Agatha Christie: The Finished Portrait

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "Agatha Christie: The Finished Portrait", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 7, pp. 555-556. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810894103

Crime writing is probably the most popular genre in public libraries. In her chapter on themes and types of crime fiction, Diana Tixier Herald, the compiler of the sixth edition of Genreflecting: A Guide to Popular Reading Interests (2006), reminds us of its range – classics like Christie and Doyle, Chandler and Hammett, Highsmith and McBain and Simenon; police detectives and private investigators, black and gay and historical and legal thrillers. It is an international phenomenon: just think of Upfield and Camilleri, Freeling and Kaminsky, Connelly and Kellerman, Scoppettone and Pérez‐Reverte, Martini and Temple. It is a hospitable genre, too, where psychology and law and forensic medicine find a natural place, where classics from “the Golden Age” continue to hold their readership, and where many readers eagerly look out for background on their favourite authors.

Biographer Andrew Norman (who has written original books about Hitler and Conan Doyle) turns to Agatha Christie here. He has written a book that readers of Agatha Christie will find fascinating and valuable. Above all, it does two jobs – one to cover the life and work of Christie, itself of continual interest, and the other, more detailed, to offer an ingenious and perceptive explanation of the strange events associated with Christie's disappearance in 1926. On the 3 December 1926 she disappeared for 11 days, leaving subsequent readers and biographers (like Janet Morgan, 1984) to wonder why. Christie turned up in a hotel in Harrogate having lost her memory. Many, then and since, regarded this as a stunt, and today it would almost certainly be seen as one. However, then, and looking at the facts of the case, as far as they can be found and interpreted, things were more substantial and serious.

Norman brings a medical and psychiatric approach to this (he practised as a doctor before becoming a full‐time writer), revisiting and unpacking the available evidence. Christie wrote over one hundred detective novels, as well as numerous plays and short stories, and so it is natural to believe that somewhere there will be revealing clues about what happened. And so there is, above all in Christie's own autobiography (published in 1977, the year after her death) and in a novel called Unfinished Portrait written under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott in 1934. There is further evidence, too, from contemporary press coverage of the affair, describing the car mysteriously discovered at the side of the road near a quarry, Christie's loss of identity in Harrogate, and the police investigation. All these provide tantalizingly oblique insights into what really happened or might have happened.

This is the core of the book – what really happened, above all in the light of what we now know about psychiatry. The explanations from contemporary accounts are laconic and Christie's own accounts of them are refracted through fiction or through a kind of retrospective self‐protectiveness. Norman builds up the picture well – her wish for a happy marriage, her first husband Archie's infidelity and her daughter's independence, her fears about her parents and terrors arising from a childhood nightmare about a stranger. We have then, the story of the story, Christie's story of the story, and then an argument for psychogenic amnesia, convincingly explained by Norman.

As with J.M. Barrie and Charles Kingsley, and Hans Christian Andersen and Conan Doyle and many more, knowing more about authors’ lives helps us understand their work better. Even so, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and so the “explanation” (as if to a whodunit in its own right) needs to be convincing and not merely ingenious. This is something that could and should be said, too, about the many theoretical interpretations of modern fiction, above all those rejecting the notion of the author. Of equal – and parallel – surprise to anyone reading this book is how and why Christie's output of detective fiction went on unabated through all these ups and downs of life: Norman explains this by saying that Christie was pragmatic and knew she needed the income.

So with Norman's study of Christie, we get a coherent framework of the author's life and work (along with a lot of readable information about her interest in trains and gardens and Englishness and even the occult), enough to enable us to place this main enigmatic episode in perspective. Christie went on to remarry – Max Mallowan, the well‐known archaeologist – and to write many books after the 1920s (she died in 1976). The autobiography was published posthumously in 1977 and remains a major – if frustrating – source for information about those missing 11 days. It would be wrong to see that episode as shaping the rest of her life, but wholly correct to examine how it arose out of the pain she felt in the years leading up to 1926. This is what Norman concentrates on, providing a readable addition to the literary biography section of any library. The book review was the 2007 paperback reprint (with corrections) of the 2006 hardback version of the book (itself still in print ISBN 978‐0‐7524‐3990‐1 at £18.99).