Out of Sunningdale

...The group is given a tour by Muza-him Mahmud Hussein, "the frustrated hero of Iraqi archaeology," who made a discovery (of gold-filled tombs) that had eluded Max...

...It is one of the few times when you wish Eames hadn't just let a statement stand...

...As the journey proceeds, the reader feels triply blessed, getting two learned and lively tales tacked on, always gracefully, to the vivid account of an epic railway journey and its own co-mingling of countries, characters, scenery, arcane knowledge, political history, literary digressions, archaeological asides—that rich gallimaufry that caused Evelyn Waugh to claim that he preferred "all but the very worst travel books to all but the very best novels...

...I And for anyone nostal1 gic for the days when the sun never set on the British Empire, Eames introduces Stephane Lambert, an English real estate agent doing a brisk business on Bulgaria's Black Sea coast selling homes to his countrymen who can't afford Tuscany or the Costa del Sol...

...Under the Balkan Sun...

...Arriving at Victoria Station, and boarding the restored Venice-Simplon Orient Express, Eames interlaces the story of the bestselling author with that of the international train, and makes the very reasonable claim that the latter's survival, albeit in a truncated and high-end form, is partly due to the former's most famous novel...

...In this engaging book, Eames has now told John, and anyone else who cares to listen...

...ithen meets a young woman in Belgrade who spends her evenings with her fa±er watching fishing programs on the Discovery Channel...

...Istanbul's ferries are like "an extended family" with "short, fat and pompous uncles" and "long, elegant and languid aunts...

...It's your standard package tour: the Iraqi Museum (founded by Gertrude Bell, looted four months after the group's visit...

...The saving power of murder...

...In Zagreb he finds the history-obsessed Croats "like a tribe of Latin teachers, well-meaning, socially unsure of themselves and a little off-fashion, and very expert in a subject which was largely irrelevant to today's world...

...If you can't beat 'em, trace 'em...

...Actually, he sets out on the eponymous 8:55 from Sunningdale, the commuter town where Agatha spent the last four unhappy years of her 14-year marriage to Archie Christie...

...Eames decides to travel to Iraq just as she had, by train from London...

...Though not a travel writer, Bernard-Henri Levy recently traversed the United States, shirt unbuttoned to the wind, with Alexis de Tocqueville by his side...

...And antagonistic sects...

...And to get her hair done...

...Not Freya Stark...

...With Max...

...Welcome the follow-up travel book...

...There is also a young American, Sean, traveling with a boom box...

...From Nineveh...

...Eames astutely travels with his own needle...

...the Minaret of Samarra (atop which Eames finds a group of Iraqi teenagers high-fiving Sean, who later tells the author that if Americans could see him showing friendship toward Iraqis they would label him "a national traitor...

...As a recently disinterred winged bull is brushed off, he requests that no one take a picture, then adds that they can "tell John"— "by whom he meant John Curtis, the Keeper of the Ancient Near East at the British Museum...

...The vehicle holds, not surprisingly, an odd bunch, which includes four elderly women: two English, one German, one French...

...In Slovenia Eames digs up a retired reporter who interviewed Christie on one of her visits to Lake Bohinj, and he tells us that, having been translated into 112 languages, she falls between the Bible and Shakespeare...

...Saddam City (actually, Eames has to see this on his own...

...In Tr^^els with a Tangerine, Tim Mackintosh-Smith replicated the journey from Tangiers to Constantinople of the great medieval explorer Ibn Battutah, and in A Sweet and Glorious Land, John Keahey traveled around southern Italy in search of George Gissing...

...At the border, men under 60 and women under 50 are all required to submit to an AIDS test...

...BY THOMAS SWICK The dilemma facing travel writers—how do you write about the world when practically every place has been visited, if not written about, already?— is producing interesting responses...

...Not Gertrude Bell...

...Eames...

...The tension builds as he gets closer to Iraq...

...Further down the line he talks to people who give credence to ±e cliche that Serbs are interested only in making love and war...

...Yet on a visit to Aleppo to visit the famous souk—"the longest roofed market in the world"—Eames was invited to tea by the proprietor of his hotel, and heard the man's mother say that the famous mystery writer came to Aleppo "to do her shopping...

...The skyline of Damascus is studded with "the occasional set of egg-box domes rippling in the waves of heat...

...His descriptions of contemporary anxiety contrast sharply with the recorded memories of halcyon days on a dig...

...Max, Eames subsequently learns, was Christie's second husband, an archaeologist whom she had met in Ur, and with whom she "spent thirty winter seasons living in testing conditions 3,000 miles from home, in a land of Kurds, Armenians and Palestinians, doling out laxatives to help the sheikh's wives with their constipation...

...And a number of writers, still infused with old-fashioned wanderlust, have enthusiastically set off, not to blaze new trails but to plod in the footsteps of those who have gone before...

...And now at your local bookstore we find The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie by the English travel writer Andrew Thomas Swick, travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is the author, most recently, of A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler...

...When not meeting memorable characters, Eames turns his attention to his surroundings, with felicitous results...

...weapons inspections are still going on...

...Many travel books have become more analytical, in an attempt to penetrate the well-photographed fa§ade (Pico Iyer leads this charge...

...His group visits Nimrud, where Max "excavated the palace of the Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II," a discovery that placed him in "the major league of British archaeologists...

...It was also here that Agatha wrote the introduction to her autobiography, and "spent some of the happiest years of her life...

...while others have become more domestic, looking not at the places we visit but at the places we inhabit (think Jonathan Raban...

...He hooks up with a tour group, on a lowly bus, at a time when U.N...

...Because," she tells him, "it's incredibly peaceful...

...Eames's dearly departed companion for the journey seems at first glance an unlikely choice...

...Though away from the ruins, Eames finds the people unfailingly friendly toward foreigners, while generally resigned to the inevitability of war...

...A few of the senior ladies complain, with mock indignation, of discrimination...

...The story of illustrious trains (Eames's fascination extends to the Taurus Express, which once traveled between Istanbul and Damascus) is replaced by that of ancient civilizations...

...The 8:55 to Baghdad is one of the better ones, and it really hits its stride in the former Yugoslavia...