You've caught me in my trailer.
To me, it's more like a caravan near an airport.
I should explain, because I'm half in character, and you've caught me during my lunch hour.
I've just taken my moustache off,
and with it on, of course, I would be Hercule Poirot.
I know this man, Agatha Christie's famous creation.
I know him so well.
I could take him shopping.
But...
how well do I, David Suchet,
know Poirot's creator?
'Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time.
Only the Bible and Shakespeare have been more widely read.
So, I wonder, what is it about her
that makes her so good and so enduringly popular?
I'm on my way to Greenway, the country retreat in Devon,
where Agatha spent most of her summers until her death in 1976.
I first came here 25 years ago,
to meet Agatha's daughter Rosalind,
to celebrate me playing Poirot.
Today I've come to see Agatha's grandson, my old friend Mathew Prichard,
and Mathew has offered me a rare peek into the treasure trove
that is the Christie family archive.'
Welcome to Greenway. Thank you. Great to see you.
Great to see you, after so many years.
Yes. Goodness me.
I've got a lot of lovely things to show you.
I'm looking forward to it. We'll go into the library.
So, I'll tell you why I'm excited about this.
There are all these fantastic photographs, which you're going to tell me about,
but for 25 years,
I have been playing that iconic character
that your grandmother, Agatha Christie, wrote,
and because of that, my whole life and career has changed.
But I've never met the lady who was responsible
for my life, really, in such a big way.
So, I want to get to know her through you.
What sort of person she was. Not the writer,
but your grandmother.
What sort of lady was she?
Well, we've put aside a few things here
which may give you at least a little clue,
particularly one item, but we'll leave that one till last.
I mean, you said you didn't want to know the writer,
but this is the sort of picture that everybody sees on books.
Yes, and that's the iconic one. Yes, that is the iconic one.
And this is the first one we have of her.
This is Christmas 1895,
and there she is, sitting by a pile of wood,
with her first little dog, who was called George Washington.
And she had this extraordinary curiosity
and huge appetite to learn.
Nobody's ever seen this before, outside the family, I don't think.
It's called... The Cowslip.
So, this is a poem.
"There was once a little cowslip, and a pretty flower too,
but yet she cried and fretted all for a robe of blue.
Now, a merry little fairy, who loved a trick to play,
has changed into a nightshade that flower without delay.
The silly little nightshade thought her life a dream of bliss,
yet she wondered why the butterfly came not to give his kiss."
She wrote that April 1901.
Agatha Miller, aged ten.
Wow. What a lovely thing to have. Yes.
Upstairs, Mathew had another treat for me.
Home movies, never before seen outside the family.
Oh, look. There's Rosalind.
There is Agatha.
Wonderful picture of her. It is.
And I think a little bit of bathing is about to take place.
Yes. There we go.
She always said she loved bathing,
and I think that is at a place called Meadfoot.
Near Torquay? Near Torquay.
She always loved immersing herself in the water.
That's my mother, I think.
I doubt if I'd even arrived in the world then.
This is great footage of your family.
'As I watched, I wondered:
how had this reclusive lady grown from a curious child
into the queen of crime?
Mathew had something for me that might provide a few clues.'
Well, they always say that, if you really want to understand a person,
and they've written something serious,
you should read what the person says themselves.
And I have here a manuscript
of Agatha Christie's autobiography,
hand-corrected,
and I think you, of all people, should read that in its original form.
Oh, my goodness. So, there you are. Wow!
Well, what a privilege. Thank you very much.
'Keeping a tight grip on the precious manuscript,
I headed down to Greenway's old boat-house by the river and began to read.'
"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think,
to have a happy childhood.
I had a very happy childhood.
I had a home and a garden that I loved.
I had a very wise and patient nanny.
And I had, as father and mother, two people who really loved each other dearly,
and who made a success of their marriage
and a success of parenthood."
'I read on.
There were many stories of a carefree childhood.
But then one tale stood out.'
"All children have nightmares.
My own particular nightmare
centred around someone I called the Gunman.
The dream would be quite ordinary.
A tea party or a walk with various people.
Usually a mild festivity of some kind.
Then suddenly, a feeling of uneasiness would come.
And then I would see him, sitting at the tea table,
walking along the beach, joining in the game.
His pale blue eyes would meet mine,
and I would wake up, shrieking."
'So, was this, I wondered,
the first clue to explain the origins of her dark side?
This is Blackpool Sands in Devon,
one of Agatha's favourite spots.
I've come here to meet her biographer, Laura Thompson.'
Of course, Agatha loved the sea, and she loved to swim.
Even when she got quite an old lady, she really got a kick out of swimming.
Well, yeah, Mathew showed me a wonderful home movie
of her running into the sea
and having a terrific time swimming.
Hello! Hello, sweetheart!
Hello, darling. And she loved dogs, of course.
Here you are.
'Having played Poirot for so long,
I know how Agatha's novels were inspired by the Devonshire landscape,
with real villages and hidden coves becoming fictional places of murder and intrigue.
And I'm sure these idyllic settings have always been a part of her appeal.
We headed off to Torquay.
It was here in this genteel town on the English riviera
that Agatha Miller was born in 1890.
She grew up in this house, Ashfield,
the youngest of three children.
If her nightmares about the Gunman had been unusual,
I needed to know whether there was anything else about her childhood
that might have influenced her life and work.'
She was an interesting child.
She was a complicated child, inevitably, because she was so clever.
And she was hugely imaginative.
The house, Ashfield,
which was a lovely house -
she would dream that the gardens were infinite,
or that there were rooms where you would open a door and there were unknown rooms in there.
She always had that sense of a world beyond,
and I think that worked very well for developing her particular gifts.
AGATHA CHRISTIE: 'People often ask me: What made you take up writing?
Many of them, I fancy, wonder whether to take my answer seriously,
although it's a strictly truthful one.
You see, I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education.
Although I was gloriously idle,
I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts.
There's nothing like boredom to make you write.'
Well, her mother, Clara...
They had a fantastically close relationship, I think.
She was the most important person in Agatha's life,
but she decided that Agatha shouldn't be allowed to read until she was eight.
That's extraordinary, to hear that today.
I know. It was mad. It was a whim. It was just something she decided.
That was what she was like - impulsive.
And Agatha, being incredibly bright, took no notice. Taught herself to read.
Did she have a class? I mean, in the class system, where would she find herself?
The interesting thing about Agatha is that she was innately cosmopolitan.
She was half-American. Her father was born in New York.
She had a side to her that wasn't this supremely English being, as we think of her.
Actually, she wasn't quite like that.
In her autobiography,
Agatha writes that her father's death, when she was 11,
symbolised the end of her childhood,
and it also brought considerable financial strain to the family.
I wonder if that's why, in over half her novels,
money is the prime motive for murder.
I learned that, despite the hardships,
society demanded that life went on.
Finishing school in Paris was followed by a whirlwind of social engagements in Torquay,
and her official coming-out in Cairo,
which inspired a first attempt at a novel, Snow Upon The Desert.
But more important was the promise of romance.
I think the phrase she used: 'We were like fillies kicking up our heels in a field.'
She had about five proposals,
and then Archie Christie came into her life in 1912.
There was a dance near Exeter.
Anyway, this gorgeous man comes up to her.
You had a dance card... 'Cut that, cut that, cut that. Dance them all with me.' Quite sexy.
(LAUGHS)
Yeah, and he was very good-looking.
But her mother didn't want her to marry Archie.
She said, 'He's ruthless. He won't treat you well,
and he's very attractive to women.'
It's a bit like Romeo And Juliet. The feud pumps up the romance.
And I think theirs was pumped up by,
A, the fact that Agatha's mother didn't want them to get married,
and, B, the war.
'The First World War began in August 1914.
By then, Archie had joined the fledgling Royal Flying Corps,
and was convinced he was going to die.
So, while on leave, he and Agatha got married in secret.
She would live with the consequences for the rest of her life.'
'In 1914, the newly married, 24-year-old Agatha Christie
hadn't published a single novel.
But what was happening to this young woman's life at the outset of war
was to lay the foundations of her future literary career.'
The famous photograph we have of Agatha Christie
is that of an elderly lady,
and one always imagines Agatha to always have been an elderly lady.
But it's lovely to read this time of her life,
when it was all beginning, as a young woman, in Torquay,
before she became a writer.
'With her husband Archie fighting in France,
Agatha volunteered as a nurse in Torquay,
treating wounded soldiers brought back from the front,
and helping out in the operating theatre.
For a well-to-do young woman,
it was an often shocking experience.'
CHRISTIE: 'The first time I went,
it was a stomach operation,
and it...
made you feel very ill to look at it.
And I began to shake all over.
But everything, in life, one gets used to.'
'It was during this time that Agatha came into contact with Belgian refugees,
and it was an encounter that sparked her imagination,
leading to the creation of her character Hercule Poirot.
It was in 1916 that Poirot made his debut on the page,
when Agatha began writing her first detective story.
She called it The Mysterious Affair At Styles.
I've come to Dartmoor with Agatha's biographer Laura Thompson, to find out more.'
So, Dartmoor - Agatha used to come an awful lot,
as a young woman, young girl.
And also, this is hugely important,
because this is where she worked out a lot of her first book.
Really? Yes.
Her mother sent her to stay here. She said, 'Unless you go away, you won't finish the book.'
She just walked across these moors for six hours at a time,
speaking the dialogue out loud.
So, some of the words you would have said. Really? Yes.
When I learn my lines, I always have to speak them out loud, as well.
Well, there you go. That's interesting.
It was rather brave of her to come out to an area like this,
cos the climate can change in a second, can't it?
It really can. You can feel the sort of sinister lowering waiting to happen.
But she liked that. That fed her imagination, as well as the beauty of Devon. The sinister side.
'After several rejections,
The Mysterious Affair At Styles was eventually published in 1920,
to enthusiastic reviews.
In the book are many of the traits for which Agatha would later become famous.
There's a country-house setting,
a closed circle of suspects,
and a death by poisoning,
the method of murder she would employ in around half of her novels.'
She's dead.
'I've read that it was while working in a hospital dispensary during the war
that Agatha developed her passion for poison.
In Torquay, Ali Marshall has created a poison garden,
dedicated to Agatha and her work.'
So, tell me all about these poisons.
I mean, it looks like a lovely garden, but it's not, is it?
But it is lovely, and a lot of these plants are common plants,
which shows you how dangerous it all is.
But this section here is where I've put the majority of my potentially very dangerous plants.
Here? But it all looks so innocent.
But then a lot of them are innocent.
For example, do you know where cyanide comes from?
Show me. Cyanide is found in the kernels
of cherries, apple pips, peaches.
That's where you get cyanide from - hydrocyanic acid,
which of course was Agatha's favourite poison.
But she had an amazing knowledge, didn't she?
She did, and that training as a pharmacy assistant
gave her so much more background knowledge.
I think the first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles,
which she wrote while she was working as a pharmacy assistant -
her favourite review was from the Journal Of Pharmacology...
Oh, what was...?
And they credited her with being very accurate,
because it was a very accurate description,
and the technical background of it, knowing that the salts sink and all the rest of it -
you need a certain amount of knowledge to talk about that and to write about that.
'This ability to draw on her own experience
to shape and inform her stories
would become another enduring trait in Agatha's work.'
You see? Already the strychnine is beginning to fall to the bottom.
In a few hours, it'll form colourless crystals...
Which remain at the bottom of the liquid?
Which remain at the bottom of the liquid.
'The end of the war ushered in a period of great happiness for Agatha.
Archie returned home, and they moved to London,
where Agatha gave birth to her daughter
and signed the publishing deal that launched her career.
She also accompanied her husband on a ten-month tour of the dominions,
and in Hawaii became one of the first Europeans to learn to surf standing up.
Then, in 1925,
they left London for Sunningdale,
where Agatha bought her first car, a Morris Cowley.
It was, she later wrote, an experience as fulfilling as meeting the Queen.
This adventurous period in her life
culminated in a story I know well.
In the Poirot novel The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd,
her decision to cast the narrator of the story as the murderer
broke all the rules of crime fiction,
cementing her at the heart of the golden age of the genre.'
So it would seem that, at this point in Agatha Christie's life,
everything was going absolutely wonderfully.
But in her autobiography, we learn that everything was about to change.
"The next year of my life is one I hate recalling.
As so often in life, when one thing goes wrong, everything goes wrong."
'I needed to know what had gone wrong in Agatha's life,
so have come to the golf course at Sunningdale to meet historian and Agatha Christie fan Bettany Hughes.
I'm hoping she has some of the answers.'
On the face of it, things are going very well.
Her books are published. She's got money coming in.
She's got this lovely young daughter, Rosalind.
She's got Archie.
But you just get the sense that, beneath the surface,
there are cracks beginning to develop.
I think Archie was probably very damaged by the Great War.
Physically and emotionally.
And then his eyes start to wander,
and there's this very attractive, curvaceous, dark young woman, called Nancy Neele,
who crosses Archie's path,
and he starts to spend a lot of time with her, on the golf course.
They come and play golf together.
And then she has a terrible time. Her darling mother dies.
Of whom she was so fond. So attached to.
And it's Agatha's job to clear out the old house.
So, you have to imagine her there,
dismantling her childhood, really.
All those childhood memories that she's wrapping up or throwing away.
She's down there on her own.
And then Archie turns up
and announces that he's having an affair and he wants a divorce.
'Agatha was devastated.
What happened next was so extraordinary,
it was like the plot from one of her own novels.
On the evening of Friday 3 December, 1926,
Agatha said goodbye to her sleeping daughter Rosalind,
then drove off into the night.
The following morning, her Morris Cowley was found abandoned
at a spot called Newlands Corner near Guildford.
Her coat and driving licence were on the back seat,
but Agatha was nowhere to be seen.
In a near-identical car,
we've come to see the place for ourselves.'
So, we know that she got this far,
because the police report the following day
reported having found this car,
but abandoned.
And can you imagine? It's bleak enough as it is now, isn't it?
Yes.
And so remote. It's not near anywhere.
No.
'Bettany had unearthed some early police reports
that I hoped would shed some light on her disappearance.'
"The lady disappeared under circumstances which opened out all sorts of possibilities.
She might have been wandering around with loss of memory around Newlands Corner,
or she might have fallen into one of the numerous gravel pits that abound here..."
Cos there's tons just a bit further down the lane there.
"..and lying helpless in agony.
Or she might, as was strongly suggested to the police,
have been the victim of a serious crime."
My goodness me.
This is an extraordinary place to come. It is.
I mean, don't you think, coming here...
this feels like a chosen place?
It doesn't feel like she's...
It doesn't seem random at all.
I mean, you can't see this from the road,
so it must be foreknowledge.
Yes. I mean, you can imagine...
It caught the public imagination. Almost immediately, it became headline news.
"Aeroplane search for missing novelist."
And then it's on page three.
"Plane scours downs for lost woman novelist."
"All-day hunt by 300 men with dogs." This is huge.
It's huge. And look: "Pool dragged again."
Actually, I think I've got some pictures of that.
Oh, they're there. Look at them, searching.
They're all searching. I don't know whether the numbers are right,
but some people said there were 15,000 who came to look for her...
because if anybody knows that people like a mystery,
it was Agatha Christie.
'But then I discovered the truth.
It lay in a hotel in the spa town of Harrogate.'
And so, now I find myself on the train, going to Harrogate,
and hoping to find
some answers to the mystery of her disappearance.
'On 4 December 1926,
Agatha arrived at this hotel,
and signed in under the surname Neele,
the same name as Archie's mistress.
And here she remained for the next ten days.
In the meantime, the search for her continued unabated.
Biographer Janet Morgan is here to tell me what happened next.'
Janet, we're not talking about a minor occurrence.
We're talking about a major manhunt,
looking for the body of Agatha Christie.
And the murderer. And the murderer.
It was an extraordinary story.
Aeroplanes. Special constables.
'Bring your boots. Bring your bloodhounds.'
But for the public that didn't know her,
and only knew her as a crime writer,
writing these mysteries...
..huge theories developed.
So, what were some of the theories after her disappearance?
That here was a woman who wanted to publicise her books.
And another theory was that this was a very complicated sort of revenge.
So, if she disappeared,
it might be thought that her husband
had intended to murder her.
And then he'd be tried for attempted murder,
and possibly, in those days, that would be the end of him.
So, how was she discovered?
Two of the men who played in the band identified her...
who, rather wonderfully, didn't go to the press and claim the £100 reward,
but went to the police,
and said that they thought that this might be Agatha Christie.
'The press quickly got wind of the story,
and photos of Agatha leaving the hotel hit the front pages.
Archie told journalists his wife was suffering from amnesia,
but there was public outcry from those who continued to see her disappearance
as nothing more than a publicity stunt.
The repercussions would haunt Agatha for the rest of her life.
But it was a subject she refused to discuss,
and I could find little mention of it in her autobiography.
I needed to see Laura Thompson again,
to see if she could shed any light on the mystery.
I began by reading what little Agatha had written.'
"But life in England was unbearable.
From that time, I suppose, dates my revulsion against the press,
my dislike of journalists and of crowds.
I had felt like a fox, hunted,
my earths dug up and yelping hounds following me everywhere.
I had always hated notoriety of every kind,
and now I had had such a dose of it,
that at some moments I felt I could hardly bear to go on living."
Poor woman. I mean...
what an honest thing to actually write. Yeah.
But that's all.
So, can you help me any more?
(LAUGHS) Well...
Where she really wrote about it is as Mary Westmacott, and this book -
Whoa. So, you're saying...
she let it out in a novel?
She did. She really did.
These Mary Westmacott novels are not particularly well known. There are six of them.
She wrote them between 1930 and 1956.
So, when she's at the peak of her powers as a detective-fiction writer,
she's writing the opposite of those books, which are neat and tidy.
Everything's resolved. You know - that catharsis at the end, the world restored to itself.
These Westmacotts are the exact opposite.
Everything's churned up, emotional, unexplained.
She's digging deep into herself,
trying to understand everything
that puzzles her in real life.
And she's writing these really rather...
They're not as accomplished as the detective fiction,
but they're incredibly powerful,
and they are probably the best clue to her that you're gonna find.
Under a pseudonym? Yes. Protected by the pseudonym.
So, her disappearance will always remain a mystery, or not?
It's a mystery in the sense that we would never know what was going on in the poor woman's head,
what anguish she went through.
It's not a mystery in the sense that, in the emotional context, we kind of know.
And of course, everything she did to get that man back
determined that she would never get him back,
because a private tragedy became this public sensation,
and I think that's as good an explanation as you're gonna get, really.
'Agatha and Archie were divorced in 1928.
In Harrogate's Turkish spa,
I reflected on what I'd learned.
It must have been a dreadful period in Agatha's life.
I imagine most of us have got to the stage where you can't think straight any more,
and you get that tight band around the head.
I know I have.'
I don't think we'll ever know what really happened.
But we do know that this whole painful experience
was the beginning of a new phase in the life of Agatha Christie.
It's as though she wanted to just slam the door on it all,
and she describes it quite vividly in her autobiography.
"I knew that the only hope of starting again
was to go right away from all the things that had wrecked life for me.
There could be no peace for me in England now,
after all I had gone through."
'On the next leg of my journey,
I'd have to go further afield,
to find out what happened when Agatha left England,
on a voyage that would change her life in more ways than one.'
'Istanbul, the city where it's said
that east meets west.
In 1928, following her divorce from Archie,
Agatha Christie was craving adventure,
so, on a whim, came to Istanbul on the Orient Express,
en route to Baghdad.
It marked the beginning of a love affair with the East
that would last for over 40 years,
one which would have a profound effect on her life and writing.
And it was her use of exotic locations in stories
like Death On The Nile and Murder On The Orient Express
that really set her apart from her contemporaries.
I'm meeting Barbara Nadel,
otherwise known as the queen of Turkish crime-writing.
Though born in London, most of Barbara's stories are set in Istanbul,
and her novels have been strongly influenced by Agatha Christie.'
Hi, David. Nice to meet you.
Welcome to Istanbul. Please come in.
'Barbara took me to Sirkeci Station,
where both Agatha and Poirot once boarded the Orient Express.
I wanted to know more about this period in Agatha's life
and the effect it had on her readers back home.'
What was your introduction to Agatha Christie?
We had her books at home,
so I picked them up as a kid and read them and thought, 'These are good.'
And when you're a young child, you don't think too much about it,
but as I got older, I started reading more crime fiction,
but I always went back to Agatha Christie.
I think one of the extra dimensions that she brings to crime fiction,
that was so extraordinary at that time, was,
you've got this sort of English cosiness about it,
but you've also got this edge.
Not just in terms of the plots
and her psychological development of the characters,
but also the edge of...she went abroad.
She set mysteries in places like Iraq and Egypt.
These were places that...
Britain had an empire, so British people were aware of these places,
but they didn't go to these places,
unless they went with the army, but that was different.
So interesting. Yes, it is.
Yeah, she's a lot more...
She's a lot more fascinating than...
People get this idea of a little English lady.
She was a hell of a lot more than that.
She was a real adventuress.
'It was on that trip that Agatha went to her first archaeological dig,
and she was fascinated by it.
It was through this new interest that she was introduced to a young archaeologist, Max Mallowan,
who became the love of her life.
This is how Max remembered their meeting.'
'Some rather imperious people
ordered me to take her on a conducted tour
over a large part of Iraq,
and this I did with pleasure.
But it was on that journey that I realised
that she would make, I thought, a wonderful companion in life.
We were stuck in the sand, and she took it all in her stride,
with the utmost good humour.
'Agatha and Max were married in September 1930,
and throughout her life, she regularly accompanied him on digs to the east,
the sights and sounds ever inspiring the plots and locations of her stories.'
Poor little beggar.
About six years old, I'd say.
Sent into the next world with nothing but a little pot and a couple of necklaces.
Well, perhaps that is all any of us need.
'Having come to Istanbul,
I could understand why Agatha had been so drawn to the east,
and why it had left such an indelible mark on her heart.
But home for Agatha was in England.
By the time of her marriage to Max,
she had already had over a dozen books published.
Then came The Murder At The Vicarage,
the first novel to feature a new creation, an elderly spinster called Miss Marple,
whose shrewd intelligence and ability to see the worst in everyone
she based upon her own grandmother.'
Miss Marple. Did you know
that she visited the Colonel on the afternoon before the murder?
Dr Haydock drove her up. Now, I find that very interesting. Don't you?
I think it would be a good idea if I had the whole story from you.
Oh, I'm sure you're too busy to listen to my little ideas, Inspector.
No-one can accuse me of not being thorough. Indeed.
'In the late 1930s, Agatha's work began to develop a new emotional complexity,
drawn from personal experience,
like the Poirot story Sad Cypress,
which I remember touched on themes of love and adultery.
That decade, Agatha and Max bought several properties,
including their beloved Greenway in Devon.
But for them, like for so many people,
peace was about to be shattered.'
NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN: 'I have to tell you now
that no such undertaking has been received,
and that, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.'
'Along with other country houses, Greenway was requisitioned during the war.
Max was sent to north Africa with the RAF,
so Agatha went to London and worked again in a hospital dispensary.
She turned down an offer to write wartime propaganda for the government,
but instead, amidst the air raids,
wrote more crime fiction than ever before.
And in stories like Evil Under The Sun,
the reassurance that good would prevail inspired her readers.
She was like the Vera Lynn of the literary world.'
VERA LYNN: # There'll be bluebirds over... #
'I've come to watch a wartime propaganda film,
with one-time air-raid warden Elaine Kidwell.'
Does this bring back memories?
Yes, yes. Look - air-raid shelter.
Apparently, I was the youngest warden in the UK.
But that's because I lied about my age.
(LAUGHS) They said, 'How old are you?' I said, '17 and two months.'
'Right. You're in your 18th year. In the wartime, we bend the rules.'
What did you do to have some form of escape for yourself during the war?
I used to read, and I loved Agatha Christie,
and her books were wonderful,
because, although they were crimes,
to what was going on in the world, they were gentle.
And what was so funny was,
if little boys got to know about Poirot,
they would be trying to walk like him,
because he was a hero.
He worked things out,
and he had justice for everyone.
She had justice for everyone in every one of her books, didn't she?
'By 1950, it was estimated
that Agatha Christie had sold over 50 million books worldwide.
But still there was no slowing her down.
That decade saw the opening of her most famous play, The Mousetrap.
On the play's tenth anniversary, in 1962,
she gave this rare interview.'
Do you think The Mousetrap is the best play that's ever run in London?
Oh, I'd hardly say that, no. Not by a long way!
Why has it been so phenomenally successful, then?
Well, there again, I don't know. People like it, but who can say why?
How many years would you give The Mousetrap yet?
I wouldn't like to prophesy!
'I wonder what she'd think if she knew it was still running today.
The 1960s were the age of the paperback writer,
and in a highly competitive market,
cover design was becoming quite literally a work of art.
In 1962, artist Tom Adams
entered into a unique creative partnership with Agatha Christie,
that resulted in over 100 paperback cover paintings.'
David, hello! Come in. Thank you very much.
David, come and see some of my pictures.
You'll probably recognise most of them.
Oh... Hallowe'en Party.
Yes. Oh, my goodness. Look what you've done, though.
That almost looks photographic, that girl,
when you compare it to the pumpkin's face and the witch.
Yeah.
I enjoyed doing that one.
Could you explain to me your process of developing an image?
What the publisher wanted was to take the cover more seriously,
and I'd read the book
at least three times.
I would make notes, do sketches, underline passages.
Certain objects which, if possible,
would be true to the story,
but not necessarily illustrate the story.
Objects which would symbolise or represent a theme in the book.
And so, the first one I did was A Murder Is Announced.
That was in 1962,
and I've been doing them up to the last one, Miss Marple's Final Cases, about 20 years later.
Wow. But you obviously love it.
I do love it, and the extraordinary is
that I really love Agatha Christie's work.
When I first started doing her covers,
like everybody else, we all had read Agatha Christie from time to time.
But I didn't think too much about it.
She herself never claimed they were great works of literature.
But as I got to read more and more of them,
I realised what a great writer she is.
Did you ever meet Agatha Christie?
No, I didn't, but in retrospect, I'm quite glad I didn't meet her,
because I then got to know her more intimately through her work.
If I'd met her, she would have had to say,
'Well, I don't like this cover very much!'
And I would have had to either defend it
or else be worried that she didn't like some of them.
So, I think it was quite a good thing that I didn't meet her.
I think I have a very similar reaction.
I've always said I wished I had met her,
and on so many levels, I do wish I'd met her,
but my own vanity as an actor would have been terrified
and most upset to have been told,
'Oh, I didn't like you in that story.'
Well, I think you would have found that she would have been absolutely amazed
and in great wonder at your interpretation of Poirot.
Well, thank you. No question.
It's been a wonderful experience, not only to do the covers,
but to talk to you, who is as intimately connected to this grand old lady as I am.
Well, we're very linked. Indeed, yeah.
'Since the publication of her first book back in 1920,
Agatha Christie has remained enduringly popular,
so I wondered finally
what might have been the secret of her continuing success.
The answer may lie in the notebooks that she used to plot her stories,
books that were only discovered in 2005.
To find out their secrets, I'm going to Burgh Island,
to meet the man who has a detailed knowledge of their contents -
lifelong Agatha Christie devotee John Curran.'
John, having studied these books in such a forensic manner,
you told me you'd bring one for me to see.
I did. Have you? (LAUGHS)
Now, this is one of the more impressive notebooks. It's quite substantial,
and it has a black, hard cover.
This is the notebook for the book that we now know as And Then There Were None,
because it went through quite a few title changes, before the age of political correctness.
This is an example of one where I think she did a lot of the plotting beforehand,
because the plot runs quite smoothly.
Here we have Vera Claythorne, a character in the book.
We have the judge. He's a character. We have a doctor.
And here we have Captain and Mrs Linyard.
Now, they're not in the book, so they were a couple that she toyed with including in the book.
Now, as everybody knows, there are ten characters in this book,
but at some stage in the notebook, she has either eight or 12 characters, for whatever reason.
But the plot of the book is followed fairly closely by the plot in the notebook.
Then she turned every notebook upside down and wrote from the back.
So, here we have household accounts,
and as you can see, she has more household accounts: "Bus and Tube, clothes."
And then we have more notes for books.
This is actually part of the dramatisation of The Secret Of Chimneys.
So, the notebooks were completely random.
I think the reason for the random notes and illegibility
was because she had so many ideas running through her mind.
She just had to get them down as fast as she could.
And it made me realise:
this woman who wrote all these books that everybody finds so easy to read
actually worked really hard to create books that are simple to read.
She's the perfect example of the art that conceals art.
Why, then, does she outshine nearly every single other contemporary crime writer?
Well, I think you can omit 'nearly'. She does outshine.
And I think, if you have to confine it to one word,
I think it's because her plots are simple.
Everybody can understand them. It doesn't matter about your level of education.
Whether you left school at 14 or whether you're a nuclear physicist,
you can understand where she's coming from,
and I think that is really the secret of her success -
her simplicity.
'Dame Agatha Christie died peacefully at home in 1976, at the age of 85.
As Hercule Poirot,
I've solved many of her mysteries.
But there are so many conundrums in her own story...
..that she's been the most difficult of characters for me to unravel.'
When most people think of Agatha Christie, what comes to their mind
is one of the most successful English crime writers in history,
whose books are sold in over a hundred countries,
films made, television series made, and so forth.
But making this programme
has allowed me to go, in my own terms, backstage,
and enter another world.
So, what do I come away with?
A very warm person,
who loved her family,
who was enormously positive.
A person, above all, who was very thankful and grateful for her life.
If I'd met her,
would I have learnt any more, I wonder?
I think I would have come away thinking
she was still very much a mystery.
CHRISTIE: 'I don't say I don't want to live longer,
but as anyone who enjoys life, who has a strong feeling
for the pleasures just of being alive,
of waking up, of knowing it's another day,
welcoming sun or wind,
or even a nice, hot breakfast and the smell of coffee...
You can't want to die when you feel like that.'
Subtitles by Deluxe