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She called it Snow Upon the Desert and modeled its characters on people she'd seen in a hotel dining room. Shortly after returning to England, she drafted her first novel in a Cairo setting. "I protested passionately with tears in my eyes The wonders of antiquity were the last thing I cared to see."Ĭairo did make an impression, however. "Mother tried to broaden my mind by taking me to the Egyptian Museum, and also suggested we should go up the Nile to see the glories of Luxor," she wrote in her autobiography, Agatha Christie, published in 1976, a year after her death. Invited to sample Egypt's historical riches, she declined, preferring dances and picnics. She missed a golden opportunity at age 20, when she was in Cairo for her formal "coming-out" into society in the winter of 1910-11.
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The film's New York release that year coincided with the opening of the King Tutankhamen exhibit (See Aramco World, May-June 1977).īorn Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller to an American father and an English mother in Devon 100 years ago this September, the author was actually slow to establish ties with the Middle East. The film version, starring Peter Ustinov as Poirot, was shot in Egypt in 1978, reopening that country to foreign filmmaking after a long drought. The author dramatized at least one of her Middle Eastern mysteries, Death on the Nile it was staged in London and New York in 1946. In Parker Pyne Investigates, published in 1934, another detective unravels mysteries in Baghdad, on the Nile, in Shiraz in Iran, and at Petra. Those books were published in 1937,19, respectively.Ĭhristie also set many of her short stories in the Middle East.
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In Appointment with Death, he uncloaks a murderer who committed the crime at Petra in Jordan. In Death on the Nile, he catches a killer aboard a Nile cruise ship. In Murder in Mesopotamia, super-sleuth Hercule Poirot solves homicides at a dig in Iraq. During the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's, she lived in or visited Syria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and Iran, and most of these countries provided venues for her crime stories. Nimrud in the 1950's was Christie's last stop in a Middle Eastern journey that started several hundred kilometers to the south, at the site of the ancient Sumerian capital of Ur, in 1928. She didn't try to interfere in their life in any way." "She was very sympathetic to the Arabs and the people she was dealing with," recalled Rosalind, who spent a season with Christie and her archeologist husband, Max Mallowan, at a dig in Syria in the 1930's. "Indeed, she has traveled much, in the most varied circumstances, and stayed in places much queerer than tents, many times before."Ĭhristie's daughter, Rosalind Christie Hicks, provided more insights about the author's Middle Eastern experiences at Greenway House, the family home in Devon, England.
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"You are wrong to think that can't live in a tent," he read from a letter that he'd written home from Nimrud in 1950. Hamilton, now in his 80's, reminisced about Christie when I visited him at his home in Suffolk, England. Her endurance for physical exhaustion was incredible." Roads in Iraq in the 1950's "were terribly bad, but Agatha never grumbled once with all of the bumps," recalled Robert Hamilton, an expedition surveyor at Nimrud. To do that, she had to cope with conditions that would have sent many women scurrying home. In fact, she put together some of her most popular whodunits while assisting at digs in Iraq and Syria. What's less well known is that a good deal of the author's immense output - she produced well over 100 works, including 21 plays - grew out of her close and affectionate links with the Middle East.
Max mallowan and agatha christie full#
Indeed, you'll find few booksellers today who don't stock a full shelf of Christie murder mysteries. Certainly, the world knows Christie best as an author and playwright: The Mousetrap has been staged continuously in London since 1952, and her 94 books have been translated into 103 languages - 14 more than Shakespeare. "Really!" she said, "Agatha Christie did that?"Īgatha Christie fans who travel to London today are much more likely to attend a performance of The Mousetrap than to visit the British Museum to see the ancient ivories she helped bring to light at digs in the 1950's. The assistant at the British Museum was incredulous when I told her about the recovery of the intricately carved Assyrian ivory plaques at Nimrud in northern Iraq.