Experience some of the places and environments that helped Agatha Christie write some of her most famous (and not so famous) novels including “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”, “The Sittaford Mystery”, “And Then there were none” and “Dead Mans folly” to name but a few.

An exhibition of costumes worn by Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Angela Lansbury, Emily Blunt and Judi Dench from Agatha Christie film adaptations including Evil Under the Sun (1982), Death on the Nile (2004) and Murder on the Orient Express (2017). 

Both our walks meet outside The English Riviera Visitor Information Office on Vaughan Parade,
Torquay TQ2 5JG.

Our walking tours take guests around Torquay’s beautiful sea front, passing the places that played a significant part in Agatha’s life, such as The Pavilion, Princess Pier and Torre Abbey.

This unique event celebrating Agatha Christie’s love of sea swimming returns, taking participants on a one mile ‘sightseeing swim’ between two of the Bays most popular beaches.

45 years after Agatha Christie’s last Miss Marple novel, Sleeping Murder, was published in 1976, a new collection, Marple: Twelve New Stories, is published by HarperCollins, penned by 12 contemporary Christie devotees.

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was 'just' an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn't? With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley talks about how she researched and wrote her authoritative new biography which is published this September.

Professor Frankie Bailey explores the work of a host of new female writers of colour in the genre and encourages us to expand our reading horizons.

Author and journalist Shreemayee Das explores the romance novels of Agatha Christie which Christie wrote under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Caroline writes, hosts and produces the Shedunnit podcast, unravelling the mysteries behind classic detective stories such as those of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey. Join Caroline for a LIVE presentation of the podcast produced especially for the Festival.

We are rolling back the years to 1911 when Agatha Christie famously roller-skated on Torquay’s Princess Pier with her friends. We are teaming up with Revolution Skate to provide the skate hire, while a DJ will be spinning the period tunes on the old 78’s. Vintage clothes very much welcome – let the good times roll again!

Award-winning best-selling novelists Robert Goddard and Kate Ellis, masters of the craft of historical crime writing, talk to author and Christie expert Tony Medawar about Christie’s pioneering influence on the genre and their own work.

SOLD OUT We’re delighted to team up with the National Trust at Agatha Christie’s former holiday home at Greenway House to host an exclusive and intimate dinner for just 20 guests. Arrive for drinks and canapes followed by a guided tour of the house. A five course dinner is followed by an after-dinner talk by renowned expert on Agatha Christie, Dr John Curran. Carriages to the door of the house at 10.30 pm.

Cult hit event Solve-Along-A-Murder-She-Wrote comes to town, with an interactive screening of the classic Murder, She Wrote episode “Broadway Malady”. Jessica Fletcher heads to New York City but soon gets caught up in a murder mystery only she (or you!) can solve!

This year’s Festival marks 100 years since Agatha set off on her Grand Tour. Christie expert and author Tony Medawar, former producer of the Festival, explores what she described as her ‘travel life…the essence of a dream’, the 10-month odyssey around the world she made in 1922, illustrated by pictures from The Christie Archive.

David Morris, Editor and author of the authoritative website Collecting Christie tells us about his fascination with collecting Christie first editions and memorabilia in a year which celebrates the centenary of the first Tommy & Tuppence novel.

Put your sleuthing skills to the test and join us to play detective and figure out whodunit in this entertaining performance, presented by Paignton Library with award-winning crime author, Kate Ellis. Kate will follow the performance with a talk about her crime fiction and the golden age of crime writing.

London is a re-occurring location throughout Christie’s work and home to her detective Hercule Poirot. This illustrated talk follows in Agatha’s footsteps to visit her former homes, and the fashionable restaurants, luxury hotels and other locations that she and her characters frequented. Tina Hodgkinson is a long-time Agatha Christie fan and qualified London tour guide.

Put your sleuthing skills to the test and join us to play detective and figure out whodunit in this entertaining performance, presented by Brixham Library with award-winning crime author, Kate Ellis. Kate will follow the performance with a talk about her crime fiction and the golden age of crime writing.

David has studied the ghost stories of Torbay for nearly 30 years now and is certain that Agatha Christie would have been aware of most of them during her lifetime.

Caroline Hostein introduces us to cocktails in Christie and the stories behind the creation of our favourites, whilst award-winning cocktail mixologist, Cosmo Boardman, demonstrates the craft: learn how to make your own in this delicious Festival Fringe talk and demonstration.

TOADS Theatre Company presents Agatha Christie’s ‘And Then There Were None’, directed by Alec Stokes at The Little Theatre, Torquay.

Senior Lecturer in biblical studies at the University of Chichester, Hannah explores the references and allusions to faith in Christie’s Poirot mysteries and reflects on the author’s stance on morality and ethics in a secular age.

To mark the centenary of Agatha Christie’s Grand Tour, Black Tomato has been appointed by the Christie Estate as the official travel partner to bring the monumental trip to life. Here Tom Marchant gives us a taster of a trip of a lifetime, seeing the world though Agatha’s eyes and footsteps.

Dr Charlotte Beyer is Senior Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. She is the author of two single-author scholarly monographs to date, Murder in a Few Words: Gender, Genre and Location in the Crime Short Story (McFarland, 2020), and Contemporary Children's and Young Adult Literature: Writing Back to History and Oppression (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021). She has published six edited books, including Teaching Crime Fiction (Palgrave 2018). Charlotte has published widely on crime fiction and contemporary literature and is currently writing a book on Agatha Christie.

Best-selling authors Vaseem Khan and the Festival’s International Writer-in-Residence, Dr Ruby Gupta, examine the spectacular rise of crime fiction set in, and about, India.

Join us for a boat trip around the Bay, passing beaches loved by Agatha or featured in her works. Local author Matt Newbury will be providing a commentary, while there will be period music and a full bar on board.

Extra date added on Tuesday 13th September​​​

Mark Aldridge is Associate Professor of Screen Histories at Solent University.  His publications include the books Agatha Christie’s Poirot: the Greatest Detective in the World (2020), Agatha Christie on Screen (2016) and The Birth of British Television (2011).

SOLD OUT An opportunity to view primary sources from the University of Exeter's Special Collections' archive of correspondence and papers from the office of Agatha Christie's literary agent, Hughes Massie & Co Ltd. and hear internationally recognised expert on Christie's work, Dr John Curran, speak about how Agatha Christie came to write her very first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and how it influenced her writing career.

Carla Valentine is a qualified mortician, curator of Barts Pathology Museum and author of Past Mortems and Murder Isn’t Easy.

Dan Clanton is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Doane University, Nebraska, USA.

Kathryn is a chemist and author. She completed a doctorate on her favourite chemicals, phosphines. Her first book was the international best-seller A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie which was shortlisted for a Mystery Readers International Macavity Award and a BMA Book Award. Join her for fascinating insights into Christie’s ‘weapon of choice’ through a chemist’s eyeview.

David has studied the ghost stories of Torbay for nearly 30 years now and is certain that Agatha Christie would have been aware of most of them during her lifetime.

A unique opportunity to hear from four Christie experts whose combined knowledge of the Christie oeuvre is unparalleled. In this panel debate they will challenge each other with their own pitches for Agatha’s greatest novel.

Jeremy Musson is an architectural historian, author and journalist. His books include How to Read a Country House and English Country House Interiors. Here he casts an architectural historian’s eye on the Country House as it features in so many of Christie’s novels and shares new insights into her work.

Michael Stanley is the writing team of South Africans Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. Their new novel A Deadly Covenant is available in North America and will be published in the UK by Orenda Books in December. In this entertaining broadcast they focus on Agatha Christie's less well-known knowledge of Sub-Saharan Africa. They will be joined by author Bryony Rheam who won the 'Write Your Own Christie' competition in 2014. She lives in Zimbabwe and has made a study of Agatha Christie's visit to Rhodesia. Her latest mystery novel is titled All Come to Dust.

Historian Professor Jeremy Black explains how Agatha Christie’s detective character Hercule Poirot is inseparable from the turbulent age in which the author lived. Black finds significant social commentary in Christie’s novels.

Christie expert Jamie Bernthal-Hooker’s talk takes places inside the atmospheric prehistoric caves that form Kents Cavern in Torquay. Partly inspired by her Grand Tour, The Man in the Brown Suit was written in Agatha Christie’s flat in London in 1924 with Agatha Christie evoking exotic African landscapes from memory. Kents Cavern plays a role in the novel as Hampsley Cavern.

This year we are hosting our literary take on a bar crawl, visiting some quirky and unusual venues around Paignton Harbour, with readings, poetry, music and unexpected happenings along the way.

All aboard for a murderous musical mystery tour as the ‘Masters of Gilbert & Sullivan in small spaces’, the Charles Court Opera company. present Express G&S, a new spoof of the classic railway mystery.

SOLD OUT We’re delighted to team up with the National Trust at Agatha Christie’s former holiday home at Greenway House to host an exclusive and intimate dinner for just 20 guests.

Brixham-based sculptor Elizabeth Hadley is commissioned to create a new artwork in tribute to Agatha Christie in her birthplace, Torquay. Meet the sculptor and hear about her work in progress at this special event. The artwork itself is expected to be completed in 2023.

The ‘whodunnit’ is by definition concerned with innocence and guilt, right and wrong. The works of Agatha Christie subtly, but with increasing insistence, engage with the Christian philosophy behind the form.

Internationally recognised expert on Christie’s work, Dr John Curran, will speak about how Agatha Christie came to write her very first crime novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles and how it influenced her writing career.

Join us for a boat trip around the Bay, passing beaches loved by Agatha or featured in her works. Local author Matt Newbury will be providing a commentary, while there will be period music and a full bar on board.

Extra date added on Tuesday 13th September​​​

Meet two brilliant local novelists who are advancing the nail-biting thriller writing tradition of the Bay: Sarah Pearse is the author of The Sanatorium, an instant New York Times & #1 Sunday Times bestseller. Her new book The Retreat is out now. Adam Nevill is the author of The Ritual, Last Days, No One Gets Out and The Reddening - all won The August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel. Both authors have film adaptations under way.

Bring your team along to use your combined detecting skills in a sixty minute puzzle room challenge. Choose from a ‘Sherlock’-themed room in Torquay or an ‘Espionage’ themed room in Dartmouth. Can you crack the case before the timer?

Julius is an Olivier award-winning theatre producer and a Fellow of the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre, University of London. The leading authority on Agatha Christie's work as a dramatist, he produced the 2001 Agatha Christie Theatre Festival (a 12-week season of Christie's complete stage works as then known), and in 2006 founded the Agatha Christie Theatre Company for Bill Kenwright Ltd. In 2012 he was invited to write the introduction to HarperCollins' 60th anniversary edition of The Mousetrap and Other Plays, and in 2015 HarperCollins published his book Agatha Christie; A Life in Theatre.

PaddleBoat Theatre Company presents a thrilling family whodunnit with their distinctive fingerprints all over it! Expect music, puppetry, clowning and more. Come and help us catch the clues and spot the suspects before Rufus goes down for a crime he didn't commit! 

Torre Abbey Museum had a rare coin collection on exhibit - had being the key word. A crafty criminal has absconded with the collection, leaving only some cryptic clues on the course of the nearby Pitch N’ Putt.

Torquay Museum hosts a fascinating documentary by Germany-based film-maker Sabine Scharnagl. The film tells the little-known story of Christie’s life in the Middle East with her second husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan and includes rare film footage Agatha herself shot whilst joining Max on his excavations in Syria and Iraq, contrasting these images with the reality of the former excavation sites today.