Exclusive interview with author Laura Thompson discussing her biography of the prolific whodunit writer
By Gabrielle Pantera
“She is mysterious,” says Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life author Laura Thompson of the great British author. “I’ve read her books since I was 12. A few years ago I was on holiday in Devon, where Agatha grew up, and without expecting it I kept thinking about her… This is the hotel where she spent her honeymoon. This is the island where she set And Then There Were None. I realized how very much she was under my skin. And suddenly I thought that I should like to write about her.”
Dame Agatha Christie wrote 66 detective novels, 14 short story collections, six romances as Mary Westmacott, and the world’s longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap. She created the fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. Many films have been based on her books, most recently the remake of Murder on the Orient Express. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling novelist of all time with two billion copies sold, ranking her as most published behind Shakespeare and the Bible.
But Christie’s own life had its share of mystery too, most notably in 1926 when she disappeared from her home in Berkshire following a row with her first husband Archie, who was having an affair and wanted a divorce. Following a nationwide search, she popped up 11 days later in a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire where she was staying under an assumed name – that of her husband’s young mistress.
Somewhat later, during World War Two MI5 investigated Christie after she named a character Major Bletchley in her 1941 spy thriller N or M?, out of concern she might know of Britain’s top secret code-breaking centre Bletchley Park.
Thompson was aided in her work by receiving the backing of Christie’s family, which transformed the scale of the book into a big biography with complete access to letters and papers.
“The research was amazing,” says Thompson. “It started when I went to Agatha’s beautiful white house in Devon: Greenway, which she bought in 1938 for £6,000. Now open to the public, it was then the home of her daughter, Rosalind, who was brisk and intelligent and absolutely marvellous. I spoke to her not long before she died. Then Agatha’s grandson gave me permission to go through everything at Greenway. I spent a couple of months there, an extraordinary experience.”
“I completely fell in love with that house,” says Thompson. “So much had been kept there: love letters from Archie, letters from Agatha’s parents, pressed flowers still inside them, sent when she was a child, a row of mink coats hanging in a closet, christening robes, the invitation to her parents’ wedding, hundreds of photographs…tremendously moving to look through all this. There were also Agatha’s writing notebooks in which she worked out her plots. I remember reading them through the night in a guest bedroom at Greenway, with a terrific storm raging outside and trees rattling against the windows. Very thrilling.”
Thompson had permission to work at Sotheby’s auction house in London, where the wartime letters between Agatha and her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, were stored. “I was there for several weeks. It would have been less, but Agatha’s handwriting is so hard to read.”
“I learned a great deal about her, not least the extent of her complexity,” says Thompson. “But certain things will always remain unknown. For instance, the episode in 1926, when she disappeared for eleven days, can be understood up to a point. Nevertheless, it cannot be solved.”
Thompson’s first book, The Dogs, won the Somerset Maugham Award. Her most recent book The Six, about the Mitford sisters, was a New York Times bestseller. Her book about the 1974 Lord Lucan case, A Different Class of Murder, was re-issued this year. Published this year by Pegasus is A Tale of Two Murders (UK title Rex V Edith Thompson). About a case in the 1920s, A Tale of Two Murders has been bought for television by Ridley Scott’s company.
Thompson trained as a dancer. She started her writing career by covering sports. Her father owned greyhounds and horses. Thompson inherited a racehorse, which lives on a friend’s farm.
Thompson is currently proofreading her memoir of her grandmother, The Last Landlady, for publication in September.
Thompson lives at the south west edge of London in Richmond. She was born and grew up in the rural village in Buckinghamshire. Her website is laurathompson.co.uk.
Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson. Hardcover: 544 pages, Publisher: Pegasus Books; 1 edition (March 6, 2018). Language: English, ISBN: 9781681776538 $35.00
