The exhibition will explore the author behind famous characters such as Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple.
The British Library has unveiled details of its upcoming Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery exhibition, going on display from the 30th October until the 20th June.
Marking the 50th anniversary of her death, the show will explore Agatha Christie’s life as well as showing how her life, travels and interests help to form her most famous work.
Featuring five immersive sections, the display will feature items from her personal life, including her typewriter, professional and personal correspondence with other writers, family photographs and notebooks and typescripts for novels.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by a season of events and displays celebrating Christie’s influence on literature at libraries across the UK. It has been developed in collaboration with Agatha Christie Limited and the Christie Archive Trust.
On entering the exhibition, visitors will enter ‘The Country House’ section which will explore Christie’s childhood and adolescence through exploring the quintessential setting for many of her novels, the English country house. Visitors will see early examples of her writing and discover how her upbringing inspired the settings for her works, from her first published novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) with the iconic ‘drawing room reveal’, and her bestselling And Then There Were None (1939).
The next section will then focus on World War One in which the author volunteered as a nurse and pharmacy dispenser, honing a knowledge of drugs and toxins which would later prove invaluable to a crime writer. Visitors will explore a dispensary filled with the poisons that crop up in Christie’s work, displayed with the study notes for her pharmaceutical exams taken in 1917 and her World War One service record.
Meanwhile, in the third part of the show ‘The Train’, visitors will board an Orient Express-inspired train carriage that will evoke the glamour and intrigue of 1920s travel while also exploring Christie’s use of the ‘closed circle mystery’, perfect for stories set in enclosed compartments. Christie was a keen rail enthusiast and this section will explore how her experiences journeying abroad and sharp observations of fellow travellers inspired her writing and helped form the characters and settings for some of her most famous novels, including Murder on the Orient Express.
In the four aspect of the display ‘The Dig’, which will concentrate on the fact that her travels were a source of inspiration, with her experiences of taking photographs and supporting the work of archaeologists on digs in Iraq and Syria from the 1930s informed novels like Murder in Mesopotamia and They Came to Baghdad. On display will be Christie’s plot notes for both novels alongside the 1937 Remington typewriter she used to write And Then There Were None, along with the cine film footage taken by Christie documenting her life on the digs and her Leica camera used for photographing artefacts, including one of the earliest known portrait sculptures, discovered on an excavation led by Max.
‘The Theatre’, this final section of the show will reveal how Christie went about adapting her novels for stage performances including her notes for Witness for the Prosecution to rare footage of Christie at The Mousetrap celebrations, the typescript for Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case and the Dictaphone she used in later life to transcribe her first drafts for stories, such as Endless Night (1967). Screen adaptations also brought Christie’s iconic detectives to wider audiences and this section features posters and costumes from film and TV adaptions over the recent decades, including Ariadne Oliver (portrayed by Zoë Wanamaker)’s coat from Dead Man’s Folly (2013)
Talking about the exhibition, Lucy Rowland, Lead Curator of Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery, at the British Library, said: ‘We’re honoured to be working with the Christie Archive Trust and Agatha Christie Limited on this very special exhibition to mark the legacy of Agatha Christie, the most famous crime writer of all time. The biggest exhibition held in the UK in almost 25 years to celebrate Christie’s writing, visitors will see over 100 items from different periods in her life, drawn from the British Library’s own collection, the Christie Archive Trust and other lenders, including material never displayed before. Her impact on crime fiction as a genre has been immense and this exhibition will take visitors back to Christie’s childhood and explore her journey to becoming an iconic writer, while celebrating how adaptions of her novels for stage and screen continue to enthral audiences today, over 50 years after her death.’
To book tickets for the exhibition visit: https://events.bl.uk/exhibitions/agathachristie