There is no more quintessentially English writer than Agatha Christie. Through her sensational murder mysteries, she created a literary universe that captured our national spirit like no one before or since.But the magical worlds where she set her stories are in fact drawn from real places.Retracing Agatha’s footsteps across England, we visit Beacon Cove, the exact location where a youngAgatha swam with her young nephew when he narrowly escaped drowning... the memory of which would be reprised in her 1939 novel And Then There Were None when a young nanny lets the boy in her charge drown. In Ealing, we hear how the young Agatha witnessed her Great Aunt, affectionately known as Granny, devoured local gossip and the news, including the fascination with the day’s gruesome murder trials, the fingerprints of which would be all over Agatha’s fictional world of MissMarple and the village of St Mary’s Mead in 1930’sThe Murder At The Vicarage. And we explore how as WW1 Agatha qualified as a pharmacist, introducing her to poisons, but also Belgian refugees floodedTorquay, inspiration for another of Agatha’s greatest creations, Hercule Poirot. With access to both her family and those who lived with her and knew her best, to her private homes combined with visits to Ugbrook House, where she met first husband Archie; Abney Hall, the original inspiration for Agatha’s inimitable country house murder template; Brown’s Hotel, immortalised in1965’sAt Bertram’s Hotel; her country retreat Greenway, the boat house of which plays host to a scene in Dead Man’s Folly, we hear how Agatha drew on her surroundings as a magpie would, as both thepeople, and the places she encounter, found themselves immortalised in her extraordinary canon of work.