Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

In April 1950, at the archaeological Expedition House in Nimrud, Iraq, Agatha Christie begins writing her autobiography in a small mud-brick room labeled in cuneiform "Beit Agatha." She describes the project as an indulgence rather than a task, driven by a sudden urge to plunge into memory. She would work on the manuscript intermittently over the next 15 years, completing it at age 75.

Christie traces her origins to a happy childhood at Ashfield, the family home in Torquay, Devon. Her father, Frederick Miller, an American with an independent income, was agreeable, generous, and lazy, spending his days at his club playing whist. Her mother, Clara Miller, was his temperamental opposite: forceful, intellectually restless, and marked by insecurity rooted in having been given away as a child by her widowed mother to a wealthy aunt. Their household provided Christie with a world of stability and enchantment. Her earliest memories center on the garden at Ashfield, her beloved Nursie, and the elaborate imaginary worlds she invented.

When Christie was about six, financial pressures and her father's declining health prompted the family to spend several months in Pau, in the French Pyrenees. There her mother hired Marie Sijé, a young dressmaker's assistant, as Christie's companion, and Christie learned French naturally through daily life. The family traveled on to Paris, Dinard, and Guernsey, expanding Christie's world through theatrical games, friendships, and the sensory pleasures of foreign places.

Frederick's health continued to deteriorate alongside mounting financial worries. When Christie was 11, he traveled to Ealing hoping to find work, caught a bad chill that developed into double pneumonia, and died. The loss transformed the family's circumstances. Christie's sister Madge married James Watts about nine months later, leaving Christie alone with her mother at Ashfield. The family's income had largely evaporated due to mismanagement of her grandfather's American trust, and keeping the house required severe economies.

Her adolescence unfolded through music, reading, and friendships. She studied piano with passionate dedication and starred as Colonel Fairfax in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Yeomen of the Guard. Her education continued at several pensionnats, or finishing schools, in Paris, where she studied piano with the Austrian teacher Charles Fürster and hoped to become a concert pianist. Fürster told her honestly she lacked the temperament for public performance, and an American opera expert confirmed her voice was not strong enough for opera. She accepted both verdicts, learning that when a cherished ambition proves impossible, it is better to recognize the fact and move forward.

Her mother brought her to Cairo for a winter season, providing an affordable social debut into the world of Edwardian courtship. Several proposals and near-engagements followed, but none took hold. At a dance in late 1912, she met Archibald Christie, a young officer determined to join the newly formed Royal Flying Corps. He was tall, fair, confident, and entirely unlike anyone she had known. Their courtship was turbulent: Both were nearly penniless, and the engagement was broken off and resumed repeatedly. Christie joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) at the converted Town Hall hospital in Torquay, progressing from ward-maid to nurse and eventually to the dispensary, where she developed a working knowledge of poisons. On Christmas Eve 1914, Archie reversed his opposition to wartime marriage, and they were married that afternoon at Emmanuel Church in Clifton with no family present.

Christie had already begun writing at her mother's encouragement, producing stories and an unpublished novel. But it was her sister Madge's dare that she could never write a detective story, combined with her daily exposure to poisons in the dispensary, that prompted her first mystery. She invented Hercule Poirot, a Belgian refugee detective inspired by the Belgian refugees living in her parish. Poirot was small, tidy, and famous for relying on his "little grey cells." She finished The Mysterious Affair at Styles during a fortnight's holiday on Dartmoor. After rejections elsewhere, the manuscript languished at The Bodley Head for nearly two years before the firm's publisher, John Lane, offered a contract with no royalties on the first 2,000 copies. Christie, thrilled simply to be published, signed without hesitation.

After the war, Archie entered the City and their daughter Rosalind was born in August 1919. The couple joined Major Belcher's British Empire Exhibition Mission for a ten-month tour promoting the upcoming exhibition across South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Christie was enchanted by Cape Town and Victoria Falls, learned to surf in Honolulu, and endured financial desperation and Archie's serious illness in Canada. Returning to England, she settled with Archie at Sunningdale. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, inspired partly by her brother-in-law James Watts's suggestion of a narrator who turns out to be the murderer, became her most celebrated book.

Then the halcyon period collapsed. Her mother died of bronchitis, and Christie, left alone to clear decades of possessions from Ashfield, worked herself into nervous exhaustion. Archie confessed he had fallen in love with another woman and wanted a divorce. Christie endured a year of his unkindness before accepting his departure. She forced herself to write The Mystery of the Blue Train in the Canary Islands, describing this as the moment she "changed from an amateur to a professional" (358), and resolved never to marry again.

A chance dinner party altered that resolution. Hearing Commander Howe, a naval officer recently returned from a posting in the Persian Gulf, describe Baghdad, Christie impulsively booked passage on the Orient Express. She visited Ur, where the archaeologists Leonard and Katharine Woolley were excavating, and fell in love with archaeology. On a return visit, Katharine assigned the Woolleys' young assistant, Max Mallowan, to escort Christie on a sightseeing trip. When Rosalind fell dangerously ill with pneumonia, Max quietly changed his travel plans and accompanied Christie home, caring for her with a practicality that deeply impressed her. He proposed at Ashfield; Christie protested the 14-year age difference, but Max was quietly certain. They married at St. Columba's Church in Edinburgh in September 1930.

Their shared life combined her writing with his archaeology. Christie accompanied Max on excavations at Nineveh and on his first independent dig at Arpachiyah, where they discovered a burnt potter's shop containing magnificent polychrome vessels some six thousand years old. She cleaned ivories with an orange stick and cosmetic face cream, learned to draw to scale, and built herself a writing room on the dig mound. Miss Marple first appeared during this period, modeled partly on Christie's grandmother's Ealing cronies, women who always expected the worst of everyone and were, with almost frightening accuracy, usually proved right.

The Second World War separated them again. Max joined the Air Force, and Christie worked as a hospital dispenser in London, writing prolifically. She produced The Body in the Library, Death Comes as the End, and Absent in the Spring under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, calling the latter "the one book that has satisfied me completely" (498). Rosalind's husband, Hubert Prichard, an Army officer, was killed in France. Max returned home unexpectedly one night to find Christie frying kippers.

After the war, Max fulfilled his dream of excavating Nimrud, the ancient military capital of Assyria, uncovering spectacular carved ivories over many seasons. Christie's theatrical career also flourished: The Mousetrap, expanded from a radio sketch, became the longest-running play in London history, and Witness for the Prosecution gave her the proudest night of her theatrical life.

Writing at 75, Christie revisits the demolished site of Ashfield, now replaced by rows of small houses with only a struggling monkey puzzle tree to mark where her childhood home stood. She finds she minds less than expected, because "whatever has existed still does exist in eternity" (531). She closes with characteristic humor and gratitude: She will probably survive to 93, quarrel with her nurse, and accuse her of poisoning. She signs off: "Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me" (532).