The novelist, born Agatha Miller, wrote because she had to. Writing was a compulsion. Having seen the "chaos" of ideas in Christie's notebooks, Worsley was touched to see the old lady working on a plot right up to the end of her life. Also, Christie had to write because she needed the money. She had a privileged childhood on the kind of estate where she set so many of her novels, until her father's mismanagement plunged the family into a precarious existence, moving around Europe to elude creditors. Even as a world-famous novelist, Agatha signed some disadvantageous contracts before she found a publisher she could trust, she spent too much on properties, and she was burdened by debt and unpaid taxes in the UK and US.
Groomed to be a proper lady and a wife, she didn't identify with the "modern" working woman that she expemplified. At the start of the Great War, she married Archie Christie, an incompetent pilot but "a hottie" according to Worsley. During his absence, young Mrs. Christie volunteered at the army hospital where she saw horrific injuries and learned a lot of useful facts about poisons. After the war, her writing career took off.
So her disappearance in December 1926 was an international sensation. She left her little daughter Rosalind with a nanny, drove all night, ran her car off the road, and vanished. When she turned up weeks later, she had been living at a resort under an assumed name. She claimed to have no memory of who she was and how she got there.
Whole decades fly by in single chapters elsewhere in the book, but Worsley gives this incident five chapters. She recounts modern examples of "dissociative fugue" to establish that an amnesiac response to unbearable stress is real. Christie had just experienced the death of her mother and had discovered Archie's affair with Nancy Neele, an acquaintance of hers.
"The great injustice of Agatha Christie's life" wasn't the infidelity, Worsley writes. "It was the fact that she was shamed for her illness in the nation's newspapers in such a public way that people ever since have suspected her of duplicity and lies" (136). Her biographers, "notably her male biographers," have accepted the conclusions of police and newsmen of the time that it was a publicity stunt or a scheme to frame her unfaithful husband for murder. Worsley does undercut her advocacy for her subject when she notes that Agatha's alias "Teresa Neele" combines the surname of Archie's mistress with an anagram for "teaser" -- coincidence, or a clue that the puzzle-writer couldn't resist planting?
Max Mallowan, a little archaeologist ten years her junior, became the abiding love of her life. Traveling with him to digs in the Middle East opened up new settings for Agatha's stories, and she wrote much of her best work in the first ten years of her marriage, before the second World War.
Worsley appreciates Christie's work without fawning. She admits that she herself first encountered Agatha Christie through "cosy, cleaned-up versions of her stories on television." The TV series transposed all her stories to the years between the wars, making her work seem to be nostalgic.
But the original novels were a product of a twentieth century that had broken with the past. Christie herself lived a 'modern' life; she went surfing in Hawaii; she loved fast cars; she was intrigued by the new science of psychology. And when her books were published, they were thrillingly, scintillatingly 'modern' too (xvi).
The plotting can be "algebraic," Worsley admits, and certain "Christie tricks" repeat in her novels. A man and woman who despise each other turn out to have been lovers; an important clue is hidden in plain sight; description of a character's appearance is misleading. Christie pioneered the sub-genre of serial murders with The ABC Murders, in which authorities come to perceive a pattern in seemingly random killings -- overlooking a different connection. The plots have overshadowed "the dialogue, the characters and the humour of her best books" (217).
Christie experimented in some other books. She enjoyed writing Gothic romances as "Mary Westmacott." As Freud's theories entered the culture, Christie introduced "psychological deductions" to crime-solving (212). With Five Little Pigs, she gave her detective Poirot a "cold case" from a decade before, enriching the story with layers of memory [see my blogpost Worst Title for Best Book (03/2017)]. A story of murder in the time of the Pharaohs was less successful. Considering the long runs of Christie's numerous stage plays, Worsley is indignant that a survey of British drama mentions Agatha Christie only as she was parodied by Tom Stoppard.
Worsley dings Christie for blatant anti-Semitism and for the way her disapproval of modern trends and lax youth marred her later books. The zeitgeist after the second war was what one historian called a "paranoid watchfulness," evinced in Christie's fiction: "Fifteen years ago," Miss Marple says, "one knew who everybody was" (281). Christie's personal age by then was weighing on her, maybe more than her family knew. She has been posthumously diagnosed with Alzheimer's, as researchers find a marked decline in her vocabulary over the last decade of her career, along with such mistakes as assigning the same name to four different minor characters in one novel (330-334). As the quality of Christie's work declined, her defensiveness ramped up. Worsley calls Christie's six-page rant to her editor "a stinker."
Early in the book, we read that Christie's "writing binges" were "powerfully felt times for her, times during which she'd feel close to God" (74). Late in the book, her bereaved husband thinks that "her inner spirit lived in near sympathy with Christ" (345). In between, there's hardly a word about faith. Worsley does paraphrase a portion of Christie's autobiography about an influential teacher who taught that "the essence of Christianity was the defeat of despair" (130). But that's a bland takeaway from Christie's passionate words about a believer's relationship to Christ, quoted in my article What Mr. Suchet Saw: Christ in Agatha Christie (10/2014).
The biography helps a reader to appreciate Dame Agatha's works in context and shares a quality with its subject's best writing: I couldn't put it down.
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