After Hours

Agatha meant to jolt Archie into returning to their marriage. She hated the idea of divorce and had begged him to stay for Rosalind’s sake. Immediately after she left, she sent Archie’s brother, Campbell Christie, a letter telling him where she was, but it went astray when Campbell did not receive it on time. He did not believe it when it finally arrived. Therefore Agatha simply stayed at the spa, paralyzed, watching her disappearance became newspaper fodder and a public relations nightmare. When Archie eventually found her, they both pretended that she had suffered from amnesia to excuse her actions. The public, which by now had a sense of ownership of her disappearance, had an understandably hard time believing this account.

In this way Thompson describes Agatha’s emotional reasons for her disappearance, and the break between the idealistic romantic Agatha had always been before her divorce and the damaged, more guarded woman who survived that turmoil. Her second marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan, although described as a very happy one, was safer. They were good friends rather than people desperately in love.

Agatha needed security in marriage, however, so she took care not to let her husband, thirteen years younger than she, stay alone and get into trouble with other women. She went on expeditions with him to Iraq and many other places in the Middle East to keep him company and write. In this way her daughter suffered for attention. Agatha was a loving daughter and wife, but a more complicated mother, who related less to her downto-earth, pessimistic daughter than her beloved mother, Clara. Until Clara’s death and beyond, she remained much more fond of being a daughter than a mother.

Laura Thompson spends a good amount of time focusing on Agatha’s mindset and psychological outlook, in contrast to Jared Cade in his book Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days. She counters his arguments and claims one by one, in particular some of his assertions about Agatha’s motivations for disappearing and the way in which she did it. She also disputes his claims of information gained from Agatha’s friend’s daughter, Judith Gardner, calling them spurious. For example, she points out that other than such assertions there is no evidence that Max Mallowan indulged in love affairs later in life, for example with colleague Barbara Parker.

Having read Cade’s book some time ago, I see how they approached Agatha’s life very differently. Cade focused strongly on chronological events and Agatha’s relationships with others around her, including her many friends throughout her life. Thompson also speaks of Agatha’s relationships with her close family and husbands, but discusses her individual psychological development from childhood onward much more extensively. She shows handily how Agatha revealed personal details and romantic, ineffable attitudes much more in her novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott than she ever did in the tightly constructed, more detached detective novels that catapulted her to worldwide fame.

Thompson mostly ignores Agatha’s strong relationships with her sister, Madge, and many friends, including Nan Kon, who features prominently in Jared Cade’s book. She does not always deny them, but they rarely feature prominently. Which biographer is correct? In any case, Thompson’s omission is perhaps a weakness in this otherwise very worthwhile account. In Cade’s version of her life, Agatha seemed to be a good, generous friend to many.

Before perusing this biography, I started re-reading Agatha’s mysteries in March as a way of escaping the pandemic. Occasionally I reread her when I need comfort reading. I believe one of her great strengths is her way of portraying conversation, particularly with her dry, sometimes straightforward and sometimes sense of humor. She captures the voice of the person on the street, the good servant, the upper middle-class family member, the ne’er-dowell black sheep of the family, and even the upper class close to perfectly. Both Thompson and Cade sometimes fail to note how alive her writing is as a result.

That being said, Ms. Christie does sometimes waver badly when it comes to depicting national or racial types. Some of her characters would now be seen as racist stereotypes. She had unfortunate tendencies to exaggerate and stereotype people as a Latin type, or a Jewish type, or an Eastern European refugee type, for example. Not all of her writing maintains the same level of quality, either. She has some silly early detective writing, such as the novel The Big Four, that aped Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlockian melodrama. Other novels show, even within the detective genre, sophisticated romantic yearnings, the desperation to which people can sink, and complications within the human spirit.

So why is it worth reading Laura Thompson’s biography? Why do we still pay attention to someone who painted in broad brush strokes that sometimes register to the contemporary ear as deeply offensive? One answer is that Agatha is inconsistent and purposefully untrustworthy in creating such stereotypes. She would sometimes undercut such images by showing that one of her characters is playing a part, causing those around them to misjudge them. Therefore, a reader cannot always trust her seemingly casual bigotry.

She always keeps us on our toes until Miss Marple, Poirot, or her other set characters solve the crime. Miss Marple herself generally leads law-enforcement and other prominent characters to misjudge and underestimate her as an older, unmarried woman. Therefore, Agatha even undercuts the ageism displayed by her police detectives and others who discount Miss Marple’s mental acuity to their own chagrin.

Agatha Christie’s popularity remains because human beings are messy and life does not tie up with neat endings. Certainly her own did not. She maintained a love for Archie Christie all her life, faithfully keeping all his letters in a briefcase, while also loving her husband, Max Mallowan, and putting Archie behind her in other ways. In her mysteries, on the other hand, murderers show a limited set of motivations. Only certain people have both the motivation and the circumstances to commit their crimes. Unlike real life, the vast majority of her killers get what they deserve.

Her plots are ingenious puzzles, and the world loves a puzzle. Her universe features clearly cut righteousness and wickedness. We also love her characters: their familiarity but also the way any of them could be made unfamiliar. Her innocent-looking detective Miss Marple, a fluffy old lady with pink cheeks, believes inexorably in evil. She and Hercule Poirot also recognize patterns within human nature rather than the facades that cover up such patterns. They or other problem-solvers reveal the recognizable licentiousness, cold calculation, or desperation percolating in the lives of more than one innocent-looking suspect.

It is therefore a mistake to focus on her characters as cardboard cutouts, despite the way she recycles some of the same tropes: the faithful servant, the femme fatale, the dry, careful lawyer, the female companion. Their simplicity is deceptive and sometimes ill-served by their televised versions. Agatha also builds real characterization, however limited, through their conversations more than inner monologues, but they are no less recognizable and sometimes more easily digestible as a result.

As Laura Thompson points out, Agatha Christie’s own life could be shambolic, despite her notable career as a prolific and diverse writer. She had complicated relationships and took paths she never completed. Agatha knew that shades of grey are the norm. In her detective novels she distills that knowledge, simplifies it, and uses sleight-of-hand while showing us afterwards how she did the magic trick. In wrapping up the plot and punishing the perpetrators, she provides vicarious satisfaction and catharsis, deceiving simplicity, and a moral certainty that most of us do not know in real life. In the end it is no mystery that her knowledge of human nature and way of arranging its facets so cleverly is the key to her continued, and well-deserved, success.

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