The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict

Marie Benedict has made a career as an author writing historical fiction about women of accomplishment. After novels about the life of Clementine Churchill, Hedy Lamarr, Clara Kelley and Mitza Einstein, Marie Benedict has turned her pen to a period of mystery in the life of renowned mystery novelist Agatha Christie.

My husband and I re-read Agatha Christie’s novels every so often, as a sort of “comfort food”. You know what you are going to get, and it is always satisfying and very very good, and it is also very unlikely that we will figure out the culprit before it is revealed by Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.  And that is exactly as Agatha Christie intended – to write a mystery novel with a case that the reader could not possibly solve.

As a young woman, Agatha Christie had dreams of marriage and a family, but also of becoming a writer. Her mother encouraged her, and there was a loving rivalry with her sister. In the years

before the First World War life was not unhappy and all these dreams seemed possible. Agatha fell in love and married. Her husband went off to war and came home, perhaps changed, or perhaps still the man she married hastily without knowing his true character. Her mother advised Agatha to always put her husband’s needs before her own, to always make him the centre of her attention, even before children. And this she did, resulting in a deep unhappiness, and damage to her own self-esteem and to her relationship with her child.

But nothing stopped her from writing, and she found success with her very first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written during WW1 and published in 1920. This novel introduced the world to Hercule Poirot and Agatha Christie went on to write many more novels featuring both Poirot and Miss Marple and others.

Marie Benedict describes Agatha Christie developing the character of Hercule Poirot, who she came to know so perfectly that he was alive in her mind and in her novels. But it is less her writing, and more the period of Agatha Christie’s disappearance in December 1926 that is the focus of this novel. The author has closely followed the true facts of what is known about that time and supposed the details that are not known – but suspected by many.

I’m not going to spoil the story if you do not know it! The Mystery of Mrs. Christie is much the same as Marie Benedict’s previous novels – she tells you a story you may not know about a very interesting woman!