It’s always fun to have one’s theories backed up, and I recently stumbled upon a one-hundred-year-old photo that made me smile. I’m talking about pawpaws.

When I was working on the 1920s edition of Agatha Annotated, I decided to flag the word “pawpaw” found in The Man in the Brown Suit. If you remember, the heroine, Anne Beddingfeld, impulsively goes on a voyage to South Africa, following clues. Anne is entranced by Cape Town – and by pawpaws. She says:

Then again, there are pawpaws. I had often read of pawpaws. I discovered at once what they were, because I had one plumped down in front of me for breakfast. I thought at first that it was a melon gone bad. The Dutch waitress enlightened me, and persuaded me to use lemon juice and sugar and try again. I was very pleased to meet a pawpaw. 

Even if you haven’t eaten one yourself, it’s obvious from the context that the pawpaw is a fruit. But I still flagged it because it seemed to me unlikely that pawpaw trees would flourish both in the Mediterranean climate of Cape Town and the below-freezing temperatures of Chicago. And I already knew pawpaws grow in Chicago.

We raised our children in the Chicago suburbs. As young teens, they were both costumed volunteers at the Naper Settlement, a living history museum. (Yes, I inflicted history on my poor children from an early age!) One summer, our daughter was the interpreter for the PawPaw Post Office, named for the pawpaw tree growing alongside it in eighteen hundred and something.

So I did the research. It turns out that the American pawpaw is a very different fruit from the pawpaw found in South Africa and South America. Native American tribes had their own names for the fruit, including ha’simini, aazimin, and assimin, which is used in the scientific name, Asimina. It is theorized that early European travelers called the tree “pawpaw” because it reminded them of the tropical tree they knew.

What fruit were they thinking of that grows in warm-weather countries? The papaya! You can see the similarities, since both are orange, soft, and sweet. But there are differences, too. Papayas are much larger than pawpaws, and the seeds are very different. They are a different size, distributed differently within the fruit, and while you can eat papaya seeds – they’re peppery! – you will get very sick eating pawpaw seeds.

Anne, therefore, was no doubt eating papaya for her breakfast in Cape Town, not American pawpaw.

Now, as all Christie fans know, Anne’s journey to South Africa follows very closely the same journey Agatha took when she and her husband, Archie, were part of the British Empire Exhibition promotional tour. I think we can safely say that, like Anne, Agatha ate papaya in Cape Town and called it pawpaw.

Just recently, I saw a photo from that British Empire Exhibition tour that I think confirms this. I don’t know how, but I somehow never got around to reading The Grand Tour, which was published in 2012. Edited by Mathew Prichard, it details Agatha’s around-the-world journey in her own words, alternating between excerpts from her autobiography and letters she wrote to her mother and daughter back in England. There are also many fabulous photos.

The photo that caught my eye and made me smile was one Agatha took of Archie in South Africa. The caption reads: “Archie in his Rhodesian hat among the paw paws.” And sure enough, he’s standing under a papaya tree.

Does knowing about pawpaws vs. papayas change anything about the mystery in The Man in the Brown Suit? Of course not. And nothing changes for Christie readers from Europe, South Africa, or South America. But it’s an extra bit of clarification for American readers that adds local color to the scene.

If you have also missed reading The Grand Tour, I do recommend it. I took my time with it, studying the photographs and trying to make out Agatha’s horrendous handwriting. It’s a lovely glimpse at a young, outgoing Agatha that we don’t see very often. Enjoy it with some pawpaw or papaya, as you please!