At one of them, Brown broached the subject of Greenway’s future. Shortly before their own deaths in 20, respectively, the couple donated the property to Britain’s National Trust, the foundation that grants protected status to historic houses, gardens and ancient monuments and opens the properties to the public.īrown recalls several meetings with the frail but alert 85-year-old Rosalind, whose failing health required her to move around the house by mobility scooter.
Greenway served as the inspiration for several scenes in Christie’s murder mysteries, including the Poirot novels Five Little Pigs (1942) and Dead Man’s Folly (1956).Īfter Christie died, at age 85, the estate passed to Hicks and her husband. Here, the author and playwright could escape from her growing celebrity and enjoy the company of friends and family: her only child, Rosalind Hicks son-in-law Anthony Hicks and grandson Mathew Prichard, whose father, Rosalind’s first husband, Hubert Prichard, had been killed in the 1944 Allied invasion of France. For Christie, Greenway-reachable only by boat or down a narrow country lane one and a half miles from the nearest village of Galmpton-represented, as she wrote in her autobiography, “the ideal house, a dream house.” The estate’s owner, financially strapped by the Great Depression, offered it for just £6,000-the equivalent of about $200,000 today.
That summer, she heard of a handsome Georgian manor house, built around 1792, going up for sale it was set on 33 acres, 15 miles from her birthplace, the village of Torquay. But Christie longed for a vacation refuge. Christie’s life had settled into a comfortable routine: part of the year was spent at her house in Wallingford, near Oxford, and part on excavations in the deserts of Iraq and Syria with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.
#Max mallowan and agatha christie series#
You can keep it, but please get rid of the latrines.’”Īgatha Christie was 48 years old in 1938, gaining fame and fortune from her prolific output of short stories and novels, one series starring the dandified Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, another centered on the underestimated spinster-sleuth Jane Marple. “Agatha said, ‘No, it’s a piece of history. “The Admiralty came back after the war and said, ‘Sorry about the frieze in the library. Coast Guard war artist billeted here with dozens of troops after the British Admiralty requisitioned the house. Christie’s reading chair sits by the window a butler’s tray holds bottles of spirits and a frieze depicting World War II battle scenes-incongruous in this tranquil country retreat-embellishes the cream-colored walls. Robyn Brown, the house’s manager, leads me into the library. Gazing beyond a verdant lawn through bare branches of magnolia and sweet-chestnut trees, I glimpse the River Dart, glinting silver as it courses past forested hills.
#Max mallowan and agatha christie windows#
On a crisp winter morning in Devon, England, sunlight streams through the floor-to-ceiling French windows of the manor house called Greenway, the secluded estate where Agatha Christie spent nearly every summer from 1938 until her death in 1976-and which opened to the public in February 2009.
Years later, she recalled the spell that the estate had cast on her: "a white Georgian house of about 1780 or '90, with woods sweeping down to the Dart.the ideal house, a dream house." For both of them, the art was to discover the hidden truth.Christie purchased Greenway in 1938. Like Hercule Poirot, her world-famous detective, Mallowan was a master of the false trail and the misleading clue. She was fascinated by his work, and theirs was a supremely happy marriage. Mallowan was always accompanied by his wife Agatha Christie, whose work on her current book was frequently interrupted by the demands of her role as site photographer, registrar of finds and repairer of pottery, as well as medical adviser and cook. After the Second World War, he returned to Iraq to supervise over a period of 12 years the excavation of the important city of Nimrud. Trained by the great Leonard Woolley at the site of the royal cemetery at Ur in the mid 1920s, Max Mallowan then excavated at previously untried sites in north-eastern Syria. This is the first full-length biography of Sir Max Mallowan (1904-78), archaeologist and husband of Agatha Christie.
In the grand manner Further reading Illustration credits Index. What about a site? Erbil, Kutha, Der, Nimrud? 9. The lure of the past came up to grab me 4. This most important cradle of civilization and religion 3. Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p.