Dispelling the misperceptions surrounding the queen of crime Agatha Christie
English writer, Agatha Christie, in her home, Greenway House, in Devonshire, England
- Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman
- Lucy Worsley
- Hodder & Stoughton, €18
Lucy Worsley has become television’s go-to historian, attracting a dedicated following with her inimitable spin on bygone eras, particularly the life and loves of the monarchy.
For her latest project, the British historian has turned to a different kind of royalty — the queen of crime fiction, Agatha Christie.
In her biography Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman, Worsley aims to dispel some of the myths and misperceptions that still surround one of the world’s most famous authors.
She may be right at home with the aristocracy in her work but as an interviewee, Worsley is refreshingly down to earth, and her passion for her subject is palpable. She has long had an interest in crime fiction and felt that there was room for a fresh look at Christie’s remarkable life.
“I have written before about the history of detective fiction, which I love, and it became clear to me just how staggering her achievement really was, head and shoulders above all the other crime writers of the 20th century. I felt there was perhaps room for a book that took a historian’s approach.
“In some ways, she offers a micro-history of the 20th century — the First and Second World Wars, the changes to the divorce law that were important to her, and she was also a woman entering the workplace and getting paid in a way that hadn’t happened before for women from her class.”
Her achievement is all the greater given the fact that she was a woman, says Worsley, citing the often-asserted fact that Christie’s books, along with the works of Shakespeare and the Bible, are the biggest sellers of all time.
“Unlike Shakespeare and God, however, she is female… she did all of this in a man’s world, as it was then, for her. I wanted to celebrate that.
“She was so successful, she is part of the wallpaper of life really, but people have forgotten about the human being that she really was.”
This empathy for the woman behind the public facade was key when it came to delving into one of the pivotal episodes in Christie’s life — her disappearance in 1926, when she went missing for 11 days, and was eventually found in a hotel in Harrogate.
There was much lurid speculation in the press about the reasons for her disappearance, which occurred after she discovered her husband Archie was having an affair and wanted a divorce.
Worsley’s research led her to the conclusion that the events surrounding it had been greatly misrepresented. Her voice rises as she speaks about the unjust treatment Christie faced from the newspapers of the time and in turn the wider public.
“Anyone who writes about Christie’s life has to come to their own conclusion about what happened during that notorious year of 1926. As I did my research, it was very clear what happened.
"I became really angry on her behalf with the newspaper journalists at the time who spun the story that the reason that she had disappeared, to put it in a nutshell, was to frame her cheating husband for her murder.
“The newspapers loved that story and I’m sorry to say that very many historians have loved that story as well. From there it leaked out into popular culture... which treated her as somehow a bad, duplicitous, deceptive person.”
In a 1928 interview, Christie disclosed the real reasons behind her disappearance.
“It makes me sad that she actually told the world exactly what had happened, that she had experienced suicidal thoughts and been really ill.
“What distresses me is the fact that she gave the solution to this so-called mystery in a newspaper interview that was read by millions of people but because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear, they didn’t believe her.”
Christie had achieved a rare level of success on her own terms but after 1926, she downplayed her achievements.
“Previously, she was happy to say, ‘I’m a career woman, it’s great, it’s fantastic’. But after 1926, you never hear her talk about her career any more, about her ambitions, her sales, her fans, or anything like that.
“When she does give very rare interviews, she has this whole schtick, like ‘Oh, I don’t know why anyone reads my books, I don’t think they’re anything special’. I’ve seen her passport — does it say major star, author, writer? No, it says married woman, that was the identity that she claimed.”
The author did achieve her goal of a more equal and modern partnership in her second marriage to the archaeologist Max Mallowan — in more ways than one, as Worsley discovered.
“I knew she would go on these archaeological digs with her second husband, that she liked to travel and found it exciting. But what I didn’t know was that she paid for the digs.
"Her second marriage worked incredibly well but there were lots of things that people thought were weird about it, like the fact that she was 14 years older.
“Had they known that she was also bankrolling her husband’s career, that would have been considered weird too. But she was paying the bills, that is one of the reasons she kept on writing.”
She has sold an estimated 2bn books and created two of the most iconic characters in fiction, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, yet for a long time there was a certain intellectual snobbery about Christie’s work and a reluctance to admit reading her books.
“There was a whole industry of bashing Agatha Christie in order to make yourself look clever, as a way of saying ‘I’m a high-minded person, I’m above all of this trash’,” says Worsley.
“But things are starting to change — 20 years ago, if you studied the great writers at university, it might well have been Joyce, Auden, Eliot, and so on.
“But now I think we are able to widen the canon, let people in, people who outsold those guys, like Agatha Christie and other female writers, and take them seriously. They deserve to be taken seriously.”
Christie was writing a century or so ago, and the social mores and values of her era and class are very much reflected in her work: Worsley was keenly aware of this.
“I guess there are two schools of thought and I don’t want to belong to either of them. One is that this is just unacceptable, we shouldn’t read these books, the other is that well, this is fairly representative of her class and time, so what are you making a fuss about?
“You can read her books for entertainment but you can also read them as records of what people thought in the past. I have presented Agatha warts and all — I have shown that there were layers to her, she was complex.
“She is my heroine but one of the things I like about her is that she can be difficult.”
Worsley also enjoyed discovering that beyond a shadowy side capable of conjuring up darkly ingenious plots and macabre murders, Christie had an incredible appetite for life and fun.
“She had an admirable ability to live in the moment and enjoy it. I love that about her, the way she enjoyed speeding along the motorway, skinny dipping and surfing, roller-skating and flying … and food — my goodness, the way she would drink a whole glass of cream.
“One of my favourite letters of hers says, ‘Oh I ate too much but what is life without an orgy now and then’.”
Then Worsley repeats the line for emphasis: “What is life without an orgy now and then, Marjorie?” and bursts into laughter.
What a shame she never met her heroine — they would have got on like a house on fire.
