“Outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare, author Agatha Christie left readers with 80 publications and a mystery not even the Police could solve. An enigma herself, she disappeared without rhyme or reason.”
Genevieve Scott, Myjournal.com, 10/21/2021
You might think you know famed mystery writer Agatha Christie from her many novels.
Most mystery buffs have read at least one of her 66 “cozy” mysteries.
She’s sold over 2 billion books worldwide, and as mentioned above, those are truly Biblical numbers.
So you imagine her happily writing her stories, herself no doubt set in a pretty English village, where truth and justice will always win out.
You might think she’s a mix of her two heroes: the somewhat silly Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, a nosy spinster with a nose for trouble.
What a contrast, the worldly, deductive genius Poirot and Marple, a knitting and watching sort of person, who has lived in the same small English village all her life. No wonder they exist in separate realities, different series. What neat little worlds they both occupy. Surely their creator must live in one as well.One thing is constant: her stock characters move like pieces in a chess set until they gather in the drawing room and all is revealed. The mystery is solved.
They are such calming stories.
We should never imagine we know anyone from their novels.
Let’s take a look at a still unsolved mystery, the disappearance of Agatha Christie, on one bitterly cold December night in 1926.
Agatha, raised in a rather wealthy, upper middle class family, is used to being comfortable. As a young woman, long-faced, with slightly crooked tiny pearl-like teeth, she is saved from being plain by her large, dark hooded eyes.
At 22 she met then- Lt. Archibald Christie. In two years, after a successful career in World War I, he would ask her to marry him, and they wed in 1914. Some might think she has made a good match with Archie, as her husband is called. In 1926, he is still quite handsome and dashing. Perhaps too much so.
Fast forward. She is now 36 years old. Agatha and Archie, now Col. Archibald Christie, have had a most adventurous life: they have traveled widely and are noted as among the first Europeans to have experienced surfing. Now settled, they have one child, little Rosalind, aged 10.
Always along with the couple’s travels and in their home was Agatha’s beloved mother. We don’t how Archie felt. But now she has died and Agatha is despondent. All agree on that, Agatha and her mother were inseparable.
Now in middle age she is just at the bloom of her astonishing career. So far, publishing first in 1920, she has written several detective novels, including “Murder On The Links.” These cosy mysteries have enabled the purchase of the Sunningdale, the large country home in which the Christies now live. But now, since the death of her mother, she is deeply depressed. Some call this house gloomy, set as it is on a lonely lane. Some say it and say it spooks Agatha, but that is village rumor. One friend adds that Agatha said Sunningdale would be the death of her.
It is not a happy home. Her husband has just asked her for a divorce. He has a young mistress whom he wants to marry. Real life is no novel, and Agatha’s is not playing out as she might have written it.
Did Agatha wish to create her own mystery, always her way to solutions? Or did some real-life villain design her disappearance?
Of course there was some sort of “rhyme” and “reason” to her disappearance, there always is. But what, precisely, was the nature?