Original subtitles

CLOCK TICKS

FOOTSTEPS

Agatha Christie's childhood is haunted by a sinister phantom.

The Gunman.

An imaginary figure stalking her dreams and her home.

Possessing and threatening the people she knows and loves.

For the terrified young Agatha,

evil is an ever-lurking presence

just waiting to be unveiled.

DOOR CREAKS

GUNSHOT

This little girl's imagination

would make her into history's greatest detective author.

But how did that happen?

We need to go back to the beginning.

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

and I think there's much more to this enigmatic

and elusive novelist than meets the eye.

She subverts what we think we want

and gives us something so much more interesting.

I'm investigating the mysterious case of Agatha Christie.

How did this woman, who grew up a Victorian,

challenge the expectations of her age?

The doctor, the judge, the general -

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

Let's go.

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

fuel her writing?

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

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

I want to explore how the changes of her lifetime

affected her writing.

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

radical writer and woman.

In the world of Agatha Christie,

no-one is ever quite who they seem to be.

And that's true of the author herself.

Do you think The Mousetrap is the best play

that's ever run in London, Mrs Christie?

Oh, I'd hardly say that. No, not by a long way.

In public, Agatha was a model of decorous self-deprecation.

Time and time again, I've tried and failed to square that vision

of Agatha with Agatha Christie the crime writer, whose talent

for ingenious murder mysteries produced works like

Death On The Nile, Murder On The Orient Express,

or the world's best-selling detective novel,

And Then There Were None.

It's a disconnection that I want to understand.

In Agatha Christie's work,

the answers are always there, hidden in plain sight.

Could it be that the same is true of her own life?

Agatha's story begins in a large house overlooking Torquay in 1890,

at the tail-end of the Victorian era.

She seems to have been a delightful afterthought

for her mother and wealthy American father,

arriving a decade after her two older siblings.

So this seems as good a place as any to start hunting

for the seeds of her unsettling imagination.

At a nearby cinema, I'm meeting someone who can give me

the inside scoop on her family life.

It's James. Hello! Welcome, Lucy. Hey.

Her great-grandson, James.

Where are we going to sit? Well, you are going to sit

in what was my great-grandmother's favourite seat. Lead me to it.

Which is where she would have sat most of the time when she...

This one? That's the one.

The actual seat? That's the actual seat that she would have sat in.

Oh, do you think that she sat here sometimes

watching an Agatha Christie film? LUCY LAUGHS

It's certainly possible. Yeah. Let's watch something. OK.

The glorious Devon coast bathed in winter...

This is Torquay, as it would have been in her day.

Oh, yes, there's the... There's the Pavilion. Concert hall.

You know, Torquay at that point was a very affluent town.

Ooh, look at all of these lovely yachts.

I reckon you'd have to be pretty well off

to fit in to this yachting world in Torquay.

Agatha's father spent a lot of time at the yacht club.

Because he'd inherited wealth from his American businessman father.

I think he was very good at what he did, which was leisure.

This photo is one of Agatha with her father Frederick at Ashfield,

which is where she grew up.

Agatha certainly adored him.

It's quite a compliment to the town of Torquay that a rich,

well-travelled American chose Torquay out of all the places

in the world, and he came to live in this beautiful house.

I think the house attracted

particularly my great-great-grandmother.

She was half German.

I think she was an extraordinary woman.

A massive impact on my great-grandmother. Mm.

People think of Agatha Christie as somebody very English, from Devon,

but, actually, her family were globetrotters. Well, indeed.

She wasn't the quintessential English woman that people thought.

I think the way she writes about the British and class

and people does have a ring of an outsider.

It is someone looking in and to some extent laughing at it at times. Mm.

Mm. I love this picture of the young Agatha.

She was an incredibly precocious child.

She never went to school because her mother didn't think she should learn

to read, or shouldn't learn to read before she was eight,

but she taught herself, aged five.

Do you think, James, the fact that she didn't really go to school

meant that she had a particularly vivid fantasy life?

Well, she sort of grew up almost as an only child,

and so, yes, she had a lot of time on her own playing games,

imagining things, making things up,

and I think that - it has to have had an impact.

Who are we looking at here, James?

So that is Agatha on the back of her sister, Madge.

Madge wrote books.

She wrote plays.

This is Monty, who was her brother.

He lived a... I think you might call colourful life.

He's acting pretty colourfully there. What is he doing?

He's riding in a cart, pulled by a goat.

There's so much in that about perhaps her family

in that I don't think it was a perfectly orthodox family.

I think they were all creative

and I think it was a very imaginative world,

such that you would have your cart pulled by goats.

And a hobby horse.

This seems like the perfect melting pot

for somebody who's going to be a creative writer.

And you can see from these images that it was a very happy time.

The only problem with that, James,

is, how does the rest of life match up to it?

Well, it doesn't.

Wasn't it fascinating to get an insight into Agatha Christie

from a member of her own family?

And what I take away from that is the central importance

of her home in Torquay to her writing.

Clearly, she was taking her life there, her family members there,

and putting them into her art.

It was this place that began to make her into a writer.

Agatha's luxurious family home, Ashfield,

with its servants' quarters and mod cons like a telephone,

was the archetype of a wealthy late-Victorian villa.

And I strongly believe it's the template

for many of the grand houses in her books.

But if her family life at Ashfield was idyllic,

why are her fictional homes so full of darkness?

Ashfield is long-gone,

but in the 1930s, Agatha bought this house nearby - Greenway.

And stashed away in a bathroom cupboard, I've uncovered a clue.

This box is completely full of bills

for things that Agatha's father, Frederick Miller,

has bought in the shops of Torquay.

He really likes jewellers' shops and antique dealers.

Gosh, there's absolutely loads of them.

Ah, look at this.

1895.

He has bought 18 dessert forks with mother of pearl handles

and solid-silver prongs.

£21.

But then, the same year, he's also bought another 18 dessert forks

with mother of pearl handles.

That's £37 on little forks for eating cake.

That's the equivalent of a year's wages

for somebody like a housekeeper.

Now, Agatha described her father as a collector,

but all this suggests to me

he was a person with a shopping addiction.

Frederick's lavish spending was fine as long as the big bucks

from America kept rolling in.

But by the time Agatha was nine, the family fortune was in rapid decline

and Frederick's inability to curb his spending

was causing major financial problems.

Agatha's parents tried to shield her from the unsettling truth

but she knew something was wrong.

Agatha said she had a happy childhood.

She was loved.

Yet throughout it all, there was this rumble

of impending financial doom.

Her family had secrets.

They weren't quite what they seemed.

And this would be such a theme of Agatha's fiction.

Possibly the first person she encountered

who wasn't quite what he seemed was her own father.

In 1901, the death of Queen Victoria

ushered in a new and unsettling period for Britain.

And it was a watershed year for Agatha, too.

Agatha was just 11 when her

much-loved father, Frederick, fell ill.

The worry of the family fortune draining away made him worse.

He began to get heart attacks,

and in November 1901, he died.

Now, Agatha's parents had been utterly devoted to each other.

Agatha tried to comfort her mother, Clara, but Clara seemed different.

She seemed like a stranger.

She seemed savage with grief

and she pushed her daughter away.

Agatha was devastated by her father's death

and terrified that her mother would be taken from her too.

At night, she'd have disturbing dreams

that her mother had turned into a stranger.

I suspect this traumatic period scarred the young Agatha deeply,

and was one she'd be compelled to revisit in her writing.

Listen to this from Agatha's autobiographical novel,

Unfinished Portrait.

DOOR CREAKS

"Of course it was Mummy.

"And then you saw the light, steely blue eyes.

"And from the sleeve of Mummy's dress...

"Oh, horror.

"It wasn't Mummy.

"It was the Gunman."

This is an idea Agatha will come back to again and again.

In her stories, home is not a safe place...

..and the people closest to you are not what they seem.

After Frederick's death, Ashfield was a changed, lonely place.

The family fortune was gone.

And with it, most of the servants.

Clara still aspired to upper-middle-class gentility

but she and Agatha were now outsiders in that world -

their social status fragile.

And instead of supper parties and soirees,

Agatha found a cheaper way to entertain herself.

Writing stories.

The result, a psychological drama called House Of Beauty,

is a tantalising portal into Agatha's teenage mind.

The story begins with a young man, John, who wakes up one morning

and he cannot forget a dream that he's had about this beautiful house.

He has the same dream again and again.

He becomes obsessed with this house.

He always sees it from the outside and it seems utterly perfect,

until one night...

"Someone was coming to the window.

"He was awake, still quivering with the horror,

"the unutterable loathing of the thing.

"The thing that had come to the window

"and looked out at him malevolently.

"A thing so vile and loathsome that the mere remembrance of it

"made him feel sick."

This thing embodies evil.

It's like Agatha's nightmare of the Gunman

captured in words.

But there's also a nod towards the future.

Agatha's already subverting our expectations.

Behind the beautiful house's facade

lurk unimaginable horrors.

Writing may have passed the time,

but as Agatha edged towards womanhood,

there were decisions to make about her future.

It was a time opportunities were starting to open up

for bright young women, with universities like Oxford,

Cambridge and Bedford College here in London,

now admitting women.

To us today, an institution like Bedford College

might seem to be a really good thing, offering new opportunities

to young women like Agatha.

But to Agatha's mother, Clara, mm-mm, it wasn't like that at all.

Overeducating your daughter might deprive her

of life's greatest opportunity - marriage.

Instead of college, Agatha would be coming out into society,

which meant a whirl of dinners and debutante balls

to advertise the fact that she'd arrived on the marriage market.

But Clara's precarious finances and position in society

meant the world of London debs was off-limits to Agatha.

Luckily, there was a cut-price deb season on offer in Egypt,

then unofficially under British control.

So in 1908, Clara and Agatha packed their trunks

and headed to North Africa.

Young though she was, Agatha must have been aware

that her entrance into society was far-removed

from that of most of her peers.

The three months stay in Egypt cost Agatha and her mother

more than a year's income from their investments,

which shows just how important Clara considered it to be

that Agatha get the chance to meet the man, and not just any old man.

He had to be from the right social class and, crucially,

he had to have money.

And one thing was a given - the man would be British.

These are the photos that Agatha and her mum took

while they were in Egypt, and what fascinates me

is that only one Egyptian antiquity makes the cut.

There's the Sphinx.

The rest of the pictures basically show British people.

There are captains from the Army.

Majors.

There's even one lonely duke. They must have been pleased to snap him.

It's almost like they're still in England, really.

Ha. They're having tea on the terrace.

They were living in this expatriate bubble.

They were not going out and exploring the Egyptian city at all.

But Agatha herself was pretty content with this, I think,

because she already had a novelist's eyes and ears.

For Agatha, this expat society was fascinating.

On the surface, they were pursuing the same lives and dreams

as they could in Britain.

But, as Agatha was only too aware,

for some of them, this image was deceptive.

And I think this crack between appearance and reality

among the ruling classes had a huge impact on Agatha.

It gave her the material to start writing seriously.

In between her social engagements in Cairo, Agatha found the time

to write her first full-length novel - Snow Upon the Desert.

It's 300 pages long.

What Agatha wrote was a sideways look

at the expatriate British social scene of Cairo.

This is how it begins.

""Rosamunde", said Lady Charminster, "..is an amazing girl."

"Then she added with a flash of inspiration,

""She can neither be ignored nor explained."

"This was distinctly good.

"It was one of those concise sayings that have a certain backing of truth

"to their epigrammatic force."

We have fireworks going on here.

Quite a lot of self-confidence for a teenage girl.

The book isn't a whodunnit, but the sharp observations

and clever dialogue that would become Agatha's trademarks,

are already there, as is the cast of well-heeled characters.

When she was old and wise, this is what Agatha had to say

about her early writing.

She basically really plays it down.

She says she'd formed a habit of writing stories,

"which took the place, shall we say, of embroidering cushion covers."

Hmm.

The reason I'm suspicious about that is that when she got home

from Cairo, she had her novel professionally typed-up.

She consulted a published author about what to do with it

and she actually sent it off to several publishers.

These seem to me the actions of somebody who was ambitious

about her writing.

But Agatha had gone to Egypt to find a husband, not a vocation.

And Clara believed that only a good marriage

could secure her daughter's vulnerable place in society.

So back in England, Operation Husband continued.

In October 1912,

there was a great ball at Ugbrooke House,

not far from Torquay.

Oh, will you be Alexander?

I am. Hello, Lucy. Welcome to Ugbrooke. Good to see you.

Thank you very much for having me.

Now, can you tell me about these famous parties,

including the one of 1912?

Yeah, absolutely.

So, my great-great-great aunt and uncle, Lady Mabel and Lord Lewis,

invited the whole barracks from Exeter - the Exeter Garrison,

for a party, and Mabel said to her friends,

"Can you guys go and find some likely lasses?"

We need some girls. We need some girls. Exactly that.

We need girls at Ugbrooke for this ball. Exactly.

So Agatha was then invited and plenty of dancing happened.

Where did the ball take place?

Well, it's now our dining room but back then it was our ballroom,

and it's just through here.

So, there it is. May I take a look? Of course. Fabulous. Thank you.

Agatha was told to look out for one officer in particular.

This is the room in which Agatha first set eyes

on Archibald Christie.

He was tall, he was fair, he was handsome,

he was a sort of mirror image of herself,

and he had this great air of careless confidence about him.

On top of that, he danced splendidly.

Archie may not have been rich or even Agatha's social equal

but he was a pilot - the most glamorous job going in 1912.

And in Agatha's personal papers,

I found a clue as to the deep impression Archie made.

There was one essential fact about Archie, as they called him,

that I didn't fully appreciate until I saw this,

his photo,

which reveals that he was incredibly hot.

What I like about this photo is that you can see it's got folds in it.

Agatha has clearly carried it around and treasured it.

It's been loved. Possibly lusted over as well.

Agatha says of the dance here at Ugbrooke

that she enjoyed the evening thoroughly.

I bet she did.

There was just one hitch.

When Agatha came to Ugbrooke,

she was already engaged, to Reggie Lucy,

who'd grown up at Charlecote Park in Warwickshire -

an even bigger pile than this one.

Reggie was everything Agatha was supposed to want.

He was rich, he was aristocratic.

He was even kind.

But to me, this is the moment that Agatha reveals

that she was more than a dutiful daughter,

and that she wanted more from marriage

than just security and safety.

Archie started to visit Agatha at Ashfield on his motorbike.

The sexual chemistry was obvious and in no time at all

she'd broken off her engagement to Reggie

and she'd embarked upon a whirlwind romance with Archie.

Let's go!

ENGINE STARTS

Archie turned the shy and sensible Agatha's world upside down.

But just as she glimpsed their happy future together,

the life she knew was about to be swept away forever.

EXPLOSION

In August 1914,

Britain joined World War I,

and Archie was sent to France.

It soon became apparent that this would be a long, brutal conflict.

EXPLOSIONS

So when Archie returned on leave that Christmas,

he and Agatha seized the moment to marry.

But only days after the wedding,

Archie had to return to France.

Agatha remained with her mother and threw herself into the war effort,

volunteering at the new military hospital in Torquay's town hall.

The wards and beds were filled with people

whose lives were utterly changed by the war.

Veteran war correspondent Kate Adie has written about

the conflict's impact on women,

and I want to see how this might have affected Agatha

and her writing.

Kate, here we are in Torquay Town Hall.

Exactly the same place. Look, there's the arch and everything.

Can you tell me who all these people would have been?

They were volunteers.

Young ladies called the VADs.

Voluntary Aid Detachment.

The sort of people whose ordinary lives

consisted rather of tennis parties and meeting nice people.

And, of course, the professional nurses

saw these young flibbertigibbets coming in

and there were tart words on both sides.

Here's Agatha in her own VAD uniform.

She would have been at tennis parties with the doctors before,

but now the doctors are up here and the VADs are down here

in the hospital hierarchy, aren't they?

Oh, you felt your place, being shouted at.

The professional nurses saying, "Right, out with those chamber pots,

"do the laundry.

"Get the beds clean and clean up the patient." Mm.

Those were things which these girls, who came from homes, usually,

with a number of servants, had never, ever done before.

What kinds of injury were brought here to the hospital?

Horrible things.

Battlefield injuries.

This is the medical record of one young man, Private L Howard,

who's arrived in Torquay after getting a bullet

which entered through his pelvis, lacerated his rectum

and exited through his buttock.

Oh, my goodness. Apart from the wound,

they've probably never seen...

A naked man.

It must have been, I suppose, the shock of their lives,

being told to...

..undress men or change dressings.

Oh, look. It says that faeces have gone through both wounds.

It's all gone septic.

And...

Oh, look.

He died on May the 17th, 1915.

And this was the first time I imagine any of them

had come to what was probably going to be a painful and awful death.

No-one prepared these girls psychologically.

There was no preparation for them at all.

Can I put a theory to you that I think

is really personally important for Agatha Christie?

So, in the hospital, she saw terrible things,

but then she went home,

and I don't think she was able to tell them what she'd done.

Oh, there are good examples of girls being told, you know,

"We don't really need to hear too much about this." Mm.

And that's keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of really dark stuff

bubbling away underneath,

which is sort of the definition of Agatha Christie's fiction.

With a clever girl like Agatha,

someone who could think things through, learn...

Very useful.

She would be gathering confidence and information

about a world she'd never, ever even dreamed of.

Millions of people's lives were upended

by the brutality of the First World War.

The rules which had governed society seemed irreparably broken.

But tough though it was, I think Agatha Christie's work

in this hospital was a crucial turning point in her life.

If it weren't for the war,

I think that she and Archie

would have set up home together immediately.

She'd have got on with being a wife and a mother.

Would she still have had time to write?

I don't know.

In fact, it seems to me that Agatha's experience

here in the hospital allowed her to escape

from the expectations of her social class and time.

It was the war... It was the First World War that gave her

the freedom to imagine

a very different future for herself.

The war broadened Agatha's horizons

but how did it affect her dreams of becoming a writer?

I'm hoping some of her personal papers

at The Christie Archive Trust in Wales might provide a clue.

Look at all of these goodies in here.

Now...

No.

Oh, yes.

Now, this is just fabulous.

This is a sort of joke hospital magazine

that was produced by Agatha and her hospital friends.

They've included portraits of themselves.

Look at her in her uniform.

And this group gave themselves a name.

They were called the Queer Women.

They were supposed to be little homebodies

but, instead, here they were in the hospital.

That was very queer indeed.

It's an irreverent little magazine

and I can sense Agatha's creative fingerprints all over it.

Look at all these lovely pictures.

"Aunt Agatha's Puzzle Page."

And this is Agatha herself, I think, in her lab coat.

In the hospital, I think she was beginning to experience new things -

feelings of competence and camaraderie.

It seems to me that as a working woman,

she was having quite a good time.

And the magazine suggests something else, too.

Agatha had long been an outsider to the ruling classes,

but now she's starting to question their authority.

Here's one of the doctors.

He's described as harassed.

Agatha's opinion of the doctors was slowly sinking

because they were rude to the nurses.

Agatha describes how she had to hand a towel to the doctor.

He'd dry his hands and then he'd just toss it onto the floor.

She was left feeling like a human towel rail.

So here Agatha is addressing the nurses.

She says, "We advise you to assert yourself a little more."

Hmm. Agatha was losing confidence in the bosses.

These pillars of society.

The people who were supposed to be in charge.

In 1916, Agatha transferred off the wards

and into the hospital dispensary -

a move that would have a vital impact on her writing.

Here, she learned how to mix and administer medicines,

but also about the deadly simplicity of poisons.

At Torre Abbey in Devon,

Ali Marshall has designed a garden full of the medicinal plants

Agatha used in the dispensary, and later in her books.

Ali, tell me about your beautiful garden.

Oh, I'm glad you said it's beautiful.

We are standing right in the middle of

the Agatha Christie potent plants display.

The potent plants display?

Does that mean that everything here could be used in a poison?

Pretty much. There are some that very definitely are used as poisons.

Some real classics in amongst these plants.

Wow.

In here, I have got a page or two

from Agatha's notebook... Ooh. ..from when she was studying

for her pharmaceutical qualification that she does. That's fantastic.

So, what catches your eye, Ali?

So, the one that I noticed first is atropine,

which is in belladonna plants.

It's really good for inducing insanity

or for giving you hallucinations. No! Really?

Have you got some here? We've got some nightshade down over there.

Oh, wow.

I mean, all of these were medicines, but if you get the dosage wrong,

they become poisons. Poisons, mm.

Take me to more poisons. More poisons.

What else have we got? Just tucked away behind here,

this gorgeous-looking plant with its lovely things.

Is that a poison? It's ricin. That's not ricin. That's ricin.

You're joking? You can just see... It looks so harmless. Yeah.

How much of that plant do you need to kill someone?

For a small person, about five seeds.

Eight seeds... For a big person? For a big person. OK.

It's not an awful lot, so... I think six seeds would finish me off.

Yeah.

There is always that line between safety and extreme danger

and sometimes death that she played with a lot in her stories

and she must have learned during that period.

When I think of Agatha studying pharmacy,

I think of her as somebody who's saving life, helping people,

but it was quite close to death, really, wasn't it? Very, very close.

I mean, in training, it must have been absolutely terrifying.

She really had to get it right or it would be catastrophic.

I think that if Miss Marple were to walk into your garden here,

Ali, she'd say, "There's an arsenal of weapons!"

Gardens can be very dangerous places

and Agatha probably quite enjoyed that side of things.

The idea that you could sort of pick a humble foxglove

or pick a bit of aconite from your garden

and then use it in one of those detective stories.

You don't need strength to do it.

It's a woman's weapon, isn't it? It is.

Quite a lot of Agatha's poisons went into drinks.

Agatha used them to commit murder many, many, many times.

With poisoning, anyone can be a killer,

from a dairy maid to a duchess.

All you need is the know-how

and access to some readily available ingredients.

It was an idea that gripped the young dispenser.

In 1916, in the middle of the war,

Agatha began writing her own tale of a death by poisoning,

and it would be a detective story.

Before we begin, we need to discuss spoilers.

There will be spoilers, for what I think is a very good reason.

If we can't discuss Agatha's plots and the ways that they work,

we do her a disservice as a writer.

And I think there's so much more to her writing

than just the secret of who'd done it.

Agatha's first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles,

is filled with insights and characters

she'd stored up over the years.

First up, Styles Court, a country house.

This is the world that Agatha knew well.

It's the sort of place where the upstairs characters

drink tea on the lawn.

But, a bit like Agatha's home, Ashfield,

it's a little bit down at heel.

Styles is ruled over by a matriarch.

Here she is - Mrs Inglethorp. An older lady.

A bit bossy, actually.

And she reminds me of Agatha's mother, Clara.

I think her life story began close to home.

Now, the men of Styles are...

Well, to be honest, they're a slightly useless lot.

They remind me of Agatha's father -

the feckless father who spent all of the money.

This is Mrs Inglethorp's stepson, John.

His brother, Lawrence.

Ooh, this is an interesting character.

This is Mrs Inglethorp's much younger husband.

Never trust a man with a beard.

The women of Styles are a much more effective lot.

This is Evelyn. She's Mrs Inglethorp's paid companion.

She's a bit gruff.

She says it like she sees it, does Evelyn.

And then we've got...

Oh, ha-ha, the young lady called Cynthia,

who works in the local hospital as a dispenser.

I wonder where Agatha got the idea from for her?!

They all of them look like pillars of the community, don't they?

But most of them have something to hide.

They all had the motive and opportunity

to poison Mrs Inglethorp using strychnine.

But to uncover the culprit, Agatha needed one final player.

Agatha wrote later on,

"The Mysterious Affair At Styles was roughed out

"and then came the dilemma...

"What kind of detective?

"Why not have a Belgian refugee?"

During World War I, a quarter of a million refugees

fled Belgium for Britain, and Agatha drew inspiration

from some of the ones she'd seen in Torquay.

"What kind of man should he be?

"A little man, perhaps?"

He's five foot four, so he's not tall.

"Like many small dandified men, he should be conceited.

"And he would, of course, have a luxuriant...

"No, no, a handsome moustache.

"And he should have a somewhat grandiloquent name.

"Hercule something...

"Hercule Poirot."

Hmm. Here he is.

Yes.

Quite pleased with him.

In this first outing, Poirot uses his little grey cells

to unmask the secret lovers behind the murder.

Today, Poirot is such an icon that it's a twist

worthy of Christie herself to discover that he

and The Mysterious Affair At Styles nearly didn't see the light of day.

No fewer than six publishers turned it down.

She'd almost forgotten about the whole business

when finally someone said yes.

It was four long years before she could call herself

a published author.

And the text that was published had a small but significant change

from what she'd originally written.

My fellow Christie fan, Jamie Bernthal,

has been investigating this change.

I can see goodies on the table. Jamie, what have we got here?

Yes, something very special.

One of Agatha Christie's most secret notebooks.

The secret notebook. Open it up.

So, in 1916, Agatha Christie used this to write the ending

to The Mysterious Affair At Styles.

This is not the version that was published.

The deleted scene! Brilliant. What happens in the deleted scene?

You have to translate the very...

The squiggles. Yes.

But we see here, "Poirot strutted into the witness box

"like a bantam cock."

This scene is set in a courtroom. What happened in it?

Poirot is introducing evidence no-one's ever seen.

He's committing probable slander on the box.

But the publisher said, "This isn't convincing.

"You need to either consult an expert or set it somewhere else."

And she did the latter.

I suppose it shows a humility. She was willing to take advice.

Well, yes. She also had a good head for business.

If her publisher was telling her this won't work, she knew to listen.

And that's how we got what's now become a cliche of the genre

and Christie in particular - the drawing room denouement.

She always reveals things in drawing rooms!

Setting it in a drawing room is an absolute stroke of genius

because it's a domestic setting,

and it's...

..moving away from the more masculine courtroom space

that's more traditional.

It's a place where women are kind of equal with men.

We can get the heights of tension that you really get at home

in personal space.

So the idea of having a murderer in a courtroom

is kind of one thing, but it's much more dangerous and scary and edgy

to have them sitting next to you on the sofa at home.

Yes? Yes.

She subverts what we think we want

and gives us something so much more interesting.

So in what ways was Poirot a breath of fresh air?

I think the most radical thing about this book is Hercule Poirot.

So, Christie is writing in 1916,

when the ultimate detective is Sherlock Holmes,

and we have a lot of male heroes popping up who are big and macho.

Poirot is not like that.

For one thing, he's foreign.

He notices small details.

He's obsessively neat.

These are not traits of the rugged macho hero.

So would you say that Agatha takes some of the heroic,

masculine conventions of detective fiction and she flips them?

She takes what we think we know about the genre

and turns it on its head to surprise us.

There's a reason Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist

of all time, because right from this first book,

she is locked into human nature.

So what for you is the significance of this notebook, Jamie?

It's a reminder that even with a genius like Agatha Christie,

the finished product doesn't just come straight out of the can.

Without that crucial change to the ending,

Agatha Christie might never have been published.

For me, this foreshadows a writing career

that was full of restless rule-breaking.

But the book's success came at a pivot point for Agatha

and the nation.

The end of the war brought rejoicing

but also huge social upheaval in class and gender roles.

The very fabric of British society had been fractured.

And Agatha, personally, was at a crossroads.

Archie got a job in a City firm

and, in August 1919, Agatha gave birth

to their daughter, Rosalind.

Would she feel compelled to abandon writing

for the traditional role of wife and mother?

Or had she and society changed enough

to allow Agatha to pursue her own ambitions?

This is a really interesting passage in Agatha's autobiography,

written towards the end of her life.

She's discussing her career, her status,

and she says here that when she was filling in a form

that asked for her occupation, she always put down "married woman".

"That was my occupation.

"I never approached my writing by dubbing it

"with the grand name of career.

"I would have thought it ridiculous."

Here's some evidence from 1921

that very much contradicts that statement.

And the Census asked for her personal occupation and she has...

There she is.

She has put down "novelist".

There are clearly different Agatha Christies at different times.

And, as Agatha Christie would tell us herself,

you've got to question everything.

And my research suggests that at the outset of her career,

Agatha was proud to be a trailblazing woman.

Here's some really compelling evidence.

It's an interview Agatha gave in 1922,

and she says here that she's addicted to crime.

"Crime is like drugs.

"Once a writer of detective stories, you inevitably return."

And then the interviewer must have said, "What about your little girl?"

And Agatha said, "Even my little two-year-old daughter, Rosalind,

"does not deter me."

Even today, a working mother would be nervous about talking

about placing work above motherhood.

She'd worry about being judged.

But here, over 100 years ago, we have Agatha doing exactly that.

It's extraordinary.

Archie initially supported his wife's writing

and the financial boost it provided,

and Agatha turned out four novels in four years.

And then, in 1926, came the book that would cement her reputation

as the era's Queen of Crime.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd.

At first sight, The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd

is just your classic country house murder mystery.

The characters are respectable members of the community.

There's Dr Sheppard. He's the narrator.

There's Poirot again.

And there's even a body in a locked room.

It belongs to Roger Ackroyd himself. He's a wealthy businessman.

And guess what, it turns out that everybody in his household

has got a reason for wanting to bump him off.

But Agatha takes all of these conventional ingredients

and she does something remarkable with them.

She takes one of the really basic conventions of any detective story

and she turns it on its head.

I'm meeting writer Sarah Phelps, who believes this twist

in Roger Ackroyd is explosive.

Sarah, can you tell me a little bit about the set-up for this story,

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd?

This is Roger Ackroyd.

He's a wealthy man but he's funny about money.

That's something we're told by the person who narrates the story to us.

The sensible village doctor...

Dr Sheppard. There he is. Dr Sheppard. Look at him.

How could we not trust this man?

Of course we trust this man. He's the village doctor.

And then Hercule Poirot, notorious private detective,

who, happily or unhappily, has retired to this village

to grow vegetable marrows.

And... I think he must call them veg-e-table marrows.

IMITATES POIROT: "Veg-e-table... Veg-e-table marrows."

It's set in a country house.

It looks like a very conventional set-up.

But what's the twist?

The one who's telling us all the clues

and the one who's telling us he heard things,

he is the one who did it.

The murderer is the narrator, Dr Sheppard. That's pretty shocking.

That's like saying Watson did it.

It is shocking, it's exciting,

it's thrilling, because it's really about how easily we're duped.

When the book was published, some people said, "This isn't right.

"Agatha Christie has broken the rules of detective fiction."

I think it's a bend. A bend?

In this book, everything is there for you.

There's this key passage where our trusted narrator

doesn't quite tell us everything.

"The letter had been brought in at 20 minutes to nine.

"It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him,

"the letter still unread.

That's a vital ten minutes.

That's the ten minutes.

The audience goes, "What happens in that ten minutes?"

But because Sheppard is telling you about it, you think,

"Well, it can't possibly be him." Yes, exactly.

The problem that you have is that you've believed

the person in authority.

We know that Agatha had had her own sort of faith in doctors undermined

by seeing the reality of them

when she was working in the war in the hospital.

I don't know that she distrusted doctors.

I think she just distrusted authority.

The doctor, the judge, the general.

I think that is really what she's writing about -

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

Because of the war? The long dark shadow of the First World War.

I think it falls very firmly on Agatha, too.

I don't see how it can't.

I don't see how you would escape what you have seen

and what you've experienced and what you know can be done

to the human mind and the human body.

She's writing about that trauma in a really potent way,

where nobody escapes, nobody is innocent.

What do you think might be the danger for a woman

who has produced such a brilliant book?

I'm sure that her detractors spoke of her as being...

That it's an unfeminine book.

She represents something quite subversive, I think,

about the relationship between an author and their work.

Whenever you have female achievement,

you get darkness as well.

It's clear that this book, Roger Ackroyd,

gave Agatha Christie the reputation as a clever woman.

Now, listen, 100 years later, people still have problems

with the idea of a clever woman,

so I can imagine that in 1926,

to be a clever woman was a very mixed blessing indeed.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd tapped into a deep dissatisfaction

felt by many in the 1920s.

It sold-out on publication, and its success helped the family

to move out of their London flat

and into a large home here in Sunningdale.

This is a very big house for a family of three people,

one of whom is a very small girl.

I know that there are 12 bedrooms tucked away in there.

Archie's City career was on the up

and the Christies looked like the model

of a suburban middle-class family.

They renamed the house Styles, in honour of Agatha's debut novel.

But beneath the surface, all was not quite as it seemed.

In her autobiography, Agatha tells us that she and Archie

were worried whether they could afford the giant house.

But as it says here, "We arranged for a mortgage."

But Agatha is often an unreliable narrator.

This is the actual mortgage deed

and the house wasn't bought by a married couple,

it was bought by Agatha Christie on her own.

"Signed, sealed and delivered, Agatha Christie."

This solicitor clearly didn't really understand what was going on

because in the deed, Agatha is referred to throughout as "he".

There really weren't that many married women in the 1920s

who were able to buy themselves a giant house,

but Agatha was one of them.

For me, this reveals why Agatha will later change tack,

presenting herself as just a housewife

who achieved success by accident.

She knew she was actually an extraordinary modern woman

whose career was steaming forward.

But she also sensed that society

wasn't ready for a woman like her, yet,

so Agatha would hide her brilliance in plain sight.

Agatha's purchase of this house stood for everything

she'd achieved so far.

And more than that, I think it stood for her confidence in the future.

She knew that books like The Mysterious Affair At Styles,

and The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, were only the beginning.

She could do more, she could do better.

She'd used the upheaval of the First World War to her advantage.

And at this moment she buys the house,

we get a glimpse of an Agatha we don't often see.

A woman in control of her destiny, a woman unapologetically herself.

Could her life get any better than this?

Next time, the lady vanishes...

It really is a cliff. I mean, a life-ending drop.

..boards the Orient Express...

It must have been almost shockingly different.

..and creates a game-changing older heroine.

How many other women are the hero of their story at the age of 65?