Agatha Christie bought and sold homes like she was playing real-life Monopoly — and one of her favourites has come up for sale

‘I swear nobody on earth had more homes than Agatha Christie,’ read the message from one of my colleagues. The prompt? An email from the agents at Sandfords, who are selling the £1.95 million flat in Swan Court, Chelsea, that was for many years home to the Queen of Crime herself.

I should say ‘one of the homes of the Queen of Crime’, for — as my colleague alluded to — Christie had many. Most famous and most picturesque of the lot is Greenway, the magnificent country pile sitting on a clifftop in Devon overlooking the River Dart a couple of miles upstream from Dartmouth and the English Channel.

Christie fell in love with the spot (as do many visitors to this part of Devon), calling it ‘the loveliest place in the world’. She had grown up nearby, so when it came up for sale in 1937 — through Country Life, naturally — she and her then-husband Max Mallowan bought the place. This historic, 16th-century landmark, once home to Sir Walter Raleigh, became their much-loved base in Devon.

Today, Greenway is in the hands of the National Trust and is a hugely popular place to come and find out more about the best-selling novelist of all time. (Only William Shakespeare and the authors of the Bible have sold more books.)

Yet while Greenway did make its way into Christie’s fiction, it was very much the couple’s holiday home rather than the place she created her stories. Much of the hard graft was done elsewhere, for Christie worked wherever she happened to be. One of the places where that work happened was Winterbrook House, on the Oxfordshire/Berkshire border in the town of Wallingford, which Christie bought a few years before picking up Greenway.

Winterbrook, like Greenway, was also advertised in Country Life ahead of its sale to Christie and Mallowan; back then it was still in Berkshire rather than Oxfordshire. Wallingford was actually in Berkshire for 1,000 years before it the Oxfordshire boundary was redrawn by the Local Government Act 1972.

Christie and Mallowan spent a large chunk of their time at Winterbook, a home which they kept for the rest of their lives, as noted by the blue plaque on the house. Yet it still wasn’t really the place that informed and nurtured her stories: as Christie makes fairly clear in her autobiography, she very much considered it Max’s house. Mallowan was an archaeologist and historian who’d studied at Oxford University, and went on to become a fellow of All Souls College. This made, Wallingford, half an hour or so from Oxford, an ideal spot. Unlike Greenway, it’s not a tourist destination, but a private home which came on to the market as recently as 2021. Once again, it made an appearance in Country Life at the time.

While several of Christie’s books and plays were worked on while she was at Wallingford, it was more a place of pleasant refuge, as historian Judy Dewey writes on agathachristie.com. While at Winterbook she went about her business as Mrs Mallowan, rather than the great crime writer Agatha Christie. She described it as ‘a nice place’ that had ‘a poor railway service and was therefore not at all the sort of place people came to, either from Oxford or from London… we have been very happy here.’