Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen

Lucy Worsley: It's December 1926.

Agatha Christie has crashed her car, leaving it balanced precariously over a chalk quarry.

Then she vanishes, triggering the biggest manhunt yet seen in Britain.

At 36, Agatha Christie was a successful detective novelist, seemingly happily married with a young daughter at home.

Was this crisis or conspiracy?

Agatha's disappearance in 1926 is usually seen as this great central mystery in her life.

I think it's even more interesting to see the effect it had.

I think that the trauma of 1926 turned Agatha Christie into the great woman that she became.

OK.

I think that we're nearly there.

Ooh!

Nettles.

Ouch.

Agh!

Ahh, OK.

It must be just here.

Surely, we must be nearly there.

Oh, gosh.

Ooh!

I'm not going to go too near the edge.

That is the edge of the cliff, and it really-- it really is a cliff.

Very interesting.

You got to imagine fewer trees in 1926, and from the maps I've looked at and the accounts I've read, I'm pretty confident that her car came off the road, and then it rolled down across much more open downland landscape then, and then it got caught in bushes.

There's really clear descriptions of the car being caught in a bush, and what you don't realize till you get here is that below would have been this perilous drop.

I mean, a life-ending drop if a car had gone over there.

Things would only have had to have been very slightly different, you know, for the bush to have given way.

Her car would have gone over, and she would have been dead.

But when the police found the car the next morning, its lights still blazing, its owner had completely disappeared.

Could it be suicide or a daring hoax, or was she the victim of foul play?

This is the police report for the incident.

"The car was found with its bonnet buried in the bushes "as if it had got out of control.

In the car was found a fur coat"-- [Flash bulb pops] now, why wasn't she wearing that if the night was so cold?

"a dressing case, and a driving license"-- that's a good clue-- "indicating that the owner was Mrs. Agatha Christie."

A famous detective novelist vanished, maybe even murdered or kidnapped, and a series of tantalizing clues.

There were all the ingredients of the perfect tabloid story, and the press went to town.

They found the ideal cast of characters: an attractive woman, of course; but also Rosalind, the 7-year-old daughter she left behind; Archie, the handsome husband who seemed to have something to hide; and pretty young Nancy Neele, who'd turn out to be Archie's lover.

The press turned the story into a sensation.

Radio was in its infancy, there was no television, and national newspapers were booming.

With a new development each day, this thrilling story would sell more papers.

The Surrey police played along.

They were convinced that Agatha would be found dead on their patch.

Special attention was paid to the nearby Silent Pool, already the site of a legendary drowning and just the sort of place to find a body caught in the weeds.

You know, as I look through these photos from the search, I have a sneaking suspicion that everybody was actually rather enjoying themselves.

Look at these gentlemen, who are very performatively dragging a pond.

They've definitely staged that for the newspaper cameras.

It's all quite macho.

And this coachload of searchers here, they're taking a break from searching, and they are--I think they're enjoying a packed lunch.

And these ones here, who are restaging the scene of the crime.

It's 1920s "Crimewatch," but do you know what?

I can't really blame the policemen and all of these kind searching people.

Under the circumstances, I can see exactly why they felt that they were living inside the world of a detective story.

The police, press, and public went into a detection frenzy.

There were dedicated front pages day after day.

Calls to action mustered thousands of volunteers.

Bloodhounds sniffed the countryside.

Aeroplanes joined the hunt.

Even Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was involved.

He hired a psychic to connect with Agatha via one of her gloves.

How could a woman whose face was in every newspaper simply disappear?

There were 11 days full of speculation and scandal.

Then a lead came in from somewhere totally unexpected.

In the elegant spa town of Harrogate 230 miles north of where Agatha had disappeared, a woman answering Agatha's description was spotted at the Hydropathic Hotel.

Two members of the hotel's dance band tipped off the police.

So Archie took the train up to Harrogate to see if the woman, who checked in as Teresa Neele, was really his missing wife.

When Archie arrived at the hotel, he and a policeman stationed themselves by the lift.

They were waiting for when the mystery woman would come down and go through to the dining room.

Time went by.

Other guests came through.

The suspense mounted.

Then finally the lift doors opened, and...there she was.

Yes, it was Agatha.

She'd been found.

but where was the dramatic reunion?

Where were the tears and recriminations?

Agatha greeted Archie, and they walked quietly off to the hotel restaurant.

To the 25 or so reporters outside the hotel, though, the mystery thickened because Agatha, sitting here calmly having her dinner, didn't look like they expected.

She wasn't distressed.

She didn't seem broken.

She didn't seem guilty about all this trouble she'd caused.

Answers were required, and Archie had answers.

He announced to the journalists that Agatha had lost her memory.

The press wanted details.

They wanted explanations.

Now, they were told Agatha didn't remember the car accident.

She didn't know how she got to Harrogate.

She definitely couldn't explain why she checked into the hotel under her husband's mistress' surname.

She'd even forgotten who she was.

To the journalists, though, this sounded almost unbelievable, a totally lame excuse.

What kind of self-respecting detective novelist would have come up with a plot twist as bad as that?

It felt like she'd made fools of them all.

They wanted motives, so they invented them.

It was a publicity stunt.

After all, while she was missing, Agatha's books had sold out across Britain, or perhaps it was a twisted hoax to punish her unfaithful husband.

Hardly anyone believed that Agatha was telling the truth, but of course, the journalists didn't know what had happened in the months before.

I think we should consider Agatha's own testimony for what she experienced in 1926.

Bad things had been happening to her that year.

Her mother had died.

She was under pressure from her work.

She reports a whole range of symptoms-- forgetfulness, tearfulness, insomnia.

In August-- so before she disappeared-- a gossip columnist reported that she'd had a breakdown.

On top of all that, just before Agatha disappeared, Archie had told her he was leaving her for another woman.

Not just any woman.

Nancy Neele was a friend of Agatha's.

She was 9 years younger, outgoing, and sporty.

Like Archie, she was a keen golfer.

She'd even stayed at their house while visiting the local golf course.

No surprise then that Agatha's mental health was suffering, but it's still a big leap from there to forgetting who you are.

I need to understand if Agatha could really have had amnesia.

I've come to Harrogate's Royal Baths, where she took regular therapeutic treatments during her stay.

This is quite the place, isn't it?

Somewhere I've always wanted to come.

Worsley, voice-over: I'm hoping Professor Edgar Jones can suggest a modern medical diagnosis.

Edgar, can I ask you, how would you describe your profession?

Technically, I'm a clinical psychopathologist and psychotherapist, but I'm interested particularly in people who've been through stressful situations such as soldiers in war, people who've got PTSD.

I can see some connections to Agatha's trauma here.

At the time, A lot of people believed that she was "faking" her condition because she did things like stay at a hotel, eat dinner... Mm-hmm.

socialize with other guests.

How can you do all of that if you've "lost your memory"?

Well, it is consistent with the diagnosis of fugue.

Ah.

Fugue.

Tell me--tell me a bit more about fugue.

That means a flight, doesn't it?

Fugue is a very rare state, but it has the purpose of extracting a person from a stressful or intolerable situation.

So you go from being in an area where you're uncomfortable, you can't see a future into a new identity with a new role and a new place.

I see it as a kind of flight into health.

A flight into health is an interesting phrase, seeing as we're sitting in a health facility, which would explain why she'd come to Harrogate, right?

It could well do.

Coming to Harrogate would mean that she's no longer reminded of things around her where she lives, of her husband, who's threatening divorce, the death of her mother, and I do wonder because when she checks into the hotel, she calls herself Teresa Neele, and Neele is, of course, the name of her husband's love interest.

It's not that she's playing a part.

She's not being an actress.

It's almost in her mind she's re-created herself in a happy place in the identity of the woman who's threatening her very marriage.

And, Edgar, have you ever met people who've experienced this fugue state?

Fugue state is very rare, so in a period of 10 years of clinical work on our ward, we had two women who fell into this fugue state and one man, also, who came pretty close to the diagnosis.

So it is very unusual because people are still able to function appropriately on a day-to-day basis, and it doesn't imply that this is acting or faking or some publicity stunt.

Gosh.

So we're talking here about a really extreme, frightening medical condition.

I'm persuaded by this argument about the fugue state, and in turn, that makes me-- it makes me so furious that people then and people still today think that somehow she was making it up, that she was faking.

It seems to me that despite her fame and her success and all the good things in her life, there's a deep injustice here.

Not only was Agatha bereaved-- she'd lost her mother-- not only had she lost her husband, not only was she ill, but that she was shamed for all of this in the newspapers globally.

Makes me angry.

This ill, confused woman was now fair game for pursuit by the press.

[Clamoring] The day after Agatha was found, with crowds of photographers waiting outside the hotel, Archie needed somehow to get her away... [Latch clicks] but he was too clever to bring her out the front.

The Christies came sneaking out the back, disappointing all the photographers, and this is the sort of behavior that turns the press against you.

The photographers soon caught up with them again.

Agatha and Archie took a train and tried to shake them off again by heading to Cheshire, home To Agatha sister's family in the splendid Abney Hall.

Still, the reporters had hunted them down by the time they arrived.

As the car came through these gates, Agatha's brother-in-law jumped out and slammed the gates closed.

Those ravenous reporters were all trapped outside, but Agatha was now under siege.

You might think this was a strange place to bring her, but it was her big sister's home, and she'd been coming here since she was 12 years old.

She couldn't go home to the house she shared with Archie.

Too traumatic, so here she was holed up amidst faded Victorian Gothic.

Now, which room am I in?

I think it's the dining room.

Look.

There's that--that door.

And it had this massive table in, like, Count Dracula's castle.

Heh.

Agatha had spent a lot of time here as a child, and you can see that the melodramatic atmosphere of the place appealed to something in her imagination.

It sparked many stories.

Often when you're reading an Agatha Christie book and there's some vast gloomy mansion, you think, "Yep, that's Abney Hall."

There's even a railway that goes round the park just like in the story "4.50 from Paddington."

Clearly it was inspired by this place.

In the book, Rutherford Hall is described as uncomfortable, cold, and dark, the perfect setting for family intrigue and a couple of murders.

but when she was on the run, when the press were after her, when she was ill, this place had the advantage of being familiar to her, but it was also a place that, my goodness, has a sort of morbid atmosphere to it.

Not sure it was the best place for her to be, quite honestly.

Doctors arrived and announced that her amnesia was unquestionably genuine.

Archie told reporters that Agatha now knew who he was but had lost 3 years of her life and still didn't recognize her daughter, but they didn't believe him.

Questions were raised in Parliament about the cost of the police search.

There were calls for the Christies to pay the money back.

On the 18th of December, Archie left Abney.

Agatha stayed on.

In early 1927, Agatha's sister persuaded her to take a flat in London in search of a cure.

Next comes a deeply mysterious part of Agatha's life.

There are hints that she came for psychiatric treatment here in Harley Street, where the best and the most expensive doctors are to be found, but there aren't any records of her treatment.

I'd love to know more.

I want to find out who might have treated Agatha and what sort of treatment she received.

Worsley: Hello.

Will you be Claire?

I'm Claire.

Thank you very much.

Worsley, voice-over: I've enlisted the help of Dr. Claire Hilton, historian in residence at the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

Hilton: This is the journal of the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, which includes a list of members and where they worked.

Ah!

Let's see how many of them... Worsley, voice-over: Just 7 psychiatrists had Harley Street addresses at the time, and Claire thinks she's found the most likely candidate.

And here we've got William Brown at number 88 Harley Street.

Yes.

Was this--was this Dr. William Brown a public figure?

Was he famous?

He gave public lectures, and in 1925, the "Guardian" and the "Telegraph" reported on some of his.

"'Loss of memory' How to cure it," Dr. William Brown.

It says here "he knew that a wave of the hand would immediately bring memory back."

Sounds like our man.

Sounds like it.

What sort of treatment did this William Brown give to people?

He was very keen on hypnosis.

It says here--ha--that "during the war "he had treated over 600 cases of loss of memory in this way with invariable success."

Worsley, voice-over: The first mental casualties of World War I appeared in 1914, exhibiting perplexing symptoms like trembling, paralysis, speech disorders, confusion, and memory problems.

Originally, it was thought vibrations from shell explosions were to blame, and the phrase shell shock appeared.

By the end of the war, 80,000 such cases had passed through British Army medical facilities.

William Brown was one of the young doctors brought in to treat them.

He agreed with Freud that recovering repressed memories was key to his patients' health, but in wartime, he needed a quick fix--hypnosis.

Now, I'm curious to know what we can learn from Agatha's novels about this mystery, and in particular, there's this novel "Giant's Bread."

It's not a detective novel, but in it, somebody loses their memory, and they get it back again with the help of a doctor.

He's "a tall, thin man with eyes that seemed to see right into the center of you."

So somebody very charismatic and penetrating, and this doctor uses a technique that sounds a bit like hypnosis.

"The doctor touched his forehead and his limbs, "told him that he was resting--was rested-- and he would become strong and happy again," and he begins to remember.

Does that sound like Dr. Brown to you?

Well, what stands out is William Brown's comment that he would touch the forehead of his patients before they passed into this hypnotic state.

That's fascinating because this--this novel that describes someone being hypnotized to get their memories back, I've always suspected that Agatha was talking about her own experience here.

I think you've brought some new evidence to the table here that she really did experience illness in 1927 and that she was treated it for it, using up-to-date techniques of psychiatry and hypnosis.

Is it possible, Claire, that he was "a tall, thin man with eyes that seemed to see right into the center of you," as Agatha says here?

Well, we have found a picture of him.

No.

Don't tell me he was short and fat.

Don't tell me that.

Well, that is William Brown to the left.

He's tall.

He's tall, he's slim.

What do you think of his eyes?

Has he got a penetrating gaze?

He knows what you're thinking, Claire.

Ha ha!

Probably.

I think Agatha put him into her novel.

It really wouldn't surprise me.

"Giant's Bread" wasn't published under the name of Agatha Christie.

She used a pseudonym-- Mary Westmacott-- and the true identity of Mary Westmacott was kept top secret, and when she was writing in the privacy of her pseudonym Mary Westmacott, I think that Agatha shows us who she really was, and to me, that's a person who's clearly had the insights of psychotherapy, and this is a whole level of understanding that's been missed by all the people who don't believe that in 1926 Agatha really was ill. She went on to write 5 more Mary Westmacott books.

They're almost like a form of therapy themselves, a place to explore her true feelings, which means these books are vital for understanding the real Agatha.

They didn't sell well, though, without the murders or the Agatha Christie name.

Now, these Mary Westmacott novels have often been written off as romances, you know, woman type stuff, but I don't think that's fair.

They're quite serious studies of human nature, and I think that this new wisdom, this new maturity comes into her detective fiction, too.

As time goes on, Poirot for example, changes the way that he works.

He gets less interested in physical clues and more interested in what we might call psychological profiling.

He says here he's not interested in cigarette ash or fingerprints.

He says, "'It is the psychology I seek.'"

He wants to read the secrets of the heart.

I believe that we wouldn't have had Agatha's most famous detective novels without her moment of crisis and, in particular, the psychotherapy that followed.

[Horn honking] We've reached 1928.

Agatha's therapy was over, but she couldn't move on just yet.

Archie wanted to marry his lover Nancy Neele, and Agatha, who didn't even want want a divorce, was forced to collude in a trick to protect Nancy's reputation.

Archie committed a kind of fake adultery.

He came here to the Grosvenor Hotel Victoria and "committed adultery with a woman" except he didn't really.

He paid a waiter to say that he'd seen Archie in bed with this woman.

All this was presented in court, and for Agatha, there were two bad things here.

Firstly, this was all in public.

It was in the High Court.

Secondly, she had to perjure herself.

She had to lie and say, yes, she believed that this had really happened.

Nancy's name was kept out of the proceedings, and you get a sense of how Agatha felt about this because in another of her Mary Westmacott books the heroine tells us if she took another woman's husband, she says, "I'd do it honestly.

"I'd not skulk in the shadow "and let someone else do the dirty work."

Agatha, of course, didn't have the luxury of hiding in the shadows, and the divorce meant inevitably another airing in the newspapers for the story of her disappearance.

Even after Agatha was found, you don't hear her voice in the press coverage.

She'd clearly decided not to give any interviews, and in lots of books you'll read about Agatha Christie, it's said that she never spoke again about her disappearance, that she kept silent for the rest of her life.

Now, that's not true.

It's almost comically untrue because in 1928, with the divorce underway, she decided to take back control of her own story.

She gave a really long, really detailed description about exactly what had happened to her.

In an exclusive interview with the "Daily Mail," Agatha directly confronted the rumors about her disappearance.

and I don't think it's a coincidence that the article came out as she was trying to win custody of her daughter Rosalind.

Oh!

Are these all your newspapers?

Absolutely.

Superb.

Thank you.

A whole range of them here.

Worsley, voice-over: I want to discuss this article with an expert on twenties journalism.

Why would she have chosen the "Daily Mail" for telling her side of the story?

Well, that's the best-selling newspaper of the 1920s.

It was still very much the market leader, and it would be ready by more people than any other organ that she could have gone to.

so I think the "Daily Mail" makes absolute sense.

It's also very striking to me that it's in the first person.

You know, she gets to say exactly what she wants to say in her own words purportedly.

Absolutely.

In her own words is one of the catchphrases of this period of journalism, this sort of-- the idea that we're opening the curtain.

We're sort of seeing right into someone's soul.

Worsley, voice-over: In the interview, Agatha is frank about her feelings, her insomnia, the fact that she began to experience suicidal thoughts.

She left home that night with the intention of doing something desperate.

She says, "At Harrogate, I read every day "about Mrs. Christie's disappearance "and came to the conclusion that she was dead.

I regarded her a having acted stupidly."

Adrian, who's reading these papers that have got Agatha Christie plastered all over the front page?

Well, they were designed to appeal to a broad middle-class audience, but we know that really the heart of the readership at this point were middle-class women.

Is that the front page?

That's the front page.

It's all about dresses.

Absolutely.

And underwear!

The "Daily Mail" knew that it could get huge amounts of money for this advertising, so the advertisers were pushing for female readers, and therefore, the editors and proprietors were "We need to reach these female readers."

Worsley, voice-over: Agatha's books were serialized in these newspapers targeted at women, the same female readers who'd also lapped up the real-life story of her disappearance.

Agatha needed to keep them on side.

There are very powerful ideas at this time of what motherhood should be, not least because there had been some murmurings, I think, about "How could someone disappear like that and leave a daughter?"

And she would probably have been conscious of the sorts of things that she would need to say not just in the courtroom but to the court of public opinion.

She would have been conscious of that, I think.

What's astonishing to me is that despite the fact she gave an interview to the "Daily Mail" saying exactly why she'd disappeared, nobody was listening because most people today still, I think, would say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, she disappeared "because she was a bad person "and she was framing her cheating husband for her murder because that made a better media story."

Absolutely, and I think to some extent it is the result of the intensity of the coverage in 1926 splashed across a whole range of different newspapers versus a one-off interview for one newspaper, which although would have got a certain reach, it didn't probably have that same lasting resonance, and so people go back to the events of 1926 and then put their own interpretation on it.

Just shows you mustn't believe what you read in the papers.

Absolutely not.

You can't ever trust the 1920s newspapers in particular.

Gosh.

Worsley, voice-over: In the end, Agatha could not stop the speculation about her disappearance, but she did win custody of Rosalind, and she was learning that she couldn't just keep quiet.

She had to get out there and manage her image.

This is beginning to make sense to me.

The very last thing she must have wanted to do was to give interviews to the press, and yet she was locked into this relationship with it.

She still had to sell books.

[Train whistle blows] Throughout the upheavals of her divorce, Agatha had been wrestling with her Next Poirot mystery... and just a month after the "Daily Mail" article appeared, a new novel hit the shelves.

"The Mystery of the Blue Train" is about a murder on a luxury train going to the South of France, and it's a book that marks a turning point in Agatha's career because this is the book that she was working on in 1926 when she disappeared.

The story reflects the turmoil in her private life.

It's about divorce and faithless spouses, but the book itself was part of the problem for her because she just couldn't finish it.

She later described it as easily the worst book she'd ever written.

When she'd come back after the disappearance, she really needed to finish it because of the money, and she describes in this letter how difficult that was.

She says here, "I wanted to write for the sake of the money," to support her daughter, "but I felt I couldn't, and it is a nerve-wracking feeling."

You can see her trying to finish the book, squeezing out the words as she tots up her daily totals on this page of her notebooks here.

She manages to get to 53,000 words, but her publishing contract says that the next novel must be "not less than 75,000 words."

Let me read you one of the very last paragraphs of the story, which throws an interesting light on all of this, I think.

"From far behind them, there came a long, drawn out scream of an engine's whistle."

[Train whistle blows] "'Trains are relentless things, "'aren't they, Monsieur Poirot?

"'People are murdered and die, but they go on just the same.'"

So this story works on two levels.

It's a story about a train, but it's also a story about the relentless, inexorable nature of success and publishing contracts.

[Train chugging] Much later, Agatha said that it was full of clichs.

The people were unreal, the plot predictable, and it had no joie de vivre.

People who thought it one of her best, she said, actually went down in her estimation, but even though it wasn't exactly a masterpiece, "The Blue Train" sold because Agatha was now notorious.

"The Murder of Roger Ackroyd," a brilliant book, sold 4,000 copies in its first year.

"The Blue Train," described by Agatha as "easily the worst book I ever wrote" sold 7,000 copies.

[Train whistle blows] Later in 1928, Agatha's divorce finally became official.

The next week, Archie married Nancy Neele.

It must have felt like yet another public humiliation.

Agatha was adrift.

Her daughter was off at boarding school.

She had no ties, no husband, and more notoriety than she wanted, but there was at least the freedom to get away.

In November 1928, Agatha threw caution to the wind and booked herself a second class ticket on the famous Orient Express.

She'd once traveled the world with Archie by her side.

Here was her chance to go solo... and this was her first stop, Sirkeci Station, Istanbul.

Agatha likes to tell the story about how fate brought her here.

She had planned to go to the West Indies, but then at a party, she ran into a couple who'd just come back from Iraq.

They told her how marvelous it was.

They told her about these incredible train journeys.

The next day, she changed her ticket, and 5 days later, she was off.

So in the autumn of 1928, Agatha arrived here in Istanbul, ready to begin the next stage of her journey even further east.

Thank you.

Now this business of the last-minute change of tickets, it does sound like a plot device from one of Agatha's own books, doesn't it?

And when she came to write her own life story, she saw it in those terms as the beginning of a fresh chapter, a new start in life.

As Agatha put it, "I was going by myself.

I should find out now what kind of person I was."

It's pretty exciting for me being here in the 21st century, and I've got a film crew with me.

Imagine what it must have been like for a woman alone here in the 1920s.

It must have been almost shockingly different from her normal life at home.

[Boat horn blowing] Single female tourists were a bit of a rarity at the time, yet here she was at 38 years old heading off on her own.

Last time that happened, there'd been a national manhunt, and now she was blissfully in control.

What's more, her journey was only just beginning.

Here's a map from the 1920s that shows Agatha's route.

It's described as an "Authentic imperial Map."

She started here at Istanbul.

British people then saw the city as the Gateway to the East.

Then she crossed the Bosphorus by boat.

Then it was onto a train to get across the rest of Turkey through some thrilling mountain passes.

Then through Syria to Damascus.

There it is.

Then the journey got really exciting because to go across the desert into Iraq, she had to travel in a bouncing desert minibus.

[Indistinct chatter] The idea of being on your own in the desert was a powerful one for Agatha.

Years later, she wrote "Absent in the Spring."

In it, a woman finds herself stranded for days and is forced to confront her self-deception.

Agatha writes, "This clear, terrible light would show her what she was."

"Would show her the truth of all the things "she hadn't wanted to look at-- the things that really she had known all along."

I think that on this journey, Agatha, too, was finally facing up to all those terrible things she'd been through.

When she reached Baghdad, she actually found it a bit disappointing.

It was a bit too British and colonial, so she immediately set off again, going in this direction towards an even bigger adventure.

Over 200 miles south of Baghdad, she reached Tell el-Muqayyar.

This was the site of an archeological dig begun in 1922, which had uncovered treasures from the 5,000-year-old Sumerian civilization at the royal cemetery of Ur.

The visit to the dig would end up being just as transformative for Agatha as the journey itself.

Many objects excavated at Ur are housed here at the British Museum... Woman: Show you these.

and I'm meeting a leading expert.

Zainab, in the 1920s, Tutankhamun has just been discovered, and everybody's mad for Egyptian things, aren't they?

Yes.

Egyptomania.

Egyptomania.

How does how does Iraq fit into that?

Well, soon afterwards, Iraq also got a different kind of a mania about these-- especially these finds from Ur, so it began to gain a similar kind of glamor.

So "If you've seen the golden treasures "from Egypt, you're also going to like the golden treasures from Iraq."

Exactly.

Exactly.

Zainab, what's this amazing thing we're looking at here?

This is the so-called "Ram in the Thicket."

It was one of the objects that was found in the royal cemetery of Ur, which was this spectacular series of 16 graves that date to the middle of the third millennium B.C.

in the south of Iraq.

How intrepid of her was this?

Well, I think it was intrepid because even now a lot of people are kind of reluctant to go to Iraq after all of the wars and so on, and we have to imagine that it was something similar.

They had just come out of the First World War.

Iraq was under the British Mandate, which is a polite way of saying it was a colony.

So it was this exotic place, but it was in the East in some place unknown, so I do think it was brave of her to decide to go.

When Agatha Christie arrived at Ur in 1928, she got invited to stay on the site.

That was a pretty special thing, wasn't it?

That's very special.

Yes.

I doubt that they would have invited every tourist.

No, because she brought-- she brought publicity to the archeologists?

Exactly, and what archeologists really want is to have that kind of publicity in order to have more funds.

Worsley, voice-over:-over: Agatha's fame may have attracted the archeologists, but she certainly got something in return.

Archeology and Iraq would become a source of inspiration for future novels, and she also gained in other ways.

Seems to me that Agatha's first trip to Iraq made a big difference to her self-confidence.

She knew now that she could live by herself, travel by herself.

I think it gave her a new sense of independence.

In the late 1920s, detective fiction was flourishing thanks to novelists like Dorothy L. Sayers, G.K. Chesterton, and of course Agatha herself, and some of these writers banded together into a dining society called The Detection Club.

If you joined The Detection Club, you had to swear the club oath.

It was very tongue in cheek.

You had to promise that in any future novels you might write you would avoid the things considered to be cheating.

These included "Trap-Doors" and "Ghosts" and "Super-Criminals and "Death-Rays," and--this is interesting-- "Feminine Intuition."

I wonder what's wrong with feminine intuition and why it's cheekier than masculine intuition.

Anyway, Agatha had always enjoyed breaking the rules, and this was a rule that she would break in creating her new detective.

Miss Marple first appeared as a character in a short story of 1927, "The Tuesday Night Club," before emerging as a detective in her own right in 1930's The Murder at the Vicarage."

Ah.

Now, you might think that Miss Marple is a sort of cuddly, tea-drinking old lady.

You'd be wrong.

She's actually an independent and quite subversive woman, and she works through feminine intuition.

This is how she defines it.

She says, "'Intuition is like reading a word "'without having to spell it out.

"'A child can't do that because a child "'has little experience.

"'But a grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.'"

She's really talking about life experience, isn't she?

As she says here, "'My hobby is--and always has been-- Human Nature."

Now, I think it was Agatha's own life experience, this sense that she'd been through trouble and come out stronger, that she was entering into her power, that allowed her to create the rule-breaking Miss Marple.

Agatha found a way of combining her new confidence and independence with the psychological insights from her illness to create the perfect detective.

Almost a century after we first Miss Marple, Some of our great novelists are still fascinated by her.

I've met up for a glass of cherry brandy with 3 best-selling writers who've just finished their own Miss Marple stories.

Now, Kate, I've heard you saying that Miss Marple's your hero.

Is that fair to say?

Yes.

Yes, she absolutely is.

I think she is one of the great unsung heroes of literature and one of the great women of literature, not just crime, but everything, because she is utterly herself.

She's uncompromising, but she's gentle and clever.

How many other women are the hero of their story at the age of 65, but without it being because they're somebody's mother?

She's someone that other people take for granted a little bit.

She's a little bit invisible, but she turns that into her secret weapon.

You know, she's able to overhear conversations because people don't think anything about talking in front of her because she's just this fluffy, little old lady, so of course, it doesn't matter what they say.

You know, part of that is also cultural, right?

Because in an Asian context, you know, we revere the older generation, and we think they have a great deal of wisdom, and when I first read Miss Marple stories, I was quite surprised by seeing, "Oh, she's being underestimated.

Kate, could you tell me what the brief was when you wrote these new Miss Marple stories?

Well, it was--the brief was quite tight in a way, wasn't it?

So I think one of the key things is that there could be no love interest.

We couldn't create a backstory of a husband that died in the War or a broken heart.

In those days, even though there was a surplus of women because of the First World War and there weren't enough men to go round, and all of these things, There was also a thing that single women and women who didn't marry were to be pitied, and that is an incredibly important part of why Miss Marple is dismissed.

Ware: I think the other really interesting thing about both of Christie's detectives actually is that they both arise out of sort of slightly destabilizing influences after the War in that, you know, Poirot is a refugee, and that was something that people had a lot of anxiety about.

Miss Marple is one of this generation of superfluous women, and what Christie does brilliantly is show that these people are not just important and integral to society, but, you know, they can be absolutely key in ensuring that society can run in a successful way.

Kate, when you were designing your crime that Miss Marple was going to solve, what did you bear in mind?

I think the most important thing is resolution, the idea that you set up something very contained.

You give the reader every single bit of information they need, but there is--it comes with a promise that there's gonna be no things left hanging.

But the other thing about Marple mysteries is that there's often some little piece of disregarded knowledge which is considered as being too trivial and too unimportant for all the grand, you know, police detectives, but for Miss Marple, nothing is too trivial, and that's her brilliance.

Kwok: You know, there are always these very clever clues, and when you try to replicate that experience, you realize how very difficult that actually is to toss in just enough information that you're playing fair but to do it without really just giving it all away, and it made me respect Christie and Miss Marple so very much because you realize this is so much more difficult than you would think to set the path and yet not make it very obvious.

Worsley: Miss Marple embodied the new Agatha of the late 1920s determined not to be at anyone's mercy, completely in control of her craft.

Agatha had gone from desperate fugitive to this confident, powerful, independent woman.

In a really horrible way, I think that the traumatic 1920s had made her stronger.

They'd certainly made her into a household name, and I also think the trouble she'd had made her work better.

It made it richer and darker and more psychologically interesting.

She was ready for a fresh chapter.

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