Agatha herself tried for years to discover what had happened to her. This biography explores her return, in detective stories and in the novels she published as ‘Mary Westmacott’, to the subject of remembering and forgetting. As she aged, she became more detached about that unhappy time. I believe that, liking to be technically up to date, she would have found current neuro-scientific research dazzling and engaging. I hoped, when my account of Agatha’s disappearance was first published, that it would be understood for what it was: an extreme reaction to prolonged physical and emotional stress, a shock, a flight. Agatha’s family and friends understood it thus, and were relieved. I had too much faith in reason. Others continue to write nonsense about the Agatha Christie Mystery of 1926 but, then, romance generally trumps a rational explanation.
Let us put that early drama into proportion. More than half of Agatha’s long life was still to be lived. Other challenges were ahead – the war, absence and loss of people she loved, serious financial uncertainty – and the eventual satisfaction of having surmounted them. Chief among the surprises was her second marriage to the archaeologist, Max Mallowan. A scholar and a hands-on field-worker, fifteen years younger than Agatha, he guided her into a rich and fascinating world. Their work in the Near East in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s was Agatha’s first real partnership, their camp life in the desert the opening for her to make an entirely different home.
New settings, spare landscapes and clear skies, crisp seasons, domestic privations (which she became skilful at overcoming), sharpened her energy and her wits. Her journeys during those years between England and Iraq, Syria, Turkey, gave sparkling material for two of her most picturesque stories, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, She had fun with new characters, like the domineering wives of expedition leaders, a category into which she herself never fell, whose tyranny towards young male archaeologists Agatha had observed when she first met Max. Speculation about ancient civilisations led her to try new themes, Murder in Mespotamia, for example, and her play Akhnaton. In these years a gaiety about Agatha, an amused delight in life, fizzes to the surface and for the next half-century carries her through.
It was only in 1999 with the appearance of Charlotte Trümpler’s magnificent exhibition, Agatha Christie, Max Mallowan and the Near East, that I recognised the extent and significance of Agatha’s contribution to Near Eastern archaeological exploration2. Detection its evident theme, the exhibition’s title lured the larger public; its content was irresistible: evocative sound and film, photographs of Agatha in flowing skirts, floppy hat and stout boots plodding through the sand, of Max allocating bonuses to queuing labourers, of camels, tented camps, sunsets, and excavated hoards. A carriage from the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, as from the Orient Express, was lifted by the British Museum (their idea) into the courtyard.
Imaginative and innovative but in no way frivolous, the exhibition and its catalogue memorably illustrated the work of Mallowan’s expeditions over successive seasons. It was known that Agatha’s household management had made the Mallowans’ camps happy and productive, that her earnings had helped fund the expeditions, and, later, endowed a chair in Near Eastern archaeology at the University of London. Her part in the conservation, recording and presentation of finds had not been acknowledged. Now we can appreciate how much she did: delicate work cleaning clay tablets and, special treasures, the Nimrud Ivories, learning how best to display and photograph them
Come, Tell Me How You Live, her recollection of those years, describes a world Agatha grew to love. Seventy years later, the places she describes – Aleppo, Raqqua, Nimrud, Mosul, Palmyra – have been violated, their people dispersed and worse, artefacts and archives pilfered, monuments destroyed. The Mallowans would have found this horrific. They loved the people of Iraq and Syria and their work at those sites was as important as, at home, Agatha’s books and plays. In some respects, Come, Tell Me How You Live seems uncomfortably light-hearted. Here and there, Agatha’s observations about religious and cultural difference sound superficial compared with the infinite, nuanced complexities of which we have become increasingly aware. We have to remind ourselves that she wrote the book for Max, a present when he came back from the war, a nostalgic memoir, a picture of expedition life that is essentially domestic.
As was Agatha herself. Her interest was in houses, their fabric and furnishings (a wooden lavatory seat was indispensable), provision of supplies and transport, selection of clothing and, sustaining all, the preparation and consumption of food and drink: Come, Tell Me How You Live. Against this background she describes what might be daily life in any large house: tensions among her husband’s team, servants’ rivalries and quarrels, the locals’ rapacities, imbalances suddenly injected by arrivals from the world outside. Famous for comfort and ingenious contrivance, the Mallowans’ camps were Agatha’s household. Come, Tell Me How You Live is, from one who wrote much about death, a joyful book about Living.
Agatha enjoyed good things: books, music, the theatre, pictures, conversation, houses and gardens, outings, her family and friends, delicious things to eat. A wise, civilised manner of life, suffused with humour, generosity and good temper, achieved with effort. I used to think that Agatha Christie was strange, manipulative, fertile in thinking of ways to murder and trick. With older eyes, I realise that this verdict was too severe. Ultra-professional, honest about what she had found she could do, she gratefully did it, to earn her living and keep herself and her readers entertained. As Max used to say: ‘The world is full of two kinds of people, ladies and gentlemen, and both work until they drop.’ The language is dated but, in Agatha’s case, his description is true.
Janet Morgan
April 2017
1A letter by Ted Hughes about Sylvia Plath, published in the TLS of 24 April 1992, reprinted 6 January 2017, describes similar anguish and his frustration at the failure of, in this case, an academic even to imagine the consequences of self-indulgent theorising.
2First exhibited at the Rurhlandsmuseum, Essen. Agatha Christie und der Orient. Kriminalistik und Archäologie, Scherz Verlag, (Bern), 1999; Agatha Christie and Archaeology, The British Museum Company Ltd, (London), 2001.
Agatha Christie valued her privacy. She rarely gave interviews and never put herself on display: ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘should writers talk about what they write?’ Her reputation, she believed, should stand or fall by her work, and that wish was respected by her family, friends and advisers. They were ready to assist serious analysts of her writing but kept at a distance those who sought to discuss her life. There have been, nonetheless, many biographies of Agatha Christie, in many languages. Some have been no more than fantasies. Others have relied on material from published sources – newspaper reports, reviews, books published by people who knew her or worked with her (though the better acquainted they were, the more circumspectly they wrote) – and have drawn on her own books, plays and poems, especially her recollections of Syria in Come, Tell Me How You Live and her Autobiography, and on her second husband’s reflections in Mallowan’s Memoirs.
In 1980 it was felt that the time had come for a full and thorough account of Agatha Christie’s life, and her daughter, Mrs Anthony Hicks, invited me to write it. Her view was that there was no point in embarking on this venture unless all her mother’s papers were opened to me, with complete freedom to use them as I thought best. This book is based, therefore, on the letters Agatha wrote and received, on her manuscripts and plotting books, photograph albums and scrapbooks, diaries and address books, receipts and accounts, saved from well before her grandparents’ time to the present day. My chapter headings, all quotations,