Agatha Christie’s England

Sunday, Jan. 24, at 10 PM

Repeats Monday, Jan. 25, at 3 AM

This documentary explores how the settings of Christie’s stories and novels were, in fact, drawn from real places. There is no more quintessentially English writer than Christie. Through her sensational murder mysteries, she created a literary universe that almost singlehandedly shaped the world’s image of England. Retracing her footsteps, this new special visits Beacon Cove, where a young Agatha swam with her nephew when he narrowly escaped drowning, the memory of which would be reprised in her 1939 novel “And Then There Were None.”

In Ealing, Christie witnessed her great-aunt, affectionately known as Granny, devouring local gossip and news of gruesome murder trials, the blueprint for the author’s fictional world of Miss Marple and the village of St. Mary’s Mead. The influx of Belgian refugees into her hometown of Torquay during World War I inspired another of Christie’s great characters, Hercule Poirot.