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Last week, I started my celebration of Agatha Christie’s birthday with a review of the book that she published 100 years ago, in 1924: The Man in the Brown Suit. Heather enjoyed some, but not all, aspects of the time-traveling novel, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.

PBS has hosted at least three other documentaries about Agatha Christie in recent years:

• The Mystery of Agatha Christie with David Suchet
• Inside the Mind of Agatha Christie
• Agatha Christie’s England

But I was still excited to see that Lucy Worsley, one of my favorite British historians, released a three-part series late last year. I saved Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen so that I could watch it in September to celebrate Agatha Christie’s birthday.

Every one of the documentaries spends a considerable amount of time on the famous disappearance of Agatha Christie in 1926. I appreciated Lucy Worsley’s take on the topic.

Worsley wondered how we would view the disappearance if we actually believed the Christies, that Agatha lost her memory at that time. A psychiatrist provided a plausible explanation. Even more interesting, and I don’t think I’ve seen this covered before, Lucy Worsley investigated what happened next. She explored the possibility that Christie sought help and treatment from a hypnotist and psychiatrist in London, with intriguing results. She also covered something else that I don’t believe I have ever seen mentioned: Agatha Christie gave an interview in 1928 to the Daily Mail, detailing her experience. I was under the impression that she never spoke about it.

Lucy Worsley has access to amazing resources for British history. When she got to the part of the story where Agatha Christie spent time at an archaeological dig in Iraq, Worsley took herself to the British Museum where she was guided to the items that were found at that site. She was shown this stunning statuette that we call Ram in a Thicket, an object that is 4600 years old.

© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.

Rather than Iraq, Worsley visited a dig in Egypt where she talked to two women archeologists who are also big fans of Agatha Christie. That allowed her to make an easy transition to talking about the book, Death on the Nile. The boat that Christie took down the Nile when she visited Egypt with her second husband still exists, and Worsley talked to us from its deck.

When we learned about how Agatha Christie came to write The Mousetrap, Lucy Worsley filmed scenes and interviewed an expert at the theater where The Mousetrap still plays in London.

The Agatha Christie Memorial, near the theater where the 70th year of performance is being celebrated

I have PBS Passport (a benefit of membership with my local PBS station), but it looks like this show is available to stream, even for people without Passport. Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen in an excellent addition to the other modern documentaries of Agatha Christie.