James Prichard
Interview| James Prichard, CEO at Agatha Christie Ltd
Q/ How was it growing up as the great grandson of Agatha Christie?
A/ I did not know anything different because that is the way I grew up. And to me it feels perfectly natural, although, obviously, I understand that it was not. What is interesting from my perspective is how, when I was growing up, Agatha Christie was not cool. She certainly was not as popular as she is now. I think about how different my own children’s experience is than mine was. My kids have the advantage of a time when she is bigger now than she ever has been. And that includes when she was alive. Film and TV are just bigger media than books and stage, which were the pools she played in.
The other thing is that I have always thought of Agatha Christie as two people. There is the world-famous icon, the author, the genius, and then there is the private person, who I think of as my father’s grandmother. I was five or six when she died. But my grandmother, her daughter, lived until 2004. My father is still alive. So, obviously, I have a lot of reflected knowledge and experience of her. I do feel as if I have a personal insight into her. I teased my father about how I thought she was the most extraordinary grandmother and how he was the most spoiled grandchild of the 20th century. And I don’t mean that purely in financial terms, although there was an element of that. She was incredibly loving. She shared extraordinary experiences with him, took him around the world, took him to the theatre, opera, and just all sorts of experiences.
Q/ Do you have any memory of her?
A/ I do have vague memories. She was obviously very old when I was a child and I remember being asked to behave and not run around too wildly by my mother, in case I knocked her over or something. I also have a very vivid memory of the day she died. I remember coming back from school and my father was sitting in this room with the curtains drawn, and was obviously very upset. I remember watching the six o’clock news and she was the lead item. Even then I realised that was not normal, and not what happened to everyone else’s great grandmothers. But obviously, I never got to sit down and discuss her work or her feelings on life, the universe or anything else. So I miss that a bit.
Q/ What is her first novel that you read?
A/ The first book I read was Death on the Nile. I think I was around nine. And bizarrely, I seem to remember that I read it surreptitiously. There was a paperback on the passage or something. I took it to my room and read it under the bed cover, because I was not sure that my parents would be happy with me reading it. I guess I just thought they would think it was too adult and I was too young, but it has always stuck with me as one of my favourite stories.
Q/ What are some memories or anecdotes that your father or grandmother might have told you about her?
A/ One of the most interesting things my father always says about her is that she was the best listener he ever met. She was a very shy person, and I think she was probably happier listening to people and asking them questions than she was regaling them with stories about herself. Her books are at heart about human nature. They are about people.
Q/ Could you describe the work that you do as chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Ltd?
A/ I do think of her books as being the heart of the business. We certainly make as much money now as has ever been made from publishing. It is extraordinary how many books we still sell. As a child, I was told that books and reading were going to come to an end. People have always been prophesying that the book is dead; it really isn’t. And then you get new versions of the book, like the e-book. The growth of audio over the last five years in the UK and the US is unbelievable, and is now a very significant part of our business. We have done some really interesting multi-voice audio projects.
I have been probably doing this job properly for 10 years or so, and have had to learn the worlds of TV, film, adaptation and stage. But the main thing is that it is still a fascinating business. It is extraordinary to see how many people still love Agatha Christie. Last week I was in China and went to see a play in Beijing—an English version of Murder on the Orient Express. There was a packed audience of about a thousand people. And then on Saturday night, I went to see a Chinese version of Murder on the Orient Express in Shanghai and it was a packed hall of 1,200 people, all having a good time. That kind of blows my mind. Her work still has an extraordinary impact on people all over the world. That is just an aspect of her genius that perhaps we will never understand, and perhaps there is no point in trying to understand.
Q/ According to you, what is the essence of her enduring appeal?
A/ I think it is a very simple thing—the stories. She had a genius for plot. And the thing about great stories is that they don’t age. They stand the test of time. They thrive across boundaries, across borders, across languages. You can translate a great story into any language in the world. And it is no accident that she is the most translated author of all time. But I also think that her understanding of human nature is completely underestimated. Bizarrely, I think she is criticised occasionally for not having enough characterisation in her books. What people underestimate is how she managed to pack everything in 70,000 words; her books are relatively short. That is part of her ability to sketch a character. We know who these people are. We still know people like them. You don’t need another 10,000 words to understand them. And I think that is part of her skill. She is criticised for something which actually was at the heart of her talent.
Q/ She wrote her first book in the aftermath of World War I. If she was writing her novels today, how different would they have been?
A/ The first part of that question to me is always fascinating, which is that essentially the murder mystery genre came out of a time of horrible bloodshed and killing. Why people came out of World War I and wanted to read about murder, I don’t know. But I think one of the things about these books is that, despite the horrible things that happen, at the end, things are all sorted and the world is put back together again. And I think that was a reassuring concept for readers at the time.