Of note: On 6 August 1975, upon the publication of Curtain, The New York Times ran a front-page obituary of Hercule Poirot, complete with photograph. The passing of no other fictional character had been so acknowledged in America’s ‘paper of record.’ Agatha Christie had always intended Curtain to be ‘Poirot’s Last Case’: Having written the novel during the Blitz, she stored it (heavily insured) in a bank vault till the time that she, herself, would retire. Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976.
Time: ‘First-rate Christie: fast, complicated, wryly funny.’
Charles Osborne on
Lord Edgware Dies
In 1933, Max Mallowan was ready to conduct a dig of his own in the Middle East, and he was fortunate enough to be sponsored by the British Museum to lead an expedition to Iraq to excavate for two months at Arpachiyah, not far from the site of Ninevah where he had worked the previous year. His party consisted only of his wife, Agatha, and a young architect, John Rose. Such was Agatha Christie’s fame by this time that the British press announcements of the expedition emphasized her involvement in it.
After the Mallowans had arrived in Iraq, the beginning of the enterprise was unpropitious, for the rain poured down so heavily that it was almost impossible to move about, and finding out who owned the land on which it was proposed to dig proved incredibly difficult. As Agatha explained in her memoirs years later, questions of land ownership in the Middle East were always fraught with difficulty. If the land was far enough away from cities it was under the jurisdiction of a Sheikh, but anything classified as a tell, that is a hillock or mound thought to be covering the ruins of an ancient city, was considered the property of the government. The tell of Arpachiyah was apparently not large enough to have been classified as such, so the Mallowan party had to negotiate with the owner of the land.
This was less simple than it appeared to be, for the huge, cheerful man who assured Max Mallowan that he was the owner was contradicted the following day by his wife’s second cousin who claimed ownership, and by the third day of negotiations Mallowan had identified fourteen (according to Agatha, nineteen) owners, who were rounded up in two horse-drawn cabs, conveyed to the Ottoman Bank in Mosul and persuaded to append their thumb-marks to a contract.
The dig produced some extraordinary finds; among them a potter’s shop with numerous dishes, vases, cups and plates, a cemetery dating from 4,000 BC which contained forty-five graves, and a rich collection of small objects such as amulets, necklaces, knives and pieces of pottery. Agatha’s tasks included washing, labelling and sometimes mending the objects discovered. She loved the work, and soon became highly competent at any job assigned to her. She was to assist her husband on all of his digs in the Middle East throughout the nineteen-thirties, learning in the process a great deal about the sites of antiquity which were being uncovered. At Arpachiyah, Agatha found time to write Murder on the Orient Express.
To celebrate the end of the season, the three members of the expedition decided to organize a cross-country race, open to all the Arab workers who had taken part in the excavations. Agatha dignified the proceedings with a name: the Arpachiyah Amateur Athletic Association, or AAAA, and Max Mallowan described the occasion in his memoirs.14
The rules were announced to all would-be competitors on the dig, and it was decreed that the race should be run from the Nergal gate at Ninevah on the Mosul side of the river Khusr, thus involving a river crossing, over a length of about three-and-a-half miles, the finishing point to be just below the tholos in Arpachiyah. We offered substantial rewards to the competitors, the first prize to consist of a cow and a calf, second prize a sheep and a lamb, the third price a goat and a kid and the fourth, as far as I remember, was a substantial sack of dates. The fifth prize was hundred eggs, and after that in descending denominations there were nine more prizes of eggs in all; moreover, every competitor who finished and did not fall out of the race was to be rewarded by a presentation of as much helawa, that is as much sweetmeat as could be covered by the span of two hands—a generous ration. Our cook was kept busy for many days organizing the purchase of these goods in the market at Mosul. He was an Indian; ‘Too much work, Memsahib,’ he said to Agatha, and I think did not particularly enjoy collecting the prizes, which on the day of the race were motored out to Arpachiyah in our lorry.