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Agatha Christie

Personal Profile

Agatha Christie
  • Birth Name:
    Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller
  • Common Name:
    Mary Westmacott, Agatha Wallace
  • Nickname:
    The Queen of Crime
  • Date of Birth:
    September 15, 1890
  • Zodiac Sign:
    Virgo
  • Place of Birth:
    Torquay, Devon, England, UK
  • Place of Death:
    Wallingford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
  • Date of Death:
    January 12, 1976
  • Sex:
    Female
  • Nationality:
    British
  • Religion:
    Christianity

Family

Agatha Christie
  • Mother:
    Clarissa Margaret Boehmer
  • Spouse:
    Max E.L. Mallowan
    Archibald Christie - Divorced
  • Daughter:
    Rosalind

Career

Agatha Christie

Trivia

Agatha Christie
  • She was awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1971 for her services to literature.
  • Wrote several romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.
  • 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 the seaside resort of Torquay, England.
  • Her father was from the United States, and her mother was English.
  • Over two billion copies of her books have been sold worldwide. Her book sales are surpassed only by the Bible and by William Shakespeare. 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.

Quotes

Agatha Christie
  • "We are all the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then."
  • "One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood."
  • "It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous, that you realize just how much you love them."
  • "I'm a sausage machine, a perfect sausage machine."
  • "Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human."
  • "It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them."
  • "I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."
View all Quotes: Agatha Christie

Biography

Agatha Christie
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 21, 2009

AgathaAgatha Christie is known throughout the world as the Queen of crime. Her books have sold over a billion copies in the English language with another billion in 44 foreign languages. She is the most widely published author of all time in any language, out-sold by only the Bible and Shakespeare. She is the author of 79 crime novels and a short story collections, 19 plays, and 6 novels written under the name of Mary Westmacott.

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, was written toward the end of the First World War, in which she served as a VAD. In it she created Hercules Poirot, the little Belgian detective who was destined to become the most popular detective in crime fiction since Sherlock Holmes. It was eventually published by The Bodley Head in 1920.

AgathaIn 1926, after averaging a book a year, Agatha Christie wrote her masterpiece. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was the first of her books to be published by Collins and marked the beginning of author-publisher relationship which lasted for fifty years and well over seventy books. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was also the first of Agatha Christie's books to be dramatized - under the name Alibi - and to have a successful run in the West End. The Mousetrap, her most famous play of all, is the longest-running play in history.

Agatha Christie was made a Dame in 1971. Her last two books to be published were Curtain: Poirot's Last Case in 1975, and Sleeping Murder, featuring the deceptively mild Miss Marple, in 1976. Both were bestsellers. Agatha Christie also wrote four non-fiction works including an autobiography and the delightful Come, Tell Me How You Live, which celebrates the many expeditions she shared with her archaeologist husband Sir Max Mallowan.

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