WHY THE QUEEN OF CRIME WAS ALSO QUEEN OF THE WAVES!

Before thrilling readers worldwide as the creative force behind Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie was an inspiration in an entirely different way... as an early surfer

- Lucy Clarke

RENOWNED as the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie is rightly famous for selling more than a billion copies of her novels, short story collections and plays, as well as creating beloved sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. But what is less known is that Christie is also believed to have been the first British woman to stand up on a surfboard.

It almost feels improbable that an Englishwoman of her class and background in that day and age should have surfed but, remarkably, it’s true.

So was Christie a thrill seeker both on and off the page?

She was certainly passionate about the joys to be found in the sea. Growing up in Torquay in South Devon, the sea was always part of her life. In 1922, she and her first husband, Archie, set off on a world trip as part of a British Empire trade mission — and that’s where she discovered surfing.

Her first experience of trying to master the waves was in South Africa, at the now famous surf spot, Muizenberg. With nothing like the sleekly shaped surfboards used today, it was a steep learning curve using heavy wooden boards. She wrote: "[We] surf bathed with planks! Very difficult. We can’t do it a bit yet."

But Christie must have got a taste for the adrenaline rush as, a few days later, she described a swim further along the coast as “a little tame after surfing”.

In her memoir, An Autobiography, Christie writes: “Whenever we could steal time off — or rather when Archie could — we took the train and went to Muizenberg, got our surf boards, and went out surfing together.”

Committed to learning, Christie wrote to her mother, in a letter published in The Grand Tour, that she was determined to “master the art”.

Excited to travel to Hawaii, she arrived at her hotel in Honolulu and recalls her delight in discovering the excellent waves.