‘Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman’
By Lucy Worsley
Pegasus Books, 414 pages

“She was simply ubiquitous, especially in the post-war period when a ‘Christie for Christmas’ became an annual ritual,” Lucy Worsley reports about an author who lived through eight decades that included two world wars and the decline of the British empire, and whose popularity rivaled that of best sellers Shakespeare and the Bible.

Christie was part of a generation of women of mystery — Margery Allingham, Josephine Tey, Ngaio Marsh, Georgette Heyer, and Dorothy L. Sayers — who kept to themselves and wanted no publicity. Yet Christie stands out, Ms. Worsley notes, because she was so prolific into the 1950s and 1960s and so insistent on her ordinariness. 

Why was it so important for Christie to be viewed as ordinary, and how could it be that an ordinary person created stories that ordinary people found so thrilling? Ms. Worsley provides an answer in her preface, recounting a scene of two women on a train, both with Christie books in hand, discussing their “matronly, middle-aged fellow passenger.” One of the ladies says she has heard that Christie “drinks like a fish,” while in fact she was “teetotal,” didn’t like wine, and was fond of a “glass of neat cream,” the biographer reports.

Readers had to project into the person what her stories suggested to them: a writer “addicted, damaged, unhappy,” Ms. Worsley suggests, even as Christie “played upon the fact that she seemed so ordinary” and “spent her life pretending to be ordinary.” 

Why is the biographer so certain that Christie’s normality is a pretense? Brought up in the late Victorian period to be modest, to perform the part of a lady, the performance might very well have become second nature. Perhaps she could not create murder mysteries without thinking of them as occurring outside herself.

The secret of Christie’s creativity may be that she identified with those ladies on the train, inventing their own fictions of what the author’s life was like. Perhaps the ordinary, the country village, and her detectives, had to appear nondescript, or at least unimpressive?

I wish Ms. Worsley had been a little more playful with what it was like to be Agatha Christie, though I do like this observation: “Rather like a stereotypical woman, [Hercule] Poirot cannot rely upon brawn to solve problems, for he has none.” He declares: “One needs only — to think.” 

Yet Ms. Worsley rushes past the detective’s aperçu that has me musing on how Agatha Christie clearly saw her own imagination as commensurate with that of her detective’s, no matter how commonplace her appearance and behavior might seem. And isn’t that also what she tells us about that seemingly staid village life, that it veils intrigue and far worse?

Like Sherlock Holmes, Poirot is an eccentric — another word for normal in the English lexicon — but the Belgian is no British empiricist, sorting through different kinds of cigar ash, Ms. Worsley points out. Poirot puts his imagination to work: Like a good novelist, I would add.

Ordinary? I’ll give you ordinary, Christie seems to have said to herself in 1930, 10 years after the first appearance of Poirot, when she created Miss Marple, spinster extraordinaire, especially in what Ms. Worsley calls the early, “acidic version,” in “The Murder at the Vicarage.” There, she is described as a “nasty old cat,” tending her garden mainly to keep a lookout for crime. 

Ms. Worsley prefers Miss Marple the first: “perhaps that’s because I’m a nasty old cat myself.” Biographers, like novelists, project themselves and their experiences into the sensibilities of their characters. Christie breaks out of the village scene with novels like “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Death on the Nile” that reflect the novelist’s trips with her husband.

Ms. Worsley does a capital job of showing how Christie worked the details of real-life crime and detective work into her stories, not to mention using her archeologist husband’s knowledge to create works like “Murder in Mesopotamia.”

For readers who want to know more about the tricks of the trade in mystery writing, the biographer happily supplies those as well in a narrative that never flags.

Mr. Rollyson is the editor of “Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction,” revised edition, in five volumes.