Christie, Agatha (1890–1976)

English novelist and dramatist, mainly of detection stories and thrillers, whose sales continue to break all records. Name variations: Agatha Christie Mallowan; Lady Mallowan; (pseudonym) Mary Westmacott. Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, Devon, England; died on January 12, 1976, at Wallingford, Berkshire; daughter of Frederick Alvah and Clarissa Margaret (Boehmer) Miller ; educated at home and at various finishing schools; married Archibald Christie, on December 24, 1914 (divorced, April 1928); married Max Mallowan, on September 11, 1930; children: (first marriage) Rosalind (b. 1919).

Published first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920); published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926); had first stage adaptation produced (1928); had first film adaptation released (1928); had first play produced (1930); published first Mary Westmacott novel, Giant's Bread (March 1930); had radio play commissioned for Queen Mary's 80th birthday (1947); saw her play The Mousetrap begin London run (November 25, 1952); received the Grand Masters Award of the Mystery Writers of America (1954); awarded the CBE (January 1, 1956); became president of the Detection Club (1957); received an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Exeter University (1961); given the Order of Dame Commander of the British Empire (January 1, 1971); was subject of wax model placed in Madame Tussaud 's, London (1972).

Selected writings: (short story collection) The Mysterious Mr. Quin (1930); (under pseudonym Mary Westmacott) Unfinished Portrait (1934); The ABC Murders (1936); The Body in the Library (1942); (autobiography) Come, Tell Me How You Live (1946); (play) Murder on the Nile (1945); (play) Witness for the Prosecution (1953); (short story collection) The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding (1960); By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968); (poetry) Poems (1973).

Though Agatha Christie's first novel did not appear until she was 30 years old, she would go on to write just under 100 books, mainly detective stories and thrillers. Owing to the fact that most English publications were soon followed by publication in America, often bearing a different title, this number can appear to be even greater. Nevertheless, her popularity was, and still is, phenomenal. By the time she died, over four million copies of her books had been sold worldwide. By now, over a billion copies have been printed in English alone, and she has been translated into more languages than Shakespeare. Her celebrated play, The Mousetrap, made theatrical history by having an unbroken London run for over 40 years. Television programs, featuring her characters Hercule Poirot, played by David Suchet, and Miss Marple, played by Joan Hickson , have had huge ratings over the years.

Agatha's mother Clarissa Boehmer had had a troubled childhood. On the early death of her father, her mother kept the three boys, and Clarissa was sent to live with an aunt. Though the aunt was of a kindly disposition, she did not really understand children, while Clarissa, despite having every material advantage, felt rejected by her own mother. She was fond of her stepuncle, a rich American, however, and particularly fond of his son Fred by a previous marriage. Though Fred was a good deal older than Clarissa and often away in America, she idolized him, even as a child. Unbelievably, Fred kept all of Clarissa's letters and poems and the pocket book she embroidered for him. Finally, he returned from his philandering in America and married his young stepcousin.

Frederick Alvah Miller never worked; his income was generated through property in New York. At first, he and his wife traveled between England and America, but they eventually settled in Torquay, Devon, in a house named Ashfield. It remained in the family for many years. In her autobiography, Agatha Christie recalled, "looking back I feel that our house was a truly happy house." She was a solitary child, as her brother and sister were a few years older, but she seems to have been contented with her own company and professed satisfaction with her upbringing: "I had a very happy childhood. I had a home and a garden that I loved; a wise and patient Nanny; as father and mother two people who loved each other dearly and made a success of their marriage and of parenthood."

The domestic arrangements were typical of the well-to-do of the period; there were sufficient servants to run the household smoothly. Agatha said that as a child the servants were far more real to her than her mother's friends or her distant relations. Frederick Miller spent each day at his club, while dinner was usually taken in the company of friends. According to Agatha, "There was one big dinner party at our home every week, and he and my mother went out to dinner usually another two or three times a week."

Agatha's day followed the strict routine of many other upper- and middle-class children of the age. She lived in the nursery with her nurse, was taken for a daily walk, and after tea would be "put into starched muslin" and taken downstairs to her mother "to be played with." The rest of the time "good" children were expected to entertain themselves so Agatha played indoors or in the garden. Like many solitary children, she peopled her life with imaginary characters. At first, there were "the Kittens," later a family who were "not quite children and not quite dogs, but indeterminate creatures between the two." Outdoors, she endowed her hoop with a personality of its own. Later still, she invented a number of female companions who remained with her for several years. She had plenty of toys, but, apart from her dolls' house and her rockinghorse, these left little impression on her in later years. She also had pets—a canary called Goldie and a Yorkshire terrier called Tony.

Christie claims to remember little of her siblings Madge and Monty while she was a child—possibly because they were both at school. Madge was generally kind and read to Agatha, though they did play one game in which the older girl pretended to be mad, which both terrified and fascinated the younger. Monty avoided his kid sister when he could, teased her when he couldn't, and called her "the scrawny chicken." Occasionally, he condescended to show her his white mice or to allowed her to "help" when he was making things. Once he took her out in his boat, but the experiment was never repeated as Agatha, always a poor sailor, became seasick.

As a little girl, Christie was indulged by her grandmothers and her uncles. Grannie B. was her paternal grandmother; Auntie-Grannie was her paternal stepgrandmother. Grannie B. was poor, "sitting all day in the window of her house, sewing." Auntie-Grannie was rich and lived in a large house in Ealing. When Agatha and her Nanny paid extended visits, Agatha particularly remembered playing a game that she called "A Chicken from Mr. Whitely's":

Needless to say, I was the chicken. Selected by Grannie with appeals to the shopman as to whether I was really young and tender, brought home, trussed up, skewered (yells of delight from my skewered self), put in the oven, done to a turn, brought on the table

dished up, great show of sharpening the carving knife, when suddenly the chicken comes alive and "It's me!"—grand climax—to be repeated ad lib.

On a Sunday, when Grannie B. and two of her sons came for a splendid lunch, they would all play school with their little visitor.

Clarissa Miller seems to have been somewhat indecisive. She flirted with several religious sects before coming full circle and returning to the Church of England. While Madge and Monty were young, their mother had ardently believed in formal education for both boys and girls. Monty had gone to Harrow. Madge had attended Roedean, though the line had been drawn when a mistress had wished her to go to the ladies' college at Girton, and she was "finished" in Paris instead. However, by the time Agatha was old enough for school, Clarissa no longer believed that children should be taught. She was very disappointed when Agatha was found to be able to read before the age of five. The little girl went on to write and to learn arithmetic from her father. French she learned from a maid whom Clarissa Miller engaged in France and brought back to England. Later, Agatha attended school in Torquay for a little while and various establishments of an educational nature in France. It was during this time that she toyed with the possibility of a musical career but found that her temperament was unsuited to public performance.

It was still the fashion at this time for young girls to "come out" into society, a costly business. Madge had made her society debut in New York, but by the time Agatha was old enough the family's financial position had changed. Frederick Miller had died, not exactly ruined but in straitened circumstances, owing, Christie thought, to the bad management of his American financial advisers. Ashfield was expensive to run, and it was often cheaper to rent out the house and live abroad. Agatha "came out" in Cairo, where her mother had gone for her health. Since several British regiments were stationed in Egypt, there was a lively social life. Christie later claimed that for three months she "went to five dances every week." Though she flirted, no one really touched her heart.

Agatha Christie's pleasure and genius lay in the dovetailing of events and the posing of a puzzle.

—Jessica Mann

Once back in England, Christie went to country house parties, attended race meetings, was driven about in the cars of friends, and, in 1909, even flew in an airplane. She fell in love several times, had a number of proposals of marriage, and eventually became engaged to Reggie Lucy, a major in the Gunners and a member of a family with whom she had been friendly for many years. During her late teens, she had had a few poems printed, mainly in The Poetry Review, and then at her mother's suggestion started to write stories, but none of them was accepted for publication. When she progressed to a novel, she sent it to Eden Philpotts for advice. A well-known writer at the time and a near neighbor of the Millers, Philpotts made some suggestions and arranged for his own literary agent, Hughes Massie, to criticize the book. Massie advised her "to stop thinking about it any more and to write another book."

Shortly before Christmas 1912, Agatha met Archie Christie. In her autobiography, she describes him as "a tall fair young man, with crisp, curly hair, a rather interesting nose, turned up not down, and a great air of careless confidence about him." After what might justifiably be termed a whirlwind romance, Agatha wrote a farewell to Reggie who was abroad with his regiment and became engaged to Archie. In 1914, war broke out between England and Germany. Archie was in the Flying Corps where his life was in great danger while Agatha worked as a voluntary nurse in Torquay. When Archie was handed an unexpected leave over Christmas 1914, he and Agatha hastily arranged to be married on Christmas Eve. The next day, Archie returned to his unit; he and Agatha were not to meet again for the next six months.

After about a year, Christie left nursing to work in the hospital dispensary. It was here, during slack periods, that she began planning her first detective story. Called The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it contained the Belgian investigator who later became so famous—Hercule Poirot. Though the book was finished during a fortnight's holiday at a hotel on Dartmoor, taken especially for the purpose, it was not published until 1920. By then, the war was well over, and the Christies were living in London where Archie had a job in the City. A daughter had been born to them the previous year. Christie's contract with Bodley Head gave her a small royalty, but only after 2,000 copies had been sold; all monies accrued by subsidiary rights were shared on a 50/50 basis. It also committed her to offer her next five novels to the same publisher. At the time, none of this worried her. She and Archie were elated, and they celebrated at the Hammersmith Palais de Danse.

In 1923, the Christies gave up their conventional lifestyle to tour the world. Archie went as financial adviser to the British Empire Mission, an organization set up to prepare for the forthcoming Empire Exhibition, with all expenses paid and a fee of £1,000. Christie was allowed to accompany him virtually free of charge. While Madge looked after their daughter Rosalind, the couple visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Canada. On their return, Archie took another City job.

Since The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Christie had continued writing. Her second novel, a thriller, introduced Tommy and Tuppence Beresford who were to become popular investigators with Christie fans. With £500 that she received from the "Evening News" for the serial rights of The Man in the Brown Suit, Christie was able to buy a car. The Christies also moved to Sunningdale where Archie could more easily indulge his passion for golf. Agatha acquired Hughes Massie Ltd. as her literary agent and wrote a series of 12 short stories for The Sketch. As soon as Bodley Head had published the contracted books, Christie left them for Collins who remained her publishers in England for the rest of her life. From then until her death, Agatha Christie wrote at least one detective book or thriller every year. Miss Marple, her other popular investigator, was not created until 1930, but her reputation as a successful crime writer became fully established with the publication of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in the spring of 1926.

That year also brought sadness. For some time, the Christies' marriage had been less than happy: golf had virtually taken over Archie's leisure hours and now he had fallen in love with a young woman named Nancy Neele and wanted a divorce. Christie was distraught. On December 3, after quarrelling with her husband, she disappeared and was missing for several days. A full-scale search was mounted involving hundreds of police and thousands of ordinary citizens. The Daily News offered £100 reward for information about her—a large sum in those days. Ten days later, she was found to be staying at a spa, the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, under an assumed name. Archie went to bring her home and issued a statement to the effect that his wife was suffering loss of memory and was to receive medical treatment. The Christies divorced in April 1928.

In the autumn of 1929, Christie holidayed alone, traveling to Damascus and Baghdad, and

as far as Istanbul on the Orient Express. While there, she visited the excavations at Ur, where Leonard Woolley was leading a dig under the joint auspices of the British Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. In March 1930, Christie returned and this time met Woolley's assistant, Max Mallowan. Max was part Austrian, part French, and 14 years younger than Christie. At the instigation of Woolley's wife, Max escorted Christie home, showing her something of the desert on the way. By September of the same year, they had married, choosing a small church in Edinburgh for the ceremony in order to avoid publicity.

From now on, except for a break during the Second World War when she returned to dispensing, Christie was to spend part of her life in England and part on digs abroad with her husband. She became skilled at documenting, cleaning, assembling, and photographing finds. She even undertook the developing of the film—a hot and uncomfortable activity as the darkroom was sometimes little more than a closet. Yet, even under these circumstances, she continued writing. Alison Light , in her book Forever England, notes, "in order to gauge what nostalgia in the work of Agatha Christie really means one needs to imagine her a stout woman in her early forties, in a hot tent or on a dusty verandah, looking across the desert, and settling down to write about murder in the vicarage."

As well as stories, Christie wrote plays, an outgrowth of her dissatisfaction with the adaptations of her works by others. The first play to be staged by another was Alibi, Michael Morton's adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Her own first play was Black Coffee, staged in 1930 and turned into a film in 1931. Undoubtedly her most popular play was The Mousetrap, which began its London run on November 25, 1952. Christie continued to write poetry and published two collections of poems, The Road of Dreams in 1924 and Poems in 1973. Although best remembered for her thrillers and her mysteries, Christie also wrote six serious novels using the pseudonym, Mary Westmacott. It is claimed

that all these novels are, to a greater or lesser degree, autobiographical. The first Mary Westmacott novel, Giant's Bread, was published as early as 1930 but until 1949 very few people were aware that Mary Westmacott and Agatha Christie were in fact the same person.

In later life, Christie had several honors bestowed upon her but the one that, according to her Autobiography, afforded her the most pleasure was "dining with the Queen at Buckingham Palace." After her husband was knighted in 1968 and she was made Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1971, Christie was handed a name problem. She solved the dilemma by being Lady Mallowan when appearing in the capacity of Max's wife and Dame Agatha when appearing in her own right.

Even after her death, one "new" Agatha Christie was published. Many years earlier, she had written two books containing the deaths of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, Curtain and Sleeping Murder. Intended for posthumous publication, their author's rights were assigned to Rosalind and to Max. In 1975, Christie was too infirm to write her annual "Christie for Christmas" and was persuaded to release Curtain instead. In January 1976, she died, and the other book, Sleeping Murder, was published in October of the same year. An Autobiography was published in 1977.

sources:

Christie, Agatha. An Autobiography. London: Collins, 1977.

Mann, Jessica. Deadlier than the Male: An Investigation into Feminine Crime Writing. London: David and Charles, 1981.

Osborne, Charles. The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie. London: Michael O'Mara, 1990 (1st pub. in 1982).

suggested reading:

Mallowan, Agatha Christie. Come, Tell Me How You Live. London: Collins, 1946.

Mallowan, Max. Memoirs. London: Collins, 1977.

related media:

Miss Marple series of films, starring Margaret Rutherford ; Miss Marple series for television, starring Joan Hickson.

Agatha (98 min.), film starring Vanessa Redgrave and Dustin Hoffman, produced by Warner Bros., 1979, screenplay by Kathleen Tynan based on her story (a fictionalization of the disappearance and search for Christie).

Endless Night, also titled Agatha Christie's Endless Night (99 min.) British film, starring Hayley Mills , Hywel Bennet, and Britt Eckland , 1971.

And Then There Were None (97 min.), film starring Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, Judith Anderson , produced by 20th Century-Fox, 1945.

Ten Little Indians, film starring Hugh O'Brien and Shirley Eaton , Seven Arts, 1965.

Ten Little Indians, film starring Oliver Reed, Elke Sommer , and Stephane Audran , 1975.

Murder on the Orient Express, film starring Albert Finney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman , Sean Connery, Wendy Hiller , and Vanessa Redgrave, produced by Paramount, 1974.

Evil Under the Sun (102 min.), starring Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg , produced by EMI/ Universal, 1982.

Barbara Evans , Research Associate in Women's Studies at Nene College, Northampton, England