Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery

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Hey, everybody. It's me, Josh.
And for this week's Select, I've chosen our episode from 2020 on Agatha Christie. It's a neat little episode about who is possibly the greatest selling writer of all time, by far, and may inspire you to get into Agatha Christie's books.
And there are definitely worse things you could do with your time. So grab a cup of tea, a nice little blanket, and enjoy this cozy little episode.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryan over there. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
I don't know if we're going to be able to get used to Jerry being around again. Is she fired? I don't think so.
She may have fired herself, though. I don't think so.
I have better things to do than hang out with you, cool cats and kittens. Well, and it's kind of like, what's the point of just sitting there? And I can't imagine it more boring than listening to us on headphones.
Oh, wait a minute. That's our show.
Yes. There are people doing that very thing right now, Chuck, and you have just mocked their existence.
Oh, I just meant for Jerry's sake, you know. Yeah, I know.
Jerry's not a fan.

No, she's not.

Or a listener.

So, I have a question for you, Chuck.

You ever read a book?

No.

No, don't be ridiculous.

Chuck, have you ever met Agatha Christie?

Yeah, I met her when I was three. Oh, really? Do you have much of a memory of that encounter? A little bit.
She was nice enough. She signed my Murder on the Orient Express copy, first edition.
Oh, wow. That's got to be worth some money.
That's pretty neat. Yeah.
Do you still have that? Nah. I did some spring cleaning here a couple weeks ago.

I didn't even recycle or put it in a little free library.

I just threw it in the trash.

Didn't you say once that your brother has like a copy of number one Superman or something nuts like that?

No.

I thought he has something, some valuable comic book.

No.

Huh. No.
I must be confusing you with some valuable comic book. No.
Huh.

No.

I must be confusing you with my other co-host, Chuck.

No.

We weren't big comic book people.

We don't have anything valuable like that.

I gotcha.

Well, having met Agatha Christie when you were a kid,

I feel like you'll probably have a lot to bring to this one.

I will.

I was, I have never met her still to this day. Probably never will.
And I have read a couple of her things and seen a couple movies based on her stuff. But I would never consider myself like a rabbit Agatha Christie fan.
But I do appreciate her work a lot. You picked this one.
Why? We have this series of books, children's books, about awesome women in history from Frida to Coco Chanel to Amelia Earhart to Agatha Christie. And so I was reading this one the other night and thought, hey, let's do one on Agatha Christie.
I haven't read any of her work, seen a couple of her movies, love the genre though. Yeah.
As films, I've never read mystery, murder mysteries, although I'm going to now. I started reading The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, which I think was her first published work last night.

And it's just great.

She just sucks you right in.

She does what's, she creates a lot of books,

not all of them,

but she creates what's called a cozy mystery

with an S because it's British.

And I'd never heard that term before until this article.

But when I came across it, I was like, yes, I love that kind of thing. And that's exactly what I love about Murder, She Wrote.
Like the Murder, She Wrote is where she goes to like Broadway or Paris or something like that. I can take her leave.
They're fine. But it's the ones that are set in tiny little Cabot Cove that's just isolated from the rest of the world and it's cozy and small and it's like a village and all that.
Those are the murders she wrote that I love the most. And I think that's what I like about Agatha Christie mysteries, too, is they're very typically cozy mysteries.
I've never seen that show. What? What? We've had this conversation before.
No. That would be seared into my brain forever.
No, we have because you said the first time. Yeah, I've never seen it, but I'm a huge fan of murder mystery movies, especially cozy mysteries like Clue is one of my favorite films.
And this year's or last year's Knives Out was one of my top like three or four films of the year. I've not seen it yet.
It's still like $7 on Amazon Prime, so I haven't rented it yet. I'm waiting for the price point to drop.
I can loan you a couple of bucks if you need. All right, sure.
$3.99. $3.99, all right.
$3.99. It's still a lot for a rental.
I mean, that's a lot. You think? $3.99 is manageable.
$4.99 and up, that's a lot of mood law for a rental, if you ask me.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm taking a stand on this.

All right, well, film professionals out there, please do not take offense to all your hard work.

So, I have a question for you. I have one more question.

Have you seen the Agatha Christie film adaptation of Crooked House that came out in 2017? No. I think you'll like it.
It was big budget, but it also looks like British made for television big budget. That's great.
Gillian Anderson, Dana Scully is in it. Okay.
Love her. Because, you know, the Brits are nuts for her.
Are they? Oh, man. She's like their favorite person in the world and has been for years.
I don't know why. Nothing against Gillian Anderson, but like she just never hit it as big over here as she did there.
Terrence Stamp is in it. Love him.
Glenn Close. She's great.
And I was like, this is really good. So I was reading little synopses of it and all that stuff.
And it seemed like it's widely regarded as one of her best, most ingenious and inventive works.

Crooked House?

Crooked House.

I believe that's on Amazon Prime for free.

Well, yes.

Do you actually do the math of how much you pay for Amazon Prime to see how much you're paying for that movie?

I don't want to do that. I just don't want to do that.
Probably pennies. Why did you do that to me? All right.
So, Charles, let's get into this because I know that this one could be a little long if we're not deliberate and I would say maybe considerate of our time.

All right.

Well, that's an eight-minute intro, so so far so good.

Okay.

She is perhaps, again, it's kind of hard to tell with book sales

because they can be a little dodgy,

but she is often quoted or seen as the best-selling novelist of all time.

And I did a little check to compare. I thought, well, Stephen King sold a book or two.
Sure. They tag his book sales at about 350 million.
Her 66 novels and 14 collected works of short stories supposedly have sold to the tune of two billion. I saw four billion in one place.
And I think after you hit the billion mark, you can just start tossing around whatever number you want. I think so.
That's a lot of books. For example, we've had 70 billion downloads now, I just decided.
Oh, great. That's a lot of downloads.
But think about it. Stephen King, how many books has that cat written? How many has he sold? All around the world.
And it amounts to 350 million. And he's one of the best-selling authors of all time.
A lot of people say that Agatha Christie's numbers hit 2 billion, like you said. That's astounding.
Yeah, that is a ton of books. I don't think our Stuff You Should Know book will approach those numbers.
No, you never say never, though, Chuck.

It's a lofty goal.

Never say never.

I also saw that she's the most widely translated author of all time, too.

I buy that.

I saw 45 languages.

I was like, this thing's a little low.

So then somewhere else I saw 103.

I said, let's go with that.

So let's talk about this cozy mystery or just mystery novels in general. They are very much formulaic, which Ed helped us put this together.
Ed points out that's why people like them, because the familiarity and it's sort of a comfort food thing, like a good beach book. You know what you're going to get.
Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And there's surprises and everything woven in. I mean, the whole thing is meant to be a surprise.
It's a mystery. And part of the mystery and the allure of the mysteries that Agatha Christie not only wrote, but actually the whole genre she helped to develop is that you are ostensibly able to figure out who the culprit is in the murder.
It's almost always a murder. And so there is like, there is surprise involved.
That's the point. But there's also a tremendous amount of familiarity.
And that's that formula you were talking about. And that's what really has sucked generations of people into this whole genre and her 66 plus books.
Yeah. So you've got that murder.
Uh, you usually don't see this murder occur. She doesn't usually, and in general, in murder mysteries, you don't see the murder.
That's kind of not the point of how grisly or gruesome the act is. It's sort of all about finding that body.
And, uh, I won't, I had a bunch of knives out things to say, but I won't say any of them now. Thank you.

But then you've got your detective that arrives on the scene. And I will say this, Knives Out very much follows this formula very smartly.
So you've got this master detective who usually arrives upon the scene, but they may already be there. And they are generally very eccentric and sort of – they always have these quirky sort of characteristics.

In Christie's case, we have the very formidable Hercule Poirot and then Miss Marple, Jane Marple.

In Hercule's case, he's Belgian and has this big mustache and is just sort of eccentric and Belgian just, you know, he's not French. There's something about being Belgian that makes it slightly different.
Sure. And Miss Marple apparently is just very ordinary and people underestimate her and that's how she sort of wins the day.
Yeah, because Hercule Poirot was a retired Belgian police detective. so he has some measure of authority still to question people and interrogate people as he wishes.
With Miss Marple, she's just kind of a quiet old lady who sews and knits a lot. And she just has a very keen eye for detail and an interest in solving the murders that seem to happen around her.
Like Angela Lansbury. Basically, yes.
But rather than interrogate people directly, Ms. Marple's thing is she just kind of quietly is there.
And people tend to confide in her. And she kind of quietly helps them along and gives them—she gives them the rope to hang themselves with that's how she interrogates people or figures out who who the murderer is right so you've got your uh setting in the in the cozy mystery setting like you said it's usually like an estate or a home maybe a hotel uh maybe it might be a small english village uh orient express is on a train another sort of confined space by the way have you seen Train to Busan? I confuse that with Snowpiercer I think I've seen both but I can't remember which one's which they're kind of very similar but Busan is Zombies on a Train, Korean film.
No, then I think I've just seen Snowpiercer. You should check out Train to Busan.
I will. If you think you've seen it all with the zombie genre, then think again.
Dude, that's saying something because that genre has gotten a little stale. Hey, let me ask you this.
Have you seen, I know you've seen it. You had to have.
Ozark? Oh, sure. You just started it.
Yeah, I'm a couple of episodes into the latest season. Okay, yeah.
You mean I just started it season one, and I'm like, all I want to do is sit around and watch Ozark. It's amazing.
Yeah, I love it. That's like Hartwell, you know.
Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah.
Smart.

I've tried to get Bateman and Laura Linney on Movie Crush, and it's always, thank you, no. Oh, yeah? Yeah.
Hey, you're getting responses. That's a big step forward.
It's nice to be told no and just not ignored. Yeah, right.
All right, so you've got your setting. With Agatha Christie, she did include her travels in some of her later novels when they became, like, super popular.
But it was still not, like, a globetrotting, like, James Bond kind of thing. No, that's the point.
So, like, in an espionage thriller or something, the locales are all over the place and, you know, the character's constantly moving. In these cozy thrillers, like even if they're in an exotic locale, they're still set in a small part of that exotic locale.
That's right. You got your suspects.
They are questioned by the detective. They usually all have a motive.
They usually all have the means because everyone, you know, in a great novel like this, everyone's got to be a suspect from the beginning. And then you can kind of quickly whittle or slowly whittle that list down.
Right. And here's the thing, what I was saying with the kind of mystery that Agatha Christie wrote and really established, you are part of the mystery.
Like, either the investigator or the detective has an assistant that they explain things to, very much like Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Sure.
Or if the detective is working solo, say like Miss Marple, Miss Marples's might write a list of suspects and their motives and little clues down as part of the narration. And you're, you're led in every step of the way.
So you're part of this working towards solving the mystery. And as it's very frequently put, it kind of pits you in a competition with the author to see if you can figure out who done it before the end of the book.

Yeah, I mean, that goes back to Encyclopedia Brown.

The whole point is to try and figure that stuff out.

Right.

Man, I love those.

Those are so great, Encyclopedia Brown.

I remember he busted one dumb kid who did something bad.

I can't remember.

Was it Bugs Meany?

Oh, man, good memory.

It may have been Bugs Meany.

Was he kind of a big, dumb oaf who'd beat up on chipmunks?

I think so.

Okay.

He busted Bugs once because Bugs had tears coming out of the outside corners of his eyes,

like a freakazoid rather than the inside corners.

That's good.

But see, the great thing about those books is that a 12-year-old doesn't really necessarily always pick up on those clues.

Oh, I did.

I wasn't that great.

I'd be curious to see if they would stump me now.

No, no.

I mean specifically with the outside of the eye thing.

But yeah, no, I'm sure there are plenty that I missed.

But you cried a lot when you were a boy.

Right. I knew.
While staring in the mirror. I knew where the tears came from.
And so then at the end, to wrap up the little genre sort of summary, you've got this great ending usually where everyone's gathered together and the detective kind of walks everyone through the big reveal of exactly how the killer did it. Right.
And in her case, she did not, like when the killer is revealed, they didn't turn around and shoot them in the face. Like it's usually pretty nonviolent.
They would be wrestled to the ground or arrested, or maybe they might run away, and you hear later that they had killed themselves or something like that. Sure.
There was rarely a grand finale where they would be pressed to death in front of a crowd. Nah.
Who needs it? So, I mean, that's it. Like, bing, bang, boom.
That was when you started on page one of an Agatha Christie novel. You knew exactly how everything was going to play out.
And then one of the other things is because this thing was so formulaic, there was also room for the author to kind of play with you, the reader, in using things like bluffs and red herrings. Oh, sure.
I think are basically the same thing. But the idea is that so the author, in this case, Agatha Christie, would say something like, you know, early on in the book, a suspect would come running out of the house looking shaken and pale.
And you, the reader, would be like, well, that's just way too obvious. She's not going to name, she's not going to point out who the murderer is at the beginning of the book.
So I can disregard that person or this very obvious clue or something like that. That was just kind of part of the interplay between author and reader.
but then it could go even deeper to where she would say something like, well, I know that you think that this is too obvious. So I'm going to actually make this the actual murderer, which she did in some cases, which was like a double bluff.
Apparently, it could just keep going on and on and on. But it was this kind of wrestling match or maybe slap fight between Agatha Christie and you, her reader, which made the whole thing all the more delightful.
That's right. And she, Ed, takes great pains to point out that she did not invent this genre.
There were people like Arthur Conan Doyle, obviously, and Poe before her that sort of established some of these rules. But she was very popular.
She's very good at what she did. She wrote about what she knew and we'll, we'll talk about her life coming up in a little bit, but these manor houses and these estates and these English villages and even the exotic locales and these train trips and things were things that she actually experienced.
And, you know, a lot of people are great at making stuff up and a lot of people are great about writing what they know. And it seems like she was really great at writing what she knew.
Yeah. And for some reason, either it was the time or maybe because of her, I'm not sure.
It was kind of a chicken or the egg thing. But she happened to write about stuff that a lot of people wanted to read about.
These small, you know, English villages and, you know, quaint mannerisms of the upper middle and upper class English society set in this period of time that, and for some reason it just captured everybody's attention. And apparently when she started expanding, I think after World War II, to some slightly more exotic locales like Egypt or Mesopotamia, you know, for like Death on the Nile was a very famous one during this time, or the Orient Express, that really catapulted her into superstardom, international superstardom too.
Yeah, I don't have a super firm read on the history of literature, but I get the idea that this is sort of aligned with the beginnings of pop lit. And like I call it the beach book.
I don't know if there had been a ton of stuff like this that was just sort of pure comfort food and entertainment up to this point. Yeah, I'm not sure either.
Nothing that I'm familiar with, I can say. But they were very entertaining books.
They were humorous, a very dark sense of humor, great dialogue. All these verbal jousts between the detectives and the suspects is really key to that genre.
Something Knives Out did really, really well. It was one of my favorite scripts of the year.
Maybe my favorite script. Wow.
But just really, really good, sharp writing. And it's no, sort of no accident that she became so hugely popular.
No, and that's something like, if you're not really familiar with Agatha Christie and you just kind of look her up in passing, one of the things you'll be confronted with is that a lot of people, a lot of critics say she was a hack. And what they're talking about is that formula that she followed to almost like a soullessly rational degree.
Like that was the formula. That's what she followed.
But that really misses like the fact that she had a really great eye for detail and the dialogue, like you were saying, like she was a good writer and she could just crank work out. I think during the decade of the 20s, she wrote a book a year.
It might've even become more prolific later on in the 30s and 40s too. Yeah, and she was a business person, you know?

Like, there's nothing wrong with... more prolific later on in the 30s and 40s too.
Yeah, and she was a business person, you know?

Like there's nothing wrong with saying,

wow, people love this stuff and they sell a lot.

And although it took a while for that to happen,

as we'll see, but there's nothing wrong with any of that.

I think people that call her a hack can go fly a kite.

Yeah, go fly it with extreme prejudice. Should we take a break? I think so, man.
We'll come back and talk about our life. Great.
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Okay, Chuck. So, um, Agatha Christie was born in 1890 in England, in Devonshire, in Torquay, which I always want to say Tangeray, Devonshire.

Sure.

And it's in the southwest of England.

So Torquay is kind of like our—or Devonshire is like our Arizona, basically.

That's my impression.

I think it is very much like Arizona. Right.
The legendary Devonshire cactus. Right.
So, so which stalks the Moors. That's right.
And she was one of three kids. And I think her older brother and sister were both at least a decade older than her.
So she had like a very solitary childhood, which appears to have made her fairly happy. She didn't go to school.
She was raised by governesses and educated by governesses, spent a lot of time reading, and just hung out around her family's estate. Yeah.
I mean, they had some dough. They were not wealthy, wealthy, but they were definitely upper middle class.
They got an inheritance from her paternal grandfather such that her dad didn't need to work. Uh, apparently she is on record as saying that Mike, her dad wasn't around much, didn't really impact me once, uh, much.
So he can go fly a kite as well. Right.
It's a lot of kite flying. And, um, she was, she loved being out in the garden.
She wasn't, um, I get the impression she wasn't like reclusive or anything, but she very much enjoyed time with herself alone, but also had friends and stuff when she eventually did go to school once her father passed and they couldn't afford that governess. Right, but she was a very, very shy person.
person. The novelist Joan Nakasella says that even as an adult,

she was so shy that sometimes she wouldn't go into shops because she would have to interact with the shopkeeper. So it is kind of— She's a novelist, you know? She was.
How many novelists are the life of the party and super outgoing? You have never met Philip Roth, apparently. I just—I don't know.
you kind of picture like the Stephen Kings just locked in an attic somewhere and not like, well, let me ride a little bit.

Then I'm going to go, you know, go to a party.

Right.

Go play some pickup basketball and maybe volunteer at the local food bank after.

I don't know.

It's sort of a solitary pastime.

So sure, there are examples of extroverted authors, but I think she kind of fits the mold that you generally think of, especially for a lady mystery writer. Yeah, and you know, I think not only fits the mold, the more I learn about her, she made the mold.
True. Like basically everything we take for granted as far as writing and mystery writing goes, like she basically made it up.
It's pretty impressive stuff. Yeah, so she, like we said, she did some pretty, to us dum-dums in America seem like exotic traveling trips.
But if you lived in England at the time, it's no big deal to go to Egypt and check out the pyramids. That was, if you had a little doe, that was a pretty common vacation that you might take.
So she did stuff like that, and she was exposed to exotic locales and used those in her work. In her very first novel, even, Snow Upon the Desert, she wrote when she was like 22 or 23 years old, I think.
And, you know, she had a hard time getting published at first because she was a young woman. Yeah, she was rejected out of hand.
And apparently also she started writing because her sister told her that she probably wouldn't be able to write a mystery novel, which I love. So she did.
She wrote the, what was it, Snow on what? Snow Upon the Desert. Snow Upon the Desert.
And she was very young then. And in between the time she wrote Snow Upon the Desert and The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, which would be her first published book, I believe, she wedged a lot of life in there in the form of getting married to a guy named Archibald Archie Christie.
And one of the things about Agatha Christie is that she wasn't a born writer, even though she did write as a younger person, like you were saying. She just didn't want to be a writer as a kid.
And she ended up writing really seriously after she and Archie Christie got married because Archie Christie wasn't particularly wealthy and couldn't necessarily care for her himself. So she started writing to make money, which some people suspect is the reason she got into mystery writing in the first place, because it was a very, very popular genre even then.
Yeah. Well, it makes sense.
So she had the skills to pay the bills, it turns out. That's right.
They were married in 1914. He was kind of promptly sent to fight in the Great War in France.
And she worked at a pharmacist at a war hospital during that period. And this is where she learned a lot about potions and poisons and pharmaceuticals and things that she would.
There's a lot of poisoning that goes on in her books. Yeah.
And she later in her career, I think she actually would consult with doctors and stuff like that because she wanted everything to be really medically accurate. But early on, she learned a lot about this stuff from her work in the pharmacy.
Which is kind of cool and ghoulish, you know, she's like, how exactly would a person die from this bottle that I'm holding? So, yeah, and apparently most of the deaths in her books are poisonings. And like you were saying, like you very rarely see the person die.
They just come upon the body. And most of the time it's a poison body.
Sometimes there was violence visited upon them. But for the most part, it's a body that was found poisoned to death.
Yeah, and that's a good vehicle for a mystery novel because, you know, there's no murder weapon per se. I guess there's the poison bottle.
But it can often be very vague, a poisoning death. Like, could it have been a heart attack? Like, you have to kind of suss out at first whether or not it was even a murder.
It's not like an obvious thing where there's a bullet hole in their chest or something like that. Right.
Right. Yeah.
So poisoning is what she went with typically. It's another example also, Chuck, I think of like her writing what she knew too.
Yeah. Or at least writing what interested her.
And she wrote in, in, I believe 1920. No, during the, during World War I.
So while she was working at the dispensary and Archie was off flying in France, I believe, um, she wrote the mysterious affair at Stiles. And it was, that's the one I started reading and I don't understand how it was rejected at rejected at first.
But it was, it's a really interesting book just right out of the gate. In that it pulls you right into this little country English estate and all of the people on it.
And you realize just after a couple of pages that you're already invested in them, which is pretty amazing. And this is like not her first book, but it was her first serious work that wasn't published immediately.
It wasn't published until 1920.

And I think even after it was published, it wasn't an immediate catapult to success for her,

but it was a remarkable first book to be published. Yeah.
And this is the one that

introduced the world to her chief detective for a lot of those novels, Mr. Poirot, like we mentioned.
And later on, they asked her why he was Belgian. And she said, why not, basically? Right.
I don't think a whole lot of thought went into it. It turned out to be a really good choice because he had this kind of interesting accent and everywhere he went, I don't, you know, they were never set in Belgium.
So everywhere he went, he was this sort of, sort of strange foreigner that would come into town with this accent that no one quite understood. And he just had this sort of larger than life presence, I think, because of that.
So it turned out to be a really smart choice. Yeah, he was also a well-known dandy who was very vain about his appearance.
And he apparently said in one of the later books that he plays up his foreignness and his dandiness to disarm suspects when he's interrogating them, to make them take him less seriously than they otherwise might. Oh, man, I want to talk about Knives Out so much.
You cannot. I appreciate you not doing that.
So she had a daughter we should mention in 1919 named Rosalind, and that's the only child she ever had. And it was in 1920, a year later, that they finally did publish the mysterious affair at Stiles.
After she agreed to change the ending, they said, we don't like Poirot revealing all this evidence in court. So she changed the ending.
They said, great. That's when she went on to publish that novel every year for about 10 years.
Very, very big books, but they weren't, they were popular, but she wasn't like a superstar internationally at this point yet. No, not yet.
Again, she really catapulted later on because she moved to some of these more exotic locales. But one of the things that cemented her legend as a mystery writer, in addition to all of the work she did, in addition to her prolificness and her extreme talent at this formula that she had worked out, was what still today is considered an unsolved mystery.
In fact, it was featured on a 1994 episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which I just randomly happened to see recently. And she disappeared.
There's a whole subplot to Agatha Christie's life that was really surprising, especially compared to how boring and normal and just kind of plotting with D's instead of T's her normal life was. The fact that she has this grand mystery plunked down in the middle of it is pretty impressive.
Yeah, so here's the back story. She and Archie were not meant to be together, as it turns out.
He revealed that he was having an affair with a lady named Nancy Neal, who was a friend of the family. And obviously that was the end of their marriage.
So at the end of 1926, they decided they were going to take a trip together, a weekender. Archie went to be with his friends instead, and then she vanished into seemingly thin air.
They found her car near a rock quarry with her fur coat and her driver's license there and no Agatha Christie. No, and her car wasn't just near the rock quarry.
According to some reports, like one of the wheels is hanging over the edge of this cliff. And still spinning.
Right. So, but she was gone.
They couldn't find her. And so within a couple of days, this massive search, depending on who you ask and depending on when you ask them, 10,000 plus people were searching for, probably more likely a couple thousand, which is still really remarkable for this tiny little area in the southwest of England at the time in 1926.

So that really kind of demonstrates she was already a well-known writer.

She wasn't legendary yet, but this disappearance is the mechanism by which she becomes legendary, I think.

And this goes on for a good week, I believe, right?

When did she disappear? December what?

I think December 3rd is when they were going to take that trip.

So she was gone almost two weeks. And by gone, we mean just vanished.
She left behind that car. She left behind the driver's license and the fur, like you said.
She was gone. Her husband had come, came to be known to have asked for a divorce already.
So people were like, well, did he bump her off? And she's a mystery writer known for generating stuff like this. So even at the time, some people were like, is this a publicity stunt? Because it's a pretty good one if it is.
Sure, it worked. And there was a band at this place called the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire, which kind of just sounds like a bit of a Kellogg Brothers type of joint.
Have you seen Cure for Wellness? Well, we talked about that in that podcast. Did we? I can't remember.
Have you seen it? I never saw it. Have you yet? I still have not seen it.
You're not missing that much, but it is pretty interesting. It's worth seeing at least once.
I might check it out. Okay.
But at any rate, they had a band here because what Hydropathic Hotel does not have a house band. And they came forward and said, hey, that's Agatha Christie lady.
She's been staying here for a week. She's been in the electric light bath cabinet and getting yogurt enemas and having a grand old time.
So they went to the cops, and the cops went to the lead detective and said, no, no, no, she's been murdered, and we're trying to find out the killer. I'm sure of it.
Eventually, this detective said, well, let me tell her husband. And husband, Archie, went out to check it out on the 14th of December.

There she was.

She was in seclusion.

And that was sort of the end of this mystery.

It wasn't so much a mystery.

By all accounts, it seems like she went there because she had thought about

or maybe tried to drive her car into that quarry and kill herself because she was upset about her marriage ending. And then it didn't happen, and she just kind of goes on a walk and ends up at this place.
May or may not have invented an amnesia story, or it may have actually happened to some degree. She didn't talk about it a lot, so we don't really know exactly what went down with the amnesia.
She said that, so two years later, she gave an interview with the Daily Mail and apparently explained the amnesia by saying she'd hit her head on the steering wheel. But in the same interview, she says that she'd let go of the steering wheel.
So she basically said, like, I attempted suicide and it didn't work out. I hit my head on the steering wheel and I wandered off and I had amnesia.
But they think that it was just a family cover story to save face, this amnesia story, and that really she had attempted to take her own life and hadn't succeeded and now regretted it and was embarrassed by all of this because the idea that there were thousands of people looking for her, I think it probably never crossed her mind when she wandered away from her car. No.
And I remember she was a very shy person, so all this attention was very, very hard on her. So the family just came up with this cover story that she had amnesia, so don't even bother asking.
And Archie and she stayed together for another year or so. And then their divorce finally became finalized in 1928.
Yeah, so she didn't even mention this in her autobiography, which kind of says all you need to know about how much she liked to talk about this. Right.
And we should say there was one other thing that did this too. It wasn't just Archie asking for a divorce.
He asked for a divorce a few months after her mother died. And Agatha Christie's mother was beloved to her.
She worshipped her mother. She thought she was wonderful.
Her mother was the parent that was there for her while she was a kid and raised her. It was just a very interesting person, it sounds like.
So she died. Archie asks for a divorce a few months later, and then this whole mysterious disappearance happened.
That's right. And then one last thing.
I read that at the Swan Hydro Hotel, she was actually playing cards and chatting with other guests about this mysterious disappearance that was in all of the newspapers, and none of the other guests recognized her. It was those band members that

you mentioned. Interesting.
I thought so too, man. So that's everything I learned from Unsolved

Mysteries. Should we take a break? Finally.
All right. Let's take our final break and we'll

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So it's 1928 at this point. She is freshly divorced.
She kept that name because, you know, that's the name that made her famous. So it makes a lot of sense.
And she kept writing novels. She traveled on the Orient Express to Baghdad.
She got into archaeology, just sort of a hobbyist, and made friends with a couple who were archaeologists, went to visit them in 1930, and on that trip met a man named Max Malawan, who was also an adventurer and an archaeologist 13 years younger, and they fell in love and got married, which is a very, very sweet story. Yeah, apparently he was giving her a tour of some archaeological sites and he got the car stuck.

And she apparently, he said later, she made no fuss about it, didn't blame him or anything like that.

And he said, that's about the time when I started to begin to realize that you are wonderful.

And so they got married.

And she said later on that the good thing about being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get, the more interested they become.

Interesting.

I thought it was kind of... And she said later on that the good thing about being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get, the more interested they become.

Interesting.

I thought it was kind of cute.

So this is when Miss Marple comes along as a detective in 1930 with the murder at the vicarage.

That was her first one?

That was the first Miss Marple book.

Okay. And then she's traveling around.

She's doing these archaeological digs and trips. She's going to Syria and Iraq.
She fell in love with Syria and the Syrian people. And she's really cranking out some big books at this point in the 1930s.
Like even on archaeological digs, Chuck, can you imagine how uncomfortable it would be to sit and write for hours at an archaeological site?

I can't. It would be tough, I would think, and yet she was still just as prolific as ever.
Yeah, books like Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express were all written during this period, and this is what really catapulted her into international superstardom as an author.

Right.

So, she and Mac stayed together for, I think, 46 years until her death, actually. Yeah, I think, yeah, she outlived him.
So it's pretty sweet. But despite all of this kind of adventure and archaeological digs and, like, visits to the Middle East.
Most of her life from that point on was in Devonshire, in this tiny little area in the English countryside, in these quaint little towns. And she gardened and was very involved in local community theater.
That was her life. She was also one of the biggest, most well-known, most best-selling writers in the world while she was alive.
And yet that's what she did. She hung out with the community theater group and gardened.
That was just her life. Yeah, she got the Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971.

And the rights to her novels were held by a company that she created for a long time.

And then before she died, she sold part of that off.

And that's been sort of bought and sold a bunch over the years,

which is kind of how that usually happens.

But she did retain enough of the company to have it be worth a ton of money, which she passed down to her daughter, of course, as her only child. She sort of took care of her mother's works for many, many years and then passed that on to her only child, a man named Matthew Pritchard, who still holds these rights and still sort of manages that today.
That's right. So everything turned out well for Matthew Pritchard, it sounds like.
Heck yeah. I wish my grandma was, actually I don't because I love my grandma, but would it have killed her to be an internationally famous author? No, it wouldn't, Chuck.
And I'm glad we're finally talking about it. It's been an elephant

in the room for a very long time.

So she, you know, a lot

of these went on to be very famous films

TV series. I think

Murder on the Orient Express has been a couple

of big movies. In fact

one a couple years ago that I have

not seen. It's

unwatchable. Oh, is it really bad?

I'm sorry if you listen to this Kenneth

Bronner. I couldn't make it through the first five

minutes. Oh, wow.
It was

Thank you. have not seen.
It's unwatchable. Oh, is it really bad? I'm sorry if you listened to this, Kenneth Brawner.
I couldn't make it through the first five minutes. Oh, wow.
It was... I didn't like it.
Okay. Is that all you watched? And I love Kenneth Brawner.
Yes. Okay.
So that's my report is on the first five minutes. She very famously has a play called The Mousetrap, which is debuted at the West End in 1952, and it is the longest running play in the history of the West End, which is remarkable.
Yeah, and to make that even sweeter,

remember her sister who said that she probably couldn't write a mystery novel? Well, her sister

was the first in the family to get a play produced on the West End, but it certainly wasn't the

longest running play on the West End of all time, so she got her back doubly so. And then she was hit by a train and Agatha Christie laughed and laughed.
And poisoned her corpse. So we need to talk a little bit here at the end.
We always like to give everyone the accolades they deserve, but also point out some of the things that weren't so great. We don't want to whitewash anything.
And she used a lot of kind of racially insensitive language, some would call anti-Semitic at times, anti-Catholic, through parts of her career such that the auntie defamationally complained to her agent at one point. And because of that, American publishers were given the ability to change that stuff out sort of at will.
Without any notice given to her, she didn't know this was going on at all. Yeah.
They just were like, I don't think the Americans are going to go for this. The Brits can barely stand it.
The Americans definitely aren't going to take this well. Yeah, and I read a lot about this, and there are different takes.
One take is that the old, you know, she was a product of her time thing, which people, you know, rightfully point out. Another is that oftentimes she's doing this to show characters are sort of underdeveloped as humans and sort of backward.
So there's that as well. But you also can't dance around the fact that she did use some pretty bad words.
And, you know, we just got to point that stuff out. And they were bad even at the time.
Yeah. Like it wasn't, yes, you can, like, yeah, a lot of people had different social attitudes toward race and racism.

And in that sense, she wasn't that much different. But there were cases where she was standing well outside of the norm, including in book titles and characters and things like that.
And one book in particular, and then there were none, was revised many, many times, not just in the U.S., but in Great Britain as well. And it's remarkable in that sense.
But in another sense, it is also remarkable in that it's considered pretty widely to have given birth to the slasher film genre. Did you know that? I didn't until my bread had said it.
Yeah, I looked this up a little more. And on its own, and then there were none, the book ends, sorry for the spoiler, everybody, but it ends with, I think, all of the suspects killing one another.
And everyone dies. In the stage adaptation of the play that she helped write,

the final girl, a female character, is left alive

and has outdone the murderer who's come to get her,

which is, you know, the formula for any slasher film whatsoever.

But there's a bunch of other elements in there too,

and they're like, you know, even on like horror fan wikis,

they point to that as like the genuine birth, even more than psycho of the slasher film genre. Oh, interesting.
Yeah, it is pretty interesting. Who would have ever thought that Agatha Christie with her nonviolence and poison and occasional racism would have been the one to birth the slasher film? Occasional racism.
Yeah. And a lot of the racist stuff, just to put a final pin on that, was a lot of it was character descriptions, which can be some of the ugliest kinds of stuff like that.
Yeah. Because it wasn't just like talking about philosophies.
It was just like literally physically describing a character. Sometimes she would use some pretty derogatory language.
Yeah. So, again, it's a bit like exploring Elizabeth Blackwell or any historical character.
There's always weird little bugs under the rocks you turn over, you know? I'm glad we're doing our great work in the time of wokeness. Right, exactly.
No one can ever go back. I mean, we've made missteps here and there, but they can't go back and talk about when Josh and Chuck were big racists at the beginning.
Yeah, no, it's true. But just wait for 20 years from now, they'll be like, I can't believe they talked about those guys were ageist bastards, you know? Probably so.
There's one other thing I want to say, too. So when she lived through World War II, Agatha Christie was worried that she was going to die in the bombing blitz of Great Britain.
And she really wanted Hercule Poirot and Jane Marples to have a final case. So she wrote a book for each of them.
One is called Curtain. That's Poirot's final book.
And the other is Sleeping Murder. That is Marples' final case.
And it just kind of explains what happens to them. I believe Poirot dies and Marple just retires.
But when she survived World War II, she was like, well, I'm not ready for these guys to be retired yet. So she kept those books and had them posthumously published, and they were in the 70s.
And when Hercule Poirot's last book came out and he died, the New York Times ran a front page obituary for him, the only fictional character to have that honor bestowed on them. That's crazy.
Isn't it? Yeah. And also a very cool, good idea to write those books early on just in case, because you never know.
Yeah. Besides the bombing thing.
I mean, she could walk off a ledge or get hit by a bus or die of natural causes early. Like, you never know.
And then you've got this legacy cemented. Right.
Pretty smart. Have you ever seen one last thing? Have you ever seen Murder by Death? I know I've asked you before.
I have that DVD sitting on my desk. Well, that's amazing that you have that on your desk and you, wait, is it on your desk at work? It is.
It's the wrong place. I was going to say, watch it tonight, but don't watch it tonight.
Wait until everything clears. Was that one of her books? No, it's a spoof actually of detective, of like Charlie Chan and Agatha Christie and Sam Spade and all that, that she helped, you know, kind of create.
But it's actually like a complaint from fans of mysteries. It's just a wonderful book, Truman, or movie, Truman Capote's in it.
David Niven. Peter Falk, right? Peter Falk, yeah.
A lot of people.

James Cromwell as a younger man.

Oh, yeah.

James Coco as Hercule Poirot.

It's just great.

You're going to love it, man.

So I guess we should say that she did die eventually,

five years or three years after I met her,

in 1976 at the age of 85 at her home in Oxfordshire.

And it was natural causes, not poison.

No.

Her last words were, good to meet you, Chuck.

You got anything else?

I do not have anything else.

Well, friends, that is Agatha Christie.

If you want to know more about Agatha Christie, go start reading Agatha Christie books.

And since I said Agatha Christie like three or four times, it's time for a listener, mate. Alright, I'm going to call this Letter from a Kid because we love reading these letters from kids.
Hey guys, I've been listening to your podcast for about eight months now and I'd like to say I am a huge fan. This is Emmett.
He's 10 years old.

Oh yeah. I love this email.
My dad is even more of a fan of you guys than me. And he told me about your podcast.
I am a huge fan of the Atlanta Falcons and pretty much everything

Atlanta related, including your podcast, which is weird because I live in Iowa.

I love it. It is a little weird though, Emmett.
You're right. I love how self-aware this guy is.
I think, you know, when you grow up in a place like Iowa with no professional sports, you, you know, you do that thing where you just pick out a team in a city. Yeah.
You're like the Bay City Rollers. You throw a dart at a map and go with it.
That's right. And now I'm really worried there's a professional team in Iowa, but there is not.
There is not. There are none, right? No need to double check that.
I've been listening to your podcast a ton during this coronavirus outbreak to keep me from going crazy. And it's worked.
My birthday is actually coming up, so I'll not be able to see my friends or even have a party. It would be totally awesome and make my year if you said happy birthday to me.
But I want to bet you won't read this on the air. That's some fine reverse psychology right there.
Well played, Emmett. I love your grass podcast.
And last year, me and my best friend Oliver started a lawn care business and I made enough money to buy Beats headphones to listen to your podcast on. That is full circle right there.
That's right. He says I made sure to wrap this letter up

and spank it on the bottom before I sent it.

So happy, happy, big, I guess, 11th birthday, Emmett.

Best to your dad.

Hello, Oliver, and everyone there in Atlanta, Iowa.

Yeah.

Happy birthday, Emmett.

That reverse psychology worked, man.

If you want to get in touch with us like Emmett did

and see if we'll wish you a happy birthday,

I'll bet we won't.

But who can tell in these crazy times?

You can get in touch with us via email.

Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,

and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
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