Page 8 →TwoAgatha Christie’s Life and Puzzling Persona

One need know nothing about an author to enjoy her novels. Literary pleasures arise from the words on the page, from the plot that unfolds, and from the characters that the author brings to life as readers advance from beginning to end. At the same time, readers often feel an ephemeral sense of connection, even kinship, with the authors whose fiction they particularly enjoy, and such a connection should not be discounted as an unsophisticated response. When readers profess that they “like” or “love” Geoffrey Chaucer or Zora Neale Hurston or Gabriel García Márquez, they likely mean that they enjoy these authors’ writings, but the authors simultaneously become enmeshed with their literature—in effect, they transform into a metonymic representation of their own works. In discerning the interplay of authors’ lives and of the literature that they have produced, some readers discover an engaging entryway into their texts, and, from this viewpoint, Agatha Christie’s biography and public persona admit another venue for exploring the pleasure that so many readers have found in her mysteries. Within this paradoxical perspective, Christie’s life story enhances an appreciation of her works, even as such information can be wholly overlooked when reading them.

Born 15 September 1890 in Torquay, a seaside town of Devon, England, Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller Christie (who would later become Lady Mallowan) enjoyed an idyllic upbringing. “I had a very happy childhood” (3), she stated simply in her Autobiography, remembering her early years as the youngest child in her family of five, comprised of parents Frederick and Clara Miller, sister Margaret Frary (“Madge,” born January 1879), and brother Louis Montant (“Monty,” born June 1880).¹ Agatha claimed that “the first memory that springs up in my mind is a clear picture of myself walking along the streets of Dinard on market day with my mother” (Autobiography, xii), while also stating that it is “difficult to know what one’s first memory is. I remember distinctly my third birthday” (Autobiography, 9). Despite the fog of recollecting one’s youth, Agatha Page 9 →relished her childhood in the family home of Ashfield and was particularly fond of Tony, the family’s Yorkshire terrier, reportedly named for George Washington (Autobiography, 21). Apparently, she did not overly object to Monty’s nickname for her: the “scrawny chicken.”

Agatha’s parents, Frederick Alvah Miller, a wealthy New Yorker with business interests in England, and Clara Margaret Boehmer, married in 1878; they met through family connections, as Frederick was Clara’s aunt’s stepson. The newlywed Millers established their residence in Torquay when Clara purchased Ashfield. Agatha describes the family as modestly, not aristocratically, wealthy: “Actually, he [her father Frederick] was merely comfortably off. We did not have a butler or a footman. We did not have a carriage and horses and a coachman. We had three servants, which was a minimum then” (Autobiography, 33–34). Due to the mishandling of family funds and possible embezzlement, Frederick’s income diminished over the years, leading the family to a variety of economizing strategies, including renting out Ashfield and living in France (Pau, Cauterets, Paris, and Brittany) in the late 1890s. (Although today one would hardly consider a lengthy stay in France as a cost-cutting measure, in those years wealthy English families could enjoy a profit from leasing their homes and then traveling on the continent.) During their French sojourn Clara hired Marie Sijé as Agatha’s companion and French instructor. Certainly, Agatha’s education could be described as mostly informal yet highly effective, as she recalled: “In those days … girls rarely went to school. Usually they had a nurse, and later, perhaps, a governess. As education, one had classes, piano classes, dancing and cookery classes.” She notes further that her mother “had been persuaded that education was hard on a child’s eyes and brain, so I was kept at home” (Petschek, “Agatha Christie,” 129).

When Agatha was eleven, her father suffered a series of cardiac ailments; during his convalescence, she wrote to him, “Darling Daddy, I am so sorry you are still ill, we miss you very much” (Thompson. Agatha Christie, 33). Frederick died soon after, at the age of fifty-five, leaving his family in such pressing economic straits that Clara considered selling Ashfield. Financial pressures were partially alleviated when Madge married James Watts in 1902 and ascended to a life of great wealth, for Agatha’s new brother-in-law was the heir to Abney Hall, in the northwest of England, near Manchester. During these years Madge appeared the more likely sister to achieve literary acclaim, as she published several short stories in Vanity Fair. Brother Monty, if not quite the black sheep of the family, struggled to establish himself in a career. Over the years he followed a range of pursuits, including enlisting in the second Boer War of 1899; traveling to India, Kenya, and Uganda; planning a business of cargo boats on Lake Victoria; enlisting again in World War I as part of the King’s African Rifles; and then returning home to convalesce after being shot in the arm. Agatha summarized Page 10 →the outcome of these actions in a single sentence: “[Brother Monty] was, alas, unsatisfactory from the point of view of making a success of life” (Autobiography, 105).

In 1905 Clara journeyed with adolescent Agatha to Paris, where she resided for approximately two years while attending several schools (under such headmistresses as Mademoiselle T., Miss Hogg, and Miss Dryden) and pursuing her musical interests in voice and piano. At the age of sixty-three, Agatha replied to the question, “If not yourself, who would you be?” with the answer “an opera singer” (Thompson, Agatha Christie, 60), testifying to her enduring passion for the musical arts and her lasting regrets that her performance anxieties had derailed her ambitions in piano and that her singing voice lacked sufficient timbre and strength for her operatic ambitions. Contemporaneous with her musical pursuits, Agatha undertook some early attempts at writing, and she credited her interest in the literary arts to her mother’s admonitions during a childhood sickness: “It was my mother who told me to write…. I was in bed with a bad cold, and she said: ‘You’d better write a short story…. Nonsense, don’t say you can’t! Of course you can!’”² After her years in France, Agatha debuted socially in Egypt, a journey which in part inspired her first novel-length but unpublished effort, Snow upon the Desert. The stunningly prolific novelist Eden Phillpotts, a Devon resident and family friend, wrote to her to encourage her efforts: “Some of these things that you have written … are capital. You have a great feeling for dialogue. You should stick to gay natural dialogue. Try and cut all moralizations out of your novels; you’re much too fond of them, and nothing is more boring to read” (Autobiography, 183). When her career was firmly established, Agatha dedicated Peril at End House to Phillpotts: “To whom I shall always be grateful for … the encouragement he gave me many years ago.”

During and after her social debut in Egypt, Agatha’s early forays in courtship testify to her charm and appeal. Several men proposed marriage to her (or to her through her mother), among them Captain Hibberd, Bolton Fletcher, Wilfred Pirie, and Reggie Lucy. Agatha met Archibald Christie, a second lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, in 1912. With the outbreak of World War I on 28 July 1914, their courtship faced challenging obstacles, and Clara expressed hesitations over Archie, particularly owing to his relative indigence. The young couple did not waver in their affections and married on Christmas Eve of 1914. Archie soon joined the Royal Flying Corps, pursuing a career as a pilot, and as her contribution to the war effort, Agatha served in a hospital dispensary as part of the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

So impressed by the medicines and poisons surrounding her, Agatha wrote a poem titled “In a Dispensary”: “Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain—courage and vigour new! / Here is menace and murder and sudden death!—in these phials of green and blue!”³ Although the literati might denounce such Page 11 →verse as doggerel, Agatha achieved notable success in her early pursuit of the poetic arts, publishing several poems in an array of venues. The decisive moment in Agatha’s authorial career occurred when her sister Madge challenged her to write a mystery novel. Agatha recalled Madge’s words—“I don’t think you could do it … They are very difficult to do”—and Agatha’s recalcitrant reaction will appeal to anyone whose intelligence and abilities were ever dismissed by an elder sibling: “From that moment on I was fired by the determination that I would write a detective story” (Autobiography, 198). And so she did: in 1916 Agatha began writing The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which featured the debut of one of fiction’s most famous and enduring detectives, Hercule Poirot, as well as his sidekick, Captain Arthur Hastings.

During the late 1910s and into the mid-1920s, Agatha viewed writing more as an avocation than as a vocation, prioritizing her personal life over her nascent profession. She expressed her contentment with marriage and family life, and both Archie and Agatha appeared very much in love. In a letter dated 4 April 1917, Archie wrote to Agatha, “I do really love you…. No one else would be the same to me. Never desert me darling and always love me” (Thompson, Agatha Christie, 91). Following the end of World War I in 1918, Agatha devoted much of her energy to domestic life. Now four years into their marriage, the Christies began married life anew, cohabiting as husband and wife for the first time. The young family grew with the birth of Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie on 5 August 1919; Agatha memorably described pregnancy as “like a nine-month ocean voyage to which you never got acclimatized” (Autobiography, 253).

With The Mysterious Affair at Styles completed, Agatha suffered the indignities of rejection meted out to so many promising young authors, until finally submitting the manuscript to John Lane at the Bodley Head. After a seemingly interminable period waiting for a response, she was invited to revise the manuscript for further consideration. It was then accepted, and she signed a contract for five additional books. The Secret Adversary followed in 1922, and this book introduced Christie’s recurring characters of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford (who were unmarried in the first installment of their adventures).

Archie took a new position as the financial advisor of the forthcoming 1924 Empire Exhibition, serving under the authority of his rather peculiar and demanding boss, Major Ernest R. Belcher, who inspired the enigmatic figure of Sir Eustace Pedler in Agatha’s The Man in the Brown Suit. As part of the requirements of Archie’s job, the Christies traveled the world throughout 1922, with stops in Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Pretoria in South Africa; Melbourne, Sydney, Queensland, and Tasmania in Australia; New Zealand; Fiji; Honolulu, Hawaii; Winnipeg, Banff, Toronto, and Ottawa in Canada; and New York City. During their days in Hawaii, Agatha learned to surf.

Page 12 →If sibling rivalry with Madge to some degree inspired The Mysterious Affair at Styles, perhaps sibling rivalry with Agatha, now a published novelist, inspired Madge to pen The Claimant, her play produced in London in 1924. The Claimant is loosely based on a notorious case of the 1860s and 1870s, in which Thomas Castro, an Australian butcher, declared himself the lost heir to the Tichborne baronetcy. Despite Madge’s ambitions, Agatha was destined to be the premier, and certainly the more prolific, author of the family, evident in the fact that 1924 witnessed the publication of three works: her short-story collection Poirot Investigates, her adventure novel The Man in the Brown Suit, and her poetry collection The Road of Dreams. As evident from these and her other titles from the 1920s and early 1930s, Agatha was experimenting with a range of genres and literary forms at this point of her career, including light-hearted thrillers (e.g., The Secret of Chimneys, The Seven Dials Mystery) and her first novel published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, Giant’s Bread.

Dissatisfied with her royalty rates and feeling as well that John Lane had taken advantage of her naiveté as a young author, Agatha left Bodley Head after The Secret of Chimneys for a new publishing house, Collins, where she found more generous terms; she also signed with the Hughes Massie literary agency. In 1926 Agatha’s published her breakthrough novel, The Murder of Roger Acroyd, with Collins. Her brother-in-law James Watts reportedly inspired this novel by proposing that the murderer of a mystery novel should be the Watson character—a suggestion also put forth by Lord Mountbatten (Mallowan, Mallowans Memoirs, 208). With her increased funds she purchased a luxury item—a grey Morris Cowley car. Tending to family matters, Madge and Agatha bought a cottage in Dartmoor for Monty, and Agatha hired Charlotte Fisher, a longtime fixture in the family who worked as Rosalind’s nanny and Agatha’s typist.

Agatha’s burgeoning success and apparently happy home life could not protect her from the traumas of 1926, a year marred by personal tragedies. Her mother Clara died on 5 April, and her marriage effectively ended when Archie confessed his romantic relationship with Nancy Neele and requested a divorce. “I’ve fallen in love with her, and I’d like you to give me a divorce as soon as it can be arranged” (Autobiography, 338), she recalls he said, as she recalled as well her resistance: “I stood out for a year, hoping he would change. But he did not” (340). The dissolution of her marriage prompted the still-mysterious circumstances of her eleven-day disappearance beginning 4 December 1926, when she vanished after abandoning her car (the Morris) at the edge of a quarry in Newlands Corner, near the village of Albury. Part of the oddness of this course of events is that it appears that she did not wish to vanish entirely: she also wrote a letter to her brother-in-law, Campbell Christie, informing him that she would be convalescing at a Yorkshire spa. Quite oddly, Agatha registered in this hotel under the name of Archie’s mistress, Nancy Neele. Agatha’s disappearance Page 13 →sparked international headlines, and Deputy Chief Constable Kenward of the Surrey Constabulary oversaw the search for her—or, as it was feared, for her body; nearby ponds were dragged as part of the investigation.

But was Agatha kidnapped, or murdered (maybe by Archie?), or did she disappear on her own volition, perhaps as part of the research for a new novel or simply as a publicity stunt? Some theorized that she was “disguised and probably in male attire” and would “be found living in London.”⁴ Or perhaps she staged her disappearance in a manner to frame Archie, thus to avenge herself for their incipient divorce and to render his marriage to Nancy Neele impossible? Such questions swirled around the nation during her disappearance, and as an investigative expert wrote in the Daily Mail: “One great difficulty is that the search is for a woman with certain attributes that are not so common to the ordinary individual. She is talented. She is a woman who by the very nature of her work would have an exceptionally elastic brain. Consequently, one would expect her, consciously or subconsciously, to do something extraordinary” (Thompson, Agatha Christie, 213). The case was solved not by the police but by Bob Tappin and Bob Leeming, two members of the band at the Harrogate Hydro (now known as The Old Swan Hotel), the spa where Agatha took refuge after abandoning her car. Tappin and Leeming informed the local police of the remarkable resemblance between Agatha Christie and the hotel’s guest known as Mrs. Neele, and the mystery that gripped the nation was quickly solved.

Archie blamed the incident on amnesia—“She does not know who she is” (Thompson, Agatha Christie, 238)—and Dr. Donald Core of Manchester University and Dr. Henry Wilson, the Watts family physician, affirmed his assessment: “After a careful examination of Mrs. Agatha Christie this afternoon we have formed the opinion that she is suffering from an unquestionably genuine loss of memory, and that for her future welfare she should be spared all anxiety and excitement.”⁵ Amnesia erases Agatha of any responsibility for her disappearance, notwithstanding the inherent implausibility that a person could lose her memory and yet function perfectly normally. On the contrary, most people truly suffering from amnesia would alert others to their condition so that they could relearn their identities and regain their lost lives, and it is remarkably odd that, as an amnesiac, Agatha would forget her own name but remember and adopt that of her husband’s mistress. Indeed, a New York Times article on these inscrutable events mentions that “a number of mental specialists in London are still inclined not to accept entirely the bulletin issued after Mrs. Christie’s examination.”⁶ Whatever motivated Agatha’s disappearance remains a mystery; she refused to talk publicly of these perplexing events of December 1926. The Christies’ divorce was finalized in 1928, and Archie married Nancy Neele soon after, with their son, Rosalind’s half-brother, born in 1930. Agatha freely admitted her heartbreak over Archie’s betrayal: “I had married the man I loved, and Page 14 →we had a child, we had somewhere to live, and as far as I could see there was no reason why we shouldn’t live happily ever after” (Autobiography, 262).

Following this tumultuous period, Agatha’s career continued its inexorable ascent. Foremost, she acknowledged a noted shift in her status as an author, realizing that she would now write novels even when she preferred not to: “That was the moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well” (Autobiography, 344). Planning a winter vacation in 1928 to the Caribbean, on a whim Agatha exchanged her tickets for a journey on the Orient Express to Istanbul, Damascus, and Baghdad, during which she met the famed archeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katharine. On a return trip to Ur, she was introduced to Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan, an archeologist fourteen years her junior. Agatha accompanied Max on an expedition to various ruins, during which their car became stuck in the sand. For Max, this moment catalyzed his attraction to his companion: “I remember being amazed that Agatha did not reproach me for my incompetence … and I then decided that she must be a remarkable woman” (Mallowan, Mallowan’s Memoirs, 45). Upon learning that Rosalind had contracted pneumonia, Agatha returned to England, with Max accompanying her. In 1929 Agatha’s brother Monty died from a stroke.

Agatha and Max married in 1930, which marked a new beginning of her personal life. In subsequent years she joined him on numerous excursions to the Middle East, where she assisted in his excavations by photographing and cataloging artifacts while also finding time to write her novels. During the years 1933 to 1938 she wintered in Iraq and Syria on Mallowan’s excavations and summered in Torquay. Alongside these events, the 1930s marked a period of astounding productivity. In 1930 she introduced the second of her most famous detectives, Miss Jane Marple, in this character’s first novel, The Murder at the Vicarage, and she also enjoyed her first noted theatrical success: the production of her play, Black Coffee, which opened at the Embassy Theatre in London on 8 December. In 1934 alone, she published five books—The Listerdale Mystery, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Parker Pyne Investigates, Murder in Three Acts, and one of her foremost classics, Murder on the Orient Express. Agatha’s experiences on Max’s archeological excavations influenced a range of novels, notably in the period between 1936 and 1938, which saw the publication of Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, and Appointment with Death, all of which are set in the Middle East. In the same year, Agatha published her second novel under the “Mary Westmacott” pseudonym: Unfinished Portrait, a semi-autobiographical novel detailing the breakup of a marriage that mirrors her failing relationship with Archie. She closed this decade with And Then There Were None, another of her masterpieces, and one of which she was particularly proud: “I don’t say [And Page 15 →Then There Were None] is my best, but I do think in some ways that is a better piece of craftsmanship than anything else I have written” (Autobiography, 458).⁷

World War II overshadowed the life of virtually all Europeans during the 1940s, but the war years did not slow down Agatha’s amazing productivity, including such noted works as Murder in Retrospect (1942), The Moving Finger (1942), The Hollow (1946), Witness for the Prosecution (1948), and Crooked House (1949), along with theatrical adaptations of And Then There Were None, Death on the Nile (as Hidden Horizon), Appointment with Death, and Towards Zero. Under her Mary Westmacott pseudonym, she published Absent in the Spring in 1944, a riveting character study of a woman confronting her shallow vision of her life, her family, and herself. Such a colossal output becomes even more eyebrow-raising when one realizes that Agatha also penned Hercule Poirot’s and Miss Marple’s final mysteries, Curtain and Sleeping Murder, during this period, to be published if she died during a London bombing.

As she did during World War I, Agatha supported the war effort by volunteering at the dispensary of University College Hospital, and Max worked with the Anglo-Turkish Relief Committee and the Directorate of Allied and Foreign Liaison, and as a squadron leader in Cairo. One of the Mallowans’ homes, Greenway, was requisitioned for war use by American officers. World War II, as Gill Plain argues, also influenced the contours of Christie’s fiction, as the novels of this period “register the effects of trauma and social change” owing to their status as “product[s] of ‘war climate.’”⁸

While allowing for the maxim that the only two people who truly know the state of a marriage are the couple themselves, the Mallowans’ marriage appeared a companionable and affectionate one. Max wrote to Agatha in a letter dated 22 December 1943: “What I treasure in you is your imagination, that has been a continual stimulus to me, needful to the scholarly side, our love and affection without which life is a drab thing, your enthusiasm, freshness and vitality, your capacity for sharing my interests and enjoyments” (Thompson, Agatha Christie, 326). Somewhere along the way the Mallowans coined pet names for each other, and as the case with many such endearments, they are both intriguing yet cloying: Mr. and Mrs. Puper. Despite Agatha’s impressive successes and eye-popping royalty checks, during this era she was plagued by financial headaches and hassles, notably owing to the efforts of the United States to tax her US profits, a situation that was further complicated by British efforts to tax her overseas profits.

Some of Agatha’s readers mark the 1950s as the beginning of her decline, with her novels becoming more formulaic, offering fewer surprises, and occasionally echoing older plots. Such an assessment fails to take into account that, notwithstanding the constraints of genre fiction and her own productivity, Agatha created several daring works during this decade: the jaunty spy thriller They Page 16 →Came to Baghdad (1951), her meditations on the meaning of family in Ordeal by Innocence (1958), and her keen portrayals of women’s labor in What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw! (1957) and Cat among the Pigeons (1959). As Agatha was by this time well-established as publishing at least one book a year, she nearly achieved a similar feat by staging so many plays in the 1950s: The Hollow, The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution, Spider’s Web, Verdict, and The Unexpected Guest. More so, any dismissive view of her accomplishments in the 1950s overlooks her greatest theatrical success: the opening of The Mousetrap on 5 November 1952, at the Ambassadors Theatre, which would become the longest running play in the history of Western drama, only shutting down in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Agatha originally wrote The Mousetrap, first titled Three Blind Mice, as a radio sketch on the occasion of Queen Mary’s Eightieth Birthday Festival Programme.

As some literary critics overlook Agatha’s novelistic achievements, so too do many theatre critics overlook her contributions to the history of the twentieth-century stage, yet as Julius Green documents, Agatha is “the most successful female playwright of all time.” In addition to the incomparable run of The Mousetrap, she is, as Green asserts, “the only female playwright to have had three of her works running in the West End simultaneously.”⁹ Agatha enjoyed another theatrical success with Witness for the Prosecution, which opened in 1953; she declared it “the best play I have written.”¹⁰ In 1954 the Mystery Writers of America selected her for their inaugural Grand Master of Crime Award, and in 1956 she was honored with the Order of the British Empire. Her confrontations with tax authorities continued, necessitating creative financial arrangements, including donating royalties from books to charities and the founding of Agatha Christie Limited, a business that paid her a salary. Agatha gave the royalties from The Mousetrap to her grandson Mathew Prichard, who was born in 1943 and whose father was killed soon after in the invasion of Normandy. At the time, neither she nor the boy recognized the full extent of her generosity. Agatha’s remarkable productivity continued in the 1960s, which witnessed the release of additional daring and creative works, particularly The Pale Horse (1961), A Caribbean Mystery (1964), and Endless Night (1967). In 1966 she published Third Girl, generally considered one of her lesser works, but the Mallowans celebrated another publication this year with Max’s two-volume Nimrud and Its Remains, his magnum opus. As the years passed and Agatha’s fame grew, so did Max’s, although in the much more circumscribed realm of Middle Eastern archeology. He served as director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and as Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the London University Institute of Archaeology. Agatha’s grandson Mathew married in 1967. Agatha’s and Max’s health deteriorated at first slightly but then more noticeably: hers Page 17 →from psoriasis and his from a series of minor strokes. Agatha’s last trip to the Middle East was in 1967.

In 1971 Agatha was named Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire. Many of even her most devoted readers concede that her powers were dimming in the 1970s, as she entered her eighties. Nemesis (1971) stands as the strongest of this period, featuring Miss Marple solving a mystery bequeathed to her by a deceased acquaintance, Jason Rafiel, with whom she allied herself during the events of A Caribbean Mystery. Agatha’s last novel, Postern of Fate (1973), depicts the final appearance of Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, and although they charm as always with their affection, common sense, and derring-do, the mystery they solve is badly disjointed and lacks the satisfying solution of so many of her finer works. Critics decried her later works as subpar efforts—in Ralph Tyler’s misogynistic view, they represented “the nattering of an inattentive woman over her yarn.”¹¹ Linguistic analyses of Agatha’s fiction indicate the likely cause of this decline as early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. As Anne Kingston documents, Elephants Can Remember (1972), Agatha’s penultimate novel, “contained a thirty percent drop in vocabulary compared to her writing at age sixty-three, eighteen percent more repeated phrases, and a nearly threefold increase in indefinite nouns”—all signs of a writer struggling to find her words.¹² A retrospective short-story collection, Poirot’s Early Cases, was published in 1974, and her prewritten final novels for Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple were published afterward: Curtain in 1975, Sleeping Murder in 1976. Agatha broke her hip in 1971, and in October 1974 suffered a heart attack; she died on 12 January 1976, in Berkshire, Wallingford, and was buried at St. Mary’s Church, Cholsey. Her headstone reads, “Sleep after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after war, death after life does greatly please,” a quotation from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen.¹³ Max married Barbara Hastings Parker, a fellow archeologist, but died soon after, in August 1978.

As this chapter records the events of Agatha Christie’s life, it can only hint at the enigmas of her personality and her family relationships, which continue to intrigue readers in the interplay between fact and fiction. Notwithstanding her life in the public eye for nearly six decades, Agatha refused much of the attention directed toward her. Indeed, Margaret Mochrie, observing in a 1937 article that Agatha refused nearly all interview requests, dubbed her “the Greta Garbo of mystery-story writers.”¹⁴ But also like the reclusive Garbo, Agatha paradoxically amplified her fame and appeal despite her distaste for the limelight, and so it matters little whether she purposefully molded her public persona or whether it accurately reflects her interior desires and identity. With the rise of the Hollywood star system and the increasing visibility of public figures across media platforms throughout the twentieth century, many celebrities such as Agatha Page 18 →Christie developed public personas in a manner similar to film stars, whether they desired to do so or not, even if they were not devised as publicity campaigns by movie studios or publishing houses.

As Richard Dyer writes in his foundational study of stardom, “Stars are like characters in stories, representations of people.”¹⁵ In a circular process, fans begin to admire a celebrity and thus develop expectations about appropriate roles for this star, which the star and studio system capitalize on to increase the star’s media presence and the financial payoffs of related projects. Further explicating the cultural work of stars and celebrity personas, Sean Redmond comments, “Stars and celebrities are often supericonic figures, who embody model identity positions that speak to certain psychic, cultural and economic needs.”¹⁶ Authors inhabit a distinct yet related type of stardom than movie stars, yet it is apparent that several twentieth-century authors, such as Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, and Dorothy Parker, paid attention to the public’s reception of their works and their selves. At the very least, as Agatha’s fame as an author increased, so did interest in the person/persona of “Agatha” as mediated through her limited press appearances, and as her name became inseparable from her novels, her life became another lens through which to interpret her fictions. Certainly, Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, recognized her as a star, mentioning “the period in my childhood when I spent the most time with her, and became aware what a star she was (even though she hated people saying that!),”¹⁷ even as he also acknowledged that “she hated being famous.”¹⁸ And so whether readers and fans recognized her as a real person—Agatha Christie—or as a person who constructed her public image through her refusal to do so—that is, “Agatha Christie”—the outward persona of “Agatha Christie” contrasted with the truth of her life.

Foremost, “Agatha Christie” is defined by her Englishness, as she is counted among the quintessential customs, artifacts, and citizens—Big Ben and high tea, King Arthur and Jane Austen, Stonehenge and steam trains—that define the English character within the world’s popular imaginary. In complementary readings, Andrew Norman suggests that Agatha “loved so much of what, in her time, was regarded as being quintessentially English,”¹⁹ and Christopher Yian-nitsaros suggests that she herself became an emblem of “quintessential Englishness”: “As one of England’s most popular literary exports, Agatha’s fictional works have become synonymous with ideas of what it might mean to be ‘English,’ while the author herself has been imaginatively transfigured into a battalion of English national identity.”²⁰ Certainly, such a presumption should at least provoke a raised eyebrow, for if Agatha Christie herself is viewed as one of the defining symbols of Englishness, would not murder, along with roses, Westminster Abbey, and Queen Elizabeth II’s corgis, represent the nation’s character as well? More so, to view her as somehow transcendentally English overlooks her Page 19 →father’s American roots and thus again points to the ways in which she bridges disparate cultural traditions. These quibbles aside, Agatha Christie’s Englishness captures an ephemeral yet compelling part of her allure (an issue that is addressed in greater detail in chapter 7).

In the rare interviews that Agatha granted, she presented herself as a retiring figure, one who avoided the limelight and lived quietly among her family and friends. In a self-deprecating assessment, she declared: “I’m a moderately intelligent, moderately industrious and quite simple woman, who has been remarkably lucky.”²¹ She abstained from alcohol and tobacco, as she recalled Max’s words on the subject—“But you never drink … Heaven knows … I’ve tried hard enough with you”—and then wryly commented on her abstemiousness: “Everyone struggles through life with some unfortunate disability. Mine is to be unable to appreciate either alcohol or tobacco” (Christie, Come Tell, 32). Given her reticence to publicly discuss her life and fiction, ostensibly one of Agatha’s defining traits was her shyness, evident in her refusal to allow herself to be photographed to promote her novels and in her shunning of interviews: “I have never enjoyed interviews, which always make me feel embarrassed and tired, and why people should want to read articles about the author of books they have read, I have never been able to understand.”²² In similar self-deprecating fashion, Agatha declared, “Writing is a great comfort to people like me, who are unsure of themselves and have trouble expressing themselves properly” (Petschek, “Agatha Christie,” 129). Yet how shy was she? For many shy people, shyness is not a perpetual condition in itself but a response to environmental conditions, evident in Agatha’s assessment of her attempts to win the friendship of Mac, a new member of Max’s archeological team, whom she feared would “prove [to be] one of those people who from time to time succeed in rendering me completely imbecile with shyness. I have, thank goodness, long left behind me the days when I was shy of everyone. I have attained, with middle age, a fair amount of poise and savoir faire” (Christie, Come Tell, 15). A. L. Rowse, Agatha’s friend and a noted literary scholar, similarly commented on the interplay of the retiring and outgoing aspects of her personality. “She actually avoided publicity all she could, never gave an interview or made a speech, let alone appeared on TV,” he acknowledged, as he further scrutinized the contrast between her public and private self: “she was so modest; her essential self so subdued and withdrawn in society; her persona as a writer was something quite different, almost as if there were two personalities.”²³

Furthermore, consider the cagey performance of identity that Agatha performs in her following “perverted” statement about Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia: “I, alas, have never admired Sainte Sophie! An unfortunate lapse of taste; but there it is. It has always seemed to me the wrong size. Ashamed of my perverted ideas, I keep silent” (Christie, Come Tell, 12). Yet in proclaiming her silence over her Page 20 →“perverted” ideas, she speaks candidly of them—or, at least, of this particular one. All human beings experience both an interior and exterior life, and we can only grasp at their interiors through the exterior events witnessed by all and the interior events that they share with the world.

While reading an author’s fiction for insights into her personal life has fallen out of fashion for many literary critics, such a perspective illuminates various aspects of Agatha’s life and fiction. Most notably, Agatha casts a version of herself in her novels through the character of mystery writer Ariadne Oliver, with numerous points of congruency between the two. The name Ariadne refers to the clever Greek maiden who helped Theseus to escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth, only for him to abandon her; this allusion captures Agatha’s ability to create and solve literary mazes for her readers, while also echoing Archie’s jilting of her. Like her creator, Ariadne Oliver is known for her apple-eating,²⁴ and Agatha famously tired of Hercule Poirot, as Ariadne tired of her Finnish detective Sven Hjerson: “I’ve written thirty-two books by now—and of course they’re all exactly the same really … and I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done” (Cards on the Table, 51). Readers can discern innumerable such snippets of Agatha’s life in her fiction. Max noted that Agatha found inspiration for her settings from actual landscapes, pointing out that the house of Dead Man’s Folly resembles their home Greenway (Mallowan’ Memoirs, 203). Christie found inspiration for her novels from a range of sources, including friends and family. For instance, Max stated that the character of Emmott in Murder in Mesopotamia is based on him (208), and it is likewise generally acknowledged that Katharine Woolley, wife of famed archeologist Leonard Woolley, inspired Louise Leidner, the first victim of this novel (208). One can only surmise the social repercussions of casting a family acquaintance as an imperious and nearly Machiavellian schemer who dies after a traumatic head injury.

While the circumstances and motivation behind Agatha’s 1926 disappearance will likely remain forever murky, it is certainly notable that, in Giant’s Bread, written during roughly the same period, one character remarks to another, “You’ve made a mystery about Groen [a musician]—part of your press campaign, I suppose” (11), which suggests Agatha’s canny appreciation for the ways in which enigmas pique the interest of the public and the press. Also in Giant’s Bread, another character, Vernon Deyre, suffers from amnesia: “The man was in a kind of mental fog. He knew his name and where he came from, but very little else” (274). In another striking coincidence that mirrors events from Agatha’s life, Vernon Deyre assumes the name of George Green; George Chetwynd is the name of his rival for his wife’s affections, as Agatha assumed the name of Nancy Neele during her 1926 disappearance. At the very least, Agatha recognized that Page 21 →mysteries and publicity enhance interest in artists, whether film stars, authors, or musicians, and after generating so much attention about herself, she never left the public eye for the remaining fifty years of her life.

Further along these lines, Agatha’s novels illuminate the shifting historical circumstances of the twentieth century, which allows additional insights into her views of contemporary politics, whether regional, national, or international. For instance, J. C. Bernthal examines Agatha’s depictions of women’s bodies in such 1940s novels as Evil under the Sun and The Body in the Library, distilling the ways in which Hollywood films and prevailing notions of social class influence their presentation.²⁵ Nicholas Birns and Margaret Boe Birns observe that They Came to Baghdad and So Many Steps to Death, two of Agatha’s novels from the 1950s, reimagine her earlier depictions of the Middle East, seeing it now as “a Cold War world in which national independence for Arab countries is on the horizon.”²⁶ Along with such historical contextualizations of her fiction, John Curran’s studies of Christie’s writing process elucidate the ways in which her novels required extensive drafting and redrafting, in which she used “[her] Notebooks as a combination of sounding board and literary sketchpad”; such archival studies allow deeper insights into her constructions of her crimes and also of her responses to shifting cultural circumstances.²⁷ With at least one book published every year between 1920 and 1976 (with the odd exceptions of 1921 and 1943), Christie’s novels depict the changing nature of twentieth-century life, providing a metaphoric photo album in which the advancing years and shifting cultural codes are registered.

To read Agatha’s novels as reflective of aspects of her biography, despite the tut-tutting of some critics, illuminates her, them, and their shared historical moment. Readers do not require an understanding of authors’ lives to digest and appreciate their fictions, but such knowledge invariably enlightens the reading experience, sparking insights that would otherwise remain hidden. In effect, reading Agatha’s fiction through the events of her life and through her celebrity persona, creates, if not quite a mystery in itself, nonetheless another puzzle to be enjoyed as it is decoded, as readers piece together the autobiographical elements that intersect with the fictional ones. Thus, the paradox of Agatha Christie’s biography is that it remains wholly superfluous yet integral to enjoying her fiction, an interpretive red herring that simultaneously allows a fuller comprehension of the mysteries at hand.