In The Library With The Lipstick

Agatha Christie set many of her murder mysteries in country houses. With the help of specially commissioned drawings by Matthew Rice, Jeremy Musson looks at the architecture of the buildings she knew and imagined

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THE country house is the natural setting for the great English crime novel of the mid 20th century. It provides a spacious, isolated location and a well-defined cast of dramatis personae with ample leisure time for intrigue or hanging around as the sleuthing is done. There is also the delightful social counterpoint of life above and below stairs. All this is the essence of good old-fashioned escapist fiction and, for many today, of unmissable on-screen drama.

The country-house setting was especially relished by the queen of crime herself, Agatha Christie. This interest is discussed in both Hilary Macaskill’s Agatha Christie At Home (2009) and Laura Thompson’s Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life (2018), studies on which this article draws. Beginning with her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), country houses, and the full-rig grandeur of their early 20thcentury life, feature heavily in her writing (although by no means in every story). In and out of these houses, Poirot and Hastings, and, elsewhere, Miss Marple, set their sleuthing minds to work (Fig 3).

Born Agatha Miller in 1890, Christie herself came from comfortably-off stock. Her parents were not country-house dwellers, but certainly part of the gentrified and professional world we encounter in her novels. They moved in county circles; she enjoyed amateur theatricals at Cockington Court, and also met her first husband, a dashing officer in the Royal Flying Corps, at a dance at Ugbrooke Castle, given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh.

She grew up in Ashfield, a much-loved, rambling Regency villa on the edge of Torquay (Christie sold it only in the 1930s and desperately tried to buy it back, unsuccessfully, after the Second World War, when she discovered it was to be demolished).