III Biographical Aspects

On first sight, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers have very little in common. They both loved music and were talented musicians themselves; and they both wrote detective fiction. Beyond that, a surface study of their respective biographies reveals few similarities. However, their fiction and the close proximity of time in which it was published provides sufficient connection to justify linking the two women in a study. They were, and are, the two most popular women authors of detective fiction.

In her Unpopular Opinions, Sayers once said that an author's work should be judged 50 years after it was written; more than 70 years have passed since the first two novels of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers were published, and their ongoing success both in sales figures and in appreciation designates them as hallmarks of the genre. Whereas many detective novels and short stories equally popular in the 1920s have sunk into obscurity and are known only to the most ardent devotee, Christie and Sayers are still household names. The era of their budding productivity has become known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, and in hindsight if not by contemporary standards, this era was dominated by those two authors and, to a lesser degree, by Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey and Ngaio Marsh.

As the most influential and earliest representation of that ever-growing group of female detective novelists, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers occupy the central place in a study of early women writers in that field. Taken both separately and jointly, they necessarily enlighten the emergence of the female detective author. To some extent, they were products of their time, and their literature, as a reflection of their personalities, is also a product of their time. As I have pointed out above, the significance of their personal development cannot be ignored. In the following, I will therefore summarise the biographical material available on each author. In the next paragraph, I will then compare the two seemingly so different women with regards to their individual and literary development. Finally, the salient points of the chapter are again embedded into the overall inquiry into the factors that enabled these particular women to rise to the height of fame at that particular time writing novels and short stories of that particular genre.

The abundance of biographical material makes it almost impossible to spread attention equally amongst the published works; I have therefore concentrated on extracting quotes only from a limited number of biographies, ascertaining as I went that authors largely agree on the salient points.

1 Agatha Christie (1890-1976)

Agatha May Clarissa Miller was born on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, to Frederick and Clarissa Miller. Her father was an American with a sufficient income from his family's business, so she was essentially brought up to be a middle-class lady. She did not attend school until she was sent to Paris at the age of 16, but was taught by her mother and a number of governesses. Frederick Miller died when his youngest child was eleven, and the family's prosperity diminished somewhat, but her mother, brother and sister were still able to live comfortably. After finishing school, Agatha Miller accompanied her mother on a three-months' trip to Egypt; she was described as an attractive young woman, with plenty of admirers and suitors in the circle of eligible bachelors of Cairo, but since she was "[...] her mother's only comfort and companion [...]"^[1], she took none of the proposals of marriage seriously. She returned to Torquay and lived with her mother, even then using her spare time to write short stories and poems, the latter of which were lyrical enough and won a few prizes, but her efforts seemed to have been undistinguished otherwise. Even so, her first novel, Snow upon the Desert, was sent to Eden Philpotts, a contemporary popular author, who encouraged her and recommended her great feeling for dialogue. Philpotts literary agent, Hughes Massie, though critical of Snow upon the Desert, advised her to "[...] begin another."^[2]

On Christmas Eve 1914, Agatha Miller married Archibald Christie, a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps. They had a daughter, Rosalind, born in 1919. While Captain Christie went to war two days after the wedding, Agatha Christie began working at the Torquay Hospital, first as a nurse and then as the dispenser; it is noted by all her biographers that her work in the hospital's dispensary gave her the accurate knowledge of drugs and poisons that she later used to so much advantage in her detective fiction.

Christie's first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, though published only in 1920, was already written by the end of the war. From 1916 onwards, prompted by her older sister Marjorie, she plotted, outlined and wrote her first attempt at the genre, a novel which was to introduce Hercule Poirot, the Watsonian Hastings and the method of 'the least-likely suspect', thus comprising as early as then almost all the ingredients of her unequalled success. All in all, she was destined to write at least one full novel every year for the rest of her career, sometimes two and a number of short stories, and though her work included five thrillers, her straightforward detective puzzles, classical 'whodunits', were the core of her work. According to the Oxford Companion to English Literature, her "[...] prodigious international success seems due to her matchless ingenuity in contriving plots, sustaining suspense and misdirecting the reader, to her ear for dialogue, and brisk, unsentimental commonsense and humour. Her style is undistinguished and her characterization slight, but sufficient for the exigencies of the form."^[3] This is already obvious in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, where she rules out the most likely subject very early in the novel, thus making him the least likely subject, only to explode his alibi in the end.

She achieved the undoubtedly most successful misdirecting of readers inThe Murder of Roger Ackroyd; in fact, the ingenuity of this novel's plot, conceived as unequalled and brilliant by her admirers and as foul play in the highest degree by her critics, rocketed her then moderate sales and gave her the publicity necessary to launch her career in earnest.

The Murder of Roger Ackroydhit the bookstores in 1926, the same year in which her marriage with Archibald Christie broke up. Following her husbands revelation that he intended to marry someone else and his request for divorce, Agatha Christie vanished "[...] in mysterious circumstances worthy of one of her crime novels."^[4] Her disappearance lasted almost two weeks, and outshone the publicity that The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had reaped. She was found in a hotel in Harrogate, registered under the name of her husband's lover, and no unequivocal explanation was ever produced. It seems most likely that she needed a break from her crumbling marriage, that she "[...] was in a condition of considerable mental turmoil [...]" and "[...] staged her disappearance in such a way as to cause the maximum distress to the man whom she loved and who had caused her such anguish."^[5] He, in the best tradition of detective fiction, was covertly suspected of having murdered his wife; if the assumptions about the reason for her disappearance are correct, this may have given her a certain amount of satisfaction. The most unlikely explanation for her disappearance would be her desire to create publicity. On the one hand, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd provided her with plenty of that, and on the other hand, she was unanimously described as very shy, shunning public appearances and avoiding the spotlight whenever she could. Be that as it may, she resurfaced a fortnight later, and the separation from her husband went through.

Christie's divorce did not interrupt her writing career for very long; in 1929, another thriller, The Seven Dials Mystery, was published, and from then on, every year saw at least one of her novels hitting the bookstores. With The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, her name had become familiar enough to make every single one of them a financial success, though few are as ingenuous as this. In 1930, two people entered Agatha Christie's life; she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 14 years younger than she was and determined to marry her. And, in The Murder at the Vicarage, she introduced her readers to Miss Jane Marple, who is "[...] inquisitive, has a good memory, a rather sour opinion of human nature (though she would deny this) and a habit of solving problems by analogy."^[6] Even though Miss Marple features in only twelve full-length novels and thus always takes second place to Poirot's eminence, she is better remembered than the limited amount of her cases suggest, for she is almost as popular as Poirot, maybe even more so. She is definitely more human, and apparently easier to cast on celluloid; or rather, when choosing an actor to play her role, there is a tendency to ignore her physical description, that is even more pronounced than the disregard Poirot's portayal suffers.

Through her marriage to an archaeologist, Christie became a traveller. She had always been fascinated by foreign countries, and now she accompanied Mallowan on his expeditions and gathered a lot of local colour for novels such as Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, two Poirot mysteries,orThey Came to Baghdad, one of Christie's few thrillers. The union was apparently a very happy one, and Mallowan was enough of a celebrity in his own field not to envy his wife's success; he was, after all, a fellow of All Souls, a Professor Emeritus of Western Asiatic Archaeology at the University of London, a Trustee of the British Museum and a knight of the United Kingdom.^[7] He accompanied her on opening nights and anniversaries of The Mousetrap, and when he died in 1978, two and a half years later than his wife, he was buried next to her.

Christie's productivity did not cease until the age of 82, four years before her death on January 12, 1976. By then, the body of her works had reached a staggering amount of 83 novels, short story compilations and plays. It has been translated into 103 languages, and a curious statistical information instructs us that almost half of all the passengers travelling on United Airlines carry an Agatha Christie novel.^[8] By 1977, the number of hardcover versions of her novels sold in the United States since 1923 had reached 48 million, and the number paperback issues exceeds this manifold.^[9] Her novels were the alleged favourites of Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Queen Mother, and in 1956, her career reached one of its peaks when she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She died as the undisputed First Lady of Crime, and there is no indication that this title might be successfully challenged in the foreseeable future.

In some respects, Christie's life was a very conventional one. She was raised as a middle-class woman typical of her time. Though her older sister profited from her mother's enthusiasm for education for girls and went to what was later known as Roedean High School in Brighton, Agatha Miller never had any formal education. Her mother had changed her mind and decided that no child "[...] ought to be allowed to read until it was eight years old."^[10] Christie learnt to read when she was five, but only through her own effort. In time, she also learnt to write, and her father taught her basic arithmetics. All in all, Christie grew up as though academic openings for women were still non-existent. Her musical talent was very much advanced, and at one time she contemplated a career as a professional singer, but her voice, though fine, was not strong enough for the stage. An equally considered career as a concert pianist was discouraged on the grounds that her nervous constitution and her shyness would not carry her through the efforts of public performances.^[11]

When the war reached Great Britain in earnest and all its seriousness and severity became apparent, Christie joined the throng of women who went into voluntary nursing, and eventually worked in a hospital dispensary. This was her only excursion into regular wage labour, and since nursing is a traditionally feminine sphere of employment, her experience is in no way unusual or progressive; working as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in a hospital, even as a dispenser, is very much in keeping with contemporary conventional ideas about women's place in society.

Her private life, too, did not deviate much from the regular. Married at the age of 24, she may have been a little on the older side, but she was never in danger to suffer that dreaded fate of being an old maid. The marriage, through little fault of her own, lasted only twelve years, and when she married again, her husband was 14 years her junior. The discrepancy of age caused her to hesitate before accepting his proposal, and it was perhaps only her own standing as a well-known author as well as her 40 years of experience that helped her overcome her doubts. It is certain, anyway, that she resented the allusion that her age was the main attraction to Mallowan, and she certainly never quipped that 'the older the body, the more attractive it becomes to an archaeologist.'^[12]

Yet this conventional middle-class lady was, and still is, one of the best-selling authors of detective fiction world-wide. Her novels have been translated into more languages than Shakespeare's dramas, her plays and the movies based on her works are box-office hits. It is difficult to imagine any show that will outrun The Mousetrap, a play continually filling theatres in London's West End since 1952. She is universally acknowledged as "the First Lady of Crime". Her success, at least, is anything but conventional.

^[1] Osborne, Charles The Life and Crimes of Agatha Christie, London, 1982, p. 9

^[2] ibid., p. 10

^[3] The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 5th Edition, Oxford, 1985, p. 196

^[4] Osborne, op. cit., p. 38

^[5] ibid., p. 42

^[6] ibid., p. 53

^[7] cf. Gilbert, Michael 'A Very English Lady' in Keating, H.R.F. (ed.) Agatha Christie: First Lady of Crime, London, 1977, p. 62

^[8] Lathen, Emma 'Cornwallis's Revenge' in Keating, op. cit., p. 82

^[9] ibid., p. 81

^[10] Christie, Agatha An Autobiography, Glasgow, 1978, p. 24

^[11] Gilbert, Michael, op. cit., p. 51

^[12] cf. Ramsey, G.C. Agatha Christie: Misstress of Mysteries, London, 1968, p. 30