Ben Tisdall: Why don't we appreciate our town's greatest writer?

I will put my cards on the table.

I was a huge Agatha Christie fan from an early age. I remember devouring her books from around age eleven and once locking myself in a bathroom, at bedtime, on a Tenerife holiday so desperate was I to find out if I had guessed the murderer correctly. She is possibly so popular because her novels and plays are essentially puzzles to solve, rather than great literature.

The main criticism that is launched at her is that her characters are paper-thin, but to a teenage reader, I did not need anything more than understanding someone was a policeman, or a vicar or a maid. What I wanted was to look for clues and see if I could guess the solution.

In Torbay, we very rarely all agree on anything, but one thing we surely must is that Christie is our greatest ever resident and, by proxy, our greatest asset in terms of tourism, which is also (outside the NHS) our biggest employer too. Since the 1980s at least, great leaps have been made to recognise her locally and celebrate those connections. The opening of her home, Greenway, near Galmpton, has revolutionised this, as well as the work done by everyone involved to build the Agatha Christie festival.

However, it still astonishes me at the lack of local interest and support there seems to be. Anyone attending events as part of the festival, or going to Greenway, will meet real Christie fanatics. You could even call some of them nutters. But it is these people who are nuts about the biggest-selling female author ever, who I think are still only the tip of the iceberg.

What baffles me though, attending festival events in recent years, is the lack of local residents at them. I barely see a face known to me, and anecdotally I know so many people across the Bay who haven’t been to Greenway or (sacrilege) read a Christie book.

Is this perhaps apathy? Are we all bored of hearing about her? Are the residents of Stratford sick to death of Shakespeare? I’d love to know. It can’t be because people have not heard of her. There are still frequent films and TV offerings, and local theatre groups such as Toads and Bjiou put on a different show every year.

I think if I were a local venue or business, I’d be trying to exploit the connection to within an inch of its life. That’s not to say there are not places already doing that or organisations flying the banner. It’s just that they only seem to be reaching the wealthy residents of Japan and America and not those of us who live here.

On April 12th there is an Agatha Christie Spring Gathering – a mini-event in which the new statue of Dame Agatha will be unveiled on Torquay’s harbourside. As part of this, there are talks from DJ Jeremy Vine, the popular children’s author Victoria Dowd, and the writer of the BBC series Death in Paradise, Robert Thorogood, who looks like the sort of dashing hero to feature in an Agatha film.

There’s also a Celebration Ball at the Imperial Hotel, where she spent a lot of time and was said to be the inspiration for the Majestic Hotel in her novel ‘The Body in the Library’. Many people won’t be able to fork out the £150 it costs to attend all of these events, but I really urge you to attend the statue unveiling on the 12th and help make this a real local celebration.

There will be music on the Strand from 2pm with a vintage trio called The Hummingbirds, as well as a treasure hunt to find ‘Doggies in the Windows’ around the harbourside inspired by Agatha’s dog Peter (featured in the sculpture). The unveiling itself is at 4.30pm, and I hope it will get the local support it deserves.

Tickets for the Agatha Christie Festival can be found at www.iacf-uk.org. You can book to visit Greenway at www.nationaltrust.org.uk/greenway