Books: I Adore Corpses and Stiffs AGATHA CHRISTIE: A BIOGRAPHY

• Share

Once, after reading in a magazine that she was "the world's most mysterious woman," Agatha Christie complained to her agent: "What do they suggest I am? A Bank Robber or a Bank Robber's wife? I'm an ordinary successful hard-working author--like any other author." Her success was not exactly ordinary. She produced nearly 90 novels and collections of stories in a lifetime that spanned 85 years. One of her plays, The Mousetrap, opened in London in 1952 and is still running.

She refined and left a lasting imprint on the detective formula. An "Agatha Christie" became a shorthand description for an unadorned display of crime unmasked by perceptive and relentless logic. She dared readers to outwit her, and few resisted the challenge. Shortly after her death in 1976, one estimate put the worldwide sale of her works at 400 million copies. Given such glittering evidence and the clues provided by her fiction, a mystique was bound to develop around the one whodunit: Agatha the enchantress, the proper Englishwoman with a power to murder and create. When she insisted that the truth was far less exotic, armchair sleuths who had been trained by her books recognized a false lead when they saw one.

She was right, of course, as this biography, the first written with the blessings of Christie's heirs and estate, conclusively proves. Author Janet Morgan does a thorough job of getting the facts in the Christie case straight and on the record. But the story, even when demystified, seems almost as unbelievable as the guessing games it prompted.

Her childhood could have been written by Jane Austen. Agatha Miller, beloved by her parents and an older sister and brother, grew up in an English seaside village surrounded by Edwardian privileges and leisure. Her American father lived off a trust fund that dwindled steadily, and his death when Agatha was eleven left family finances ever more unsteady. Still, breeding and manners meant as much as money, and the young woman, largely educated at home, moved in a circle of eligible bachelors. She turned down three proposals and took a flyer instead. After a stormy courtship, she married Archie Christie, a dashing aviator with few expectations of living through World War I.

While he fought, his new bride stayed home, working in a hospital. Her sister suggested that Agatha, who was both exhausted and bored during her free time, try to write the sort of detective novel they both enjoyed reading. She did, but by the time The Mysterious Affair at Styles appeared in print, the war was over and Agatha had a daughter, and a husband, grounded at last, who seemed chiefly interested in making money and playing golf.

The year 1926 changed her prospects and her life. For one thing, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which caused a stir because it broke the rules of detective fiction: the narrator did it. Something more shocking followed. In December Agatha left her husband and child and disappeared for ten days, setting off a nationwide search and a carnival of speculation. Morgan's re-creation of this drama is meticulous, but it lacks, perhaps unavoidably, the tight resolution that Christie gave her invented plots.