Dr's Casebook: On the trail of Agatha Chrstie
A few years ago my family stayed for a week at Greenway, the Devon home of the crime writer, Agatha Christie.
Dr Keith Souter writes: It is a beautiful mansion overlooking the River Dart.
I have always been an Agatha Christie fan, and she was the number one influence on me when I started writing crime novels myself, under my pen name of Keith Moray.
We had the use of the tennis court, the swimming pool and the croquet lawn.
I was actually able to write two chapters of one of my first crime novels while I was there.
Last weekend I was again on the Agatha Christie trail – literally.
This time I was down in Wallingford, a delightful Oxfordshire village for a special Agatha Christie Mystery weekend.
There were talks, plays and workshops for fans and expert ‘Agathologists’ alike.
Agatha Christie and her archaeologist husband Sir Max Mallowan lived in the town at Winterbrook House for over 40 years.
There is good evidence that she in fact used the house as the model for Danemead, Miss Marple’s house in St Mary Mead.
And she also used Wallingford as the model for Market Basing, the site of a number of her mysteries.
The town is delighted to now have a permanent tribute to Agatha in a bronze statue of her sitting on a bench overlooking the Kinecroft meadow, a seven-acre green expanse.
I took my turn to sit on the bench with her and seek inspiration for my next novel.
During the First World War Agatha worked as a VAD, a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in Torquay’s field hospital, before transferring to the dispensary, where she worked as an assistant to the pharmacist.
She subsequently qualified as a dispenser and it was while working there that she found inspiration for her first detective novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduced her famous detective Hercule Poirot.
In the museum there is an exhibition of her life in Wallingford, with many of her early books and in pride of place her actual pestle and mortar which she used during the war to compound medicines, while thinking up her plots.
If you feel energetic, you can walk the Dame Agatha Christie Trail, which takes you from Wallingford, cross-country to St Mary’s Church in Chorsley, where she is buried alongside her husband, Sir Max Mallowan.