You're Dead to Me - Agatha Christie (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Sue Perkins and Dr Lucy Worsley join Greg Jenner to discuss the life of world-famous novelist, Agatha Christie.Agatha Christie is arguably the greatest ever crime novelist but her work has also permeated film, theatre and television over the past century. Christie also lived during an extraordinary period of modern history. Her life encompassed the end of the Victorian era, the two world wars and ended at the age of 85 in 1976.There was also much more to Christie the person: from unexpected sporting hobbies to a romantic life that had its fair share of heartbreak and harmony; her life off the page is as interesting as her novels are on it.For the full-length version of this episode, please look further back in the feed.Research by Jessica Honey Written by Emma Nagouse, Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Jessica Honey and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Steve Hankey

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are hopping aboard the Orient Express to investigate the life and works of the Queen of Crime Writing herself, Agatha Christie. And to help us sift through clues and detect fact from fiction, I'm joined by two very special suspects.

Sorry, guests. Guests. In History Corner, she's a historian, writer, BBC broadcaster and chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. She's the host of the fantastic BBC Sounds historical true crime podcast Lady Killers. She's the author of A Very British Murder and, lucky for us, also the author of the recent biography Agatha Christie, A Very Elusive Woman. It's Dr Lucy Worsley. Welcome, Lucy. Hello. Thank you for having me. And in Comedy Corner, she's a renowned broadcaster, writer, actor, comedian. You name it, she can do it.

You'll know her from her iconic hosting skills on Just a Minute, Great British Bake Off, insert name here, plus various marvellous travel adventures, documentaries and shows. It's the sensational Sue Perkins. Welcome, Sue. It's lovely to be here. I'm willing to bet the series budget, all £8.50, that you know your Agatha Christie's. Love Agatha Christie. Yeah? Agatha Christie's. Love Agatha Christie.

Yeah? Agatha Christie Christie Agatha Christie is another writer. Agatha Christie kept me company during a

unpleasant bout of Galangalafever when I was 14, 15. Wow. I read all of them. All of them?

That's the way my brain works. Why do one when you can do it all? I haven't read most of them. Oh I've read a whole lot

and I've still got them I've still got the full edition on my shelf. That's all. I haven't read most of them. Oh, I've read a whole lot and I've still got them. I've still got the full edition on my shelf. That's amazing. I've read the 80 books as such, but there are short stories that got away from me. I guess two experts in the room then and then me in the corner.

So, what do you know? So, this is the So What Do You Know? This is where I try to guess what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And, well, Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. That's two billion books sold. She wrote such total bangers as Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, and then there were none.

But with 73 novels to her name, it would be a Herculean task to name them all. That is a pun, sorry. And then, of course, there's the telly and the movies. Maybe you've watched the dazzling David Suchet play Detective Poirot on TV, or Kenneth Branagh's enormous moustache play Poirot on film, because let's be honest, the moustache did most of the acting. Or maybe you've seen The Mousetrap in London's West End,

because it is the longest running play in theatrical history. We all know Christie's deliciously dark and deadly stories, but who was the woman behind the murder she wrote? Let's find out. Dr Lucy, can we start with the childhood? I'm going to guess fairly cosy. She was born into a family called the Millers in the very nice, very genteel seaside resort of Torquay.

They lived in this big, lovely house in Torquay, and they had lots of money until they lost it all, frittered away. The father was very good at shopping and not very good at earning. And siblings? Is Agatha a lonely little child on her own, or has she got brothers and sisters? She was an afterthought. So there was a decade's difference between her older sister and her older brother. So she had the kind of vibe of an only child.

And she looked up enormously to her sister, whose name was Madge. And Madge was a writer and was really good at amateur dramatics and altogether a very sort of pretty, witty, successful, intelligent person. Monty, I'm sorry to say, was a bad lot. Oh, a cad, a bander. A wrongon. OK, so Agatha has these two elder siblings who aren't really in the picture because they've grown up and moved away. So, Sue, how are you imagining the little girl Agatha, Agatha Miller? I'm imagining she, as you say, lived like an only

child in her head. She was a, created characters and was very fanciful and occupied herself with stories and storytelling and that's how I like to think of her. You're right. She was a great reader. She taught herself to read against the wishes of her mother. In fact, one day the nanny said, I'm awfully sorry, ma'am, but Miss Agatha has taught herself to read. Well, the trouble was that the older sister, Madge, she had been educated. She was sent to boarding school. And when she came back from boarding school, she had all sorts of terrible ideas.

She had thoughts. Yeah, she had thoughts. She had thoughts. And she also came back possessing sexual magnetism. Oh, wow. Yes. It's rare you come back from boarding school with that. I mean, often it's sort of, you know, a cold sore in some sort of, I don't know, athlete's foot.

But sexual magnetism. Yeah. Her father did try to teach Agatha maths on the dining table after breakfast. I really wish that he had persevered because Agatha described herself as being a natural mathematician. She said she would have liked to have done that as a job if she'd had a better education. And we will discover that counting and money will be her Achilles heel as we go on. We have also Agatha as a young person, her favourite drink. Is it neat cream? And I say drink.

It's sort of a food. It's sort of a drink. It's sort of... But this is something that sticks with her through life. So I get the idea here of a little girl who never really grows up. Maybe that's not fair. Neat cream. I mean, I could do a shot, but I couldn't.

I probably couldn't do a whole thing. Just one of those spray cans just out of the fridge. Oh, I've done one of those. Okay. Well, all of her life, she never enjoyed the taste of alcohol. And if she wanted to celebrate a success, she had a glass of neat cream. Wow. This was happening into the 70s, into the 80s.

But obviously we get the tragedy of the father dying. And that's tragic. And that leaves the family with not much money. Well, actually, that's not true. With quite a lot of money, but not enough money for their status. Is that right? That's right. When Agatha is 11, her father dies.

And this is catastrophic on many levels, emotionally, but also financially, because now they're not able to live in the manner of the gentry, which is what they aspire to. And from this point on, you begin to see this streak in Agatha that today I feel might get you diagnosed with depression by your doctor? So they're subsisting on £400 per year, which now, of course, not enough. Back then, 10 times the annual salary. It's already a full wage now. So they're comfortable, but they feel the pressure because obviously they feel like they should be living higher up. And that takes us up to an interesting moment in Agatha's young life, which is her sort of debutante coming out

status. You know, the fact that they're meant to introduce her to the marriage market and they can't afford the lavish version that Madge has had. So they're going to go for a budget option. Sue, what is the budget option? Well, it's sausage rolls and a registry office, isn't it? But in terms of attracting the husband, is that what you mean? Well, where do they go? Do they just go for a promenade? Do they just go to the beach and just basically just walk her up and down and someone says,

all right, I'll take her off your hands. That is what you would do on a budget. I feel like their budget's a bit bigger because they go to, Lucy? Cairo. They go to Egypt. You made me think it was really low budget. Is that a thing at the time?

In Cairo, there are British garrisons and a lot of British officers. And while she's there, she spends three months in Cairo. Agatha has to go to a dance five times a week. That's work. Yeah, it's like work. You've got to put the hours in if you want to find a husband. So this is 1908. They've gone to Egypt. I mean, the fascinating thing to me is that there's this sort of joke about her being a very good dancer, if only she could talk, which seems a little harsh. And not only is she out there trying to meet a fella, she's writing already. She's 18 years old.

She writes her first novel, which is called what? It's called Snow Upon the Desert. And it's not a detective story. It's a kind of a Jane Austen type social satire that's basically laughing at all of these Britishers abroad in Cairo. But the novel doesn't get picked up. But she does do quite well on the marriage market. How many engagement offers do you think young Agatha Miller gets from her Cairo sojourn? I'd say seven. I'm going to go for seven. Yeah, it's not a bad guess. It's nine. Point of fact, the nine offers included when she was back in England.

Oh, okay. They were all in Cairo. I think she only got one in Cairo. Oh, is it a disaster then? Cairo's a failure. But she comes back with a tan. Is that what it is? What do you do in that situation where you've got nine offers? Do you sit down in an evening? Have they got a Victorian...

I'm trying to think what the name of the... Is it daguerreotype? Yes. A daguerreotype of all the suitors that they've got laid out and they pick one. How do they do it? Well, they come one after another, so you can't sort of compare them all at the same time. Unless you get two at once, which is something that did. Oh, hello.

On the same night. She's engaged and then suddenly another one comes along and she goes, actually, this one's better. She's at another ball back home at Devon this time when in walks the 10th man. And he's an aeroplane pilot. Yeah, that's hot. And on top of this, he rides a motorbike as well. Yeah, double hot. It's Tom Cruise.

It's basically Tom Cruise. Yeah. So 1913, his name is Archie. Archibald Christie, generally known as Archie. He breaks the first engagement by his hot face and says, hey, come with me, get on the motorbike. And off we go. And Agatha says, yeah, all with me, get on the motorbike and off we go. And Agatha says, yeah, all right.

Absolutely. Bit of umming and erring and thinking about it. But when the war breaks out, he goes off to France. And when he comes back at Christmas, he's like, right, we've got to do it. I've seen things that make me think that we've got to do it. So he insists that the marriage is done and dusted in his Christmas leave of 1914. So the marriage starts with a war in the way, which is a bit tricky. The most important thing, I think, from Agatha as a crime writer is what she gets up to in World War I.

She's a VAD, a V-A-D. She's a volunteer nurse. Ah, yes, yeah, yeah. Perfect, because this is where she learns about strychnine and arsenic. You got it. All the things that become her stock in trades. Yeah, absolutely. And we get her first detective novel written soon after this is that i mean yes she she's working in this hospital dispensary

and while she's waiting for the prescriptions to come in for her to mix up the poisons she writes medicines yeah very important we say medicines at this point and the death rate was very high yeah medicines and she writes her first book that gets published, which is called The Mysterious Affair at Stiles. And it features a death by poisoning. And it also features a young lady who works in a hospital dispensary. And it also features a certain detective, Sue. Well, this would be Poirot.

Poirot. For listeners who don't know him, he's a Belgian. But that's, again, from the war. From the war, yeah. It's not so much to do with the war effort. It's to do with refugees. So Hercule Poirot, he's a Belgian. But that's, again, from the war. From the war, yeah. It's not so much to do with the war effort, it's to do with refugees. So Hercule Poirot, he's representing, it's like a quarter of a million Belgian refugees

who flee Belgium in the First World War and they come to Britain, right? So this is Agatha again drawing on experiences and what's happening in society. But she's also writing against type. She's a huge fan of Conan Doyle. She loves Sherlock Holmes. She doesn't want to write a hero. I think this is linked to the fact that she is a woman now

living in a man's world, the world of the hospital, the world of violence and death and saving life as well. And she looks unfrettening, right? And yet she has so much to offer that you don't know at first glance. And the same is true of Hercule Poirot. There's even a joke in his name. You know, Hercules is a big, strong, classical hero. But Hercule, it's diminutive. It's camp, if you like. And everybody underestimates Poirot because he has a foreign accent. And he looks a bit sort of small and ridiculous with his moustache. And he hasn't been to public school.

Yes, he's always dismissed. There's always at least one character who's belittling him, who's making some observation about the way he speaks or the way he looks, little fat man. And he's not active. He's very passive. So he just recedes a lot, observes and then draws them together at the end, like the master ceremonies. In terms of professional success, she has a hit. She has a book that sells well. People are now aware of her as a writer. What I love as well is it's not a procedural in the sense that the police are there, but they're very much secondary or tertiary characters. It's more this little domestic scene of a strange man who comes to the house for tea

and then observes everything and then draws them all together at the end for the revelation. In terms of her private life, the marriage with Archie sours quite quickly. She's trying to be a housewife, but he quickly gets bored. He's off with his mistress. He's playing golf. He's away at the weekends. He's gone a bit Monty. He's gone full Monty. He's gone full Monty. And so Agatha Christie is now Agatha Christie in terms of her writing, but she's actually already suffering the slightly lonely life of the housewife who's been neglected. Yes. One of the things I like about Agatha Christie's life is the way that she seems to stand in for the experience of so many other women in the 20th century. And Archie, like so many other men, couldn't really settle down after the war, after four years in France. And he got himself a job in the city. He didn't find it challenging. He took up golf. He got bored of his wife. They had a little girl by this point, which is a key, key fact.

little girl by this point, which is a key, key fact. And it's really hard to track this down through the archives, but there are hints that he was uncomfortable. It would have been surprising if he wasn't uncomfortable with the fact that his wife was being so professionally successful and earning all of this cash as well. She bought the house that they lived in. But his job takes him around the world and he takes Agatha with him on this tour because he works for a sort of British Empire style, hooray for the empire type festival and off they go on a huge tour they go to madeira south africa australia new zealand it's nine months and while she's on the tour she goes to honolulu where she discovers a new sporting passion sue do you know what it is surfing yes ridiculous that's great i love her even more christy oh so she's as you say she's sporty

she's athletic she's modern in a lot of ways. And yet she is still kind of trapped in the conventional marriage of a husband who plays golf and ignores her. But we also then get this sort of leap forward in her writing career. We get 11 books, I think it is, in 10 years, including some classic detective stories, some poetry, a novel, thrillers. She's bouncing between the genres. In 1926, she publishes her absolute best book yet, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And this just takes her up a level into the stratosphere. It's often voted as the greatest detective story ever written.

Yeah. So Lucy, we have the narrator of the book, who everyone is trusting as they read it all. Yes. He's the killer. Yes. It's like Dr. Watson did it. It's that level of shock and surprise. And this is not an original idea that Agatha has herself. This is an idea that's been sent in by two separate people, but she executes it perfectly. That's the thing about her.

So readers are sending her in suggestions? This is Lord Louis Mountbatten who sends her the idea. I'll tell you what, though, Greg. He claims that he sent in the idea. So does her brother-in-law. And I think that Agatha was thinking, oh, well, I'll let them think that. Do you think she's allowing it to happen? Do you think it's guys just not allowing her to have her moments?

They mansplained her in work to her. And that's the first time that we've had an unreliable narrator. It's a technique that goes back to 18th century novels, but it's the execution of the idea in this context that's so brilliant. And it's also in the context of in the 20s, writers are coming up with what they call the rules of detective fiction. They're even codified in a kind of a jokey way. And some people get cross because they think this is a breach of the rules.

Oh, really? Yeah. I've read those rules. Oh. I'll tell you why I've read those rules. When my dad passed away, I wanted to, we were unsure whether his dad was really his dad. And I wanted to write a detective story, finding out,

because weirdly, I looked up the rules of detective fiction, and one of them is no twins. Yes. My dad's an identical twin. Oh. And then I said to my mum, well, I'm going to do this. I'm going to find out, because you cut a lock of his hair when he passed away.

And she went, no, you did. And then I went, no unreliable narr narrators it was just really fascinating then we got around to it in the end because we found out through lots of other means that he was not illegitimate as he thought but I remember reading those rules and thinking oh the first thing I'd want to do is play with those that's fascinating okay so there are hard and fast rules already and Agatha is breaking them and the next part of the story really is the most famous thing the most scandalous thing in some ways is the vanishing of Agatha. And I think we're going to leave this for now because I think Lucy's going to cover it in the nuance window.

But what we'll say is that there is a huge scandal in this period where Agatha becomes a celebrity for the wrong reasons because she... Vanishes. Vanishes. For 11 days. We get then this successful writer who divorces her husband

she moves on from Archie and so how does Agatha get over Archie so this is 1928 by the way it's another adventure I mean so it's not

Honolulu surfing but it is another trip does she go base jumping in New York does she go on a dig because I know she goes on a

so where was she probably gone back to Egypt or somewhere to go on a it's a good guess she goes back to Egypt So where was she? Probably gone back to Egypt or somewhere to go on a... That's a good guess. She goes back to Egypt later, doesn't she? But at this stage, it's Iraq. At the time, there was this archaeologist called Mr. Woolley

who was excavating the ancient city of Ur. And it was super famous. This was the archaeological sensation that everybody wanted to go to see. So she heard good things about it. And she decided that she was going to travel there on the Orient Express and see the thing for herself. Oh! Yeah! Wow. And so it's Catherine and Charles to travel there on the Orient Express and see the thing for herself. Oh, wow. And so it's Catherine and Charles Woolley are the sort of celebrity archaeology pair.

And their assistant is called? Max Mallowan, who's just a young man. He's 14 years younger. He's dark. He's quiet. He's kind of diligent, gets on with stuff. And the key thing is he's safe. They hit it off.

Yes. Of course, since she was divorced, she's rich, she's famous, she's successful. She's had all of these men hitting on her. And I think she kind of relaxes into a friendship with him because he doesn't appear to be at all threatening. And he respects her brain because he also has academic aspirations of his own. But he has to convince Agatha to marry him. He has to convince her, yeah. And to get to Agatha, he has to get to the daughter too

in terms of convincing, because Rosalind holds some cards here. Well, there's a fabulous letter which Agatha writes to Max saying Rosalind, the daughter, has found out about the proposal and she will give her consent to the marriage if you send her by return two dozen toffee lollipops from Selfridges. Please tell me she was sort of 21 at the time. I know she was little, but that's brilliant. She was 11. By the 30s, Agatha is a rock star and she's rich now, like properly rich.

Do we have any modern metric of how wealthy she was at the time? Enough to own eight houses. Wow, okay. What she was perhaps not doing as she should have done is keeping the records and at the time. Enough to own eight houses. Wow. Okay. What she was perhaps not doing as she should have done is keeping the records and paying the tax. Yes. And the 1930s, not only is it a time of great lavishness for her, she's buying these gorgeous houses and she loves doing them up. She loves interior design and all that. But creatively, she's so fertile in the 30s in terms of the book. I mean, the ABC murders, Murder on the Orient Express, Murder in the Vicarage, the first Marple.

We get Murder in Mesopotamia, which I guess is... Set in Iraq. Yeah, set in Iraq. You know, really, we're now into the kind of golden age of Agatha Christie as the crime writer. Golden age for Agatha Christie. And it's also generally known as the golden age of crime fiction. Although today you always put a footnote and say,

apart from the racism, the sexism, the classism, and all the rest of it. Yes. And Rosalind, therefore, is slightly packed off although today you always put a footnote and say apart from the racism the sexism yeah sure yes and rosalind therefore is slightly packed off to boarding school is that fair one of the things that you know you'll often hear it said agatha christie was a bad mother sent the kid off to boarding school but the kid will learn sexual magnetism that's very true that's very true and then you know classic obviously we we've got an archaeologist here. So I'll make the analogy.

But as with Indiana Jones, the Nazis ruined everything. World War II has begun. And she's going to go and live in the Blitz. She moves into the Blitz. She does because she takes a job. She always had this great sense of public service. And she took a job at the London University College Hospital. And she went back to the dispensary.

Back to the poisons. Yes. Straight back to strychnine. And Max, meanwhile, is in Cairo. So he's in the war zone and she's in the Blitz. I mean, she's literally been bombed. She's not getting on well without Max. He was an essential support and he's off serving in North Africa. So one of the ways in which she keeps herself on something like an even keel, although it's very rocky, is producing a huge number of books. So, I mean, you're a writer. I don't know what a good day would be in terms of word count.

Oh, I mean, a good day is actually doing some writing. I mean, I have terrible attention issues and yeah. So for me, a good day of writing 3,000 words. That's an amazing day. Agatha Christie, 17,000 words a day for three days straight. Do we know if she'd plotted before? Do we know the style of writing?

She's got it all in the memory bank and then she just runs it out. This particular book, she says it was the book that she'd wanted to write all of her life. She'd been planning it. She'd been building up to it. And what's interesting is this book is called Absent in the Spring and it's not an Agatha Christie. She writes under a pseudonym. What would your pseudonym be? It depends how good the book is. If it was good, I'd have something fanciful. If it was bad, I'd just mail it. She writes under a pseudonym. What would your pseudonym be? It depends how good the book is. I mean, if it was good, I'd have something fanciful.

If it was bad, Mel Gedroich, probably. It's just really annoying. Can I ask what the genre of the book is? It's not a crime. Is it romance? It's an interesting question because conventionally these are said to be romances. But I don't like that name for them. I think if they were published today, you might well call them literary fiction. Yeah.

Does she use her mother's maiden name? Oh, close, yes. Claire? Not quite. Lucy? It's Mary Westmacott. It's a mash-up of family names, basically. Yeah, and that's classic Agatha Christie drawing from her own life, slightly twisting it so you don't realise it's her.

Then the war ends and Max returns home safely. And Rosalind has also had a real tragedy. Her husband has died, hasn't she? Super sad, yes. Her husband had died after 18 months, I think, of marriage. It's after D-Day, isn't it? He'd gone into Northern France and left Rosalind with a little baby boy. So Agatha, his grandma, kind of rolls up her sleeves and gets to work and helps out to bring up the baby.

She even cooks the dinner. And slightly later on, baby Matthew acquires a nanny. And the nanny's relatives say one day, oh, yes, they'd like a writer called Agatha Christie. And the nanny says, oh, I know Agatha Christie. She's our cook. Really? Amazing, isn't it? Oh, good for Agatha Christie, though, mucking in.

But also this decade, the late 50s into the 60s, is when the movies and TV shows start to happen. Well, there's two things that happen, really, and it's interesting that you didn't even say. There's the age of her as a playwright. Yeah, why? She was the Queen of the West End, and people have really forgotten that today.

Of course. They think of her as a novelist, but before the films come, The Mousetrap and Witness for the Prosecution, which are both going to be performed in London tonight. Yeah. And I think it's fair to say that she's history's most performed female playwright. But The Mousetrap is 1958.

And until COVID came along, it was the longest running play in the history of the world. And still nobody knows how it ends. Everyone's kept the secret. But we get 1961, the first MGM movie, and then they start to sort of churn them out. And we end up with Murder on the Orient Express, which I think is like the biggest ever smash in 1974. But we also get the tax crisis because the tax rate is 83% for top rate. And so she gets some tax issues, Lucy. Yes, the reason that she sells the rights to make films of her books to MGM Studios. rate is 83% for top rate. And so she gets some tax issues, Lucy.

Yes, the reason that she sells the rights to make films of her books to MGM Studios, she doesn't want to do this because she won't be in control, right? And we've established that she's a control freak. She's run up these massive, massive back tax bills going right back to the 1930s. And members of her family say, look, become a tax exile, but she doesn't want to do that. She sort of feels like she has to keep on working. But she's got such an ambivalent mixed up attitude, because as we know, also, her work is really important to her for her mental health. As you say, you know, theatre, radio plays, novels, the Mary Westmacott books, this is a prodigious output of quality work. And I think some would say her work slightly reduces in quality towards the end of her life.

Some would say that she's a little bit harsh. But I think the thing is that she's just incredibly rich and fertile in her ability to just tell stories. But she does sadly, of course, die in the end in 1976. She's 85. It's been a long and happy life. Does Max survive her? He does. He's with her when she dies.

He was pushing her in her wheelchair into the drawing room just after lunch, and he was by her side where he'd been since 1930. And so in total, I think we've got, I mean, 73 novels, 30 plays for stage TV, radio, 26 collections, three books of poetry, an autobiography in two volumes, which was published after her death, which is interesting. So at the end of her life, there is this sort of commemoration in the West End. They dim the lights in the West End on the night that she dies. Yes, for the mousetrap and also the other play that was running then, which was The Murder of the Vicarage.

Yeah. So she became a bit of an institution. She is an institution. I feel like she's part of the wallpaper in the back of a lot of British people's minds. And they don't realise quite what an interesting, slightly mixed... Quite counter-cultural. Yeah, yeah. Counter-cultural figure that she was, yeah.

The Nuance Window! Well, it's time now for The Nuance Window. This is where Sue and I drink gallons of neat cream. And we allow Dr. Lucy to talk for two uninterrupted minutes to tell us something that we need to know about Agatha Christie and the famous vanishing, which is a very famous story. But I think, Lucy, you'd like to recontextualise it and look again. In 1926, Agatha Christie disappeared for 11 days

and she was discovered living under a false name in a hotel in Harrogate. And at the time, and since the time, a lot of people will tell you that she did this either to get publicity for her books or to frame her cheating husband with having murdered her. And this is often still spoken of as a mystery because people got caught up in this event at the time that was in all the newspapers. The sad truth is that she explained exactly what had happened in an interview to the Daily Mail. The thing is, people didn't want to hear what she had to say because it was distressing. It was difficult to hear. She said that after her husband's betrayal, she began to experience suicidal thoughts

and she made an attempt on her life. She tried to crash her car that night in December 1926. And after that, she went into what's called a fugue state, which is where you set aside your normal self and your trouble and your trauma, and you adopt a kind of different imaginary persona. So when she was in Harrogate, this at the time was a place of health and your trauma, and you adopt a kind of different imaginary persona. So when she was in Harrogate, this at the time was a place of health and medical treatment and an obvious place for her to go. She was living under a false name to protect herself from the reality of her situation.

So the mystery of what happened in the 11 days isn't a mystery at all. Agatha was really ill and she was doing what she could to make herself better. I just find that really awful that a woman of that time, and perhaps still of this time, society around her finds it more palatable to create this sort of dangerous, dark mythology around her than accept that women are very, very damaged, as are men, in unfaithful, unhappy, difficult and traumatic relationships.

Because, as you say, it was published and no one wanted to see it because it had to come with this sort of corona of sort of mystery and intrigue and no it's just it's basic human emotions and she was just sad and tired and and messed up and it makes me very very sad for her because that sort of disassociation of personality must have been caused by years of trauma and grief and pain. And your book goes into much more so richly. If people want to read it, they should. I'd like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner. We have the murderously magnificent Dr. Lucy Worsley.

Thank you, Lucy. You charmer. And in Comedy Corner, we have the fatally funny Sue Perkins. Thank you, Sue. Pleasure. Loved it. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we apply our little grey cells to another historical mystery. But for now, I'm off to go and order

a giant crate of toffee lollipops. Bye! Bye! Hello, I'm Dr Michael Moseley and in my new BBC Radio 4 podcast, Stay Young, I'm investigating some simple, scientifically proven things you can do to rejuvenate yourself from the inside out. Which will you try? Maybe a slice of mango to reduce your wrinkles.

Mmm, delicious. Or learning something new to stay sharp. Hi, OK. Hi, OK. How about lifting some weights to protect your muscles against the ravages of time? That was quite tough. To hear all about how to stay young, subscribe to the podcast on BBC Sounds. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's.

It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. you