Agatha Christie, Life Lesson #1: “Very few of us are what we seem.”

The joy in discovering that the author you wrote off as irrelevant may be just the woman to teach us how to bounce back, be wildly productive, deal with haters, and always get the last laugh

Agatha Christie: 1920s novelist, mother, tabloid fodder.

She was the original Gone Girl—and not because she wrote mysteries, but because for eleven days in 1926, she was actually gone. As in missing. Presumed to be in danger. Like Gillian Flynn’s main character Amy, perhaps even killed by her handsome husband.

As it turns out, Agatha Christie was not killed by Archie Christie, of course. But she had been betrayed by him.

British tabloids speculated that the novelist, who had published only four books by that time, was getting revenge against her husband by implicating him in her high-profile disappearance. More sober modern historians accept the crime writer’s version of events—that she was depressed, even suicidal, the victim of a dissociative fugue that led her to leave her young daughter behind, abandon her car, and check into a health spa under a false name.

Archie’s affair with a female golf partner, as well as Agatha’s grief over the recent death of her mother—never mind the stress she was under to write her latest detective novel and rescue the family from financial ruin—were the main triggers.

Far from loving the media attention that followed her disappearance and discovery, Agatha was mortified by it. Most scholars agree that her dislike for publicity and general reclusiveness began after this fiasco. Agatha Christie, the woman (as versus the steadily productive novelist) would never be the same again. 

If all this sounds familiar

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, then you know much more about Agatha Christie than I did just prior to last year, when I went from having zero interest in the most successful novelist of all time to becoming obsessed with her.

It wasn’t the author’s disappearance that interested me—or even her more than eighty books, which have sold between two and four billion copies, making her second only to the Bible and Shakespeare in popularity. (That factoid is repeated nearly as much as the disappearance story.)

Instead, my fascination leapfrogged over her oeuvre, which is amazing enough, targeting the writer’s surprising life, at the end of which Christie may have suffered from undiagnosed Alzheimers or another form of dementia, even as she continued to try to crank out fiction. (The struggles experienced by women writers, including in their later years, have always intrigued me

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.)

That got me hooked on understanding old Agatha.

But young Agatha was equally surprising.

“Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seems to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour…. It is one of the most perfect physical pleasures that I have known.” From An Autobiography, published posthumously.

Consider this picture, which instigated my quest to dig deeper into the life of a person I had unfairly underrated as Victorian and irrelevant.

The inventor of fussy Hercule Poirot and boring Miss Marple, surfing? She may have been the first British woman stand-up surfer—sampling the sport first in South Africa, then in Hawaii. Even when the waves beat her up, she kept at it.  

Next, I stumbled into the story of Agatha’s second marriage to a dashing archaeologist named Max Mallowan, whom she met on a solo trip to Iraq, not long after her divorce to the adulterous Archie. Max was 26 to her 39. I loved picturing the middle-aged Agatha venturing among the sand dunes, learning how to clean and photograph ancient artifacts, and allowing herself to fall in love again.

Deep into Christie’s autobiography, as well as two biographies and countless articles and podcasts by the winter holidays, I still hadn’t read a single one of her novels, but I hesitantly began with one of her best-known: Five Little Pigs, followed by The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

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I knew there was a good chance I’d find many of Christie’s detective novels formulaic—but then again, the Queen of Crime

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was full of surprises. If I decided the novels were good, then what fun, since she’d written so many. If I decided they were dull, then there’d be yet another mystery to solve: why did so many people around the globe, regardless of language or cultural background, continue to read her?

But beyond her fiction, I felt determined to extract lessons from the shy author about how she learned to write so productively and live a life on her own terms. Agatha Christie didn’t leave us a craft book, as did her compatriot, Patricia Highsmith. But any reader could sift her dense autobiography and cull some essential pointers.

In this monthly series, I’ll tackle the mystery of how such an unexceptional, quiet, “slow” girl (so her mother thought) grew up to become the most successful novelist of all time—and, other than that one heartbreak-inspired amnesiac fugue, seemed to enjoy her life in the process. She found inspiration in the places she traveled, including Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. She embraced challenging roles that other privileged ladies might have more happily skipped—for example, learning pharmacy (the source of endless knowledge about poisons—a-ha!) and volunteering in hospitals during both world wars. 

Whether you’re a suspense writer, a Christie fan, or just someone who admires women who blazed new trails and weren’t punished for it—a happy story for once, thank goodness!—I hope you’ll check back for the next episode.

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Endnotes below poll

1. The disappearance has inspired at least two successful novels and a mostly forgotten and highly fictionalized 1979 movie starring Vanessa Redgrave as Agatha and Dustin Hoffman as a reporter hot on Christie’s trail. The movie itself spurred a lawsuit between the producers and the male lead, who wanted to continue shooting an essential final scene against the wishes of producers who were already sweating the budget they’d exceeded. Artistic perfectionist Hoffman, who was willing to use his own money to keep shooting, lost the battle. The movie, which wasn’t quite the thriller that audiences expected, nonetheless earned respectful reviews.

2. Recently, I spent over a year reading about the life of Sylvia Plath. When I finished that project and switched over to Agatha, I thought that part of the pleasure would be noticing all the differences between them and feeling some relief that at least one writer’s story ended happily. Plath died by suicide at the age of 30, little known for her few published works. Agatha lived happily to the age of 85, having published over a book a year for most of her life. One writer failed to thrive; the other achieved her every dream and died wealthy and recognized. But there’s more here than meets the eye. As it turns out, a Venn diagram would show more overlaps than differences—which says a lot about the commonality of women authors’ struggles. Curious? Leave a comment or send me a note and I’ll get diagramming and write a future post on the topic.

3. There’s that Gone Girl parallel again. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd made use of an unreliable narrator, with a twist ending that so surprised readers that many wondered whether it was “unfair.” In part due to its clever twist, scholars have called Christie’s 1926 novel one of the most influential crime novels of all time. In 2013, the Crime Writers’ Association voted this novel as CWA Best Ever Novel.

4. Turns out that the Christie Estate takes the “Queen of Crime” trademark seriously—and they are litigious.