The Mystery of Christie

 

Agatha Miller was born on 15 September 1890, the third child of American stockbroker Frederick Miller and his wife Clara. A wealthy family, they lived in a villa named Ashfield in the coastal town of Torquay, which is in the English county of Devon. Although the family home was in the south west of the country, Agatha also spent a good deal of time with her aunt and step-grandmother, at their home in Ealing, West London. The early years that she spent in the metropolis, would bear much ripe fruit later in her life. Agatha always described her childhood as “very happy”. However, in November 1901, her father who had been in poor heath for some time, died aged only 55. Although just 11 years old at the time, she claimed that her father’s death marked the end of her childhood.

 

Young Agatha

 

In about 1913, Agatha met Archibald Christie at a dance held near to her home in Torquay. Archie, as he was known, was an army officer who had become a member of the fledgling Royal Flying Corps. With World War One looming on the horizon, Archie and Agatha decided to get married as soon as possible. That date turned out to be Christmas Eve 1914, while Archie was home on leave. In the decades to come, her married name of Agatha Christie, would become synonymous with the murder mystery genre of writing. After the war, the couple took a flat in St. John’s Wood, London.

 

Archibald Christie (1889-1962)

 

Agatha Christie’s first novel was published in 1919, and in that same year she gave birth to her only child, a daughter named Rosalind Margaret. As her literary career began to take off, and with Archie now gainfully employed  in the financial sector, all seemed rosy in the Christie household. They travelled widely, visiting such far flung destinations as Hawaii, South Africa and Australia, and were quite possibly the first English man and woman to learn to surf standing upright. Agatha later wrote in her autobiography “I learned to become expert, or at any rate expert from a European point of view – the moment of complete triumph on the day I kept my balance and came right onto shore standing upright on my board”.  In short, family life for the Christie’s seemed idyllic. Then, to the complete surprise of her burgeoning fan base, Agatha Christie disappeared!

 

On 3rd December 1926, her secretary discovered a note from Christie in which she said she was going to Yorkshire. Her car was later found parked above a chalk quarry, near Guildford in Surrey. In it were her driving licence and clothes. A massive hunt ensued, with around 1,000 police officers and 15,000 volunteers involved in the search. Aircraft were even deployed in pursuit of the missing author.

 

 Agatha’s Disappearance Made Headlines on Both Sides of The Atlantic 

 

Agatha Christie was eventually discovered on 14th December, staying at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, under the name Mrs Neele. So what had caused the successful novelist to stage her own disappearance? As you can probably guess, all was not quite what it seemed. Agatha’s mother had passed away earlier in the year, and her grief was compounded when her husband confessed to infidelity; he having fallen in love with another woman. Archie had asked for a divorce shortly before her dramatic vanishing act. Although Agatha herself never offered an explanation for her erratic behaviour, the most poignant clue was the alias of Mrs Neele, that she gave to the hotel receptionist upon checking in. The name of Archie’s mistress was Nancy Neele!

 

Public reaction was not positive, with many suggesting a publicity stunt, or even an attempt to frame Archie and Nancy for murder. A more likely explanation is that she was simply in a fragile mental state, and just needed to get away from it all for a while. Agatha and Archie were divorced in 1928 and Archie soon married Nancy. Agatha was given custody of their daughter, and also retained the name of Christie for professional purposes, as this was the name by which she was known to her readers worldwide. Agatha herself remarried in 1930. Her second husband was Max Mallowan, an eminent archaeologist, and they remained happily married for almost forty six years.

 

Max and Agatha

 

Her two most acclaimed fictional characters were Hercule Poirot, a Belgian detective based in London, and Miss Jane Marple, an elderly amateur sleuth who lived in the equally fictional village of St Mary Mead. Follwing the publication of her novel Curtain, in which Poirot dies, he became the only fictional character to receive an obituary in The New York Times! Agatha always maintained that the character of Jane Marple was based on an amalgamation of her step grandmother and her “Ealing cronies”. She remarked that both Gran and the fictional Jane “always expected the worst of everyone and everything, and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.”

 

                            An Obituary For a Man Who Never Lived!

 

Another mysterious episode, or rather coincidence, involving Agatha, occurred during World War Two. In her novel N or M , a character named Major Bletchley claimed to have knowledge of crucial British wartime secrets. At the time Christie was friends with Dilly Knox, a cryptographer working at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, Britain’s top secret codebreaking establishment. MI5 were alarmed, and wondered whether Knox had passed information to Christie, as she seemed to be aware of the name of an institute that was not supposed to exist. Knox was adamant that he had not told her anything, and approached Agatha to establish the origin of the name of the character. It transpired that it was the result of a delayed train. She told Knox “Bletchley? My dear, I was stuck there on my way by train from Oxford to London, and took revenge by giving the name to one of my least loveable characters.”

 

Alfred Dilwyn “Dilly” Knox (1884-1943)

 

Agatha passed away on 12th January 1976, at the age of eighty five. She was laid to rest in the churchyard of St Mary’s, Cholsey, in South Oxfordshire, close to the house where she had lived with Max. She was survived by both her husband and daughter Rosalind.

 

Sources:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/52724/11-reasons-agatha-christie-was-interesting-her-characters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie