They Came to Baghdad

I'm very surprised that 'They Came To Baghdad' has such a low profile amongst Chrisitie's novels. I'd never heard of it until it came up as the next book being read by the 'Appointment With Agatha' group. I found it very entertaining. Having read it, I'm amazed that it hasn't already been adapted for film or television many times.

It's a solid contemporary pre-Cold War thriller set in an exotic location and centred around a global conspiracy to frustrate the achievement of a lasting peace after World War II.

'They Came To Bagdhad' is much more sophisticated than Christies fun but frantic early Tommy and Tuppence thrillers, 'The Secret Adversary' (1922) and 'Partners In Crime' (1929). They were light-hearted and very much in the spirit of show more adventure stories like Buchan's 'The 39 Steps' (1915) with plucky Brits of the right sort going up against the enemy. This is a different generation, living in a complex and rapidly changing world where doing the right thing often involves secrecy, violence and deceit.

It features an English spymaster who presents himself as a bland, easy-to-ignore, slightly put-upon businessman, a square-jawed English hero who dresses like the nomadic tribesmen he has befriended and who holds the crucial evidence that will expose the conspiracy, a charming but apparently lightweight young Englishman who is working in Iraq with a charity promoting international friendship and who is the male love interest, an enigmatic American woman who is the trusted lieutenant of an American billionaire, an expansive Iraqi hotelier who knows everyone and an absent-minded archaeologist running a dig in the desert who can never remember who is due to arrive on site when.

'They Came To Baghdad' is filled with spies, kidnappings, assassinations and treachery. Yet all of that is really just a backdrop for telling the story of Victoria Jones, who has now gone to the top of my list of favourite Christie female characters.

Victoria is a working-class woman in her twenties with limited education, no family, no career and no money. What she does have is a lively intelligence, a voracious curiosity, a willingness to take risks, an ability to think on her feet, a facility for telling lies that will help her get what she needs, an aversion to planning and an unshakeable belief that she'll figure something out when the occasion demands it.

I think she was the perfect character to capture the changing aspirations of young English women in the 1950s. I loved her brio, her humour and her refusal to be intimidated by the posh, the powerful and the erudite. I admired her determination to learn from the people around her, her bravery in the face of threats that filled her with fear, her passion for defeating her enemies and her irrepressible belief that things would work out in the end.

My enjoyment was increased by the small details of 1950s life that Christie took for granted like how British currency restrictions hobbled even the very rich, that air travel from England to Iraq involved an overnight layover and that the English in Baghdad acted as though the Kingdom o Iraq was still administered by the British Empire.

I recommend the audiobook version of 'They Came To Baghdad', which is admirably narrated by Emilia Fox. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.

https://soundcloud.com/harpercollinspublishers/they-came-to-baghdad-by-agatha show less

Victoria Jones finds herself out of a job after an ill-timed impression of the boss’s wife. However, she is inventive and adaptable, and soon manages to bluff her way onto a trip to Baghdad as a paid companion for an American woman. Once there, however, she’s on her own. Then she becomes embroiled in a situation of international intrigue. Will her wits be enough to carry her through?

This was delightfully bonkers and I loved it. Victoria was exactly the sort of irrepressible heroine I needed to read about at this point in my reading year, and the pages flew by as Victoria came to grips with the strange international plot she’d become involved in. This was also fun to read for the archaeology aspect; Christie, being a fan of show more archaeology (so much so that she married an archaeologist), describes the digs with affection and vividness.

I recommend this book if you are looking for a slightly madcap thriller that doesn’t take 500 pages to get through. Christie makes her pages count. show less

A fun post-war Christie, where the slightly ridiculous plot is given weight by he author's knowledge of Iraq and its people (her second husband was British archaeologist Max Mallowan and she accompanied him on archaeological digs in the Middle East). There's also an undercurrent of seriousness - epitomised by the misquotation - it's better to serve in heaven than reign in hell. Enjoy the adventures of the little cockney liar Victoria Jones as she gets mixed up in espionage whilst looking for love!

Agatha Christie's 1951 novel is a spy thriller rather than her usual fare of mystery detective novels, but if she was out of her comfort zone I would never have guessed on reading this novel. This spy story involving yet another amateur participant in Victoria Jones runs smoothly along and never fails to be interesting. Firstly there is the central character of Victoria a competent young woman not blessed with money or status but with a healthy curiosity and a taste for adventure. Secondly most of the action takes place in Iraq with some excellent scene setting and feel for the Middle East. Thirdly there are a host of well developed characters and in true mystery fashion a genuine twist that I felt I should have seen coming, but show more didn't.

Victoria's character can seem a little frivolous and Marcel the Iraqi hotel manager is played for laughs in a not very respectful way. There is plenty of stiff upper lipping going on and Victoria never really breaks out of her expected role of a plucky young woman, but although this is a lighthearted 1951 novel written to entertain there was just enough of an undercurrent of danger to keep me interested. I enjoyed the descriptions of Iraqi city life and the brief sojourn at an archeological dig way out in the desert. Christie's prose never lets her down and although I had to 'suspend belief' on a number of occasions it never spoilt the novel for me. A nice surprise and so 3.5 stars show less

This was a surprise. I'm certainly a long way from having read the entire Christie canon, but I've read enough to expect a certain...atmosphere in her books. They Came to Baghdad certainly defied those expectations. Exuberant is the only word that comes to mind.

Unfortunately the plot is ludicrous. For the first 13 chapters, Christie was on fire, creating rich characters and setting. The breaking of the fourth wall in Chapter two, when Christie's narrator uses the collective present (Victoria was like most of us, ...), has left me wondering if there isn't a touch of the autobiographical in Victoria. I can imagine Victoria's first impressions of Baghdad being Christie's and I could well believe her final thoughts on relationships are show more pulled from Christie's first hand knowledge. It isn't until the plot is revealed that it all goes sideways. It's all just a bit too Austen Powers.

Still, if you can overlook it (and it becomes harder to do so in the second half of the book, to be honest), it's a highly entertaining book; practically a romp. I enjoyed it overall, and it was worth the wobbly plot to see Christie's lighter side.

(This was a buddy read for Summer of Spies.) show less

They Came to Baghdad - Christie
4 stars

As I read this 1954 stand-alone mystery I had a sneaky feeling that I’d read it before… or not. It seemed strangely familiar. There are some formulaic similarities to Christie’s 1924, The Man in The Brown Suit. It was unintended, but I’d actually read the earlier book one month before I picked up the Baghdad mystery. Christie did rework her material. And I fall for it every time. Oh yes! She’s done this before! I know what’s going to happen.

But, I don’t. She always trips me up.

There are many ridiculous elements in this story. Victoria Jones is a comic character. I didn’t really believe in her, but I enjoyed her. An interesting difference in this book was that I had no trouble show more deciding, correctly, who the bad guy was. I was completely wrong about the identity of the white hat characters. show less

This is the only Christie book that I haven't read before because I always thought I'd prefer the whodunnits over espionage. That still holds, but this was a lot of fun. Victoria Jones is a wonderful character, a reckless romantic who has a taste for excitement. Add an archaeological dig into the mix, complete with an absent-minded archaeologist with the obligatory double-barrelled name and you have a perfect example of a Christie adventure story.