'There's nothing like boredom to make you write': A rare interview with the elusive Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie's murder mysteries have captivated audiences for more than a century, but, 50 years after her death, she remains an enigma. A rarely heard BBC interview from 1955 reveals some of the secrets of a writer who was as complex as her plots.

Dame Agatha Christie was brilliant at hiding in plain sight. She presented herself as a genial older lady in a fur coat who loved gardening, good food, family and dogs, but behind that cosy exterior she delighted in plotting best-selling stories of poisonings, betrayals and blood. And she offered few clues to the inner workings of her ingenious mind. Christie was chronically shy, but in 1955 she was persuaded to give a rare interview in her London flat for a BBC radio profile. In it she revealed how an unconventional childhood fired her imagination, why writing plays was easier than writing novels, and how she could finish a book in three months.  

Born Agatha Miller into a prosperous family in 1890, she was mostly home-schooled. When asked why she took up writing, Christie said: "I put it all down to the fact that I never had any education. Perhaps I'd better qualify that by admitting I did eventually go to school in Paris when I was 16 or thereabouts. But until then, apart from being taught a little arithmetic, I'd had no lessons to speak of at all."

Christie described her childhood as "gloriously idle", but she had a voracious appetite for reading. "I found myself making up stories and acting the different parts, and there's nothing like boredom to make you write. So by the time I was 16 or 17, I'd written quite a number of short stories and one long, dreary novel." She said she finished writing her first published novel at the age of 21. After several rejections, The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920, introducing her most famous creation, Hercule Poirot. 

The poisoning murder method that she chose for the story came straight from her personal experience during World War One. While her first husband Archie Christie was deployed in France, she worked on the home front as a volunteer nurse in a hospital for wounded soldiers. She became an assistant in the hospital pharmacy, which gave her an understanding of medicines and toxins. In her stories, poison is used in 41 murders, attempted murders and suicides.

Christie's typical formula begins with a closed circle of suspects from the same social world, and a murder that generates clues leading to a climactic confrontation. At the centre is a private detective, such as Poirot or Miss Marple, who unravels the mystery and reveals the truth to the group in a dramatic final scene. This structure, familiar yet endlessly adaptable, is part of what makes Christie's work so enduring.

In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a book that cemented her professional reputation even as her personal life unravelled that year. Her beloved mother died, and Archie confessed he had fallen in love with another woman. He asked for a divorce. Struggling with grief and writer's block, Christie herself became the subject of a mystery. On a cold December night, her crashed car was found at a desolate Surrey beauty spot, balanced precariously over a chalk quarry. Police found her fur coat and driving licence in the car, but there was no sign of her.

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One of Britain's biggest ever missing-person searches was launched. The story had all the makings of a tabloid sensation: the celebrated crime novelist who had disappeared leaving a trail of tantalising clues, the seven-year-old daughter left behind, and the handsome husband entangled with a younger lover. Even Sherlock Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got involved, hiring a psychic to connect with Agatha via one of her gloves. 

Travels in the Middle East

Ten days later, she was discovered 230 miles from the crash site at a hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. Theories abounded: had her disappearance between the result of memory loss, a calculated attempt to embarrass her husband, or even a publicity stunt? Christie chose not to clear up the mystery in her autobiography, writing only: "So, after illness, came sorrow, despair and heartbreak. There is no need to dwell on it." 

She was similarly matter-of-fact when it came to the secrets of her working style, telling the BBC in 1955: "The disappointing truth is that I haven't much method. I type my own drafts on an ancient faithful machine I've owned for years, and I find a dictaphone useful for short stories or for recasting an act of a play, but not for the more complicated business of working out a novel."

In 1930, Christie married Max Mallowan, an archaeologist 14 years her junior, six months after meeting him during a trip to Iraq. With their shared passion for ancient cultures, the couple's travels in the Middle East informed stories such as Death on the Nile, which was first published in 1937. Her new-found happiness seemed to have a profound effect on her work: over the next nine years, she would write 17 full-length novels.  

For Christie, the main pleasure of writing came from devising her ingenious plots. She said: "I think the real work is done in thinking out the development of your story and worrying about it until it comes right. That may take quite a while. Then when you've got all your materials together, as it were, all that remains is to try to find time to write the thing. Three months seems to me quite a reasonable time to complete a book, if one can get right down to it."

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In the 1955 radio profile, theatre impresario Sir Peter Saunders, who produced her runaway hit play The Mousetrap, said Christie had a remarkable gift for creating fully-formed scenes and stories in her head. "I said to her once, 'How's the new play going?' 'It's finished,' she told me. But when I asked if I may read it, she replied so disarmingly, 'Oh, I haven't written it.' From her point of view, the play from beginning to end had been worked out to the last detail. The writing of it was an act of mere physical labour."

That view was backed up by Penguin Books founder Sir Allan Lane, who said that in 25 years of close friendship he had never once "heard the click of her typewriter… in spite of the astonishing quantity and quality which she steadily produces". He said that, whether organising day-to-day camp work on a Mesopotamian desert expedition or doing needlework in the evenings, "while she was doing all these manifold things, some new Agatha Christie play or novel was being worked out in her mind".

While Christie believed that a book could be polished off in three months, she said that plays were "better written quickly". At the time of the BBC's 1955 profile of Christie, three of her plays were running in London's West End. The Mousetrap was already breaking box-office records, just three years after its premiere. The play began as a BBC radio drama titled Three Blind Mice, broadcast in 1947 as part of an evening of programmes celebrating Queen Mary's 80th birthday.

Writing plays was "much more fun than writing books", according to Christie. She said: "You haven't got to bother about long descriptions of places and people, or about deciding how to space out your material. And you must write pretty fast to keep in the mood and to keep the talk flowing naturally."

The UK's longest-running play

In 1973, Christie attended a 21st birthday celebration for The Mousetrap at London's Savoy Hotel. Also in attendance was its original leading man Richard Attenborough, who predicted it "could run another 21 years". He added: "I won't put it in the same class as St Paul's Cathedral, but certainly the Americans decide that the thing to do if they come to London is to go and see The Mousetrap." Having become the UK's longest-running play in 1957, the only thing that could stop it was the Covid pandemic in 2020. In March 2025, it celebrated its 30,000th performance, and is still running today.

Attenborough was also interviewed in the 1955 BBC profile, where he said that Christie was "just about the last person in the world you would ever think of in connection with crime or violence or anything blood-curdling or dramatic". Summing up her enduring mystery, he said: "We just couldn't get over the fact that this quite quiet, precise, dignified lady could possibly have made our flesh creep, and fascinated people all over the world with her mastery of suspense and her gift for creating on the stage and the screen such an atmosphere of terror."

While Christie's BBC interview gives us a fascinating glimpse of her writing methods – the lack of rigid technique, the reliance on imagination, the joy of plotting – the enigma of the woman herself lives on. 

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