Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
It is December the 4th, 1926. In the grey light of dawn, a detective picks his way over a desolate hillside. This is Newlands Corner, a beauty spot in the south of England, just outside London. The ground is waterlogged and strewn with jagged branches. It's only four miles from the town of Guildford, but it feels like the wild and inhospitable landscape of a gothic novel. Accompanied by police constables, he trudges towards an abandoned car
The vehicle, a Morris Cowley, has its bull-nosed bonnet buried in a thornbush, its headlamps glaring into the gloom. Beyond the car lies the cliff edge of a chalk quarry, where the land drops away into a void. Peering into the vehicle, he sees a fur coat on the back seat. As he opens the door, he notices a small suitcase, too. He opens it up.
Inside is a random collection of women's clothing. An evening gown, a pullover, two pairs of almost identical shoes. He concludes that this woman packed in a hurry. Then he notices a sticky patch on the steering wheel. He touches a fingertip to the liquid and smells it. The driver must have hit her head when she crashed. He ignores the squalls of rain as his mind grows turbulent with questions. Why did the driver veer off the road and cross the field?
Had it been her intention to crash into the quarry and end her life? If so, why pack a suitcase? If not, and this is an accident, why bring a fur coat, only to abandon it on a December night? And the most pressing question of all: where is the driver now? The officer dispatches the constables to climb down into the quarry, in case someone is lying injured after falling. Or jumping.
He remembers that nearby is a lake, which once claimed the lives of two children, earning the eerie name of "The Silent Pool". He sends a bobby there, too. There are many perils here for a person who might be wandering, disorientated by a head injury. But then his attention is drawn to something lying in the passenger footwell of the car. He reaches in and picks up a driver's license. In the grey morning, he has to strike the match to make out the small print.
It burns down as he reads and rereads it, hardly believing his eyes. When the flame nips his fingers, he drops the match to the ground. Despite the gloom, he suddenly sees this scene in a whole new light. An abandoned car with headlamps left on, a driver's license as identification, valuable personal items left behind. This is no motoring accident. This is an act of foul play. In fact, it is just like the start of a crime novel.
Which is fitting, because the driver of this vehicle is the world's most celebrated writer of murder mysteries. The author, Mrs. Agatha Christie, is missing, perhaps murdered. Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time. Her books have sold over two billion copies and been translated into 103 languages.
Her play, The Mousetrap, is the longest-running production in London's West End, a run of 70 years, interrupted only by theatre closures during the Covid pandemic. Christie's life spanned the golden age of mystery writing. Her most famous characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, define the "who done it" genre of detective fiction.
But her work has also proved controversial, sometimes revealing attitudes typical of her time but which we now find elitist or racist. Nonetheless, her influence is such that she retains the title of "The Queen of Crime" to this day. Across 66 novels, 14 short story collections, and 20 stage plays, Agatha Christie depicted the evil lurking in the hearts of ordinary people.
Her killers are not monsters or criminal masterminds, but troubled souls. A murderer might be a husband, wife or lover, a doctor, cleric or lawyer, a secretary, soldier or archaeologist. Focusing on twisted versions of the upper middle class world that she inhabited, like many an author before and since, Christie simply wrote what she knew.
But how is this privileged girl from a well-to-do English family able to write shrewdly about poisons, psychopaths, and the dark side of life? Why did a sheltered young woman become an expert in murder? And what happened after her disappearance in 1926? A real-life mystery that saw the whole country turn amateur detective to try to find her. I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of Agatha Christie.
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller is born on the 15th of September 1890. Her family live in a magnificent Victorian villa called Ashfield in Torquay, a fashionable seaside town in southwest England. She is close to her mother, but homeschooled by her American father, a socialite and stockbroker. Although Agatha has a brother and a sister, her siblings are a decade older, so she plays alone.
She fills her solitary hours with imaginary friends and storybooks and a dog called George Washington. But the family's grip on their affluent lifestyle is slipping. They have to raise cash by subletting Ashfield in the summer and spending those months living cheaply in France. The strain makes her father sick, and he dies of a heart attack when she is just 11. She will later write that this is the moment her childhood ended.
Perhaps it is no surprise that in her novels people will do anything, even commit murder, to hold on to their privilege. Sophie Hanna is a best-selling crime writer and the author of several modern novels starring Agatha Christie's famous detective, Hercule Poirot.
I like to think of her as almost like a philosopher of the crime fiction genre. One of her main areas of interest as a writer was psychology. I think she's really interested in how human beings harm each other or end up harming each other, you know, sometimes deliberately, but sometimes just because different people passionately want different things and they can't both get their way. So I think one of the key themes in her work is
is relationships with other human beings can be an amazing source of support and nourishment. And when they go well, they're the best thing ever. I mean, she shows lots of really positive examples of relationships that mean a lot to people and enhance their lives. But when it goes wrong, Agatha knows exactly how poisonous
one person trying to get their own way about something, how poisonous that might be for somebody else if their desires or needs are different. And I think that's her main subject matter is humans, the good and evil in all of us. As a teenager, Agatha falls sick. Bedridden at Ashfield, she suffers strange dreams that inspire her to write short stories full of madness and the paranormal.
She submits some of her work to magazines under a male pseudonym, but gets rejected. For her mother, Clarissa, who is now the head of a single-parent family, the writing is a mere hobby compared to the important matter of marriage. Agatha has many suitors, some of whom she takes more seriously than others, but it all changes on one night in 1912. It is the 12th of October, and Lady Clifford of Ugbrook House in Devon is having a ball.
The venue is her 800-year-old stately home that resembles a small sandstone fort. Its arched windows blaze with lights so that the whole building glows. Agatha makes her way into a splendid dining room where dancers circle beneath sparkling chandeliers, aged 22. She is tall, fair-haired and popular, known to be clever and adventurous.
She has spent time living in Paris and Egypt, and has already received a considerable amount of romantic interest from eligible bachelors. She also loves to dance, and has heard about a man here tonight who has a reputation as a mover and shaker. In life, as well as on the dance floor, Lieutenant Archibald Christie, a mutual friend, introduces them, and they clink champagne glasses, appraising one another.
Agatha notes what she'll later describe as his "crisp, curly hair, interesting nose, and an air of careless confidence." Not only is Archie handsome, but he's exciting. A pilot at the Royal Flying Corps. When he's not airborne, he rides about the Devonshire countryside on a motorcycle. The couple take to the floor, and it is lust at first sight. Agatha is smitten. By the time the band are packing up their instruments, Archie has asked to visit her at Ashfield.
She agrees and they set a date. There is only one obstacle standing in the way of their blossoming romance. Agatha is already engaged. With what will become her trademark cold-blooded pen, the unwanted fiancé is dismissed with a "Dear John" letter. Agatha and Archie start courting in earnest. Early in 1913, Archie is about to be relocated to continue his pilot training at an airbase near Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain.
He proposes before he leaves. And like many young couples with war looming, they're in a hurry to wed. In the summer of 1914, when Agatha is 23, the conflict arrives on her doorstep. She volunteers at the Red Cross Hospital in Torquay, to which wounded soldiers are evacuated from overwhelmed field hospitals across the Channel. She helps in the operating theatre, dealing with surgeries and amputations. One of her jobs is to carry lost limbs down to the incinerator.
Her interest in dark psychology, the evil side of human nature, is piqued by the conflict, and she qualifies as an apothecary's assistant, becoming familiar with medicines, poisons, and the dangerous household substances sold by chemists.
I think a lot of people forget that poison and poisonous substances were far easier to come by in those days than now. And many of the most lethal poisons might just have been lying around in domestic households, pantries or sheds. So that obviously presented Agatha with a lot of opportunities in her writing. I have heard it said that poisoning is a sort of female way of killing someone.
To me, what's unique about poisoning is it's a kind of killing someone that one can do without necessarily being present when they die.
So for me, poisoning is the murder method of choice for anyone who's squeamish. And they might be male or female, but it's the squeamish thing. If you put poison in something that you know someone's going to drink later, you can be, you know, off on a train to somewhere far away before there's any kind of gruesome death scene to be witnessed. Since she was a girl, Christy has dabbled with writing fiction.
But around this time, she is dared by her older sister to write a story with a twist so cunning it cannot be guessed. She gets down to work and produces a novel called "The Mysterious Affair at Stiles." It opens with the Lady of the Manor found dead, murdered, not surprisingly, by poisoning. In time, 41 of Christie's 66 novels will involve her specialist subject of poison.
In this first full-length novel, she introduces a detective to solve her ingenious mystery. He has an elaborate waxed mustache, an egg-shaped head, and a strong Belgian accent. His name is Hercule Poirot. Her leading man is inspired by one of the many continental refugees who arrive in Torquay during the war.
She saw this person who was clearly in the UK just because of the war and his appearance was very striking and she decided to make him her detective character or to base the physical appearance of Poirot on this chap she'd seen. So his appearance, mannerisms, the sort of external Poirot, you know, he's very striking to look at.
And then there's his fun mannerisms, like all this sort of obsessive behavior. And in fact, in one of the books, he actually stumbles across a major clue that enables him to help put the final bit of the puzzle in place. He only discovers that clue because he's tidying up some objects on a mantelpiece that seem to be ordered in an irregular way. So I personally love that about him because to know that you've got a character who's so clever and brilliant that they will solve problems
Every mystery, however baffling, is incredibly reassuring. He was there from the start and she continued to write about him for the rest of her career. I don't think she could have written such brilliant books about him if she hadn't loved him on some level. Christy wins the bet with her elder sister, but the mysterious affair at Stiles is initially turned down by publishers. By now, Agatha is a mother, busy with a baby daughter called Rosalind.
But she keeps sending the novel to publishing houses, and eventually it is picked up by an editor called John Lane, who says he will publish the story if Christie changes the ending. In the original version, Poirot unveils the killer in front of a courtroom. But John Lane points out that this is unrealistic. Amateur detectives are not allowed to address courtrooms at such length. So Christie instead has Poirot gather all the characters into the library of the grand house called Stiles for a showdown.
by revealing who done it. From her very first novel, the literary devices that will become known as Christie tricks are deployed. The country house setting, the closed circle of suspects, the red herrings, the cunning solution, the revelation in front of a captive audience. The mysterious affair at Stiles is a success, but Christie's groundbreaking use of an unreliable narrator is too much for some critics, who accuse her of cheating.
A review in the Times Literary Supplement says: "The only fault of this story is that it is almost too ingenious." Readers, however, have no such qualms. After years of trying to get published, Christie is an overnight success. But she will come to rue her first publishing contract. The deal means she has to write five novels for little financial return, which she will later describe as exploitative.
Soon after publication of her first book in 1922, Agatha and Archie leave three-year-old Rosalind behind and spend ten months travelling the world. They're part of a delegation sent around the colonies to persuade local governors to participate in the British Empire Exhibition, the largest trade show of that time. The exhibition itself will eventually take place at a purpose-built site in London, an arena that will become Wembley Stadium, England's home of football.
But in order for the event to be a success, the Christies and the rest of the delegation have to persuade exhibitors to come. In South Africa, Christy takes up a hobby that she describes as "bathing with planks." The sport will become better known as surfing. In Hawaii, she buys a round-ended wooden surfboard and learns to ride the waves. After their promotional work is over, the Christies extend their stay in Hawaii by three months to practice the sport.
But Agatha still manages to write a book a year until her exploitative contract is fulfilled. As soon as she is free of it, Christie flexes her literary muscles to write an audacious new novel called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. It is snapped up by the publisher William Collins on more favorable terms, beginning a partnership that will continue for the rest of her career. Wily, twisty, and groundbreaking, Roger Ackroyd is Agatha Christie's masterpiece.
As recently as 2013, it was voted one of the most influential crime novels ever written. When you actually look at the subject matter and content and sort of sophistication and sort of darkness of some of her plots and characters, there's nothing cosy about them at all. There's proper...
evil and malice in her books. And one of the brilliant things she pulls off in a way that almost nobody else I've ever read can, she has all the darkness and the evil and the sin and the grimness of the human condition. But she also has
this hugely fun readability thing going on. And neither one, you know, you might think that that would be a kind of hodgepodge that doesn't quite work, but it isn't. She makes both work brilliantly. So it's fun and light as a read, but it's serious and dark as subject matter. And neither one ruins the other. It's incredible. I can't think of any other writer who does that. The murder of Roger Ackroyd makes her name.
But behind the scenes, the plot of Christie's private life is more twisted than her novels. Soon, Agatha's reputation for crime, cunning, and conspiracy will come back to haunt her. The year 1926, when she turns 36, proves to be Christie's Annus Horribilis. In April, her sister phones to say that their beloved mother, Clarissa, is dying. Christie jumps in her Morris Cowley car and dashes to her bedside, but by the time she gets there, it is too late.
Her mother passed away while she was en route. Christie is sure that she sensed it happening. Turning cold at the very moment of her mother's death, she spends six lonely weeks in her mother's home, clearing rooms and mopping up leaks during rainstorms. She suffers terrible insomnia and takes sleeping drafts from the chemist. Aware that her mental health is precarious, she hopes that a change of scene might ease her depression. She suggests to Archie that they take a family holiday to the Pyrenees to recuperate.
In response, her husband informs her that he is in love with another woman. Her name is Nancy Neal, a friend of the family. Ten years younger than Agatha, Nancy is pretty, youthful, untroubled. And by the end of the year, Archie is pushing for a divorce. On Friday the 3rd of December, he leaves the family home in a village called Sunningdale in Berkshire, west of London. He catches the 9:15 morning train to join friends for a long weekend of golf.
Agatha suspects that Nancy Neal will be there too. She's not wrong. She spends the day pretending that everything is normal and takes her daughter Rosalind to visit Archie's mother. Over tea, the women discuss a trip to Yorkshire. On the way home, with Rosalind in the car, Christie passes a beauty spot called Newlands Corner. As the road curves round, the ragged cliff edge of a quarry comes into view and she suddenly imagines veering off and over the precipice.
Forcing the thought away, she keeps the Morris Cowley on the road and continues on towards the sanctuary of home. But she's shocked by the power of her despair. Just for that moment, she'd considered a violent act that would have endangered the life of her daughter. It is 6:00 PM when she reaches Sunningdale. She puts Rosalind in the care of the three servants on duty and retreats to her study to recover. Later, at 9:30 in the evening, the maid sees her mistress go upstairs to say goodnight to her daughter.
Christie then comes down and leaves two letters, one addressed to her husband, the other to her closest friend. At 9:45 pm, she drives off into the darkness. No one knows where she goes next, but almost 12 hours later, before dawn breaks the following morning, her car is identified in a field overlooking the quarry, and Agatha is nowhere to be found. It is the 4th of December, 1926.
Superintendent William Kenwood of the Surrey Constabulary is on the case of the missing author. His constables were called to an abandoned car in the early hours of that morning after it was spotted by a local farm worker. The missing driver cannot be located. Even after a search of the quarry and house-to-house inquiries in surrounding villages, it is a mystery. Superintendent Kenwood's resemblance to Hercule Poirot is notable.
Short, portly, with a moustache, he is also a little self-important. He is convinced that the famous writer has met a tragic end somewhere in the vicinity of her vehicle. Suicide or murder, Kenwood is looking for a body. As the morning goes on, he gathers a search party, sending constables and volunteers in different directions over the hills. They march off in determined teams. Some wield sticks to hack through undergrowth that could conceal a body.
Kenwood also makes arrangements to drag the lake called the Silent Pool, and he accepts an offer from a local pilot to conduct an aerial search. This idea excites him. It is the first time an airplane will ever have been used in a police investigation. Kenwood knows that a case involving a celebrity will be high profile, and he's determined to be the one to crack it.
Fifteen miles away, Superintendent Charles Goddard of Berkshire Police approaches a grand house in the village of Sunningdale. This is the home of Colonel Archibald Christie and his famous wife. They named the house Stiles after the writer's first novel. The fictional Stiles was the scene of a murder, but that didn't stop the Christie's using the name in real life. It makes Goddard shudder. A superstitious person might think they're tempting fate.
Mrs. Christie's car is not on the driveway, of course. Inconveniently, she crashed it in the neighboring county of Surrey. That means two different police forces are involved in the investigation. Finally, a servant opens up and shows Goddard in. While they hurry off to get the item he has come for, the superintendent looks around. The home has all the trappings of wealth and success. Expensive furniture, decorations from around the world, books everywhere.
but there is a gloomy atmosphere. It feels lonely. He remembers a line from a Poirot novel, possibly written right here: "My friend, one may live in a big house but have no comfort." For a woman surrounded by such beautiful things, this author certainly has dark thoughts. The servant returns and hands him a letter Mrs. Christie left behind for her friend when she departed the previous evening.
The note is rambling, disorganized, very different from the precise prose of her novels. She complains that her head is bursting. Suddenly, Superintendent Goddard is very worried indeed about the dark thoughts of Mrs. Agatha Christie. By Monday, the 6th of December, Christie has been missing for three days. The newspapers are having a field day, splashing the details all over the front pages. The case has sparked the biggest manhunt in British history.
It involves dogs, motorbikes, aircraft. The fact that the disappearance of Agatha Christie reads like the plot of one of her novels is an irony not lost on the newspapers. They dedicate yards of column inches to the story, printing expert opinions from police officers, crime reporters, crime writers. The tabloids carry more lurid reports, spurious sightings, scurrilous gossip.
There's even a claim that an apparition in a long white dress near Newlands Corner is the ghost of Agatha Christie, already haunting a local cafe. Amid this frenzy, the police go about their investigation. A missing persons appeal hits the newsstands too, but the physical description issued is hardly necessary. Her photo is everywhere. If Agatha Christie wasn't already a household name as a crime writer, she becomes one as a possible crime victim.
One newspaper offers a hundred pound reward. The Home Secretary, William Joynson Hicks, calls on the police to solve the case more quickly due to the level of public interest. The Daily Mail newspaper comments that "concern about the fate of a brilliant woman is equalled only by sympathy for her long-suffering husband, Colonel Archibald Christie." At Sunningdale, the Colonel is in a quandary. He paces in front of the fire, holding the letter from his wife.
With a shaking hand, he pours himself a whiskey. Should he hand it over to the police? Startled by the chime of a clock, he drops his glass, which smashes on the hearth. He curses himself. He's supposed to be a war hero, but now his nerves are shot. No one knows that the night Agatha disappeared, he was celebrating a premature engagement party with his mistress and their friends.
So far, he's been able to keep his lover a secret. Nancy Neal's name has not appeared in the press. But the police always suspect the husband. What happens when they find out about the divorce? Will that make him a suspect? What should he do? He grabs a poker and stokes up the fire. Well, Poirot once said, we must be so intelligent that they do not suspect us of being intelligent at all. His mind is made up.
The intelligent thing here is to prevent the police from reading the letter that Agatha left for him. Archie rips Agatha's missive into shreds and throws it on the fire. Late on Thursday, the 9th of December, Archie stands in front of the bathroom mirror to bril-cream his hair. He's often told he's handsome, and today, more than ever, he needs to look well for the cameras. He has been persuaded to give an interview to the Daily Mail newspaper. A reporter is waiting outside the house.
he rinses his hands and dries them carefully. A sticky handshake might make him seem nervous, shifty. With a last smooth of his eyebrows, he goes down to face the music. Until now, speculation has focused on the idea that Agatha could have lost her memory after bumping her head. But she's been missing for almost a week, and people are finding the amnesia story hard to believe. The Daily Mail photographer poses Archie in front of the house,
Meanwhile, the reporter asks for an insight into his wife's state of mind. Put on the spot by the probing questions, Archie describes Agatha as very clever, very cunning. Perhaps she engineered the disappearance herself. The reporter urgently scratches notes on his pad. Then he presses on with more questions. He asks, "Why Mrs. Christie would want to disappear?"
Unwilling to answer truthfully, Archie shifts on the spot, blinded by the constant flash of the camera. He invites the reporter to walk around the garden, trying to strike the tone of a confidential chat. Soon, he warms to the topic of his wife's devious mind. "Yes," he confirms to the entranced journalist, "she had discussed the possibility of disappearing. After all, she is best known as a plotter of deceitful stories."
Archie confides that his wife also accumulates money secretly, and she's very clever at getting anything she wants. Soon, much of the media at home and abroad are convinced Agatha Christie has staged a disappearance to publicize her novels. Some print mocked-up pictures of how she might look in various wigs and glasses so that members of the public can foil her disguise. But no one does, and she remains missing. Saturday, December 11th, New York City.
Everyone is talking about the missing writer, Mrs. Agatha Christie. They're obsessed. Over dinner, in bars and in clubs, people discuss their theories about her fate. Was she bumped off by a no-good husband? Is it all just a promotional stunt? Does she have amnesia after hitting her head? Or is she living in London disguised as a man? Maybe she's gone mad from writing those two clever books.
With the ending of the story still impossible to guess, Agatha Christie has now been missing for nine days, and she's the talk of the town. Back in England, the famous Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is sitting at a table in the parlour of an ordinary house. He is holding a lady's glove. Across from him sits a psychic and medium called Horace Leaf, who is well known for his powers of psychometry.
This is a form of extrasensory perception that allows him to tell someone's fortune from an object that they have touched. The clairvoyant closes his eyes and lays his hand on the table, facing up. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle places the glove onto Leif's palm. The moment the item touches his skin, Leif whispers, Agatha. The room erupts in shock. Someone asks how the psychic could have known. They didn't forewarn him who the glove belonged to.
But someone else frowns at a newspaper lying on the table, which has Agatha Christie's photo splashed all over the front page. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle clears his throat and calls for silence. He believes in spiritualism and thinks he can locate his fellow crime writer with less orthodox methods than those employed by the police.
As his creation, Sherlock Holmes once said, "When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." The psychic, Horace Leaf, closes his fingers around the glove and announces that Agatha is "not as dead as people think." He is certain she will return no later than Wednesday.
Elsewhere, Superintendent Goddard of Berkshire Constabulary is in his office at the police station, laboriously poring over the paperwork on the case. He receives a call with some new information. The brother of Archibald Christie has just received a letter in the post. Agatha must have sent it before she vanished. In the letter, she says she might go to Yorkshire. Superintendent Goddard hangs up the phone and rifles through a pile for another witness statement.
Yes, Archie's mother also mentioned Yorkshire. The family were planning a trip there. Goddard thinks that Colonel Christie is tight-lipped and shifty. He's hiding something. But social hierarchy means that he can't lean too heavily on the upper-class war hero without plenty of evidence. And despite the husband's suspicious behavior, Goddard believes Mrs. Christie must be alive or they would have found a body.
He picks up the phone and orders another missing persons appeal. This time he sends it nationwide. In her perilous state of mind, Mrs. Christie could be anywhere, even Yorkshire. It is Monday evening in the bustling dining room of the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, a spa town in Yorkshire. It is a respectable establishment, frequented by wealthy ladies and well-heeled gentlemen looking for rest and relaxation. The lift opens.
An elegant woman enters the restaurant and makes her way towards a table by the window. She is tall and fair-haired, aged in her mid-thirties, her clothes newly purchased and fashionable. A waitress carrying a tray of wine glasses keeps her eyes lowered as the woman walks past, but then turns to stare at her back. The guest goes by the name of Mrs. Neal.
She says she's from South Africa. Traveling alone, she arrived without a single piece of luggage, which apparently got lost on the journey. She's been here for more than a week, visiting the famous baths, shopping in Harrogate and Leeds, dancing to the house band as they play the Charleston. She has newspapers delivered each day and reads them cover to cover, and borrowed a great pile of mystery novels from the town's library. She behaves like a normal guest.
But the hotel staff whisper behind her back. Some of the guests whisper too. Doesn't the so-called Mrs. Neal look awfully like the missing author, Agatha Christie? The waitress puts down her tray and rushes to be the one who will take a food order from the mysterious Mrs. Neal. But the manager stops the excitable girl and delivers a stern rebuke.
Yes, the newspapers are offering a handsome reward, but the hotel's wealthy guests expect total discretion here. For the sake of her job, she slinks off to the kitchen. But as she glances back, she sees the strange Mrs. Neal tapping her feet to the Happy Hydro Boys, the house band. On Tuesday the 14th of December, 11 days after his wife vanished into the night, Archibald Christie arrives at Harrogate Station.
A group of around 25 reporters and press photographers are gathered on the platform. He hurries into a waiting police car, followed by shouting journalists and popping camera lights. Last night, two musicians from the Hydropathic Hotels house band visited the police station after their shifts. They report that Mrs. Agatha Christie is alive and well and dancing the Charleston, albeit very badly.
The police immediately summoned Archie, but have yet to speak to the woman. Though she has broken no laws, she may be in a fragile mental state, and it is considered best that the husband deal with his errant wife. Around dinnertime, Archie enters the hotel. The manager explains that the woman in question checked in under the name of Mrs. Neal. Archie flinches at the use of his lover's surname, but reminds himself that nobody here knows about his affair.
He simply comments that Mrs. Christie, if it is she, may have used a false name to avoid detection. Nervously twisting his hat in his hands, Archie waits by the lift for the suspicious guest to come down to the dining room. Presently the doors open and the so-called Mrs. Neal steps out. Like his wife, she's tall and fair and wears a beautiful mauve dress and pearls. Glancing around the restaurant, she smiles and waves to a couple of guests with whom she's become acquainted.
Then, slowly, her gaze settles on her husband. They say nothing. In the background, the house band strike up a popular new tune called "I Wonder Where My Baby Is Tonight." Agatha breaks eye contact and makes her way to her regular table by the window. Archie turns to the manager and confirms that their guest is Mrs. Agatha Christie. Then he follows his wife to her table, where she invites him to join her for supper.
They make polite conversation as they butter bread rolls and wait for the wine waiter. In the lobby, the manager sends away the police and, with more difficulty, the journalists. The case of the missing crime writer is solved. The mystery may be over, but the scandal is only just beginning. It will dog Christy for the rest of her life.
Putting their marital strife aside, for now, Archie and Agatha flee Harrogate to hole up in the privacy of her elder sister's country home called Abney Hall. The press is in a frenzy, reporters besieging the gates of the estate. The intense speculation over where Agatha went transforms into accusations of why Agatha went.
Though many believe it was a mere publicity stunt, others suggest her disappearance was a desperate attempt to revive a failing marriage or a psychiatric disorder, a fugue state brought on by deep depression. Although Christie recovers and starts writing fiction again soon after, she never sheds light on those missing eleven days. Her disappearance is barely mentioned even in her autobiography, but like many writers, she plunders her own life and trauma for her fiction.
Her 1934 novel, Unfinished Portrait, published under the pen name of Mary Westmacott, tells the story of a woman who hits rock bottom. And many critics claim that the events of 1926 inspire Christie's most gothic detective novels too. In these bleakest of stories, no one and nowhere is safe, especially not the home, where darkness lurks even in the heart of a beloved spouse. She will later write that
From that point on, there are quite a few books that she publishes in which the dashing, handsome, kind of obvious alpha male love object
turns out to be not that reliable or not that happy an option. And in some of these books, Poirot will even say to the female protagonist, you know, instead of that dazzling, handsome chap that you think will make you happy, what about this quiet, still quite handsome, but less noticeable chap over here who happens to be quietly in love with you? And that is very much presented as, you know, the route to happiness rather than snagging the big romantic hero that everyone would want.
The 1926 disappearance is a disaster for Christie's personal reputation. The interview in which her husband described her as cunning, devious and money-grabbing fixes in the public mind an impression of Agatha as mercenary, a living embodiment of the idea that any publicity is good publicity. While that image does her a disservice, cruelly underestimating her struggle with mental health issues, it is true that her fame is good for sales.
Her masterpiece novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published shortly before the scandal, sold 4,000 copies. Her next publication sells twice that amount. In the literary Game of Thrones, Christie is now crowned the undisputed queen of crime. Inevitably, Agatha and Archie divorce. He marries Nancy Neale a week later, and the couple go on to have children of their own, remaining married for the rest of their lives.
Agatha fights for custody of their daughter, Rosalind, and wins despite her damaged reputation. But in the aftermath of the scandal, the newlyweds become unwilling celebrities. Their wedding photos are printed by newspapers. Agatha deals with this further public shame by fleeing overseas. Though she has always been adventurous, now she is rich enough to travel in style. She writes a book a year, each one selling more than the last.
On a whim, in 1928, she heads to Baghdad in what is now Iraq. A childhood interest in archaeology is rekindled, and late in August she sets off across Europe on a luxury train, the Orient Express. Arriving in the desert, she makes herself useful on archaeological digs by sketching and cataloguing artefacts. It's here that she meets a young archaeologist called Max Malouin, 14 years her junior.
The relationship blossoms, and when they marry in London in 1930, they both lie about their dates of birth to make the age gap seem less scandalous. She would later write that "an archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her." Now called Mrs. Mallowan in private, Agatha Christie retains her famous pen name. At the peak of her fame and literary skill, Christie is also more relaxed and confident in her marriage.
She poses for stylized publicity photos that boost her image as the Duchess of Death, a self-made wealthy woman whose now infamous name is synonymous with glamour and danger. Her books sell and sell and sell. Christie buys houses like a game of Monopoly. Soon she owns eight properties. She writes while moving between homes in England and Max oversees archaeological digs, which she funds from her own pocket.
Her nomadic lifestyle means she has no precious routine or diva-ish demands. She merely writes wherever she can prop her typewriter. In 1930, a new character called Miss Marple appears. Her first novel-length mystery is called "Murder at the Vicarage." As ever, Christie swirls her real-life adventures into her tales. In "Murder in Mesopotamia," she sends Hercule Poirot in her own footsteps to Iraq.
to the exact archaeological dig where she met Max. One of her most ingenious books is Murder on the Orient Express. One of her most famous is Death on the Nile. She even sheds light, fictionally, on her experience as a writer. I mean, insofar as she put herself
into her books with a kind of regular character. Clearly Ariadne Oliver is the one who is based on her. So Ariadne Oliver is a regular sort of minor-ish character. She often crops up and sort of helps Poirot a bit while he's en route to solving a mystery or hinders him occasionally by not being particularly helpful. But Ariadne Oliver is a writer herself and she writes...
Within Agatha's fictional universe, she writes a series of mystery novels starring a detective called Sven Hearson, a Scandinavian detective. This was Agatha's way of gently poking fun at herself. So she has Ariadne Oliver lamenting the fact that everyone wants her to write about this infernal Scandinavian guy and she really wishes she doesn't have to write about him quite so much. So
That is commonly recognised to be Agatha sort of turning herself into a bit of a comic character. And Mrs Oliver's a brilliant character. She's always saying, you know, I've been invited to speak to the ladies' circle at such and such about my life as a writer.
I've no idea what I'm going to say to them. I just have an idea and then I have to write it down. And it's not very interesting. I don't know why they want me to come and talk to them. So I love Mrs. Oliver as a character because of that, because you feel as though you're getting a bit of a sort of mischievous insight into how Agatha thought about her life as a writer. When World War II breaks out, Christy holds up in London to volunteer in hospitals during the dark days of the Blitz.
Aware of the ever-present risk to life, she pens two books designed to be the final appearances of her beloved characters Poirot and Marple. Unwilling to let down her loyal readers, she puts these novels into storage in case she should be killed before she can conclude their stories. But in the rapidly changing culture of the post-war period, Christie comes under pressure to account for anti-Semitic sentiments that blight some of her work.
In America, the Council Against Intolerance persuades her publishers to remove derogatory comments about Jewish characters. Christie could be progressively unconventional at times, offering ahead-of-her-time portrayals of LGBTQ and disabled characters and questioning the hypocrisy of upper-class society. But her depiction of Jews and people of color is often stereotyped at best and vicious at worst.
Famously, the title of her biggest selling novel, And Then There Were None, was updated to avoid her blithe use of extreme racist language. But the cultural backlash doesn't affect sales. By the 1950s, Christie is earning around £100,000 a year, £2.5 million in today's money. Her disciplined approach to writing also pays dividends.
A creature of habit, Christie writes over the winter months, leaving the summer free for family, travel, and edits. This schedule means that her books are ready in time for a festive release. So her publisher devises the slogan, "A Christie for Christmas." They promote her novels as the perfect gift, an annual marketing campaign that adds an estimated 15,000 copies per year to her sales.
Frequent screen adaptations for the festive television schedules also fix the connection between Christie and Christmas. Over the decades, her stories will be adapted for radio, film, graphic novels, and computer games. But it is during the 1950s that she comes to the fore as a playwright. Back in 1946, the BBC asked the then Queen Mother what she would like as an 80th birthday gift.
Queen Mary requested a new Agatha Christie play. In response, Agatha wrote a short piece called Three Blind Mice, which was broadcast in 1947. Five years later, that story is turned into a show called The Mouse Trap. It opens in the Ambassadors Theatre on the 25th of November, 1952.
Over 70 years later, it is still showing in the West End, not even missing a night when it moved to St. Martin's Theatre in 1974. Towards the end of her long career, Christie's reputation as national treasure is restored after the scandal that blighted her earlier life. In 1968, she becomes Lady Malouane when her husband is knighted for his work in archaeology.
Soon after, she also receives a DBE honour from Queen Elizabeth II, making her Dame Agatha Christie. She writes her last novel in 1973, at the age of 82. But her health is waning. After a heart attack leaves her frail, she retreats to her home in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, where she passes away on the 12th of January, 1976.
That evening, two London theatres that are showing her plays dim their lights, and their audiences give the late Agatha Christie a standing ovation. But she has saved a final twist for her own denouement. Her fans are thrilled by rumours of unpublished novels and stories.
Later in the year, the book she wrote almost 30 years earlier, when she feared for her life during World War II, is published as Sleeping Murder. It is the last case of Miss Marple. The conclusion she wrote for Hercule Poirot is also published under the fitting name of Curtain. As the Curtain falls on the life of Agatha Christie, what is her legacy? I think she expanded the boundaries of what the crime novel could be and do.
she kept in story after story testing the boundaries. You know, could a crime novel maybe do this that hasn't been done before? And could a crime novel maybe do that that hasn't been done before? And sort of extending the limits of the genre and being super ambitious as to what a crime novel could achieve. And I think she's just a brilliant example of what crime writers can do and should aim to do. You know, she is a sort of
shining illustration of the fact that you can write not just one or two but many dozens of brilliant books and still be the best crime writer that's ever lived many years after your death so I think she is a brilliant example of the amazingness that is possible for crime writers to achieve.