by Arline and Sam Bleecker
Special to ShipCritic Blog

Ironically, lots of people die nasty deaths in the bucolic English countryside … at least in the popular British TV series “Midsomer Murders” and in many of the much-loved 80-plus mystery novels of Dame Agatha Christie.

We know because we’re addicted to murder and mayhem in the British Isles and have watched every episode of the 14-year run of the Midsomer series as well as faithfully followed frumpy Miss Jane Marple and pompous Hercule Poirot, creatures of the Queen of Crime’s fertile mind, in their pursuit of crime and many a victim’s untidy end.

But our knowledge has been from afar, from 3,000 miles across the pond and in front of the TV.

So we decided the best way for a pair of rough-edged, Brooklyn-born New Yorkers to ease our way into a British mindset was to plan a “surf & turf” vacation — cross the Atlantic aboard Cunard’s quintessentially British Queen Mary 2 (QM 2) then drive along England’s south coast in pursuit of Agatha Christie’s trail from Torquay in Devon, where she was born and lived in the years before she wrote voluminously, to the very posh Art Deco hotel on Burgh Island off the tip of Bigbury-on-Sea, where she was inspired to write “Ten Little Indians,” also known as “Then There Were None.”

Our choice of QM2 also was appropriate to the mood and time of Dame Agatha’s books and life. The shy and ever-modest author was born at the tail end of the Victorian era in 1890 and grew to maturity in and, wrote about, murder in Edwardian times and the Jazz Age.

Crossing on the tastefully appointed flagship is like setting your metronome back by several beats and your clock to yesteryear, a time of luxury and refined dining. On a QM2 transatlantic, for example, formal wear is required four nights of seven.

Indeed, the 2,620-passenger vessel feels like a well-to-do London estate where even the entertainments display the nation’s typical Anglican understatement. Don’t expect million-dollar Broadway or Las Vegas revues, nor dancers plumed in feathers and glittering costumes.

Instead expect genteel inducements. For instance after dinner one evening, about 50 guests were invited into the private Queens Grill Lounge for a harp recital and evening of poetry readings from Rudyard Kipling, and Dylan Thomas, among others. Another evening, a smart cast of talented actors performed “The Taming of the Shrew.”

Lectures also are integral to the QM2 agenda. In one dubbed “Molecules of Murder” given by Dr. John Emsley, we learned that poisons were the weapons of choice prior to modern chemistry because they were undetectable.

Despite the bad rap the English get for their cooking, there was nothing to grumble about with the gourmet dining experience in either the Princess Grill, reserved for suite passengers, or in the Britannia, the main restaurant for all other passengers.

Ritual, too, plays its part. Each afternoon at four, we splurged on scones and clotted cream at the line’s white-gloved tea service, which offers (count them!) 15 varieties of tea.

By the time the vessel docked in Southampton, England, we thought we had absorbed enough culture to qualify as Brits, but apparently not their accompanying driving skills.

Renting a pint-sized car near the port, we soon discovered that driving on the left side of the road in an auto with a steering wheel on the right and a manual shift on the left, along roads, in some cases, narrower than a New Jersey driveway, could be harrowing.

While we didn’t injure anyone, we certainly did scare quite a few as we wended our way toward Torquay, one of three villages along the so-called English Riviera, a slip of coastline blessed with mild winters, gentle breezes, and a rainbow of subtropical plants.
Along the way, the English countryside offers a rainbow of colors: hillsides a patchwork of green fields and yellow rapeseed; promenades lined with profusions of pink rhododendron and golden forsythia; and paths brightened by purple-petal asters.

At Victorian Torquay, a shrine to the Queen of Crime, we stayed at the still elegant Grand Hotel just below suite 216, where Agatha honeymooned with aviator husband Archie Christie on Christmas
day in 1914.

When visiting Christie’s seaside honeymoon suite (only one room in her day), we had the sense of communing with the author. Indeed, walking along the same Strand where Dame Agatha swam and skated as a child only helped intensify her presence.

It was here in Torquay that the novelist on a bet by her sister began her prodigious writing output, said Joan Nott, an intimate of Dame Agatha’s daughter Rosalind and founder of the official “Agatha Christie Mile Tour” that journeys visitors through the author’s life in this beachside resort, something akin to Coney Island meets Monte Carlo.

Designated the best-selling author of all time by the Guinness Book of World Records, Agatha Christie churned out 80 novels, 160 short stories, 15 stage plays, a half-dozen romances, and two autobiographies. “Only the Bible is known to have outsold her collected sales of roughly four billion copies of novels,” notes Wikipedia.  Her play, “The Mouse Trap” is the world’s longest running play, going strong for 58 years.

The inspiration for her works often came from her life’s experiences.  For instance, Dame Agatha, a qualified apothecary, worked for two years at the Torquay dispensary and volunteered as a nurse at the beginning of the war in 1914. There she learned how to both heal with drugs and kill with poisons — which she put to apt use in her novels.

At Torre Abbey, a medieval monastery built more than 900-years ago, we saw an assortment of poisonous plants used by the author in her novels – foxglove for digitalis, poppy for morphine, ornamental rhubarb for deadly oxalic acid.

In a section of the Abbey’s gardens, the author’s poisonous beauties are presented as literary mysteries in themselves. In each of the garden’s quadrants, you are invited to guess in which novel Christie employed the plants grown there. Ricin, for example, was chosen for “The House of Lurking Death,” and aspirin willow in “Then There Were None.”

Clues to Chritie’s personality abound in the author’s lush 375-acre estate at Greenway in Brixham, which became the family’s homestead with her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archeologist whose travels inspired such novels as “Death on the Nile.”

Now part of the National Trust, the estate, a short drive from Torquay, has recently opened to the public.

Though Dame Agatha had amassed great wealth by the time she bought her estate in 1938, both the house and its furnishings are quite modest, and, probably wouldn’t fetch much even on Ebay. Collectibles abound everywhere — inlaid tables, mille-fleurs, China bowls, as well as treasured family memorabilia, such as the rugs she acquired when she traveled with Max on his digs to Egypt and the Middle East.

A docent told us that so much unexamined “stuff” remained after her death that at an auction someone bought an unopened suitcase that actually contained piles of the author’s valuable jewelry. (It was not returned!)

The home also is rich in Christie trivia: a leaflet notes the author’s favorite foods — lobster and blackberry ice cream. Her presence is made tangible by the upholstered chair in the library to which she retired daily after breakfast; it sits just where it had in her day.

On the private tidal island of Burgh with steep cliffs plunging to the sea, remains another stop off of Christie’s, a cloud-white Art Deco hotel sits just below a promontory that is separated from mainland Bigbury-on-Sea by a spit of beach that floods twice daily with the wash of tides. At low tide, guests either walk or be shuttled across the beach to the hotel by SUV. When the beach floods, they are ferried to the hotel by an insect-looking contraption called a sea tractor.

Built by multimillionaire Archibald Nettlefolk just prior to the Great Depression in 1929, the hotel served the likes of the Duke of Windsor and Noel Coward and continues to cater to the cricket crowd.

Even if Christie had not written “Ten Little Indians” here, this place is so period-piece perfect (or at least an evocation of it) you’d expect that, at any moment, Poirot might come popping out from behind a potted plant in the conservatory.

“You can feel the ghost of Poirot, the cigarette holders, the laughter,” observed the hotel’s longtime bartender Gary McBar (Agatha herself couldn’t have given him a more apt name.)

At first blush, our island mates appeared a bit frosty or, indeed, extremely proper; but after cocktails and dinner, a feisty Edinburgh judge peeled back the facade and tinkled the ivories ‘til the wee hours, while we all sang vintage songs, the words of which hardly any of us remembered.

Agatha would find no mystery in our pleasures and we’d gladly follow in her footsteps again.