About Agatha Christie

What made Agatha’s upbringing unusual, even for the time, was that she was home-schooled by Frederick in those early years. Clara, who was an excellent storyteller, did not want Agatha to learn to read until she was eight but Agatha, bored and as the only child at home, taught herself to read by the age of five.

Where did Agatha’s creativity come from? Clara’s made-up tales certainly fuelled her vivid imagination, and she absorbed the children’s stories of the time including Edith Nesbit (The Story of the Treasure Seekers, The Railway Children) and Louisa M Alcott (Little Women) as well as poetry and thrillers from America. With her brother and sister away at school Agatha was used to amusing herself, inventing imaginary friends, playing with her animals and writing poems. When at home, Madge would often spend time with her little sister making up scenarios about frightening characters, and Agatha had a recurring nightmare about a terrifying ‘Gunman’. People not being who they seem went on to play a part in her later stories.

When Agatha was five the family’s investments in America were suffering and, in order to economise, they rented out Ashfield and spent some time in France. It was here that Agatha learnt her idiomatic but erratically-spelt French, and the trip marked the start of her lifelong love of travel.

Agatha regularly visited her grandmothers - Granny B (Clara’s mother), and ‘Auntie-Grannie’ (Clara’s aunt/Frederick’s stepmother) - in the London suburb of Ealing, and wrote a poem about the new trams that arrived there in 1901 which was published with much pride in the local magazine. Shortly after her eleventh birthday however, Agatha’s world was turned upside down by the sudden death of her father. Clara was distraught and Agatha became her mother’s closest companion. There were more money worries and talk of selling Ashfield, but Clara and Agatha found a way forward.

Agatha attended a girls’ school in Torquay for a short while, but finding that unsuitable, Clara took her daughter to Paris where she spent time in a succession of boarding schools, taking piano and singing lessons and embracing the culture of the French capital. She could even have been a professional pianist but for her excruciating shyness.

At the age of 18 Agatha was already amusing herself writing short stories, which Clara had suggested she do to stave off boredom while in bed with influenza. Family friend and author Eden Philpotts offered shrewd and constructive advice: “The artist is only the glass through which we see nature, and the clearer and more absolutely pure that glass, so much the more perfect picture we can see through it. Never intrude yourself.” Some of these early stories were re-worked later and compiled into collections.

Clara’s health and the need for economies dictated their next move. In 1910 they set off for Cairo and a three month debutante season at the Gezirah Palace Hotel. Marriage was the main goal for young women, and the girls were on the lookout for handsome men to flirt with. There were evening dresses and parties, and young Agatha showed more interest in these than the local archaeological sites. Friends she made in Cairo invited her to house parties back home on her return and various marriage proposals followed. Most were rejected, but she warmly accepted the hand of her friend Reginald Lucy. Reggie, ever practical, insisted however that they wait for two years – and should anyone else richer come along in the meantime then Agatha was free to break off the engagement.

In 1912, Agatha attended a party at Ugbrooke House, a stately home near Exeter in Devon. Here she was swept off her feet by the charming Archie Christie, a sub-altern and qualified aviator who had applied to join the Royal Flying Corps.

Their courtship was a whirlwind affair; both were desperate to marry but with no money. According to her autobiography, it was the “excitement of the stranger” that attracted them both. Agatha broke off her engagement to Reggie, and married Archie on Christmas Eve 1914 after both had experienced the atrocities of the First World War – Archie in France and Agatha on the Home Front, working as a nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment in a Red Cross Hospital in Torquay. They spent their honeymoon night in the Grand Hotel, Torquay and on the 27th December Archie returned to France. They met infrequently during the war years and it wasn’t until January 1918 when Archie was posted to the War Office in London that Agatha felt her married life truly began.

Where did the inspiration for Hercule Poirot come from? During the First World War thousands of refugees fled the fighting in Belgium to settle in England. The people of Torquay welcomed them, and Agatha thought that a Belgian refugee, a former great Belgian policeman, would make an excellent detective for The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Hercule Poirot was born.

“And he should be very brainy - he should have little grey cells of the mind”

For the murder method, she naturally settled on poison, putting her newfound expertise from the dispensary to good use. The murderer’s application of poison was so well described in fact, that when the book was eventually published Agatha received an unprecedented honour for a writer of fiction - a review in the Pharmaceutical Journal.

To finish her manuscript. Agatha took a two week holiday at the Moorland Hotel at Haytor on Dartmoor, where during long walks she would enact the chapters and speak aloud as the characters. When finalised, she sent the story off to various publishers but each one came back with a rejection.

1919 was a momentous year. With the end of the war, Archie had found a job in the City and they had just enough money to rent and furnish a flat in London. Later that year, on 5th August, Agatha gave birth to their only daughter, Rosalind. It was also the year that a publisher, John Lane of The Bodley Head, and the seventh to have received the manuscript, accepted The Mysterious Affair at Styles and contracted Agatha to produce five more books. Lane insisted on a couple of changes to her manuscript including a reworked final chapter – instead of a courtroom climax, Lane proposed the now familiar denouement in the library.

Following the war Agatha continued to write, experimenting with different types of thriller and murder mystery stories including The Secret Adversary, starring the adventurous young crime-solving duo Tommy and Tuppence.

In 1922, leaving Rosalind with her mother and sister, Agatha and Archie embarked on ‘the Grand Tour’, a fact-finding mission across the then British Empire to promote the Empire Exhibition of 1924. While in Cape Town the Christies learned to surf, and Agatha became the first British woman to do so standing up! Archie’s employer, who led the mission, proved the inspiration for Sir Eustace Pedlar in The Man in the Brown Suit, set in Africa.

Once returned from the Grand Tour, the family were reunited and moved to Sunningdale outside London where they eventually settled in a house they named Styles. Archie enjoyed playing golf, and in 1923 Agatha published her second Poirot novel, The Murder on the Links, at the end of which she sent Poirot’s faithful friend Arthur Hastings off to a ranch in Argentina.

It was around this time Agatha decided to change publishers. Fed up with what she saw as the unfair terms offered by The Bodley Head, she sought out an agent, Edmund Cork of Hughes Massie, and he found her a new publisher - William Collins and Sons (now HarperCollins).

One night in early December, overwhelmed and with close friend and secretary Carlo away for the night, Agatha left Rosalind and the house to the care of the maids without saying where she was going. Her car was found abandoned the next morning several miles away. A nationwide search ensued. The press and public enjoyed various speculations as to what might have happened and why but no one knew for sure. It eventually transpired that Agatha had somehow travelled to Kings Cross station where she took the train to Harrogate and checked into the Swan Hydropathic Hotel (now the Old Swan Hotel) under the name of Theresa Neele, previously of South Africa. Having been recognised by members of the hotel band, who alerted the police, she did not recognise Archie when he came to meet her. Possibly concussed and suffering from amnesia, Agatha had no recollection of who she was. An intensely private person, made even more so by the hue and cry of the press, Agatha never spoke of this time with friends or family.

Agatha and Archie remained apart, Agatha living with Rosalind and Carlo in London and following a course of psychiatric treatment in Harley Street. Needing an income and unable to write new material, her brother-in-law Campbell Christie suggested she combine the Poirot short stories written for The Sketch magazine thus creating The Big Four.

Towards the end of 1927, Agatha created an intriguing new amateur detective – a white-haired old lady from a seemingly sheltered village named Miss Jane Marple. Miss Marple made her first appearance in ‘The Tuesday Night Club’, a short story published in the Royal Magazine. With her knitting and her gardening, she was unassuming, overlooked, and exceedingly shrewd.

Finally accepting that her marriage was over, Agatha’s divorce from Archie was granted in 1928. She and Rosalind immediately escaped England to the Canary Islands where Agatha painfully finished Poirot novel The Mystery of The Blue Train, the book she had struggled with as she mourned her mother. This marked the moment when writing was no longer a pleasure, but a profession.

Late in 1928 Agatha also wrote her first novel under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, Giant’s Bread - not a detective story but a work of fiction about a composer who reinvents his identity. The pseudonym allowed Agatha the freedom to write more heartfelt, personal pieces about life’s experiences.

The Woolleys invited Agatha back to Ur in 1930, and it was here that she met twenty-five-year-old archaeologist-in-training Max Mallowan. Katherine Woolley tasked Max with showing Agatha the historic sites and each found the other's company relaxing. Their relationship was forged by travel – Max could “rough it” and so could Agatha; she was unperturbed when their vehicle became stuck in a desert wadi, which Max found most attractive!

Max proposed on the last evening of his visit to Agatha's family home of Ashfield, and they were married on 11th September 1930 at St Cuthbert's Church in Edinburgh. The eventful honeymoon included stops in Venice, Yugoslavia and Greece, after which Max returned to the Woolleys’ dig – for the last time alone – and Agatha to London and writing. Earlier in the year she had released a collection of short stories with the ethereal Mr Quin and his counterpart Mr Satterthwaite. In October, the first full length novel starring Miss Marple was published – The Murder at the Vicarage.

When Max later left the Woolleys for new projects, Agatha went with him, herself becoming a pivotal part of the dig team. She would write in the mornings and in the afternoons help on site, cleaning (with her face cream!), drawing and photographing the finds. She undertook a photography course at the Reinhardt School, the results of which proved too creative for Max who simply wanted everything recorded exactly as it was.

Thus began a productive and recurring annual writing and travelling routine for Agatha and Max: summers at Ashfield with Rosalind, Christmas with her sister’s family at Abney Hall, late autumn and spring on digs in Iraq and Syria and the rest of the year in London and their house in Winterbrook, on the edge of Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

As a rule Agatha wrote two or three books a year at this point. The atmosphere of the Middle East was not lost on her, as can be seen in novels such as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile (inspired by a trip with Max and Rosalind), Murder in Mesopotamia, Appointment With Death and They Came to Baghdad as well as many short stories, including several of the Parker Pyne tales, featuring a civil servant turned happiness consultant.

Among her prolific output was The ABC Murders, a Poirot novel about a serial killer, and Dumb Witness, which features a star turn from a terrier, highlighting Agatha’s deep love for dogs. She also released her second Mary Westmacott novel in 1933, Unfinished Portrait. This was the closest Agatha had come to an autobiographical work, thinly disguising some of her most poignant and painful memories.

As well as writing novels, Agatha had begun to take an interest in playwriting following the disappointing adaptation of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd into Alibi, by Michael Morton, in 1928. In 1930 she wrote a brand new play featuring Poirot, Black Coffee, after which she decided to remove Poirot from future stage productions arguing that he took away the attention from the plot.

In 1938 she made the difficult decision to sell Ashfield, but only after falling in love with another Devon property she remembered from her childhood – Greenway. On the banks of the River Dart, Greenway was, to Agatha, “the loveliest place in the world”, and inspired three of her novels.

In 1940 a house opposite theirs in Sheffield Terrace was bombed, with the shock causing the basement of their own home to collapse. The Mallowans subsequently moved into a flat in the modernist Isokon Building in Hampstead. Shortly afterwards, Max was sent out to Cairo as a squadron leader in the Directorate of Allied and Foreign Liaison, leaving Agatha – now volunteering in the dispensary at University College Hospital - alone for the duration of the war, despite concerted efforts to arrange work overseas near her husband.

The Tommy and Tuppence novel N or M? was Agatha’s own patriotic gesture to the war effort and she was disconcerted to see its publication delayed in the US until after the Americans had joined the Allies. The novel’s plot centres on the enemy within: Nazi spies that the couple – at first miserable that they are too old to offer any significant help in wartime - need to unmask

Agatha was focused and productive during this period. Missing Max and with external entertainment more limited in wartime, she wrote and or published such classics as Evil Under the Sun, The Body in the Library, Five Little Pigs, The Moving Finger and And Then There Were None. This latter, published at the onset of war in 1939, reflects the sombre mood of the population with its dark subject matter and claustrophobic atmosphere. At some point during the war years, she also penned the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels to be published – Curtain and Sleeping Murder respectively. Written in the mid-1940s, they were safely locked away in a vault to be published on the event of her death. Curtain was eventually printed in 1975, but Sleeping Murder was released posthumously in 1976.

She also continued to write plays, with her adaptation of And Then There Were None making its stage debut in 1943.

In 1940, Agatha’s daughter Rosalind married Hubert Prichard and gave birth to a son, Mathew, in 1943. Max had moved to a post in Libya, but Agatha was a doting grandmother and often went to help look after the baby. Sadly, Hubert was a casualty of war the following year.

Feeling introspective and inspired, Agatha took some time out of her hospital job and penned Absent in the Spring, a new Mary Westmacott novel, in just three days. The 1944 publication focuses on the slow realisation of the main protagonist, after being stranded in the desert, that perhaps her carefully crafted life is not quite what it seems.

That same year, Greenway was requisitioned by the US Coastguard, who added a series of lavatories to the house – which Agatha had to fight to have removed! One of their number, Lt Marshall Lee, painted a frieze around the walls of the library detailing their perilous journey from Orange in the USA to the River Dart.

Despite not being able to travel, Agatha continued her interest in the Middle East and Ancient Egypt, and with input from close friend and Isokon neighbour Stephen Glanville, an Egyptologist, she penned Death Comes As The End, a murder mystery novel about an Egyptian priest.

The Second World War ended in 1945 and Agatha was delighted when Max appeared on her doorstep after such a long separation.

That same year, Agatha released a charming non-fictional account of her time on the expedition digs entitled Come, Tell Me How You Live, detailing the finer points of life in the Middle East. In 1947 Max’s work was recognised when he became the first Chair of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology - part of the University of London - and subsequently the new director of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. His efforts continued to uncover new delights, including the largest ever ivory head of a woman ever found, at Nimrud in 1952. By the end of the decade, however, political turmoil in Iraq and the assassination of their royal family drove the expedition to withdraw from the country.

In 1947 Agatha was approached by the BBC to write a radio play for the 80th birthday of Queen Mary, who was an avid admirer of her work. The result was Three Blind Mice, which ultimately became The Mousetrap. The world’s longest running play opened in October 1952 in Nottingham, before transferring to the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End in November with Richard Attenborough and Sheila Sim as the stars. In September 1956 it became the longest running play in British history, and in 1974 it moved to the St Martins Theatre where it has been ever since (save for an enforced hiatus during the corona virus pandemic). The 1950s was a busy decade for Agatha’s play-writing, and she struck up a fruitful new relationship with theatre producer Peter Saunders. In 1953 her adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution (from an earlier short story) debuted at Winter Gardens, and in 1954 she became the only playwright to have three productions running concurrently in the West End when Spider’s Web was added to the mix.

In 1955, a solution to Agatha’s tax worries presented itself when Agatha Christie Limited was formed and Agatha effectively became an employee. The following year she received a CBE, and then in 1957 Billy Wilder released his iconic film adaptation of Witness for the Prosecution. MGM followed with a series of movies in the 1960s based on the Miss Marple stories starring Margaret Rutherford; Agatha was disappointed in these interpretations and deemed Rutherford miscast.

Agatha’s standing as an author showed no signs of abating, and in 1948 Penguin published 100,000 copies of ten of her novels; then, in 1950, Collins printed 50,000 copies of her 50th book, A Murder is Announced – for which she persuaded her Wallingford neighbours to help her plot out a crucial scene. She continued to play with genres and reflect contemporary events, offering modern readers an insight into life through the 20th century. In 1954 she released Destination Unknown, a spy thriller about a missing scientist and nuclear powers, and as her 70s advanced she wrote surprisingly perceptively about young people in the 1960s in such novels as Third Girl and Endless Night, which was written in just six weeks. Her 1970 novel Passenger to Frankfurt played on the ongoing fears of a Nazi uprising.

In 1971 Agatha was made a DBE, and the same year she released her final Miss Marple novel (save for Sleeping Murder), Nemesis. She also wrote her final Mr Quin story, ‘The Harlequin Tea Set’. The last Tommy and Tuppence book, Postern of Fate, appeared in 1974, with the couple having aged in real time with Agatha.

Agatha herself was now succumbing to old age. Her last public appearance was in November 1974 at the premiere of Sidney Lumet’s Murder on the Orient Express, which featured an all-star cast including Albert Finney as Poirot. Her verdict: a good adaptation with the minor point that Poirot's moustaches weren't luxurious enough... She rose from her chair to be greeted by Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Anne.

In 1975 Curtain was finally released, the very last Poirot novel. The New York Times ran the first ever obituary for a fictional character.

After a hugely successful career and a very fulfilling life Agatha died peacefully on 12 January 1976, when lights were dimmed in West End theatres.
She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, Cholsey, near Wallingford.

In 1976 Sleeping Murder was published, and in 1977 her autobiography was released. Since then, there has been an incredible legacy of films, television, theatre, games and further continuation stories based on her enduring characters.

She returned to France when she was fifteen to complete her formal education, boarding at a series of pensions in Paris and training under one of the most respected singing teachers of the time. While she developed an interest in fashion and clothes, French society proved a disappointment to her; much more to her tastes were the visits with her mother to the Grand Opera and excursions to Versailles, Fontainebleau and other historic places.

It was also with her mother that she would see Cairo for the first time, where she was to come out in society. The young debutante was introduced to many eligible men (she went to around fifty dances) but later wrote that she was more drawn to “bronzed middle-aged colonels”, most of whom were already married. One thing she didn’t do during her time there was admire the relics of its ancient civilisation.

“Luxor, Karnak and the beauties of Egypt were to come upon me with wonderful impact about 20 years later. How it would have spoilt them for me if I had seen them with unappreciative eyes.” An Autobiography

“Going round the world was one of the most exciting things that ever happened to me. It was so exciting that I could not believe it was true. I kept repeating to myself, 'I am going round the world.'”

The trip cemented Agatha’s passion for adventure and travel, taking in South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii, Canada and mainland USA. It was in South Africa that Agatha discovered her love of surfing, and couldn’t wait to take to the water again when they reached Honolulu – where she became the first European woman to surf standing up.

The people she met would form the basis for many a plot, not least the forceful figure of Major Belcher, their travelling companion, who provided the inspiration for a character in 1924’s The Man in the Brown Suit. The story centres around heroine Anne Beddingfeld, who is looking for adventure:

'“I had the firm conviction that, if I went about looking for adventure, adventure would meet me halfway. It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants.” Anne Beddingfeld, The Man in the Brown Suit.

Sadly Agatha’s marriage to Archie was not to last, and their divorce was finalised in 1928. Earlier that year Agatha had travelled to the Canary Islands with her secretary and daughter Rosalind, where she struggled through finishing The Mystery of the Blue Train, set on the French Riviera.

'‘Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a good thing that that is so.' Hercule Poirot, The Mystery of the Blue Train.

She had always wanted to travel on the Orient Express and her autobiography lists in exquisite detail the sights and sounds of the journey to Syria. She had a myriad of adventures en route, including an attack of bed bugs that made her limbs swell, a near marriage proposal from a Dutch engineer and a mystifying session in a Turkish bath in Damascus. From Damascus she travelled overland to Baghdad and from there on to an excavation at the ancient site of Ur, where she met archaeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife Katherine.

The Woolleys invited her back the following season, and it was then that she encountered her second husband Max Mallowan. Max showed Agatha around some of Iraq’s most evocative locations, and after she proved her patience and good humour when their desert transport got stuck in a wadi Max knew she was the woman he wanted to marry.

Max and Agatha had an easy companionship, motoring across the bumpy desert roads that connected walled towns, romantic Mesopotamian castles and acres of excavated ancient cities. Once married, they honeymooned in Italy, Croatia, Montenegro and Greece, and following one dig they travelled back to Europe via Azerbaijan (then part of the Soviet Union) where they ate copious amounts of caviar.

Agatha began to spend the Middle East digging season, from October to March, at her husband’s side, helping to clean, catalogue and photograph the finds, between bouts of writing. At Christmas 1931 she was travelling back to England alone on the Orient Express when a violent thunderstorm just after Istanbul delayed them by two days. She closely observed her fellow travellers, describing them in a letter to Max; these included an animated American woman who spent much time talking about her daughter (sound familiar?). Murder on the Orient Express was published in 1934.

In 1933 Agatha, Max and Rosalind holidayed in Egypt and took a cruise down the Nile. With her daughter, she spent many happy hours speculating on the backgrounds of the other passengers. Four years later, Death on the Nile was published. “I think,” she later wrote, “that the book is one of the best of my ‘foreign travel’ ones.”

“Rosalie murmured: ‘I suppose we might as well go on to Egypt. It doesn’t make any difference.’

‘It’s certainly not a matter of life or death,’ said Mrs Otterbourne.

But there she was quite wrong—for a matter of life and death was exactly what it was.” Death on the Nile.

During the mid 1930s political tensions in Iraq were growing, and Max decided to start a fresh excavation in the Habur Valley, Syria. They were assisted by young archaeologist Robin McCartney, who was also a watercolour painted and created the covers for Murder in Mesopotamia (with characters inspired by the Woolleys), Death on the Nile, Murder in the Mews and Appointment with Death (Agatha and Max visited Petra on a journey home one year, which influenced the location of this story).

Work on the digs was halted with the advent of the Second World War.

Agatha wrote some of her finest later Poirot novels there, including After the Funeral, Hickory Dickory Dock, and Cat Among the Pigeons. It was also at Nimrud that she began work on a project many had urged her to undertake for some time – her autobiography. Agatha revelled in her life in the Middle East. The people, landscape, culture, birdlife, architecture and antiquities all seemed to fuel her optimistic spirit as well as her creative instincts. She chronicled her time there in 1946’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.

“How much I have loved that part of the world. I still love it and always shall.” Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

In 1958 there was a revolution in Iraq, and they finally left for good in 1960.

'‘One really knows so little about the people one meets when one is travelling,’ said Miss Marple. ‘I mean—how shall I put it—one only knows, doesn’t one, what they choose to tell you about themselves.” Miss Marple, A Caribbean Mystery

Further trips in the 1960s included a break in Upper Egypt where Max could recover from a bout of flu after finishing a book of his own on Nimrud; a visit to Belgium to see a museum named after Hercule Poirot; and a tour of the US where Max was giving a series of lectures. During this trip they visited the museums in Washington, and journeyed to Ohio and Texas. They also stopped in Vermont where they experienced a typically American Fall, which provided the inspiration for 1966’s Hallowe'en Party.

As she aged, Agatha’s love of travel and adventure never waned. As she stated in her autobiography:

“Life is really like a ship - the interior of a ship, that is. It has watertight compartments. You emerge from one, seal and bolt the doors, and find yourself in another. […] Ever since [The Grand Tour] I have felt the same about travel. You step from one life into another. You are yourself, but a different self. The new self is untrammelled by all the hundreds of spiders' webs and filaments that enclose you in a cocoon of day-to-day domestic life: letters to write and bills to pay, chores to do, friends to see, photographs to develop, clothes to mend, nurses and servants to placate, tradesmen and laundries to reprove. Your travel life has the essence of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing to see some dearly loved person - Rosalind, my mother, Madge. But you are like the Vikings or the Master Mariners of the Elizabethan age, who have gone into the world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.”