Agatha Christie

The Paris year

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, on the Devon coast, on 15 September 1890, and had almost no formal schooling: she taught herself to read at five against her mother's wishes and was educated at home. Her father Frederick died suddenly shortly after her eleventh birthday, leaving the family short of money and Agatha as her mother Clara's closest companion. A girls' school in Torquay was tried and found unsuitable. Then Clara took her daughter to Paris.

This was the ordinary finishing-school circuit that middle-class English families used to complete a daughter's education, and Agatha did it thoroughly, moving through a succession of Paris boarding schools between 1905 and 1906 and finishing at the one she remembered most warmly in her autobiography, an English-run establishment kept by a Miss Dryden. She took piano and singing lessons and absorbed the city. The line she chose for it, quoted by her estate from her autobiography, is unequivocal: "The two winters and one summer that I spent in Paris were some of the happiest days I have ever known. All sorts of delightful things happened all the time."

Paris was also where the music ended. She had trained seriously enough that, as her estate's official biography puts it, she "could even have been a professional pianist but for her excruciating shyness." The talent was real and the nerve was not there; performing in front of people was impossible for her, and a girl who had been pointed at a concert career came home without one. It is worth being plain about the size of this: Paris was one year of finishing school in a life of eighty-five, and no part of her fiction is set there. What that year did was close a door. The writing began three years later, and it was work she could do alone in a room.

A dispensary, a bet, and Hercule Poirot

At eighteen, in bed with influenza and bored, she started writing short stories on her mother's suggestion. In 1914 she married Archibald Christie, an officer in the Royal Flying Corps — the British army's air arm, the forerunner of the RAF — on Christmas Eve; he returned to France two days later, and she spent the war working in a Torquay hospital dispensary — the room where medicines are made up and handed out — where she qualified as an apothecaries' assistant, a licensed dispenser of drugs, and learned a great deal about poisons. Her elder sister Madge bet her she could not write a good detective story. She took the bet.

Thousands of Belgian refugees had fled the German invasion and settled in England, some of them in Torquay, and Christie decided her detective should be one of them: a retired Belgian police officer, fastidious, vain, and reliant on what he called the little grey cells of the mind. She named him Hercule Poirot. The murder was done with poison, described so accurately that when the book finally appeared it was reviewed in the Pharmaceutical Journal, the trade paper of British chemists — an unheard-of honour for a novel. She finished it on a fortnight's holiday at the Moorland Hotel on Dartmoor, the high open moor inland from Torquay, walking the moor and speaking the chapters aloud as her characters. Six publishers rejected it. The seventh, John Lane of the London house The Bodley Head, accepted it in 1919, asked her to replace the courtroom ending with a drawing-room denouement — the closing scene, since copied by everyone, in which the detective gathers the suspects in one room and explains the crime — and tied her to five more books. The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920.

Eleven days in 1926

1926 was the year The Murder of Roger Ackroyd made her famous for a trick played on the reader — a solution that broke what critics had taken to be the rules of detective fiction, and that readers still argue about — and the year everything else came apart. Her mother died; her husband Archie told her he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. In early December, with her secretary and close friend Carlo away for the night, she left her daughter Rosalind with the maids, walked out of the house without saying where she was going, and vanished. Her car was found abandoned the next morning some miles away.

The search that followed was the largest the country had seen for a missing person — thousands of police and volunteers, the newspapers running it daily for eleven days. She had in fact travelled to King's Cross station in London, taken a train to the spa town of Harrogate in Yorkshire, and checked into the Swan Hydropathic Hotel — a hotel built around water cures — under the name Theresa Neele, of South Africa. Staff in the hotel band recognised her and told the police. When Archie arrived to collect her she did not appear to know who he was; the contemporary account was that she was possibly concussed and suffering from amnesia. She never discussed the episode with her family or friends, or in her autobiography, for the remaining fifty years of her life.

Nimrud, and the play that never closed

Divorced and travelling alone in 1930, she visited the great excavation at Ur in Iraq — the Sumerian city, one of the oldest in the world, that the archaeologist Leonard Woolley was digging out of the desert — and met a twenty-five-year-old archaeologist-in-training named Max Mallowan. They married on 11 September 1930 and stayed married until her death. She did not simply accompany him: on the digs she wrote in the mornings and worked in the afternoons, cleaning finds — famously with her own face cream — drawing them, and photographing them. The year acquired a shape it kept for decades: summers at Ashfield in Torquay with Rosalind, Christmases with family, late autumn and spring in Iraq and Syria, the rest in London and at Winterbrook, their house at Wallingford in Oxfordshire. From 1947 the winters were at Nimrud, the ruined Assyrian capital in northern Iraq that Mallowan was excavating, where she wrote novels in a tent. The Middle Eastern books — Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death — come straight out of that life. They left Iraq for good in 1960, after the revolution of 1958, which overthrew and killed the king, made the work impossible.

In 1947 the BBC asked her for a radio play as a birthday present for Queen Mary — the widow of King George V and mother of the reigning George VI — who was turning eighty and had named Christie as the writer she wanted. The result, Three Blind Mice, grew into a stage play called The Mousetrap. It opened in Nottingham in October 1952, transferred to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End, London's commercial theatre district, that November with the young actors Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim in the leads, and by September 1956 was the longest-running play in British history. It moved next door to the St Martin's Theatre in 1974 and has run there ever since, apart from the pandemic closures — the longest-running play in the world.

She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971 — the honour that made her, formally, Dame Agatha. Her last public appearance was in November 1974, at the premiere of the director Sidney Lumet's film of Murder on the Orient Express. She died on 12 January 1976 at Winterbrook, aged eighty-five, and is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's at Cholsey, near Wallingford; the West End dimmed its theatre lights for her. Her books have sold around a billion copies in English and another billion in translation, which makes her, by a distance, the best-selling novelist who has ever lived.