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On 30 October the British Library will open a major exhibition exploring the life and work of the bestselling novelist of all time, Agatha Christie. Marking fifty years since her death, the exhibition will examine not only the origins of iconic fictional creations like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple but will also go behind the characters and stories to explore Christie's world and legacy.

The exhibition will take visitors on a journey through Christie’s upbringing, her interests and travels and how she adapted her novels for the stage, through five immersive sections filled with items from her personal life, including her typewriter, professional and personal correspondence with other writers, family photographs and notebooks and typescripts for novels. There will also be clues and ‘Easter eggs’ dotted throughout the exhibition for Christie fans to sleuth out. Christie’s impact on the wider crime fiction genre will be explored through interviews within the exhibition with leading writers, broadcasters and notable fans.

Of particular interest the exhibition reveals Christie's active interest in photography through her own albums with photographs taken when she was accompanying her second husband MAx Mallowan on archaelogical digs in Mesopotamia. Christie took pictures throughout her life from her teenage years in to 70s.

As Dr Pippa Oldfield, the curator who uncovered Christie's photographic interest, notes photography is used in the plots of several of her novels.  In an intervciew with Oldfield the Financial Times reports “The extent to which Agatha entered into the endeavour really surprised me,” says Dr Pippa Oldfield.  Thee British Library will show Christie’s notebooks and typescripts, her 1937 Remington typewriter and a full-size replica of a 1920s Orient Express train carriage as well as her Leica camera and several photo albums, bringing the woman behind the modern murder mystery into focus.

Only a fraction of the photographic material held by the Christie Archive Trust in Devon will be exhibited at the British Library, but Oldfield and design historian Yasuko Suga are also co-curating a show dedicated exclusively to Christie’s photography, which will be shown in the British Library Entrance Hall next year. There are, 'many thousands' of images to wade through. 

Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery
30 October 2026 – 20 June 2027
London, British Library, Euston Road
See: https://events.bl.uk/exhibitions/agathachristie

Read the FT article which goes into much greater depth about Christie's photography here.

A selection of Christie images weer shown in 2015 see Amateur Photographer report here

Image: Agatha Christie boarding the EET Salon at lunchtime on the train from Bulawayo to the Cape. In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the world. Her husband Archie had been invited to join a trade mission to promote the British Empire Exhibition and Agatha was determined to go with him.© The Christie Archive Trust

Following the cyber-attack in October 2023, the British Library's Archives and Manuscript catalogue is back online. For researchers wishing to find the Kodak Historical Collection, Fay Godwin's photographs, and the Talbot collection alongside the wider photographic materials related to South Asia, you can use this link: https://searcharchives.bl.uk/?f%5Bcollection_area_ssi%5D%5B%5D=Visual+Arts

In the last year, we've been focusing on improving access to the Kodak Historical Collection and in particular the Kodak News archive, which spans from the late 19th century through the early 2000s. Since the start of this new project, our cataloguer has prepared approximately 9000 records. These will be made available via the Archives and Manuscript platform in due course.

The new cataloguing of photographic material (negatives, photographic prints, glass plates) specifically looks at the material from the Kodak Research Division of Kodak which was based at Harrow from 1928-2000s - and some of the projects that were developed including Harold Edgerton's 'Kodatron' with Eastman Kodak in 1939 and Kodak's involvement with Spacelab, a resuable laboratory developed by the European Space Agency (ESA). 

For access and enquiries, email us at apac-prints@bl.uk.

Top image: An unidentified woman who was employed in the Kodak Research Division in the 1950s, British Library, Kodak A3146/27(8)​.