Agatha Christie helped popularize surfing.
Agatha Christie’s characters have done it all — survived attempted murder, traveled to far-off lands, and solved mystery after mystery. But the bestselling author didn’t just write about adventure; she also sought it out, sometimes on a surfboard. Two years after publishing her first novel, Christie embarked on an international trip with her first husband, Archibald. Their 1922 stop in South Africa included an attempt at surfing, where it’s possible she may have become the first Western woman to stand up on a surfboard. The globetrotting couple quickly fell in love with the sport, and went on to catch swelling waves off the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaii. Christie, in letters to her mother, recounted the tricky experience of learning to surf, describing the sport as “occasionally painful” thanks to a “nosedive down into the sand.” But the writer eventually became more skilled, detailing in her 1977 autobiography that nothing could compete with the rush of approaching shore at high speeds. She also wrote about surfing in her novel The Man in the Brown Suit, in which her protagonist, nicknamed “Anna the Adventuress,” goes surfing in Cape Town.
Christie’s pursuit of the perfect wave was unusual for an English woman of her time. The Museum of British Surfing suggests she and her husband may have been two of the earliest Brits to attempt the activity. However, they did have regal company: Prince Edward, the British royal who would eventually abdicate the throne in 1936 to marry Wallis Simpson, was photographed surfing in Hawaii two years before Christie rented her first surfboard.
Despite her literary success, Agatha Christie’s writing career took some time to launch; her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was rejected six times before publication. Christie, who had an interest in storytelling as a child, took her first stab at writing thanks to a bet with her sister, Madge. In The Mysterious Affair, her long-featured detective Hercule Poirot made his entrance, investigating a poisoning. It wasn’t until 1920, some four years after she began writing, that Christie’s thriller was finally printed; her description and use of poisons from knowledge gained as a World War I nurse even landed the novel a favorable review in a pharmaceutical journal. Christie’s first book made such an impact that she even named her home Styles after the story’s setting.
