items tagged with agatha christie

Agatha Christie is the best-selling author of all time.  She has sold over two billion books worldwide and has been translated into over 45 languages. In a writing career that spanned more than half a century, Agatha Christie wrote eighty novels and short story collections.  She also wrote over a dozen plays, including The Mousetrap, which is now the longest running play in theatrical history.

"The Mysterious Affair at Styles" gave the world the inimitable Hercule Poirot, a retired Belgian police officer who was to become one of the most enduring characters in all of fiction. With his waxed moustache and his "little grey cells," he was "meticulous, a tidy little man, always neat and orderly, with a slight flavour of absurdity about him." (The New Bedside Christie Companion...). One of the most famous fictional creations of all time, Poirot's 'little grey cells' triumphed over some of the most devious criminal minds ever created in crime fiction.

Christie wrote more than 30 novels featuring Poirot. Among the most popular were "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" (1926), "Murder on the Orient Express" (1934), and "Death on the Nile" (1937).

In 1926, Archie asked for a divorce, having fallen in love with another woman. Agatha, already upset by the recent death of her mother, disappeared. All of England became wrapped up in the case of the now famous missing writer. She was found three weeks later in a small hotel, explaining to police that she had lost her memory. Thereafter, it was never again mentioned or elaborated upon by Christie.

She later found happiness with her marriage in 1930 to Max Mallowan, a young archaeologist who she met on a trip to Mesopotamia.

Another of Christie's most well-known and beloved characters was introduced in "Murder at the Vicarage" in 1930. Miss Jane Marple, an elderly spinster in the quaint English village of St. Mary Mead, solved all manner of mysteries with intense concentration and intuition. Featured in 12 novels, Miss Marple exemplified the cozy style, a form of mystery fiction that became popular in, and ultimately defined, the Golden Age of fiction in England during the 1920s and '30s.

Christie’s last published novel,  Sleeping Murder, featured her other world-famous sleuth, the shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple of St. Mary Mead.  Miss Marple appears in twelve novels, and twenty short stories; the first novel to feature her was  The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930.  The Poirot and Marple novels have been widely dramatized in feature films and television movies.   Murder on the Orient Express (1974),  Witness for the Prosecution (1957),  And Then There Were None (1945), and  Death on the Nile (1978) are a few of the successful films based on her works.  Agatha Christie also wrote six romantic novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.  She also wrote non-fiction; one book Come Tell Me How you Live, describes her archeological travels with her husband Max and the other two are collections of poems, stories and verses, some with a religious theme.  She also wrote her Autobiography which she completed in 1976.  Although synonymous with crime fiction, the breadth of themes in her novels is quite extraordinary and she deserves her place as one of the best-loved writers of all time.

Christie ultimately became the acknowledged Queen of the Golden Age. In all, she wrote over 66 novels, numerous short stories and screenplays, and a series of romantic novels using the pen name Mary Westmacott. Several of her works were made into successful feature films, the most notable being Murder on the Orient Express (1974). Her work has been translated into more than a hundred languages. In short, she is the single most popular mystery writer of all time.

In 1971 she was awarded the high honor of becoming a Dame of the British Empire.