Teresa Reviews Agatha Christie’s England (2021)

Teresa Reviews Agatha Christie’s England (2021) and found, much to her surprise that it delivered what it says on the title.

(c)2025 by Teresa Peschel

Is it entertaining? 4 Agathas

This is one lush, gorgeously photographed documentary. It promises England, and it delivers.

Is it educational? 4½ Agathas

You’ll learn new tidbits about Agatha and her England and wish this documentary was longer.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Agatha Christie’s England was another documentary I eagerly anticipated but — I admit! — also dreaded after the terrible disappointment of Agatha Christie’s Garden (2006) which promised glorious gardens and skipped over them, in favor of a tedious rehash of the same old story you’ve seen in every Agatha documentary.

Yeah, I’m bitter. That experience was like reading a nursery catalog, ordering with great anticipation for a glorious flowering, and discovering the expensive plants I’d bought were dead on arrival weeds.

Fortunately, this documentary delivered. Its major flaw is it should have been longer. Its other flaw was misunderstanding how Agatha saw the world as she got older.

We open in Torquay, in the county of Devon, where Agatha was born in 1890 in a once grand and now long demolished house named Ashfield. Torquay was a very fashionable resort town in her time and, based on climate alone, it still is. Any place in England that can grow palm trees and tree ferns outside can be honestly designated as the English Riviera. I bet you can overwinter your dahlias without a heavy mulch. Imagine that. Agatha Christie’s Garden claimed she raised dahlias but you won’t see them.

Anyway. Torquay. A slice of heaven on earth for her childhood. Agatha loved Torquay even if as children she and her nephew nearly drowned in Beacon Cove. If the boatman had been slower to spot their peril, we wouldn’t be talking about Agatha Christie today.

She was cast out of Torquay’s charmed embrace at 11 when her father died and the family fell on hard times. Relative hard times; she didn’t have to make matches in some Dickensian workhouse to pay the bills. But the lack of money and the loss of home was never far from her mind.

Agatha and her mother traveled frequently, visiting relatives across England (free room and board!). She briefly attended finishing school in Paris (her sole stab at formal education) and made her society debut in Cairo. But always, always, Torquay and Devon floated dreamily in her imagination.

After her marriage to Archie, they moved to London. When her book royalties let her, she bought a home in Sunningdale. Renamed Styles, it provided a home for her daughter, a working space for Agatha, and two nearby golf courses for Archie.

This is a familiar part of her story and, thankfully, this documentary didn’t spend much time rehashing her failed marriage and subsequent disappearance. As Janet Morgan says in her interview, the facts were plain but they didn’t make as juicy a story for the baying hounds of the press as the possible murder of a famous mystery novelist by her cheating husband.

Wherever Agatha traveled, whether visiting relatives, going to school, making her debut, or heeding her urge to be on the move, she paid careful attention to what she saw and heard. The importance of her visits to her great aunt in Ealing as a child cannot be underestimated. Ealing was a bustling suburb of London and based on the period photos, very different from Torquay. But in Ealing, she listened to her great aunt and her friends chat. In a period recording you’ll hear Agatha’s own remembrances and you can see why auntie became the model of Miss Marple, and Ealing, which bore little resemblance to a quaint English village, could be made over into St. Mary Mead. Tight neighborhoods where everyone knows everyone else’s business remain the same the world around as Miss Marple discovered on her Caribbean vacation in 1989.

Similarly, her visits to great houses — Ugbrooke House where she met Archie, or her sister Madge’s houses, Abney Hall and Upper House — inspired her with their complex layouts, armies of servants, and varied guests. Those houses and others became the setting for her English country house stories. From narrow passageways to sweeping grand halls to courtyards to vast parks surrounding them, those houses set the stage for murder.

But always, always, she wanted to return to Torquay and Devon. While married to Max Mallowan (second chance at love), she sold Ashfield and used the money to buy Greenway. Ashfield was later demolished, but she never forgot it. In her autobiography, she specifically describes the wallpaper in the nursery. You wonder if that memory became part of Sleeping Murder (1976) when Gwenda remembered the wallpaper that should be in the house and to her shock, delight, and horror, it was.

Greenway became her and Max’s new home, when they weren’t out on some dig in the Middle East, in one of their other homes (the documentary doesn’t discuss how she collected and decorated houses) or their home outside of Oxford in the village of Wallingford. They bought Winterbrook in 1934 and it became Max’s home, like Greenway was hers. They divided their time between their homes, depending on the season and their schedule. A great advantage to Agatha of living at Winterbrook was she could be Mrs. Mallowan, professor’s wife, instead of Agatha Christie, famous author.

It was in Winterbrook that she gave one of her very, very few interviews. A 12-year-old schoolboy knocked on her front door and asked for an interview for his school newspaper. And she agreed. Sadly, the documentary doesn’t tell us what happened to that intrepid boy who dared to ask the great Mrs. Christie for an interview.

Where Agatha Christie’s England fails is its interpretation of how Agatha saw the changes wreaked on the country during her life. You’d get the impression that she longed for the past, that she didn’t accept change, that she couldn’t cope with modernity.

Yet she coped fine. She remembered the past and appreciated it, but she never wanted to turn back the clock. If you use her fiction as a way of accessing her famously private mind, you see Miss Marple in At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) ruminating on change and accepting it. When cultures don’t change, they stagnate and die. In fact, she knew something was wrong at Bertram’s Hotel because it was so ostentatiously unchanged to the point of parody. In The Mirror Crack’d, Miss Marple had plenty to say about changes small (packets of cold cereal instead of hot oatmeal) and large (the development where her new maid, Cherry, lived). But she didn’t regret the changes the way the documentary implies Agatha did.

If Agatha had rejected how modern life altered itself over her more than fifty-year span of writing, she’d have kept on writing the same books she wrote in the ’30s. Her books changed with the times, her characters updated themselves, and so did their situations.

But this minor failure on the part of this documentary isn’t a reason to omit it any more than them omitting Agatha’s house collecting habit. Watch and revel in bits of her England, an England we can share.