10 Things Writers Should Know About Agatha Christie
Author Nancy West shares 10 things writers should know about all-time bestselling mystery author Agatha Christie
(Editor's note: Recently, Nancy West, author of Agatha Christie: The Mother of the Cozy Mystery, put together a list of 10 things writers should know about one of the bestselling authors of all time.)
She wrote on any available space.
She wrote at dining room tables, kitchen countertops, even washstands. She wrote on edges of newspapers and napkins. She wrote in her sleeping compartment while traveling on the Orient Express and on a makeshift desk while on archeological digs in the Middle East. Her best ideas emerged in the bathtub, eating apples.
This wherever/however approach is classic Christie, a practical, adaptable woman who wrote in between the duties and pleasures of ordinary life. “You never saw her writing,” her son-in-law Anthony Hicks once said. “She didn’t shut herself away, like other writers do.”
At 62, she catapulted to fame as a playwright.
Christie began writing plays at 18, but it wasn’t until the West End production of The Mousetrap in 1952, at 62 years old, that she distinguished herself as a playwright. Thirteen more plays followed, including the courtroom drama, Witness for the Prosecution, adapted into a hit movie by Hollywood in 1957.
She remains the only female playwright to have had three plays—The Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution, and Spider’s Web—running simultaneously in the West End. And The Mousetrap, now in its 73rd year, is the longest running play in history.
She harbored a secret career as a literary novelist.
Under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, Christie published six literary novels, striking in their psychological depth. Autobiographical to varying degrees, these novels enabled the deeply private Christie to explore the more painful aspects of her personal life, including her divorce from first husband, Archie Christie, and her attempted suicide.
Christie and her publisher, William Collins, kept these novels a secret for almost 20 years before being outed by the Atticus gossip column in The Sunday Times, in 1949. Although she wrote two more Westmacott novels after this public revelation, critics agree that the latter books don’t measure up to the first four. “It’s really all washed up,” she lamented to her agent, Edmund Cork.
She created a stand-in character.
In 1936, the character of Ariadne Oliver, a bestselling crime writer, first appeared in Christie’s Cards on the Table, spouting lines like, “What really matters [in a crime novel] is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up.” Oliver soon evolved into a recurring character in Christie’s fiction.
A “stout,” middle-aged woman who loves apples and has grown tired of her detective, Oliver offered the public a “strong dash” of Christie, as she herself put it. Brash and outspoken, Oliver enabled Christie to vent about Hercule Poirot, publisher demands, readerly expectations, and the pitfalls of being a celebrity author.
She would have hated the description of herself as a “cozy mystery” writer.
Her novels may feature quaint villages and charming eccentrics, but Christie was unsparing in her assessment of human nature: Children kill; “respectable” people commit heinous crimes; and a placid old lady who knits and gardens casually observes, “Nobody really knows anyone at all.” But Raymond Chandler, peddling his hardboiled novels, called her style of writing “Venetian vase” crime, and the description caught on.
Around the same time, her publisher came out with an annual “Christie for Christmas,” suggesting that her novels made for light holiday reading. Beginning in the 1980s, contemporary crime writers, aiming to recreate the “Golden Age” of detective fiction, have self-identified as “cozy” mystery writers. Meanwhile, ITV and BBC have glossed up her settings and characters. Christie’s coziness is a construction of our making, not hers.
She never missed a deadline.
When Archie Christie left her for another woman in December 1926, Agatha suffered a mental breakdown that lasted over a year. Meanwhile, William Collins, basking in the phenomenal success of Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, eagerly awaited her next book. Though barely able to concentrate, she delivered her seventh novel, The Mystery of the Blue Train, on time.
It was, she claimed, “easily the worst book I ever wrote.” But it changed her from an amateur into a professional writer. “I assumed the burden of a professional, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.” Christie maintained that sense of professional discipline until the end of her career, often writing a novel in as little as six weeks.
She wrote in a variety of genres.
The author of 66 detective novels, Christie also published 15 short story collections, two poetry collections, six Mary Westmacott novels, and six spy thrillers. She also wrote 22 full-length plays.
Writing in other genres not only freed Christie from the grind of producing one detective novel after another (“I am like a sausage machine,” she once said) but also enabled her to test out different writing styles: introspection for the Westmacott novels; a lighthearted tone for the spy thrillers; a whimsical approach for her short story collections.
She outlined all her detective novels before she wrote a single word.
Her outlines, moreover, all followed a definite pattern. After identifying the murder, she proceeded to describe the murderer and detective, puzzle out the plot and red herrings, and finish with a denouement that ties up loose ends.
Beginning in 1930, as she shifted from writing one to two novels a year, Christie wrote the final chapter immediately after completing the first one, all but guaranteeing that she would stick to her outline.
She milked her life for narrative material.
During World War I, Christie worked as a nurse in a dispensary where she developed an astonishing knowledge of poisons. Poison subsequently became her main method of killing, with over half her murderers choosing it as their weapon. She also exploited other hobbies, such as singing, gardening, and bridge, the latter playing a key role in several novels.
Her travels to the Middle East provided the setting for five of her novels, including Murder in Mesopotamia (1936). On a meta level, the reading of detective fiction also crops up frequently in her novels, with characters gleefully chatting about crime and corpses.
She controls our response to her novels more than we think.
Christie’s readers rarely identify the murderer correctly. Through the work of reading specialists using computer analysis, we now know that Christie developed certain fictional patterns that carefully control our reading. Her descriptive passages, for example, taper off as the novel goes on so that we read faster, and she focuses our attention on certain repeated concepts, like remembrance or guilt. In this way, she manipulates us into reading the way she wants us to.
Her biggest trick? To create more suspects and subplots than we have the mental capacity to retain. Because we can’t track them all, we abandon thought and enter a state, according to reading specialists, akin to a “hypnotic trance.”
Check out Nancy West's Agatha Christie: The Mother of the Cozy Mystery here:
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