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 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 ( )

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 deciding, correctly, who the bad guy was. I was completely wrong about the identity of the white hat characters. ( )

Victoria Jones gets sacked from her shorthand secretary job, both for mocking the boss behind his back and for being rubbish at shorthand and typing, then she goes to the park for a life-contemplative lunch, meets a cute dude, learns he's headed to Baghdad the next day, then decides to chase after him. This not-at-all-stupid decision lands her in a foreign country with no money, no job, no prospects, and the difficult tasks of finding a man when she only knows his first name. I mean, honestly. And then she gets pulled into some serious international intrigue, gets herself kidnapped, and plays a significant role in helping to take down the Big Bad Men.

A different Christie plot than I'm used to, but still fairly fun. I think I prefer a simple locked room murder, though. ( )

Victoria Jones decides to go to Baghdad in pursuit of a young man but finds herself caught up amongst intelligence agents trying to foil a shadowy organisation that wants to stoke tensions between the US and the USSR.

I enjoyed this more than most of the author's forays into spy fiction. ( )

This was an Agatha Christie novel I had never heard of, so I picked it up thinking it would be on the order of Murder on the Orient Express. How wrong I was! Instead it is an oddly political (and colonial) book about a international conference being held in Baghdad and the efforts of a shadowy organization to disrupt its objectives.

The plot is muddled and the character that is supposed to be the3 heroine is a nit wit. Really not her best effort. ( )