The mystery of Christie

Agatha Christie penned some of the world’s most famous crime novels, but the real-life mystery of her own disappearance has never been solved

- FELICITY DAY

She is the best-selling fiction writer of all time. Her 66 murder mysteries have sold more than 2 billion copies worldwide. Her super-sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple are household names. But the inimitable Agatha Christie, Queen of Crime, might never have penned a detective novel at all were it not for a bit of sibling rivalry: “I bet you couldn’t,” her sister Madge goaded her.

But of course she could, and she did, and in January 1921 her debut landed on the shelves of British bookshops. One of her trademark tales of murder in an isolated country house, peppered with clues that kept readers guessing until the end, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was a hit with the critics. Among the various positive reviews, however, there was one that particularly pleased its author. Having praised the novel “for dealing with poisons in a knowledgeable way” the Pharmaceutical Journal declared “Agatha Christie knows her job.”

For the crime writer was also qualified as a pharmacy dispenser, a role that had inspired her first foray into fiction. Having initially volunteered to nurse at the Red Cross Hospital in her home town at the start of the First World War – shortly before her marriage to Captain Archie Christie – she had later transferred to the hospital pharmacy, where she was introduced to the range of deadly toxins she would later deploy so skilfully in the name of murder: everything from strychnine to cyanide and arsenic.

There too she came to appreciate the deadly potential in the most everyday of drugs, witnessing on one occasion a pharmacist make a terrible mistake – a simple miscalculation that resulted in a hazardously toxic dose. “He struck me,” she later remarked, “in spite of his cherubic experience, as possibly a rather dangerous man.”