Key facts
Agatha Christie was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on 15 September 1890. So just add a ten to the year of publication of any of her books to get her age when it was published – ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ 1934: 34 + 10 = 44 (in fact 43, as it was published in January and she was born in September, but you get the basic idea).
The surname Christie derives from her first husband, Archie Christie, who she married on Christmas Eve 1914, as the First World War was settling in for the long haul (p.94).
In total Agatha Christie published 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, as well as six non-detective novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
She created the famous fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple who have featured in countless movie and TV adaptations, not to mention radio, video games and graphic novels. Over 30 movies have been based on her works.
She wrote the world’s longest-running play, the murder mystery ‘The Mousetrap’, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952.
She is the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Her novel ‘And Then There Were None’ is the world’s best-selling mystery novel and one of the best-selling books of all time, and with over 100 million copies sold.
Childhood
Christie was born into a wealthy upper middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled.
Frederick and Mary Boehmer
Her parents were an odd couple. Her mother, Clarissa ‘Clara’ Margaret Boehmer was born in Dublin in 1854 to British Army officer, Frederick Boehmer, and his wife Mary Ann West. Boehmer died in Jersey in 1863, leaving Mary to raise Clara and her brothers on a small income.
Nathaniel and Margaret Miller
Two weeks after Boehmer’s death, Mary’s sister, Margaret West, married the widowed American dry-goods merchant, Nathaniel Frary Miller.
Foster Clara
To help her impoverished widowed sister, Margaret and Nathaniel agreed to foster nine-year-old Clara Boehmer. In other words, at a very early age Clara was taken away from her mother and brothers and raised by her aunt and never ceased to regret it.
Frederick Miller
Now Nathaniel had a son, Frederick from his previous marriage. Fred was born in New York City and travelled extensively after leaving his Swiss boarding school, returned for visits as Clara grew up. In 1969 i.e. six years into this fostering arrangement, Nathaniel Miller, like Frederick Boehmer before him, died young, leaving Margaret a widow.
Frederick Miller marries Clara Boehmer
Fifteen years after Clara’s father died and nine years after Nathaniel Miller died, in 1878, this Frederick Miller, now 32, proposed to Clara, now 24, and she accepted. They were married in London in 1878.
Madge and Monty
Their first child, Margaret ‘Madge’ Frary, was born in Torquay in 1879. The second, Louis Montant ‘Monty’, was born in Morristown, New Jersey, in 1880, while the family was on an extended visit to the United States.
Fred and Clara buy Ashfield
When Fred’s father (and Clara’s foster father), Nathaniel, had died in 1869, he had left Clara £2,000, something like a quarter of a million in today’s money. In 1881 Fred and Clara used this to buy a villa in Torquay named Ashfield. It was here that their third and last child, Agatha, was born in 1890. Note the age difference between her elder siblings: Madge was 11 years older, Monty 10 years older.
Home schooling
Clara actively prevented Agatha from going to school, believing she should be home schooled. The result was Agatha largely taught herself, not least by voraciously reading everything in her father’s library.
Fred Miller dies
In 1901 Agatha’s cheerful, lazy father Fred died from pneumonia and chronic kidney disease. Christie later said that her father’s death when she was 11 marked the end of her childhood. Two points about this:
1) Fred never worked a day in his life and cheerfully lived off investments. However, income from these had steadily declines, with suspicions of embezzlement or sharp dealing by his American trustees. Whatever the precise reason, Fred’s death left Clara severely straitened for funds. Not that impoverished – she could still afford the upkeep of Ashfield and some servants but could no longer afford to entertain or maintain the traditional upper middle class lifestyle (p.58).
The matriarchy
The other point is The Matriarchy. All these men died young, and the womenfolk lived on with the result that Agatha was raised in a household of women (Clara and Madge), and made regular visits to her great-aunt the ‘magnificent’ (p.77) Margaret Miller in Ealing and maternal grandmother Mary Boehmer in Bayswater.
Nice old ladies
There are dashing young chaps in her novels, older professional men such as judges and police and so on, but I think Agatha’s upbringing in a matriarchy left a strong impression on her fictional world. Her novels abound with highly enjoyable older women, Miss Marple just being the most obvious. The utterly conventional values attributed to characters like Miss Marple or Miss Peabody or numerous others, have such warm-hearted authority because they are, in fact, the values of the utterly conventional Agatha.
- Miss Jane Marple – elderly spinster who lives in the village of St. Mary Mead
- Mrs Price Ridley, Miss Wetherby, Miss Hartnell – Miss Marple’s three friends who make up the quartet of old ladies in St. Mary Mead, in the first Miss Marple book, ‘Murder at the Vicarage’
- Mrs Harfield – who Katherine Grey is a companion to (The Mystery of the Blue Train)
- Miss Lavinia Pinkerton – suspects there is a murderer at work in the village of Wychwood under Ashe (Murder Is Easy)
- Miss Caroline Peabody – tubby, sharp and witty spinster lives at Morton Manor, and is the oldest resident of Market Basing (Dumb Witness)
Laura Thompson on Agatha’s childhood
It’s Agatha’s childhood, girlhood and teenage years, mostly spent at the women’s family home of Ashfield, which Laura Thompson’s biography really dwells on. It gives a vivid and sympathetic portrait of a late-Victorian childhood and a girl growing into a young woman during the Edwardian decade, raised with traditional values which Thompson clearly sympathises with.
Music
Music for a while was a passion. Agatha learned piano as a girl and as a teenager took singing lessons to a very high standard. Thompson has page after page quoting Agatha’s diary and letters and the autobiography she wrote at the end of her life to describe her intoxication with music. She had a classic late-Victorian sensibility, with lots of vapouring about beauty, fancy dress balls where people dressed as characters out of Tennyson, she had a lifelong love of Wagner’s music (Wagner died in 1883, so by the 1910s when she was in love with it, it was 30 or more years out of date) (p.61).
Paris
In 1905, Clara sent Agatha to Paris, where she was educated in a series of pensionnats (boarding schools), focusing on voice training and piano playing. She was very good at both but not good enough to take them up professionally. Agatha stayed in Paris for nearly two years. Presumably this influenced the nationality of her greatest creation, Hercule Poirot – not the fact that he’s Belgian so much as Agatha’s confidence in rendering his French speech patterns.
Conventional
Thompson tried to make much of her heroine’s intelligence and Agatha was fluent and articulate and thoughtful, there’s lots of works and autobiography to quote from –but all of it is second rate. There is nothing about ideas or challenging books she read or intellectual pursuits. Instead, as she hit 18 and ‘came out’ to society, Agatha spent all her time going to parties and dances and concerts, amateur theatricals and attending fox hunts (p.64), flirting with large numbers of eligible young men, endlessly discussing their merits with her watchful mother, Clara.
As to her beliefs, she was a run of the mill, ordinary, devout Anglican. As to feminism and women’s rights, Agatha thought it was her role and fate in life to get married. That’s what women of her age and class did, and she never changed her view.
So it’s no surprise to learn that she was a lifelong Conservative voter (p.353).
The Mary Westmacott novels
In describing Agatha’s early years, Thompson draws heavily on the set of six Westmacott novels. Christie was so unstoppably prolific that alongside her murder mysteries she wrote six ‘ordinary’ non-detective novels, about love and relationships etc, sometimes described as ‘romantic’ novels’. They gave her ‘the chance to better explore the human psychology she was so intrigued by, freed from the expectations of her mystery fans’ as her grand-daughter explained.
To distinguish them from the murder mysteries she came up with a nom be plume based on her own middle name (Mary), Westmacott being the blandly English name of some distant relatives. The six Westmacott novels are:
- Giant’s Bread (1930)
- Unfinished Portrait (1934)
- Absent in the Spring (1944) – she wrote this in less than a week!
- The Rose and the Yew Tree (1947)
- A Daughter’s a Daughter (1952)
- The Burden (1956)
Thompson quotes from them extensively. Thus ‘Giant’s Bread’ concerns a sensitive young musician named Vernon Deyre, and Thompson reckons Christie poured into it a lot of her own feelings for classical music, for studying, practicing and performing; and similarly with autobiographical elements of the other books.
Marrying off Agatha
Clara had successfully married Madge off in 1902 to James Watt who had taken her off to his family home in the Midlands. Monty had joined the army and was posted overseas. What about Agatha? For Clara, and Agatha herself, adulthood meant marriage.
1907 to 1908: Trip to Egypt
Clara decided to spend the winter of 1907 to 1908 in the warm climate of Egypt, which was then a regular tourist destination for wealthy Britons. They stayed for three months at the Gezirah Palace Hotel in Cairo. Christie attended many dances and other social functions; she particularly enjoyed watching amateur polo matches.
First story
At 18 Agatha wrote her first short story, ‘The House of Beauty’, while recovering in bed from an illness. It was 6,000 words about ‘madness and dreams’. Her imagination had a decidedly Gothic turn. Subsequent stories dealt with spiritualism and the paranormal. Some of this lingered on into her mature novels, such as the powerful séance scene at the start of The Sittaford Mystery (p.78).
1909: first novel
Around the same time, in 1909 Christie wrote on her first novel, ‘Snow Upon the Desert’ based, predictably enough, on the winter she’d just spent in Egypt (p.67).
Conventional
Agatha was utterly conventional. About everything she had ‘the conventional, sensible attitude’ (p.116). As she came out, aged 18, she took to a life of country house parties, riding, hunting and countless dances, and numerous flirtations with eligible men.
‘Cairo meant nothing to me – girls between eighteen and twenty-one seldom thought of anything but young men’ (Agatha’s Autobiography, quoted p.68)
She had short-lived relationships with four men and an engagement to another (p.74). And Laura Thompson comes over as every bit as conventional, expecting no depths or insights from her heroine. She writes so well about Agatha’s life because she functions at the same shallow, Readers’ Digest level.
It was delight, all of it; the life that any normal, healthy, attractive, young girl would want to live (p.60)
1912: Archie Christie
In October 1912 she was introduced to Archibald ‘Archie’ Christie at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford at Ugbrooke, 12 miles from Torquay (p.73). The son of a barrister in the Indian Civil Service and an Irishwoman Ellen, known as Peg, Archie was a year older than Agatha (born September 1880). He was a Royal Artillery officer who was seconded to the Royal Flying Corps in April 1913.
Archie proposes
The couple quickly fell in love. Three months after their first meeting, Archie proposed marriage, and Agatha accepted. (She was something of a pro at all this, having already received three proposals of marriage, and actually being engaged to someone else when Archie proposed, to one Reggie Lucy, p.79.)
Anti-feminism
‘I hate a slobbering female,’ said Miss Percehouse. ‘I like one who gets up and does things.’
(The Sittaford Mystery, Chapter 17)
A naive feminist like Lucy Worsley thinks Agatha is a feminist heroine, but Christie was expressly anti feminist in both the tendency of her characters and stories, and explicitly, in her letters and autobiography – in fact anywhere and everywhere she could express an opinion.
Satirising feminist characters
The novels feature a number of loud-mouthed feminists who Agatha heartily satirises, boomingly women’s libbers like Lady Westholme in ‘Appointment with Death’ or the pretentious (and alcoholic) feminist author Salome Otterbourne in ‘Death on the Nile’. Rather:
[Christie] had a deep regard for working women. Not the strident ones who waved the feminist flag, like the politician Lady Westholme in ‘Appointment with Death’, proclaiming that ‘If anything is to be accomplished, mark my words, it is women who will do it’… (p.85)
Agatha’s anti-feminist attitudes
Pages 83 to 84 are just some of the many where Thompson makes crystal clear how utterly conventional Agatha was in her notions of gender roles. It was a woman’s responsibility to get married. She never considered a career of any kind. I’m going to quote from these pages to really convey the flavour.
To Agatha [marrying Archie] was fate; it was her female destiny. Having been brought up to express herself in any way she chose, she expected only to marry. This was her upbringing, which she had no urge to question. Girls of her sort did not have careers. They had husbands.
Agatha, despite her extraordinary achievements, would always assert that a career was a man’s job – ‘Men have much better brains than women, don’t you think?’ was a typical comment – and that the true value of a woman lay within the personal arena.
‘It makes me feel that, after all, I have not been a failure in life – that I have succeeded as a wife,’ she wrote to her second husband, Max, in 1943.
So as a girl she never chafed against the limits of her life: the conventions, the corsets, the need to speak low or sing to a teddy bear. Unlike her near-contemporary Dorothy L. Sayers – who, at the time of Agatha’s entry into the marriage market, was chewing the intellectual fat over cocoa at Somerville [college] – she had no desire to break free. She felt free anyway.
For all that she loved the novels of May Sinclair, she shared none of her feminist concerns. The frustrations of a girl like Vera Brittain, then at Oxford with Sayers, whose Testament of Youth rages against the male-dominated conventions of the time, would have been utterly remote from her.
The truth is that she liked a man’s world. She saw beyond it, although not in a political sense; later she would live beyond it, with her success and self-sufficiency; yet she loved being female and never felt circumscribed by her sex. She had grown up in a matriarchy after all. And she understood – as ‘cleverer’ girls perhaps do not – that female strength could show itself in many different ways… (pages 83 to 84)
Romantic love
Thompson has page after page after page describing Agatha’s initial love for Archie. Although her mother instantly saw the danger that he was a) selfish and b) attractive to other women, Agatha (who Thompson repeatedly tells us was immature and still basically ‘a girl’) saw the whole situation in Victorian terms, as something out of Tennyson, she as the pure-hearted lady Elaine cleaving to her handsome Sir Lancelot etc etc. He was ‘her dream come true’.
1914: VAD
When the war broke out Archie was sent to France almost immediately and Agatha hastened to join up as a nurse in a VAD:
Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) were organizations that provided support to the military during World War I. These detachments, formed by the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John, played a vital role in staffing hospitals and providing various services like nursing, cooking, and general aid.
Doctors
Dr Lord approached the bed, Nurse O’Brien fluttering behind him. Mrs Welman said with a twinkle: ‘Going through the usual bag of tricks, Doctor: pulse, respiration, temperature? What humbugs you doctors are!’
(Sad Cypress, part 1, chapter 5)
As a nurse Agatha saw at first hand how pompous and incompetent many doctors are. There’s a police doctor in most of the murder mysteries, but some doctor characters play larger roles and, by and large, they’re pretty unflattering characters.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Dr Bauerstein, sinister
- The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Dr Sheppard, the murderer
- Why Didn’t They Ask Evens? – Dr Nicholson, a sinister drug addict
- Murder is Easy – Dr Thomas
- Cards on the Table – Dr Donaldson
- The Sittaford Mystery – Dr Warren
- And Then There Were None – Dr Armstrong, the murderer
Thompson describes Agatha as being as unflappable and sound in her work as a nurse, calmly describing the amputations, the severed limbs, the crying men, briskly getting on with the work (p.94). This is very much of a piece with the attitude which comes over in the books, brisk and no-nonsense, ‘Stop crying, girl! There’s a job to be done! Pull yourself together!’
And with her extraordinary ability to be interrupted at any point of writing a novel, go out for lunch or dinner, go to a party, come back and pick up exactly where she left off, and carrying on writing. Extraordinarily nerveless and anxiety-free (p.129). What a gift!
1916: The dispensary
In 1916 a drug dispensary was opened at Torquay hospital and Agatha switched to it from nursing. The hours were shorter and the pay better (p.103). The detailed knowledge of drugs, medicines and poisons she acquired her was to stand her in good stead for the rest of her life. The murder in her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, is entirely premised on professional knowledge of the action of poisons.
Twenty-four years later, in ‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’, the feel for drugs and poisons acquired in Torquay hospital dispensary, along with the relationships between the processions involved, was still underpinning the storyline of a dentist who appears (for a little while at least) to have poisoned a patient with a combination of adrenaline and prococaine.
‘These things happen—they happen to doctors—they happen to chemists…Careful and reliable for years, and then—one moment’s inattention—and the mischief’s done and the poor devils are for it. Morley was a sensitive man. In the case of a doctor, there’s usually a chemist or a dispenser to share the blame—or to shoulder it altogether. In this case Morley was solely responsible.’
(‘One, Two, Buckle My Shoe’, Chapter 2, section 1)
Unintellectual
Thompson tries to persuade us how imaginative Agatha was and yet what comes over is how utterly unimaginative she was, uninterested in politics, uninterested in suffragettes or feminism, uninterested in any social issues, in philosophy or any of the humanities – but with a vivid sense of her class of people, conceived as stock types.
Surely that’s one of the secrets of her success, is how utterly unthreatening her books are; how populated they are by reassuringly conventional jolly good chaps and plucky chapesses, stern judges, reassuring police inspectors, and so on. Everyone observes the decencies and common courtesies. It’s their lovely manners and good behaviour which are so attractive, reassuring and comforting. Seen from this angle the murders almost don’t register.
Readability
And this goes a long way towards explaining probably the biggest single explanation of her success, which is her immense readability.
The invention of Poirot
Poirot arrived fully formed in her first novel. Later she at various times tried to explain his creation but couldn’t because she was a deeply unreflective, unintellectual writer. Belgian refugees during the war provided the nationality, the rest she plucked from circumstances around her and voilà, he was fully formed. A miracle. What’s so impressive about Poirot is how much he doesn’t change over the next 40 years.
The feature which struck me most about Poirot from his first appearance is that he is old, in fact he has retired from being a detective on his first appearance. And he is old like Miss Marple. So Christie’s two great characters are outwith any concern for sex, outside relationships, the marriage market, the whole thing. Outsiders to the fierce competition over sex, mates, children, resources, jobs, reputations, money. It’s because of this that the books they appear in can observe the silliness of human sex lives – and family rivalries and bitterness about money – with such detachment and amusement.
Yes, amusement, that’s the watchword, the key quality of Christie’s novels and the main reason I like them. I don’t care that much about the murders and the silly clues and the ludicrous explanations; I enjoy the humour of the characters and, above all, the amused, smiling tone of her narrative voice.
1919: Parenthood
The war ended, Archie was demobilised fairly quickly and got a job at the Air Ministry. The couple took to living together as man and wife, something they hadn’t actually done during the war. Within a year Agatha was pregnant and delivered of a baby girl. Like everything else in her life, Agatha accepts pregnancy as the fate of a young wife here, as in everything, adopting the conventional, sensible attitude.
But she wasn’t a natural mother for the simple reason that she herself was still a girl.
Agatha did not need a perfect child: she herself was perfect to Clara. So in love was she with being a daughter… that she was unable to find true fulfilment as a mother. (p.122)
It is a recurring theme in her later novels that mothers often don’t like or resent their daughters (p.123). Lots of evidence that she never really bonded with Rosalind.
Something about this marvellous, bright, sharp-edged child seems to have shrivelled Agatha’s maternal impulses in the bud’ (p.268)
Nonetheless, they came to have a respectful relationship, joshing bonhomie concealing the underlying tension. Thompson quotes a character from the novel ‘Five Little Pigs’:
Many children, most children, I should say, suffer from over attention on the part of their parents. There is too much love, too much watching over the child. It is uneasily conscious of this brooding, and seeks to free itself, to get away and be unobserved. With an only child this is particularly the case, and, of course, mothers are the worst offenders.
Or this from Dumb Witness:
‘What is she like, your cousin?’
‘Bella? Well, she’s a dreary woman. Eh, Charles?’
‘Oh, definitely a dreary woman. Rather like an earwig. She’s a devoted mother. So are earwigs, I believe.’
She was sometimes angry or frustrated that she would never be to her daughter what her mother, Clara, had been for her, her all-in-all.
Writing for money
Archie suggested she write another novel, in fact he actively supported her writing career. ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ made her £25 for serialisation rights in the Weekly Times. Its sequel ‘The Secret Adversary’ made the grand total of £50 and sold better than Styles. There followed in quick succession ‘The Murder on the Links’, ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’ and a bunch of Poirot stories.
1922: tour of the white Empire
Archie was offered a job touring the white Empire nations (Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand) to promote the upcoming 1924 Empire exhibition. He took Agatha and they were abroad travelling for most of 1922.
Thompson judges the novel she wrote during and about the trip, ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’, to be her most joyful and sexy. The heroine, Anne Beddingfield, falls madly in love with the tall adventurer Harry Rayburn and is given to bold idealistic speeches:
‘I shouldn’t dream of marrying any one unless I was madly in love with them. And of course there is really nothing a woman enjoys so much as doing all the things she doesn’t like for the sake of some one she does like. And the more self-willed she is, the more she likes it.’
‘I’m afraid I disagree with you. The boot is on the other leg as a rule.’ He spoke with a slight sneer.
‘Exactly,’ I cried eagerly. ‘And that’s why there are so many unhappy marriages. It’s all the fault of the men. Either they give way to their women—and then the women despise them, or else they are utterly selfish, insist on their own way and never say ‘thank you.’ Successful husbands make their wives do just what they want, and then make a frightful fuss of them for doing it. Women like to be mastered, but they hate not to have their sacrifices appreciated. On the other hand, men don’t really appreciate women who are nice to them all the time. When I am married, I shall be a devil most of the time, but every now and then, when my husband least expects it, I shall show him what a perfect angel I can be!’
Archie was often quite ill on the trip. On their return his job in the City had gone to someone else and he was unemployed and miserable for months. Their (relative) impecunity is turned to comic account of the start of the first Tommy and Tuppence novel, The Secret Adversary.
1924: Brown and money
In 1924 the Evening News offered Agatha £500 for the serialisation rights of ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’. This brought home to her and Archie (and her sister and mother, Clara) that Agatha was looking at the makings of a real career and serious money. With the money she bought her first car, a grey Morris Cowley (p.153).
Agatha always drove a hard bargain, as producers at the BBC were later to complain. Money is a central preoccupation of her books and their characters. Money is the motive in 36 of the 55 murder mystery novels.
There was a silence, and then Tuppence burst out:
‘Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’
‘Same here,’ agreed Tommy with feeling.
(The Secret Adversary, Chapter 1)
In 1924 she signed a three book deal with Collins, who were to remain her publisher for the rest of her life, having left Bodley Head after her initial five-book deal which she felt had taken advantage of her.
1925: Chimneys
In Thompson’s view ‘The Secret of Chimneys was perhaps the happiest book that Agatha ever wrote’ (p.143).
1926: Ackroyd
Her first book for Collins, ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’, transformed her reputation. It is often described as the ‘ultimate detective story’. This is for the simple reason that the narrator, honest-sounding Dr Sheppard, turns out to be the murderer. That’s it.
In ‘Roger Ackroyd she revealed for the first time her natural quality of translucency: her ability to control every sentence of her books, yet allow them breathe free. Agatha did not impose. Nor did she interpose one atom of herself between her writing and her readers. Her words communicate exactly and only what is required; which is not the same as saying they have no life beyond what is on the page. They have, in fact, the mystery of simplicity. They are the conduits for her plots, which are ultimately simple. (p.156)
Agatha’s qualities
Agatha was not a naturally descriptive writer. (p.139)
‘She was by nature remarkably unobservant’ she wrote of herself in ‘Unfinished Portrait’ (quoted p.139)
Agatha was not an especially humorous woman. (p.143)
Chimneys is what nowadays would be called a snobbish book…Impossible to deny that Agatha lived in an enclosure, that of the upper middle class into which she was born. (p.145)
Archie and Agatha grow apart
In 1924 Archie finally got a job in the City and was happy. He was taking home £2,000 a year. He took up golf and slowly this became an obsession. Soon he played every weekend, and resented anyone coming to stay who didn’t play. Agatha tried her best but wasn’t very interested and wasn’t very good. She had thickened since having Rosalind. She was 35 and her young good looks had gone. She rarely drank alcohol (good) but her favourite drink became a mix of milk and cream, such as she had loved as a girl at Ashfield. She put on weight. Archie began to dislike her schoolgirl gushiness, her chunkiness, her resentment at his weekends at the golf course.
Clara dies
Then her mother, Clara, died, on 5 April 1926. Agatha (‘too much of a child herself’) was devastated and went down to Ashfield to spend months clearing out the house of her childhood. Archie reacted badly: he disliked illness and hadn’t wanted to hear about Clara’s decline and refused to go down to comfort or help Agatha. It was the end of the marriage though she didn’t realise it.
Agatha disappears
The most famous incident in Agatha Christies life was when she went missing for 11 days and sparked a nationwide frenzy. She left her car abandoned off a lane on the North Downs overlooking a quarry with a deep pool nearby. The Surrey police were convinced she had killed herself. Day after day more volunteers joined the search scouring the Surrey countryside and numerous people claimed to have sighted the missing woman all around the UK.
Thompson devoted pages a slightly staggering 72 pages to the incident, page 186 to 258. Frankly I find this kind of thing quite staggeringly boring, as it doesn’t really seem to have impacted her writing – certainly not as much as her projection of herself into upper middle class settings, her xenophobia, her ingenuity, and her thumpingly conventional view of human nature do – based on her ‘obtuse and childlike’ character (p.179).
In Thompson’s the whole thing was a ploy to win back Archie’s love. While Agatha was away in Torquay weeping over her lost childhood, Archie decisively fell in love with a younger, sexier woman, named Nancy Neele. Archie told Agatha about it in August 1926, and asked Agatha for a divorce. After many recriminations, they agreed on a three-month trial period to try and save the marriage, but the months passed and Archie continued to spend much time in London or at friends’ house parties with Nancy in attendance.
Finally, in December things came to a head. On 3 December 1926 they had a big argument after Archie announced his plan to spend the weekend with friends, unaccompanied by his wife, but in the presence of Nancy.
Late that evening Christie disappeared from their home in Sunningdale. The following morning, her car, a Morris Cowley, was discovered at Newlands Corner in Surrey, parked above a chalk quarry with an expired driving licence and clothes inside. It was feared that she might have drowned herself in the Silent Pool, a nearby beauty spot.
The disappearance quickly became a news story. One newspaper offered a £100 reward. Over 1,000 police officers, 15,000 volunteers, and several aeroplanes searched the rural landscape. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gave a spirit medium one of Christie’s gloves to find her.
Christie’s disappearance made international headlines, including featuring on the front page of The New York Times. According to Thompson she wrote and posted a letter to Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, i.e. her brother-in-law, explaining that she needed time away and was going to a spa in Yorkshire and she caught a train from London to Harrogate where she checked in under the name Mrs Neele. That, of course, was the name of his husband’s mistress.
In Thompson’s view, Campbell Christie was intended to get the letter on the Monday morning, ring up Archie who would have been distressed at her disappearance, and got on the next train to Yorkshire. Harrogate, according to Thompson, is the kind of Yorkshire equivalent of Sunningdale, very posh, and so it shouldn’t have taken Archie long to track her down.
According to eye witnesses (notably a Mr Pettelson, a cultivated Russian exile) she had a lovely time in the Swan Hydropathic Hotel where she checked in, spending the days sightseeing and the evening joining in singing and music making or billiards in the drawing room.
The main source of the delay and the escalation of a private marital squabble into a national manhunt appears to have been the obsession of the police officer in charge of the investigation, police Superintendent Kenward, that Agatha had killed herself. Even when (belatedly) informed of the letter in which she simply explained that she’d gone to stay in Yorkshire, he refused to believe it. Only when guests at the hotel approached the local police to claim that the mysterious Mrs Neele looked strikingly like the missing Agatha, did the cops intervene and invite Archie up. He walked into the hotel at dinner time on the tenth evening and simply identified Agatha, for himself and to a detective who’d accompanied him.
So it appears to have been a pitiful cock-up by the police, egged on by a tabloid press always keen for a scandal. To the members of the press who quickly flooded the hotel, and the railway stations on the route to her sister’s house outside Manchester, then back at their home in Surrey – Archie gave out the same rather desperate story that Agatha had suffered a breakdown accompanied by complete amnesia. The press and most of the public didn’t believe this and Thompson thinks it’s a lie.
Failure and divorce
As an attempt to win Archie back by sparking panic and regret, it was a miserable failure.
Having, as she thought, helped to destroy her marriage by leaving Archie alone while she grieved for her mother, she had now delivered its death blow by making herself an object of public ridicule, and Archie an object of public loathing. (p.256)
Archie lived at the unhappy family home in Sunningdale while he tried to sell it, Agatha lived in a flat in London with her daughter. They met once in 1927, where she begged him again to return but he simply stated he was in love with Nancy and only waiting for her to return from the round the world cruise her family had packed her off on to get her out of the limelight, before he wanted to marry her. So in spring 1928 Agatha petitioned for divorce and was granted a decree nisi against her husband in April 1928. This was made absolute in October 1928 and two weeks later Archie married Nancy Neele. Game over.
(Incidentally Archie remained married to Nancy for the next 20 years, till her death from cancer in 1958. It wasn’t just a flash in the pan.)
(Also incidentally, Agatha, up till then a fairly devout Anglican, never attended communion again after her divorce, p.290.)
The relevance of Agatha’s disappearance for her books
Thompson cites a shrewd quotation from P.D. James who says that Archie’s betrayal and desertion was the first real trauma she’d ever faced in her pampered protected life, that she never really recovered from it – and that this shaped her fiction.
Anybody who’s written about Christie’s novels makes the same point which is that, no matter how brutal the murder(s) and how byzantine the plot and backstories, in the end, everything comes out right: the guilty party is identified, everyone else is vindicated, surprisingly often one or more couples who we’ve met during the narrative end up getting married; and Poirot makes everything better, by tying up all the loose ends and leaving us with one of his little quips, very much like the Afterword to an Elizabethan play craving their audience’s indulgence.
On this reading, every single one of her detective stories does the same thing, which is throw us into death, disorder and ever-more bewildering confusion before… slowly, slowly leading us back up into the light. Thus every one of the novels can be seen as a cathartic experience. Almost every one leaves us with a jaunty smile on our faces.
For Thompson, the failure of her marriage represented Agatha finally growing up after 38 years of pampered privilege: not financially (the couple had been hard-up after the war, and Agatha had independent income from her writing) but in psychological terms. Her mother and her husband abandoned her, within a matter of months. No longer young or attractive or living a life of dreamy illusions, Agatha changed character, buckled down, and became a really professional writer.
The comment about no longer good-looking may sound sexist but it’s Thompson’s view that it came as a liberation.
Without the burden of normal female expectations, she found herself free. There was no longer an obligation to be a certain kind of woman: slim, pleasing, feminine. She could absent herself from these restraints. She could formulate a persona and wear it like a suit of armour – present it to the world in place of herself – and inside she could be whoever she chose. That was the freedom of the creator.
And so she became the staggeringly prolific professional writer. Between 1930 and 1939 Agatha produced 17 full-length novels, plus short stories. Although ‘Agatha Christie’ was her legal name, after the divorce it became a pen-name, a fictional name, a persona. And she used it to create radical reinventions of the detective novel:
- the murderer who pretends to be a victim
- the murderer who pretends to be a serial killer
- the murderer who is also the investigating policeman
- the cast of suspects who are all innocent
- the cast of suspects who are all guilty
Mary Westmacott
But while she addressed the murder mystery novel with a kind of cold-blooded forensic experimentalism, at the same time she embarked what became a series of six novels under the alter ego of Mary Westmacott. See the section above. Knowing that they were written soon after her life-changing divorce sheds a different light on them and explains why Thompson mines them so heavily to depict the ‘real’ Agatha.
Travels and Max
In 1928 Christie left England and took the (Simplon) Orient Express to Istanbul and then onto Baghdad. Obviously the Orient Express trip provided the material for the book of the same name.
In Iraq she became friends with archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife, Katherine. They stayed with her at her new London home and then invited her to return to their dig in February 1930. On that second trip, she met archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 and a half years her junior. She was 39, he was just 25 (Max b. 6 May 1904; Agatha b. 15 September 1890) (p.284). The precise occasion was when he took her and a group of tourists on a tour of his expedition site in Iraq.
By the standards of the day it was a fairly quick romance. Christie and Mallowan married in Edinburgh in September 1930. Unlike her first marriage, and like Archie and Nancy, Agatha and Max’s marriage lasted the rest of their lives, until Christie’s death in 1976.
Agatha accompanied Mallowan on all his subsequent archaeological expeditions, and her travels with him contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East, notably ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’, ‘Death on the Nile’ and ‘Appointment with Death’. His last trip back to Ur, the ancient city being excavated by Woolley was in 1931.
According to Thompson, Woolley’s wife, Katherine Woolley appears only thinly disguised in ‘Appointment with Death’ as the murderee, Mrs Leidner, a cold woman who enjoyed trifling with all the men around her – a rare instance of Agatha basing a character on an identifiable real life person.
Critics accused young Max of being a gold-digger and Agatha certainly funded his expeditions, notably one to Arpachiyah in Iraq in 1933. In 1935 he took Agatha to Chagar Bazar in Syria. Max wasn’t a brilliant excavator but he was brilliant at organising digs and keeping up to 200 local workmen under discipline. Agatha wasn’t that interested in the finds, but happily played the loyal wife and was also very interested in exotic wildflowers.
It was also, often, extremely uncomfortable, but Agatha was tough and healthy, and always despised complaining women. (p.314)
It’s true she featured archaeologists in some of her books: in ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’ but most critically in ‘Death in the Clouds’ where the narrator mocks the pretensions of the father and son team of archaeologists.
Thompson analyses the relationship at length but what it boiled down to was that Max restored her faith and trust and allowed her to return to a kind of state of pampered childhood, the state she enjoyed with her beloved mother and, at first, with Archie, till he got fed up of her gushing girliness: Max restored it to her and, thus liberated, her imagination was set free to roam far and wide, taking the detective story genre to pieces, and putting it back together in all kinds of interesting forms.
Buying houses
During the 1930s Agatha bought a number of houses with her earnings. At one point Thompson mentions properties at:
- Sheffield Terrace
- Campden Street
- Half Moon Street
- Park Place
- a mews cottage at 22 Cresswell Place, Chelsea, SW1 (1929)
- Lawn Road (p.344)
She finally, reluctantly, allowed beloved Ashfield to be sold but she had bought a comfortable home at Wallington near Oxford (Winterbrook; 1934) abut her romantic purchase was of the grand white house named Greenway, which overlooked the banks of the River Dart in Devon (also 1934).
On page 348, Thompson states that Agatha owned four houses: so presumably that’s Winterbrook, Greenway and two in London, so the other properties must have been flats.
Second World War
Max had a distinguished war career. According to his Wikipedia entry:
After the beginning of the Second World War he served with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in North Africa, being based for part of 1943 at the ancient city of Sabratha in Libya. He was commissioned as a pilot officer on probation in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch on 11 February 1941, promoted flying officer on 18 August 1941, flight lieutenant on 1 April 1943 and for some time he also had the rank of wing commander. His first role with the RAF was as a liaison officer with allied forces and, later in the war, as a civilian affairs officer in North Africa.
Thompson summarises Max’s career rather differently on page 319, emphasising the initial struggle he had to find a post.
Peripatetic
Greenway was commandeered by the military before being handed over to the American navy in 1942.(Naval officers billeted there painted a mural round the cornices of the library, celebrating their feats, which sounds like a bit of a liberty).
So Agatha spent the war years in London, moving between her half dozen properties, but mostly at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead.
Agatha’s prolific war years
Agatha kept on writing at a prodigious rate. Between September 1939 and August 1945, she published:
- And Then There Were None (1939)
- Sad Cypress (1940)
- One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940)
- Evil Under the Sun (1941)
- N or M? (1941)
- The Body in the Library (1942)
- Five Little Pigs (1942)
- The Moving Finger (1943)
- Towards Zero (1944)
- Absent in the Spring (1944)
- Death Comes as the End (1945)
- Sparkling Cyanide (1945)
And this doesn’t include the plays she adapted from her own novels, sometimes radically rewriting the endings. Prodigious output, eh?
Five Little Pigs
Of all of these, Thompson singles out ‘Five Little Pigs’ as the masterpiece. This is because of the unusually intense and real feeling with which she describes a marriage on the rocks, as the husband falls for a much younger woman (although, typically, the situation turns out not to be quite as straightforward as it seems for the first three-quarters of the book). It has a ‘lived’ quality, which most of her novels don’t, really.
Stephen Glanville
During the war, while Max was away, Agatha had a brief flirtation, of sorts, with Stephen Glanville, a historian and Egyptologist ten years her junior. He helped her write her strangest novel, a murder mystery set in ancient Egypt, ‘Death Comes as the End’ (pages 330 to 335).
Shakespeare
She developed an intense passion for Shakespeare, attended numerous productions, and adapted her novel, ‘Ten Little N******’ for the stage, in 1943.
Hospital volunteering
In 1940 Agatha began to give a few days a week to voluntary work at University College Hospital, in the dispensary, the same kind of work she’d done during the first war.
Rosalind comes of age and marries
Thompson uses her war chapter to bring us up to speed with the life of Agatha’s difficult daughter Rosalind. Born in 1919, she ‘came out’ in 1937. In 1940, aged just 21, after a brief courtship, she surprised Agatha and Max by marrying a soldier, Major Hubert de Burr Prichard, in Wales. In 1943 they had a child, Mathew Prichard. A year later Major Prichard was killed in the invasion of Normandy. Five years later (in 1949) she married the lawyer Anthony Hicks and kept the married name Rosamond Hick to the end of her life.
Fat as a psychological defence
According to Thompson it was really during the war years that Agatha completely lost her youth and figure and became the stout middle-aged woman we know from the photos. Becoming fat made her sad but ‘she loved to eat’ (p.328). Thompson has a lyrical paragraph describing the change in Agatha’s self image:
It was a long way from the slender, fairy-like girl who had married Archie Christie: between those two there had been the mystery of physical allure, which Agatha still conjured in her books but had deliberately destroyed for herself. She had, indeed, coarsened. She did not merely his behind the public persona of ‘Agatha Christie’; she sheltered within a shroud of flesh, dense and unwieldy, a symbolic defence against the sharp agonies of the past. (p.328)
And even more so after the war:
Her large comfortable physicality was a defence against wounds, and after the war it grew more massive still. She lost the last trace of the attractions she had held, until her early fifties, for a man like Stephen Glanville. Her weight rose to nearly fifteen stone, her legs swelled immensely and she became extraordinarily sensitive about photographs.
And quotes a friend of Stephen Glanville’s daughter who met her in Cambridge in the 1950s:
‘I thought the sight of her surprising, with a fat, somewhat uncoordinated body and messily applied lipstick.’ (p.364)
It made her unhappy but this was the course she had adopted.
Tax troubles
To the amazement of Agatha, her agents in both the UK (Edward Cork of Hughes Massie) and the States (Harold Ober), towards the end of the 1930s she got into trouble with the tax authorities in both countries, trouble with ramified and complexified and ending up dogging her for decades. Thompson’s account begins on page 345 and then the theme recurs for the rest of the book.
As far as I can make out, the problem had two causes. Until the later 1930s Agatha had been categorised by the US tax authorities as a ‘non-resident alien author’ and so didn’t have to pay tax on income earned through the sale of her copyrights in the US, plus the increasing amount of movie and theatrical rights sales. All this changed when the US authorities decided that the wildly successful popular British novelist, Rafael Sabatini, did have to pay tax on the income he earned in the States. In 1938 the US tax authorities began to pry into Agatha’s affairs, quickly revealing how much she earned in the Sates and backdating her tax liability to the start of her career (in 1920). They started impounding her US earnings while the case went through the courts.
But in the meantime, back in the UK Agatha continued to live an upper middle class life, maintain her half dozen properties, with staff etc, and enjoy the high life, but with no income coming in from the States (p.359). She began to go into debt and borrowed to maintain her lifestyle. But at the same time, although she continued to be prolific and popular, wartime conditions in Britain also hit sales, revenue and publishers payments.
Then in 1945, the new Labour government put up tax thresholds to fund the welfare state and other policies, and people like Agatha, well off but not rich, were penalised.
A combination of all these factors means that the war years were marked by growing concerns about her income, her tax, and her lifestyle, worries which dogged her for decades to come.
The impact of war
Several novels Agatha published just after the war deal with its impact:
- The Hollow (1946)
- Taken at the Flood (1948)
- The Rose and the Yew Tree (1948)
With their mood of restlessness and dissatisfaction (p.351).
The post-war
Thompson commences her account of Agatha’s post-war years with a couple of generalisations:
It was in the middle of the century that the phenomenon of ‘Agatha Christie’ really took off. In 1945 she was a popular and successful author whose new books always sold out a print run of 25,000. But by 1950 she was a global brand estimated to have sold 50 million books! And receiving increasing amounts of fan mail (p.361).
Two paradoxes about this:
1. It is generally agreed that this huge popularity came just as the quality of her novels began to fall away. In the 30 years from 1945 to 1976 she wrote a handful of outstanding books, but most of them war solid, reliable, formulaic. Not many matched the brilliance of the 20 or so year before (1926 to 1945) and especially ‘the period of intense, sustained creativity around the war which marks the high point of her achievement’ (p.356).
2. The other paradox is that her fame became truly enormous more from the adaptations of the books than the books themselves. Thus movie versions of:
- Love From A Stranger (1937)
- And Then there Were None (1945)
And theatrical adaptations of:
- And Then there Were None (1943)
- Hidden Horizon (adaptation of Murder on the Nile; 1944)
- Murder at the Vicarage (1949)
- The Hollow (1951)
- The Mousetrap (1952)
- Witness for the Prosecution (1953)
Not to mention radio, for example a series of weekly adaptations of the Poirot stories on American radio.
Goodbye
And with that, with Agatha having married off her daughter, undergone a period of prolific productivity, had a brief flirtation but remained fundamentally true to the man who rescued her wounded heart (Max), settling into middle-age and overweight, becoming a global brand but sinking into ever-murkier disputes with the tax authorities in two countries – I’m going to leave this biography. Maybe, when I’ve read the later books, I’ll pick it up and review the post-war years. But not now.
Credit
‘Agatha Christie: An English Mystery’ by Laura Thompson was published in 2007 by Headline Review. Page references are to the 2008 paperback edition.
Books & Boots 