Fans given chance to investigate Agatha Christie’s rural retreat
Artefacts used by Agatha Christie to embellish some of her most gruesome murder mystery stories will go on public view for the first time this weekend as the National Trust opens the author’s rural home.
Visitors to Greenway, the Devonshire house where Christie entertained guests by reading them extracts from her latest manuscripts, will be able to see objects such as a brass-studded trunk that, in fiction, concealed the body of a murder victim. Hercule Poirot, Christie’s Belgian detective, inspected the trunk in the short story The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest. The item, known as an Iraqi kist, was brought back from Baghdad by Christie after she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on an archaeological dig.
The house itself, which has cost £5.4 million to restore, was the setting for Dead Man’s Folly, another Poirot mystery that was adapted for film starring Peter Ustinov. Visitors will be able to walk the same floorboards as the fictional murderer and even rent part of the house for holidays.
The building, which overlooks the River Dart, was given to the National Trust by Christie’s family in 2000 but remained closed to the public until after the death of Rosalind and Anthony Hicks, the author’s daughter and son-in-law, in 2004 and 2005...
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Visitors to Greenway, the Devonshire house where Christie entertained guests by reading them extracts from her latest manuscripts, will be able to see objects such as a brass-studded trunk that, in fiction, concealed the body of a murder victim. Hercule Poirot, Christie’s Belgian detective, inspected the trunk in the short story The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest. The item, known as an Iraqi kist, was brought back from Baghdad by Christie after she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on an archaeological dig.
The house itself, which has cost £5.4 million to restore, was the setting for Dead Man’s Folly, another Poirot mystery that was adapted for film starring Peter Ustinov. Visitors will be able to walk the same floorboards as the fictional murderer and even rent part of the house for holidays.
The building, which overlooks the River Dart, was given to the National Trust by Christie’s family in 2000 but remained closed to the public until after the death of Rosalind and Anthony Hicks, the author’s daughter and son-in-law, in 2004 and 2005...