For years, I’ve read Agatha Christie short stories in bed, before I go to sleep, and on vacation. I find his style calming. Although she almost always tells stories of murder, the writer never departs from her Victorian reserve. The crime – the how – interests her less than the motive – the why -, which means that she spares us the bloody scenes to better offer us captivating stories of finely chiseled enigmas.
An expert in the art of physical descriptions picked up and in that of catchy incipits, the one who is nicknamed the “queen of crime” never disappoints me. I particularly like his series of short stories starring Parker Pyne, an investigator recycled into a professor of happiness, a specialist in schemes aimed at restoring a taste for life in the depressed. Rarely transcendent, Christie is always good.
When my friends learn that, as a serious book reader, I revel in the popular writer’s short stories (more than two billion books sold in a hundred languages and tons of adaptations for TV and cinema), they often ask me questions about Christie’s life. Has she been dead long? What were his political ideas? And I realize that if I know the novelist well, I know nothing of her life.
So I read with avidity Agatha Christie. The mysteries of a life, the detailed biography dedicated to him by the French historian Marie-Hélène Baylac, published in pocket format this summer (Perrin, Paris, 2022, 432 pages).
Jealous of her private life, the writer, even in her few autobiographical works, never said everything. The lights of his biographer are therefore revealing.
Born in England in 1890, into a wealthy family, and died in 1976 in her native land at the age of 85, leaving a fortune of several billion to her heirs (including Rosalind, her only daughter), Agatha Christie, born Miller, is a bourgeois woman who lived like an aristocrat.
When she was young, she did not go to school: instead, she had private teachers of English, French (which she spoke all her life with the southern accent of her tutor) and music. Cheerful and charming, she is already used to inventing stories by talking to herself out loud.
His first marriage, in 1914, with the aviator Archibald Christie will turn sour in 1926, when the latter falls in love with a younger woman. Injured, the writer already known for a few years will disappear for a few days, causing a stir in the country which is looking for her everywhere. Found in a hotel, she attributes (unconvincingly) her escapade to an episode of amnesia. Above all, she will learn a lesson from this: journalists should never be given the opportunity to interfere in their private life. Until her death, she will flee interviews and television.
In 1930, when she married archaeologist Max Mallowan, 14 years her junior, Christie was already famous. Some people around him even suspect the young man of marrying out of interest, since he needs funding for his excavations in Iraq and Syria. The writer, however, goes for it and will never regret it, despite the inconsistencies of this second husband.
She took part for 25 years in Mallowan’s archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, under strong British influence until 1958. Seduced by the region, Christie approached it with a colonialist perspective, being convinced “that her country has vocation to bring progress and civilization to the rest of the world”, sums up her biographer by evoking “the ordinary racism” of the writer, which excludes hatred, but not prejudice, in particular towards the Jews. The title of one of his great successes sold over 100 million copies, ten little niggers (1939), will moreover be contested in the United States from 1940 and in England in 1966, before becoming They were ten in 2020.
The decade 1930-1940 is the great period of Christie, who publishes in particular The crime of the Orient Express in 1934. The writer enjoyed “iron health”, was able to write anywhere and often completed her novels in two or three months. However, the tax authorities have it in their sights. Generous with her family – her whole family lives on her hooks – the conservative novelist will never stop criticizing the voracity of the government, which nevertheless leaves her enough to maintain a pasha’s life. Even today, the company that manages his work, 36% owned by his descendants, remains a money-printing machine.
When I want to read tougher detective stories or with a social impact, I read the American Patricia Highsmith, in particular her excellent collection Disasters (1988), or the Frenchwoman Karine Giebel. Agatha is my cuddly toy.