About Agatha Christie

Where did her creativity come from? She absorbed the children’s stories of the time - Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, The Railway Children) and Louisa M Alcott (Little Women) but also poetry and startling thrillers from America. Agatha invented imaginary friends, played with her animals, attended dance classes and began writing poems when she was still a child.

When she was five, the family spent some time in France having rented out the family home of Ashfield to economise, and it was here with her “governess” Marie, that Agatha learnt her idiomatic but erratically spelt French. At the age of eleven there was a shock. Her father, not well since the advent of financial difficulties, died after a series of heart attacks. Clara was distraught and Agatha became her mother’s closest companion. There were more money worries and talk of selling Ashfield. But Clara and Agatha found a way forward and from the age of 15 Agatha boarded at a succession of pensions and took piano and singing lessons. She could have been a professional pianist but for her excruciating shyness in front of those she did not know.

By the age of 18 she was amusing herself with writing short stories – some of which were published in much revised form in the 1930s - with family friend and author Eden Philpotts offering shrewd and constructive advice. “The artist is only the glass through which we see nature, and the clearer and more absolutely pure that glass, so much the more perfect picture we can see through it. Never intrude yourself.”

Clara’s health and the need for economies dictated their next move. In 1910 they set off for Cairo and a three month “season” at the Gezirah Palace Hotel. There were evening dresses and parties and young Agatha showed more interest in these than the local archaeological sites. The friends and young couples she met in Cairo invited her to house parties back home on her return. Various marriage proposals followed.

It was in 1912 that Agatha met Archie Christie, a qualified aviator who had applied to join the Royal Flying Corps. Their courtship was a whirlwind affair; both were desperate to marry but with no money. According to her autobiography, it was the “excitement of the stranger” that attracted them both. They married on Christmas Eve 1914 after both had experienced war – Archie in France and Agatha on the Home Front now working with the Voluntary Aid Detachment in a Red Cross Hospital in Torquay. They spent their honeymoon night in The Grand Hotel, Torquay and on the 27th December Archie returned to France. They met infrequently during the War Years and it wasn’t until January 1918 when Archie was posted to the War Office in London that Agatha felt her married life truly began.

1919 was a momentous year for Agatha. With the end of the war, Archie had found a job in the City and they had just enough money to rent and furnish a flat in London. Later that year, on the 5th August, Agatha gave birth to their only daughter, Rosalind. It was also the year that a publisher, John Lane of The Bodley Head, and the fourth to have received the manuscript, accepted The Mysterious Affair at Styles for publication and contracted Agatha to produce five more books. John Lane insisted on a couple of changes to her manuscript including a reworked final chapter – instead of a courtroom climax, Lane proposed the now familiar denouement in the library.

So where did the inspiration for Hercule Poirot come from? During the First World War there were Belgian refugees in most parts of the English countryside, Torquay being no exception. Although he was not based on any particular person, Agatha thought that a Belgian refugee, a former great Belgian policeman, would make an excellent detective for The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Hercule Poirot was born.

Following the war Agatha continued to write – experimenting with different types of thriller and murder mystery stories, creating first Tommy and Tuppence and then Miss Marple in quick succession. In 1922, leaving Rosalind with her nurse and her mother, she and Archie travelled across the then British Empire, promoting The Empire Exhibition of 1924. She continued to write: Agatha received the joyous news of good reviews for The Secret Adversary while in Cape Town (where she also became the first British woman to surf standing up) and Archie’s boss proved the inspiration for Sir Eustace Pedlar in The Man in the Brown Suit, also set in Africa. By this time Christie had already decided to change publishers. Fed up with what she saw as the unfair terms offered by The Bodley Head, she sought out an agent, Edmund Cork, of Hughes Massie and he found her a new publisher - William Collins and Sons (now HarperCollins).

One night in early December, overwhelmed and with close friend and secretary Carlo away for the night, Agatha left Rosalind and the house to the care of the maids without saying where she was going. Her car was found abandoned the next morning several miles away. A nationwide search ensued. The press and public enjoyed various speculations as to what might have happened and why but no one knew for sure. It eventually transpired that Agatha had somehow travelled to Kings Cross station where she took the train to Harrogate and checked into the Harrogate Spa Hotel under the name of Theresa Neale, previously of South Africa. Having been recognised by the hotel staff, who alerted the police, she did not recognise Archie when he came to meet her. Possibly concussed but certainly suffering from amnesia, Agatha had no recollection of who she was. An intensely private person, made even more so by the hue and cry of the press, Agatha never spoke of this time with friends or family.

Agatha and Archie remained apart; Agatha living with Rosalind and Carlo in London and following a course of psychiatric treatment in Harley Street. Needing an income and unable to write new material, her brother-in-law Campbell Christie suggested she combine Poirot short stories composed for The Sketch magazine thus creating The Big Four. Finally accepting that her marriage was over, divorce from Archie was granted in 1928. Agatha and Rosalind immediately escaped England to the Canary Islands where Agatha painfully finished The Mystery of The Blue Train, the book she had struggled with as she mourned her mother. Late in 1928 Agatha wrote her first Mary Westmacott novel, Giant’s Bread, not a detective novel but a work of fiction about a composer forced to work for financial reasons.

As a rule Agatha wrote two or three books a year and when with Max often wrote a chapter or two during quiet mornings and helped out on site in the afternoons. The atmosphere of the Middle East was not lost on Agatha, as can be seen in books such as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, Appointment With Death and They Came to Baghdad as well as many short stories written within this period.

N or M? was her own patriotic gesture to the war effort and she was disconcerted to see its publication delayed in the US until after the Americans had joined the Allies.

Rosalind, having married Hubert Prichard, gave birth to Mathew on 21st September 1943. Max was in Cairo but Agatha was a doting grandmother and often went to help look after the baby.

Agatha was focused and prolific during this period. Missing Max and with external entertainment more limited in wartime, she wrote and/or published such classics as And Then There Were None, Evil Under the Sun, The Body in the Library, Five Little Pigs and The Moving Finger.

At the end of 1946, Agatha’s cover as Mary Westmacott was blown by an American reviewer of Absent in the Spring. She was disappointed as she had enjoyed the freedom to write without the pressure of being Agatha Christie.

The 1940s and 50s saw much time-consuming work with theatrical productions which also limited the time Agatha could devote to writing.

Agatha's last public appearance was at the opening night of the 1974 film version of Murder on the Orient Express starring Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot. Her verdict: a good adaptation with the minor point that Poirot's moustaches weren't luxurious enough.

After a hugely successful career and a very happy life Agatha died peacefully on 12 January 1976. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey, near Wallingford.

She returned to France when she was fifteen to complete her formal education, boarding at a series of pensions in Paris and training under one of the most respected singing teachers of the time. While she developed an interest in fashion and clothes, French society proved a disappointment to her; much more to her tastes were the visits with her mother to the Grand Opera and excursions to Versailles, Fontainebleau and other historic places.

It was also with her mother that she would see Cairo for the first time, where she was to come out in society. The young debutante was introduced to many eligible men (she went to around fifty dances) but later wrote that she was more drawn to “bronzed middle-aged colonels”, most of whom were already married. One thing she didn’t do during her time there was admire the relics of its ancient civilisation.

“Luxor, Karnak and the beauties of Egypt were to come upon me with wonderful impact about 20 years later. How it would have spoilt them for me if I had seen them with unappreciative eyes.” An Autobiography

“Going round the world was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me. It was so exciting that I could not believe it was true. I kept repeating to myself, 'I am going round the world.'”

The trip cemented Agatha’s passion for adventure and travel, taking in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, Canada and mainland USA. It was in South Africa that Agatha discovered her love of surfing, and couldn’t wait to take to the water again when they reached Honolulu – where she became the first European woman to surf standing up.

The people she met would form the basis for many a plot, not least the forceful figure of Major Belcher, their travelling companion, who provided the inspiration for a character in 1924’s The Man in the Brown Suit. The story centres around heroine Anne Beddingfeld, who is looking for adventure:

'“I had the firm conviction that, if I went about looking for adventure, adventure would meet me halfway. It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants.” Anne Beddingfeld, The Man in the Brown Suit.

Sadly Agatha’s marriage to Archie was not to last, and their divorce was finalised in 1928. Earlier that year Agatha had travelled to the Canary Islands with her secretary and daughter Rosalind, where she struggled through finishing The Mystery of the Blue Train, set on the French Riviera.

'‘Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a good thing that that is so.' Hercule Poirot, The Mystery of the Blue Train.

She had always wanted to travel on the Orient Express and her autobiography lists in exquisite detail the sights and sounds of the journey to Syria. She had a myriad of adventures en route, including an attack of bed bugs that made her limbs swell, a near marriage proposal from a Dutch engineer and a mystifying session in a Turkish bath in Damascus. From Damascus she travelled overland to Baghdad and from there on to an excavation at the ancient site of Ur, where she met archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katherine.

The Woolleys invited her back the following season, and it was then that she encountered her second husband Max Mallowan. Max showed Agatha around some of Iraq’s most evocative locations, and after she proved her patience and good humour when their desert transport got stuck in a wadi Max knew she was the woman he wanted to marry.

Max and Agatha had an easy companionship, motoring across the bumpy desert roads that connected walled towns, romantic Mesopotamian castles and acres of excavated ancient cities. Once married, they honeymooned in Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Greece, and following one dig they travelled back to Europe via Azerbaijan (then part of the Soviet Union) where they ate copious amounts of caviar.

Agatha began to spend the Middle East digging season, from October to March, at her husband’s side, helping to clean, catalogue and photograph the finds, between bouts of writing. At Christmas 1931 she was travelling back to England alone on the Orient Express when a violent thunderstorm just after Istanbul delayed them by two days. She closely observed her fellow travellers, describing them in a letter to Max; these included an animated American woman who spent much time talking about her daughter (sound familiar?). Murder on the Orient Express was published in 1934.

In 1933 Agatha, Max and Rosalind holidayed in Egypt and took a cruise down the Nile. With her daughter, she spent many happy hours speculating on the backgrounds of the other passengers. Four years later, Death on the Nile was published. “I think,” she later wrote, “that the book is one of the best of my ‘foreign travel’ ones.”

“Rosalie murmured: ‘I suppose we might as well go on to Egypt. It doesn’t make any difference.’

‘It’s certainly not a matter of life or death,’ said Mrs Otterbourne.

But there she was quite wrong—for a matter of life and death was exactly what it was.” Death on the Nile.

During the mid 1930s political tensions in Iraq were growing, and Max decided to start a fresh excavation in the Habur Valley, Syria. They were assisted by young archaeologist Robin McCartney, who was also a watercolour painted and created the covers for Murder in Mesopotamia (with characters inspired by the Woolleys), Death on the Nile, Murder in the Mews and Appointment with Death (Agatha and Max visited Petra on a journey home one year, which influenced the location of this story).

Work on the digs was halted with the advent of the Second World War.

Agatha wrote some of her finest later Poirot novels there, including After the Funeral, Hickory Dickory Dock, and Cat Among the Pigeons. It was also at Nimrud that she began work on a project many had urged her to undertake for some time – her autobiography. Agatha revelled in her life in the Middle East. The people, landscape, culture, birdlife, architecture and antiquities all seemed to fuel her optimistic spirit as well as her creative instincts. She chronicled her time there in 1946’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.

“How much I have loved that part of the world. I still love it and always shall.” Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

In 1958 there was a revolution in Iraq, and they finally left for good in 1960.

'‘One really knows so little about the people one meets when one is travelling,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I mean—how shall I put it—one only knows, doesn’t one, what they choose to tell you about themselves.” Miss Marple, A Caribbean Mystery

Further trips in the 1960s included a break in Upper Egypt where Max could recover from a bout of flu after finishing a book of his own on Nimrud; a visit to Belgium to see a museum named after Hercule Poirot; and a tour of the US where Max was giving a series of lectures. During this trip they visited the museums in Washington, and journeyed to Ohio and Texas. They also stopped in Vermont where they experienced a typically American Fall, which provided the inspiration for 1966’s Hallowe'en Party.

As she aged, Agatha’s love of travel and adventure never waned. As she stated in her autobiography:

“Life is really like a ship - the interior of a ship, that is. It has watertight compartments. You emerge from one, seal and bolt the doors, and find yourself in another. […] Ever since [The Grand Tour] I have felt the same about travel. You step from one life into another. You are yourself, but a different self. The new self is untrammelled by all the hundreds of spiders' webs and filaments that enclose you in a cocoon of day-to-day domestic life: letters to write and bills to pay, chores to do, friends to see, photographs to develop, clothes to mend, nurses and servants to placate, tradesmen and laundries to reprove. Your travel life has the essence of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing to see some dearly loved person - Rosalind, my mother, Madge. But you are like the Vikings or the Master Mariners of the Elizabethan age, who have gone into the world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.”