![Agatha Christie with her daughter, Rosalind](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2018/05/08/rexfeatures_5850859ep_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq6Jg7R_naOrnE53pZVeRvnAACm4Qb5v_g4idM5pXBETY.jpg?imwidth=680)
Affairs, betrayal and contemplating suicide... The devastating real story behind Agatha Christie's novels
![Agatha Christie with her daughter, Rosalind](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2018/05/08/rexfeatures_5850859ep_trans_NvBQzQNjv4Bq6Jg7R_naOrnE53pZVeRvnAACm4Qb5v_g4idM5pXBETY.jpg?imwidth=680)
I lifted the lid from the old cardboard box and sorted through the faded papers until I came to the file I was looking for: Agatha Christie’s divorce records. The documents, many of them handwritten in black ink and held at the National Archives in Kew, outline the basic chronology of the ‘Christie vs Christie’ case, which was finalised in 1928, exactly 90 years ago.
These papers provide background information such as the date – Christmas Eve 1914 – when Agatha Miller married Archibald Christie; the birth of their only child, a daughter Rosalind, in 1919; and the addresses of both petitioner and respondent. At the time the divorce was filed, Christie was living in her home town of Torquay, Devon, while Archie, a businessman and former pilot, resided at the Royal Air Force Club on Piccadilly, London.
Although the documents state that he frequently committed adultery, the name of his lover is not mentioned (as was customary with many divorce cases of the time) and instead the petition maintained that: ‘On the 18th and/or 19th and/or 20th November 1927 at the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria SW, the said Archibald Christie committed adultery with a woman whose name is unknown to your petitioner.’
Yet the dusty papers give no indication of the extraordinary drama that lay behind the marriage – or how it contributed to making Christie the bestselling novelist in history.
![Christie with her first husband, Archie, in 1919. When he revealed his affair with a younger woman in 1926, she said ‘my happy life ended’](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2018/05/08/BTJXG4_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqXXgfRvqK2jo0JCXX972iM5DCZvzgx0Lxi1XEF2nfZbM.jpg?imwidth=350)
In December 1926 – shortly after Archie declared that he wanted a divorce in order to marry his younger mistress, Nancy Neele – Christie disappeared. The facts of her disappearance are well known: the then 36-year-old writer’s car was found abandoned at an isolated beauty spot in Surrey; 15,000 volunteers, bloodhounds and aeroplanes searched for clues; and police suspected Archie had murdered his wife. But 10 days later, she turned up at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, after registering under the surname of her husband’s mistress.
The story made headlines around the world at the time; and fascination with Christie shows no sign of abating today. The sales of her 66 detective novels stand at around two billion and, more than 40 years after her death in 1976, new adaptations of her books continue apace.
After the recent BBC adaptation by screenwriter Sarah Phelps of Ordeal by Innocence, at Christmas we will see her dark reworking of The ABC Murders; and next year Kenneth Branagh returns with a star-studded feature-film treatment of Death on the Nile. Next week Sky Arts reinterprets the events of 1926 as a comedy in its series Urban Myths, with Anna Maxwell Martin playing the missing novelist.
There was, however, nothing remotely amusing about Christie’s experience, and the year 1926 was one of the lowest in her life. The death of her mother, Clara, in April robbed her of her best friend and brought on a crisis of identity.
Christie's identity crisis
One day, Christie later recalled, she was sorting through her mother’s belongings at the family home of Ashfield, Torquay, when she began to lose sense of who she was; she signed a cheque with the name of a character from a William Thackeray novel.
Later that year, when Archie travelled down to Torquay from London to celebrate Rosalind’s seventh birthday, Christie intuited that his feelings for her had changed. Finally, he told her that he wanted a divorce and had met a beautiful brunette who was 10 years younger than her. ‘I suppose, with those words, that part of my life – my happy, successful, confident life – ended,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘It was not as quick as that, of course – because I couldn’t believe it.’
The couple tried to patch up their differences for the sake of their daughter, but Archie, who Christie depicts in her autobiography as a supremely selfish man, could not sacrifice the chance of finding happiness with his new lover, whom he went on to marry in 1928. ‘I did tell you once, long ago,’ he said to Agatha, ‘that I hate it when people are ill or unhappy – it spoils everything for me.’
In Unfinished Portrait, a semi-fictional portrait of her marriage breakdown, which Christie wrote in 1934 under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, the character representing Archie is depicted not only as a coward but as a potential murderer. Celia (the Agatha figure) is so afraid that her husband Dermot (Archie) is going to poison her that she takes the precaution of locking up a packet of weedkiller that she finds in the garden shed. ‘He wished her dead,’ Christie writes in the novel. ‘He must wish her dead, otherwise she wouldn’t be so afraid.’
The mysterious case of the vanishing novelist
When Christie disappeared in December 1926, one of the lines of enquiry pursued by the Surrey police was the suspicion that Archie had killed his wife so that he would be free to marry his mistress. After the writer was found at the hotel in Harrogate – now the scene of a crime-writing festival, held each year in July – psychiatrists determined that she had suffered a serious episode of amnesia.
A number of contemporary witnesses who gave accounts to the police and the newspapers at the time said they saw her at the hotel, singing, dancing and playing billiards, while she introduced herself to fellow guests as a woman from South Africa who had lost a baby. Yet the question of why she disappeared from her Berkshire home remains a mystery.
Over the years, theories have included a diagnosis of dissociative fugue state (a psychiatric condition involving loss of identity, often brought on by trauma), while one writer alleges that Christie planned the whole episode to win back her husband’s love. Had this been her motive, the mission was a failure: Archie was appalled by the ensuing scandal, which made him more determined to leave her.
![A newspaper article reporting Christie’s disappearance](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2018/05/08/GettyImages-3163089_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqMgwi8xs1_L2Pvkt7g0nU4yEpLDX-WiMruTlK1ihj_Xc.jpg?imwidth=350)
Some critics even alleged that, at the time, Christie had staged her disappearance in order to boost her public profile; by this point she had published only six novels, though one of them was the groundbreaking The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, earlier in 1926. ‘That success, in part, was why her disappearance received so much attention,’ wrote Joan Acocella in 2010 in The New Yorker. ‘Conversely, her disappearance, with its interesting link to detective fiction, made her a celebrity.’
In A Talent for Murder, the first of my novels in a series featuring Agatha Christie, I outline a fictional reimagining of her disappearance. But in reality, I believe that she experienced a deep psychological crisis that pushed her to the point where she contemplated suicide. I suspect that she drove away from her house in Sunningdale with the intention of killing herself, but at the last minute she decided she could not go through with it. Not only was Agatha a Christian, for whom suicide was a sin, but she realised that the news would devastate others, particularly her daughter and sister.
Christie later refused to talk about the events of her disappearance and the 560-page autobiography published after her death does not contain a single detail about the episode. She sums up the experience as such: ‘So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it.’
Instead, much of Christie’s autobiography focuses on her happy childhood in the seaside town of Torquay, which was fashionable among the wealthy at the time.
Becoming a bestselling writer
She was born in 1890, the third and youngest child of an American father, Frederick Miller, and an English mother, Clara, who entertained writers such as Henry James and Rudyard Kipling in their home. Although her siblings were educated privately – her sister at a school that later became Roedean and her brother at Harrow – Christie was for the most part raised at home.
She was a highly imaginative and sensitive child, always making up stories; though her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was the product of a bet with her elder sister Madge who declared Christie too stupid to write a detective novel.
The resulting book, published in 1920 when Christie was 30, is the first featuring her retired Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Success was not immediate and the novel netted her just £25, at a time when Archie was earning £500 a year. However, four years later she was paid the equivalent of her husband’s annual salary for the serialisation rights to The Man in the Brown Suit, which enabled her to buy a car of her own, the beloved Morris Cowley that she drove the night she disappeared.
By the time she began divorce proceedings at the High Court of Justice in December 1927, Christie had realised that, with no husband to support her, she would have to earn her own living. She was under contract to deliver a novel and, although she did not feel in the mood to write, she knew she had no choice.
In January 1927, together with Rosalind and her secretary Carlo Fisher, Christie sailed on the SS Gelria bound for the Canary Islands and while staying at the glamorous Taoro Hotel in Tenerife, then an upmarket winter destination, she forced herself to finish the novel The Mystery of the Blue Train. ‘That was the moment when I changed from being an amateur to a professional,’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you are writing and aren’t writing particularly well.’
The resulting novel, published in 1928, was one of her least favourites; she often wondered how ‘that wretched book ever came to be written’.
When I read this sentence in Christie’s autobiography my imagination began to work. What else could Agatha have been doing in Tenerife? At the end of A Talent for Murder, my fictional Christie mulls over an offer from the Secret Intelligence Service to travel to the Canary Islands.
In my second book, A Different Kind of Evil, Christie investigates the discovery of the partly mummified body of a British secret agent. Although I’ve created a fictional universe for Agatha, I grounded the novels in reality and each book in the series is set in a real place visited by Christie. I also explore the fall-out from her divorce.
Life after Christie's divorce
At this time, stigma still surrounded the dissolution of marriage. Christie had grown up with a deep faith and from the moment her divorce was finalised in October 1928, she did not take communion in church.
Rosalind seemed to accept her parents’ split with equanimity – ‘I know Daddy likes me, and would like to be with me,’ she once told her mother. ‘It’s you he doesn’t seem to like.’ But later when Rosalind was presented at court as a debutante, Christie was not allowed to accompany her because she was a divorcee.
Nonetheless, the split from Archie also proved creatively inspiring, requiring her to write more books and prompting her to explore new horizons. In fact, it’s arguable that without the divorce Christie would not have gone on to become the bestselling novelist of all time.
Although she had been around a good deal of the world with Archie back in 1922, when he worked as financial adviser to the British Empire Exhibition, now she felt at a crossroads. ‘I should find out now what kind of person I was – whether I had become entirely dependent on other people as I feared,’ she said.
In the autumn of 1928, aged 38, she journeyed alone on the Orient Express to Damascus, and then on to Baghdad. From there she went south to the ancient Mesopotamian city of Ur, site of a famous archaeological dig, where in 1930 she would meet her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was 14 years her junior.
![With second husband Max Mallowan, 1956](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2018/05/08/GettyImages-492770612_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqwRnwQ0KgCqCTKamrqQKaYgsIcagKWDTsYii0WZbrxoU.jpg?imwidth=350)
The marriage was a happy one and each winter Christie would accompany Max on his digs to the Near East. Christie used her growing wealth to buy houses – at one stage she owned eight properties, including a house in Kensington and a magnificent Georgian country estate, Greenway, overlooking the river Dart in Devon, which she used for holidays for the rest of her life.
The split from Archie also affected her work: although Christie had explored the concept of evil lurking under a surface sheen of respectability in her early books, it was the brutal experience of her divorce that provided some of the power and plots of her greatest novels. In the aftermath of the divorce, she published many of her most popular titles, including The Murder at the Vicarage, Peril at End House and Murder on the Orient Express.
During one of Christie’s lowest moments, when her handsome first husband told her that he wanted to leave her, she later said that she came to the realisation that he was not what he seemed. An old childhood nightmare came back to haunt her, a sense that a malign presence had stolen into the body of someone close to her. ‘He went through the motions of ordinary greetings, but he was, quite simply, not Archie,’ she wrote.
The same sentiment is expressed by Celia, the heroine in her novel Unfinished Portrait. Of this character – a woman whose husband leaves her for another woman, and who then goes on to contemplate suicide – Christie’s second husband Max Mallowan said that in her ‘we have more nearly than anywhere else a portrait of Agatha’.
Towards the end of Unfinished Portrait, with Christie writing as Westmacott (a pseudonym that was not exposed until 1949), she says through the guise of Celia, ‘Nobody can hurt you except a husband – nobody’s near enough’. If her husband was treacherous, then ‘anyone could be treacherous. The world itself became unsure. I couldn’t trust anyone or anything any more.’ No doubt Christie felt the same.
A Talent for Murder is out now in paperback, £8.99; A Different Kind of Evil is out in hardback on 31 May, £14.99. Both are published by Simon & Schuster