Hello all. I wrote this because I needed to get it off my chest! I should also say that there is a tiny spoiler at the very end, if you haven’t read or seen an adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. I’ve been lurking in everyone’s blog since I went on holiday here – very much enjoyed the 1949 Club! – and have been bad about commenting, so I’m not expecting anyone to, though of course, lovely if you do.
The most intimidating reading group I ever belonged to involved a collection of academics who read classic texts of psychoanalytic theory together. I can’t remember how I ended up there – probably a general email invitation. Something that made the whole thing sound fun and informative, rather than the most terrifyingly performative point scoring exercise conducted by people far above my pay grade that I had ever had the misfortune to attend. Anyway, at one of these meetings, talk digressed to our favorite childhood reading, which turned out to be either The Odyssey or The Aeneid, there was quite a tussle. While other members of the group competed over the number of times they had reread these riveting books by age eight, I kept very quiet. My favorite author had been Agatha Christie, and the only thing I knew for sure in this company was not to mention it.
Agatha Christie is often scorned as light reading, easy entertainment, not noir and gritty enough for any status in the crime fiction world. But this judgment overlooks how incredibly clever she was. Today, with every possible trick of misdirection now familiar to audiences from the great ocean of crime drama available, it’s easy to forget that she was the first person to come up with them. As an overthinking child it was so beguiling to read these puzzles that I couldn’t solve, and to marvel, when the solutions came, at the clues and connections I had missed. It ought to have been traumatic, but it was deeply pleasurable. Do it again, Agatha! Do it again!
I say she’s often scorned, but Christie remains a huge figure in the crime fiction library, fair game it seems, for modern rewrites, whether they appear on television at Christmas or come in the form of Sophie Hannah’s continuation novels. And now, two recent releases attempt to dig deeper into her ongoing appeal by immersion in the one strange event in Christie’s otherwise blameless life – the eleven days she went missing in 1926.
In some ways her disappearance is straightforward. It came on the back of two harrowing events – the death of her beloved mother, Clara, and the betrayal of her husband, Archie, who chose a day when Agatha was clearing out her mother’s house, half-deranged with grief, to tell her he was leaving her for another, younger, woman. Agatha Christie did not want a divorce and fought hard to keep her marriage. It was never going to work – Archie was one of those impulsive people who are madly stubborn, but in all fairness, he did remain with Nancy Neele until he died. Agatha’s suffering came to a head on the evening of 3rd December 1926, when she packed as if for a short trip and then, a little over a half hour from her home, drove her car off the road at a local beauty spot/wasteland (depending on your point of view) called Newlands Corner. It was found the following morning on the edge of a quarry, doors open, headlights still on, her coat and case on the back seat. Christie had recently published her breakthrough novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and the menacing scenario of this young author’s disappearance caught the imagination of the media and the public. The following eleven days produced an onslaught of conjecture, at the end of which Christie was found in a Harrogate hotel, booked in under the false persona of Theresa Neele from South Africa, who had recently lost a child. The official story was that she had lost her memory, but thwarted by her survival, (in a nice hotel! while everyone had been so worried!) the media and public turned on her. They assumed she had tricked the good will of honest folk in a bid for publicity – or possibly revenge on Archie. Ideally, whichever was the worst interpretation.
Christie rode out the storm by saying nothing about the event and producing a series of brilliant, inhaleable crime novels. Well, in fact she did once say something. She gave an interview to the Daily Mail about 14 months later, describing how grief had provoked her into a suicide attempt that failed; she had hit her head on the steering wheel of the car and entered into a dissociative state and didn’t know herself how she’d ended up in Harrogate under an assumed name. Her testimony made very little impact.
So, this takes us to the books and first up is Laura Thompson’s short biography, Eleven Days. Thompson has written a full biography of Christie (which I read and enjoyed many years ago) and she knows her subject well. This doesn’t prevent her, however, from attempting a number of impossible things. The first is to write a whole book about these eleven days which has something new to say about an event that’s had its bones picked clean over the intervening century. As this book shows, there is very little in the way of reliable evidence to be parsed and it’s all in the public domain already. The second is to bring together all of the material the case generated, every scrap of it, and deal with all the nutty speculation that proliferated, too. The problem with the disappearance story is that it spawned a huge quantity of slightly different iterations – each newspaper managed to mangle the events, the various police reports are contradictory, the family kept a lot of secrets and gave out mismatching accounts, and so on and so forth. This is a set of circumstances that produces a highly complex narrative and whilst Thompson juggles it well, it’s inevitably confusing at points.
The third is Thompson’s desire in one chapter to ‘become Agatha Christie’ by means of a reenactment of the crucial 24 hours from the evening of 3rd December. Up until this point, I felt for Laura Thompson. She’s doing the very best she can – the best perhaps that it’s possible to do – with the unwieldy material in her hands, but here the desire to do something no one has done before clearly took hold of her reason. An accurate reconstruction of the crime (as it were) is impossible, because all the little branch lines from Newlands Corner to Waterloo have closed, and the trains Christie might possibly have taken simply don’t run any more. Thompson then decided that abandoning her own car was out of the question. And so she drove at 9pm to Newlands Corner and had a bit of a walk about in the dark before returning to her very nice hotel to spend a comfortable night. She then drove up to Harrogate the following day for a short stay in the hotel where Christie was found. As a reenactment, this sucks. What exactly is being reenacted here? Thompson doesn’t even take the train to Harrogate, which was surely one of least things she could do. The dramatic tone in which this journey is conveyed sits very uncomfortably with its half-arsed execution.
I really like Laura Thompson as a writer and want to be fair to her, and there are a few little nuggets of insight that she brings to this deep dive into Christie’s disappearance. I very much enjoyed the information about Archie Christie that I hadn’t read before, for instance. But I was disappointed by the book overall and wondered why exactly she had wanted to write it.
The second book is Cathy Rentzenbrink’s The Agatha Christie Cure. In this memoir, Rentzenbrink recounts a low point in her life when she decided to read her way through Christie’s entire works in chronological order, and it’s subtitled ‘What Reading the Queen of Crime Taught Me About Life’. Okay, then. For me it was a book of two halves. At first, it’s Christie-heavy, with Rentzenbrink reading the first six books she published with great attention to detail, and providing a biographical account of Christie’s early years. We learn how Rentzenbrink came to love Agatha’s books and a little bit about her own life, enough to know that her marriage is in trouble and her teenage son, Matt, is going through a rough patch at school. She writes neatly enough to coincide her own divorce with Agatha’s, and then spends a lot of time on the disappearance, which she describes with more engaging fervour than Laura Thompson, in fact.
But then the focus shifts for the rest of the book to Cathy and Matt and their various tribulations. She does manage to mention almost all of Christie’s books, but the attention paid them is scant, not least because it turns out she doesn’t like anything that Christie published after 1945 (another 31 books, with the final non-posthumous publication in 1973). And for me, the book lost all direction, all drive and became very self-indulgent. I think the main problem is that I was not at all clear what Cathy’s problems were. They all centred around her son who I think (in retrospect) disliked school because of his dyslexia, caught long Covid, and went through a phase of school refusal and all the mental health issues that come with it. Not being aware of exactly what was wrong as I was reading meant that I could not get engaged with either Renzenbrink’s misery or her recovery. In an afterword she explains that telling her readers everything was impossible because it wasn’t her story to tell. Well, fine. Then maybe tell me a story that I can hear in its entirety instead. I’m also not at all sure that her son is protected in this narrative. Rentzenbrink makes it clear that she struggles mightily with his problems, must give up her beloved escape to literary festivals to care for him, and that her ‘recovery’ such as it is, is all about learning to love and accept her son just as he is. It’s padded about with tender-sounding sentences, but there’s something beneath the surface that makes me wince.
Once again, the sort of snappy concept that publishers love produces a difficult book to write. It pivots around Agatha Christie! Great – big market for that. The author reads all her books and learns to love life again! Uplifting self-help in predigested form! But really, stop and think about it. Rentzenbrink has to cover 66 crime fiction novels, burdened by a linear chronology that has no meaningful drive to it, and what could a person possibly learn from them? That committing murder is a bad idea? She works hard to incorporate Agatha and settles on a kind of enforced chumminess, returning to her disappearance to write a long monolog in second person – ‘You became famous for the wrong reasons before you were famous for the right reasons… You didn’t want to talk about it but everyone else carried on talking about it…’ – which feels more like she is teaching Christie some things about her life than the other way round: ‘I know you always felt like a failure over the divorce, but can I offer you an alternative view? …. It’s not good for children to live in a dishonest set-up.’ The only way Rentzenbrink knows how to use Christie is to ‘relate’ to her, woman to woman. But Agatha Christie is not particularly good for this kind of activity because nothing much happened in her life outside of the disappearance.
As a woman, Christie was resolutely ordinary. It’s as a writer that she was an epic event. Here’s some things you could legitimately learn from her: the art of concision, with every scene bringing something to the plot. The sense of a powerful purpose underlying the storytelling, which makes the reader trust the narrative and relax into it. The constant surprises asking you to reread everything that’s come before. The psychological insight into fear and anxiety and what unsettles us. The art of textual interpretation from her master readers, the great detectives. And so on and so forth. You can see the Christie toolbox still being plundered in things like The Traitors, admittedly in a sort of manic post-truth way, but the legacy is there. The format is And Then There Were None, the round table is an absurd version of every denouement scene. Miranda Hart role-plays Miss Marple.
I was feeling a little desperate by now to read something that used Agatha Christie and her disappearance in ways that inspired me. The way literature and life are enmeshed in one another is what interests me most about both. And then along came Jenn Ashworth’s brilliant essay collection, Notes Made While Falling. The inciting incident is a botched caesarean section in which Ashworth’s anaesthetic wore off, causing her afterwards, unsurprisingly, severe PTSD. The essays explore trauma structurally – for instance, in the essay that concerns Christie she considers it a form of derailment and as such weaves in and out of train stories, some personal, some literary, reading for resonance, metaphor, association and unexpected analogy.
This takes her to Christie’s most famous novel, Murder on the Orient Express. She notices a tiny detail that most readers overlook: the novel opens with Poirot returning from Syria after an investigation he conducted ends in the suicide of a French soldier. The details are withheld in the novel, but the 2010 television adaptation dramatises the implied moment. Poirot’s denouement is so rock solid that the accused soldier shoots himself through his head while the detective is delivering it, spattering Poirot’s face with blood. Weaving in and out of certain details in the novel, including Poirot’s unusual malaise, his insomnia on the night of the murder, his hallucinatory image of the victim being stabbed while still half-conscious (which strikes Ashworth forcibly in the place of her own memories), she comes to the conclusion that on the Orient Express, Poirot is ‘separated from his better self’. Distressed by the consequences of his powerful deductions, he is unable to make his usual confident denouncement and as such, ‘he provides two options and leaves the suspects themselves to decide. He’s out of his mind, off his head: the good Catholic letting a train of murderers get away with it. What’s wrong with him?’ Well, she points out, ‘Christie knew about the uncanniness of trains: the unhappiness of them.’ With the flight to Harrogate as a model, the train journey becomes a space of trauma-fused transition in her novels, time out of time in which the normal rules fail to apply. Every passenger on that train is both themselves and someone else, hiding in plain sight. This is the most elegant way of linking Christie’s life to her creativity that I have read, and the most convincing too. Not the bird watching pastime of spotting autobiographical details in the wild, but feeling out the deeply rooted structures of fiction and the way they replicate, perform, manifest something about our most enigmatic but urgent experiences. I haven’t finished the book yet so can’t review it in full, but it’s a cracker. It makes being alive more interesting, which is just what I want my literature to do.
