Review
Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley review – in
search of the elusive author
The historian shines a light on the modernity of
Christie’s crime fiction and debunks the myths surrounding her disappearance
Alex Clark
Wed 31 Aug
2022 09.00 BST
If Agatha
Christie remains elusive, it’s not for the want of those trying to find her.
Janet Morgan’s official biography of 1984 and Laura Thompson’s equally detailed
but ultimately more impressionistic portrait of 2007 have both been updated and
reissued; and there are numerous other analyses that try to understand how the
woman who routinely described herself as a housewife became Britain’s
bestselling novelist of all time. Enter historian Lucy Worsley, whose declared
intention is to rescue Christie, who died in 1976 at the age of 85, from the
misperceptions that cling to her life and her works of fiction.
In service
of the former, she revisits the most notorious episode of Christie’s life: her
disappearance for 11 days in December 1926, prompting blanket media coverage,
an extensive police search and, after she had resurfaced at a hydropathic hotel
in Harrogate, widespread suspicion that her tale of memory loss was an
elaborate publicity stunt. In terms of the novels, Worsley’s focus is on
debunking the assumption that Christie invented and epitomised what has become
known as “cosy” crime fiction, pointing to the darker elements of her work, its
modernity, and its increasing interest in psychological themes.
Is she
convincing? Up to a point. These ways of thinking about Christie are not
entirely new or unfamiliar, and although Worsley has evidently done due
diligence among her subject’s correspondence and personal records, there are no
major revelations. It’s more, perhaps, that she brings a clear-eyed empathy
that allows her to acknowledge Christie’s limitations and prejudices without
consigning her to the silos of mass-market populist and absentee mother.
Sometimes,
this is a stretch. Worsley is correct to argue that dismissing the books as
formulaic – algebraic, indeed – is a way of diminishing Christie’s power to
graft an apparently impenetrable mystery on to an evocatively imagined and
interestingly peopled setting, and to repeat the trick over and over again;
such reductive ways of characterising the work of popular writers are still
very much in evidence. Her gift for dialogue and for manipulating social
stereotypes, as Worsley demonstrates, was formidable, keenly attuned to the
proliferating class anxieties of the 20th century; numerous characters are,
interestingly, transitional or dispossessed in some way, at odds with one view
of her as a writer of the country-house elite. (This approach gets only so far
when it comes to discussing her reliance on racist tropes, and particularly
antisemitic slurs, on which Worsley maintains that we must accept her as a
product of her class and time, but also that we must squarely face the reality
of what she writes and not try to excuse it. The issue here is that,
fundamentally, the circle cannot be squared and rests largely on whether one
believes bigotry is, at some level, historically inescapable.)
This
doesn’t quite amount to the claims made in one eyebrow-raising passage in the
biography, in which Worsley appears to argue that Christie has common ground
with the modernists whose defining moment came as her first novels were
published: “What if the middlebrow and the modernist could actually be the same
thing?” she writes. “A more inclusive definition of modernism might mean that
you can also find it in works that don’t necessarily bludgeon you in the face
with the shock of the new in the manner of Ulysses.” If you are going to rescue
one writer from misunderstanding, it’s as well not to visit the same ignominy
on another. And as much as The Murder of Roger Ackroyd’s ingenuity relies on
the disruption of accepted narrative convention, I don’t think it has a lot in
common with Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
A Very
Elusive Woman does, however, paint an intriguing picture of Christie as an
upper-middle-class Victorian and Edwardian child whose life, then and later,
encompassed significant losses and reversals of fortune, emotionally and
materially. Perhaps counterintuitively, Worsley’s plummy-chummy tone bolsters
rather than detracts from the seriousness with which she has evidently taken
her task, as if she’s attempting to translate the sensibilities of a bygone era
and mindset to contemporary life. Of Christie’s first husband, Archibald, whose
adultery sparked that 1926 flight, she confides that a photograph of him
impressed on her “an essential fact” that she hadn’t hitherto appreciated: “He
was incredibly hot.” When Agatha is patronised by a chemist from whom she’s
trying to learn about poisons, Worsley simply says: “Urgh”.
Where
Worsley excels is in her descriptions of Christie’s day-to-day life; we hear
virtually nothing of her political opinions as she lives through two world
wars, for example, but we do glean a sense of her exceptionalism in the news
that she consistently ignored air-raid sirens and simply turned over in bed. And
she reports Christie’s almost compulsive buying of properties, her quiet,
near-clandestine funding of her second husband’s archeological career and her
love of rich food in a way that allows us to understand the version of home,
love and stability she was trying to recreate. This may be the first biography
I’ve read where my attention was genuinely piqued by the discussion of the
subject’s tax affairs. Has Lucy Worsley tracked down Agatha Christie? Not
quite, but her nose for diverting byways may suffice.
Agatha
Christie: A Very Elusive Woman is published by Hodder & Stoughton(£25). To
support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
Delivery charges may apply.
BBC’s Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the
Mystery Queen - viewers ‘adored’ first episode on famous author
Historian Lucy Worsely delves into the life-tellings
of Agatha Christie in new BBC documentary
Will Millar
By Will
Millar
26th Nov
2022, 11:02am
Historian
Lucy Worlsey delves into her mysterious life-tellings of the world’s
most-famous detective writer in Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery
Queen. The BBC three-part documentary series aired last night and viewers are
loving it.
Many
Christie fans have paid good money to follow in the footsteps of the much-loved
author, with countless tours taking place across the country at all times. Last
night, viewers got to enjoy the experience at home as Lucy Worsley told a
fantastic historic tale of the elusive Queen of crime.
In the BBC
factual series, Worsely explores the life of Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie
- a renowned novelist who has only been outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible.
Christie wrote 75 novels, plays and countless short stories before she died in
1970, dedicating her life to the detective fiction genre.
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