Agatha

Over the years, BH and I have consumed a good deal of Agatha Christie, both by reading the books and by watching the television adaptations. Rather more of the latter, consumed as much as costume dramas as detective stories - this despite the fact that I believe them all to have been originally written in the present, or near present. Plus the odd excursion to the 'Mousetrap'. Plus the excursion into biography some years ago now, noticed at reference 1.

For some reason which has vanished, despite it only being a few days ago, I was prompted to read Lucy Worsley's biography of Christie (reference 2), which I happened to have bought for BH not long after it came out a couple of years ago, and have chomped through its 350 pages of text in no time at all. Worsley was previously known and liked by BH as a television personality and is to be found at reference 5.

Quite a lot of space is given to her fugue of 1926, at the time her first marriage was breaking up. I had forgotten what a stir it caused at the time and I learned of the huge amount of Berkshire and Surrey police time it soaked up before she was run down to Harrogate. Her second marriage, which hung fire for some time, was much less conventional but much more successful, with the second, much younger husband being an archaeologist who specialised in western Asia, that is to say what is now Iraq and Syria. We learn something of her rather old fashioned views, I dare say a product of her class and her time, but which got her into trouble in later life. On the other hand, perhaps her class background meant that she was not driven (for recognition) in the way that her contemporary Simenon was; she lusted after no Nobel prizes.

Her treatment of her daughter, Rosalind, by her first husband, was rather odd by today's standards. A daughter who nevertheless went on to become the guardian of the Christie heritage - not to say industry - although a good chunk of it had by then been sold off - and is presently with Acorn, for whom see reference 9. What with one thing and another, I dare say she would have provided plenty to interest a psychoanalyst.

We still watch the Joan Hickson version of Marple when we are on holiday, despite having dumped most of our DVDs with the arrival of our smart television - so I was interested to learn that Christie had met and liked Hickson as a young woman - and who made her first appearance in a Marple adaptation back in 1960, under Margaret Rutherford.

It so happens, that reading this book interrupted my reading of the third volume of autobiography by Richard Church (reference 6), built around the importance of home, in one form or another, so I was struck in this book by the importance of home to Christie - this despite the rather nomadic life she led, never actually living in the home on the Dart now most associated with her and looked after by the National Trust (reference 8). More a place she liked to spend summers at. It is also true that finally letting Ashfield in Torquay go in 1960, her natal home, was something of a wrench, this despite the fact that she had not actually owned it for a long time. Perhaps what she really liked was the idea of home and the business of buying stuff for homes. She did accumulate a great deal of stuff, a large chunk of which was eventually sold off by the National Trust to pay for putting Greenway back together again, she having been rather careless about care and maintenance.

She made a huge amount of money, from books, from plays and from films, but her money affairs were very tangled and she had a lot of bother with the tax people both here and in the US - with income tax being a lot more progressive here after the second world war than it is now, with high marginal rates. She also became a brand, which meant that some of her later work, rather inferior, still sold terribly well: she didn't need to bother to do the job properly. For all that, perhaps someone who might have done better to stop publishing a few years before she did.

Her plays were good earners in part because they were written on a small scale, mostly suitable for repertory and amateur, and so generated lots of fees. Her estate did very well out of television adaptations, particularly of Marple - which went through four Marples - and of Poirot - which had to make do with David Suchet.

Quite a lot on women's questions. The role of women in marriage. The demise of domestic service. The rise of her female readership with their Christies for Christmas. Christie's matrimonial affairs.

Altogether a satisfactory excursion. One which I dare say will be repeated at some point. We may, one day, even get to Greenway.

PS 1: according to Bing, the snap above comes from Time News. A snap which shows her framed by heavy works of reference from Oxford, a rather improbable mise-en-scène given her unpretentious working methods and generally unpretentious style - although she did go as far as a good make of typewriter. I did not turn the snap up at Time News, but I did turn up an item from April of this year about a theatrical production in Greece, for which see reference 7.

PS 2: Church, as a literary type, had to make ends meet with literary journalism. His poems and novels, while well enough received, did not pay the bills. Christie did not need to do this, although I dare say she was cute enough when it came to getting herself into magazines.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=christie+biography.

Reference 2: Agatha Christie: A very elusive woman - Lucy Worsley - 2022.

Reference 3: Collected works - Agatha Christie - c1920-1970. Published by Heron Books in red hard covers with yellow book marks. Black and white illustrations which I do not like at all. We own about 80%, bought as an incomplete set from eBay, quite a long time ago now.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Worsley.

Reference 6: The voyage home – Richard Church – 1964. 

Reference 7: https://time.news/back-to-murder-by-agatha-christie-2024-04-19-171144/. 

Reference 8: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/devon/greenway.

Reference 9: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/tree-bathing.html.