Who2 Editorial Blog

Notes and Commentary from the Editors

Thursday, July 09, 2009

Book Review: Duchess of Death

2 billion copies sold worldwide.

Affairs, betrayal, and heartbreak.

Novels translated into 105 languages.

A bizarre 11-day disappearance in 1926 that has never been explained.

So reads the back cover of Duchess of Death, Richard Hack's nifty new unauthorized biography of mystery novelist Agatha Christie.

It's the "bizarre 11-day disappearance" which interests us most. It's the event which made Christie an anchor of one of our oldest loops: Disappearing Acts.

The basic facts have always been known: Christie drove off from her home late one December night in 1926, shortly after her husband Archie announced that he wanted a divorce. (He had fallen in love with a family friend named Nancy Neele.) The next morning Christie's car was found by country folk, next to a bog, abandoned, her driver's license on the front seat, all of it looking very much like misadventure if not foul play. Christie herself was nowhere to be found.

The tabloids got wind of the story -- famous mystery author is missing! -- and soon the vanished Mrs. Christie was the talk of the British Isles as police dragged the lake, brought in dogs, and generally behaved like characters in an Agatha Christie novel.

Christie was finally spotted, 11 days later, in the Harrogate Hydropathic Hotel, registered under the name of Teresa (ba-da-bing!) Neele. Her husband arrived and, chased by paparazzi, they retreated to their home at Abney Hall and closed the gates.

From that point on, Christie wouldn't talk and neither would her husband, beyond a few vague statements about Christie suffering from memory loss. Everyone was left to wonder what had just happened and speculate about mental distress, amnesia, or whatever else seemed to fit the facts.

Christie refused to talk about her disappearance, at least publicly, for the rest of her life. Even in her autobiography, Hack notes, Christie ignored the whole year; she "waved it away like one would a pesky mosquito: 'The next year of my life is one I hate recalling... There is no need to dwell on it,' she wrote."

Thus was born the Eternal Mystery of Agatha Christie. It's hard to know whether Christie kept it a secret all those years out of geniuine pain, a desire to jab her ex-husband, or an inbred sense of drama. The old storyteller knew a good hook when she saw one.

Eternal the mystery it may be, but Hack has a pretty good explanation for it. He tracks Christie pretty much step by step from the time she left her house in the car to the time she was spotted by employees of the Harrogate spa.

It turns out that Christie actually tried to alert her husband to her whereabouts at the start. The night she disappeared she seems to have ditched her car, caught a train to London, and then mailed a letter to her brother-in-law there, asking him to tell Archie he could find her in Harrogate. As Hack tells it, Christie thought that Archie would see the error of his ways and come rushing to find her.

Only one problem: the brother-in-law promptly lost the letter. And Archie, had he received the message, was in no mood to chase after a wife he was planning to divorce.

By the time this all dawned on Christie, she was at the center of an national missing persons case. So, shifting tactics, she used her sudden notoriety to make sure all England got the point that her husband had been fooling around ("Teresa Neele" indeed) while at the same time smartly keeping a mysterious silence. (She and Archie were quietly divorced the next year.)

The incident is really only one modest part of Duchess of Death. The book is full of good meaty detail on Christie's life and works -- and on her younger second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, whom she met at a dig in Iraq.

Christie robbed the cradle:

On the marriage license, Agatha gave her age as thirty-seven, instead of forty; Max gave his age as thirty-one, rather than twenty-six. The age on Agatha's passport was aso changed to agree with the document, and remained incorrect for the rest of her life.

Hack is also full of hearty respect for Christie's amazing ability to crank out the books -- the "sausage machine," she called it with some exasperation when pressed by publishers to keep 'em coming.

Hack has the final tally:

Thirty-three years after her death, all of her books remain in print -- eighty-four novels and compilations of short stories, six additional novels written as Mary Westmacott, her two autobiographies, and three books of poetry. She wrote 157 short stories and had her name over the title of nineteen plays.

And, of course, those two billion copies sold.

Despite all that, Christie herself seems to have slipped out of the public consciousness, having become a reliable old brand name more than anything else. Duchess of Death does a nice job of bringing her back.

Labels: Agatha Christie, Disputed Birth Dates