Photos: International acclaim for Agatha Christie Festival

The International Agatha Christie Festival has proved to be the biggest and best yet with record numbers of visitors, with more than half attending from abroad.

Festival Creative Director, Matt Newbury, confirmed that ‘We easily had over 5-6000 visitors attending events – well up on last year. We haven’t crunched the exact numbers yet, but I can tell you we had people from over thirty countries, the furthest away being New Zealand.

"54% of those attending was from overseas, many of whom are very high net worth, and undoubtedly the festival has given a real boost to our hospitality and retail industries, in the Bay. I am delighted by how everything has gone. We held 55 different events across thirty different venues and the vast majority sold out.’

I can certainly report first hand, that the enthusiasm for the festival, with has been going since 1990, seems only to be growing.

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The ‘super-fans’ who travel form vastly different places, including throughout the UK, can attend a huge array of different events, whether it’s serious sometimes academic talks about specific elements of Christie’s work, to fun Murder Mystery games, or visits to places like Greenway or Burgh Island.

Last Saturday there was a ‘Victory Ball’ at the Grand Hotel, where Agatha honeymooned. After dinner a curtain was drawn back to reveal a 21-piece big band and singer, which had a real ‘wow factor’.

I spoke to guests from amongst other places, Australia, America, Italy, Estonia, Sweden, France and Canada. What was clear from speaking to this wide variety of tourists was not only their passion for Christie, but the fact that they loved visiting Torbay, and many had returned several times.

A common theme though was that guests were astonished that there was not ‘Christie centre’ or place that singly celebrated her, as for example as Stratford does with Shakespeare, or Bath with Jane Austen. If such a venture could be based at, for example
the Pavilion, I expect this would bring in far greater numbers than those just attending the festival, or just visit Greenway, but don’t come to Torbay.

It already attracts big names, and I particularly enjoyed talks by bestselling novelist Lucy Foley, who has been commissioned the write the first ever new Miss Marple book, and Broadchurch and Dr Who writer Chris Chibnall, who has written a new version of The Seven Dial’s mystery out on Netflix early next year.

The festival concluded with a fun Traitors type game at the award-winning Pier Point restaurant, at which the speakers were top Icelandic novelist Ragnar Jonason, whose book The Darkness, is currently streaming on Channel 4, and former Hollowood producer Kelly Mullen speaking about her crime novels.

Ragnar Jonason was typical of both the sort of author, but also fan, at the festival. He as a teenager read most of Christie’s novels but discovering that 14 were not translated from English to Icelandic, he, aged just 17 decided to undertake the task himself. He also signed up many years ago to the festival newsletter and one day he dreamt of attending the festival. He finally did so some years ago, and has now returned many times, this year as a speaker.

He epitomises the international audience that is clearly out there around the world, and which I suggest the Christie festival is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be achieved for tourism in the Bay.

Further details about next years festival will be at: www.agathachristiefestival.com