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She said that she came up with her stories while knitting and while traveling. Its main characters – an eccentric Belgian detective and a modest English elderly lady – no longer seem to be literary characters, but real historical figures. Let us recall the main facts from the life of the great writer on the day of her 130th birthday.
Attempt at writing
The family of Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller moved to old England from America. After the death of her father, Agatha, her sister and brother stayed with their mother. As the writer recalled, her mother had a special talent for talking to people so that they obeyed her. She was especially good at it with children. It was to her mother that Agatha later entrusted the upbringing of her daughter during her own numerous departures from England.
Agatha Miller received a classic home education – it was customary to prepare girls from good families for marriage, and not for work and career. But the Miller sisters suddenly showed a literary talent. The eldest began to publish earlier – according to one version, she also pushed Agatha to write stories.
During the First World War, Agatha Miller worked in a military hospital, and later in a pharmacy. It was there that she got an idea about poisons, which then often became a weapon of crime in her stories.
One of the reasons why the writer published quite a lot of stories was money. The fact is that in 1914, Agatha Miller broke off her engagement to a promising but boring young man, falling in love with a pilot, Colonel Archibald Christie. But the beloved husband turned out to be a womanizer and a spender, so the income from the literary work of the wife turned out to be very useful.
Mysterious Disappearance
The marriage lasted more than 10 years, but one day Archibald announced that he was leaving the family because he fell in love with another. The next morning, after a quarrel with her husband, Agatha disappeared. They searched for her for more than 10 days, but the woman disappeared without a trace. The found car with the fur coat thrown in it cast on unpleasant suspicions. The whole story was like a plot for another detective story.
As it turned out later, leaving the car, Agatha Christie went to one of the hotels, where she checked in under the name of Teresa Neal. She spent all those days there reading books, visiting spa treatments and playing the piano.
What really happened? Psychologists and biographers of the writer put forward many versions. Some believed that the writer wanted to stage her own death and throw suspicion on her husband out of revenge for the betrayal. Others spoke of amnesia due to severe shock – shortly before breaking up with Archibald, Agatha buried her mother.
Many assumed that in this way she experienced depression and recovered, doing what gave her joy. If so, then, as a subtle psychologist and a wise woman, Agatha Christie unmistakably chose the method of “self-healing.”
Some time later, while traveling in Iraq, Agatha Christie met the archaeologist Max Mellowen. He was 15 years younger than her – and their marriage lasted almost half a century. The venerable age of a wife is a special value for an archaeologist, the writer joked.
Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple
Agatha Christie admitted that the modest English lady was much closer to her than the charismatic Belgian. But the public loved it, and people were waiting for the continuation after each new book. The first Poirot novel was published in 1920. A few years later, Agatha Christie has already become a famous writer.
The stories invented by her are always logical and flawless from the point of view of psychology. Leaving the reader small hints, she involves him in the game, offering to determine who the killer is. But the ending, in which the detective or the old maid exposes the killer, always remains unexpected.
Tired of her hero, Agatha Christie wrote her last novel in her fortieth year, in which she killed Poirot. But the work saw the light much later, in the mid-seventies, before the death of the writer herself.
She admitted that she invents plots for knitting – just as her heroine then unravels mysterious murders, methodically moving the knitting needles and sorting through the balls. From real life, Agatha Christie took not only personal experience in the hospital and excellent knowledge about poisons and their effects into her books. The next mysterious crimes could be committed in the homes of her friends, the camps of archaeologists, on the Orient Express or on the steamer, on which the writer herself made her next trip.
Observation and the ability to understand the cause-and-effect relationships of human actions filled her stories with subtle psychologism. Much less known than the detectives are her novels, published under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. These are stories about love and the complexities of human relationships.
The works of Agatha Christie have become theatrical productions many times and have been filmed. Bright actors tried themselves in the role of Poirot, but the most famous and well-aimed image was created by David Suchet in the series, which we all know well.
In the role of Miss Marple, we remember Joan Higgs from the series of the eighties – there she is a reserved, prim English lady, the standard of an impeccable noble old maid. In a later film adaptation of the XNUMXs, the heroine appears in a different image – lively, curious and more emotional, but at the same time retains the main features that the author endowed her with.
And there was an investigation…
As the literary father of Sherlock Holmes got tired of his character, so Agatha Christie periodically found new characters for stories. This is how Colonel Race appeared – an MI5 employee, Mr. Parker Pyne, who finds ingenious solutions to the problems of his clients – by the way, it is his secretary Miss Lemon who will then go to work for Hercule Poirot.
A separate series (which was also filmed and translated into Russian) is dedicated to the adventures of the Beresford spouses. And in five novels, Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard leads the investigation.
Lady Agatha
Agatha Christie has become for many a symbol of the success that a woman can achieve in a world where all paths are open to men. Her career began when the “weaker sex” began to assert their rights and the struggle for equal opportunities for women and men was just unfolding.
Back in 1920, the writer received six refusals to publish the story “The Mysterious Affair at Stiles.” When they finally agreed to print it, she was ready to take on a male pseudonym. However, the editor liked her sonorous name, and he decided to make an exception.
Decades later, this woman received the Order of the British Empire, the title of lady commander. But most importantly, she won the love of readers around the world. Her novels are still in demand today. True, time only makes unexpected adjustments.
For example, Stanislav Govorukhin’s “Ten Little Indians” known to us from Stanislav Govorukhin’s brilliant film adaptation was politically correct renamed “And There Were None”, and the new British film adaptation with Charles Dance definitely deserves attention. An alternative title is Ten Little Indians, a film of the same name released in 1965. And in the new season at the Moscow theater of Oleg Tabakov, Vladimir Mashkov staged his version of the novel, which critics have already called “extreme”.