Agatha Christie’s great-grandson names author’s most ‘uncared for’ character | Books | Entertainment | EUROtoday

Fifty years after Dame Agatha Christie’s dying, the world nonetheless can’t get sufficient of her brilliance. The Queen of Crime’s Seven Dials Mystery on Netflix, starring Mia McKenna-Bruce, has been a scores hit, a Miss Marple reboot is within the works and her award-winning play, The Mousetrap, stays a West End hit 73 years after its debut. None of this surprises the author’s great-grandson, James Prichard, who turned chairman and chief govt of her property in 2010. “We’re probably selling more books now than we have for a very long time,” he chuckles with apparent delight.

The super-prolific Christie wrote 66 detective novels, 150 quick tales and greater than 20 performs throughout her lifetime. She is commonly cited because the third-most-published creator on the planet – behind solely Shakespeare and the Bible. And her work has stood the check of time. “Because it’s only 50 years ago she died, it proves how modern a writer and a woman she was,” says James, 55. “She was still writing at the beginning of the seventies.”

He was solely 5 when his great-grandmother died. He can keep in mind visiting her at residence however his recollections come into higher give attention to the day of her dying in January 1976. “I remember my father [Mathew, Christie’s only grandchild] being in deep mourning but I also remember that it was the lead item on the Six O’clock News,” he remembers. “That was the moment I realised it wasn’t normal to have your great-grandmother’s death on the news.”

Today James sees her as two girls. “There’s Agatha Christie, the icon, and then there is Nima, which my father called her, the family member,” he explains. “She was an amazing parent and grandparent, and she really loved to be around those people.”

Despite attaining large fame throughout her lifetime, Christie stays one thing of an enigma. Born right into a affluent household in Torquay, Devon, she was homeschooled by her father, Frederick, for a lot of her childhood and taught herself to learn by the age of 5. With two a lot older siblings away from residence, she realized to entertain herself. “I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts, and there’s nothing like boredom to make you write,” she remarked in later life. “So by the time I was 16 or 17, I’d written quite a number of short stories and one long, dreary novel.”

Christie’s first published book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, arrived in 1920 and introduced the character of Hercule Poirot. From then on, she became the master – or should that be mistress? – of the murder mystery.

Her super power was listening, according to James. “My father always said she was the best listener she ever met. She was a very shy person, she wasn’t the life of the party. One of the tips she gave aspiring writers was to ride around on the bus and just listen to conversations. If she were sitting in a cafe, she would be slightly listening to the conversation on the table next door, and she would take names from that as well. She frequently took note of people’s names and noted them down for use later on.”

In fact, when it came to crafting her ingenious plots, Christie didn’t particularly worry about the actual writing.

“I would call my great-grandmother a genius, and with a genius, the rules don’t apply,” says James. “She had this extraordinary brain in her head. We have her notebooks, but she didn’t plan in the way that I think most modern writers would plan. There aren’t reams of what the story would look like – there are scribbles, but she did most of it in her head. She compared the process of writing to giving birth. There was a period in her head when all of these things were muddling around, and then at some point, it was ready, and she sat down, and she wrote it.

“Some of them came out very quickly. She wrote manically, certainly two, possibly three, even four books a year at her peak, but she didn’t have to do interviews or social media or events. So, she had the time between writing her books to have a very private life.”

While Christie drew inspiration from real life people, she lifted snippets of information only. “Very rarely did she take someone she knew and literally put them on the page,” continues James. “What she did more frequently was take bits of people she knew and blend them into a character. It was more like patchwork.”

He considers the fastidious Belgian detective – arguably her greatest creation. “I don’t know where Poirot came from, but there’s a story of her seeing Belgian refugees by the side of a bus stop in Torquay, and that’s probably true, but exactly where that particular person came from was really in her head,” he says. “There is an element of Miss Marple that’s her, that’s her mother and that’s her grandmother. She always claimed it’s not her, but I suspect there’s an element that’s her.”

Despite being her most famous detective, Christie expressed her dislike for the moustached detective frequently over the years. Today, James waves this away as fickleness. “There are quotes from her talking about her frustration with Poirot at various times, but if you spoke to any writer, they’d say they get frustrated with returning characters at some point.”

Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov, David Suchet, John Malkovich and Kenneth Branagh have all played Poirot but James diplomatically declines to name a favourite. “You’re not allowed to have a favourite child, and you’re not allowed to have a favourite Poirot or Marple,” he chuckles. “There have been extraordinary actors who have played Poirot over time; they all did it in their own way, and that’s what’s so special about it.”

If he does have a niggle it’s that perhaps Poirot has had too much screen time in comparison with another of Christie’s all-time greats, spinster sleuth Miss Marple.

“I hope to do something extraordinary with Miss Marple,” he says of plans for a new film about her. “We have not finished something with Miss Marple for a very long time and I all the time really feel like Miss Marple will get barely uncared for and falls behind Poirot.”

Modern adaptations of Christie productions have been accused of being too “woke”, and fixated with multicultural casting or superimposed storylines about racism or anti-colonialism. The BBC was recently urged to abandon “tick box” diversity when it comes to casting parts, following an independent review commissioned by the public broadcaster.

Former Bafta chair Anne Morrison and ex-Ofcom executive Chris Banatvala’s report criticised a 2023 Agatha Christie adaptation of Murder Is Easy, which featured a black lead actor, David Jonsson, as Luke Obiako Fitzwilliam, and was described by its director as “an excellent allegorical story about colonialism”.

Prichard rejects the report and believes the adaptation “worked”. Speaking recently, he said: “I believe – and I believe my great-grandmother believed, because she did this herself when she adapted her stories into plays – that to adapt something into a different medium you have to make changes to that original story. We are categorically using her stories and relying on her genius but it’s moved on. We’re not doing literal translations of her books for TV. We are making period drama but we are looking through a modern sensibility.”

If he has any quibbles about public misconceptions, these relate only to Christie herself. His major bugbear is the use of older pictures which he believes identifies his great-grandmother as an eternal Miss Marple figure. “She was a young woman once, and she was an incredibly adventurous and spirited young woman who travelled extensively, did extraordinary things, and one of them was singing,” he says.

Christie was musical from a young age and once aspired to become an opera singer. “But that’s where the shyness caused an issue – performing became a problem,” James adds. “But she played the piano and sang privately and for fun all through her life.”

During both world wars, Christie abandoned her writing to help the national effort. In the First World War, she volunteered as a nurse. “It was presumably quite a traumatic experience where she regularly saw fairly unpleasant things,” reflects James. “But she became a pharmacist and learned about drugs and medicines, which crept into her writing.”

Christie’s passion for travelling made it onto her pages too. In 1922, she and first husband, Archie, embarked on a 10-month grand tour of the British Empire. During their retreat, Agatha learnt and perfected the craft of surfing, and is widely believed to be the first Western woman to learn to surf standing up in South Africa.

Her experience is thought to have inspired the book, The Man in the Brown Suit, which features a protagonist who travels to South Africa who tries – and fails – to surf. After marrying her second husband, Max Mallowan, she spent months every year living in the Middle East on excavation sites as a keen archaeologist.

During her annual retreats, she became a regular on the Orient Express, which travelled between London and Baghdad. Her now-infamous book, Murder on the Orient Express, was inspired by a real-life incident in which her train was stuck in a blizzard for 24 hours.

She also drew similar inspiration for her books Death on the Nile, Murder in Mesopotamia, and Appointment with Death.

Christie, who died aged 85 in January 1976, continued to work into her twilight years. Age incredibly never dulled her talent.

“She wrote longhand, and when she couldn’t write anymore later in life, she dictated her books,” says James. “We have tape recordings of her and it sounds like she’s reading, but she’s writing. She had this amazing brain and mind until the end.”