Later this month, a new .statue of Agatha Christie will be unveiled in Torquay. Created by Elisabeth Hadley, it depicts Christie with her beloved wire-haired terrier Peter, the dog immortalised as Bob in the 1937 novel Dumb Witness. This is not the first Christie statue, of course. A bronze Agatha sits on a bench in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, where she owned one of her several houses. Then there is a memorial near London’s St Martin’s Theatre, which stages that indestructible entity The Mousetrap, as well as a bronze bust (described by a friend as a fine likeness of Sir Frederick Ashton) by Torquay harbour. 

So Christie will be represented twice in the Devon town where she grew up, as is only right. Torquay has changed much since her birth there in 1890, and since the days when Kipling – oppressed by its gentility – characterised it as ‘such a place as I do desire to upset it by dancing through it with nothing on but my spectacles’. But the sweep of its bay and the high, healthful hills retain a strong enchantment. If one ignores the town centre, one can still see why Christie loved it so much. In 1922, while on a tour of the dominions with her first husband, Archie, she wrote to her mother that South Africa was ‘like all really beautiful places, just like Torquay!’

From then on she yearned to travel. When the marriage ended, a calamitous rupture culminating in the 1926 episode known as the ‘eleven-day disappearance’ (a mental health crisis with rococo touches), Christie decided to take a solitary trip to Iraq, travelling on the Orient Express. This became the means to