Keely Bautista - Agatha Christie: A Biography (Creator of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple)

Agatha Christie's own life was, in many ways, as mysterious as those of her characters. Assuredly it was her predilection for the cryptic that led her to create the fiery-yet-unfathomable Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot. Yet, while Poirot epitomizes the image of the enigmatic detective, his creator was just as inscrutable, making her own life a story worthy of a novel of its own.

Agatha Christie's other great creation, Jane Marple, seems far more accessible, but she keeps her own counsel as well, a trait that Agatha Christie perfected in her own life. It came as no great surprise to her fans that, after her death, secrets from Christie's life suddenly tumbled out in the form of newly-discovered archived recordings she had made decades before. These recordings, completely unknown to the public, provide a new insight into her creations, and created a fascinating denouement that Agatha would have loved.

Why have the writings of this exacting, rather reclusive author resonated with the public for so many generations? The secret is one that Agatha knew well: her stories are about people we can relate to in real life. As Hercule Poirot was fond of saying, everyone has the makings of a criminal in him; the key to success in life is in how we master those darker feelings. As we read an Agatha Christie novel, we realize that we ourselves could easily be one of the characters and yes, even the murderer.

The dark side of human nature is the world that Agatha Christie explored. Her characters don't typically travel down the fathomless descent into madness, nor do they traverse the path of pure evil although characters poisoned by these factors occasionally crop up in her works. Rather, they live, love and are tempted just like the rest of us. Some of them resist temptation and often get a lucky break in the end while others don't resist; that's when they fall into the waiting handcuffs of Scotland Yard, courtesy of Marple and Poirot.

Yet quite a number of Christie's murderers could easily be one of us. We can relate to their motives, their passions, even rationalize their anger and sense of injustice. They're typically not madmen, nor are they usually purely evil. Instead of a Conan Doyle-type villain such as Moriarty, we have a gentrified landowner, a put-upon sister, a group of friends and relatives brought together in their grief to seek revenge against a villainous mobster.

Agatha Christie always displays a sense of fair play. Without giving the plot away, the person or persons responsible for murder get away scot-free in one of her major works because Poirot has a sense of justice tempered with mercy. This sense of compassion is rare in murder mysteries; it's another ingredient in the Agatha Christie magic. While we admire the intellect of another great literary detective, Sherlock Holmes, we empathize with Poirot's humanity; likewise, his quirks and small obsessions make him as human as the rest of us. Jane Marple, too, is a sort of British Everyman (or Everywoman) character; she is as accessible and recognizable as our favorite aunt or grandmother.

The realness of her characters, warts and all, makes Agatha Christie's novels resonate with us. Added to these characterizations are the brilliant plots. Nothing is predictable; she doesn't let you rest for a moment. She is the master of the red herring, the verbal sleight of hand; you think Poirot is on one track, when all along he's been pursuing another idea entirely.

For generations of readers, Agatha Christie has been considered to be the true master of the murder mystery novel. Yet nothing in her early background even hinted at the path she would eventually take in life.

The writer who would become known as the unchallenged master of the mystery genre was born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1880, in the resort town of Torquay, England. This most British of writers was actually half American; her father, Frederick, was a wealthy stockbroker from the United States and her mother, Clara, was British.

As the youngest of three siblings (and 10 years younger than the next-eldest), Agatha was alone most of the time while her brother and sister attended boarding school. Agatha was home-schooled according to the accepted standard of other British upper-class girls of her generation; she was drilled in a basic education of sorts, including French and music, by a series of tutors.

Her greatest talent, however, was in writing. Agatha had taught herself to read by the time she was five, and her mother encouraged her hobby of writing poetry and short stories. When she was still in her teens, a friend of the family brought one of her stories, "Snow upon the Desert," to his literary agent, but nothing came of the venture.

Agatha finally went to school for the first time in her life at the age of 16, when her mother, now widowed, sent her to finishing school in France. While there, she began to show exceptional talent as a pianist and singer, and admitted later that she doubtless would have had a concert career, were it not for her extreme stage fright.

When Agatha left school after two years, she began to travel as a companion to her mother, starting with a three-month trip to Egypt. These early trips led to a love for traveling, which served her well in later life when she set her mysteries in exotic locales throughout the world.

The years just before and during World War I brought several new interests to Agatha's life. By 1912, she was engaged to a major in the Gunners, Reggie Lucy. Shortly after the engagement was announced, she fell in love with a young applicant for the Royal Flying Corps, Archibald Christie. The aviator won, and Agatha and Archibald were married on Christmas Eve in 1914. The day after Christmas, Archie went back to the front lines in France.

The First World War changed the course of her career as well as her domestic life. Agatha became a volunteer nurse in Torquay's Red Cross Hospital, and while there she began studying pharmaceuticals in the dispensary, eventually receiving an official license as a dispenser of drugs; this made her a qualified expert in poisons. As this new-found knowledge grew, she began to contemplate writing her first novel a murder mystery.

According to biographers and Agatha herself, it was her sister Madge who inspired her to write her first novel. Madge had humorously challenged her if she thought she could write a detective story, then why didn't she do it? In 1916, Agatha rose to the challenge and, to prove her sister wrong, began working on what was to become The Mysterious Affair at Styles . It was in this debut novel that she introduced the character considered by many to be the quintessential detective of all time: Hercule Poirot.

As with many other great first novels, The Mysterious Affair at Styles went the rounds of publishers' offices and was rejected several times. Finally, it was published by Bodley Head in 1920, but only after Agatha signed a contract that yielded her little money for her next five novels.

Other than its inventive plot, a major reason for the success of this first novel was the quirky yet captivating character of Hercule Poirot , who was inspired by the Belgian refugees living in England whom Agatha had met during the First World War. She recalled that they had a hard time understanding the British way of doing things, and preferred to assimilate as little of British life as possible.

Throughout the 1920s Agatha completed to write, and produced one of her greatest successes, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd , in 1926. This novel was a sensation with the reading public because of its unexpected and even shocking ending, and was so popular that it was made into a movie in 1931,