ANALYSING

AGATHA

Author’s Note: This is the unabridged article, an edited version of which 
appeared in the magazine Thriller UK.

Even now in 2002, nearly 30 years after her death, Agatha Christie still 
retains the title “Queen of Crime” against such worthy contenders as 
Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh. The acclaimed ‘mistress of the macabre’ 
has had her works translated into more languages than Shakespeare and her 
novels have been present on stage, in cinemas and on TV screens almost 
continuously from the 1920s to the present day.  

However, the most mysterious thing about Agatha Christie was the woman 
herself.  She deeply detested interviews and strove to remain in the 
shadows. She allowed only a very few “publicity” shots of herself, and these 
such as the image, left, became the standard that people always saw on 
dust jackets, and magazine covers: genteel, with slightly ethereal gaze, but 
above all unchanging from year to year. What few interviews she did give 
were short and ‘neutral’, more often than not ‘non-opinion’ sound bytes.   
Like mist that a child attempts to grasp in its hand, Agatha repeatedly 
always seemed to slip away.  So who was the woman behind the mask?

On 15th September 1890, Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller made her way into the 
world in the English seaside town of Torquay, the third-born child of Fred 
and Clara Miller [the other two were her brother Louis Montat (Monty) and 
sister Margaret (Madge) – the latter of whom would have an impact on her 
writing]. Agatha was born into a world characterized by a great dichotomy.  

Firmly Victorian, Britain was a place of rigid social and class structure where 
everyone had their place and there was a place for everyone.  Conversely, 
since the 1700s, Britain had been the epicentre of colossal socio-political, 
scientific and religious changes that reverberated around the globe.  When 
Agatha was born those changes were approaching their zenith in the ‘Empire 
upon which the sun never set’.

The 19th Century saw tremendous advancements in the arenas of Science, 
Religion and Art.  In 1890, the year Agatha was born, Berlin became the first 
city in Europe to have electric streetlights instead of gas lamps; the 
suffragette movement was gaining pace; Charles Darwin had published the 
seminal Origin of Species1. Victoria's reign was the ‘Golden Age’ of the new 
Renaissance Men - the adventurer-explorers who accidentally invented new 
disciplines such as archaeology (Austen Henry Layard2) and anthropology (Sir 
Richard Burton3).  In 1875, Layard had vindicated the book of Genesis, 
dismissed as ‘fiction’ by bible critics, by discovering three of the five cities 
of supposedly ‘non-existent’ Assyria4, including Nineveh itself - a place 
Agatha would become well acquainted with, and which would have a 
profound impact on her life.

Champollion5 was becoming ‘the father of Egyptology’ and French explorer 
Henri Mouhot inspired dozens of imitators when he walked around some 
bushes in Cambodia and came face to face with the splendor of Angkor Wat, 
the largest religious edifice in the world.  In the sphere of the Arts, Sir 
Arthur Conan Doyle, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, G. K. 
Chesterton et al were inventing new genres of writing – such as murder-
mysteries and sci-fi - with casual regularity and P. G. Wodehouse’s early 
books would be published as Agatha reached her teens. Agatha was a 
toddler when the Sherlock Holmes serialisations gripped the country, 
including her own family; ‘the Master’ was one of her self-confessed 
influences. Indeed, the timeline of her Hercule Poirot tales made the little 
Belgian almost a precise contemporary of Sherlock Holmes to the point 
where I cannot help but wonder if anyone has written any pastiches of the 
two interacting, as has been done with Holmes and many other famous 
fictional characters of the day?

Agatha's immediate family was not typical of the upper-middle class social 
strata into which she was born; for a start, she was only half-English.  Her 
mother's family had been minor country gentry in and around Torquay for 
over 700 years - in the 13th Century their money had built All Saints Torre, 
Torquay's parish church - but Agatha's immediate maternal antecedent 
sporadically earned a living by being, of all things, a psychic!  Agatha's 
father was an American businessman who had settled in England and despite 
some imprudent investments, he and his wife usually managed to sustain 
the income needed to maintain their upper-middle class position during 
Agatha’s early childhood. 

The immediate family situation was rather complex. Agatha’s mother, 
Clara, neé Boehmer, had been born on the island of Jersey, one of five 
children (though one died in infancy). Aged just twenty-seven, Clara’s 
mother Mary ‘Polly’ Boehmer had been left a virtually penniless widow when 
her husband, serving in the Argyll Highlanders, had suffered fatal injuries 
upon being thrown from a horse. At a similar time, Polly’s elder sister, 
Margaret, had married late to a wealthy American widower, Nathaniel 
Miller. Nathaniel agreed to he and his wife raising one of Polly’s four 
children as their own to ease the financial burden, and Margaret promptly 
wrote to her sister with this offer.
Faced with a choice between three sons and a daughter, Polly made the 
logical choice, and Clara left Jersey to reside with her aunt and uncle. 
However, Clara Boehmer never quite threw off the suspicion that she was 
chosen because her mother preferred her sons to her daughter and never 
entirely forgave Polly, despite the far more materially privileged childhood 
she enjoyed. Clara got on well with her aunt and uncle, but the highlight of 
her new life were periodic visits by Frederick Alva Miller, her uncle’s son by 
his first marriage. Despite a considerable age gap, Fred and his foster sister 
got along extraordinarily well, and nobody was surprised when the pair 
married.

Their firstborn child, Margaret (known generally as Madge, and also 
nicknamed ‘Punkie’) was born in Torquay. Then Fred and Clara went out to 
America with a view to settling there permanently. Fred’s maternal 
grandparents were still alive and living in New England, having raised him 
after his mother’s death while his father was busy with his transatlantic 
business concerns. In 1880, their second child Louis Montat (perennially 
known as Monty) was born in the United States. Shortly thereafter, they 
returned to Britain intending a brief visit, but Fred was forced to leave and 
go to New York on business, and on impulse, Clara purchased Ashfield, a 
house in Torquay. Fortunately, Fred fell in love with the area, and so the 
foursome remained until ‘afterthought Agatha’ as she described herself in 
her biography made her appearance a full decade after her brother, in 
1890.

Agatha Christie always claimed to have a happy childhood, and indeed this 
was probably so, but by the time she was a toddler, money was an issue. 
Today, Clara and Fred Miller would be unkindly termed ‘flakes’ but this 
would be blaming them unfairly. True, Clara fancied herself a psychic and 
married scatterbrained charm with a tendency towards idleness (traits she 
unfortunately passed onto her feckless son, Monty) and Fred, as the heir of 
a wealthy father, had never been expected to work for a living, but they 
were certainly not the spendthrifts their son Monty turned out to be.

Fred Miller’s main fault was that he was generous with both his money and 
his view of his fellow men. By 1895, the family were forced to lease Ashfield 
for the rent revenue and tour the continent, (where Agatha learned French 
and music). Upon their return, Agatha’s dubious views of doctors got their 
inception when various physicians could not agree on her father’s declining 
health, though today it would be recognized as stress. Fred Miller died when 
Agatha was eleven in 1901, a sad distinction he shared with the Queen-
Empress Victoria, and the family’s financial situation became perilous. 

Nathaniel Miller had left his money for his son in various trusts, and Fred 
had always lived within this supposed income, but all too often that income 
had been wanting. There on paper, it often failed to materialize in fact; 
instead of the trusts providing a smooth, steady flow of income, all too 
often monies were a sporadic trickle. By the time the executors had finished 
sorting it all out, it was clear that Fred Miller had been badly advised and 
systemically defrauded. However, Clara was – just – able to maintain 
Ashfield and keep herself and Agatha. Thanks to the 2nd Boer War of 1899-
1902, Monty was no longer a financial burden on the family, having joined 
the Army and though still-grieving, Madge married her fiancé James Watts 
at her mother’s urging nine months after Fred died. Another cause of 
Madge’s marital hesitation was that Monty Miller and her fiancé James 
detested each other. Unfortunately, James Watts’ opinion of his brother-in-
law was all too accurate. A lifelong bachelor, Monty served in the Army in 
South Africa and India, but his virtue of physical courage was outweighed by 
his vices of indolence, drink and forever cadging money off his sisters for 
grandiose quick-buck schemes that inevitably floundered. Finally invalided 
out of the Army due to being seriously ill, Monty defied all opinions and 
lived for quite some time, before moving to Marseilles for the sake of his 
housekeeper’s health; he remained in that French city under the care of a 
nurse-companion and died, instantly and painlessly, from a cerebral 
haemorrhage, while lunching at a Marseilles café one day.                    

Despite her mother's bouts as a psychic and her father's erratic business 
fortunes, Agatha's childhood was actually extremely traditional for the era. 
Part of the English Riviera, Torquay was acutely conscious of its privilege in 
being one of the places frequented by the Royal and noble families of 
Britain, including the ‘immediate’ Royal Family of Queen Victoria and her 
children.  Consequently, all families in the area were aware of the 
opportunities for advancement inherent in their illustrious summer visitors 
and anything ‘innovative’ would have been frowned upon greatly due to the 
risk of offending the elderly, arch-conservative Queen.  So as usual for 
children of their class, Agatha, Monty and Madge were educated at home by 
their mother and a series of governesses. 

It must be stressed that this ‘home tuition’ was a quite excellent education, 
a far cry from the modern version.  A contemporary of Agatha Miller far to 
the north in Nottinghamshire was one Anna Mellors, daughter of a Cotton 
Mill manager.  Born into a lower-middle class household only one generation 
removed from working-class farm labourers, Anna's home education made 
her so fluent in French that she obtained a position as governess to the 
children of a minor aristocrat, traveling with them to Paris each summer. An 
indirect benefit of Anna’s education came when she was able to marry into 
the well-to-do Derbyshire Cuttell stonemasonry family. A cadet branch of 
the even wealthier South Yorkshire Hallam clan, such an achievement would 
have been considered beyond the wildest dreams of her grandparents' 
generation, as would the fact that Anna and her husband William Cuttell 
annually attended the Christmas Ball of the (then) Duke & Duchess of 
Devonshire.

Unlike Anna, Agatha's strength was not languages but the sciences.  She 
went to finishing school in Paris (following in the footsteps of Madge), 
becoming an accomplished pianist and singer, but upon her return to Britain 
in 1908, she obtained work at the University of London’s pharmacy, a 
fortuitous occurrence that would prove hugely beneficial in her writing, 
especially as turn-of-the-century pharmacies still had more in common with 
alchemy than chemistry. Even as late as the 1920s, you could still walk into 
a British chemist's shop and see a strong resemblance to the quasi-mystical 
medieval apothecary.  In the early 1900s, when Agatha was doing her 
apprenticeship, heroin and cocaine were sold as over-the-counter remedies 
as cures for everything from constipation to acne; heroin was even used in 
cosmetics. 

In this arcane environment, Agatha learned the secret of noxious 
substances, and gained a lifelong affinity for them, acquiring the kernels of 
later stories. In her Autobiography, she recounts witnessing the chemist 
incorrectly make up a mixture of suppositories that were thus lethal, and 
thus deliberately engineered an ‘accident’ destroying the tainted items. 

This same chemist used to walk around carrying the paralyzing poison 
‘curare’ in his pocket because he admitted, “‘it makes me feel powerful’”. 
Christie rather perceptively described him as a dangerous man, and 
probably he had strong sociopathic tendencies, but he proved the basis for 
The Pale Horse many years later. Her total writing output was over 100 
books including plays, poetry and non-fiction, of which about 85 were 
murder mysteries of some description. By far the greatest method of killing 
she used was via poison. Thirty-four of the murder mysteries had the victim 
dying in such a manner, whilst her second most popular means of dispatch – 
gunshot – only occurred nineteen times. 

(NB – if you decide to tot up the murder methods of Christie, you will 
achieve a greater number than her output, because some books contained 
several murders by different methods, such as The Big Four (1927), which 
had murder by poison, bludgeoning, electrocution and hit-and-run.)   

Indeed, one feels a certain relief that Agatha was on the side of the angels.  
There is an apocryphal story of her telling a Scotland Yard detective that 
‘hundreds if not thousands’ of people throughout history had got 
successfully away with murder by the use of poison, and that murdering 
someone with poison without being detected was ‘quite easy’.  As she 
pointed out, the big advantage of poison over the gun, knife or strangulation 
cord is that there are no visible signs of attack.  

The main disadvantage of poison as a murder method is its variables.  
Depending on what the intended victim has eaten or drunk, the absorption 
of the poison can be speeded up, slowed down or even negated altogether.  
The dose you give to a large individual is different to that you give to a 
smaller size person.  Some people have a higher tolerance for substances 
than others, Rasputin the mad monk of Russia being the classic example of 
someone who had built up a tolerance to levels of arsenic that would wipe 
out several people in one go.  In ancient Rome, the Cassaverii were 
assassins who from birth had been given miniscule doses of poison that built 
up in their system, rendering they themselves immune but making their 
slightest touch death to anyone else.  Catherine de Medici, the ‘Serpent 
Queen’ of France, was legendary for her apothecary skills and supposedly 
dispatched dozens of victims unsuspected.  This ‘disadvantage’ of using 
poisons can be easily overcome by competent training - as so terribly shown 
by British physician and serial killer Dr Harold Shipman, whose medical 
education allowed him to kill at least 215 people without detection for 
fifteen years.

It was also about the time she started work in the University of London's 
dispensary circa 1909 that Agatha finally stopped ‘dabbling’ and began to 
write ‘properly’, mainly short stories and poetry, but her work as a 
dispenser still took up the majority of her time. Just before the outbreak of 
World War I, she met one Colonel Archibald Christie of His Majesty's Royal 
Flying Corps. Tall, good-looking, with an elegantly aristocratic mien, 
Christie seemed to epitomize the stiff-upper lip ‘magnificent men in their 
flying machines’ attitude, a sort of real-life Biggles.  Belonging to the minor 
aristocracy herself on her mother's side, Agatha fell deeply in love with him. 
What would have happened between the two has to remain forever a matter 
of conjecture, for as their romance reached the full height of the ‘rose-
tinted spectacles’ phase, war suddenly erupted between Britain and 
Germany, something that the vast majority of people had never really 
believed would happen, despite the Kaiser’s perpetual sabre-rattling over 
the previous thirty years. 

The attitude of Agatha and Archibald  - along with most of British society - 
was that Germany was an upstart, a nation that had not even existed before 
1860, the year many smaller kingdoms, principalities and duchies merged to 
become an Empire under King Wilhelm of Prussia, who became the first 
German Emperor. Extremely touchy and nervous of its position in European 
affairs, the already extremely militaristic new nation had begun posturing 
immediately, but the Teutonic arrogance had always been tempered by a 
healthy dose of common sense. Wilhelm’s son Frederick who married the 
British Princess Royal, daughter of Queen Victoria, immediately realized the 
unassailable position of the Grandmother of Europe, so called because her 
nine children had married into most of the ruling houses thereof; Germany 
would be squashed like a bug by the aging Queen’s irate children! 

Unfortunately, Frederick III was only Emperor for a few months before dying 
of “throat cancer”. [It was really syphilis, he being as incapable as his wife’s 
brother King Edward VII of keeping his trousers zipped around women]. 
Kaiser Wilhelm II had all of his father’s arrogance but none of his sense. 
Love of his grandmother, Victoria, and fear of his uncle Edward VII kept him 
in check, but when Edward VII’s heir Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence & 
Avondale, died of pneumonia at 28, Wilhelm made the mistake of tarring 
Albert’s younger brother with the same brush as Albert, who had been a 
drunken lecher. When George V ascended the throne in 1910, Wilhelm 
sneering referred to his much younger cousin as a “nice boy”. 

Inevitably, Wilhelm sought to seize on the opportunity created by the 
murder of his other cousin Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Empire of 
Austro-Hungary, but George V, unlike Albert, was an intelligent man and 
capable military strategist whose close relationship with his parents Edward 
VII and Queen Alexandra, daughter of the “Sea-King” Christian IX of 
Denmark, had made him superbly qualified to be a king during wartime.      

Caught up in the urgency and uncertainty of the time, Agatha Miller and 
Archibald Christie copied thousands of other sweethearts in foregoing the 
customary long courtship, marrying on Christmas Eve 1914. While Archibald 
as a Flying Corps Colonel experienced immediate ‘recall’ to duty, Agatha 
promptly volunteered to be an Army Medical Corp nurse and returned to 
Torquay, which became a convalescent centre for the injured World War I 
soldiers. Her experience as a nurse during World War I advanced even 
further Agatha's knowledge of narcotics and how to administer precise doses 
to achieve the desired effect. It also introduced her to other methods of 
killing people, particularly bullets and bayonets.  She never ‘got on’ with 
guns, but they did feature as the murder weapon in her stories, albeit the 
gun was always a generic ‘Army service revolver’ as opposed to something 
specific, e.g., ‘.22 Derringer’ or ‘1873 Cold Peacemaker’. Stabbing also 
became part of the Christie murder repertoire, including such variant 
weapons as knitting needles. In fact, stabbing as a murder method was 
beaten to third place in the Christie canon by just one. Bludgeoning and 
strangulation hold joint third with 14 occurrences each, whilst stabbing 
comes 4th with 13 occurring throughout her novels.

It is Agatha's sister, Madge, whom we can thank for the hours of reading 
enjoyment provided by the ‘Queen of Crime’. Madge dared her sister to 
write an actual book as opposed to poetry and short stories, and at about 
the same time Agatha read The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a classic 
sealed-room murder story whose protagonist was a cheeky French detective 
named Joseph Rouletabille.  In 1917, still working as a nurse in Torquay, 
Agatha Christie wrote her first full-length novel, The Mysterious Affair at 
Styles, as an answer to her sister, by now Lady Watts of Cheadle.

The Mysterious Affair At Styles introduced her first and most popular 
character, the fussy Belgian genius Hercule Poirot, and his famous saying 
about the “little grey cells”. For a long time, Hercule Poirot's genesis 
seemed obvious. One of Agatha’s favourite authors, and deservedly so, was 
the great G. K. Chesterton. A man of towering intellect, Chesterton was an 
essayist, journalist, philosopher and one of the greatest sociological, 
religious and political thinkers and debaters of any century. The sheer 
intelligence of his works and his eerily prescient judgements on how 
capitalism, communism and secularism would affect post-1950s Western 
Society are brilliantly insightful, and in person he was a raconteur and witty 
debater to rival Bernard Shaw or Dr Johnson. Yet to the general public, 
Chesterton is – unfairly - vaguely recalled as being the creator of the Father 
Brown mysteries and that’s that. Of course, Father Brown’s often-times 
sidekick was reformed master criminal…Hercule Flambeau, and in 1917 
Torquay was packed to the rafters with Belgian refugees – many of high 
social status, including high-ranking police officers, which of course 
‘Hercule Poirot’ had been. The link seemed obvious, even though Hercule 
Flambeau was a forceful giant of a man that neither in looks nor personality 
bore any resemblance to a short, egg-shaped Belgian with fussy sartorial 
tastes.  

However, in Agatha Christie's Centenary Year, a BBC researcher named 
Margaret Osoba claimed that Christie in fact stole the character from a 
turn-of-the-century crime writer named Frank Howel Evans.  From 1909 (the 
year eighteen-year-old Agatha began to write fully constructed novels 
alongside her poetry and short stories) to 1910, Evans' detective stories, 
featuring as chief protagonist a French detective named Jules Poiret, were 
published in New Magazine, and Poiret had many of the prissy mannerisms 
and stilted speech of Poirot. 

Besides Evans’ creation, there was a third character unmentioned by Ms 
Osoba – one Hercules Popeau, created by Marie Belloc Lowndes 
contemporarily to Frank Howel Evans’ Poiret. In actual fact, deliberate 
plagiarism can safely be discounted, but thanks to Ms. Osoba, we can now 
state with 99% certainty that “Hercule Poirot” was, probably, the result of 
Agatha Christie's busily macabre subconscious merging Chesterton's Hercule 
Flambeau with Evans' Poiret and adding a dash of Hercules Popeau.

In 1917, however, nothing much happened.  After several rejections, Agatha 
managed to sell Styles to publishers Bodley Head, who did nothing with it.  
In 1918 the ‘Great War’ ended, so Agatha and Archie settled down to a life 
of domestic bliss.  It wasn't to last.

World War I, whose outbreak had precipitated their rapid nuptials in the 
first place, caused the Christie marriage to consist of lengthy periods of 
separation, interspersed with short reunions made ‘romantic’ by their 
brevity. As long as that situation continued, Agatha & Archie's marriage was 
sound.  When the war ended in 1918, they were able for a time to settle 
into a bucolic, civilian tranquility, resulting in the birth of Rosalind Christie, 
Agatha's only child, in 1919; but remorselessly the cracks appeared that 
became fissures that became gaping chasms.

Archibald Christie was handsome, urbane, charming, witty and possessed 
effortless élan. Unfortunately, whilst being over-blessed with style, he was 
utterly lacking in substance.  Agatha had no pretensions to fame and was 
happy being the wife of the husband she loved and mother to a daughter she 
adored, but her feelings for Archie were gradually exterminated in the face 
of Archibald Christie's increasingly blatant inability to keep his trousers 
zipped around any female younger, prettier or blonder than his thirty-year 
old wife.

Then in 1920, Bodley Head suddenly published The Mysterious Affair at 
Styles to reasonable success. Agatha had continued her writing since 1917, 
and with the success of Styles was presented with a classic opportunity to 
go into denial, which she promptly did.  Raised to believe that marriage was 
for life, and that it was the woman's responsibility to hold the family 
together in the face of male intransigence (as her mother had had to do on 
the occasions when Mr Miller's business dealings went sour), Agatha worked 
hard to maintain, at least for Rosalind's sake, the veneer of a happy family 
life.  Her writing provided her with a way to escape the pressure of hiding 
the fact that Archibald Christie was a waste of space and she wrote 
prodigiously. The Secret Adversary appeared in 1922, introducing 
childhood sweethearts Thomas ‘Tommy’ Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence’ 
Cowley, who at the end of the book marry and continue their sleuthing 
together. Just as Styles obviously had its roots in Agatha’s childhood, 
Adversary was clearly her own dearest wish – a relationship that was a 
happy partnership. It was followed by two Poirot novels: Murder on the 
Links (1923) and Poirot Investigates (1924), plus a non-Poirot mystery, The 
Man in the Brown Suit, also in 1924.  

Styles had just set the ball rolling and it was her story, The Murder of 
Roger Ackroyd, in 1925 that put Agatha on the map literature wise.  The 
book came about after a comment by her brother-in-law, Sir James Watts, 
who said that he would have liked to see “‘a story where Watson turned out 
to be the criminal’”.  Shortly after that (the then) Lord Mountbatten wrote 
Agatha a letter in which he suggested that the narrator turn out to be the 
murderer.  In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the killer turns out to be 
Hercule Poirot's likeable associate, Dr James Sheppard, who was the book’s 
narrator instead of Hastings. It was one of her best early books, possibly 
because the underlying psychology – Poirot betrayed by someone he trusted 
– struck far too close to home.

Upon being published in 1926, Ackroyd… garnered a lot of publicity due to 
the controversy of having such an ‘unsporting’ denouement – having the 
narrator turn out to be the killer was unique for the time - and put Agatha 
Christie firmly in the public's gaze as a crime writer.  Such a public success 
was a much-needed boost to her battered spirit with her marriage to 
Archibald Christie disintegrating in front of her, something that she took as 
a personal failure. It is ironic that, just as no-one named Wallace is related 
to thriller master Edgar Wallace because his surname was invented on the 
spot by his mother, so too Archibald Christie was a womanising nonentity 
who should have been a dust mote on the page of history, yet his name is 
instantly recognised across the globe because he happened to be married to 
Agatha when she found literary fame.

In April 1926 Agatha's mother, Clara Miller died, leaving her grief-stricken. 
After years of panting after one woman then another, Archie had finally 
begun an affair with one Nancy Neele, who by 1925 was his permanent 
mistress. With his trademark crass insensitivity, Archibald Christie chose 
Autumn 1926 to tell still-grieving Agatha that he was abandoning her and 
their child for Nancy Neele, whom he intended to marry. Agatha was utterly 
distraught, but her main worry was Rosalind. Her daughter was the one good 
thing Archie had managed to produce, and though paranoid, Agatha’s 
greatest fear suddenly became that Archibald and his mistress would gain 
custody of the seven year-old. After all, as a Colonel in the Flying Corps, 
Christie had influence!

In December 1926 came the famous ‘10 missing days’. On the evening of 
December 3rd, Agatha Christie left Rosalind in the care of servants at her 
Berkshire home (Archie was by now living with Neele) and drove off. She did 
not return. Her 1925 Morris Cowley being discovered suspiciously abandoned 
near a disused quarry in Surrey sparked a nationwide hunt for her and 
Archibald Christie found himself the prime suspect in her murder once the 
press learned that he was a serial adulterer who had recently abandoned 
her. Agatha was discovered 10 days later at the Hydropathic Hotel, 
Harrogate (now the Old Swan) reading about her own disappearance.  She 
had signed into the hotel under the name Teresa Neale and refused to 
believe she was Agatha Christie. Archie collected her and left her with her 
sister and brother-in-law, Lady Madge and Sir James Watts at Abney Hall, 
Cheadle. Two doctors called in by her family informed the press that Agatha 
Christie was suffering from ‘traumatic amnesia’, the unspoken but implicit 
blame being placed upon Archibald Christie.

However, out of spite or lack of caution, during the search Archibald had let 
it slip to a Daily Mail reporter that Agatha had considered disappearance as 
a ‘plot device’. Whilst some of the press were hugely supportive of the 
pallid, drawn authoress, other sections of the media wrote scathing 
editorials condemning what they claimed was nothing more than a publicity 
stunt of very bad taste, pointing out that ‘Teresa’ was an anagram of 
‘teaser’. (In the 1920s, it was more usual to spell the name Theresa). 

Agatha simply refused to discuss the matter; in her memoir of 1944, her 
autobiography of 1971 and the ‘official’ biography by Janet Morgan in the 
1980s, the disappearance is simply glossed over. Even today, debate still 
rages as to whether her disappearance was genuine or planned, though in 
her autobiography she makes reference to having suffered amnesia during 
youth in times of great stress. Whatever the truth, it worked. The 
disappearance finally destroyed her and Archibald Christie's marriage - he 
was outraged at being considered a suspect in her murder and his egotistical 
nature had been chafing for years at being eclipsed by his wife's rising 
literary star, soaring even higher since the publication of Ackroyd. The 
judge looked at the fragile dignity of Agatha Christie then at the obvious 
irritation of her unsympathetic husband, and awarded her sole custody of 
Rosalind.

The divorce was finalised in 1928; Archibald insensitively married Nancy 
Neele three weeks later. Agatha was profoundly distressed and depressed at 
what she considered to be her personal failure. The fact that Archibald 
Christie was a womanising egotist whom she would probably have seen right 
through had it not been for the ‘pressure cooker’ of World War I was not in 
Agatha's eyes any excuse.  Her sister had a happy marriage, so had her 
parents.  What was wrong with her? Would she end up like Monty, their 
reckless, feckless, ne’er do well perpetual bachelor brother? Nevertheless, 
triumph occurred in that otherwise grim year of 1928, when The Secret 
Adversary appeared on celluloid for the first time, in a film of the same 
name.

With Rosalind safely immured from much of the trauma at school, Agatha 
decided on a change of scene. In mid-1928, she boarded the Orient Express 
for Baghdad to visit her friends Leonard and Katherine Woolley, which would 
inspire the famous Murder on the Orient Express (1934). During her visit, 
the Woolleys took her to visit Ur6 and she was so enthralled by the ruins of 
the ancient Mesopotamian city that they invited her to visit the site again. 
She returned to the Woolleys and visited Ur again in early 1930. On this 
second visit, she was introduced to the archaeologists on the site, including 
one named Max Mallowan, with whom she immediately hit it off.

Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan was fourteen years her junior, an archaeologist 
with the British Museum and lecturer at the University of London where 
Agatha had worked before the war. Between 1926-1929, Mallowan had spent 
most of his time excavating Ur in conjunction with the American University 
of Pennsylvania and thus regaled Agatha with tales of ancient life. Later 
that very year, Max Mallowan and Agatha Christie were married after a 
whirlwind courtship. Agatha herself later admitted to serious misgivings over 
her feelings for Max, especially when he revealed that he had attended 
school with none other than James ‘Jack’ Watts, Agatha’s nephew, the son 
of Madge and James; certainly her sister Madge was vehemently opposed to 
the marriage for the very reason of this age gap.

For the next 16 years until 1946, Agatha and Max lived in Baghdad, using the 
city as a base for their many archaeological expeditions. Due to the short 
courtship and the age gap between them, particularly as Max was the 
younger party, the marriage was surrounded from the start by persistent 
rumours of Mallowan’s infidelity. Several Christie critics even wrote ‘as fact’ 
that Agatha ‘pined for her adored Archie’ – an attitude of mawkish Victorian 
sentimentality completely opposite her middle-class upbringing - and that 
she tolerated a sort of ménage a trois with Mallowan’s long time assistant.

In view of the fact that Agatha and Max were happy to spent a great deal of 
time in each other’s company, such a scenario was actually highly unlikely. 
From 1931-1947, Agatha accompanied Max on so many expeditions that she 
became the British Museum’s official site photographer. She even devised a 
method to protect the precious Assyrian ivories Max uncovered at Nimrud7, 
which had a distressing tendency to disintegrate upon exposure to the air, 
by wrapping them in wet cloths and standing guard over them for 12-hour 
stretches until Max could safely transport them. A French archaeologist 
recounted Agatha’s comment that “‘the advantage of being married to an 
archaeologist is that the older you get, the more he loves you,’” – seen by 
many people to be an unsubtle swipe at the way Archibald Christie had 
routinely embarrassed himself and humiliated Agatha by chasing younger 
women*. In his book, The Luck of Nineveh, author Arnold Brackman (who 
met them), recounted an example of their affectionate camaraderie. As 
Agatha watched in fascination, Max pointed to a few bits of dirt and 
explained how part of Nimrud had been attacked and burned in 614BC, after 
which a drunken mob rampaged through the streets. 

“How do you know they were drunk?” Asked Agatha Christie, creator of 
Hercule Poirot.

“Elementary, my dear Agatha,” replied Max dryly, “they didn’t burn the 
wine cellars.”

However, even if Max Mallowan was as faithless as Archibald Christie, he 
unlike his predecessor was so discreet that the rumours could never be 
proved. In reality, Agatha’s second marriage was as happy as her first 
marriage had been unhappy. Of greater value to her fans is that her 
marriage to Max vastly broadened her literary horizons, and she produced 
some of her finest works during her second marriage. The year she married 
Max was the year Miss Jane Marple was introduced to the world in The 
Murder at the Vicarage, along with Murder in Mesopotamia. In 1931-32, 
she and Max went to continue excavating Nineveh8, one of the three great 
Assyrian cities discovered in 1876 by the late Austen Henry Layard, where 
Peril At End House and the second Miss Marple book, The Thirteen 
Problems (1932) were finished. Imbued with a new sense of romantic 
contentment after the pain Archie had caused, in 1930 she wrote Giant’s 
Bread, the first of six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary 
Westmacott. The second Westmacott romance, Unfinished Portrait came 
in 1934. 
 
Her travels with Max throughout Europe, Egypt and Mesopotamia (now the 
Near and Middle East) gave rise to, besides Express: Death on the Nile 
(1937); They Came To Baghdad (1951); Passenger to Frankfurt (1970); 
and also her only ‘historical’ murder mystery - set in ancient Egypt of the 
Pharoahs - Death Comes As The End (1944). This last was based on the 
Heqanakht Papyri. Shortly before her death, she also wrote a meticulously 
researched play based on the life of the ‘heretic’ Pharoah Akhenaten9.

Finally free after years of bearing the crushing burden of Archie’s 
histrionics, Agatha’s marriage to Max Mallowan enabled her to concentrate 
fully on her writing, and it showed. From 1930 onwards is the period that 
she produced much of her most famous and best work, including such titles 
as Lord Edgeware Dies (1933) and Crooked House (1949). 

Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and Ian Fleming with 
James Bond, Agatha did get tired of her two main protagonists, Poirot and 
Miss Marple; after marrying Max she solved this ennui by writing several 
stand-alone books that became her favourites because they showed she 
could write something other than her two most famous series. They are also 
considered some of her best work. 

The first stand-alone, The Sittaford Mystery, came in 1931, featuring one 
of Agatha’s usual courageous and determined heroine arch-types. Many 
people remember the TV/film versions of this novel because it starts with 
the characters in the middle of a psychic ‘table rapping’ scene when the 
table suddenly announces that one Captain Trevelyan has just died. The 
Listerdale Mystery of 1934 was an anthology of twelve short stories; the 
two stories of note from this anthology are Philomel Cottage, which was 
filmed as Love From A Stranger in 1937 starring Basil Rathbone of Sherlock 
Holmes fame and Ann Harding, and Accident, because in it the murderer 
isn’t apprehended! 

In the same year as Listerdale, Agatha wrote one of her most famous stand-
alones, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, whose amateur sleuths bear the 
closest resemblance of her characters to those typical of P.G. Wodehouse 
and Evelyn Waugh. John Gielgud starred in the 1980 TV-movie. Another title 
was Ordeal By Innocence in 1958; what makes it noteworthy is that when 
Arthur Calgary realizes the innocence of a youth jailed for murder it’s 
already too late, the man having died in prison. Agatha possessed acute 
social observation skills and was just as concerned with protecting the 
innocent as seeing the guilty get punished – hence Calgary’s determination 
to clear the name of someone branded a killer despite there being nobody 
left alive to care.

One of the most admired of the stand-alones was a very late one, Endless 
Night, in 1967. Like her only historical murder mystery, Death Comes As 
The End, Endless Night is a profound departure from her usual crime-
fiction in its complex image of a psychotic murderer.

Considered by many to be the finest of her non-Poirot/Marple stand-alone 
titles is Ten Little Niggers. Pictured left is the highly collectible original 
Collins Crime Club edition, worth £3,000 in its original dust jacket! In her 
Autobiography, Christie admitted that: “ten people had to die without it 
becoming ridiculous or the murderer obvious.” On the jacket blurb 
publishers Collins declared it would: “come to be considered the greatest 
crime problem ever devised in fiction”. Published in 1939, it was based on 
the nursery rhyme of the title, as per Agatha’s love of riddles and rhymes. 
The title was unacceptable in the United States, still a country practicing 
apartheid, so the 1940 U.S. version bore the neutral title, And Then There 
Were None, which was the last line of the book’s nursery rhyme. The first – 
and best – movie version from Hollywood in 1945 sported this title. Many 
later editions were re-titled Ten Little Indians, but this was a children’s 
aide-memoire counting song that had no connection whatsoever to the 
nursery rhyme the plot of the novel was built around. One of the very 
inferior movie remakes in 1965 had the Indians title, but another equally 
inferior one a decade later reverted to None.          
        
However, despite this prodigious output that began in the 1930s, Christie 
didn’t by any means abandon her most famous creations. Despite a hectic 
writing schedule she managed to squeeze in Hercule Poirot’s Christmas 
(1938) as a present for Madge’s husband after Sir James requested a story 
containing: “a good violent murder with lots of blood.” [Hercule Poirot’s 
Christmas is one of only two books in which the victim is killed by having 
their throat slashed, the other being The Big Four, written in 1926 at the 
height of her marital misery with Archibald Christie].

By 1944, Agatha had 48 published titles under her belt. A couple of years 
previously, her daughter Rosalind Margaret Clarissa Christie had married 
Major Hubert de Burgh Prichard of the 6th Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, 
and the young couple’s treasured son, Mathew Prichard, made his 
appearance on 21st September 1943. Therefore in ’44, Agatha somewhat 
prematurely had published her memoir, Come Show Me How You Live, a 
witty, detailed account of her travels with Mallowan that, just like her many 
other interviews said a lot without revealing anything of the woman behind 
the public image.

Sadly, tragedy visited the family in that same year. Hubert Prichard was 
killed in action on 16th August 1944, leaving Rosalind a widow with an 
eleven-month old baby. Some time later, Rosalind remarried Anthony Hicks, 
but like her mother, had no more children. Despite these sad events, 
Agatha’s tremendous writing output continued apace, as did the 
transference of her work onto celluloid. After the debut of Secret 
Adversary on the silver screen in 1928, seven of her works, including her 
first ever play, Black Coffee, had been made into movies by 1947. Alibi 
(based on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), Black Coffee (1931) and Lord 
Edgeware Dies (1934) had all starred tall, handsome 1930s matinee idol 
Austin Trevor as Hercule Poirot, despite his spectacular unsuitability for the 
role of a short, prissy, “egg-shaped” Belgian.     

In 1947, a change occurred. Beginning that year, Max accepted two less 
roving positions, as Director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq 
(until 1961) and professor at the University of London (until 1962). 
Returning to Britain, that same year Agatha Christie wrote a thirty-minute 
BBC radio play as a birthday present to King George VI's mother, the 
Dowager Queen Mary. It was called The Mousetrap, and would become 
more legendary than any of her filmed work. The expanded play (for which 
Agatha gave the stage rights to her only grandchild, Mathew Prichard, for 
his 9th Birthday in 1952) opened in London on 25th November 1952 for what 
was initially going to be a ‘limited run’. [Queen Mary was in ill health and 
died a few months later in 1953]. In 1977, British Prime Minister James 
Callaghan attended the 25" Anniversary of the play's opening. In November 
2002, Queen Mary’s granddaughter Queen Elizabeth II attended St Martin's 
Theatre, London for a matinee of the play, celebrating her and its Golden 
Jubilee, The Mousetrap now being the longest running theatre production 
in the world. Back in the 1950s, two film producers paid Christie £5,000 for 
the film rights on condition they did not begin to film until six months after 
the play finished its run – both are now long deceased!  

Nothing slowed Agatha down. Neither splitting her time between Britain and 
Iraq, nor the decade she and Max took excavating Nimrud (1949-1959) nor 
even the CBE she received from the new young Queen Elizabeth II, Mary’s 
grand-daughter, in 1956, slowed the Christie pen. The 1960s began 
auspiciously. In 1961, she achieved a Doctorate in Literature from Exeter 
University.  On 1st ApriI 1962, Hercule Poirot made his television debut in 
the United States of America, played by Martin Gabel, and also in that year 
Miss Marple went celluloid in Murder She Said, the first of four classic Miss 
Marple films starring Dame Margaret Rutherford and her real-life husband as 
faithful sidekick Mr Stringer. Agatha hated the MGM films, believing they 
were far too comic, but she became firm friends with Dame Margaret 
herself, to the extent that she dedicated The Mirror Crack’d From Side To 
Side (1962) to Rutherford. On the set of Murder She Said, Agatha Christie 
met a young, ‘bit-part’ scene-extra actress named Joan Hickson, and 
presciently said, “‘One day I would like you to play my Miss Marple.’” A 
decade after Agatha’s death, Joan Hickson would make the role her own 
until 1992, filming all twelve of the Miss Marple novels.    

Also, Archibald Christie suddenly died shortly before he had arranged to 
meet, for the first time, his only grandchild Mathew Prichard, who had 
written to him from Eton requesting a meeting.  Agatha Christie's 1961 book 
The Pale Horse may have been a reaction to that event because for all his 
failings, Archie had given her Rosalind. 

As previously mentioned, Agatha’s dangerous chemist employer was the 
seed that germinated into The Pale Horse and just as Arthur Conan Doyle's 
detective plots enabled him to prove the innocence of two men wrongly 
convicted, The Pale Horse saved two lives and condemned two. 

Upon reading it, one Christie fan realised that a neighbour was trying to 
poison his wife.  A nurse who was also a fan read the book and recognised 
the symptoms of thallium poisoning in a baby in time to save its life.  A fan 
who was a detective investigating the mysterious, inexplicable deaths of six 
men read the book and was able to apprehend the murderer. 

In 1966, after a 30 year absence from the big screen, Hercule Poirot 
returned to cinemas in The Alphabet Murders, starring American Tony 
Randall as Poirot and Robert Morley as a spectacularly dull-witted Captain 
Hastings. Another of the more famous Christie novels, By The Pricking of 
my Thumbs, appeared in 1968, the year Max Mallowan was knighted for 
services to archaeology. In 1971, Agatha was made a Dame Commander of 
the British Empire. In 1974 came probably the most famous Christie film 
adaptation of them all, and some say the best. Starring Albert Finney, 
praised as ‘the definitive Hercule Poirot’, Murder on the Orient Express 
had an all-star supporting cast including John Gielgud, Sean Connery, Lauren 
Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Anthony Perkins, Vanessa Redgrave and Michael 
York. The film received 6 Oscar nominations and won 3 British Film Awards.

Its success triggered two more all-star cast movies. The late Peter Ustinov, 
again more comic than Agatha would have preferred, starred in Death on 
the Nile in 1978, probably the best of the imitations. Supporting cast 
included Bette Davis, David Niven, Angela Lansbury and Maggie Smith, whilst 
Evil Under the Sun (1982) had Colin Blakely, James Mason and Diana Rigg 
joining Maggie Smith in support. Ustinov played Poirot in one more feature 
film, Appointment with Death (1984), and three made-for-TV movies, 
Thirteen at Dinner (1985), Dead Man’s Folly (1986) and Murder in Three 
Acts (1986). However, from 1989 actor David Suchet, brother of newscaster 
John Suchet, made the role his own in what is viewed as the best portrayal 
of Hercule Poirot ever, barring possibly Albert Finney’s brief foray into the 
role.

Not to be left out of the Hollywood party, in 1980 there appeared a far too 
young Angela Lansbury in The Mirror Crack’d, supported by Elizabeth 
Taylor, Rock Hudson, Kim Novak and Tony Curtis. Two TV movies starring 
American actress Helen Hayes as a very reasonable Miss Marple appeared in 
1983 and 1985, respectively A Caribbean Mystery and Murder With 
Mirrors. Hayes was the only over-age Miss Marple to appear (remember, in 
the books she started off at 65), and her ill-health led to the series of 
movies being cancelled in 1985 after Mirrors, the same year Joan Hickson 
took on the role to great acclaim.   

Perhaps feeling the approach of her own personal pale horse10, in 1975 
Agatha arranged for the publication of Curtain, Poirot’s last case (the rights 
for which she had gifted to Rosalind), and Sleeping Murder (gifted to her 
husband Max), the finale of Miss Marple. She had actually written both books 
during the Blitz of World War II, since she was living in London, just in case 
she did not survive the war, because she did not want her readers to be left 
‘hanging’ with no character resolution – thus showing a courtesy and 
consideration for faithful readers that some modern authors would do well 
to emulate. Dame Agatha Christie Mallowan died on 12th January 1976, aged 
85 years; two years later in 1978, Sir Max Mallowan also passed away.

However, though Agatha Christie remains the undisputed ‘Queen of Crime’ 
to the general public, in recent years her work has fallen victim to that 
pernicious disease that is Political Correctness (just like Enid Blyton, Edgar 
Wallace et al). “Xenophobic!”, “Racist!”, “Stereotypical!” are just some of 
the idiotic epithets undeservedly flung.

It is true that Agatha Christie wrote using ‘types’ rather than characters, 
but the reason that her servants are always innocent, Americans are called 
Hiram/Homer and are loud and vulgar, parents are emotionally distant, 
etc., etc., is because that is the way they really were – that is how 
‘stereotypes are formed in the first place!

Agatha’s childhood was spent in the company of cooks and maids whom the 
young girl discovered were far more emotionally reliable than her financially 
anxious father and flaky, ‘psychic’ mother; in her books these are stalwarts. 

As for authority figures, especially doctors, being the “killer” – for example 
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1925) and 4.50 From Paddington (1957) – 
Agatha Miller grew up in a world where a doctor was unfortunately just as 
likely to kill a patient as cure them, as shown by her father’s experiences. 
Often arrogant, conceited and misogynistic, one can only wonder how many 
times, especially during World War I when she was a nurse, that Agatha saw 
a doctor harm a patient – or worse – through his own hubris; the recent 
Alder Hey hospital organ transplant scandal being a modern example how 
some doctors still suffer ‘delusions of divinity’.  

What Agatha Miller was brought up to see as a sign of ‘class’, the 
determinedly egalitarian Americans viewed as ‘stuck-up showing off’. The 
fact is that in the 1930s, the only Americans who could afford to travel 
abroad were the extremely rich sort who really were named Hiram/Homer 
and who were boisterous, brash and cheerful. Agatha Christie didn’t write 
them as she did because she was racist, but because she came from a 
culture that viewed such extrovert attitudes as vulgar, undignified ‘yob’ 
behaviour. Had ‘Agatha Christie’ been American, the PC brigade would now 
be howling because she stereotyped the British as emotionally frigid, stiff-
upper lipped aristocrats!

Nevertheless, it must be admitted that Agatha had more of an affinity for 
codes than characters. She loved riddles, rhymes, puzzles and logic 
problems. Nursery rhymes particularly appealed because of the way they 
were based on real, historical events. For instance, “Ring-A-Ring-A-
Roses/Pocketful of Posies” is about the Black Death that swept Europe in 
the 1400s, when it was believed that carrying crushed flowers or flower 
petals in a person’s pocket would ward off the plague. “Old Mother 
Hubbard” was King James I, whose economic policies left the “cupboard 
bare” or the kingdom nearly bankrupt. “Eenie Meenie Miny Mo” are actually 
the last surviving words of true English, the language spoken by the 
indigenous Britons before they were swallowed up by the Vikings, Romans, 
Scots and others. “One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four” is about 
the rationing in the Irish Potato Famine of 1845, when a million Irish people 
died and further million emigrated the United States and Britain.

Famous quotes, poetry and religious symbolism also appear frequently in her 
work, as we can see: Mysterious Mr Quin (1930); The Hand of Death 
(1933); And Then There Were None (1939); One, Two Buckle My Shoe 
(1940); The Moving Finger (1942); Five Little Pigs (1943); The Labours of 
Hercules (1947); Taken at the Flood (1948); Crooked House (1949); Three 
Blind Mice (1950); A Pocketful of Rye (1953); Hickory Dickory Dock 
(1955); Cat Among The Pigeons (1959); The Pale Horse (1962); The Mirror 
Crack’d From Side To Side (1962); By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968); 
Nemesis (1971). 

Indeed, in one Miss Marple novel, the characters are murdered to the 
nursery rhyme, “The King was in his counting house…” Agatha’s usual M.O. 
was to develop the riddle into the murder plots and their denouement, then 
slot in the characters around the plot, which made the characters somewhat 
interchangeable. With a few minor changes, it is possible to remove Hercule 
Poirot, Captain Hastings and Inspector Japp and replace them with Miss 
Marple and Inspector Craddock instead, or take away Jane Marple and insert 
Tommy & Tuppence Beresford. 

Agatha herself came to believe that her ‘big mistake’ in her writing was to 
make Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot both too old to start with. When 
Captain Hastings first meets Poirot in 1917 Torquay, the Belgian is already in 
late middle-age, with a distinguished police career behind him, spending his 
early retirement as an amateur “private consulting detective” a la Sherlock 
Holmes. With no family, Poirot did not even have any interesting 
background story to elaborate upon. Similarly, Jane Marple was a 65-year-
old spinster with no immediate family bar a novelist nephew Raymond West 
(and later a niece-in-law), plus a couple of nieces and a few god-daughters 
who conveniently end up with troublesome corpses on their hands. It makes 
them very two-dimensional characters in many ways. Only Tommy & 
Tuppence Beresford progress from the sweethearts of Secret Adversary in 
1922 through parenting three children to grandparents in Postern of Fate 
(1973). 

It appears that Agatha learned from her early work of making Hercule Poirot 
and Arthur Hastings characters so detailed, for later characters are more 
interchangeable types than individuals. For example, the Arthur Hastings we 
meet in The Mysterious Affair At Styles (1917) is the epitome of the 
perfect Englishman. Tall, good-looking, military, honorable, brave, loyal, 
incapable of deceit and chock full of integrity, ‘Arthur Hastings’ is Archibald 
Christie as an adoring Agatha Christie still saw him, before she discovered 
the true size of her idol’s feet of clay.

She still had Hercule Poirot books to write after Archie proved to be a tin 
god, but the Arthur Hastings she had originally written was too finely drawn 
to be casually rearranged. As Tuvok declared to Tom Paris in Star Trek: 
Voyager, “the characters actions must flow from the logic of their 
personalities, which you have created.” In short, Arthur Hastings could not 
suddenly undergo a character transplant for no apparent reason. So 
gradually in later Poirot adventures Arthur shifts from the decent, 
competent military chap to become a bit of a fun figure, a spaniel like 
buffoon to Poirot’s straight man; that is when Christie bothered to bring him 
back at all, having initially gotten around the Hastings problem by having 
him marry Dulcie Duveen (who he’d met in The Murder on the Links) and 
emigrate to a ranch in Argentina. In the 1930s Basil Rathbone series of films, 
Hollywood made a ghastly mess of the Sherlock Holmes stories by portraying 
Conan Doyle’s admiring but individually competent sidekick Dr Watson as a 
blustering, bumbling British buffoon whose sole purpose was to provide 
comic relief. Possibly Agatha realized she could nudge Arthur/Archie in the 
same direction, albeit less obviously.

In all honesty, Agatha Christie may no longer be the ‘Queen of Crime’. Her 
books are set too firmly in the middle/aristocratic class world that she was 
born into under Queen Victoria, but which was fully killed off by World War 
II. Today people want superbly twisty plots and decent characterization to 
boot. Nor, truthfully, did Agatha want the accolades she was given. The 
success of her writing certainly provided some much needed self-esteem, 
but it always remained firmly in third place after ‘husband’ and ‘child’. 
Agatha’s dream was not Silver Dagger Awards, Carnegie Medals or the 
Booker Prize, but rather to have the happy domestic life she, her brother 
and sister had enjoyed as children. With wisdom many celebrities today just 
don’t have, Agatha understand that these were the truly important things in 
life.

Also, that any section of the press could actually side so spitefully with the 
adulterous Archie, as happened in 1926, left her with a deep distrust of the 
media already lurking due to being raised to believe that ‘blowing one’s own 
trumpet’ was the height of bad taste. She often tried to get out of having 
her picture put on the back or inside of a book jacket because she 
considered it to be the sort of publicity-seeking self-aggrandizement 
practiced by ‘politicians and celebrities’. The idea of chat shows, interviews 
and ‘self-promotion’ was to her the height of vulgarity. Agatha was also 
aware of the fleeting nature of ‘fame’. She had lived through the reigns of 
seven monarchs and seen the public forgetting great ones. Queen Elizabeth 
II awarded her both her Honours, but Agatha had been ten at the funeral of 
Elizabeth’s great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. She had watched men like 
Churchill and Montgomery become global legends, only to be forgotten by 
the early 1970s, when Agatha realized she was living in a world where Monty 
was only Monty Python, and few people under the age of 30 realised there 
ever had been a King Edward VIII.

What her books lack in characterization, they more than make up in plots 
that are twisty, turning, interesting and fun to decode before the 
denouement (if you can!) Maybe no longer the Queen of Crime, Agatha 
Christie is still certainly one of its princesses!

NB:

1 Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) stole the Theory of Evolution from the 
naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace in 1852, which he published in 1859 after 
persuading Wallace to be complicit in the theft. Unlike Wallace’s clear 
prose, Origin of Species is largely unreadable. See the book, A Delicate 
Arrangement by Arnold C. Brackman.
2 Sir Austen Henry Layard (1812 – 1894) adventurer-explorer who invented 
archaeology and discovered three of the five cities of ancient Assyria – 
Nineveh, Ashur and Calah (Nimrud). See Genesis Chp 10 verse 10, the Book 
of Jonah, the Book of Isaiah and The Luck of Nineveh by Arnold C. 
Brackman.
3 Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890) adventurer-explorer and first 
anthropologist; 1st non-Muslim to penetrate Mecca (1953); discovered Lake 
Tanganyiki in 1858 with John Hanning Speke (1827-1864) whilst exploring 
East Africa. Translated The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra (1885-1888) 
into English. In later life, Burton like Layard fell foul of the racist, bigoted 
British Museum trustee Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis Budge, and after his 
death his wife disastrously burned much of his work in a vain attempt to 
please Budge.
4 Empire of Assyria: city of Asshur found after 2489 and before 2303 BC by 
Asshur, son of Shem (2468 – 1868 BC). Between 2303 – 1839 BC the area was 
invaded by Asshur’s cousin, Nimrod, who had already built Babylon and 
Akkad in Chaldea and built Calah (Nimrud), Resen and Rehoboth-Ir. He is 
also credited with Nineveh, though much of the city was completed after his 
death by his father Cush and wife Semiramis. The Assyrian Empire was 
finally destroyed in 632BC by King Nabopolasser of Babylon, though King 
Ashur-uballit II escaped the destruction and fled.
5 Jean François Champollion, deciphered how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics 
by means of the Rosetta Stone.
6 Ur: city in Mesopotamia, now known as Muqaiyir. Birthplace of Abraham 
(2018 BC) and his half-sister wife Sarah (2008 BC), the common ancestors of 
Jews and Arabs. Abraham left Ur to lead a nomadic life in tents in what is 
now modern Israel shortly before 1943 BC. The significance of this move was 
not understood for centuries due to the “popular” view of Ur as a small 
village of wooden huts. The excavations of Max Mallowan showed that Ur 
was a large, luxurious and technological city. Abraham left behind a three-
storey, 14-room stone mansion with paneled walls, marble floors, gold, 
silver and lapis lazuli inlay plus indoor plumbing and central heating. One 
writer explained, “4,000 years ago Abraham flushed the loo and turned on 
the tap for his cup of tea; in 19th Century Britain, the so-called height of 
civilization, rich people crapped in buckets and fetched water from often 
polluted wells.” When Abraham (2018-1843 BC) and Sarah lived (2008-
1881BC), Ur was not part of Chaldea (Babylon), however by the time Moses 
wrote Genesis in 1513BC, 500 years later, Ur had become part of Babylonia, 
thus it is referred to as “Ur of the Chaldeans” in Genesis Chp 11 to identify 
it to readers of the time. Abraham and Sarah however were not Chaldean.
7 Nimrud (Nimrod): City of Calah, as mentioned in Genesis 10:10. Nimrod 
was not the actual name of the man in Genesis, but a description of him. 
Nimrod means “Great Rebel” or “Opposer of God” and derives from his 
claim that God lied to humans when He promised never to drown the world 
again, and thus it was necessary to build a great Tower to escape the waters 
when God broke his promise. His birth name is unknown. Such descriptions 
are commonplace in the bible: Saul means “chosen to be king” and the real 
name of King Saul is believed to have been Lobihu. Shishak, erroneously 
identified with Pharoah Shoshenk I by Champollion, means “destroyer of 
cities” and is believed to have been Pharoah Ramesses the Great. 
8 Nineveh: capital city of Assyrian Empire after 2003 BC. Now known as 
Kouyunik. Layard and his friend Hormuzd Rassam excavated the palaces of 
Kings Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal and Esar-haddon there, as mentioned in the 
Book of Isaiah. Max Mallowan excavated the palace of Shalmaneser. The 
large hill next to the excavated ruins of Nineveh, believed to be the tomb of 
the biblical prophet Jonah (see Book of Jonah) is the site of a mosque and 
remains largely unexplored. By 1850, Nineveh was nothing more than a large 
hill, utterly forgotten until Layard arrived, convinced the area was the site 
of Nineveh. The final two cities built by Nimrod, Resen and Rehoboth-Ir, 
have not yet been discovered.
9 Akhenaten abandoned Eygpt’s pantheon to worship one god, Aten. He is 
tentatively identified as the heir of the Pharoah whose daughter adopted 
Moses as her son, raising him as an Egyptian prince. The Israelites, 
unusually, had always been monotheistic, and it is believed Akhenaten was 
influenced by the beliefs of Moses’ family, whom he met through Moses.
10 Pale Horse – Death. The last of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as 
described in Revelation 6:8. The first Horseman was Jesus Christ, given 
authority by God to rule the world. The next three Horsemen were symbolic 
“plagues” designed to alert people that the 1st Horseman had started to 
ride. The 2nd Horseman was War (verses 3,4), followed by Famine (verses 
5,6) and “general” Death, the Pale Horse of verse 8.

* Several commentators have pointed out that Christie was “disowning” this 
remark attributed to her as early as the mid-1960s…which doesn’t mean she 
didn’t say it…

Author’s Note: Some readers may note a difference between the years of 
book publication in this article to other sources they’ve read. This is 
because, for whatever reason, some of Christie’s books were not published 
when they were written. The most famous examples are of course, The 
Mysterious Affair At Styles (written 1917, published 1920); Curtain (written 
World War II, published 1975) and Sleeping Murder (written World War II, 
published 1976). Having checked several different works and seen several 
different years “authoritatively” listed in each (!) I have erred on the side of 
choosing the most “popular” date.  

© 2002 C.D. Stewart