Agatha Christie - Clues to Christie: The Definitive Guide to Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Tommy & Tuppence and All of Agatha Christies Mysteries

C LUES TO C HRISTIE

The Definitive Guide to

Miss Marple,

Hercule Poirot,

Tommy & Tuppence

and All of Agatha Christies Mysteries

Contents

Agatha Christie:

AnIntroduction

J OHN CURRAN

W ho isknown as the Queen of Crime, the Mistress of Mystery, the Duchess of Death? Whois the worlds most translated writer? Who is the biggest-selling writer in theworld, with only Shakespeare and the Bible selling more copies? Who wrote thelongest-running stage playalmost sixty yearsin the history of the theater? Theanswer: Agatha Christie.

In a career spanning over fifty years, AgathaChristie transformed detective fiction both on the page and, later, on thestage. Through the creation of a gallery of immortal charactersHercule Poirot,Miss Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresfordshe sold more books in more parts ofthe globe than any crime writer before or since. Almost forty years after herdeath, her entire output is still available in bookstores and seen in theatersaround the world. How did she do it? A look at her life may provide some clues....

Life

The youngest of three children of anAmerican father and English mother, Agatha Miller was born in Torquay, England,on September 15, 1890. Her family home, Ashfield, was a large, comfortable houseand her childhood was a very happy one. Although she never went to school, theyoung Agatha devoured books, many of which The ThreeMusketeers, Vanity Fair, Bleak House are mentioned in her Autobiography and can be seen to this day on theshelves of her last home, Greenway House.

Her father died unexpectedly when Agatha was elevenand it was subsequently discovered that his investments, the only source ofincome for the family, were not as gilt-edged as previously supposed. Someeconomies were necessary, but the young Agatha continued to enjoy a carefreeexistence, participating in full in the social life of turn-of-the-centuryTorquay, attending concerts and dances and amateur dramatics, roller-skating onthe pier; and eventually travelling to Paris to study music. Luckily for theworld of crime fiction, she was too nervous to perform professionally. Sheretained a love of music, especially the operas of Wagner, throughout her life.A trip to Egypt with her mother, in 1910, provided her with the background forher still-unpublished novel Snow upon the Desert .(Twenty years later, in Death on the Nile, novelistSalome Otterbourne describes her novel, Snow on theDeserts Face : Powerfulsuggestive. Snowon thedesertmelted in the first flaming breath of passion !)

Although she received more than one offer ofmarriage, Agatha eventually settled on Archie Christie, a dashing member of theRoyal Flying Corps. They married on Christmas Eve 1914 and, after a very briefhoneymoon at The Grand Hotel in Torquay, Archie returned to his flying duties inWorld War I. Agatha also volunteered and, after a brief stint as a nurse, movedto the dispensary of the local hospital, eventually becoming a qualifieddispenser. This gave her a professional knowledge of poisons, which she was toput to good use in her literary career.

As she explains in her Autobiography , during this time she read Sherlock Holmes and The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux (laterto achieve immortality as the author of The Phantom of theOpera ) and Anna Katherine Greens TheLeavenworth Case . In the course of a conversation with her sisterMadge, she accepted a challenge to write her own detective story. Furtherencouraged by her mother, Agatha worked on her novel, eventually taking herselfoff to a hotel on Dartmoor for an undisturbed period of intense writing.Although she began The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, it was not published until the end of 1920 in the United States and inearly 1921 in the United Kingdom. By then, she was the mother of her only child,Rosalind, born in 1919. Although already working on her third novel (The Secret Adversary, her second novel, had beennearly finished before The Mysterious Affair atStyles was published), Agatha enjoyed homemaking in post-WWILondon.

In 1921, Archies boss, Major Belcher, asked him toparticipate in a business trip to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada,and the United States, Belcher also arranged for Agatha to join the party andthe trio set off on January 20, 1922. This exotic once-in-a-lifetime adventurecemented Agathas love of travel; her letters and photos from every stage of thetrip confirm this; it also provided her the background for her fourth novel, The Man in the Brown Suit , much of which waswritten during the long sea journeys involved in such a trip. The couple arrivedhome in November 1922 and shortly afterward set up home in Sunningdale,Berkshire, in a house they called Styles, in honor of the success of Agathasfirst novel. The dream of happy wife and mother and successful author was not tolast.

The first blow was the death, in 1926, of Agathasbeloved mother, and the consequent dismantling of Agathas idyllic childhoodhome. Worse was to follow when, shortly after, Archie asked for a divorce inorder to marry his sometime golf partner, Nancy Neele. Within a short time, twoof the people Agatha most adored in the world had deserted her, and thiscombination of emotional shocks precipitated her famous disappearance inDecember 1926. Although for the rest of her life she never discussed this, thereseems little doubt that a breakdown of some sort, coupled with a desire for sometime to herself, was the sole motivation behind the bizarre episode, althoughthe newspapers of the time and books and documentaries ever since would lead usto believe otherwise. Agatha was identified in a hotel in Harrogate ten daysafter leaving home; she immediately retired to Abney Hall, the home of hersister Madge and brother-in-law James Watts, to recover from the ordeal. Herlifelong aversion to the press, and publicity of almost any kind, probably stemsfrom this unhappy experience.

Agatha produced an episodic novel, The Big Four, in 1927, with the help of CampbellChristie, her brother-in-law. She used these previously published short-storyadventures featuring Hercule Poirot to keep her publishers Collins and herpublic happy until a new Poirot case, The Mystery of theBlue Train, appeared in 1928. Agatha wrote most of this novel whilein the Canary Islands, with Rosalind and her faithful secretary, Carlo, during1927.

In 1930, Collins inaugurated the Crime Club; AgathaChristie would be a prolific contributor to this imprint for the rest of herlife. The first Christie title to feature the now-famous hooded gunman logo onits cover was also Miss Marples first book-length case, The Murder at the Vicarage . Thus began Agatha Christies golden age,in terms of both productivity and ingenuity. For almost the next twenty yearsshe published two novels a year, at least; 1934 saw the publication of five.Most of her classic titles appeared during this period, including Lord Edgware Dies, The A.B.C.Murders, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Hercule PoirotsChristmas, And Then There Were None, The Body in the Library, The Labors ofHercules, and Crooked House. Dominatingthe world of detective fiction with enviable ease, she became a favorite notonly of magazine editors, but critics, as well as her insatiable public.

In 1930, Agatha married archaeologist Max Mallowan,a man fourteen years her junior, whom she had met while visiting her friends theWoolleys on a dig in southeastern Iraq. Although on the face of it an unlikelyalliance, they remained happily married for the next fifty years; for most ofthat time Agatha accompanied Max every year on his digs, where she lived in atent, happily cleaning, cataloguing, and photographing the finds. Always one toput an experience to good literary use, she adopted the background for some ofher best books Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), Death on the Nile (1937), and Appointment with Death (1938)as well as the memoir Come Tell Me How You Live. To produce her novels whileon a dig, all she needed was a typewriter and a steady table.