All language subtitles for Agatha.Christie.Lucy.Worsley.on.the.Mystery.Queen.S01E03.Unfinished.Portrait.1080p.HDTV.H264.DARKFLiX

TRAIN TOOTS

Anything else, Mrs Christie?

No. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you very much.

Oh, here they are.

Good morning. Good morning.

Good morning.

That's funny,
I have one of hers with me, too.

Here.
Oh, yes, that's a good one.

But I guessed the ending.

This is her new one. She must be
worth a small fortune by now.

If she's got anything left.
SHE CHUCKLES

How do you mean?
I hear she drinks like a fish.

AGATHA LAUGHS

WHISTLE BLOWS

TRAIN TOOTS

Agatha Christie recounted this story
in an interview in 1970,

and I love what it tells us
about her.

She was stupendously famous,

yet she was able to slip
beneath the radar.

They thought that she was a drinker
but in fact she was teetotal.

And I think that this story
is key to understanding

who Agatha Christie had become
in later life.

At the height of her fame
and success,

she revelled in being mysterious.

The greatest mystery that Agatha
Christie ever created was herself.

I've been fascinated by Agatha
Christie since I was a child

and I think there's much more
to this enigmatic

and elusive novelist
than meets the eye.

She subverts what we think we want

and gives us something
so much more interesting.

I'm investigating the mysterious
case of Agatha Christie.

How did this woman,
who grew up a Victorian,

challenge the expectations
of her age?

The doctor, the judge, the general -

these people, they're just
not who you think they are.

Let's go.

How did her own dark psychology,
her anxieties and experiences,

fuel her writing?

What made this woman the
best-selling novelist in the world?

In this series, I want to uncover
the true Agatha Christie.

I want to explore how the changes
of her lifetime

affected her writing.

And I want to show you
that she was a pioneering,

radical writer and woman.

In the spring of 1930,
Agatha Christie travelled alone

to visit ancient sites
in the Middle East.

Aged 40, she was an internationally
successful novelist,

but she was also emerging from
a tumultuous few years.

The death of her mother and a
divorce from her unfaithful husband

had led to a personal crisis
played out in public.

The trip abroad was an escape.

An opportunity to take stock and
rebuild far from press intrusion.

She joined a dig being run
by a British couple -

Leonard and Katharine Woolley.

Agatha knew that travelling
would help her to escape

from her problems at home.

What she didn't know was the
completely transformational effect

that the Arab world
would have on her life.

Partly this was the culture shock
of being a single woman from Devon

in an environment like this.

But on top of that
there was the actual activity

the Woolleys were here for.

There was something about
an archaeological dig

that lit Agatha's fire.

The Woolleys' dig was in Iraq.

This one in Egypt is led by mother
and daughter team Elena Pischikova

and Katherine Blakeney, who've been
working here for over 15 years.

Ah, this is your site? Yes.

Hi, Lucy. I'm Elena.
Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you for having me.
It's lovely to meet you.

May I take a tour? Absolutely.
You want to see the tomb?

I do want to see the tomb.
Thank you. Follow us.

I've always wondered why Agatha,
the crime writer,

was so drawn to archaeology,

and I think I've come to
the right place to find out.

I understand that you are
Agatha Christie fans.

Am I right? Huge. Huge!

LAUGHTER

What draws you to Agatha?

She's a brilliant writer.
Brilliant writer.

And her approach to everything
is very archaeological.

She treats every object
as an incredible find, actually.

You like Agatha Christie
because she treats objects, clues,

things as important in the way that
an archaeologist does? Exactly.

Yes, she goes into this really
poetic description of a dagger

being discovered and the glint
of gold and it's very romantic.

Every person, every clue,

absolutely everything
is celebrated by Christie,

and that's what I call
an archaeological mind.

And that's what I admire
about Christie.

But in the deserts of Iraq,
Agatha's passion for archaeology

would offer her more than
just literary inspiration.

On one dig with the Woolleys
in 1930,

she spotted a curious person.

She described this person
as a thin, dark, young man.

He was quite quiet
but very perceptive.

Agatha's thin, dark young man
was called Max Mallowan.

Max was a 25-year-old archaeologist
from England.

Katharine Woolley called Max
the perfect assistant.

And now she had the perfect job
for him -

chaperoning Agatha around
the sites of ancient Mesopotamia.

As they set off on their road trip
across the desert,

they must have seemed an odd couple.

The young archaeologist

and the famous novelist
14 years his senior.

But on that trip, they got to know
each other and something clicked.

Of course, this wasn't at all
a romantic relationship.

There was the age gap
and they were so different.

But then, boom,

just months after meeting her,
Max asked Agatha to be his wife.

She was thrown into turmoil.

Max was lovely.

She'd been able to relax with him
and he was offering her a life

of travel and adventure
and his passion for archaeology.

But her demons were never far away.

Her first husband, Archie,
had betrayed her,

leading to a painful divorce.

The memories were still raw.

Something of her feelings
enters into her writing.

Here's Murder In Mesopotamia.

This book draws heavily
on her experience of archaeology

in the Arab world,

but I think she also gives us
a glimpse into her own heart.

She has one character,
who's lost her husband, say this...

"Lots of people wanted to marry me

"but I always refused.

"I'd had too bad a shock.

"I didn't feel I could ever
trust anyone again."

It took Agatha months
to make up her mind

but, at last, her feelings
for Max won out,

and in September 1930,
just six months after they'd met,

they got married.

This is a letter
that she wrote to him

on Christmas Eve of that same year.
I love this letter.

Christmas Eve had been the date
of Agatha's first wedding to Archie,

so the anniversary of that,
as she says here,

"It's always been a sad day for me
but not this year.

"I feel so happy and safe and loved.

"Bless you, my darling,

"for all that you've done for me
and given back to me."

This new-found happiness had a
profound effect on Agatha's work

and ushered in a golden age
for her writing.

In the next nine years,
she would go on to write

an incredible 17 full-length novels.

And in that time, every year,

the happy couple returned
to digs abroad.

Agatha and Max's shared passion
for archaeology

was never far from her thoughts.

In one book, she even has
the great Poirot

refer back to that case
he cracked in Mesopotamia

and she has him draw a parallel
between the work

of the archaeologist
and the work of the detective.

They do the same thing, he says.

"You take away the loose earth,

"you scrape here and there
with a knife,

"removing the extraneous matter
so that we can see the truth,

"the naked, shining truth."

But this book wasn't set
on an archaeological dig.

It wasn't even set in Iraq.

It's the story of
a Death On The Nile.

In 1931, Agatha and Max
went to Egypt.

They became friends
with Howard Carter

and visited the tomb of Tutankhamun
he'd discovered.

And they came here
to the Temple of Karnak...

..which Agatha described as one
of the great beauties of Egypt.

In the early 1930s, Egypt had
become a popular destination

for British travellers.

Tourists like Agatha
flocked to the ancient ruins,

which meant Egypt offered her the
perfect setting for her new book -

one she knew would resonate
with her readers.

In Death On The Nile,
Agatha would develop

one of her favourite plot devices -
the closed circle.

You know, when she seals all the
suspects into a particular place.

It has to be one of them.

She used this way
back in her first book,

The Mysterious Affair At Styles,
when it had been the country house.

In Murder On The Orient Express,
it had been the train.

And now she'd pick a setting
that to most of her readers

would have seemed exotic
and glamorous.

This time, her closed circle would
be a luxurious paddle steamer

on the Nile.

Agatha and Max boarded
this very boat in 1933.

The SS Sudan was built in 1885
for Egypt's royal family

and later converted into
a cruise ship for wealthy tourists.

On the surface, Death On The Nile
is classic Christie.

A rich cast of characters
is trapped on the boat

and, when a murder occurs,

Hercule Poirot is on board
to solve the case.

But it's more than that.

In this book, Agatha uses her own
observations of love, marriage

and betrayal as the engine
of the story.

I've been reading the book again
and I've noticed it's also got

another one of Agatha's favourite
devices in it - the hidden couple.

To explain how this works,

I'm going to have to do
a bit of plot spoiling.

The story starts
with Jackie and Simon,

who are in love.

But they're very poor.

Jackie has a plan, though.

She asks her friend Linnet,
a rich American,

to give Simon a job.

Linnet says, "Absolutely!"

Everything is going very well.

Fast-forward three months...

..and Simon, the cad,

he leaves Jackie and goes off
with rich Linnet instead.

They get married.
They go on their honeymoon to Egypt.

But who should turn up
like the ghost at the feast?

It's the jilted, troubled Jackie,
who follows in their footsteps.

Everywhere they go,
she seems to be there, too.

There's definitely
going to be trouble.

Linnet asks for Poirot's help

and he agrees to talk to Jackie
to tell her to back off.

"Mademoiselle",
Poirot says to Jackie.

"I speak as a friend.

"Give up the past.

"Turn to the future.

"What's done is done.

"Bitterness will not undo it.

"You are young, you have brains -
the world is before you."

Poirot might almost be
talking to...

..a younger Agatha here

after she'd been betrayed
by her first husband, Archie,

and bitterness had entered
her heart.

Poirot goes on to say to Jackie...

"Do not open your heart to evil

"because if you do,
evil will come."

But, this being Christie,
evil is never far away.

GUNSHOT

Linnet is murdered in her sleep.

Jackie is the obvious suspect,
but she has a watertight alibi.

So does Simon, Linnet's husband,
who stands to inherit her fortune.

Finally, though, Poirot is able
to unmask the villain.

Or villains,

because, secretly, Simon and Jackie
have been in cahoots all along.

Simon had only pretended
to fall in love with Linnet.

He married her so that
when she was dead,

he could inherit the money
and share it with Jackie.

Agatha is so clever at the way
she misdirects us.

She makes us feel sympathy for poor,
lonely Jackie, jilted at the altar.

She makes us feel sympathy
for Simon,

whose lovely young wife
has been killed,

when all along, these two
have been the villains.

Death On The Nile has it all -

the glamorous romantic setting,
the stunning plot twist.

But I think its success
is down to the personal experience

Agatha brings to it,
which resonates through the novel.

It's great to think of Agatha
walking around that boat,

checking it out,
making sure the plot worked.

But on top of that,
it's a bit sad to think of her

perhaps thinking about her own past.

That story definitely has the
emotional charge that it carries...

..because of her own experience
of betrayal...

..and of the destructive power
of romantic love.

Agatha and Max loved Egypt and Iraq,
but they made their home in England.

BELL CHIMES

Its towns and villages
shaped so many of her novels.

For Agatha, the county of Devon
in particular

exerted a gravitational pull.

Agatha still owned
her old family home of Ashfield

but, somehow, going back didn't
feel right for her and Max.

It was too bound up
in the trauma of her youth,

the death of her father,
the family's financial uncertainty

and the oppressive grief
of her mother.

But then Agatha became aware of
a house for sale on the River Dart.

Here's the advert
in Country Life magazine.

It was huge.

It has stabling for seven horses,
a billiard room,

ten bedrooms,
six more bedrooms for staff,

and it was advertised as being
"eminently suitable

"as a first-class hotel."

BELL RINGS

May I come on? Please do.

Thank you. Shall I go down there?
Yes, please. Lovely.

It was a sign of the times.

In the interwar years,
the English country house

that had dominated so many of
Agatha's novels was in decline.

Now they were more likely to
become hotels or boarding houses.

Only a best-selling author could
afford to buy a house like this

to live in it.

I love the idea of Max and Agatha
arriving here at Greenway

for the first time, getting
their first glimpse of the house.

In the end, it was Max who said,
"Why don't you buy it?"

Agatha knew that to do that
she'd have to sell Ashfield.

But do you know what?
She didn't need Ashfield any more.

Now she was happily married,
she could let go of the past,

she could embrace the future,
so she got out her chequebook.

Agatha and Max were putting down
their own roots in Devon

and Agatha's writing that year
was directly inspired

by the landscape
that surrounded them.

In 1938, the year Agatha
bought Greenway,

she wrote a new story
set on an island

and the island was crowned with a
beautiful white house, she wrote.

Now, this story is clearly
set in Devon.

Plymouth is mentioned, so is Exeter.

But could the island itself
be a real place, too?

Well, here's a clue.

That same year, she wrote another
story set on an island.

This is her notebook, where
she was planning it all out,

and she's written here,

"Scene - hotel on island, Bigbury."

Now, Bigbury is definitely
a real place.

It's only 20 miles away from here.

There it is.

And guess what?

Right by Bigbury,

yes, there is an island.

Agatha had stayed at
Burgh Island Hotel in the 1930s.

At high tide, the sea cuts it off
from the mainland.

ENGINE STARTS

The only way across
is by sea tractor.

That's it. We're in the water now.

Its unique location would spark
Agatha's imagination.

We've crossed the sea
and we've arrived

at this mysterious, isolated island.

Just as in Agatha's day,
Burgh Island is fun and glamorous.

But one of her most famous books
made this setting

a much more disturbing
and menacing place.

A group of strangers,
they don't know each other,

have been brought to an island.

They've been invited to stay
in a mysterious private house

with a mysterious owner
who isn't even there.

And in Agatha's version
of Burgh Island,

there's no sea tractor,
there's no causeway,

there's no way of getting off
the island.

There's just the treacherous sea.

It's the classic Christie
closed circle.

But this time there's no Poirot.

There's nobody on the island at all
who represents the force of good.

Be very afraid.

As the story unfolds,
each of the ten guests dies.

And then there were none,
as the title goes.

Except that wasn't
the original title.

When the book was first
published in Britain,

the title notoriously contained
a racial slur - the N-word.

Obviously, this is utterly
offensive.

Why would anyone want to read
this book today?

The offensive title
came from a nursery rhyme.

It was also found
in blackface minstrel acts -

racist theatrical performances.

Frankie Bailey has studied race
and crime fiction.

What would you say if I asked you

if you liked and admired
Agatha Christie?

I admire her as a writer.

She's a master of that
three act construction.

She's very efficient in terms of
how she goes through the book,

building the suspense,

alerting the reader that
something bad is going to happen

but you don't know quite when.

And in this case, she's telling us
that they're going to die

one at a time,
as in a serial killer movie.

She's the queen of suspense
in that respect.

I think she does that as well as,
or even better in some cases,

as Alfred Hitchcock, who is my
favourite director of all time.

The offensive title
wasn't on the front cover

of the first American edition,
was it? No.

Which is interesting because
we get the same nursery rhymes

but I think by 1939, we've got
Roosevelt in the White House,

things are beginning to improve

and you don't want to
put that out there.

If you offend people and have
people boycotting your book,

then it's not going to do well.
Yeah.

So the publishers in America
thought,

"This racial slur
will not sell here."

It was unnecessary
to what they wanted to do.

In the USA, another title was used
for the book and a film adaptation.

It was also a racial slur -
against Native Americans.

Meanwhile, almost unbelievably,
in Britain,

the N-word title was still in use
until 1986.

Now, some people would say
that this kind of offensive title

is typical of her class and time.

But that's not a get out of jail free
card, is it? No, it's not.

It is disappointing.

But Agatha Christie
is a woman coming out

of that colonial background.

She's well read, well educated,

and she's coming out
of a fairly elite class.

She's not writing to change
the narrative,

she's writing so that she's ready
for that white audience,

that white European,
white American audience,

and she is picking up where they are
and not advancing that discussion.

Which is why, as a historian,
I think we have to look at this stuff

and appreciate that it was there
and to understand how potent it was.

Exactly. We need to understand it
in context,

knowing that Agatha Christie
was not alone

in terms of what she was doing.

Writers in the United States
and elsewhere, here in England,

everyone was writing in this vein
and using this kind of language.

That's interesting.

You find it possible to say
she's a good writer,

there are some things that aren't
acceptable that she wrote?

Because if I rule her out,
I would be ruling out

a lot of other writers
during that period.

There are things you can learn
from reading those writers.

Frankie, you're saying this is
complicated. It is complicated.

We can't just put people into
these boxes of good and bad. Right.

And Then There Were None is said
to be the best-selling mystery novel

of all time.

And it was published just weeks
after Agatha and Max

heard an announcement on the radio
in the kitchen at Greenway.

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: I have to
tell you now,

this country is at war with Germany.

Having survived one world war,
the prospect of another one

must have appalled Agatha,

and it threatened to upend
her new-found security.

In September 1940, the blitz
on British cities began.

Children were being evacuated
from places like London

to the safety of the countryside,

but Agatha was going in
the opposite direction.

She even rented out her Devon house,
Greenway, to be a home for evacuees.

And the reason she came here
to Blitz London

was to be with her beloved Max.

With his archaeological career
on hold,

Max had taken a desk job
with the RAF.

And in March 1941,
seven months into the Blitz,

which killed almost 20,000 people
in London,

Agatha moved with Max to this
ultra modernist block of flats

in Hampstead.

These were dangerous times
and this was a dangerous street.

Before Agatha moved in,
a bomb blew out the glass

of all the windows of this building.

And over the eight months following,
38 bombs fell on this neighbourhood.

But Agatha herself wasn't
particularly fazed by this.

She tells us that she never bothered
to go down to the shelter,

and if she was woken in the night
by the sound of bombs falling,

she'd just say to herself,
"Oh, dear, there they are again,"

and she'd turn over
and she'd go back to sleep.

Was this genuine calm
in the face of mortal peril

or a reflection of Agatha's
state of mind?

The bombs might not have bothered
Agatha, but something else was up.

In February 1942, Max volunteered
for a job in Cairo.

He was going back to Egypt,
where they'd been so happy together,

but this time he was going alone.

These are letters
Agatha wrote to Max

and I think they show
evidence of...

..deteriorating mental health.

She has dreams
that he's abandoned her.

Listen to this.

"They told me you no longer cared
or wanted me and had gone away.

"I woke up in a panic."

And then, again,
"I feel so afraid sometimes.

"Write often because I need cheering
when there are no sunny days."

Now, Agatha had come to London
to be with Max

but he'd gone off to North Africa.

He was living there
in a sunny climate

with lots of other British people
serving in the Forces,

all of them away
from their families,

some of them women his own age.

If Agatha still had any insecurities
about being older

or about what had happened
in her first marriage,

they must have come flooding back.

Lonely and jealous,

the clouds of her past turmoil
were gathering again,

so to keep them at bay, Agatha
poured herself into her work.

In the war years,
she wrote 16 novels,

seven collections of short stories
and a play.

Agatha tells us that she wrote
one of these wartime books

in just three days.

She describes producing it
in a white heat.

She didn't dare leave it
and go and do anything else.

She says, "I had to go on with
the book until I'd finished it."

When she finally got to the end,
she collapsed.

She slept for 24 hours.

And she later said that this book
was the one book

that had satisfied her completely.

She called it the book
she'd always wanted to write.

It wasn't a detective novel at all

and it didn't even have
Agatha's name on the cover.

Written under her pseudonym
Mary Westmacott,

Absent In The Spring
is in part about a woman

who comes to realise
that her marriage is a lie,

that her husband loves
another woman.

" 'Rodney and I have been perfectly
contented with one another.'

" 'Of course, you always were
as cold as a fish, Joan.

" 'But I should have said
that husband of yours

" 'had quite a roving eye.'

" 'Really, Blanche?'
Joan flushed angrily.

" 'A roving eye, indeed? Rodney?'

"And suddenly, discordantly,

"a thought slipped
and flashed sideways

"across the panorama
of Joan's mind."

In 1943, no-one knew
that Mary Westmacott

was really Agatha Christie.

And I think Agatha was revelling
in the freedom

this gave her,
the freedom to be off brand.

These Westmacott books really are
her most personal,

her most intense works.

I believe that when she'd started
to write them years earlier,

it had almost been under doctor's
orders, as a kind of therapy,

because she'd been struggling
with her mental health.

And by the time we get to the war,

I think that was happening
once again.

Max was away,
she was lacking support,

she was in a bad place emotionally.

But when she was being
Mary Westmacott,

she was writing herself better.

In the war years, a gloomy Agatha
wrote another book -

Curtain: Poirot's Last Case.

But instead of publishing it,
she locked it away.

It would provide money for her
family in case, as she said,

she was killed in the raids.

But I don't think this
was just about Agatha

and herself and her family.

I think she also wanted Poirot,

the character who had
made her famous,

to have a perfectly orchestrated
final bow,

even if it might take place after
she herself had left the stage.

But Agatha wasn't planning on
leaving the stage any time soon.

Far from it.

In fact, inveterate observer
that she was,

Agatha was instead on the lookout
for writing inspiration,

and she found it
in the darkest of places.

In the summer of 1944,

three brothers from South Wales
were taken to Shropshire.

Their parents had been deemed
unfit to look after them,

so they'd be fostered.

Dennis O'Neill was 12, Terence
was nine, and Freddie was seven.

The two older boys were taken in
by a couple called the Goughs,

who lived in a remote farmhouse.

The farm was in rolling countryside.

There were chickens and cows
and a vegetable garden.

When Terence arrived, Mrs Gough
gave him a kiss and said,

"Welcome to Bank Farm.
You'll be very happy here."

A little while afterwards, the boys
had to write an essay at school

about their parents.

This is what Terence wrote.

"My mother is very good
and kind to me,

"she buys me new clothes,

"she gives me lots to eat
and lots of cake."

Later, Terence revealed
that this was all a fantasy.

As he says here,
"I knew instinctively

"that I would be in huge trouble
if I told the truth

"about the way the Goughs
were treating us.

"The lack of food,
the scratchy straw mattress,

"the heavy workload
and the stripes."

That's the wounds they got
from the beatings every night.

The awful truth was that the O'Neill
brothers were horribly abused

by the people who should
have cared for them.

They were starved and beaten
until the inevitable happened.

This is a newspaper report from 1945

about the investigation following
the death of Dennis O'Neill.

"The doctor who examined the body
says that the cause of death

"was heart failure

"following violence applied
to the front of the chest."

It's really horrible.

"And the violence was consistent
with having been caused

"by a man's fist."

That man was Reginald Gough.

He was Dennis's foster father.

Gough was arrested...

..and Terence O'Neill
had to watch a policeman

bringing something down the stairs.

The something was the body
of his dead brother.

One of the many people reading
about this case in the papers

was Agatha Christie.

Years later, she wrote, "There
was a case once where children

"had been neglected and abused

"after they had been placed
by the council on a farm.

"One child did die
and there had been a feeling

"that a slightly delinquent boy
might grow up

"full of the desire for revenge."

The O'Neill case gave Agatha
the germ of an idea

that she used for
a 30-minute radio play

called Three Blind Mice.

Here's the notebook
where she's working on the idea,

and she's done the title
as a pictogram.

Three, blind -
that's an eye crossed out -

and then a cute little mouse.

But she couldn't use that title
when she expanded the radio play

into a full-length stage play.

There was already a play
with that title.

She was stumped.

She just couldn't think of an idea
for what to call it

until somebody came up with
a stroke of genius.

It was to be called The Mousetrap.

APPLAUSE

On the surface, the play
Agatha developed

is a classic Christie whodunnit.

WHOOSHING

A group of unconnected strangers
arrive at a guesthouse.

They become trapped there
by bad weather.

It's another closed circle.

But soon, Agatha will weave the
O'Neill tragedy into the drama.

The play begins in quite
a light-hearted way.

But Agatha is so good
at light and shade,

things soon turn dark.

There's been a murder.

A policeman arrives at the house
to follow up a lead

and he tells everybody
that the victim was a woman

who, years before, had been
responsible for the death

of a little boy in her care.

Was she murdered in revenge?

Taking inspiration from
the real-life O'Neill case,

Agatha imagines that
the surviving brother

could be the vengeful killer.

The first suspect in The Mousetrap
is a young man of the right age.

Could it be him?

The Mousetrap opened in 1952

and it's become the longest-running
play in theatrical history.

But could its success, in part,
be down to a real-life tragedy?

Do you think that the people sitting
here watching The Mousetrap in 1952

would have remembered
the O'Neill case?

It was, in 1945,
a very important case.

This awful story of the boys
who were sent into foster care.

This forms the back story
of The Mousetrap.

It's not the actual action
of the piece

but it is referenced throughout it
as one of the reasons

for the motivation of the characters
and the reason why people are there.

For the audiences of 1952,

yes, it would have been fresh
in their memories.

They would have understood
the referencing in the play.

Now, we believe that Agatha Christie
was inspired by the O'Neill case

for writing The Mousetrap,

but is there any actual
hard evidence of that?

Well, have a look at this from
the Agatha Christie archive.

It's a newspaper cutting from 1966
from the Sunday Mirror,

which obviously caught Agatha's eye.

She's written on it.
This is brilliant.

And what does it say here?
"From this real-life..."

"From this real-life happening..."
Happening, that's what it says.

"..I took the idea
for The Mousetrap."

And I like the way she's signed it
"Agatha Christie".

She's written that for posterity.
She's written that for us.

It's endlessly fascinating to me.

People think that Agatha Christie
somehow celebrates Britishness,

that she's the sort of
tourist marketing board image

of Britishness.
I imagine you disagree.

There's nothing cosy
about The Mousetrap.

Over time, I think people began
to appreciate

exactly the significance
of what it was talking about.

Harold Hobson, the great
Sunday Times theatre critic,

wrote an article
about The Mousetrap

in which he attributed
its success to the fact

that it was what he called
a parable of our times.

Everybody in it is displaced,

everybody in it is suffering
from post-war anxieties.

This is not a country house but a
country house that's being turned

into a guesthouse
in order to make ends meet.

This is people having strangers
in their house after the war.

The suspicion of the stranger
very much comes through in the play.

And you have perhaps one of the most
radical images on the London stage

at the time, which is
the lady of the house

carries a vacuum cleaner
across the stage.

Now, we have to contextualise this
in that, four years later,

at the Royal Court,
John Osborne's Look Back In Anger

is thought to have, you know,
recalibrated the entirety

of British theatre by showing
a woman doing the ironing,

which was not the kind of thing
you went to the theatre to see.

But Agatha Christie was doing it
first. Exactly.

As well as this extraordinary
background story,

it works very well as entertainment,
and people like to be entertained.

It's got a lot of comedy in it, it's
got a lot of very good characters,

and it's got a really
fascinating plot

with one of the most legendary twist
endings in theatre of all time.

In the 1950s, with the troubles
of wartime behind them,

it was back to Greenway.

The house became a happy
family retreat,

full of food, laughter and fun.

Agatha's contentment was complete.

This is one of my favourite letters
that Agatha ever wrote to Max.

"Darling...", she says, "..you
are 40 today. Hurrah. At last.

"It makes a big difference to me.

"I feel it closes the gap a little.

"When you were in the thirties
and I had reached the fifties,

"it was pretty grim."

As Max was settling into
comfortable middle age,

perhaps some of Agatha's old
insecurities were melting away.

And she was also closing the age gap

with somebody else
who was very important to her.

Agatha's creation Miss Marple.

The shrewd and observant old lady
detective appears in 12 novels,

most of them
from the post-war years.

Now, I think the very best Poirot
novels are from the '20s and '30s,

when Agatha was young.

In 1950, she turned 60,
and from then on,

she and Miss Marple would get older
at the same pace.

They'd go through life together,

almost as if Christie and Marple
were the very same person.

Agatha inhabited Miss Marple
inside and out.

She was so immersed
in Marple stories

that she grabbed anyone she could to
help perfect their brilliant plots,

including getting her neighbours
to act them out.

Agatha had the neighbours
come into the drawing room

and she stationed one of them
behind the door.

This would be significant.

Then she turned off the lights...

..and came in waving a torch around.

Then the lights came back on again

and Agatha asked everybody
to explain what they'd seen.

Of course, all the neighbours
said, "We saw nothing.

"We were dazzled by the torch,"
except for this person,

because this person
was behind the beam

and they could see what had gone on.

When the book A Murder Is Announced
came out,

the neighbours all realised
that they'd been part of

a kind of a novelist's
field experiment

to test out this really crucial
aspect of the plot.

But the Marple stories are more
than just cunningly plotted

and deeply satisfying crime novels.

I think that they document
a changing British society.

Caroline Crampton is a detective
fiction podcaster...

Come in for a cup of tea.

..and fellow Christie fan.

We're sitting in a lovely village,

just the sort of place
that Miss Marple lived,

but something's changing
about these villages

in the later Marple novels,
isn't it?

In A Murder Is Announced,
it's 1950,

we start to see the way the social
fabric of England has changed.

People's lives were completely
disjointed and fragmented

by what happened in the war.

Once upon a time,
everyone who lived there

would have been known
to everybody else

and if, in the unlikely event
that any newcomers arrived,

they would come via
some established network.

They would come with a letter
of introduction

from a friend or family member.

And yet by the time we reach
the post Second World War period,

people turn up all the time
with no letter and no roots,

and that's just how the world
is now.

And that changed - that gap.

Agatha Christie really inhabits
and makes it work for her mystery.

In the story, Miss Marple even says,

15 years ago we would have known who
everybody was. Now we no longer do.

And that's the effect Christie
is trying to create, I think.

Destabilising these ideas
of identity.

The way that she writes mysteries
keeps pace with the way

that the world is changing,

so she's not trying to recreate
the villages of the 1920s and '30s.

She's looking at the world
as it is and going,

"How can I use parts of this in
order to write a really good plot?"

You know, Caroline, I think
a lot of people would say

that Agatha Christie
was socially conservative,

but her stories don't necessarily
prove that, do they?

No. There's one really good example
of that in A Murder Is Announced,

where we've got an openly
lesbian couple.

Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd
are just totally normal neighbours,

and we even get a really
emotional moment in that book

when Miss Murgatroyd is killed
and Miss Marple

comforts Miss Hinchcliffe
at the loss of her partner,

and that this is really
tragic and devastating.

To me, it's quite amazing
that a same-sex couple

is just slipped into
the landscape like that

in commercial fiction in 1950.
It's really progressive.

It is. And even subversive in a way,

homosexuality not being legalised
until much later,

and yet it's completely normal
in the book.

As we go on into the 1960s

and Agatha Christie
is now in her own seventies,

how do the villages change?

Well, everything changes about them.

St Mary Mead is no longer this
tight, closed little circle

of a high street with a few
different shops and a few cottages.

All sorts of modern ideas have
arrived, including a supermarket

instead of your individual
grocer shops,

and things like people
don't eat bacon and eggs

for breakfast any more,
they eat cereal for convenience,

it comes straight out of a box.

And, yes, a lot of people would say,
well, all Agatha Christie stories

are set in the same year
of roughly 1935, wouldn't they?

People get this idea of the fact
that Agatha Christie

can be identified
with a specific era

when, actually, she had a writing
career spanning decades

and she evolved through it.

Part of that evolution involved
a late reconciliation

with the film industry.

The movie studios had come calling
for Agatha's best sellers

from the beginning
but, the truth was,

she didn't really like
the films of her books.

She struggled with seeing
her detectives,

Marple and Poirot, on screen.

But in 1974, now an old lady,
Agatha relented,

and movie moguls persuaded her to
lend them one of her biggest titles.

Starring the greatest cast
of suspicious characters

ever involved in murder...

The murderer is with us now.

You can identify the murderer?

Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman,
Jacqueline Bisset.

He makes it sound like a poison.

Sean Connery.
How did you know?

Beddoes.

John Gielgud.

Mr Beddoes.

Murder On The Orient Express.

I think that, in old age,

Agatha wanted to give
her most successful creation

a life beyond her own,

to ensure that Hercule Poirot
would live on for a new generation.

At the London premiere,
Agatha, the queen of crime,

was introduced
to the Queen of England.

But by now, Agatha's health
was in decline.

She attended the premiere
in a wheelchair.

Agatha had ensured Poirot's legacy
on the silver screen

but she also wanted to say
a more personal goodbye

to her cherished character.

In 1975, sensing the end,

Agatha published
Curtain: Poirot's Last Case,

that novel she'd written
in the war years and locked away.

In this story, Poirot, like Agatha
herself, is now in a wheelchair.

And right at the end,
just before he dies,

he says goodbye to his
really old friend, Hastings.

He says, "Goodbye, cher ami.

"They were good days."

It's like Agatha is saying goodbye
to her readers.

MUSIC: Nimrod
by Edward Elgar

Agatha Christie died peacefully

on 12th January 1976...

..with Max at her side.

Ever the writer,
she scripted her own funeral.

She wanted a piece of music
by Elgar called Nimrod...

..the name of the place in Iraq
she and Max had excavated

in their glory days.

After Agatha died, this letter
was found folded up very small

in her purse.

Turns out she'd been carrying it
around with her for 39 years,

and I can see why.

This is what Max had written.

"Sometimes, but not so very often,

"two people find real love together
as we do.

"We know that what we have
cannot perish.

"For me, you will remain
beautiful and precious

"with the passing of years."

Ah.

The happiness at the end of her life
and the success she enjoyed

as a writer belied the tumultuous
times she endured getting there.

But that turmoil
was the making of her.

Agatha Christie's dark,
brilliant imagination

was shaped by the upheaval of her
own extraordinary lifetime.

Without all that, I don't think
she would have become

the pioneering author she was...

..and we would not have
such a rich legacy of stories.

A legacy that continues
to captivate to this day.