Inside the Mind of Agatha Christie (2019) - full transcript
A profile of Agatha Christie with access to the author's personal notebooks, letters and diaries as well as never-before-seen documents.
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Agatha Christie is
the best-selling novelist
of all time.
The queen of crime wrote
66 murder mysteries
and dozens more plays
and short stories.
We all know Agatha, don't we?
The nice old lady
having tea with the vicar,
arsenic in the crumpets.
But do we really know
what was going on
inside her brilliant mind?
You sit down to start a book
that has lived in your mind.
All you have to do
is to write it.
Tonight, we'll delve
deeper into the genius
of Agatha Christie
than ever before.
We'll hear from the people
who knew her best...
She listened
to what anybody said,
watched what they did,
and then she made
her own use of it.
And uncover the secrets
of her rarely seen archive...
I went to a room
in which the entire history
of Agatha Christie's
literary career was to be found.
To discover the moments
that changed
Agatha's psyche forever.
She watches the century grow up
and she doesn't watch it
get any better.
This is the untold story
of what made
Agatha Christie tick.
She saw blood, she saw Gore,
she saw death, and she
wasn't afraid to use it.
I think she had
the most extraordinary mind.
Agatha was born
in Torquay in Devon
on the 15th of September, 1890.
Agatha Christie was
my great-grandmother.
We all referred to her
as "nima," which was
my father's attempt
at "grandma."
Nima and I were
closer than she was
even with my mother.
She was the cement
in the family.
I've always told everybody,
including my grandchildren,
that nima was the best listener
I ever met in my life.
She listened to what
anybody said,
she watched what they did,
and then she made
her own use of it.
Agatha watched,
she listened, and she also did
something remarkable...
she recorded everything.
Agatha's family
have granted US access
to this rarely seen
treasure trove
of manuscripts, letters,
and diaries.
They are the key
to understanding exactly
how her mind worked.
Hidden within are 73 of Agatha's
rarely seen notebooks.
For decades, the significance
of the notebooks
remained an enigma.
I went to a
room in which the entire history
of Agatha Christie's
literary career was to be found.
But now, they've been decoded
by Dr. John Curran.
The haphazardness is the clue
to Agatha Christie's
phenomenal success.
These scribblings
may look indecipherable,
but to John, the privilege
of getting hands-on
with the notebooks has given him
a tantalizing window
into Agatha's mind.
Her brain teemed with ideas.
Essentially, her notebooks
were her sounding board.
That's where she
brainstormed on paper.
Next to
shopping lists and train times
is a fascinating discovery...
the secret way Agatha
constructed her plots.
Well, one method
that she did use frequently
was this idea
of allocating letters
to short scenes and then
re-ordering those letters.
Good example of this
is the book "towards zero."
She's allocated a-b-c-d-e-f-g
up as far as "h"
to a series of little scenes.
Then she goes back
and does a-d-c-b,
and then, after "b," she had
written g-h,
and she scratched them out
and wrote g-h
at the very beginning
of all this, so she's
completely jumbled up
the alphabetical sequence
till she got to the plot that
she eventually was happy with.
Over the years, Agatha stored
the workings of her mind
with encyclopedic precision.
But to truly understand
how this inspired her writing,
we need to return
to her early years.
People often ask
me what made me take up writing.
You see, I put it all
down to the fact
that I never had any education.
She could only educate herself,
and that left far more room
for the imagination.
She had a lot
of time on her own,
inventing stories,
inventing games.
She wasn't taught how to think,
so she thought differently, she
thought in a very lateral way.
I found myself making up stories
and acting the different parts,
and there's nothing
like boredom to make you write.
Agatha's imagination was shaped
by her unconventional family.
She kind of grew up
in a matriarchy, I would say.
Her father, he just went
around being lovely,
and her brother, he ended up
sort of taking drugs
and he actually died
quite young,
so the force of the family
was in the women:
The mother,
the clever sister,
and the grandmothers,
both of whom kind of appear
in "miss marple," I would say.
That innate wisdom really
permeates the detective fiction.
Agatha channeled what
she learnt about female
intuition into one of
her most iconic characters,
miss marple.
It was their treatment
of the note
by the body that surprised me.
The handwriting expert
seemed to know his onions.
Oh, yes, it was
obviously a forgery,
but we didn't need
an expert to tell US that.
Agatha's childhood
may have been lonely,
but she grew up
in a chocolate-box world
that would later become the
backdrop to many of her novels.
This setting may explain
why people sometimes dismiss
Agatha's writing
as so-called "cozy crime."
The truth is they have
misunderstood
what really made her tick.
I think there is a huge
amount of intellectual snobbery
about populist literature.
It's the kind of belief
that there is absolutely no way
on god's green earth that there
could be anything contained
within it other than
silly froth.
It was the poker in the library
and there's a body on the floor,
and somebody discovers it
after they've been
playing lawn tennis,
but it doesn't really matter;
Somebody comes in
and sorts it out
and everyone has a sandwich,
and it's endlessly,
wildly popular.
But there is a darker and more
intricate side
to Agatha's writing.
I don't think there is
anything "cozy" about her works.
She's infinitely
more complex than that.
She's infinitely more subtle,
and she is infinitely
more of a tricksy bitch.
It's just "are you paying
attention to her?"
If you're not, that's fine.
Read it and have fun,
and then send it back to
the lending library.
If you're paying attention,
you get a whole lot more.
Little details. What's that
little detail over there?
Pay attention to that
and think about it,
and the whole book skews
on details and clues.
Sarah Phelps has
adapted 5 of Agatha's works.
Need tickets, please.
Need tickets.
In "the abc murders,"
little details and clues drive
Agatha's sophisticated plot.
"The abc murders" is
actually an extraordinary story.
It's one of the few books,
actually, where to some extent,
the potential murderer
is limitless.
A serial killer is on the loose.
The mood is disturbing
and the murders brutal.
It's not the traditional kind
of locked-room mystery
or country-house murder,
where, you know,
there is a limited group
of suspects.
Very definitely not cozy.
Next,
Agatha's imagination
gets darker.
She saw blood, she saw Gore,
she saw death, and she wasn't
afraid to use it.
And her life has
its own plot twist.
Without
the disappearance, would she
have become the Agatha Christie
that we now have?
In 1914,
as britain's troops
marched into battle...
Agatha Christie took
her first steps into adult life.
It's a very
poignant picture for me
because, of course,
I never knew nima
in those younger days,
and I think it displays a person
who perhaps had a degree
more innocence
and joie de vivre at a very
important stage of her life.
What is fascinating to me is
how her view of the world is
shaped by the first world war.
The first world war
was an opportunity
for Agatha to explore
the power of medicine.
In October 1914,
she volunteered to be a nurse
at her local hospital
in Torquay.
She is watching medicine change
so radically and so fast.
We start the first world war
and with having
no real idea at all
about what heavy artillery
is going to do to
the human body and also
to the human mind.
By exposing herself
to the dark reality of warfare,
Agatha built a mind bank
of chilling experiences.
In 1917,
she qualified as a dispenser,
and her mind turned to
the possibilities of poison.
I always imagine that everything
for her is a grain.
In a grain of morphine,
which is the difference
between pain relief and death,
and balancing everything
on those tiny, tiny scales,
one grain this way
is pain relief
and possible life;
one grain too far is death.
Carla Valentine is investigating
how Agatha concocted
her dark methods of murder.
She saw blood, she saw Gore,
she saw death, and she wasn't
afraid to use it.
She is very accurate
in her forensic descriptions.
She talks about guns
and silencers.
She knows about blood
spatter analysis,
she knew about trajectories,
she knew about entry wounds
and exit wounds,
and so she uses that
in a lot of her books.
Agatha's
forensic attention to detail
plays out most clearly
in "death on the nile."
Poirot is cruising through Egypt
and gets embroiled
in a murderous love triangle.
Entrer.
Ah, my dear colonel.
What a beautiful morning,
n'est-ce pas?
I'm afraid someone's been shot.
Who?
Linnet Doyle, last night.
Shot through the head.
In "death on the nile,"
for example,
the victim has a specific
gunshot wound.
The pistol was held
close against her head.
See, where the skin is squashed?
Oui.
There was no struggle.
She was shot in her sleep.
These are some really fantastic
examples of gunshot wounds,
and you can see there's
a huge difference.
An entry wound tends
to be quite small,
and then the exit will be
a lot bigger.
There's also a difference
between the gun being away
from the skin and the gun
being placed on the skin.
But the bullet wound
showed signs of scorching, and
that is to say the revolver had
been placed against her head.
And Agatha's
knowledge of this is
the thing that really
pushes the plot forward.
Agatha found
inspiration for her murders
in the work of
a home office pathologist
known as the father
of forensics.
In the early 20th century,
sir Bernard Spilsbury was
a media celebrity
whose discoveries were splashed
across the newspapers.
This is a really fantastic
forensic specimen.
What we've got here
is a stomach,
and the lining here,
you can see hemorrhages,
and that's because this person
has been poisoned.
But the specimen itself
has been prepared
by sir Bernard Spilsbury.
He was a really famous
golden-era pathologist.
She would have loved the fact
that he was a real-life
Sherlock Holmes.
He was involved in all
the famous cases of the time:
The brides in the bath,
Dr. Crippen,
the Brighton trunk murders,
so it's a nice marriage
of fact and fiction.
Agatha started writing in 1916.
After "the mysterious affair
at styles,"
an Agatha Christie
murder mystery
was published every year.
Our access to Agatha's archive
is a rare opportunity to hear
her insights in her words.
How awful
the first day is always,
when you really sit down
to start writing the book
that has lived in your mind,
that's had notes made for it
and a skeleton...
And the whole thing is there,
laid out, ready.
But, on December the 4th, 1926,
Agatha's life took
an unexpected twist.
Her car was abandoned
in the surrey countryside.
The best-selling novelist
of all time
had disappeared.
It started
quite small in the papers,
and then it suddenly
went mammoth.
The papers were just
covered in it.
Is she disguised as a man?
Is she this? Is she dead?
It was... A massive,
massive sensation.
For 11 days,
nobody knew where
Agatha Christie had gone.
What was really going on
in Agatha's mind?
On Christmas Eve, 1914,
Agatha Miller
became Agatha Christie.
She met Archie
right at the beginning
of the first world war.
She decided she loved Archie,
so, despite the fact
that a war was starting,
they got married,
and he went away and did
his bit in the war.
Then he returned,
and they hadn't got
a lot of money,
but they did the best
they could.
Until that stage, I think
they were quite happy.
I don't think that I really
considered myself
as a bona fide author.
Married woman was
a profession in itself,
and it was my profession.
That was my status.
That was my occupation.
As a side line, I wrote books.
In 1926,
Agatha published a book
that would turn her
into a household name.
The literary world was
ready to receive her.
She had written
this wonderful book
called "the murder
of Roger Ackroyd."
The world was her oyster then,
as far as a crime writer
was concerned, and this was
the precursor to the years
which were unquestionably
the unhappiest of nima's life.
So, in April 1926,
her mother died.
What she was clinging to was
the thought that Archie would
come to the house, and they were
going to go on holiday together.
And what happened was
that Archie came to the house
in August 1926 and said,
"I've fallen in love
with another woman
and I'd like a divorce."
Archie had fallen in love
with a lady called Nancy Neele.
She's Agatha Christie,
so what does she do?
She makes up a plot.
In her plot, there's a kind
of devious innocence
to this disappearance that I
think is very typical of her.
She arrived at what was then
called a hydro.
It was like a spa
and is now the old swan hotel.
She turned up at about 7:00
on the evening
of Saturday, the 4th of December
and that she signed
the register,
calling herself "Teresa Neele,"
I.e. The surname
of her husband's girlfriend,
Nancy Neele, and that
she took a room
for 5 guineas a week.
Harrogate's, you know, it's
a very lovely place.
It's the sort of place
that Agatha Christie
would disappear to...
you know, cloistered, protected.
It's like the Torquay
of the north.
She would have felt
comfortable there.
As the police continued
their nationwide search,
nobody knew Agatha
had fled to a spa in harrogate.
I think,
without the disappearance,
would she
have become the Agatha Christie
that we now have?
This is the great imponderable.
Would she have written
the books that she wrote?
Nearly a century later,
the mystery behind
Agatha's disappearance
is still hotly debated.
Something did
happen in her mind.
She wasn't trying
to publicize the book
"the murder of Roger Ackroyd,"
which was
what was going on at the time.
It was just that she
was desperate.
I think she wanted to see
what people would do
and what people would say
in the presence of absence;
her absence, most specifically.
All of her books are
about what people do
when confronted
with an absence of life.
They're murder mysteries.
It was all about Archie.
She wanted to get
her husband back,
and she tried
everything, pleading.
Nothing had worked.
He was completely obdurate.
After 11 days,
Agatha was finally discovered.
She had mastered the art
of deception,
and the disappearance
would influence the way
she worked up her plots
for years to come.
Yes,
I do find that one's friends
are curious about
the way one works.
"What is your method?"
They want to know.
I think the real work is done
in thinking out the development
of your story and worrying
about it until it comes right.
That may take quite a while.
As she weaved twists
and turns through her plots,
Agatha added the mystery
to her murders.
She enjoys the twists,
twisted people,
twisted stories,
then finally gives you
a series of twists
that you can't believe,
but you do believe.
"Witness for the prosecution"
is a perfect example of
the way Agatha
uses lies to keep
an audience guessing.
Leonard vole, you are charged
on indictment that you,
on the 14th day of October,
killed Emily Jane French.
Are you guilty or not guilty?
Not guilty.
There's a surface level
of brilliant plot-making,
but for the most part,
she's talking about,
you know, layers
and layers of mendacity
and brilliant, brilliant lying.
You said there
was blood on both cuffs?
Yes. Both cuffs?
I told you, as that
is what Leonard said.
No, Mrs. Harvey,
you said, "he told me
to wash the cuffs.
They had blood on them."
Did you wash both cuffs?
I remember now.
It was only one cuff I washed.
Another lie, then?
She loves the disturbing,
she loves to play something
that, uh, you think is
one thing and then is
revealed to be not.
Perhaps your memory
as to other parts
of your story is
equally untrustworthy.
You originally told
the police that the blood
on the jacket came
from a cut caused
by a slip when carving ham!
I said so, yes,
but it was not true.
More lies.
It's the art of making
US fall in love with the liar
and not realizing they're lying
and feel completely betrayed
when you do discover
that they are lying,
they're sort of damaged.
The question the jury
must ask themselves
is were you lying then,
or are you lying now?!
And I think
that's what keeps US,
for the most part,
sort of so intrigued
by her novels,
'cause we love a good liar.
Coming up...
I think her mind
shifted fundamentally
into that of, if you like,
the onlooker.
Agatha's curiosity
takes her to the middle east.
She said,
"that's when I became a writer."
And she discovers
the darkest corners
of the human psyche.
You are going
to twist on the pin
that you're impaled upon,
but there's nothing you can do
because here it comes.
In 1928,
Agatha Christie's inquiring mind
began to explore a place
that would inspire some
of her best writing,
the middle east.
What lit the blue
touch paper, so to speak,
was her ability
to find a new life,
which started
with a trip to Iraq.
I felt, well, it is my risk,
but I believe it is
worth taking a risk.
I had had so much publicity
and have been caused
so much misery by it
that I wanted things kept
as quietly as possible.
After the disappearance,
Agatha's crime fiction dried up.
To distract herself
from the death of her mother
and a devastating divorce,
Agatha traveled the world.
She now found herself involved
in an archaeological world
far away from england.
I think then,
for the first time,
she found people
who were kind to her
and interested in her
as a person.
Agatha lost her heart
to the ancient sites
and archaeologist Max Mallowan.
I was very happy.
We had become instant
and closer friends than,
it seemed to me, any friend
I had ever had before.
I realized how close
our companionship had been,
how we seemed
to understand each other
almost before we spoke.
He wasn't the likeliest
candidate for marriage,
as far as nima was
concerned, but I think
it was born of probably
both their needs
to have someone who they
could trust around them
whilst they pursued careers
that were
in neither case orthodox,
and she began to regain
her confidence.
It had never occurred to me
that Max and I would be
or ever could be on those terms.
We were friends.
Quite suddenly,
I felt that nothing in the world
would be as happy
and delightful
as being married to him.
I felt it was appropriate
that her second husband was
an archaeologist because
it was like an excavation,
getting to grips with this lady
and her extraordinary mind.
Surrounded by arabian wonders,
Agatha changed the way she
observed the world around her.
She became
an expert photographer
and helped with
the photographing of the finds.
Filmed by Agatha,
this footage is
a rare opportunity
to see the world
through her eyes.
I think her mind
shifted fundamentally
into that of, if you like,
the onlooker.
She was obviously
inspired by all
of her surroundings;
I mean, you know, a lot
of the books are based
around her travels.
Her hunger for travel,
which wasn't just
"let me go first-class
and sit in a hotel
and have a cocktail."
It was getting stuck
in there and being
really, really interested
in the country she went to,
and I think that was very much
key to the way her mind worked
and her subsequent success.
As Agatha
broadened her horizons,
her spirit was renewed
and her mind awoken.
She said,
"that's when I became a writer."
Agatha's imagination
was now unstoppable,
so much so that her experience
of a trivial train delay
would become immortalized
in one of her most
popular books.
I summoned the hotel clerk
and made him book me
a seat on the orient express
for 3 days' time.
In 1931,
Agatha traveled from Istanbul
on what she described
as "the train of my dreams"...
The orient express.
Agatha recalled the journey
in a letter she sent to Max:
"My darling, what a journey!
"Started out from Istanbul
in a violent thunderstorm.
"We went very slowly
during the night,
and about 3 A.M.
stopped altogether."
After the rain turned to snow,
she was stranded for two days.
In 2017, Agatha's
most famous book
was further celebrated
on the silver screen.
"Murder on the orient express"
is remarkably similar
to Agatha's
own troubled journey.
There is a train stuck
in a snowdrift with these
13 characters on it.
But Agatha gives
the story a plot twist.
One of these characters
ends up dead,
and poirot is obviously
on hand to detect it.
As we are snowbound,
I have elected to take the case
and find for my friend,
monsieur bouc, the criminal.
And why you?
My name is hercule poirot,
and I am probably the greatest
detective in the world.
Agatha Christie definitely had
a view of right and wrong.
Interestingly, I think
she felt that human nature
was such that nearly all of US
actually could turn
our hands to murder.
I think you see that
in the books.
"Murder on the orient express,"
you know, is
the perfect example,
where, to some extent,
all the participants are equals,
so the likelihood is that it is
one of these 12 or 13 characters
who've committed the crime.
If there was a murder,
then there was a murderer.
The murderer is with US
on the train, now.
It is extraordinary
how well she travels
and how well she translates that
all back to these stories.
She just had the most
wonderful imagination.
Agatha's wanderlust
helped her to build a new life,
and by the late 1930s,
once again, her dark mind
was thriving.
Despite traveling the world,
Agatha's most chilling
masterpiece
was inspired
by burgh island in Devon.
"And then there
were none" is published
in the summer of 1939,
a few short weeks away
from the second world war being
declared, where we were going
to be pitched cataclysmically
into another bloodbath.
In the book, 8 strangers
have been invited to stay
on an isolated island.
Action begets action
begets action.
There's a terrible fate,
and it's coming for you,
and there is no mitigation.
You're going to twist on the pin
that you're impaled upon,
but there's nothing you can do
because here it comes.
Get up!
Get up!
It's like being held
in the white eye of god.
It is cruel, it is unflinching,
it is brutal, and I loved it.
Let's just quickly
break it down as a plot.
It looks like a parlor game:
The mercenary, the general,
the judge, the spinster,
schoolteacher, Butler.
Bit by bit, the veneers are
stripped away from
these people, and they're
confronted with the terrible
thing that they've done.
You are charged with
the following indictments:
Edward George Armstrong,
that you murdered Louisa...
Who is this? I don't know, sir.
Emily Caroline Brent,
that you murdered
Beatrice Taylor.
Who is this?
What's the meaning of this?
William Henry Blore,
that you did murder
James Steven Landor...
Each of the strangers
have committed a murder
and escaped justice.
You'd think to yourself
that if you killed somebody,
you'd expect, you know,
that you're haunted by this.
That you did murder 21 men.
But no, all these people
have carried on functioning
in society; They've gone on with
living, they're not bothered.
Agatha wrote part of the novel
when she stayed on burgh island.
On a wind-scoured rock,
where nobody can see them and
no... and they can't see anybody,
where they're entirely isolated,
and they're dying one by one
and they know that they
are going to be picked off, and
there is nothing they can do.
"And then there were none,"
in lots of ways,
is the darkest
of all her novels,
and the more you get into it,
the darker it becomes.
It is a story of what lies
behind guilt, what amounts
to a crime, and, you know,
what is justice.
I think that there is justice
and that there is
obliteration for
the sheer hell of it.
As Agatha reached
the peak of her dark powers,
the outbreak of the second
world war threatened her output.
The war years
did not seem like years.
They were a nightmare,
a bad dream
in which reality stopped
and the nightmare took over.
As bombs battered London,
Agatha retreated to a safe haven
in the north of the city.
In 1941, she ended up
at really quite
an unlikely place...
this modernist block,
the isokon.
She really loved it.
She said to Max,
"it's not beautiful,
"but whenever I pass
that funny old block
like a white ship, I think,
oh, I was so happy there."
On the face of it,
it's a surprising building
for Agatha Christie
to have lived in.
You know, cozy, chintzy Agatha,
you'd think, oh,
she'd have a big room
with big, plush chairs
and all that kind of thing,
but, of course,
Agatha was much more
complicated than that.
Agatha's wartime letters
are a unique insight
into the workings of her mind.
So these are a few
letters from her time here.
This one that is undated
when she says,
"I should have the greatest
objection to signing
"the enclosed agreement, as it
seems to be for the rent of an
unfurnished flat, therefore
not applicable to me at all."
So the fact that she's
getting the right flat
and getting it furnished
the way she wants it,
and there's something here
about carpet cleaning
and that kind of thing.
She's got this ability
to compartmentalize.
It shows how she could
divide her attention
without any trouble whatsoever.
She could be on top
of something domestic
and then write these
ridiculous amount of books.
You know, at times, she
was writing 3 or 4 books a year.
I mean, that is a pretty
extraordinary output.
You talk to any writer
about trying to come up
with that much material
and to keep it original,
keep it fresh,
and, you know, they would...
they would take
their hat off to her.
It's almost as though the war,
the pressure, the fear
of death in the air...
which it absolutely was...
focused her.
It's insane.
I do realize now, looking back
over my war output,
that I really produced
an incredible amount of stuff
during those years of war.
This was in anticipation
of my being killed in the raids,
which seemed to me,
in the highest degree,
likely.
During world war ii,
Agatha's popularity soared.
She got a larger reading
public who wanted something;
something from her, wanted
something from her that was
going to give them
a feeling of security,
stability, closure.
Agatha's tales
of crime and punishment
allowed blitz-weary britons
to lose themselves
in the twists and turns
of her plots.
She was very aware of audiences
wanting something different
in this new landscape.
Coming up...
She herself was incredibly shy.
Agatha's retreat
from the limelight...
She didn't love
the public attention at all.
Reveals the woman
behind the popular myth.
She shielded herself
with that image,
you know, the nice old lady
having tea with the vicar
and arsenic in the crumpets.
Agatha Christie is
the best-selling
novelist of all time.
Her 66 classic murder mysteries
still live on today.
She is famously only outsold
by Shakespeare and the Bible.
I mean, when you think
about that,
it's an extraordinary thing.
By the 1950s,
as "the mousetrap" embarked
on its record-breaking
west end run,
Agatha had already sold
millions of books.
She is a literary sensation.
But on rare public appearances,
Agatha revealed she was
uncomfortable
in the limelight.
She herself was incredibly shy.
She didn't love
the public attention at all.
Mrs. Christie,
may I congratulate you
on the record performance
put on by "the mousetrap"?
Do you think it the best
play you've written?
I don't know. Other people
seem to, at any rate.
I was wondering why
"the mousetrap," rather
than your other plays,
achieved this record.
I don't know.
I think the shyness
probably emanated
from the unhappy period
of her life
when she felt she was
hounded by the media.
I always think there are
two Agatha Christies.
There is the world-famous icon,
the novelist, the playwright,
then there is
Agatha Christie the woman.
She did start to become
this far more guarded person
in many, many ways,
and she allowed the persona
of Agatha Christie
to sort of develop.
She used it to protect
her own private life,
as it were, but I think she
also recognized its value
as a selling point;
You know, the nice old lady
having tea with the vicar
and arsenic in the crumpets.
I think she shielded herself
with that image.
In her later years,
Agatha plotted her own escape
and retreated to Greenway,
her private holiday home
in Devon.
How beautiful Greenway looked
in its tangled beauty.
We were thankful to be together
and, as it were,
gently trying out life,
to start again.
She was probably happiest
down here at Greenway in,
amongst her friends and family.
She was a very private person,
and this was the place
she came to relax.
I think Greenway
was so important to her
because it was fun times,
time to enjoy yourself
with your family
and close friends at a place
which she described
as the most beautiful place
in the world.
As her pace of life slowed,
Agatha's thoughts began
to turn to her own mortality.
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.
But I know, or believe,
that it is a good age
at which to pass from life
to whatever comes next.
Whilst Agatha's novels focused
on the complexity
of death, to her,
the ending of life was simpler.
People always
seem very embarrassed
by having to discuss
anything to do with death.
The question of death nowadays
is very important to talk about.
Agatha died peacefully
on the 12th of January, 1976,
aged 85.
But, through her novels,
short stories, plays,
and the extraordinary
treasures of her archive,
her legacy is endless.
You can't imagine
the world without her books.
Her unorthodox childhood
unleashed her imagination.
The simplicity means
that a child can read them,
but the simplicity is deceptive.
There's an awful lot more
beneath the surface.
She journeyed
into the darkest corners
of the human psyche.
She started writing
during the first world war.
She finished writing
in the early 1970s.
And most of those books are set
in the time
that they were written.
The bloody 20th century,
filtered through
Agatha's poison pen
onto the page.
She watches the century grow up
and told stories
about the tumultuous
20th century
and about britain and about who
we were then and who we are now.
Even today,
Agatha's dark mind lives on.
I fear it might run
in the Christie blood
to think about death,
to think about murder.
I don't know how many
other people think this.
Maybe it's a unique trait
to my family.
How would you,
if you were so minded, commit
the perfect murder?
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this program possible.
support your local pbs station.
Agatha Christie is
the best-selling novelist
of all time.
The queen of crime wrote
66 murder mysteries
and dozens more plays
and short stories.
We all know Agatha, don't we?
The nice old lady
having tea with the vicar,
arsenic in the crumpets.
But do we really know
what was going on
inside her brilliant mind?
You sit down to start a book
that has lived in your mind.
All you have to do
is to write it.
Tonight, we'll delve
deeper into the genius
of Agatha Christie
than ever before.
We'll hear from the people
who knew her best...
She listened
to what anybody said,
watched what they did,
and then she made
her own use of it.
And uncover the secrets
of her rarely seen archive...
I went to a room
in which the entire history
of Agatha Christie's
literary career was to be found.
To discover the moments
that changed
Agatha's psyche forever.
She watches the century grow up
and she doesn't watch it
get any better.
This is the untold story
of what made
Agatha Christie tick.
She saw blood, she saw Gore,
she saw death, and she
wasn't afraid to use it.
I think she had
the most extraordinary mind.
Agatha was born
in Torquay in Devon
on the 15th of September, 1890.
Agatha Christie was
my great-grandmother.
We all referred to her
as "nima," which was
my father's attempt
at "grandma."
Nima and I were
closer than she was
even with my mother.
She was the cement
in the family.
I've always told everybody,
including my grandchildren,
that nima was the best listener
I ever met in my life.
She listened to what
anybody said,
she watched what they did,
and then she made
her own use of it.
Agatha watched,
she listened, and she also did
something remarkable...
she recorded everything.
Agatha's family
have granted US access
to this rarely seen
treasure trove
of manuscripts, letters,
and diaries.
They are the key
to understanding exactly
how her mind worked.
Hidden within are 73 of Agatha's
rarely seen notebooks.
For decades, the significance
of the notebooks
remained an enigma.
I went to a
room in which the entire history
of Agatha Christie's
literary career was to be found.
But now, they've been decoded
by Dr. John Curran.
The haphazardness is the clue
to Agatha Christie's
phenomenal success.
These scribblings
may look indecipherable,
but to John, the privilege
of getting hands-on
with the notebooks has given him
a tantalizing window
into Agatha's mind.
Her brain teemed with ideas.
Essentially, her notebooks
were her sounding board.
That's where she
brainstormed on paper.
Next to
shopping lists and train times
is a fascinating discovery...
the secret way Agatha
constructed her plots.
Well, one method
that she did use frequently
was this idea
of allocating letters
to short scenes and then
re-ordering those letters.
Good example of this
is the book "towards zero."
She's allocated a-b-c-d-e-f-g
up as far as "h"
to a series of little scenes.
Then she goes back
and does a-d-c-b,
and then, after "b," she had
written g-h,
and she scratched them out
and wrote g-h
at the very beginning
of all this, so she's
completely jumbled up
the alphabetical sequence
till she got to the plot that
she eventually was happy with.
Over the years, Agatha stored
the workings of her mind
with encyclopedic precision.
But to truly understand
how this inspired her writing,
we need to return
to her early years.
People often ask
me what made me take up writing.
You see, I put it all
down to the fact
that I never had any education.
She could only educate herself,
and that left far more room
for the imagination.
She had a lot
of time on her own,
inventing stories,
inventing games.
She wasn't taught how to think,
so she thought differently, she
thought in a very lateral way.
I found myself making up stories
and acting the different parts,
and there's nothing
like boredom to make you write.
Agatha's imagination was shaped
by her unconventional family.
She kind of grew up
in a matriarchy, I would say.
Her father, he just went
around being lovely,
and her brother, he ended up
sort of taking drugs
and he actually died
quite young,
so the force of the family
was in the women:
The mother,
the clever sister,
and the grandmothers,
both of whom kind of appear
in "miss marple," I would say.
That innate wisdom really
permeates the detective fiction.
Agatha channeled what
she learnt about female
intuition into one of
her most iconic characters,
miss marple.
It was their treatment
of the note
by the body that surprised me.
The handwriting expert
seemed to know his onions.
Oh, yes, it was
obviously a forgery,
but we didn't need
an expert to tell US that.
Agatha's childhood
may have been lonely,
but she grew up
in a chocolate-box world
that would later become the
backdrop to many of her novels.
This setting may explain
why people sometimes dismiss
Agatha's writing
as so-called "cozy crime."
The truth is they have
misunderstood
what really made her tick.
I think there is a huge
amount of intellectual snobbery
about populist literature.
It's the kind of belief
that there is absolutely no way
on god's green earth that there
could be anything contained
within it other than
silly froth.
It was the poker in the library
and there's a body on the floor,
and somebody discovers it
after they've been
playing lawn tennis,
but it doesn't really matter;
Somebody comes in
and sorts it out
and everyone has a sandwich,
and it's endlessly,
wildly popular.
But there is a darker and more
intricate side
to Agatha's writing.
I don't think there is
anything "cozy" about her works.
She's infinitely
more complex than that.
She's infinitely more subtle,
and she is infinitely
more of a tricksy bitch.
It's just "are you paying
attention to her?"
If you're not, that's fine.
Read it and have fun,
and then send it back to
the lending library.
If you're paying attention,
you get a whole lot more.
Little details. What's that
little detail over there?
Pay attention to that
and think about it,
and the whole book skews
on details and clues.
Sarah Phelps has
adapted 5 of Agatha's works.
Need tickets, please.
Need tickets.
In "the abc murders,"
little details and clues drive
Agatha's sophisticated plot.
"The abc murders" is
actually an extraordinary story.
It's one of the few books,
actually, where to some extent,
the potential murderer
is limitless.
A serial killer is on the loose.
The mood is disturbing
and the murders brutal.
It's not the traditional kind
of locked-room mystery
or country-house murder,
where, you know,
there is a limited group
of suspects.
Very definitely not cozy.
Next,
Agatha's imagination
gets darker.
She saw blood, she saw Gore,
she saw death, and she wasn't
afraid to use it.
And her life has
its own plot twist.
Without
the disappearance, would she
have become the Agatha Christie
that we now have?
In 1914,
as britain's troops
marched into battle...
Agatha Christie took
her first steps into adult life.
It's a very
poignant picture for me
because, of course,
I never knew nima
in those younger days,
and I think it displays a person
who perhaps had a degree
more innocence
and joie de vivre at a very
important stage of her life.
What is fascinating to me is
how her view of the world is
shaped by the first world war.
The first world war
was an opportunity
for Agatha to explore
the power of medicine.
In October 1914,
she volunteered to be a nurse
at her local hospital
in Torquay.
She is watching medicine change
so radically and so fast.
We start the first world war
and with having
no real idea at all
about what heavy artillery
is going to do to
the human body and also
to the human mind.
By exposing herself
to the dark reality of warfare,
Agatha built a mind bank
of chilling experiences.
In 1917,
she qualified as a dispenser,
and her mind turned to
the possibilities of poison.
I always imagine that everything
for her is a grain.
In a grain of morphine,
which is the difference
between pain relief and death,
and balancing everything
on those tiny, tiny scales,
one grain this way
is pain relief
and possible life;
one grain too far is death.
Carla Valentine is investigating
how Agatha concocted
her dark methods of murder.
She saw blood, she saw Gore,
she saw death, and she wasn't
afraid to use it.
She is very accurate
in her forensic descriptions.
She talks about guns
and silencers.
She knows about blood
spatter analysis,
she knew about trajectories,
she knew about entry wounds
and exit wounds,
and so she uses that
in a lot of her books.
Agatha's
forensic attention to detail
plays out most clearly
in "death on the nile."
Poirot is cruising through Egypt
and gets embroiled
in a murderous love triangle.
Entrer.
Ah, my dear colonel.
What a beautiful morning,
n'est-ce pas?
I'm afraid someone's been shot.
Who?
Linnet Doyle, last night.
Shot through the head.
In "death on the nile,"
for example,
the victim has a specific
gunshot wound.
The pistol was held
close against her head.
See, where the skin is squashed?
Oui.
There was no struggle.
She was shot in her sleep.
These are some really fantastic
examples of gunshot wounds,
and you can see there's
a huge difference.
An entry wound tends
to be quite small,
and then the exit will be
a lot bigger.
There's also a difference
between the gun being away
from the skin and the gun
being placed on the skin.
But the bullet wound
showed signs of scorching, and
that is to say the revolver had
been placed against her head.
And Agatha's
knowledge of this is
the thing that really
pushes the plot forward.
Agatha found
inspiration for her murders
in the work of
a home office pathologist
known as the father
of forensics.
In the early 20th century,
sir Bernard Spilsbury was
a media celebrity
whose discoveries were splashed
across the newspapers.
This is a really fantastic
forensic specimen.
What we've got here
is a stomach,
and the lining here,
you can see hemorrhages,
and that's because this person
has been poisoned.
But the specimen itself
has been prepared
by sir Bernard Spilsbury.
He was a really famous
golden-era pathologist.
She would have loved the fact
that he was a real-life
Sherlock Holmes.
He was involved in all
the famous cases of the time:
The brides in the bath,
Dr. Crippen,
the Brighton trunk murders,
so it's a nice marriage
of fact and fiction.
Agatha started writing in 1916.
After "the mysterious affair
at styles,"
an Agatha Christie
murder mystery
was published every year.
Our access to Agatha's archive
is a rare opportunity to hear
her insights in her words.
How awful
the first day is always,
when you really sit down
to start writing the book
that has lived in your mind,
that's had notes made for it
and a skeleton...
And the whole thing is there,
laid out, ready.
But, on December the 4th, 1926,
Agatha's life took
an unexpected twist.
Her car was abandoned
in the surrey countryside.
The best-selling novelist
of all time
had disappeared.
It started
quite small in the papers,
and then it suddenly
went mammoth.
The papers were just
covered in it.
Is she disguised as a man?
Is she this? Is she dead?
It was... A massive,
massive sensation.
For 11 days,
nobody knew where
Agatha Christie had gone.
What was really going on
in Agatha's mind?
On Christmas Eve, 1914,
Agatha Miller
became Agatha Christie.
She met Archie
right at the beginning
of the first world war.
She decided she loved Archie,
so, despite the fact
that a war was starting,
they got married,
and he went away and did
his bit in the war.
Then he returned,
and they hadn't got
a lot of money,
but they did the best
they could.
Until that stage, I think
they were quite happy.
I don't think that I really
considered myself
as a bona fide author.
Married woman was
a profession in itself,
and it was my profession.
That was my status.
That was my occupation.
As a side line, I wrote books.
In 1926,
Agatha published a book
that would turn her
into a household name.
The literary world was
ready to receive her.
She had written
this wonderful book
called "the murder
of Roger Ackroyd."
The world was her oyster then,
as far as a crime writer
was concerned, and this was
the precursor to the years
which were unquestionably
the unhappiest of nima's life.
So, in April 1926,
her mother died.
What she was clinging to was
the thought that Archie would
come to the house, and they were
going to go on holiday together.
And what happened was
that Archie came to the house
in August 1926 and said,
"I've fallen in love
with another woman
and I'd like a divorce."
Archie had fallen in love
with a lady called Nancy Neele.
She's Agatha Christie,
so what does she do?
She makes up a plot.
In her plot, there's a kind
of devious innocence
to this disappearance that I
think is very typical of her.
She arrived at what was then
called a hydro.
It was like a spa
and is now the old swan hotel.
She turned up at about 7:00
on the evening
of Saturday, the 4th of December
and that she signed
the register,
calling herself "Teresa Neele,"
I.e. The surname
of her husband's girlfriend,
Nancy Neele, and that
she took a room
for 5 guineas a week.
Harrogate's, you know, it's
a very lovely place.
It's the sort of place
that Agatha Christie
would disappear to...
you know, cloistered, protected.
It's like the Torquay
of the north.
She would have felt
comfortable there.
As the police continued
their nationwide search,
nobody knew Agatha
had fled to a spa in harrogate.
I think,
without the disappearance,
would she
have become the Agatha Christie
that we now have?
This is the great imponderable.
Would she have written
the books that she wrote?
Nearly a century later,
the mystery behind
Agatha's disappearance
is still hotly debated.
Something did
happen in her mind.
She wasn't trying
to publicize the book
"the murder of Roger Ackroyd,"
which was
what was going on at the time.
It was just that she
was desperate.
I think she wanted to see
what people would do
and what people would say
in the presence of absence;
her absence, most specifically.
All of her books are
about what people do
when confronted
with an absence of life.
They're murder mysteries.
It was all about Archie.
She wanted to get
her husband back,
and she tried
everything, pleading.
Nothing had worked.
He was completely obdurate.
After 11 days,
Agatha was finally discovered.
She had mastered the art
of deception,
and the disappearance
would influence the way
she worked up her plots
for years to come.
Yes,
I do find that one's friends
are curious about
the way one works.
"What is your method?"
They want to know.
I think the real work is done
in thinking out the development
of your story and worrying
about it until it comes right.
That may take quite a while.
As she weaved twists
and turns through her plots,
Agatha added the mystery
to her murders.
She enjoys the twists,
twisted people,
twisted stories,
then finally gives you
a series of twists
that you can't believe,
but you do believe.
"Witness for the prosecution"
is a perfect example of
the way Agatha
uses lies to keep
an audience guessing.
Leonard vole, you are charged
on indictment that you,
on the 14th day of October,
killed Emily Jane French.
Are you guilty or not guilty?
Not guilty.
There's a surface level
of brilliant plot-making,
but for the most part,
she's talking about,
you know, layers
and layers of mendacity
and brilliant, brilliant lying.
You said there
was blood on both cuffs?
Yes. Both cuffs?
I told you, as that
is what Leonard said.
No, Mrs. Harvey,
you said, "he told me
to wash the cuffs.
They had blood on them."
Did you wash both cuffs?
I remember now.
It was only one cuff I washed.
Another lie, then?
She loves the disturbing,
she loves to play something
that, uh, you think is
one thing and then is
revealed to be not.
Perhaps your memory
as to other parts
of your story is
equally untrustworthy.
You originally told
the police that the blood
on the jacket came
from a cut caused
by a slip when carving ham!
I said so, yes,
but it was not true.
More lies.
It's the art of making
US fall in love with the liar
and not realizing they're lying
and feel completely betrayed
when you do discover
that they are lying,
they're sort of damaged.
The question the jury
must ask themselves
is were you lying then,
or are you lying now?!
And I think
that's what keeps US,
for the most part,
sort of so intrigued
by her novels,
'cause we love a good liar.
Coming up...
I think her mind
shifted fundamentally
into that of, if you like,
the onlooker.
Agatha's curiosity
takes her to the middle east.
She said,
"that's when I became a writer."
And she discovers
the darkest corners
of the human psyche.
You are going
to twist on the pin
that you're impaled upon,
but there's nothing you can do
because here it comes.
In 1928,
Agatha Christie's inquiring mind
began to explore a place
that would inspire some
of her best writing,
the middle east.
What lit the blue
touch paper, so to speak,
was her ability
to find a new life,
which started
with a trip to Iraq.
I felt, well, it is my risk,
but I believe it is
worth taking a risk.
I had had so much publicity
and have been caused
so much misery by it
that I wanted things kept
as quietly as possible.
After the disappearance,
Agatha's crime fiction dried up.
To distract herself
from the death of her mother
and a devastating divorce,
Agatha traveled the world.
She now found herself involved
in an archaeological world
far away from england.
I think then,
for the first time,
she found people
who were kind to her
and interested in her
as a person.
Agatha lost her heart
to the ancient sites
and archaeologist Max Mallowan.
I was very happy.
We had become instant
and closer friends than,
it seemed to me, any friend
I had ever had before.
I realized how close
our companionship had been,
how we seemed
to understand each other
almost before we spoke.
He wasn't the likeliest
candidate for marriage,
as far as nima was
concerned, but I think
it was born of probably
both their needs
to have someone who they
could trust around them
whilst they pursued careers
that were
in neither case orthodox,
and she began to regain
her confidence.
It had never occurred to me
that Max and I would be
or ever could be on those terms.
We were friends.
Quite suddenly,
I felt that nothing in the world
would be as happy
and delightful
as being married to him.
I felt it was appropriate
that her second husband was
an archaeologist because
it was like an excavation,
getting to grips with this lady
and her extraordinary mind.
Surrounded by arabian wonders,
Agatha changed the way she
observed the world around her.
She became
an expert photographer
and helped with
the photographing of the finds.
Filmed by Agatha,
this footage is
a rare opportunity
to see the world
through her eyes.
I think her mind
shifted fundamentally
into that of, if you like,
the onlooker.
She was obviously
inspired by all
of her surroundings;
I mean, you know, a lot
of the books are based
around her travels.
Her hunger for travel,
which wasn't just
"let me go first-class
and sit in a hotel
and have a cocktail."
It was getting stuck
in there and being
really, really interested
in the country she went to,
and I think that was very much
key to the way her mind worked
and her subsequent success.
As Agatha
broadened her horizons,
her spirit was renewed
and her mind awoken.
She said,
"that's when I became a writer."
Agatha's imagination
was now unstoppable,
so much so that her experience
of a trivial train delay
would become immortalized
in one of her most
popular books.
I summoned the hotel clerk
and made him book me
a seat on the orient express
for 3 days' time.
In 1931,
Agatha traveled from Istanbul
on what she described
as "the train of my dreams"...
The orient express.
Agatha recalled the journey
in a letter she sent to Max:
"My darling, what a journey!
"Started out from Istanbul
in a violent thunderstorm.
"We went very slowly
during the night,
and about 3 A.M.
stopped altogether."
After the rain turned to snow,
she was stranded for two days.
In 2017, Agatha's
most famous book
was further celebrated
on the silver screen.
"Murder on the orient express"
is remarkably similar
to Agatha's
own troubled journey.
There is a train stuck
in a snowdrift with these
13 characters on it.
But Agatha gives
the story a plot twist.
One of these characters
ends up dead,
and poirot is obviously
on hand to detect it.
As we are snowbound,
I have elected to take the case
and find for my friend,
monsieur bouc, the criminal.
And why you?
My name is hercule poirot,
and I am probably the greatest
detective in the world.
Agatha Christie definitely had
a view of right and wrong.
Interestingly, I think
she felt that human nature
was such that nearly all of US
actually could turn
our hands to murder.
I think you see that
in the books.
"Murder on the orient express,"
you know, is
the perfect example,
where, to some extent,
all the participants are equals,
so the likelihood is that it is
one of these 12 or 13 characters
who've committed the crime.
If there was a murder,
then there was a murderer.
The murderer is with US
on the train, now.
It is extraordinary
how well she travels
and how well she translates that
all back to these stories.
She just had the most
wonderful imagination.
Agatha's wanderlust
helped her to build a new life,
and by the late 1930s,
once again, her dark mind
was thriving.
Despite traveling the world,
Agatha's most chilling
masterpiece
was inspired
by burgh island in Devon.
"And then there
were none" is published
in the summer of 1939,
a few short weeks away
from the second world war being
declared, where we were going
to be pitched cataclysmically
into another bloodbath.
In the book, 8 strangers
have been invited to stay
on an isolated island.
Action begets action
begets action.
There's a terrible fate,
and it's coming for you,
and there is no mitigation.
You're going to twist on the pin
that you're impaled upon,
but there's nothing you can do
because here it comes.
Get up!
Get up!
It's like being held
in the white eye of god.
It is cruel, it is unflinching,
it is brutal, and I loved it.
Let's just quickly
break it down as a plot.
It looks like a parlor game:
The mercenary, the general,
the judge, the spinster,
schoolteacher, Butler.
Bit by bit, the veneers are
stripped away from
these people, and they're
confronted with the terrible
thing that they've done.
You are charged with
the following indictments:
Edward George Armstrong,
that you murdered Louisa...
Who is this? I don't know, sir.
Emily Caroline Brent,
that you murdered
Beatrice Taylor.
Who is this?
What's the meaning of this?
William Henry Blore,
that you did murder
James Steven Landor...
Each of the strangers
have committed a murder
and escaped justice.
You'd think to yourself
that if you killed somebody,
you'd expect, you know,
that you're haunted by this.
That you did murder 21 men.
But no, all these people
have carried on functioning
in society; They've gone on with
living, they're not bothered.
Agatha wrote part of the novel
when she stayed on burgh island.
On a wind-scoured rock,
where nobody can see them and
no... and they can't see anybody,
where they're entirely isolated,
and they're dying one by one
and they know that they
are going to be picked off, and
there is nothing they can do.
"And then there were none,"
in lots of ways,
is the darkest
of all her novels,
and the more you get into it,
the darker it becomes.
It is a story of what lies
behind guilt, what amounts
to a crime, and, you know,
what is justice.
I think that there is justice
and that there is
obliteration for
the sheer hell of it.
As Agatha reached
the peak of her dark powers,
the outbreak of the second
world war threatened her output.
The war years
did not seem like years.
They were a nightmare,
a bad dream
in which reality stopped
and the nightmare took over.
As bombs battered London,
Agatha retreated to a safe haven
in the north of the city.
In 1941, she ended up
at really quite
an unlikely place...
this modernist block,
the isokon.
She really loved it.
She said to Max,
"it's not beautiful,
"but whenever I pass
that funny old block
like a white ship, I think,
oh, I was so happy there."
On the face of it,
it's a surprising building
for Agatha Christie
to have lived in.
You know, cozy, chintzy Agatha,
you'd think, oh,
she'd have a big room
with big, plush chairs
and all that kind of thing,
but, of course,
Agatha was much more
complicated than that.
Agatha's wartime letters
are a unique insight
into the workings of her mind.
So these are a few
letters from her time here.
This one that is undated
when she says,
"I should have the greatest
objection to signing
"the enclosed agreement, as it
seems to be for the rent of an
unfurnished flat, therefore
not applicable to me at all."
So the fact that she's
getting the right flat
and getting it furnished
the way she wants it,
and there's something here
about carpet cleaning
and that kind of thing.
She's got this ability
to compartmentalize.
It shows how she could
divide her attention
without any trouble whatsoever.
She could be on top
of something domestic
and then write these
ridiculous amount of books.
You know, at times, she
was writing 3 or 4 books a year.
I mean, that is a pretty
extraordinary output.
You talk to any writer
about trying to come up
with that much material
and to keep it original,
keep it fresh,
and, you know, they would...
they would take
their hat off to her.
It's almost as though the war,
the pressure, the fear
of death in the air...
which it absolutely was...
focused her.
It's insane.
I do realize now, looking back
over my war output,
that I really produced
an incredible amount of stuff
during those years of war.
This was in anticipation
of my being killed in the raids,
which seemed to me,
in the highest degree,
likely.
During world war ii,
Agatha's popularity soared.
She got a larger reading
public who wanted something;
something from her, wanted
something from her that was
going to give them
a feeling of security,
stability, closure.
Agatha's tales
of crime and punishment
allowed blitz-weary britons
to lose themselves
in the twists and turns
of her plots.
She was very aware of audiences
wanting something different
in this new landscape.
Coming up...
She herself was incredibly shy.
Agatha's retreat
from the limelight...
She didn't love
the public attention at all.
Reveals the woman
behind the popular myth.
She shielded herself
with that image,
you know, the nice old lady
having tea with the vicar
and arsenic in the crumpets.
Agatha Christie is
the best-selling
novelist of all time.
Her 66 classic murder mysteries
still live on today.
She is famously only outsold
by Shakespeare and the Bible.
I mean, when you think
about that,
it's an extraordinary thing.
By the 1950s,
as "the mousetrap" embarked
on its record-breaking
west end run,
Agatha had already sold
millions of books.
She is a literary sensation.
But on rare public appearances,
Agatha revealed she was
uncomfortable
in the limelight.
She herself was incredibly shy.
She didn't love
the public attention at all.
Mrs. Christie,
may I congratulate you
on the record performance
put on by "the mousetrap"?
Do you think it the best
play you've written?
I don't know. Other people
seem to, at any rate.
I was wondering why
"the mousetrap," rather
than your other plays,
achieved this record.
I don't know.
I think the shyness
probably emanated
from the unhappy period
of her life
when she felt she was
hounded by the media.
I always think there are
two Agatha Christies.
There is the world-famous icon,
the novelist, the playwright,
then there is
Agatha Christie the woman.
She did start to become
this far more guarded person
in many, many ways,
and she allowed the persona
of Agatha Christie
to sort of develop.
She used it to protect
her own private life,
as it were, but I think she
also recognized its value
as a selling point;
You know, the nice old lady
having tea with the vicar
and arsenic in the crumpets.
I think she shielded herself
with that image.
In her later years,
Agatha plotted her own escape
and retreated to Greenway,
her private holiday home
in Devon.
How beautiful Greenway looked
in its tangled beauty.
We were thankful to be together
and, as it were,
gently trying out life,
to start again.
She was probably happiest
down here at Greenway in,
amongst her friends and family.
She was a very private person,
and this was the place
she came to relax.
I think Greenway
was so important to her
because it was fun times,
time to enjoy yourself
with your family
and close friends at a place
which she described
as the most beautiful place
in the world.
As her pace of life slowed,
Agatha's thoughts began
to turn to her own mortality.
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.
But I know, or believe,
that it is a good age
at which to pass from life
to whatever comes next.
Whilst Agatha's novels focused
on the complexity
of death, to her,
the ending of life was simpler.
People always
seem very embarrassed
by having to discuss
anything to do with death.
The question of death nowadays
is very important to talk about.
Agatha died peacefully
on the 12th of January, 1976,
aged 85.
But, through her novels,
short stories, plays,
and the extraordinary
treasures of her archive,
her legacy is endless.
You can't imagine
the world without her books.
Her unorthodox childhood
unleashed her imagination.
The simplicity means
that a child can read them,
but the simplicity is deceptive.
There's an awful lot more
beneath the surface.
She journeyed
into the darkest corners
of the human psyche.
She started writing
during the first world war.
She finished writing
in the early 1970s.
And most of those books are set
in the time
that they were written.
The bloody 20th century,
filtered through
Agatha's poison pen
onto the page.
She watches the century grow up
and told stories
about the tumultuous
20th century
and about britain and about who
we were then and who we are now.
Even today,
Agatha's dark mind lives on.
I fear it might run
in the Christie blood
to think about death,
to think about murder.
I don't know how many
other people think this.
Maybe it's a unique trait
to my family.
How would you,
if you were so minded, commit
the perfect murder?
[Typewriter bell dinging]
[Typewriter keys tapping]