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Agatha Christie: The Queen of Crime

Best-selling author Agatha Christie published her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, in 1920, and went on to become one of the most famous writers in history. She sold billions of copies of her work and was also a noted playwright and romance author.

Agatha Christie: The Queen of Crime

Early Life

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born on 15th September 1890. Her father was a wealthy American man called Frederick Miller, and her mother was Clara Boehmer from Ireland.

Her parents settled in Torquay, a seaside town in South-East England. Baby Agatha came along, ten years after her brother Monty, and eleven after her sister Madge. As the youngest of three siblings, she was educated at home by her mother, who encouraged her daughter to write. As a child, Christie enjoyed fantasy play and creating characters, and, when she was 16, she moved to Paris for a time to study the piano.

Work

She began writing while working as a nurse in London during WWI. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, written towards the end of the First World War, introduced us to Hercule Poirot, who was to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. She is known throughout the world as The Queen of Crime.

Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language and another billion in 44 foreign languages. She is the author of 80 crime novels and short story collections, 19 plays, and six novels under the name of Mary Westmacott and saw her work translated into more languages than Shakespeare. Her enduring success, enhanced by many film and TV adaptations, is a tribute to the timeless appeal of her characters and the unequalled ingenuity of the plots.

Christie’s plays included The Mousetrap which set a world record for the longest continuous run at one theatre at the Ambassadors Theatre, London before moving in 1974 to St Martin’s Theatre, where it continued without a break until the COVID-19 pandemic closed theatres in 2020, by which time it had surpassed 28,200 performances.

Personal Life

In 1914, she wed Colonel Archibald Christie, a Royal Flying Corps pilot, and took up nursing during World War I.

In 1926, Agatha Christie released The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a hit which was later marked as a genre classic and one of the author’s all-time favorites. She dealt with tumult that same year, however, as her mother died and her husband revealed that he was in a relationship with another woman. Traumatized by the revelation, Christie disappeared only to be discovered by authorities several days later at a Harrogate hotel, registered under the name of her husband’s mistress.

Christie would recover, with her and Archibald divorcing in 1928. In 1930, she married archaeology professor Max Mallowan, with whom she traveled on several expeditions, later recounting her trips in the 1946 memoir Come, Tell Me How You Live. The year of her new nuptials also saw the release of Murder at the Vicarage, which became another classic and introduced readers to Miss Jane Marple, an enquiring village lady.

During World War II, Christie moved to London and worked in the pharmacy at University College Hospital, London, where she updated her knowledge of poisons. Her novel The Pale Horse was based on a suggestion from Harold Davis, the chief pharmacist at the hospital.

Around 1971, Christie’s health began to fail, but she continued to write. Her last novel was Postern of Fate in 1973. Sadly she passed in 1976 at the grand old age of 85.