Grande Dame

By Martha Duffy

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Agatha Christie

Dodd, Mead; 529 pages; $15

One sympathizes reluctantly with the publishers of this posthumous book. They have added a two-page preface, mostly of chatty, mildly condescending detail about their long relationship with the immensely profitable author. But, yes, buried in the middle of the third paragraph is the real reason for the note: she has chosen not to discuss the one episode in her 85 years that everyone will be looking for. There is nothing about her notorious lapse into amnesia in 1926, and Dodd, Mead might well have tried to head off a great deal of fruitless inquiry. Dame Agatha's first husband had asked her for a divorce so that he could marry a younger woman. This was unthinkable, and to her unending regret, she did the unthinkable in return. Abandoning her car a few miles from home, she vanished. Following a massive man hunt and nearly two weeks' worth of headlines, she was discovered in a small Yorkshire hotel, registered in the name of her husband's new love. She said she had no memory of any of it.

The incident colored the rest of her life. Archibald Christie, a chilly, willful man, remarried anyway. Agatha spent the next years mostly out of England, traveling in remote parts of the Middle East until she found a kinder husband, the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. She began to create a series of lonely, high-strung heroines, and soon fashioned a sleuth, Jane Marple, whose method of detection is based on solid premises: appearances are misleading and to trust is to be deceived.

One can see that her husband's rejection was obliterating to Agatha: she liked herself and thought life was fun. She grew up in the Devon town of Torquay, the child of a well-born Englishwoman and an affable American expatriate who let his wealth evaporate in the hands of remote, incompetent New York brokers. She was a much-loved but solitary child who entertained herself effortlessly, playing for hours in the garden, bowling her hoop along the stations of three imaginary railway lines: "Lily of the Valley Bed. Change for the Tubular Railway here. Tub. Terminus. All change." Twelve years ago, when she completed this book at 75, she remembered every invisible platform.

Social life picked up in her teen-age years. She plunges into vivid accounts of coconut shies and garden parties, the technique of hat painting and cheating on one's dance card. In the myriad detail of the book is an irresistible ingenuousness. When she achieved her first success as a thriller writer, she bought a car. "I will confess," she says, "that of the two things that have excited me most in my life the first was my grey bottle-nosed Morris Cowley. The second was dining with the Queen about forty years later." There follows a paragraph of Dame Agatha's worst prose extolling the "small, and slender" Elizabeth II, who told a story about soot falling from her chimney to put her guest at ease.

If Christie stints, it is in the discussion of her writing. A few details are vouchsafed: the ideal detective story is 50,000 words long; the short story is not a good form for mysteries; neither is much love interest, nor an overcomplicated midsection of the plot. Her ideas began as a couple of random images: "Girl and not really sister--August." Contrary to popular belief, writing was never easy for the author of 68 books. She fretted for weeks before getting into a novel and required constant expressions of reassurance from Sir Max. "I got very tired, and I also got cross," she states at one point. "Writing has that effect, I find."

For a large-spirited woman, she is notably grudging to the man who got her to Buckingham Palace--Hercule Poirot. There is little about him in the book, and what she does write is rilled with ennui and regret that she did not make him younger, handsomer, more dashing. Finally, however, she is gracious. "As life goes on, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented," she writes. "Presumably you have learned literary humility. If I could write like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark or Graham Greene, I should jump to high heaven with delight, but I know that I can't." This disarming passage ends with a motto that also fits this modest, agreeable book. Dame Agatha recalls a plate on her nursery wall, "which I think I must have won at a coconut shy at one of the regattas. 'Be a wheel-greaser if you can't drive a train.' "

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