As Christie said: “Strychnine is a very poor choice as a murder weapon. Or maybe they all did it – but whoever done it, they chose the wrong method of despatch. Was it the unhappily married Lucy, who was having an affair with someone on the dig, or Pearl, frustrated that she had been overtaken by Max? Maybe it was the decadent Katharine (Katherine Kingsley), Woolley’s wife, a woman dedicated to having fun and noisy sex, or Ezekiel, angry that his country was being looted? Rounding out the cast was Marmaduke’s security chief Ezekial (Waj Ali), the British ambassador Sir Constance (Stanley Townsend, both pictured above) and his wife, Lucy (Bronagh Waugh), also part of the dig team.Įach one of them looked guilty – except the lovely Max, whom Christie fell for (Christie and Max Mallowan later married in real life). Keen Christie fans will have enjoyed how writer Tom Dalton introduced a classic of the Christie genre – the country house – as all the protagonists stayed at a mansion rented by Marmaduke (Rory Fleck Byrne), the obnoxious American who was funding the dig. Here, she turned super-sleuth herself in a tale of murders, international art theft, extra-marital affairs and betrayal. What do you know, but within a few minutes of setting foot on the site, she was involved in a mystery involving a few deaths – although the closest Christie came to gruesome endings in real life was her invention of detectives Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Enter Agatha Christie (Lyndsey Marshal), recently divorced and lonely, and looking for inspiration as she started to write romances, having decided to move away from the detective novels that brought her fame and fortune. We were in Ur, southern Iraq in 1928 where a team of British archaeologists led by Leonard Woolley (Jack Deam) and his assistants Max (Jonah Hauer-King) and Pearl (Crystal Clarke) were uncovering a site in the desert, which contained an abundance of ancient Babylonian artefacts, including a tablet with the curse of Ishtar etched on it. So Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar was an early festive treat, another enjoyable melding of fact and fiction (mostly fiction, it should be said) from husband-and-wife producer team Tom and Emily Dalton, whose Agatha and the Truth of Murder was a hit for Channel 5 last year.