Agatha Christie with her surfboard (Image: Supplied )
Renowned as the Queen of Crime, Agatha Christie is rightly famous for selling more than a billion copies of her novels, short story collections and plays, as well as creating beloved sleuths Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. But what is less known is that Christie is also believed to have been the first British woman to stand up on a surfboard.
It almost feels improbable that an Englishwoman of her class and background in that day and age should have surfed but, remarkably, it’s true. So was Christie a thrill seeker both on and off the page?
She was certainly passionate about the joys to be found in the sea. Growing up in Torquay in South Devon, the sea was always part of her life. In 1922, she and her first husband, Archie, set off on a world trip as part of a British Empire trade mission – and that’s where she discovered surfing.
Her first experience of trying to master the waves was in South Africa, at the now famous surf spot, Muizenberg. With nothing like the sleekly-shaped surfboards used today, it was a steep learning curve using heavy wooden boards. She wrote: “[We] surf bathed with planks! Very difficult. We can’t do it a bit yet.”
But Christie must have got a taste for the adrenaline rush as, a few days later, she described a swim further along the coast as “a little tame after surfing”.
In her memoir, An Autobiography, Christie writes: “Whenever we could steal time off – or rather when Archie could – we took the train and went to Muizenberg, got our surf boards, and went out surfing together.”
Committed to learning, Christie wrote to her mother, in a letter published in The Grand Tour, that she was determined to “master the art”.
Excited to travel to Hawaii, she arrived at her hotel in Honolulu and recalls her delight in discovering the excellent waves.
“We arrived in the early morning, got into our rooms at the hotel, and straight away, seeing out of the window the people surfing on the beach, we rushed down, hired our surfboards, and plunged into the sea.”
Spending as much time in the surf as possible, Christie became a devoted fan. When she finally took off on her first stand-up ride, she was thrilled and delighted.
“Oh, it was heaven! Nothing like it. Nothing like that rushing through the water at what seems to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour…”
Christie’s love for the waves was not reserved for the warm waters of Honolulu. Back home in Torquay, she was also a keen swimmer. In An Autobiography she writes: “Bathing was one of the joys of my life, and has remained so almost until my present age.”
Did her passion for surfing play out in her novels? Did Poirot sideline as a waverider? Or did Miss Marple ‘hang ten’ in her free time? Well, no. But in Christie’s novel, The Man in the Brown Suit, which introduced her lesser-known character Colonel Johnnie Race, her spirited protagonist, Anne Beddingfeld, goes surfing in Cape Town.
Her description draws to mind Christie’s early surfing experiences.
“Surfing looks perfectly easy. It isn’t. I say no more. I got very angry and fairly hurled my plank from me. Nevertheless, I determined to return on the first possible opportunity and have another go. I would not be beaten. Quite by mistake I then got a good run on my board, and came out delirious with happiness. Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.”
Clearly Christie was ahead of her time in her discovery of surfing.
It’s only in recent decades that women have taken up surfing in strong numbers. In the early nineties, there were no female surfers in my hometown of Bournemouth. At 12-years-old, I bought my first bodyboard and, when wondering if I could advance to stand up surfing, was told by a man: “It would be too hard for you.”
So I let the waves roll by and watched from the shore. Years later, after I’d had two children, and was tired of sitting on the sidelines, I decided to buy myself a surfboard – a soft top foamie, which was far more forgiving than the wooden ‘surf planks’ ridden by Christie. On my first few attempts, I managed to scrabble to my knees, and occasionally my feet, before toppling off.
I can certainly relate to Christie writing: “It was occasionally painful as you took a nosedive down into the sand…” But when you experience that first wave ride and feel the power of the ocean lifting you, and somehow, miraculously, you make it to your feet, it is sheer elation.
Christie knew that feeling. “Oh, the moment of complete triumph on the day that I kept my balance and came right into shore standing upright on my board!”
There’s been huge progress in equality in surfing. Once a sport dominated by men, now 35% of surfers are women. Since 2019, the World Surf League has distributed equal prize money at all WSL controlled events.
Even the previously macho arena of big wave riding in spots like Nazare, Portugal, are now being surfed by inspiring women, such as Brazilian Maya Gabeira, who broke the world record for surfing the largest wave ridden by a woman, measured at 73-feet.
It’s fantastic to have a host of female wave riders to cheer for.
Many famous writers are also keen surfers, including one of my favourite authors Tim Winton.
Twice nominated for the Booker Prize, Winton is a lifelong surfer and passionate environmentalist.
In one interview, Winton even suggested that writing a book was a bit like surfing.
“As a writer, you roll up to the desk every day, and then you sit there, waiting, in the hope that something will come over the horizon. And then you turn around and ride it, in the form of a story.”
Whilst writing is cerebral and surfing physical, they both demand total presence. When you are paddling for a wave, there isn’t time to think of how you’ll pop up, the line you’ll carve, or whether you’ll try for a cutback.
It all happens on instinct, in a pure wash of flow. With storytelling, we rely on instinct and flow too. When things are working on the page, distractions melt away, time stretches and contracts, and there is only the story.
My own latest novel, The Surf House, is a Morocco-set thriller. In it we meet British model, Bea, who takes refuge in a remote surf house, only to become entangled in the disappearance of a missing traveller.
I used my own journey of learning to surf to pen Bea’s experiences, whose challenges in the waves empower her to solve darker challenges on land.
Perhaps, like me, Christie didn’t suit the sedentary rhythms of author life and was drawn to the adrenaline rush of catching waves. When I’m struggling with a plot point, or wrangling a mystery, I don’t battle it out on the page. I take it to the water.
Christie was a true pioneer, not only in her crime writing exploits, but also as a woman of the waves. It’s fun to wonder whether Christie, in moments of writerly frustration, put down her pen and picked up her board.
Perhaps this question must remain a mystery. Yet I will hold tight to the image of her riding her ‘plank’ to shore, knowing that of surfing she wrote, “It was one of the most perfect physical pleasures that I have ever known.”
The Surf House by Lucy Clarke (HarperCollins, £16.99) is out now