Queen of crime: Agatha Christie

On December 3, 1926, a 36-year-old woman left her home in Sunningdale, Berkshire, in the UK at 9.45 p.m. She drove her car at considerable speed and parked it precariously on the edge of a chalk pit in Surrey. Leaving her bag of clothes and private possessions inside, she travelled to London and caught a train for Harrogate in Yorkshire. From the station, she took a taxi to the Swan Hydro Hotel and registered herself under the name of Teresa Neele. The young woman was the crime fiction writer, Agatha Christie. Teresa Neele was the name of her husband’s mistress.

Agatha Christie’s mysterious disappearance prompted by her mother’s recent death and her husband’s infidelity led to a huge manhunt in Britain. Newspapers offered rewards for information and helicopters and search parties combed the areas near Berkshire. Eleven days later, she was recognised in Harrogate by a local banjo player, Bob Tappin, who alerted the police. Colonel Christie, her husband, came immediately to collect her. She kept him waiting and finally joined him for dinner. Agatha Christie put the episode down to temporary amnesia caused by the accident. Most of her readers and fans thought otherwise. The writer never referred to the incident again and a year later divorced her husband.

This year, the 30th anniversary of Dame Agatha Christie’s death, the Queen of Crime will be remembered in the same hotel at a Crime Writer’s Festival. The hotel, now re-named the Old Swan Hotel, part of the MacDonald hotel chain, and extensively refurbished, will host the three-day event from July 20-23. Speakers at the Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival will include the top crime writers of the day, P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Martina Coles, Val McDermid, Mark Billingham and George Pelecanos, among others. The crime writers’ festival (Europe’s biggest), started in 2003 and has become an annual institution in this Yorkshire spa town. It has a ?3,000 prize for the best crime fiction, won by Mark Billingham last year. This year, Christie will be the main focus, as the venue moves to The Old Swan.

“We have already seen a huge interest in the event and rooms at the hotel are getting booked,” said a spokeswoman for the Old Swan Hotel. The hotel has suites named in the memory of Agatha Christie’s novels and often hosts Murder Mystery weekends which begin on Friday evening with dinner, followed by the discovery of the body on Saturday morning, the briefing by the police and the hunt for clues and the murderer by the guests ending on Sunday morning with the final revelation.

Apart from the Crime Writer’s Festival, the life and works of Agatha Christie will be celebrated around the country. Londoners can see a West End production of And Then There Were None directed by Steven Pimlott, which has been successfully running since October, and have afternoon tea, like that enjoyed by Agatha Christie herself, in the Brown’s Hotel in Mayfair. The hotel was used as the setting for the Miss Marple mystery At Bertram’s Hotel.

Also at the West End, fans can still see Christie’s Mousetrap, the longest running play in history now in its 54th year, still weaving the magic for tourists and fresh viewers. The story about a group of people trapped in a snow-bound hotel with a murderer in their midst was originally written as an 80th birthday present for Queen Mary. The play opened in 1952 at the Ambassador’s Theatre, with Richard Attenborough and his wife Shiela Sim in the cast. It transferred to the St Martin’s Theatre in 1974 where it has been running ever since.

On New Year’s Day, a new drama of ITV’s Poirot was premiered on British television with David Suchet in the role of the Belgian detective. There are plans for further dramas.

In Torquay in Devon, where Agatha Christie was born and lived for most of her life, the lure of the crime writer has always been a major selling point. The coastal town has a Christie trail, including a Christie Mile which takes in the Grand Hotel, where Agatha and her husband, Archie, spent their honeymoon and Torre Abbey, home to the Agatha Christie Museum, which houses her favourite armchair, her 1937 Remington typewriter and her plotting notebook containing the handwritten manuscript of A Caribbean Mystery. The walk also takes the Christie fan to Princess Gardens which is featured in the ABC Murders, past the bronze bust of Christie unveiled in 1990 to the Torquay Museum which is home to the Agatha Christie Centenary exhibition and towards Beacon Cove, where Agatha Christie enjoyed swimming as a teenager and nearly had an accident. The last stop is the elegant Imperial Hotel, with its views over the bay, instantly recognisable to Christie fans as “The Majestic” hotel in Peril at End House. It is also on the terrace of this hotel that Miss Marple unravels the mystery in the final chapter of Sleeping Murder.

Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Miller in 1890 and wrote her first book in 1916. She married Archie Christie on Christmas eve, 1914. When her husband left for the First World War, two days after their marriage, she joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment and worked as a nurse in the Red Cross Hospital in the Town Hall. Later, she worked at the dispensary in Torquay where she acquired knowledge of poisons, which she used later in her novels. The English Riviera Tourist Board is also capitalising on the Christie connection.

All along the Riviera are sites that were used by Christie in various novels. The Tourist Board invites fans to visit the various locations made famous by the writer. Kents Cavern in Torquay appears as Hempsley Cavern in The Man in the Brown Suit and it is in Elberry Cove, a peaceful cove surrounded by the South Devon hills, that Sir Carmichael Clark meets his untimely death, in The ABC Murders. Poirot comes in to investigate. Poirot also travels on the Paignton and Dartmouth Steam Railway which features in The ABC Murders and again in Dead Man’s Folly. Churston station appears as Nassecombe Station in Dead Man’s Folly and as itself in The ABC Murders.

Agatha Christie’s house, Greenway, overlooking the Dart River has also been opened to the public following the death of her daughter Rosalind Hicks and is now managed by National Heritage. Hotels in the area such as the Meadfoot Bay Hotel in Torquay stage special Murder Mystery weekends through the year for Christie fans.

With sales of over two billion books worldwide, and translations second only to the Bible and Shakespeare, the fascination with Agatha Christie and her creations, Poirot and Miss Marple, continues to endure.