Overview: This set includes two films about the world's most successful crime writer. Discover what made Agatha Christie tick and see how the people and places Agatha encountered found themselves immortalized in her huge canon of work.

DVD Verdict: Surpassed only by the Bible and Shakespeare, Agatha Christie is the most successful writer of all time. We all know her characters and incredible plot twists, but what do we know about Agatha herself?

Combining rare access to Agatha's family, her personal archive and speaking to those who know her work best, in 'Inside The Mind of Agatha Christie' we discover what made the world's most successful crime writer tick.

Dr. John Curran has spent years pouring over the most precious elements of Agatha's legacy – her personal archive, a treasure trove containing her letters, manuscripts and 73 meticulously kept notebooks, in which she documented everything she saw and heard.

We’ll garner unprecedented insight into how the author wove together formidable plots and how, despite being known as the Queen of Cozy Crime, Agatha's mind was, the words of screenwriter Sarah Phelps, "incredibly dark."

Contrary to being a Marple-esque figure, she was "infinitely more complex," the clues as to why lie in her own life-story. We'll hear how an isolated childhood sparked Agatha's imagination and how her time as a dispenser during WWI gave her a knowledge of medicine – and poison, blood and gore.

And how the breakdown of her first marriage allowed her, according to Biographer Laura Thompson, her very own plot twist – a disappearance which flummoxed the nation and how traveling the world healed her broken heart and transformed her writing from a hobby into a serious profession.

And how during WWII Agatha's own sense of mortality made her output more urgent, writing an awesome three to four books every year.

There are 73 Christie Notebooks, the earliest dating from before her career, the last with notes for a book that she would not live to write.

In these unimpressive jotters she scribbled ideas for plots, notes for characters, possibilities for settings. Here she experimented with stage adaptations, wrote travel diaries – she was a lifelong traveler – compiled lists of Christmas presents, kept bridge scores and solved crossword clues.

There are notes for all but a half-dozen of her novels, many of her stage plays, some short stories and her autobiography. And, most fascinating of all, are those jottings that got no further than the page on which they appear; what I call her “Unused Ideas”.

Her existing impressive literary output – 66 novels, 150 short stories, 18 plays – did not exhaust this fund of ideas, which seemed, quite simply, infinite.

'Agatha Christie's England' is a thorough exploration of the British locales made famous by Agatha Christie. Ranging from London to Wallingford to Torquay, from Harrogate to Burgh Island, these itineraries create a travelling companion for the millions of Christie fans wanting to walk in the footsteps of Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.

This documentary will appeal to both Christie fans planning a trip to England (when Covid has departed, of course) and armchair travelers. It is organized into themes, such as all the places that Christie lived in London, Torquay, trains (did you know that some cars from the Orient Express are used for some British trips at certain times of the year?), etc.

This documentary does a great job of making the connections between locations found in Christie's work and how those locations were significant in her own life (and I believe that Greenway House, near Torquay, is still open to the public. But if you are a Christie fan, this is a fun journey to take, for sure. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs.