AGATHA CHRISTIE'S ENGLISH IDYLL

Agatha Christie's legacy as the Grand Dame of Mystery tends to make the author seem as innocent as Miss Marple, her apple-cheeked, grandmotherly heroine. Even Laura Thompson, in her extensive, glowing biography (published in 2007), noted only one odd incident in Christie's lifetime: a strange ten-day disappearance in 1926. But this mini-drama ended when Christie was found at the Harrogate Hotel, safe and sound, in a brand new georgette dress.

Some wondered if hidden skeletons would surface after her grandson stumbled on 13 hours of autobiographical audio tapes. But even these offer little in the way of intrigue. Her fans are soothed: though it may be odd to consider the bloody imagination of such a maternal figure, she created a world that was often more about domestic pleasures than grim instincts.

Readers keen to enter the world of Christie can now do so more literally. Her 18th-century estate at Greenway, donated to the National trust by her grandson, has recently opened to the public after a $7.8m restoration. The house has been carefully, reassuringly embalmed in a 1950s time warp. Her novels, set mostly in the interwar years, are similarly suspended in a moment of calm, untouched by modernity.

Her London is not a fast-paced city, but a place of tidy flats and maids who pine for their days off. She has conjured up a delicious universe. Her prose (which some have criticised as mere hack-work) is all atmosphere and no reality. Sure, there are stabbings on train platforms, but most crimes are solved over a warming cup of tea. Her puzzles are “cosy", as P.D. James put it: they take place in a "rather comfortable, conforming, peaceful world.”

I inherited my collection of Christie novels from my father. He read them growing up in Delhi, I read them mostly in my New York bathtub, hands and feet pruning. Our distance from Christie's English idyll is part of what has us enamoured with it. A fascination with the charmed domesticity of Christie's books helps explain her appeal, in England and abroad. She has been translated into more languages than Shakespeare. When Hercule Poirot, her moustachioed Belgian detective, died in "Curtain", the New York Times ran an obituary.

Her novels tend to feel like a night-time trip in a car on a highway as a child: you know the ride will end, but until then it's pure comfort.

I’d like to visit Greenway soon, walk among the gardens and have tea in the dining room with a collection of Christie-obsessed guests. Everything will be as it should, unless of course someone discovers a body in the library.

~ ARIEL RAMCHANDANI