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When Agatha was five or six, her family’s difficult financial situation drove them to the more economical solution of renting out their Torquay home and spending time in various hotels in France.

By the end of the decade, however, political turmoil in Iraq and the assassination of their royal family drove the expedition to withdraw from the country.

In 1947 Agatha was approached by the BBC to write a radio play for the 80th birthday of Queen Mary, who was an avid admirer of her work. She trained under an experienced pharmacist, who carried a lump of curare in his pocket as it made him feel powerful!

The Millers had two other children: Margaret Frary Miller (1879–1950), called Madge, who was eleven years Agatha's senior, and Louis Montant Miller (1880–1929), called Monty, ten years older than Agatha.

As she aged, Agatha’s love of travel and adventure never waned.

It has watertight compartments. She became less prolific, aiming for one novel a year (a Christie for Christmas) and focusing on playwriting.

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At some point during the war years, she also penned the last Poirot and Miss Marple novels to be published – Curtain and Sleeping Murder respectively. And so it was that five days later I started for Baghdad.” Agatha Christie, An Autobiography

Agatha Christie at Innsbruck Station, Austria c1930 Image © The Christie Archive Trust

The autumn of 1928 proved a turning point for Agatha after a chance meeting at a dinner party led her to book a journey alone on the legendary Orient Express.

“…one must do things by oneself sometime, mustn't one ?' I never had before - I didn't much want to now - but I thought: 'It's now or never.

As she stated in her autobiography:

“Life is really like a ship - the interior of a ship, that is. Inside, the church was dark and cold; it was unheated except at service times. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing to see some dearly loved person - Rosalind, my mother, Madge. Christie's 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Hotel Pera Palace in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railway.

She chronicled her time there in 1946’s Come, Tell Me How You Live.

“How much I have loved that part of the world. On the banks of the River Dart, Greenway was, to Agatha, “the loveliest place in the world”, and inspired three of her novels.

One night in early December, overwhelmed and with close friend and secretary Carlo away for the night, Agatha left Rosalind and the house to the care of the maids without saying where she was going.

‘I mean—how shall I put it—one only knows, doesn’t one, what they choose to tell you about themselves.” Miss Marple, A Caribbean Mystery

Further trips in the 1960s included a break in Upper Egypt where Max could recover from a bout of flu after finishing a book of his own on Nimrud; a visit to Belgium to see a museum named after Hercule Poirot; and a tour of the US where Max was giving a series of lectures.

She would write in the mornings and in the afternoons help on site, cleaning (with her face cream!), drawing and photographing the finds.