Agatha Christie & David Suchet, Traveling Together a Century Apart

In 2013, actor Sir David Suchet hung up the mustache and accent and retired from the role of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot after twenty-five years of playing the character on screen. However, his enthusiasm for the Queen of Crime, author Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has never dimmed, and a decade after Agatha Christie's Poirot ended, he is back, in Travels with Agatha Christie & David Suchet. Following her written account of the globe-trotting trip she took on the brink of her career breakthrough following the release of her first Poirot mystery, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Suchet reveals the younger Agatha as adventurous, curious, and perceptive. 

Still married to her first husband, officer Archie Christie, the future Dame Agatha accompanied him on his appointment to the British Empire Exhibition Mission in 1922 to drum up support for the 1924 British Empire Exhibition. The itinerary took them to South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, plus the Christies swung by Hawaii for a surfing holiday. (Agatha could catch a wave with the best!) It was the trip of a lifetime.

Suchet shares his love of photography, nature, and history as he visits the places on Christie’s itinerary, some of which have changed very little; even staying in the same hotels. He meets with museum curators, artists, academics, and Christie fans. But he also visits places Christie wouldn’t have seen or even known about, and explores the post-colonial legacy which has shaped the lives of those living there now.

First stop is Cape Town, South Africa, where Suchet has family roots, his own family having emigrated there from Lithuania before settling in Britain. He carries a camera once owned by his grandfather, a Fleet Street journalist, and discovers the clues to what made Agatha Christie a prolific observer of people and places. She loved travel (apart from sea voyages which made her seasick, a condition she inflicted upon Hercule Poirot) and her thoughts and impressions of the places she visited show up repeatedly in her books. Armed with a copy of the catalogue for the 1924 exhibit, Suchet joins the links between Agatha Christie the writer and the places she visited a century ago.

Cape Town is dominated by the legacy of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, revered in his time for his seizure of African lands, leaving a lasting effect of pain and racism. Suchet meets with Rhodes Must Fall Movement members, led by Rhodes University and the University of Oxford, to discuss his legacy and the ongoing debate of whether Rhodes’s remains, interred in Malindidzimu's sacred burial place of kings in what is now Zimbabwe, should be moved.

Christie visited the DeBeers diamond mine in Kimberley a year after production had closed, and a massive hole in the ground still gapes. At its peak, it produced 90% of the world’s diamonds at the cost of many workers' lives. Now a museum, the sorting house where stones are sized and polished is still open for visitors, and Suchet chats genially with the women at work there. 

But the highlight of this leg of the trip is Suchet’s visit to Victoria Falls, where his photograph echoes Agatha’s own, taken a century earlier. He is also captivated by the thundering water, mists, and rainbows. One of the original names of the Falls, long revered as a sacred place, translates as “the smoke that thunders.”

Suchet then heads to Tasmania, where Christie sees the 1804 harbor where British convicts landed, still remarkably unchanged in the 21st century. Despite its beginnings as a wild, brutal place of punishment, Tasmania transformed into a technology leader in Christie’s era, with a highly sophisticated hydroelectric power station, the first to transport electricity across the country. 

Sadly, what Christie would not have seen on the island was the existence of its Aboriginal peoples, other than to view their remains in the local museum. The remains of Truganina, known as “the last Tasmanian aboriginal,” were once on display, but her descendants have reclaimed their legacy, revived the language, and given her a traditional burial.

According to Suchet, Christie’s second novel, the Partners in Crime mystery The Secret Adversary, was based on Christie’s experiences with her husband. Like many at the time, Slueths Tommy and Tuppence are young people left without purpose (or money) post-Great War. Australia offered returning veterans Outback farmland; Suchet marvels at one vast sheep farm where 94,099 sheep were sheared the day Christie visited. It also boasted a refrigeration system and “Big Lizzie,” the world’s biggest tractor. In Australia, Christie was also recognized as a writer, sitting for interviews for the first time, and revealing herself as intelligent and witty. (It's a shame later in life she became reclusive, refusing to speak to the press.) 

New Zealand was the country Christie found the most beautiful. The wool industry is now famous for producing the costumes for the Lord of the Rings franchise (if you’re interested, you can run up a Gandalf costume on demand). However, gold held the most allure for adventurous settlers, although the New Zealand Gold Rush was most over when Christie arrived. New Zealand is still a source of gold, with American investments, and giant machines are used to chew up the land. (What is it doing environmentally? We’re not told.) 

Another highly prized mineral is the greenstone, which holds spiritual significance for the Maori, who own the area’s rivers where the stones are found. Once used for weapons, the craft of shaping the greenstone has been revived, and Suchet is given a pendant crafted from a stone he chose. On her visit Christie made a solo trip to Rotorua on the North Island, an area of thermal activity sacred to the Maori. Suchet follows and is entranced by a church that combines Western and Maori carvings, although we don’t know if Christie visited it. But we get to meet the great-grandson of Maori guide Bella, who served as guide to Christie.

The Christies needed a break from the meetings and negotiations that characterized much of their tour, so they went on vacation to Hawaii, as is now standard practice for many Americans, went to Hawaii for a vacation. Christie became passionate about surfing, which she and Archie learned initially in South Africa. She rhapsodizes about it as a liberating experience that tapped into the wildness of the human spirit. Suchet doesn’t try to emulate her passion, although he explores the history of the lei and the revival of traditional hula dancing (pre Captain Cook). 

As well as speeding atop a wave, Christie liked fast cars and the island was full of them. (She bought her first car with royalties from The Man in the Brown Suit.) Also significant to national defense, the island served as a military base for the U.S. and attracted wealthy American tourists. Then, as now, Hawaiians and Americans maintained an uneasy relationship in this multi-cultural country that hires agricultural laborers from China, Portugal, and Japan. 

When Christie arrived, the island’s natural vegetation was already being destroyed, mainly by the intensive sugar and pineapple industries. Restoration of the original forest has begun, starring the cacao tree, which produces the raw ingredients for chocolate. Cacao trees stabilize the more fragile native trees, such as mahogany. Suchet samples some raw cacao fruit and then the finished product. He concludes that the forest, with its towering native trees, feels like a happy place.

Canada, the last stop on the tour, was somewhat resistant to the idea of the Exhibit, but it has plenty to boast about. First stop is a visit to the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, which at that time housed the biggest telescope in the world when Christie visited soon after its opening. (The observatory is still in use today — albeit with computers.) Then, Suchet heads for the railroad, as the project linking the east and west coasts was completed in the 1880s; Irish and Chinese laborers built a miracle of engineering over the Rockies. (It’s estimated the human cost of the project was one life per mile.) 

Suchet rides the luxury train (complete with a black tie dinner!) to its highest point, Banff, in the Canadian Rockies. At the time of Christie’s trip, the Prince of Wales was the future Edward VIII, who loved the countryside so much he bought a ranch house in Alberta in 1919. (Useful, since brief reign ended in abdication later in the century.) Suchet reminds us that Royals don’t buy houses — they inherit them (or grab them if they’re Henry VIII). The Prince was memorialized in “cowboy mode” in a butter sculpture exhibit in the 1926 Exhibition. 

However, what Christie didn’t see in Canada, but Suchet makes sure to cover, were the First Nation Peoples. In one of the darkest parts of Canada’s history, the government forced assimilation on the native populations over most of the 20th century. Suchet visits one of the notorious children’s homes, the St. Eugene Mission in British Columbia, now a luxury hotel, its conversion a decision tribal leaders made in defiance of its history. At this and similar government-managed establishments, children were forbidden to speak their native language and treated with great cruelty. The last of the schools closed in 1996, although the law that encouraged this appalling policy, the Indian Act of 1876, has never been repealed.

Despite royal butter sculptures and beautifully presented exhibits in gorgeous pavilions, the 1924 British Empire Exhibition was not the success it promised. There was little interest from other countries, and no traces of the buildings survived into the 21st century. (Wembley Stadium now stands on the original site.) But Archie’s failure to drum up interest stands in opposition to Christie who returned to England at the end of their yearlong trip to find her third book (featuring Poirot’s second appearance), Murder at the Links was a best-seller. She had arrived.

For Christie, hard times were to follow, with the death of her mother, and the discovery that Archie wanted a divorce to marry one of his female colleagues from the 1922 mission. In 1926, she staged her famous eleven-day “disappearance,” which has never been adequately explained, and certainly not by Christie herself. (Whether or not you want to believe wasps were involved is your choice.) 

The series ends with Suchet on the front door steps of Greenway, where his last scene as Poirot was filmed. The trip feels like an experience that’s come full circle, and brings a kind of closure for the actor and fans of his time in Christie’s spotlight.

All five episodes of Travels with Agatha with Sir David Suchet arrive on BritBox on International Women’s Day, Saturday, March 8, 2025.