Aggie's Politics

“Had Archie Christie not had the soul of a stockbroker in the body of a romantic hero, had he not become addicted to golf and the City, had he been a more responsive and understanding partner, had he not been given the opportunity to fall in love with another woman, had he and Agatha had more children, or at least one other child more in Agatha’s own image- had any or some of these possibilities been realized, Agatha might perhaps have devoted herself to husband and family, repeating the family career of her mother.”

 

As pertaining to her daughter, it did not seem to occur to her that leaving her quite frequently with the help, nanny, governess, etc. would do any harm.  Agatha and Archie were planning a ten-month world tour, which would prove to be the high spot of the Christie marriage.  Agatha, during the trip found a few moments to go off alone, and was absolutely a social success.  She had great success doing comedy skits in an amateur show.  She was an outgoing, independent woman, taking center stage with confidence and charming all those she met. 

 

Back home, Archie was so consumed with golf and social conventions, and Agatha did not especially enjoy the company of the golfers or their wives.  He stopped Agatha in her tracks when she suggested that they have another child, but did try to make her happy by splurging on a car and teaching her how to drive.  As far as their conversations went, he was either discouraging or indifferent when Agatha tried to discuss ideas for a book with him, and did not enjoy the London literary world to which she was being introduced. 

 

“Idea? I’ve got any amount of ideas.  In fact, that’s just the difficulty.  I can never think of even one plot at a time.  I always think of at least five, and it’s agony to decide between them... One actually has to think, you know.  And thinking is always a bore.”

 

Christie is seen as politically conservative and socially conventional, but her attitude toward the New Woman is radically different from Mrs. Lynn Linton’s or from Waugh’s.  Christie is a strict sexual egalitarian in that she is able to imagine a cold heart beating under a soft young feminine breast, a calculating mind working behind the brown curls and dancing blue eyes.  Throughout her work, Agatha reveals a certain disregard for politicians.  She distrusts politics as indifferent or even hostile to the important spheres of life, religion, and interpersonal relationships.  However, Christie keeps herself and her work out of the political arena.  Her novels are relatively free from political references and/or slang. 

 

One category, though, Agatha did not avoid and that is the issue of anti-Semitism.  A very bold kind of anti-Semitism colors the Jewish characters in many of her early novels, and Christie reveals herself to be as unreflective and conventional as the majority of her compatriots.  We can laugh with her as she pokes fun at some of her characters, but specifically the portrayal of the Jewish financier in the Secret of Chimneys is hard to understand and forgive.  However, as she and other authors grew to understand what Nazism really meant for Jewish people, Christie abandoned her previous ways.  Agatha even corrects herself in Westmacott’s novel Giant’s Bread published in 1930.  Christie makes one of her five protagonists Jewish, and addresses head-on the Anti-Semitic prejudice present in England. 

 

“Agatha Christie had moved into the forefront of British detective-story writers.  Ironically, her very fame and success were to make the next, and most dramatic episode in her life, even more traumatic.”

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.”