Mark Aldridge

It's so international.

Because while we are in sunny Torquay, and I'm not being sarcastic, it is literally the sunniest day.

No, it's a gorgeous day.

spring day it's so nice so it might be a bit windy so you can't do much about that but it's beautiful and sunny and we're sat outside talkie museum because it's uh the agatha christie festival spring gathering today so i guess that's also a reminder to say that if people want to come and see us at the festival in september there are a few tickets left at the time of recording

Yes.

So, uh, do, do come along, but yeah, this is international, not because of Torquay actually, but because we have a very special guest, don't we?

So our story starts in 1944 with the publication of Absinthe in the spring, and it was written only a year or two before publication.

So it wasn't one of the books that Agatha held on to for years.

So perhaps you could have a little think about what was happening in her life around this time.

It's funny, though, that you just said about having been married to Max for more than a decade.

It just suddenly occurred to me that, of course, that means she's been married to Max by this point longer than she was ever married to Archie.

And she's actually probably been Agatha Malowan for longer than she was ever Agatha Christie.

So there's there's distance there in the way she might be thinking about relationships by now.

There's an interesting distance from the limbo period of between 1926 and 1930, her two marriages, where she sort of half is Agatha Christie, because obviously she doesn't divorce actually in 1926, it takes a little while, and she's this sort of independent woman, and then she has to find herself again before she can find Max, you know, those things have to come in order.

She's not somebody who just jumps from a relationship to a relationship.

absent in the spring she she loved it right she loved writing it yeah i'm going to wrestle the the autobiography out of kemper's hands and i'm going to read out a little bit of what she says about it because it's it's so so striking and i love this by the way this i don't know if we're supposed to declare favorites yet but this this probably is my favorite and one of my very favorites things that she ever wrote um and i love it when you read something

And you realise that the author knew it worked as well because it doesn't always work like that.

So she says in her autobiography that the one book that has satisfied me completely is Absent in the Spring.

When talking about Joan's journey, Agatha says that what brought about this revelation would be the fact that for the first time in Joan's life, she was alone, completely alone for four or five days.

So you sit and think about yourself, having read the only two books you have with you,