"I Adore Corpses and Stiffs"

By Paul Gray

Once, after reading in a magazine that she was "the world's most mysterious woman," Agatha Christie complained to her agent: "What do they suggest I am? A Bank Robber or a Bank Robber's wife? I'm an ordinary successful hard-working author--like any other author." Her success was not exactly ordinary. She produced nearly 90 novels and collections of stories in a lifetime that spanned 85 years. One of her plays, The Mousetrap, opened in London in 1952 and is still running.

She refined and left a lasting imprint on the detective formula. An "Agatha Christie" became a shorthand description for an unadorned display of crime unmasked by perceptive and relentless logic. She dared readers to outwit her, and few resisted the challenge. Shortly after her death in 1976, one estimate put the worldwide sale of her works at 400 million copies. Given such glittering evidence and the clues provided by her fiction, a mystique was bound to develop around the one whodunit: Agatha the enchantress, the proper Englishwoman with a power to murder and create. When she insisted that the truth was far less exotic, armchair sleuths who had been trained by her books recognized a false lead when they saw one.

She was right, of course, as this biography, the first written with the blessings of Christie's heirs and estate, conclusively proves. Author Janet Morgan does a thorough job of getting the facts in the Christie case straight and on the record. But the story, even when demystified, seems almost as unbelievable as the guessing games it prompted.

Her childhood could have been written by Jane Austen. Agatha Miller, beloved by her parents and an older sister and brother, grew up in an English seaside village surrounded by Edwardian privileges and leisure. Her American father lived off a trust fund that dwindled steadily, and his death when Agatha was eleven left family finances ever more unsteady. Still, breeding and manners meant as much as money, and the young woman, largely educated at home, moved in a circle of eligible bachelors. She turned down three proposals and took a flyer instead. After a stormy courtship, she married Archie Christie, a dashing aviator with few expectations of living through World War I.

While he fought, his new bride stayed home, working in a hospital. Her sister suggested that Agatha, who was both exhausted and bored during her free time, try to write the sort of detective novel they both enjoyed reading. She did, but by the time The Mysterious Affair at Styles appeared in print, the war was over and Agatha had a daughter, and a husband, grounded at last, who seemed chiefly interested in making money and playing golf.

The year 1926 changed her prospects and her life. For one thing, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which caused a stir because it broke the rules of detective fiction: the narrator did it. Something more shocking followed. In December Agatha left her husband and child and disappeared for ten days, setting off a nationwide search and a carnival of speculation. Morgan's re-creation of this drama is meticulous, but it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, the tight resolution that Christie gave her invented plots.

Grieving over the death of her mother and staggering under the burden of sorting out the estate, the heroine learns from her husband that he is in love with another woman. She drives off one night; her abandoned car is discovered the next morning. Questions multiply. Is she seeking publicity, has she joined her lover, is she embarrassing her husband, or has she been murdered?

When she is discovered at a Yorkshire hotel, registered under the last name of the woman Archie now wants to marry, Agatha Christie has nothing to say. Her biographer gives all the available details but suspends judgment: "There are moments in people's lives on which it is unwise, as well as impertinent, for an outsider to speculate, since it is impossible to be certain about what actually took place or how the participants felt about it."

Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot would accept such an alibi, but truth is messier than fiction. Whatever may have happened to Christie in 1926, she recovered admirably. Two years after her divorce, while visiting friends on an expedition in Iraq, she met Max Mallowan, an archaeologist nearly 14 years her junior. Eventually he proposed, fretting at the same time that she might find his line of work boring. She reassured him: "I adore corpses and stiffs." They lived happily ever after.

Morgan is candid about the weaknesses in her subject's work. Christie's stories were ingenious but her writing was pedestrian. She intentionally offered stereotypes instead of rounded characters and grew annoyed when Poirot, her Belgian detective, began to assume a life of his own in the popular imagination. She once privately described him as "an ego-centric creep." She constructed puzzles, not literature; she devoted what energies she could spare from a busy life to craft rather than art. To list real liabilities in this manner is, ultimately, to beg a question: Why, among so many talented competitors in a small field, did Agatha triumph? Responsible biography can suggest but never prove the probable verdict: she was the best at what she chose to do.