It is one hundred years since the first Agatha Christie was published “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”. This biography by Laura Thompson was first published in 2007 and has been updated and revised with a new introduction to celebrate this occasion.
I read this when it came out and I am wondering whether I found it as irritating as I did this time around but it seems I did not review it on Random. The book is brilliantly written but veers wildly between flights of fancy and fact. The author relies enormously on interpreting the books Agatha wrote under the name Mary Westmacott and, yes I agree they are very autobiographical in nature, but they cannot be used as a basis for verisimilitude. I have read all of these titles and they are very revealing and give a glimpse into Dame A’s thoughts and psyche but they ARE novels and I do not believe that they should be treated as authentic resources.
Everyone knows that Agatha Christie vanished for ten days and caused a huge upheaval. Theories abound why she did it. My take on this is that she went away for a few days to a “spa” in the hope that Archie her errant husband would worry, come and find her and they would be reunited. She actually sent a letter to her brother in law informing him of this so that he would pass on the information to Archie but for some reason this did not happen. He was suspected of doing away with her, the entire thing got out of hand and when he finally found her he was furious at the damage that had been done and a reconciliation was out of the question. She ran away to teach him a lesson and then had to have recourse to the amnesia excuse to cover it up. I think she felt humiliated and distraught at what had happened and that is why she would never discuss it and refused to do so for the rest of her life.
What is clear is that hearing that her husband was in love with another woman (he told her just after her beloved mother had died with huge insensitivity) brought her close to a breakdown which would explain why she embarked on this disastrous course of action.
The section of the book dealing with this episode is called The Quarry and it is pure fantasy. We are told that on the evening she disappeared she had dinner and was hoping to hear Archie’s car and would constantly check through a chink in the curtains to see if he was coming. “She smiled at the maid Lily who cleared the plates and looked concerned at how much was left on them....the clock ticked heavily........the fire was dying in the grate. She sat on and on” and so it continues more fiction rather than fact.
Throughout this biography Laura Thompson points us in the direction of quotes and settings from her books that reveal that she never got over Archie, her attitude to husbands, elliptic references which could be to this disappearance and on and on and on. It is the kind of biography which I find acutely irritating. I call it the Surely she Must have Felt and it is Clear she must have Thought style and it is all supposition.
But then we come to her later life when she marries Max Malllowan and the whimsicality vanishes and we have good solid biographical writing of great verve and huge interest full of detail and colour. She uses sections of Agatha’s own autobiography and her letters which show how satisfying this part of her life was with the travelling to the archeological digs and how much she enjoyed it all. Her books set in this part of the world are among her best (Death on the Nile, Appointment with Death, Murder in Mesopotamia) and it is clear she felt happy and comfortable there.
Her relationship with her daughter Rosalind seems to have been a difficult one and it is clear that she was not a devoted maternal person. She found Rosalind “tricky”, very matter of fact and cool (Hastings daughter in Curtain is said to be based on her) and though they were clearly fond of each other it was never easy.
I suppose the conclusion as to whether one has enjoyed a book or not is how one reads it and this proved, despite all I have said above, to be a fascinating biography and one I could not put down. I read it solidly over two days and by the end of those two days it was bristling with stick it notes as I marked up things I wanted to mention. Well I simply cannot as there are too many but I have checked one which I wanted to refer to.
There is a masterly section on English Murder which is worth reading on its own in which she discusses Agatha’s place among the pantheon of Sayers, Marsh, Allingham et al and I was delighted when she used the word “simplicity” to describe her writing as it is the way I have always viewed it.
”Simplicity sets Agatha apart. It was hard won as her notebooks make clear but she knew that it was the desired end. The finished product had to be impregnable. Its geometry had to be capable of being turned this way and that like a jewel in the sunlight. It had to be constructed so that it could be satisfyingly dismantled. Then everything had to be hidden from view”.
Because of this her books are quite often misunderstood and dismissed which I think it totally wrong. After reading Laura Thompson’s biography I have re-read several of her books - some Poirot, some Miss Marple and some stand alone, and I have admired them all over again for this very characteristic - there is no feeling, as we sometimes get with Sayers and Marsh, that the author’s private feelings and prejudices (or love of their detective) are intruding. The story is the thing and that is that.
Yes I found aspects of this book irritating but I also found it totally fascinating and obviously a labour of love for the author. Well worth reading.
