Through the Looking Glass and Back with Agatha Christie

The title of Andrew Eames's book sounds so much like a mystery by Agatha Christie that Borders puts it in its mystery/thriller category. Actually it concerns his attempt in 2002 to retrace her steps taken in 1928 as a thirty-eight-year-old single mother and popular writer who was traveling by train from London to Iraq. One of the reasons for her journey was to leave behind the wreck of her marriage to a husband who had rejected her for another woman. The novelist also left behind the unsolved mystery of her famous disappearance for ten days in 1926, until she was discovered in a Yorkshire hotel, where she had checked in under the surname of her husband's mistress.

One can easily imagine Hercule Poirot analyzing various possibilities before he sets out the true explanation. The mystery writer Edgar Wallace, as Eames notes, "theorized that she had faked her own disappearance simply to spite her husband." But her confusion of identity was real: when her husband found her, he said she neither recognized him nor herself. She used the mistress's surname as if it were a magical way of restoring to herself her husband's affections.

What is clear from The 8:55 to Baghdad is that Christie's journey was her way of dealing with the end of her marriage and the death of her mother by recovering in a challenging setting her sense of herself as a competent person. Eames frames his own journey with the metaphor of Alice's adventure down the rabbit hole into a strange new world; and he hopes that his trip, like Christie's, will "set the personal compass free and see if it found any new magnetic poles."

The weakness of his story, however, is that there is no equivalent personal significance at all to his route into the Balkans in a time of war, when President Bush was making a foray into "the lair of Saddam Hussein, where Off With Their Heads could definitely apply." Christie wrote several famous mysteries about dramatic happenings on trains, but in her real life the drama is all in the reason she made her journey and how she found a new life in Iraq. Christie met there the young assistant archaeologist Max Mallowan, with whom she would begin a new marriage and find satisfying new work in cleaning, mending, and photographing the objects he and his team excavated. Eames is disappointed to find no traces of the dig in Ur where they had worked together. He unwittingly wanders into a nato target zone and is startled to see a pall of white smoke arising from a loud explosion. It is the only adventure in Eames's own story.

Eames is surprised to discover shelves of Christies's stories in Arabic editions in Middle Eastern cities, even though only one of them, Murder in Mesopotamia (1936), is set at the site in Iraq on which she worked with her husband for many winters. Eames has little interest, however, in analyzing her fictional talents or works. He does have the wit to return to his metaphor about Alice by reprinting as an epilogue "A-Sitting on a Tell"—Christie's rewriting of the White Knight's song about "an aged, aged man a-sitting on a gate." She cleverly adapted it to her archaeological life with her husband:

I sigh for it reminds me so Of that young man I learned to know Who lectured learnedly and low, Who used long words I didn't know, Who sought conclusively to show That there were things I ought to know And that with him I ought to go And dig upon a Tell!

Eames is an amiable and knowledgeable travel writer, but it is a fellow mystery writer, Robert Barnard, who has paid close critical attention to Christie's work in A Talent to Deceive (1980...