Agatha Christie (1890 - 1976) was an English writer of detective fiction whose novels and short stories have sold in the region of two billion copies, making her the best-selling novelist in recorded history. She created the detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple and wrote sixty-six crime novels, fourteen short story collections, and the play The Mousetrap, the longest continuously running production in theatre history. [1] She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971. [2]
Early life
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon, the youngest child of a wealthy American father and an English mother. She was educated at home and later in Paris, and trained for a time as a singer and pianist. [1]
During the First World War she worked as a nurse and then in a hospital dispensary in Torquay, acquiring a knowledge of poisons that supplied the method of murder in many of her books. In 1914 she married Archibald Christie, a Royal Flying Corps officer. [2]
Early novels and the creation of Poirot
Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written on a challenge from her sister and published in 1920 after several rejections. It introduced Hercule Poirot, a fastidious retired Belgian police detective living in England as a refugee, who would appear in more than thirty novels. [1]
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd in 1926 established her reputation, its narrative device provoking argument among readers and critics about the rules of detective fiction. Miss Jane Marple, an elderly village observer whose knowledge of human nature solves crimes that baffle the police, first appeared in a short story in 1927 and in the novel The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930. [3]
Disappearance and second marriage
In December 1926, following the death of her mother and her husband's request for a divorce, Christie disappeared from her home. Her car was found abandoned and a large public search followed; she was discovered eleven days later staying at a hotel in Harrogate under an assumed name. She never explained the episode, and doctors at the time attributed it to amnesia. [1]
After the divorce she travelled on the Orient Express to the Middle East and in 1930 married the archaeologist Max Mallowan, joining him on excavations in Iraq and Syria for many seasons. Several novels, among them Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile, draw on those settings. [2]
Major work
Christie's most widely read books include Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, The ABC Murders and And Then There Were None, the last of which is among the best-selling novels ever published. She also wrote six romantic novels under the pen name Mary Westmacott. [3]
Her plays were equally successful. The Mousetrap opened in London in 1952 and has run almost continuously since, and her stage adaptation Witness for the Prosecution was later filmed to acclaim. Her final Poirot novel, Curtain, and the last Marple, Sleeping Murder, were written decades earlier and held for posthumous publication. [1]
Death and legacy
Christie died at her home at Winterbrook, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, on 12 January 1976, aged 85. [2]
Her books remain in print in more than a hundred languages and have been adapted continuously for film, television, radio and the stage. The plotting conventions she refined, including the closed circle of suspects and the concealed but fairly presented clue, defined the golden age of detective fiction and continue to shape the genre. [4]
