Christie's travels

While Agatha Christie's first experience of travel was to France, her first Society season was spent in fashionable Cairo. Most of her trip was dedicated to the social whirl of dances, races and polo that was typical of the time, but the atmosphere of Egypt would leave a lasting impression. In 1928, she returned to the East, fulfilling a lifelong ambition to travel on the Orient Express to Baghdad. Christie loved trains and they suited her gift for observation. Her autobiography describes the “fascination with looking out at an entirely different world: going through mountain gorges, watching ox-carts and picturesque wagons, studying groups of people on the station platforms.”

On a return trip from Nineveh in 1931 she was stranded on the Simplon-Orient Express when wet weather washed part of the track away. In 1934 Murder on the Orient Express was published; a group of people are stranded on the train following a snow storm. Clearly Christie drew on her own experiences as a traveller for inspiration for her novels.

In Baghdad she visited the archaeological digs at Ur. She was received particularly warmly by the archaeologist Leonard Woolley because his wife, Katherine, had just finished The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and was a huge fan. On a return trip in 1930, she would be introduced to Leonard Woolley's assistant Max Mallowan, the man she would later marry.

Agatha’s life was transformed when she met Max. For the next 30 years she accompanied him on archaeological digs in the Middle East, sleeping on site in the exhibition house. She loved the simplicity of desert life and threw herself into the investigation of ancient civilisations. She developed the photographs on the early excavations and later photographed the digs herself. She also worked on the restoration and labelling of ancient exhibits; cleaning and conserving the delicate ivory pieces.  She was, in her lifetime, one of the most informed women in the world in the archaeological field.

Agatha Christie continued to write her detective novels on location and many of her best-loved novels were informed by direct observation of life on her travels. The actual layout of the Nile steamer SS Karnak is crucial to the plot of Death on the Nile. The excavations in Ur inspired Murder in Mesopotamia which she dedicated to “my many archaeological friends in Iraq and Syria”. The atmospheric description in Appointment With Death was based on her visits to Petra. In They Came to Baghdad the heroine talks about her experience on a dig in Southern Mesopotamia.

Looking back over her life as an author, she said that, whilst the characters that she created were fictitious, the settings were always real.

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• Stories: Appointment With Death, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, The Mystery of the Blue Train and They Came to Baghdad