Selects: Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery

Agatha Christie was a great writer of murder mystery novels and is probably the best selling author of all time. Listen in this classic episode to learn her story.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's Meat Josham. For this week's Select, I've
chosen our episode from twenty twenty 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 they're definitely
worse things you could do with your time, So grab

(00:23):
a cup of tea, a nice little blanket and enjoy
this cozy little episode.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
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'm I don't know if we're gonna
be able to get used to Jerry being round again.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Is she fired?

Speaker 1 (00:58):
I don't think so. She made a fire yourself, though,
I have better things to do than hang out with
you cool cats and kittens.

Speaker 2 (01:06):
Well, and it's kind of like, what's the point of
just sitting there? And I can't imagine any more boring
than listening to us on headphones. Wait a minute, that's
our show.

Speaker 1 (01:16):
Yes, there are people doing that very thing right now. Chuck,
and you have just mocked their existence.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Oh, I've just met for Jerry's sake, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
Yeah, I know Jerry's not a fan. No, she's not
or a listener. So I have a question for you, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
You ever read a book? No?

Speaker 1 (01:37):
No, don't be ridiculous, Chuck. Have you ever met Agatha Christy?

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yeah? I met her when I was three. Oh?

Speaker 1 (01:49):
Really, do you have much of a memory of that encounter?

Speaker 2 (01:53):
A little bit? She was, She was nice enough. She
signed my Murder on the Orient Express copy, first edition.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Oh wow, that's gotta be worth some money.

Speaker 2 (02:02):
It's pretty neat.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Yeah. Do you still have that hot Nah?

Speaker 2 (02:07):
I did some spring cleaning here a couple weeks ago,
and I didn't even recycle or put it in a
little free library, just do it in the trash.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Did you? 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, we must be confusing you
with my other co host, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Now, we weren't big comic book people. We don't have
anything valuable like that.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
I gotcha. Well, having met I get that Christie. When
you were a kid, I feel like you probably have
a lot to bring to this one. 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 of movies based on her stuff. But

(02:58):
I would never consider myself of like a a rabbit
Agatha Christie fan. But I do appreciate her work a lot.
You picked this one.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
Why we have this series of books, children's books about
awesome women in history, from Freda 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

(03:29):
you want an Agatha Christie that haven't read any of
her work, seen a couple of her movies, loved the
genre though yeah as films. I've never read mystery murder mysteries,
although I'm going to now.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
I started reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which I
think was her first published work, last night, and it's
just great. She just sucks you right in, like you.
She does what's She creates a lot of books, not
all of them, but she creates what's called a cozy
mystery with a S because it's British, and i'd never

(04:03):
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 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

(04:24):
cozy and small and it's like a village and all that.
Those are the murder she wrotes 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.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
I've never seen that show what we what this conversation before.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
No, that would be seared into my brain forever.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Now we have because you said that 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 fa 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.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
I've not seen it yet it's still like seven dollars
on Amazon Prime. So I haven't rented yet. I'm waiting
for the price point to drop.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
I can known you a couple of bucks if you need,
all right, sure, three three ninety nine, All right, now.

Speaker 1 (05:20):
Three ninety nine. It's still a lot for a rental.
I mean, that's a lot. Do you think three ninety
nine is manageable? Four ninety nine and up, that's a
lot of That's a lot of mood law for a rental,
if you ask me. Wow, yeah, this is I'm taking
a stand on this.

Speaker 2 (05:36):
All right. Well, film professionals out there, please do not
take offense to all your hard work.

Speaker 1 (05:42):
So I have a question for you. Have one more question.
Have you seen that Agatha Christy film adaptation of Crooked
House that came out in twenty seventeen.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
No, I think you'll like it.

Speaker 1 (05:55):
It was big budget, but it also looks like British
made for television big budget.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
It's great.

Speaker 1 (06:00):
Jillian Anderson Danas Gully is in it, okay, 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, isn't it?

Speaker 2 (06:19):
Love him?

Speaker 1 (06:20):
Glenn Close? She's great, and I was like, this is
really good. So I was reading little synopsies of it
and all that stuff, and it seemed like that's It's
widely regarded as one of her best, most ingenious and
inventive works. House Cricket House. I believe that's on Amazon
Prime for free.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
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?

Speaker 1 (06:47):
I don't want to do that. I just don't want
to do that. Pennies, Why did you do that to me?
All right, so, Charles, let's 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

(07:09):
of our time.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
All right, Well that's an eight minute intro. So so far,
so good.

Speaker 1 (07:14):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
She is perhaps again it's kind of hard to tall
with book tell with book sales because they can be
a little dodgy. But she is often quoted as the
or scene as the best selling novelist of all time
and I did a little check to compare, Like, I thought, well,
Stephen King sold a book or two. Sure, they tag
his book sales at about three hundred and fifty million.

(07:37):
Her sixty six novels and fourteen collected works of short
stories supposedly have sold to the tune of two billion.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
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
like a for example, we've had seventy 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 is he sold all around

(08:08):
the world? And it amounts to three hundred and fifty million,
and he's one of the best selling authors of all time.
A lot of people say that Agatha Christie's numbers hit
two billion, Like you said, that's astounding.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
Yeah, that is. That is a ton of books. It's
I don't think our stuff. You should know book will
approach those numbers.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
No, you never say never, though it's a lofty goal,
Never say never. I also saw that she's the most
widely translated author of all time too, that so forty
five languages. I was like, this thing's a little low.
So then somewhere else I saw one hundred and three.
So let's go with that.

Speaker 2 (08:44):
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 thing, like a good beach book. You know
what you're gonna get.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's 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

(09:26):
always a murderer, and so there is like, there is
surprise involved, that's the point. But there's also a tremendous
amount of familiar familiarity, and that's that formula you were
talking about, and that's what really has sucked generations of
people into this whole genre her sixty six plus books.

Speaker 2 (09:44):
Yeah, so you've got that murder. 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 grizzly or gruesome the act is.
It's sort of all about finding that body. And I
won't have a bunch of knives out things to say,

(10:06):
but I won't say any of them now. 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

(10:29):
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 it's just sort of eccentric and Belgian.
Just you know, he's not French. There's something about being

(10:51):
Belgium that makes it slightly different. Sure, and Miss Marple
apparently it's just a very ordinary and people underestimate her
and that's how she sort of wins the day.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
Yeah, because for 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

(11:24):
keen eye for detail and an interest in solving, you know,
the murders that seem to happen around her, Like Angela
Lansbury basically, yes, but rather than interrogate people directly, Miss
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

(11:47):
them the rope to hang themselves with. That's how she
interrogates people or figures out who who the murderer is.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
Right, So you've got your setting in the cozy mystery setting.
Like you said, it's usually like in a state or
a home, maybe a hotel, maybe it might be a
small English village or an express obviously is on a
train another sort of confined space. By the way, have
you seen Trained to Busan?

Speaker 1 (12:19):
I confuse that with Snow Piercer. I think I've seen both,
but I can't remember which ones, which.

Speaker 2 (12:25):
They're kind of very similar. But bon is Zombies on
a Train Korean film.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
No, then I think I've just seen snow Piercer.

Speaker 2 (12:33):
You should check out Trained to Busan. If you think
you've seen it all with the zombie genre, then think again, dude.

Speaker 1 (12:40):
That's saying something because that genre has gotten a little tired. Tale. Hey,
let me ask you this. Have you seen I know
you've seen it. You had to have Ozark? Oh sure,
I'm just started it.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Yeah, I'm a couple of episodes into the latest season.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Okay, yeah, you me and I just started at season one,
and I'm like, all I want to do is sit
her own and watch os Ark. It's amazing.

Speaker 2 (13:02):
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 Lenny on movie Crush and it's always
thank you no.

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Oh yeah, yeah, Hey, you're giving responses. That's that's a
big step forward.

Speaker 2 (13:20):
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 globe trotting like James
Bond kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (13:39):
No, that's that's the point. So like in a espionage
thriller or something that locals are all over the place,
and you know, the characters constantly moving in these cozy thrillers,
like even if they're in an exotic local, they're still
set in a small part of that exotic local.

Speaker 2 (13:58):
That's right, you got your suspect. 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.

Speaker 1 (14:19):
Right. And here's the thing what I was saying with
the with the kind of mystery that Agatha Christie wrote
and really established, you are part of the mystery, like
you're either the investigator. The detective has an assistant that
they explain things to very much like Sherlock, Holmes and Watson. Sure,

(14:41):
or if the detective is working solo, say like Miss Marple.
Miss Marples might write a list of suspects and their
motives and little clues down as part of the narration,
and you're let in every step of the way, So
you're part of the working towards solving the mystery. And

(15:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yeah. I mean that goes back to Encyclopedia Brown. The
whole point is to try and figure that stuff.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (15:24):
Was it bugs meaning?

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Oh man, good memory. It may have been bugs meaning
was he kind of a big dumb o who'd like
beat up on chipmunks?

Speaker 2 (15:32):
I think?

Speaker 1 (15:32):
So, okay, he busted bugs once because bugs had tears
coming out of the the outside corners of his eyes,
a freakazoid by the inside corners.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
That's good. But see, the great thing about those books
is that a twelve year old doesn't really necessarily always
pick up on those clues.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
Oh I did.

Speaker 2 (15:54):
I wasn't that great. I'd be curious to see if
they would stump me now No, no, I mean.

Speaker 1 (15:59):
Specif with the outside of the eye thing. But yeah, no,
I'm sure there are plenty that I missed.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
But she cried a lot when you were a boy,
I knew while the mirror tears came from uh. 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

(16:25):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
Sure, there was rarely a grand finale where they would
be pressed to death in front of a crowd.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Nah, who needs it?

Speaker 1 (16:53):
So that? 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 this for the author to kind of play
with you, the reader in using things like bluffs and

(17:14):
red herrings, I think are basically the same thing. But
the idea is that so the author in this case,
I get said Christy 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

(17:36):
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

(17:57):
was like a double bluff. Apparently 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.

Speaker 2 (18:12):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:28):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
She wrote about what she knew. And we'll talk about
her life coming up in a little bit. But these
manor houses in 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.

(18:48):
And it seems like she was really great at writing
what she knew.

Speaker 1 (18:52):
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

(19:15):
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, like I think after
World War Two, to some slightly more exotic locales like
Egypt or Mesopotamia, you know, for like Death on the

(19:38):
Nile was a very famous wonder in this time, or
the Orient Express that really catapulted her into superstardom, international
superstardom too.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
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.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
Yeah, I'm not sure either. Nothing that I'm familiar with
I can say.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
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 nis 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

(20:34):
sharp writing. And it's no sort of no accident that
she became so hugely popular.

Speaker 1 (20:40):
No, And that's something like if you're not really familiar
with Agatha Chrissy and you just kind of look her
up and 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 soul les Lee rational degree, Like that was the formula,

(21:03):
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 workout. I
think during the decade of the twenties she wrote a
book a year. It might have even become more prolific

(21:23):
later on in the thirties and forties too.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
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 kite?

Speaker 1 (21:45):
Yeah, go fly it with extreme prejudice.

Speaker 2 (21:47):
Should we take a break.

Speaker 1 (21:49):
I think so, man, we'll come back and talk about
her life. Great, okay, Chuck.

Speaker 2 (22:17):
So.

Speaker 1 (22:19):
Agatha Christie was born in eighteen ninety in England, in Devonshire,
in Torquay, which I always wanted to say, Tanga Rey, Devonshire. Sure,
And it's in the southwest of England. So Torquay is
kind of like our Devonshire is like our Arizona, basically,

(22:40):
that's my impression.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
I think it is very much like Arizona, right, the
legendary Devonshire cactus.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Right, 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

(23:11):
hung out around her family's estate.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
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. Apparently, she is on record
as saying that her dad wasn't around much. Didn't really
impact me once much. So he can go fly a

(23:34):
kite as well. Right, it's a lot of kite flying.
And she loved being out in the garden. She wasn't
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.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
Governess, right, but she was a very very shy person.
The novelist Joan neck Sella 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.

Speaker 2 (24:11):
So it's just ast. You know how many novelists are
the life of the party and super outgoing.

Speaker 1 (24:18):
You've never met Philip Roth, apparently.

Speaker 2 (24:20):
I just I don't know, you kind of picture like
the Stephen Kings, just locked in an attict somewhere and
not like, well, let me write a little bit, then
I'm gonna go, you know, go to a party.

Speaker 1 (24:31):
Right, go play some pickup basketball and maybe volunteer at
the local food bank act.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
I don't know it just it's sort of solitary pastime.
So that. 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.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
Yeah, and you know, I think not only fits the mold,
the more I learned about her, she made the mold true.
Basically everything we take her for granted as far as
writing and mystery writing goes like she basically made it up.
It's pretty impressive stuff.

Speaker 2 (25:02):
Yeah. So she, like we said, she did some pretty
to us dumb dumbs 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 dough
that was a pretty common vacation that you might take.
So she did stuff like that, and she was exposed

(25:23):
to exotic locales and use those in her work. In
her very first novel, Even Snow Upon the Desert, she
wrote when she was like twenty two or twenty three
years old, I think, and you know, she had a
hard time getting published at first because she was a
young woman.

Speaker 1 (25:41):
Yeah, she was rejected out of hand. And apparently also
she'd started writing because her sister told her that she
probably wouldn't be able to write a mystery novel, yeah,
which I love, So she did. She wrote the what
was it? Snow on?

Speaker 2 (25:57):
What? Snow upon the Desert?

Speaker 1 (25:59):
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 Styles, 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

(26:19):
the things about Agatha Christie is that she never she
wasn't a born writer, even though she did write as
a younger person, like you were saying, like, she wasn't
like a 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

(26:39):
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 though yeah, well it makes sense, so she had
the skills to pay the bills.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
It turns out that's right. They were married nineteen fourteen.
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 would there's a lot of poisoning

(27:20):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
Which is kind of cool and ghoulish, you know, She's like, h,
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 times of

(27:55):
poison body. Sometimes there was violence visited upon them, but
for the most part, a body that was found poisoned
to death.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Yeah, and that's a good vehicle for a mystery novel
because you know there's no murder weapon per se. There
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

(28:25):
a bullet hole in their chest or something like that.

Speaker 1 (28:29):
Right, right, Yeah, So poisoning is what she went with typically.
Another example also, Chuck, I think of like her writing
what she knew too, Yeah, at least writing what interested her.
And she wrote in I believe nineteen twenty no during
during World War One, so while she was working at

(28:50):
the dispensary and Archie was off flying in France. I
believe she wrote The Mysterious Affair at Styles and it
was that's the one I started reading, and I don't
understand how it was rejected at first, but it's a
really interesting book just right out of the gate in
that it pulls you right into this little country English

(29:13):
estate and all 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 nineteen twenty,
and I think even after it was published, it wasn't
an immediate catapult to success for her, but it was

(29:37):
a remarkable first book to be published.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
Yeah, and this is the one that introduced the world
to her chief detective for a lot of those novels,
mister Poirot, like we mentioned, And later on they asked
her why he was Belgian, and she said why not? Basically,
I don't think a whole lot of thought went into it.
It turned out to be a really good choice because

(30:01):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
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,

(30:43):
to make them take him less seriously than they otherwise might.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Man, I want to talk about knives out so.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Much you cannot. I appreciate you not doing that.

Speaker 2 (30:53):
So she had a daughter, we should mention, in nineteen
nineteen named Rosalind, and that's the only child she ever had.
And it was in nineteen twenty a year later that
they finally did publish The Mysterious Affair at Styles after
she agreed to change the ending. They said, we don't
like Poirot revealing all this evidence in court, so she

(31:13):
changed the ending. They said great. That's when she went
on to publish that novel every year for about ten years,
very very big books. But they weren't They were popular,
but she wasn't like a superstar internationally at this point yet.

Speaker 1 (31:29):
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

(31:53):
today is considered an unsolved mystery. In fact, it was
featured on a nineteen ninety four episode of Unsolved Mysteries,
which I just randomly happened to see recently, and she disappeared.
There's a whole sub plot to Agatha Christie's life that
was really surprising, especially compared to how boring and normal

(32:16):
and just kind of plotting with these instead of teas
her normal life. Was the fact that she has this
grand mystery plunk down in the middle of it is
pretty impressive.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
Yeah, it's so. Here's the backstory. 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 Neil who was a friend of the family,
and obviously that was the end of their marriage. So
at the end of nineteen twenty six, they decided they

(32:50):
were going to take a trip together a weekend, or
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.

Speaker 1 (33:08):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
Cliff and still spinning right.

Speaker 1 (33:19):
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,
ten like ten thousand 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

(33:42):
at the time in nineteen twenty six. So that really
kind of demonstrates she was already a well known writer.
She wasn't legendary yet, but is 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?

Speaker 2 (34:03):
What I think December third is when they were going
to take that trip.

Speaker 1 (34:06):
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 in the fur like you said,
she was gone. Her husband had 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

(34:27):
the time, some people were like, is this a publicity stunt,
because it's a pretty good one if it is.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:48):
Have you seen a Cure for wellness?

Speaker 2 (34:50):
Well? We talked about that in that podcast.

Speaker 1 (34:53):
Did we? I can't remember. Have you seen it?

Speaker 2 (34:55):
I never saw it?

Speaker 1 (34:56):
Have you yet? I still have not seen it, missing
that much, but it is pretty interesting. It's it's worth
seeing at least once.

Speaker 2 (35:03):
I might check it out, okay, but 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

(35:27):
went to the cops, and the cops went to the
lead detective and said, no, no, no, she has been
murdered and we're trying to find out the killer.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
I'm sure of it.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Eventually, this detective said, well, let me tell her husband.
And husband Archie went out to check it out on
the fourteenth 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, you know. She by
all accounts, it seems like she went there because she

(35:58):
had thought about or maybe tried to drive her car
into that quarry and kill herself because she was upset
about her marriage ending. Yeah, 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

(36:19):
to some degree. She didn't talk about a lot, so
we don't really know exactly what went down with the amnesia.

Speaker 1 (36:25):
She said that. So two years later she gave an
interview with The Daily Mail and apparently explain 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

(36:49):
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 was embarrassed
by all of this because the idea that there were
thousands of people looking for I think it probably never
crossed her mind when she wandered away from her car. No,

(37:09):
and that I remember she was a very shy person,
so this all this attention was very very hard on her.
So the family just came up with this cover story
that she had amnesia, so didn't even bother asking, and
Archie and she stayed together for another year or so
and then their divorce finally became finalized in nineteen twenty eight.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
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.

Speaker 1 (37:36):
This, right, 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 I getak, Christie's mother was
beloved to her. She worshiped 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.

(37:58):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:07):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (38:08):
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?

Speaker 2 (38:33):
All right, let's take our final break, and we'll talk
a little bit more about her later life and further success.

(39:02):
All right, So, it's in nineteen twenty eight. 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 Bagdad. She got into archaeology,
just sort of a hobbyist, and made friends with a

(39:24):
couple who were archaeologists. Went to visit them in nineteen
thirty and on that trip met a man named Max
Malawan who was also an adventurer and an archaeologist thirteen
years younger, and they fell in love and got married,
which is a very very sweet story.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
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

(40:03):
married to an archaeologist is that the older you get,
the more interested they become interesting. That's kind of cute.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
So this is when Miss Marple comes along as a
detective in nineteen thirty with the Murder at the Vicarage.

Speaker 1 (40:19):
That was our first one.

Speaker 2 (40:20):
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 nineteen thirties.

Speaker 1 (40:37):
That's why even on archaeological digs, Chuck, can you imagine
how uncomfortable it would be to sit and write for
hours in an archaeological site.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
I can't.

Speaker 1 (40:47):
It would be tough, I would think. And yet she
was still just as prolific as ever.

Speaker 2 (40:51):
Yeah, books like Murder and Mesopotamia and Death on the
Nile and Murder on the Orient Express were all written
during this period, and this is what really can appulted
her into international superstardom as an author.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
Right. So she and Max stayed together for I think
forty six 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

(41:29):
that point on was in Devonshire, in this tiny little
area in the English countryside, in these the 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,

(41:50):
most well known, most best selling writers of in the
world while she was alive, and yet that's what she did.
She hung out with community theater group in garden. It
was just her life.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
Yeah. She got the Dame Commander of the Order of
the British Empire in nineteen seventy one, and the rights
to her novels were held by 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

(42:25):
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 and named
Matthew Pritchard, who still holds these rights and still sort
of manages that today.

Speaker 1 (42:47):
That's right. So everything turned out well for Matthew Prichard sounds.

Speaker 2 (42:52):
Like, yeah, I wish my grandma was Actually I dunt
because I love my grandma, But sure would it have
killed her to be an internationally famous author.

Speaker 1 (43:01):
No, it wouldn't, Chuck, and I'm glad we're finally talking
about it. Been an elephant in the room for a
very long time.

Speaker 2 (43:08):
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 of years ago that I
have not seen.

Speaker 1 (43:21):
It's unwatchable.

Speaker 2 (43:23):
Oh was it really bad?

Speaker 1 (43:24):
I'm sorry if you listened to this. Kenneth BROWNO. I
couldn't make it through the first five minutes.

Speaker 2 (43:28):
Oh wow, it was.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
I didn't like it.

Speaker 2 (43:31):
Okay. Is that all you know?

Speaker 1 (43:32):
I love? Yes? Okay, So that's my report is on
the first five minutes.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
She very famously has a play called The mouse Trap,
which is debuted the West End in nineteen fifty two,
and it is the longest running play in the history
of the West End, which is remarkable.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
And then she was hit by a train and Agatha
Christie laughed and.

Speaker 1 (44:12):
Laughed and poisoned her corpse.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
So we need to talk a little bit here at
the end. We always like to give everyone's 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

(44:36):
anti Catholic through parts of her career, such that the
Anti Defamation League 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.

Speaker 1 (44:51):
Will, without any notice given to her. She just she
didn't know this was going on at all. Yeah, we
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.

Speaker 2 (45:06):
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.

(45:30):
But you also can't dance around the fact that she
did use some pretty bad words, and you know, we just.

Speaker 1 (45:37):
Got were bad stuff out and they were bad even
at the time. Yeah, like that it wasn't. Yes, you
can say, 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

(45:58):
book titles and care characters and things like that. And
one book in particular, and then there were none was
revised many many times, not just in the US 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

(46:20):
slasher film genre.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
Did you know that I didn't until my bred d say.

Speaker 1 (46:26):
It, I yeah, I look 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

(46:49):
is left alive and has out done the murderer who's
come to get her, which is, you know, for 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.

Speaker 2 (47:10):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Interesting, Yeah, it is pretty interesting. Who would have ever
thought that. I guess Christie, with her non violence and
poison and occasional racism, would have been the one to
birth the slasher.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
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, because it
wasn't just like talking about philosophies. It was just like
literally physically describing a character. Sometimes she would use some

(47:43):
pretty derogatory language.

Speaker 1 (47:45):
Yeah. So again, it's a bit like exploring Elizabeth Blackwell
or any historical characters. Always weird little bugs under the
rocks you turn over. You know.

Speaker 2 (47:55):
I'm glad we're doing our great work in the time
of wokeness, right, exactly. No, one can never go back.
I mean we've made missed ups here and there, but
they can't go back and talk about when Josh and
Chuck were big racists at the beginning.

Speaker 1 (48:07):
Yeah, no, it's true. But just wait for twenty years
from now, they'll be like, I can't believe they talk
about those guys were ageous bastards, you know.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
Probably.

Speaker 1 (48:16):
So there's one other thing I want to say too.
So when she lived through World War Two, Agatha Christie
was worried that she was going to die in the
bombing blitz of Great Britain, and she really wanted Hercule
poi Row and Jane Marple's to have a final case,
so she wrote a book for each of them. One

(48:38):
is called Curtain that's Paul Roe's final book, and the
other is Sleeping Murder that is Marple's final case, and
It just kind of explains what happens to them. I
believe poor Rowe dies and Marple just retires. But when
she survived World War Two, she was like, well, I
don't I'm not ready for these guys to be retired yet.
So she kept those books and had them posthumously published,

(49:01):
and they were in the seventies. And when Hercule poil
rose 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.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
That's crazy, isn't it?

Speaker 1 (49:17):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (49:17):
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?

Speaker 1 (49:38):
Have you ever seen one last thing? I've ever seen
murdered by death? I know, I've asked you before.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
I have that DVD sitting on my desk.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
Well, that's amazing that you have that on your desk,
and you wait, is it on your desk at work?

Speaker 2 (49:51):
It is the wrong place.

Speaker 1 (49:54):
I was going to say, watch it tonight, but don't
watch it tonight. Wait until everything clear that you're gonna
love it. No, it's a spoof actually of detective books
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 mystery mysteries.

(50:15):
It's just a wonderful book. Truman movie, Truman, Capote's in it,
David Niven, Peter Peter Falkah, a lot of people. James
Cromwell as a younger man. Oh yeah, James Coco is,
Hercule poil Row. It's just great. You're gonna love it, man.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
So I guess we should say that she did die
eventually five years or three years after I met her
in nineteen seventy six, at the age of eighty five,
at her home in Oxfordshire or Oxfordshire, and it was
natural causes, not poison.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
No. Her last words were good to meet you, Chuck,
you got anything else?

Speaker 2 (50:57):
I do not have anything else?

Speaker 1 (50:59):
Well, friends, that is Agatha Christie. If you want to
know more about it, the Christie, go start reading. I
get the Christie books. And since I said Agatha Christie
like three or four times, it's time for a listener mate.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
All right, I'm gonna call this a 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. Uh.
This is Emmett. He's ten years old.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
Oh yeah, I love this email.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:42):
It is a little weird, though, amit. You're right? I
love how self aware this guy is.

Speaker 2 (51:46):
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.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
Yeah, you're like the Bay City Rollers. You throw a
dart at a map and go with it.

Speaker 2 (51:59):
That's right. Now, I'm really worried there's a professional team
in Iowa. But there is not.

Speaker 1 (52:04):
There is not, There are none, right, No need to
double check that.

Speaker 2 (52:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
That's some fine reverse psychology right there.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
Well played, Emmitt. I love your grass podcast, and last
year me and my best friend Oliver started a long
care business and I made enough money to buy Beats
headphones to listen to your podcast on.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
That is full circle right there.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
That's right, he says. I may ture to wrap this
letter up and spank it all the bottom before I
sent it, so happy happy big I guess eleventh birthday, Emmet,
best to your dad, Hello Oliver and everyone there in Atlanta, Iowa.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
Yeah, happy birthday, Emit. That reverse psychology worked. Man. If
you want to get in touch with us like Emmett did,
and see if I'll wish you a happy birthday, I'll
bet we won't. But who can tell them these crazy times?
You can get in touch with us via email. Wrap
it up? Spank it on the bottom and send it

(53:19):
off to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (53:27):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.