The greatest mystery ever: Who was the real Agatha Christie, according to her biographer | books | entertainment

As a little bookworm, I would check out one of Agatha Christie’s novels from the library as a treat at the start of every school holiday. During my childhood, I must have discovered dozens and dozens of her books thinking they were pointless fun.

Sunday Evenings revolved around David Suchet as Poirot on TV, with Hugh Fraser as his sweet, and somewhat understated friend, Captain Hastings. It was great entertainment and like the books themselves, it was incredibly relaxing.

No matter how horrific the crime was, Kristi’s stories ensured a carefully wrapped package of resolution in the end. happy Days. Of course, as I grew up, I realized that crime queen stories were much more than entertainment, although they excelled at that. It also depicts how society—especially for women—has changed over the course of the turbulent 20th century, something I hope to reflect in my new autobiography of history’s best-selling novelist.

Before I began my research, I had not fully appreciated the long life that Agatha Christie had. Born in Victorian England in September 1890, when she died in January 1976 at the age of 85, she was a world celebrity alongside people like The Rolling Stones. However, despite her unimaginable success, there was always something in Christie that saw her placed in a box that read “Difficult Women”.

In fact, as I began my journey into a treasure trove of her private letters and notebooks that remain in the care of her family, I admit I was a bit worried. Perhaps Agatha Christie was too successful, too talented, to be able to warm up to her?

I began to change my mind as I became increasingly acquainted with her through her correspondence.

While she was a quiet and shy character, perhaps misunderstood as a tough-eyed, on paper she was talkative and weak.

The youngest of three children to quintessential parents was born in Torquay, then an elegant seaside resort where her wealthy family enjoyed a privileged life in their villa, Ashfield.

But their financial situation worsened, and at the age of eleven Agatha lost her father, Frederick, to pneumonia and kidney disease.

This was the end of her childhood, and she began to have terrifying nightmares that would tell her about her imagination. Kristi dreamed that she was playing with her now widowed mother Clara, or having tea with her as usual. Then, she was looking at her mother’s face, only to find that she had suddenly and mysteriously transformed into a stranger. Mummy became a man with solid blue eyes and a missing hand.

She later described this frightening fantasy in a semi-autobiographical novel, An Incomplete Portrait, in 1934: “From the sleeve of her mother’s dress came, O horror!—that terrible torso. It wasn’t a mummy. It was the armed man.”

This “armed man” was the name Christie gave her a nightmare.

Aspects of personality will become a central theme in her work. Almost all of her books feature a nice, respectful, friendly guy… who suddenly turns out to be the opposite of all of these things. Someone who can kill.

It was expected that a young woman like Agatha would marry out of money. But when World War I broke out in 1914, the 23-year-old volunteered as a nurse. It was another experience that would enrich her imagination.

In her second book, The Secret Adversary, published in January 1922, introducing her young heroine Tommy and Tuppence, she began her life in the hospital washing 649 plates a day, passing to wait at tables in the canteen, and graduates to sweep a real ward.

Christie herself had a similar experience, although she was eventually promoted to a hospital dispensary, where she did the responsible job of mixing medications. This inspired one of my favorite Christie characters, the brown-haired Cynthia who lures Hastings into her dispensary in her first novel—and Hercules Poirot’s first affair: The Mysterious Affair At Styles.

Until now, Kristi has been a wife and mother. She married a war hero, Archie Christie, and had their daughter Rosalind in 1919. At the age of 30, she was a published and soon-to-be bestselling author.

I’ve written novels for fun since childhood, but Styles was the first to be published – and even this was a slow process. Unusually, given the subsequent success, four years passed before the publisher picked it up.

It has now produced in quick succession a series of novels that have taken over a decade. Kristi was too old to be a blink, but she did share some flapper values. She was a good dancer, and she played sports. Slant-nosed Moore swam – once she went to Hawaii to surf – and she loved fast cars. Nothing gave her more joy, she said, than “dear little Maurice Cowley.”

Some of my favorite early characters reflect the confident and beautiful young Kristi, such as Dulcy in Murder On The Links, in her “fancy little red hat”, and her “totally impossible crimson” lips.

Agatha’s first marriage unraveled, and at the age of 38, she took an adventurous trip, alone, to Iraq. There she had a romance with a young archaeologist, Max Mallowan, who became her second husband. Traveling with Max broadened her horizons. A trip to Egypt inspired Death On The

During a train ride home from Istanbul, the Orient Express murder was born.

After World War II, Christie branched out from novels to write on stage, producing witty and entertaining plays such as The Mousetrap. Amazingly – except for the shutdowns – it’s still running in the West End. But she also continued to write stories that are in high demand by television and film producers. For those old enough to remember the 1960s, Miss Marple was played by the great comedian, Margaret Rutherford.

For me, watching with my grandmother, Joan Hickson was the questionable puzzle solver, Julia McKenzie, or (my own favorite!) Geraldine McEwan.

By the age of 80, Christie had published a staggering 80 books. She was the first crime writer to have 100,000 copies of 10 of her titles published by Penguin on the same day in 1948; He is listed as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, with more than two billion copies sold in 44 languages.

One of the last in her life, Passenger To Frankfurt – an independent edition published in September 1970, featuring adventurer Sir Stafford Nye – spent an astonishing six months on the bestseller list. Until now, it has become a ritual for millions of fans to buy the annual “Christie’s for Christmas”.

When she passed away in 1976, with her husband of 45 years at her side, this was the main topic on the evening news. But the more I looked into her personal life, the more I realized that Agatha was not the powerhouse she seemed in her first appearance. The basis for her success was the support she received from her second wealthy husband.

He was 14, and she was always the main breadwinner. But in return, he was always on her side. She needed this because since that early loss of her father, Kristi has been emotionally fragile, though she hid it so well.

Max married in the wake of the second major crisis in her life (after her father’s death), which occurred in 1926. That year, she was betrayed by her first husband Archibald, who served in the Royal Flying Corps.

Christie was in a dark place that year after her mother’s death and under pressure to put out more books like her 1926 masterpiece, The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd. But Archie was unable to provide any support. Instead, he announced that he would leave her, for the sake of a woman ten years younger than her, with whom he was playing golf.

Kristi began experiencing what we now call deep depression.

On a dark December night, I left the family’s large home in Sunningdale, Berkshire. The next morning, Morris was found deserted near a steep cliff in Surrey Down. The police suspected she was in danger, or even dead. Maybe her hand. Or maybe at the hands of her cheating husband?

There was a national manhunt, and 11 days later Christie was found, alive and well, but living under an assumed name at the Old Swan Hotel in the Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate. Journalists can hardly acknowledge that she has “lost her memory” as she claimed.

It looked incredibly vulnerable, especially after the massive search, in which hundreds of policemen and members of the public volunteered their time.

To the cynical hacker, Kristi seemed to have purposely disappeared. Perhaps she wanted publicity for her books? Or maybe she hid herself away in order to accuse her cheating husband of her murder?

Under pressure, Kristi reluctantly claimed she had attempted suicide – driving her car toward the edge of a cliff – but could not move forward.

She said the accident shocked her and prompted her to want to live, but she couldn’t bear to go back to her agonizing life as the bereaved and betrayed Mrs. Christie. So she ran away.

It was a horrific and dark time, exacerbated when the media turned against her, telling their version of the story instead of hers. Millions of readers came to believe that she might have been a great writer, but somehow she was a con man.

If you’ve met Agatha Christie later in her life, you may have mistaken her heroine for Miss Marple: a sweet-looking old lady enjoying cream tea in the garden of her Devon, Greenway home.

But she knew darkness and pain in intimacy. And overcoming that betrayal and public slander in 1926, I think, reveals her true strength in her character. For this reason, while Agatha Christie has an extraordinary talent, I can also feel a sense of kinship with her.

• Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman by Lucy Worsley (Hodder, £25) now available. To order £22.50 with free UK P&P, visit Expressbookshop.com Or call 020 3176 3832