How Istanbul inspired Agatha Christie to write her greatest novel

I’m a latecomer to the charms of Istanbul, but I struggle now to think of a city where I would rather spend time. My enthusiasm was sparked by a visit to a Russian friend who chose it as his place of exile after the invasion in Ukraine. It was on that visit that I learnt of Istanbul’s links with Agatha Christie, whose novels are another of my mid-life passions.

In fact, by the time Christie made her first trip to the city in 1928, she was already a seasoned traveller. It’s an insufficiently known fact that the queen of detective fiction was, among other things, a pioneer surfer. Yes, you read that correctly. On her honeymoon in 1922 with her first husband, Archibald, the newlyweds tried out longboards in Hawaii.

Christie describes the thrill of it in her autobiography. But by 1928, the marriage was over. Archibald had fallen in love with someone else and had asked for a divorce. Christie was in a recognisably modern predicament: a heartbroken, successful woman in her late 30s, she was travelling solo for the first time in her life in an effort to rediscover a sense of who she was.

Istanbul was only a stop on a longer journey by rail to Baghdad. But it was a fateful encounter. Christie would return many times, and was frequently a guest at the Pera Palace Hotel. That’s where I chose to stay, in room 411, the so-called Agatha Christie Suite. Like everywhere with a link to the world’s best-selling novelist, the hotel has seen the value of making the most of the connection.

I doubt the Underwood typewriter in my room was ever used by her, but it’s a charming touch, as is the period furniture and the (annoyingly) locked bookcase containing her novels. I was less sure about the beady-eyed portrait of the older Agatha gazing disconcertingly towards the bedstead from above the Nespresso machine. While this detail might be a plus for hardcore Christie fans, I think it would cast a definite chill on any honeymooners who are thinking about taking the room.

Of course, readers of Murder on the Orient Express will recall that Poirot actually booked his hotel room at the Toklatiyan – which is where Christie spent her first night in Istanbul. She describes this in her autobiography. On her arrival by train, she was taken under the wing of a friendly Dutchman – who later turned out to have ulterior motives. He recommended the Toklatiyan Hotel and a restaurant nearby run by Russian emigres. Then, as now, the city was a place of refuge for Russians fleeing the oppressive regime of their native country.

The shell of the Toklatiyan stands on bustling Istiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s answer to Oxford Street, but today it houses shops and offices. However, on a nearby backstreet, the restaurant is still going. On Christie’s first visit, it was called Rejan’s and that name is visible above the entrance. Today it’s called 1924 Istanbul. I went there with my Russian friend, Andrei.

The restaurant’s website makes it look overly bright and unwelcoming, but it’s one of the most evocatively Christie-like interiors I found in the city. You can imagine Poirot enjoying a last meal there by candlelight before heading for the railway terminus. An elderly accordionist played Kalinka a bit too loudly – or was he trying to send me a message? Were the polyglot diners plotting murders over cocktails and classic Russian dishes? Andrei and I enjoyed vodka from the trolley, blinis, smoked fish and chicken Po-Kievski.

My first helping of chicken was potentially fatally undercooked – hard to spot in the dim light – but I don’t think it was premeditated. The waiter replaced it without demur. I had a precautionary shot of pepper vodka and suffered no ill effects. After dinner, I walked along Istiklal and back to the Pera Palace Hotel. I took a seat in the opulent Kubbeli Lounge and read some more of Murder on the Orient Express. 

When it was published, 90 years ago this year, the US edition appeared as “Murder in the Calais Coach”. But it was the British title that made the book immortal. It’s the exoticism of those words “Orient Express” that seizes the reader’s imagination, and the extraordinary itinerary from Calais to Trieste, through the Balkans and finally Istanbul itself.

The next morning, I went to visit Sirkeci Station, the old terminus of the Orient Express, which lies on the other side of the Golden Horn. I got there on the Tünel – the second-oldest underground railway in the world. It only links two stops: Beyoglu and Karakoy.

It’s an amazing piece of history – a British-financed, French-designed engineering project commissioned by the Ottoman Sultan that came into service in 1875.  At Karakoy I switched to the tram and travelled two stops on the T1 to Sirkeci. I tapped in and out with my UK debit card – 70p a journey.

The Orient Express stopped running in the 1970s. Sirkeci today has a small free museum about the world’s most famous railway, but it’s hard to escape a poignant sense of lost glory. It’s no longer a hub of intrigue and glamorous arrivals. My dad went from Paris to Istanbul on it in the 1970s and wrote about it in his best-selling travel book The Great Railway Bazaar. I rang him to share my regret, and he said that by the 1970s there was none of the old glamour left anyway.

There was no food served on the train and he felt as though, even then, he and his fellow passengers were chasing a shadow of the train’s past. But at least further overland journeys were possible then. From the terminus at Haydarpasa, my dad was able to go by rail to Tehran and almost into Afghanistan: unthinkable now.

The Orient Express has been supplanted by budget airlines. The teeming new Istanbul Airport now serves as the gateway between Europe and Asia – and between the hostile sides in the new Cold War. This is one of the only routes into Moscow, Tashkent and other cities of the former Soviet Union. I hope it’s not cavalier of me to enjoy this sense of heightened geopolitical drama.

It seems in keeping with the spirit of Christie’s book, which was written as the shadow of conflict darkened over the world. But any modern version of her cast would have to include someone travelling for cosmetic surgery. Istanbul has an eerily high number of women with their noses in plaster and men with their heads stippled and bandaged from cut-price hair transplants.

During my visit, I didn’t just stalk the ghost of Agatha. My non-Christie related tourism included the Topkapi Palace, Hagia Sophia, and best of all, I think, two Turkish baths. One at the Galatasaray Hamam, which was walking distance from my hotel, and one at the Hurrem Sultan Hammam, opposite Hagia Sophia.

I loved these restorative baths, where you are scrubbed and pummeled into the most relaxed version of yourself. As travel experiences go, I can’t think of much that’s nicer than one of these, followed by an armchair in the Kubbeli Lounge, an hour or so to go before dinner, and a hundred pages in the company of Belgium’s most famous detective.