Barbara Toy

Barbara Alex Toy FRGS (11 August 1908 – 18 July 2001) was an Australian-British travel writer, theatrical director, playwright, and screenplay writer. She is most famous for the series of books she wrote about her pioneering and solitary travels around the world in a Land Rover, undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. Toy was drawn to deserts, and so the majority of her journeys were in the arid lands of Northern Africa and the Middle East. Toy's first solo journey took place almost five years before the perhaps more celebrated six-man team Oxford and Cambridge Far Eastern Expedition, a London to Singapore overland trip between September 1955 and March 1956 that was also undertaken in Land Rovers.

In 1949 Toy and Moie Charles approached Agatha Christie about adapting her 1930 novel The Murder at the Vicarage into a play of the same name. Christie's official biography suggests that the play was written by Christie with changes then made by Charles and Toy, presumably enough for them to claim the credit. The play included a major change to the denouement. Whatever the truth of the authorship, Christie was enthusiastic about the play and attended its rehearsals and first night at The Playhouse in December 1949. The production ran for 126 performances.