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It was not a predictable match.

In 1981 Agatha Christie’s daughter Rosalind, Mrs Anthony Hicks, was at last persuaded to allow Collins, publisher of her mother’s books, to commission a biography, its author to have unrestricted access to family archives. For years, Mrs Hicks had resisted this; like her mother, she believed that a writer’s work should stand by itself, the context of and motives for its production being irrelevant to readers’ enjoyment. As for her mother, for Rosalind private life was precious; once breached, all she valued would become the public’s property.

In the case of so well and worldwide-known an author as Agatha Christie, a brand (shudders from Rosalind), it was admittedly unrealistic to hope that the drawbridge would never be lowered. Agatha Christie was after all the writer so famous that her first book for Collins, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, had been chosen in 1934, with As You Like It and The Gospels, as the first Talking Book produced in Britain for blind people. At some future time, an emissary would have to be given entrance. But would that be Mrs Hicks’ decision or one bequeathed to her son, Mathew Prichard, Agatha’s only grandchild?

Mrs Hicks understood the contract between Agatha Christie and her readers. Appreciating the comfort which financial security had given her, she saw it as her duty to protect the integrity of her mother’s work, spending hours in correspondence with agents and publishers, in checking proofs, appraising covers, scripts for film, television, radio, correcting slips in reviews. Rights brought responsibilities. She refused to engage in crude forms of commercial exploitation – invitations, for instance, to endorse the manufacture of teacups with Poirot moustaches – but an occasional celebration was allowed. (A memorable Nicaraguan commemorative postage stamp depicted little grey cells spilling from Hercule Poirot’s head.) The ultimate invasion, an Authorised Life, was strenuously repelled.

What led Mrs Hicks to change her mind? In 1979 a bomb was hurled through the defences. Sapping and mining had been underway for years via often dotty speculative biographies, focusing on the episode in December 1926 when Mrs Christie had vanished from her home in Surrey. As Agatha wrote years later in her Autobiography, she was exhausted after the death of her mother and ensuing house-clearing, and distressed by her husband Archie’s admission that he loved someone else. Her flight, to which she did not allude, was an escape. Thirteen days later, at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, Agatha was identified by her husband.

The story was now worked into a clever, if tasteless, film script, Agatha, written by Kathleen Tynan. The film’s plot, derived from sensational newspaper reports in 1926, was that Mrs Christie had arranged her disappearance in order to engineer a charge of murder. The film proposed that Agatha intended to kill herself in such a way as to make Miss Neele, the woman Archie loved and later married, the chief suspect for Agatha’s murder. In those days, if convicted, Miss Neele would have been hanged. This confection – foggy moors, helmeted policemen, steam engines, a grand spa hotel, pearl necklaces, cloche hats, reporters shouting telegrams, and, triumphantly, Vanessa Redgrave as Agatha and Dustin Hoffman her saviour – made a successful entertainment. So successful that, the family feared, people would come to believe it¹. Rosalind’s objections went further. She believed in treating people fairly and was angry at this mockery of her mother, who had evidently been at her most vulnerable, by hard and careless people. Rosalind applied for an injunction. It was refused. Agatha Christie had died in 1976. The family was reminded, ‘You can’t libel the dead.’

The challenge now was to defend Agatha’s reputation, not as a writer but as a human being. But what had happened in December 1926? In her Autobiography, written in the 1950s and ’60s, Agatha herself had not chosen to – indeed, even after help from psychiatrists, had been unable to – unravel the story, so Rosalind would have to investigate it herself. This was daunting, especially since so much time had passed. Rosalind had been seven years old when her mother had left the house in the winter night, when the house had filled with policemen, the garden with press, curious crowds pushing against the gates, the servants scared, her father haunted. For fifty years there had been no explanation. She did and did not wish to know. The living are as vulnerable as the dead.

Rosalind could not do this herself. She needed an outsider, someone at a distance. I don’t know who suggested me. I suspect that it was Rosalind’s husband, the kind, scholarly, amusing Anthony Hicks. He knew my tone of voice, having seen pieces I’d written in the TLS, and, I believe crucially, had understood the role I had acquired in being asked to edit the Diaries of the former Cabinet Minister, Richard Crossman, a voracious observer and vivid journalist. The diaries, at mazy length, had originally been dictated, and while he lived, Crossman himself clipped and sorted the first volume for publication. As well as providing essential editorial apparatus, my task was to assess the truthfulness of his tidied up version not so much as to the events and people he was describing but to the impressions he had recorded messily at the time. For later volumes, prepared for publication after Crossman’s death, both responsibilities had fallen to me.

An unexpected match. There was surprise and in some quarters irritation that this sought-after commission should be entrusted to a writer with experience neither of biography nor detective fiction. Looking back, I think that what Agatha’s family were hoping for was simply to find someone to assemble and assess evidence and apply judgement, as an apprehensive patient or litigant might put their case to a medical or legal specialist.

I was interested because I thought that writing a biography would be difficult. Trying to absorb and reflect a life. Understanding not just what I would be told, but why. Steering a course among strong currents. I remembered the ominous words of Philip Williams, biographer of Hugh Gaitskell: ‘Wait till the widow is dead.’ Here, a daughter was very much alive. Stipulations could to be made about non-interference with what I was to publish but an inclination to shape certain passages would surely be irresistible. It is significant that, when Rosalind agreed to an Authorised Life, she was much the same age as her mother had been when she decided to write her Autobiography. That was to be Agatha’s own life as she saw it, anticipating versions with which she might not agree, which she might find ridiculous.

What I hadn’t realised was the pervasive obsession that a large number of people had with this matter of Agatha Christie’s disappearance. As a child, I had read her detective stories in green-striped Penguin Crime paperbacks (and had preferred Michael Innes) and, before meeting her family at Greenway in Devon to discuss this biographical proposition, I had galloped through a selection of her novels and read her Autobiography, but I had no idea that at every turn I should expect this sinkhole, The Disappearance. I have begun here by alluding to it not to inflate its importance but, first, to explain what prompted Mrs Hicks to authorise and Collins to commission a biography, and, second, to suggest that in the broad sweep of Agatha Christie’s life this affair was relatively insignificant.

This biography described what took place in December 1926 and its aftermath, in as thorough a reconstruction as I was able to provide. Rosalind’s friends and family warned me not to explore the subject with her until I knew all I wanted to ask. ‘She will talk about it only once.’ This was not the case. On my second visit, and first long stay, at Greenway, Rosalind pulled from her handbag an account of those events written as a letter by her mother’s secretary-companion Carlo. Tea was on the table, beyond it, a fire, worryingly, burnt brilliantly. Anxious lest I should never see the letter again, I read it with what I hoped was the appropriate mixture of interest and nonchalance, and put it in my pocket.

Months later, I was ready to address this period in Agatha’s life, following her from Surrey to Yorkshire, putting what happened to her in the context of what came before and afterwards. As this biography describes, people who had been present at the time, including some at the Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate, now felt able to talk about what they remembered. Persistent myths were exposed, notably Mrs Christie’s alleged reply to a reporter who accosted her on the staircase: ‘You are Agatha Christie.’ ‘Yes, but I’ve lost my memory.’ When I was writing this biography, I was shown an uncut draft of that reporter’s own memoir, in which he admitted that he’d invented the exchange.

A fake scoop, making Agatha’s whole adventure seem to have been a fake. Today, oddly, Agatha’s purported reply sounds more genuine. During the past half century, as neuro-science has developed with the support of advanced imaging technology, we have learnt more about the work of memory and the brain. Agatha’s condition sounds like Transient Global Amnesia, an isolated episode, in which the person affected becomes disorientated but remains alert, capable of general understanding and management of themselves: how to catch a train, book in to an hotel. No new memories are made of what must afterwards be a frightening blank, but afterwards those who have experienced it will remember who they are and recognise people in their circle. Nowadays the fictitious exchange with the reporter could have been a diagnosis.

Agatha herself tried for years to discover what had happened to her. This biography explores her return, in detective stories and in the novels she published as ‘Mary Westmacott’, to the subject of remembering and forgetting. As she aged, she became more detached about that unhappy time. I believe that, liking to be technically up to date, she would have found current neuro-scientific research dazzling and engaging. I hoped, when my account of Agatha’s disappearance was first published, that it would be understood for what it was: an extreme reaction to prolonged physical and emotional stress, a shock, a flight. Agatha’s family and friends understood it thus, and were relieved. I had too much faith in reason. Others continue to write nonsense about the Agatha Christie Mystery of 1926 but, then, romance generally trumps a rational explanation.

Let us put that early drama into proportion. More than half of Agatha’s long life was still to be lived. Other challenges were ahead – the war, absence and loss of people she loved, serious financial uncertainty – and the eventual satisfaction of having surmounted them. Chief among the surprises was her second marriage to the archaeologist, Max Mallowan. A scholar and a hands-on field-worker, fifteen years younger than Agatha, he guided her into a rich and fascinating world. Their work in the Near East in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s was Agatha’s first real partnership, their camp life in the desert the opening for her to make an entirely different home.

New settings, spare landscapes and clear skies, crisp seasons, domestic privations (which she became skilful at overcoming), sharpened her energy and her wits. Her journeys during those years between England and Iraq, Syria, Turkey, gave sparkling material for two of her most picturesque stories, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, She had fun with new characters, like the domineering wives of expedition leaders, a category into which she herself never fell, whose tyranny towards young male archaeologists Agatha had observed when she first met Max. Speculation about ancient civilisations led her to try new themes, Murder in Mespotamia, for example, and her play Akhnaton. In these years a gaiety about Agatha, an amused delight in life, fizzes to the surface and for the next half-century carries her through.

It was only in 1999 with the appearance of Charlotte Trümpler’s magnificent exhibition, Agatha Christie, Max Mallowan and the Near East, that I recognised the extent and significance of Agatha’s contribution to Near Eastern archaeological exploration². Detection its evident theme, the exhibition’s title lured the larger public; its content was irresistible: evocative sound and film, photographs of Agatha in flowing skirts, floppy hat and stout boots plodding through the sand, of Max allocating bonuses to queuing labourers, of camels, tented camps, sunsets, and excavated hoards. A carriage from the Compagnie des Wagons-Lits, as from the Orient Express, was lifted by the British Museum (their idea) into the courtyard.

Imaginative and innovative but in no way frivolous, the exhibition and its catalogue memorably illustrated the work of Mallowan’s expeditions over successive seasons. It was known that Agatha’s household management had made the Mallowans’ camps happy and productive, that her earnings had helped fund the expeditions, and, later, endowed a chair in Near Eastern archaeology at the University of London. Her part in the conservation, recording and presentation of finds had not been acknowledged. Now we can appreciate how much she did: delicate work cleaning clay tablets and, special treasures, the Nimrud Ivories, learning how best to display and photograph them

Come, Tell Me How You Live, her recollection of those years, describes a world Agatha grew to love. Seventy years later, the places she describes – Aleppo, Raqqua, Nimrud, Mosul, Palmyra – have been violated, their people dispersed and worse, artefacts and archives pilfered, monuments destroyed. The Mallowans would have found this horrific. They loved the people of Iraq and Syria and their work at those sites was as important as, at home, Agatha’s books and plays. In some respects, Come, Tell Me How You Live seems uncomfortably light-hearted. Here and there, Agatha’s observations about religious and cultural difference sound superficial compared with the infinite, nuanced complexities of which we have become increasingly aware. We have to remind ourselves that she wrote the book for Max, a present when he came back from the war, a nostalgic memoir, a picture of expedition life that is essentially domestic.

As was Agatha herself. Her interest was in houses, their fabric and furnishings (a wooden lavatory seat was indispensable), provision of supplies and transport, selection of clothing and, sustaining all, the preparation and consumption of food and drink: Come, Tell Me How You Live. Against this background she describes what might be daily life in any large house: tensions among her husband’s team, servants’ rivalries and quarrels, the locals’ rapacities, imbalances suddenly injected by arrivals from the world outside. Famous for comfort and ingenious contrivance, the Mallowans’ camps were Agatha’s household. Come, Tell Me How You Live is, from one who wrote much about death, a joyful book about Living.

Agatha enjoyed good things: books, music, the theatre, pictures, conversation, houses and gardens, outings, her family and friends, delicious things to eat. A wise, civilised manner of life, suffused with humour, generosity and good temper, achieved with effort. I used to think that Agatha Christie was strange, manipulative, fertile in thinking of ways to murder and trick. With older eyes, I realise that this verdict was too severe. Ultra-professional, honest about what she had found she could do, she gratefully did it, to earn her living and keep herself and her readers entertained. As Max used to say: ‘The world is full of two kinds of people, ladies and gentlemen, and both work until they drop.’ The language is dated but, in Agatha’s case, his description is true.

Janet Morgan

April 2017

¹A letter by Ted Hughes about Sylvia Plath, published in the TLS of 24 April 1992, reprinted 6 January 2017, describes similar anguish and his frustration at the failure of, in this case, an academic even to imagine the consequences of self-indulgent theorising.

²First exhibited at the Rurhlandsmuseum, Essen. Agatha Christie und der Orient. Kriminalistik und Archäologie, Scherz Verlag, (Bern), 1999; Agatha Christie and Archaeology, The British Museum Company Ltd, (London), 2001.