After her divorce from her first husband Archie Christie, Agatha took her first trip on the Orient Express to the middle east in 1928 at the invitation of Leonard and Katharine Woolley. In 1930, they invited her back to visit their dig at Ur. Again, Agatha boarded the Orient Express expecting another exciting adventure. Little did she know, she was about to meet Max Mallowan, the Leonard’s assistant, who would become her second husband.
Fourteen years her junior, Max was assigned to show Agatha around and generally keep tabs on her. Unlike other twenty-six-year-olds, Max was happiest visiting a museum or studying ancient hieroglyphs. Max and Agatha hit if off immediately.
According to Christie’s autobiographical travel log from their adventures in the middle east, Come Tell Me How You Live, on one adventure, their lorry broke down in the middle of the desert. And Agatha, unflappable, simply lay down in the shade of the broken-down vehicle and took a nap. It was at that moment that Max decided he wanted her to be his wife.
Come Tell Me How You Live is chock-full of entertaining anecdotes about their later adventures together when Agatha would accompany her husband on his archeological digs. It’s a wonderful and highly entertaining read.
Christie tells of an overzealous driver named Michael would take pleasure in running pedestrians and animals off the road, when he wasn’t shopping for bargains that often were such good deals the goods were spoiled. Or the time one of their visitors arrived with a specially made sleeping suit to ward off mosquitos which were nonexistent in the desert. Mice, on the other hand, were plentiful. And in the middle of one night, when the guest was screaming bloody murder, they discovered him hopping from foot-to-foot after a mouse had crawled inside his sleeping suit.
She also tells of a time when Max caught workers planting forgeries at the dig in order to claim extra baksheesh. Less upset about the plants, Max was more impressed with the quality of the forgeries. He was tipped off by an engraving of a camel on a supposedly ancient Sumerian piece when in fact there were no camels in ancient Sumeria.
These and other tales were the inspiration for The Case of the Christie Curse, the third book in my Detection Club Mysteries, in which Agatha meets her future husband… while helping Eliza and Theo solve a murder, of course.