Stranger Than Fiction

November 2024

Greenway, She Wrote: When Agatha Christie Found Inspiration Close to Home
by Dean Jobb

Agatha Christie used Greenway, her Devon estate, as the setting for her 1956 Hercule Poirot novel Dead Man’s Folly. (Dean Jobb Photo)

Even Hercule Poirot, who visited countless country houses as England’s foremost solver of murders and mysteries, was impressed with Nasse House. “This is indeed a beautiful spot, and what a superb and noble mansion,” he declared, proving himself as astute a judge of architecture and landscape as he was a stickler for order and method. “Quite, as the saying goes, out of this world.”

The house was enthroned on a wooded hillside overlooking the River Helm. Passengers on passing boats, headed upriver from the port of Helmmouth on the Devon coast, caught glimpses of its Georgian elegance through the trees. Poirot, who arrived by train from Paddington, was chauffeured to the estate in a Hudson saloon that was as sleek and curvy as Nasse House was square and spartan. The driver navigated a narrow, hedge-bordered driveway before pulling up in front of the impressive three-story, white-stucco home.

An urgent and puzzling call extracted Poirot from the comfort of his London flat. His friend Ariadne Oliver, the crime writer, had phoned from the estate, where she has been organizing a “murder hunt”—a sort of scavenger hunt, with clues planted to help players solve the crime—as part of a summer fête. Something, however, was off. The organizers were trying to tweak the storyline she had devised. Someone, she feared, intended to use her fake murder as the cover for a real one.

This is how Agatha Christie opened her 1956 novel Dead Man’s Folly, a suspect-rich whodunit that taxes the little gray cells of her Belgian detective. Oliver is a mystery-solving ally whose chaotic manner and muddled thinking are the perfect foil to Poirot’s neat-freak fussiness. It’s clear that Christie had fun writing the book. It’s peppered with wisecracks and inside jokes. A police inspector describes Poirot as a “music hall parody of a Frenchman” before adding, “but in spite of his absurdities, he’s got brains.” Oliver’s character, in turn, allows Christie to vent about the travails of the crime writer. “If you know anything at all about writers, you’ll know that they can’t stand suggestions,” she notes at one point on her creator’s behalf. When well-meaning fans suggest other suspects and alternate solutions, Oliver adds, “one wants to say, ‘All right then, write it yourself if you want it that way.’ ”

Christie is at her most playful, however, with the setting for the novel. It’s a corner of Devon just down the coast from Torquay, her birthplace on the resort town studded English Riviera. The River Helm is a stand-in for the River Dart. Helmmouth, where the river joins the sea, is the port of

Dartmouth. And Nasse House is modelled on Greenway, a mansion a few miles inland that overlooks the Dart and rules an estate of more than thirty acres.

It’s a place Christie knew well. By the time she wrote Dead Man’s Folly, she had owned it for almost two decades.

“The loveliest place in the world,” Christie called it. “The ideal house, a dream house.” As a child she had visited Greenway with her mother, who considered it “the most perfect of the various properties on the Dart.” She bought the estate in 1938, the year she published Appointment with Death, as a summer and holiday home for £6,000, or less than $600,000 today. “I could hardly believe it,” she recalled. It was “incredibly cheap.”

Within a couple of years, Christie and her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, were forced out when Greenway was requisitioned for the war effort. A frieze, painted by a U.S. Coast Guard officer stationed there, still encircles the upper walls of the library and records his unit’s service in Africa, Italy, and England. The house narrowly escaped damage in the early days of the war when German planes strafed boats on the river and dropped a couple of bombs on the grounds.

There had been a house on the site since Tudor times. Greenway Court, as it was originally known, was the home of the Gilbert family and changed hands several times. Christie researched the history of the estate and traced the name to “grain way,” a nearby river crossing used to transport farm produce. The explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh’s half-brother, she discovered, was born there.

The three-floor, hip-roofed house Poirot admired and Christie purchased replaced earlier versions of the main house in 1790. Single-story wings were grafted onto each side in 1815, preserving the symmetry of the facade while adding a dining room and a drawing room. A wing housing a billiard room was tacked onto the back in the 1890s.

The fictional Nasse estate had a similar long and venerable history. It had been the ancestral home of the Folliat family since 1598. Sir Gervase Folliat, reputed to have sailed to the New World with Sir Francis Drake, built the original house. In the novel his descendant, Amy Folliat, tells Poirot that the original house fell into disrepair and burned down about 1700. Nasse House, like Greenway, was built in 1790. And the fictional house was also requisitioned for military use during World War Two.

Amy Folliat, a widow, lost her two sons in the war and had been forced to sell. The buyer was Sir George Stubbs, a nouveau riche businessman, who saved Nasse House from being renovated into a hotel or a youth hostel (the latter fate befell a neighboring property). Folliat is grateful not only that the house has been preserved—the magnanimous Stubbs has allowed her to stay on and she lives in a lodge near the main gate.

Dead Man’s Folly is Christie’s love letter to her country retreat.

The view of the River Dart from Greenway, a country retreat Christie considered “the loveliest place in the world.” (Dean Jobb Photo)

“This was a personal project,” notes Christie scholar John Curran, “an extended and detailed use of her beloved Greenway.” The novel is filled with glowing descriptions of the house and grounds. When Poirot approaches along a path leading from the river, “the house showed white and beautiful . . . in its setting of dark trees rising up behind it,” she writes. “It was,” she adds at another point in the book, “a gracious house, beautifully proportioned.”

Characters ascend and descend the zigzag paths that connect the house with the riverbank. An abandoned gun battery, likely built during the Napoleonic Wars—“round in shape, with a low battlemented parapet,” as Christie describes it—stands guard over the river. Nearby is a stone-walled boathouse, “nestled remote in its trees with its little balcony and its small quay below,” that she enlists as the scene of the novel’s first murder. During the war, this peaceful setting was transformed—landing craft were anchored along this section of the river as troops trained for the D-Day invasion.
The author’s beloved gardens, with their magnificent hydrangeas, rhododendrons, and camellias, are backdrops for many scenes. The fête includes rounds of clock golf on a patch of lawn behind the house; in the game, a Christie family pastime, players putt to twelve numbered stakes laid out like a clockface.

The interior of Nasse House also mirrors Greenway. Poirot enters through the front door, turns left, and passes through “a small daintily furnished sitting-room and on into the big drawing-room beyond”—the precise layout of the real house. And he stays in “a big airy room looking out over the river,” which matches the description of Christie’s bedroom. Not long after she bought Greenway, she demolished the billiard room addition at the back. “It would be a far better house, far lighter,” an architect told her, without the clunky Victorian-era addition. She defends the decision in Dead Man’s Folly. One of the suspects Poirot encounters, an architect working on the estate, scoffs at Sir George Stubbs’s plan to build a garish billiard room extension.

Christie added one embellishment to Greenway and its grounds for the novel—the folly that features in the title. It’s “a small white pilastered temple” and Stubbs has built it on the wrong spot. It’s nestled in the trees when it should have been erected higher up the hillside, to take advantage of the view of the river. “These tycoon fellows are all the same—no artistic sense,” the architect character complains to Poirot. It’s one of the clues that will help the detective to crack the case.

The 2013 television version of Dead Man’s Folly was filmed at Greenway, where a copy of the script—signed by the actor David Suchet, who portrayed Poirot—Is on display. (Dean Jobb Photo)

Greenway is now in the hands of Britain’s National Trust and has been open to the public since 2009. The house came with its contents—some 20,000 items, from furniture and books to collections of china and silverware—and the interior has been restored to how it looked in the 1950s. Christie’s Steinway piano (she was classically trained but too shy to play in public) fills a corner of the drawing room and her fur coats and dresses hang in her bedroom closet. Thousands of fans visit every year for glimpses of the Queen of Crime’s private life.

When Dead Man’s Folly was filmed in 2013 for the television series starring the actor David Suchet as Poirot, Greenway was the logical location to shoot exteriors. The house, boathouse, battery, and gardens feature in numerous shots. Suchet, still in costume, stopped here and there on the grounds to pose for photos with Greenway staff. He left behind a signed copy of the script, now on display in one of the rooms alongside first editions of Christie’s sixty-plus novels. “How amazing it was to be able to film this story at Greenway,” he wrote.

There was something about Greenway that the author could not change when she wrote Dead Man’s Folly. Christie’s stays at Greenway—like the visits of the day-trippers the estate now welcomes—were subject to the whim of England’s changeable weather.

“Devonshire is a very lovely county. Do you not think so?” Poirot asks Lady Hattie Stubbs, Sir George’s young wife, who’s bored with country life and pines for the nightclubs and nightlife of London.

“It’s nice in the daytime,” she replies. “When it doesn’t rain.”

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Dean Jobb’s latest book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books) is the incredible true story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. For more on this and his other true crime books, find him at deanjobb.com.