Agatha Christie and the Shit She Had Going On in Her Life During Writing The Big Four

The Big Four is considered a bit of a departure from Agatha Christie’s previous detective novels, which basically set the tone for Golden Age detective fiction. It’s the fourth of the Hercule Poirot novels, and it’s different because it’s more of an international espionage tale than a straight-up classic murder mystery. But it’s also structured differently because it began as a collection of short stories. 

The book was first published in January 1927, but Agatha spent the previous calendar year mourning her mother’s death and experiencing the disintegration of her marriage to Archibald Christie. It was actually Agatha’s brother-in-law Campbell Christie who encouraged her to repackaged the short stories as her next novel as opposed to starting over completely from scratch under all the stress she was already under. In fact, it may actually be fair to credit Campbell as a co-writer on The Big Four. He took the short stories and revised the beginning and the end to all of them so that they could be read more seamlessly as a novel.

As if her mother’s death and an imminent divorce were not enough devastating life events to happen before a publication of an anticipated novel, Agatha Christie actually disappeared for like ten days. In December 1926, a couple months after Archie asked for her a divorce, they had a big fight after Archie announced that he was going to be spending the weekend with another woman. The next day, Agatha’s car was found near the Silent Pond at Newlands Corner in Surrey, and it was thought that she may had drowned. 

Obviously, since Agatha was a rock star in her day, the disappearance was a big news story, so much that it even made the front page of The New York Times. Police were pressured to find her, and at one point 15,000 volunteers and several airplanes combed rural areas looking for her. Arthur Conan Doyle himself even gave a medium one of Agatha’s gloves in hopes of learning where she was. On December 14, more than a week after her car was found, Agatha was seen at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire, almost 200 miles away from her home — and she actually booked herself using the last name of the lady her husband was fooling around with. 

It is still unclear what happened to Agatha that spurred those ten disappeared days. Curiously, her posthumous autobiography published in 1977 makes no mention of her disappearing act. A couple doctors said that she genuinely suffered a loss of memory, and her biographer Janet Morgan thinks it happened during a fugue state. Jared Cade, the dude who wrote Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (1998), has said the event was planned so she could publicly embarrass Archibald. 

Anyway, back to The Big Four. With a dozen short stories being reworked as a complete novel, there’s a lot going on and the book has its flaws and critics. One critic named James Zemboy said that this book didn’t have the cohesive unification of a proper novel, an unsurprising take when we understand that it took a more unconventional route to creation and publication. Zemboy also said that if this is the reader’s very first Agatha Christie novel, that reader may not be especially inspired to pick up another book of hers. English crime writer Robert Barnard even called it “demeaning to Poirot.” 

Knowing what we know in retrospect about the circumstances under which this book was created, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that The Big Four is not a great introduction to Agatha Christie for anyone looking to dive into her work. Nevertheless, it was engaging to learn about this chapter of her life and we are happy to present the fourth Hercule Poirot novel. 

Click on the cover to buy The Big Four!

Cover Image Credit: Background image of Shanghai is circa 1927 and part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Image of Agatha Christie is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons.

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