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| Agatha Christie |
The weather is cold in Austria and the low temperatures affect the aerial traffic, too. They have been waiting some hours in the airport and they have taken profit to buy some souvenirs and books. The Grandma has bought some novels of Agatha Christie, one of her favourite writers, who dies on a day like today in 1976.
During the flight to Barcelona, The Grandma has beenstudying a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 71).
More information: Calendar
Christie also wrote the world's longest-running play, a murder mystery, The Mousetrap, and, under the pen name Mary Westmacott, six romances. In 1971 she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her contribution to literature.
Christie was born into a
wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon. Before marrying and
starting a family in London, she had served in a Devon hospital during the
First World War, tending to troops coming back from the trenches. She was the youngest of three children born to Frederick
Alvah Miller, an affluent American stockbroker, and his British-born wife Clara
Miller née Boehmer.
She was
initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this
changed when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot, was
published in 1920. During the Second World War, she worked as a pharmacy
assistant at University College Hospital, London, acquiring a good knowledge of
poisons which feature in many of her novels.
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| Agatha Christie |
Agatha's mother Clara had been born in Belfast in 1854 to Captain Frederick Boehmer and Mary Ann West as the couple's only daughter. Boehmer was killed in a riding accident while stationed on Jersey in April 1863, leaving his widow to raise the children alone on a meagre income. In that same year, 1863, Mary Ann's sister Margaret married a wealthy American, Nathaniel Frary Miller, and the couple settled in Southbourne, West Sussex.
Christie described her childhood as very happy. She was surrounded by a series of strong and independent women from an early age. Her time was spent alternating between her home in Devon, her step-grandmother and aunt's house in Ealing, West London, and parts of Southern Europe, where her family would holiday during the winter.
More information: The Guardian
Agatha was raised in a household with various esoteric beliefs and, like her siblings, believed that her mother Clara was a psychic with the ability of second sight. Agatha's sister Margaret had been sent to Roedean in Sussex for her education, but their mother insisted that Agatha receive a home education. As a result, her parents were responsible for teaching her to read and write and to master basic arithmetic, a subject she particularly enjoyed. They also taught her music, and she learned to play both the piano and the mandolin.
In 1902, she was sent to receive a formal education at Miss Guyer's Girls School in Torquay but found it difficult to adjust to the disciplined atmosphere.
In 1905, she was sent to Paris where she was educated in three pensions, the last of which served primarily as a finishing school.
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| Agatha Christie takes a photo of a lamassu, Egypt |
Christie attended many social functions in search of a husband. She visited ancient Egyptian monuments such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but did not exhibit the great interest in archaeology and Egyptology that became prominent in her later years. Returning to Britain, she continued her social activities, writing and performing in amateur theatricals. She also helped put on a play called The BlueBeard of Unhappiness with female friends. Her writing extended to both poetry and music. Some early works saw publication, but she decided against focusing on writing or music as future professions.
Christie wrote her first short story, The House of Beauty, an early version of her later-published story The House of Dreams, while recovering in bed from an undisclosed illness.
More information: Thought
Christie had long been a fan of detective novels, having enjoyed Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and The Moonstone, as well as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's early Sherlock Holmes stories. She wrote her own detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring Hercule Poirot, a former Belgian police officer noted for his twirly large magnificent moustaches and egg-shaped head. Poirot had taken refuge in Britain after Germany invaded Belgium.
Christie's inspiration for the character stemmed from real Belgian refugees who were living in Torquay and the Belgian soldiers whom she helped to treat as a volunteer nurse in Torquay during the First World War. She began working on The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1916, writing most of it on Dartmoor.
In late 1926, Archie asked Agatha for a divorce. He had fallen in love with Nancy Neele, who had been a friend of Major Belcher, director of the British Empire Mission, on the promotional tour a few years earlier.
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| Agatha Christie news |
That same evening, around 9:45 pm, Christie disappeared from her home, leaving behind a letter for her secretary saying that she was going to Yorkshire. On 14 December 1926, she was found at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel, now the Old Swan Hotel, in Harrogate, Yorkshire, registered as Mrs Teresa Neele, the surname of her husband's lover, from Cape Town.
In 1928, Christie left England for Istanbul and subsequently for Baghdad on the Orient Express. Late in this trip, in 1930, she met a young archaeologist 13 years her junior, Max Mallowan, whom she married in September 1930. Their marriage was happy and lasted until Christie's death in 1976. In a 1977 interview, Mallowan recounted his first meeting with Christie, when he took her and a group of tourists on a tour of his expedition site in Iraq.
More information: BBC
Christie frequently used settings that were familiar to her for her stories. She often accompanied Mallowan on his archaeological expeditions, and her travels with him contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Other novels, such as And Then There Were None, were set in and around Torquay, where she was raised.
Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palace Hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railway. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author.
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| Agatha Christie |
Around 1941–42, the British intelligence agency MI5 investigated Christie after a character called Major Bletchley appeared in her 1941 thriller N or M?, which was about a hunt for a pair of deadly fifth columnists in wartime England. MI5 was afraid that Christie had a spy in Britain's top-secret codebreaking centre, Bletchley Park. The agency's fears were allayed when Christie told her friend, the codebreaker Dilly Knox, I was stuck there on my way by train from Oxford to London and took revenge by giving the name to one of my least lovable characters.
In honour of her many literary works, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1956 New Year Honours. The next year, she became the President of the Detection Club. In the 1971 New Year Honours, she was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). Three years after her husband had been knighted for his archaeological work in 1968. They were one of the few married couples where both partners were honoured in their own right. From 1968, owing to her husband's knighthood, Christie could also be styled Lady Mallowan.
Dame Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976 at age 85 from natural causes at her home Winterbrook House which was located in Winterbrook, Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
More information: History Extra
Crime is terribly revealing.
Try and vary your methods as you will,
your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind,
and your soul is revealed by your actions.
Try and vary your methods as you will,
your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind,
and your soul is revealed by your actions.
Agatha Christie
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