(1890-1976), English
Agatha Christie Biography
Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born September 5, 1890, in Torquay, England. In 1914, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, an aviator in the Royal Flying Corps. They had a daughter, Rosalind, and divorced in 1928. By that time, Christie had begun writing mystery stories, initially in response to a dare from her sister. She published her first novel in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which featured the debut of one of her most famous characters, the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. Christie would go on to become the world's best-selling writer of mystery novels.
By the time Christie began writing, the mystery novel was a well-established genre with definite rules. Edgar Allan Poe had pioneered the mystery genre in his short story "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle carried on the practice. The story is traditionally told from the perspective of a detective-protagonist (or a friend of the detective, like Sherlock Holmes's companion, Dr. Watson) as he or she examines clues and pursues a killer. At the end of the novel, the detective unmasks the murderer and sums up the case, explaining the crime and clearing up mysterious events. As the story unfolds, the reader gets access to exactly the same information as the detective, which makes the mystery novel a kind of game in which the reader has a chance to solve the case for him- or herself.
Fairly early in her career, in 1926, Christie came under fire for writing an "unfair" mystery novel. In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the killer turns out to be the narrator, and many readers and critics felt that this was too deceptive a plot twist. Christie was unapologetic, however, and today The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is considered a masterpiece of the genre.
In all, Christie produced eighty novels and short-story collections, most of them featuring either Poirot or her other famous sleuth, the elderly spinster Miss Marple. She also wrote four works of nonfiction and fourteen plays, including The Mousetrap, the longest-running play in history. Eventually, Christie married an archaeologist named Sir Max Mallowan, whose trips to the Middle East provided the setting for a number of her novels. In 1971, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Christie the title of Dame Commander of the British Empire. Christie died January 12, 1976, in Oxfordshire, England.
Agatha Christie Study Guides
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie Quotes
I have given them life instead of death, freedom instead of the cords of superstition, beauty and truth instead of corruption and exploitation.
I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.
The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.
Agatha Christie Novels
Death on the Nile
The Murder at the Vicarage
The ABC Murders
Agatha Christie Short Stories
Poirot Investigates
Agatha Christie Plays