Of Note: Agatha Christie’s Advice
This post is by Manuscript Division archivist Katherine S. Madison. Of Note is an occasional series in which we share items that have caught our eye.
In 1972, a Florida teenager wrote to famed mystery novelist Dame Agatha Christie asking for advice on writing. “I thought her secretary would type me a response and maybe have Agatha sign it,” eighteen-year-old Shirley Dawson is quoted as saying in the Miami Herald at the time. Instead, Christie wrote to Dawson herself. These letters are now in the collections of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
Christie wrote to Dawson in Miami from her home at Winterbrook House in the town of Wallingford, England. The young American was interested in writing her own stories, and she initially reached out to Christie as part of a school project. While Dawson’s original questions are not preserved in the Manuscript Division’s collections, Christie’s responses shed light into the published writer’s own philosophy about fiction – and criminality.
“There is nothing useful you can say to a would be writer – except ‘If you really want to write you won’t be able to help doing it,’” Christie wrote in her first letter to Dawson, on May 7, 1972. “Try out different ways – different kinds of stories…. It’s all ‘trial and error,’ really. One needs both luck and persistence.”
Agatha Christie spoke from experience. At the age of eighteen she wrote her first short story, “The House of Beauty.” This and other short stories were rejected for publication, as was her first completed novel, Snow Upon the Desert. But Christie continued to write. It wasn’t until age thirty, in 1920, that The Mysterious Affair at Styles finally appeared in print – and introduced detective Hercule Poirot to the world. By the time she wrote to Shirley Dawson, Christie had published more than sixty mystery novels and had been named a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) to honor her contributions to literature. (Under a pseudonym, Mary Westmacott, she had also published six mainstream novels during her writing career.)
In her second letter to Dawson, dated June 11, 1972, Christie wrote:
I think your instinct is quite right in not caring to use ideas for crimes which might suggest methods to those who have criminal tendencies.
The late Dorothy Sayers who was a very famous detective writer always considered that a Detective story was the modern version of the old Morality Play of the Middle Ages – an influence for good and certainly not a handbook for crime.
The important point is the delivery of the innocent from injustice.
It is not difficult to see this philosophy at work in many of Christie’s novels and stories. Justice, morality, and motive are central themes of her whodunnits. Both her complex and her deceptively simple cases hinge on the values of her characters, and she often depicts criminal acts as related to the moral corruption of the criminal – covering up for adultery, financial greediness, or revenge. Her morality is sometimes too circumscribed by the social mores of her Edwardian upbringing at the height of the British Empire, yet she is also remembered for her critiques of a flawed legal system. Morality (or justice) does not always equal legality in the worlds of her novels, as exemplified by the extrajudicial murders committed in two of her still best-selling novels, And Then There Were None (1939) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934). Still, all her mysteries are resolved with her sleuths identifying the guilty party (or parties) and thoroughly explaining their motives to the reading audience.
Agatha Christie died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. Her last contemporary novel, A Postern of Fate, featuring detective duo Tommy and Tuppence, was published in 1973. The final outings of Hercule Poirot in Curtain and small-town sleuth Miss Jane Marple in Sleeping Murder were published by Christie’s estate decades after having been written and locked away during the London bombing raids of World War II.
Christie remains an icon of the mystery novel genre. It is estimated that fifty years after her death she remains outsold only by William Shakespeare and the Bible. In these two letters to an American teenager, written near the end of her long life, she speaks succinctly about topics that made up her life’s work.
The Agatha Christie Papers, comprising the original June 1972 letter and a copy of the May 1972 letter, as well as photocopies of clippings from contemporary Florida newspapers covering the correspondence, are now available for research in the Manuscript Reading Room.
Do you want more stories like this? Then subscribe to Unfolding History – it’s free!
“Miami Herald…” “Dame Agatha Gave Coed Writing Tips,” Miami Herald, January 17, 1973, photocopy, Agatha Christie Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“These letters…” The Agatha Christie Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division contains one original letter (June 11, 1972) donated to the Library of Congress by Shirley Dawson, and a photocopy of a second letter (May 7, 1972) Dawson donated to the University of Exeter in England.
“first letter…” Agatha Christie to Shirley Dawson, May 7, 1972, Agatha Christie Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
“second letter…” Agatha Christie to Shirley Dawson, June 11, 1972, Agatha Christie Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.