By Diane Prokop
Excerpted from Christie: The Legacy, Issue One, UK, 2020
The wind blew me in the front door of Greenway on a recent visit to my favorite author’s home and I called out (in my mind), “I’m here Agatha.” Of course, in my mind, she knew who I was.
Dame Agatha and the characters she created were my friends and companions for some 40 years, albeit across the pond and my imagination.
I was always an avid reader as means of escape from the raucous escapades of six brothers and two sisters, growing up in a row house in Philadelphia.
Her stories transported me from Pennsylvania to the Vicarage, to St. Mary Mead, Burgh Island, Egypt, the Caribbean – not to mention a ride on the Orient Express. I fell in love not only with the challenge of solving her crime puzzles and recognizing a red herring when I saw one, but also with the country homes, haunting halls and quintessential British villages where her tales took place.
While, alas, I don’t remember my very first Christie novel, I do remember being mesmerized as a teenager, watching the 1965 film Ten Little Indians on the 12-inch black and white TV in my bedroom.
When the action stopped with a big question mark on the screen and the viewer was asked if they knew who the murderer was, a spark ignited and I was hooked. After that I devoured every Agatha Christie book I could get my hands on, including my favorite – And Then There Were None. I have the complete black leather-bound Agatha Christie Collection with gold lettering on the binding, published in 1984. I even named my beautiful black Labrador Retriever/Cocker Spaniel-mix pup after Dame Agatha.
While I’ve also long-owned a copy of The Mousetrap, for decades I refused to read it, instead saving myself for the day I would see the play at St. Martin’s Theatre in London. On Wednesday, 19 September, 2018, I sat in the front row with my daughter and from before the curtain rose until long after it came down, I couldn’t stop smiling. As an owner of a bed and breakfast myself, imagine my surprise when I discovered the setting was a guest house. I chuckled thinking that Dame Agatha would be pleased that I waited.
During that inaugural visit to England, I realized that I had missed the timing of the International Agatha Christie Festival by one week and knew I had to return.
We packed as much as we could into our two nights in Torquay during our Devon/Cornwall 2019 vacation, but there still wasn’t time for the IACF festival sessions. We visited Greenway via the steam train from Paignton and hiked through her lush woodlands to see the iconic estate. While Dame Agatha’s collections were magnificent, I was more interested in looking out every window of her home so that I might see what she saw, what inspired her as she worked out her plots, not to mention a trek down to the infamous Boat House on the River Dart.
The 2019 IACF exhibit at Torre Abbey gave me the opportunity to see Dame Agatha’s typewriter and learn more about her life and loves. We had tea and scones at the Grand Hotel overlooking the sea and enjoyed an evening performance of Mousetrap at the Princess Theatre as a birthday present for my husband.
The highlight though was a morning visit to the Torquay Museum before catching a train to Penzance.
We were welcomed from the time we walked in by David Wills, president of the museum. While we were in the gift shop near the entrance, he pointed out the stair treads hung on the wall that were once part of Agatha Christie’s childhood home. I tapped them for luck.
Upstairs I met him again in the Agatha Christie exhibit, tagging onto his tour for another museum-goer, discussing the collection and reference to the museum in The Man in the Brown Suit.
And then there was the Art Deco furniture from the set of Poirot.
“There are privileges of being president,” Wills said, and moved the velvet rope from in front of the display of Poirot’s office furniture. Then he told us to sit down and he’d take our pictures.
I sat at Poirot’s desk, in David Suchet’s chair and laughed as I wondered if the actor pretended to pinch a penny even when his famed character sat.
Never in my wildest dreams, mon ami. My heart was full.