1. The Mysterious Affair at Ashfield
Agatha Christie is famous for her murder mysteries set in aristocratic country houses, and her childhood home, Ashfield, was just such a place: a large Victorian villa in Torquay, Devon, with a garden full of trees. Agatha was born there to Clara and Frederick Miller on 15 September 1890, but her idyllic childhood was cut short by the death of her father in November 1901. Unlike most of the deaths in her novels, Agatha’s father died of natural causes. The Millers were in financial difficulties at the time, possibly due to criminal mismanagement of their money by one of the trustees of the family fund.
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John Moffat as the moustachioed Hercule Poirot.
2. Debut on the Nile
After sending Agatha to a succession of French finishing schools, in 1908 Clara decided that it was time for her daughter to be married. Due to their reduced financial circumstances, she planned a budget coming out party... at a hotel in Egypt! Agatha’s debut was a success, and after their return to England she was inundated with marriage proposals. In the end, her heart was captured by a dashing member of the Royal Flying Corps named Archibald Christie.
3. A War is Announced
Archie was mobilised in August 1914, but Agatha didn’t spend the war weeping for her fiancé. Between October 1914 and December 1916, she volunteered for the Red Cross, before training as a pharmacist at Torbay Hospital. It was here that Christie learned all about poisons, a recurrent trope in her books. Of her 66 detective novels, an astonishing 41 feature a murder or suicide by poison, and The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1921, even includes a young woman who works as a pharmacy dispenser.
4. Live Man’s Folly
Agatha and Archie married while he was home on leave in December 1914, but could not live together until September 1918. Agatha threw herself into her new role as wife: she tried to be a good cook, started a typing and book-keeping course, and in August 1919 the couple’s only child, Rosalind, was born. But Archie declared his wife’s cooking “uninteresting” and her soufflés “indigestible”, and he began to spend more and more time on the golf course. Maybe it’s no coincidence that several of Christie’s plots feature murders on golf courses!
5. Surfing is Easy
In 1922, Agatha and Archie spent nine months travelling the world for his job. As part of this they enjoyed a month-long holiday in Honolulu, where Agatha learnt to surf, describing it as “one of the most perfect physical pleasures I have known”.
6. Appointment with a Publisher
In 1919, Christie had sold The Mysterious Affair at Styles to the publisher John Lane. Recognising her lack of industry experience, Lane trapped her with a five-book deal which earned her scant royalties. Over the course of the 1920s, with her growing critical and commercial success, Christie grew frustrated with this deal. In January 1924, she signed a new contract with the publisher William Collins, Sons & Co, and in 1926 they published one of her best-known books: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
