Agatha Christie is best known as the ingenious plotter of scores of murder mysteries, but the queen of crime also wrote a very personal memoir of the archaeological trips she made to the ancient ruins of Syria and Iraq, many of which are now under threat from Islamic State fighters.



Described as Christie’s “forgotten book” by her publisher HarperCollins, the novelist’s Come, Tell Me How You Live is due to be republished this August, complete with about 40 “long-forgotten” photographs, many taken by Christie, documenting her travels with her archaeologist husband Max Mallowan and showing their work in the ruins.

Christie’s travels, described by the author as a “meandering chronicle”, took place during the 1930s and saw her visiting locations including the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud, looted and bulldozed by Isis in March, the tomb of Sheikh Adi, near Mosul, and Palmyra, the Syrian world heritage site which Isis reached last week.

Car aboard the ‘Queen Mary’ on the Euphrates during Christie’s Syrian trip. Photograph: © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946/PR

More than 70 years ago, Christie recorded her arrival at Palmyra, her usually light tone giving way to one of genuine emotion. “After seven hours of heat and monotony and a lonely world – Palmyra! That, I think, is the charm of Palmyra – its slender creamy beauty rising up fantastically in the middle of hot sand,” she writes. “It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream. Courts and temples and ruined columns … I have never been able to decide what I really think of Palmyra. It has always for me the dreamlike quality of that first vision. My aching head and eyes made it more than ever seem a feverish delusion! It isn’t - it can’t be – real.”

Going to the “holy shrine of Sheikh Adi … situated in the Kurdish hills near Mosul”, described last year as “hell on earth” in a Guardian piece, she writes that “there can be, I think, no spot in the world so beautiful or so peaceful”.

“You wind up far into the hills through oak trees and pomegranates, following a mountain stream. The air is fresh and clear and pure,” records the novelist. “And then, suddenly, you come to the white spires of the shrine. All is calm and gentle and peaceful there. There are trees, a courtyard, running water. Gentle-faced custodians bring you refreshments and you sit in perfect peace, sipping tea.”

The archaeological dig at Chagar Bazaar. Photograph: © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946/PR

“This is Agatha Christie’s most ignored book,” said David Brawn, who is bringing out the new edition this summer. “She published it just after the second world war, in 1946 – she had got married in the 1930s to Max Mallowan, and she used to travel with him. She was a real emancipated character – she’d live in the tents, get involved in the digs, catalogue and clean the artefacts, and photograph them … There’s a bit of real-life adventure in there, such as her car getting stuck in a wadi, but it’s really just a charming and personal account of what her life was like.”

Christie writes as the memoir opens: “This book is an answer. It is the answer to a question that is asked me very often. ‘So you dig in Syria, do you? Do tell me all about it. How do you live? In a tent?’ etc, etc,” adding a little later: “This is not a profound book … It is, in fact, small beer – a very little book, full of everyday doings and happenings.”

Its opening pages see her describing her travails attempting to find a suitable outfit for her travels: “‘Of course, Modom, we are not being asked for that kind of thing just now! We have some very charming little suits here - OS [outsize] in the darker colours.’ Oh, loathsome OS! How humiliating to be OS! How even more humiliating to be recognised at once as OS!” writes Christie, cheerily.

The House at Tel Brak, photographed during Christie’s visit. Photograph: © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946/PR

Brawn said the book has been in print since it was first released in 1946, but that a new edition has not been released in 20 years. August’s reissue will include rare, “long forgotten” photographs from the 1946 edition, said the publisher, which he discovered when he tracked down a first edition online: HarperCollins did not even have one in its own archive.

“It was a bit of a niche publication and is very much her forgotten book,” said Brawn. “But it’s just a lovely book, [and] with what’s been happening around those areas with Isis, with the destruction of historical monuments – well, these are the places Agatha went to, where Max was the principal archaeologist.”

Come, Tell Me How You Live will be published on 27 August, in advance of what would have been Christie’s 125th birthday this September, and HarperCollins promises readers it will also give “great insight into many of her best novels, including Murder in Mesopotamia, Death on the Nile, Death Comes as the End and Appointment With Death”.