Agatha Christie Mallowan: Archaeologist

Q. Surely not the 'Queen of Crime'

A. One and the same. Christie's second husband was the celebrated British archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan, and she accompanied him on digs, particularly to Iraq, between 1928 and 1958.

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Q. And why is this news

A. Because the British Museum is running an exhibition entitled Agatha Christie: An Archaeology Mystery in Mesopotamia. The curator of the exhibition said the aim of the show was to demonstrate how much Christie had contributed to archaeology.

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Q. What's in the show

A. Archaeological finds from the sites on which Christie worked with her husband at Ur, Nineveh and Nimrud. Important objects from these sites in the Museum's collections are combined with archives, photographs, and films made by Agatha Christie herself.

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Other exhibits include personal memorabilia and souvenirs of travel, ranging from first editions of those novels with an Oriental setting to a sleeping compartment from the Orient Express, from a 1930s hypodermic syringe to a first millennium ivory of a man being mauled to death.

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Q. What's the big mystery

A. The big mystery that the couple spent many years trying to solve was the site of the lost city of Urkesh, once the centre of the Syrian kingdom of the Hurrians, which flourished around 2300 BC but disappeared almost without trace.

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When the couple began to look for its remains in the 1930s, all they had to go on were footnotes and folklore. A single reference to Urkesh appears in the Bible and another was inscribed in a 4,000-year-old clay tablet that once belonged to the Egyptian pharaoh Amenmhet IV. They scoured the Middle East for the city, conducting many digs, and along the way they discovered many artefacts which they sent to the British Museum.

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Q. And did they find the city

A. No. It wasn't until 1996 that Urkesh was located, in north-eastern Syria near the modern city of Tel Mozan, after a farmer stumbled across relics from the site and tried to sell them on the black market. Ironically, Christie and Mallowan had visited the spot and dug there for two days before giving up.

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Q. Is the exhibition a success

A. There are some who feel that using the Christie element to get people to go to an archaeological exhibition at the British Museum is, at best, a bit tacky. Jonathan Jones in the Guardian is one such: 'The British Museum inspired some of Keats' and Shelley's most famous poetry. It is home to world-beating collections. And what does it give us An exhibition about Agatha Christie. It's shameful.'

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However, if it get the punters in...

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Q. And this other life inspired some of her books

A. Christie spent her honeymoon in 1930 on board the Orient Express and continued to use trains to travel to archaeological digs in the following years. Her experiences on the train inspired the Poirot novel Murder on the Orient Express, and she researched many of her most famous books while hunting for Urkesh, including Death on the Nile and Murder in Mesopotamia, in which Poirot solves a murder on an archaeological expedition.

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She also wrote a humorous book called Come Tell Me How You Live, which detailed life on an archaeological dig, and Death Comes in the End, which was set in Mesopotamia in 3000 BC.

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Q. Wasn't there another, more personal mystery associated with her first husband

A. Indeed. Famously Christie disappeared for 11 days in 1926, just around the time that she was making a name for herself as a writer. The official explanation after her discovery in a Harrogate hotel was that she had suffered amnesia following a car crash in Surrey and had no idea how she came to be in Yorkshire.

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However, there have always been those who didn't accept this story. Questions were even put to the House of Commons as to whether the Christies should be forced to cough up for wasting police time - there was a suggestion that the whole thing had been a publicity stunt - after the massive operation which took place when the tabloids turned the story into a national corpse hunt.

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Q. So what is the truth

A. The most recent, and probably the definitive answer to this real-life whodunit is supplied in a book entitled Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days by Jared Cade (ISBN 0720611121). He posits - and this has been corroborated by people close to those involved - that Christie deliberately engineered the disappearance in order to teach her cheating husband, Archibald, a lesson. But it all got out of hand when the papers got hold of the story.

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The fact that Christie's grandson, Matthew Pritchard, keeper of the flame of her memory and Chairman of the Agatha Christie Society has denounced the book, saying 'I invited Jared Cade into my home...and I feel he has betrayed me...I'm asking all of you not to buy it,' only makes it more compelling.

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See also the answerbank article on the African Galleries at the British Museum

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For more on Jared Cade's research go to http://www.jaredcade.whodunit.co.uk/

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For details about the exhibition at the British Museum go to http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/agathachristie/

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For more on Arts & Literature click here

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By Simon Smith