The Life of Agatha Christie, the World’s Best-Selling Novelist, Goes Under the Microscope at the British Library

An upcoming London exhibition will explore the breadth of Christie’s ‘remarkable’ experiences through letters, photographs, a typewriter and a replica of her Hawaiian surfboard

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

September 10, 2026 1:55 p.m.

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“My darling, what a journey!” Agatha Christie wrote in a letter to her husband in 1930. The novelist was describing an eventful trip on the luxurious Orient Express, the 20th-century passenger train that ran between Paris and Istanbul. Within four years, it would become the setting of Christie’s most famous novel: the tenth installment in her Hercule Poirot series, Murder on the Orient Express. 

Christie fans will soon be able to lay eyes on rare letters like this one, as well as some of her notebooks, photos, other personal belongings and manuscript drafts. “Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery,” opening next month at the British Library, in London, includes never-before-seen artifacts from the rollicking life of literature’s “Queen of Crime.” 

“Her impact on crime fiction as a genre has been immense,” exhibition curator Lucy Rowland says in a statement from the library. “This exhibition will take visitors back to Christie’s childhood and explore her journey to becoming an iconic writer, while celebrating how adaptations of her novels for stage and screen continue to enthrall audiences today, over 50 years after her death.” 

Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time: Her books have sold at least one billion copies in English and a billion more in other languages. Countless film adaptations of her work were made throughout the 20th century, and they’re still coming. Murder on the Orient Express became a Hollywood blockbuster in 2017, and Death on the Nile followed in 2022. 

“There’s something to be said about the mystery novel being something you can escape into,” publisher David Brawn told All Things Considered in 2020, on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Christie’s first book. “All good mystery novels end up with some kind of happy ending. Justice is done. The perpetrators are found out and locked away, and you've had a very enjoyable experience helping to solve the puzzles.” 

“A World of Mystery” will take visitors on an immersive tour of Christie’s life, which began in 1890 in Devon, England. In the first of five sections, library-goers will explore the quintessential setting of many of Christie’s works, the English country house, and get a glimpse of a developing writer. They’ll see the typescript of Christie’s unpublished short story “The House of Beauty,” which she wrote at age 18. A notebook from Arthur Conan Doyle detailing Detective Sherlock Holmes’ mystery-solving methods, as well as crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers’ feedback on some of Christie’s work, will also be on display.

Christie wasn’t just a writer, though. She had many identities and passions, which the exhibition aims to illuminate. After the country house, visitors will walk through a dispensary filled with various poisons that feature in Christie’s novels and learn about her work as a pharmacy dispenser during World War I. An Orient Express-inspired train carriage will then highlight Christie’s penchant for “closed circle” mysteries and detail her globe-trotting adventures, including surfing in Hawaii. Next, a constructed dig site will evoke Christie’s time spent photographing and supporting the work of archaeologists in the Middle East. In the final section, visitors will be transported to London’s 1950s West End and examine how the novelist adapted her stories for the stage.

Much of Christie’s life is documented in her own film photos. Alongside the Remington typewriter on which she wrote 1939’s And Then There Were None, the exhibition spotlights her Leica camera and yellowed photo albums. They demonstrate the novelist’s passion for photography. 

“The extent to which Agatha entered into the endeavor really surprised me,” photography curator Pippa Oldfield, whose research revealed some of the photos in the exhibition, tells the Financial Times’ Lucy Davies. “I’d always seen her as this cozy figure in aspic, probably from the nostalgic world of the TV adaptations, when actually she was part of this incredible wave of women who were traveling the world, observing it, taking photographs of it, crucially from their own viewpoint.” 

Like the works of the novelist it honors, the exhibition will be scattered with “clues” and “Easter eggs,” per the library’s statement. It will also feature interviews with fans, journalists and other writers, exploring Christie’s influence on the crime genre, which has boomed in the past decade.  

“It feels fitting to do this to help mark the 50th anniversary of her death,” says James Prichard, Christie’s great-grandson and the CEO and chairman of Agatha Christie Limited, in the statement. “This combines an opportunity for quiet reflection but also an opportunity to celebrate the immense achievements of her life. Hers was truly one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century.” 

“Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery” will be on view at the British Library, in London, from October 30, 2026, through June 20, 2027. 

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.