The Last Word

Dame Agatha Christie’s books are often listed right after William Shakespeare’s works and the Bible on the list of the bestselling works of all time. How did a modest puzzle maker and writer who called herself “lowbrow” create a template for the twentiethcentury mystery novel and achieve worldwide fame in her lifetime? Why has she maintained her reputation as the world continues to read her works widely forty-five years after her death? Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson provides a few clues while examining the mystery of Agatha’s life.

Thompson focuses more on Agatha Christie’s mental processes than traditional biographical details throughout the book, exhibiting an admirably thorough and convincing reading of her works while offering her own interpretation of Agatha’s much-heralded disappearance for eleven days in 1926. She does establish Agatha’s base for her imagination in her childhood at Ashfield, her beloved house in Torquay, Devon, England.

Agatha Miller was born in 1890 and grew up there as a very happy child with little formal schooling. As the youngest sibling in her family, she grew up like an only child in a structured, middleclass life near the seaside, free to dream and imagine her life while surrounded by her parents and the kind of competent, respectable servants who populate her novels.

The first twelve years of her life gave her the warmth and stability to bear the turmoil that occurred after her father, Frederick, died of a heart attack. Her mother, Clara, had to decide what to do with Agatha as they faced precarious financial straits and the possible sale of Ashfield. Agatha went off to a pensionnat, a kind of finishing school, in Paris, briefly considering singing as a profession, and then went with her mother to Cairo as a debutante, since coming out was far less expensive abroad.

When Agatha met Archibald Christie in 1912, her fate was determined. A penniless pilot, lean, single-minded, and attractive, he excited both her love and her imagination. She never felt as if she could solve the puzzle of his personality, which was a characteristic of her nature. As Thompson indicates, Agatha loved not getting to the bottom of mysteries in real life.

While Archie went off to World War I, they became engaged. She joined a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), serving as a trainee nurse who dispensed medications. Here Agatha grew to know the nature of the poisons she so liberally used in her later works while she waited for Archie to come home.

At this point Agatha was a romantic young woman full of notions, but also open to the dialogue in the conversations that swept around her. Married to her sense of story was this unconscious absorption in her characters’ voices. Their veracity lent her plots substance and minimal but impactful clues to their types and humanity.

After they married, she and Archie set out upon a life together, living in London and traveling around the world to former and current British colonies for a year when Archie got a limited job to do so. Their trips to South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States fed her love for travel. Agatha always kept in mind the view of a rather conservative British public, which pops up in her characters’ voices sometimes: “British is best” or “British is good enough for me.” Such characters represented many of her readers.

Yet her fans fall under a very big tent. She often reveals the aforementioned characters as xenophobic or easily taken in by Hercule Poirot, for example, who turns the dial up on his “Frenchified” foreign image to get such bigots to take him less seriously or confide in him. They cannot even remember that he is Belgian, not French. After all, what’s the difference? Therefore, Agatha’s attitudes are always hard to ascertain. Sometimes her characters are of the people, but the outsider also features prominently, and they are sometimes one and the same. That, in many ways, is one secret to her everlasting popularity. So many of us look like we belong and never feel like we do, and most of us present a mask to the world.

When she and Archie returned from their voyage, Agatha started writing mysteries as a way of competing with her older sister, Madge, who had written a play that was being put on in London. Her first mystery, and first Hercule Poirot book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was a cleverly plotted book that finally got her into print as a detective fiction writer while creating perhaps the most famous detective, aside from Sherlock Holmes or her own Miss Marple, in the history of mysteries. Miss Marple first appeared in a book of short stories, The Thirteen Problems, seven years later.

Agatha and Archie had a daughter, Rosalind, and moved to a golfing community near London, Sunningdale. They were able to get a mortgage on a home they called “Styles” after the home in her first mystery novel. In 1926, though, Archie presented Agatha with the equivalent of an ultimatum, telling her that he had fallen in love with another woman, Nancy Neele, and that he wanted a divorce. He did so soon after her beloved mother’s death, while Agatha was grieving deeply. Agatha, still romantic and in love with her husband despite their increasing distance, was devastated.

Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of Thompson’s biography has her imagining Agatha’s trajectory as she left her daughter in the hands of a trusted servant. In a state of shock, she then drove her car to a quarry. At that point Agatha disappeared to her husband and the public. Thompson imagines Agatha on the brink of suicide, finally deciding to disappear in a confused bid to get Archie’s attention. She presents Agatha’s desperate emotions and actions as she detaches from her own identity, pretending to be a Mrs. Teresa Neele.

In essence, Agatha reacted psychologically to stress by taking on another personality. Mrs. Neele travels to the Harrogate Hydro Spa in northern England as a widow from South Africa bearing the last name of Archie Christie’s future wife-to-be. In the mean time, the world looked for the author Agatha Christie, increasing her notoriety. As a private person, she regretted the scandal she created all her life.

Many of her mysteries’ characters don disguises or take other names: her life bled into her writing in this regard. Ms. Christie decided to escape her anguish physically and psychologically in lieu of suicide, creating a temporary persona to relieve her suffering.

TAGS: Agatha Christie, classic mysteries, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple, Mary Westmacott, memoir

Thompson offers a different perspective on Agatha’s disappearance than those offered before. From her research she believes that