This essay appears in Issue 24 of The Mockingbird, now available to pre-order.
I.
The most notorious episode of Agatha Christie’s life took place late in 1926, in the wake of her husband Archie Christie’s request for a divorce so he could marry another woman, Nancy Neele. Plunged into what we might now call a fugue state, Agatha left home in her car, which she later abandoned, perhaps after an abortive suicide attempt. She walked to a local train station, traveled to London and then northwards, ending up at a resort in Harrogate in Yorkshire. She checked in under the poignant false name of Teresa Neele.
Her family, the police, and the public went nuts. For eleven days they could trace neither hide nor hair of her. This was the dawn of the paparazzi, who cheerfully exploited a mysterious disappearance — and, as a bonus, the disappearance of a mystery author. Theories for her vanishing ranged from Archie having murdered her to Agatha staging her own faked death to shame him, or possibly to boost sales. Volunteers (among them fellow mystery author Dorothy L. Sayers) joined local authorities in raking over her home region for a clue, any clue, as to her whereabouts.
But all this time, and evidently for the most part unaware of the uproar she had caused, Agatha lived incognito at Harrogate, dining with the other guests, singing, dancing, and playing billiards. In time they recognized her, but the staff in particular were keenly aware of a resort’s reputation depending on its privacy. If she wasn’t going to reveal herself, they weren’t going to, either.
Even when her disappearance made the cover of all the newspapers, such that even Agatha could not ignore the obvious, she maintained her cover as Teresa Neele. The Daily Mail reported that, when asked what she thought about the news story, she replied, “Agatha Christie is a very elusive person. I cannot be bothered with her.”
If Agatha Christie hadn’t been a very elusive person before her eleven-day disappearance, she certainly became one afterwards. Shy by nature and wounded to the depths of her soul by the sudden end to what she thought was a happy marriage, the real Agatha went into remission from the public eye. She downplayed her success for years to come and firmly divorced her public and private personae. Common wisdom has it that the most successful character Agatha Christie ever created was … Agatha Christie.
There is another commonplace about Agatha Christie: that she was a deeply religious person. Biographers assert it, fans agree with it, yet proof is rarely proffered. We feel its texture in the warp and woof of her writing, rather than beholding it in bright and glittering colors on the page. If Agatha Christie was a Christian, she was a very elusive Christian.
II.
When a mystery presents itself, the thing to do is investigate. Faced with a move so meta it seems as implausible as one of Agatha’s thrillers, the curious reader has little choice but to dig down and detect. What clues point toward Agatha’s Christian faith?
Her autobiography, published a year after her 1976 death though completed in 1965, is not a bad place to start. It is whimsical, nostalgic, and passionate, though much more obviously about houses, delicious dishes, and Middle Eastern archaeology than about God. Yet the clues are indeed scattered throughout its five hundred-plus pages.
For starters, Agatha recalls her mother as being “of a naturally mystic turn of mind,” with “the gift of prayer and contemplation, but her ardent faith and devotion found it difficult to select a suitable form of worship.” Clarissa Miller almost became a Roman Catholic, “bounced off into being a Unitarian,” cycled through Theosophy, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism, and at last, rather improbably, settled on the Church of England. Her tastes were high church, she kept a picture of St. Francis over her bed, and she read The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis every morning and every evening — as Agatha herself would later do, and Miss Marple as well.
Her father, by contrast, was a “simple-hearted, orthodox Christian,” who said his prayers nightly, went to church weekly, and never indulged in internal scrutiny, though he was very relieved — once his wife settled down religiously — to get his youngest daughter properly baptized at the parish church.
Precocious, Agatha taught herself to read around the age of four. She loved Bible storybooks, and she comments, “There is no doubt that the stories of the Old Testament are, from a child’s point of view, rattling good yarns.” Many years later, after observing the locals’ use of slingshots during visits to Iraqi archaeological sites, she would conclude that the story of David and Goliath was more about technological superiority than anything else!
Given the loving colors with which she paints her happy childhood, and its palpable contrast to the agonies of adulthood, it’s little surprise that the religious details become rarer as her life unfolds, especially after her first marriage evaporated. In the autobiography Agatha confesses to her horror of divorce and ongoing “sense of guilt” for agreeing to it, especially on account of her and Archie’s daughter Rosalind.
What Agatha doesn’t report in her autobiography is how Archie bullied her into suing for divorce herself on the grounds of his alleged infidelity — which probably had not yet taken place physically, albeit had very much so emotionally — with, so as to protect Nancy Neele’s reputation, an “unnamed woman.” It’s only from other, private sources that we learn how much the perjury, an actual crime that she could never reverse once the divorce was finalized and her ex-husband remarried, troubled her conscience. Agatha never again took Communion, as would have been expected of a High Church Anglican at the time.
Another relevant detail from this period of her life, unearthed by biographers but not included in her autobiography, is that after Archie’s departure Agatha kept among her personal effects a transcription from Psalm 55: “It is not an enemy who taunts me — then I could bear it; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me — then I could hide from him. But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend.” The depth of Archie’s betrayal marked Agatha forever after. But it also drove her extraordinary fictional output. It is not strangers or serial killers, but friends, lovers, and relatives who commit the ultimate betrayal of murder in her novels.
Moreover, much earlier in her memoir Agatha recalls a math teacher from her girlhood whose one impromptu sermon made a greater impression on her than anything she ever heard in church:
If you never face despair, you will never have faced, or become, a Christian, or known a Christian life. To be a Christian you must face and accept the life that Christ faced and lived; you must enjoy things as he enjoyed things … But you must also know, as he did, what it means to be alone in the Garden of Gethsemane, to feel that all your friends have forsaken you, that those you love and trust have turned away from you, and that God Himself has forsaken you. Hold on then to the belief that that is not the end. If you love, you will suffer, and if you do not love, you do not know the meaning of a Christian life.
Carefully distanced though the two events are in her book, it is no great leap to infer that, when Archie abandoned her, Agatha felt that God had abandoned her, too. And yet, out of the depths, she learned what it meant to be a Christian. Elsewhere she remarks how in the grip of creation she feels nearest to God. That is a notion often deployed sentimentally, but considering what God did to Agatha, and Agatha did to her characters, the analogy is sharp and not a little alarming!
Agatha never intended to marry a second time. Indeed, she recoiled from the idea, unwilling to put herself in the emotional grip of another ever again. Which is why her guard was lowered while Max Mallowan, fourteen years her junior and an aspiring archaeologist on one of the digs she joined, befriended her, showed her around, and engaged her in lively, thoughtful, personal conversation of a kind she hadn’t enjoyed in years.
When Max finally talked Agatha into marrying him, religion was a matter requiring some negotiation. Max had taken a dislike to the Anglicanism represented by his school. He refused to be confirmed and thus become eligible for Communion. In university, though, under the influence of beloved friend Esmé Howard, who died tragically young soon after, Max became a Roman Catholic. Although it began as a promise to a friend on his deathbed, Max’s faith surprised him in its sincerity. It was only when he fell for Agatha, and realized that the Catholic Church would not recognize his marriage to a divorcée, that he made the break.
It’s a bit ironic, really, because as far as Anglicans go, Agatha was quite friendly toward Roman Catholicism, even proposing (perhaps in jest) that she could convert on her own deathbed so they could be buried together. Her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot was a pious Catholic, regularly invoking le bon Dieu. In 1971 Agatha added her signature to a petition to Pope Paul VI topermit celebration of the Latin mass in England and Wales on special occasions. Supposedly it was her name, rather than those of other illustrious co-signatories such as F. R. Leavis, Graham Greene, and Iris Murdoch, that persuaded the pontiff to approve it, so the concession is popularly known as the “Agatha Christie Indult.”
Moreover, the Church of England was not exactly favorably disposed toward remarriage after divorce, either, which could not be blessed with a church wedding until 2002! Yet it was evidently so important to both Max and Agatha to receive God’s blessing on their nuptials that, to put it plainly, they went rogue. They also went north. Bypassing their respective ecclesiastical domiciles, they arranged for a wedding at St. Cuthbert’s (misremembered by Agatha in her autobiography as St. Columba’s, and thus misreported by many biographers) in Edinburgh, a parish of the Church of Scotland. This Presbyterian established church was not open to remarriage after divorce, which became permissible only in 1959 — but Max and Agatha married in 1930. One can only assume that Rev. George MacLeod didn’t follow the papers too closely, or simply overlooked the irregular status of the famous but secretive bride. And if you’ve committed one perjury, you may as well commit another: on the marriage certificate Agatha reported her age to be lower, and Max’s to be higher, than they in fact were.
Church services continued to be a feature of Max and Agatha’s married life, including on digs in the Near East, where they visited the whole range on offer: “the Maronites, the Syrian Catholics, the Greek Orthodox, the Nestorians, the Jacobites.”
Agatha further reports in her autobiography how she donated the rights to two of her stories for the support of church buildings she loved. The proceeds of “Sanctuary,” which plays on the double meaning of that term where churches are concerned, went to the Westminster Abbey Appeal Fund. Another story, “Greenshaw’s Folly,” paid for a stained-glass window in her local parish of Churston Ferrers. Agatha herself solicited designs and settled on a Mr. Patterson as artist, especially on account of his striking use of “mauve and pale green” over against the usual red and blue. Special approval from the Diocese of Exeter was required not to have a crucifixion scene in the east window. Agatha wanted instead a Good Shepherd, “a happy window which children could look at with pleasure.” In the end her proposal was accepted on the grounds that it was, after all, a “pastoral parish.” The finished window also depicts “the manger and the Virgin with the Child, the angels appearing to the shepherds in the field, the fishermen and their boats with their nets, and the Figure walking on the sea.”
The very last words of Agatha’s autobiography are: “A child says, ‘Thank God for my good dinner.’ What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.’”
Agatha was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s in Cholsey. A memorial service a few months later included Psalm 23 and a reading from The Imitation of the Christ. Max was buried by her side two-and-a-half years later.
We’ve got here an impressive concatenation of clues. But as a defense attorney might well protest, what do they prove? Her biographical details are not especially remarkable or distinctive. They might just as easily mirror the life of any other cultured Englishwoman of her time: the inevitable outcome within a secure Christendom. The scriptural and ecclesiastical allusions of her books might only have been in the air, not her soul.
III.
It’s time for the smoking gun.
And that is a collection of stories and poems published in the same year that Agatha completed her autobiography, Star Over Bethlehem. Little known even to her fans, this slender volume barely fills eighty pages. Unusually, it is graced with line drawings, and even more unusually, it appends her married name of Mallowan to the byline. It was, by her own admission, the only one of her books that she actually liked autographing.
The poems are bright, cheery, and devout. “A Greeting” welcomes Christmas and concludes that all the bobs and whistles of the season “trumpet forth God’s gift of love.” In “A Wreath for Christmas,” Agatha draws on the mythologization of holly, mistletoe, and gorse as each witnesses in its own way to the babe in Bethlehem destined for the cross. The magi bring their famous gifts in “Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh,” but only myrrh — used in burial rites — stays with Christ to the end, and the cry “’Tis finished” marks the moment when his reign begins. “Jenny by the Sky” concludes its tale of heartache with, “In the cool of the evening I walked in the wood / And God walked beside me … We both understood.”
But it’s only in excavating the stories that we discover how deeply Agatha really did know the Scriptures and tradition of the church — so well that she could take some frankly startling risks.
The eponymous story is the most startling of the bunch. It is, in fact, a detective story, with the Virgin Mary in the role of detective, the baby Jesus as the potential victim, and the identity of the would-be killer not quite clear.
At least, not clear to any reader less familiar with the Bible than Agatha. But an astute reader would immediately suspect the Angel who graces Mary and the baby with his presence, since he is described as shining “with the radiance of the morning sun.” A little later he asserts, “I am the Morning Angel, and the Light of the Morning is Truth.” Isaiah 14:12, anyone? “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn!” That’s right, we have Lucifer on our hands.
Lucifer may well be the “father of lies” (John 8:44), but he doesn’t play his trick by outright lying. That would be unworthy of him — and, for that matter, unworthy of a detective novelist at the top of her game. Lucifer seeks to deceive not with untruths but with misdirects, sleights-of-hand, and clues stripped of their context.
The Angel offers to show the beaming young mother scenes from her son’s future. She joyfully accepts but is in due course horrified by what she beholds: his agony in the garden and “no answer to his prayer,” God “absent and silent”; the sleeping indifference of his so-called friends; his march among criminals carrying their crosses; and at last, her beloved boy nailed to that cross crying out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Mary can’t bear it and protests, with more truth that she can possibly know: “There has been some confusion of identity; he has been mistaken for someone else. He is suffering for someone else’s crime.” But the Angel concludes his slideshow with a snapshot of the esteemed High Priest judging her son guilty of blasphemy.
Back home in the stable, Mary protests that she and Joseph will bring up their son to “practise religion and to revere and honour the faith of his fathers,” which will surely avert his horrible future. But the Angel insists that he has shown her the inevitable Truth. Mary knows in her heart of hearts he’s right. Grieving, she wishes aloud that her son could have died at birth and avoided such a future — and the Angel offers exactly that. Though he is careful to say that God lays no command on Mary, the Angel grants her the possibility of choosing a different future: “Choose now if the child shall live or die.”
At this point Mary begins to turn over in her own mind what she has seen, picking up on, yes, clues that she hadn’t noticed before. In the garden, her son regarded his sleeping friends with sadness, pity, understanding, and love; she realizes that his is “the face of a good man.” In the High Priest’s court, he accepted the judgment but “in his eyes was no consciousness of guilt.” One of the crucified criminals looked upon her son with love, trust, and adoration.
So when the Angel prompts Mary again to consider returning her son to God unsullied by his future, she replies, “[S]ince God has given him life, it is not for me to take that life away … It may be that I have seen only part of a picture, not the whole. My baby’s life is his own, not mine, and I have no right to dispose of it.” Or, as we might paraphrase from Hercule Poirot, “I do not approve of murder!”
Enraged at his defeat by a lowly woman, “Lucifer, Son of the morning, laughed aloud in ignorance and arrogance and flashed through the sky like a burning streak of fire down to the nethermost depths” — an allusion to Jesus’ very brief comment in Luke 10:18.
But here is where the real punch of the story lies, a gut-punch that you should’ve seen coming but didn’t — as in the best of Agatha’s murder mysteries. The scene makes a sudden shift to the East, where three Watchers notify their Masters of a “Great Light in the Sky. It must be that some great personage is born.” But a very old Watcher among them demurs. “A Sign from God? God has no need of Signs and Wonders. It is more likely to be a Sign from Satan.”
In other words, the “Star over Bethlehem” is not a stellar conjunction announcing the arrival of a cosmic king, but the flaring rage of defeated Satan. Imagine that: Agatha turned one of the happiest signs of Christmas into a demonic omen!
The Watcher concludes, “It is in my mind that if God were to come amongst us, he would come very quietly.” One might even say that God likes to hide under the sign of his opposite. Evidently, so does Lucifer.
While none of the other stories in this collection so clearly map onto the detective genre, each in its own way demonstrates Agatha’s profound engagement with the biblical writings and the Christian tradition.
“The Naughty Donkey,” for instance, imagines a descendent of Balaam’s ass who plays a key role in getting the holy family out of Herod’s clutches. “The Water Bus” lurches forward into the present, following a modern woman of high religious principle suffering enormous distress over her lack of love for her neighbors, until a key encounter with the gorgeous cloak of an unnamed dark-skinned man — a deft interweaving of John 19:23 with Mark 5:27–28. “Promotion in the Highest” plays with the old tradition of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, though Agatha shuffles the saints around to include her favorites, and — stranger still — sets the events on January 1, 2000, with the punchline of the story musing that “your old Saints would be very different nowadays, I expect …”
The most affecting story of the collection, though also the most unnerving, is “In the Cool of the Evening.”
It opens during Evensong. Janet Grierson, mild-mannered on the outside, prays passionately in her heart for her “sweet boy — so gentle — so innocent” to “be normal.” Begging God to hear her, she insists, “With Thee all things are possible. My faith shall make him whole — I have faith — I believe. I believe! Help me!” A whole panoply of scriptural allusions are juxtaposed here, inclining us toward respect and admiration for this mother’s love. It’s only if you already know something about Agatha’s very complex views on love, and its potential to do devastating harm, that you might have some qualms about what’s coming.
On the way out the door, Janet and her husband chat with other churchgoers, including a newcomer who carelessly laments “when one’s children turn out to be morons.” The newcomer meant it colloquially (if tactlessly), but she accidentally strikes the target: we learn that the Griersons’ son is “subnormal. Mentally retarded.”
Mr. Grierson tries to comfort his wife on the way home, suggesting (probably for the thousandth time) that Janet should accept the boy as he is. She refuses aggressively, insisting that surely something could be done, “injections — hypnotism,” since after all he’s physically “perfect.” He says she prays too much; she says there’s no such thing.
“I believe in God, I tell you. I believe in him. I have faith — and faith can move mountains.”
“You can’t give God orders, Janet.”
“What an extraordinary thing to say! … I don’t think you know what faith is.”
“It ought to be the same as trust.”
Yet Janet cannot trust because, during Evensong, “I felt that God wasn’t there. I didn’t feel that there was no God — just that He was somewhere else … but where?”
At this point, the nuanced exchange on prayer and faith takes an abrupt turn for the weird. We meet Alan, the “subnormal” child (later revealed to be thirteen-years-old), “fair and blue-eyed,” and his pets living at the end of the garden — pets that prove to be mutants. And not just any mutants, but a side-effect of nuclear experimentation gone wrong! Alan finds them and names them. He proudly holds one up, “partly like a frog — but he isn’t a frog — he’s got feathers and a sort of wings.” Other such beasts have “[q]ueer heads — and extra legs.” His mother is disgusted; they’re all so unnatural. But Mr. Grierson supposes “everything has to have a first time.”
The story ends with Alan laughing at the funny word “church” and the funnier idea that God would live in a house. “Doesn’t He come down and walk about? In the evenings? In summer? When it’s nice and cool?” Mr. Grierson says that He did, back in the Garden of Eden. Alan insists that He does so now in their family garden. The story closes as Alan converses with his “imaginary friend” in the Garden, who admits that “I live in many places … But sometimes, in the cool of the evening, I walk in a garden — with a friend and talk about the New World —”
A mother’s love exposed as faith without trust, and prayer without humility? This is your usual Agatha Christie. An intellectually impaired teen and radioactively mutated animals as signs of the coming kingdom? This is not your usual Agatha Christie.
As the book begins, so it ends — with Mary. This time she is no longer a postpartum mother confronted with an angelic apparition, but an aged exile on Patmos with her adoptive son, the beloved disciple John. After a sequence of mistaken identities (the bread and butter of the detective novelist), Mary departs this life in the company of her risen son and two of his friends, while John remains behind, ready at last to receive the Spirit. He writes down phrases from what will become the book of Revelation, which in turn are the final words of this book: “I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last … I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of the death … Behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work shall be …”
The jury should have reached a unanimous verdict by now. These wild and woolly stories are the work of an author deeply immersed in Christian faith, in Scripture, in Church history and tradition. She lived in and with these things, and made them so entirely her own that she could confess and retell the faith even while rearranging and juxtaposing tesserae of the Christian mosaic in surprising configurations. In so doing she illuminated the theology of the cross, the joyful exchange, demonic pride and saintly humility, the real presence of Christ among his own, and hope for the kingdom to come.
IV.
Star Over Bethlehem may be the proof, but it’s not the reason countless Christian readers have taken Agatha as one of their number. They feel her faith below the surface: in Poirot’s Catholic devotion and abhorrence of murder, in Miss Marple’s low estimation of human potential that is simultaneously the source of her charity.
The murder mystery is often claimed to be Christian at its core, what with its commitment to truth, punishment of the guilty, and vindication of the innocent, alongside the recognition that all have fallen short of the glory of God. Original sin, free will, and justice are tagged as the defining doctrines of the genre.
God part aside, it’s questionable whether these features are uniquely Christian, much less the genre itself. After all, it wasn’t long before the so-called golden era of detective fiction gave way to noir and hard-boiled, unleashing a blizzard of fictional and true crime writing that shows no signs of slowing down or staying within Christian bounds. But more to the point, these clichés fail to do justice to Agatha’s implicit theology.
For one thing, original sin is so obvious as to be beyond dispute. What’s at stake is not original but actual sin, where distinctions between people must be made. It matters that those innocent of the crime of murder are not condemned for it, and it matters that those guilty of murder are exposed. Yes, there is guilt enough to go around — it would be hard to have false accusations and red herrings without other misdeeds and lesser crimes getting tangled up with the central one — but a murder mystery is about actual sin in the actual world, not the sin inherited from Adam or imposed by the intergenerational web of compromise.
Second, however, it’s a mistake to overplay the free will card. Conceptualizations of free will versus bound will — moral sovereignty versus determinism — poorly serve the actual human experience of willing. What Agatha shows on the page is not so much clear-sighted moral choice for good or evil, but creatures driven by their loves. Love, far more than hate, is what motivates the crimes in her stories. A late novel has Miss Marple soberly reflecting, “Love is a very terrible thing. It is alive to evil, it can be one of the most evil things there can be.” Miss Marple is a true Augustinian: We are defined by our loves, but if our love is attached to the wrong thing or in the wrong way, it becomes evil and leads unto death.
And as for the tired assumption that murder mysteries are comfort for convalescents, or cozy reassurances to postwar PTSD that all will be well, Agatha’s stories depict rough justice at best. She and her detectives are rightly horrified by murder, but they defend the death penalty; to them, taking a human life is abhorrent in the wrong context, but not inherently.
And even the rules of rough justice are often violated. Poirot sometimes permits the villain to commit suicide. Miss Marple is even less constrained by the requirements of human jurisprudence, what with her tactical lies, devious traps, and shattering exposures. If even the non-murderers are guilty, then even the righteous restorers of justice regularly exceed their official or moral jurisdictions.
This may be why Murder on the Orient Express remains Agatha’s most famous novel. (Spoiler alert — but if you still haven’t read it in the eighty-nine years since its publication, you have no one to blame but yourself.) The entire point of the mystery is that, in fact, everyone is guilty: actually, specifically, murderously guilty. The answer is revealed again and again before Poirot spells out the mechanism, but the idea is so ludicrous that the other investigators, and the readers, can’t believe that the plain truth is being plainly told them.
Moreover, love drove the crime, and drove the twelve murderers — twelve like a jury, and perhaps like disciples — beyond all inhibition and fear to avenge the death of a beloved child and her family that was destroyed as a result. You can’t help but sympathize with them; you can’t help but rejoice in the murdered man’s murder.
Which is why Poirot, he who does “not approve of murder!” abandons any pretense of human justice against the killers, since human justice failed to convict their victim. Nor does Poirot blaspheme by calling the premeditated crime an outworking of divine justice. Nor does he distance himself from the sordid affair or justify the decision he comes to. Instead, he fabricates an alternate explanation that lets all twelve of them off the hook, which his fellow investigators gratefully accept. Nothing is set right at the end of the story, which ends with unusual abruptness, even for Agatha. The case is closed. That’s all.
I read once, years ago, about a study I’ve never been able to locate since, on the range of murderers in detective novels. The study concluded that every conceivable character has been the killer: obvious ones like lover or spouse, parent or child, heir or jealous friend or blackmailed victim at the end of her wits, but also edge cases that might just violate the unspoken contract of the genre, like detective, policeman, or narrator. (Agatha covered them all.) The one single exception to the universal guilt was … the reader.
But then I got to thinking of the Gospels. They recount, of course, a mystery — the mystery of mysteries. There is the core identity question surrounding Jesus, more a whoizit than a whodunnit. As the identity question ratchets up in tension, so does the proliferation of guilt. By the time you get to his arrest, trial, and execution, every party has been implicated in guilt, whether through active evil of Judas, the failure to recognize the evidence like the religious authorities, the jumbled testimony of false witnesses, the blood lust of the mob, the silent standing-by of Peter, the greed of the gambling soldiers, or the shrugging indifference of Pilate.
And yet you, the reader, are not permitted to distance yourself from them. The story is not told for you to remain cozy and innocent, curled up with your mug of hot tea on a rainy day, siphoning off your aggression at a safe remove. If you read the Gospels aright — and keep going through the Epistles — you come to the inescapable conclusion that you too are guilty — just as guilty. You were there when they crucified your Lord. As we sing to the dying Christ in the devastating Lutheran Good Friday hymn, “Ah, Holy Jesus,” “Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee? Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee. ’Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee; I crucified thee.”
We are all cooped up together on the Orient Express, blood on our hands and guilt in our hearts. Our only hope is for a just judge to come along and exonerate us.
Sarah would like to express her profound thanks to Mark Michael, Ian McCormack, and Kemper Donovan for their expert advice and feedback in the writing of this article.
COMMENTS
2 responses to “Agatha Christie, a Very Elusive Christian”
Leave a Reply
A masterpiece. Thank you.
A brilliant look at the mysterious Christie. Most enjoyable. Thank you for digging deeper.