Adventure classics – Digging through dirt in a labor of love

Come, Tell Me How You Live

by Agatha Christie Mallowan

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So you think you know Agatha Christie? Just as we Christie fans can’t really know the famously private author without reading the romantic novels she wrote under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott (possibly the closest Christie ever came to public revelation of her inmost feelings), we also can’t know her until we read her sole comic work, Come, Tell Me How You Live. This short memoir cum travel book is the record of the years she spent with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, between sifting happily (more or less) through the sands covering the ancient cities of Iraq and Syria.

Published in 1946, it is a record of Mallowan’s archaeological digs of the 1930’s, written nostalgically during the Second World War, while Mallowan was posted to Egypt and Christie was living alone in London. It is one of only two books she published under the name “Mallowan,” and comprises a love letter of sorts to her then-absent husband.

Christie and Mallowan met at an archaeological excavation site, the ancient Sumerian city known as Ur, south of Baghdad. (The illustration for today’s post is taken from his 1930 article in National Geographic Magazine, “New Light on Ancient Ur.”) Christie at the time was divorced from her first husband, Archibald Christie. She claims in her autobiography to have been astonished when the much younger Mallowan proposed to her after a relatively short acquaintance, although given Christie’s typical reticence about her private life, the proposal may not have been entirely unexpected.

Believing that extended absences were one of the reasons for her divorce from Archibald, she seems to have been determined not to make the same mistake in her second marriage. Each year, as Mallowan left England for a new expedition, Christie traveled with him.

Personally and professionally, the digs proved fruitful for both. While he worked on (and later directed) excavations at Nineveh, and several other sites in Syria and Iraq, Agatha added archaeological backgrounds to the settings for her mystery stories, beginning with Murder in Mesopotamia, a fictionalized record of the Ur site where the two met.

Ever artful, Christie collapses several seasons of excavation into what appears in Come, Tell Me How You Live to be a single expedition.

In contrast to today’s headlines from Syria, the Syria of Christie’s record, Syria seems blissfully exotic, its worst dangers a malady known as “Gippy tummy” and a tendency to discombobulate the inner workings of fountain pens and watches.

“The desert is not kind to watches,” she writes. “After a few weeks there, one’ watch gives up steady everyday work. Time, it says, is only a mode of thought. It then takes its choice between stopping eight or nine times a day for periods of twenty minutes, or of racing indiscriminately ahead. Sometimes it alternates coyly between the two.”

Suitably prepared (on her part) with a plentiful supply of watches and on Max’s part by suitcases filled primarily with books, the pair start off, crossing the Channel by ferry and boarding the Orient Express to Istanbul (the setting for a favorite Christie mystery). From Turkey, the pair embark in a further series of trains and hired vehicles, arriving at last in Palmyra, where her description serves as an epithet to a place now synonymous with horror and ruin. “…the charm of Palmyra—its slender creamy beauty rising up fantastically in the middle of hot sand. It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream.”

Alas, its Roman-era ruins are all modern for Mallowan, who craves more ancient ruins. And so he and Christie continue their travels, deeper into the past.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a January of true adventures with Agatha Christie’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.)

Adventure classics -- Art of murder made personal

Murder in Mesopotamia

By Agatha Christie

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What’s a mystery writer to do when the wife of her husband’s boss tries to sabotage her marriage? For Agatha Christie, the temptation was overwhelming -- to kill the offender, in fiction if not in reality.

When young archeologist Max Mallowan joined the Iraqi archeological investigation at Ur, he soon learned the acid test of his qualifications was meeting Katharine Keeling, the future wife of his employer, Leonard Woolley.

Mallowan passed the test so well Katharine (by then Mrs. Woolley) deputized him as a tour guide when the famous mystery novelist Agatha Christie visited Ur. Katharine’s cordiality, however, dissolved at the unexpected mutual attraction between Agatha and the much-younger Max.

“I finally broke the news (of Mallowan’s proposal) to the Woolleys,” Agatha recounted in her autobiography. “They seemed pleased. . . .Only (Katherine) said firmly, ‘you mustn’t marry him for at least two years.. . . it would be fatal.’”

Of course, they married as soon as possible. And of course, the outcome was fatal -- just not to Max or the new Mrs. Mallowan.

The excavation season following Agatha and Max’s marriage was his last with the Woolleys. Given Agatha’s knowledge of poisons, it’s lucky Katharine’s notoriously poor health survived the encounter, and fascinating to speculate on what might have happened if she had succumbed to a bout of food poisoning during Agatha’s visit. Would the Queen of Crime have found herself a murder suspect?

Four years later, Agatha published Murder in Mesopotamia, whose victim was a thinly-disguised version of Katharine Woolley.

In his biography, Woolley of Ur, H.V.F. Winstone reports that another of Woolley’s assistants persuaded Agatha to give the central role of Murder in Mesopotamia to a character based on Katharine Woolley, the team leader’s wife, Louise Leidner. But only Agatha could have described the too-deserving victim’s sense of entitlement so acutely, as in the following exchange between members of the fictional excavation staff.

“‘She’s always known as Lovely Louise.’

“‘Is she so very handsome then?’ I asked.

“‘It’s taking her at her own valuation. She thinks she is!’”

Did the scent of libel hang in the air? Fortunately, according to Winstone, although everyone else on the excavation recognized the inspiration for Louise Leidner, “Katharine always believed that she was represented by a minor character named Emmott.”

In Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha refrains from any mention of Murder in Mesopotamia, speaking only graciously of Katharine, whose last words to her husband as she retired to bed November 7, 1945, were, “Leonard, I shall die this night.” And she did, apparently of natural causes.

The Mallowans called on Woolley the next day, paying their last respects to “the woman who perhaps found her only substantial reality,” Winstone writes, “as one of Agatha’s characters.”

(Next Friday -- Writers need jobs. They also need hobbies. Adventure classics takes counsel on sailing from Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Crooked Candle.)