Agatha Christie

A Life of Mysteries

The Queen of Crime

• 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.

An English Lady

• The richness of the settings in Christie’s novels add to the great enjoyment when reading her novels and she drew on real places when writing her stories.  Many are set in Devon where she grew up; Burgh Island, just off the coast is said to be the setting for  And Then There Were None and  Evil Under the Sun. 

Biography

• Born in the family home Ashfield in Torquay, Devon, England on 15 September 1890. Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was the youngest of the three children born to Clarissa ‘Clara’ Margaret née Boehmer and American Frederick Alvah Miller, who died when Agatha was just ten years old. While she received no formal education, her mother and then a governesses taught her at home to read before she entered finishing school in Paris in 1906. Having long been encouraged by her mother to write, Agatha continued to write there while also studying music (which became a life-long love), singing, and piano.

• On 24 December 1914, at the age of twenty-four, Christie married Royal Flying Corps pilot Archie Christie. During WWI Agatha worked as a nurse, tending to the ill and injured, many who were displaced Belgians. Their bewilderment and personal sorrows affected her deeply. She amassed a great deal of knowledge about sicknesses and poisons such as strychnine and ricin that she often featured in her novels.

• Around this time she also started writing her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles, an immediate best-seller. In 1926, profoundly grieving the death of her mother, Christie created some mystery of her own, disappearing for a time;

when she was found she claimed that she had had a bout of amnesia

• In 1928, Archie divorced Agatha. She then set off on her first of many trips to the Middle East, travelling on the famed Orient Express from Calais, France to Baghdad, Iraq, then on to the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia. It was on her second trip there she met her future husband, archaeologist Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan. They were married in Scotland on 11 September 1930. She often accompanied him on digs as a member of the team, photographing and cataloguing finds.

Max & Agatha

• In 1974 Christie appeared for the last time in public on opening night for her play Murder on the Orient Express. When she was not travelling the world, her and Max’s home in England was in the town of Wallingford, Oxfordshire, where she died peacefully on 12 January 1976.

And Then There Were None

• Published: November 1939.• In the novel, ten people (all from varying social

classes), who have previously been complicit in the deaths of others but have escaped notice and/or punishment, are tricked into coming onto an island. Even though the guests are the only people on the island, they are all mysteriously murdered one by one, in a manner paralleling, inexorably and sometimes grotesquely, the old nursery rhyme, "Ten Little Indians".

And Then There Were None

• It is Christie's best-selling novel with 100 million sales to date, making it the world's best-selling mystery and the seventh most popular book of all time. It has been adapted into several plays, films, and a video game.