The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

“This heightened the drama and romance of our fleeting time together and made me ever more certain that I must marry this enigmatic, passionate man.”

Romance and abiding love are characterized as inimical to one another in The Mystery of Mrs. Christie. Romance is portrayed as a youthfully folly, and though Agatha’s mother routinely offers her daughter marital advice that Agatha will ultimately resent and reject, Mummy’s view that a practical marriage is better than a love match is supported by Agatha’s journey through the dissolution of her marriage to Archie.

“Local lore had linked [the Silent Pool] to the legendary King John, who’d allegedly abducted a beautiful woodcutter’s daughter. It was said that King John’s unwelcome amorous advances had forced the girl into the pool’s deceptively deep water, where she drowned. But the drowning hadn’t silenced the girl, local folks claimed; if one was unlucky enough to be in the pool’s vicinity at midnight, one could witness her rise from its depths. It was nonsense, of course, and he’d told Agatha so.”

The lore of the Silent Pool, a lake near Styles, plays into the mythologized atmosphere that charges Agatha’s disappearance more and more as her absence stretches on. The details of the King John legend do not adhere closely to Agatha’s case—it is, in fact, the very absence of any amorousness between Agatha and Archie, for good or for ill, that characterizes the cold relationship between the Christies—but this difference does not affect how Agatha’s story becomes intertwined with the mysterious lore of the lake. More interesting than the details, Benedict’s novel often suggests, is the overall story.

“From their chatter, these folks seem to be enjoying [Agatha’s disappearance], almost as if it’s a mad, morbid caper. What would make these people break from their regular Sunday routines to search for a woman they don’t even know? He certainly wouldn’t do it. In fact, he wouldn’t have joined in the search today but for the specter of the alternative.”

Archie’s misanthropic view of the public who come to help search for Agatha offers more about his character than it does about the allegedly “chattering” folks. Unlike some novels that use the “unreliable narrator” convention, Benedict’s text does not, in the end, necessarily suggest which narrator is wholly right or wrong, which leaves readers uncertain about the depth of distrust they ought to have for each narrator they encounter.

“I was determined to prove my self-assured sister wrong, that I could write an unsolvable mystery. The elegant bottles of poisons on the shelves—so deceptively seductive with the sinuous shape of the glass and the vivid colors within—only fanned that spark into a blaze.”

Agatha here describes the sibling rivalry and competitive spirit that, in part, fuels her to her career as a mystery novelist. Her description of “seductive” and “elegant” poison bottles can be read as a description of the allure of the murder mystery itself—though the contents within may be morbid or gory, mystery novels have long drawn in readers with their intrigue.

“[Seething] would begin with slight irritation at [Agatha’s] constant chatter over plots and characters that would boil over into fury and a throbbing headache as she continued with her flights of fancy and indecent discussions of feelings when all he wanted was the peace of a quiet dinner, the serenity of an orderly house and the evening newspaper, and the weekend spent on his club’s tidy 18-hole golf course with a pleasant woman nearby.”

Benedict’s description of Archie’s anger and the things he asks for to soothe it follows a rising and falling pattern: Archie’s anger builds, starting with irritation and morphing to fury as he thinks of conversation (which he characterizes as containing only topics he dislikes) with his wife. The “all he wanted,” phrasing implies that his requests are few (before launching into a long list), and the tenor of the sentence relaxes as Archie thinks of soothing topics. His concluding desire for “a pleasant woman nearby” illustrates his perspective on women as “props” who serve at the pleasure of their husbands. This could be, the indefinite article suggests, any woman, so long as she isn’t, as he feels Agatha is, unpleasant—which is to say, challenging him in any way.

“If only I could serve him the perfect meals, clean the flat until it shone, provide the most interesting dinner conversation, become the ideal lover, then he’d be content. It was my duty, I believed, to restore him to that state, and that goal became the focus of my postwar days. It was the least I could do for my husband, one of the few who’d returned home at all.”

Agatha’s thoughts about trying to please Archie in the postwar years indicate how World War I affected contemporary thinking about domesticity. Though much of Agatha’s ideas about how to be a “perfect wife” come from her (late Victorian) mother’s advice, the idea that Archie “deserves” perfection as a reward for surviving his time as a soldier indicates the generational trauma inflicted by a country who had lost millions of young men to war.

“My thoughts swirled around one central core: he had changed. In my darker moments, I wondered whether this was always the real Archie, that I’d only grown to actually know him.”

A novel rife with unreliable narrators, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie offers conflicting views of what constitutes the “real” version of a person. Though Agatha struggles to reclaim the “old Archie,” the question of whether time has changed him or whether this “new Archie” has always existed remains undecided. Benedict suggests that it is impossible to fully know another person, a lack of understanding that is played out to cruel effect in the Christies’ unhappy marriage.

“‘Yes, Archie. Of course, there will be changes. But they’ll be wondrous changes.’

‘No, they won’t,’ he yelled. ‘Your focus will be on the baby and not me. I will be forgotten.’

I suddenly realized that rather than uniting us and bringing my restless husband a modicum of joy, this baby could bring us to the brink. I would never, ever allow that to happen. After all, it was my job to tend to him and his happiness.

Standing, I walked to Archie’s side and placed a consoling hand on his shoulder. ‘I promise you that you will forever be my focus. You and no one else. Not even this baby.’”

Though traditional notions of gender roles for married women often conflate the positions of “wife and mother,” Archie’s objections to Agatha’s pregnancy highlight the ways in which motherhood seems to stand in the way of the “perfect wife” role that Agatha struggles to embody. Though stereotypes of the happy, domestic woman suggest that the idealized wife and mother can effortlessly (and selflessly) care for everyone in her household, Archie here shows that he sees some of the impossibilities of that challenge. He still demands the “perfect wife,” and Agatha remains determined to be that for him.

“For the weeks of my [postpartum] convalescence, it was as if Mummy and I formed a cocoon around ourselves, not unlike that of my childhood, and Rosalind was an occasional visitor. On those nights when I longed to hold my baby in my arms, even sleep with her in my bed, I told myself that this distance was necessary practice. How else could I ensure that Archie maintained his position at the center of my affections? How would he take it if Rosalind got used to sleeping with me in my bed? In time, it became easier and easier, and I felt more like a daughter myself than a mother to a daughter.”

Agatha’s complicated relationship to mothering is demonstrated through this quote, as is one of the complications of her relationship with her own mother. Agatha purports to spurn baby Rosalind for Archie’s sake, though she will later confess to an “ambivalence” about motherhood. Becoming a mother, curiously, allows her to finally be mothered by Mummy, who approves of Agatha’s hands-off parenting and who spent little time with her children herself. Feeling the pleasure of being mothered, however, does not spur Agatha into mothering her daughter more affectionately.

“The idea that his missing wife—now mythologized into the beautiful novelist happily married to the handsome war hero—has turned into the victim in one of her own mystery books is an irresistible tale to reporters and their readers alike.”

The question of Agatha’s disappearance as a story being told (by various narrators and characters in the novel) recurs throughout Benedict’s text. Archie’s unreliability as a narrator means that the degree to which he disbelieves the press’s mythology of his marriage is unclear. While he evidently rejects the idea of Agatha as “the beautiful lady novelist” and that of their marriage as happy, his self-aggrandizement makes it difficult to know if he truly views himself as “the handsome war hero.”

“‘How would you describe your wife, Colonel Christie?’

‘Her hair has a reddish hue but is streaked with gray—’

Goddard interrupts, ‘My apologies for being vague, Colonel. How would you describe your wife’s personality?’

‘Hmm.’ Archie is surprised at the query; it’s one he hasn’t been asked yet. ‘I suppose she’s like any wife and mother in some ways.’”

Archie here inadvertently reveals the distance that has grown between him and Agatha, even as he tries to pretend that he is concerned for her well-being. In initiating his description of her with the physical, he reveals how little attention he pays to his wife’s inner life. When pressed to describe her personality, he reveals that he views the roles of “wife and mother” as totalizing identities for women; in saying that Agatha is “like any wife and mother,” he implies that the women who embody these roles are interchangeable.

“I was an outsider in my own home, and no one was waiting in the wings to invite me in.”

Agatha’s thoughts here encapsulate one of the key emotions of the domestic noir genre: that a protagonist (who is almost always a woman) feels alienated by the domestic sphere over which she is “supposed to” (per traditional gendered division of labor) have authority and mastery. Pulling on the status of the domestic noir as a subgenre of psychological thrillers, this line prefaces that the “crime” at the center of the novel is not a kidnapping or a disappearance, but rather a slow, psychological crime against Agatha’s sense of self.

“In truth, the only time I felt like myself was when I was writing. No matter how I tried to anticipate his needs, I couldn’t please Archie, and all the qualities he used to adore—my spontaneity, my love of drama and adventure, and my desire to discuss feelings and events with him—now irritated him. But why was Archie frustrated so often? Was it that he wasn’t the only center of attention? That I was busy with my career?”

Here, Agatha considers the role of the relationship between the art and the artist, as framed within the problems of the domestic noir. Though she views herself as someone who should feel most herself when serving her husband, she finds that the creation of an art (in her case, writing mystery novels) provides insight to an authentic self. Though Agatha tries to reconcile these two aspects of her identity by framing her writing in service of her family, this narrative continues to fall apart as her relationship with Archie sours.

“‘So you didn’t kill Mama?’ she asks him, her blue eyes boring into his.”

This question, posed to Archie by innocent Rosalind, demonstrates the trope of the “wise child,” who is capable of succinctly articulating things that the world-weary adults around her cannot. Archie knows that virtually everyone around him suspects him of murdering Agatha, and the police officers and staff all know that he knows. Yet, nobody is able to say it out loud except for Rosalind. Rosalind’s articulation of the “elephant in the room,” prompts Archie to let out an unfiltered reaction of his own: He shouts at his daughter so fiercely that she remains frightened of him for days afterward.

“Despite my disappointment, despite my sense of having been abandoned in my time of extreme need, I decided to respect the limitation of Archie’s nature—his discomfort with all this emotion—and forgive him. I reminded myself that a good wife would indulge him no matter her own situation, and I wanted desperately to be a good wife.”

Agatha here holds up three large concepts—nature, emotion, and what it means to be a “good wife”—comparing them in a way that highlights the impossibility of achieving the expectations that she herself and Archie hold for her. In arguing that Archie’s “discomfort with [all] emotion” is ‘natural,’ Agatha implicitly disregards her own propensity to have emotion—a basic quality of humans. His nature, she posits, merits respect but hers (and by extension, her humanity) does not. This frames the entire denial of the self that is required to build the “good wife” construct; if she wishes to achieve that role, Agatha must push away her very humanity.

“Inquiries turn into accusations, and they mesh with one another, becoming indistinguishable denunciations for what seems like a walk to the gallows.”

Archie here reflects on his growing sense of doom as Agatha’s plan unfolds around him. His reference to “a walk to the gallows,” a punishment that was at that time reserved for murderers, hints at a subconscious acceptance that he is responsible, in some way, for Agatha’s disappearance, despite his continued insistence that he is innocent. This will coincide with Agatha’s later assertion that he has murdered her “authentic self.”

“While this unexpected time alone with my daughter hadn’t exactly bonded us as I’d been bonded to Mummy, the absence of Charlotte and Archie had yielded a certain understanding and camaraderie between us.”

In the summer after her mother’s death, Agatha finds time to bond with Rosalind while they are stuck alone at Ashfield, going through old family possessions. There is irony in Agatha’s simultaneous longing to be closer to her daughter while comparing it to her relationship with her late mother; Agatha and Mummy were close, though Agatha points to her mother’s “hands-off” approach to motherhood. The oddities of Agatha and Rosalind’s relationship are emphasized when, in Part 2, Agatha confesses feeling “ambivalent” about motherhood, which casts doubt on her depiction of their relationship in the sections of “The Manuscript.”

“Hadn’t Mummy always wanted me never to leave my husband alone for too long? And hadn’t I emotionally and physically abandoned him this summer in my grief? Even when he was in Spain, he knew my heart and mind weren’t with him but lost to my sorrow over Mummy.”

This recollection of her mother’s advice cements the absurdity of the “perfect wife” persona that Agatha has been advised to cultivate. Agatha, whose vision of what a “good wife” should do has been warped by her beloved mother’s recommendations, contrasts Archie’s departure for Spain for weeks in the wake of Mummy’s death with Agatha’s own grief at losing her mother and concludes that she, in fact, is to blame for having these emotions—an indication of the ways her mother’s perspective and expectations have warped her own.

“The Daily News trumps the other publications by soliciting the insights of detective novelist Dorothy Sayers, a mystery writer whom Agatha has admired.”

In referencing how Dorothy Sayers, a mystery writer, is brought in to consult on the real-world case of Agatha’s disappearance, Benedict illustrates how real mysteries and fictional mysteries are conflated within her novel. Differentiating Fact From Fiction is often difficult in Benedict’s novel, a condition that is exacerbated by the in-text characters treating this distinction as mutable as well.

“Rosalind adores having routines and a firm schedule, too, and even though this particular chore is a deviation from her usual quiet Sunday, it’s part of his routine, so she welcomes it. Like him, Rosalind understands the need for order. It is something Agatha never comprehended or embraced, even for him.”

Archie here exemplifies the novel’s theme of Selfish Love and the ignorance created by his self-absorption with regard to his daughter. Though he claims that Rosalind likes a firm schedule, he insists that she is happy to disrupt her schedule for the sake of his, even if this is an inherent contraction to the thing she likes (at least according to Archie). Rosalind’s actual likes or dislikes are obscured by Archie’s point of view. His potential ignorance of what his daughter truly thinks is emphasized by his conviction that Agatha never understood his desire for routine, despite the fact that she frequently references it in “The Manuscript” section as a key organizing principle of her life.

“I laughed, not caring for the first time in months how loud or unladylike my guffaw sounded. Because in that moment, I did not care about his opinion of me.”

As the marital strife between the Christies comes to a head on the morning of Agatha’s disappearance, Agatha’s determination to please Archie at all costs loses its hold over her. By laughing a free and “unladylike” laugh without worrying over Archie’s reaction, Agatha realizes that the constraints of being “ladylike,” as part of her “perfect wife” persona, have been stifling her.

“There’s only ever been one path through this intricate web. His only recourse has always been to follow the sticky silken thread right to the web’s center, and only then does he stand a chance of being unwound—as if he were Theseus clutching at Ariadne’s red thread through King Minos’s deadly labyrinth. But who knows what really awaits him at the labyrinth’s center? After all, Agatha is no Ariadne, and he is no one’s Theseus.”

Archie uses this mixed metaphor and mythic allusion to describe his feelings as Agatha’s disappearance drags on. He begins by framing himself as stuck in a spider’s web, with Agatha as the spider. The center of the web, which he sees as a potential avenue for escape (contrary to what the center of a web would mean for a real spider’s prey), becomes conflated with the center of Minos’s labyrinth from Greek mythology. He compares himself to Theseus, who slayed the Minotaur at the center of the labyrinth—again, blurring the representation of the “center” of an ensnaring structure as a place of danger or possible escape—and escaped using a spool of thread gifted to him by Ariadne, but quickly dismisses the comparison. The muddle of literary devices illustrates both Archie’s increasing anxiety and mental turmoil, and—in contrast to his wife—his lack of writerly prowess.

“A man who misses his wife, a man who has been worried for 11 long days that she was dead, would be delighted and relieved when she resurfaced. He might even hold her hand or give her an embrace. If he had nothing to do with her disappearance, that is.”

Here Agatha leverages the public speculation around the mystery of her disappearance to keep Archie’s anger in check. Her emphasis on “if” serves as both a warning and a reminder that he had something to do with her disappearance, even if the discovery that she is unharmed does absolve him of any illegal activity, such as the murder of which he has been expected. Though the detectives assigned to the case are concerned solely with legality, Agatha here points to a more complex definition of culpability and what acts count as crimes, especially with regard to The Promise and Peril of Marriage.