Past Perfect: A Day in the Life

Open the 1936 mystery novel Murder in Mesopotamia to almost any page, and you will encounter Agatha Christie’s exacting eye for local color and detail. Dame Agatha’s intimate knowledge of Middle Eastern life could only have come firsthand; indeed, she often accompanied her second husband, British archaeologist Max Mallowan, on excavations in Mesopotamia. Completed in 1944, Christie’s nonfiction book Come, Tell Me How You Live details, among other things, Mallowan’s 1935–36 excavations at Chagar Bazar, in northern Syria. The excavation team included some 140 laborers, including Arabs, Kurds, Turks and—in Mallowan’s words—“a sprinkling of Yezidis, the mild devil-worshipers from […]