All language subtitles for ep2gtyhjd

It's December 1926.

Agatha Christie has crashed her car,

leaving it balanced precariously
over a chalk quarry.

Then she vanishes,

triggering the biggest manhunt
yet seen in Britain.

At 36, Agatha Christie was
a successful detective novelist,

seemingly happily married,
with a young daughter at home.

Was this crisis, or conspiracy?

Agatha's disappearance in 1926 is
usually seen as this great

central mystery in her life.

I think it's even more interesting
to see the effect it had.

I think that the trauma
of 1926 turned

Agatha Christie into the great
woman that she became.

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.

OK, I think that we're nearly there.
Ooh, nettles! Ouch!

Ah!

OK... It must be just here.
Surely, we must be nearly there.

Oh, gosh!

Ooh! I'm not going to go
too near the edge.

That is the edge of the cliff
and it really is a cliff.

Very interesting. You've got to
imagine fewer trees in 1926

and from the maps I've looked at
and the accounts I've read,

I'm pretty confident that her car
came off the road

and then it rolled down across much
more open downlands...

..landscape then,
and then it got caught in bushes.

There's really clear descriptions
of the car being caught in a bush

and what you don't realise till
you get here is that, below,

would have been this perilous drop.

I mean, a life-ending drop,
if a car had gone over there.

Things would only have had to have
been very slightly different,

you know, for the bush to
have given way,

the car would have gone over
and she would have been dead.

But when the police found the car
the next morning,

its lights still blazing, its owner
had completely disappeared.

Could it be suicide?

Or daring hoax?
Or was she the victim of foul play?

This is the police
report for the incident.

"The car was found with its bonnet
buried in the bushes,

"as if it had got out of control.

"In the car was found a fur coat..."

Now, why wasn't she wearing this,
if the night was so cold?

"..a dressing case and a driving
licence..." That's a good clue.

"..indicating that the owner
was Mrs Agatha Christie."

A famous detective novelist
vanished,

maybe even murdered, or kidnapped,
and a series of tantalising clues.

There were all the ingredients
of the perfect tabloid story

and the press went to town.

They found the ideal
cast of characters.

An attractive woman, of course,
but also Rosalind,

the seven-year-old daughter
she left behind.

Archie, the handsome husband who
seemed to have something to hide,

and pretty young Nancy Neele,
who'd turn out to be Archie's lover.

The press turned
the story into a sensation.

Radio was in its infancy,
there was no television,

and national newspapers
were booming.

With a new development each day,

this thrilling story would
sell more papers.

The Surrey Police played along.

They were convinced that Agatha
would be found dead on their patch.

Special attention was paid to the
nearby Silent Pool,

already the sight of a legendary
drowning

and just the sort of place to find
a body caught in the weeds.

You know, as I look through these
photos from the search,

I have a sneaking suspicion
that everybody was actually rather

enjoying themselves.

Look at these gentlemen, who are
very performatively dragging a pond.

They definitely staged
that for the newspaper cameras.

It's all quite macho. And this coach
load of searchers here,

they're taking a break
from searching and they are...

I think
they're enjoying a packed lunch.

And these ones here were re-staging
the scene of the crime.

It's 1920s Crimewatch.
But do you know what?

I can't really blame the policemen

and all of these
kind searching people.

Under the circumstances, I can see
exactly why they felt that they

were living inside the world
of a detective story.

The police, press and public
went into a detection frenzy.

There were dedicated front pages
day after day.

Calls to action mustered
thousands of volunteers.

Bloodhounds sniffed the countryside.

Aeroplanes joined the hunt.

Even Sherlock Holmes author
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got involved.

He hired a psychic to connect with
Agatha via one of her gloves.

How could a woman whose face was
in every newspaper simply disappear?

There were 11 days
full of speculation and scandal.

Then a lead came in from somewhere
totally unexpected.

In the elegant
spa town of Harrogate,

230 miles north of where Agatha
had disappeared, a woman

answering Agatha's description was
spotted at the Hydropathic Hotel.

Two members of the hotel's dance
band tipped off the police.

So, Archie took the train up to
Harrogate to see if the woman

who'd checked in as Teresa Neele
was really his missing wife.

When Archie arrived at the hotel,

he and a policeman stationed
themselves by the lift.

They were waiting for when the
mystery woman would come down

and go through to the dining room.

Time went by, other guests came
through, the suspense mounted.

Then, finally, the lift doors opened
and...there she was.

Yes, it was Agatha.

She'd been found.

But where was the dramatic reunion?

Where were the tears
and recriminations?

Agatha greeted Archie

and they walked
quietly off to the hotel restaurant.

To the 25 or so reporters
outside the hotel, though,

the mystery thickened
because Agatha, sitting here,

calmly having her dinner,
didn't look like they expected.

She wasn't "distressed",
she didn't seem "broken",

she didn't seem "guilty"
about all this trouble she'd caused.

Answers were required.

And Archie had answers.

He announced to the journalists
that Agatha had lost her memory.

The press wanted details.
They wanted explanations.

Now, they were told Agatha didn't
remember the car accident.

She didn't know how
she got to Harrogate.

She definitely couldn't explain why
she'd checked into the hotel

under her husband's mistress's
surname.

She'd even forgotten who she was.

To the journalists, though,
this sounded almost unbelievable,

a totally lame excuse.

What kind of self-respecting
detective novelist would have

come up with a plot twist
as bad as that?!

It felt like she'd made
fools of them all.

They wanted motives,
so they invented them.

It was a publicity stunt.
After all, while she was missing,

Agatha's books had sold
out across Britain.

Or perhaps it was a twisted hoax to
punish her unfaithful husband.

Hardly anyone believed that Agatha
was telling the truth.

But, of course,

the journalists didn't know what had
happened in the months before.

I think we should consider Agatha's
own testimony for what

she experienced in 1926.

Bad things had been happening
to her that year.

Her mother had died, she was under
pressure from her work.

She reports a whole
range of symptoms - forgetfulness,

tearfulness, insomnia.

In August,
so before she disappeared,

a gossip columnist reported that
she'd had a breakdown.

On top of all that,
just before Agatha disappeared,

Archie had told her he was leaving
her for another woman.

Not just any woman. Nancy Neele
was a friend of Agatha's.

She was nine years younger,
outgoing and sporty.

Like Archie, she was a keen golfer.
She'd even stayed at their house

while visiting the local
golf course.

No surprise, then, that Agatha's
mental health was suffering.

But it's still a big leap from there
to forgetting who you are.

I need to understand if Agatha
could really have had amnesia.

I've come to
Harrogate's Royal Baths,

where she took regular therapeutic
treatments during her stay.

This is quite the place, isn't it?

Somewhere I've always
wanted to come.

I'm hoping Professor Edgar Jones can
suggest a modern medical diagnosis.

Edgar, can I ask you, how would
you describe your profession?

Technically, I'm a clinical
psychopathologist

and psychotherapist, but I'm
interested particularly in people

who've been through stressful
situations,

such as soldiers in war,
people who've got PTSD.

I can see some connections
to Agatha's trauma here.

At the time, a lot of people
believed that she was faking

her condition, cos she did things
like stay at a hotel,

eat dinner,
socialise with other guests.

How can you do all of that
if you've "lost your memory"?

Well, it is consistent with
the diagnosis of fugue.

Fugue, tell me
a bit more about fugue.

That means a flight, doesn't it?

Fugue is a very rare state,
but it has the purpose of extracting

a person from a stressful or
intolerable situation.

So you go from being in an area
where you're uncomfortable,

you can't see a future,
into a new identity with a new role

in a new place. I see
it as a kind of flight into health.

A flight into health is
an interesting phrase,

seeing as we're
sitting in a health facility,

which would explain why she'd come
to Harrogate, right?

It could well do.

Coming to Harrogate would mean she's
no longer reminded of

things around her, where she lives,

her husband who's
threatening divorce,

the death of her mother,

and I do wonder, because
when she checks into the hotel,

she calls herself Teresa Neele,

and Neele is of course the name
of her husband's love interest.

It's not that she's playing a part,
she's not being an actress.

It's almost, in her mind, she's
recreated herself in a happy place,

in the identity of the woman
who's threatening her very marriage.

And, Edgar, have you ever met people
who've experienced this

fugue state?
Fugue state is very rare,

so in a period of ten years
of clinical work, on our ward,

we had two women who
fell into this fugue state

and one man also who came pretty
close to the diagnosis,

so it is very unusual,

because people are still
able to function appropriately

on a day-to-day basis,
and it doesn't imply that this

is acting or faking or some
publicity stunt.

Gosh!

We're talking
here about a really extreme,

frightening medical condition.

I'm persuaded by this argument
about the fugue state and, in turn,

it makes me...

It makes me so furious that people
then and people still today

think that somehow she was making it
up, that she was faking it.

Seems to me that despite her fame
and her success

and all the good things in her life,
there's a deep injustice here.

Not only was Agatha bereaved, she'd
lost her mother, not only had she

lost her husband,
not only was she ill,

but that she was shamed for all
of this

in the newspapers...globally.

Makes me angry.

This ill, confused woman was now
fair game for pursuit by the press.

The day after Agatha was found,
with crowds of photographers

waiting outside the hotel, Archie
needed somehow to get her away.

But he was too clever to bring
her out the front.

The Christies came
sneaking out the back,

disappointing all the photographers,

and this is the sort of behaviour
that turns the press against you.

The photographers soon caught up
with them again.

Agatha and Archie took a train,

but tried to shake them off again
by heading to Cheshire,

home to Agatha's sister's family,
in the splendid Abney Hall.

Still, the reporters had hunted them
down by the time they arrived.

As the car came through these gates,

Agatha's brother-in-law jumped out
and slammed the gates closed.

Those ravenous reporters were all
trapped outside,

but Agatha was now under siege.

You might think this was a strange
place to bring her,

but it was her big sister's home

and she'd been coming here
since she was 12 years old.

She couldn't go home to the house
she shared with Archie -

too traumatic.

So, here she was, holed up amongst
faded Victorian Gothic.

Now, which room am I in?

I think it's the dining room.
Look, there's that door.

And it had this massive table,
like Count Dracula's Castle.

Agatha had spent a lot of time
here as a child

and you can see that the
melodramatic atmosphere of the place

appealed to something
in her imagination.

It sparked many stories.

Often when you're reading
an Agatha Christie book, and there's

some vast, gloomy mansion, you
think, "Yep, that's Abney Hall."

There's even a railway that goes
round the park,

just like in the story
4:50 From Paddington.

Clearly,
it was inspired by this place.

In the book, Rutherford Hall is
described as uncomfortable,

cold and dark -

the perfect setting for family
intrigue and a couple of murders.

But when she was on the run,
when the press were after her,

when she was ill,

this place had the advantage
of being familiar to her, but it was

also a place that, my goodness, has
a sort of morbid atmosphere to it.

Not sure it was the best
place for her to be, quite honestly.

Doctors arrived

and announced that her amnesia
was unquestionably genuine.

Archie told reporters that Agatha
now knew who he was, but had

lost three years of her life and
still didn't recognise her daughter.

But they didn't believe him.

Questions were raised in Parliament
about the cost of the police search.

There were calls for the Christies
to pay the money back.

On 18th December, Archie left Abney.
Agatha stayed on.

In early 1927, Agatha's sister
persuaded her to take

a flat in London
in search of a cure.

Next comes a deeply mysterious
part of Agatha's life.

There are hints that she came for
psychiatric treatment

here in Harley Street,

where the best and the most
expensive doctors are to be found.

But there aren't any
records of her treatment.

I'd love to know more.

I want to find out who might
have treated Agatha

and what sort of treatment
she received.

Hello. Will you be Claire?
I'm Claire.

I've enlisted
the help of Dr Claire Hilton,

historian in residence at the
Royal College of Psychiatrists.

This is the journal of the Royal
Medico-Psychological Association,

which includes a list of members

and where they worked. Ah!

Just seven psychiatrists had
Harley Street addresses at the time

and Claire thinks she's found
the most likely candidate.

And here we've got William Brown,

at number 88 Harley Street. Yes.

Was this Dr William Brown a public
figure? Was he famous?

He gave public lectures and in 1925,

the Guardian and the Telegraph
reported on some of his.

"Loss Of Memory, How To Cure It,
Dr William Brown."

It says here, "He knew that
a wave of the hand would immediately

"bring memory back."
Sounds like our man.

Sounds like it.

What sort of treatment did this
William Brown give to people?

He was very keen on hypnosis.

It says here that,
"During the war, he had treated

"over 600 cases of loss of memory in
this way with invariable success."

The first mental casualties of World
War I appeared in 1914, exhibiting

perplexing symptoms, like trembling,
paralysis, speech disorders,

confusion and memory problems.

Originally, it was thought
vibrations from shell explosions

were to blame and the
phrase "shellshock" appeared.

By the end of the war,

80,000 such cases had passed through
British Army medical facilities.

William Brown was one of the young
doctors brought in to treat them.

He agreed with Freud that recovering
repressed memories was key to

his patients' health and in wartime,
he needed a quick fix - hypnosis.

Now, I'm curious to know what
we can learn from Agatha's novels

about this mystery and,
in particular, there's this novel,

Giant's Bread, it's not a detective
novel, but in it, somebody loses

their memory and they get it back
again with the help of a doctor.

"He's a tall, thin man with eyes
that seemed to see right into

"the centre of you," so somebody
very charismatic and penetrating.

And this doctor uses a technique
that sounds a bit like hypnosis.

"The doctor touched his forehead
and his limbs, told him that he was

"resting, was rested and he would
become strong and happy again..."

And he begins to remember. Does
that sound like Dr Brown to you?

Well, what stands out is William
Brown's comment that he would

touch the forehead of his patients
before they passed into this

hypnotic state. That's fascinating,

because this novel that describes
someone being hypnotised to

get their memories back, I've always
suspected that Agatha was

talking about her own
experience here.

I think you've brought some new
evidence to the table here,

that she really did experience
illness in 1927

and that she was treated for it,

using up-to-date techniques
of psychiatry and hypnosis.

Is it possible, Claire, that he
was "a tall, thin man with eyes

"that seemed to see right into the
centre of you," as Agatha says here?

Well, we have found
a picture of him. No!

Don't tell me he was short and fat!
Don't tell me that!

Well, that is William Brown...
He's tall. ..on the left. He's tall.

He's thin. He's slim.

What do you think of his eyes?
Has he got a penetrating gaze?

He knows what you're thinking,
Claire!

Probably. I think
Agatha put him into her novel.

It really wouldn't surprise me.

Giant's Bread wasn't published under
the name of Agatha Christie.

She used a pseudonym,
Mary Westmacott,

and the true identity of
Mary Westmacott was kept top secret.

And when she was writing
in the privacy of her pseudonym,

Mary Westmacott, I think that Agatha
shows us who she really was and,

to me, that's a person who's clearly
had the insights of psychotherapy.

And this is a whole level
of understanding that's been missed

by all the people who don't believe
that in 1926, Agatha really was ill.

She went on to write five more
Mary Westmacott books.

They're almost like a form
of therapy themselves,

a place to explore her true
feelings,

which means these books are vital
for understanding the real Agatha.

They didn't sell well,

though, without the murders or
the Agatha Christie name.

Now, these Mary Westmacott
novels have often been

written off as romances, you know,
woman-type stuff,

but I don't think that's fair.

They're quite serious
studies of human nature.

And I think that this new wisdom,
this new maturity,

comes into her detective
fiction too.

As time goes on, Poirot,
for example,

changes the way that he works.

He gets less
interested in physical clues

and more interested in what we might
call psychological profiling.

He says here he's not interested in
"cigarette ash or fingerprints",

he says, "It is
the psychology I seek."

He wants to read
the secrets of the heart.

I believe that we wouldn't
have had Agatha's most famous

detective novels without her
moment of crisis,

and in particular,
the psychotherapy that followed.

We've reached 1928.

Agatha's therapy was over,
but she couldn't move on just yet.

Archie wanted to marry his lover,
Nancy Neele,

and Agatha,
who didn't even want a divorce,

was forced to collude in a trick
to protect Nancy's reputation.

Archie committed
a kind of fake adultery.

He came here to the Grosvenor Hotel,
Victoria, and "committed adultery

"with a woman",
except he didn't really.

He paid a waiter to say that he'd
seen Archie in bed with this woman.

All this was presented in court
and for Agatha,

there were two bad things here.

Firstly, this was all in public,
it was in the High Court.

Secondly,
she had to perjure herself.

She had to lie and say, yes,

she believed that this had
really happened.

Nancy's name was kept
out of the proceedings

and you get a sense of
how Agatha felt about this

because in another of her
Mary Westmacott books,

the heroine tells us, if she took
another woman's husband, she says,

"I'd do it honestly.
I'd not skulk in the shadow

"and let someone else do
the dirty work."

Agatha, of course, didn't have the
luxury of hiding in the shadows,

and the divorce meant, inevitably,

another airing in the newspapers
for the story of her disappearance.

Even after Agatha was found,

you don't hear her voice in the
press coverage.

She'd clearly decided not to
give any interviews.

And in lots of books you'll
read about Agatha Christie,

it's said that she never spoke
again about her disappearance,

that she kept silent for the rest
of her life. Now, that's not true.

It's almost comically untrue

because in 1928,
with the divorce under way,

she decided to take back
control of her own story.

She gave a really long,

really detailed description about
exactly what had happened to her.

In an exclusive interview with
the Daily Mail, Agatha directly

confronted the rumours about her
disappearance.

And I don't think it's a coincidence
that the article came out

as she was trying to win
custody of her daughter Rosalind.

Ooh! Are these all your newspapers?

Absolutely. Superb. A whole
range of them here. Thank you.

I want to discuss this article with
an expert on '20s journalism.

Why would she have chosen
the Daily Mail for telling her

side of the story?

Well, that's the best-selling
newspaper of the 1920s.

It was still very much
the market leader.

And it would be read by more people
than any other that she could

have gone to, so I think the
Daily Mail makes absolute sense.

It's also very striking to me
that it's in the first person.

She gets to say exactly what
she wants to say in her own words,

purportedly. Absolutely.

"In her own words"
is one of THE catchphrases of this

period of journalism, the idea that
we're opening the curtain,

we're sort of seeing
right into someone's soul.

In the interview, Agatha is
frank about her feelings,

her insomnia,

the fact that she began to
experience suicidal thoughts.

She left home that night

with the intention of doing
something desperate.

She says...

Adrian, who's reading these papers
that have got Agatha Christie

plastered all over the front page?

Well, they were designed to appeal
to a broad middle-class audience,

but we know that, really,
the heart of the readership

at this point were middle-class
women. Is that the front page?

That's the front page.
It's all about dresses. Absolutely.

And underwear. The Daily Mail
knew that it could get

huge amounts of money for this
advertising,

so the advertisers were
pushing for the female readers

and therefore, the editors were, "We
need to reach these female readers."

Agatha's books were serialised in
these newspapers, targeted at women.

The same female readers who'd also
lapped up the real-life

story of her disappearance.

Agatha needed to keep them onside.

There are very powerful
ideas at this time of what

motherhood should be, not least

because there had been some
murmurings, I think,

about how could someone disappear
like that and leave a daughter?

And she would probably have been
conscious of the sorts of things

that she would need to say,

not just in the courtroom,
but to the court of public opinion.

She would have been
conscious of that, I think.

What's astonishing to me

is that, despite the fact she gave
an interview to the Daily Mail

saying exactly why she'd
disappeared,

nobody was listening, because most
people today still, I think,

would say, "Oh, yeah,
she disappeared

"because she was a bad person
and she was framing

"her cheating husband for her
murder,"

because that made a better media
story. Absolutely,

and I think, to some extent, it is
the result of the intensity of the

coverage in 1926, splashed across a
whole range of different newspapers,

versus a one-off interview for one
newspaper, which although would

have got a certain reach,

it didn't probably have that same
lasting resonance,

and so people would go
back to the events of 1926

and then put their own
interpretation on it.

It just shows, you mustn't believe
what you read in the papers.

Absolutely not. You can't ever trust
the 1920s newspapers, in particular.

Gosh!

In the end, Agatha could not stop

the speculation about her
disappearance.

But she did win custody of Rosalind.

And she was learning that she
couldn't just keep quiet.

She had to get out there
and manage her image.

This is beginning to make
sense to me.

The very last thing she must have
wanted to do was to give

interviews to the press.

And yet, she was locked into this
relationship with it.

She still had to sell books.

Throughout the upheavals
of her divorce,

Agatha had been wrestling with her
next Poirot mystery.

And just a month after
the Daily Mail article appeared,

a new novel hit the shelves.

The Mystery Of The Blue Train
is about a murder on a luxury train,

going to the South of France.

And it's a book that marks a turning
point in Agatha's career, cos this

is the book that she was working
on in 1926, when she disappeared.

The story reflects
the turmoil in her private life.

It's about divorce and faithless
spouses, but the book itself

was part of the problem for her
because she just couldn't finish it.

She later described it as easily
the worst book she'd ever written.

When she'd come back after the
disappearance,

she really needed to finish it
because of the money

and she describes in this letter
how difficult that was.

She says here, "I wanted to
write for the sake of the money,"

to support her daughter,

"but I felt I couldn't
and it is a nerve-wracking feeling."

You can see her trying to finish the
book, squeezing out the words,

as she tots up her daily totals

and on this page
of her notebooks here.

She manages to get to 53,000 words,
but her publishing contract

says that the next novel must be

"not less than 75,000 words".

Let me read you one of the very
last paragraphs of the story,

which throws an interesting
light on all of this, I think.

"From far behind them,
there came a long, drawn-out scream

"of an engine's whistle.

" 'Trains are relentless things,
aren't they, Monsieur Poirot?

" 'People are murdered and die,
but they go on just the same.' "

So, this story works on two levels.

It's a story about a train,
but it's also a story about the

relentless, inexorable nature
of success and publishing contracts.

Much later, Agatha said that it
was full of cliches, the people

were unreal, the plot predictable,
and it had no joie de vivre.

People who thought it one of her
best, she said,

actually went down in her
estimation.

But even though it wasn't exactly
a masterpiece,

the Blue Train sold
because Agatha was now notorious.

The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd,
a brilliant book,

sold 4,000 copies in its first year.

The Blue Train, described by Agatha
as "easily the worst book

"I ever wrote", sold 7,000 copies.

Later, in 1928, Agatha's divorce
finally became official.

The next week,
Archie married Nancy Neele.

It must have felt like yet another
public humiliation.

Agatha was adrift. Her daughter
was off at boarding school,

she had no ties, no husband,
and more notoriety than she wanted.

But there was, at least,
the freedom to get away.

In November 1928,
Agatha threw caution to the wind

and booked herself a second-class
ticket on the famous Orient Express.

She'd once travelled the world with
Archie by her side.

Here was her chance to go solo.

And this was her first stop -
Sirkeci Station, Istanbul.

Agatha likes to tell the story
about how fate brought her here.

She had planned to go to the
West Indies, but then, at a party,

she ran into a couple
who'd just come back from Iraq.

They told her how marvellous it was,

they told her about these
incredible train journeys.

The next day, she changed her ticket
and five days later, she was off.

So, in the autumn of 1928,
Agatha arrived here in Istanbul,

ready to begin the next stage
of her journey even further east.

Thank you.

Now, this business of the
last-minute change of tickets,

it does sound like a plot device
from one of Agatha's own books,

doesn't it?

And when she came to write her own
life story,

she saw it in those terms,

as the beginning of a fresh chapter,
a new start in life.

As Agatha put it, "I was going
by myself, I should find out now

"what kind of person I was."

It's pretty exciting for me
being here in the 21st century,

and I've got a film crew with me.

Imagine what it must have been like
for a woman alone here in the 1920s.

It must have been almost shockingly
different

from her normal life at home.

Single female tourists were
a bit of a rarity at the time.

Yet, here she was, at 38 years old,
heading off on her own.

Last time that happened,
there'd been a national manhunt,

and now
she was blissfully in control.

What's more,
her journey was only just beginning.

Here's a map from the 1920s
that shows Agatha's route.

It's described
as an Authentic Imperial Map.

She started here at Istanbul.

British people then saw
the city as the gateway to the East.

Then she crossed the Bosporus
by boat,

then it was on to a train to get
across the rest of Turkey, through

some thrilling mountain passes,
then through Syria, to Damascus,

there it is, then the journey got
really exciting because to go across

the desert into Iraq, she had to
travel in a bouncing desert minibus.

The idea of being on your own
in the desert was a powerful one

for Agatha. Years later,
she wrote Absent In The Spring.

In it, a woman finds herself
stranded for days

and is forced to confront her
self-deception. Agatha writes...

I think that on this journey,
Agatha too was finally facing up to

all those terrible things
she'd been through.

When she reached Baghdad,

she actually found it a bit
disappointing.

It was a bit too British
and colonial.

So she immediately set off again,
going in this direction,

towards an even bigger adventure.

Over 200 miles south of Baghdad,
she reached Tell el-Muqayyar.

This was the site
of an archaeological dig,

begun in 1922, which had uncovered

treasures from the 5,000-year-old
Sumerian civilisation

at the Royal Cemetery at Ur.

The visit to the dig would
end up being

just as transformative for Agatha
as the journey itself.

Many objects excavated at Ur are
housed here at the British Museum.

And I'm meeting a leading expert.

Zainab, in the 1920s,
Tutankhamun has just been discovered

and everybody's mad for Egyptian
things... Yes. ..aren't they?

Egyptomania. Egyptomania!
How does Iraq fit into that?

Well, soon afterwards,
Iraq also got a different

kind of a mania about these...
Especially these finds from Ur.

So, it began to gain a similar
kind of glamour.

So, if you've seen the
Golden Treasures from Egypt,

you're also going to like the
Golden Treasures from Iraq. Exactly.

Zainab, what's this amazing thing
we're looking at here?

This is the so-called
Ram in a Thicket.

It was one of the objects that was
found in the Royal Cemetery of Ur,

which was this spectacular
series of 16 graves that date to the

middle of the third millennium BC
in the south of Iraq.

How intrepid of her was this?

Well, I think it was intrepid,

because even now a lot of people
are kind of reluctant to go to Iraq,

after all of the wars and so on.

And we have to imagine
that it was something similar.

They had just come
out of the First World War.

Iraq was under the British mandate,

which is a polite way of saying
it was a colony.

So it was this exotic place,
but it was in the East,

in someplace unknown.

So I do think it was brave of her
to decide to go.

When Agatha Christie arrived at Ur
in 1928,

she got invited to stay on the site.

That was a pretty special thing,
wasn't it?

That's very special.

Yes, I doubt that they would
have invited every tourist.

No, because she brought publicity
to the archaeologists. Exactly.

And what archaeologists really want
is to have that kind of publicity

in order to have more funds.

Agatha's fame may have attracted
the archaeologists,

but she certainly got
something in return.

Archaeology and Iraq would become
a source of inspiration

for future novels.

And she also gained in other ways.

It seems to me that Agatha's first
trip to Iraq made a big difference

to her self-confidence.

She knew now that she could live
by herself, travel by herself.

I think it gave her
a new sense of independence.

The next step was to apply
this new confidence

to her life at home.

And, by chance,

1928 was also the year
she had her first encounters

with the movies.

I'm meeting Mark Aldridge,
an expert on Agatha's films,

to find out
how she showed her mettle.

Mark, what was the...what was
the very first Agatha Christie film?

It's actually not
one of the big stories.

So you might think it would be
Poirot or that it would be one

of her really famous mysteries.

But actually, it was a short story,
a Mr Quinn short story,

one of her interesting characters.

It starts quite like
what Agatha Christie wrote,

but we also get things
like poisonous snakes

and all sorts of things

that are absolutely not
in her original story.

Oh, look! There's the snake.

Adaptations of films
in this era

very often were playing fast
and loose with the original story.

This is a silent film,

so you're having to make changes
anyway.

So we shouldn't think that
Agatha Christie was particularly

poorly treated here.

Reviews weren't terribly kind,
and one said it was

one of the least convincing things
they'd ever seen on film.

Oh, dear. Yes.

So, can we see this first film?
The really bad one?

Unfortunately,
no prints are known to survive.

But who knows
if that was deliberate or not?

So, 1928, this really terrible film
kicks off her career.

What happens next? Does it
get any better? Well, a little.

What we then have is Austin Trevor,

a fairly young actor
playing Hercule Poirot on screen.

Can we see this guy, then,
Austin Trevor?

We can see him in 1934
in Lord Edgware Dies. Ooh!

Let's assess his performance,
shall we? See what you think.

Mr Poirot, I believe.
At your service, my dear.

Oh, you Frenchmen are so cute.

I just love your Parisian manners.

He's French!
LAUGHING: He's French.

He's not supposed to be French.
I know. I know.

He's famously Belgian.
He's famously Belgian...

..unless you're a film producer,

in which case, he'll be
whatever you want him to be.

Mr Poirot, I want to consult you.
But certainly, madame.

Shall I call on you tomorrow?

Oh, tomorrow means nothing
in my life -

only the present counts.
Why not now?

By all means, if you wish.

We should be quite undisturbed
in there.

What's going on with the moustache?

Exactly. Where is his moustache?

He's not Poirot! No.

Of course, if we were in Chicago,

I could get him bumped off
quite easily.

But you don't seem to run to
gunmen over here. No, madame.

Here, we consider human beings
have a right to live.

Even husbands. Oh, I see.

So how does she react to people
taking Poirot and making him sexy

and French, messing with him?

Well, we've got a pretty good idea,
because later in the 1930s, MGM,

the big Hollywood studio,
they showed some interest.

This is a letter from May 1936
from her American agent,

written to her British agent, to say

that they'd better drop
negotiations. Oh! What went wrong?

Well, the New York office thinks
this is because the author,

our beloved Agatha Christie,

wanted a clause put in the contract

saying that Poirot should not
be involved in any love story.

So she said, you can have Poirot,

but you can't make him
into a romantic hero.

And that was enough for a big studio
like MGM to say, "No, we'll pass."

Gosh. So they wanted him to be
this kind of guy, a romantic lead.

Yes, they did.

I love the sense that
she's taking up control.

She's becoming the queen of crime.
I think so.

And I think she started
to have confidence to speak back

to people who tried
to correct her or said

that she should be doing
certain things.

And I think that
the earlier Agatha Christie

wouldn't have done that.

She's a changed woman. Hmm.

It's fascinating to see Agatha
fighting to keep Poirot

under her control.

Made wiser by recent troubles,

emboldened by
her independent travel,

she was beginning to find
the confidence

to stand up for herself
and her writing.

In the late 1920s, detective fiction
was flourishing, thanks to novelists

like Dorothy L Sayers,
GK Chesterton

and, of course, Agatha herself.

And some of these writers banded
together into a dining society

called the Detection Club.

If you joined the Detection Club,
you had to swear the club oath.

It was very tongue in cheek.

You had to promise that, in any
future novels you might write,

you would avoid the things
considered to be cheating.

These included trap doors and ghosts

and super criminals and death rays

and - this is interesting -
feminine intuition.

I wonder what's wrong
with feminine intuition

and why it's cheatier
than masculine intuition.

Anyway, Agatha had always enjoyed
breaking the rules,

and this was a rule
that she would break

in creating her new detective.

Miss Marple first appeared
as a character in a short story

of 1927, The Tuesday Night Club,

before emerging as a detective

in her own right in 1930's
The Murder At The Vicarage.

Ha! Now, you might think

that Miss Marple
is a sort of cuddly,

tea-drinking old lady.
You'd be wrong.

She's actually an independent
and quite subversive woman,

and she works through feminine
intuition.

This is how she defines it.

She says, "Intuition
is like reading a word

"without having to spell it out.

"A child can't do that because
a child has little experience,

"but a grown-up person
knows the word

"because they've seen it
often before."

She's really talking
about life experience, isn't she?

As she says here,

"My hobby is - and always has been -
human nature."

Now, I think it was
Agatha's own life experience,

this sense that she'd been through
trouble and come out stronger,

that she was entering into her power

that allowed her to create
the rule-breaking Miss Marple.

Agatha found a way of combining
her new confidence and independence

with the psychological insights
from her illness

to create the perfect detective.

Almost a century
after we first met Miss Marple,

some of our great novelists
are still fascinated by her.

I've met up for a glass of cherry
brandy

with three best-selling writers

who've just finished their own
Miss Marple stories.

Now, Kate, I've heard you saying
that Miss Marple is your hero.

Is that fair to say?

Yes, she absolutely is.

I think she is one of the great
unsung heroes of literature

and one of the great women
of literature,

not just crime, but everything,

because she is utterly herself.

She's uncompromising,
but she's gentle and clever.

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

but without it being
because they're somebody's mother?

She's someone that other people
take for granted a little bit.

She's a little bit invisible,
but she turns that

into her secret weapon.

You know, she's able to overhear
conversations because people

don't think anything about talking
in front of her because she's just

this fluffy little old lady.

So, of course,
it doesn't matter what they say.

You know, part of this
is also cultural, right?

Because in an Asian context,
you know,

we revere the older generation

and we think they have
a great deal of wisdom.

And when I first read Miss Marple
stories, I was quite surprised

by saying...by seeing,

"Oh, she's being underestimated."

Kate, can you tell me
what the brief was when you wrote

these new Miss Marple stories?

Well, it was... The brief was
quite tight, in a way, wasn't it?

So I think one of the key things
is that

there could be no love interest.

We couldn't create a back story
of a husband that died in the war

or a broken heart. In those days,

even though there was a surplus
of women

because of the First World War

and there weren't enough men to go
round and all of these things,

there was also a thing
that single women

and women who didn't marry
were to be pitied.

And that is an incredibly
important part

of why Miss Marple is dismissed.

I think the other really interesting
thing about both of Christie's

detectives, actually, is that
they both arise out of sort of

slightly destabilising influences
after the war,

in that Poirot is a refugee,

and that was something that people
had a lot of anxiety about.

Miss Marple is one of this
generation of superfluous women.

And what Christie does brilliantly
is show that these people are not

just important and integral
to society, but, you know,

they can be absolutely key
in ensuring that society can run

in a successful way.

Kate, when you were designing
your crime that Miss Marple

was going to solve,
what did you bear in mind?

I think the most important thing
is resolution.

The idea that you set up
something very contained.

You give the reader every single bit
of information they need.

But there is...it comes
with a promise that

there's going to be
no things left hanging.

But the other thing
about Marple mysteries

is that there's often
some little piece

of disregarded knowledge
which is considered

as being too trivial
and too unimportant

for all the grand,
you know, police detectives.

But for Miss Marple,
nothing is too trivial.

And that's her brilliance.

You know, there are always
these very clever clues.

And when you try to replicate
that experience, you realise

how very difficult
that actually is,

to toss in just enough information
that you're playing fair,

but to do it without really
just giving it all away.

And it made me respect Christie
and Miss Marple so very much,

because you realise this is so much
more difficult than you would think

to set the path and yet
not make it very obvious.

Miss Marple embodied the new Agatha
of the late 1920s,

determined not to be
at anyone's mercy,

completely in control
of her craft.

Agatha had gone
from desperate fugitive

to this confident,

powerful, independent woman
in a really horrible way.

I think that the traumatic 1920s
had made her stronger.

They'd certainly made her
into a household name.

And I also think the trouble
she'd had made her work better.

It made it richer and darker

and more psychologically
interesting.

She was ready for a fresh chapter.

Next time, archaeology
gets under Agatha's skin.

Absolutely everything is celebrated
by Christie.

Evil comes to a remote island.

Be very afraid.

And the dark origins
of a famous play.

Have a look at this.
She's written on it!

This is brilliant.