AGATHA CHRISTIE MALLOWAN
Come, Tell Me How You Live
With an Introduction
by Jacquetta Hawkes
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by
William Collins Sons & Co Ltd 1946
Copyright © Agatha Christie Mallowan 1946
Agatha Christie® copyright © Agatha Christie Limited. All rights reserved.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.
Cover photograph© Christie Archive Trust 2015
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Agatha Christie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008129460
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780007487202
Version: 2017-04-11
To my husband, Max Mallowan; to the Colonel, Bumps, Mac and Guilford, this meandering chronicle is affectionately dedicated
Contents
CHAPTER 1: Partant Pour la Syrie
CHAPTER 3: The Habur and the Jaghjagha
CHAPTER 4: First Season at Chagar Bazar
CHAPTER 7: Life at Chagar Bazar
CHAPTER 10: The Trail to Raqqa
Also by Agatha Christie Mysteries
There are books that one reads with a persistent inner smile which from time to time becomes visible and occasionally audible. Come, Tell Me How You Live is one of them, and to read it is pure pleasure.
It was in 1930 that a happy chance had brought a young archaeologist, Max Mallowan, together with Agatha Christie, then already a well-known author. Visiting Baghdad, she had met Leonard and Katharine Woolley and accepted their invitation to stay with them at Ur where they had been digging for several seasons. Max, their assistant, was charged to escort Agatha homeward, sight-seeing on the way. Thus agreeably thrown together they were to be married before the end of the year and so to enter their long and extraordinarily creative union.
Agatha did not see her own renown as any bar to sharing in her husband’s work. From the first she took a full part in every one of Max’s excavations in Syria and Iraq, enduring discomforts and finding comedy in all such disasters as an archaeologist is heir to. Inevitably her personal acquaintance, who knew nothing of the mysteries of digging in foreign lands, asked her what this strange life was like—and she determined to answer their questions in