The OTHER Mysterious Affair at Styles

This episode takes a deep dive into the life of Agatha Christie, the most widely read author of fiction in history. By listening, you'll find out which of her most famous characters she hated with a passion, how she started on her path of detective novel-writing, and the mystery that surrounds a two week period in her life in December 1926. 

Curious? Have about thirteen minutes? LISTEN TO THE EPISODE!

Audio mixing done by Craig Murdock, who to this day, remains an absolute delight!

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Transcript

1.      Its one of the main questions asked of many writers whenever they are in an interview. What exactly made them want to become a writer? 

2.      For some writers, the call to put words to a page was great enough that they say they’d be doing it even if they made no money at it whatsoever. 

3.      Others may have started it as a hobby, but found that they had a gift, and took a chance at sending in a manuscript. 

4.      But most tend towards simply banging their heads on the wall of the established publishing industry, writing and bringing their manuscripts to publisher after publisher until one finally takes a chance on an unknown writer and says yes. 

5.      Nobody is immune to this kind of inauspicious start, even Agatha Christie, the most widely read author of fiction in history, and playwright of the longest-consistently running play in in the West End in London. 

6.      What makes the degree of her success all the more impressive is that Christie became this popular through not one, but two beloved characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and that she did so using arguably one of the more difficult genres to write in: the murder mystery. 

7.      Because for a proper murder mystery, not only do you have to bring in memorable characters, a plot that people are willing to follow, and an interesting setting, 

8.      but driving it all has to be the murder, simple enough that suspects are abound, but complex enough that it will take the entire book to solve. 

9.      It is a very difficult tightrope to walk, but Agatha Christie did it sixty-six times over her literary career. 

10.  However, there is one mystery surrounding Agatha Christie that remains unsolved even to this day. On the night of December 3rd, 1926, after an argument with her then-husband, Agatha Christie vanished off the face of the earth. 

11.  Her car was found the next day parked by a quarry, with clothes packed in a suitcase inside. Her disappearance became an international story, appearing on the front page of the New York Times. 

12.  Rewards were offered for any information leading to Christie being found, and one of the largest manhunts in British history were unable to find any trace of her. 

13.  In fact, no new information surfaced until ten days later, when Christie herself was located in a hotel, checked in under an assumed name in Harrogate, Yorkshire, almost 200 miles north of where she disappeared from. 

14.  This incident was never mentioned in her autobiography, and even the people who wrote her biographies are split as to the reason and what exactly happened over those ten missing days. 

15.  I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and this is What?! Explain. 

16.  Agatha Christie started her mystery writing career by a method that seems to be a tradition among authors profiled in What?! Explain. : somebody bet them that they couldn’t do it. 

17.  In Agatha’s case, this was from her older sister Madge, who bet Christie that she couldn’t write a mystery story. However, there was more to it than that.

18.   In fact, the bet was as follows. “Agatha Christie, who has previously never written a book, could not compose a detective novel in which the reader would not be able to spot the murderer, though having access to the same clues as the detective.

19.  Agatha, not wanting to prove her sister correct, took the bet, and work began on writing her first mystery story. 

20.  Trying to figure out the manuscript was also a welcome change from the monotony of working in the hospital dispensary in her hometown of Torquay, England, where she was working during World War 1. 

21.  While working in the dispensary did give her a significant amount of knowledge of medicine, poisons and other lethal concoctions, the day-to-day work was quite boring, so Christie had plenty of time to work the plot of her novel around in her head. 

22.  For this particular story, the plot came to her first, of a soldier in World War 1 coming back from the front after being injured, and being invited to spend his sick leave at his old friend’s stately manor. 

23.  The soldier meets his old friend’s stepmother and new husband, and begins to realize all is not well in these idyllic surroundings. 

24.  The step-mother ends up being poisoned, and the murderer needs to be found. 

25.  Having the general plot figured out, Christie then needed to find the characters that would populate the book, most notably the investigator who would actually solve the mystery. 

26.  The soldier coming back from the front was fleshed out as Captain Arthur Hastings, a character that would show up in many of Christie’s books as a narrator and in-universe chronicler, similar to John Watson in Arthur Conan Doyle’s mysteries. 

27.  Since Christie now had her Watson, she needed a Sherlock Holmes, and she found one, using the inspiration of the Belgian soldiers that came to Torquay off of the front lines of World War 1. 

28.  Their charm and gentility brought about the creation of a diminutive detective, who was both fastidious in nature and observation, who concentrated mostly on the psychological aspects of the murder, rather than the physical clues. 

29.  The most important aspect of this character was the magnificent mustache that would be a trademark of the former Belgian police officer turned private detective: Hercule Poirot.

30.  The manuscript for Christie’s first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, was completed in 1916, but it wasn’t published until 1920, four years later. 

31.  This was primarily due to the difficulty Christie had in getting a publisher for the work, as very few publishers were willing to take a chance on an unpublished writer who had only written poetry and short stories beforehand. 

32.  “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” was successful enough that it even warranted a review in the New York Times, which raved “Though this may be the first published book of Miss Agatha Christie, she betrays the cunning of an old hand.”. 

33.  Christie didn’t stop there, averaging one book a year for the first decade of her publishing career, and then accelerating after that, sometimes publishing three in a single year. 

34.  By and large, all of Agatha Christie’s mysteries are wrapped up in the last chapter. All factors were explained, the murderer was caught, and the detective goes off into the sunset, ready for the next case. 

35.  However, this wasn’t the situation for the one time where the quiet and retiring Christie was the topic of headlines herself in December of 1926. 

36.  In August of that year, her then-husband Archie Christie had asked Agatha for a divorce. He had fallen in love with another woman, and wanted to be free to marry her. 

37.  Agatha was taken aback by this, and refused Archie’s request. 

38.  The pair continued to live together, albeit in very grim conditions until December 3rd, 1926, when the two quarrelled over Archie’s wanting to spend a weekend with his friends without Agatha. 

39.  She ended up packing the car and driving away herself into the night. The car was found the next day, abandoned, and with the suitcase full of Christie’s clothes still inside. 

40.  Given that Christie had gained some fame for the six novels that she had published at this point, her disappearance in such a dramatic method generated much public attention. 

41.  The high-profile case was on the front page of newspapers all over the United Kingdom, to the extent that one publisher offered a 100 pound reward (close to $12,000 CDN today) for any actionable information about where Agatha Christie had disappeared to. 

42.  The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom was pressuring the police for results, and one of the largest search parties in British history, consisting of over a thousand police officers, 15,000 civilian volunteers, and several airplanes combed the area where she disappeared.

43.   However, no trace of her was ever found in the area, and the search was called off. 

44.  In fact, Christie wasn’t found until a week and a half later, checked into a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire under an assumed name. 

45.  Irony of ironies, the last name she used was the same name as the woman Archie was trying to leave her in order to marry. 

46.  Christie herself claims absolutely no recollection of the events of those eleven days, they are not mentioned in her autobiography in any format, and the two doctors who examined her both agreed that she had suffered some sort of “unquestionable genuine loss of memory”, 

47.  but how she managed to both disappear for so long, and end up that far north away from the place she originally disappeared from is still a matter of debate to this day. 

48.  The more charitable view of some people was that Christie had disappeared during a fugue state, which is defined as a sudden unexpected travel away from home or one’s place of work, with an inability to recall one’s identity or past. 

49.  The less charitable, and the one that the public seemed to share at the time, was that Christie was trying to embarrass or even frame her husband for murder by planning this event and disappearing, or that it was just a publicity stunt to give herself free advertising.

50.  The day after Christie was found in Harrogate, she left for her sister’s residence, where she stayed sequestered from the world for a few weeks, until she travelled with her daughter and secretary to the Canary Islands to recuperate. 

51.  This period of time only slowed her productivity slightly, as she wrote consistently from the date of her first publication in 1920, until her death in 1976. 

52.  The Hercule Poirot novels, particularly Death on the Nile, and Murder on the Orient Express, were fan favorites, and there was always a demand for more stories starring the peculiar Belgian detective. 

53.  However, much like Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes, the person least enamored with Poirot was his creator. 

54.  In 1930, Christie was quoted as finding Poirot “insufferable” and thirty years later, expanded on that statement, saying that he was a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. 

55.  She kept producing Poirot mysteries because the public liked him, and she felt that it was her duty to give the public what they wanted.

56.  She may have been able to keep that philosophical point of view because, unlike Conan Doyle, she had other characters to fall back on, particularly Miss Marple, who she liked a great deal better than the exacting and apparently quite irritating Poirot. 

57.  She did manage to get her revenge on Poirot in the end though, having him die of a heart attack in Curtain, her final Poirot novel ever written.  

58.  In terms of the disappearance of Agatha Christie for eleven days in December 1926, I don’t necessarily believe the people that claim the vanishing act was an attempt to frame her husband for murder.

59.   In April 1926, Agatha’s mother Clarissa, had passed away, and as the two were very close, the loss sent Agatha into a deep depression. 

60.  She threw herself into work for months afterwards, to the point where she ended up having to go to the south of France to recuperate from a breakdown due to overwork in August of 1926, according to British tabloids of the time. 

61.  Now imagine when you’re just coming back from trying to stitch yourself back together mentally from a trip, only for your husband to tell you that he is in love with another woman and wants a divorce so that he can marry her quicker.  

62.  That combination of events is enough to do something to pretty much anyone, and the quarrel in December may have been that last straw. 

63.  It’s unfortunate that this is the thing that Agatha Christie is known for in some circles, because the thing I like about her is that she truly took inspiration from anything she could read, watch, or listen to. 

64.  The inspiration for Poirot came from the Belgian refugees in her hometown, Miss Marple came from some of her grandmother’s friends, and a not-insignificant part of her early work was indebted heavily to Arthur Conan Doyle. 

65.  Christie wasn’t one to just stay shut away and write. She lived a life of what she wanted to do, and used those experiences to make her work all the richer. I kind of like that as an option, myself. 

66.  I’m Braden Thorvaldson, and I’ll talk to you all in a couple weeks.  

67.  Audio mixing for this episode was done by Craig Murdock, who tells me that this tea tastes funny not because it was poisoned, but because I forgot the teabag in there, and it’s been steeping for eight hours.  

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