There are
many websites where a lot of information about Agatha Christie can be found. In
this post, we are going to comment on two of them for those of you who want to
go deeper in the life and novels of Agatha Christie. Finally, a Works Cited
page with all the references to the articles and books used is going to be also
added.
Agatha Christie in profile: facts about her life. In this website, you can find a lot
of information in relation to different events of Christie’s life such as her
birth, her marriages, her disappearance, her death, etc.
We probably all know Agatha Christie as a great writer of mystery novels, but not much will be known about her facet as an archaeologist since she catalogued, cleaned and photographed great archaeological artefacts. Some of them can be found nowadays in the British Museum of Art in London.
After separating and divorcing her first husband, Agatha Christie decided to get away from everything that reminded her of Archibald by taking a trip to Jamaica. After planning the trip, the fascinating stories about the romantic Baghdad and about the recent archaeological finds arouse Agatha Christie's interest in the culture and history of Iraq. With two days left on her trip to Jamaica, she decided to cancel her plans and buy a ticket on the Orient Express destiny Baghdad.
Thanks to her fame as a writer, she was invited to join the British colony where she spent several days. Everything still reminded her of London and her husband Archibald, so she decided to take a trip on her own to Ur to immerse herself completely in the culture and history of Iraq, where she met the archaeologist Leonard Woolley. They became good friends and she decided to accompany him on his next archaeological expedition to Ancient Sumeria, where she met her future husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan.
The archaeological dig at Chagar Bazaar
Since then, Agatha Christie has accompanied Max Mallowan in all his archaeological excavations. In the Syrian excavation, Agatha Christie was not only a mere observer, but worked on restoring pieces of pottery, cataloguing and taking photos of them. Another of her trips took her on the Nimrud expedition where she spent so much time that she came to consider it her second home. Nimrud turned out to be a rich source of archaeological finds where Max Mallowan's team, of which Agatha Christie was also a member, found incredible ivory statues that Christie helped clean and document.
Nimrud ivory statues cleaned by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie's travels through Baghdad, Syria and Nimrud, and her passion for archaeology are reflected in some of her famous novels such as Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile.
Agatha Christie is one of the most well-known authors
regarding murder mystery novels. As the best British female writer of all times since March 2017 (Guinness World Records), she wrote a total of 66 mystery
novels which are characterised by the use of mystery elements to engage the readers.
One mysterious element present in every novel written
by Agatha Christie is the appearance of some characters which are based on real
life people. Sometimes, Agatha Christie could not imagine characters who were
able to commit the murders present in her novels. For this reason, she used features
from real life people that she had seen on the street in order to create relatable
characters for the readers. Therefore, some characters in Christie’s novels are
based on daily people.
Characters from the film Murder On the Orient Express (2017)
Another mysterious element is the crime. Most of
Christie’s novels are based on a crime which must be solved. The development
until the final resolution of the crime is based on thinking of who the murderer is, why this person has murdered another one and how this person has committed the
murder. Then, suspects are guarded as well as their explanations in relation to
the murder. Finally, Christie creates a network of suspects, suspicions and reasons
whose main aim is to mislead the readers. In this way, Christie achieves her
goal of leaving the reader perplexed with the end of the story and the discovery
of the real killer. This plot is quite common in all her novels and its one of
the reasons for Christie’s success due to the fact that it engages the readers
until the last page of the story.
Main characters of Christie's novels: Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot
Related to the previous element, the last mysterious element
is the development of psychological struggles. Agatha Christie loves to play
with the thoughts of the characters as well as those of the readers. In this
way, the mess and hidden details present in her novels lead characters and
readers into a tangled mess of ideas that is eventually resolved in a wonderful
way.
These three characteristics are common to all of Christie's
novels and thanks to their use, the British writer has been so acclaimed during
the 20th and 21st centuries.
To finish with, we would like you to see this PowerPoint presentation where you can get more
details about Agatha Christie’s life as well as the title of some other novels
written by her. This PowerPoint presentation includes information corresponding
to four posts written in this blog. We recommend you to see the PowerPoint presentation
to get a panoramic view of Agatha Christie.
Friday,
3rd of December, 1926. Archibald Christie leaves Styles (county of
Berkshire, west of London) to stay in a house with some friends for the
weekend. Nancy Neele is also there. It is night-time. Rosalind, Archie and
Agatha’s daughter, is in bed. Agatha goes out and drives away in her car.
This
is what happened the day the Queen of Mystery disappeared.
Her
car was found abandoned near a lake in Newlands Corner (Surrey), but without
any trace of its owner. As stated by Kovačević (2016), the most varied
hypotheses about Agatha’s fate soon began to emerge. Some said that she had
escaped, others stated that she had committed suicide, and it was even said
that it was only a publicity stunt. Others talked about a possible murder
committed by her unfaithful husband, Archie Christie. In short, Agatha’s
disappearance caused a police investigation and much speculation by the press. The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd had recently become a successful novel and Agatha
was already a well-known writer. With her unexplained disappearance, her
picture occupied the front pages of all the leading newspapers of England.
Pictures of Agatha Christie in the Daily News. The
central one corresponded to how she was last seen and the other two
(left and right) showed Agatha with different hair and wearing glasses
in case she would have disguised herself.
Gill (1990) explains that, after eleven days without knowing about her whereabouts, Agatha
was finally found in the luxurious Hydropathic Hotel in the city of Harrogate
(north of England), alone and calling herself Teresa Neele. One of the guests at
the hotel had recognized her and had called the police. On the 14th
of December, Archie Christie arrived to identify his wife. She claimed to
suffer from amnesia and said she had no idea how she could have got to Harrogate.
Agatha leaving the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate
Apparently,
Agatha and Archie's marriage was going from bad to worse. He started seeing
another woman, Nancy Neele, and in 1928 he asked Agatha for a divorce (“1925-1928: A
Difficult Start”, About Agatha Christie, The Home of Agatha Christie). Many believe that the writer,
upset by the impending divorce and the recent death of her mother, may have
suffered a nervous breakdown that led her to disappear like that.
According
to Kovačević (2016), many theories have tried to explain the strange
event. Some argued that the novelist suffered a loss of memory after a car
accident. Others held that the whole episode was devised by Christie herself to
thwart a plan by her husband to spend the weekend with Nancy Neele in a house
near the spot where she left her car. Indeed, one of the reasons why
investigators believed that the writer's disappearance occurred as revenge on
her husband was the fact that she checked into the hotel under the name of
Teresa Neele, the same last name as her husband's lover.
In
any case, whatever the cause of her disappearance, Agatha Christie never spoke
about it again. Whether due to amnesia or an attempt to take revenge on her
husband, it was always a mystery. And it still is.
For
further information about Agatha's disappearance, you can watch this video from the BBC:
Apart from writing, Agatha had a few other hobbies that were quite unusual, one of them being her interest for poisons. From a young age she had felt intrigued by the effects some substances could have in the human body. When World War I began, she volunteered as a nurse, where she spent most of her time working in the pharmacy. There, she learnt chemistry in order to manipulate drugs in the right way. During that time her sister dared her to write a detective novel, which she accepted and wrote The Mysterious Affairs at Styles. She used poisoning for the cause of death, since she was very familiar with the different poisons and effects they could have. The novel was acclaimed by different critics, which encouraged her to keep introducing poisons in her stories.
Agatha Christie as a nurse during WWI
During World War II she volunteered again to work in the dispensary since she was familiarized with the different pharmaceutical practices. Being in constant touch with the different medicines, inspired her to keep writing more mystery novels where poisons were involved. The most common substances present in her stories were arsenic, cyanide, glycine and strychnine but also toxic plants, such as the yellow jasmine or foxgloves among many others.
Christie was far from being the first writer using the element of poison in her novels, but her way of introducing them was astonishing. Thanks to the broad knowledge of different poisons she was able to write mystery novels with great detail.
