They Came to Baghdad by Agatha Christie (1951)

 

‘Outside in Bank Street it was sunny and full of swirling dust and the noises were terrific and varied. There was the persistent honking of motor horns, the cries of vendors of various wares. There were hot disputes between small groups of people who seemed ready to murder each other but were really fast friends; boys and children were selling every type of tree, sweetmeats, oranges and bananas, bath towels, combs, razor blades and other assorted merchandise carried rapidly through the streets on trays. There was also a perpetual and ever renewed sound of throat clearing and spitting, and above it the thin melancholy wail of men conducting donkeys and horses amongst the stream of motors and pedestrians shouting, “Balek — Balek!”

It was eleven o’clock in the morning in the city of Baghdad.’

It is 1950 and everyone is coming to Baghdad.
Mr. Dakin, the undercover head of British Intelligence in Baghdad, is awaiting Henry Carmichael who is returning to Iraq with evidence to back up his fantastic story of an international plot involving a deadly weapon.

‘In substance, it is exactly like the Fifth Column activities at the beginning of the last war, only this time it is on a world-wide scale.’

Dakin’s best and most reliable man has either gone mad or his story is true. Four men with similar features to Carmichael have already been murdered in Persia and Iraq. He didn’t get away unsuspected and the enemy are on his trail. When he enters Baghdad the danger will be even greater.
World leaders hoping to promote peace are coming to Baghdad for a secret summit and Dakin is desperate to have Carmichael’s evidence to present to them.

Meanwhile in London, Victoria Jones, a young Cockney typist just fired from her job, is sitting in a park eating her lunch when Edward, a handsome young man, strikes up a conversation. Victoria, who considers herself an excellent judge of character, is immediately smitten, so much so that when she hears that he is heading to Baghdad the next day to work for a Dr. Rathbone, she decides that somehow, she would get herself to Baghdad.

They Came to Baghdad is one of the few Christie novels that is a spy/political thriller rather than her typical detective novel.
I think her detective novels are better than her spy thrillers but this book was a fun read with a complicated plot full of people who are not what they seem.
It took me a while to figure out that Victoria Jones was the main character. She didn’t seem very promising at first with her tendency to tell elaborate creative lies to make her life more interesting. Her sudden decision that she was in love with a man she’d barely talked to gave all the appearance of an airhead; but she was also generous, courageous and thoroughly optimistic, and she grew on me.

‘She, Victoria Jones, a little London typist, had arrived in Baghdad, had seen a man murdered almost before her eyes, had become a secret agent or something equally melodramatic, and had finally met the man she loved in a tropical garden with palms waving overhead, and in all probability not far from the spot where the original garden of Eden was said to be situated.’

Victoria’s quick wits and inventive qualities are given plenty of scope in Baghdad where she is caught up in a kidnapping and a murder and manages to talk her way into working at an archaeological dig by posing as an anthropologist. Through it all she matures and learns some truths about human nature while keeping her inherent optimism and revealing her true mettle.

‘Surely those were the things that mattered — the little every day things, the family to be cooked for, the four walls that enclosed the home, the one or two cherished possessions…
Humility is what keeps you sane and a human being…’

They Came to Baghdad was a good Christie book to follow on from her autobiographical, Come, Tell Me How You Live, where she recounts her time working and travelling with her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, in Syria and other parts of the Middle East.
It also captures a very different Baghdad to that of today, just over 70 years later.

Interesting links:

Mysteries and the Middle East

Agatha Christie in Egypt & the Near East

2020 Nonfiction Reader Challenge - Final Post

This year I've read quite a few non fiction titles but the following are the only books I've written about so far. I've liked to my reviews/thoughts on them.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald - Memoir: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014) (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

To Sir With Love by E.R. Braithwaite - To Sir With Love by E.R. Braithwaite (1959) Non-fiction (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

Come, Tell Me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan - Come, Tell me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946) (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley - Non-Fiction: Queen Victoria by Lucy Worsley (2018) (journey-and-destination.blogspot.com)

Linking up to Book'd Out

Come, Tell me How You Live by Agatha Christie Mallowan (1946)

Come, Tell me How You Live, which Christie describes as 'a meandering chronicle' of life on an archaeological dig, is just delightful! I came across this book accidentally when I was looking for some of her crime novels with an archaeological setting.

Agatha Christie met the distinguished young archaeologist, Max Mallowan, in 1930 when she visited Leonard and Katherine Woolley in Baghdad. Her first marriage had come to an end a few years previously and she and Mallowan were married about six months after they met and enjoyed forty-six years together until her death in 1976. During the pre-war years, Agatha accompanied Mallowan on all his digs and took an active part in the photography, recording and preservation of the finds. Come, Tell me How You Live was written to answer a question that was asked of her very often:

'So you dig in Syria, do you? Do tell me all about it. How do you live? In a tent?...'

The book was begun before the war but was put aside for four years while she was engaged in volunteer work in war-time London and Max was serving overseas. In 1944 she picked it up again and said that it was a joy and refreshment to her to live those days again.

'Writing this simple record has been not a task, but a labour of love. Not an escape to something that was, but the bringing into the had work and sorrow of today of something imperishable that one not only had but still has.'

Come, Tell Me How You Live revealed a side of Agatha Christie that I would never have guessed existed. Her warmth, humour and honesty shone through the writing and I felt I got to know her as a person and not a detached narrator. It was such a pleasure to read about her relationship with Mallowan. They obviously were very secure and comfortable with each other. I had to laugh when she describes an 'archaeological packing,' which consists mainly of books. (I can relate to that!) Mallowan asks if she has room in her suitcases and promptly rams two immense tomes on top of her smugly packed clothes and forces down the lid. The next morning...

'At nine a.m. I am, called in as the heavy-weight to sit on Max's bulging suitcases.

'If you can't make them shut,' Max says ungallantly, 'nobody can!'

Max saw everything through an archaeological lens. Seeing a folded printed linen dress in one of Agatha's suitcases he asked what it was and when told commented that it had 'fertility motifs all down the front.' Another time he suggested she wear 'the greenish buff with the Tell Halaf running lozenge pattern.' He described everything in pottery terms - 'pinkish buff,' and was obsessed with Tells.

Agatha continued her crime writing while on the field and found much inspiration for her books in her Middle Eastern travels. One day, one of the expedition team who had newly arrived and was very sociable, interrupted her while she was getting down to the gory details of a murder. He asked if he could join her in the office while he labelled some objects, but she had to be firm:

'I explain clearly that it is quite impossible for me to get on with my dead body if a live body is moving, breathing, and in all probability talking, in the near vicinity.'

Mice, fleas, mechanical breakdowns, fighting workers, eccentric personalities, post office dramas, conniving sheiks, are all a part of life and are described vividly.

'Anointing beds with carbolic merely stimulates the fleas to even greater displays of athletics. It is not, I explain to Mac (a young archaeological assistant), so much the bites of the fleas. It is their tireless energy, their never ending hopping races round and round one's middle that wears one out. Impossible to drop off to sleep when fleas are holding the nightly sports round and round the waist.'

I've shared in a previous post the Archaeological Studies I'd put together for my daughter in which I included some fiction as an added interest and also because she's always hunting for books to read. After reading Christie's memories of her and Mallowan's archaeological expeditions in the Middle East and enjoying it so much, I decided I'd add this to her reading in Year 11.

252 pages.

Linking to the 2020 NonFiction Reading Challenge at Book'd Out: Memoir

Our High School Archaeological Studies

The Ring of Brodgar, Orkney

Gods, Graves & Scholars: The Story of Archaeology by C.W. Ceram

I’ve used this book in the past with my older ones and it’s very good. Ceram, a journalist and not an archeologist, traces the development of a highly specialised science in a way that the ordinary person can read it with genuine excitement as they would if they were reading a detective thriller.
The book was originally published in 1949 and was later revised and substantially enlarged. We have the 1971 edition and it is well-illustrated with black & white photographs, pen drawings and maps. There are 32 chapters, an appendix with chronological tables and a bibliography for the topics he covers.

The Folio Society have published the book and of course it's lovely, but expensive. Here is what they say about it:

'From Pompeii to the Rosetta Stone and from Nineveh to Chichén-Itzá, this hugely influential book was the first to tell the story of archaeology. First published in German in 1949, it was translated into 26 languages and became an international bestseller. More than any other book, it helped stoke a passion for archaeology in the imagination of the post-war world, and remains one of the world’s most widely read books on the subject...
Ceram tells us that ‘the great Palace of Minos was as large as Buckingham Palace’, that the bronze statues of Pompeii ‘rang like bells’ when they were first struck by the workmen’s shovels, and describes how our modern superstition about a black cat crossing our path stems from ancient Babylon.'

We're using Ceram's book as our main 'text' for the year and this term I'm adding in some fiction that is centred around archaeology. 

The Boy with the Brown Axe by Kathleen Fidler

This book is geared towards a younger audience (around 9 to 13) but I included it because it's a fictionalized account set in the Neolithic village of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands which dates back 3,000 to 5,000 years ago. It describes how the village may have been destroyed and weaves in some geographical detail such as the Bay of Skaill, the Standing Stones of Stenness and Maidstowe. One of the characters in the book is a stone mason who is working on the Ring of Brodgar. Both my daughter and I enjoyed it even though it was a quick read for us.
Thanks to Sarah @delivering grace for suggesting this book.

The Rediscovered Village of Skara Brae

Crocodile on the Sandbank by Elizabeth Peters (1975)

This is the first book in the author’s Amelia Peabody series and it was a delightful read. We've both read this and my daughter loved it. While her characters in these books are fictitious, historic figures do make an appearance from time to time. For example, in Crocodile on the Sandbank, a well-known French Egyptologist plays a small part in the story. William Flinders Petrie, the famous archaeologist, is referred to a number of times, as well as a some other Egyptologists.
Amelia Peabody had lived a quiet life with her father, a scholar and antiquarian, generally supporting him and keeping house as he got older. The story takes place in the 1880’s. Amelia is 32 years old, single, and very sure of herself. 
When her father dies he leaves her his considerable fortune and she decides to leave England and travel to see all the places her father had studied: Greece, Rome, Babylon and Thebes.
She engages a companion, a Miss Pritchett, to go with her. Miss Pritchett contracts typhoid while they are in Rome and is dispatched back to England. Amelia, musing whether or not she should find a substitute, comes across Evelyn, a young English woman on the street near the Roman Forum. She had been heartlessly abandoned by her false lover when he realized she had no fortune and had fainted from hunger and exhaustion. Amelia rescues her, nurses her back to health then two of them take a boat up the Nile to an archaeological site to embark on their Egyptian adventure.

I looked into this series of books for my daughter to read alongside her Archaeology studies this year, for enjoyment mostly, but the settings bring archaeology to life and certainly give a feel for antiquity.
Elizabeth Peters earned her Ph.D in Egyptology and her archaeological knowledge comes through into her mystery writing which adds an authentic touch.
The author writes well and there’s a good dose of humour in her writing. Both my daughter and I think this first book has some similarities to Agatha Christie’s The Man in the Brown Suit, which we both really enjoyed.
I've started reading the second book in the series, The Curse of the Pharaohs, and while it's a great read, I think it may be just a tad mature at the moment for my daughter. Fortunately our library has a good number of the Amelia Peabody books so I'll check them out to see if they're suitable. I think once you've read the first one it's not necessary to read them in order. But do read Book 1 first if you decide to try them out!

Murder in Mesopotamia by Agatha Christie - a murder mystery set in a Middle Eastern
archaeological dig.

Appointment With Death by Agatha Christie - set in Petra. When Christie was 40 years of age she met her second husband, Max Mallowan, an archaeologist who was assisting Leonard Woolley in Ur. Christie worked alongside her husband and became an invaluable aid to him in his work. 

Ur from the air, 1927 - about a year before Christie visited