In Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman (Pegasus Crime, Sept.), historian Worsley reframes the prolific detective novelist’s life.
You write that Agatha Christie is “thrillingly, scintillatingly modern”—how so?
In her personal life, she was very cutting edge. She went around the whole globe in 1922 and surfed in Hawaii in a pearl necklace. She was a driver at a time when that was unusual for women—she loved to speed. She was really a successful hardworking woman, although she had to pretend that she wasn’t.
You cover many misconceptions about Christie. Which has been the most pervasive?
People’s dismissal of her mental health issues. We need to believe what women say. Nobody took her seriously when she explained that she had suicidal thoughts when she disappeared in 1926. They said she disappeared to frame her cheating husband for murder. I would like to put this right. Like a lot of other people in the 1920s, after WWI, she had terrible mental health issues: people couldn’t keep the trauma down.
Can you talk about the importance of understanding Christie in a more serious, literary way?
I really take pleasure in trying to bring modern scholarship into my books. For example, I include the work of Alison Light, a fantastic woman who started to take Agatha Christie seriously around 1990. Light’s argument is that Christie’s books, although middlebrow like much woman’s fiction, are modernist in their break with the past and their symbolism. She has Tommy and Tuppence in the 1920s split bills in restaurants. Now, there are loads of academics who study Christie, but she deserves a wider audience that takes her seriously, too.
What surprised you most about Christie’s life?
How involved she was in archeology because of her second husband. You don’t want to say “My wife bought my career,” but that was effectively what happened. Proving that was a wonderful paper chase, and I found killer documents that showed her covering his salary. Then there’s the fact that when I read her letters, I found her surprisingly exuberant and joyful. She enjoyed life, and there are little jokes in her books. She had a buoyancy of spirit. Hers is a story about second chances and redemption.
