Baghdad is the chosen location for a secret summit of superpowers, concerned but not convinced, about the development of an, as yet, unidentified and undescribed secret weapon.
Only one man has the proof that can confirm the nature of this fantastic secret weapon – a British agent named Carmichael. Unfortunately, the criminal organisation responsible for the weapon’s development will stop at nothing to prevent him entering Baghdad and presenting his proof to the assembled delegates. Can Carmichael enter the city against such odds?
Into this explosive situation appears Victoria Jones, a girl with a yearning for adventure who gets more than she bargains for when a wounded Carmichael dies in her arms in her hotel room.
Now, if only she could make sense of his last words ‘…Lucifer…Basrah…Lefarge…’

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.