‘Poirot’s hotel was the place to stay in Istanbul’: the book that inspired my travels | Literary trips
Istanbul
Inspired by Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express
I visited Istanbul because of Murder on the Orient Express, even though the city only makes a fleeting appearance in the novel.
In fact, one of the things I love about Agatha Christie is that she doesn’t fart about with long descriptions of place. Part of the charm of her detective novels is that they are welterweights, all knotty muscle and six-packs, feinting one way then smacking you in the chops with an unexpected revelation. An extra stone of description would kill that energy.
And it’s possible to read Murder on the Orient Express and miss how important the city is, both to the novel and its author. Christie is a master of misdirection and buried clues. Even her autobiography is notably guarded about her personal life. She doesn’t hide the fact, however, that her first trip to Istanbul was a landmark. She went as a solo traveller after her first marriage broke down and the city became the starting point for her life’s second chapter.
She often stayed at the Pera Palace Hotel and allegedly wrote a draft of Murder on the Orient Express in one of its rooms. Pera Palace is still going; its suite 411 is named in Christie’s honour and kitted out with an antique typewriter and copies of her novels. From Istanbul, Christie undertook intrepid overland adventures to the Middle East. Amazingly, in those days you could travel from Haydarpaşa station on the city’s Anatolian side all the way to Baghdad, Mosul and Tehran.
One Easter egg buried in the pages of Murder on the Orient Express is the name of the hotel that Poirot visits in its second chapter: the Tokatlian. Christie is so sparing with details that this really stands out. The handsome facade of the Tokatlian is still intact. You can read the name carved on the masonry of its upper storeys, but today it houses shops and offices. It couldn’t be more central: it stands on a corner of İstiklal Avenue, the long, pedestrianised thoroughfare that runs through the heart of the Beyoğlu district. At one end is Taksim Square; at the other, the Tünel, the amazing Victorian funicular that is the second-oldest underground railway in the world, after the London Underground.
I sneaked into the Tokatlian and had an underwhelming wander: the hotel shut down many years ago. But once upon a time, this was the place to stay in Istanbul. It’s where Christie herself spent her first nights in the city. In her autobiography, she describes going to a restaurant on a nearby backstreet run by White Russians. That is almost certainly Rejans, renamed Istanbul 1924, and still doing good business serving Russian-inspired food and flavoured vodka.
Poirot doesn’t stay the night in Istanbul. He barely has time for a bath and a bowl of soup before he has to get across the Golden Horn to Sirkeci station and catch the 9pm train to Paris, which he finds mysteriously crowded. That train doesn’t run any longer, sadly, but the echoing interior of Sirkeci and its fetching pink facade give you a tantalising flavour of what it must have been like to travel by train in that era.
One thing that’s clear is that Christie knows far more about Istanbul than she makes explicit in Murder on the Orient Express. She doesn’t show off any local knowledge; there’s not a glimpse of a hammam or a mosque, no one smoking a shisha, no sense of Turkish food – or any food for that matter. But the book is still rooted in Istanbul and an intriguingly understated introduction to it.
Istanbul’s unique geography and blended cultures shape the opening chapters. Christie perfectly understands the logistics involved in moving Poirot around the city. And just as she leaves clues that enable an alert reader to solve the mysteries in her novels, she drops hints at what it is that makes Istanbul special. This is a gift: her reticence leaves anyone travelling in her footsteps free to make their own discoveries.
Marcel Theroux
Yukon and Alaska
Inspired by Jack London’s The Call of the Wild
I came to Jack London through Mr Hill, the best English teacher I ever had, and so from early on a love of the North – breathlessly capitalised – and a love of words went hand in hand. It’s the story of Buck, a Californian house dog, abducted to work pulling sledges in the Yukon gold rush who, chapter by chapter, frees himself from the shackles of civilisation.
I liked Buck but it was the Yukon that held me. “The stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow.” Here was the midnight sun and endless spruce forest, the noble wolf and 50 degrees below, and solitary men grinding a living from the land. It was a place that seemed impossibly distant, not only in space but in time.
I made it there two decades later. I spent five months paddling the length of the Yukon River, from its source in the Pelly Mountains. It was a place of superlatives. The river is 2,000 miles long and, where it meets the Bering Sea, some of its channels can be seven miles from bank to bank.
Rereading the book this past week, placenames that once sounded like invocations have become familiar to me: Five Fingers, Little Salmon, Sixtymile. Outside Circle City, where Buck attacked the troublemaker Black Burton in a bar, I saw my first grizzly. In Dawson, where in a wager Buck pulled a sled that weighed 1,000lbs, I visited London’s cabin, or the half that remained (the other is on display in California).
London spent fewer than nine months in Dawson, and most of those in bed with scurvy. His experience of this “Northland”, as he calls it, is not the one of the characters he beatifies. What he wrote was an idea, a backdrop for forging a new version of oneself. These lands were “new and naked”, operating under the “law of club and fang”, an ongoing tussle between the outsiders who had come into the country and the wild nature that they found there. Apart from their role in the tragic denouement, Indigenous people scarcely get a mention. If anything, they are one more facet of this wild nature to be contested, rather than people who built a communal, grounded life here for millennia before the rest of the world showed up.
As I travelled in the Yukon, and met the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and the Tlingit tribes, and heard about the terrible legacies of the gold rush, I came to better see through London’s fantasy. Yet I could not deny its lure. I could have moved to the Yukon in a heartbeat. “I may never in my life get to Alaska,” wrote the US essayist Edward Abbey, “but I am grateful that it’s there.” London’s writing acknowledges that need for such escape in all of us. For conjuring the seed that first led me to that place, it’s a book that I’ll always hold dear.
Adam Weymouth
South of France
Inspired by Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse
It was 1964 and I was a bored 15-year-old in Basingstoke. I’d already discovered that literature could be scandalous. A couple of years earlier, my girlfriends and I hid behind the rattan sofa in the living room of one of the more “alternative” family homes after school and read out the rude bits in Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When I got my hands on a copy of Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novella Bonjour Tristesse, labelled a succès de scandale by the French press and literary establishment, I was away. Away from my dull, small country town existence and my equally boring family.
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I wanted to be French, like the protagonist, 17-year-old Cécile; I wanted to sit in a Paris cafe. I wanted to discuss philosophy with elegant adults while drinking an aperitif and smoking a Gauloises (untipped). My list of wants was endless. I dreamed of staying in a white-walled villa on the Côte d’Azur, the sun burning through the bedroom window on my bare body, gauzy curtains blowing in the warm wind. Not icy patterns on the inside of the glass in a semi on a new-build estate in Hampshire. I wanted warm caressing sea and hot sand, not the freezing English Channel and painful pebbles. I wanted to ride in an open-topped car along the corniche dressed in a Givenchy cocktail dress and Cartier jewellery to casinos, not a Westward Ho! holiday camp in the same hand-knit, turquoise sweater as my brothers. I wanted to be treated as an equal by grownups and live my life in dangerous colour. I wanted to write a hedonistic novel of shocking immorality – as Françoise did at 18. And I wanted to not be a virgin.
By 1969, I had an artist boyfriend and was staying in the apartment of a schoolfriend’s film-star uncle in Paris. So many boxes ticked! I marvelled at the sophistication of Parisienne women, swooned at the lemony chewing-gum smell of the Métro and the soft whoosh of the trains with different classes of carriage, the beauty of the regimented Tuileries. We bought baguettes and croissants and learned how to tear them apart to eat à la française, the proper way. Because in Paris it seemed there was a proper way for everything.
It was in 1971 that I finally got to the Côte d’Azur, to Port Grimaud and Saint-Tropez, and found the France I’d been searching for: heat, blinding sunlight, blue sky and sea. Sunbathing topless, covered in baby oil, reading Valley of the Dolls and smoking Gitanes. The pan bagnat, moules farcies and frites. The celebration of indulgence and liberation, such a contrast to the rules and regs of Paris.
In 1979, my husband and I were back there, on holiday with a load of friends, staying in a white-walled villa with two grand pianos in Cap d’Antibes, driving an open-topped, gold Beetle. And that’s where I conceived my longed-for first child, after dinner one night at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc. Seems dreams can come true. Now I just need to write that novel …
Elaine Kingett
Elaine runs writing holidays in Spain
Kyrgyzstan
Inspired by Chinghiz Aitmatov’s The White Ship
The smoky smell of grilled meat drifted out of cafes and over sunbathers, swimmers and a group of elderly ladies dressed in sun hats selling dacha-grown berries by the bucket-load. After a long, hard winter in Kyrgyzstan, life looked sweet on Central Asia’s “beach”, sand-fringed Issyk-Kul, the world’s second largest mountain lake after the Andes’ Titicaca.
This visit in 2011 wasn’t my first to Kyrgyzstan but it was the first time I’d dipped my toes into the lake’s frigid water. I’d wanted to do so ever since reading The White Ship (first published in 1970 and translated by Mirra Ginsburg) by Chinghiz Aitmatov, who was born in a village in the north-west of Kyrgyzstan in 1928.
In the story, a lonely seven-year-old boy – abandoned by his divorced parents – dreams of morphing into a fish. That way he can better look out for his father who, he believes, captains the white ship that sails on Issyk-Kul. This moving novel, in which the lake features heavily, reads like a fable, mixing in Kyrgyz legends, clans and myths. There are many references, for example, to the “horned Mother Deer”; the Bugu clan – Kyrgyzstan has 40 historical tribes, each represented by a sun ray on the national flag – consider their earliest ancestor to be a deer.
One of the first people I met at Cholpon-Ata, the busiest stretch of the shoreline, was a Russian woman, a factory manager from an industrial city in Siberia, who was visiting Kyrgyzstan with her family. She told me that she’d just tried a fresh peach, rather than a canned one, for the first time. I have never forgotten the pleasure that spread across her face as she described it to me. She also believed that the environment – fresh mountain air and the lake’s slightly saline properties – to be health-giving, good for her asthmatic son. Just as in Aitmatov’s book, the lake was expected to offer hope and perhaps answers. Above us, paragliders hovered in the cloudless sky.
Issyk-Kul in summer remained a place of simple pleasures, of buckets and spades, sandcastles and blow-up beach balls. Only the backdrop of the chocolate-brown mountains of the Tian Shan range hinted at our altitude of 1,600 metres (5,270ft). Once I’d had enough sun, and enjoyed the cooling effects of fresh cherries and a Baltika beer, I set off to nearby Rukh Ordo, an open-air museum also on the lake.
The museum, pitched as a spiritual centre promoting world peace and respect for different religions, was a place to wander, with chapels and yurts scattered along the shore. Pleasingly, I learned that after Aitmatov’s death in 2008, Rukh Ordo was dedicated to his memory. Before getting a bus back to the town of Karakol, where I’d based myself, I found a statue of him and had my photograph taken alongside it. A final personal tribute to Kyrgyzstan’s beloved literary son.
Caroline Eden
Cornwall
Inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek
I first read Frenchman’s Creek aged 12 or 13. I can’t recall how it came into my orbit; maybe it was on the bookshelves at home, or one of my worldly aunts pressed it into my hands. The effect was instant. From the dreamy, almost hallucinogenic opening chapter, I was swept up in this girls’ own adventure, gasping aloud at the daring feats of our sassy heroine, Lady Dona St Columb, as she escapes her stodgy husband and their feckless court life in Restoration-era London.
Retreating to their Cornish estate with her two children, she discovers their long-neglected country house is being used as a base for a wanted man – a French pirate (of the passionate, artistic variety, natch). They embark on a wild and dangerous romance in and around the Helford River, as she joins him on board his ship, even dressing as a cabin boy to launch raids on the oafish locals. But when her husband and his friends show up, determined to hunt down her swashbuckling lover, she must make a choice – sacrifice him to certain death, or risk her own life to save him.
As an adventure-hungry teen, it wasn’t just the bold Dona and her below-decks antics that lured me in, but the almost physical immersion in the setting. Like all Du Maurier’s novels, Frenchman’s Creek employs all the senses to transport the reader, conjuring a mysterious, untamed Cornwall that bore no resemblance to the muddy campsites and ice-cream vans of my childhood holidays. Here was a lawless land of secret tributaries, hidden pools and wooded riverbanks where anything could happen.
Reading the novel again recently (and still gasping at every turn), I was inspired to finally make my pilgrimage, summoning the spirit of Dona as I headed west from London.
Frenchman’s Creek is a real place. It’s about 15 miles south of Falmouth, part of a ria – a flooded river valley open to the sea – described in the book as “a narrow inlet, branching from the parent river, its short, twisting course running westward into a valley”. Nowadays it’s owned by the National Trust and apart from a few tastefully placed signs and footpath markers, it remains its enchanted self, unchanged from how it would have appeared to the novel’s 17th-century characters. It’s more accessible now, with a 3.8-mile circular walk from the village of Helford following the creek itself. Through the trees you can glimpse the sailing boats anchored in the main channel and it’s easy to imagine Dona wandering among the oaks, spying the white sails of the pirate ship hidden up the creek, her heart pounding as she descends to the water’s edge.
Du Maurier excels not only at setting and plot but also at subversive female characters. Written in 1941 as an escape from the grim realities of war, and reflecting her own resistance to domesticity, the novel’s themes of female lust, infidelity and disregard for maternal duties would have been controversial, even shocking. Refreshingly, Du Maurier never attempts to justify or apologise for her protagonist’s actions.
This is a book that deserves to be read breathlessly in one sitting, far from the distractions of the modern world. Fortunately for today’s reader, there’s a remote holiday cottage owned by the Landmark Trust, tucked away in the woods at the head of the creek, with no wifi or phone signal. Ask yourself, what would Dona do?
Lois Pryce
