Agatha Christie Unveiled: Hidden Layers of the Queen of Crime
An Encounter with Her Own Fame
Like her books, Agatha Christie’s life contained layers and mysteries. Once while travelling on a train, incognito, she heard two other middle-aged women discussing her. With her books on their laps signifying how widespread her readership was, one said: “I hear she drinks like a fish.” This was an anecdote that Christie narrated during an interview on her 80th birthday.
Agatha, by then, was immensely popular: “Christie is the best-selling author after Shakespeare and the Bible, so the cliché runs.” She also didn’t drink. Of course, she was to deploy that very incident in one of her books, creating a scene where a detective hears herself being discussed by strangers.
Discomfort with Her Celebrity Status
Agatha wasn’t comfortable with being such a public figure. She might have cherished her camouflage on the train. On official forms, she always wrote “housewife” for her profession, rather than acknowledging that she was an author whose books had sold about two billion copies: “And despite her gigantic success, she retained her perspective as an outsider and onlooker.”
Why, asks Lucy Worsley in Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman, was the author so obsessed with seeming ordinary? Did it also stem from the cultural era that she inhabited? Where women’s success was always a double-edged sword, drawing slander rather than respect?
Her Mysterious Disappearance
Another incident that drew salacious coverage was her vanishing in 1926 for eleven days. Newspapers and tabloids – then slowly becoming more popular and celebrity-dominated – suggested that she had staged her disappearance to frame her husband for murder.
Worsley, however, avers that this was just a misogynist reading of a woman’s altered mental state and retreat during a time of intense personal stress. After all, she had just discovered her husband’s infidelity, and was clearing out her childhood home after her mother’s recent death.
The House Where It All Began
Born Agatha Miller on September 15th 1890, in Torquay, south of Devon, in a Victorian villa called “Ashfield” – she wandered in a garden filled with trees, among “the big beech tree, the Wellingtonia, the pines, the elms.” And from where you could get glimpses of the ocean. She describes herself in An Autobiography as “a solemn little girl with pale, flaxen sausage curls.”
Influence of Her Mother
Christie’s mother, Clara, was rather domineering and wielded a strong influence on her. Clara convinced young Agatha that she had purchased their country house, despite the legal impossibility for women in that era to enter such transactions. Agatha later emulated her mother’s obsession with houses by becoming a collector and owner of multiple houses.
Homeschooled for Marriage
Clara was determined that Agatha should marry above her class. The philosophy with which she was raised was, as Agatha herself put it, “you were waiting for The Man, and when the man came, he would change your entire life.” So Christie was deliberately not sent to school. She was taught music and French and ‘character’ at home. Ironically, her older sister had been allowed to attend school, and came home expressing many ‘troubling’ opinions, because of which Agatha was educated at home.
With time on her hands, Agatha turned into a ‘bookworm’ – devouring all books she could lay her hands on. Later on, one of her murderess characters would say: “I always had brains, even as a girl! But they wouldn’t let me do anything…I had to stay at home – doing nothing.”
An Independent Spirit
Far from being a prim Victorian girl, Christie had a noticeable “joie de vivre” – an ability to “make the best of everything.”
She loved her piano lessons, cakes and cream. She was also messy, leaving “possessions, notes, toys behind her in a trail.” She liked being alone, making up stories. She wasn’t comfortable talking to strangers. As she put it, “Inarticulate I shall always be, it is one of the causes that have made me a writer.”
Spendthrifts and Globetrotters
Despite being projected as a “quintessentially English lady,” Christie’s family had a global outlook. Her father, Frederick, was the son of a self-made, wealthy American. Frederick himself was notably lazy, and a compulsive shopper who stuffed their home with bric-a-brac, even cramming their walls with oil paintings.
Her mother’s stepmother, Auntie-Grannie, with her know-it-all gleam might have inspired the character of Miss Marple.
Mining Troubles Inside The Home
Despite the family going through various financial crises, Frederick could not rein in his spendthrift ways. At one point, they had to rent out Ashfield – her idyllic home – to tenants and hop between hotels in France. Her father died when she was just 11-years-old and her mother was wrought with grief.
Right through, one of the consistent themes in Christie’s works is that these magnificent homes carried a streak of evil or darkness: “The idea that a house, a person even could suddenly flip from familiar and friendly to evil and wicked was all too familiar to Agatha, for it emerges in her childhood nightmare of the Gunman or Gun Man.” The Gunman was an imaginary figure who had haunted her childhood. At times, her mother could turn into the “Gun Man” and her sister into a sinister “Elder Sister.” Unlike in Sherlock Holmes, “in Agatha Christie, the murderer was often a trusted family member.”
Marriage and the Great War
The very attractive, magnetic, if somewhat reserved Agatha received several offers of marriage. Clara expected the standards of her generation to still hold. “But Agatha and her contemporaries were hoping marriage would be something different, companionate, more of a partnership, less of a hierarchy. More fun.”
Agatha eventually married Archibald Christie after breaking off an earlier engagement. As Worsley puts it about Christie after examining a photograph, “He was incredibly hot.” And a pilot.
The outbreak of World War I disrupted their lives, with Archie serving in a mostly administrative role, though he might have pretended to be flying planes to Agatha and others.
Challenging Social Norms
Agatha Christie’s work, while reflective of her era’s social prejudices, also subverted norms. Through characters like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, she portrayed childfree singletons leading vivid, fulfilled lives, challenging the conventional view that happiness stems from a traditional family.
A Woman of Modern Interests
Contrary to what one might expect of someone from her time, Christie relished the thrills of modernity. She loved racing cars, tried surfing in Hawaii, and had an interest in the emerging field of psychology.
Early Writerly Struggles
Agatha’s first novel, Snow Upon The Desert, was rejected by all publishers and an agent. Despite this early setback, her talent was recognized by a neighbor who encouraged her to persist: “& should life so fall out for you that it has room for art & you can face the up-hill fight to take your place & win it, you have the gifts sufficient…however life knocks the art out of a good many people.”
Fortunately for the world, despite receiving blows from life – her parents’ financial distress, her failed first marriage – her art wasn’t knocked out of her.
References
Lucy Worsley, Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman, Hodder & Stoughton, Hachette UK, 2022