A ceramic skull, grinning at visitors from a side table in the entry hall, offers a clue to the identity of the former owner of this grand home perched above the banks of the River Dart in Devon.
You don’t need Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells or the observational skills of Jane Marple to solve this mystery. Who else but the Queen of Crime would display such a macabre ornament?
Welcome to Greenway, the country retreat of Agatha Christie. This compact Georgian mansion, faced in white stucco that gleams in England’s rare bursts of spring sunshine, was her refuge from the demands of being the world’s most famous and beloved crime writer. It’s secluded – accessible only by boat or via a long, narrow driveway – and set on more than thirty acres of gardens and woodland. Her dream home, she called it, “the loveliest place in the world.”
Each year thousands of Christie fans make the pilgrimage to Greenway, which opened to the public fifteen years ago. The home’s austere façade is a Poirot-pleasing blend of order and method. Rows of identical windows line the two upper floors, thin columns anchor the porch roof above the central entrance, and single-story wings bookend the central block. The rooms have been restored to how they looked in the 1950s when Christie and her second husband, archeologist Max Mallowan, spent their holidays and summers here. The scattered hats, the unopened mail, the dominos set up on the drawing room floor create the impression that the occupants have stepped out for a moment.
The interior looks authentic because it is. The house was handed over with its contents intact. It took two years for staff of Britain’s National Trust to catalogue and conserve some 20,000 items, from Christie’s Steinway piano – she was classically trained but too shy to play within earshot of anyone, even her family – to the collections of silverware, porcelain, pottery and other antiques she and family members amassed over the years. She accompanied Max on expeditions to archaeological sites in the Middle East and artifacts he unearthed are also on display.
Christie, who grew up in nearby Torquay, bought the estate in 1938 – the year she published Appointment with Death – for the knock-down price of £6,000, less than $600,000 today. There has been a home on the site since Tudor times but today’s mansion was built in the 1790s. Christie and Mallowan had barely moved in when the property was requisitioned for the war effort. A U.S. Coast Guard officer stationed there painted a frieze that encircles the library and chronicles his unit’s Second World War service in Africa, Italy, and England. Christie left the memento intact once she returned.
Staff members circulate through the house, answering questions and offering insights and anecdotes. The doll a bored-looking, four-year-old Christie clutches in a portrait housed in the morning room? Her name is Rosie and, 130 years later, she’s propped up in a nearby chair. Ask about the cuneiform tablet embedded in an outside wall – Mallowan brought it back from Iraq in the 1930s – and a staff member hands over a printout explaining it dates from 600 BCE and is a plea to the Assyrian god Nabu. The black gown with gold trim hanging in a bedroom closet? Christie wore it to the 1952 premiere of The Mousetrap, her record-setting play that has been performed in London’s West End more than 29,000 times and is still going strong.
Greenway is a monument to her personal life. While she sometimes brought along novels and stories to edit, or read from works-in-progress for family and guests, she did not write here. Most of the 5,000 volumes in the library are on subjects unrelated to poisons and murder, ranging from religious tomes and histories of Devon to reference works on antiques. Here she was a gardener, a collector, a mother and grandmother. The home was a haven of ordinary life for a writer who lived an extraordinary life, a respite from the work of devising clever mysteries for Poirot and Marple to solve.
Christie the crime writer, however, is never far away. A suitcase in her closet bears a sepia-toned luggage sticker from Paddington Station, inviting thoughts that it could be a souvenir from a trip on the 4:50. In one room, more than sixty first editions of her works fill two wide shelves. And in a snippet of a recorded interview, played as visitors check out her bedroom, she describes her matter-of-fact approach to writing. “The real work to be done is thinking out the development of your story, worrying about it, ’til it comes right. That may take quite a while,” she says, offering a master’s version of Mystery Writing 101. “All that remains is trying to find time to write the thing.”
One of the most popular ways to get to Greenway is to catch a steam train from the resort town of Paignton to Kingswear, on the River Dart, and a ferry from there to the estate. Is there a better way to get in the Christie mood than to feel like Poirot and Captain Hastings rushing off to investigate their latest case? Diehard fans looking for a live-like-Christie-did experience can book a stay in a four-bedroom apartment spread over two floors of the house, complete with a private garden. Farther afield, there are Christie-related sites, plaques, and walking tours in Torquay, which hosts a Christie literary festival each September that includes side trips for events at Greenway.
The setting for the 1956 Poirot novel Dead Man’s Folly is an estate Christie modeled on Greenway, making it the logical location to shoot exteriors for the television version released in 2013 and starring David Suchet as the fussy French – sorry, Belgian – detective. The house features in numerous shots, the estate’s boathouse was used as a murder scene, and Suchet and actress Zoë Wanamaker, as mystery writer Ariadne Oliver, meet to plot strategy just steps away, at a centuries-old riverside gun emplacement. Between takes Suchet, in costume, posed for photos on the grounds and with Greenway staff. It’s as if Poirot came to life and returned in search of his creator.
If you stop by for your own deep dive into the life of Agatha Christie, set aside time to stroll through the grounds. Trails crisscross the wooded hillside above the river and walled gardens fan out from the back of the house, showcasing a collection of exotic trees and plants.
And take a closer look at that skull in the entry hall. A lid at the top lifts off to reveal its true purpose. Sorry, Hercule and Jane, this piece of vintage pottery was neither a famed crime writer’s cheeky souvenir nor inspiration for one of her stories. Mallowan used the jar to store his tobacco.
***
Dean Jobb’s new book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, published by Algonquin Books in June, tells the incredible true story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. Find him at deanjobb.com
(All photos by Dean Jobb)
