Agatha Christie At Home

"My dear home, my nest, my house": these words from a 1958 song by Jules Bruyère, with which Agatha Christie opened her autobiography, sum up the importance of home to her. She also wrote: "What I liked playing with as a child I have liked playing with later in life. Houses for instance." She also lovingly included descriptions of houses (especially ‘her’ houses) in her books.

Hilary Macaskill examines the houses that meant most to Agatha Christie, including her childhood home, Ashfield, in Torquay; Winterbrook in Oxfordshire, and, above all, Greenway, soaring above the River Dart and Agatha’s favourite home from 1938 to the end of her life in 1976 (though requisitioned in the Second World War by the Admiralty, and from 1943 to 1945 home also to the United States Coast Guard).

The author also explores more temporary abodes, not only a succession of flats and houses in London (mainly in Kensington and Chelsea) but also the homes she set up at the digs in the Middle East that she travelled to with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, and the hotels – notably the Moorland Hotel on Dartmoor, to which she adjourned in the grip of writer’s block to complete her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and the Burgh Island Hotel, a major inspiration for And Then There Were None and Evil Under the Sun.

About the Author
Hilary Macaskill is a longstanding journalist and travel writer and author of four books on authors and their homes: Agatha Christie at Home, Charles Dickens at Home, Daphne du Maurier at Home and Virginia Woolf at Home. She is also co-author with Molly Wood of Downhill All the Way, about walking with donkeys along the route in the Cevennes taken by Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey. She lives in London.