When I set about writing The Christie Affair, I knew my narrator had to be Archie Christie’s mistress. The woman who was the catalyst for Agatha Christie’s eleven-day disappearance would be the last person anyone would go to for answers. At the same time: think of everything she’d know.
Creating a sympathetic fictional character based on Agatha Christie was easy. For one thing, everybody already loves her. For another, there’s a wealth of endearing anecdotes in Christie’s memoirs, and her keen, witty, empathetic mind is on full display in her fiction. But her husband’s mistress was a different matter. How to arrive at a past for Nan that might be a point of connection between her and Agatha? What would it take to make allies of these two natural rivals?
One of the magical elements of Agatha Christie’s disappearance is the way she was found – safe, healthy, and whole. She’d had ten days at a spa, soaking in hot water, getting massages, eating luxurious food. It’s not the way missing women usually turn up, as evidenced by the methods police used to search for Agatha Christie. They used hounds to hunt through bramble. People set off in large parties, covering great expanses of land, and using threshing sticks to move aside brush. They dragged lakes. Far from Berkshire, where Christie’s car was abandoned, police searched for a woman in hiding. But closer to home they looked for a body. What a glamorous relief, then, to finally discover her suffering from nothing more than heartbreak. Agatha Christie had left home under her own steam, for her own reasons.
Perhaps the most important line in The Christie Affair belongs to Nan, our mistress narrator. “I had disappeared once, too,” she tells us. Pregnant with Finbarr’s child, Nan may leave London of her own volition but once she arrives in Ireland the story changes. With no resources and nobody but the Mahoneys to turn to, Nan quickly loses control of her own life story, in an era and country where being poor, unmarried, and pregnant is reason enough to be incarcerated.
Reading The Christie Affair, you may feel there’s a Gothic, fanciful element to what Nan and the other women go through at Sunday’s Corner. But almost everything they experience is based on my research into Ireland’s mother and baby homes and Magdalene Laundries. To land in the latter – where many women spent their whole lives – you didn’t need to have been unmarried and pregnant. Some women were sent to the laundries because they were too pretty or flirtatious. Or maybe they made the mistake of telling a priest or family member they’d been molested. Most shockingly, while the events in my novel take place nearly a century ago, these crimes against women went on well after the end of Nan’s story. The last Magdalene Laundry closed in 1996.
I often hear people express concern, and rightfully so, that stories like The Handmaid’s Tale represent our dystopian future. But it’s important to remember, the commodification of women – punishing them for their sexuality then conveniently taking their children – is also our dystopian and not-so-distant past.
It’s also important to note, there aren’t just two women who disappear in The Christie Affair. There’s a third, Nan’s daughter, Genevieve, who was renamed and given to a new family, never knowing she was taken from the biological mother who’d do anything to get her back. Nan may have escaped the convent but she can never escape the loss of her child. If we can’t agree with Nan’s methods, any mother can understand her motives – driven by a loss so huge and devastating even Agatha Christie would be willing to admit she deserved protection in its aftermath.
