Agatha Christie

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Mallowan, Lady Mallowan, known professionally as Agatha Christie, was an English author born on 15 September 1890 in Torquay, Devon, into a wealthy upper-middle-class family. She was the youngest of three children of Frederick Alvah Miller and his wife Clara.

Largely home-schooled at her mother’s insistence, Christie taught herself to read by age four despite her mother’s belief that she should wait until she was eight. She described her childhood as “very happy,” though she often played alone with pets and imaginary companions due to the age gap with her siblings. Her early life included a year abroad in France and Guernsey, as well as a memorable appearance in a youth production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeomen of the Guard.

Works of fiction

Christie initially struggled as a writer, facing six consecutive rejections before her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was published in 1920. This book introduced the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who would become one of her most famous characters. She later created the detective duo Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary (1922) and the elderly sleuth Miss Marple in The Murder at the Vicarage (1930).

Book sales

A key figure of the “Golden Age of Detective Fiction,” she earned the nicknames “Queen of Crime” and “Queen of Mystery,” the former now trademarked by her estate. Her 66 detective novels and 14 short-story collections have sold more than two billion copies, making her the best-selling novelist of all time. She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

Her personal life included a marriage to Archibald Christie in 1914, with whom she had one child before divorcing in 1928. Following the breakdown of that marriage and her mother’s death in 1926, she disappeared for 11 days, making international headlines. During both world wars, she worked in hospital dispensaries, gaining expert knowledge of poisons that she used in her fiction. In 1930, she married archaeologist Max Mallowan, and thereafter spent months each year on Middle Eastern excavations, incorporating that experience into her writing.

Christie wrote the world’s longest-running play, The Mousetrap, which opened in London’s West End on 25 November 1952 and has been performed continuously since, with over 27,500 performances by 2018.