Christie, Agatha (1890-1979)

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Christie, Agatha (1890-1979)

Deemed the creator of the modern detective fiction novel and nicknamed the Duchess of Death, Agatha Christie continues to be one of the most popularly read authors since the publication of her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920. Since then, more than 100 million copies of her books and stories have been sold.

Born Agatha Miller on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, located in Devonshire, England, Christie enjoyed a Victorian childhood where her parents' dinner parties introduced her to Henry James and Rudyard Kipling. Formally educated in France and debuting in Cairo,

Agatha began writing seriously after she married Archibald Christie in 1914. She wrote her first novel in 1916 in just two weeks. Several publishers rejected the manuscript. Almost two years later, John Lane accepted the book and offered her a contract for five more.

While her creative interests increased, Christie's relationship with her husband steadily declined until he left her in 1926 for his mistress, Nancy Neele. On December 6 of the same year, Christie disappeared for eleven days. Her car was found abandoned at Newlands Corner in Yorkshire. Later, employees at the Hydro Hotel in Harrogate recognized Christie as a guest at the spa resort, where Christie had identified herself to hotel employees and guests as Teresa Neele from South Africa. Christie later claimed to have been suffering from selective amnesia; she never wrote about her disappearance.

Divorcing her first husband in 1928, Christie married Max Mallowan in 1930 after meeting him during an excursion to Baghdad in 1929. Accompanying him on archeological excavations, Christie traveled extensively in the Middle East and also to the United States in 1966 for his lecture series at the Smithsonian Institute. While stateside, Christie began to write a three-part script based on Dickens's Bleak House. She only completed two parts of the project before withdrawing herself from the script. While she enjoyed novel and short story writing, Christie cared little for scriptwriting and even less for the film adaptations made from her novels, even though critics praised Charles Laughton's and Marlene Dietrich's performances in Witness for the Prosecution (1955).

Several national honors arose in accordance with Christie's popular fame as a novelist. In 1956, she was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1971, Christie was appointed Dame of the British Empire. Despite these accolades, Christie continued to lead a quiet private life, writing steadily until her death in 1979.

Though mystery novels as a genre became fashionable in the nineteenth century, Christie popularized the format so successfully that mystery writers continue to follow her example. Christie built on an early modern theme of comedies: a misunderstanding, crime, or murder occurs in the first act, an investigation follows with an interpolation of clue detection and character analysis, and the story concludes with a revelation, usually of mistaken identities, leading to the capture of the murderer.

During her life, Christie wrote sixty-six novels, more than one hundred short stories, twenty plays, an autobiography, and other various books of poetry and nonfiction. Though her play The Mousetrap (1952) is the longest running play in London's West End, Christie's most enduring work incorporates the two now-famous fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple.

A Belgian immigrant living in London, Hercule Poirot embodies the ideal elements of a modern detective, though Christie clearly fashioned him after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Like Holmes, Poirot studies not only the clues of the crime but also the characters of the suspects. What distinguishes him from Holmes is Poirot's attention to personal appearance. Even while traveling by train in Murder on the Orient Express, Poirot finds time to set and style his moustache. Because of his attention to detail, Poirot, in a time before fingerprint matches and DNA testing, solves mysteries by using what he terms "the little gray cells."

Miss Marple, an elderly spinster, acts as Poirot's antithesis except for her ability to solve mysteries. Marple is a successful detective because of her unobtrusive and innocuous presence. Few suspects assume an older woman with a knitting bag can deduce a motive behind murder. Marple, like Poirot, however, does embody a particularly memorable trait: she doesn't trust anyone. In Christie's autobiography, the author describes Miss Marple: "Though a cheerful person she always expected the worst of everyone and everything and was, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right."

Both detectives have been made famous in the United States by the critically acclaimed television series Poirot and Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, produced by and aired on the Arts and Entertainment network, and beginning in 1989, and on the PBS weekly program Mystery! Although more than sixty-five film and made-for-television adaptations have been produced from Christie's novels, none claims the following these series command. Immortalizing the roles of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, David Suchet and Joan Hickson have indelibly imprinted images of the detectives in the minds of fans. Though Agatha Christie died long before the creation of the series, her legacy of detective fiction will be remembered in the United States not only in print but on the small screen as well.

—Bethany Blankenship