Follow in Agatha's footsteps

With a new Poirot film out this month, now's the time to take a bookish break in the Queen of Crime's home town - Wallingford

- CHRIS MORLEY

A centuries-old town snuggled on the banks of the Thames in Oxfordshire, Wallingford is bathed in English charm - rosy-bricked houses, hollyhock-peppered lanes and timbered pubs.

Yet a whiff of murder infuses this cosy idyll. For it's here that Agatha Christie, the world's most successful crime writer, penned bestselling works, devising ingenious plots and gruesome ways to die from hemlock poisoning (Five Little Pigs) to strangulation by ukulele string (The Bird with the Broken Wing). Now the town is celebrating its famous literary resident with a new statue and a slew of murder-mystery events.

Murder, she wrote

In 1934, Christie and her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan, moved into Winterbrook House, a solid Queen Anne property with rolling lawns that dip down to the river. The crime writer longed to escape her fame (many locals only knew her as Mrs Mallowan), and the quiet pace of life here suited her creative process - ideas for books and plots came to her while out shopping or sitting in cafes, observing people and sometimes eavesdropping on their conversations.