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The Times & The Sunday Times
The Times & The Sunday Times
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A thoroughly modern murder queen

Richard Brooks
Richard Brooks
The Sunday Times
The creator of Hercule Poirot was a thoroughly modern woman (The Christie Archive)
The creator of Hercule Poirot was a thoroughly modern woman (The Christie Archive)
Richard Brooks
The Sunday Times

Most images of Agatha Christie suggest a great-aunt figure in fusty clothes.

But an exhibition of 60 photographs, most never seen before and covering the crime writer’s life from the age of five until her early eighties, shows she was a thoroughly modern woman who loved surfing and roller-skating.

The queen of crime playing the mandolin (The Christie Archive)
The queen of crime playing the mandolin (The Christie Archive)

They include a photograph taken on a beach in Hawaii during a 1922 trip with her first husband Archie and another of her in the sea off South Africa.

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Surfing was one of Christie’s sporty activities
Surfing was one of Christie’s sporty activities

Others images that will feature in the exhibition, which opens this week at the Bankside Gallery in London before moving next month to her home town of Torquay in Devon, show her dancing with friends, roller-skating and playing the mandolin.