Have You Ever Wanted to Run Away? 

I am in my sitting room holding a copy of Sleeping Murder. There is one chapter left, and when I finish it I will have read all the novels Agatha Christie wrote in the order they were published. My head is full of her; I dream of mauve irises and scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers, of a little girl in a garden looking up at a monkey puzzle tree, of a young woman twirling around a ballroom in a green chiffon dress.  

I call her Agatha now. I didn’t always. It felt over familiar at first, but typing her full name was weighty and ‘Christie’ was both cold and not quite right. Although it is on the front of all those covers, the name belonged to her first husband, and she only used it to describe her actual self for sixteen of her eighty-six years. I tried ‘AC’ which was the way she signed off postcards, but it always made me think of air conditioning, so I overcame my scruples and got on first name terms. Agatha. I see her in her nurse’s uniform just after the outbreak of the First World War, I see her looking in the window of a hat shop, and mostly I see her on trains and in stations. She is in the refreshment room at Exeter Station, on the platform at Victoria, or looking out of the window of the Orient Express as it takes her to a new life.  

Over the past couple of years, when I told people I was reading all her books in order, they’d be full of questions. I enjoyed answering. Agatha always said she became a writer so she didn’t have to talk, but I love falling into conversation with strangers and quickly clocked that she was an excellent topic because almost everyone has an Agatha story.  Even non-readers might have a mother who is a fan, or will have seen the films and have opinions about the plot or the actors or how modern the sex should be – She’d be turning in her grave or Well, they need to spice it up a bit, don’t they? 

The first question was almost always what my project meant in terms of volume. How many books had she written?  Even huge fans were surprised by the numbers. Sixty-six crime novels? Really? And six more under a pseudonym? Only outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible? And you’re really going to read them all? 

Yes, I’d say. Though I’m not sure what to do about the short stories. I won’t read the poetry. Or the plays. She’s the most successful female dramatist ever, too. 

And they might know that The Mousetrap is the longest running play of all time, and I’d say I’d seen it three times, most recently with my son, Matt, who found it less scary than I did and held my hand through the frightening bits.  

They’d ask if I preferred Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple. That’s hard! The real showstoppers tend to have Poirot in the leading role, but I like how Miss Marple’s intuition is drawn from her experience of village life. Tommy and Tuppence? Yes, very keen; I know some people find them irritating but I enjoy Tuppence’s oomph. And unlike Poirot and Marple, Tommy and Tuppence age in real time – which is also Agatha’s time – so they reflect her life and preoccupations. 

Then – often – their brow would wrinkle.  

Didn’t she go missing? What was all that about? She was all over the papers and then she turned up in Harrogate. Did she really lose her memory? 

For a long time, I didn’t want to get into that question. I didn’t think it was my business. Yes, there were eleven days in December 1926 when no one knew where she was. When she was discovered to be safe, if not well, in a hotel  in Harrogate, people speculated that her disappearance must have been a publicity stunt or an intentional attempt to frame her husband for murder. All that was a matter of public record, but I didn’t want to pick over the bones. In one of the few direct references Agatha made to it, she described feeling like a hunted fox whose earth had all been dug up. I didn’t want to blow a horn and join the pack and turn a private crisis into entertainment and gossip.  

I’d say I thought it was unimportant in the grand scheme of things. She’d obviously had some kind of breakdown and beyond that I didn’t intend to comment. I’d say that writers  – everyone – deserve privacy to make mistakes. Which of us would enjoy having our most vulnerable moments broadcast to the world? I’d steer the questioner back to more comfortable territory, see if they had a favourite book, tell them I had several candidates but was always changing my mind. If they wanted a recommendation I’d say, if you are interested in narrative and how stories are made, then start with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. If you want a straight-up cracker then Murder on the Orient Express or Death on the Nile. 

But as I read on through all those sixty-six novels, as I read the six novels she published under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott, as her autobiography became my constant companion, as I travelled back through time and tried to see her world through her eyes, it became harder to ignore Harrogate. If we see Agatha’s life as a train journey – and why not, when she loved trains so much – and all her books as stations, then Harrogate is an explosion that wrenches her off track. A bomb goes off, and the blast throws shrapnel  into the future, marking her pages with little burns and scars. To understand everything that came afterwards, I realised, I did need to pay attention not only to those eleven days in December but to all of 1926. And then I began to feel that Agatha herself was leading me there. Because while she might not have talked about it directly, there were so many clues scattered through the books, it was almost as though she’d been waiting for an attentive reader to piece them all together. And as my own life derailed, and as I  increasingly wished that I, too, could run away to Harrogate, I felt like she had something to teach me about disappointment and heartbreak, about grief and recovery, and about  the very nature of making mistakes.  

And now, if I could go back in time to those conversations, I wouldn’t say that Harrogate was unimportant. I  would instead look at the person asking me, and say, I think she wanted to run away. 

And then I’d allow a pause. I’d break eye contact. Maybe  glance out of the window. Then I’d look back and, depending on their expression, on whether they seemed  broadly sympathetic and curious and up for discussing the  big questions of life with a stranger they’d just met on a train, I might ask, haven’t you ever wanted to run away?  

And then I might add, I have.