Christie’s success as a writer kept growing too, as did the speed of her prolific pen. She turned out at least one book a year, sometimes three. While everything in her life was coasting along on an even keel, Archie was invited to travel around the world as part of the Empire Tour to showcase “products of the British Empire.” Archie’s job was to handle the finances while interest was being drummed up in the various provinces and territories of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. Much to Agatha’s delight, they could add a month’s holiday in Honolulu to the trip. They packed their bags and left in January 1922. Rosalind went to stay with Agatha’s mother and sister.
ABOVE : Christie and her young daughter, Rosalind
While on tour, Christie found out that she was an international hit; her reputation had preceded her. People loved her books, and Archie stood by and watched as the flames of his wife’s fame grew hotter. When they returned from abroad, Archie had to find a new job. Over the next few years, the only steady factor in the couple’s life was Christie’s rising star as a professional writer. One biographer notes that at age thirty-four she had reached a point when her “health and strength, looks and temper were at their most resilient, when it is easy to feel sure of one’s own nature and capacities.”12 That resiliency would be sorely tested in a few years’ time, when Archie announced that he was in love with a golfing girl.
The year 1926 was one that Agatha would forever “hate recalling. As so often in life, when one thing goes wrong everything goes wrong,” she remarked. The series of misfortunes began with the death of her mother. Archie missed the funeral because he was in Spain. When he returned, he was anxious to get away from any unhappiness and suggested that Christie leave her family home and go away with him. She declined, finding his cheer-up attitude “very hard to bear when you have lost a person who is one of three you love best in the world.”13 He left, and she stayed behind to sort out the estate at Ashfield. Christie fell into a deep despair; she would burst into tears for no reason and forget her own name when signing checks. She was tired. Too tired. Archie returned just as her spirits were lifting a little, but when he arrived he was a stranger. She likened the feeling to a waking nightmare. He soon announced that he had fallen in love with a lady named Nancy and that he’d like a divorce as soon as possible. “I suppose” she writes, that “with those words, that part of my life—my happy, successful, confident life—ended.”14
The author’s disappearance followed. Distressed, she left the house on a December evening, driving off without a word to the housemaids about where she was headed. Her car was later found abandoned, halfway down a grassy slope and buried in some bushes. The media went wild. Christie had vanished, and a massive eleven-day manhunt ensued. There were accusations that she had been murdered by Archie, that she had devised her own mysterious publicity stunt, that she’d committed suicide or been terribly hurt. Search teams roamed the countryside, lakes and ponds were dredged in gruesome hope of finding her body, and bloodhounds barked as they tried to pick up a scent. All the while, Christie had checked herself into a spa hotel. Drinking coffee and eating Melba toast with grapefruit slices, she read the daily newspaper headlines about her own disappearance, but she did not know they were referring to her. The depression she had been suffering from had culminated in some kind of nervous breakdown and amnesia. She lost herself, literally. The whole event was traumatic, and Christie was subsequently mortified by the media’s ongoing feeding frenzy.
Things eventually calmed down, and she granted Archie the divorce she didn’t want. She left with Rosalind for the Canary Islands, hopeful that she could catch her breath there and get some writing done. When she returned home to England, she was in a much more adventurous, lost-it-all-anyway mood.
CHRISTIE’S CAREER IN archaeology was unconventional. Although she had “always been faintly attracted to archaeology,” unlike the other pioneers in this book, she didn’t pursue it as her own career. Instead, she was a unique kind of witness to the field. She was fluent in archaeological methods and sites, yet she never published any of her own research or excavation results. She was an assistant, an observer, a field hand, the wife of the director. Her contributions to archaeology are not as much groundbreaking in the academic sense as they are captivating, highlighted by good old-fashioned mystery, and successful in exciting public interest in ancient landscapes and antiquity. Who could be better qualified to reconstruct events of the past than a mystery writer who has an eye peeled for every clue?
Christie met Leonard and Katherine Woolley on the famous site of Ur in Iraq (a site Gertrude Bell was once involved with). She traveled there via the Orient Express and by boat to Beirut, suffering from the agony of greasy food and bedbug bites so bad she had to cut the sleeves of her shirt to let her swollen arms out. Leonard was the site’s director and Katherine the charismatic and mildly crazy wife who also happened to be a huge fan of Christie’s book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. She invited Christie to visit and made sure she received VIP treatment. While most visitors to an archaeological site were viewed as pesky interruptions, Christie was warmly received. Leonard gave her a tour through the excavations, and she met with other historians and scholars as well.
Her time at Ur was transformative. She wrote:
I fell in love with Ur, with its beauty in the evenings, the ziggurat standing up, faintly shadowed, and the wide sea of sand with its lovely pale colors of apricot, rose, blue and mauve changing every minute. I enjoyed the workmen, the foremen, the little basket boys, the pickmen—the whole technique and life. The lure of the past came up to grab me . . . The carefulness of lifting pots and objects from the soil filled me with a longing to be an archaeologist myself.”15
That longing would come to fruition. While on site, Christie also met the man she would fall in love with—Max Mallowan, a “thin, dark, young man” and a true archaeologist who would reach renown in his lifetime. He was then twenty-five years old (at age forty, Christie had a little streak of cougar in her) and an invaluable assistant to Leonard. He oversaw the field crew, which numbered two hundred and above, spoke Arabic, organized the books, and knew how to handle the irascible Katherine (methods included hair brushing, massage, and placing a few blood-sucking leeches here and there at her request16). After a brief return to England, Christie went back to Ur the following season to view the progress in the excavation trenches and then travel through Syria and Greece. Her arrival was greeted by a vicious sandstorm and Max. Katherine Woolley declared that Max would be escorting Christie to Nejef, Kerbala, the site of Nippur, and finally on to Baghdad, setting them on a path neither would have expected. Christie balked; after three months of excavating a young man wouldn’t want to spend his free time touring her around. Would he?
Max didn’t mind at all it, and besides, once Katherine made a decision about something, there was no undoing it. They started off, and under Max’s influence Christie became “more enamored of digging than ever.”17 As they traveled together, Agatha would pick up potsherds from all the tell sites they visited. She was most enchanted by the brilliantly colored pieces—the green, turquoise, blue, and gold-flecked bits that would have sat well in a peacock’s tail—and she collected a large bag of them. When they reached a hotel in Baghdad, Christie dipped each sherd in water and “arranged them in glistening iridescent patterns of colour” on the floor. The result was an archaeological rainbow. Max added a few pieces of his own to the display, and Agatha caught him staring at her “with the air of an indulgent scholar looking kindly at a foolish but not unlikeable child . . .”18
During their travels together Max realized that Christie was wonderful. When their car got badly stuck in sand after the two had snuck away for a quick swim in their improvised swimsuits of doubled-up “knickers,” they faced the prospect of a day or two in the desert stranded without water. Max’s response was to get busy solving the problem; Christie decided to take a nap. It was her mellow nonchalance toward a rather urgent situation that made Max
realize she was the woman for him. They parted ways in Baghdad, but soon enough he found his way to England, where he looked her up. They met for breakfast. She invited him to come stay at Ashfield for a weekend. They got along so fabulously well as friends that she was struck dumb when he proposed marriage.
Max snuck into her bedroom and sat at the edge of her bed to ask if she might marry him. He also asked if she minded that his profession was “digging up the dead.” The woman whose very favorite thing was a well-done murder replied, not at all—“I adore corpses and stiffs.”19
Christie said it was through friendship that Max made his way into her heart. Had she known that he was courting romance, she would have turned away from it. Her divorce had been bitterly painful, shameful, and her desire to remarry—to risk being hurt again—was nil. But there was Max, the twenty-something stealth who had managed to slip past the clever mystery writer’s instinct for foreshadowing. She could think of every reason why they shouldn’t marry, but she couldn’t say that she didn’t want to, because it wasn’t true. When she thought about it, she realized that “nothing in the world would be as delightful as being married to him.” In 1930, Agatha Christie married the young archaeologist in an Edinburgh church.
ABOVE : Christie and her husband Max Mallowan on their archaeological journey to northern Iraq
BY 1934, THE COUPLE WAS IN the Khabur valley, in the northeastern portion of Syria, scouting for tells. They circled the bases of some sixty mounds to sniff out the most promising one for prehistoric pottery. Walking around and around, staring at the ground looking for just the right kind of potsherds, Christie began “to understand why archaeologists have a habit of walking with eyes downcast to the ground.” With a long season ahead of her, she said that “soon, I feel, I myself shall forget to look around me, or out to the horizon. I shall walk looking down at my feet as though there only an interest lies.”20
They settled on the tell site of Chagar Bazar, and a lifestyle of le camping began. The phrase amused Christie. While en route to their survey of tells, she, Max, and the architect they had brought along to map the cities and towns they hoped to uncover stumbled upon some French tourists. The tourists were fascinated by the band of traveling archaeologists, and the ladies inquired about Christie’s accommodations: Ah, Madame, vous faites le camping? Christie thought the expression classified their adventure as pure sport. Yes, le camping it was, albeit sans tent. They settled into a mouse-infested (“Mice across one’s face, mice tweaking your hair—mice! Mice! MICE ! . . .”) mud-brick building. The services of a “highly professional cat” were immediately solicited and took care of the mouse problem, but it wasn’t until the walls had been whitewashed, the windowsills and doors painted, and a smattering of furniture brought in that the couple felt comfortable and Christie, after weeks, could finally wash her hair.
By night Max and Agatha reckoned with armies of cockroaches and zingy fleas, but nothing was so bad as the mice. A schedule slowly fell into place. Max got up at dawn and made his way to the excavations. Christie would either go with him or see to the mending of pottery and objects and the labeling of artifacts, and every so often she would make use of the typewriter she’d lugged halfway around the world.21
Work at Chagar Bazar was conducted from 1935 to 1938, and during that time, Christie’s involvement with the excavations continually deepened. One account notes that “she had developed into an indispensable member of the team, leaving her own career as a writer in abeyance.”22 While living and working in the field, she wore several hats. She oversaw matters pertaining to the kitchen and tried to teach the hired hands to cook everything from omelets to lemon curd to soufflés. Her previous work as a nurse put her in a good position to function as a sort of ad hoc desert medicine woman; not only did she treat the injured field crew, but she would also give counsel (and aspirin) to the Kurdish and Arab women who came to see her in groups all dressed in their flowing robes and jingling bangles. She supervised the basket boys, the table settings, the shopping excursions, and the purchase of meat. Yet she also began to play a critical role in the archaeology that was being conducted, and her coat pockets were always bulging with the potsherds she loved to collect.
Christie first became acquainted with the process of artifact collection and cleaning while working with Max at the site of Nimrud. Beginning work in 1949, Max would continue to excavate the site for the next ten years. There Christie spruced up the ancient ivory carvings that were eventually dispersed to museums around the world and even fabricated her own toolkit for dealing with them:
I had my part in cleaning them. I had my own favourite tools, just as any professional would: an orange stick, possibly a very fine knitting needle—one season a dentist’s tool, which he lent, or rather gave me—and a jar of cosmetic face-cream which I found more useful than anything else for gently coaxing the dirt out of the crevices without harming the friable ivory. In fact there was such a run on my face-cream that there was nothing left for my poor old face after a couple of weeks!23
Agatha Christie pioneered a whole new method in artifact processing: a cold-cream wash. The stuff that smoothed facial wrinkles was equally effective at restoring a fine polish to ivory.
While working, Christie would reflect on the “patience, the care that was needed; the delicacy of touch” that her task required. She devoted herself to archaeology with ease because for her it was a life “free of outside shadows.”24 Her books would still be written—and she loved to write them—but she surrendered to archaeology’s simplicity, to the uncomplicated and predictable routines of dig life. She didn’t envy the site director’s job—scanning the whole site, putting this and that together, assessing what fit with what and where the next trench should be opened—but rather very much enjoyed the workmen’s lifestyle. Freed from Victorian society, career strains, and a million places to be, she reveled in a simpler life: eat breakfast (hot tea and eggs); walk the site; complete multiple tasks that can be started, finished, and savored with a feeling of satisfaction; have dinner, some wine, and a biscuit; go to bed, and start the next day anew and in the same way. Life on a dig was rigorous and not always comfortable, but it was also devoid of the chaos or social obligations that the naturally shy Christie was inclined to avoid. Field days were the “most perfect” she had ever known.
Standing in a vast and quiet desert landscape, sipping her tea, Christie mused that five thousand years ago, this had been the busy part of the world: a thriving region of commerce, trade, and bustling temples. She considered the dainty china cup in her hand and its long evolution: “Here [during their survey of tells] were the beginnings of civilization, and here, picked up by me, this broken fragment of a clay pot, hand made, with a design of dots and cross-hatching in black paint, is the forerunner of the Woolworth cup out of which this very morning I have drunk my tea . . .”25
Everything in her excavator’s life was akin to a jigsaw puzzle. She fit the pieces together. From reassembling broken potsherds into a whole pot to making connections between the material cultures of then and now, Christie reveled in the hints and revelations of archaeology. It was during this first season at Chagar Bazar that Agatha felt some writerly inspiration as well and wrote Murder in Mesopotamia, in which an archaeologist’s wife, highly reminiscent of Katherine Woolley, is murdered.
The second season of work at Chagar Bazar took place in 1936, and Christie began photographing the dig and the objects recovered. She even made two 16-mm films, each forty-five minutes long, which recorded both the technical side of excavating and the humorous anecdotes of everyday life on an archaeological site.26 Her job was to take highly accurate pictures of the artifacts found—each detail in clear relief, with a scale alongside the object. She had her own little darkroom where she would work—and little it was. She wrote that “in it, one can neither sit nor stand! Crawling in on all fours, I develop plates, kneeling with bent head. I come out practically asphyxiated with heat and unable to stand upright.”27 She craved a lit
tle sympathy for the suffering she endured in her chemical-filled hotbox, but Max and the others were far more interested in the quality of the negatives than the photographer’s comfort, or lack thereof.
The second season of work in Syria was also when Max decided to open excavations of two tells simultaneously. They continued their work at Chagar Bazar and began new investigations at the nearby Tell Brak. In between seasons they had returned home for a visit. Max wrote up his archaeological reports while Christie luxuriated in her fill of “Devon, of red rocks and blue sea . . . [her] daughter, the dog, the bowls of Devonshire cream, apples, bathing . . .”28 Now back in the field, Max and Agatha had the pleasure of a new house to live in at Chagar Bazar (one with a more spacious darkroom), and they were armed with restored energy and six rounds of ripe Camembert cheese. As a side note, the cheese was sadly misplaced and lost in the back of a cupboard, and it wasn’t until the house was pungent with a smell they likened to death that they found the “gluey odorous mass” and decided to bury it in a remote spot, far from the house. It was back to hot tea, hard bread, and eggs.
LEFT: Bronze bracelets, decorative rings, and simple stone tools
RIGHT: Carved spear points found in a burial site
ABOVE : The young writer Agatha Christie, 1924
Work at the two tells carried on through a third season, and it was only because war broke out in 1939 that excavations at the Tell Brak, a site Max thought worthy of decades of investigation, would stop. Both Chagar Bazar and Tell Brak were, in Max’s mind, of “extraordinary interest archaeologically, historically and artistically.”29 Each had its major discoveries. At Chagar Bazar they found a burnt-out palace containing about seventy cuneiform tablets that revealed much about the ethnic backgrounds of the former residents. Tell Brak contained, among many other things, the spectacular Eye Temple, named for the “hundreds of little eye idols of black and white alabaster that lay all over the floors.”30 Throughout all of the work, Christie was in lockstep with her archaeologist husband; she took part in every aspect of field life for many years afterwards. Christie’s last dig occurred when she was sixty-eight. She and Max were still married and excavating Nimrud.
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