The Mysteries of Agatha : How Could the Grande Dame of Crime Genre Be So Forward-Looking but Backward, Too?

She was shy, ferociously private and deeply devoted to her garden. Food was Agatha Christie’s other great passion. She adored chocolate truffles, even ordered them to be delivered to her in the desert of Arabia, and thought nothing of drinking an entire cup of rich, pure cream.

So much for any element of scandal in the great mystery writer’s life. So successfully did Agatha Christie guard her private life that the world--if it thought of this sweet, white-haired lady behind the stories at all--tended to view her as dowdy and decidedly dull.

“She didn’t feel she had to have a picturesque life,” said Gillian Gill, a professor of literature whose first book, “Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries” (The Free Press, $22.50), was published this month to mark the 100th birthday this Saturday of the mystery writer, who died in 1976.

“She led a happy life,” Gill said. “She didn’t care what people thought of her--as long as the books sold.”

There was little problem in that department. Christie wrote almost nonstop for 55 years and completed 86 volumes. They have sold and sold and sold, and still sell; more than 1 billion copies, in dozens of languages, are in print.

Her success not only made her rich--just how rich is a secret closely guarded by the Christie estate--but also turned her into what Gill considers an “almost unrivaled” cultural phenomenon.

“You talk about Agatha Christie, and everyone knows who she is,” Gill said, sitting in the garden of her suburban Boston home. “They may not have read the books, but they have seen the movies” or the television adaptations.

But Christie’s “boring” reputation kept scholars away, said Gill, who teaches literary theory at Harvard University. “She was not an intellectual. The literati of the world have not found her interesting.”

Besides, Gill said, “I think so many people think they know what they are going to find” in Christie and in her books. The prevailing wisdom is that “anyone with any intelligence won’t find anything.”

Perhaps even to her own surprise, Gill said, “I found quite the contrary.”

She discovered, for instance, that although the former Agatha Miller was “if anything, radically anti-feminist in her pronouncements,” Christie the novelist was remarkably egalitarian in her views toward the sexes.

Gill, a specialist in feminist theory, decided to “disregard what Christie says about herself and simply look at the books.”

She read all of Christie’s books, in order, and found that Christie had created “two important sleuths”--Miss Jane Marple and Inspector Hercule Poirot--”one female, and one male.” Gill also concluded that, in Christie’s books, “men were as likely to be victims as women, and just as likely to be murderers as women.”

This was unusual, Gill said: “Most murderers in most books are male, and most murder victims in most books are women.”

That “her women kill people” makes Christie distinctive. Her murderess is “not some sly seductress, not the stereotypical female murderer,” Gill said. “In Christie’s books, the women are very ordinary. They can be sweet young things; they can be elderly spinsters. They are you and me, essentially.”

As early as her second novel, “The Secret Adversary,” Christie introduced a sleuthing couple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. The pair, Gill said, operate as “a team of equals, not as boss and female sidekick.” In other words, ‘it’s not always Tommy who bops the guy on the head. Tuppence can do that too.”

That sense of equity, Gill writes, immediately sets Christie apart from “the American hard-boiled school of detective fiction. The heroes of Chandler or Spillane or Hammett fall for mysterious blondes who do them wrong, and they employ intelligent, snappy, hard-working, reliable, loyal brunettes as secretaries.”

Christie’s “totally unrealistic balance between the sexes is a profoundly hopeful sign,” Gill said--and so is the fact that Christie’s view of the roles of men and women has remained so resoundingly popular.

“From a feminist point of view, I find that her message is an interesting one,” Gill said. “Her women are not demeaned. They are nearly always extremely smart and very energetic. If you think about it, it’s not such a bad model for us.”

In some ways, Christie’s female characters may also have reflected aspects of the author herself. She had “a conventional and conservative childhood” in a family of means but not of great wealth. Frederick and Clara Miller, her parents, raised their children in an Italian-style stucco villa called Ashfield on the outskirts of Torquay, a seaside town in Devonshire, England.

Encouraged by her mother to take physical risks, young Agatha spent her days roaming in the garden and swimming in the sea. Christie studied piano in Paris but was told she was too shy to make a career of it. As became proper young ladies of her era in Great Britain, she played tennis, golf and croquet, and was a passable horsewoman. Christie could even hold her own at roller-skating.

She starred in amateur theatrical performances, and even whipped up the costumes and scenery. She had a circle of close female friends--and an equally large cadre of male admirers. Agatha Miller claimed nine proposals and was engaged twice before finally giving her hand to the dashing Col. Archibald Christie.

Unlike many of her earlier suitors, Archie Christie lacked the means, Gill writes, “to keep Agatha in the lap of luxury.” An avid fan of detective fiction, Christie took a challenge from hardship and in 1916 began writing “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” her first murder mystery, and the book that establishes the character of Hercule Poirot.

Already, Gill writes, in the book that launched Christie’s remarkable career, “it is the women who work while the men remain idle.”

But Christie’s respect for her female characters was “not wrapped up in a feminist package,” Gill said. “She doesn’t go around spouting it.”

Far from some subtle feminist message, “there is almost no message in Christie,” said Gill.

“Christie is not interested in telling people what to do,” she said. “It comes at you sub rosa. It hits you where you are least aware, and therefore most susceptible.”

What message there is, Gill said, “is that women can be as smart and as energetic as men, and that men can be sex objects for women.”

Christie also trumpets an optimistic tune, Gill said. “You have a strong feeling that age doesn’t matter. You can conquer any infirmities if you have the wit and the energy.”

Her books also convey the author’s firm belief “in justice, and in good and evil,” Gill said. Christie believed in “an active force of justice, such as Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple.”

In a Christie mystery, evil might exist even in the most unlikely surroundings, said Gill. “Ordinary people can harbor murderous thoughts,” she said. “It’s troubling, but at the same time, it is not putting evil away from us. It is saying that crime is right here among us, right here in this beautiful little Lexington suburb or, in the case of Christie, a beautiful little English village.”

For all of her success as a writer, Christie shied away from public scrutiny, Gill said. Her first marriage ended in divorce when her daughter Rosalind was 7. She treasured her marriage to second husband Max Mallowan, an archeologist, abhorred reporters and steadfastly burrowed in for as reclusive a life as she could manage.

“As a media person, Christie did not project well,” Gill said. “She has this matronly image and matronly is the kiss of death. You can be a portly old man and get away with it, but you can’t be a portly old woman. Christie was very aware of that.”

Christie was also quiet, Gill said. “She was a silent woman. She had no repartee. She was not a lively, witty, verbal person.” Instead, “she put everything into her books.”

Were Christie alive today, said Gill, she would probably not be writing at all. Her genius for fiction may have sprung in part from the times and from necessity. Christie did not attend a university, but with a brain like hers, today she almost certainly would, Gill said.

“I think she would much more likely be in the world of science or even computers,” she said. “She wouldn’t have needed to move into the fantasy world.”

Christie would have been a happy woman under those circumstances, Gill believes, “and she would have been less lonely.” But the world, Gill said, “would have lost a very interesting cultural phenomenon.”