Original subtitles

For a woman who spent her life solving fictional mysteries, Agatha Christie

left behind one remarkable mystery of her own.

One cold December night in 1926, she drove away from her home and vanished.

Her car was discovered abandoned.

A huge search followed.

Newspapers across the

and for eleven extraordinary days the famous mystery writer seemed to have

disappeared into one of her own novels.

Yet Agatha Christie's life was far greater than that single mystery.

She created Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, transformed detective fiction,

and wrote stories that would be read by generations around the world.

Imagine a woman who left school at no particular age because she never really

went to school at all.

Picture her as a shy girl in a seaside town in the south of England, so timid

that she dreaded being asked to speak to strangers, and who believed for much of

her youth that her future would be spent quietly, at home, being a good daughter

and perhaps a good wife.

Now consider what that same woman became.

She wrote 66 detective novels, 14 collections of short stories, and some

of the most successful plays in the history of the theatre.

Her books have been translated into more than a hundred languages and she is

generally counted as the best-selling novelist of all time.

One of her plays has been performed in London almost without interruption since

the year 1952.

She created a retired Belgian policeman with an egg-shaped head and a

magnificent moustache.

and an elderly spinster who sits knitting in an English village and

understands the worst of human nature better than any policeman.

Consider, too, that when the Belgian policeman died in a novel published in

1975, the great newspaper of New York, the New York Times, printed an obituary

for him on its front page.

A fictional man, mourned in the paper that records the deaths of presidents

and kings.

It is often said that he was the only imaginary character ever to be given

such an honour, and the woman who made him, who gave the world so many poisoned

teacups, so many locked rooms, so many unexpected murderers, was herself the

gentlest of people.

She enjoyed gardens and cream and the sea.

She ate apples in the bath.

She liked to sit quietly in a room and watch other people.

and she said that she was never quite sure how it had all happened.

Her name was Agatha Christie.

Tonight we're going to tell her story slowly from the beginning.

We will begin in a large, comfortable house above the sea in Devon, in the

last years of Queen Victoria.

We will travel with her to Paris, and to Egypt, and across the deserts of Iraq.

We will sit beside her in a hospital dispensary during two world wars.

and we will stand with her in a very dark week in the winter of 1926, when

for eleven days the whole of England wondered where she had gone, and at the

end we will come to a quiet churchyard in Oxfordshire, where she rests.

But to understand how a shy girl from Torquay came to rule the kingdom of

crime, we must go back to the beginning, to a house called Ashfield, and a girl

who, in her own words, was very happy.

If you enjoy these long, quiet stories of remarkable lives, you might consider

subscribing so that you will find the next one waiting for you. And if you are

listening to this in bed, there is no need to try to stay awake.

The story will be here.

Let us begin.

The town of Torquay lies on the southern coast of Devon, in the part of England

that people call the English Riviera.

It sits on the edge of a bay, with seven hills rising behind it, and in the 19th

century it grew from a fishing village into a fashionable resort.

The reason was the climate.

Torquay is sheltered from the cold winds, the winters are mild and palm

trees will grow there, which seemed almost miraculous to Victorian visitors

from the north.

Doctors sent their consumptive patients to Torquay to breathe the air.

Retired officers Widows and families of modest private income came to live

there. Grand white villas were built on the hillsides, with views of the water,

and a promenade grew along the harbour.

It was a place of calm routine.

There were band concerts, tea rooms and afternoon calls.

There were the talky regattas in summer and the long, slow quiet of winter.

And in the winter season… The town filled with a particular kind of

visitor, people who had come to be well, or to be careful, or simply to be out of

the way.

It is hard to imagine a better place for a future writer of mysteries to grow up.

In a town of retired colonels and elderly ladies, with quiet streets and

large houses and a great deal of time for observation, a child with sharp eyes

could learn a great deal about human beings.

The year was 1890.

Victoria had been on the throne for 53 years.

The empire was at its height.

The railway had brought Torquay within a day's journey of London.

The telephone existed, but few people had one.

Gaslight was still common, and the motor car was a rumour.

Most women of the middle class did not work, did not vote, and were not

expected to want to.

In the house at the top of Barton Road, called Ashfield, a family was living in

comfortable circumstances.

The house was a large villa with a garden and a conservatory, and a view

that, as the child who grew up there later recalled, took in a good deal of

the sea.

The father of the family was Frederick Alva Miller.

He was an American, born in New York, who had come to England as a young man

and had married there.

He was a gentle, sociable, easy-going person, fond of company and of the

theatre, and not especially fond of work.

He had a private income, partly inherited and partly invested, and for

most of his life he did not need to earn a living.

He passed his days in the pleasant occupations of a gentleman of leisure.

He played cards at his club, he went to the cricket, he took part in amateur

theatricals. and he entertained friends.

His daughter remembered him as a loving and generous man who was entirely

devoted to his wife.

Frederick had a complicated family history.

His father had been a wealthy American businessman, and after the death of his

first wife he had married an Englishwoman named Margaret Miller.

Frederick was raised by her.

That woman, his stepmother, became in due course a central figure in the life

of his daughter.

who knew her as her grandmother and, with a child's affectionate precision,

as Aunty Granny.

She lived in a large house in Ealing, to the west of London, and we will visit

her in due course.

The mother of the family was Clarissa Margaret Bomer, always known as Clara.

She was related to Frederick through that same stepmother, who was her aunt,

a connection that made the family tree rather tangled.

Clara was the daughter of a British army officer who had died young.

She had grown up in modest circumstances, partly in the care of her

aunt, and she had a strong, original, unpredictable mind.

She was a person of odd and sudden opinions.

She was inclined to believe in the supernatural, to have intuitions and

premonitions, and to announce them with perfect confidence.

She was also a reflective and thoughtful person.

with a quiet sense of humour and a sincere belief that children should be

left to discover things for themselves.

Frederick and Clara had married in 1878 and had three children.

The first, a daughter named Margaret, whom everyone called Madge, was born in

1879. She was clever, quick and high-spirited, a natural storyteller

and a tease.

The second, A son named Louis Montand, whom everyone called Monty, was born in

1880. He was charming, restless and adventurous, and he was, as the

family would learn, a young man who never quite found his place.

Then, after a gap of ten years, came a third child.

She was born on the 15th of September 1890 at Ashfield.

She was given the names Agatha Mary Clarissa.

the first name was unusual in the family the second was after the mother of jesus

and the third was after her mother the family called her agatha and in time

various affectionate abbreviations she was as she would later say the baby of

the family and she arrived when her sister was eleven and her brother was

ten and already away at school in a sense she was raised as an only child

Frederick was 45 when his youngest daughter was born.

Clara was in her late 30s. They were no longer young parents, and they were not

in a hurry.

Their youngest was going to be allowed to grow slowly.

The house at Ashfield was the first world she knew, and she remembered it

for the rest of her life with extraordinary clarity.

In the autobiography she wrote in her later years, she described the house

room by room.

and the garden tree by tree.

There was a big wide hall where the family gathered.

There was a nursery on the upper floor and a drawing room with a piano and a

dining room where meals were served at a long table.

In the garden there was a very tall wellingtonia, a pine tree that had been

planted in the property and the smaller trees that she had named herself.

There was a kitchen garden.

There was a greenhouse.

There was a slope of lawn where one could roll down the hill, and there was

the cook, a woman called Jane, who ruled the kitchen and was, in the eyes of the

small child, a person of the greatest authority.

She was not alone in the nursery.

Her days were organised by her nurse, a woman she called Nursie, who was devoted

to her, and who is described in the autobiography with great fondness.

Nursey was a countrywoman, practical and affectionate, full of sayings and

proverbs and sensible views on how a child should be brought up.

She would remain a presence in the family for many years.

The household also employed housemaids, a parlour maid and a gardener.

It was an Edwardian world, with a rhythm of its own, in which every person had a

place.

The Millers were not rich in the way that great families were rich, but they

were comfortably off, and the child grew up with a settled sense that the world

was safe.

There was always food on the table, there was always a fire in the grate,

there was always a person nearby who loved her.

This was, as she herself would observe in later life, the greatest gift of her

childhood, and one that she did not understand until she was grown.

Because she was alone so much, she invented companions.

She made up imaginary friends, a group of children who lived with her in the

nursery. She gave them names, and she had long conversations with them.

She invented a whole family of kittens known as the kittens, and she was the

mother of them, and kept their stories going from day to day.

She described the kittens years later.

as a family that she was deeply devoted to.

The imagination that would later produce so many mysterious plots was already at

work, and it was entirely at home in the quiet of a Devon nursery.

She was also, it must be said, a very timid child.

She was afraid of strangers.

She was afraid of being asked a question she could not answer.

She was afraid, in particular, of a figure in her nursery imagination whom

she called the gunman.

a shadowy man who lived, as she imagined, in the places where one could

not quite see.

This fear, which she described in her autobiography with a certain amused

honesty, would stay with her in some form for many years.

But it was also perhaps a seed.

A child who learns to fear the unseen learns also to wonder about it and to

imagine what lies behind a door.

Her mother Clara had a theory about education.

She believed that children should not be taught to read too early.

She believed that the mind should be allowed to develop in its own time, and

that learning to read before the age of eight was bad for the health.

Agatha, however, was a child who wanted to read.

She had seen the books, and she wanted them.

In secret, with a determination that must have been remarkable in a child of

four or five, she taught herself.

She asked questions of the family, she studied the pages, and she puzzled out

the letters.

One day, to everyone's astonishment, she was found reading.

Clara, to her credit, let it be.

The child had taught herself, and the world of books lay open before her.

It was the beginning of a lifelong love.

she read the stories of mrs molesworth she read the fairy tales she read the

novels that were left lying about the house and she discovered in the library

of her grandmother's house in ealing the great pleasure of a shelf of books of

her own choosing she would never be without a book again the girl who sat on

the nursery floor at ashfield turning pages and inventing kittens could not

have known where this would lead.

But the first elements were all in place.

There was a quiet, observant child.

There was an attentive mother who believed in leaving her alone.

There was a house full of stories.

And there was a town, full of old ladies and retired officers, who would one day

become the villagers of St Mary Mead.

Now the child was growing, and the world was widening.

Soon she would meet the people who shaped her and suffer the first great

loss of her life.

There were two houses in Agatha Miller's early life, and they were very different

from each other.

The first was Ashfield, the seaside home of Sunshine and Kittens.

The second was the large house in Ealing, where her grandmother lived.

Aunty Granny, as the girl called her, was a formidable Victorian lady.

She was the widow of Frederick's father and the aunt of Clara.

She was rich, and she lived in the manner of the well-to-do elderly, with a

household of servants, a great deal of heavy furniture, and a ritual of meals

that did not change from year to year.

Her house was full of curiosities.

The dining table was laid with a great quantity of silver.

The cupboards were filled with china.

and with stores of food and with oddments that had been collected over

decades. The little girl was taken there on visits, and was both thrilled and

subdued by it.

She remembered it as a house of mysteries and abundance, where a child

could explore for hours.

Auntie Granny had firm views.

She believed in order, in good manners, and in a particular sort of fine living.

She also had a quality that appealed to the child.

which was a shrewd and sceptical eye.

She was suspicious of servants, of tradesmen, and of anyone who seemed too

agreeable. She expected the worst of people, and she was frequently right.

Her granddaughter would later say that her grandmother had taught her a good

deal about human nature, and that what she'd learned was that it was wise to be

on one's guard.

It is a lesson that would serve a writer of detective stories well.

Visits to Ealing were a regular part of the year.

In the memory of the grown woman, that house on Ashfield stood out as the two

pillars of her childhood.

The family, meanwhile, was growing older.

Madge had been sent away to school in Paris, and when she returned she married

a man named James Watts and went to live in the north of England, in a large

house called Abney Hall in Cheshire.

Abney Hall was grand.

Victorian Gothic and full of staircases and corridors and the young Agatha loved

to visit.

In later years she would use it as the model for more than one fictional house.

Monty went into the army and then travelled and was often elsewhere.

The house at Ashfield was left to the parents and the youngest girl.

Agatha was educated at home.

This was not unusual for a girl of her class, but in her case it was thorough

and also unusual.

She was taught by her mother and by governesses who came and went, and later

by teachers who came to the house for particular subjects.

She learned French.

She learned arithmetic, which she loved, and for which she had a real gift.

She enjoyed numbers and puzzles.

She liked the neat answers that came at the end of a sum.

She took dancing lessons and music lessons and she was taught to play the

piano. She read widely and chose her own books.

For a short time she went to a small school in Torquay run by a Miss Geyer.

She attended on a few days of the week and took classes in the afternoon and

enjoyed it in a modest way.

But she was a girl who did her best learning alone.

She was shy.

and it is worth saying again how shy.

As a child she would hide behind a chair when visitors came.

As an adolescent she would lose her voice if she had to speak in front of

strangers.

She had a horror of being noticed.

She would, in later life, find ways to manage this, but she never quite lost

it, and when she became world famous she would continue to feel, as she put it, a

little out of place when people stared at her. She said she did not think of

herself as clever, and that she was happiest when nobody was looking.

Yet she was not unhappy.

She was a contented child and a cheerful one, with a talent for amusing herself.

She made up plays and acted them out with friends.

She wrote little verses.

she took part in the amateur theatricals that her father loved so much she built

doll's houses of the imagination and she walked in the devon countryside on the

moors and on the cliffs by the sea there was however a more serious matter Her

father, Frederick, had begun to have money worries.

He was a man who had never been good with business.

His income came partly from investments and partly from property in America, and

as the years passed, his affairs began to go wrong.

A series of poor decisions and some bad luck and the slow erosion of the income

that he had relied upon put the family finances under strain.

It was not a catastrophe yet, but it was a cloud.

The servants were reduced.

Expenses were cut.

And Frederick, who was not strong and was beginning to show his age, grew

anxious and tired.

Then came the winter of 1901.

Frederick caught a chill and it turned to pneumonia.

He was ill for some time.

The family gathered. The doctors came.

And in the last days of November, he died.

He was 55 years old. His youngest daughter was 11.

She never forgot it.

She described the days afterward with the clear, unvarnished precision of a

person who remembers every detail of a thing that mattered.

The house was hushed. The curtains were drawn.

The grown people moved about in a daze. Her mother, Clara, who had been so

devoted to her husband, was shattered.

and the child, who had lost the person who had made the whole world seem safe,

was sent away to stay with friends, and learned the hard lesson that love does

not protect one from loss.

In the autobiography she wrote about her father's death with a tenderness that is

still moving to read, she said that he was a man who'd been loved by everyone.

She said that the house was never the same afterward.

And she said, with a candour that was typical of her, that after his death the

family's money troubles became serious and that it was her mother who bore the

brunt of it.

Clara, left a widow in her fifties, with a daughter at home and an income that

was much smaller than before, took stock.

She was a woman of extraordinary resilience.

She did not collapse.

She managed the household, dismissed the unnecessary staff and kept Ashfield

going on a budget that would have defeated a less determined person.

She turned to her daughter for company.

They became close in a way that is often possible between a widowed mother and

her youngest child.

Agatha later wrote that her mother was one of the people she most admired and

that they shared a private understanding.

The two women lived together at Ashfield for many years, and the bond between

them was deep.

It was not an easy time. There was little money to spare.

The house was large and in need of repair, and the girl was growing up in a

world that did not yet know what to do with clever young women.

But she had her books, and her piano, and her mother, and she had a streak of

cheerfulness that no sorrow could quite dim.

At fifteen she wrote a short story.

It was the first thing she had ever written, as far as she could remember,

and she wrote it, as she said, in bed during an illness.

It was a ghost story, and it was followed by others.

Her sister Madge, who was now a married woman with a wicked sense of humour, was

an early reader, and encouraged her.

Some of these early efforts were gloomy.

and rather melodramatic as the writings of the young Othanar.

One was called The House of Beauty, a story of a lonely man with a haunted

house. Another was a tale of sorrowful lovers in a desert.

She sent some of them to magazines, and they came back with polite notes of

refusal. She was not discouraged.

She simply kept writing, and kept putting the pages in a drawer.

She was also a gifted musician,

She had a pleasant voice and a decent talent at the piano.

Her mother, who had her own plans, decided that the girl should go to Paris

to study.

In those years it was customary for a young English woman of the middle class

to spend a season or two on the continent, to finish her education, to

learn French and to be introduced to the world.

Clara may also have had in mind the idea that her daughter might become a

professional musician.

It was a plan that mixed ambition with affection.

And so, in about the year 1906, Agatha Miller, aged 16, went

to Paris.

She stayed in a pension, a small boarding house run by a Mademoiselle

Boyer, and then at a finishing school kept by a Miss Dryden.

She took lessons in singing and in piano.

She lived a regulated life, with other English and American girls, and her days

were filled with scales and exercises.

She enjoyed the city. She enjoyed the shops, the cafes, the evenings at the

opera. She also found that she was homesick, and that the French were

rather amusing and rather alarming.

The singing, in the end, did not come to much.

She had a true voice, but a small one.

and her teachers told her that it would not be strong enough for opera, and the

piano, though she played it nicely, was not enough for a concert career.

Worse, she found that when she sat down to perform before an audience, her

nerves overcame her.

Her hands shook, her mind went blank, and her old terror of being looked at

returned in full force.

A career on the stage was impossible.

She accepted it with a mixture of disappointment and relief.

She came home to Torquay in 1908 or thereabouts, with a good command of

French and a sense of having seen something of the world, and she settled

into the life that was expected of a girl of her kind, which was to wait for

a husband.

In the winter of 1910, Clara, whose health was not good, decided to spend a

season in Cairo.

This was a fashionable thing to do. The climate was dry and warm, the hotels

were comfortable, and the British army was in residence, so that there were

plenty of dances and parties.

Clara took her daughter with her. They stayed for about three months, and the

young woman from Torquay, who had never been farther than Paris, found herself

in a city of minarets and bazaars, with the pyramids on the horizon and the Nile

at the door.

she loved it she danced almost every night she went to the races she watched

the camels in the street she was introduced to a succession of young

officers and she received a number of proposals she was not yet twenty-one and

she was by her own cheerful admission enjoying herself immensely it is hard

not to think that something of that egyptian winter lingered in her mind and

that when she came to write Death on the Nile a quarter of a century later, she

was remembering the heat of the sun on the river.

The trip in the end did not produce a husband, but it produced, perhaps, a

novel.

While she was in Cairo, or soon after, she wrote a longer story, a novel set in

the Egyptian desert, with the wistful title Snow Upon the Desert.

She wrote it under a pen name She showed it to a neighbour in Torquay, the

novelist Eden Philpotts, a well-known writer of Devon stories who lived nearby

and was a friend of the family.

He read the manuscript and gave her generous advice.

He told her where the story was weak.

He encouraged her to go on.

He also introduced her to his own literary agent who returned the novel

with regret.

Nothing came of it.

But the kindness of an established writer meant a great deal to the young

woman, and she remembered him with gratitude for the rest of her life.

By the age of twenty-two then, Agatha Miller had learned to read in secret,

had lost a father, had studied in Paris, had danced in Cairo, and had written

and failed to publish a novel.

She was pretty, cheerful, and quiet.

She was engaged for a short time to a young officer named Reggie Lucy, whom

she liked very much, though the engagement came to nothing.

She was waiting, as the saying goes, for her life to begin.

In October of 1912 she went to a dance.

It was held at Ugbrook House, a country house near Torquay belonging to Lord

Clifford.

Agatha was staying with friends, and she went to the party in a new dress.

and there, among the guests, was a young man in uniform whom she had not met

before. He was tall, fair, and good-looking, with a confident manner

and a reputation for being dashing.

His name was Archibald Christie.

He was a lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery, and he was a pilot in the

making for he had a passion for flying machines, which were then a daring

novelty. He asked her to dance.

He danced very well.

He asked her to dance again.

They were, as she said later, swept off their feet.

Within a short time he was calling on her at Ashfield.

Within a few months he was in love, and within a year he had asked her to marry

him. Her mother was not delighted.

Clara thought the young man impulsive and penniless, and she worried that he

would not provide for her daughter.

The two were in no position to marry.

Archie had a small income and a precarious career, and he was about to

be transferred to the new Royal Flying Corps.

They became engaged, but the wedding would have to wait.

Then, in the summer of 1914, the world changed.

In August, Britain went to war, and a young man in uniform and a young woman

in a seaside town discovered that waiting was no longer possible.

War came to Torquay quietly, as it came to most of England, in the form of

notices pinned to doors, and young men disappearing from the streets, and a

change in the sound of the trains.

In the first weeks of August the town was still in its summer dress.

The regatta had been held.

The visitors were still on the promenade.

But within days the territorials were marching. The shops were running short

of sugar.

and the first rumours of casualties were drifting back across the Channel.

Archie Christie was among the first to go.

He was an officer, a trained pilot, and a member of the Royal Flying Corps,

which was still so new that its aeroplanes were made largely of wood,

wire and fabric.

In the autumn of 1914 he was sent to France.

He was 25 years old, and he had a gift for the work.

His fiancée stayed behind in Devon with her mother and waited for letters.

Then, in December, Archie came home on a short leave.

He had been given a few days and he had decided that they would not be wasted.

He proposed that they marry at once.

There would be no grand wedding, no long engagement and no waiting for a better

time. Better times, he said, were not going to come.

Clara Miller had her doubts, as she had always had, but the war had changed her

view, as it changed so many.

She could see that the young couple were devoted, and she could see that nothing

was certain.

On the 24th of December 1914,

Agatha Miller and Archibald Christie were married by special licence in a

church in Bristol, with very little ceremony.

It was a quiet, hurried wedding, arranged within a day or two, and

attended by a handful of family.

The bride, as she later recalled, wore a simple travelling outfit.

There was no honeymoon to speak of.

By the 28th, Archie was on his way back to the war.

Consider the strangeness of it.

A girl who had spent her whole youth in the quiet of a Devon villa, wrapped in

the routines of the Edwardian world, was suddenly a married woman with a husband

in the air over France.

The world that had made her was ending, though she did not yet understand it.

She went home to Ashfield, took off her gloves and began to think about what she

could usefully do.

The answer was nursing.

Like thousands of other young women of her class, she joined the Voluntary Aid

Detachment. the volunteer organisation that supplied nurses for the war

hospitals.

Torquay's town hall was converted into a hospital for wounded soldiers and she

went to work there in a plain uniform with her hair pinned beneath a white

cap. She worked long shifts, often through the night.

She scrubbed floors, changed dressings, carried trays and sat beside men who

were frightened or in pain or simply lonely.

She was, by her own account, rather good at it. She was calm, she was practical,

and she did not faint at the sight of blood which surprised her.

It was hard, humble work and she did it for years.

In the memory of those who passed through the hospital, she was a quiet,

kindly presence, always ready with a cup of tea.

She would later say that she had learned more about human beings in those wards

than in all her years of reading.

In 1916, a change came.

Agatha was offered the chance to work in the hospital dispensary, the small room

where medicines were prepared.

It was a quieter post, with more regular hours, and she took it gladly.

She studied for the examination of the apothecary's hall, and she passed.

She learned the names of drugs, and how they were weighed and measured and

mixed.

She learned which of them were dangerous.

She learned the doses that healed and the doses that killed.

She stood in a small room, lined with bottles, in a hospital in Devon in the

middle of a world war, and she acquired the knowledge that would make her

famous. It is one of the most curious facts of literary history.

In Agatha Christie's books, poison appears again and again.

arsenic, strychnine, cyanide, digitalis, hemlock and many others, and the details

are almost always correct.

A pharmacist reading her novels today will often find that the symptoms are

accurately described and that the chemistry is sound.

She herself said that the dispensary was the ideal place for a person who wished

to write detective stories because it was full of poisons and because she

found them interesting.

A later admirer, a toxicologist, even observed that her descriptions of the

effects of thallium in one novel were so precise that a nurse recognised the

symptoms in a real patient and saved the patient's life.

It is a remarkable thing to say of any writer, and it speaks of the care that

she took.

But we are getting ahead of the story in the evenings after her shifts she was

still reading.

and one particular kind of book was her favourite.

She had loved Sherlock Holmes since childhood, and she had read the French

novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux with great admiration.

She liked puzzles, and she liked the clean, orderly pleasure of a solution.

And she had a sister who liked to tease her.

Madge was a great reader of detective stories.

and had once, for the amusement of it, challenged her younger sister.

She said that Agatha could not write a really good one.

She said that it was much harder than it looked.

A detective story, she said, needed a real puzzle, with clues laid fairly

before the reader, and a solution that was surprising but inevitable.

Agatha, who was not combative by nature, found that she could not let it pass.

She thought she might try.

The plan came together slowly, over a period of months.

She thought about the story as she measured medicines.

A poison, she decided, would be the weapon.

A country house would be the setting, a large and comfortable one, with a rich

old woman as the victim and a household full of people who might have wished her

dead.

She worked out the method of the crime and the clues that would point to it.

and she needed a detective.

She did not want a policeman.

She did not want a Sherlock Holmes with his violin and his cocaine.

And here, once again, Torquay gave her what she needed.

Because of the war, the town had received a number of refugees from

Belgium who had fled the German invasion in 1914.

They were housed in the neighbourhood, and she saw them about the streets.

There was a colony of them.

living in Torquay, in a state of grief and displacement.

It struck her that a Belgian refugee might make a most original detective.

He would be a foreigner, which would make him a figure of fun to English

characters. He would be a retired police officer, with a lifetime of experience.

He would be small and fussy and neat and absurdly vain.

And beneath all that he would be very, very clever.

She named him Hercule Poirot.

The first name, she said later, was a rather grand one, like Hercules, who was

a very large man, and the contrast pleased her.

The surname she took from somewhere in the air, and she never could say exactly

where. She gave him an egg-shaped head, a pair of enormous moustaches, and a

habit of speaking of his little grey cells.

And she began to write.

She wrote when she could, in snatches, and in the end, to finish the work, she

did something unusual.

She took a leave of about two weeks, in 1916, and went to stay at a hotel on

Dartmoor, a place called the Moorland Hotel, near Hayter.

It was a quiet hotel, set among the great brown hills, with a view of the

Tours and the Sheep.

She took a room and sat down every day and wrote.

She told no one at the hotel what she was doing, and at the end of her stay

she had the first draft of a novel. She called it The Mysterious Affair at

Stiles. She typed it and posted it to a publisher, and then the long wait began.

Here it is worth pausing, because this is the part of the story that all

aspiring writers should know.

The first publisher returned the manuscript.

The second returned it.

Several others did the same.

Some of them gave short notes, saying that the book was not quite suited to

their lists.

Some gave no reason at all.

She put the manuscript back in its wrapping and sent it out again and put

the whole matter at the back of her mind.

Then, in 1917, a hopeful sign arrived.

A publisher called John Lane of the Bodley Head, a firm in London, showed

interest.

They held on to the manuscript.

They asked for changes.

They asked her to rewrite the final scene, which took place in a courtroom

and which they thought was unconvincing.

She rewrote it.

And then, as often happens in the publishing world, they said nothing.

Month followed month.

The war went on, and the manuscript sat in a drawer at the Bodley Head while its

author went back to her dispensary.

Year after year, as the saying goes, the world moved on.

By 1918, the war was nearly over.

In November, the armistice came and the church bells rang across Devon.

Archie came home, a decorated officer with the rank of Colonel, and was given

a position at the Air Ministry in London.

The young couple were reunited after four years of separation.

and they had to learn how to live together.

They took a small flat in London, and they furnished it, and they began their

married life in earnest.

On the 5th of August 1919 in Ashfield their daughter was born.

They named her Rosalind.

She was a bright, sturdy, lively little girl, and her mother adored her.

Agatha was 28.

and for the first time in her life she had a child of her own to care for.

It was a joy to her, and it would remain one all her life.

Rosalind would grow up to be, in her mother's words, a person of strong and

independent character, and the two would become very close.

And at about this time, almost two years after she had first sent it, the bodily

head wrote to her.

They would publish the mysterious affair at Stiles.

She was thrilled.

though she did not show it.

But when she read the contract she was less pleased.

It was a hard bargain.

The publisher offered her a very small share of the profits, and demanded that

she write five more books for them on the same terms, with an option on each.

She was a young, inexperienced writer, with no agent and no one to advise her,

and she signed.

In later years she would regret it.

and would spend a good deal of time trying to untangle herself from the

agreement. But at the moment, she was simply glad.

Her book was going to be printed.

The first edition appeared in America in 1920 and in Britain in January of

1921. It was received kindly.

The reviewers called it clever and well-constructed. A newspaper serialised

it and paid her a modest sum.

It did not make her rich.

It sold a few thousand copies.

It was, in the end, a modest beginning.

But it was a beginning, and there was a small, unexpected thing.

A Belgian detective had walked into English fiction, and he was not going to

leave.

Hercule Poirot, the little man with the egg-shaped head, had his first case, and

he would solve 33 novels and more than 50 short stories before he was done.

His creator had no idea of this.

She was simply a young mother in a London flat who had won a bet with her

sister. She was thirty years old.

The next chapters of her life would be a mixture of happiness and sorrow, of

triumph and of strange darkness, and the first great test was already

approaching.

The early 1920s were busy.

Happy years in the life of Agatha Christie, though they were not without

their anxieties.

The flat in London was small, the money was tight.

Archie, who had left the Air Force, had taken a job in the city, in the world of

finance, and was not earning as much as he had hoped.

The couple employed a nanny for Rosalind, and a maid, and had to count

the pennies.

Agatha's earnings from her writing at this stage were a welcome supplement,

but they were not yet a fortune, she went on writing.

In 1922, the Bodley Head published her second novel, The Secret Adversary.

It was a different kind of book, a lively adventure story about a pair of

young detectives, a man and a woman, who go into business together as private

investigators and become entangled with a secret conspiracy.

It was light, cheerful and full of energy, and it sold better than the

first.

In it she introduced two characters, Tommy and Tuppence, who would return in

later books and grow old along with their creator.

They were, in a sense, a portrait of the young couple she and Archie had been in

the happy days after the war.

Then came a chance that changed the pattern of her life.

Archie had been offered a place on an unusual expedition.

A man named Major Ernest Belcher was organising a tour of the British Empire

to promote the Great Empire exhibition planned for 1924 at Wembley.

The tour would travel to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and

Canada over the course of ten months.

Archie was invited to join as financial advisor, and Agatha… to the surprise of

everyone, was invited too.

There was a difficulty.

Rosalind was only two years old and could not be taken.

Agatha hesitated.

It was a very hard thing to leave a small child for ten months.

But her mother and her sister and the nurse all urged her to go and said that

the child would be perfectly well looked after.

She was twenty-nine.

She had never been farther than Egypt.

and she decided that she would do it. In January of 1922 they sailed.

It was the great adventure of her young life.

They went first to Cape Town and to Johannesburg, where she saw the gold

mines. They went to Australia, and then to New Zealand, where they stayed for

some weeks.

And in Hawaii and in South Africa she did something that was very unusual for

a woman of her time, and which she remembered with delight.

She learned to surf.

She stood on a board at Waikiki in Hawaii and at Muizenburg near Cape Town

and rode the great waves toward the shore.

She was, she said, one of the first English women to do so.

It was, she thought, one of the happiest things she ever did.

She returned from the tour sunburned, cheerful and full of stories.

She and Archie along the way had grown closer.

and Rosalind, when she got home, did not recognise her at first.

She wrote steadily after this.

In 1923 she published The Murder on the Links, and in 1924 a collection of

short stories about Poirot. She wrote about the Belgian detective's friend,

Captain Hastings, who was a bluff and slightly slow-witted narrator, the sort

of companion who helps the reader to feel clever.

In 1924 she wrote The Man in the Brown Suit, a lively adventure partly inspired

by her African trip, and she was gradually gaining readers.

Still, she was not yet a great success.

She wrote her books in odd moments.

She had no study. She had no desk that she liked.

She wrote as she would for the rest of her life, wherever there was a flat

surface. in whatever room was free, with a pencil, a notebook, and later a

typewriter. She said that she never needed anything special.

A kitchen table was enough.

A marble-topped washstand would do.

She said that the idea of a writer shutting herself away in a study was one

that seemed rather odd to her.

The real work was done in the head, while she was doing other things.

And then a change came.

In 1924, she moved from the Bodley Head to a new publisher, the firm of William

Collins. It was one of the most important decisions of her career.

With the help of a literary agent, a man named Edmund Cork, who would look after

her business affairs for decades, she freed herself from the old contract.

The firm of Collins offered her fair terms, and an editor who admired her

work. They would publish her books for the next 50 years.

In 1926, Collins published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

This is the book that made her name.

It was, and still is, one of the most famous detective novels ever written.

It is narrated by a country doctor in a quiet English village who is a friend

and helper to Hercule Poirot.

A wealthy man is found murdered in his study.

The suspects are many.

And at the end, in a solution that stunned its first readers, the murderer

is revealed.

We will not say who it is, for there may be someone listening who has not yet

read it.

But the solution broke a rule that readers had thought unbreakable, and it

did so without cheating, for every clue had been fairly given.

It was a daring piece of storytelling, and critics argued about it.

Some said it was a trick, others said it was a masterpiece, but everyone read it.

It established her as a writer of the first rank, and it made her, for the

first time, a person of real income.

She was 35 years old, and her career was beginning to take flight.

She had a loving husband, a healthy daughter, a growing reputation, and a

mother who was proud of her.

Everything seemed to be going well.

What she could not know was that the happiest chapter of her life was about

to close and that the next one would be the darkest.

The year 1926 began in sunshine and ended in a kind of fog.

In the spring, Agatha's mother Clara fell ill.

She had been in poor health for some time, with bronchitis and a weakness of

the chest, and in the early months of the year it grew worse.

Agatha went to Ashfield to be with her.

She sat by the bed.

She talked with her and read to her and did what a daughter does.

And on the 3rd of April, Clara Miller died at the age of 72.

It was the great sorrow of Agatha's adult life.

Her mother had been her closest friend, her advisor and her anchor.

They had lived together through the long years after her father's death.

In her

autobiography, she wrote of it with simple restraint.

She said that she felt as though the ground had been taken from beneath her

feet. There was worse to come.

The task of clearing Ashfield fell to her.

The house was filled with the accumulation of a lifetime, and it had

to be sorted and divided and closed.

She went there alone, for Archie was busy in London and did not come.

For weeks she lived in the quiet house, among the old furniture and the

cupboards full of her mother's things, and she was desperately tired and

unhappy.

The house in which she'd been a child was being unmade around her.

Meanwhile her marriage was changing.

Archie had grown distant.

He'd been spending his weekends away, playing golf with friends, and he'd been

increasingly absent from home.

In the early summer he was often elsewhere.

Agatha, in her grief, did not understand it.

She thought that he was simply tired or preoccupied with his work.

In August he told her the truth.

He said that he had fallen in love with another woman.

Her name was Nancy Neal, and she was a young woman whom he had met through

friends. a secretary who was a frequent golf partner.

He said that he wanted a divorce.

He said it plainly and without much feeling and she was stunned.

In the space of a few months she had lost her mother, her childhood home and

now her husband.

She was 35 years old with a seven-year-old daughter.

She told him that she would not agree at once.

She asked him to think it over.

They tried.

for a little while to carry on as before, but it was impossible.

On the 3rd of December 1926, a Friday, Archie left the house in Berkshire where

they were living, called Stiles, after her first novel, to spend the weekend

with friends and with Miss Neil.

There was a quarrel before he went, and that evening, at about 9.30, after

kissing her sleeping daughter goodnight, Agatha got into her car, a Morris

Cowley, and drove away into the dark.

She left a note for her secretary.

She was not seen again for eleven days.

The next morning the car was found.

It was at a place called Newlands Corner near Guildford in Surrey, a well-known

beauty spot on a chalk ridge above a quarry pit.

It was lying at the edge of a steep slope with its headlights off.

its bonnet pushed into the bushes and its front wheels hanging over the edge.

Inside were a fur coat, a small suitcase of clothing and her driving licence.

There was no sign of the driver. The police were called and as the news

spread the matter became a sensation.

The disappearance of Agatha Christie was reported in the newspapers on the front

page, day after day.

She was already well known.

and a mysterious disappearance of the author of mysterious stories was too

good for the press to ignore.

There were headlines in London, in New York, and across the world.

The Home Secretary was said to have taken an interest.

The police chiefs of several counties were told to look.

A thousand policemen were reported to be involved in the search.

Volunteers came by the thousand, and they combed the woods and the hills and

the heaths of Surrey.

Aeroplanes flew overhead.

Dogs were brought in.

A pond in the area called the Silent Pool was dragged.

And over the fields, in a cold December, the searchers walked in long lines,

looking for a woman who might be lost, or hurt, or dead.

There was a great deal of speculation.

Some people said that she had been murdered, perhaps by her husband, who

had a clear reason for wanting her out of the way.

and who was, in the public mind, under suspicion.

Some said she'd committed suicide.

Others said it was a publicity stunt, designed to sell her books.

Some suggested a more fanciful explanation.

The great writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a keen believer in spiritualism,

gave one of her gloves to a medium to see whether the spirit world could say

where she was.

The medium, it was reported, held the glove for a time and said that the woman

was alive, but that she was in a strange state of mind.

It was not a bad guess.

Archie, meanwhile, was questioned by the police.

He said that he knew nothing and that they had quarrelled.

He was a man in an awkward position and he said very little.

And in the middle of all this, in a large and cheerful hotel in a spa town

in the north of England,

quiet woman was sitting down to breakfast.

The town was Harrogate in Yorkshire.

The hotel was the Swan Hydropathic Hotel, a comfortable establishment where

visitors came to take the waters and to dance in the evenings and to play

billiards and cards.

A woman had arrived there on the Saturday after the disappearance by

train from London with a small amount of luggage.

she had signed the register under the name of mrs theresa neale of cape town

south africa the surname of course was the surname of the woman her husband

loved she stayed for eleven days she behaved perfectly normally she

joined in the life of the hotel she read the papers and was seen to look at the

very reports of her own disappearance she played the piano

She danced the Charleston in the evenings with the other guests.

She took part in a game of billiards. She took the baths. She was observed to

be pleasant, a little reserved, and rather charming.

One or two people noticed that she looked rather like the missing author,

but it was not thought likely, and no one said anything for some days.

Then, on the evening of the 14th, A member of the hotel's band, a man named

Bob Tappin, who had been looking at the newspaper photographs, was sure that he

knew her.

He told the manager, the police were called, and Archie Christie, who had

been summoned, came north by train.

He found her sitting in the hotel and she looked at him, he later said,

without recognising him.

Or at least without admitting that she did.

He said that she was a person of curious calm.

The meeting was brief.

She went with him and she went home, and the hunt, to the great relief of

everyone, was over.

Then the questions began.

What had happened?

Why had she gone?

Why Harrogate, and why that name?

To this day, nobody knows for certain.

The family gave out an explanation.

Two doctors who examined her said that she was suffering from a loss of memory,

a kind of amnesia, brought on by the shock of her bereavement and her marital

troubles. That became the official account.

It may be true.

Medical men of the time spoke of a condition called a fugue state, in which

a person under great stress may wander away, assume a different identity, and

later have no clear memory of it.

It is a recognised phenomenon, and the circumstances of her life that year,

with the death of her mother, the collapse of her marriage, and her

exhausted state, were precisely such as might bring it on.

Others suspected that she had acted deliberately.

Some said that she had wished to embarrass her husband by letting the

world see where his behaviour had led.

The choice of the name Neil seems pointed.

Others said that she had been seeking an escape, a pause in which to think, and

had not meant to cause such alarm.

A few biographers have thought that she was in a state of real mental distress

and that she was close to a breakdown, and a few have suggested that the whole

thing had been planned.

We have no way to know.

What we do know is that Agatha Christie herself, for the rest of her life, would

never discuss it.

In her autobiography, written decades later, she skipped over the episode

almost entirely.

She gave it a few quiet lines, saying only that after her mother's death and

her husband's departure, she'd been very unhappy and that she had been ill.

She chose to leave the matter in silence.

And there is something fitting about this.

The Queen of Mystery who explained everything in the last chapter left one

mystery of her own entirely unsolved.

It was a bitter time.

The press had been merciless. Public sympathy was mixed.

Some thought she had behaved foolishly, and some thought she had behaved

cruelly, and some, kinder, thought she had suffered.

She withdrew from the world.

She did not give interviews for many years.

She was, as she had always been, a shy woman.

And the experience made her more guarded still.

Archie and Agatha were divorced in 1928.

He married Nancy Neal soon afterward.

And Agatha, with her daughter, began to put her life together again.

She did what she always did.

She wrote.

She finished the book that she'd been working on, which was perhaps a little

hurried, but which kept her going.

She published a collection of stories.

She travelled, with Rosalind and a maid, to the Canary Islands in the winter of

1927 and 1928, and there she rested in the sun and wrote and

found that her spirits were slowly mending.

She had decided that the best answer to sorrow was work, and she was going to

stay at it.

She also decided that she would keep the name Christy. It was the name on her

books. and the name that the world knew.

It was in a sense a gift from the husband who had left her, and she would

make it famous.

And now, in the winter of 1928, with her life in ruins and her daughter at her

side, she would make a decision that seemed, at the time, almost an act of

whim, but which would turn out to be the most important of her life.

She would go to the Middle East.

The idea came, in a roundabout way, from a dinner party.

Agatha was sitting at a table in London in the autumn of 1928 when she fell into

conversation with a couple who had lately returned from Baghdad.

They spoke warmly of the East.

They spoke of the desert and the old cities and the journey by train, and one

of them mentioned the Orient Express.

She had always wanted to travel on it.

The great train ran from Calais in France, across Europe to Istanbul, and

its name conjured all the romance of foreign lands.

She had read of it in novels.

She had longed for years to ride on it herself.

Now, at the age of 38, with her life in disorder and a daughter who could be

left safely at school, she decided that she would simply go.

She went to the travel office and booked a ticket.

A few days later she was on her way.

It was a wonderful journey.

She travelled across France, through the Alps and down through Yugoslavia, in a

comfortable carriage with a small bag and a notebook.

She saw the lights of Venice at one point from the train and the great

plains of the Balkans.

She came to Istanbul and was charmed by the minarets and the sea.

She went on by another train across Turkey and Syria, and then by a long

motor journey across the desert to Baghdad.

There she stayed, for a time, and she was fascinated by everything.

The markets, the river, the old streets, the people.

She had never been happier in her life, she said, than on that trip.

And she was told by someone she met that she must see Ur.

Ur was an ancient city in the south of Iraq, the city, according to tradition,

from which the biblical Abraham had set out.

It had been excavated since 1922 by an English archaeologist named Leonard

Woolley, working for the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania.

Woolley had made astonishing discoveries.

In a great cemetery, he had uncovered the royal tombs of Ur.

with their golden helmets, their lyres, and the bodies of attendants buried with

their rulers, from about 2,500 years before the birth of Christ.

It was among the most spectacular archaeological sites in the world.

She went there. She was welcomed by Woolley and his wife, Catherine, and she

was shown over the dig.

She stood on the edge of the ancient city in the dry air.

Watching the workmen carefully uncover the past layer by layer, it made a

profound impression.

She'd always had a feeling for the old, and for the patient business of sifting

and fitting and discovering.

Here was a kind of detective work on the grandest scale in which the clues were

thousands of years old.

She stayed a few days.

She met the staff of the expedition.

She liked it very much.

and she went home to England with a new love, which would stay with her all her

life. She wanted to come back.

In 1929 she travelled again, this time to Baghdad and Syria, and in the early

months of 1930 she went to Ur once more.

Woolley and his wife welcomed her warmly, and this time among the members

of the team was a young man whom she had not met before.

His name was Max Malowan.

He was a young archaeologist, 25 years old, a quiet, scholarly, good-natured

Englishman who had studied at Oxford and was already making his mark.

He was assisting Woolley as a junior member of the staff, and Catherine

Woolley, who had a great fondness for arranging things, asked him to show

Agatha around the district.

He did so.

He took her to see the sights.

and the old mounds and the surrounding country.

They talked, and they discovered that they got on rather well.

He was shy, like her.

He was amused by the same things.

He was thoughtful and kind and capable.

He loved his work and he loved to talk about it. And she, who had spent the

last years of her life being rather lonely, found that she liked being with

him very much.

Then, Something happened.

Agatha received a telegram from England saying that Rosalind was ill. She had to

leave at once.

Her plan was to take the train home, but a flood on the route had washed out part

of the railway and she could not go by the usual way.

Catherine Woolley asked Max to escort her, by an overland route, across the

desert and on to Europe.

It was a long journey, over several days, by car and by train, through the

wild country of Syria, and it threw the pair together.

By the time they reached the end of it, they were, in a quiet way, in love.

Rosalind, as it happened, recovered.

And back in England, Agatha was left to consider her situation.

She was forty, Max was twenty-five.

He was fourteen years younger than she.

It was a gap that, at that period, would raise eyebrows.

She herself was uneasy about it.

She was divorced with a child.

She'd been burned once.

She thought that a younger man would surely tire of her.

Max, however, did not.

He wrote to her, and he visited, and he proposed.

And in the end, she said yes.

They were married on the 11th of September, 1930, in Edinburgh.

in a small quiet ceremony at a church called St Cuthbert's. There were few

guests. It was a long way from the first wedding in the shadow of the war.

The bride was happy and rather amazed.

In her autobiography she wrote that she had never expected to be happy again in

that way and that she was grateful.

It was, by all accounts, one of the great successes of her life.

The marriage lasted 45 years.

It was not without difficulties, and Max had his own interests and there would be

times of strain.

But it was a deep and enduring partnership, built on shared tastes, on

mutual respect, and on a great deal of humour.

Max loved her books, and she loved his work.

He was endlessly curious, she was endlessly kind, and in the dry deserts

of Iraq and Syria, They found the setting for a long and contented life.

She often joked that an archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have,

because the older she gets the more interested he is in her.

It is one of her best-known remarks.

It is not quite true of Max, who was devoted to her from the beginning.

But it is typical of her gentle, dry wit.

From then on, for many years, the two of them spent their winters in the east.

Max conducted his excavations at sites in Syria and in Iraq, and Agatha went

with him.

She did not merely sit and watch.

She helped.

She cleaned and labelled the finds.

She photographed them, and she developed the pictures herself with a small

improvised darkroom.

She learned to clean ivories.

with a knitting needle and a pot of face cream, a technique that she was proud

of. She sat in the camps, in the evenings, under the lamp, and wrote her

books. And in the cool of the early morning she watched the sun come up over

the mounds of ancient cities.

It was a new life, and it suited her entirely.

If there was a golden age in the life of Agatha Christie, it was the decade that

followed her marriage to Max.

The 1930s were the years in which her fame became settled, her income grew

large, and her way of life became comfortable.

They were also the years in which she wrote many of the books by which she is

best remembered.

She wrote at astonishing speed.

In the single decade of the 30s she published well over a dozen novels about

Hercule Poirot alone, and a number of others besides.

In 1930 came Murder at the Vicarage.

the first book to introduce the village of St Mary Mead and its most famous

resident, Miss Jane Marple.

Miss Marple was an elderly, gentle, rather fluffy-looking spinster who lived

in a cottage and knitted and kept a garden and apparently did nothing at

all. But she watched, she noticed, and when a crime occurred in the

neighbourhood, She would think of someone from the village who had behaved

in just the same way, and she would see through the matter at once.

The author said that Miss Marple was based in part on her own grandmother,

the formidable Auntie Granny of Ealing, who had expected the worst of everybody

and was generally right.

And there was a good deal of truth in that.

The old lady in Ealing, with her suspicious eye and her sharp tongue, had

taught her granddaughter a valuable lesson, which the granddaughter then

taught to the world.

People, it appeared, are much the same everywhere, and the quiet village with

its tea and its gossip and its garden fences is a place as full of passion as

any city.

In the same year, under a different name, she published something quite

different. She wrote a serious novel about a woman's life called Giant's

Bread. and she published it under the pen name Mary Westmacott.

She wished to see whether she could write a book that would stand on its

own, without the weight of her reputation, and for twenty years she

kept the secret.

She wrote six novels as Mary Westmacott, books of emotion and character, in which

no one is murdered, or at least not very much.

Few people knew.

The secret was not discovered until 1949, when a journalist made the

connection. She said afterward that she'd been very pleased and that it was

a joy to write in a different voice.

Now the great books came, one after another.

In 1934, she published Murder on the Orient Express.

She had been inspired, of course, by her own journey on the famous train.

and she'd been writing it in part while staying in Istanbul at the Pera Palace

Hotel.

It is the story of a luxury train snowbound in the Balkans, a murdered

American, and a carriage full of suspects of many nationalities.

Poirot interviews them all.

And the solution, once again, is one that readers had not expected.

It was drawn, in part, from a real and terrible event.

the kidnapping of the infant son of the aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1932, which

had shocked the world.

The book was an immense success and was later filmed more than once.

In 1935 she wrote Three Act Tragedy. In 1936, Cards on the

Table and Murder in Mesopotamia, which drew directly on her days at the digs.

In 1937 came Death on the Nile.

set aboard a steamer on the Great River, in which a rich young woman is shot, and

a cluster of passengers all have something to hide.

She had written it partly on her travels in Egypt, in a winter hotel at Aswan,

and one can feel the heat of the sun in the pages.

In 1938 came Appointment with Death, and in 1939 a book that would become the

best-selling mystery novel of all time.

It was first published under a title that we would not use today and which

was soon changed.

It is now known as And Then There Were None.

It tells of ten strangers, invited to a lonely island off the coast of Devon,

who are accused by a mysterious voice of past crimes and then are killed one by

one in accordance with a nursery rhyme.

By the end, no one is left.

The island is cut off.

the reader cannot guess who is doing it.

It is, by general agreement, one of the most ingeniously constructed books in

the language, and she herself said that it was the hardest she had ever written.

It has sold, over the decades, more than a hundred million copies.

Let us pause here, in the middle of the story, and look at the woman herself,

for the instruction of this tale is not only about what she did, but about who

she was.

She was in these years a large woman.

In her youth she'd been slim, fair-haired and pretty.

In her middle age she grew heavier, comfortable and rather matronly.

She had a round, pleasant face with blue eyes, a gentle smile and soft, greying

hair that she wore in a plain style.

She dressed in the loose, practical clothes of an Englishwoman of the

countryside, in tweeds and cardigans and sensible shoes, with a hat on special

occasions. She was not interested in fashion.

She had a rather shy, soft voice.

When she spoke to strangers, she was a little hesitant and often seemed vague.

Many people who met her thought that she must be a pleasant, rather

scatterbrained lady.

and was surprised to find that she had the mind of a mathematician.

She was a creature of habit.

She rose at a regular hour, and she took breakfast with her husband.

She liked a good breakfast.

She liked cream, and she was fond of puddings and cakes, and of Devonshire

clotted cream above all.

She had a famous sweet tooth.

She enjoyed her food, and she did not diet.

She said that a woman should eat what she liked.

She was fond of a cup of tea and had a taste for rich sticky cakes.

She also, as we noted earlier, was well known for eating apples in the bath.

It was one of her great pleasures and she said that it was an excellent way to

pass the time.

She took a long bath with a book and a bag of apples and ate them one after

another with the juice running down her hands and she was entirely content.

She loved her garden.

She loved the sea.

She loved to swim and to walk and to sit in the sun.

She loved to travel by train, by ship and in her later life by aeroplane.

She enjoyed the theatre and she was a lover of music.

She was, as a young woman, a good pianist and she kept up her playing.

She had a great love of dogs and kept several. She enjoyed card games.

She collected old furniture and old houses and had a good eye for a bargain.

She was a good, careful housekeeper and she liked to make a house comfortable.

She was, in particular, a buyer of houses.

She and Max, over the years, acquired a number of homes and she took great

pleasure in furnishing each.

She had an eye for a good house, as some people have for a good horse.

In 1934 they bought a house in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

called Winterbrook House, a large, pleasant Georgian building by the river,

which would be their principal home for the rest of her life.

And in 1938 she bought a place that she had loved since her childhood.

It was called Greenway.

It was a white Georgian house, set high on a wooded slope above the River Dart,

in the south of Devon, not far from her birthplace.

It had gardens that ran down to the water.

and a boathouse, and a view over the river that was, she said, the loveliest

she knew.

She bought it for a modest sum, and she made it a holiday home for the family.

She spent summers there, with her daughter and her grandchildren.

She wrote there, and she used it in at least one of her books, Dead Man's

Folly, and the setting of a number of others.

Today it belongs to the National Trust and visitors may walk through the rooms

where she lived and look at the river.

Her writing habits were unusual.

She had no fixed place.

She wrote when the mood took her and she wrote fast.

She would think out her plots at length, in the bath, or while doing the washing

up, or while taking a walk, and then, when the plan was ready, she would write

it down quickly.

She often dictated her novels in the later years into a machine and had them

typed. She kept dozens of notebooks, which her family discovered after her

death, filled with jottings, plot ideas, and scribbled lists of poisons and names

and places.

There are about 73 of these notebooks, and they are a rich treasure for those

who study her.

They are filled with half-formed ideas, with strange diagrams.

with crossed-out plans and with the evidence of a mind which was always at

work. She was a modest person.

She never thought of herself as a great writer.

She described herself in her later years as a sausage machine, for she turned out

books, as she said, in the same way a butcher turned out sausages.

She said that she had never expected to be famous.

and that when strangers asked for her autograph she found it quite

embarrassing. When filling in a form that asked for her profession, she's

said to have written for many years, not novelist, but married woman.

In later years she would say that she was a housewife who wrote books.

She was, more than anything, a private person.

She disliked reporters.

She disliked parties and speeches and public attention.

She would turn down invitations.

She seldom gave interviews.

She was warm and friendly with her family and her close friends, but for

the rest she kept to herself.

When she did attend a literary function, she was often silent.

She was, as she said, too shy.

And yet, among friends and family, she had a quiet, dry wit.

She enjoyed a joke.

She had an observant eye for absurdity. She wrote funny letters.

She enjoyed telling stories.

She could be teasing in a gentle way.

She was, as her grandson recalled, a very kind grandmother, with a gift for

making a child feel safe.

She had a way of saying very little and meaning a great deal.

Her relations with Max were affectionate and settled.

He was by this time a rising scholar.

and in the 30s he conducted important excavations in Syria, at the great

mounds of Tel Chaga Bazaar and Tel Brak, and at other sites in the valley of the

river Kabul.

Agatha went with him to many of them, and she wrote of those seasons with

enormous pleasure in a delightful little memoir called Come, Tell Me How You

Live, which she published in 1946.

It is a light, funny account of life on a dig.

with its mud-brick house, its fleas, its cheerful workmen and its endless small

crises. It is one of the best of her non-mystery books and it gives a picture

of a woman who was completely happy.

Rosalind, in the meantime, had grown up.

She'd been educated at school and at home and she was a lively, capable young

woman. In 1940 she married a young soldier named Hubert Pritchard.

Their son, Matthew, was born in 1943, and in 1944 Hubert

was killed in action.

Rosalind was left a widow with a young child.

Her mother, who had known such sorrow herself, was a great support.

In 1949 Rosalind married again, and her second husband, Anthony Hicks,

would remain with her all her life.

But we've gone ahead of ourselves.

and the war has not yet come into the story.

For the golden years of the 30s, like all golden years, had an end.

In September of 1939, the second great war of the century began, and

Agatha Christie, who was then 49 years old, with a place in the world, a

husband, a daughter, and a house on the river, would find herself once again at

work in a dispensary.

When war broke out in 1939, the household at Winterbrook House was

quickly caught up in it.

Max, who was 35, was needed for work.

He joined the Royal Air Force and was posted after some training to Libya in

North Africa, where he served with the Allied forces.

He was away for much of the war.

Rosalind, as we have seen, was married and living apart.

And Agatha.

after a few months decided that she too must do her part.

London was bombed.

The Blitz began in the autumn of 1940, and for months the city was attacked by

night, with great fires and heavy loss of life.

Agatha went up to London to a small flat in Lawn Road in Hampstead, and she took

a job as a volunteer in the dispensary of University College Hospital.

It was the same kind of work she had done in Torquay twenty-five years

before. She stood at a counter, weighing powders and measuring liquids, and

filling prescriptions.

She worked several days a week, in the plain clothes of a dispenser, and she

did her job with her usual quiet efficiency.

She was well liked there.

She was a pleasant, reliable colleague.

Few of her fellow workers knew that she was famous.

or if they did they were too polite to say.

She would take the bus to work, in the dark of the blackout, past the blasted

streets and the sandbags, and would go home at night to her small rooms to eat

a plain supper.

Her own house at Winterbrook was taken over for a time by evacuees, and her

London home at one point was damaged by bombs.

She was in short in the same position as many other people, and she did not

complain. and she kept writing.

In the middle of the war, she produced a number of her books. In 1941, she

published N or M, a story of spies and fifth columnists, featuring her young

detectives, Tommy and Tuppence, now middle-aged and eager to serve.

In 1942, she produced The Body in the Library, a Miss Marple novel, and in

1943, Five Little Pigs, a Poirot story.

which is regarded by many readers as one of her finest and a most subtle study of

memory and guilt.

She also wrote plays, and she wrote, in secret, two books that she was not

intended to publish until after her death.

This is an interesting story.

In the early years of the war, when the air raids were at their worst, she was

concerned that she might be killed.

She decided to provide for her family.

She would write final novels for her two great detectives, in which each of them

would meet his or her end, or at least bring their career to a close, and she

would put them away in a safe place to be published after her death, as a kind

of legacy for her daughter and her husband.

The book for Poirot she called Curtain.

The book for Miss Marple was called Sleeping Murder.

She wrote them in the early part of the war, in the dark of the Blitz.

and she locked them in a bank vault.

Then she went on with her life, and she more or less forgot about them.

They stayed in the vault for more than thirty years.

She had not intended them to be published in her lifetime, and she had

no idea that she would live to a great age.

When she did, she changed her mind about one of them, which we shall come to.

and the other, Sleeping Murder, was published after her death in 1976 in the

year she died and became one more bestseller.

Meanwhile, the war ended.

In 1945, the guns fell silent in Europe.

Max came home from Libya, thin and tanned, and the family were reunited.

The couple looked about them. The world had changed and England had changed.

The great houses were being sold, the old servants were gone.

Rationing continued for years.

The empire, which had been the backdrop of her youth, was dissolving.

But Max was keen to return to the field, and in 1949 he began a new set of

excavations at a site that would occupy him for the next ten years and which

would become the great work of his life.

It was called Nimrud.

It was an ancient Assyrian city on the banks of the Tigris River in northern

Iraq, not far from Mosul.

It had been the capital of the Assyrian kings in the 9th century before Christ,

and it had been uncovered in part by the Victorian excavator Austin Henry Layard

a century earlier.

Max, with the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, began to dig it

again.

and the finds were extraordinary.

There were great stone reliefs and treasures of carved ivory, of which many

hundreds were found in a well and in storerooms, richly decorated with scenes

from the ancient world.

They became among the most celebrated finds of the century.

Agatha was there season after season.

She helped to clean and catalogue the ivories.

She wrote in the evenings in the expedition house.

with its mud walls and its lamplight.

She worked at a table in a room which Max had built for her, and which she had

insisted should be plain.

She was in her sixties, and she was perfectly happy in the dust and the heat

among the stones of a vanished world.

It was a good life, and in time it brought new honours.

Max was knighted in 1968.

for his services to archaeology.

And that made his wife, in a sense, Lady Malouin, though she was far better known

by her other name.

Indeed, a joke went round that the Malouins among the archaeologists were

known for the fact that she was famous and he was not, and that it never

bothered him in the least.

He was proud of her, and she was proud of him.

They were a pair.

Now, in the years after the war, A new chapter opened, which would bring the

author into the theatre.

She had written plays before.

In 1930 she had written a play, Black Coffee.

In 1943 she adapted Ten Little Indians for the stage.

And in 1947 something happened that would change the history of English

theatre. She was asked to write a short radio play for the BBC.

to celebrate the 80th birthday of Queen Mary, the consort of King George V, who

was a devoted admirer of her books.

She wrote a short piece about a snowbound guesthouse, a murder and a

nursery rhyme.

She called it Three Blind Mice. It was broadcast and was well received.

Then she turned it into a short story.

And finally she turned it into a stage play with the new title, A new title was

suggested in time by her son-in-law. The new title was The Mouse Trap.

The play opened in London at the Ambassadors Theatre on the 25th of

November 1952.

It was a modest production with a small cast and a single set, and no one

expected it to last long.

The author herself thought that it might run for eight months.

She was wrong by a very wide margin.

It was a success from the first night and has been running ever since.

It moved in 1974 to a different theatre, St Martin's Next Door, and it has never

stopped, except for the closing of all theatres during the pandemic of 2020.

It is the longest continuously running play in the world.

At the end of each performance, the audience is asked to keep the secret of

the ending, and they have kept it.

to a remarkable degree for more than 70 years.

She gave the rights to the play as a birthday present to her grandson

Matthew, who was then nine years old.

It was one of the most generous gifts ever given.

She said, with her usual dry modesty, that she supposed it would be a useful

pocket money.

In fact, it brought him a large income for the rest of his life.

In the same year and the next, She was busy in the theatre.

In 1953 she wrote Witness for the Prosecution, a play based on one of her

short stories set in a courtroom, with a most devious and startling final scene.

It was a triumph in London and in New York and was made into a famous film in

1957 with Charles Lawton, Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich.

She herself considered it one of her best.

She had, at the age of 63, become the first lady of the English stage, with

more than one play running at the same time.

A newspaper noted in the middle of the 1950s that she was the only woman in the

world to have three plays running simultaneously in London's West End, and

as such was a record without parallel.

It was a long, bright afternoon, but the light was beginning to change.

The honours came late and gently.

as honours do for those who never seek them.

In 1956 she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire for her

services to literature.

In 1955 the Mystery Writers of America made her their first Grand Master.

In 1957 she became President of the Detection Club, the Society of British

Crime Writers.

whose members had long counted her among their founders in spirit, and she held

that office for the rest of her life.

And in the New Year Honours of 1971, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order

of the British Empire.

She was eighty years old.

She went to the palace to receive the honour, in a plain and sensible outfit,

and she was reported to be rather bewildered by the fuss.

Asked how it felt to be a Dame, She gave a modest answer.

She said that it was very nice, and that she supposed it was recognition that

detective stories had a place in the world.

It was a typical remark, and a generous one.

She spoke less of herself than of the craft she loved.

In these later years the pace of her work slowed, but it did not stop.

She wrote a new novel almost every year, as she had done since the twenties.

and her publishers had come to expect one for Christmas.

They were not all as sharp as the early ones, and she knew it.

Critics sometimes said that she was repeating herself, but there were many

good books among them.

In 1950 came A Murder Is Announced, a Miss Marple story, and in

1952 They Do It With Mirrors.

In 1957 came 450 from Paddington.

In 1961, The Pale Horse, in which thallium poisoning plays a part, and in

which her old knowledge of poisons was as sound as ever.

And in 1962, The Mirror Cracked from Side to Side.

She was by now in her seventies, and she wrote with the ease of long practice.

She had a way of working that she described with a certain amusement.

Each year, she said, she would begin a book with a feeling of horror, certain

that she had no idea at all what to write.

Then a plot would begin to form, often from a small detail, a name, a place,

a line in a newspaper, a stranger seen on a train.

She would turn it over in her mind for weeks, and then, as if by itself, the

thing would come.

She said that the difficulty was never the writing but the thinking, and that

she was always pleased to have it over.

She was, by now, a very wealthy woman.

Her books had been translated into dozens of languages.

They were read in Europe, in America, in India, in Japan, and in the Soviet

Union. At one time, she was said to be the most widely translated individual

author in the world.

Her plays were performed on stages everywhere.

Her stories were made into films and into radio plays, and later into

television series.

She had a considerable income, though. As she remarked, a great deal of it was

taken in tax.

She made little of her wealth. She lived, as she always had, in a

comfortable and unostentatious way.

She did not buy yachts or racehorses.

She bought houses and furniture and presents for her grandchildren.

There were also troubles.

She did not much like the films made of her books.

She felt that they distorted the stories.

She disliked the portrayals of Poirot that she saw, and she once said that she

could never find an actor who looked like the Belgian that she had imagined.

She was fond of one actress who played Miss Marple, and critical of others.

She grew rather weary of Poirot himself.

By the 1950s and 60s she admitted that she found him tiresome.

She called him an egocentric creep in a letter and wondered why she'd not killed

him off long before.

But the public would not let her. Her readers and her publishers demanded

more.

In her 70s she wrote an autobiography.

She had begun it in the 1950s in the East.

and she worked on it, in the odd hours, for some fifteen years.

She completed it in 1965 and put it away, with instructions that it should

not be published until after her death.

It was a long, warm, rambling book, full of the details of childhood and of

travel, and in it, with great charm, she looked back across eighty years.

It contains almost nothing about the year 1926.

but it contains the nursery at Ashfield, and the garden, and her mother, and the

kittens, and a great deal of laughter.

It is perhaps the best of her books for those who wish to know her.

As the 1960s went on, her health began to fail.

She was over 70, and she tired more easily.

She suffered from a persistent weakness of the legs.

Her handwriting, once clear, became shaky.

Her memory, which had been so reliable, began to let her down.

She would forget names and mislay things.

In her last novels, critics noticed a certain looseness and a failure of grip.

The great plotter was beginning to lose her touch.

In 1971 she wrote Nemesis, and in 1972 Elephants Can Remember.

in which an elderly writer of detective stories struggles to retrieve old

memories. There is something very touching in the choice of subject, and

in 1973 she published her last novel written in her own hand, Postern of

Fate, which was not a success.

She knew it. She was a realist, and she saw clearly what was happening.

In the last years, she did what she'd always done.

which was to set about arranging her affairs.

She remembered the novel that she had locked in the bank vault in 1940.

It was the last case of Hercule Poirot in which the little detective, old and

frail, returns to the House of Styles where he had first appeared and where,

in a final and rather terrible twist, the story ends.

She had written it so that the character she had created in a Devon dispensary

should have a fitting departure.

And now, with her own strength fading, she decided that the time had come.

She asked her publishers to bring it out.

Curtin was published in the autumn of 1975.

It was greeted with enormous interest.

Poirot, the most famous detective in the world after Sherlock Holmes, was dead.

And on the 6th of August in 1975,

the New York Times carried an obituary.

which we have mentioned on its front page.

It was headed Hercule Poirot is dead, and it ran to a couple of columns, a

unique tribute to a person who had never lived.

Readers across the world mourned him and wrote letters of sympathy.

His creator, then 84, was by this time too frail to take much notice of it.

But those around her said that she was quietly pleased.

She spent the last year of her life at Winterbrook House.

in Wallingford, where she'd lived for forty years.

She rarely went out.

She was cared for by her husband, her daughter and her servants.

She sat in her chair by the window, in the drawing room, with a rug over her

knees. She looked out at the garden and the river.

She read and listened to the radio and had visits from her family.

Her grandson came and her great-grandchildren.

She was rather deaf and rather weak, but, her family said, she was untroubled

and kindly, and she remained, in a gentle way, entirely herself.

Her husband, who was then seventy-one, was beside her.

They had been married for forty-five years.

By every account it had been a partnership of rare contentment.

And now we come to the end of her story.

It is a quiet end.

as she would have wished.

In the first days of January 1976 the weather in Oxfordshire was cold with the

grey damp light of the English winter.

The garden at Winterbrook House was bare.

The river lay low and still.

In the house the fires were lit and the curtains drawn against the early dark.

Agatha Christie had been unwell for some weeks.

She had caught a chill which In a woman of 85 was a matter of concern.

She was in her bed, in her own room, where she could see the trees.

Her family were with her.

The doctor had been and had said that she was not in pain and was simply very

tired. On the 12th of January, a Monday, in the afternoon, she died.

It was a peaceful death, at home, in her own house.

and it was caused, according to the record, by natural causes, a failure of

the heart following the illness of the previous weeks.

Her husband and her family were near.

There was no struggle.

She slipped away, as the saying goes, in her sleep, or very nearly so, without

fuss in the way she'd lived.

There are no famous last words.

No firm record of them survives, and it would be wrong to invent one.

We know only that she was surrounded by those who loved her, and that the house

was silent.

The news was carried the same evening.

By the next morning, the newspapers across the world carried the story on

their front pages.

A great number of tributes appeared.

Writers, actors, and public figures spoke of her.

In the cities of Europe and America,

Newspapers recalled the shy woman who had given so much pleasure.

The funeral was held on the 16th of January at the Church of St Mary in the

village of Cholsey, a few miles from Wallingford in Oxfordshire.

It was a small private service, as she would have wished, attended by her

family and a few close friends.

There was no grand ceremony.

The church was a plain and ancient one.

with a squat Norman tower set in the soft green valley of the Thames.

In the churchyard in a quiet corner under a yew tree, a grave had been

prepared. She was laid to rest there.

Her husband stood by, a tall and grave figure.

Her daughter, her son-in-law and her grandson were with him.

Flowers were laid. The wind was still.

Her gravestone is a simple one. It bears her name.

Dame Agatha Christie Malowan, and the dates of her birth and death.

And on it, according to the family's wish, is a short verse, taken from the

Fairy Queen of Edmund Spencer, a poem that she had loved.

It reads, in the old spelling, that sleep after toil, port after stormy

seas, ease after war,

death after life doth greatly please.

It is a gentle epitaph.

and a fitting one, for a woman who had known toil and storms of her own, and it

is a little reminiscent of the last page of a mystery, in which everything that

was troubled is made quiet, and the puzzle, at last, is complete.

Max Malouin outlived his wife by two years.

He continued to write, and he published his memoirs in 1977.

He died in August of 1978, and was buried beside her.

in the same churchyard.

The memoir that Agatha herself had written was published, as she had asked,

in 1977.

And in the same year, the last of her sealed novels, Sleeping Murder, was in

the hands of her readers.

The family had kept faith with her instructions.

It is almost impossible to measure what she left.

Let us try to do it in a few plain facts.

She wrote 66 detective novels and a number of short story collections, of

which the best known include Poirot Investigates and The Thirteen Problems

and Miss Marple's Early Adventures.

She wrote six novels as Mary Westmacott. She wrote some 20 plays, of which The

Mousetrap, Witness for the Prosecution and Spider's Web are best known.

She wrote poems and a memoir of the digs, and an autobiography.

Her books have sold, by the estimate of her publishers, about two billion copies

in more than a hundred languages, a figure that is sometimes said to be

exceeded only by the Bible and by Shakespeare.

The exact numbers are, of course, impossible to verify, but the claim has

been repeated for decades and she remains the best-selling novelist of all

time. The Mousetrap, as we have said, has run for more than 70 years and has

been seen by many millions of people.

Her stories have been adapted for film and television again and again.

The great Poirot of the screen, in recent decades, was played by David

Suchet, who spent 25 years in the role and filmed every one of the stories.

Miss Marple has been played by Margaret Rutherford, by Joan Hickson, whom Agatha

herself had once hoped to see in the part, and by Geraldine McEwan, Julia

McKenzie, and others.

New adaptations are made every few years.

Each new generation of readers finds the books afresh.

Her influence on the form of the detective story was immense.

She did not invent the genre, but she shaped it more than any other writer.

She perfected the art of the fair puzzle, in which the reader is given

every clue and still cannot see the answer.

She mastered misdirection, which is the heart of the matter.

She understood that the best hiding place is in plain sight.

She understood, as few writers have, how to make a reader believe the obvious,

and then to turn that belief upside down.

Her inventions became the common property of her successors, the closed

circle of suspects.

the country house and the snowbound train, the final gathering in the

drawing room in which the detective names the murderer, the twist that

changes everything.

A hundred writers have followed her and a thousand have borrowed from her.

In everyday life, her influence is felt in ways that are easy to overlook, in

the whole idea of the cosy mystery, with its village and its vicarage and its cup

of tea.

In the habit of reading a good detective story on holiday, or on a train, or in

bed. In the English imagination of the country house, and the quiet lane, and

the genteel old lady who sees all.

In the lore of poisons, in the very phrase little grey cells.

She gave English a number of expressions, and she gave the world a

set of images that are even now instantly recognisable.

Her name lives in institutions.

In Torquay, her birthplace, there is a bust of her on the seafront and a trail

of places connected with her life.

An annual festival is held there in September each year in honour of her

birthday. The Torquay Museum has a gallery devoted to her.

Greenway, her holiday house on the Dart, is open to the public through the

National Trust and visitors go in thousands to see it.

In Wallingford and Cholsey there are walks that take in the places she knew,

and there is the Agatha Christie Limited, the company that manages her

estate, of which her family still hold a share, so that the shy woman's name

remains in the care of those she loved.

Prizes are given in her name, and conferences held, and her notebooks are

studied by scholars.

There is an even greater thing which is difficult to put into words.

It is the pleasure that she gave.

Think of the countless hours of comfort that her books have offered.

Think of the soldiers who read them in the trenches of the Second War, of the

patients in hospital beds, of the commuters on the early train, of the old

and the lonely and the sleepless.

Think of the children who, at the age of twelve, took one down from a shelf.

and discovered the joy of reading for its own sake.

Think of those who have read all her books and read them again.

She said that she wrote to entertain and nothing more.

But entertainment of that kind, when it is done so well and for so long, is a

considerable gift.

There have been controversies, as there are with every great figure.

Some of her early books contain attitudes and phrases that belong to

their time, and that readers today find uncomfortable.

Her publishers have, in recent years, adjusted certain words in her texts, and

the question of how to treat the past in the pages of a classic has been much

discussed.

Some critics, particularly in the literary world, dismissed her as a mere

entertainer, lacking in depth, while others have defended her as a subtle and

humane observer.

Her books are not great works of literary style, and she would be the

first to say so, but they are works of extraordinary craft, and craft, of that

order, is a form of art.

Let us return in these last quiet minutes to the beginning.

We began with a paradox.

We spoke of a shy girl who never went to school, who grew up to be the most

widely read novelist in the world.

We spoke of a woman who was terrified of strangers, and yet who spoke through her

books to hundreds of millions of them.

We spoke of a gentle person who loved gardens and cream and the sea, and who

spent her life writing about murder.

And we spoke of a Belgian detective, mourned in the greatest of newspapers,

though he had never lived.

now at the end perhaps we can see more clearly how these things fit together

she was shy and so she watched she was lonely as a child and so she

invented she was taught to read late and so she taught herself she lost her

father and learned what it was to be afraid she worked in the hospital

dispensary and learned the nature of poison

She met the refugees of a foreign war and conceived a detective.

She lost her mother and her husband in a single year and went into the dark.

And she came out of it and travelled to the east and found in the ruins of

ancient cities a new life and a love that lasted.

It was not a plan.

It was a series of accidents, kindnesses and small decisions.

And through all of it, she went on writing.

There is a thought which she herself expressed in one of her books, and which

seems fitting here.

Poirot is made to say, in his gentle way, that the little grey cells need

order and method, and at the end of her life, looking back, she might have said

the same of her own.

Out of disorder she made order, out of sorrow she made stories.

Out of the crimes of the imagination she made a world in which, in the end,

everything is explained, and the guilty are found, and the innocent are safe.

In an uncertain world that is no small thing, it is perhaps why so many people

turn to her pages at night, and so we leave her, as we found her, in a quiet

place, a churchyard in Oxfordshire, a yew tree.

a low stone wall, the Thames flowing nearby, grey and slow, and the verse on

the stone which says that sleep after toil and port after stormy seas are very

pleasing. If you have listened to the end of this story, thank you.

I hope it has been a gentle companion to the close of your day.

If you enjoyed it, a like or a comment would be very welcome, and if you would

like to hear more stories of remarkable lives, You're welcome to subscribe, so

that the next one will be waiting for you. Until next time then, rest well.

The mystery is solved, the lamps are low and the house is quiet.

Good night.