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Chapter 1: What accolades did Agatha Christie receive during her writing career?
Agatha Christie received a lot of accolades during her long writing career. She had fans all over the world, her books sold thousands upon thousands of copies and mostly received good reviews, and in 1971 she was made a Dame by the Queen for her services to literature.
But one of her most prized compliments was actually in response to her very first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Stiles, which was published in 1921. This novel has the rare merit of being correctly written, a reviewer in the Pharmaceutical Journal declared.
Since this was a whodunit with a clever, unusual poisoning plot, Christie was very proud that it had been praised and her use of science endorsed by the prestigious academic journal published by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.
Unlike other crime novelists who littered their pages with so-called untraceable poisons and mysterious compounds, it seemed to suggest that here was a novelist who really knew her stuff when it came to chemicals that can kill people. And indeed she did. Before Agatha Christie was a detective novelist, she was a hospital dispenser.
Chapter 2: How did Agatha Christie's early experiences influence her writing?
And her experience in that role would go on to exert a great influence over her fiction for decades to come. Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.
She Done It
Agatha Christie wasn't exactly groomed for a high-flying career in science. Indeed, few women in Britain were when she was a teenager in the first decade of the 20th century. University degrees for women was still a hotly contested topic within higher education, and women doctors had only really very recently won the right to qualify and practice medicine freely.
Although her older sister Madge was sent away to school, Agatha was educated at home with her parents in Devon. According to Christie biographer Janet Morgan, her mother Clara had some rather esoteric ideas about homeschooling, including the notion that children shouldn't be taught to read until they were eight years old because delay was better for the eyes as well as the brain.
It seemed like her daughter learned anyway, becoming a voracious reader from a young age, and learning arithmetic every morning from her father after breakfast. At the age of 13, she had a brief period of attending a school in her hometown of Torquay two days a week, and then at 15, she was sent to Paris for a year to be finished.
But in neither case is it likely that she spent much time learning even the most general science, let alone chemistry.
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Chapter 3: What role did Agatha Christie play during World War I?
But for Agatha Christie, as for so many women, the First World War changed everything. She was almost 24 when Britain entered the war in 1914. And so far, marriage had seemed like the obvious and inevitable next step in her life. She was already engaged to a family friend, Reginald Lucy, when she met Archie Christie at a local garrison dance in October 1912.
Their whirlwind romance superseded all her previous attachments, and it was only the cautioning voice of her mother that prevented them from getting married mere weeks after they met.
During their two-year engagement, Archie qualified as a pilot and joined the Royal Flying Corps, which meant that he was part of the first British expeditionary force and was deployed to France as soon as the war began.
Agatha, meanwhile, joined the voluntary aid detachment in Torquay and worked as a ward maid, scrubbing floors and helping the nurses and doctors care for the wounded soldiers arriving on boats from the front.
It was her first time working in a professional setting, albeit as a volunteer, and it exposed her to the daily working life of a hospital in a way she would never have encountered in peacetime. Agatha and Archie got married in Bristol on Christmas Eve 1914 while he was on leave, but he had to return to his unit almost immediately, and she went back to her hospital work.
Although being busy and useful undoubtedly helped with the anxiety she felt at a very chaotic time,
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of a dispenser in a hospital setting?
It does seem like Agatha Christie wasn't necessarily cut out for nursing.
She hated nursing, absolutely detested it. And so a friend suggested to her that she might prefer working in the dispensary, making up all of the pills and the potions that would be prescribed to the recovering soldiers.
This is Dr Catherine Harkup, a chemist and the author of A is for Arsenic, The Poisons of Agatha Christie. She wrote a whole book about just how accurate and extensive Agatha Christie's knowledge of poisons was. And she's also explored in detail how crucial this wartime period was for developing Christie's interest in the topic.
But before we get to that, it's first worth understanding exactly what a dispenser is and how you might become one in 1915.
She had to study to do this. You don't just, you know, stick your name on the list and you get the job. This is a very... difficult, precise job. You have to know what you're doing because this is the days before pre-packaged pills and stock solutions and the rest of it. So she studied very hard. She studied theoretical chemistry, also the practical side of actually making pills and lotions.
So she had an awful lot of knowledge at her fingertips from this particular era.
Being a dispenser in a big hospital at this time, like Christy was, was really a very responsible and skilled job. It's no wonder she had to pass exams before she was allowed to do it. Dispensers didn't just reach for packets off the shelf and pass them over. They actually had to mix raw ingredients to create the medicines doctors wanted for their patients.
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Chapter 5: How did Agatha Christie utilize her knowledge of poisons in her novels?
Well, they would receive the prescription from a doctor, much like you would take a doctor's prescription to a chemist today, except that it would just list the compounds.
And then you had to take them off the shelf, weigh them out and actually mix them in with other things so that they could be pressed into pills or they could be mixed with oils to make creams or they could be dissolved into solutions to be sold as tonics.
So you had to know not only how much was an appropriate dose to give someone, you had to know what it mixed with so that you can make it into the appropriate formulation. But you also had to know what you couldn't mix with it. So certain drugs could not be mixed together, otherwise they would have a chemical reaction.
While scientific knowledge was obviously extremely important to this work, There was also a subtler, almost artistic side to it.
One of the books that she studied for her exams was called The Art of Dispensing, and it really was an art. Not only was all this theoretical knowledge that she had to bring to bear, but there was a skill in making these pills so that they didn't crack or they weren't soft. And mixing cream so that they wouldn't separate.
So it really was an incredible job, a difficult job to do, not just from the safety aspects, but also from the aesthetics of it to make a product that people were willing to swallow.
When Christy qualified as a dispenser, substances like arsenic, strychnine and thallium were still used regularly in medicines and she would have been familiar with their applications and their doses. Sometimes the smallest of margins lay between treatment and poison, and she rather flamboyantly made this point in a poem she wrote at the time titled In a Dispensary.
It goes, Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain, Courage and vigour new. Here is menace and murder and sudden death In these files of green and blue.
While it all sounds very exciting and dramatic to me as a layperson, what with the constant danger of accidental or even deliberate poisonings, Christy makes clear in her autobiography that work as a volunteer dispenser wasn't often very thrilling. There was hardly anything to do but sit around in a room surrounded by poisons, she said.
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Chapter 6: What changes occurred in poison regulation during Agatha Christie's lifetime?
She finished it in a burst of productivity while on a short holiday from her job at Dartmoor and eventually sent it off to a few publishers. It received a few initial rejections and I think she forgot all about it. She had other things on as life restarted after the turmoil. Archie came home, the war ended, she had a baby, they moved into a flat in London, and so on.
But then in 1919, the publisher John Lane from Bodley Head asked her to come in for a meeting to discuss the manuscript she'd sent in on spec two years before.
Looking back with greater wisdom later in her career, Agatha felt that the contract she was offered wasn't as lucrative as it could have been, but in 1919 she was just delighted that the book that she'd dreamed up in the dispensary was going to be published at all. In 1921, therefore, readers in the UK were able to buy the very first Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Stiles.
Agatha Christie's life changed beyond recognition between 1920 and 1940. She found fame as a detective novelist after books like The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express found readers all over the world. She got divorced from Archie Christie after her infamous disappearance in December 1926. There's more on that in episode four of this podcast.
She travelled extensively on her own and then met and, in 1930, married an archaeologist called Max Malowan. Her growing fortune enabled her to invest in property, including the Greenway estate in Devon that is now preserved by the National Trust. Her daughter Rosalind grew up and got engaged to her first husband, the soldier Hubert Pritchard.
The world changed immeasurably during that time too, of course, in ways both big and small. But for our purposes today, one of the biggest changes concerned poisons. By the time the Second World War broke out, it was no longer quite so easy to wander into a chemist's and buy a large order of arsenic, for instance.
One of the major plot points of the mysterious affair at Stiles – and don't worry, this isn't a spoiler – concerns a forged signature on the poison register at a shop where the deadly drug used to murder Mrs Inglethorpe was supposedly purchased. That was no invention, Catherine says.
Writing your name and address in a so-called poison book was really all you had to do in the 1920s in order to be allowed to buy these substances.
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Chapter 7: How did Agatha Christie's writing evolve with societal changes regarding poisons?
Because it was just embarrassingly easy to get hold of this stuff. This way of tracking the sale of highly dangerous substances, it's not exactly watertight. If you're OK with killing people, you are OK with lying on a poison register and signing the wrong name and giving the wrong address or the wrong purpose for your purchase.
So, yeah, I mean, it was a step in the right direction, but I really don't think it hindered many people.
Scientific and social advances in the next couple of decades saw arsenic and strychnine disappear from medicines and household cupboards, meaning that detective novelists like Christie had to adjust the way they used poisons in their books too. If it was going to remain plausible that these murders could actually happen among ordinary people in a recognisable version of real life,
The fiction had to move with the times.
So she was very up to date with this. And it was interesting that poisons that she might have used at the beginning of her career were less relevant later on. So you couldn't just drop arsenic into the soup when she was writing in the late 60s because it wasn't that easy to get hold of. Whereas in the 1920s, it was frighteningly everywhere.
Luckily, with her background as a dispenser, keeping up with the latest in the pharmaceutical world was something Christy enjoyed doing. She collected medico-legal textbooks and sometimes corresponded with experts about ideas she had for new poisonings.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, her husband Max was posted to North Africa with the Royal Air Force, and Christy was on her own in London. She volunteered again as a dispenser, and after updating her qualifications, worked at least two days a week at University College Hospital. A lot had changed since her first stint in the dispensary in Torquay.
Lots more medicines now came prepackaged, so the art of creating pleasing pills was far less in demand, for one thing. Many treatments had moved on too, so this work allowed Christie to see firsthand the new developments and the new ways that hospitals worked. As Catherine points out in her book, A is for Arsenic, the war was actually a tremendously productive period for Christie as a writer too.
She completed 12 novels during this time, including several books with ingenious and horrifying poisoning plots, such as 1942's Five Little Pigs.
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Chapter 8: What lasting impact did Agatha Christie have on the mystery genre?
The remarkable thing about Christie's use of poisons, Catherine says, is how very strict she was about getting the science behind them right. After all, she was writing fiction. How bad could it be if she altered a symptom or two because it served her plot better?
She almost never bent the rules regarding chemistry or science, which is an astonishing fate. And she is, I think, actually a remarkable science communicator because she can put across very accurate science in a very accessible, easy way that people just digest readily. So she's under no obligation, no crime writer is under any obligation to stick to the facts. This is fiction.
You can make things up as you wish. But the fact that she almost never did I think, is to her enormous credit. And I realise that there's very, very few people like me who appreciate that. But it makes it so much nicer when we read a book and realise that, oh my God, they did their homework. Oh my God, this is really how it could happen.
Over the course of her career, Christy far preferred using poison as a murder weapon than, say, guns. She freely admitted that she knew very little about ballistics. She even ended up slyly apologising in a later novel via her detective novelist character Ariadne Oliver for an inaccuracy in the length of the blowpipe in 1935's Death in the Clouds.
But no such retrospective correction was ever required for her poisonings. Unlike, say, Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie didn't get a university degree or cultivate an intellectual reputation particularly. But she did have her sphere of academic pride. It's really no wonder that she cherished that early review from the Pharmaceutical Journal.
It was recognition from experts that she was an expert too.
MUSIC
This episode of She Done It was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. Many thanks to my guest, Dr Catherine Harkup. Catherine has been a regular on the show over the years. For more of her, I'd recommend looking out the Green Penguin Book Club episode, all about the mysterious affair at Stiles, and the deep dive we did into how changes to poison regulation show up in murder mysteries.
That one's titled The Poison Book. For more about Catherine and her books, visit her website at harkup.co.uk. For more information about the books referenced in this episode, visit shedoneitshow.com slash thedispenser rerun. I also publish transcripts of every episode, including this one. Find them all at shedoneitshow.com slash transcripts.
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