Dame Agatha: Queen of the Maze

Dame Agatha Christie made more profit out of murder than any woman since Lucrezia Borgia. One estimate of her total earnings from more than a half-century of writing is $20 million. But the exact amount remains a mystery not likely to be solved even when her will is read. Her royalty arrangements and trusts would tax the brains of her two famous detectives, M. Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple. In addition, Agatha Christie had already given away millions to her family. Her only grandson, Mathew Prichard, 32, was eight years old when she presented him with sole rights to The Mousetrap, the world's longest-running play.

It has grossed nearly $3 million since its London opening in 1952. Last week, before the play's 9,611th performance, the theater lights were dimmed in memory of the 85-year-old writer, who had just died at her house hi Wallingford.

The Christie output was torrential: 83 books, including a half-dozen romances written under the name Mary Westmacott; 17 plays, nine volumes of short stories, and Come, Tell Me How You Live, in which she described her field explorations with her second husband, British Archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. The number of printed copies of her books is conservatively put at 300 million. New Guinea cargo cultists have even venerated a paperback cover of her Evil Under the Sun--quite possibly confusing the name Christie with Christ.

Her own characters were much less exotic: doctors, lawyers, army officers, clergymen.

Her stalking grounds were usually genteel English houses, and she rarely strayed. "I could never manage miners talking in pubs," she once said, "because I don't know what miners talk about in pubs." Dame Agatha herself looked as if she had been raised on a good golf course, although her main hobbies were gardening, and buying and redecorating houses.

Godlike Genius. In a Christie murder mystery, neatness not only counts, it is everything. As the genre's undisputed queen of the maze, she laid her tantalizing plots so precisely and dropped her false leads so cunningly that few--if any--readers could guess the identity of the villain. The reader surrenders to an enigma in which the foul act of murder seems less a sin against man or God than a breach of etiquette.

Yet, as W.H. Auden observed, the British murder mystery, with its accent on clever detection rather than violence, seems to provide an escape back into the Garden of Eden. There innocence and order are restored, and readers "may know love as love and not as the law." The Great Restorer is the godlike genius detective. Christie's own genius resided in a mind of intimidating clarity. She never allowed emotion or philosophical doubt to cloud her devious conceptions or hinder the icy logic of their untanglings. Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, she was the daughter of a rich American and an English mother. Although gifted with a good singing voice, she abandoned a stage career because of her shyness. In 1914 she married a British airman, Colonel Archibald Christie, and plunged into the war effort. Between volunteer nursing and practicing pharmacy, she wrote her first detective story on a dare from her sister. The Mysterious Affair at Styles introduced the 5-ft. 4-in. dandy and retired Belgian police officer Hercule Poirot. His egoism, eccentricities and the fact that for a time he had a Watsonian colleague called Hastings suggest that Christie was strongly influenced by Sherlock Holmes.

Christie was a well-established writer when her controversial The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in 1926. Purists complained because she did what no detective-story writer had done before. She revealed the killer as none other than the book's narrator. Publication of the novel coincided with another first in the author's otherwise scandal-free life. For two weeks in December 1926, Agatha Christie, 36, was officially a missing person. A frenzied nationwide search led to a Yorkshire hotel, where she was found registered as Tessa Neele, the name of the woman Colonel Christie married after his divorce from Agatha two years later. Doctors said the disappearance was caused by amnesia.

Even so, the episode was a uniquely devilish way of telling her husband that she knew about his mischief.

Stoic Brevity. Dame Agatha recalled that unhappy time with stoic brevity: "My husband found a young woman." In 1930, on a trip to the Middle East, she found Max Mallowan, 14 year her junior, who was excavating on the site of ancient Ur. "An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have," she noted before their 25th anniversary. "The older she gets, the more interested he is in her."

In their 45-year marriage, the Mallowans shared an interest in travel and properties. During one period, the couple owned eight houses.

World War II found Christie again practicing pharmacy and brushing up on the latest lethal drugs. Poison was a preferred method of dispatching a victim--frequently "in quiet family surroundings." She continued to publish one or two novels a year, often plotting them in a hot bath while eating apples. There was scarcely a time when her work was not before the public, not only on book jackets but in the credits of such stage and film works as Witness for the Prosecution and Ten Little Indians.

The last few years of Dame Agatha's life saw an upsurge in Christiemania. Murder on the Orient Express, the film based on her novel Murder in the Calais Coach, was a huge box office success that spurred even further the sales of her books. Curtain, the novel in which Hercule Poirot predeceases his author (TIME, Sept. 15), is still No. 1 on U.S. bestseller lists, with over a quarter of a million copies in print.

But it was the elderly, frail spinster Jane Marple who remained her favorite detective. Gifted with as many "little grey cells" as Poirot, Miss Marple also possesses an unpretentious village wisdom and homey psychological insight that make her Agatha Christie's alter ego. Although Poirot is gone, Marple survives for at least a while longer An unpublished manuscript in which she too passes on is locked in the Christie vault, along with the ultimate whodunit, Dame Agatha's autobiography By refusing to publish it during her lifetime, Dame Agatha has assured herself one last, suspenseful hurrah.

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