Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman

by Lucy Worsley

This particular incident, a novelist overhearing herself described as a drinker, made its way into Agatha’s novel Dead Man’s Folly when it happens to her fictional alter ego, the detective novelist Mrs Ariadne Oliver.

Her father Frederick was born in New York City to American parents, while her mother Clara’s place of birth was Dublin.

Auntie-Grannie also thought that ‘every woman should always have fifty pounds in five pound notes with her in case of what she called emergencies,’

one of the points often made ‘against’ her as a writer is her lack of humanity towards domestic employees. This can be seen in novels like Evil under the Sun, where the staff of a hotel are freed from suspicion entirely on the basis of class. But she also plays with prejudice, and woe betide the reader who assumes that a servant in a Christie story ‘couldn’t have done it’.