Biography for
Agatha Christie

advertisement

Date of Birth

15 September 1890, Torquay, Devon, England, UK

Date of Death

12 January 1976, Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England, UK

Birth Name

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller

Nickname

The Queen of Crime

Spouse

Max E.L. Mallowan	(11 September 1930 - 12 January 1976) (her death)
Archibald Christie	(24 December 1914 - April 1928) (divorced) 1 child

Trade Mark

All her books and short stories feature some kind of plot twist or surprising ending

Trivia

Her books have sold more than 100 million copies.

Created a Dame of the Order of the British Empire in 1971.

Wrote several romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

Gave birth to a daughter, Rosalind, in 1919.

Disappeared for several days in 1926. Disappearance remains unexplained.

Interred at Cholsey Churchyard, Cholsey, Oxfordshire, England, UK.

On Saturday April 12th, 1958, her play "The Mousetrap", which opened in London on November 25, 1952, became the longest running production of any kind in the history of British Theatre, beating out the five-and-a-half years of Chu Chin Chow.

She worked at a chemist's shop between 1915 and 1918 in Torquay, south-west England.

Her father was from the United States, and her mother was English.

Over 1 billion copies of her books have been sold worldwide. Her book sales are surpassed only by The Bible and by William Shakespeare.

With over two billion copies of her books in print, she is the best selling author of all time.

First novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), was also the first to feature her eccentric Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Last published novel, Sleeping Murder (1976), featured her other world-famous sleuth, the shrewdly inquisitive Miss Jane Marple.

Her work has been translated into more than a hundred languages.

According to her grandson Mathew Prichard, who runs the Agatha Christie estate, she was very keen on using new types of media to help reach fans in new ways. He said this in April 2004 when it was announced that five of her books would be turned into computer games.

Her second husband, Max Mallowan, was an archaeologist, and she chronicled her travels with him in the Middle East in her 1946 book "Come, Tell Me How You Live."

Her novel "And Then There Were None" is also published as "Ten Little Indians" and is a Mystery's #1 Bestseller

Although it was not the last novel she published in her lifetime, the last novel that Agatha Christie wrote was "Postern of Fate" (1973). It featured her re-occurring characters Tommy and Tuppence, and marks their final appearance in a novel.

The last two novels published in her lifetime were "Curtain" (chronicling Hercule Poirot's last cast) and "Sleeping Murder" (the last Miss Marple novel). She wrote both books in the 1940s, and then locked them in a safe deposit box.

Personal Quotes

"An archaelogist is the best husband a women can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her."

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."

"Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend."

"If one sticks too rigidly to one's principles one would hardly see anybody."

"Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody."

"Curious things, habits. People themselves never know they had them."

"One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one."

"The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes."

One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."

"Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions."

"I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

"I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest."

"It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them."

"Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human."

I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine.

Browse biographies section by name

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z