The ObserverBiography booksReviewLaura Thompson's biography of Agatha Christie finds clues to her popularity in the quality of her prose, says Rachel Cooke

Agatha Christie: An English Mystery

by Laura Thompson

Headline Review £20, pp534

If you read lots of literary biographies, as I do, you can't help but feel that the available pool of subjects is distinctly puddle-sized. A few writers die every year, which is helpful, but not all of them, alas, are worthy of their own book. Meanwhile, all the meatiest names have already been done. So what is the restless biographer to do? Go back, that's what: try someone who was last 'done' a couple of decades ago.

Laura Thompson's previous subject was Nancy Mitford, whose biography had already been ably written by Selina Hastings, and she made a decent go of it - even if it wasn't exactly crammed with revelations, and even if her style was, at times, on the toothache-inducing side of syrupy (Nancy herself would have honked like a drain at its worst excesses). Emboldened by this success, Thompson has now tried the same trick again, with Agatha Christie, who was last the subject of a biography (by Janet Morgan) in 1984.

Thompson clearly feels that she brings a fresh eye - and a special passion - to the already thoroughly picked-over life of the world's bestselling crime writer. But perhaps her publisher is worried others may not agree. The people at Headline have certainly gone all out to sell it. Subtitled An English Mystery, its cover boasts that it was written with 'unique' access to Christie's diary, letters and family, and inside the dust jacket we're promised not a biography but a 'full-scale investigation'. As for its author, she is no mere writer; she has turned 'detective'. As I read, I kept picturing Thompson in a trench coat, pacing a library in which could be found not only dusty notebooks but the body of a stout, middle-aged woman in a fox stole, graduated pearls and bucket hat.

Christie, of course, did not die a violent death (though her reputation has been murdered a few times, notably by Michael Dibdin in J'Accuse on Channel 4), nor was her life especially eventful. She was born in Torquay in 1890 and grew up surrounded by servants. She made an unhappy marriage, had a daughter, became a successful writer, got divorced, and made a happy, if unconventional, second marriage. She died in one of her several grand homes at the age of 85. To what 'mystery', then, does the book's subtitle refer?

There are two. The first, and most obvious, is Christie's infamous 10-day disappearance in 1926, when police dredged ponds in search of her body and the Daily News published pictures of her as she might look in disguise, only for her to turn up in a Harrogate hotel, alive and well and wearing a lovely new georgette frock. The second is the mystery of her success. Though there are people (I'm one of them) who still love Margery Allingham and Dorothy L Sayers, Christie has outlasted and outsold both of them, the same way she did all her Golden Age contemporaries. A billion copies of her books have been sold in English alone. Why? We can't look to Christie for answers: she hated interviews, and was not much given to literary introspection. But go back to the novels, and you won't be any the wiser. As a child, I loved Christie (this, perhaps, is why I think of her stories as children's books) and as I was reading Thompson's massive volume, I dug out my old paperbacks. How mystifying. Bereft of description and characterisation, even her famous puzzles seem silly now: it was Norman Gale in the 18-seater aeroplane with a blowpipe! (Death in the Clouds).

When it comes to Christie's disappearance, Thompson does a fabulous job of getting inside her head, imagining her racing thoughts as she abandoned her car by a North Downs chalk pit and headed on a train to Yorkshire ('In the ladies' room at the Army and Navy she washed her hands and tidied herself. She looked respectable again, not a fugitive at all ...'). Archie, Christie's ex-soldier husband, had revealed he was in love with another woman, and wanted a divorce - and this, coming hard on the death of her adored mother, pushed her to act desperately, and stupidly. The amnesia story that Archie later concocted for the benefit of the press was, it's fair to say, total rubbish. Nor was her disappearance, as has been suggested, a publicity stunt.

But while Thompson is sympathetic ('No writing for now. Just this story of her own, whose ending she did not know'), Christie comes over as a woman used to getting her own way. This wasn't a nervous breakdown; she simply thought that Archie would come running. Thompson is in a bind here because - a little in love with her subject - she wants to defend Agatha from the silted weight of the gossip of the past, and thus maintains that because Christie had written to her brother-in-law explaining her plan to go to Yorkshire (he'd thrown the note away, and had neglected to contact Archie immediately, as she'd intended him to do), she had not really disappeared at all: she had simply done as she said she would. The trouble is, this is not wildly exciting. So Thompson clutches at straws. 'The facts may now be known ...' she writes. 'In the end what is left is a story. A mystery story. Her finest, because it cannot be solved.' What does this mean? Hasn't Thompson just done exactly that?

She is calmer when she describes Christie's second marriage, to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who was 14 years her junior and almost certainly a virgin when they married in 1930, and this approach bears fruit: their relationship comes over as, by turns, peculiar, necessary and loving. Thompson mildly defends Mallowan of the charge that he was a fortune hunter; in any case, Christie, so bruised by the failure of her first marriage, wouldn't have cared if he was (though her cash was undoubtedly useful as he dug away in Iraq and Syria). She thinks, also, that he probably did not have an affair with Barbara Parker, who helped to organise his digs, and who became his wife after Agatha's death.

But then Thompson turns her attention to the second mystery of Christie's life - her success - and she simply goes to pieces. She is quite daffy about her subject's prose. She quotes the novels (where they touch on something experienced by Christie in life) reverentially, as if they were Wharton or Eliot, not the result of the hack-work that meant Christie could write one and sometimes two novels a year for five decades. She repeatedly tells you how brilliant this or that book is - and what she admires is not Christie's way with riddles, but the stuff nobody else can find in her books: insight, motivation, deep emotion. Five Little Pigs, to take just one example, is 'a mystery resolved into simplicity by an understanding of human complexity ... a beautiful process, and a beautiful book'. Thompson devotes a whole chapter to Christie's writing, and it makes for bewildering reading. Her passionate analysis - no, she was not anti-Semitic; no, she was not lacking in imagination - is absolutely, and stubbornly, at odds with anything else on the subject that I've ever read (even PD James, an admirer, concedes that, in Christie, 'we're not dealing with reality'). I wonder.

Agatha's family has always been protective of her reputation; did the relatives require signs of true fandom before they would hand over those diaries? I hope not. But I will say this. Whether by accident or design, something of the oddly pale quality of Christie's fiction has leached into Thompson's own book. Agatha Christie, as she appears here, is as elusive as ever - which is, I'm afraid, exactly the way she would have wanted it.

Life of crime

Agatha Christie has been translated into more languages than Shakespeare.

Christie dedicated The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side to Margaret Rutherford, who portrayed Miss Marple in four films.

On publication of the final Hercule Poirot novel in 1975, the fictional Belgian detective was given a front-page obituary in the New York Times.

She said: 'An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have: the older she gets, the more interested he is in her.'

They say: 'She has her cards and she shifts them with those cunning fingers until, of course, the reader sees the kind of trickery she operates.' - PD James

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