Now, thanks to “Agatha Christie and Archaeology: Murder in Mesopotamia,” an engaging new exhibit at the British Museum (through March 24), visitors can grasp the full impact that Christie’s personal adventures had on her work. Her grandson, Mathew Prichard, who wrote the catalog’s foreword, says that Christie first visited Baghdad in 1929 to escape “from quite an unhappy period in her life.” (Her husband had just left her for another woman.) In Baghdad, she stayed with renowned British archeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife, Katharine, who offered their field assistant, 25-year-old Max Mallowan, as a guide. Seven months later–and despite her qualms about the 14-year age gap–Max and Agatha were married. Did she mind, he asked when proposing, that his profession was “digging up the dead”? Not at all, she replied; “I adore corpses and stiffs.” Her ideas about marriage were more conventional. “A woman, when she married, accepted as her destiny [her husband’s] place in the world and his way of life,” she wrote.
Fortunately, she relished Mallowan’s way of life. Each year until she was 68 and suffering from ill health, Christie returned to the Middle East with her husband for three months, roughing it in a tent and helping the crew clean and repair objects they found, sometimes using her own face cream to preserve the ivory. The exhibit includes some of the striking archeological treasures they unearthed over the years, many from Nimrud, the capital of the Assyrian Empire (now in Iraq), where Mallowan launched his own dig in 1949. There Christie developed photographs of life on the dig, which also can be seen in the exhibit along with her maps and drawings of the sites. In her spare time, she wrote classics like “Death on the Nile” and “Murder in Mesopotamia.”
Joan Oates, a Cambridge University professor of archeology who was a young student on the Nimrud dig, remembers fondly how Agatha enlivened the little community. “Agatha loved rich food and paid for the extras and the cook herself,” she recalls. “Water-buffalo cream was a favorite, and her publisher would send a whole Stilton at Easter.” After dinner she would read a chapter from her latest novel or start a game. The expedition house in Baghdad was a lively center for entertaining. “A lot of interesting people came,” Oates says. “But Agatha was shy. She would sit quietly in the corner after dinner, then years later one would read a book and recognize a conversation, and it would go back to a dinner party there 10 years earlier.”
One of the highlights of the show, a first-class sleeping carriage from the Orient Express, had to be returned to Turkey this week. But the exhibit is still set up to look like the original dining service from the train, and visitors can experience its luxury and claustrophobia. Christie certainly did; just before Christmas in 1931, she was traveling to England when a thunderstorm washed away the tracks, leaving the train stranded. The fear and discomfort she experienced later metamorphosed–along with some of her fellow passengers, barely disguised–into “Murder on the Orient Express.”
The similarities between her craft and that of her husband, who was knighted for services to archeology in 1968, were not lost on Christie. Unmasked as the guilty party at the end of “Murder in Mesopotamia,” the archeologist Dr. Leidner, who was modeled on Leonard Woolley, pays his captor the highest compliment: “You would have made a good archeologist, M. Poirot. You have the gift of re-creating the past.”
The exhibition goes a long way toward revealing Christie in all her complexity. Most important, says curator Charlotte Trumpler, it contradicts the belief that Agatha Christie was “just like Miss Marple, living in her home in England and doing lots of work in the garden.” Christie’s forays into the field may have stemmed from her desire to support her husband’s career, but they had a profound impact on her own work as well. Luckily for millions of readers, while she was digging up artifacts, Hercule Poirot was summoned to Syria from London, and his own investigations took a turn for the exotic.
