They Came to Baghdad

In her autobiography, Agatha Christie said how easy it was for her to write.  All she needed was a table for her typewriter and she could produce a novel or two and some short stories every year.  She also talked about going on archaeological expeditions with her husband, Max Mallowan.  Because everyone on the expedition needed to contribute, she became one of the staff photographers, taking pictures of labeled pottery shards every morning and then, when the heat made most work impossible, retiring to her room and her typewriter after lunch.

This is how I imagine she wrote They Came to Baghdad.  It's a caper novel, along the lines of her Tommy and Tuppence series.  The book starts with the run-up to a major international conference where the east/west balance of power may be at stake.  That's just the framework for a young, barely competent typist's adventures.  Victoria Jones has been fired (again) and on her way to her employment agency, she meets a young man, Edward, about to leave for Baghdad as part of an NGO (or something like that - the details are fuzzy, both both to him and to Victoria).  On a whim, she decides to follow him and, shockingly, she manages to get a position as a companion to a traveller who's broken her arm.  Once in Baghdad, Victoria starts working for Edward's NGO - at least until she's kidnapped and drugged, waking up to find her hair has been bleached and she's far from town.  She ends up being mistaken for an anthropologist sent out to work on an archaeological dig, where she not only finds she has a talent for reconstructing ancient pottery from shards but also manages to solve her kidnapping and foil an international plot.  There's more (a dead body in the night, an attempted murder on a bus, a dashing spy, and a mysterious woman named Anna Scheele), which Christie ties everything together neatly and with proper support.  It's probably not one of her classics, but a highly amusing mystery novel that's definitely worth reading.