Agatha Christie is considered one of the most prolific authors in history. Everyone knows her novels. However, behind her writer persona lie mysteries and anecdotes that make her life as intriguing as those of the protagonists in her novels. She lived intensely: she worked as a pharmacy dispenser during both world wars, got married several times, traveled around the world. In her book Death on the Nile, she reflects the passion she felt for Egyptian culture, which she discovered during one of her many trips around the world.
These experiences, combined with her creativity and imagination in storytelling, resulted in a prolific career with over seventy novels. Christie once said: "the best crimes for my novels come to me while I'm washing dishes. Dishwashing turns anyone into a category killer." She suffered from dysgraphia, a condition that affects muscular function, which made her handwritten manuscripts illegible. When the disease progressed, she hired an assistant to continue writing her novels.
Manuscript page of Agatha Christie where her dysgraphia is clearly visible
Christie, who worked as a nurse during World War I and turned her fictional characters into companions after turning 30, wrote more than 50 novels and short stories and adapted her novels for the stage: one of them, The Mousetrap, is the longest-running play in the world. She has sold over 2 billion copies of her works and received the honor of Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1971.
THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF THE QUEEN OF CRIME, A SIMPLE COINCIDENCE?
The mystery began on December 4, 1926, when in the county of Surrey, in her native Britain, her car was found with a severe front-end impact. Inside the car were the writer's coat, her driver's license, a suitcase... but what had happened to Agatha Christie? Where was she? Kidnapped? Murdered perhaps as in one of her novels? That day would be the first of eleven long days without any news about her. A mystery in the life of the queen of mysteries.
It seemed as if the earth had swallowed her: police, volunteers, firefighters, search dogs and even a medium participated in the search. During those days, all kinds of hypotheses were considered: she could have been a victim of a crime at the hands of her husband or someone seeking fame by being the murderer of the queen of mysteries. Even the idea that it might be a strategy by the writer to launch her latest novel was considered.
However, everything was resolved on December 15 when she was found in the spa town of Harrogate, in the county of Yorkshire, staying under the name of Teresa Neele. The true reason for her disappearance was never known, but the most plausible hypothesis was that the writer had taken refuge there to cope with a difficult personal situation. Her husband asked for divorce because he wanted to marry a younger woman: Nact Neele (the writer knew of her existence and stayed in the spa using his surname). This news along with the death of her mother plunged the writer into deep depression, leading to an attempted suicide. After this, she was admitted to a clinic to recover from everything that had happened. Despite this episode, Agatha Christie summed up her life as happy. In her childhood, she had a house with a garden and parents who "loved each other tenderly," according to her own words.
Recovered from everything that happened, she remarried the archaeologist Max Mallowan, whom she met on a trip to the Middle East, and with him spent seasons in Syria and Iraq due to his research and work. A famous quote by the writer is: "marry an archaeologist, the older you get, the more charming he finds you."
ÁGATHA CHRISTIE AND THE USE OF POISON: REALITY OR FICTION?
Her innate talent for writing gave her the title of forensic pioneer. Even before the term was used rigorously in science, forensics had a great presence in her novels. She was the first person to use the term "crime scene" in 1923, in her book The Murder on the Links. Fingerprint analysis, footprints or even the use of a forensic kit, were just some aspects that could be read in her novels and which at the time were not applied in forensic science. The forensic kits used in Agatha Christie's novels began to be used around 1916, while the first real-life kit emerged around 1924 when Sir Bernard Spilsbury witnessed how a police team collected samples from a crime scene without any rigor or criteria.
But what stood out the most was the prominence she gave to poison as a murder weapon in her novels. But, how could the quantities of poison used in her murders be so precise? The accuracy with which she described the use of these substances came from her knowledge of chemistry after working as a nurse and pharmacy dispenser at hospitals in Torquay and University College London. In real life, she was responsible for preparing medicines to treat war patients: different mixtures according to their ailments. Substances and quantities that, depending on their use, could cure or kill a person.
The use of poison in Agatha Christie's novels became so famous that it even became the subject of study. Kathryn Harkup wrote a book titled A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Ágatha Christie, where the author analyzes all the writer's novels where poison is used as a murder weapon.
There was great commotion over the topic of using poison, its clear description and analysis; you might wonder why. Well, in her novels, the most commonly used poisons were arsenic and thallium. The first known case of thallium poisoning occurred only a few months after the publication of the novel Pale Horse, in 1962. Graham Young, the murderer, said he had not read the book but was he lying or was it just a tragic coincidence? We will never know...
But not everything related to the queen of crime has to be bad. Thanks to her precision in describing poisoning symptoms, the life of a girl was saved. In 1977, an 18-month-old girl was admitted to London Hospital with what appeared to be a strange illness. Her nurse, Marsha Maitland, was a reader of Christie's novels and recognized possible thallium poisoning. After conducting appropriate tests on the girl, it was discovered that she had indeed suffered accidental thallium poisoning.
Agatha Christie lived surrounded by mystery, both in her novels and in real life. She was a person as enigmatic as interesting. Her novels could well be said to have been written in this century. Have they inspired any other crimes in real life? Perhaps... but that is part of the mystery surrounding Agatha Christie.
Bibliography
Caamaño, E. (2020): Ágatha Christie: la biografía definitiva de la Reina del Crimen (Memoria y biografías). Editorial Almuzara.
Christie, A (1977): An Autobiography. Editorial Molino.
Harkup, K (2015): A is for Arsenic: The Poisons in Ágatha Christie. Bloomsbury Sigma.
Moreno, V. et alli (2000): Biografía de Ágatha Christie. www.buscabiografias.com
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