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Arizona Republic, AZ
July 23 2005
Tracking the wild side of Agatha Christie
Stephen H. Morgan
Boston Globe
Jul. 24, 2005 12:00 AM
This is the stuff of great travel writing. With an intriguing theme
and compelling details, its inquiring narrator takes us along on an
epic adventure to places most of us will never see and into the
hearts and minds of people we will never know.
Andrew Eames' hook is a 1928 journey by Agatha Christie. The mystery
novelist, then 38 and a famous face in and out of England, had seen
her dream life among the gated homes of a sedate English suburb
crumble. Freshly divorced from her beloved Archie Christie, and with
their daughter in boarding school, she set off alone to Iraq, not an
easy trip for a solo woman in those days, even though it was a
British protectorate and a promising new destination due to recent
archaeological finds and Thomas Cook's bargain train fares.
For veteran travel writer Eames, Agatha Christie's journey had the
makings of a mystery, "not of a whodunit, but a whydunit, and how."
He sets off to walk the streets she wandered, gaze on the sights she
saw, ride the trains she rode, sleep in the rooms she inhabited and
understand what she experienced, despite the dangers of heading into
the land of Saddam Hussein in late 2002, as the United States and
Britain were preparing to invade. advertisement
At the outset, Eames knew little about Christie, certainly not that
Arabic editions of her works are readily available in places like
Syria.
"Most of all," he writes, "I had no idea that this doyenne of the
drawing-room mystery had first traveled out to Iraq, alone, by train,
as a thirty-something single mother. And that thereafter, she'd spent
thirty winter seasons living in testing conditions 3,000 miles from
home, in a land of Kurds, Armenians and Palestinians."
It was a far cry from neat, safe Sunningdale, where Eames comically
skulks around to get a feel for the life Christie had left behind.
People devoted to trains will find much to appreciate in Eames'
explanations of the golden age of train travel and its deprecated
forms today. He seeks out the Taurus Express, which chugs away in the
opening scene of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, and he goes
into detail about the Orient Express itself, once "the Magic Carpet
to the East," then reduced to a couple of luxury cars, then revived,
in large part due to the hoopla of the 1974 film version of
Christie's great train mystery.
July 23 2005
Tracking the wild side of Agatha Christie
Stephen H. Morgan
Boston Globe
Jul. 24, 2005 12:00 AM
This is the stuff of great travel writing. With an intriguing theme
and compelling details, its inquiring narrator takes us along on an
epic adventure to places most of us will never see and into the
hearts and minds of people we will never know.
Andrew Eames' hook is a 1928 journey by Agatha Christie. The mystery
novelist, then 38 and a famous face in and out of England, had seen
her dream life among the gated homes of a sedate English suburb
crumble. Freshly divorced from her beloved Archie Christie, and with
their daughter in boarding school, she set off alone to Iraq, not an
easy trip for a solo woman in those days, even though it was a
British protectorate and a promising new destination due to recent
archaeological finds and Thomas Cook's bargain train fares.
For veteran travel writer Eames, Agatha Christie's journey had the
makings of a mystery, "not of a whodunit, but a whydunit, and how."
He sets off to walk the streets she wandered, gaze on the sights she
saw, ride the trains she rode, sleep in the rooms she inhabited and
understand what she experienced, despite the dangers of heading into
the land of Saddam Hussein in late 2002, as the United States and
Britain were preparing to invade. advertisement
At the outset, Eames knew little about Christie, certainly not that
Arabic editions of her works are readily available in places like
Syria.
"Most of all," he writes, "I had no idea that this doyenne of the
drawing-room mystery had first traveled out to Iraq, alone, by train,
as a thirty-something single mother. And that thereafter, she'd spent
thirty winter seasons living in testing conditions 3,000 miles from
home, in a land of Kurds, Armenians and Palestinians."
It was a far cry from neat, safe Sunningdale, where Eames comically
skulks around to get a feel for the life Christie had left behind.
People devoted to trains will find much to appreciate in Eames'
explanations of the golden age of train travel and its deprecated
forms today. He seeks out the Taurus Express, which chugs away in the
opening scene of Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, and he goes
into detail about the Orient Express itself, once "the Magic Carpet
to the East," then reduced to a couple of luxury cars, then revived,
in large part due to the hoopla of the 1974 film version of
Christie's great train mystery.