Original subtitles

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 sharing 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 Crime watch. 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 "shell shock" 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, "|t 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?

Ancl 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 travel led 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.

Ancl 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.

Ancl 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 Lorcl Edgware Dies. Ooh!

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

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

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.

Ancl 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.

Ancl 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.

Ancl I think that the earlier Agatha Christie

wouldn't have clone 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 I 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 clays,

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.

Ancl 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.

Ancl 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.

Ancl 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.