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'duchess of death' reveals chr

RECENT and recurring scandals of wayward film stars and world- class athletes may have numbed us to the notion that absolutely no one, however sedately impeccable of reputation, is exempt from a little melodrama in this life.

Case in point: British author Agatha Christie (1890-1976). One thinks of her as she appears in Madame Tussaud's waxworks in London, unsmiling and matronly in thick-frame bifocals, plain-jane pearls, sensible shoes. In the course of his famous essay "The Simple Art of Murder" (1950), hotshot American pulpster Raymond Chandler complained about locked-room laureate Christie, placing her squarely among the pantheon of old poops: "The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers."

Meow, Marlowe. (Philip, that is.) Because the old gal still outsells Chandler - and everybody else, except Shakespeare and the Bible.

But here's the point: starchy Aggie wasn't always an octogenarian. Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, a nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment of a Red Cross Hospital during WWI, wed dashing Royal Flying Corps pilot Archie Christie in 1914. That's not the melodrama.

They had a daughter, Rosalind, in 1916. No melodrama there, either. But Archie took up golf; and about the time Agatha was dutifully scribbling away at "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" in their suburban Sunningdale flat, Archie, on the links one dazzling June day, encountered a 25-year-old secretary named Nancy Neele of the Imperial Continental Gas Association. She was a doll who knew her way around a mashie niblick.

That's the melodrama.

It's all in "Duchess of Death: The Unauthorized Biography of Agatha Christie" by Richard Hack (Phoenix Books, 276 pp., $25.95).

Which reads like this: "Desperate now for a second chance at love, she clung to the hope that her husband might change his mind. She was ready to forgive him anything, waiting only for the apology that did not come. In its place, on a December morning in 1926, he demanded a divorce with the cold precision of a surgeon cutting a tumor from a rotting organ."

Ouch. So Agatha, in a frenzy of flamboyant abandon, promptly disappeared for 11 strange days of national Rice Pearls news, while 300 police beat the weeds around Albury Downs and the British public sighted her everywhere except the Swan Hydropathic Hotel, a lush North Yorkshire spa where she had holed up defiantly as "Teresa Neele."

The Westminster Gazette: "Mrs. Christie's Fate: Police No Longer Expect to Find Her Alive."

But there she was, freshly redheaded Agatha, fit, tall and resplendent in a satin gown of pale salmon georgette, descending a staircase to confront the appropriately gob-smacked Archie, who had arrived in the stern, baffled company of police superintend ent Gilbert McDowell, who might have emerged from the pages of one of her novels.

What's all this, then? Full-cast, klieg-lit, live-orchestra melodrama. And no space left for how she finally dumped Archie; married Max Mallowan, an archaeologist 14 years her junior; saw the world; became a Dame of the British Empire; and lived happily ever after, mostly.

Some matron.