I read my first Agatha Christie mystery story when I was 13; eighth grade English class. And then there were none was assigned reading. Before I even finished the book I was hooked. On each subsequent trip to the bookstore, I picked out yet another Christie novel, eventually en massing most of her collection. In my sophomore English class, we were told to choose an autobiography for an assignment. I no longer remember the assignment, but I do remember reading Agatha Christie's autobiography.
I picked it up again recently after finding a used copy for cheap. Agatha Christie's life was extremely interesting, and only partially due to her ability to create fascinating mystery stories. She lived through both World Wars at ages where she could easily remember details, married and divorced her first husband, and eventually married an archeologist she met whilst traveling alone through the Middle East. Her autobiography was written over the course of 15 or so years, and is consequently rambling, disorganized, and skips from event to event with little regard for chronological order. For instance, she mentions her brother returns home from overseas rather ill and Agatha and her sister found affordable healthcare for him. The next mention of him is when she ran into an old army buddy of his while in the Middle East who asks after his health. That's when we found out he had been dead by that point for a few years. After a while I just adjusted to not knowing how old she was, how much time had passed between one event to the next, and just went with the flow.
Agatha Christie was a product of a late Victorian upbringing, and opens her autobiography with an anecdote of how happy her childhood had been. It's hard to believe in 2011 that she was not really formally schooled, and spent most of her childhood playing, traveling abroad, and playing make believe. Her only formal instruction came on the piano, and to a lesser extent, learning French from a French maid.
She was a girl in her late teens or early twenties when WWI broke out. Like many unmarried girls of the time, she began working at a local hospital, first as a nurse, then in the dispensary. As she's reminiscing of her time learning to mix potions for soldiers, it was easy to see where some of her writing ideas stemmed from: poisons. Her love affair with poisons showed up early in her novels and continued through most of her career.
Two of my favorite comments from the book are her interpretations of the evolution of parenting from the Victorian era to what she calls present day which I think is the fifties; and a comment about how women in Victorian England had much more power than given credit for. Her long life offered a great social commentary on the tumultuous times in which she lived.
The one book of hers she frequently references is The murder of Roger Ackroyd, which I don't remember reading and now feel like I must. She spent a significant time traveling around the Middle East, which is setting for most of my favorite Christie books. In many instances it seems like she mentions writing as an afterthought. I like that despite the sheer number of books, plays, and adaptations she wrote, she saw writing as first a hobby than a chose which sometimes interrupted her time spent traveling, reading, spending time with her husbands and only child.
I recently read that her home is now a museum, visited by many, many people annually. It was opened to the public on a whim, and turned out to be incredibly successful. Definitely something I'm adding to my bucket list...
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