Agatha Christie

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Agatha Christie is the best selling author of all time. Two billion copies of her novels have been published worldwide and translated into over forty languages. Born in 1890, Christie had her first novel, The Mysterious Affair At Styles published in 1921.

In the tradition of Poe’s Dupin and Conan-Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Christie managed to create two much loved genius sleuths in Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple introducing Poirot to much acclaim in her first piece of detective fiction.

The most famous novels featuring Poirot perhaps being The Murder on the Orient Express, Dumb Witness, Death on the Nile and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, in which Christie most controversially experimented with the form of her genre placing the culprit as narrator.

Poirot’s huge popularity was noted when in 1971, the New York Times reported his death in the obituaries section.

Miss Marple’s most popular novels were arguably, The Murder at the Vicarage, 4.50 from Paddington and Nemesis. Many Marple novels were famously dramatised by the BBC with Joan Hickson as the discerning busy-body.

Christie also published romantic fiction under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott and had many works made into films both in Hollywood and closer to home. She wrote over a dozen plays most notably, The Mousetrap which holds a Guinness World Record for the longest running play, first performed in 1951 and still running in St’ Martin’s Theatre in London.

She was awarded a CBE in 1956 and appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire. In 2000 at the Boucheron World Mystery Convention she was named Mystery Writer of the Century, and sadly died in 1976.