Carla Valentine - The Science of Murder: The Forensics of Agatha Christie

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CARLA VALENTINE

The Chick and the Dead

Copyright 2021, 2022 by Carla Valentine

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Originally published as Murder Isnt Easy in 2021 in the United Kingdom by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group.

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress.

For Margaret and Les,
without whom this book would not have been possible

Its quite easy, you know.

What is?

To get away with it. He was smiling againa charming, boyish smile.

Murder Is Easy

As a pathology technician who worked in a mortuary, the question Im asked most often is, How on earth did you end up working with dead bodies? The answerthat Id wanted to do so ever since I was a childrarely satisfies. But the reason for this early fascination is simple: I fell in love with forensic science after I fell in love with the books of Agatha Christie, books that I began borrowing from my local library when I was just eight years old. Coincidentally, Christie described me exactly via the twelve-year-old character Pippa in her 1954 play, Spiders Web. When Jeremy Warrender, the house guest of Clarissa Hailsham-Brown, asks Clarissas stepdaughter, Pippa, what her favorite subject at school is, were told that her answer was immediate and enthusiastic. She says, Biology Its heaven. Yesterday we dissected a frogs leg. The application of biology to crime can loosely be described as forensic pathology, and its something I was surprisingly aware of and enamored with from childhood.

Of course, Christie herself didnt talk of forensicsits a relatively modern term. But every one of her stories is an expert tapestry of human observation and ingenuity, threaded through with the emerging sciences and detection methods of the era, and its this attention to forensic detail that really enthralled me at that young age. Included in her repertoire are mentions of fingerprints and document comparison, blood spatter analysis, trace evidence, and firearms. There is a proliferation of poisonsperhaps the weapon most associated with Christies bookssince she spent time working as a dispenser in a pharmacy during both world wars and incorporated that knowledge into her fiction with immense success. Also, critically, every Christie detective story involves oneor more commonly severaldead bodies. For a curious child already fascinated with biology and pathology, these stories and their corresponding bodies were the perfect puzzles.

A quick synopsis of the chapters of Christies own life, for those who arent familiar, reads just as intriguingly as one of her books. She was born Agatha Miller in 1890 in Devon, UK, and became the worlds most commercially successful novelist, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. In 1952, she wrote The Mousetrap, a play that had the longest initial run in history. In fact, after sixty-seven years, the only thing capable of suspending performances of The Mousetrap was the coronavirus outbreak of 2020. In 1971, she was made a dame of the British Empire. However, before her incredible literary successes, she mucked in like the rest of the population during the First World War (as she did again in the Second) by working for her country as a nurse and then a pharmacistroles that would become pertinent in many of her future stories. Some people are aware of the unfortunate end of the marriage to her first husband, Archie Christie, in 1926 and her subsequent disappearance. It hit international headlines at the time when, after eleven days, she was discovered in a hotel in Harrogate, suffering from possible short-term memory loss, although the incident remains somewhat of a mystery, and she didnt mention it in her autobiography. Thankfully, her second marriage four years later, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, was much happier and stayed that way until her death in 1976. This second union even inspired in Christie an interest in archaeology that provided yet another talent in her rapidly growing repertoire to be drawn upon in later books. And drawn is the operative word here; Max encouraged her to attend sketching lessons so she could record the finds at various excavations for posterity, and after meticulously cleaning and illustrating them, she became a bona fide member of the dig team.

Despite creating such enduring sleuths as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Christie didnt only author crime fiction. She also wrote six romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott (a pseudonym that remained a secret for nearly twenty years), several works of nonfiction, including her autobiography (published posthumously in 1977), and numerous short stories and plays.

But its evident that what Christie knew best was crime. She wrote sixty-six full-length whodunits in her forty-five-year career, along with a prolific number of short detective stories. She was the first person ever to receive a Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America, and she was a founding member and president of the Detection Club in 1930a society of crime-fiction writers whose members were required to follow rules about writing detective fiction specifically and swear an oath of allegiance on a human skull called Eric in a rather tongue-in-cheek ceremony.

Im interested in the fascinating history of forensic science, and Im an avid reader of murder mysteries. Agatha Christies books are the perfect combination of the two. Her desire for procedural accuracy and the developments in criminology and medicolegal sciences her writing tracks show clearly the progression of forensics into the field of study it now is.

The term medicolegal and the more archaic medical jurisprudence are designations that were once slightly more common than the word forensic we currently use, although they refer to almost the same topic. Medicolegal means encompassing both medical and legal aspects, so it specifically involves the medical sciences, while forensic means relating to or denoting the application of scientific methods and techniques to the investigation of crime.