The best-selling novelist of all time – the writer of 66 detective novels – Agatha Christie loved train travel and was fond of using trains in her novels, as crime scenes for example. Sometimes they’re such a big character in the book they feature in the title. In The ABC Murders (1936) each victim has an ABC Railway Timetable left by the body; in 4.50 From Paddington (1957) a train passenger witnesses a murder in a slowly passing train; and in Murder on the Orient Express (1934) inspired by real events, a murder occurs on a glamorous, snowbound train.
Agatha and her first husband, businessman Archie Christie, moved to what had been described as an ‘unlucky house’ in Sunningdale in 1924. It was close to the railway station, so Archie could commute to his job in London. In 1926 Agatha’s mother died and a few months later Archie asked her for a divorce, having fallen in love with someone else.
In December Agatha’s car was found abandoned on the North Downs, close to where her husband was spending the weekend with his girlfriend. Agatha was feared missing, and a newspaper offered a reward for information. In fact she’d had a nervous breakdown and used the train to ‘disappear,’ travelling as ‘Mrs. Neele’ – her husband’s lover’s name. She was discovered 11 days later in a Harrogate hotel having been recognised by staff.
The following year Agatha began her next work – a Poirot novel called The Mystery of the Blue Train set on a luxurious train from London to the Riviera. She put her ‘unlucky’ Sunningdale home on the market and after her divorce was complete, she set off to see friends in Istanbul… on the Orient Express!
In 2023 as part of its ‘100 Great Westerners’ series GWR named the Intercity Express train 802110 ‘Agatha Christie’.
