Duchess of Death: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie

320 Pages·2009·2.5 MB·English

by  Richard Hack

Duchess
of Death
THE UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF
Agatha Christie
Richard Hack
PPHHOOEENNIIXX
BBOOOOKKSS
Copyright © 2009 Richard Hack and Phoenix Books, Inc.
All rights reserved. Written permission must be secured from the
publisher to use or reproduce any part of this book, except brief
quotations in critical reviews and articles.
The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author of this book
and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher or its affiliates.
ISBN-10: 1-59777-620-3
ISBN-13: 978-1-59777-620-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication Data Available
Book Design by Sonia Fiore
Printed in the United States of America
Phoenix Books, Inc.
9465 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 840
Beverly Hills, CA 90212
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Jared N. Stein,
who knows the reason why.
Table of CoNTeNTS
PRologue Mystery at Newlands Corner .........................................vii
oNe Mrs. Miller Has a baby ......................................................1
Two Coming of age ...................................................................27
THRee Mrs. archibald Christie ...................................................49
fouR The Mystery writer .........................................................71
five My Name is Neele ............................................................93
Six finding agatha ...............................................................115
SeveN Mrs. Max Mallowan .......................................................135
eigHT The Tax Man Cometh ....................................................155
NiNe The Sausage factory .....................................................173
TeN one for the books ...........................................................191
eleveN The Movie Years ............................................................207
ePilogue The great entertainer ...................................................231
aPPeNDix ..........................................................................................239
eNDNoTeS ......................................................................................................247
bibliogRaPHY ...................................................................................257
aDDiTioNal PeRioDiCalS .................................................................261
iNDex ......................................................................................................265
aCkNowleDgMeNTS ..................................................................................283
vii
PRologue
MYSTERY AT
NEWLANDS CORNER
“...you’re so beautiful—so beautiful.
Promise me you’ll always be beautiful.”
“You’d love me just the same if i weren’t.”
“No. Not quite. it wouldn’t be quite the same. Promise me.
Say you’ll always be beautiful…”
agatha Christie
unfinished Portrait
DECEMBER3, 1926.AGATHA CHRISTIE DREW ASIDE THE
thick velvet drapery and peered expectantly through the
bedroom window. The fog, so typical of Sunningdale in
December, had moved across the road and now threatened to
block her view of the front drive completely. She hated fog;
hated the way it leaned into familiar shapes, turning them
sinister and threatening. As her body shivered, she protectively
pulled closed the curtain, blocking the cold draft that found its
way through the window at night, turning the room damp. It
was a little after nine p.m., and she knew her husband wasn’t
ever coming home.
After twelve years of marriage, mystery writer Agatha
Mary Clarissa Miller Christie was thirty-six years old, famous
and alone. Not alone in the sense that there was no one else in
the large, brooding brick house named Styles. Her seven-year-
old daughter, Rosalind, was sleeping in the next room, and
Lilly, a chambermaid, was downstairs doing whatever it was
she did at night before getting ready to sleep herself. In less
than an hour, Rosalind’s nanny and Agatha’s secretary, the
viii Richard Hack
always punctual Charlotte Fisher, would be returning home on
the last train from London, just forty minutes away.
She would normally welcome Charlotte’s arrival, for
she regarded her as her closest friend. Only the previous
evening, she and Charlotte (whom she nicknamed Carlo) had
danced the Charleston, or tried to, as they were taking classes
together in Ascot, one town over. Dear Carlo. Loyalty paid for
by the hour.
She would need to leave Carlo a note to explain what
she was about to do. But how,she thought, does one explain
that your life is over? How do you explain the overwhelming
isolation of feeling alone?
Moving to her writing desk, she found a correspondence
card and her fountain pen, and then struggled to get beyond
“Dear Carlo.” A writer without words. Even at a time like this,
the irony amused her. Despite having authored eight books,
Agatha still found writing difficult. Imagining the stories was
easy; that was fun. Writing them down, explaining them, that
was the difficult part.
Her first book had taken years to be published, and
even after it appeared in bookstores across the country when
Agatha was thirty, she never thought of writing as a career. Her
husband wouldn’t have accepted that. To him, her mystery
stories were little more than amusing diversions, like
needlepoint or gardening. He thought of them as “silly”—
almost as ridiculous as he now thought her to be.
It wasn’t always that way, of course. When Agatha
Miller eloped with Archibald Christie in December 1914, hers
was the “happily ever after” love of fairy tales and dreams
come true. He was tall, movie-star handsome and an aviator in
Britain’s Royal Flying Corps. In the two years he had courted
her, she could think of none other. Back then, she had a
flawless complexion, long wavy red hair, a tall, fashionably full
figure and a plan to be his wife forever. Even then, he was
hardly ever comfortable with her touch or talk of the future,
but she steadfastly refused to admit that her husband believed
the commitment of marriage was less about eternity and more
about the companionship of an eternally attractive wife.
“Promise me you’ll always be beautiful,” she later wrote in a
novel, mimicking Archie’s words.
Duchess of Death ix
Determined to be ever available to her husband, she
never allowed him to see her writing, not that he had shown
any interest. He was so structured, so utterly obsessed with his
fledgling investment career, that any hope she had once held
of rating a passing smile or compliment had been dimmed in
the shadow of his neglect. As one year followed another,
Archie showed less and less interest in her, often spending
nights at his club in London and weekends on the golf course.
She wanted his touch, needed his attention. Yet the more she
tried to draw him close, the harder he pulled away. All the
while, she quietly produced one book and then the next and
the next, with her meager royalties bolstering the family’s
finances, which, at the time, were barely adequate.
Now it has come to this,she thought, looking back at
the too quiet room. She felt movement at her feet and reached
down to stroke her beloved wirehaired terrier, Peter, as he
repositioned himself to lick the back of her hand. She barely
felt his moist, warm tongue, her mind muted as if shrouded in
layers of cotton wool, unable to command itself to think. Still,
she needed to finish, quickly now, and leave before logic and
reason shattered her plan.
After removing her wedding ring, Agatha placed it
inside a small mahogany box on the desk, where she was
certain it would be discovered. She stood and crept toward the
door, lowering her head, as if embarrassed, and never slowing
until she reached her daughter’s room. Inside, she watched
silently as Rosalind exhaled rhythmic breath in the cadence of
peaceful sleep. She then kissed her child on the forehead, as
she did every night, just as her own mother had done with her.
It was only as she left the room that she allowed herself to
remember the smell of her mother’s violet cologne as her face
drew near. Agatha wiped away the tears summoned by the
memory.
Eight months earlier, everything had been so different.
Then, Agatha’s mother, Clara, was still alive, living in Ashfield,
the family’s estate in Torquay. Her mother would have known
what to do. Clara had a way of always knowing what was right.
Yet the suddenness of her mother’s death in April 1926,
at the age of seventy-two, fueled a depression that left Agatha
bereft of joy and spirit. A gray wash of numbness was her only
x Richard Hack
comfort. “Sometimes one feels so eager to get out of this body,”
her mother had told her, during one of her frequent illnesses
near the end. “One longs to be released from this prison.”i
Suddenly Agatha understood.
Archie was no help in times of sadness. He was awkward
around grief, and had, in fact, “a violent dislike of illness, death
and trouble of any kind.”iiIn place of compassion, Archie made
jokes. At the time of Clara’s death, he suggested traveling—a
vacation in Spain. It would be “fun,” he said. It would “distract.”
Distract? Agatha didn’t want distraction. “I wanted to
be with my sorrow and get used to it,”iiishe said. Leaving her
husband in London, she drove herself to Torquay, three hours
away, dreading the chore of closing a house that had been her
childhood haven of fantasy and safety. Once there, Agatha was
engulfed by her suffering, stalled like a storm front, shuffling
silently through her task on slippered feet. She had only meant
to be gone for weeks, not months, and certainly not half a year.
But there it was.
Archie declared he found it inconvenient to travel to
Ashfield on weekend visits, suggesting instead that the pair
take an extended trip to Italy in August to visit an obscure
health resort in Alassio, on the Gulf of Genoa. Agatha readily
agreed, hoping that the vacation would rekindle love,
clutching onto the plan with such anticipation that when her
husband eventually arrived at Ashfield on August fourth, she
was packed for two weeks of mineral baths and therapeutic
scrubs. Her eagerness manifested itself in nervous whispered
chatter, like the swarming of a thousand bees, when simple
silence might have served her well.
Archie thought Agatha looked edgy and in extremely
poor health. While her letters had made mention of her
inability to sleep as well as her lack of appetite and mental
despair, he was horrified at what he saw when she rushed to
meet his car. His shock translated itself into superficial
conversation, polite but without emotion.
It was that coldness that terrified her. “I think the nearest
I can get to describing what I felt at that moment is to recall an
old nightmare of mine,” Agatha wrote in her autobiography.
“The horror of sitting at a tea table, looking across at my best-
loved friend, and suddenly realizing that the person sitting
there was a stranger.”iv
Duchess of Death xi
What she did not admit then, or later, was the complete
absence of love in her husband’s face. If her eyes were glazed
with disappointment, his shifted with the uneasiness of
betrayal. Well-mannered words passed between husband and
wife found stilted conversation fall away to silence, until Archie
burst into a spontaneous revelation. Barely able to meet
Agatha’s gaze, her husband confessed that he had fallen in
love with another woman, and wanted an immediate divorce.
Divorce. Upon hearing the word, red and white
blotches like oilcloth gingham spread across Agatha’s face, as
anger replaced disbelief. This was not happening, could not
be happening.
“Her name is Nancy Neele,” he said. “You remember
her,” he said. “She’s been in our house,” he said. It was all so
rushed and unexpected, the words hardening into a wall of
denial structured by her refusal to forsake a happy ending.
Agatha was sick, her stomach an acid swirl of
recrimination and self-doubt. She begged for time; she would
be different; she could change. Panicking, she asked for three
months; he gave her four. Sixteen weeks of polite pirouettes,
circling rather than crossing paths, saying words but skipping
thoughts. He skillfully avoided the real issues by arranging
schedules of separate play, biding time, nothing more.
The morning of Friday, December third, began the
same as any other in Sunningdale. Cook had served eggs,
beans, sausage, and tomatoes, a proper English breakfast. It
was Agatha who spoke first, announcing her intention to spend
the weekend resting at a bed and breakfast in Yorkshire three
hours away, and invited Archie to join her. He was unavailable,
he said, having already made plans to meet his friends, the
Jameses, for a weekend at their lodge in Hurtmore near
Godalming. Her disappointment roiled in her mind, poisoning
her mood. She was the one who shouted first, for volume was
all she had left now. Meaningless words and one idle threat. If
he would not be spending the weekend with her, she
threatened, she would not be at home when he returned.
Archie’s reaction was cold and prepared. Worse still,
he was in control. The louder his wife shouted, the less need
there was for him to respond at all. He only had to tell her the
truth. Slowly, without emotion, he did. He had waited long