Agatha Christie
The best-selling novelist of all time vanished for eleven days in 1926, and checked into a Harrogate hotel under her husband's mistress's surname.
Published
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Quick Facts
- Born
- 15 September 1890, Torquay, Devon
- Died
- 12 January 1976, Winterbrook House near Wallingford; buried at Cholsey
- Famous for
- Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and around 66 detective novels
- First novel
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published 1920
- Longest-running play
- The Mousetrap, opened in London's West End in 1952
- Also wrote as
- Mary Westmacott, for romantic novels
- Honours
- CBE in 1956, made a Dame in 1971
- Her Devon home
- Greenway, on the River Dart, now National Trust
The eleven days she vanished
On the night of 3 December 1926, Agatha Christie left her home in Berkshire and drove off into the dark. Her car was found at Newlands Corner in Surrey, headlights dimmed, a fur coat inside. She was nowhere to be seen. Her husband Archie had just told her he was in love with another woman, Nancy Neele. The press went wild. Police searched the countryside, and the story ran in newspapers around the world. Arthur Conan Doyle even took one of her gloves to a spiritualist medium in the hope of finding her. On 14 December she was recognised at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate. She had been staying there as 'Mrs Teresa Neele'. In a Daily Mail interview in February 1928 she gave a public account, describing a car crash and subsequent memory loss. Her autobiography, by contrast, skips over the episode entirely.
The bet that made Poirot
Christie grew up in Torquay, taught at home, and loved reading. Her older sister Madge dared her to write a detective story that she couldn't guess the ending to. The result, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introduced a retired Belgian policeman named Hercule Poirot. Her knowledge of poisons was real. During the First World War she worked in a hospital dispensary in Torquay, and later during the Second World War she worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital in London. Poison became her trademark, and she used it with a precision that other crime writers admired. Miss Marple first appeared in the short story The Tuesday Night Club, published in December 1927, and took on her first full novel with The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. Her sleuth was an elderly woman in a quiet village who knew exactly how human nature worked. Christie never wanted Poirot to dominate her work, but readers refused to let him go. When Curtain, the novel that finally killed him, appeared in 1975, the New York Times ran an obituary for a fictional man.
Surf's up, Mrs Christie
In 1922 Christie set off on a ten-month world tour with Archie as part of a British Empire exhibition mission. She was one of the first Britons to stand up on a surfboard, riding the waves in South Africa and Hawaii. Her second marriage, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, took her to digs in Iraq and Syria. She helped clean and photograph finds, and the travel found its way into books like Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile. Murder on the Orient Express came in 1934, after journeys on the real train. She was also a very private person. She didn't enjoy interviews, and she didn't give many.
A play that keeps on running
The Mousetrap began life as a radio play written as a birthday present for Queen Mary. It opened in London's West End in 1952 and is the world's longest-running play. In 1974 it moved to St Martin's Theatre, where it still plays. The West End run paused in March 2020 because of COVID-19 restrictions, and the show returned on 17 May 2021. Christie gave the rights to her grandson Mathew Prichard as a ninth birthday present. Audiences are still asked at the end not to reveal who did it. On the page, her books have sold in the region of two billion copies and have been translated into over a hundred languages. Only the Bible and Shakespeare are usually put ahead of her.
Where you can still find her
Torquay is the best place to start. The town has an Agatha Christie Mile, with plaques at places linked to her life, and Torquay Museum has a Christie gallery. The Grand Hotel was where she spent her honeymoon. Greenway, the elegant white house above the Dart where the family spent holidays, is now run by the National Trust, and visitors can see her rooms and belongings. Burgh Island Hotel, off the south Devon coast, inspired the settings of And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun. She died in 1976 at her home near Wallingford. She is buried in the churchyard at St Mary's, Cholsey, in a plain grave beside the village.
Notable people
- Agatha Christie
- Archie Christie
- Max Mallowan
- Madge Watts
- Mathew Prichard
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Hercule Poirot
- Miss Marple
Keep exploring
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