Agatha Christie: A Biography
Janet Morgan’s definitive and authorised biography of Agatha Christie, with a new retrospective foreword by the author.Agatha Christie (1890–1976), the world’s bestselling author, is a public institution. Her creations, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, have become fiction’s most legendary sleuths and her ingenuity has captured the imagination of generations of readers. But although she lived to a great age and was prolific, she remained elusively shy and determinedly private.Given sole access to family papers and other protected material, Janet Morgan’s definitive biography unravels Agatha Christie’s life, work and relationships, creating a revealing and faithfully honest portrait. The book has delighted readers of Christie’s detective stories for more than 30 years with its clear view of her career and personality, and this edition includes a new foreword by the author reflecting on the longevity of Agatha Christie’s extraordinary success and popularity.
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JANET MORGAN
Agatha Christie
A Biography
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1985
First published by William Collins Sons and Co.Ltd 1984
Copyright © Janet Morgan 1984
Janet Morgan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008243951
Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 9780007392995
Version: 2017-07-28
For Shiela
Contents
2 ‘In private and in your own time’
3 ‘A possession that is yours to do what you like with’
4 ‘She will have to make up her mind between them some time’
5 ‘He will change your entire life’
6 ‘This waiting is rather hard but all is ready’
7 ‘Menace and murder and sudden death’
8 ‘1st Class! Good oh! Right here’
9 ‘The next I write will be the 5th’
10 ‘I do not think she knows who she is’
12 ‘An unquestionably genuine loss of memory’
13 ‘London – Paris – Lausanne – Milan – Venice’
14 ‘An idea I’ve never ever considered’
17 ‘Things all seem to come at once’
19 ‘A certain amount of fêting’
21 ‘All the panoply and misdirection of the conjuror’s art’
22 ‘I shall go on enjoying myself’
23 ‘An onlooker and an observer’
24 ‘Like a cinema film run backwards’
25 ‘An ordinary successful hard-working author’
It was not a predictable match.
In 1981 Agatha Christie’s daughter Rosalind, Mrs Anthony Hicks, was at last persuaded to allow Collins, publisher of her mother’s books, to commission a biography, its author to have unrestricted access to family archives. For years, Mrs Hicks had resisted this; like her mother, she believed that a writer’s work should stand by itself, the context of and motives for its production being irrelevant to readers’ enjoyment. As for her mother, for Rosalind private life was precious; once breached, all she valued would become the public’s property.
In the case of so well and worldwide-known an author as Agatha Christie, a brand (shudders from Rosalind), it was admittedly unrealistic to hope that the drawbridge would never be lowered. Agatha Christie was after all the writer so famous that her first book for Collins, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, had been chosen in 1934, with As You Like It and The Gospels, as the first Talking Book produced in Britain for blind people. At some future time, an emissary would have to be given entrance. But would that be Mrs Hicks’ decision or one bequeathed to her son, Mathew Prichard, Agatha’s only grandchild?
Mrs Hicks understood the contract between Agatha Christie and her readers. Appreciating the comfort which financial security had given her, she saw it as her duty to protect the integrity of her mother’s work, spending hours in correspondence with agents and publishers, in checking proofs, appraising covers, scripts for film, television, radio, correcting slips in reviews. Rights brought responsibilities. She refused to engage in crude forms of commercial exploitation – invitations, for instance, to endorse the manufacture of teacups with Poirot moustaches – but an occasional celebration was allowed. (A memorable Nicaraguan commemorative postage stamp depicted little grey cells spilling from Hercule Poirot’s head.) The ultimate invasion, an Authorised Life, was strenuously repelled.
What led Mrs Hicks to change her mind? In 1979 a bomb was hurled through the defences. Sapping and mining had been underway for years via often dotty speculative biographies, focusing on the episode in December 1926 when Mrs Christie had vanished from her home in Surrey. As Agatha wrote years later in her Autobiography, she was exhausted after the death of her mother and ensuing house-clearing, and distressed by her husband Archie’s admission that he loved someone else. Her flight, to which she did not allude, was an escape. Thirteen days later, at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Agatha was identified by her husband.
