The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

Dame Agatha Christie (1890-1978) was an English mystery writer who published 66 novels, 14 short story collections, and wrote the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which has been in continual production since 1952 (excepting a short pause in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 crisis). Born Agatha Miller to an upper-class family in Torquay, Devon, England, Christie was educated at home. She married Archibald Christie in 1914, and divorced him in 1928. During a 1924 Empire Tour of Britain, Christie discovered surfing, which became a lifelong hobby. She married her second husband, Max Mallowan, in 1930. Mallowan was an archaeologist, and Christie frequently went on dig sites with him in the Middle East. Christie was still married to Mallowan when she died in 1976 at age 85. Christie had one child, Rosalind Christie Hicks, with her first husband, Archie.

Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written during World War I in 1916 and published in 1920 after several rejections. Styles introduced Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, one of her most famous protagonists alongside armchair detective Miss Jane Marple. Poirot appears in more than 30 novels and 50 stories, while Miss Marple appears in 12 novels and 20 stories.

Christie is commonly associated with the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” a literary movement prominent in the 1920s and 1930s. Also often referred to as “whodunnits,” Golden Age detective stories often repeated similar conventions, such as the closed cast of characters, who were typically upper-class but not aristocratic, often in an enclosed setting (such as the English country house). Various writers of the period, including Ronald Knox and S. S. Van Dyne, attempted to codify the “rules” of Golden Age Detective Fiction. These rules largely centered on the idea that the novel must focus on a mystery, that the clues must be clearly presented to a reader, and that a solution must ultimately be found. Some of Christie’s most celebrated novels, however, are those that break these supposed rules. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), for example, shocked readers with the twist that the narrator was the murderer. Ackroyd, for all that it broke the purported rules of its genre, is frequently cited as one of the best mystery novels of all time.

In 1955, Christie was given the first Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writer’s Guild of America. She holds the Guinness World Record for “Most Translated Author,” with 7,236 translations of her work as of her receipt of the record in 2017. Her works have been adapted into film, television, stage productions, radio, video games, and graphic novels.

In The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, Benedict creates a narrative in which Agatha is intentionally complicit in her own disappearance, whereas much debate and speculation continues to surround Christie’s actions and state of mind during her real-life disappearance. Biographer Janet P. Morgan proposes that the incident occurred in a “hysterical fugue, in which a person experiencing great stress fleas from intolerable strain by utterly forgetting his or her own identity” (Agatha Christie: A Biography. Fontana, 1985, p. 158)—a theory widely accepted at the time perhaps because, as Benedict’s novel posits, Agatha engineered it that way. In contrast, in his book, Agatha Christie and the Missing Eleven Days, author Jared Cade (whose work is cited by Benedict in the Acknowledgements of The Mystery of Mrs. Christie) presents evidence that supports Benedict’s version of the narrative, arguing that Christie planned the disappearance herself in order to expose her husband’s infidelity and escape her marriage on her own terms.