Early Married Life/Nurse Life/First Book

The Christies had a one-day honeymoon, and then he had to return to his unit and Agatha went back to live with mother and Aunti-Grannie at Ashfield.  She continued to live there until September 1918, reunited with her husband for only rare and brief leaves.  The Christies spent only a matter of weeks together in the next few years due to the war.  While Archie served in the Royal Flying Corps unit, Agatha worked first as a volunteer nurse at the local hospital and then, as a hospital dispensing pharmacist.  It was hard, grueling, uncertain work.  The hours were long, and there was never enough food to go around for the staff.  Archie didn’t approve of this type of work.  He wanted a wife who was carefree and beautiful, untroubled by the woes of the world.  Clara shared this same view, and for once Archie and Clara were both working on the same side.  What is important for the history of detective fiction is that working in the dispensary gave her a working knowledge of poisons. 

 

Agatha eventually, because of Archie’s feelings about the work, quit her job as a nurse.  She was talking to her sister one day about a mystery novel, and Agatha said that she didn’t care for the book that her sister was reading.  Madge then dared Agatha to write something better… and she did.  She wrote her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while at Ashfield.  However, when she would hit writing blocks, her mother would tell her to take some time off from being there and go stay in a hotel for a couple of two weeks to have complete concentration.  She would walk on the moors, and act all the scenes out loud and go back to the hotel and finish writing the scenes. 

 

 

“The reader who wants to discover the solution to an Agatha Christie mystery can learn three valuable lessons from studying the solution to The Mysterious Affair at Styles.  First, give careful consideration to every mention of a written document, and analyze any text included in the novel with special care.  Second, be suspicious of material clues, especially if they appear in the textual equivalent of neon lights.  Third, place more reliance on your knowledge of novels, particularly detective novels, than of science.”

 

 

Perhaps the best example of Agatha Christie’s ability to use elements from existing tradition of detective fiction and forge something new and original is her creation of Hercule Poirot, the second most famous fictional detective after Sherlock Holmes.  The Great Detective is described like this:  Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity.  His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side.  His moustache was very stiff and military.  The neatness of his attire was incredible. I believe a speck of dust would have caused him more pain than a bullet wound.”

Red Herrings

I may be the only one who didn't know what this song meant, but in case I wasn't...

Red Herrings is an observation that draws attention away from the central issue in an argument or discussion; an informal logical fallacy. 

Its etymology:  from the practice of distracting hunting dogs by dragging a smelly, salt cured herring (fish) across the trail or the animal they were pursuing.  

*It is usually irrelevant and emotionally charged.

***Random Fun Fact...  Agatha wrote her first book on a dare from her sister.

Randoms

Demure Agatha and Dashing Young Archie

Archie and Agatha's courtship

Excerpt from Agatha's biography:

 

“They met at a dance, both were excellent dancers, there was an immediate attraction.  A few days later, he borrowed a friend’s motorbike and called unexpectedly at Ashfield.  Agatha was at the house of a friend, but she quickly responded to Clara’s anxious summons to come home at once.  From the first moment, Clara was not to feel at ease with Archie, never wholly to like him or trust him.  Archie was certainly good looking, and not doubt brave, but he had absolutely no money of his own and no immediate prospects of earning much.  The bluntness, directness, and impetuosity, the sheer machismo of Archie, did nothing to reassure Clara, who feared for the happiness of her shy, introverted, romantic daughter as the wife of such a man.  Clara was clear sighted about Archie in a way Agatha could not be.  Agatha fell in love with Archie because he was different, other, a stranger whose mind she could not read.  Clara, no doubt, did everything she could to prevent the marriage.  But Agatha persisted in seeing the relationship between Archie and herself as a romance.  They had no money.  They had almost nothing in common.  She was already engaged to someone else.  He was very likely to be killed in the war then raging.  Agatha’s beloved mother deeply distrusted Archie.  Two years of tears, struggle, and separation followed, but at last passion prevailed and Archie and Agatha went out and were married on a day’s notice on Christmas Eve, 1914. "

 

 

 

 

 

The Gunman Dream- referred to in Vanishing Point

Agatha Christie’s childhood was extremely happy and peaceful for the most part, but she did have a childhood dream that would haunt her into adulthood.  In its early stages, the dream was of an eighteenth century soldier, with blue eyes, a three cornered hat, and a queue, carrying a musket, the kind of soldier a Victorian child might have seen illustrated in a book by Hans Christian Anderson.  Agatha says she was not afraid of the gun or of it being shot.  But what frightened her was the fact that the gunman was able to enter any ordinary occasion: tea, picnic, or a walk.  He was able to transform into anyone with only his blue eyes identifying him.  He turned into her mother, her sister, her brother, a friend, etc.

 

At the heart of this nightmare is the idea that people are not what they seem, that the most consistent and beloved person can turn suddenly into a negative and threatening force in a person’s life.  In theory she could have had this dream because she was unusually aware from her early childhood that there was a split between her body and her observing consciousness and knew that she herself was not what she seemed.  In the Burden written by Agatha as Westmacott, she paints a picture of a little girl who was so withdrawn that seemed actually a little slow, yet who was so in love with her parents that she violently hated her little sister who she believed stole love from her parents.  It is unclear as to whether or not she felt like that toward her siblings, but seeing how much she loved her mother, it is possible that she could have been driven to a point of extreme jealousy.  But what is certain is that when her husband, Archie Christie suddenly came home to tell her that he was in love with someone else, Agatha who was 36 at the time became overwhelmed with anger and grief, and had a very childlike panic attack sort of response to the whole matter.  Archie, the real life lover, friend, and husband had become the Gunman of her fantasy.  That is actually something that I think is the same between she and I in our chemical make-up.  There are certain things that I can be very level headed and mature about, and other things like dealing with betrayal or loss where I deal with it and go through the emotional journey of lets say an eight year old.  This sounds a lot like how Agatha dealt with big changes in her life. 

 

But some might say that the Gunman nightmare, although it haunted her, gave her the greatest writing tool of her life.  A great strength in Agatha’s books is that any person in the story can be the killer:  the child, the sweet young miss, the charming major, the doctor, the maid, etc. 

 

“The Gunman dream indicates that this view of life was not an intellectual conceit or a literary game for Christie, but an elemental structuring fact of her creative unconscious.”

 

Younger Aggie

Aggie Pics

The Early Years

Agatha: the early years.

 

Agatha Christie, born Agatha Miller, was born in Ashfield, the house where she was born- a large Italian-style stucco villo on the outskirts of Torquay, an English seaside town in Devon.  Agatha loved this house almost as much as she loved her mother, Clara Miller.  Clara would prove to be the most influential person in both Agatha’s personal and professional life.  At the base of Agatha’s feelings for her mother was a deep sense of poignant sympathy for her childhood.  Clara wasn’t raised by her biological parents, but was adopted and given materially most everything a girl could want. Maureen Summerhayes, a character in Christie’s 1952 detective novel Mrs. McGinty’s Dead, expresses the author’s doubts about the benevolent adoption:

 

“My mother parted with me and I had every advantage, as they call it.  And it’s always hurt –always- always-to know that you weren’t wanted, that your mother could let you go.”

 

Clara married Fredrick, Agatha’s father, and according to Agatha their relationship was a real-life version of a romantic women’s novel.  It had great significance for Agatha’s own adult attitudes to men and marriage.  Agatha describes her father, Frederick Miller, as an easy going, affectionate man who lived the life of a gentleman.  Even with his good nature, he wasn’t totally able to read Agatha.  Agatha as a child and even into adulthood was incredibly shy and inward.  Only Clara, who knew what it was to lack self-confidence and the ability to express the inner self, understood her daughter, and acted almost as her translator to the world. 

 

One incident in Agatha’s youth is a perfect illustration of how she could be so easily be misunderstood by the world, but how Clara understood at once.  Agatha was about six and living in the South of France.  Agatha’s father and sister planned a daylong muleback excursion into the Pyrenees.  Agatha was pleased with the mule, which proved to be the most dangerous mule of the bunch, walking on the edge of perilous spots.  After the ride, the family’s kind French guide thinking to amuse a young girl, pinned a live butterfly to Agatha’s hat.  Tormented by the flutterings of the dying insect yet not wiling to seem ungrateful to the guide, Agatha could only collapse into a heap of tears.  Her father, irritated by the lack of explanation of this sudden disturbance of emotion, called them stupid tears.  Clara Miller heard the story, and looked at her long and hard.  After a few moments, diagnosed the situation correctly and removed the butterfly from her hat.  Agatha remembered the “glorious… wonderful relief” she felt at that moment, as she as released from “that long bondage of silence.”

 

*Agatha also had many private imaginary friends called Kittens, and when they were discovered Agatha swore…”The Kittens were my Kittens and only mine.  No one must know.”

 

 

 

 

 

Quotes

Aggie Quotes:

 

I think these show her wit and her scheming that goes into many of her books, and some of how she behaved in her own life.  She was very much ahead of her time and progressive, and these quotes also show her sarcasm that oozes out of everything she says.  Also, some of them like the first one, for example, show a softer more delicate side.

 

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world.

 

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.

 

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming... suddenly you find - at the age of 50, say - that a whole new life has opened before you.

 

I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

 

 

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

 

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

 

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

 

One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.

 

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

 

Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.

 

It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.