The Millers were still able to live comfortably. With Madge married and living in New York, and Monty serving with the army in India, Mrs Miller decided shortly after Agatha’s return from finishing school in Paris that she would let Ashfield furnished for three months and take her teenage daughter off to Egypt. Her own health had not been good, but three months with Agatha in and around Cairo, sight-seeing, going to dances and parties and on excursions to the sites of antiquity, seemed to improve her condition and certainly helped Agatha to overcome her childhood and adolescent gaucherie. The attractive young lady even received several proposals of marriage from officers serving in the British Army in Egypt, but took none of them seriously. She was still very young, and she was also now her mother’s only comfort and companion. When they returned to Torquay, Agatha continued to live at home with her mother, though she also led an active social life with friends of her own age.
Agatha had already begun to write. During her childhood, when she was lying in bed recovering from influenza, her mother had suggested that, instead of telling stories which she enjoyed doing, she should write one of them down. Soon Agatha had produced a number of stories, and began to write poems as well. It was as a poet that she made her first appearance in print, at the age of eleven, with a poem about the new electric trams which she had seen when visiting her grandmother at Ealing, a suburb of London. The poem, which was printed in the local Ealing newspaper, began: ‘When first the electric trams did run/In all their scarlet glory,/’Twas well, but ere the day was done,/ It was another story.’
Her poems improved, and by the time she was in her late teens Agatha had won a few prizes with them, usually of a guinea or so offered by the Poetry Society, and had had several poems published in The Poetry Review. She had also written a number of stories which, as she said later, usually revealed the influence of whomever she had been reading the previous week, as often as not D. H. Lawrence. Under various pseudonyms, among them Mack Miller and Nathanael Miller (her grandfather’s name), she would send her stories off to magazines and they would invariably come back to her accompanied by a printed rejection slip. She even attempted a novel, which she called Snow Upon the Desert, and at the suggestion of her mother sent it off to Eden Phillpotts, the author of popular novels of Devon rural life in the tradition of Thomas Hardy. (In the twenties and thirties, Phillpotts was to write murder mysteries, both under his own name and as Harrington Hext.)
Phillpotts, who was a neighbour of the Millers and a friend of the family, gave generously of his time and advice. Though he was critical of Snow Upon the Desert, and advised its author to cut out the moralizing of which he considered she was much too fond, he thought Agatha had a ‘great feeling for dialogue’, and introduced her to his literary agent, Hughes Massie. Agatha went to London and was interviewed by Mr Massie, a large, swarthy man who, she said, terrified her. Massie read her novel, and advised her to put it aside and begin another. Instead, she returned to writing her poems and stories.
Agatha was now in her early twenties and fending off young men who wished to marry her. After what she referred to as two near escapes, she became engaged in 1912 to Reggie Lucy, a Major in the Gunners, but while Lucy was serving with his regiment in Hongkong, she fell in love with a handsome young Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, whom she had met at a house party in Chudleigh, not far from Torquay. He was Lieutenant Archibald Christie, the son of a Judge in the Indian Civil Service. They danced together several times at their first meeting, and a few days later Christie arrived on his motorcycle at Ashfield and was allowed by Mrs Miller to stay to supper. Within days, he and Agatha had become engaged, and Agatha eventually plucked up the courage to write to Reggie Lucy in Hongkong ending their engagement.
It was eighteen months later that Agatha Miller married Archie Christie, now a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps. The wedding took place on Christmas Eve, 1914. During the period of their engagement, the Miller family income had been further depleted by the liquidation of a firm in New York, and Britain had declared war on Germany. Captain Christie went off to war two days after the wedding, while his bride went to work at the Torbay Hospital in Torquay, nursing the first casualties who were being brought back from the Front. After two years of nursing, and a number of reunions with Archie when he came home on leave, Agatha transferred to the hospital’s dispensary, where she acquired the accurate knowledge of poisons which was later to prove so useful to her.
Years earlier, Agatha and her sister Madge had one day been discussing a murder mystery they were reading, and Agatha had mentioned, idly, that she would like to try her hand at a detective story. Madge was of the opinion that Agatha would find this too difficult a task, an opinion which Agatha remembered in 1916, while working in the hospital dispensary at Torquay. She decided to devote her occasional slack periods at the dispensary to the composition of a detective novel, in the hope of proving her sister wrong.
Her first problem, as Agatha Christie revealed many years later in her autobiography, was to decide what kind of detective story she would write. Since she was surrounded by poisons, it was natural that death by poisoning should be the method she selected. She settled on one particular fact or donné which seemed to her to have possibilities, toyed with the idea for a time, and finally decided upon it. Next she turned to the dramatis personae. Who should be poisoned? Who would be the poisoner? When? Where? How? Why? It would, she decided, have to be ‘very much of an intime murder’, because of the method chosen. It would have to be all in the family, so to speak.
And, of course, there would have to be a detective to unravel the mystery and unmask the evil-doer. An avid reader of the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha pondered upon the personality and methods of Holmes and his relationship with Dr Watson, his friend and the chronicler of his cases. Her detective, she decided, would have to be as different in personality from Sherlock Holmes as possible. However, the device of the friend and helper, the Dr Watson-figure whose obtuseness sets off the brilliant deductive powers of the great detective, was too useful to discard. Her detective would, therefore, have such a figure in attendance, and he could be the narrator of the story. The budding crime writer now had an idea for the actual crime, and a detective and his aide. But who were the other characters to be? Who was to be murdered? Husbands frequently murdered their wives, of course, but perhaps it would be better to opt for a more unusual kind of murder and for a very unusual motive. But then the whole point of a really good murder mystery was that the criminal should be someone obvious, whose obviousness was not apparent until pointed out in the last chapter by the brilliant detective. At this point in her reasoning, Agatha Christie confessed later, she became confused and went away to make up a couple of extra bottles of hypo-chlorous lotion, so that she would have more free time the following day to give further consideration to her crime project.
Over the next few days, her plot began to develop in some detail, though in a somewhat unorthodox manner. Having first decided what she wanted her murderer to look like, Agatha next began to search around among her acquaintances for someone who fitted the description, in order to study his physical characteristics. She soon realized, however, that it was pointless to attempt to base a fictional character upon a real person’s characteristics. Later, with experience, she would find ways of doing this to some extent, but for the present she was in need of a starting-off point. She found it when, sitting in a tram, she saw exactly what she wanted: ‘a man with a black beard, sitting next to an elderly lady who was chattering like a magpie.’ As she did not know these people, her imagination was unfettered; she could invent characters for them, and place them in situations of her own invention.
She continued to give consideration to the question of the detective. It was important that he should not be simply an imitation Sherlock Holmes. What other models were there? Arsène Lupin? The young journalist Rouletabille in The Mystery of the Yellow Room?1 Perhaps the detective could be a scientist. Or a schoolboy? A schoolboy would be too difficult, and Agatha was not acquainted with any scientists. Then she remembered the colony of Belgian war refugees who were living in the parish of Tor, in Torquay. Might not one of them be a Belgian police officer? A retired Belgian police officer, not too young:
I allowed him slowly to grow into his part. He should have been an inspector, so that