About

Andrew Eames is a travel writer, broadcaster and former newspaper journalist and the author of five travel books including the bestseller, The 8.55 to Baghdad. In this book he retraces a solo journey made by Agatha Christie from London to Baghdad in 1928, a journey that was to change her life completely.

The idea of the book came to the author when he stayed overnight at a hotel in Aleppo, northern Syria, in the late 1990s – and realized that Agatha Christie had been a regular guest in the hotel, and that the opening scene of Murder on the Orient Express was set in the railway station at which he himself had just arrived.

This didn’t accord with his preconception of Agatha Christie as a typical Home Counties person, more comfortable in vicarage tea parties than in Arab souks. Further investigation revealed quite how adventurous the crime writer had been. After her marriage to her second husband, Max Mallowan, she criss-crossed Europe, mostly by train, and spent several winter seasons in Iraq and Syria living in tents, with the occasional trip to Aleppo to do some shopping and get her hair done. A surprisingly well travelled life.