Agatha Christie

British · 1890 to 1976

Born Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller on September 15, 1890, in Torquay, Devon, into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, she was largely home-schooled by a mother who believed she should not learn to read until she was eight; thanks to her own curiosity she was reading by four. She served in a Torquay hospital dispensary during the First World War, acquiring a working knowledge of poisons that would furnish a hundred plots. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), was rejected six times before it found a publisher and introduced the fastidious Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. After the breakdown of her marriage to Archibald Christie and the death of her mother in 1926, she vanished for eleven days, abandoning her car near Guildford and registering at a Harrogate hotel under the name of her husband's mistress, an episode she never publicly explained. In 1930 she married the archaeologist Max Mallowan, fourteen years her junior, and began spending months each year on his digs in Iraq and Syria, where she wrote in a hotel room with a typewriter on her knees. She produced sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short-story collections, sold over two billion copies, and gave the world Miss Marple, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Murder on the Orient Express (1934), and And Then There Were None (1939), which alone has sold around one hundred million copies. The Mousetrap opened in the West End in November 1952 and is still running. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1971. She died on January 12, 1976, at the age of eighty-five, at her home Winterbrook House in Wallingford, and was buried at St Mary's, Cholsey.