Agatha Christie is best known for creating Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple — two of fiction’s most iconic detectives. She remains the best-selling novelist of all time. But there is another title attached to her name that few people know: one of England’s first female surfers.
Christie was born in Devon in 1890 and grew up swimming off the Torquay coast. The sea was part of her daily life from childhood. That early bond with the ocean set the stage for something far more daring later on.
After World War I, Christie and her husband Archie joined a British Empire Exhibition trade mission that took them around the world. Their first taste of wave-riding came in South Africa, where they tried bellyboarding. They continued through Australia and New Zealand before arriving in Honolulu in August 1922. At Waikiki Beach, they learned to ride surfboards standing up — a significant leap from bellyboarding.
Surfing in the 1920s was brutally physical. The boards were finless wooden planks, roughly 10 feet long and weighing up to 100 pounds. Christie described her early attempts as a mix of painful wipeouts and rare moments of pure joy. “After ten days I began to be daring,” she wrote. “Starting my run, I would hoist myself carefully to my knees on the board, and then endeavor to stand up.” When she finally rode a wave upright all the way to shore, the triumph was total.
The Christies loved it so much they extended their stay in Hawaii by three months just to keep surfing. Christie later described the feeling in vivid terms: “Oh it was heaven! Nothing like rushing through the water at what seems to you a speed of about two hundred miles an hour. It is one of the most perfect physical pleasures I have known.” The couple dedicated those extra months to mastering the sport on the same famous Waikiki breaks that attract surfers to this day.
