The Mystery of Mrs. Christie

“I mean, how could you write an unsolvable mystery, the very core of a detective novel? You are positively transparent.”

This comment from Madge, Agatha’s sister, takes on an ironic tone for readers familiar with Agatha Christie’s history. As one of the 20th century’s most renowned mystery writers, her sister’s lack of faith reads as humorous. Madge will, of course, be proven wrong, yet the notion that Agatha is transparent is also a wink at her development as a character throughout the rest of the novel, in which she proves just as shrewd and clever as the protagonists that she writes.

“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.