Dame Agatha Christie died 50 years ago today. It was only five months since she had killed off the greatest Belgian (along with TinTin) who had never lived. ‘HERCULE POIROT IS DEAD, FAMED BELGIAN DETECTIVE’ ran the front-page of the New York Times on 7 August 1975. In fact, Christie had written and sealed his demise, in Curtain, as early as 1940 fearing that she would be killed in a London air raid but she proved as hardy as her hero. Both, mercifully, succumbed from natural causes. She was 85; Poirot at least 110.
The world of Agatha Christie is stuck for all eternity at a tea party in a country vicarage, sticking a fork into her seedcake as a bank manager’s wife chokes on a strychnine sandwich; the world firmly fixed in 1932.
Born in 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, enjoyed a comfortable upper-middle class Edwardian upbringing funded by an American inheritance. She taught herself to read from her father's library at Ashfield, a large villa at Torquay, which was to form the backdrop to a number of her novels. Her father died when she was 11. Much of the wealth had disappeared so it became a matter of keeping up appearances. Interestingly, of her 55 full-length murder mysteries, 36 involved motives of financial gain.
On Christmas Eve 1914, she suddenly married Archie Christie, a young officer in the Royal Flying Corps on his first leave (the Dames's most recent biographer, Lucy Worsley, has described him as "hot"). She worked as a nurse and then in a dispensary, a font of her knowledge of poisons. Challenged by her sister Madge, Agatha embarked on a detective story. The refugees she saw in Torquay inspired Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer - clever, meticulous, and self-important. Rejected by two publishers, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, did not appear for two years.
In 1919, her only child Rosalind was born and three years later Agatha set off without her on a ten-month tour of the colonies to promote the British Empire Exhibition with Archie.
In 1926, she caused a stir with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd but soon attracted much unwanted attention for her very own mystery. Miserable after her mother's death and exhausted by the strain of clearing Ashfield, Agatha broke down when Archie admitted he had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, a golfing partner, and wanted to marry her. Agatha fled the unlucky house they had called Styles and disappeared for 11 days. Because her car was discovered perched on the edge of a quarry on the North Downs, there were fears for her safety. Suicide was suspected; a police inspector believed Archie had murdered her. She had made her way to Harrogate, registering herself as Mrs Neele at the Hydropathic Hotel. Police combed the country, attended by bloodhounds, amateur search parties, and clairvoyants – even Dorothy L Sayers joined the hunt. Ten days later she was identified by the hotel's bandsmen.
As Laura Thompson argues convincingly in 2007, it seems Agatha had really only wanted to jolt Archie into changing course. She wanted him to look for her. She had written to his brother saying she was going to a spa in northern England. And Archie should have guessed the reference to Mrs. Neele but he never got the message.
They divorced in 1928. Agatha was advised to retain her first married name and so, for the rest of his life, Archie could not enter a bookshop or library without seeing his surname on the shelves.
The previous year her immortal Jane Marple made her first appearance. “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quietly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival”. Christie became so fond of the tweedy anthropologist from St Mary Mead that she couldn't bear to kill her orf. (Wasn't it extraordinary how many inhabitants this sleepy village could bury?)
Following the deeply embarrassing episode at Harrogate, she shrunk from any sort of personal publicity. Her autobiography does not mention it but there is an oblique picture of the end of her marriage in Unfinished Portrait (1933), one of six novels she wrote as Mary Westmacott. This liberating pseudonym revealed much about the inner life of young Agatha.
In 1928, while visiting Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur, Agatha met Max Mallowan, an archaeologist, fourteen years her junior. They wed in 1930. He did promise her a life of stiffs but he never said, though widely quoted, that the older the wife of an archaeologist, the more interesting she becomes to him. She accompanied Max on his expeditions – living rough, photographing finds and cleaning pieces with her face cream. A handful of her novels reflect the archaeological life, notably Death Comes As the End (1945) and a slim, affectionate, factual account, Come Tell Me How You Live (1946).
At least one novel a year appeared from the 1930s to the 1950s. She was at her best during the war but paradoxically her popularity increased as her powers declined. Critics were rarely kind. As Edmund Wilson put it, “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Raymond Chandler once claimed “Can’t read Christie” and praised Dashiell Hammett for ‘giving murder back to the sort of people who commit it.’ But as Allan Massie wrote, Christie at her best was more serious than Chandler or Hammett because, unlike them, murder horrified and disgusted her – Poirot regards it as unforgivable; for Miss Marple it is evil. Part of her pattern was the juxtaposition of good and evil. A Pocketful of Rye, Hickory Dickory Dock, Three Blind Mice, Five Little Pigs (arguably her best work).
Studies of her work have proved as fascinating as her fiction. See Julian Symons' Agatha Christie The Art of Her Crimes (1981) and John Curran's Secret Notebooks (2009); the latter based on the 70 notebooks found in albums, envelopes, trunks, drawers, and bureaus in her Georgian jewel of a house on the River Dart. It proved a unique insight as she would never be drawn on her technique. Under the title One, Two, Buckle My Shoe was a note: ‘How? Where? Who? Why? When? Which?”
For everything you would possibly want to know about Christie’s iconic duo, Mark Aldridge’s brilliant double, Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World (2020); and Marple: Expert on Wickedness (2024) are indispensable.
Christie lived well but was the victim of rapacious taxmen in the US and the UK where she paid nineteen-shillings-in-the-pound. She left only £147,000 in her will, which is astonishing for the most popular author in the world after Shakespeare and the Bible - more than one billion sales in English and as many in other languages. She was translated into 103 of them.
Her film rights were sold for record sums but she was rarely pleased with the outcome. Witness for the Prosecution and, to a less extent, Death on the Nile were exceptions. Five early MGM productions starring the delightfully dotty Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple were travesties but Miss Rutherford – beady-eyed, darting-tongued and leading with her chin – was so captivating that Christie dedicated The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side to her in 1962. Meanwhile one of her 20 plays, The Mousetrap, has been running continuously for seven decades.
Of all the many television adaptations, Joan Hickson and David Suchet were judged to be the most faithful to their literary originals; although Celia Johnson had been first choice for Marple but died before discussions began. As for Poirot, Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov were convincing personifications; even Kenneth Branagh, despite what looks like a possum attached to his upper-lip, has played him with conviction.
Marvelling at her extraordinary stories, the range of her imagination; the darkness beneath the narrative, the twisted characters with backgrounds and histories, Guy Slater, producer of the BBC's first Marple series, put it neatly, "actually she’s bloody clever”.
