The mysterious affair of the C-list celebrities and the scurrilous gossip – how could Agatha Christie possibly have resisted?

What would Dame Agatha have thought? I refer, of course, to the way in which her revered name is currently splashed all over the news, incongruously attached to the acronym “Wag”. The “Wagatha Christie” portmanteau is a headline, a hashtag, a phrase with a crazed life of its own. And it refers to the High Court libel action in which Coleen Rooney – wife of Derby County manager Wayne – is being sued by her erstwhile friend Rebekah Vardy, wife of Leicester City and England striker Jamie.

The “Wagatha” epithet was conjured on Twitter (where else?) in tribute to the deductive powers of Mrs Rooney, who – by deliberate deployment of fake stories on her Instagram account – alighted upon Mrs Vardy, who denies the accusation, as the source of leaks to The Sun. The ongoing courtroom drama – a lurid gossip-fest that has dragged in random figures such as singer Peter Andre – offers an insight, both mesmerising and unedifying, into the workings of the tabloids, as well as into the smartphone-centric machinations required to maintain a certain type of modern celebrity.

And it represents, one would think, an improbable culture clash with the genteel figure of Agatha Christie (minus the all-important “W”), whose tea-at-the-vicarage social landscape is one in which chipolatas are merely party sausages, and leaks are found only in drains.

However, that pervasive view of Christie does not quite square with the reality. Certainly her matronly image makes one think that she would have clutched her pearls in horror at the antics of the permatanned. Yet the real woman – although a product of the upper-middle class into which she was born in 1890 – was, in truth, a supremely unshockable cosmopolitan. Like her detective Miss Marple, she hoped for the best in people, and knew all about the worst. And I suspect that, contrary to appearances, she would have been compelled by the saga that bears her name.

One of her last known remarks, before her death in January 1976, was: “I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?” Like most of us, she was fascinated by these real-life stories – not least because her job required her to be. She was a student of human nature, of motivation, and in essence that is what the Rooney-Vardy showdown is all about: two women, watched with who knows what feelings by their husbands, locking balayaged ponytails and refusing to back down.

Of course, Christie would have loathed the contemporary trappings of this case, especially the ugly idiocies of social media (she never even enjoyed television). Yet she moved with the times far more than is generally realised, and often depicted those outside the decorous hierarchies that are regarded as her milieu. For instance, her 1967 novel, Endless Night, is narrated by a young working-class man on the make, a sexual player who embodies to perfection the modern creed of self-centred entitlement, and who would have fitted like a designer glove into the hustling, thrusting, tweeting, flashbulb-popping Wagatha World.

Christie, remarkably, was able to see life from this young man’s viewpoint. She did not necessarily approve, but she absolutely got it. She would certainly have “got” Coleen Rooney, bright daughter of a Liverpool bricklayer who now lives in a £4 million mansion. Her books contain plenty of feisty girls full of native wit, such as the gutsy heroine of The Sittaford Mystery (1931), who stops at nothing to save her boyfriend from the gallows. Beneath her impersonal veneer, one clearly discerns Christie’s admiration of the type of woman who seizes life and gets what she wants from it.

Nor is she unsympathetic to the type who has no weapon in her armoury except physical attraction. Her 1944 novel, Towards Zero, actually features a portrait of a celebrity sportsman’s wife (in this case a tennis player). Snubbed by the local gentry as a “creature” with “painted toenails”, all too aware that she is valued only for her impeccable appearance, this unhappy girl is portrayed with a certain wry sympathy. Key to this, perhaps, is the fact that Christie herself grew up with little money, her amiable gentlemanly father having squandered most of it. She understood, always, the urgent need to acquire security – understood, too, that there are many ways of earning it.

As for the “plot” aspect of the Wagatha saga – this, too, would surely have appealed. There is even a vital missing clue, the phone belonging to Rebekah Vardy’s agent – also in the frame as a source of newspaper stories – which now lies somewhere in the North Sea. Coleen Rooney’s scheme to identify, by a process of elimination, the author of the anonymous leaks is somewhat reminiscent of Christie’s 1943 novel, The Moving Finger, which centres upon similar attempts to trace the source of a series of