Travelling the world with Agatha Christie
Agatha Milner married twice, and both her relationships fed her taste for foreign travel. Her first gave her a new surname and took her around the world, and her second took her deep into ancient history via the Near East. A hopeful romantic, she often travelled for love or to recover from the loss of it.
Agatha liked abroad and knew the abroad she liked. She had firm views about travel, as she did about many things:
“I am quite capable of disliking a place just because the hills seem to me the wrong shape – it is very, very important that hills should be the right shape. Practically all the hills in Devonshire are the right shape. Most of the hills in Sicily are the wrong shape, so I do not care for Sicily … In Switzerland the hills and mountains stand about you too closely. Snow mountains can be incredibly dull …’ Views’ can be dull, too. You climb up a path to a hill top – and there! A panorama is spread before you. But it is all there. There is nothing further. You have seen it.”
The adventures away from Agatha’s childhood home near Torquay started early and helped shape her life. In the early months of 1910, short of money after the premature death of her husband, Agatha’s mother, Clara, took the two of them off to Egypt. It became a kind of “coming out” opportunity for Christie, an alternative to an unaffordable “season” in London. For three months, they stayed at the stylish Gezirah Palace hotel in Cairo and chaperoned by her mother, the young Agatha went to over fifty dances and met numerous young men, many of them British officers on Spring Manoeuvres. Their youthful spirits meant, in Agatha’s words, “we didn’t need pep pills; we didn’t need sedatives”.
Agatha played the looking-for-a-husband game with enthusiasm. Like so many of her age and class, there didn’t seem to be an alternative. She was a lively and adventurous young woman and attractive to the young men she met. She adored opera, wrote some poetry, and, prompted by her mother, began story-writing. But the discovery of her writing talents was soon put on hold by love and an opportunity for adventure abroad.
Aged just 22, Agatha fell for a handsome officer based at the Exeter garrison named Archie Christie. Archie was only a year older than her and was an outgoing and determined young man. He became a flying officer in the First World War. He and Agatha were infatuated with each other, and as the war ended, they married and set up a home in London.
A daughter was born not long afterwards, and with her husband busy at the office, Agatha turned more seriously to her writing, and The Mysterious Affair at Styles soon followed. But Archie was restless and quickly bored with life in the City and so agreed to join a promotional tour of the Dominions, one of the events planned for the Empire Exhibition of 1924. It was arranged for Agatha to join the party.
This proved to be a chaotic and often hilarious trip around the globe. Agatha enjoyed it immensely and, in her diary, recorded its mishaps and comic happenings as they made their way by sea via South Africa to Australia and New Zealand and on to Canada.
Her marriage to Archie seemed idyllic, made more so by their year together on the world tour; but it was not to last. Archie fell for another woman, and despite Agatha’s efforts to hold things together, the marriage broke down irretrievably. Agatha was distraught. Her writing and growing enjoyment of travel provided solace.
In 1928, Agatha spontaneously abandoned a planned trip to the West Indies and boarded the Orient Express, heading for Baghdad instead. It was a journey that changed her life once more.
By the waters of Babylon, she discovered the ancient worlds of Ur and of Nineveh as well as her second husband, the distinguished archaeologist Max Mallowan. They became abiding and complementary companions and Agatha became a regular visitor on the Orient Express, even taking her typewriter with her when she went on trips with Max, or when she went to visit him on archaeology sites in Iraq and Syria. “All my life I had wanted to go on the Orient Express. When I had travelled to France or Spain or Italy, the Orient Express had often been standing at Calais and I had longed to climb up into it,” the author wrote in her autobiography.
Agatha effectively divided her life between the writing of crime novels and plays – still labelled as “Mrs Christie” – and developed a highly ordered domestic life as Mrs Mallowan (later Lady Mallowan after her husband was knighted). Agatha was always somewhat surprised when, during her travels, the worlds of Mrs Mallowan met that of Mrs Christie, and she found herself meeting her readers across the world.
Despite her great adventures, Agatha was a home bird at heart. Travel was an engaging diversion, but home was at “Greenway”, their rather grand house in Devon. The crime world depicted in her novels is a very English and confined world. Whether focussed on Miss Marple or the Belgian Hercule Poirot, the location is England, if not in name, then in more subtle scope and character.
Even when her love of adventurous travel and her crime novels intersected, Agatha’s fictions have a claustrophobic quality and reflect a nostalgia for 1930s England. As her husband, Max, commented later, the most realistic depictions of their life together in the Near East was captured in Murder in Mesopotamia, which she wrote in 1936.
What is striking to a reader today is how little description there is of the local area and how the action is concentrated on the characters and the murder mystery. It is effectively a murder in a transposed English country house.
It’s no accident that Murder on the Orient Express is also set in a confined location with the action driven by the characters and the process of finding the murderers. Again, the murder might as well have been in an English country house as in an international railway carriage. Of course, this point works both ways, and it is why Agatha had readers from across the world seeking the comforting security of her world and of her fictional England.
When Geoffrey Jackson, the British Ambassador to Uruguay, was kidnapped by the Tuparamos terrorist guerrillas in 1971, he was asked by his captors if he knew about a writer called “Agata Creestee”. He did indeed, and as a result, they provided him with some of her books. As Jackson later recalled, from that moment, he never lacked an escape – the novels provided unlimited visits back to his native land.
But Jackson’s native land had become others’ too; Agatha’s work found resonance across cultures, ages and languages. In a poem he wrote for his wife’s 80th birthday, Agatha’s second husband, Max Mallowan, wrote:
“So blessings upon you our Agatha dear
And remember this birthday with never a tear
Throughout the wide World, in East and in West
You are loved for your kindness your craft and your zest.”