The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Romance, magic and mystery on the trail of Agatha Christie
With Emily Bronte, it’s easy. You tick off Wuthering Heights and Haworth. With Jane Austen, there’s Chawton and Bath. Even Dickens’s ghost is easy to locate in and around London.
But to pay homage to Agatha Christie, where do you go? The author is elusive in more ways than one. She travelled extensively with both her husbands, and owned many houses during the course of her long life – including several in London, important homes in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and even one in Baghdad.
Though her novels and stories take her readers to destinations as varied as Cape Town, Aswan
As Devon prepares to celebrate the literary sleuth’s 125th anniversary, Chris Moss does some detective work of his own
and Tilbury in Essex, she is not known for a keen sense of place. Backdrops occasionally come to life, but as often as not they are breezed through to get the plot moving – to hear the gunshot, to reveal the body, to get Poirot, or Marple, ruminating.
South Devon has one of the strongest claims to being official Agatha Christie country. Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on September 15 1890 in Ashfield on the northern edge of Torquay. The Victorian villa was demolished in the Sixties – a blue plaque marks the spot – but the town is replete with sites associated with the author’s life.
I started my walk on Princess pier, where the young Agatha liked to roller-skate and enjoy the sea air. Now, a sleek boardwalk looks back over the yacht-filled marina, offering sweeping views of Torquay’s limestone cliffs, the Princess Gardens – which feature in the novel The ABC Murders – and across to the handsome Grand Hotel, where Agatha spent her honeymoon night with her first husband, Archie Christie, on Christmas Eve 1914.
Just east of the pier is Beacon Cove, a sheltered beach formerly known as Ladies Bathing Cove, where Christie once got into difficulty while swimming and almost drowned. Torquay is an unusual, but likeable, seaside resort, with a convivial seafront, palatial houses at the top of town – where you can imagine the young Christie strolling and going to church – and an untidy pedestrianised centre. Torquay Museum, to the east, has the only dedicated Agatha Christie Gallery. Paying homage to television as well as the texts, it has a “Poirot’s study and lounge”, featuring furniture, books, pictures and fireplaces used in the ITV adaptations.
It’s easy to go by bus or car (or, via Paignton, by steam train) to Greenway, the holiday home Christie and her second husband, Max Mallowan, bought in 1938 for £6,000. But I hopped on a boat for an hour and a half to voyage across a beautiful, if blowy, Tor Bay to Dartmouth, where I changed to another vessel for the 30-minute ride up to the handsome Georgian mansion.
Now a National Trust property, Greenway opened to the public in 2009. One of the estate’s volunteers told me, “At first, we were told not to talk about Agatha. This was Greenway House and that was to be the story. But then we realised that everyone who came was a fan.” And how they came. Every year, about 90,000 people visit this remote spot on the east bank of the tidal Dart.
Even without the Christie connection, Greenway would make a lovely day out. The tiered gardens are filled with magnificent oaks
and rare magnolias, and there are plenty of benches and places to picnic. The zigzagging footpaths lead down to a Napoleonic-era battery and a plunge pool under the boathouse – from where you can see down to Dartmouth and Kingswear.
Christie and Mallowan were avid collectors, filling Greenway with Chinese ceramics, silk embroideries, papier-mâché pieces, hats and Victorian “whatnots”. A lot of items from Ashfield were transplanted here, making Greenway House something of a collage of Christie’s long life. While there is a “fax room”, Christie did not keep an office or even her own desk here. Greenway was where she came to rest once a book was finished.
In the 1860s, the Dartmouth and Torbay Railway planned to extend the line to the riverbank at Greenway, but the thenowner Richard Harvey refused permission. Instead, a 540-yard tunnel was built to run the line through to Kingswear. A steamoperated tourist train still operates from Paignton, making a stop at Greenway Halt. Christie often used the line to get to Churston Station, where a car would collect her. Hercule Poirot took the train in The ABC Murders and Dead Man’s Folly. The loud toot that sounds on the hour evokes a more romantic time.
Many areas of Devon claim a connection with Agatha Christie. While, for most literary pilgrims, Dartmoor belongs to Conan Doyle and The Hound of the Baskervilles, Christie wrote her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, while staying at Moorlands House Hotel in Haytor in 1916. She met Archie during a concert at Ugbrooke, near Chudleigh, in 1912, during which they are said to have danced five times – despite her card being full.
Unsurprisingly, given the astonishing sales figures of Christie’s novels, everyone wants a piece of the pie. But it still takes a bit of imaginative effort to connect the queen of crime with these sedate, sunny milieus, and to make the journey back though time to wonder at the author’s upbringing, social life, daydreams and dawdles along the prom. The most avid fans, who show up year on year at Torquay’s dedicated festival – which this September celebrates her 125th birthday – like to dress in period costume, attend tea dances and play murder mystery capers, all in a bid to get inside the head of the author.
But for those who want to come to Devon, read (or reread) the novels and stories, and slowly absorb the world the author knew, the South West coast path is the most inspired option. The easy, low-level 7.5mile Torquay-to-Brixham section covers many of the seaside connections – and since she was, after all, an author whom we admire for dead bodies, exotic climes and mystery- shrouded yarns, the sea fogs and the hazy horizons seem as good a place as any to think about ghosts. Greenway (01803 842382; nationaltrust.org.uk/ greenway). Open daily until the end of October, then weekends only; adults £10.90. DartmouthGreenway ferry, 30min, £8.50 return (01803 882811; greenwayferry.co. uk). Torquay-Dartmouth ferry, 90min, £7.50 return; the same firm runs a combined steam train, boat and bus service, incorporating Greenway (01803 555872; dartmouthrailriver.co.uk).