Not many people would know Margaret Frary Miller; she is one of those people who tip-toed incognito through the hallways of history. Still, if it was not for her, the world might never have gotten its most beloved crime writer—Agatha Christie. Agatha—and the world at large—has two things to thank Margaret for. First, for challenging her to write a crime novel. It happened after both read Gaston Leroux’s The Mystery of the Yellow Room and Margaret made a bet with Agatha: that she would never be able to pull off a book like Gaston’s. Agatha, of course, took up the challenge and the rest, as they say, is a legacy in crime.
Second, Margaret gave her a setting for many of her novels—Abney Hall in Cheadle, which was Margaret’s married home, where Agatha spent many happy days as a young girl. Later, its “quantities of rooms, passages, unexpected steps, back staircases, front staircases, alcoves, niches” would become the site of many bloody murders, served Agatha style. They made an appearance in her books like 4.50 from Paddington (in which it was described as a “proper old mausoleum”), They Do It With Mirrors and, of course, her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles.
In the last, it had to compete for attention with perhaps Agatha’s greatest literary offering—the flamboyant Belgian whiz Hercule Poirot, whose head was “exactly the shape of an egg”, whose moustache was “very stiff and military”, and for whom a speck of dust on his suit would have caused more pain than a bullet wound. He became so popular that when his creator killed him off, The New York Times published an obituary. Together, Agatha and her master detective trudged the corners and crevices of the English countryside, snooping in vicarages, coastal resorts and English girls’ boarding schools for clues, interviewing passengers in trains and ships, and using their “little grey cells” to solve the unsolvable. Agatha’s quintessential Englishness provided the backdrop for a little-appreciated facet of her writing—her humour. Often, she was at her sassiest while taking a potshot at her own people. In her short story Triangle at Rhodes, for example, she wrote of an Englishwoman: “Unlike most English people, she was capable of speaking to strangers on sight instead of allowing four days to a week elapse before making the first cautious advance as is the customary British habit.”
In fact, if you solved the mystery of Agatha’s life, you got an insight into the machinery of her mind. For example, her favourite murder weapon of choice—poison—was developed during her years working at a Torquay dispensary during World War I, when she was married to her first husband Archibald Christie and living with her widowed mother. History has lost count of the unsuspecting men and women who have been bumped off with Agatha’s strychnine-laced cocoa and thallium-spiked tea.
But some of her best books—like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile—were a result of her travels to Egypt, Iraq and Syria with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan. In fact, it was recently revealed that the couple also visited India in January 1960 for an archaeological lecture tour. The next year, she visited Kashmir on a leisure trip. “Lake and mountains rather lovely,” she wrote her daughter Rosalind from Srinagar’s Oberoi Palace. “This is a hotel rather like at Jaipur—converted rajah’s palace—miles and miles of corridors, enormous rooms and we are in a kind of super suite looking over the lake.” Pity her imagination did not poison the walls of the hotel with arsenic fumes; unfortunately, the queen of crime did not set any of her novels in India.
So how was this maverick writer—whose 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections have made her the best-selling novelist of all time, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare—in real life? “She was incredibly loving,” says her great grandson, James Prichard, CEO at Agatha Christie Ltd. “She shared extraordinary experiences with my father—her grandson—taking him around the world, to the theatre, the opera and all sorts of experiences. I tease my father that he was the most spoiled grandchild of the 20th century.”
According to James, she was also a great listener. “My father says she was the best listener he ever met,” he says. “She was very shy, and was happier listening to people and asking them questions than regaling them with stories or anecdotes about herself. There is a piece of advice she gave aspiring writers. She told them that if they wanted to learn about people, just ride around on the bus and listen to their conversations.”
It is difficult to reconcile this shy and gentle grandmother with the ace crime writer who plotted countless gruesome murders. But perhaps one can get a clue to the mystery of Agatha from what she herself once said: “I had an idea that writing books was only the natural successor to embroidering sofa-cushions.” To think that if it was not for Margaret, the world might have gotten a seamstress instead of a crime writer. Thank God for the bet that gave us corpses and not cushions.