Who is the greatest selling author in the world? If you said William Shakespeare you wouldn’t be wrong as he is tied with Agatha Christie for that distinctive honour according to Google.
On the 12th January 2026, the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the death of Agatha Christie (1976), whose extraordinary legacy includes nearly 70 crime novels, more than 150 short stories and over 25 plays. Of course, William has been dead a few centuries longer than that (1616).
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on September 15 1890 in Ashfield on the northern edge of Torquay (a seaside town in southwest England). The Victorian villa was demolished in the Sixties – a blue plaque marks the spot – but the town is replete with sites associated with the author’s life.
During the Great War, the Town Hall in Torquay was converted into a military hospital for soldiers grievously wounded in the trenches of France or Belgium. Agatha worked in the dispensary, and picked up a knowledge of medicines, and poisons, that she would later put to good use. When she married Lieutenant Archibald Christie, they honeymooned at the Grand Hotel. Her marriage to Archibald did not last, perhaps yet another casualty of that devastating war.
In February 1927 Agatha Christie visited Canary Islands to recover from the psychological strain of the events that took place late in 1926. She mysteriously disappeared for eleven days in a “fugue state”, an amnesic episode due to emotional stress. Her mother, Clarissa Miller, had died after a severe illness, her husband was in love with another woman and she was going through a period of financial difficulties.
In 1930, Christie married noted archaeologist Max Mallowen. She travelled extensively with both her husbands, and owned many houses during the course of her long life – including several in London, important homes in Oxfordshire and Berkshire, and even one in Baghdad.
“An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.”
They made periodic expeditions to archaeological digs directed by Mallowen in the Middle East—places like Ninevah and Tyre. However, in one sense Agatha never left Torquay and the incredible beauty of Torbay behind. She returned to it again and again in her fiction, setting many of her classic murder mysteries in its golden arch of beach, cove and island. Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple both ventured to Torbay to solve heinous crimes. A good author writes what they know.
In 1938, now independently affluent from her writing, Agatha Christie herself returned to Torbay, and purchased a Georgian manor, Greenway House. Greenway sits on rising ground overlooking the placid Dart river valley.
The National Trust officially opened Agatha Christie’s Greenway House to the public in February 2009 following a £5 million restoration project. It was the first time a residence of this most famous author had been open—to give a personality, a face to her intriguing life and work.
Though the property had been deeded to the National Trust (and its gardens open to the public for several years), Greenway was home to her daughter and son-in-law, Rosalind and Anthony Hicks until their deaths. Agatha’s grandson, Michael Prichard, then determined that the home as Agatha herself knew and loved it, be made available to the public.
While Greenway was never Agatha’s primary residence, it was for a generation the family holiday retreat—where the family gathered for Christmas and Easter, and where she spent her summers.
As her grandson and the NT developed Greenway House for “public consumption,” they determined that it ought to remain her home—and not a museum to Miss Marple. Today, Greenway is restored and furnished as Christie and Max Mallowen would have known it in the 1950s.
Any way you arrive at the quay, it is a 400-yard climb up hill to the house and gardens. This is not a trip for those with limited mobility. The house itself is surrounded by gardens—walled gardens, conservatories, orchards and woodland gardens. Through the spring months here on the English Riviera, the climate produces an early profusion of rhododendron, camellias and the like. The gardens at Greenway have been open to the public since 2003. They are elegant and well-tended.
Greenway is a place to get to know Agatha Christie, to sneak beyond the curtain of time and place and see the personal world of the Grand Dame of the English murder mystery. Below are some quotes attributed to Agatha.
“Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it.“
“The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.”
“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.“
“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention – invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. …“
“Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.“
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest continuously running play in theatrical history, having premiered in London’s West End on November 25, 1952. This murder mystery, noted for its plot twist, has staged over 30,000 performances and continues to run, currently at St. Martin’s Theatre.
Thanks for the visit, see you again soon!
REFLECTIONS OF A SWAMPER 