Renowned historian Lucy Worsley explores the life of Agatha Christie at the Emirates Literature Festival in Dubai
Dubai: In a sold-out one-hour session at the Emirates Literature Festival, British historian and broadcaster Lucy Worsley and Icelandic thriller writer Ragnar Jónasson spoke about the revered British detective author Agatha Christie (1890-1976). Actively writing for more than five decades, the best-selling “Queen of Crime” led a remarkable life and career of ups and downs.
She taught herself to read at age 5, wrote 66 detective novels, surfed in Hawaii, and survived infidelity and a painful divorce. He sold over 2 billion books and was knighted by the Queen in the 80s. One could say that Christie was a fighter, and the pen was her weapon of choice.
Both Worsley and Jonasson are longtime fans of Christie’s. Worsley has a new biography about the author out, while since her teens, Jonasson has translated more than a dozen of Christie’s novels into Icelandic. “You go back to the books again and again, like leisure reading,” he said.
“Someone like Agatha Christie can sometimes be placed in this box that is marked with the words ‘difficult women.’ You are not immediately likable, not immediately knowable, you are not all sweet and mild, Worsley told the Dubai audience. “It strikes me that a lot of times when a woman is put into that category in people’s minds, it’s because she’s breaking the rules for what women are supposed to be at the time.”
Worsley, who wrote his book during the pandemic, had access to Christie’s family archive and did research at their Georgian holiday home in Devon, England. Christie began writing her books seriously in the 1920s, often referred to as the “Golden Age of Crime Fiction”. Worsley believes it was World War I, when Christie was a nurse, that kicked things off for her.
“She began writing detective novels during the quiet hours in the hospital dispensary while she waited for prescriptions to arrive,” she explained. “It was his job to mix drugs and produce drugs (and) poisons that could either save life or take life.”
During her peak years, between the 1920s and 1940s, Christie always seemed to outdo other contemporary crime writers. “She was simply the best,” Jonasson said, complimenting her for her genius plots. “Others were writing very good detective stories, but he always had this extra layer of a twist at the end … His ideas are sometimes so simple that you sum them up in one sentence.”
The sessions also considered Christie’s personal difficulties, including her infamous 1926 disappearance, when she shunned society for 11 days as a result of her first husband’s adultery. In the later years of her life, suffering from the early stages of dementia, Christie’s books were not as successful as her previous books.
But there were some positive points too. His adventures in the Middle East gave the world such all-time classics as “Death on the Nile” and “Murder on the Orient Express.” It was in Iraq that she met archaeologist Max Mallowan, her second husband of more than 40 years. Interest in Christie’s writings remains high, as films and TV shows inspired by her books continue to be produced. Not only do these attract longtime fans but, and perhaps most importantly, they introduce his work to a younger generation.