Women's Wednesdays: Agatha the Master at Murder

The day of women in literature, both real and imagined. *****

Dame Agatha Miller Christie Mallowan 1890-1976

I was twelve when I discovered Agatha. Up until that time I voraciously read books for young girls. I engulfed myself in girls mysteries, girls romances, girls adventure stories, and girls coming of age. I didn't limit myself to any time period. I enjoyed reading about girls from long ago, from the fifties, and from my time own time period of the seventies. Agatha was the first adult book I read. It

was a story starring adults and my first murder, because girls mysteries don't involve murder. They are about stealing, smuggling, kidnapping, con men, and disguises, but no one ever dies. I still love those books and have a soft spot for girls adventure series which I collect. I cannot remember the name of the first Agatha book I read. I remember it was funny. Something that involved an old woman. It grabbed me right away and I began devouring her works. Currently I own almost all of them, including her six Mary Westmacott romances. What? You didn't know about those? It's not surprising really. She often threw romance into

the mix of her murders. My favorite of her detectives isn't Marple or Poirot, but Tommy and Tuppence, a pair that we first meet as young single people in their twenties, in the twenties, and we join up with them sporadically through the years as they marry, have children, have grandchildren, and grow old, all the while going on madcap adventures and exchanging quips with each other. Agatha created the lover adventure wisecracking duo long before it became a staple on detective tv shows. Agatha had her own real life mystery in 1926 when she disappeared and when she was found she claimed to not remember anything.

Personally, I think she wanted to get away for awhile. She was famous, discovered her first husband, Archibald Christie, was a low down good for nothing cheater, and she wanted to disappear from the paparazzi for awhile as she licked her wounds and figured out what to do with her broken heart, her broken marriage, and her broken life. She divorced him. Continued with her success which is the best revenge, fell in love again, this time with Max Mallowan, an archeologist, and then went on digs with him where she wrote more books incorporating Egypt and artifacts into her work. That

marriage was long and happy and ended with his death. Her books are brilliant in the way she always fools you. I'm not sure I've ever figured out who the murderer was. She knew how to twist and turn things, and yet the clues were there. She didn't hold back. She just hid them in plain sight. I read somewhere that she planned her books backwards, starting with the who, how, and why. Which makes sense. I've done it the other way and you can get into really tricky situation that you don't know how to get out of.

Agatha Miller was born in England to an upper middle-class family in 1890. Her first book "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" which introduced the world to Hercule Poirot, was published in 1920. It was during WWI when she worked as an apothecaries assistant that she learned about poisons, a knowledge that would come in useful in her career as a typewriter killer. She gave birth to 1 daughter from her first marriage, 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, 6 romance novels, 4 plays, 3 autobiographies, and a charity for children and old people.

Her play "The Mousetrap" has been playing continuously somewhere since 1952.

TV series and movies have been made of her books. Part of the charm of these movies is the snapshot in time. I saw an adaption of Murder on the Orient Express where they updated it and they had laptops. Movies and tv shows of her work should take place at the time they were written. Hercule Poirot uses his little gray cells, not his cell phone! I found some trailers of movies coming out this year. I'm surprised at how many there are. The first one looks like a story with Agatha in it as the detective. Interesting.