Linda Carter
Carpinteria, California, United States

It is not well known that Agatha Christie (1890–1976), the most published author of all time,¹ served as a Red Cross nurse volunteer in World War I. Beginning in 1914, she logged 3,400 hours of supportive care in a temporary hometown hospital. That same year, twenty-four-year-old Agatha Miller married first husband Archie Christie, a member of the Royal Fighting Corps, on assignment to expeditions in France.² At first overcome by the sight of blood in makeshift surgical theaters, the would-be murder writer attended to seriously wounded soldiers returning straight from the trenches and covered in lice.³ Following gruesome procedures that physicians performed under primitive conditions, she mopped up bloody detritus and pitched amputated limbs into the furnace.⁴

Later, Christie studied theoretical and practical chemistry and qualified to dispense medications. Knowledge of toxins and time away from ravaged patients apparently stimulated imaginings of “murder most foul,”5 inspiring her mystery writing career. According to Kathryn Harkup, a former chemist, Christie poisoned more than thirty fictional victims in sixty-six nail-biting detective mysteries.6 These stories were frequently populated by medical professionals, including seven nurses and eighty-four others on a list predominated by doctors.⁷ Was her writing an artistic vehicle for coping with the deepest of all mysteries: life and death?

Throughout her oeuvre, Christie entices us into plots with characters representing archetypal patterns of human nature carrying an element of universal truth. Enigmatic “fogginess” often surrounds settings, encouraging curiosity and tolerance of the unknown. She drops clues like bread crumbs along the way, and we eagerly join those in the drawing room anxiously awaiting a final resolution, only to be surprised and outwitted—yet again. Unlike life as we usually know it, satisfaction can be found in structured stories with a beginning, middle, and end that present a conclusion with loose threads no longer dangling. Life and death are held within the “safe” but stimulating context of a parlor game with anticipation of the adrenaline-fueled thrill of surprise, culminating in a final reveal. Immersion in someone else’s life and distraction from our own troubles can be an enormous relief during traumatic times. Consequently, we willingly give over to Christie’s seductive storytelling wiles.

Christie’s second marriage to Max Mallowan, an archeologist thirteen years younger, whom she met on a dig and married in 1930, influenced the writing and backdrop of both Murder in Mesopotamia (1936) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934). The start of this forty-six-year relationship followed a series of traumatic events for Christie in 1926, including the death of her mother, Archie’s affair and request for divorce that was finalized two years later, and the public uproar over her eleven-day vanishing act and sudden reappearance, saying only that she had lost her memory.⁸ 

Life with Max Mallowan began surrounded by archeological excavation sites in Iraq that opened new vistas where Agatha Christie (professional surname maintained) devoted time to photographically documenting finds and “cleaning ivories dug up from the ruins, using her own face cream to coax dirt out of the crevices.”⁹ It is possible that a new and dramatically different environment along with the soothing qualities of working with her hands provided open, imaginative space for healing and the generation of new writing material.

Not surprisingly, Iraq and archeology create set and setting for a sense of exotic otherness in Murder in Mesopotamia, with layers of mysterious history employed to foreground a complex web of personal relationships. The scientific team is led by Dr. Leidner, whose new wife is experiencing little-understood distress requiring assistance from reliable Nurse Leatheran. Stereotypical assumptions emerging from the team reveal polarizing views of feminine identity: the ailing wife as ethereal wisp of airborne seductive spirit contrasted with the practical earthmother/nurse; however, this nurse meets her patient through compassion and intuition, not consciously seen but palpably sensed.

Nurse Leatheran accepts and proficiently carries out her duties as caregiver and note-taking narrator; however, she also quite sensitively reads atmospheric subtleties. This character’s natural empathic acuity, in conjunction with a gift for attention to shifting, nuanced expressions and gestures, beautifully exemplifies the essence of nonverbal implicit knowing, usually communicated through facial expression, head orientation, voice tone, rhythm, body movement, etc. What has often been considered magical intuition may in fact have more to do with pattern recognition outside conscious awareness.

Personal and collective trauma probably influenced Christie’s recognition of beauty and darkness in human nature. The disliked, vulnerable Mrs. Leidner as patient cannot be split from the caregiving nurse. Murder and violence are daily occurrences at varying scales residing within each and all. The lure of exceptional beauty, innocent in and of itself, whether manifested in human embodiment, a work of art, or an ancient artifact, may produce a compulsion to kill what may not be possessed. The antidote to such envious poison may lie in self-differentiation and authentically living one’s own life.

References

1. Agatha Christie, “About the Author,” in Murder in Mesopotamia (New York: HarperCollins 1936, 2011), www.AgathaChristie.com.
2. Vanessa Thorpe, “How Agatha Christie’s Wartime Nursing Role Gave Her a Lifelong Taste for Poison,” The Guardian, October 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/21/wartime-nursing-gave-agatha-christie-taste-for-poison?CMP=share_btn_url.
3. Annabel Venning, “How Agatha Christie’s Agonies as a War Nurse Helped Inspire Poirot: Real Story Behind the Crimson Field Is Even More Remarkable than TV Drama Gripping Millions,” Daily Mail, April 19, 2014, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2608194/How-Agatha-Christies-agonies-war-nurse-helped-inspire-Poirot-Real-story-The-Crimson-Field-remarkable-TV-gripping-millions.html.
4. Thorpe, “How Agatha Christie’s Wartime Nursing Role Gave Her a Lifelong Taste for Poison.”
5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, (l.27–28); the ghost comments on his own death: “Murder most foul as in the best it is/But this most foul, strange and unnatural.”; David Pusall, director, Murder Most Foul, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; loosely based on Agatha Christie’s Mrs. McGinty’s Dead (Dodd Mead and Company, 1952).
6. Kathryn Harkup, A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2017, reprint).
7. “Harley Street: Physicians of Agatha Christie,” Poirot Central, 2000–2021.
8. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (Collins Crime Club, 1934).
9. Mary Evans, “Christie and the State,” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Agatha Christie, eds. Mary Evans and J. C. Bernthal (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 331.
10. Isabel Coles, “In the Ruins of an Iraqi City, Memories of Agatha Christie,” Reuters, August 4, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/world/in-the-ruins-of-an-iraqi-city-memories-of-agatha-christie-idUSKBN1AK1GV/.