Agatha Christie - 10 Dark Secrets Even Die Hard Fans Never Knew!

[00:00:00]In December 1926, Agatha Christie vanished. Her car was found abandoned near a cliff edge. Her coat left inside. And for 11 days, the most famous crime writer in Britain became the subject of the biggest manhunt the country had ever seen. While the real story of where she was and why, she took to her grave without ever explaining. The woman who gave the world Hercule Puo and Miss Marple spent her entire life hiding something and the disappearance was only the beginning.

[00:00:33]Fact one, she vanished. She never explained. On the evening of the 3rd of December 1926, Agatha Christy left her home in Barkshire, got into her Morris Cowie, and drove away. She did not come back.

[00:00:48]The following morning, her car was found near Newand's Corner in Surrey, close [music] to a chalk pit. The headlights were still on. Her fur coat was in the back. [music] There was no sign of her.

[00:00:59]Britain assumed the worst. The newspapers ran the story on their front pages for days. 15,000 volunteers joined the search across the Surrey countryside. The home secretary was briefed. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, obtained one of her gloves and gave it to a medium in the hope of locating her psychically. The Daily News offered £100 to anyone who could find her. She was found 11 days later at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Harriate, Yorkshire. She had checked in under a false name, the name of her husband's mistress, the woman for whom Archie Christy had just announced he was leaving her. She was sitting in the lounge, apparently calm, apparently unaware that anything unusual had occurred. Christy never publicly explained what had happened. She gave no interview, published no account, and made no reference to those 11 days in her autobiography beyond acknowledging that they occurred. The most plausible explanations, a dissociative fugue brought on by psychological collapse or a deliberate act of revenge against a husband who had humiliated her remain exactly that, plausible. The truth died with her in January 1976, and the mystery she left behind is the one she never solved. [music] Fact two, she had a secret identity. The world knew Agatha Christie as the queen of crime fiction. What the world did not know for more than 20 years was that she was also Mary Westmakott, a romantic novelist whose books had nothing to do with murder, detectives, or the puzzle plots that made her famous. Between 1930 and 1956, Christy published six novels under the West Mott name. They were not detective stories. They were emotional, introspective, autobiographical works exploring love, marriage, grief, and identity. The interior life of a woman whose public persona as the creator of Puro left almost no room for anything so personal. She kept the secret carefully and her publishers kept it with her. The secret held for two decades. In 1949, a Sunday Times journalist identified her as West Makott, and Christy confirmed it without elaborating. She continued to publish under the pseudonym regardless, completing the final West Makott novel in 1956.

[00:03:25]Those six books are read today almost entirely by Christy Specialists. They are not widely available, not heavily promoted, and rarely discussed in the same breath as her crime work. But they are the truest record of what was happening inside a woman who spent her public career constructing elaborate puzzles while her private life was considerably harder to solve than anything she ever put on the page. Fact three, third most translated author ever. Agatha Christie is the bestselling fiction writer in human history. More than two billion copies of her books have been sold worldwide, a figure so large it is difficult to make sense of it, except by comparison. In the entire history of human publishing, only the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare have been translated into more languages than Christy's novels.

[00:04:17]She has been translated into more than a 100 languages. In countries where British television has never reached and British culture is only dimly understood, Christi is nonetheless known through local translations, local editions, local readers who have been working through the canon for generations. Puro is recognized in Japan, in Brazil, in countries whose relationship to the English-speaking world is minimal at best. The sales figure is not historical. Christy currently sells approximately 4 million copies per year. The bulk of them outside Britain. Every new television adaptation, every Puro series, every Marple, every Kenneth Brer film sends a fresh wave of readers back to the source material. A writer who died in 1976 is still by commercial measures among the most active authors on Earth. She did not set out to build an empire. She set out to earn a living and then to write better books than the last ones. The scale of what she built was as invisible to her as it was to everyone around her.

[00:05:24]She gave no speeches about her legacy.

[00:05:26]She simply kept writing for 56 years until she couldn't. Fact four. Rejected five times, then billions. The mysterious affair at Styles, the novel that introduced Hercule Puo to the world, was not immediately recognized as anything special. Christy wrote it during the First World War, partly on a dare from her sister, Maj, who believed she could not construct a detective story that would be impossible to solve before the end. Christy completed the manuscript and sent it to publishers.

[00:05:59]They sent it back. Five publishers rejected the book before John Lane at the Bodley Head agreed to take it. The process took years. Christy set the manuscript aside at various points, convinced it was not good enough, then returned to it, revised it, and sent it out again. The persistence required to keep submitting a novel across years of rejection while working as a hospital dispenser and then raising a child was considerable. When Lane finally accepted it in 1920, the contract he offered was poor. Christy, eager to be published and inexperienced in negotiation, signed away significant rights to the character of Puero and the novel itself. It was a decision she would spend years regretting and attempting to reverse, and it left her financially disadvantaged precisely at the moment when her career was beginning to generate real money. The irony is complete. The most successful crime novelist in history, whose books would eventually sell more than two billion copies, was turned down five times for her debut. Signed away her rights out of gratitude for being accepted at all, and spent the early years of her career in a worse contractual position than she had any reason to accept. Success, when it came, came in spite of the start. Not of it. Fact five. She was a trained poisoner. During the first world war, Christy worked as a voluntary aid detachment nurse at a hospital in Toqu and later as a dispenser, a role equivalent to a qualified pharmacist in the hospital dispensary. She spent years handling drugs, compounding medicines, and learning in professional detail how various substances acted on the human body. It was unglamorous, precise work, and she absorbed it completely. The knowledge showed immediately in her fiction. Christiey's murders are disproportionately achieved through poison, not because poison is the most dramatic method, but because she understood it better than any other. The poisons she used were real, correctly named, correctly dosed, and correctly described in their effects. The Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain later acknowledged her as one of the most toxicologically accurate crime writers who had ever practiced. The connection between the hospital dispensary in to the two billion books sold is rarely made explicit, but it is direct. Without those years of handling poisons and drugs, without the professional precision they instilled, Christy's murders would be less convincing, her plots less watertight, and her reputation for impossible to guess solutions less earned. She killed so many fictional people so effectively because she had once very carefully learned how. If you're enjoying this, it would mean a lot if you subscribed. It helps us keep making videos like this one. Just hit that button and you'll never miss a new one. Fact six, she married her opposite. The years following Christiey's disappearance and her divorce from Archie Christie in 1928 were among the most difficult of her life. She was a single mother, professionally uncertain and personally devastated. What rescued her both emotionally and creatively was a trip to the Middle East, a shared interest in ancient things, and a young archaeologist named Max Malawan. They met on an archaeological dig in Iraq in 1930.

[00:09:29]Maloan was 26, Christy was 40. She was already one of the most famous writers in Britain. He was at the beginning of a career that would eventually make him one of the most celebrated archaeologists of his generation. They married the same year they met and remained together for the rest of her life. Christiey's own remark about the marriage has become one of the most quoted lines she ever produced outside her fiction. An archaeologist, she observed, is the best husband any woman can have because the older she gets, the more interested in her he is. The line is funny and deflecting in the way she preferred, but the marriage itself was serious and sustaining. More practically, accompanying Maloan on his digs gave her the settings for some of her most celebrated novels. Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, and several others were written directly from her experience of the Middle East. The landscapes, the hotels, the archaeology, the particular texture of life on a dig, all of it found its way into her work.

[00:10:35]Without the second marriage and without the world it opened to her, the Christy cannon would be noticeably thinner. Fact seven, she locked his death away. By the 1930s, Agatha Christie had grown to find Hercu genuinely tiresome. She had described him privately as a detestable little creep, a character she had invented, made famous, and now felt trapped by. Readers adored him.

[00:11:01]Publishers needed him. Christy found him exhausting and would have been glad to stop. She could not simply abandon him.

[00:11:08]He was too valuable commercially and contractually for that. What she did instead was write his ending. During the Second World War, she produced Curtain, the novel in which Puero solves his final case and dies. She locked the manuscript in a bank vault with instructions that it was not to be published during her lifetime. She did the same with Miss Marple. Sleeping Murder, the novel intended as Marple's last case, was also written in the 1940s and also vaulted. Both books were published in 1975 and 1976, the years immediately before and after Christiey's own death. She had been carrying those endings around for 30 years. When Curtain was finally published in 1975, the New York Times ran an obituary for Hercule Pu, a formal death notice for a fictional character treated with all the gravity of a real bererement. It is the only time a newspaper of record has published an obituary for someone who never existed. Christy, who had waited three decades to be rid of him, did not live to see quite how seriously the world took the loss. Fact eight. She gave the hit away. [music] The mousetrap opened at the Ambassador's Theater in London's West End on the 25th of November, 1952.

[00:12:26]Christy reportedly expected it to run for about 8 weeks. She was by this point in her career experienced enough to know that theatrical runs were unpredictable, but 8 weeks was a reasonable expectation for a modestlymounted mystery play. It ran for a great deal longer than that.

[00:12:45]The mousetrap has been running continuously in the West End ever since transferred to St. Martins's Theater in 1974 where it remains today. By any measure, it is the longest running play in the history of professional theater. No other production comes close. It has been seen by more than 10 million people. It is still selling tickets.

[00:13:07]Christy had given the rights to the play to her grandson, Matthew Pritchard, as a birthday gift in 1952, the year it opened. He was 9 years old. The gift was well-intentioned and probably not expected by anyone to amount to very much. It has since made him and the Christy estate a very considerable sum of money compounded across seven decades of continuous performance. The play itself contains a twist ending which the audience is asked at the curtain call not to reveal. This request has been honored more or less faithfully for more than 70 years. The secret of the mouse trap is one of the few genuine secrets in British cultural life widely alluded to, almost universally known to exist and rarely spoiled. Christy, who made her reputation on the surprise ending, would have appreciated that particular irony. Fact [music] nine, she lost her own characters. The contract Christy signed with the Bodley head for her first novel was not the last professional mistake of her early career. As her reputation grew and her books began to sell in serious numbers, she found herself bound by agreements that gave publishers and agents rights over her work that she had not fully understood when she signed them. The woman who constructed the most elaborate deceptions in fiction had been deceived in plain sight by her own contracts. The situation with Puero was particularly acute. The rights to the character were complicated by the terms of her original publishing deal, and untangling them required years of negotiation and legal attention. Christy's protectiveness over adaptations. Her fierce resistance to films and television productions [music] she considered unworthy was not merely artistic snobbery. It was the defensiveness of someone who had once signed away things she should have kept and was determined never to do so again.

[00:15:04]She eventually achieved a level of control that satisfied her and the Christy estate has maintained it with considerable rigor ever since. The standards she insisted on during her lifetime accuracy of period, fidelity to character, no gratuitous alterations became the framework within which her grandson Matthew Pritchard continued to operate after her death. The estate's reputation for careful stewardship of her work is a direct inheritance from a woman who learned the hard way what happened when you let others decide what your characters could do. Fact 10. She hated being famous. By the 1950s, Agatha Christie was among the most famous people in Britain. Her books were translated into dozens of languages. Her plays were running in the West End, and her name was recognized in countries she had never visited. She was invited everywhere, celebrated constantly, and photographed whenever she appeared in public. She found almost all of it intolerable. Christy was constitutionally private. She gave very few interviews, and the interviews she did give were careful, controlled, and revealed almost nothing she had not decided in advance to reveal. She disliked being photographed. She avoided literary gatherings. The public life that her success required of her was the part of the career she consistently found most difficult and she managed it by minimizing it as far as she possibly could. Her autobiography published postuously in 1977 is written with the same evasiveness. It covers her childhood with warmth and detail, her travels with pleasure and her work with professional matterof factness. The 11 days in 1926, the broken first marriage, the interior life that the West Makott novels were trying to express. These are present only in outline, if at all. The most famous mystery writer in the world was, in the end, the mystery she protected most carefully. She died in January 1976 at the age of 85 at her home, Winterbrook House in Wallingford.

[00:17:12][music] She had been writing until the end. The two novels she had vaulted during the war were published within a year of her death. The mousetrap continued its run.

[00:17:23]The books kept selling. And the 11 days in Harriut, which she had refused to explain for 50 years, remained as she had always intended, entirely her