This book is not only for people who like detective stories but also for those who are interested in a writer’s development and experience, in Agatha Christie’s character and the instinct which made her work a success. Like the lives of many writers, hers changed pace as she reached middle age. There was less incident, more consolidation. She was, moreover, quiet and reflective by temperament, and increasing age and fame made her more so. Though her energy remained immense, she gave most of it to her work. This book looks at the way in which she distilled her experience in her novels, plays and detective stories. Only in one case, however, does it reveal the solution to a plot and then only where Agatha Christie has done so in her own memoirs.
Agatha Christie lived to a great age and she was prolific. I have not given a chronological list of her work at the end of this book, for it is already long and readers who would like such a bibliography may find it in one of the interesting critical accounts of Agatha’s writing. The Agatha Christie Chronology by Nancy Blue Wynne (New York: Ace Books, 1976) is particularly useful; less accurate but more daring is Charles Osborne’s The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie (Collins, 1982). Robert Barnard has published an excellent study in A Talent to Deceive (Collins, 1980); Gordon C. Ramsey’s Agatha Christie: Mistress of Mystery (Collins, 1972) is thoughtful and was examined before publication by Agatha Christie herself. Sir Peter Saunders’s autobiography, The Mousetrap Man (Collins 1972), gives a producer’s perspective on her work for the theatre, while Tom Adams and Julian Symons have compiled a volume that is stimulating to look at as well as to read, by writing about the jacket designs for some of her paperbacks, in Tom Adams’s Agatha Christie Cover Story (Paper Tiger, 1982). Those who need assistance in keeping track of the characters in Agatha Christie’s work will find, as I have done, that Randall Toy’s The Agatha Christie Who’s Who (Muller, 1980) is painstaking and invaluable. Citations from the reviews of books and plays may be found in many books about Agatha Christie, notably Dennis Sanders and Len Lovallo’s Agatha Christie Companion (Delacorte Press, NY 1984), which is devoted to this theme. I have preferred, however, not to draw greatly on such material, for, apart from their remarkable geographical spread, reviews of Agatha Christie’s work are interesting mainly for their predictability.
There is one more group whom, at the end of this preface, I would like to thank: the secret army of those who gave good advice, pursued elusive references and raided libraries and bookshops across the world, so that they could telephone to Devon – and remoter spots – with answers to questions I thought urgent. Though these friends are anonymous here, I will write their names, with gratitude and affection, in their copies of this biography.
Janet Morgan
Even the beginnings were deceptive. To comfortable middle-class households in Torquay, the airy coastal resort in Devon where Agatha was born, the end of the nineteenth century seemed to be a Victorian afternoon. They did not notice that twilight was stealing over the terraces, the gardens and the pier. Agatha’s own family, the Millers, looked equally prosperous and secure, but their fortunes, too, were imperceptibly growing shakier. And, like most families, the Millers were not as ordinary as they first appeared. In fact, they were decidedly unconventional.
Agatha was the youngest of three children. Madge, her sister, had a passion for disguise that exasperated her teachers and, eventually, her husband, as much as it entertained her friends and bewildered her visitors. Monty, Agatha’s brother, had a different if related talent – for hitting on wild schemes into which he would draw harmless bystanders, to no one’s profit but everyone’s delight, particularly that of the women. Frederick, Agatha’s father, was a charming, nonchalant American, keen on amateur theatricals, fussy about his health but not, until too late, about his investments; her mother, Clarissa, known always as Clara, was capricious, enchanting, and said to be psychic. She was also prone to spiritual and intellectual recklessness. Agatha adored them all.
Frederick and Clara had a romantic and complicated history. Clara’s childhood was a mixture of comfort and insecurity that made her an especially possessive mother; this, in turn, fed Agatha’s devotion, which for a time was to become obsessive. To understand Agatha, it is necessary to know her parents and, equally important, the two women who shaped their lives: her grandmother and step-grandmother, Mary Ann and Margaret.
The family was connected as neatly as characters in a detective story. These links are clearer if they are described like the settings for Agatha’s plots, with the help of a plan:
Mary Ann and Margaret West and their ten brothers and sisters were orphans and were brought up on a farm in Sussex by childless relations. In 1851 Mary Ann met Captain Frederick Boehmer of the Argyll Highlanders, who pressed her to marry him. Since he was thirty-six and she sixteen, her family demurred but Captain Boehmer argued that, as his regiment was about to be sent abroad, the wedding should take place at once – and it did. Mary Ann and Frederick had five children in quick succession (one died as a baby) of whom the only daughter, Clara, was born in Belfast in 1854.
In April 1863 Captain Boehmer, then stationed in Jersey, was thrown from his horse and killed, at the age of forty-eight, leaving Mary Ann, now twenty-seven, with four children to support as best she could. She was an excellent needlewoman and, by embroidering pictures and screens, slippers, pincushions and the like, augmented her husband’s tiny pension. As Frederick had lost what savings he had in some vague speculative venture, Mary Ann had a great struggle to make ends meet. It is little wonder that in an entry in a family ‘Album to Record Thoughts, Feelings, etc.’ known as the ‘Confessions’, written eight years after Frederick’s death, she gave her state of mind as ‘Anxious’.
Meanwhile, Mary Ann’s elder sister, Margaret, had been working in a large hotel in Portsmouth, a post found by an aunt who had for many years been its forceful and greatly respected receptionist. Margaret, already formidable herself, married when she was twenty-six, in April 1863. Her husband, Nathaniel Frary Miller, a widower, had been born in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and had become a successful businessman, a partner in the firm of H.B. Chaflin in New York City. Nathaniel and his first wife, a hospital nurse, had only one child, a son, Frederick Alvah Miller. After his mother’s death, Frederick was brought up mostly by his grandparents in America, but, after his father remarried and settled in England, where his firm had business in Manchester, Frederick visited Nathaniel and Margaret there. Here he met Clara.
It was a fortnight after Margaret’s marriage to Nathaniel that Mary Ann lost her husband. Margaret wrote immediately to her younger sister, offering to take one of the four children and bring it up as her own, and Mary Ann, now despairing, decided that Clara should go to live with her aunt and uncle in the North. The little nine-year-old was lonely and homesick in her new surroundings and Clara always believed Mary Ann had sent her away because she cared more for the boys, rather than, as seems likely, because she felt it would be less easy for a girl to make a career for herself. Clara’s chief consolation was her favourite book, The King of the Golden River, which she brought with her from Jersey. She would read aloud to her uncle Nathaniel the story of its hero, a lonely but determined little boy, who conquered his desolation by being sensible and considerate. Clara, quiet and imaginative, knowing her aunt and uncle were being kind to her but feeling bereft and misunderstood, treasured this book all her life, as Agatha did in her turn.
Clara’s upbringing and tastes were those of an intelligent but sheltered late-Victorian girl. When she was seventeen, she too listed her likes and dislikes in the ‘Confessions’. Her ‘favourite qualities in man’, she said, were ‘firmness, moral courage and honour’, and, in woman, ‘refinement, frankness and fidelity’. Her favourite occupation was reading and talking, her chief characteristic ‘a great love