Review | Agatha Christie, mystery woman — Lucy Worsley’s new biography reveals the very elusive writer behind the cosy mysteries

When you hear the name Agatha Christie, what immediately comes to mind?

Perhaps you picture the author herself, the doyenne of crime fiction, aging and matronly, respected and respectable. (I tend to transpose her with Jessica Fletcher, the crime-solving mystery writer of Cabot Cove, as played by Angela Lansbury in “Murder, She Wrote,” but that might just be me.)

Or perhaps you think of her books, one of the bestselling backlists of all time. You might think of “Murder on the Orient Express” or “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” and lump them in with cosy mysteries, comfort reads or gateway books to the mystery genre. They’re not great literature, but they’re (mostly) good reads.

It’s not that these impressions and reactions are incorrect; it’s more a matter that they’re incomplete, or based on insufficient evidence.

As Lucy Worsley argues in her new book, “Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman,” there’s far more to Christie than that. “In this book,” she writes, “we’re going to meet one of the great writers of the twentieth century, someone who’s constantly disparaged and consistently misunderstood, whose towering achievements are almost hidden in plain sight.”

Beginning with the author’s birth in Torquay in 1890, to a prosperous upper middle class family, Worsley follows Christie’s life through childhood tragedy — the death of her father in 1901 and the family’s economic collapse — and her early education (home-schooled, Christie was largely self-taught, through a voracious reading appetite). She had many suitors as a young woman (Worsley writes, “Many people think of Agatha Christie as the elderly ‘Duchess of Death’, intimidating in her cat’s-eye spectacles, and fail to realize what a total man-magnet she was in her youth.”), but married Archibald Christie in 1914, in the early days of First World War. While Archie served in Europe, Christie volunteered in a dispensary, discovering a passion for poisons which would be an integral part of her fiction. Christie gave birth to her only child, Rosalinde, in 1919. While she had been writing for most of her life, her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” was published in 1920.

Those familiar with Christie’s biography know what follows: her eleven day disappearance in 1926 (following Archie asking for a divorce, having fallen in love with a younger woman); her second marriage to archeologist Max Mallowan (13 years younger than the author), and her participation in (and financial support of) his work; her increasing popularity as a novelist; her history-making work as a playwright and her later life role as the Queen of Crime (“a ‘Christie for Christmas’ became an annual ritual”).

Worsley doesn’t break much new ground in this biography: there’s little new information on her disappearance, for example, which is likely the event most of interest. Given the current revival of interest in the author, however, with recent reimaginings from the BBC and in the films of Kenneth Branagh, not to mention the legacy of Christie evident in the “Knives Out” films and “White Lotus,” “Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman” is a valuable and timely read. With a breezy style, Worsley goes out of her way to refute or challenge previous biographies (revealing underlying misogyny and snobbery) while also arguing for the unappreciated complexity of Christie’s work, especially as it developed over time, both within the genre and as a reflection of the tumultuous changes of the twentieth century.

While it’s not entirely successful in its positioning of Christie as a previously unacknowledged progressive (Worsley’s attempt to wave away her anti-semitism, for example, is far from convincing), it is refreshing to see Christie’s work taken seriously and recontextualized, rather than seen as a mere souvenir of empire. Christie devotees will come away with a newly contextualized appreciation for Christie’s life and work, while newcomers will be enthralled by her story, and its reflection in her novels.

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