Dan Snow's History Hit - Agatha Christie with Lucy Worsley

Episode Date: September 25, 2022

Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time and her many detective novels, short stories and plays have gripped and entertained millions around the world. Her real life was just as fascinating as any of her crime novels. It was full of love and loss, travel and adventure and an enduring passion for archaeology.In this episode, Dan is joined by historian and Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces Lucy Worsley to discuss the life of Agatha Christie. They talk about her upbringing, what Christie was like in private and the inspirations that led her to become probably the most famous author in history.This episode was produced by Mariana Des Forges, the audio editor was Dougal Patmore.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.Complete the survey and you'll be entered into a prize draw to win 5 Historical Non-Fiction Books- including a signed copy of Dan Snow's 'On This Day in History'.

Hi buddy, welcome to History Hit. I'm on the Nile, it's searingly hot, I'm looking over at the Valley of Kings on the West Bank, the side of the dead. But you know what? I'm nice and cool. Do you know why I'm nice and cool? Because I'm strolling along the side deck of a beautiful paddle steamer, one of the most fantastically refurbished historical vessels in the world. And you know me, I love a historic ship. This one ploughs up and down the Nile, it's the the most luxurious all the cruisers that go on the isle it is the ss sudan it's a paddle steamer it's built by thomas cook company who in 1911 commissioned a series of steam ships to ride up and down the isle it took agatha christie among other celebrities from cairo down to luxor to look

at the newly found tomb of tutankhamen in the early 1920s and down to Aswan and Abu Simbel. It was while Agatha Christie was on the ship in 1931, she was with her husband, Max Malowan, that she decided it would make the perfect setting for one of her fabled murder mysteries. And it was a bit like a big English country house, really. You're stuck with loads of posh people in a very intense environment with no escape. And sure enough,

Poirot finds himself on board and he solves the ensuing murders. Sorry about that spoiler, folks. In this episode of Dan's Social History, I'll be talking to someone who, like Agatha Christie, is a national treasure. She's the one and only Lucy Worsley.

You've heard her on the podcast before. You've seen her on TV before. You've read her books. She's the best. And she has now got a new project out all about Agatha Christieie and so i thought this would be the ideal place to come record an introduction fly out to egypt and give her the opening that she definitely deserves so while i enjoy a little pink gin on the upper deck of the paddle steamer sudan you can listen to mine too with Lucy. Enjoy. Lucy, great to have you back on the pod.

Thank you for having me. What is going on? Why Agatha Christie? When I saw Lucy's Ways of Nicknames for Agatha Christie, I'm like, okay, fine. Why? Oh, really? Yeah. To me, it made perfect sense because I like a difficult woman, me. I like somebody who's got layers and complexity. And also, I've enjoyed her work over the years, but I think she's a fascinating person for how long she lived, how much of history she experienced and what effect that had on her life. And, you know, actually, I'd written about Jane Austen previously and Queen Victoria.

These are writers. They're writers who are female, obviously, and they're a particular kind of writer, a writer who just gets on with it and doesn't make a great song and dance about being a great artist. Somebody who writes on the edges of life, if you like. That appeals to me. And what I was really struck by in your book is we've forgotten to remember her and her impact. We just, for some reason, have sort of pigeonholed, oh yeah, Agatha Christie, she is a monumentally successful and influential British female writer. But because of maybe TV or Poirot or movies and Orient Express, we've sort of

imprisoned her, haven't we, in that little bit of reputation. And you have released her from that. She's been sort of woven into the background. Yeah, you made me just think about that in a new way. And people who are her fans say, yeah, yeah, she sold her books in more languages after only the Bible and Shakespeare. Two billion copies or something have been produced now. The things that blow my mind is that unlike Shakespeare and God, she's female as well. It's an extraordinary achievement, but particularly for somebody who's female. And I think that she sort of entered into the establishment, the background, the mainstream in such a way that people don't realise how novel and exciting she was.

That definitely comes through in your book. Tell me about the upbringing, the years that turned her into the woman she became, the author she became. What was her background? She's born into a wealthy family. They had inherited money. They lived in Torquay. Her father actually frittered away a lot of the wealth. And so she sort of was on this downward trajectory.

But still, you know, she was expected as an Edwardian young lady to get married. So she grows up in Torquay, which is the most Agatha Christie place you can possibly imagine. And what her dad was just spent all the money. He did, he did. He was second generation wealth

from a really successful business. And the key thing about her dad is that he was American. You know, she seems like the classic insider British person, but she wasn't. Right from the start, she had a bit of an outsider perspective built into her from the fact that she had an American father. Her mother came from an international family. They were an army family. They traveled the world as well. And he was just somebody who couldn't get a grip of money. And I think, and it was to her detriment, gave her a really poor

financial education. So when it came to her business affairs and her tax later on, she couldn't really deal with that. She felt like that was not something that she ought to concern herself with. And did that throw them into hardship? Was she embarrassed? You've got to be careful about the relative values that we're talking about here, because clearly she was not embarrassed. She had a very luxurious lifestyle. But compared with what they'd had before and after her father spent all of the money, it was quite a fall. When she came out into society, for example, her sister was brought out into society in New York to great fanfare. When the same happened to Agatha, they went to Cairo, which sounds like a curious choice,

but this is, in British society terms, an excellent sort of cheaper second-ranked place to bring your daughter out. She meets a lot of eligible men at the big dances in the Egyptian hotels. I don't want to say it's a hardship to be brought out in Cairo, right? Clearly, that's not a lifestyle which anybody needs to feel a lot of pity for, but it wasn't quite what her family had wanted for her when she was born. When she's in Cairo being released into society on the cheap, did she meet a suitable young man? We should say these were not Egyptian men that they were hoping to meet.

Absolutely not. Are you joking? No, she herself was very aware that she was only meeting people that she could have met in Cheltenham. And one of the things that is complex about her, a lot of people would say, oh, yeah, she's very disrespectful and unaware that other races in the world exist. She knows how disrespectful her class are about other races in the world. That's something that she addresses in her books. And when she was in Cairo, she got her first offer of marriage. And then back in England, she got, I think, 10 more. And one of the things that, you know, if you've got a mental image of her and you think of her as an old lady with the cat's eye spectacles and a bit kind of intimidating looking, which was the best known image of her in later life.

It comes as quite a surprise to realize that she was a total man magnet. She was really attractive and she got about 10 offers of marriage. And she's so funny the way she writes them off. There's one young man she says to, no, it's really awfully silly that you've proposed to me. You hardly know me at all. And it's just not suitable. Go away. So she was slashing her way through this field of young men. And finally, she met the 10th young man, who was very exciting because he was from a slightly lower social class from her own. He worked for a living. He rode a motorbike. He was blonde. He was tall. He was terribly handsome. And he was a pilot that thrilled her because she really loved speed, driving fast, things that were

modern and to do with modernity. So she fell for him. He wasn't the right man for her, though, sadly. No, but you can see why she fell for him. And what year was this? They met just before World War I. And I think part of the attraction was that then World War I happened and he got sent to France. So, you know, the stakes were raised. A lot of people in World War I were marrying people

that they wouldn't have done otherwise, just because it seemed like he was an act of life in the stakes were raised. A lot of people in World War I were marrying people that they wouldn't have done otherwise, just because it seemed like here was an act of life in the face of death. I have to just slightly undermine the picture I've drawn of Archibald Christie, though, because although he's usually depicted as this glamorous pilot, he didn't fly in battle because he had sinus problems and he wasn't the best pilot in the world to be fair and they didn't have enough planes so he had a very successful war career as an administrator it was his job to order the spare parts for the aircraft and to test the lamps to see if they

worked and that sort of thing and it's really interesting to me that he's usually depicted as Tom Cruise basically because that's the way people like to think about people in World War I as glamorous individuals whereas in fact there was a lot more. A ginormous number of people checking lamps. World War I, I think, was really important to her. It upended things. And she spent four years working in a hospital. And that would have been the time during which, if the war hadn't happened, she'd have been marrying the bloke and having children and running a household and doing all the things that were expected. But instead, she was working. And it wasn't just work. It was difficult work, you know, dealing with wounded, dirty, naked men.

And she ended up getting paid for this work as well. So many rules were being broken there. One of the famous facts about her work during the war is that in the hospital, she ended up working in the pharmacy where all the poisons were kept and that is where during Quiet Moment she had the idea of writing a detective story featuring a death by poisoning. I've done loads of pods about the effect of the post-war retreat of women from the workplace, the fact they were sort of forced out of so many jobs that they'd been doing during the war. Was the creative industries, was being an artist, a writer, something that was free for women to pursue or it was easier to pursue than continue as a doctor or a nurse, for example? Yeah, I think that it was because writing had always been a leisure

activity for women in her social class. So her older sister had published short stories in magazines, actually. I love her older sister. She was a sort of typical new woman. She went to school. She got educated. She was quite feisty. But this upset her parents a little bit. And Agatha Christie was definitely told, no, don't embrace those values. Be much more conventional. But she observed people in her family writing for fun, for pin money. And it was something that clearly she was very good at. And clearly, after the war, she was ambitious and set off on a career as a writer. In later life, she became very conflicted about all of this. And Agatha Christie's views on working and professional success is so complex. Do you know in her passport, even when she'd become a massively

successful author, she wouldn't put down author, she'd put down housewife. And I think those are basically her Victorian Edwardian values speaking. But there was a time before a big event happened in her life that we're probably going to come on to, that she really embraced life as a professional working woman, as a novelist. When she started writing, was there a lane for female authors? You know, George Eliot, a century before, we know how difficult it was for her. But what was it like as a young woman setting out to write in this period? Well, she was cresting a bit of a wave just after World War I, which was for female detective fighters.

It's sometimes called the Golden Age. Lots of questions about whether it really was or not. But there's Dorothea Elser, there's Marjorie Allingham, there's A.O. Marsh. And there's an argument that that's what society wanted's Marjorie Allingham, there's A.O. Marsh, and there's an argument that that's what society wanted after all the macho and the blood and the fighting, you know, something that was more, lots of female characters, detailed domestic stories

that build up the plot, like the weaving of a tapestry. That's sometimes how golden age, so-called detective fiction is described. So there was definitely a space in culture that was ready to receive her. She had wanted to write under a man's name, as her sister had done when she successfully wrote a play. But her publisher actually said, nope, I think we're going to stick to Agatha Christie. And the name Christie followed her throughout the rest of the career, even though

she wasn't Mrs. Christie anymore. And it became associated with a particular kind of writing, the crime writing. But actually, she was ambitious as a writer. She wanted to write other things in the way that Conan Doyle did as well, but only people wanted Sherlock Holmes from him. Later on, after her mental illness in 1926, and the sort of intrusion into her privacy that that created, she did write books that were more personal, that weren't detective based, and that were under the name of Mary Westmacott. The name Mary Westmacott was kind of related to names in her family. There were Wests in her family. She'd originally wanted to call herself Martin West, I believe. It was a kind of a smorgasbord of names that had some meaning to her. And these are a key source because people close to her said

some of the heroines in these stories are basically Agatha herself. Just quickly, since I've got you and you're a great expert on these things, it reminds me when Queen Victoria put on the census that Albert was the heir of the household. Yes. Why is it so difficult for a woman,

a hugely successful woman, to admit that she's a writer? What is that? Well, you pay a price for it socially, I think. Other people would judge you negatively for it at the time. And it's still not easy. There's this vexed question of if you ask a woman how she spends her time, you've got to be really careful how you ask so you're not passing any judgments. Do you work? Do you not work? Are you a stay-at-home mom? You know, it's still an area we haven't sorted out. No one has to ask Lucy Worthy how she spends her time.

Everybody knows that. So the war comes around. what's the breakthrough? What's the big moment? Her first big hit was The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, which was a slow burn, actually. It took a long time for any publishers to pick it up. But when they did, it was immediately pretty successful. And she'd already started writing her second book by that point. She got into a stride. She started turning out lots of different books in lots of different genres until we get to 1926 when she publishes one of the greatest books ever. It's The Murder of Roger at Croyd. I don't like to say it transcends genre because that implies that genre is less good than other forms of writing, but it is one of the greatest detective novels ever. Do you know the secret of the plot? I don't know anything about it at all. Well, there's a great dispute when you're talking about Agatha Christie about whether you should reveal the secrets of the plot, right? Well,

I agree, yeah. That might spoil your pleasure in reading the book. But there's another argument, which is that if you privilege that, it means you can't discuss her work in a sort of literary critical way and that means that people put her back into that middle brow commercial box right when you talk about dickens everyone goes you know at the end he gets head chopped off i mean exactly yeah okay well then let's share the plot it's an unreliable narrator it's one of the it's one of her notorious christy tricks of which there are many and one of the ways in which she keeps tricking us is that she plays the same trick again. And you think, no, she can't be doing this, but she does. That's very cool. And that enjoys big success. It does. And it creates this wonderful reputation for her as a woman who's unbelievably good at thinking up deceptive, tricky things.

And she gave a newspaper interview that to me seems really significant. Firstly, that she was giving a newspaper interview, she'd become a figure of public interest. And in it, she said, no, I could never give up my life of crime. Even my little daughter won't distract me from this career that I've got. And hats off to her, from my point of view. But that is so unfortunate in the light of what's about to happen next in her life story. Is it accidental that the year that she starts to enjoy that big session, she also has a bit of a breakdown? Well, her mother dies. I think there are indications that things are already going a bit wrong in her marriage.

And that summer, her husband leaves her, basically. And I can't believe this is controversial, but it is. I believe that she suffers a severe episode of mental illness. But in ever so many books today, and in all the newspapers at the time, you would read that that's not what happened. She disappeared. She notoriously disappeared for 11 days. And people at the time said that she'd done it to frame her cheating husband for her murder. I mean, it's a good story, right? But it's kind of tragic when you believe, as I do, that she was suffering from mental illness and that she went away because she'd had suicidal urges.

She was worried about that she might harm her daughter and that she'd gone away to escape from normal life in order to recover. There are two completely opposing views of what happened during these notorious 11 days. One of them involved imputing bad motives to her. The other view is, which I share, which is that this was mental illness. It stares us in the face. Nobody wants to talk about it then. Nobody wants to talk about it now. So her personal life, she had these tragedies. Is there something weird about success in the creative arts as well? Like actually sometimes we sit with so many singers and artists and writers. When you reach this moment of supposed apotheosis, you feel so hollow and empty. Do you think there's

something going on there as well? You can see in her case that there was a sort of perfect storm of things going on. She'd become a celebrity. Writers were becoming celebrities in the 1920s. People were interested in their lives in a way. They were being commodified in a way they hadn't been previously. She'd also become a detective novelist. So there's that whole expectation that she was tricksy. She was also a working woman, very bad, neglecting her child. And so there were lots of reasons that were sort of there in the background for people to impute bad motives to her. And the 1920s interest me as a period when mental health in general was starting to be talked about because there'd just been World War I. People were horribly familiar with concepts of shell shock and that sort of thing.

And a lot of other nurses, and this is academic research that I had access to that I'm really grateful for, there are a lot of other nurses who'd served in World War I. Christine Hallett is the historian of this, were suffering from shell shock too in ways that it was hard for society to understand because they weren't on the front line and they weren't men. So there was this sort of difficulty in talking about mental health for females that I also think you see people's thoughts about that

being expressed in their feelings towards the famous disappearance of Agatha Christie. She gets divorced, does she? She does, yes. Is that unusual? It was. By this time, she had become a professional novelist, so she'd entered a more rackety social class than her own.

It was difficult for her. She was deeply pained by it. But she was a really progressive person in the sense that people just don't get this about her. She loved fast cars. She loved surfing. After her mental health episode, she underwent psychoanalysis. So she was in many ways at the forefront of society. And her husband sort of forced her into getting this new kind of divorce. It was called a Brighton quickie. And the law had just been changed so that Agatha could bring the divorce, but the woman

he wanted to leave her for wouldn't come into it. So he went off to a hotel and he paid a witness to observe him in bed with a sort of paid accomplice, if you like. That was the evidence that was used in court against him. And Agatha was asked by the legal system, there's no shifty business going on here, and she had to lie. She was forced by the situation to lie and say, yes, yes, this is all above board, my husband's a swine because he went off and took a woman to a hotel, when that wasn't the case at all.

Well, it was, but that's not why he wanted the divorce. He'd fallen in love with someone else. That sounds really very bonkers. Well, there's this gradual, really interesting history of the way that the divorce system sort of loosens up within her lifetime. And even in Agatha's lifetime herself, she grew up with a Victorian model of marriage where there was the man and the woman and the man was out in the world and the woman was staying at home. I'm massively able to simplify it. But what she sought was a 20th century model of marriage, a companionate model of marriage, where the two people were partners. And that's not what she got in her first marriage,

but joyfully and wonderfully, and in the 1930s, she did find that in her second marriage. Companionate marriage, the new goal of the 20th century. You listen to Dan Snow's history of more coming up. Hi there, I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway, visit Chief Poetin as he prepares for war with the British, see Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists, and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park.

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Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So she's now single. How old is she at this point after divorce? She's in her late 30s. She's a child. She's absolutely a baby. She's starting out. And does that change her life? Well, like many British women from the middle to upper classes in the 20th century, she decides, right, I need a new life. Where will will I go I will go to Asia and she sets off by train

to visit the archaeological site at Ur in Iraq. And these are British mandates sort of effectively part of the British empire so people can sort of travel and? Yes the empire is for middle-class people becoming more about tourism than it is about old notions of public service. But this is definitely still a really important part of the world for the British because of the oil, obviously. So the archaeologists who are working there are sort of embedded in other aspects of the British Empire, like Gertrude Bell, like a woman called Catherine Woolley, actually, who was an archaeologist. She decided that this is where she would find her best self. It's quite interesting to look at this in the light of the history of the empire. A lot of books about Agatha Christie treat her interest in archaeology as something that's kind of a

harmless pastime. No, obviously not. To her, it was a source of great interest and satisfaction, and she genuinely loved finding out about other people. That was the secret of her success as a novelist. She observed the people around her, she wrote about their lives. But this business of archaeology was clearly mixed up with the business of imperialism. Also gives one of the flavours that we associate with her writing of affluent, slightly eccentric people gathered in a slightly exotic location where they're sort of vaguely cut off. I mean, there's something... Well, what really interests her is domesticity. She likes families.

She likes people who live together in a place. So she has a small group of people and she can really go into their motives and their characters. So she replicates that on a boat, in a hotel, in an archaeological encampment. She'll find two things. She'll find domestic situations anywhere and she will find darkness at their heart. She has a very dark view of the world. Is that because darkness sells books

or do you think she did have a dark view of the world because of what she'd seen? She must have done. She must have done. Her ability to ascribe evil to people who seem awfully nice in the eyes of her first middle-class British readers is undisputed. And it's sort of what makes her great, really. The Gothic novel had already existed in the 19th century,

but evil was found in haunted monasteries or on pirate ships. But now it's found in the homes of respectable people. I mean, if this were an Agatha Christie novel, Dan, I should be very afraid. Lucy, it isn't, but you should be. I should be anyway. You should be anyway. Okay, well then, you're trying to put Agatha Christie back where she belongs as a kind of great literary figure, as well as a sort of cultural best-selling phenomenon. I don't want to say that she's a great literary figure and leave it at that. I want to say that the nature of what a literary figure is

needs to change. A lot of people learning about literature at university in the 1920s would have learned about James Joyce and the modernists, you know. But there's a brilliant academic, I love her work, called Alison Light, who's argued that actually Agatha Christie is the supreme modernist because modernism, it basically means something

that's completely different from the past. And one of the ways in which Agatha Christie is sometimes criticised is that people say, well, her characters aren't very deep. They're a bit like symbols. That's something that modernists do, you know. And the fact that she's female and commercially successful has put her into this box marked middle brow. And this is a big debate that was happening in culture in the 1920s. You've got the high modernists, the highbrows, say, no, this is what culture should be. Then you have these other people writing in newspapers and being commercially successful, who are saying, this is what culture should be. Agatha Christie is in that camp. And that has lost the battle critically as time's gone on.

It's a battle that we're still fighting today. It is. It is. But now people are seriously interested in Christie. You'll find her on university syllabuses in a way that I find fascinating. More people are allowed to take part in culture now. Tell me about taking part in archaeological digs, because it's the bit I love about Agatha Christie, obviously, travelling through Egypt. And she does, I mean, it is an extraordinary passion. She really likes it. But part of the reason she really likes it is because she fell in love with this archaeologist. It happens, I do.

Fourteen years younger than herself, very cool, called Max Maloan. And this is his life's work, his passion. So she embraces that. And one thing that I find fascinating about Agatha Christie in archaeology is that there's this sort of defining image of her in people's minds, which is discussed in ever so many books about her. And it was her job that

she willingly adopted of being on his digs and cleaning the very delicate ivories, the ancient ivories. They're now in the British Museum. And she had her own particular way of doing it involving face cream, and she had her own little poker. And this is often considered to be her great contribution to archaeology in the 20th century. Actually, you know, she was paying for the dig. Nobody talks about this. She subsidised her husband's career. She subsidised the digs. She subsidised the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. That's her contribution to archaeology in the 20th century. She made it happen on a financial level. Like Lord Carnarvon, a patron like him? Yes, she was a secret patron because obviously she didn't want her husband to think that his wife was paying for his career. Oh,

he didn't know? Well, no, he knew, but this isn't how it was presented to the world. She's got what seems to be quite an attractive lifestyle of... Travelling endlessly to exotic places. Going away from this benighted island in the winter and going to exotic places and immersing yourself in archaeology and Egypt as well as Mesopotamia. Well the archaeological digs that she attended and took part in were in Iraq and in Syria. The trip to Egypt was a holiday trip with her archaeological loving second husband. But Iraq and Syria were the main places that her husband actually dug. And it's nice to get away from the North Atlantic archipelago to go and dig there, I'm sure. And so while she was on these digs, it was wonderful for her because she was still gathering material for her books, presumably.

She was gathering material for her books like Murder in Mesopotamia, all set in a dig house. I love her murder weapons. Her murder weapons are, they're so domestic in nature. It's part of her being really interested in families and households and that sort of thing. So there are things like the knob on the end of a bedstead,

a tennis racket, poison in the form of paint for a hat, that sort of thing. And the murder weapon in, spoiler, spoiler, but listen, this is literary criticism, not trying to destroy your pleasure. It's an archaeological find. It's an ancient quern. A quern. What is a quern?

A grindy thing for grain. Actually, you know, this insight I owe to an Agatha Christie scholar called Jamie Berntal, he's really excellent. And he notes that when this quern is first introduced to the reader, she plants it as a clue in such a fabulous way. They're describing all the things that are around the archaeological dig house. And yeah, there are some bits of rock and there are some old bits of wood and there's a quern. And you're reading it and you think, oh, what's a quern? And then you just move on. But when the quern appears as the murder weapon, you think, oh, yes, yes. Why do people in Agatha Christie books kill

each other? Is it because of money and sex, marital infidelity? Well, the answer to this sort of really changes throughout the 20th century, I think, which is one of the things that's really interesting about her. The trouble is that, did you watch in the 80s and 90s Poirot on the TV? Religiously. Yeah, well, that sort of places all of the work in a year that's about 1935. That's what you see on screen. But actually, she was writing from the 1920s to the 1970s. So you get this development in her that's not apparent to the naked eye unless you actually read the books. And in the 1930s, for example, she starts to get really interested in,

as someone who's been through psychoanalysis, right? She starts getting interested in the subconscious as a motive. That comes to the fore. Poirot actually talks in terms of a psychoanalyst himself. He talks about the secrets of the heart. But after World War II, and in a period of much more stability and happiness in her personal life. She moves back from that and she gets into a much more old-fashioned black and white good and evil view of the world. And by the end of her life, she really thinks that what motivates people is this discreet thing called evil. And she's not at all on side with British culture's later 20th century sort of more understanding view that maybe the

murderer had a difficult childhood. She hates that. That's not for her. So they're just bad people by the end of her life? By the end of her life, yes. And Miss Marple, Miss Marple's clearly Agatha Christie's favourite character, the one that she's most related to. Is she late career? Yes, she can only emerge with the fully formed, professionally successful, confident Agatha Christie. And by the end, Miss Marple, the fluttery old lady, and this is a brilliant example of the way Agatha Christie flips stereotypes. You think you're a harmless little old lady? She's described as nemesis. That's the name of a late book title, Nemesis. She will bring judgment to you, little old lady or not.

And those baddies tend to be just nasty bits of work. Well, every sort of baddie she will cover. She has a murderous child that a lot of detective writers will say, no, I won't go that. That's too dark for me. There are plots where everybody's done it and get punished for it. There are plots where people get let off because you can sort of understand why they did it. Every permutation she goes through. How many books did she publish? Well, this is a vexed question. Yes. Because it's really complex. They got published in America with different titles. And then there are all these questions of short stories. But her publishers, Collins, for her 80th birthday, did a bit of clever counting and said, yeah, there are 80 books. 80 years, 80 books.

How many have you read for this book? I have read the majority of the novels. There are short stories that have eluded me. Excellent. And was her second marriage a success? Yeah, it was in a way that interests me because I think that when they entered upon it in the 1930s, they were entering upon something that maybe her friends in the hospital had wanted in World War I, but it hadn't been widely acceptable. By the 1930s, companionate marriage was a thing. This is the way that people were more widely considering marriage. But after World War II, the model changed again, and a more sort of romantic view of marriage came in, where it

was going to be a lifelong, passionate bond between two individuals who'd be all in all to each other. And I don't think that's what Agatha Christie and Max had. They had a slightly earlier model of marriage. Who does, Lucy? Who does? Well, exactly. And it leads to divorce because people can't live up to that ideal. That's what Agatha Christie might well say if she was sitting amongst us today. And so they had a companionate model. That's what Agatha Christie might well say if she was sitting amongst us today. So they had a companion model. That was good. They worked together. They lived together. Yeah, and he was loyal to her to the very end.

She actually died. And what better way to go just before lunch with him pushing her into the dining room in her wheelchair. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

And she had quite grand darlings, because as you say, she relaxed and enjoyed being wealthy and built beautiful houses and... She embraced the values of her feckless Edwardian father. She wanted to recreate that sort of leisurely lifestyle. And if you go to her house in Devon that's run by the National Trust now, it's called Greenway.

Have you been there? It's beautiful. It's on the banks of the River Dart. It's got huge gardens and it's all very gracious. But what I find particularly agorafacristy about the whole setup is that you think great she's become a lady of leisure living in a manor house not really because she couldn't quite afford it she ran into all these tax issues in later life and she could only really live there in the summertime and there were difficulties in getting staff and if you sort of dig down into this perfect

country house lifestyle there's something a little bit makeshift about it to my mind. There were interesting, rackety, creative people there living a lifestyle that is a bit like a set up in an Agatha Christie novel. And so was she banging out novels to try and pay for that by the end? Well, nothing is simple about her. On the one hand, she'd say, yeah, I've got to keep churning out books because of my tax. But on the other hand, you can still see her, even in later life, going on these binges of writing where it just takes her over and she'll spend weeks on a book and she'll hardly sleep, she'll hardly talk. She goes into this sort of, as she saw it, a sort of God-given state of grace. And that's the true artist in her,

which she became very reticent about talking about after 1926 and the way the media had used her professional success against her. After that, she tended to depict herself as an amateur. I know it's astonishing, but that's what the 20th century did to her. Was she very famous by the end? Massively famous. I mean, one of the reasons that she appears odd by the 1960s is that she becomes very reclusive.

She doesn't do many photo shoots. She won't talk to journalists. And you get all of this if you know what happened to her in 1926. But the values of the 1960s were all, you know, celebrities, footballers, pop stars. And here we've got this reclusive. There's a fabulous little vignette about a party that was held in London to celebrate the success of her play, The Mouse Trap. Still going, they closed it for COVID, but it's back, it's come back. And they were holding this big party in the Savoy. It was called the Night of the Thousand Stars. All the stars of London had been invited. And she was supposed to

arrive early to have some photos taken. And she turned up and she said, can I come in? They said, no, no, the party's not begun yet, madam, go and wait. And she didn't say, I'm Agatha Christie, don't be stupid. She just went and sat in the lobby by herself. And she knew it was foolish on one level. But to me, that says so much about her sort of conflicted attitudes towards her work, her career, her fame and everything. When you went on a cruise ship and you found out your neighbour was Agatha Christie, did you just panic and think, Christ, I'm about to be in a book? That must have been quite stressful. Well, I think that when she was out and about, she did her very best to keep a low profile after 1926.

She was very upset and cross when people followed her, harassed her, tried to photograph her, that sort of thing. You might not know that you were on the ship with her. And if you did, you might actually find her a bit unfriendly. I mean, she only talked about herself to trusted friends and she only talks about her work to very few people indeed. One of the things I admire about her is that she, you know, she just had one biological child, right, from her first marriage,

no children from the second marriage. Yet these people that she spent her time with at Greenway, she had this huge sort of group of people that she had made into her family. In-laws, nephews, nieces, hangers-on. And because she trusted them, they became involved in her business affairs as well. So Agatha Christie, it became a family empire. You have these wonderful insights. In terms of her archive, how close can you get as a historian to her?

Did she write extensive non-fiction as well, memoirs and things? Oh, her voice, her voice. This archive exists in the care of her family. And I embarked upon this project with a completely open mind because there is a sort of school of thoughts that's current at the moment, which is that maybe she did disappear out of malicious intentions. And this comes from a feminist place, because the cab deserved it, right? So I started to read, you know, possibly I could go with that if I found the evidence. And I'm completely persuaded that that's not true

just because of the character that comes through her letters. She was so vulnerable, chatty, joyous, open, extrovert in her letters in a way that she wasn't allowed to be by the world in real life, I suppose. Her letters to her second husband through this whole tumultuous summer, where she realised that she was actually going to marry a man who was quite a lot younger than her, who had no money, who was socially inferior to her, but she's gonna do it anyway. They're just so exciting to read, partly for the joy of it and partly for the vulnerability that she expresses

then. Do you think in 200 years time we'll still be talking about her? I mean, has she, as a woman, as a professional, as a writer, what was her impact, do you think? I think we will still be talking about her, because not just because of the entertainment value, but because her books are historical sources for social life and the values of a certain group of middle-class British people throughout the whole history of the 20th century. And, you know, it's obvious, but it's overlooked. She was a role model. The ways in which she was interesting to me are as a working woman, a professional woman, a successful woman. And she was a person who negotiated mental health.

If we have to read one Agatha Christie book, what it be? Oh no question in my mind The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. A sparkling work of genius. Lucy it's so nice you to come back on the pod. What is the book called? It's called Agatha Christie A Very Elusive Woman. As she is. as she should always remain. you