Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which was performed in the West End from 1952 to 2020, as well as six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.

Christie was born into a wealthy upper-middle-class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons which featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on digs in the Middle East and used her first-hand knowledge of his profession in her fiction.

For some unknown reason, the Queen of Crime married, for the second time, at Saint Cuthbert’s Church at the West end of Edinburgh.

At the time both she and Max Mallowen were living in London, however when they married in Edinburgh, she gave her address as the “Broadford Hotel in Strath, Inverness” – her Banns had been proclaimed at Broadford on Skye, where they had been on holiday.

It seems likely that they had their banns proclaimed in Skye and were married at Saint Cuthbert’s in Edinburgh because few there would have known them personally.  There was a disparity in their ages – she was 14 years older – which might have been frowned upon by some.

At their marriage Max Mallowen’s age was recorded as 31 (he was actually 26) while Agatha Christie was registered as aged 37 (in reality she was just four days away from her 40th birthday).

The text above was written on 14 February 2021, but it seems that we were not the only ones who were interested as The Mystery of Agatha Christie’s Connection to Saint Cuthbert’s was it was the subject of a talk by Mary Comer just a few weeks later on 13 March 2021! This gives much more detail regarding the mystery.