Author’s life rivaled her mysteries
Agatha Christie’s work has never gone out of style, nor out of print, in the four decades since her death in 1976 — to the tune of more than 2 billion copies sold.
Christie’s flame burns extra bright in the present, thanks to new film adaptations (“Murder on the Orient Express”), authorized sequels (“The Monogram Murders” and “Closed Casket,” by Sophie Hannah) and homages (“Magpie Murders,” by Anthony Horowitz).
Derivative offerings and adaptations, however, can’t fully explain why Christie’s work endures.
A splendid biography by Laura Thompson does.
“Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life” was published in Britain more than a decade ago and took an inexplicable amount of time to cross the pond.
Thompson’s thorough yet readable treatment of Christie’s life, combined with artful critical context regarding her work, arrives at the reason for her endurance: “As she would often do, Agatha has used the familiarity of the stereotype to subvert our expectations. It was one of the cleverest
tricks she would play. It was, in fact, more than a trick. By such means, she revealed her insight, her lightly worn understanding of human nature.”
Christie, as Thompson details, came by such understanding through early hardship. She was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in 1890. Her middleclass upbringing in Torquay, England, was idyllic, including her close relationship with her mother.
Christie, a skillful nurse during World War, wished for a domestic life as a wife and mother — and got it, after marrying Archie Christie and giving birth to their only child, Rosalind.
But her imagination needed an outlet. Healthy competition with her older sister, who also published stories, spurred Christie to write the book eventually published as “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” (1920), the first of many outings for her iconic Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. ■
Christie’s life and work collided in 1926. She had already published “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” the Poirot novel that still provokes vociferous reader debate, to modest success and critical acclaim.
By December she was infamous, the subject of constant media scrutiny, after an 11-day disappearance that ended with her being discovered at a Harrogate spa.
She never discussed the underlying reasons for the vanishing. Thompson lays out a plausible theory of a fugue state, brought on by the crushing discovery that Archie was in love with someone else, exacerbated by terror and shame that essentially paralyzed Christie. The spell broke; she and Christie divorced; she married Max Mallowan, an archeologist; and they lived a merry life.
Afterward, there was the public Agatha, whose Poirots, Miss Marples and other detective fictions reached readers at a nearannual clip. But the more private one had a creative outlet, too, under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott.
Thompson artfully shows how Christie revealed in the Westmacott novels her pain over her collapsed first marriage, her difficult relationship with Rosalind and her overwhelming love for her mother.
Christie didn’t take public ownership of the pseudonym until the 1960s. While “Agatha Christie” could present herself as “the clever, controlled, sensible woman who knew all about human emotion but who dealt with it, every time, and kept chaos at bay,” Mary Westmacott was, by contrast, the “sensitive, secret creature who had been born of the drifting ghost of Harrogate ... who could never have existed without the strange freedom that came from using another woman’s name.”