a Christie novel, but are in fact from Vanessa's family albums of the 1930s.
It's a sleight that Christie herself might well have approved of, and Vanessa found it to be one of the most rewarding aspects of her work: "One of the first pages in my book shows the gates of Abney Hall, the source of inspiration for many of Christie's country locations, shrouded in mist and smoke. I fused two pictures for this; firstly, I lit a bonfire at the bottom of my garden at home, and photographed the smoke and mist in the trees and then I combined it with a picture of the gates at the hall. So I got to set-design the picture, and then design it again as a page layout, which was a very creative process."
A Reader's Companion has provided an equally lively start to her own career; one which she hopes to build on with a new work about women's dress in the family, once again drawn from her photography archives, which she plans to approach with her customary enthusiasm: "I hope that with my work, I'll encourage other people to search out their visual histories. There's been a lot more interest recently in genealogy in general, but it is the visual accounts that interest me, the old family photographs that many families have if you just look around and ask."
With her other interests in fine art, spiritualism, magazine and set design, Vanessa has plenty of other projects up her sleeve, which will doubtless develop in time: "I have a great belief that passions are there to be pursued, and you've just got to follow them." Like the plot of a good Christie novel, or the course of a microlight sweeping across the English countryside, you might not know where Vanessa's particular passions will take her, but you can tell it will be exciting.
