Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
SHEDUNNIT! AGATHA’S EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
PHARMACIST, ARCHAEOLOGIST, MUSICIAN, SURFER... THE QUEEN OF CRIME’S ACTION-PACKED LIFE WAS AS DRAMATIC AS HER BOOKS, SAYS ANDREW WILSON, AUTHOR OF A SERIES OF NOVELS FEATURING MRS CHRISTIE AS THE SLEUTH
For a woman with very little formal education, Agatha Christie didn’t do too badly thank you. Not only is she the bestselling novelist of all time and the creator of the world’s longest-running play, but she was also an assistant pharmacist, archaeologist, traveller and even surfer.
It all started with a friendly challenge between two sisters. Agatha, at 19 years old, wanted to try her hand at writing a detective story, but her older sister Margaret, known as Madge, who was 30, suggested she didn’t have the brain power. ‘I don’t think you could do it,’ said Madge, who had already published short stories in Vanity Fair magazine and would go on to have her own play produced in London’s West End.
From that moment Agatha, a shy young woman who had been schooled by her mother, became fired up by the notion. ‘The seed had been sown,’ she said later. ‘Some day I would write a detective story.’
That story was The Mysterious Affair At Styles, published 100 years ago this month. Today, nearly 45 years after her death in 1976 aged 85, Agatha is still the undisputed Queen of Crime. Her total sales are thought to be in the region of two billion books, with one novel alone, And Then There Were None, first published in 1939, selling an astounding 100 million copies.
She created two of the world’s most iconic detectives – Miss Jane Marple and Hercule Poirot (portrayed most memorably on TV by Joan Hickson and David Suchet). Poirot made his first appearance in The Mysterious Affair At Styles and his 100th anniversary is also celebrated this month. She is the only female playwright to have had three plays in the West End at the same time, and one of those, The Mousetrap, is the longest running ever, clocking up more than 28,000 performances since it was first staged in 1952.
Here, to mark the anniversary, we take a look at her extraordinary life…
INSPIRED BY HER MOTHER’S SPOOKY TALE
Agatha always said her childhood was idyllic. She was born Agatha Miller into an upper middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, on 15 September 1890. The youngest child of Frederick Miller, a man of independent means, and his wife Clarissa (known as Clara) who was born in Ireland, she grew up at Ashfield, a large villa on the outskirts of the town. ‘One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood,’ she wrote in her autobiography, which was published in 1977, the year after her death.
Although her sister Madge – or ‘Punkie’ as Agatha liked to call her – went to the school that would later become Roedean, and her brother Louis Montant (or Monty as he was known) was sent away to Harrow, Agatha was for the most part educated at home. ‘My mother, who had been passionately enthusiastic for education for girls, had now, characteristically, swung round to the opposite view,’ Agatha remarked later. In addition, Clara had decided that no child should learn to read until they were eight years old, as she thought the lack of stimulation was better for the eyes and the brain.
However, Clara did read aloud to her youngest child, planting the seeds for her future career. One sinister tale made up by Agatha’s mother was The Case Of The Curious Candle, a story about a villain who rubs poison into a candle. After two episodes the narrative was interrupted by visitors who came to stay and the tale was abandoned. ‘That unfinished serial still haunts my mind,’ Agatha said later.
THECASEOFTHE MISSING WRITER
Having published The Mysterious Affair At Styles in 1920 when she was 30, by the end of 1926 she had written six novels and been married for 12 years to a handsome former fighter pilot, Archibald Christie. At the age of 36 she appeared to be the picture of happiness. She had a seven-year-old daughter, Rosalind, and the family were living in a large, rambling house in Sunningdale, Berkshire. But behind the facade lay deep despair. In April that year she had lost her beloved mother, and she was suffering from writer’s block.
But most painful was the news that Archie had been unfaithful and wanted to divorce her in order to marry his mistress, Nancy Neele, who was ten years Agatha’s junior. What happened next is still discussed almost 100 years later.
On the night of 3 December, she kissed Rosalind goodnight, put on her fur coat and stepped out into the cold. She drove her Morris Cowley through the Berkshire lanes to Surrey. Reaching the famous beauty spot of Newlands Corner, she abandoned her car, leaving her driving licence and fur coat behind. The next day, after police were called to the scene, Superintendent William Kenward launched a hunt to find Agatha’s body. His theory was that Archie had killed his wife to marry his mistress. The disappearance attracted huge attention. Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle even took one of Christie’s gloves to a medium in the hope she would provide information. ‘The person who owns it is half dazed and half purposeful,’ said the psychic. ‘She is not dead, as many think. She is alive.’ Indeed she was.
Unknown to anyone, Agatha had travelled by train to Harrogate, where she checked into the Hydropathic Hotel. On her first night there she was observed dancing the Charleston to the popular song Yes! We Have No Bananas, but fellow guests didn’t spot her real identity. Finally, on 14 December, she was identified as the missing novelist and her husband journeyed north to collect her. A blurred photograph from the time shows the couple leaving the hotel.
Doctors were called in to examine her and it was decided she was suffering from amnesia. Some, however, accused her of dreaming the whole thing up as a publicity stunt (sales of her books rocketed during and after the scandal), while others said she had manufactured the disappearance to enact humiliating revenge on her cheating husband. But what is the truth?
In February 1928, she made her only public statement on the matter. This came about thanks to a libel action, brought by the explorer FA Mitchell-hedges against the Daily Express, in which her actions of December 1926 were described as ‘a foolish hoax on the police’. Agatha felt she had no choice but to put the record straight.
The interview describes how, on the night of 3 December, she left home ‘in a state of nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate’. Agatha was having suicidal thoughts, brought about by her mother’s death and a ‘number of private troubles, into which I would rather not enter’ – namely her husband’s infidelity and desire to divorce her. While visiting her mother-in-law in Dorking, Agatha had passed a quarry near Newlands Corner. This was going to be the spot where she would kill herself. ‘When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near the quarry I had seen earlier, I turned the car off the road down the hill towards it,’ she said. She let go of the wheel and let the car run down the slope. ‘The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly,’ she added. ‘I was flung against the steering wheel and my head hit something.’
From then on, she says she wandered about in a daze and found herself in Harrogate. At the hotel, she thought she was a ‘well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa’.
Agatha was a committed Christian who believed that suicide was a sin. She had a young daughter and could not bring herself to end her life. Was the amnesia an unconscious way of protecting herself from the harsh reality of what she had considered? Whatever the truth, she never talked about the scandal again, and the only other reference to it in her autobiography is the line, ‘So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak.’ LOVE STRIKES IN THE DESERT Agatha had a passion for digging up the past, and while doing so in Iraq in 1930 she unearthed a new husband. After her split from Archie, she was not actively looking for another relationship, but on a trip to an archaeological dig in Ur, Iraq, she met Max Mallowan. He was 14 years her junior, and she initially regarded him as more of a nephew figure than a love interest, but then during a driving tour of the desert, in which the couple bathed in a lake with Agatha dressed in a double pair of knickers and a pink silk vest, Cupid’s arrow struck. When