Solving the Mystery behind Queen of crime’s success
LUCY WORSLEY’S LATEST WORK REVEALS ‘PIVOTAL MOMENTS’ IN AGATHA CHRISTIE’S LIFE
‘She was of her time and ahead of it’
THE historian Lucy Worsley is currently presenting Mystery Queen, a threepart BBC TV documentary on popular author Agatha Christie.
“Over the course of three episodes, Lucy Worsley turns her powers of investigation onto Agatha herself,” says the BBC.
It adds: “In episode one, Lucy explores Agatha Christie’s early life and the origins of her talent for murder mysteries, unearthing the inspiration for some of her greatest characters and the secrets that the enigmatic Christie kept carefully hidden from public view.
“Lucy’s investigation follows the trail of pivotal moments in Christie’s life and the nation’s experience to weave a picture of a woman who was both of her time, and thoroughly ahead of it.
“She explores how, far from being cosy whodunnits, Christie’s early books tap into and capture the social upheavals of one of the most tumultuous periods of the 20th century.
“Like the best Agatha Christie stories, Worsley’s exploration is laced with charm, suspense, a sprinkling of humour and a compelling cast of characters. Interviewees include James Prichard, chairman of Agatha Christie Limited and great grandson of the author; Katie Adie, author and former BBC war correspondent; Sarah Phelps, screenwriter; Ali Marshall, head gardener, Torre Abbey and curator of the Poison Garden; and Jamie Bernthal, Agatha Christie expert.”
Worsley is chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces and a popular presenter of history programmes on the BBC. But to gain an in-depth understanding of the ‘Queen of Crime’,
Eastern Eye readers can do no better than turn to her just published biography,
Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman,
on which her documentary is based.
Agatha, as Worsley calls her throughout the book, was adept at working reallife events in her life into her novels.
Worsley’s biography is quite wonderful in the way that she brings the writer to life, so that readers have a sense of the woman behind “the best-selling author of all time”.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on September 15, 1890, into an upper middle-class Victorian family, but her “lazy father and useless brother (Monty)” managed to lose their inherited wealth. This was a time when many people believed “over-educating girls overstrained their health”.
One of Agatha’s murderesses – “I always had brains, even as a girl, but they wouldn’t let me do anything” – is eventually “driven by frustration to kill”.
During the First World War (1914-18), she volunteered as a nurse in the local hospital in Torquay. Nursing confronted Agatha with the harsher aspects of life. She went home, but did not tell her mother that “she had incinerated limbs, wiped up blood – and shockingly for a young lady – witnessed the male body naked and soiled”.
She was promoted to the dispensary, where handling drugs “stimulated her imagination about the possible uses of poison” and “Agatha first had the idea of writing a detective story”. She found doctors were rude so that “in her writing, doctors would become ‘statistically the most homicidal profession’”.
Agatha, 24, and her first husband, Archibald Christie, 25 and on leave from the Royal Air Force, married in 1914. He was born in Peshawar, the son of a barrister or a judge in the Indian Civil Service. Their daughter, Rosalind, born in 1919, was often ignored as she grew up because her mother became too busy with her career.
Initially, though, Agatha did not think she would make it as a writer, because her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was rejected by six publishers. She introduced the detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 33 of her novels and more than 50 short stories. Miss Jane Marple was introduced in a series of short stories that began publication in December 1927 and were subsequently collected under the title The Thirteen Problems. By the time Agatha died, aged 85, on January 12, 1976, she had written more than 80 books.
When her husband began an affair with a younger woman, Nancy Neele, Agatha disappeared for 11 days in 1926. She crashed her car into a quarry and only a hedge prevented it from toppling over the precipice. Worsley deals with Agatha’s mental breakdown and divorce and says her second marriage in late 1930 to Max Mallowan, a budding archaeologist nearly 14 years her junior, turned out to be blissful.
With her reputation enhanced with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, she accompanied Max on digs to Ur and Nineveh in Mesopotamia (now in modern Egypt), and to Aswan in Egypt. Readers were captivated by the “exotic locations” in Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile.
Her views on race also became more liberal. But the name of a bestselling novel from 1939, Ten Little Niggers, had to be changed to And Then There Were None.
Success brought wealth as well as a “toxic relationship” with the taxman, both in Britain and in America. But she now could buy houses and, at one point, owned eight. Worsley notes that “the poisons she chooses are often found round the houses: arsenic used for the health of pets, cyanide for wasps...
“She also employs the kitchen pestle, the meat skewer, the golf club, the tennis racket, and the steel ball from a bedstead as ways of killing”.
She gifted her husband Winterbrook, a Queen Anne house in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, which called “Max’s house”. Agatha and Max, who died two years after her, are buried side by side in nearby St Mary’s Church in Cholsey. Worsley says Agatha wanted to be remembered as “a rather good writer of detective stories”.
When Agatha died, the lights dimmed in the West End where Murder at the Vicarage and The Mousetrap were playing.
November 25 marked the 70th anniversary of The Mousetrap, “the longest running play in the world”. It was announced that Agatha’s iconic thriller will make its Broadway premiere next year. The show has been performed more than 28,915 times in London and has been seen by 10 million people.
The New York premiere will be a coproduction between The Mousetrap’s UK producer, Adam Spiegel, and multiple Tony Award-winning American producer Kevin McCollum.
Spiegel said: “There can be no better way to mark today’s milestone in The Mousetrap’s illustrious run, than to look ahead to a production in New York.”
McCollum commented: “I am thrilled that Agatha Christie’s beloved murder mystery that changed popular theatre and has been a landmark attraction for US visitors to London’s West End for the past 70 years will now be coming to Broadway.”