An Introvert as Mystery Woman
Agatha Christie, who sold more novels worldwide than any other author, enjoyed being inconspicuous. She became a prolific writer, she said, because of her difficulty in speaking with strangers.
Born into a modestly prosperous family, Agatha Christie (1890-1976) ranks as the most translated author of all time, having sold an estimated 4 billion books in some 100 languages. Her play, The Mousetrap, which debuted in 1952, continues to hold the record as the most performed play of all time. You may know her work from movie adaptations such as Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express. But what you probably don’t know is the extent to which this woman who became fabulously wealthy and internationally acclaimed hung back from the public eye.
Christie’s introverted personality showed up from her earliest childhood. Little Agatha amused herself easily, learning to read just by being read to, and making up a house full of imaginary friends. Yet her family regarded her as “slow” because she could not keep up with the quick wit of her mother and sister. “I was very inarticulate,” Christie wrote in her autobiography. “I knew it and accepted it. It is probably one of the causes that have made me a writer.”
Outside of the family, the verdict was similar. “She dances beautifully, but you had better try to teach her to talk,” commented a young man to her mother when Agatha made her society debut at age 17. As is typical for introverts, she could never come up with the right thing to say or do on the spot, only 24 hours later.
Like Edith Wharton and Marcel Proust, Christie was able to portray so effectively the dynamics between servants and other layers of society in her detective novels because she kept her eyes open, quietly observing the swirl of interactions in her world. Indeed, her household’s servants were “far more real to me than my mother’s friends and my distant relations,” she commented in her autobiography. It is easy to imagine the slow-talking girl bonding one-on-one with the cook and the scullery maid out of the way of the brilliant adults, who nevertheless taught her to respect the help. Her mother would lecture:
“Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training. And remember they cannot answer back. You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you. If you are impolite, they will despise you, and rightly, because you have not acted like a lady.”
Christie’s inborn preference for remaining behind the scenes showed up in some amusing ways during her adulthood. During World War II, when she had already achieved some fame as a writer, she inconspicuously did her part for Britain’s war effort by dispensing prescriptions at a hospital in London three days a week. According to biographer Lucy Worsley, “Agatha liked chatting to patients through a pigeonhole that kept her safely invisible.” When her play The Mousetrap passed the threshold to become the longest-running theatrical production ever, Christie steeled herself to endure the hoopla of a thousand-guest party to celebrate the milestone. However, the doorkeepers at the Savoy Hotel did not recognize her and would not let her in. “Instead of being sensible, I couldn’t utter a word, and just slunk away,” she later told the producer, whose staff eventually tracked her down sitting by herself in the hotel lounge.
When young and when old, Christie eschewed self-promotion. She rarely gave interviews and held off journalists and biographers for decades by sending out the word that she was at work on an autobiography. Ironically, the biggest personal crisis of her life led to massive publicity that must have been excruciating for her. In 1926, when she learned of her husband’s infidelity and desire for a divorce, Christie disappeared for 11 days. The tabloid press speculated relentlessly about who might have killed her or what she might have done, only to have her reappear staying at a hotel in Yorkshire under an assumed name. The official version, that she had lost her memory in a nervous breakdown or a mental fugue, did not quell other theories. Christie coped by writing more books, faster.
Some commentators describe her two famous sleuths, the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot and the intuitive spinster Miss Marple, as temperamental introverts like Agatha Christie but who learned to interact smoothly with all kinds of people as a means to gather information. In this way, her still-beloved characters combined the essence of the author with a polish she herself never managed to acquire.
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