When I started researching my book Agatha Christie at Home, published the year that Agatha Christie's house Greenway was opened to the public for the first time, I hadn't realised just how many other people had written about the less obvious aspects of her life and works. As I ferreted through libraries in search of material on Agatha's enthusiasm for acquiring and decorating houses (at one point she owned eight) and on her home county of Devon which provided inspiration and backdrops for several of her novels, I came across all sorts of angles to the work of the crime novelist – her use of proverbs, an analysis of her poisons, cover designs. Some books represented huge labours of love, such as The Agatha Christie Who's Who by Randall Toyes, listing over 2,000 characters, and Dawn Sova's Agatha Christie A-Z. The best-selling author of all time has inspired an inter-disciplinary conference on detective fiction, a psychological treatise, recipes and plays - for example, Let's Kill Agatha Christie, starring 'Prudence Sykes, an eccentric lady novelist who would like to be a second Agatha Christie (she isn't)'. There is even a crossword book.
I found many of these at the Welsh home of Agatha's grandson, Mathew Prichard, who had invited me to see if I could find any relevant material for my book. Before leaving me to rummage through news cuttings, pamphlets and letters, he showed me a small selection of Agatha's notebooks – old school jotters and exercise books used by Agatha to sketch out her plots and characters. John Curran, a lifelong fan, has recently produced a book based on this source material, Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks, in which he deciphers and analyses the scrawled notes, which are interrupted by shopping lists or reminders to herself to do something. Rather than simply presenting facsimiles – this wouldn't have worked well as the plot notes are randomly scattered, let alone the difficulty of actually reading Agatha's handwriting – he has grouped the books by theme (nursery rhyme books, murder by quotation) which allows him to skip from notebook to notebook, as she herself did.
One of the most absorbing books I found in the bookcase at Mathew's archive was the Official Centenary Celebration, published in 1990, and crammed with photographs and features on her home and professional life. One of the oddest was The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion, an American book which alternates plot résumés with slight essays on the English tea ritual, recipes derived from her novels, interviews with fans and methods of murder.
Along with the two acclaimed biographies - Janet Morgan's seminal work commissioned soon after Agatha's death, and the more recent one by Laura Thompson in 2007 - there have been profiles of her major detectives. Anne Hart has written biographies of both Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. James Cresswell has gone one further in Miss Marple and All her Characters: only part of his book is dedicated to a profile of Miss Marple but in a painstaking task over many years, he has catalogued every single character in all the stories, annotating them as 'analogies' (those people remembered by Miss Marple as doing something similar in her village), pseudonyms or reference names (e.g. Adam and Agamemnon) and cross-referencing them with the story or novel in which she appears. Perhaps, however, the oddest of her appearances is in Reflecting on Miss Marple, in which Marion Shaw and Sabine Vanacker, two Hull academics, present the venerable female detective as feminist heroine. Agatha Christie herself is given the psychoanalytical treatment (alas, only in French) in Un Divan pour Agatha Christie by Sophie de Mijolla-Mellor, who claims to be following in the footsteps of Freud who was particularly fond of reading Agatha Christie novels.
Even her language is minutely examined. The Agatha Project, a computer-aided linguistic study claimed to find that her language patterns stimulated higher-than-usual activity in the brain. In Black Sheep, Red Herrings and Blue Murder, George Bryan systematically examined the use of all her proverbs, itemising each and calculating the distribution among her characters and estimating the average number per novel.
Perhaps most interesting to Crime Time readers is The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie by Michael Gerald, Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Ohio – which gives a detailed exposition of all the poisons she used (together with the correct pronunciation). That could come in handy.
Agatha Christie at Home is published by Frances Lincoln
