Agatha Mary Clarissa, Lady Mallowan, DBE (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976), mainly known as Agatha Christie, was an English crime fiction writer. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but is chiefly remembered for her 66 detective novels. Her work with these novels, particularly featuring detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre.
Christie has been called—by the Guinness Book of World Records, among others—the best-selling writer of books of all time, and the best-selling writer of any kind second only to William Shakespeare. An estimated one billion copies of her novels have been sold in English, and another billion in 103 other languages[1]. As an example of her broad appeal, she is the all-time best-selling author in France, with over 40 million copies sold in French (as of 2003) versus 22 million for Emile Zola, the nearest contender.
Her stage play, The Mousetrap, holds the record for the longest run ever in London, opening at the Ambassadors Theatre on 25 November 1952, and as of 2007 is still running after more than 20,000 performances. In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and in the same year, Witness for the Prosecution was given an Edgar Award by the MWA, for Best Play. Most of her books and short stories have been filmed, some many times over (Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile, 4.50 From Paddington), and many have been adapted for television and radio and video games.
In 1998, the control of the rights to most of the literary works of Agatha Christie passed to the company Chorion, when it purchased a majority 64% share in Agatha Christie Limited [2].
Biography
Agatha Christie was born as Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller in Torquay, Devon, to an American father and an English mother. She never held or claimed United States citizenship. Her father was Frederick Miller, a rich American stockbroker, and her mother was Clara Boehmer, a British aristocrat. Christie had a sister, Margaret Frary Miller (1879–1950), called Madge, eleven years her senior, and a brother, Louis Montant Miller (1880–1929), called Monty, ten years older than Christie. Her father died when she was very young. Her mother resorted to teaching her at home, encouraging her to write at a very young age. At the age of 16 she went to a school in Paris to study singing and piano.
Her first marriage, an unhappy one, was in 1914 to Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. The couple had one daughter, Rosalind Hicks, and divorced in 1928.
During World War I she worked at a hospital and then a pharmacy, a job that influenced her work: many of the murders in her books are carried out with poison. (See also cyanide, ricin, and thallium.)
On 8 December 1926, while living in Sunningdale in Berkshire, she disappeared for ten days, causing great interest in the press. Her car was found in a chalk pit in Newland's Corner, Surrey. She was eventually found staying at the Swan Hydro (now the Old Swan hotel) in Harrogate under the name of the woman with whom her husband had recently admitted to having an affair. She claimed to have suffered a nervous breakdown and a fugue state caused by the death of her mother and her husband's infidelity. Opinions are still divided as to whether this was a publicity stunt. Public sentiment at the time was negative, with many feeling that an alleged publicity stunt had cost the taxpayers a substantial amount of money. A 1979 film, Agatha, starring Vanessa Redgrave as Christie, recounted a fictionalised version of the disappearance. Other media accounts of this event exist; it was featured on a segment of Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story, for example.
In 1930, Christie married a Roman Catholic (despite her divorce and her Anglican faith), the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. Mallowan was 14 years younger than Christie, and his travels with her contributed background to several of her novels set in the Middle East. Their marriage was happy in the early years, and endured despite Mallowan's many affairs in later life, notably with Barbara Parker, whom he married in 1977, the year after Christie's death. Other novels (such as And Then There Were None) were set in and around Torquay, Devon, where she was born. Christie's 1934 novel, Murder on the Orient Express was written in the Pera Palas hotel in Istanbul, Turkey, the southern terminus of the railroad. The hotel maintains Christie's room as a memorial to the author. The Greenway Estate in Devon, acquired by the couple as a summer residence in 1938, is now in the care of the National Trust. Christie often stayed at Abney Hall in Cheshire and penned two of her novels there: The Tale Of The Christmas Pudding and After The Funeral.
Agatha Christie's room at the Pera Palas hotel where she wrote
Murder on the Orient Express.
In 1971 she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Agatha Christie died on 12 January 1976, at age 85, from natural causes, at Winterbrook House in the north of Cholsey parish, adjoining Wallingford in Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire). She is buried in the nearby St Mary's Churchyard in Cholsey. Christie's only child, Rosalind Hicks, died on 28 October 2004, also aged 85, from natural causes. Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, now owns the copyright to his grandmother's works.
Hercule Poirot & Miss Marple
Agatha Christie's first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles was published in 1920 and introduced the long-running character detective Hercule Poirot, who appeared in 30 of Christie's novels and 50 short stories.
Her other well known character, Miss Marple, was introduced in The Murder at the Vicarage in 1930, and was based on Christie's grandmother.
During World War II, Christie wrote two novels intended as the last cases of these two great detectives, Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple—respectively, Curtain, in which Poirot is killed, and Sleeping Murder. Both books were sealed in a bank vault for over thirty years, and were released for publication by Christie only at the end of her life, when she realised that she could not write any more novels. These publications came on the heels of the success of the film version of Murder on the Orient Express in 1974.
Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Christie was to become increasingly tired of her detective, Poirot. In fact, by the end of the 1930s, Christie confided to her diary that she was finding Poirot “insufferable”, and by the 1960s she felt that he was an “an ego-centric creep”. However, unlike Conan Doyle, Christie resisted the temptation to kill her detective off while he was still popular. She saw herself as an entertainer whose job was to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot.
In contrast, Christie was fond of Miss Marple. However it is interesting to note that the Belgian detective’s titles outnumber the Marple titles by more than two to one.
Poirot is the only fictional character to have been given an obituary in The New York Times, following the publication of Curtain in 1975.
Following the great success of Curtain, Christie gave permission for the release of Sleeping Murder sometime in 1976, but died in January 1976 before the book could be released. This may explain some of the inconsistencies in the book with the rest of the Marple series—for example, Colonel Arthur Bantry, husband of Miss Marple's friend, Dolly, is still alive and well in Sleeping Murder (which, like Curtain, was written in the 1940s) despite the fact he is noted as having died in books that were written after but published before the posthumous release of Sleeping Murder in 1976—such as, The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side. It may be that Christie simply did not have time to revise the manuscript before she died. Miss Marple fared better than Poirot, since after solving the mystery in Sleeping Murder, she returns home to her regular life in Saint Mary Mead.
On an edition of Desert Island Discs in 2007, Brian Aldiss recounted how Agatha Christie told him that she wrote her books up to the last chapter, and then decided who the most unlikely suspect was. She would then go back and make the necessary changes to "frame" that person. [2]
In popular culture
On 10 August 2007, it was announced that Christie, played by actress Fenella Woolgar, would appear as a character in the 2008 season of the science fiction TV series Doctor Who.
List of works
Novels
Year
publishedTitleDetectives1920The Mysterious Affair at StylesHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings
Chief Inspector Japp1922The Secret AdversaryTommy and Tuppence1923Murder on the LinksHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings1924The Man in the Brown SuitAnne Beddingfeld
Colonel Race1925The Secret of ChimneysSuperintendent Battle1926The Murder of Roger AckroydHercule Poirot1927The Big FourHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings
Chief Inspector Japp1928The Mystery of the Blue TrainHercule Poirot1929The Seven Dials MysteryBill Eversleigh
Superintendent Battle1930The Murder at the VicarageMiss Marple1931The Sittaford Mystery
also Murder at Hazelmoor1932Peril at End HouseHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings
Chief Inspector Japp1933Lord Edgware Dies
also Thirteen at DinnerHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings
Chief Inspector Japp1934Murder on the Orient Express
also Murder on the Calais CoachHercule Poirot1934Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
also The Boomerang Clue1935Three Act Tragedy
also Murder in Three ActsHercule Poirot1935Death in the Clouds
also Death in the AirHercule Poirot
Chief Inspector Japp1936The A.B.C. Murders
also The Alphabet MurdersHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings
Chief Inspector Japp1936Murder in MesopotamiaHercule Poirot1936Cards on the TableHercule Poirot
Colonel Race
Superintendent Battle
Ariadne Oliver1937Death on the NileHercule Poirot
Colonel Race1937Dumb Witness
also Poirot Loses a Client
also Mystery at Littlegreen House
also Murder at Littlegreen HouseHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings1938Appointment with DeathHercule Poirot1938Hercule Poirot's Christmas
also Murder for Christmas
also A Holiday for MurderHercule Poirot1939And Then There Were None
also Ten Little Indians
also Ten Little Niggers1939Murder is Easy
also Easy to KillSuperintendent Battle1940Sad CypressHercule Poirot1940One, Two, Buckle My Shoe
also An Overdose of Death
also The Patriotic MurdersHercule Poirot
Chief Inspector Japp1941Evil Under the SunHercule Poirot1941N or M?Tommy and Tuppence1942The Body in the LibraryMiss Marple1942Five Little Pigs
also Murder in RetrospectHercule Poirot1942The Moving Finger
also The Case of the Moving FingerMiss Marple1944Towards Zero
also Come and be HangedSuperintendent Battle
Inspector James Leach1944Death Comes as the End1945Sparkling Cyanide
also Remembered DeathColonel Race1946The Hollow
also Murder After HoursHercule Poirot1948Taken at the Flood
also There is a TideHercule Poirot1949Crooked HouseCharles Hayward1950A Murder is AnnouncedMiss Marple1951They Came to Baghdad1952Mrs McGinty's Dead
also Blood Will TellHercule Poirot
Ariadne Oliver1952They Do It with Mirrors
also Murder with MirrorsMiss Marple1953A Pocket Full of RyeMiss Marple1953After the Funeral
also Funerals are Fatal
also Murder at the GallopHercule Poirot1954Destination Unknown
also So Many Steps to Death1955Hickory Dickory Dock
also Hickory Dickory DeathHercule Poirot1956Dead Man's FollyHercule Poirot
Ariadne Oliver19574.50 From Paddington
also What Mrs. McGillycuddy Saw
also Murder She SaidMiss Marple1958Ordeal by Innocence1959Cat Among the PigeonsHercule Poirot1961The Pale HorseInspector Lejeune
Ariadne Oliver1962The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side
also The Mirror Crack'dMiss Marple1963The ClocksHercule Poirot1964A Caribbean MysteryMiss Marple1965At Bertram's HotelMiss Marple1966Third GirlHercule Poirot
Ariadne Oliver1967Endless Night1968By the Pricking of My ThumbsTommy and Tuppence1969Hallowe'en PartyHercule Poirot
Ariadne Oliver1970Passenger to Frankfurt1971NemesisMiss Marple1972Elephants Can RememberHercule Poirot
Ariadne Oliver1973Postern of Fate
final Tommy and Tuppence
last novel Christie wroteTommy and Tuppence1975Curtain
Poirot's last case, written four decades earlierHercule Poirot
Arthur Hastings1976Sleeping Murder
Miss Marple's last case, written four decades earlierMiss Marple
Collections of Short Stories
Co-authored works
Plays adapted into novels by Charles Osborne
Works written as Mary Westmacott
Plays
Radio Plays
Television Plays
Nonfiction
Comics
Television and Movie Adaptions
Source: For much more information about the television series, movie adaptations, video games and Agatha Christie's unpublished works please visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christ
