The Life of Agatha Christie, the World’s Best-Selling Novelist, Goes Under the Microscope at the British Library

The novelist was describing an eventful trip on the luxurious Orient Express, the 20th-century passenger train that ran between Paris and Istanbul. Within four years, it would become the setting of Christie’s most famous novel: the tenth installment in her Hercule Poirot series, Murder on the Orient Express. Christie fans will soon be able to lay eyes on rare letters like this one, as well as some of her notebooks, photos, other personal belongings and manuscript drafts.

Countless film adaptations of her work were made throughout the 20th century, and they’re still coming. Murder on the Orient Express became a Hollywood blockbuster in 2017, and Death on the Nile followed in 2022. The perpetrators are found out and locked away, and you've had a very enjoyable experience helping to solve the puzzles.” “A World of Mystery” will take visitors on an immersive tour of Christie’s life, which began in 1890 in Devon, England.

In the first of five sections, library-goers will explore the quintessential setting of many of Christie’s works, the English country house, and get a glimpse of a developing writer. They’ll see the typescript of Christie’s unpublished short story “The House of Beauty,” which she wrote at age 18. A notebook from Arthur Conan Doyle detailing Detective Sherlock Holmes’ mystery-solving methods, as well as crime writer Dorothy L.

Sayers’ feedback on some of Christie’s work, will also be on display. Christie wasn’t just a writer, though. She had many identities and passions, which the exhibition aims to illuminate.

After the country house, visitors will walk through a dispensary filled with various poisons that feature in Christie’s novels and learn about her work as a pharmacy dispenser during World War I. An Orient Express-inspired train carriage will then highlight Christie’s penchant for “closed circle” mysteries and detail her globe-trotting adventures, including surfing in Hawaii. Next, a constructed dig site will evoke Christie’s time spent photographing and supporting the work of archaeologists in the Middle East.

In the final section, visitors will be transported to London’s 1950s West End and examine how the novelist adapted her stories for the stage. Much of Christie’s life is documented in her own film photos. Alongside the Remington typewriter on which she wrote 1939’s And Then There Were None, the exhibition spotlights her Leica camera and yellowed photo albums.