Digging for Mysteries.(Brief Article)

Agatha Christie has mesmerized generations of readers with gripping tales of murder and deceit, set in some of the world's most exotic locales. Her mysteries have sold more than 2 billion copies in 44 languages. But few fans know that Christie was an amateur archeologist who had firsthand knowledge of many of her fiction's settings--and that her characters were often based on real people she met in her travels. Watching archeologists, "the lure of the past came up to grab me," she wrote in her autobiography. "To see a dagger slowly appearing, with its gold glint, through the sand, was romantic."

Now, thanks to "Agatha Christie and Archaeology: Murder in Mesopotamia," an engaging new exhibit at the British Museum (through March 24), visitors can grasp the full impact that Christie's personal adventures had on her work. Her grandson, Mathew Prichard, who wrote the catalog's foreword, says that Christie first visited Baghdad in 1929 to escape "from quite an unhappy period in her life." (Her husband had just left her for another woman.) In Baghdad, she stayed with renowned British archeologist Leonard Woolley and his wife, Katharine, who offered their field assistant, 25-year-old Max Mallowan, as a guide. Seven months later--and despite her qualms about the 14-year age gap--Max and Agatha were married. Did she mind, he asked when proposing, that his profession was "digging up the dead"? Not at all, she replied; "I adore corpses and stiffs." Her ideas about marriage were more conventional. "A woman, when she married, accepted as her destiny [her husband's] place in the world and his way of life," she wrote.

Fortunately, she relished Mallowan's way of life. Each year until she was 68 and suffering from ill health, Christie returned to the Middle East with her husband for three months, roughing it in a tent and helping the crew clean and repair objects they found, sometimes using her own face cream to preserve the ivory. The exhibit includes some of the striking archeological treasures they unearthed over the years, many from Nimrud, the capital of the Assyrian Empire (now in Iraq), where Mallowan launched his own dig in 1949. There Christie developed photographs of life on the dig, which also can be seen in the exhibit along with her maps and drawings of the sites. In her spare time, she wrote classics like "Death on the Nile" and "Murder in Mesopotamia."

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