Original subtitles

TRAIN TOOTS

Anything else, Mrs Christie?

No. Thank you so much.

Oh, thank you very much.

Oh, here they are.

Good morning. Good morning.

Good morning.

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

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

But I guessed the ending.

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

If she's got anything left. SHE CHUCKLES

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

AGATHA LAUGHS

WHISTLE BLOWS

TRAIN TOOTS

Agatha Christie recounted this story in an interview in 1970,

and I love what it tells us about her.

She was stupendously famous,

yet she was able to slip beneath the radar.

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

And I think that this story is key to understanding

who Agatha Christie had become in later life.

At the height of her fame and success,

she revelled in being mysterious.

The greatest mystery that Agatha Christie ever created was herself.

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

and I think there's much more to this enigmatic

and elusive novelist than meets the eye.

She subverts what we think we want

and gives us something so much more interesting.

I'm investigating the mysterious case of Agatha Christie.

How did this woman, who grew up a Victorian,

challenge the expectations of her age?

The doctor, the judge, the general -

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

Let's go.

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

fuel her writing?

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

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

I want to explore how the changes of her lifetime

affected her writing.

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

radical writer and woman.

In the spring of 1930, Agatha Christie travelled alone

to visit ancient sites in the Middle East.

Aged 40, she was an internationally successful novelist,

but she was also emerging from a tumultuous few years.

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

had led to a personal crisis played out in public.

The trip abroad was an escape.

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

She joined a dig being run by a British couple -

Leonard and Katharine Woolley.

Agatha knew that travelling would help her to escape

from her problems at home.

What she didn't know was the completely transformational effect

that the Arab world would have on her life.

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

in an environment like this.

But on top of that there was the actual activity

the Woolleys were here for.

There was something about an archaeological dig

that lit Agatha's fire.

The Woolleys' dig was in Iraq.

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

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

Ah, this is your site? Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

was so drawn to archaeology,

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

I understand that you are Agatha Christie fans.

Am I right? Huge. Huge!

LAUGHTER

What draws you to Agatha?

She's a brilliant writer. Brilliant writer.

And her approach to everything is very archaeological.

She treats every object as an incredible find, actually.

You like Agatha Christie because she treats objects, clues,

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

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

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

Every person, every clue,

absolutely everything is celebrated by Christie,

and that's what I call an archaeological mind.

And that's what I admire about Christie.

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

would offer her more than just literary inspiration.

On one dig with the Woolleys in 1930,

she spotted a curious person.

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

He was quite quiet but very perceptive.

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

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

Katharine Woolley called Max the perfect assistant.

And now she had the perfect job for him -

chaperoning Agatha around the sites of ancient Mesopotamia.

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

they must have seemed an odd couple.

The young archaeologist

and the famous novelist 14 years his senior.

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

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

There was the age gap and they were so different.

But then, boom,

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

She was thrown into turmoil.

Max was lovely.

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

of travel and adventure and his passion for archaeology.

But her demons were never far away.

Her first husband, Archie, had betrayed her,

leading to a painful divorce.

The memories were still raw.

Something of her feelings enters into her writing.

Here's Murder In Mesopotamia.

This book draws heavily on her experience of archaeology

in the Arab world,

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

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

"Lots of people wanted to marry me

"but I always refused.

"I'd had too bad a shock.

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

It took Agatha months to make up her mind

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

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

they got married.

This is a letter that she wrote to him

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

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

so the anniversary of that, as she says here,

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

"I feel so happy and safe and loved.

"Bless you, my darling,

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

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

and ushered in a golden age for her writing.

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

an incredible 17 full-length novels.

And in that time, every year,

the happy couple returned to digs abroad.

Agatha and Max's shared passion for archaeology

was never far from her thoughts.

In one book, she even has the great Poirot

refer back to that case he cracked in Mesopotamia

and she has him draw a parallel between the work

of the archaeologist and the work of the detective.

They do the same thing, he says.

"You take away the loose earth,

"you scrape here and there with a knife,

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

"the naked, shining truth."

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

It wasn't even set in Iraq.

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

In 1931, Agatha and Max went to Egypt.

They became friends with Howard Carter

and visited the tomb of Tutankhamun he'd discovered.

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

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

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

for British travellers.

Tourists like Agatha flocked to the ancient ruins,

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

one she knew would resonate with her readers.

In Death On The Nile, Agatha would develop

one of her favourite plot devices - the closed circle.

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

It has to be one of them.

She used this way back in her first book,

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

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

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

would have seemed exotic and glamorous.

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

on the Nile.

Agatha and Max boarded this very boat in 1933.

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

and later converted into a cruise ship for wealthy tourists.

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

A rich cast of characters is trapped on the boat

and, when a murder occurs,

Hercule Poirot is on board to solve the case.

But it's more than that.

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

and betrayal as the engine of the story.

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

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

To explain how this works,

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

The story starts with Jackie and Simon,

who are in love.

But they're very poor.

Jackie has a plan, though.

She asks her friend Linnet, a rich American,

to give Simon a job.

Linnet says, "Absolutely!"

Everything is going very well.

Fast-forward three months...

..and Simon, the cad,

he leaves Jackie and goes off with rich Linnet instead.

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

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

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

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

There's definitely going to be trouble.

Linnet asks for Poirot's help

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

"Mademoiselle", Poirot says to Jackie.

"I speak as a friend.

"Give up the past.

"Turn to the future.

"What's done is done.

"Bitterness will not undo it.

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

Poirot might almost be talking to...

..a younger Agatha here

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

and bitterness had entered her heart.

Poirot goes on to say to Jackie...

"Do not open your heart to evil

"because if you do, evil will come."

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

GUNSHOT

Linnet is murdered in her sleep.

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

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

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

Or villains,

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

Simon had only pretended to fall in love with Linnet.

He married her so that when she was dead,

he could inherit the money and share it with Jackie.

Agatha is so clever at the way she misdirects us.

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

She makes us feel sympathy for Simon,

whose lovely young wife has been killed,

when all along, these two have been the villains.

Death On The Nile has it all -

the glamorous romantic setting, the stunning plot twist.

But I think its success is down to the personal experience

Agatha brings to it, which resonates through the novel.

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

checking it out, making sure the plot worked.

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

perhaps thinking about her own past.

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

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

..and of the destructive power of romantic love.

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

BELL CHIMES

Its towns and villages shaped so many of her novels.

For Agatha, the county of Devon in particular

exerted a gravitational pull.

Agatha still owned her old family home of Ashfield

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

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

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

and the oppressive grief of her mother.

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

Here's the advert in Country Life magazine.

It was huge.

It has stabling for seven horses, a billiard room,

ten bedrooms, six more bedrooms for staff,

and it was advertised as being "eminently suitable

"as a first-class hotel."

BELL RINGS

May I come on? Please do.

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

It was a sign of the times.

In the interwar years, the English country house

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

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

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

to live in it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agatha and Max were putting down their own roots in Devon

and Agatha's writing that year was directly inspired

by the landscape that surrounded them.

In 1938, the year Agatha bought Greenway,

she wrote a new story set on an island

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

Now, this story is clearly set in Devon.

Plymouth is mentioned, so is Exeter.

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

Well, here's a clue.

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

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

and she's written here,

"Scene - hotel on island, Bigbury."

Now, Bigbury is definitely a real place.

It's only 20 miles away from here.

There it is.

And guess what?

Right by Bigbury,

yes, there is an island.

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

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

ENGINE STARTS

The only way across is by sea tractor.

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

Its unique location would spark Agatha's imagination.

We've crossed the sea and we've arrived

at this mysterious, isolated island.

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

But one of her most famous books made this setting

a much more disturbing and menacing place.

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

have been brought to an island.

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

with a mysterious owner who isn't even there.

And in Agatha's version of Burgh Island,

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

there's no way of getting off the island.

There's just the treacherous sea.

It's the classic Christie closed circle.

But this time there's no Poirot.

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

Be very afraid.

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

And then there were none, as the title goes.

Except that wasn't the original title.

When the book was first published in Britain,

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

Obviously, this is utterly offensive.

Why would anyone want to read this book today?

The offensive title came from a nursery rhyme.

It was also found in blackface minstrel acts -

racist theatrical performances.

Frankie Bailey has studied race and crime fiction.

What would you say if I asked you

if you liked and admired Agatha Christie?

I admire her as a writer.

She's a master of that three act construction.

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

building the suspense,

alerting the reader that something bad is going to happen

but you don't know quite when.

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

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

She's the queen of suspense in that respect.

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

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

The offensive title wasn't on the front cover

of the first American edition, was it? No.

Which is interesting because we get the same nursery rhymes

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

things are beginning to improve

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

If you offend people and have people boycotting your book,

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

So the publishers in America thought,

"This racial slur will not sell here."

It was unnecessary to what they wanted to do.

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

It was also a racial slur - against Native Americans.

Meanwhile, almost unbelievably, in Britain,

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

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

is typical of her class and time.

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

It is disappointing.

But Agatha Christie is a woman coming out

of that colonial background.

She's well read, well educated,

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

She's not writing to change the narrative,

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

that white European, white American audience,

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

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

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

Exactly. We need to understand it in context,

knowing that Agatha Christie was not alone

in terms of what she was doing.

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

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

That's interesting.

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

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

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

a lot of other writers during that period.

There are things you can learn from reading those writers.

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

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

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

of all time.

And it was published just weeks after Agatha and Max

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

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: I have to tell you now,

this country is at war with Germany.

Having survived one world war, the prospect of another one

must have appalled Agatha,

and it threatened to upend her new-found security.

In September 1940, the blitz on British cities began.

Children were being evacuated from places like London

to the safety of the countryside,

but Agatha was going in the opposite direction.

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

And the reason she came here to Blitz London

was to be with her beloved Max.

With his archaeological career on hold,

Max had taken a desk job with the RAF.

And in March 1941, seven months into the Blitz,

which killed almost 20,000 people in London,

Agatha moved with Max to this ultra modernist block of flats

in Hampstead.

These were dangerous times and this was a dangerous street.

Before Agatha moved in, a bomb blew out the glass

of all the windows of this building.

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

But Agatha herself wasn't particularly fazed by this.

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

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

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

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

Was this genuine calm in the face of mortal peril

or a reflection of Agatha's state of mind?

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

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

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

but this time he was going alone.

These are letters Agatha wrote to Max

and I think they show evidence of...

..deteriorating mental health.

She has dreams that he's abandoned her.

Listen to this.

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

"I woke up in a panic."

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

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

Now, Agatha had come to London to be with Max

but he'd gone off to North Africa.

He was living there in a sunny climate

with lots of other British people serving in the Forces,

all of them away from their families,

some of them women his own age.

If Agatha still had any insecurities about being older

or about what had happened in her first marriage,

they must have come flooding back.

Lonely and jealous,

the clouds of her past turmoil were gathering again,

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

In the war years, she wrote 16 novels,

seven collections of short stories and a play.

Agatha tells us that she wrote one of these wartime books

in just three days.

She describes producing it in a white heat.

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

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

When she finally got to the end, she collapsed.

She slept for 24 hours.

And she later said that this book was the one book

that had satisfied her completely.

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

It wasn't a detective novel at all

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

Written under her pseudonym Mary Westmacott,

Absent In The Spring is in part about a woman

who comes to realise that her marriage is a lie,

that her husband loves another woman.

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

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

" 'But I should have said that husband of yours

" 'had quite a roving eye.'

" 'Really, Blanche?' Joan flushed angrily.

" 'A roving eye, indeed? Rodney?'

"And suddenly, discordantly,

"a thought slipped and flashed sideways

"across the panorama of Joan's mind."

In 1943, no-one knew that Mary Westmacott

was really Agatha Christie.

And I think Agatha was revelling in the freedom

this gave her, the freedom to be off brand.

These Westmacott books really are her most personal,

her most intense works.

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

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

because she'd been struggling with her mental health.

And by the time we get to the war,

I think that was happening once again.

Max was away, she was lacking support,

she was in a bad place emotionally.

But when she was being Mary Westmacott,

she was writing herself better.

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

Curtain: Poirot's Last Case.

But instead of publishing it, she locked it away.

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

she was killed in the raids.

But I don't think this was just about Agatha

and herself and her family.

I think she also wanted Poirot,

the character who had made her famous,

to have a perfectly orchestrated final bow,

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

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

Far from it.

In fact, inveterate observer that she was,

Agatha was instead on the lookout for writing inspiration,

and she found it in the darkest of places.

In the summer of 1944,

three brothers from South Wales were taken to Shropshire.

Their parents had been deemed unfit to look after them,

so they'd be fostered.

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

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

who lived in a remote farmhouse.

The farm was in rolling countryside.

There were chickens and cows and a vegetable garden.

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

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

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

about their parents.

This is what Terence wrote.

"My mother is very good and kind to me,

"she buys me new clothes,

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

Later, Terence revealed that this was all a fantasy.

As he says here, "I knew instinctively

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

"about the way the Goughs were treating us.

"The lack of food, the scratchy straw mattress,

"the heavy workload and the stripes."

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

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

by the people who should have cared for them.

They were starved and beaten until the inevitable happened.

This is a newspaper report from 1945

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

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

"was heart failure

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

It's really horrible.

"And the violence was consistent with having been caused

"by a man's fist."

That man was Reginald Gough.

He was Dennis's foster father.

Gough was arrested...

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

bringing something down the stairs.

The something was the body of his dead brother.

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

was Agatha Christie.

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

"had been neglected and abused

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

"One child did die and there had been a feeling

"that a slightly delinquent boy might grow up

"full of the desire for revenge."

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

that she used for a 30-minute radio play

called Three Blind Mice.

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

and she's done the title as a pictogram.

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

and then a cute little mouse.

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

into a full-length stage play.

There was already a play with that title.

She was stumped.

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

until somebody came up with a stroke of genius.

It was to be called The Mousetrap.

APPLAUSE

On the surface, the play Agatha developed

is a classic Christie whodunnit.

WHOOSHING

A group of unconnected strangers arrive at a guesthouse.

They become trapped there by bad weather.

It's another closed circle.

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

The play begins in quite a light-hearted way.

But Agatha is so good at light and shade,

things soon turn dark.

There's been a murder.

A policeman arrives at the house to follow up a lead

and he tells everybody that the victim was a woman

who, years before, had been responsible for the death

of a little boy in her care.

Was she murdered in revenge?

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

Agatha imagines that the surviving brother

could be the vengeful killer.

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

Could it be him?

The Mousetrap opened in 1952

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

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

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

would have remembered the O'Neill case?

It was, in 1945, a very important case.

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

This forms the back story of The Mousetrap.

It's not the actual action of the piece

but it is referenced throughout it as one of the reasons

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

For the audiences of 1952,

yes, it would have been fresh in their memories.

They would have understood the referencing in the play.

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

for writing The Mousetrap,

but is there any actual hard evidence of that?

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

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

which obviously caught Agatha's eye.

She's written on it. This is brilliant.

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

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

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

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

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

It's endlessly fascinating to me.

People think that Agatha Christie somehow celebrates Britishness,

that she's the sort of tourist marketing board image

of Britishness. I imagine you disagree.

There's nothing cosy about The Mousetrap.

Over time, I think people began to appreciate

exactly the significance of what it was talking about.

Harold Hobson, the great Sunday Times theatre critic,

wrote an article about The Mousetrap

in which he attributed its success to the fact

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

Everybody in it is displaced,

everybody in it is suffering from post-war anxieties.

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

into a guesthouse in order to make ends meet.

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

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

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

at the time, which is the lady of the house

carries a vacuum cleaner across the stage.

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

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

is thought to have, you know, recalibrated the entirety

of British theatre by showing a woman doing the ironing,

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

But Agatha Christie was doing it first. Exactly.

As well as this extraordinary background story,

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

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

and it's got a really fascinating plot

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

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

it was back to Greenway.

The house became a happy family retreat,

full of food, laughter and fun.

Agatha's contentment was complete.

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

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

"It makes a big difference to me.

"I feel it closes the gap a little.

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

"it was pretty grim."

As Max was settling into comfortable middle age,

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

And she was also closing the age gap

with somebody else who was very important to her.

Agatha's creation Miss Marple.

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

most of them from the post-war years.

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

when Agatha was young.

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

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

They'd go through life together,

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

Agatha inhabited Miss Marple inside and out.

She was so immersed in Marple stories

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

including getting her neighbours to act them out.

Agatha had the neighbours come into the drawing room

and she stationed one of them behind the door.

This would be significant.

Then she turned off the lights...

..and came in waving a torch around.

Then the lights came back on again

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

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

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

because this person was behind the beam

and they could see what had gone on.

When the book A Murder Is Announced came out,

the neighbours all realised that they'd been part of

a kind of a novelist's field experiment

to test out this really crucial aspect of the plot.

But the Marple stories are more than just cunningly plotted

and deeply satisfying crime novels.

I think that they document a changing British society.

Caroline Crampton is a detective fiction podcaster...

Come in for a cup of tea.

..and fellow Christie fan.

We're sitting in a lovely village,

just the sort of place that Miss Marple lived,

but something's changing about these villages

in the later Marple novels, isn't it?

In A Murder Is Announced, it's 1950,

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

People's lives were completely disjointed and fragmented

by what happened in the war.

Once upon a time, everyone who lived there

would have been known to everybody else

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

they would come via some established network.

They would come with a letter of introduction

from a friend or family member.

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

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

and that's just how the world is now.

And that changed - that gap.

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

In the story, Miss Marple even says,

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

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

Destabilising these ideas of identity.

The way that she writes mysteries keeps pace with the way

that the world is changing,

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

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

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

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

that Agatha Christie was socially conservative,

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

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

where we've got an openly lesbian couple.

Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd are just totally normal neighbours,

and we even get a really emotional moment in that book

when Miss Murgatroyd is killed and Miss Marple

comforts Miss Hinchcliffe at the loss of her partner,

and that this is really tragic and devastating.

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

is just slipped into the landscape like that

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

It is. And even subversive in a way,

homosexuality not being legalised until much later,

and yet it's completely normal in the book.

As we go on into the 1960s

and Agatha Christie is now in her own seventies,

how do the villages change?

Well, everything changes about them.

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

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

All sorts of modern ideas have arrived, including a supermarket

instead of your individual grocer shops,

and things like people don't eat bacon and eggs

for breakfast any more, they eat cereal for convenience,

it comes straight out of a box.

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

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

People get this idea of the fact that Agatha Christie

can be identified with a specific era

when, actually, she had a writing career spanning decades

and she evolved through it.

Part of that evolution involved a late reconciliation

with the film industry.

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

from the beginning but, the truth was,

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

She struggled with seeing her detectives,

Marple and Poirot, on screen.

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

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

Starring the greatest cast of suspicious characters

ever involved in murder...

The murderer is with us now.

You can identify the murderer?

Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Jacqueline Bisset.

He makes it sound like a poison.

Sean Connery. How did you know?

Beddoes.

John Gielgud.

Mr Beddoes.

Murder On The Orient Express.

I think that, in old age,

Agatha wanted to give her most successful creation

a life beyond her own,

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

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

was introduced to the Queen of England.

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

She attended the premiere in a wheelchair.

Agatha had ensured Poirot's legacy on the silver screen

but she also wanted to say a more personal goodbye

to her cherished character.

In 1975, sensing the end,

Agatha published Curtain: Poirot's Last Case,

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

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

And right at the end, just before he dies,

he says goodbye to his really old friend, Hastings.

He says, "Goodbye, cher ami.

"They were good days."

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

MUSIC: Nimrod by Edward Elgar

Agatha Christie died peacefully

on 12th January 1976...

..with Max at her side.

Ever the writer, she scripted her own funeral.

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

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

in their glory days.

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

in her purse.

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

and I can see why.

This is what Max had written.

"Sometimes, but not so very often,

"two people find real love together as we do.

"We know that what we have cannot perish.

"For me, you will remain beautiful and precious

"with the passing of years."

Ah.

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

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

But that turmoil was the making of her.

Agatha Christie's dark, brilliant imagination

was shaped by the upheaval of her own extraordinary lifetime.

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

the pioneering author she was...

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

A legacy that continues to captivate to this day.