Behind the scenes: British historian Lucy Worsley dives into the mysterious life of Agatha Christie

Researching is a fascinating process for Lucy Worsley.

The London-based historian recently got the opportunity to uncover the story of author Agatha Christie.

“Agatha is having a resurgence now,” Worsley says. “With the films coming out, more people want to know more about her.”

Worsley got a team together to create the three-part series, “Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen.”

The series kicks off at 7 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, on New Mexico PBS, channel 5.1. The other two episodes will premiere at 7 p.m. Dec. 10 and Dec. 17. The series will also be available to stream on the PBS app.

In the series, Worsley travels the world in Christie’s footsteps to unravel the secret life of the writer who revolutionized detective fiction.

She looks into how the conventional British matron wrote so convincingly about the dark art of murder.

As in the best of Christie’s novels, clues are hiding in plain sight, and Worsley uncovers surprising new evidence and some carefully concealed secrets that illuminate the life of a writer whose work continues to delight readers worldwide.

Over 100 years since the publication of her first novel, Christie remains the most successful novelist of all time, outsold only by Shakespeare and the Bible. In 75 novels, plays and countless short stories, she defined the detective genre. But the real woman behind the literary persona has long remained an enigma.

Worsley explores how the arc of Christie’s life follows the dynamic history of the 20th century. She witnessed extraordinary upheaval: not just two World Wars but revolutions in scientific understanding and enormous social change. Attitudes toward everything from class and gender to race, science, technology, psychology and politics were challenged. And — touched by these changes in very personal ways — she plowed all of it into her books.

In each episode, Worsley gets to the heart of Christie’s personal experiences — her family, marriages, influences and inspirations, as well as her sorrows and struggles. She traces the novelist’s footsteps, from the beautiful countryside of the Devon coast to the landscapes of Istanbul and Egypt, and analyzes the many hints of her life that the novelist planted in her works.

“I’m really lucky enough to get my hands on things that are deep in archives,” Worsley says. “When you handle a document that’s the original, it takes you right back to being in that person’s presence. It’s just a magical feeling.”

During the process for the show, Worsley was able to have plenty of “a-ha” moments.

Behind the scenes: British historian Lucy Worsley dives into the mysterious life of Agatha Christie

“One of those moments happened when I handled Agatha Christie’s first ever detective story, which you won’t read about anywhere else because it’s here for the first time on our show,” she says. “It’s the equivalent of what might be a high school yearbook for you. It’s in this magazine that she made with her friends when she was working as a nurse in World War I, which is a key time in her life. She was a wealthy person and it was astonishing that she would be working.”

By 1926, Christie was seeing a psychiatrist, who was an expert in the recovery of memories.

“She went through a talking therapy with Dr. Brown to bring her memories back,” she says. “She writes about five or six novels under the pseudonym of Mary Westmacott. She used a pseudonym because she didn’t want anybody actually being inside the mind of Agatha Christie. The first of these stories explains exactly what happened to her. It’s about a woman who is betrayed by her husband and makes an attempt on her life. She then is redeemed by love in her second marriage to a much younger man, who felt a lot less threatened by her success.”