Last reviewed: June 2017
British novelist, short story writer, and dramatist best known for writing mysteries
September 15, 1890
Torquay, Devon, England
January 12, 1976
Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England
The acknowledged “queen of crime,” Agatha Christie is probably still the world’s best-known and most popular mystery writer. Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller, Christie was the child of an English mother, Clarissa Boehmer Miller, and an American father, Frederick Alvah Miller. After her father’s death, Christie was educated at home by her mother, who encouraged her talents as a storyteller. She later studied piano and voice in Paris. Hers was a typically upper-middle-class British upbringing; the environment in which she was raised would form the basis for nearly all of her later novels.
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In 1914, she married Colonel Archibald Christie, with whom she had a daughter, Rosalind. During her husband’s service in World War I, Christie worked in a Red Cross hospital in Torquay, where she began writing her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Completed toward the end of the war, the book was rejected by several publishers before it finally appeared in print in 1920. The Mysterious Affair at Styles introduces Christie’s famous Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, a small, eccentric man with a waxed moustache and an unshakable belief in the deductive powers of his “little grey cells.” During the course of Christie’s long and prolific career, Poirot would appear in dozens of her novels, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Murder on the Orient Express. To this day, he is surpassed in fame as a fictional sleuth only by Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie
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It was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, published in 1926, that firmly established Christie’s reputation as a mystery writer. Its surprising and controversial conclusion won for her an international following and demonstrated what would become the hallmark of her style: a talent for devising fiendishly clever plots that lead her readers away from the true solution while still presenting them with all the relevant clues to the killer’s identity. The year 1926 also marked what would remain the most mysterious episode in Christie’s life: her still-unexplained ten-day disappearance. After vanishing from her home one day in December, she became the object of a widely publicized search and was eventually found at a hotel in Harrowgate, registered under the name of her husband’s lover. Doctors ruled that Christie had been suffering from temporary amnesia, and she refused until her death to discuss the episode, omitting it entirely from her autobiography fifty years later. In 1928, she and Archibald Christie were divorced, although she retained his name professionally throughout her life.
Two years later, Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan and wrote her tenth book, The Murder at the Vicarage, which introduced Miss Jane Marple to her reading public. An elderly, white-haired spinster, Miss Marple relies on intuition and an uncanny understanding of human nature to solve her cases, hiding a shrewd intelligence behind woolly scarves and her ever-present knitting needles. Christie’s sleuths have also included Superintendent Battle of Scotland Yard; the retired government statistician Mr. Parker Pyne; and Tuppence and Tommy Beresford, a wealthy crime-solving couple, but only Miss Marple has shown herself to be a worthy rival to Poirot in the public’s affections. Among the best of the Miss Marple mysteries are The Body in the Library, A Murder Is Announced, 4:50 from Paddington (better known as What Mrs. McGillacuddy Saw!), and The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side.
In 1930 Christie also wrote the first of six romantic novels under the name Mary Westmacott, but the books never approached the popularity of her mysteries. It was during this period that she began accompanying her husband regularly on his archaeological digs throughout the Middle East. The region, as well as Christie’s growing knowledge of archaeology, inspired several of her mysteries, including Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile. As Agatha Christie Mallowan, she also wrote a travel book describing her experiences titled Come Tell Me How You Live. In 1939, Christie published one of her best-known books, Ten Little Niggers (later retitled And Then There Were None; known in the United States as Ten Little Indians), in which ten people stranded on an island estate are murdered one by one. The book became a popular stage play in 1943, adapted by Christie herself. During World War II, Christie worked in the dispensary of a London hospital but continued to write steadily. Indeed, throughout her career, she would produce an average of one book a year, in addition to numerous plays and some thirty collections of short stories. Each book took approximately six weeks to complete, and she maintained in interviews that her best ideas came to her in the bathtub.
In 1952, Christie wrote The Mousetrap, a play that would go on to become London’s longest-running production. She followed it with Witness for the Prosecution, for which she received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1955, and Spider’s Web. Some of Christie’s critics complained that her later books were sluggish and less imaginative than her earlier efforts. In 1975, the year before her death, the last of the Hercule Poirot mysteries was published. The novel, Curtain, had been written many years earlier and set aside until Christie was certain that her writing career was nearing its close. The book contains not only Poirot’s final case but his death as well, a fact which led The New York Times to run a front-page obituary notice, the first time in the newspaper’s history that a fictional character had been so honored. The final Miss Marple mystery, also written earlier in her creator’s career, appeared in 1976, shortly after Christie’s death at the age of eighty-five.
During Christie's lifetime, a number of film adaptations were made of her novels, among them Witness for the Prosecution in 1957, Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, and Death on the Nile in 1978. Several of Christie's plays—Black Coffee, The Unexpected Guest, and Spider's Web—were novelized by Charles Osborne after her death.
In the 2010s, Christie's literary estate granted permission to Sophie Hannah to pen a couple of novels about her beloved protagonist Hercule Poirot, The Monogram Murders (2014) and Closed Casket (2016).
Agatha Christie’s work enjoys a worldwide following, and her books have been published in more than one hundred languages. Her mastery of the techniques of the mystery plot has had an extensive influence on those writers who have followed her into the genre, and the simplicity of her books—there is very little description, and her characters are often two-dimensional—is the result of a writing style in which everything is centered on a strong, intricately constructed story line. Christie has been criticized for focusing her stories on a narrow segment of society and for her ordinary use of language, but her brilliant plotting and her ability to disguise clues even as she reveals them have been praised. In a way that is true of perhaps no other writer, her name remains synonymous with the murder mystery.