Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen

[Clock ticking] [Thumping] Lucy Worsley, voice-over: Agatha Christie's childhood is haunted by a sinister phantom.

The Gun Man.

An imaginary figure stalking her dreams and her home.

Possessing and threatening the people she knows and loves.

For the terrified young Agatha, evil is an ever-lurking presence just waiting to be unveiled.

[Clock ticking] This little girl's imagination would make her into history's greatest detective author.

But how did that happen?

We need to go back to the beginning.

Worsley, voice-over: I've been fascinated by Agatha Christie since I was a child.

And I think there's much more to this enigmatic and elusive novelist than meets the eye.

Man: She subverts what we think we want and gives us something so much more interesting.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm investigating the mysterious case of Agatha Christie.

How did this woman, who grew up a Victorian, challenge the expectations of her age?

Woman: The doctor, the judge, the general.

These people, they're just not who you think they are.

[Engine revving] Let's go.

Worsley, voice-over: How did her own dark psychology, her anxieties and experiences fuel her writing?

What made this woman the bestselling novelist in the world?

In this series, I want to uncover the true Agatha Christie.

I want to explore how the changes of her lifetime affected her writing.

And I want to show you that she was a pioneering, radical writer and woman.

In the world of Agatha Christie, no one's ever quite who they seem to be.

And that's true of the author herself.

Do you think "The Mousetrap" is the best play that's ever run in London, Mrs. Christie?

Oh, I'd hardly say that.

No, not by a long way.

Worsley, voice-over: In public, Agatha was a model of decorous self-deprecation.

Time and time again, I've tried and failed to square that vision of Agatha with Agatha Christie the crime writer, whose talent for ingenious murder mysteries produced works like "Death on the Nile," "Murder on the Orient Express," or the world's bestselling detective novel "And Then There Were None."

It's a disconnection that I want to understand.

In Agatha Christie's work, the answer's always there, hidden in plain sight.

Could it be that the same is true of her own life?

Agatha's story begins in a large house overlooking Torquay in 1890 at the tail end of the Victorian era.

She seems to have been a delightful afterthought for her mother and wealthy American father, arriving a decade after her two older siblings.

So, this seems as good a place as any to start hunting for the seeds of her unsettling imagination.

At a nearby cinema, I'm meeting someone who can give me the inside scoop on her family life.

James.

Hello... Worsley, voice-over: Her great-grandson James.

Where are we going to sit?

Well, you are going to sit in what was my great- grandmother's favorite seat, Lead me to it.

which is where she would have sat most of the time when she...

This one?

That's the one.

The actual seat.

That's the actual seat Gosh.

that she would have sat in.

Oh.

Do you think that she sat here sometimes watching an Agatha Christie film?

[Laughs] It's certainly possible.

[Laughs] Yeah.

Let's watch something.

OK. Narrator: The glorious Devon coast bathed in... Prichard: This is Torquay, as it would have been in her day.

Worsley: Oh, yes.

There's the--there's the pavilion, concert hall.

You know, Torquay at that point was a very affluent town.

Oh, look at all of these lovely yachts.

I reckon you'd have to be pretty well off to fit into this yachting world in Torquay.

Agatha's father spent a lot of time at the yacht club.

Because he'd inherited wealth from his American businessman father.

I think he was very good at what he did, which was leisure.

[Clicking] This photo is one of Agatha with her father Frederick at Ashfield, which is where she, she grew up.

Agatha certainly adored him.

It's quite a compliment to the town of Torquay that a rich, well-traveled American chose Torquay out of all the places in the world, and he came to live in this beautiful house.

I think the house attracted particularly my great-great-grandmother.

[Slide projector clicking] She was half-German.

I think she was an extraordinary woman.

A massive impact on my great-grandmother.

People think of Agatha Christie as somebody very English from Devon, but actually, her family were globetrotters.

Well, indeed, she wasn't the quintessential Englishwoman that-- that people thought.

I think the way she writes about the British and class and people does have a ring of an outsider.

It is someone looking in and to some extent laughing at it at times.

Mm.

[Clicking] Mm.

I love this picture of the young Agatha.

She was an incredibly precocious child.

She never went to school because her mother didn't think she should learn to read or shouldn't learn to read before she was 8.

But she taught herself aged 5.

Do you think, James, the fact that she didn't really go to school meant that she had a particularly vivid fantasy life living-- Well, she sort of grew up almost as an only child.

And so, yes, she had a lot of time on her own playing games, imagining things, making things up.

And I think that--it has to have had an impact.

[Slide projector clicking] Who are we looking at here, James?

So, that is Agatha on the back of her sister Madge.

Madge wrote books.

She wrote plays.

[Slide projector clicking] Prichard: This is Monty, who was her brother.

He lived a--I think you might call colorful life.

Mm.

He's acting pretty colorfully there.

What is he doing?

He's riding in a cart pulled by a goat.

There's so much in there about perhaps her family in that I don't think it was a perfectly orthodox family.

I think they were all creative and I think it was a very imaginative world such that you would have your cart pulled by goats.

And a--and a hobby horse.

This seems like the perfect melting pot for somebody who's going to be a creative writer.

And you can see from these images that it was a very happy time.

The only problem with that, James, is how does the rest of life match up to it?

Well, it doesn't.

Worsley, voice-over: Wasn't it fascinating to get an insight into Agatha Christie from a member of her own family?

And what I take away from that is the central importance of her home in Torquay to her writing.

Clearly, she was taking her life there, her family members there, and putting them into her art.

It was this place that began to make her into a writer.

Worsley, voice-over: Agatha's luxurious family home Ashfield, with its servants' quarters and mod cons like a telephone, was the archetype of a wealthy late Victorian villa.

And I strongly believe it's the template for many of the grand houses in her books.

But if her family life at Ashfield was idyllic, why are her fictional homes so full of darkness?

Ashfield is long gone, but in the 1930s, Agatha bought this house nearby--Greenway-- and stashed away in a bathroom cupboard, I've uncovered a clue.

This box is completely full of bills for things that Agatha's father, Frederick Miller, has bought in the shops of Torquay.

He really liked jewelers' shops and antique dealers.

Gosh, there's absolutely loads of them.

Ah, look at this.

1895.

He has bought 18 dessert forks with mother of pearl handles and solid silver prongs.

�21.

But then the same year, he's also bought another 18 dessert forks with mother of pearl handles.

That's �37 on little forks for eating cake.

That's the equivalent of a year's wages for somebody like a housekeeper.

Now, Agatha describes her father as a collector.

But all this suggests to me he was a person with a shopping addiction.

Worsley, voice-over: Frederick's lavish spending was fine as long as the big bucks from America kept rolling in.

But by the time Agatha was 9, the family fortune was in rapid decline, and Frederick's inability to curb his spending was causing major financial problems.

Agatha's parents tried to shield her from the unsettling truth, but she knew something was wrong.

Agatha said she had a happy childhood.

She was loved.

Yet throughout it all, there was this rumble of impending financial doom.

Her family had secrets.

They weren't quite what they seemed.

And this would be such a theme of Agatha's fiction.

Possibly the first person she encountered who wasn't quite what he seemed was her own father.

Worsley, voice-over: In 1901, the death of Queen Victoria ushered in a new and unsettling period for Britain.

And it was a watershed year for Agatha, too.

Agatha was just 11 when her much-loved father Frederick fell ill.

The worry of the family fortune draining away made him worse.

He began to get heart attacks and in November 1901, he died.

Now, Agatha's parents had been utterly devoted to each other.

Agatha tried to comfort her mother Clara.

But Clara seemed different.

She seemed like a stranger.

She seemed savage with grief.

And she pushed her daughter away.

Worsley, voice-over: Agatha was devastated by her father's death and terrified that her mother would be taken from her, too.

At night, she'd have disturbing dreams that her mother had turned into a stranger.

I suspect this traumatic period scarred the young Agatha deeply and was one she'd be compelled to revisit in her writing.

Listen to this from Agatha's autobiographical novel "Unfinished Portrait."

[Door creaking] "Of course, it was Mummy.

"And then you saw the light, steely-blue eyes "and from the sleeve of Mummy's dress, oh, horror!

It wasn't Mummy.

It was the Gun Man."

This is an idea Agatha will come back to again and again.

In her stories, home is not a safe place, and the people closest to you are not what they seem.

Worsley, voice-over: After Frederick's death, Ashfield was a changed, lonely place.

The family fortune was gone, and with it, most of the servants.

Clara still aspired to upper-middle-class gentility, but she and Agatha were now outsiders in that world, their social status fragile.

And instead of supper parties and soirees, Agatha found a cheaper way to entertain herself-- writing stories.

The result, a psychological drama called "House of Beauty," is a tantalizing portal into Agatha's teenage mind.

The story begins with a young man--John-- who wakes up one morning and he cannot forget a dream that he's had about this beautiful house.

Worsley, voice-over: He has the same dream again and again.

He becomes obsessed with this house.

He always sees it from the outside, and it seems utterly perfect until one night.

"Someone was coming to the window.

"He was awake, still quivering with the horror, "the unutterable loathing of the thing, "the thing that had come to the window "and looked out at him malevolently.

"A thing so vile and loathsome that the mere remembrance of it made him feel sick."

Worsley, voice-over: This thing embodies evil.

It's like Agatha's nightmare of the Gun Man captured in words.

But there's also a nod towards the future.

Behind the beautiful house's facade lurk unimaginable horrors.

Writing was a fun pastime.

But as Agatha edged towards womanhood, only one thing counted-- finding a husband.

This meant Agatha coming out into society, usually a whirl of London dinners and debutante balls advertising her arrival onto the marriage market.

But Clara's precarious finances and position in society meant the world of London debs was off limits to Agatha.

Luckily, there was a cut-price deb season on offer in Egypt, then unofficially under British control.

So, in 1908, Clara and Agatha packed their trunks and headed to North Africa.

Young though she was, Agatha must have been aware that her entrance into society was far removed from that of most of her peers.

3 months' stay in Egypt cost Agatha and her mother more than a year's income from their investments, which shows just how important Clara considered it to be that Agatha get the chance to meet the man.

And not just any old man.

He had to be from the right social class, and crucially, he had to have money.

Worsley, voice-over: And one thing was a given: the man would be British.

These are the photos that Agatha and her mum took while they were in Egypt.

And what fascinates me is that only one Egyptian antiquity makes the cut.

There's the Sphinx.

The rest of the pictures basically show British people.

There are captains from the army.

Majors.

There's even one lonely duke.

They must have been pleased to snap him.

It's almost like they're still in England, really.

Ha!

They're having tea on the terrace.

They were living in this expatriate bubble.

They were not going out and exploring the Egyptian city at all.

But Agatha herself was pretty content with this, I think, because she already had her novelist's eyes and ears.

Worsley, voice-over: For Agatha, this expat society was fascinating.

On the surface, they were pursuing the same lives and dreams as they could in Britain.

But as Agatha was only too aware, for some of them, this image was deceptive.

And I think this crack between appearance and reality among the ruling classes had a huge impact on Agatha.

It gave her the material to start writing seriously.

In between her social engagements in Cairo, Agatha found the time to write her first full length novel, "Snow Upon the Desert."

It's 300 pages long.

What Agatha wrote was a sideways look at the expatriate British social scene of Cairo.

This is how it begins.

""Rosamund," said Lady Charminster, ""is an amazing girl."

"Then she added, with a flash of inspiration, ""She can neither be ignored nor explained."

"This was distinctly good.

"It was one of those concise sayings "that have a certain backing of truth to their epigrammatic force."

We have fireworks going on here.

Quite a lot of self-confidence for a teenage girl.

Worsley, voice-over: The book isn't a whodunit, but the sharp observations and clever dialogue that would become Agatha's trademarks are already there, as is the cast of well-heeled characters.

When she was old and wise, this is what Agatha had to say about her early writing.

She says she'd "formed a habit of writing stories which took the place of embroidering cushion-covers."

Hmm.

The reason I'm suspicious about that is that when she got home from Cairo, she had her novel professionally typed up.

She consulted a published author about what to do with it, and she actually sent it off to several publishers.

These seem to me the actions of somebody who was ambitious about her writing.

Worsley, voice-over: But Agatha had gone to Egypt to find a husband, not a vocation.

And Clara believed that only a good marriage could secure her daughter's vulnerable place in society.

So, back in England, Operation Husband continued.

In October 1912, Agatha was invited to a great ball at Ugbrooke House, not far from Torquay... and she was told to look out for one officer in particular.

This is the room in which Agatha first set eyes on Archibald Christie.

He was tall, he was fair, he was handsome.

He was a sort of mirror image of herself.

And he had this great air of careless confidence about him.

On top of that, he danced splendidly.

Worsley, voice-over: Archie may not have been rich, or even Agatha's social equal, but he was a pilot, the most glamorous job going in 1912.

But in Agatha's personal papers, I found a clue as to the deep impression Archie made.

There was one essential fact about Archie, as they called him, that I didn't fully appreciate until I saw this.

His photo, which reveals that he was incredibly hot.

What I like about this photo is that you can see it's got folds in it.

Agatha has clearly carried it around and treasured it.

It's been loved, possibly lusted over as well.

Agatha says of the dance here at Ugbrooke that she enjoyed the evening thoroughly.

I bet she did.

Worsley, voice-over: That was just one hitch.

When Agatha came to Ugbrooke, she was already engaged to Reggie Lucy, who'd grown up at Charlecote Park in Warwickshire, an even bigger pile than this one.

Reggie was everything Agatha was supposed to want.

He was rich.

He was aristocratic.

He was even kind.

But to me, this is the moment that Agatha reveals that she was more than a dutiful daughter and that she wanted more from marriage than just security... and safety.

Worsley, voice-over: Archie started to visit Agatha at Ashfield on his motorbike.

The sexual chemistry was obvious and in no time at all, she'd broken off her engagement to Reggie and she'd embarked upon a whirlwind romance with Archie.

Let's go.

[Engine revving] Worsley, voice-over: Archie turned the shy and sensible Agatha's world upside down.

But just as she glimpsed their happy future together, the life she knew was about to be swept away forever.

In August 1914, Britain joined World War I and Archie was sent to France.

It soon became apparent that this would be a long, brutal conflict.

So, when Archie returned on leave that Christmas, he and Agatha seized the moment to marry.

But only days after the wedding, Archie had to return to France.

Agatha remained with her mother and threw herself into the war effort, volunteering at the new military hospital in Torquay's town hall.

Veteran war correspondent Kate Adie has written about the conflict's impact on women, and I want to see how this might have affected Agatha and her writing.

Kate, here we are in Torquay Town Hall.

Exactly the same place.

Look, there's the arch and everything.

Can you tell me who all these people would have been?

They were volunteers.

Young ladies called VADs-- Voluntary Aid Detachment.

The sort of people whose ordinary lives consisted, rather, of tennis parties and meeting nice people.

And, of course, the professional nurses saw these young flibbertigibbets coming in and there were tart words on both sides.

Here's Agatha in her own VAD uniform.

She would have been at tennis parties with the doctors before, but now the doctors are up here and the VADs are down here in the hospital hierarchy, aren't they?

You felt your place, being shouted at.

The professional nurses saying, "Right, out with those chamber pots.

"Do the laundry, get the beds clean, and clean up the patient."

Mm.

Those were things which these girls who came from homes, usually with a number of servants, had never, ever done before.

What kinds of injury were brought here to the hospital?

Horrible things.

Battlefield injuries.

This is the medical record of one young man, Private L. Howard, who's arrived in Torquay after getting a bullet which entered through his pelvis, lacerated his rectum, and exited through his buttock.

Oh, my goodness.

Apart from the wound, they've probably never seen... A naked man.

It must have been, I suppose, the shock of their lives, being told to undress men or change dressings.

Oh, look.

It says that feces have gone through both wounds.

It's all gone septic.

And...oh, look.

He died on May the 17th, 1915.

And this is the first time, I imagine, any of them had come to what was probably going to be a painful and awful death.

No one prepared these girls psychologically.

There was no preparation for them at all.

Can I put a theory to you that I think is really personally important for Agatha Christie?

So, in the hospital, she saw terrible things, but then she went home and I don't think she was able to tell them what she'd done.

Oh, there are good examples of girls being told, you know, "We don't really need to hear too much about this."

Mm.

And that's keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of really dark stuff bubbling away underneath, which is sort of the definition of Agatha Christie's fiction.

With a clever girl like Agatha, someone who could think things through, learn, very useful.

She would be gathering confidence and information about worlds she'd never, ever even dreamed of.

Worsley, voice-over: Agatha was one of millions whose lives were upended by the brutality of the First World War.

The rules which had governed society seemed irreparably broken.

If it weren't for the war, I think that she and Archie would have set up home together immediately.

She'd have got on with being a wife and a mother.

Would she still have had time to write?

I don't know.

In fact, it seems to me that Agatha's experience here in the hospital allowed her to escape from the expectations of her social class and time.

It was the war, it was the First World War that gave her the freedom to imagine a very different future for herself.

Worsley, voice-over: The war broadened Agatha's horizons.

But how did it affect her dreams of becoming a writer?

I'm hoping some of her personal papers at the Christie Archive Trust in Wales might provide a clue.

Look at all of these goodies in here.

Now.

Oh, yes.

Now, this is just fabulous.

This is a sort of joke hospital magazine that was produced by Agatha and her hospital friends.

They've included portraits of themselves.

Look at her in her uniform.

And this group gave themselves a name.

They were called the Queer Women.

Worsley, voice-over: It's an irreverent, little magazine, and I can sense Agatha's creative fingerprints all over it.

Look at all these lovely pictures.

Ha!

"Aunt Agatha's Puzzle Page."

And this is Agatha herself, I think, in her lab coat.

Worsley, voice-over: Although it's an amusing read, I believe this magazine is evidence that Agatha's attitudes towards authority are shifting.

Here's one of the doctors.

He's described as harassed.

Agatha's opinion of the doctors was slowly sinking because they were rude to the nurses.

Agatha describes how she had to hand a towel to the doctor.

He'd dry his hands and then he'd just toss it onto the floor.

She was left feeling like a human towel rail.

So, here, Agatha is addressing the nurses.

She says, "We advise you to assert yourself a little more."

Hmm.

Agatha was losing confidence in the bosses, these pillars of society, the people who were supposed to be in charge.

Worsley, voice-over: In 1916, Agatha transferred off the wards and into the hospital dispensary, a move that would have a vital impact on her writing.

Here she learned how to mix and administer medicines, but also about the deadly simplicity of poisons.

At Torre Abbey in Devon, Ali Marshall oversees the Agatha Christie Potent Plants Garden full of the plants Agatha used in the dispensary and later in her books.

Ali, in this bag, I've got some pages from Agatha's notebook from when she was studying for her pharmaceutical qualification that she got.

Oh, that's fantastic.

So, what catches your eye, Ali?

So, the one that I notice first is atropine, which is in belladonna plants.

It's really good for inducing insanity or for giving you hallucinations.

No, really?

Have you got some here?

We have got.

We've got some nightshade down over there.

Oh, wow.

I mean, all of these were medicines, but if you get the dosage wrong, they become poisons.

Poisons.

Mm.

Take me to more poisons.

More poisons.

What else have we got?

Marshall: Just tucked away behind here, this gorgeous-looking plant with its lovely things.

Is that a poison?

It's ricin.

That's not ricin.

That's ricin.

Ha!

You're joking.

You can just-- It looks so harmless.

Yeah.

How much of that plant do you need to kill someone?

For a small person, about 5 seeds.

8 seeds... For a big person.

for a big person.

OK.

It's not an awful lot, so.

I think 6 seeds would finish me off then.

Yeah.

[Laughs] There is always that line between safety and extreme danger and sometimes death that she played with a lot in her stories, and she must have learned during that period.

When I think of Agatha studying pharmacy, I think of her as somebody who's saving life, helping people, but it was quite close to death, really, wasn't it?

Very, very close.

I mean, in training, it must have been absolutely terrifying.

She really had to get it right or it would be catastrophic.

I think that if Miss Marple were to walk into your garden here, Ali, she'd say there's an arsenal of weapons.

Gardens can be very dangerous places, and Agatha probably quite enjoyed that side of things.

The idea that you could sort of pick a humble foxglove or pick a bit of aconite from your garden and then use it in one of those detective stories.

You don't need strength to do it.

It's a woman's weapon, isn't it?

It is.

Quite a lot of Agatha's poisons went into drinks.

Agatha used them to commit murder many, many, many times.

Worsley, voice-over: With poisoning, anyone can be a killer, from a dairymaid to a duchess.

All you need is the know-how and access to some readily available ingredients.

It was an idea that gripped the young dispenser.

In 1916, in the middle of the war, Agatha began writing her own tale of a death by poisoning.

And it would be a detective story.

Before we begin, we need to discuss spoilers.

There will be spoilers for what I think is a very good reason.

If we can't discuss Agatha's plots and the ways that they work, we do her a disservice as a writer, and I think there's so much more to her writing than just the secret of whodunit.

Worsley, voice-over: Agatha's first detective novel, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," is filled with insights and characters she'd stored up over the years.

First up, Styles Court, a country house.

This is the world that Agatha knew well.

It's the sort of place where the upstairs characters drink tea on the lawn, but a bit like Agatha's home Ashfield.

It's a little bit down at heel.

Styles is ruled over by a matriarch.

Here she is--Mrs. Inglethorp.

An older lady.

A bit bossy, actually.

And she reminds me of Agatha's mother Clara.

I think her life story began close to home.

Now, the men of Styles are, well, to be honest, they're a slightly useless lot.

Ha ha!

They remind me of Agatha's father, the feckless father who spent all of the money.

This is Mrs. Inglethorp's stepson John.

His brother Lawrence.

Ooh, this is an interesting character.

This is Mrs. Inglethorp's much younger husband.

Never trust a man with a beard.

The women of Styles are a much more effective lot.

This is Evelyn.

She's Mrs. Inglethorp's paid companion.

She's a bit gruff.

She says it like she sees it, does Evelyn.

And then we've got--oh, ha ha.

The young lady called Cynthia, who works in the local hospital as a dispenser.

I wonder where Agatha got the idea from for her.

They all of them look like pillars of the community, don't they?

But most of them have something to hide.

Worsley, voice-over: They all had the motive and opportunity to poison Mrs. Inglethorp using strychnine.

But to uncover the culprit, Agatha needed one final player.

Agatha wrote later on, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" was roughed out and then came the dilemma.

"What kind of detective?

Why not have a Belgian refugee?"

Worsley, voice-over: During World War I, a quarter of a million refugees fled Belgium for Britain, and Agatha drew inspiration from some of the ones she'd seen in Torquay.

What kind of man should he be?

A little man, perhaps.

He's 5' 4", so, he's not tall.

"Like many small dandified men, he should be conceited."

And he would, of course, have a luxuriant-- no, no, a handsome mustache.

And he should have a somewhat grandiloquent name.

Hercule something.

Hercule Poirot.

Mm.

Here he is.

Yes.

Quite pleased with him.

Worsley, voice-over: In this first outing, Poirot uses his little gray cells to unmask the secret lovers behind the murder.

Today, Poirot is such an icon, but it's a twist worthy of Christie herself to discover that he and "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" nearly didn't see the light of day.

No fewer than 6 publishers turned it down.

She'd almost forgotten about the whole business when finally, someone said yes.

It was 4 long years before she could call herself a published author, and the text that was published had a small but significant change from what she'd originally written.

Worsley, voice-over: My fellow Christie fan Jamie Bernthal has been investigating this change.

Worsley: I can see goodies on the table, Jamie.

What have we got here?

Yes, something very special.

One of Agatha Christie's most secret notebooks.

The secret notebook.

Open it up.

So, in 1916, Agatha Christie used this to write the ending to "The Mysterious Affair at Styles."

This is not the version that was published.

The deleted scene.

Brilliant.

What happens in the deleted scene?

You have to translate the very-- The squiggles.

Ha ha!

But we see here "Poirot strutted into the witness box like a bantam cock."

This scene is set in a courtroom.

What happened in it?

Poirot is introducing evidence no one's ever seen.

He's committing probable slander on the box.

But the publisher said, "This isn't convincing.

"You need to either consult an expert or set it somewhere else."

And she did the latter.

I suppose it shows a humility.

She was willing to take advice.

Well, yes, and she also had a good head for business.

If her publisher was telling her this won't work, she knew to listen.

And that's how we got what's now become a cliche of the genre and Christie in particular, the drawing room denouement.

She always reveals things in drawing rooms.

Ha ha ha!

Setting it in a drawing room is an absolute stroke of genius because it's a domestic setting.

And it's moving away from the more masculine courtroom space that's more traditional.

It's a place where women are kind of equal with men.

We can get the heights of tension that you rarely get at home in personal space.

So, the idea of having a murderer in a courtroom is kind of one thing, but it's much more dangerous and scary and edgy to have them sitting next to you on the sofa at home, yeah?

Yes.

She subverts what we think we want and gives us something so much more interesting.

So, in what ways was Poirot a breath of fresh air?

I think the most radical thing about this book is Hercule Poirot.

So, Christie is writing in 1916 when the ultimate detective is Sherlock Holmes, and we have a lot of male heroes popping up who are big and macho.

Poirot is not like that.

For one thing, he's foreign.

He notices small details.

He's obsessively neat.

These are not traits of the rugged, macho hero.

So, would you say that Agatha takes some of the heroic, masculine conventions of detective fiction and she--she flips them?

She takes what we think we know about the genre and turns it on its head to surprise us.

There's a reason Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time.

Because right from this first book, she is locked in to human nature.

Worsley, voice-over: Without that crucial change to the ending, Agatha Christie might never have been published.

For me, this foreshadows a writing career that was full of breathless rule breaking.

But the book's success came at a pivot point for Agatha and the nation.

The end of the war brought rejoicing, but also huge social upheaval in class and gender roles.

The very fabric of British society had been fractured.

And Agatha personally was at a crossroads.

Archie got a job in a city firm, and in August 1919, Agatha gave birth to their daughter Rosalind.

Would she feel compelled to abandon writing for the traditional role of wife and mother, or had she and society changed enough to allow Agatha to pursue her own ambitions?

This is a really interesting passage in Agatha's autobiography, written towards the end of her life.

She's discussing her career, her status, and she says here that when she was filling in a form that asked for her occupation, she always put down "married woman."

"That was my occupation.

"I never approached my writing "by dubbing it with the grand name of 'career.'

I would have thought it ridiculous."

Here's some evidence from 1921 that very much contradicts that statement.

And the census asked for her personal occupation.

And she has--there she is.

She has put down "Novelist."

There are clearly different Agatha Christies at different times.

And as Agatha Christie would tell us herself, you've got to question everything.

Worsley, voice-over: Most importantly, why was the older Agatha so keen to throw a veil over her talent and ambition?

I don't think it came from Archie.

He initially supported her writing, and Agatha had space to write 4 novels in only 4 years.

And then in 1926 came the book that would cement her reputation as the era's queen of crime-- "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd."

At first sight, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" is just your classic country house murder mystery.

The characters are respectable members of the community.

There's Dr. Sheppard.

He's the narrator.

There's Poirot again.

And there's even a body in a locked room.

It belongs to Roger Ackroyd himself.

He's a wealthy businessman.

And guess what?

It turns out that everybody in his household has got a reason for wanting to bump him off.

But Agatha takes all of these conventional ingredients, and she does something remarkable with them.

She takes one of the really basic conventions of any detective story, and she turns it on its head.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm meeting writer Sarah Phelps, who believes this twist in "Roger Ackroyd" is explosive.

Sarah, can you tell me a little bit about the setup for this story, "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd"?

This is Roger Ackroyd.

He's a wealthy man, but he's funny about money.

That's something we're told by the person who narrates the story to us-- the sensible village doctor Dr. Sheppard.

Dr. Sheppard.

Dr. Sheppard.

Look at him.

How could we not trust this man?

Of course you would trust this man.

He's the village doctor.

And then Hercule Poirot, notorious private detective, who, happily or unhappily, has retired to this village to grow vegetable marrows, and-- I think he must call them veg-e-table marrows... [Belgian accent] Veg-e-table.

Veg-e-table.

Veg-e-table marrows.

It's set in a country house.

It looks like a very conventional setup.

But what's the twist?

The one who's telling us all the clues, the one who's telling us he heard things, he's the one who did it.

The murderer is the narrator--Dr. Sheppard.

That's pretty shocking.

That's like saying Watson did it.

It is shocking.

It's exciting.

It's thrilling because it's really about how easily we're duped.

When the book was published, some people said, "This isn't right.

Agatha Christie has broken the rules of detective fiction."

I think it's a bend.

A bend?

In this book, everything is there for you.

There's this key passage where our trusted narrator doesn't quite tell us everything.

"The letter had been brought in "at 20 minutes to 9.

"It was just on 10 minutes to 9 when I left him, the letter still unread."

That's a vital 10 minutes.

Ha ha!

That's the 10 minutes.

The audience goes, "What happens in that 10 minutes?"

But because Sheppard is telling you about it, you think, "Well, it can't possibly be him."

Yes, exactly.

The problem that you have is that you've believed the person in authority.

We know that Agatha had had her own sort of faith in doctors undermined by seeing the reality of them when she was working in the war in the hospital.

I don't know that she distrusted doctors.

I think she just distrusted authority.

The doctor, the judge, the general.

I think that is really what she's writing about these people.

They're just not who you think they are.

Because of the war?

The long, dark shadow of the First World War.

I think it falls very firmly on Agatha, too.

I don't see how it can't.

I don't see how you would escape what you have seen and what you've experienced and what you know can be done to the human mind and the human body.

She's writing about that trauma in a really potent way.

Nobody escapes.

Nobody is innocent.

Worsley, voice-over: It's clear that this book, "Roger Ackroyd," gave Agatha Christie the reputation as a clever woman.

Now, listen, 100 years later, people still have problems with the idea of a clever woman.

So, I can imagine that in 1926, to be a clever woman was a very mixed blessing indeed.

Worsley, voice-over: "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" tapped into a deep dissatisfaction felt by many in the 1920s.

It sold out on publication, and its success helped the family to move out of their London flat into a large home here in Sunningdale.

This is a very big house for a family of 3 people, one of whom is a very small girl.

Worsley, voice-over: Archie's city career was on the up and the Christies looked like the model of a suburban middle-class family.

They renamed the house Styles in honor of Agatha's debut novel.

But beneath the surface, all was not quite as it seemed.

In her autobiography, Agatha tells us that she and Archie were worried whether they could afford the giant house.

But as it says here, "We arranged for a mortgage."

But Agatha is often an unreliable narrator.

This is the actual mortgage deed, and the house wasn't bought by a married couple.

It was bought by Agatha Christie on her own.

"Signed, sealed, and delivered.

Agatha Christie."

There really weren't that many married women in the 1920s who were able to buy themselves a giant house.

Worsley, voice-over: For me, this reveals why Agatha will later change tack, presenting herself as just a housewife who achieved success by accident.

She knew she was actually an extraordinary modern woman whose career was steaming forward.

But she also sensed that society wasn't ready for a woman like her yet.

So, Agatha would hide her brilliance in plain sight.

Agatha's purchase of this house stood for everything she'd achieved so far.

And more than that, I think it stood for her confidence in the future.

She knew that books like "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" and "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" were only the beginning.

She could do more.

She could do better.

She'd used the upheaval of the First World War to her advantage.

And at this moment she buys the house, we get a glimpse of an Agatha we don't often see-- a woman in control of her destiny.

A woman unapologetically herself.

Could her life get any better than this?

"Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen" is available on Amazon Prime video