Artefacts used by Agatha Christie to embellish some of her most gruesome murder mystery stories will go on public view for the first time this weekend as the National Trust opens the author’s rural home.

Visitors to Greenway, the Devonshire house where Christie entertained guests by reading them extracts from her latest manuscripts, will be able to see objects such as a brass-studded trunk that, in fiction, concealed the body of a murder victim. Hercule Poirot, Christie’s Belgian detective, inspected the trunk in the short story The Mystery of the Baghdad Chest. The item, known as an Iraqi kist, was brought back from Baghdad by Christie after she accompanied her husband, Max Mallowan, on an archaeological dig.

The house itself, which has cost £5.4 million to restore, was the setting for Dead Man’s Folly, another Poirot mystery that was adapted for film starring Peter Ustinov. Visitors will be able to walk the same floorboards as the fictional murderer and even rent part of the house for holidays.

The building, which overlooks the River Dart, was given to the National Trust by Christie’s family in 2000 but remained closed to the public until after the death of Rosalind and Anthony Hicks, the author’s daughter and son-in-law, in 2004 and 2005.

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The trust discovered that the building was on the verge of collapse. Robyn Brown, the property manager, said that the roof was in a parlous state and that the south wall was falling out. “Our structural engineer came to look at the last bit of work on the roof and was heard to say, ‘I can’t imagine how this house is still standing up.’ ”

The house was completed on time and within budget with the help of volunteers who put in 10,000 hours over two years. It has been preserved as the Hicks family kept it, but Christie’s legacy persists in objects such as a china Pierrot clown ornament that featured in Marvellous Mr Quinn.

Highlights include the drawing room, where Christie read out her latest stories and invited guests to guess the murderer. According to the trust: “Her husband would wake from his post-dinner slumber just in time to pronounce on the identity of the murderer. He was usually right.”

Ms Brown, who was a friend of the Hicks family, said that nothing had been thrown away. “There is an element of kitsch in the house. Some of it was early Woolworths tat, but we haven’t thrown it out.” Christie bought the house in 1938 and made it her holiday home until 1959.

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